Ah October, when a young man’s fancy turns to horror! I still have hundreds of unwatched horror films to get to, so I’m making a dedicated effort to only watch horror movies for the next month in hopes of making a dent. Here’s my first pass:
Boardinghouse (John Wintergate 1982) Known for being the first Shot-On-Video slasher, but not much else I imagine. Forget being filmed on tape, this thing looks like it was edited using two VCRs— choppy and incomprehensible transitions between scenes and almost no establishing shots or second-camera work make what was already a confusing tale of a telekinetic girl who kills her fellow boardinghouse members with her mind even more befuddling. I rarely knew what was happening, but I could follow enough to realize this wasn’t keeping me from anything worthwhile. Perhaps if you are not talented enough to raise the funds to make a real movie, you should not be making one anyways. I see my slow Bataan death march towards the second Hundred 80s Slashers mark is going to be littered with examples somehow even worse than the first…
Disconnected (Gorman Bechard 1983) It may be unfair to praise this film for being so fascinatingly inept while decrying
Boardinghouse, but this like
Satan’s Blade or
A Night to Dismember enters into that sweet spot of being intensely watchable and unexpectedly endearing in its cluelessness. Alternately artsy and hypnotically artless, this is one of the strangest slashers I’ve ever seen. There’s sort of a plot (one that ends with twenty-five minutes still left in the movie!), but the most accurate description is that the film presents an endless loop of plotless scenes in which a comely young actress ambles around her apartment while answering the phone, looking at the phone, and being in the general vicinity of the phone, occasionally interspersed with other actors, locales, and murders. The “improv” in the film is car crash-level role playing out of a job interview, but amazingly this only helps to build-in the intentional awkwardness of moments like a nerd trying to hit on a qt video store employee. There are also lots of phoned-in film references— 90% of the apartment scenes unfold in front of a
Trouble With Harry poster, which is A+ meta placement, but I liked how this particular shot was contrasted with the
Dial ‘M’ For Murder poster in the background
—and the characters talk about “old” movies and stars like we do here… which is disconcerting for all involved! The Wikipedia entry for the actress playing the lead even insists she’s related to Claude Rains, which would be doubly impressive since she spells her last name with an E. Recommended for advanced students of my 80s Slasher breadcrumb syllabus.
Doctor Butcher MD (Marino Girolami 1980) Those
42nd Street Forever / Video Nasties discs strike again. I actually had both this and
Zombie Holocaust penciled down from various comps, but I was able to quash both with one fell viewing, since
Doctor Butcher MD is a reedit with additional footage. I don’t imagine it made it any worse or better in the process though. No intention of finding out, either— once is definitely enough for this tripe. I did enjoy the titular doc saying “the juggler vein” ala Jon Wurster though.
Horror Express (Eugenio Martin 1972) The stated premise of this one didn’t sound too promising (Scientist Christopher Lee’s frozen apeman thaws out and attacks victims on a moving train) but it turns out there’s more going on than just cavemaniacs running wild— like Rasputin stand-ins for starters! It took me a while but I did eventually warm to this one, especially by the time Telly Savalas shows up for some reason in the last third of the movie. Goofy fun.
Killer’s Moon (Alan Birkinshaw 1978) Though it starts to undermine itself with some unnecessary scenes of rape and sexual violence about halfway in, overall this is a surprisingly light and arch comic take on grindhouse fare, with many memorable and frequently bizarre lines (My favorite: “Thank you dog”). A rare case of one of these films that would actually play better edited for television. Also, this is the pullquote Redemption went with, which is just a Mary Whitehouse-ish description of the worst elements without recommendation or value ascribed:
MARIO BAVA-O-RAMA: Black Sunday (1960) / Five Dolls For an August Moon (1970) / Baron Blood (1972) / Lisa and the Devil (1973) While I liked parts of
Black Sabbath, I wasn’t too taken with the other four Bava pictures I’ve seen, but I kept hearing and reading about his vaunted reputation, so I finally got to more of his high profile titles and… I’m now ready to write off yet another Euro horror auteur as Not My Thing.
Black Sunday is a passable gothic tale of a vampiric witch brought back to life rather surreptitiously who proceeds to kill others to rebuild her body. I’m not the biggest fan of these spooky castle-set Euro movies, though I guess I should learn to love them since I still have a ton of unwatched Hammer films to get to! Though I can’t say I enjoy the modern-day Euro murder-fests any better:
5 Dolls For an August Moon is a confusing and silly portrait of mod rich people getting killed and shoved into a freezer every ten minutes. I did enjoy the jaunty theme that played every time we found ourselves back inside the deep freeze— it obviously gets played many, many times!
Baron Blood is worse yet: Joseph Cotten is the titular cursed figure who is brought back to life in the form of Witchy Poo before transcending to his final slumming Hollywood star form. Borders on Jess Franco-levels of unwatchability. Speaking of, last up was
Lisa and the Devil, wherein stupid shit happens to characters who may or may not be ghosts in yet another dilapidated Italian estate. If there is anything all these giallos and Euro sleaze horror pics have taught me, it’s that the truly lucrative business in the 70s was owning one of these properties to rent out for the seemingly endless stream of movies that needed a place to put dead bodies.
Nightmares Come at Night (Jess Franco 1970) Blonde Mary Tyler Moore doppelgänger tricks 100% nude all the time girl into killing jewel thieves in her sleep. Grading this movie on the same scale as other films is like grading
Hot Springs Hotel as a sitcom— the only reason this thing exists is so people could get aroused by it, not invest themselves in the plot or the craft. And it fails by even those wispy metrics, as Franco is so incompetent a filmmaker that most of the copious nudity here is either obscured by poorly-considered shadows and poor blocking or filmed in garish harshness that flatters no one. I have no nice explanation as to how in the
world a director this incompetent had such a flourishing career in the film industry, but I assume he was just a drug dealer who knew both beautiful women and film producers from his day job and used these movies to launder cash. Drugs would also explain why anyone went to see these during their first runs as well. I have nothing to base this unfair conjecture on apart from my disbelief that the single most incompetent director of all time somehow managed to make movies for decades and is now receiving endless deluxe Blu-ray editions of his work-- which means DARE clearly
didn’t work!
Premature Burial (Roger Corman 1962) Lively Poe adaptation from usual suspect Corman, with Ray Milland (who fared so much better with these Corman pics than his unlucky star-fallen brethren will the next decade in giallos) starring as a man obsessed with being buried alive. Some effective twists and generally accomplished atmosphere help the whole slight but fun enterprise wash down well.
She Killed in Ecstasy (Jess Franco 1970) He Watched in Boredom.
the Watcher in the Woods (John Hough 1980) I imagine RL Stine is a fan of this one, as his entire
Goosebumps series echoes the film’s structure and use of “scares.” However, like that series, I’d have liked this a lot more if I’d experienced it when I was nine. This is all a bit silly now, and the explanation as to just what is going on in the woods of cranky old Bette Davis’ estate is full-on ridiculous.
X: the Man With X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman 1963) A wonderful movie, and a breath of fresh air amongst a lot of garbage this round. Ray Milland plays God and ends up going mad at the sight of him after his permanent x-ray spex via radical medical experiments allow him to not just see thru ladies’ blouses but also into the eye of the creator. Side effects! While it’s obvious Corman didn’t quite have enough material (in conception or actuality) to round out a feature-length film, what is here is marvelously quick-moving and novel, though the film exhausts itself near the end and we get a completely useless car chase to kill/fill a few minutes. Still, this is probably as good a film as could ever be made of this material. Highly recommended.