Night Killer - 1990

 Different years for this movie exist on the internet, but one fun piece of trivia I found that keeps being repeated is that Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released in Italy under the title "Do Not Open That Door", with this movie then capitalizing on it and being named "Don't Open That Door 3".

Does that make this an unofficial part of the "Don't" series of films I was watching?  Does this make it part of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series?  Does it make it both?  I say yes.  Let's look at it through eyes like that, shall we?

Well, no, we won't.  But this movie is insane.  In the beginning of the flick, a modern housewife has her husband leave her home.  She immediately starts fondling her naked breasts in front of a mirror, and gets a obscene phone call from a killer.  The killer is in the house of course, and thankfully the rape scene is not shown but rather alluded to later.  The woman's reality is shattered, she hooks up with an abusive weirdo, and there's still a killer out there.

This movie is all sorts of off-kilter misogyny, full of weak exploited women and insane creepy men.  Night Killer was directed by the guy who brought us the infamous Troll 2, and it feels like it.  Not only that, but Bruno Mattei was also brought in to film additional gore scenes when the studio didn't deem it gory enough. 

Night Killer is a pretty fucking over the top experience, and the acting, the effects, the pacing, are literally all over the place.  If you wanted backstory about anyone, motivation, explanation, if you wanted this to make sense, please go look somewhere else.  This movie is wall to wall fun for exactly that reason though, and it will leave an impression on you.  

Night Killer is what became of the giallo style eventually, it got mixed with too much weirdness and amateur attempts at bloody horror that it got forgotten.  But these weird in between films are a fucking hoot, and honestly, this is one I'd watch again.  Ill give it 4 stars.

Silent Madness - 1984

 I'm not purposely comparing movies to Friday the 13th installments, but when the first 3D shot came in this film, I couldn't help but think of Friday the 13th part 3.

Silent Madness was a filmed-in-3D slasher, towards what Wikipedia calls "the end of the 80s 3D craze".  I knew some 3D movies had come out at this point, but which ones?  What started the craze?  I'm sort of interested.  Given this is 3D there's some gimmicky shots and some dumb choices, but hey, that's expected right?

A clerical error at a mental hospital releases Howard Johns instead of John Howard.  Not sure who John Howard was, but Howard Johns is a insane maniacal killer, who immediately gets back to doing what he does best.  Dr. Joan Gilmore is our plucky heroine, who immediately worries about Howard Johns despite the hospital covering up the release of Johns.  Johns returns to a school where he killed a few girls about 11 years ago, and Joan is hot on his trail.

The movie is half horror and half tongue in cheek, but also a tongue in cheek that doesn't quite come off as believable.  When it falls into that type, I could've sworn it was a modern-ish movie made in the "style" of an 80s film, the way that dumbass modern horror movies are doing.  I did check once, though, to see what year this movie was.  I was thinking it was a early 2010s "comedy horror" of that type.

There's a bit of nudity, the acting is decent, and the movie isn't terribly boring, those are the good news parts of this.  However, it's also got no good kills, the killer sucks, and the weird end twist undercuts the killer quite a bit.  

Okay, I guess a few of the kills are decent.

Silent Madness comes off like the B or C level horror flick it is, something to put on in the background, something to watch only for die hard fans.  I give it a 2.

Bloody Wednesday - 1988

 Some things you can't make up.  Per Wikipedia.  Tagline: You'll pray for Thursday!

Bloody Wednesday was made in 1985 and released in 1988.  It's the B movie story of a guy mentally on the edge, struggling with his last grips of reality and unsure of himself.  It is based on the happenings during the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre of 1984, and for what's it's worth, may be a somewhat realistic depiction.

This is another perfect definition of amateur.  It was directed and produced by a man with no other IMDb credits, the main star only has a small handful of other acting roles.  The writer had done quite a bit but also been based a lot in B movie, unknown, or unreleased films.

Bloody Wednesday is very forgettable film, it leaves you with nothing, not like it's expected to.  The film has the main character talking to a teddy bear at multiple points, and none of that is even fun.  Instead, it just keeps going and going until it's actually quite tense and dark finale.

I think I pointed out in a recent review that I have always disliked movies where it's about someone going insane, because I end up wondering too often what is happening in reality.  When the main character kills a person that no one else sees the dead body, is that person really dead?  If not, where did they go?  I get annoyed because there's intentionally no answers to those questions, so we end up shrugging and finishing the movie, thinking 'whatever'.

Overall very bland until the end scene, this is some rank film-making that is hard to appreciate.  1 star.

The Bedroom Window - 1986

 Erotic thrillers, as pointed out by the HDTGM guys, really are extinct now.  It's not a giant loss in the scope of things, but it is an interesting phenomenon and some of these are fun enough to be worth seeing and talking about.

The Bedroom Window would have been at the early forefront of the erotic thriller, the real bulk of these coming along in the 90's with Basic Instinct and such.  The Bedroom Window is also a thriller and a good guys going after the bad guys sort of a thing, everything culminating in the trademark movie scene where unassisted, the heroes have to track down a dangerous killer.

We begin with Steve Guttenberg having an affair with the wife of a powerful man.  She witnesses a brutal attack from his house window, and cannot have anyone know she was there, so they decide to pretend it was he who witnessed it.  But his story falls apart in court and now the killer is free.  Meanwhile, sexy things are happening and the erotic thriller part of the storyline is charged up the yazoo in this 80's flick.

I can tell I'm a mature cool guy because when the sexy bar dancing scene happens, I laugh and say to myself "this is so stupid".  Realistically, some of these aspects simply have not aged well, but they're so indicative of a time and world which was quite different.  It's fun to see in a nostalgic sort of way, and it's really fun because these were the types of movies I was watching when I was young, getting weird ass ideas about sex, romance, women, flirting and relationships. 

The Bedroom Window won't make you scream to watch it again, but it reminds me of a off-kilter sorta gauzy flick like Body Double, just quite not as good.  Entertaining enough, especially if you ever saw this sorta thing when you were in your early pubescence.  

Silver Bullet - 1985

 Bump here on the blog because I'm watching less movies these days.  It's the new job.  I spend all day looking at a screen and sitting, I kinda don't want to look at a screen and sit when I'm off work too.

Silver Bullet is one of the many many Stephen King adaptations, I believe it's a short story of his from early on, and it's not one I've ever read.  Silver Bullet stars Gary Busey, Everett McGill, Corey Haim, and Terry O'Quinn in a small role as the sheriff.

In the small isolated town of Tarker's Mills, a savage beast begins killing people.  Local handicapped kid Corey Haim lives with his parents and his sister, coming of age and seemingly undisturbed by his difference from the other kids.  His alcoholic uncle Gary Busey is there, and when Haim sees the werewolf one night, he manages to convince his sister of this, and they manage to enroll Busey as an unlikely assistant.

Much like a lot of King written projects, the focus on character is very forefront in the story.  Everyone interacts and reacts in familiar, realistic, and human ways.  The idyllic, suburban neighborhood feels like a lot of our actual childhoods, as well as the brother sister relationship feels very familiar.  Everyone is part of this small community, and the werewolf kills drag up discomfort and residual bad feelings that have been swept under the rug.

Silver Bullet was directed by Dan Attias, a man who went on to be a TV director.  It's confidently handled, and the effects are really good as well.  The werewolf transformations are great, and the performances all work.  The just-out-of-normal way that some people act is really cool, and for a while it is a great whodunnit as well as a well crafted horror film upon reveal.

This has gone on to become a cult film, and it is one of the better King adaptations.  I'd seen it before, and I may see it again, it's good enough to consider anyways.  I'll give it. 3.5.

Sweet Sixteen - 1983

 I'm still in the mode of "let's get back to the core of the blog" which is also coupled with "I just broke up with my girlfriend and started a new job, I need some escapism".

Sweet Sixteen was stylized as Sweet 16 on Tubi, which despite having advertisements has overtaken Amazon in terms of horror for me.  They have tons and a lot of it is 70s, 80s, 90s, foreign, and super unheard of.  Hey guys, you're attracting some customers with that lemme tell ya.  

It's 1983 and Friday the 13th part 3 had come out in the previous year.  So they grabbed one of the girls from that film and put her in this, which is yet another 80's slasher for all y'all.  The plot involves a young girl named Marci who is having her sweet 16 pretty soon.  She lives in a small town where there's some racial tension involving two Native Americans and the white people, and early on she is flirting with a guy that is then killed.  As the plot goes on, every man that hits on her is killed, the Native Americans are blamed, and tensions all around rise to a boiling point.

We also follow fellow young girl classmate Melissa and her brother, and overall there's a lot of likable characters in this film.  There's not a lot of intricacy to the plot, and there's only about three kills, but the focus on the interactions with decent acting and decent writing make the movie feel good enough to watch.  

I guess we're flipping the script with having the man be hunted, and spoiler alert a female killer who is the main character's mom I think (I don't remember), and that's enough to differentiate this one, right!  It is the 8-s and we need slashers after all. 

Sweet Sixteen is another one to watch when you need some basic slasher, and it functions in this form to a average degree.  3 stars

Devil Story - 1985

 What do France, a deformed killer, a psychotic dangerous horse, a mummy, a creepy castle, and the 80's all have in common?  They're all awesome and they are all words that describe this movie.  This bizarre, bizarre movie.

I first knew Devil Story was something special when the music kicked on and it was pretty good.  Then I knew it was something special by the "acting" or should I more accurately say, the people they pointed the camera at when they said action, because these people are not actors.

Then, the horse comes along and it's as inexplicable as it sounds, which is about on par with the deformed killer and everything else in this movie.  

Now...here's the real fun part.  There's in incredibly long scene in a graveyard, then a long chase, and I realized at some point no one had saying anything  I believe there's about 45 minutes in this film of non-dialogue, just groaning, screaming, horse whinnying, and music.  The killer is put through the ringer too, getting kicked by the horse and lit on fire. 

Let's not even stray into the ending, which involves a Egyptian coffin, a ship that's on land, and very conveniently labeled containers of gun powder.  This movie is not just "bonkers", it's full on lock-me-in-a-straight-jacket commit-able.  It's not bad, in fact it's the very thing that gets guys like me into weird shit.  It'd be great with buddies and beers.

Sting of Death - 1966

 Is it wrong to complain about something being "amateur"?  I mean, what are we saying?  "These people didn't have vast amounts of natural skill, talent, or schooling that taught them things, so when they did it, it wasn't as good as those that did have natural talent, skill or schooling"?

Also, isn't that obvious?  Most people, I would argue, are not born with huge amounts of natural talent.  If they were, we'd have a lot more marvelous inventions, a lot more doctors, a lot more singularly known people who defined industries, history, or in this case genres of film.  What I'm sort of saying, in a way, is how dare I ever downgrade something for not specifically being made by those with magnificent presence enough to make it amazing?

I say this in a way because Sting of Death is fun, is captivating, but also brazenly amateur.  This is the type of movie where there was only a second take if someone botched a line.  If they were somewhat short on film that day, who knows, they may even let a botched line into the film, figuring "who will notice?"

Sting of Death is in short about a group of people at a beachside resort who are being terrorized by a school of jellyfish that are there along with something worse: a giant mutated jellyfish man.  The jellyfish man is hilarious, and points out most of the amateur part of this movie.  The costume changes from shot to shot sometimes, and it is super obvious they just glued on seaweed or moss and painted it, or in the case of the huge rubber fins, they simply did nothing.  You can even see the actors ankles in multiple shots.

There's long, nothing shots of people snorkeling.  There's endless scenes of guys driving around on hovercraft.  There's a truly obvious villain who never gets explanation, but is also pretty well acted and very creepy.  And there's helpless women aplenty: being attacked, carried, rescued, hunted, and stripping down to bathing suits or less.  There is no nudity of course, no blood, no scares.  

The definition of this film is "regional" horror.  This means that it was made outside of Hollywood, by no one connected to Hollywood: it was shot, distributed, and remained in one place.  Manos The Hands of Fate belongs to that club, as does this.  These movies were funded and made entirely by non-filmmakers, using non-actors, DIYing the entire thing.  For that being said, hey, it could most certainly be WORSE!  What's really fun about these is to watch it for what they do have, and they things they did put importance into, instead of criticizing it for being "amateur".

Despite all this internal arguing, it's not like this is all that fun though, and it is slow and it is funky.  It has a place for those who truly care to try.  I'll give it a 2.

The Child - 1977

 The main character in The Child is played by an actress which acted in not one but TWO films made by Larry Buchanan.  I mention this because I seriously had to check to make sure this film was not made by him.  Welcome back, Z-grade.  It's been a while.

The Child is a boringly-named late 70's thriller/mystery/horror film.  The plot involves the aforementioned girl coming to watch a younger girl at a house way out in the middle of nowhere.  Something odd and sinister is going on, with the girl going into the cemetery at night and meeting "friends" there.  Everyone else acts weird too, obviously having things they're hiding and being cagey about.

The Child has a weird "mash the piano dissonantly" score, and that approach to music also encapsulates the rest of the film.  The cinematography is ridiculous, the acting is all over the place, the pace slows down and speeds up at random.  There's slightly comedic moments that were unintentional, there's stupidity which wishes it had been intentional, and the horror, which was the intention, completely fails.  

All this said, The Child is somewhat fun to watch, as it's completely off the rails and whackadoo.  It's slow though, even barely being over an hour.  There's no nudity or blood to speak of, there's not anything super cool about it in that way, so it rides this whatever sorta middle meh of a movie that you'll realize has a lot out there better than it. 

For what is has, and doesn't have, I'll give it 2.5 stars still.  

Bloody Moon - 1981

 Recently I had a thought to visit again the types of films that "got me here in the first place."  Those would be the title of the blog, the Grindhouse, the cult, the offbeat and weird and probably terrible.  I have strayed, out of want to write more, and included a lot of things that probably should not be on here, TBH.

With that in mind, on Tubi, I searched out the underground cult legend that is Jesus Franco.  Italian master of all things bad that he is, I was thrilled to see something that was in the horror genre, and that the plot description said was a slasher!  I was more than thrilled, I was fucking pumped.

Originally titled "The Saw of Death", this film revolves around a scarred young man who is killing people.  At first I thought, and was happy that, it seemed he was modeled after both Jason and Michael Myers.  Scarred like Jason, first person POV like Michael, mask wearing and non-verbal like both of them.  Actually, I thought this came out later in the 80's, in 1981 thy would have likely only seen Friday the 13th part one at this point, where obviously the killer is not Jason...but I digress.

"Does anyone want a coffee or anything?  I was about to go to the cafe."

We follow the scarred villain to his first kill, and then there's the first "uh-oh", he's taking his mask off.  And not putting it back on.  Then the second, he has dialogue.  Then the third, this film is incredibly hard to follow.  We're following random characters, we don't know who they are, where they are, how they're related to anything else.  Then as the "plot builds" we reveal bro is having a incestuous relationship with his sister, and there's two killers (or more, really, I don't think they ever say).

Here's another thing about this.  I watched this and INSTANTLY forgot about it.  It's mostly because the film is so wandering, so dreamlike and has nothing, need I repeat NOTHING that grabs you and makes you pay attention.  You might as well be watering plants.  Franco achieves the weird altered dreamy state I fell into with Oasis of the Zombies, another sludgy mess of random people doing random things and occasional death.

Some people apparently enjoy this weird early-morning feel of a film, a feeling of bizarre, cryptic, dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness filmmaking.  I have to say, I don't enjoy it.  It is too tedious, it's too banal, it's too unintentional.  It feels like a trip, but not a good trip, just a trip, and maybe one filled with mildly upsetting circumstances.

It does achieve a feeling, but overall it's too boring and nonsensical to recommend.  I'll give it 1.5 for the things it does do well.

Rituals - 1977

 Horror movie people talk about slashers endlessly, and we all in our own way talk about proto-slashers as well.  Black Christmas and Psycho are some well known logical precursors to the genre that's now experiencing some re-investing, with the Halloween trilogy.

Rituals isn't really a proto-slasher, but I could see people pointing to it in some sort of "grab-bag" alongside other horror toned films from the 70's.  Rituals star Hal Holbrook and a few other guys in the slow, methodical story of men being hunted while on a camping trip.  Body count, unknown killer, thrills, darkness, there's a lot about this that has later slasher elements.

For me, and what I love about Rituals, the difference is what the focus is on.  There is no way to watch this alongside Halloween and compare.  The focus of Halloween is on the killer, and it's on the horror generated by the killer.  Rituals focuses on the characters, their relationship, and their reaction to the horror surrounding them.  It's a character piece with a horror edge, which of course is sorta like the first Halloween, but you see what I mean I hope.

Rituals begins with five friends going on a trip to a river.  The second morning, they wake up to find all their shoes are missing.  One of them packed extra shoes, and he heads off for a nearby dam, while the others are slowly hunted by an unseen killer.  One of them is an alcoholic, one of them steps in a bear trap, and there are plenty of other obstacles as they slowly fight to survive.

This film feels much closer thematically to Deliverance than Halloween.  It's about the interaction, and the psychological impact of the situation they're in.  It feels deeply, deeply human.  As the slasher genre evolved in the mid-late 80's, we saw our protagonists painted as unlikable; we wanted them to die.  Not so in the 70's man.  These films still care about the body that spills the blood, it's not just looking to spill it.

Rituals is a off-the-beaten-path slower burn character piece with a horror edge.  Although it is slow at times, it's really good, and it has truly remarkable moments.  I liked it a lot, and fuck you Tubi for making me watch ads and for not remembering where I left off in the film.

The Cell - 2000

 Sometimes when a movie like The Cell comes out and casts popular actors, and is hugely budgeted, and succeeds, I wonder how the hell the director did it.  Often it seems the answer is they came from music videos.  Reading about Tarsem Singh, I discovered that was also true of him.

The Cell made quite a lot of waves when it came out.  I remember people comparing it to Silence of the Lambs, and it's weird to retrospectively think this was less than 10 years after Lambs.  I saw it when it was new-ish, and I liked it, and I think I've maybe only seen it once since then.  It joins the annals of the Oxygen's, the Bone Collectors, the Seven's, in a weird subcategory of turn of the century bizarre ultra-horror, but a psychological one mainly.

The Cell stars Jennifer Lopez, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Vince Vaughn.  Remember when Jennifer Lopez was an actor?  Anyhow, she's a psychologist of some sort with a new technology that lets her enter her patients minds.  D'Onofrio, in one of his trademark insane roles, is serial killer Carl Stargher, and he is reaching the sloppy peak of his string of murders of young women.  Vince Vaughn is the detective that tracks him down, and Jennifer Lopez is going to enter his head with the tech.  But what will the twisted mind of a psychotic hold?!

The scenes in this film were very memorable when I first saw them, and they look awesome even now.  There's a lot of surreal imagery, inspired by artwork and offbeat artists.  There's a bisected horse, there's crazy costumes, there's colorful tricky cinematography, it's a insane mishmash of anything and everything in this film.  The actors back it up, and a lot of this film really works.

In terms of aging, I'd say The Cell has aged very well.  Nothing jumps out at you as bad, and in fact it's a film where the absence of cell phones isn't even noticed.  D'Onofrio really helps make the film, and damnit, why was he not in more movies?  I mean, we need to make roles specifically for actors like him.  He has maybe 5 of these awesome performances, and we needs more!

I give it a 4.