Late Night Retro Television Review: Freddy’s Nightmares 1.18 “The Art of Death”

Posted on December 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Fridays, I will be reviewing Freddy’s Nightmares, a horror anthology show which ran in syndication from 1988 to 1990. The entire series can be found on Tubi!

This week’s episode is actually decent.

Episode 1.18 “The Art of Death”

(Dir by Ken Wiederhorn, originally aired on March 12th, 1989)

Jack (Carey Scott) is a talented artist and college student who has a crush on Joan (Laura Schaefer). When Joan’s jock boyfriend humiliates Jack, Jack suddenly finds himself approached by The Phantom (Judd Omen), a masked figure who claims that he can kill Jack’s enemies if Jack draws a picture of him doing it. After the jock is killed in a treadmill accident, Joan sees the picture that Jack drew and decides she doesn’t want anything to do with Jack. The Phantom suggests drawing a picture of him surprising Joan in the shower. Jack refuses, just to discover that the picture has already been drawn and the Phantom is now holding Joan prisoner in a boiler room. Jack draws a picture of the Phantom being sucked down a hole. The Phantom vanishes but …. oh no, now Jack’s wearing the mask! Jack was the Phantom all along!

As for the second story, Joan struggles to recover from the trauma. In typical Freddy’s Nightmares fashion, she has a series of hallucinations that lead to her killing her psychiatrist.

This episode actually worked! The first story was genuinely creepy. The second story was predictable but it featured a good performance from Laura Schaefer and the action moved at a decent pace. I’m going to give the majority of the credit to director Ken Wiederhorn, who previously directed one of my favorite zombie films, 1977’s Shock Waves.

This is my final Freddy’s Nightmares review for 2025. Retro Television Review is taking a break for the holidays, so I can focus on Awards Season and Christmas movies! Freddy’s Nightmares will return on January 9th.

I Want My R-TV: Spellcaster (1992, directed by Rafal Zielinski)

Posted on October 24, 2018 by Jedadiah Leland

Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!

In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities. British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos. (A music station that actually plays music? Imagine that!) Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star. Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.

The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check. The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money. They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart. Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.

The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying. For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting. Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it. When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber. It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.

With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late. By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age. The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Terror Night, aka Bloody Movie (dir by Nick Marino)

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Okay, so this is kind of a weird one.

The movie known as Bloody Movie was originally filmed in 1987, under the title Terror Night. However, it was never released. There are plenty of rumors about why it wasn’t released. Some people say that it was because the film was produced with Mafia money. Some people say it was because it used a lot of footage that was lifted from other movies and the producers apparently didn’t bother to clear the rights. Of course, it’s also totally possible that the film wasn’t released because it wasn’t very good. I mean, that does happen.

Regardless of why, the film apparently sat on the shelf for 20 years. It was finally released by Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia and retitled Bloody Movie. That said, the DVD that I own (and watched for this review) was released by Legacy Entertainment and still had the Terror Night title. The transfer on the Legacy DVD was notably bad. From what I’ve been told, the Retromedia release looks a lot better.

Now, there’s a lot bad things that can be said about Terror Night. It’s low-budget, which is one of those things that can be overcome by a clever director but, in this case, it just results in Terror Night looking cheap. It’s poorly written, full of one-dimensional characters who were shallow even by the standards of a late 80s slasher. This is also one of those movies where formerly respectable actors pop up for five minutes cameos. Whenever one of those actors shows up, all the action stops so that they can earn their paycheck. Aldo Ray is homeless and doomed. Cameron Mitchell is a cynical cop and doomed. Alan Hale, Jr. is an affable security guard and apparently not doomed. There’s no real reason for any of them to be there but there they are! There’s also a biker couple who show up for no particular reason, along with the typical collection of teenage victims.

But yet, there are moments when Terror Night goes from being bland to being almost transcendently odd.. There are moments of comedy mixed in with some surprisingly mean-spirited death scenes. Necks are snapped. Heads are chopped off. Bodies are split in half. It all gets rather messy and the presence of all those old time actors makes the sudden gore scenes feel all the more strange.

However, the main thing that distinguishes Terror Night from the other slashers of the era is the identity of the killer. (And, before anyone yells at me, this is not a spoiler. There is never any mystery about who the killer is.) Lance Hayward is not a zombie like Jason Voorhees or a silent symbol of evil like Michael Myers. He’s not seeking vengeance for some crime in the past. Instead, he’s a former silent screen star. (It seems like Hayward would have been close to 90 years old at the time of Terror Night. He’s still surprisingly spry.) Hayward commits his murders while wearing costumes from his old movies. Adding to the strangeness of the whole scenario is that actual silent footage is spliced into the murder scenes. Most of the footage comes from movies like The Thief of Baghdad, The Black Pirate, and the Gaucho. You have to wonder if Douglas Fairbanks cheated the director’s father or something.

(Since Hayward spends most of the movie in costume, I’m assuming that he was mostly played by stuntmen. When Hayward actually shows his face, he’s played by one-time Oscar nominee, John Ireland. At the height of his career, Ireland co-starred in films like All The King’s Men.)

As to why a silent scream star would be murdering teenagers … well, your guess is as good as mine. It’s a strange film, a mix of gore and nostalgia. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it but I still always appreciate anything this strange.