Tag Archives: review

Horror Film Review: Prophecy (dir by John Frankenheimer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released way back in 1979, Prophecy is one of those films where a big evil corporation is selfishly polluting the environment and a group of noble Native Americans is convinced that a vengeful spirit of the forest has been awakened as a result.

We’re told that the vengeful spirit is named Katahdin and that it’s “as large as a dragon and has the eyes of a cat.” We’re also told, by someone who claims to have actually seen it, that the Katahdin is a combination of several different creatures, “a part of everything that is God’s creation.”

Sound pretty scary, right?

Well, it is until the bear itself actually shows up on screen. That’s when we find ourselves confronted with this:

I mean, don’t get me wrong. He certainly is ugly. But he just looks so silly and …. well, fake.

The lesson here, and it’s an important one, is that you should never put your monster onscreen unless it can actually live up to all the hype. Take a lesson from Spielberg. When it became obvious that the shark in Jaws looked like a tin model, Spielberg made the decision to not show the shark. Instead, he gave us a lot of point of view shots and, by the time the shark did appear, audiences were so frightened that it didn’t matter whether it looked convincing or not. Prophecy makes the mistake of having its monster all over the place and it just doesn’t work.

Of course, once the EPA’s Dr. Robert Verne (Robert Foxworth) shows up with his pregnant wife (Talia Shire, who somehow went from The Godfather and Rocky to this), he discovers that one reason why the Katahdinh doesn’t live up to all the hype is because it’s just a mutant bear. It turns out that all that pollution led to some crazy results and now every logger, Native American activist, and camper in the area is in danger! Can Dr. Verne and a team of disposable, forgettable characters end the threat of Katahdinh!?

Prophecy is a big, dumb movie that’s never as much fun as you want it to be. There is one early scene that features a camper trying to hop away from Katahdinah while zipped up in a sleeping bag. That scene — which ends with one ruined sleeping back and lot of feathers floating around — is just demented enough to be kind of fun:

Otherwise, the entire film is slow-moving and rather dull. Part of the problem is that it was directed by John Frankenheimer, a major and important filmmaker who had entirely the wrong sensibility for this film. Frankenheimer was a legitimately great director (among his good credits: The Manchurian Candidate, Birdman of Alcatraz, Ronin, Seconds) but he takes the material too seriously. He spends so much time trying to sell the film’s environmental message that he forgets that the majority of the audience for a film like this isn’t watching because they want to become a better person. They’re watching for mutant bear mayhem! This is the type of film that needed to be directed by someone from the Roger Corman school of quick thrills and shameless shlock.

So, here are the twin lessons of Prophecy: know your audience and make sure your monster can live up to its reputation! Otherwise, you’ll just be known for that one scene with the exploding sleeping bag.

Horror on the Lens: Dementia 13 (dir by Francis Ford Coppola)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(I originally shared this film back in 2011 and 2019 — can you believe we’ve been doing this for that long? — but the YouTube vid was taken down both times!  So, I’m resharing it today!)

For today’s excursion into the world of public domain horror, I offer up the film debut of Francis Ford Coppola.  Before Coppola directed the Godfather and Apocalypse Now, he directed a low-budget, black-and-white thriller that was called Dementia 13.  (Though, in a sign of things to come, producer Roger Corman and Coppola ended up disagreeing on the film’s final cut and Corman reportedly brought in director Jack Hill to film and, in some cases, re-film additional scenes.)

Regardless of whether the credit should go to Coppola, Corman, or Hill, Dementia 13 is a brutally effective little film that is full of moody photography and which clearly served as an influence on the slasher films that would follow it in the future.  Speaking of influence,Dementia 13 itself is obviously influenced by the Italian giallo films that, in 1963, were just now starting to make their way into the drive-ins and grindhouses of America.

In the cast, keep an eye out for Patrick Magee, who later appeared as Mr. Alexander in A Clockwork Orange as well as giving a memorable performance in Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat.  Luana Anders, who plays the duplicitous wife in this film, showed up in just about every other exploitation film made in the 60s and yes, the scene where she’s swimming freaks me out to no end.

October Positivity: Face In The Mirror (dir by Russell S. Doughten Jr.)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1982 film, Face in the Mirror, opens with a community in crisis.

A teenager named Danny DeMarco (played by Michael Mitchell) has been shot and is being rushed to the hospital.  As we listen to the people who are following the ambulance to the hospital, it soon becomes clear that Danny shot himself and that the shooting occurred at a youth group meeting.  At the hospital, Danny is sent to the ICU.  He’s in a coma.  The doctors are not sure whether he’ll ever come out of that coma.

The first half of the 65-minute film is dominated by flashbacks as people try to figure out what could have led to Danny shooting himself.  Danny’s father remembers the time that he gave Danny a hard time for winning first place in a chess tournament.  Though I think most parents would be proud to have a son who was actually good at playing a game that required a certain amount of intelligence, Danny’s father is unimpressed.  Danny’s father was a jock in high school and he expects Danny to be the same.  Chess?  Why, that’s for wimpy youth group kids!

Speaking of wimpy youth group kids, the members of the youth group occasionally pause from the prayer to remember all of the times that they failed Danny.  They remember their own hypocritical behavior and how they would give Danny a hard time whenever he pointed it out.  They remember all of the times that Danny seemed to be confused about his faith and how they didn’t listen to his concerns.  They remember the youth group meeting in which Danny suddenly pulled out a gun and, after calling out everyone else on their hypocrisy and saying that he didn’t really believe in God, he pointed the gun at his head.  When another member of the group tried to grab the gun, it went off.  While their parents dismiss Danny as just being “a crazy kid,” the members of the youth group confront the role that they all played in Danny’s depression….

The first 30 minutes of this film is surprisingly well-acted and the theme of teen suicide is sensitively handled … up until the point that the film insinuates that Danny wouldn’t be depressed or suicidal if he was really a Christian.  I’ve known enough depressed but sincerely religious people to know that this is simply not the truth.  It’s actually a rather dangerous message to send out, as it suggests that depression is somehow a personal failing as opposed to something that everyone, to some degree, is going to have to deal with at some point in their life.

The second half of the film is all about the efforts of Danny’s friends to sneak into his hospital room so that they can pray for him and hopefully get through to him, even though he’s in a coma.  Again, the performances are sincere.  However, tonally, this half of the film is a mess.  There are some awkward moments of humor which really don’t seem like they belong in a movie about teen suicide.  The dialogue also get a bit cringey, as often happens when teenage characters are written by screenwriters who obviously were quite a bit older than the people they were writing for.

Face in the Mirror was directed by Russell Daughten, Jr.  Daughten also directed Nite Song and produced the Thief In The Night films.  Like those films, Face in the Mirror is a sincere but flawed time capsule.  The film’s tone is all over the place but I have to admit that I did kind of enjoy watching this grainy production with its amateur cast.  What can I say?  I have a weakness for low-budget indie films that feature a bunch of people who probably never made another film after this one.  Like Nite Song, watching this film is like stepping into a time machine and traveling to a simpler, if not quite innocent, past.  In the end, the film’s main message is that we should be aware that our words and our actions can hurt people without us even realizing it.  That’s not a bad one.

Horror on TV: Tales From The Crypt 4.8 “Showdown” (dir by Richard Donner)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The old west could be a dangerous and haunted place, as was revealed in this episode of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt!  Outlaw Billy Quintaine (Neil Guintoli) enters a saloon and discovers that the spirits of his victims have been waiting for him!

This episode originally aired on August 1st, 1992.  Along with being directed by The Omen‘s Richard Donner, it was written by Frank Darabont.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Horror Gindhouse: Flesh Feast (dir by Brad Grinter)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, poor Veronica Lake.

In the 1940s, Veronica Lake was undoubtedly a star.  She appeared in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy, Sullivan’s Travels.  She played the femme fatale in a series of classic film noirs.  She proved herself to be just as capable of playing comedy as she was playing drama.  By wearing her hair down and often allowing it to fall over her right eye, she created the peek-a-boo hairstyle.  She was briefly a star and a fashion icon but she also developed a reputation for heavy drinking and being difficult to work with.  During World War II, the U.S. government actually requested that Lake change her hairstyle in order to decrease incidents of women, many of whom were working factories as a part of the war effort, getting their hair tangled in the machinery.  Lake did so, cutting her long hair and going for a more practical look.  Her career never recovered.

The years following her 1940s heyday would not easy ones for Veronica Lake.  Along with multiple divorces, she also struggled with alcoholism and with the IRS.  Lake spent much of the 50s in England.  When she returned to the States in the 60s, she was arrested several times for public drunkenness and eventually took a job as a waitress to pay the bills.  A news story about her life as a waitress renewed some interest in Veronica Lake, as did the publication of her memoirs in 1969.  As so often happened with former stars who fell on hard times, she considered taking roles in the type of low budget films that she wouldn’t have even been offered when she was at the height of her fame.

That brings us to Flesh Feast.

In Flesh Feast, Veronica Lake is cast as Dr. Elaine Frederick.  Living in a dilapidated mansion in Florida, Dr. Frederick believes that she has discovered the perfect way to not only look younger but to also reverse the aging process itself!  It involves maggots, lots and lots of maggots.  For just a few dollars, Dr. Frederick will apply maggots to your skin and, like magic, they’ll suck away the years.  That may sound disgusting but, whenever the viewer is show Dr. Frederick working in her laboratory, it’s obvious that the maggots are instead grains of rice.

Dr. Frederick is approached by a group of South American neo-Nazis who want Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make their leader young again.  They refuse to tell her the name of their leader but you can guess who it is, right?  I mean, he’s living in Argentina.  He’s in hiding.  The rest of the world thinks that he’s dead.  He’s German.  He used to be involved in the government …. oh, okay, I’ll tell you.  It’s Hitler.  The group wants Dr. Frederick to use her maggots to make Hitler young again.  Dr. Frederick agrees but it turns out that she’s only interested in getting revenge!

There’s a lot of negative things you can say about Flesh Feast but it’s perhaps the only film to feature Veronica Lake laughing as a bunch of maggots eat Hitler’s face.  Don’t get me wrong.  It takes forever to actually reach that moment.  There’s a whole subplot about a journalist trying to investigate Dr. Franklin’s experiments.  As well, Dr. Franklin’s assistant is an undercover government agent and she keeps stumbling across dead bodies at inopportune times.  The first 70 minutes of Flesh Feast are about as draggy and boring as any movie that I’ve ever seen.  But, after all that, you get to see Veronica Lake kill Hitler.  Some would say that’s definitely worth the price of admission!

Flesh Feast was Veronica Lake’s final movie.  (She not only starred in the film but she co-produced it as well.  Director Brad Grinter was also responsible for Blood Freak.)  It was filmed in 1967 but not released until 1970, after the publication of her memoirs renewed interest in her career.  Unfortunately, Flesh Feast didn’t exactly do well at the box office.  Lake would die just three years later, at the age of only 50.  But her films and her performances will live forever.

Retro Television Reviews: Fantasy Island 1.7 “The Funny Girl/Butch and Sundance”

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Tuesdays, I will be reviewing the original Fantasy Island, which ran on ABC from 1977 to 1996.  The entire show is currently streaming on Tubi!

“Smiles, everyone, smiles!”

Sorry, Mr. Roarke, there’s not much to smile about when it comes to this episode.

Episode 1.7 “The Funny Girl/Butch and Sundance”

(Dir by Cliff Bole, originally aired on March 18th, 1978)

At the start of this episode, Tattoo is all excited because his birthday is coming up and he remembers that, last year, he partied all night and a bunch of beautiful women celebrated with him.  Mr. Roarke promises Tattoo that things will be different this year.  This year, Mr. Roarke says, there will be no presents.  Tattoo will play a game of chess and drink a glass of sherry and maybe there will be a cello recital.  Tattoo, needless to say, is disappointed.

Ignoring Tattoo’s anger, Mr. Roarke introduces him to the latest guests at Fantasy Island and it turns out that their fantasies are almost as disappointing and boring as Mr. Roarke’s plans for Tattoo’s birthday.  Kay Penny (Marcia Strassman) is apparently the world’s most successful comedienne even though she never comes across as being particularly funny.  Her fantasy is to move to small town where no one knows her.  That sounds like a pretty lousy fantasy but whatever.

Bill (Christopher Connelly) and Alex (James MacArthur) are two friends who want to be Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid for a weekend.  They’re huge fans of the film, though it appears neither one of them ever stuck around for the end.  Mr. Roarke takes Bill and Alex to an old west town (perhaps the same one that we saw a few weeks ago) and Bill and Alex get to live out their fantasy while trading quips and robbing banks.  The problem, for those of us who are watching then, is that neither Christopher Connelly nor James MacArthur can compare to Robert Redford and Paul Newman.  Eventually, though, the great character actor William Smith shows up as a visitor whose fantasy is to be Wyatt Earp.  He attempts to arrest Butch and Sundance.  They outsmart him and then Bill and Alex go home, satisfied.  Good for them but what about the guy who wanted to be Wyatt Earp?  Does he get his money back?  Seriously, I don’t think being humiliated was a part of his fantasy.

Meanwhile, Kay finds herself living in a small town.  Using the name Katherine Patrino, she gets a job as the receptionist for a veterinarian (played by Dennis Cole) and she also helps the vet’s silent son get over the recent loss of his mother.  She also tells a lot of jokes, none of which are particularly funny.  The best thing about this fantasy is that Mr. Roarke disguised himslef as a clown and showed up at the small town’s Founders Day Festival.

And then Tattoo did the same thing.

Anyway, during the festival, a dog was hit by a truck but Kay helped to bring it back to life and that brought a tear to my mismatched eyes.  Otherwise, this was a very forgettable trip to Fantasy Island.

On a positive note, though, it turned out that Mr. Roarke was just joking and Tattoo got to have a wild party after all.  Good for him, he earned it!

Horror Film Review: Queen of Outer Space (dir by Edward Bernds)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1958’s Queen of Outer Space, four rather dumb men take off in a spaceship from Earth.

There’s Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz) and Lt. Mike Cruze (David Wilcox), both of whom come across like they like to spend the weekend hanging out at their old frat house, playing beer pong. And then there’s Prof. Konrad (Paul Birch), who is smart because he knows what the word “atmosphere” means. And finally, in charge of the flight, is Captain Neal Patterson (Eric Fleming), who is upright and kind of dull.

The four men are supposed to be going to a space station but they get knocked off course by an animated laser beam and the ship crash lands on a mysterious planet that’s covered with cardboard rocks and plastic trees. Prof. Konrad takes one look at the planet and says that they’re on Venus.

Uh-oh! That’s not good! Isn’t Venus like a really bad place for human beings to find themselves?

Well, apparently not, because soon the four men are casually walking around the planet without so much as wearing a space suit or bringing along an oxygen supply. They even stop to get some sleep among the cardboard rocks. That’s when they’re captured by Venus’s inhabitants.

To the men’s shock, they discover that Venus is exclusively populated by women! The men are all like, “Hey, how you doing?” And the women are all like, “Silence, we have ray guns!”

Anyway, long story short, it turns out that Venus is ruled over by a disfigured queen (Laurie Mitchell), who hates men in general and Earth men in specific. She’s built a giant space laser that she’s planning to use to destroy Earth and it’s up to the men to stop her! Fortunately, they’ve got some help from Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor), a Venusian courier who has a wardrobe that’s to die for and who has apparently been waiting her entire life for men to come to Venus. When the Queen flirts with the captain, Talleah jealously exclaims, “I hate the Queen!” and that’s pretty much all it takes to start a revolution.

Needless to say, this is an incredibly sexist movie but, at the same time, it’s so goofy (in a 1950s sort of way) that you really can’t get too outraged by it. Instead, you just kinda cringe when Turner and Mike suggest that the captain needs to “turn on some of that old black magic” and invite the Queen out for a midnight stroll. Prof. Konrad quickly adds that Venus actually has several moons, though not all of them can be seen. I mean, it’s dumb but, at the same time, it’s just so 1958.

It’s really is a thoroughly ludicrous movie but, watching it, you get the feeling that the entire cast understood that it was ludicrous and they adjusted their performances accordingly. I mean, this is a movie that features Zsa Zsa Gabor putting on a mask and attempting to imitate the Queen while making absolutely no attempt to hide her trademark Hungarian accent. This is also a movie that features a giant rubber spider that pops up out of nowhere and for nor particular reason. I guess they just had the spider on set for the day and they decided to toss it in.

Queen of Outer Space is an incredibly silly movie but it’s entertaining in it’s own stupid way. Don’t take it too seriously. It’s only 80 minutes. Watch it for the experience.

Horror on the Lens: The Terror (dir by Roger Corman, Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Dennis Jakob, and Jack Nicholson)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever woken up and thought to yourself, “I’d love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?”

Of course you have!  Who hasn’t?

Well, fortunately, it’s YouTube to the rescue.  In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever.  However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon.  (Judging from his performance here and in Cry Baby Killer, Jack was not a natural-born actor.)  Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual.  Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman.  That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.

Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven.  The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie.  Among the directors: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, and even Jack Nicholson himself!  Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have some historical value.

(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets.)

Check out The Terror below!

October Positivity: Nikki and the Perfect Stranger (dir by Jefferson Moore)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The third part of The Perfect Stranger trilogy finds Nikki Comiskey at a crossroads …. again.

The film begins with Nikki (now played by Julianna Allen) recapping how, many years ago, she was a high-profile attorney who, after having dinner with Jesus (Jefferson Moore), decided to ditch her legal career and devote herself to her family.  (Nikki explains that she was a “closet agnostic” before she met Jesus.)  Ten years after having dinner with Nikki, Jesus appeared to Nikki’s teenage daughter, Sarah, and encouraged her to not abandon the faith of her parents.  However, while Sarah is off thriving at college, Nikki feels like her life is in a rut.  Though she still believes, she no longer gets much out of going to church and, once again, her marriage is starting to feel strained.

A visit with her mom doesn’t go well.  Mom wants to know why Nikki had to abandon her legal career.  Nikki gets annoyed and storms out of the house.  She gets in her car and starts to make the long drive home.  She calls her husband and explains what happened.  Her husband informs her that he’s going to busy working on the roof for a bit.  (Hmmm …. I wonder if this seemingly random bit of dialogue is going to come up again towards the end of the film?)  While Nikki is driving home, she sees a familiar figure standing on the side of the road.

Yes, it’s Jesus (though he’s currently going by Josh).

Nikki gives Jesus a ride and they discuss why Nikki is feeling so unsatisfied with her life.  Along the way, they meet a trucker with a porn addiction and they take him to dinner so that Jesus can encourage him to go to rehab.  (At the diner, Nikki tries to order a late night salad.  Needless to say, that doesn’t go well.)  Finally, Nikki gets a chance to help out a minister named Tony (Matt Wallace), who is a character in another film that Jefferson Moore made in which he played Jesus.

(In fact, I discovered that Moore also starred in a TV series called The Stranger, which was a spin-off of The Perfect Stranger films.  So really, there’s an entire Perfect Stranger cinematic universe out there.)

My main impression of Nikki and the Perfect Stranger is that it was surprisingly short.  With a running time of 63 minutes, it definitely felt more like an extra long episode of an anthology show than an actual movie.  That said, Nikki and the Perfect Stranger doesn’t feel as preachy as the previous Perfect Stranger films.  I imagine that’s because the previous two films featured Jesus “educating” an agnostic while this third one features Jesus checking up on an old friend and giving advice.  Since he’s a bit less condescending and argumentative in this film, Jefferson Moore is far more likable here than he was in the previous films.  As opposed to some of the films that I’ve watched this month, the emphasis is more on helping than on judging.  (I can only imagine the tortures to which the Christianos would have subjected that trucker.)  By the time the end credits roll, Nikki’s story has been efficiently wrapped up.

Horror on TV: Tales From The Crypt 3.7 “The Reluctant Vampire” (dir by Stephen Hopkins)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Reluctant Vampire was the 7th episode of the 3rd season of HBO’s Tales From The Crypt!  It stars Malcolm McDowell as a vampire who is a little bit too nice for his own good.  Seriously, you can’t go wrong with Malcolm McDowell as a vampire.

The Reluctant Vampire originally aired on July 10th, 1991.

Enjoy!