4 Horror Films For The Weekend (10/3/26)

Posted on October 3, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It’s October! Here’s four films that you can watch this weekend to help you get in the Halloween mood!

For last night’s #FridayNightFlix, we watched Roger Moore’s first outing as James Bond, Live and Let Die (1973). Now, I know that a lot of people are going to read that and think to themselves, “Live and Let Die isn’t a horror movie!” While it’s true that Live and Let Die is primarily a spy movie, it does borrow quite a bit from the horror genre. I mean, this is a film that opens with a man being killed in voodoo ceremony! Baron Samedi (played by Geoffrey Holder), the man who cannot die, is one of Bond’s best villains and also one of the few that apparently does manage to avoid dying. If Hammer or Amicus had produced the Bond films, they would probably look a lot like Live and Let Die. So, if you’re looking for a horror-adjacent film to help get you in the Halloween mood, Live and Let Die is a great choice. It’s the closest thing we have to a true James Bond grindhouse film. The boat chase is a classic, though how much of a classic depends on you feel about having a redneck Louisiana sheriff dropped right in the middle of a Bond film. The film is currently on Prime, along with all the other Bond films.

Two weeks ago, for #MondayActionMovie, we watched Graduation Day (1981). Featuring a great soundtrack, several over the top kills, a hammy Christopher George, a young Vanna White, and an epic 12-minute performance of the song Gangster Rock by Felony, Graduation Day is one of the best of the early slashers. Like a lot of those pre-Nightmare On Elm Street slasher films, it owes a huge debt to the giallo genre. The killer even wears black gloves! Can you figure out who the murderer is? And will you ever get the film’s insanely catchy theme song, The Winner, out of your head? Everybody wants to be the winner…. Graduation Day is streaming on Prime.

The Dead Pit (1989) is a personal favorite of mine. A woman end up in a mental hospital and spends the majority of the movie running around in her underwear while trying to get people to understand that the dead are coming back to life. I’ve had that dream more times than I care to count. This is an enjoyably over-the-top B-movie. Director Brett Leonard captures some truly creepy images and lead actress Cheryl Lawson gives a good and sympathetic performance as the amnesiac who keeps seeing terrible things. With all of the elevated horror nonsense that’s going on right now, it’s nice to see a film from an age when the horror films were made by people who didn’t feel the need to apologize for the genre. The Dead Pit is streaming on Tubi.

Finally, with In The Mouth of Madness (1995), John Carpenter proved himself to be one of the few directors capable of actually capturing the bleak atmosphere of H.P. Lovecraft’s best stories. The much-missed Sam Neill gives one of his best performances as a reporter who discovers a horrifying truth. The film’s final scene is brilliant.

Happy October!

Horror Film Review: The Dead Pit (dir. by Brett Leonard)

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let me set up the scene for you:

It’s late at night. A woman wakes up from a terrible nightmare and finds herself in a shadowy, white-walled hospital room. She gets out of bed and walks over to the window. Standing outside, staring up at her, is a lone figure in blood-stained surgical scrubs. The figure’s eyes glow red as he says, “Around here, I’m the head surgeon.”

And then he tosses some poor orderly’s decapitated head up at the window.

If you enjoy the type of silly but effective creepiness that is epitomized by this scene, than 1989’s The Dead Pit might just be the film for you.

In The Dead Pit, Cheryl Lawson plays Jane Doe. As you might guess from her name, Jane isn’t quite sure who she really is or how she came to lose her memory. All she knows for sure is that she’s been checked into a disturbingly sterile hospital. At night, she’s haunted by nightmares in which she’s stalked by a menacing figure wearing a doctor’s mask and during the day, she has to deal with the occasional earthquake and the fact that she occasionally starts to speak in a vaguely possessed voice that freaks out the head psychiatrist (Jeremy Slate). Could it have anything to do with the fact that one of her fellow patients is an ex-nun who is obsessed with sprinkling holy water over everything? Or could it possibly be related to the fact that many years ago, her psychiatrist murdered Dr. Ramzi (Danny Gochnauer) when he discovered that Ramzi was actually a serial killer who murdered countless patients? Then again, it could just be related to the fact that there’s apparently a hundred freaking zombies just wandering around the hospital…

If The Dead Pit sounds like it’s kinda silly and a little bit campy … well, it is. However, it’s also a lot of fun, the type of unapologetically trashy horror film that makes for perfect Halloween viewing. Director Brett Leonard makes good use of what appears to be a very small budget. The film was apparently shot on the grounds of an actual mental hospital and, through the use of inventive lighting and a constantly tracking camera, Leonard makes good use of the locale’s inherent creepiness. This is yet another film that works far better than you might expect, simply because the director understood just how scary it can be to feel isolated.

Just from doing a quick google search, I can also say that apparently, this film — and, specifically, Cheryl Lawson’s lead performance in this film — has a lot of fans on the Internet. I can understand that because Lawson’s likable, she’s believable when she’s both scared and possessed, and she screams with panache. She makes this film effective because she takes the material seriously and has enough respect for the audience to actually give a good performance and that makes it impossible not to 1) identify with her and 2) hope that she makes it through the film in one piece. Even when Lawson is having to scream for her life, she never allows Jane Doe to come across as weak. Speaking as a girl who loves horror films but hates to always see women having to act like simple-minded victims, I found Lawson’s performance to be almost empowering and I’m sure that’s why so many of The Dead Pit’s fans love this movie.

Of course, Cheryl Lawson also spends almost the entire movie running around in her panties and a t-shirt. I guess that also could possibly have something to do with the film’s popularity…

Okay, I guess that is a more likely explanation. However, in all honesty, if I was in a horror movie, I would totally want to be the girl who spends the whole movie running around in her underwear. I mean, yes, I know that it’s the good girls who always survive until the end but seriously who wants to be a good girl in a horror movie? The good girls are boring and usually end up forgotten by the time the sequel comes out. The bad girls are the ones that everyone remembers.

But, regardless of the main reason why you personally might enjoy it, the Dead Pit is a fun movie that’s a great pick if you’re like me and you often find yourself simply looking for something to watch at 2 in the morning.

6 Trailers While You Wait

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

So, I’m currently still working on my review of Black Swan, which I saw this weekend and loved so much that I ended up having an asthma attack at the end of it. But anyway, as we wait for me to discover articulation, why not check out 6 more of my favorite grindhouse and exploitation film trailers?

1) Deathdream (a.k.a. Dead of Night)

Now, this is an interesting debut film from the prolific Canadian director Bob Clark (the man who later gave the world both Black Christmas and A Christmas Story). A young soldier is killed in Viet Nam and shows up back in his hometown one night later without a soul. The allegory is pretty obvious but it’s still effectively done and crawls under your skin. This film was also one of Tom Savini’s early films. The soldier’s father is played by John Marley who later appeared in The Godfather with a horse’s head in his bed.

2) Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess

I’ve never seen this movie. I just like the title.

3) The Black Cat

Director Lucio Fulci made this film around the same time he was making his more famous zombie films but it never got the same attention, despite starring David Warbeck. I love the cat — he’s so cute and he reminds me of my own cat. Plus, he’s quite effective at killing people.

4) School of the Holy Beast

Apparently, this is a nunsploitation film from Japan! That nunsploitation was a very popular genre in Italy, Spain, and Ireland makes sense when you consider that those are three of the most Catholic countries on the planet. But Japan?

5) The Blood Splattered Bride

The trailer for the 1971 Italian lesbian vampire film goes on for a bit too long but I think it has nice atmospheric feel to it (the same can be said of the film itself).

6) The Dead Pit

Since we started with a zombie film, let’s end with one as well. The Dead Pit is pretty silly but I enjoyed it and would happily star in a remake. Plus, the trailer’s line about “the thickness of the door” just amuses me on so many levels.