CALL OF CTHULHU, THE (2005)

Dir: Andrew Leman

It's incredible that the hugely influential classic horror tale by H.P. Lovecraft THE CALL OF CTHULHU took from 1927 until 2005 to be adapted into a movie.  I've never understood why this story (and its sequels and followups) didn't quickly become one of the best-known, endlessly remade classics of horror cinema along with Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde and Dracula.  Equally oddly, this long-overdue version was produced and created by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society rather than any Hollywood studio.  The result is a brilliant example of creative storytelling and artful filmmaking that deserves instant classic status.  In a bold and inspired concept, the movie is made entirely in the style of a silent era picture,  expertly recreating the look and feel of the best of the 1920s like METROPOLIS and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA but with a dark beauty all its own.  So what you get is a beautiful rendition of what the movie version might have looked like had it been produced during Lovecraft's lifetime when his watershed story was still new.  Shot over a period of a year and a half, this magisterial 47-minute movie follows the author's text very closely for an authentic experience that is obviously the work of people who cared deeply about the material rather than fixating on showbiz demographics, test audiences and spreadsheets.  The intertitles often quote their dialogue from Lovecraft verbatim.  The sets are perfect to the smallest detail, in particular the jaw-dropping sunken city of R'yleh in which Cthulhu sleeps.  Not only are the R'yleh sets remarkably true to Lovecraft's hard-to-visualize vision, but they are wrought in a style and splendor that could well have been achievedin 1927, with large flat obelisks and off-kilter angles that suggest the stylism of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI without ever actually aping it. The music score is amazing too, a perfect combination of dark, tension-filled themes quite unlike today's horror film scores but eerier than was the norrn in the silent days.  The only thing that might be seen as a flaw is the limited production budget's mandate of obvious models for ships at sea and other miniature work, but in a movie made in the '20s this style of effects was typical and it presents no real problem here, adding in some cases to the dreamy storybook feel of the horrors unfolding.  Best of all, the decision was made to bring Cthulhu himself to the screen via stop-motion animation techniques perfectly suited to 1920s fantasy filmmaking, rather than now-common computer animation which would have drawn attention to itself and spoiled the masterfully sustained mood and authentic period setting. Interestingly, even though this serves as an exercise in recreating a long-outmoded style of movie making, it's also the most accurately any of Lovecraft's tales have ever been adapted to film. If you have even the slightest interest in the works of Lovecraft, you owe it to yourself to see this dark, scary, beautifully made masterpiece in low-budget gothic horror.  

 CANDY STRIPERS (2006)

Dir: Kate Robbins

This nasty, cheap, very dumb gore movie must have been a lot more fun to make than it is to watch. It has a few clever lines of dialogue, some good-looking women and mostly adequate acting but not much else going for it.  The story is too thin to be of interest and the action and characters are strictly by the numbers.  A hospital patient dies after ejecting a dill pickle from outer space into the mouth of a "candy striper" nurse. The infected girl proceeds to kiss her fellow nurses on the mouth in order to transmit space pickles to them, too.  Soon the hospital is quarrantined and people are being mauled by the now evil candy stripers. The gore effects are okay but some of the other special effects are awful, such as the preponderance of fake cobwebs that suddenly appear, looking more like Halloween decorations than alien organisms. Male victims are wrapped in web cocoons like in the ALIEN movies, but in some scenes there are clumps of webbing stuck to the ceiling here and there, which looks pretty silly.  I still don't know how the women were supposed to have made the webs. When the alien-possessed girls die (insulin injections kill the invaders but unfortunately also cause their human hosts to expire at the same time), they go all wonky with a chintzy funhouse mirror effect.  A band of teenage stereotypes (of course) tries to escape the cut-rate carnage. A nerdy boy who has gotten an alien STD has random smudges of what looks like either cobwebs or soapsuds on his face that come and go. The exact nature of the aliens, their powers and their plans were all beyond the imagination of the writers, so you get a bunch of generic space monster stuff, as when one nurse's hand suddenly mutates into what looks like one of Pumpkinhead's hands and a single scene in which a girl turns all the way into an interesting looking space creature, a mask that's onscreen for all of two seconds.  Male viewers lured by the sexy promotional art, not to mention the title, will be disappointed because even though some (pretty filthy) sexual situations are hinted at, most of the actresses keep all their clothes on most of the time. You'd think a film this short on ideas would at least try to win guys over with lots of nudity, but that's not the case.  (I'm not saying that would have made it a good movie; I'm just pointing out that the cast of models and Playboy bunnies generally stay clothed, which seems strange considering the sleazy nature of the concept and the script.) The candy stripers are uniformly young, skinny and pretty but there's nothing at all interesting about them since they have no personalities. They spend the whole movie flouncing around like they think they're on a fashion runway, smiling vacuously and flirting with dopey guys who then get converted to blood-'n'-guts messes because.... well, because the aliens are evil and therefore they like to kill people, I suppose.  Even the ending refuses to come up with anything unexpected, sticking to formula as closely as everything else in CANDY STRIPERS.

 CARNIVORE (2001)

Dir: Kenneth Mader

This is a below average, cheap-looking throwback to the "monster on the loose" films of the 1950s.  After a foulmouthed idiot scientist is killed by the monster he's been creating for the government, the dark, fanged, hairy, clawed creature wanders around the ordinary smalltown home that was serving as the "secret" lab, looking at the poorly boarded-up windows with his solarized vision and listening to the sound of his own (loud) heartbeat.  As fate and bad writing would have it, that very night a quartet of teens break into the house for kicks.  Meanwhile, horrible incompetent government agents who hate each other take forever to drive one single automobile to the house to stop the killer beast which they think is now threatening the whole town.  This boring, badly-acted movie must have had an interesting history.  CARNIVORE bears a copyright date of 2001 but the girls' hairstyles and fashions look very '80s but a goverment computer registering the monster's escape clearly shows a date of 1989 and the whole thing is told as a flashback.  There's also no real ending, with several major characters simply driving off and never seen again. The monster is left alive inside the house, presumably looking to avenge itself on the agent who wounded it. The creature is a vaguely demonic creation and eventually it learns to talk but no explanation is ever given for just how it was created. The seemingly arbitrary flashback structure is achieved by adding some unbelievably poorly-spoken narration at the beginning. This is so badly read that it's hard to believe a professional actress could have been behind it.  It sounds more like they just handed the script to someone's mom who happened to have a couple of free minutes and, without even letting her run through it a time or two first, simply had her read it aloud while they recorded her.  The monster suit might have been a neat creation, but since they never give us a good look at it...and clearly, the monster itself is the only point of potential interest here... there's really no reason for anybody to watch this one.  It's not clever or original enough to be scary and it's not bad enough to laugh at.  It just sort of lies there like a corpse.

CATACOMBS (2007)

Dirs: Tomm Coker, David Eliot

Although it seems out of character, a mousy, neurotic, pill-popping American woman  (Shannyn Sossaman)  flies to France to visit her trashy party-girl sister.  (The casting director must have been blindfolded, because the two actresses bear no resemblance to each other beyond being human females with the same number of ears, making them unconvincing as sisters.)  The nervous heroine is introduced to a gang of fun-seekers who host illegal rave parties in the famous catacombs beneath the streets of Paris, and practically against her will, is taken to a surprisingly large, loud party complete with professional disco lighting and sound equipment.  A local horror story about a gang of crazy satanists who groomed their own personal Antichrist in the catacombs is told, and sure enough, the American girl soon gets separated from the crowd and finds herself pursued by a homicidal freak in a goat mask.  The story seems a little far-fetched and has to go pretty far out of its way to place the star in horrible situations, but the look of the film is great and the simple action is actually tense and scary most of the time.  Pop star Pink plays the sister and she makes you really hate her character, but in fairness to Pink it should be noted that the character is written as a one-dimensional unsympathetic sleaze, so she's actually playing the role just right by making her seem so unappealing.  One thing that stands out as unlikely is the conveniently clean, safe swimming hole located in the middle of an underground chamber lined with millions of centuries-old human bones.  The gloomy lighting and kinetic photography are well above average and many sequences are genuinely suspenseful.  A drawback is that the heroine isn't very bright and is a disagreeable, whiny sort who isn't exactly easy to warm up to.   Running madly through the claustrophobic maze of corridors, she meets up with a guy named Henri who is also looking for a way out.  It irritated me to no end that she kept babbling away at him even though she knew he couldn't understand a word of English, and it irritated me even more that immediately after he introduced himself by pronouncing his name in French (sounds like 'ahn-WREE'), our ditzy damsel in distress started addressing him with the Anglicized pronunciation "Henry".  I wasn't sure if the character was supposed to have no respect for foreign culture or if the actress just couldn't say the name correctly.  But it certainly got annoying listening to her ignorantly bark out "Henry!" at him over and over, knowing he'd probably never been called that before in his life.  Some of the French accents don't sound authentic, but that's probably because the movie was actually shot in Roumania with a non-French cast.  Despite the shortcomings, the film is never boring and the successfully blindsiding double-twist ending works remarkably well and makes CATACOMBS a reasonably satisfying experience for slasher-horror fans.  Not to be confused with the 1988 David Schmoeller movie CATACOMBS, which was eventually released on video in the U.S. as THE CURSE IV: THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE.  

 CAVE, THE (2005)

Dir: Bruce Hunt

After an archaeological expedition is lost to a strange cave-in somewhere in the Carpathians, a crack team of U.S. divers is sent to explore the  vast underground cavern opened up beneath the mountains. They find a series of increasingly huge, ancient chambers in which they eventually become trapped. Trying to make their escape, they encounter an unknown parasite that causes mutation in its chosen hosts, and later realize they're being stalked by some suspiciously human-sized gargoyle-like creatures with bat wings and enormous toothy jaws who have evolved into their present form entirely within the dark, wet underground world of The Cave. We never get a very good look at the impressively organic looking monsters, who have batlike radar and recoil from loud noise and light, but they look very convincing in their brief screen time and help make this an intense, gripping action/ sci-fi thriller. The expertly lighted underwater photography is beautiful, some of the best in monster movie history, and the succession of gigantic cavernous sets is nothing short of breathtaking.  The clarity and realism shown here are hard to top. The acting is also excellent, although I could have done without some of the standard silly bickering between a couple of the team's testosterone-fueled macho men. Their leader is bitten by a monster and shortly thereafter begins to show early signs of adaptive mutation himself, so a big question is whether he'll be able to use his growing insight into the hows and whys of the creatures and the cave system to help his party to freedom before he loses too much of his humanity to the infection and joins the opposing side, as it were.  There's a lamely telegraphed nonending back above ground, but monster movie watchers are used to that by now, so don't let it stop you from enjoying one of the more suspenseful horror thrill ride movies since ALIENS. It's not often you get to see a monsters-vs.-trapped explorers movie that looks as great as this one. 

 CHAMBER OF HORRORS (1966)

Dir: Hy Averback

Quick!, name a good scary movie about a serial killer named Jason who is believed to be drowned but who is actually still lurking around, killing people in extremely gruesome ways with weapons like meat cleavers, knives and spears.  No, not FRIDAY THE 13TH-- I said a good movie, remember?  This 1966 production, originally made for TV but released to theaters when it was deemed too gruesome for the small screen, is one of the better killer-on-the-loose flicks I've seen and deserves to be better known.  Patrick O'Neal is right up there with Hannibal Lechter and Norman Bates in terms of being a frightening, truly deranged presence, and the story's eerie wax museum setting and well-told crime-solving structure keep things solidly entertaining. Unfortunately, at the last minute a silly gimmick in the William Castle tradition was added: whenever something shocking is about to happen, the "Fear Flasher" and the "Horror Horn" --a few frames of solid red film and a buzzing sound effect--kick in and rather spoil the mood.  The idea was that any viewers too horrified to keep watching would know when to close their eyes!  Most of the violence happens out of frame anyway, so this gimmick wasn't needed at all here and would have been much better suited to a movie that lingered on sadistic bloody violence like the trashy nonsense Herschel Gordon Lewis was churning out around this time.  The killer has an ingenious gimmick of his own, one that's such a marvelous idea for a mass murderer that I'm surprised we haven't seen it repeated in dozens of other slasher films. This Jason chopped off his own hand to escape drowning, and he now wears a specially-made stump attachment that can accommodate not only the traditional hook, but can alternately be fitted with a number of other lethally sharp objects (a large cleaver, a harpoon-like spike, etc.),  giving him the ability to vary his murder weapons in a uniquely personal way. Even with the liability of the Fear Flasher-Horror Horn warning gimmickery, CHAMBER OF HORRORS is still a scary, highly involving horror tale with better-than-average acting, pacing and characterization and a very scary psycho. This has yet to make its video debut, so watch for any late-night TV broadcasts beamed your way.  My favorite line: A soon-to-be-victim meets up with the bloodthirsty Jason and exclaims "You!--But, you're dead!",  to which O'Neal calmly replies "Yes. Won't you join me?"    

 CLIMAX, THE (1944)

Dir: George Waggner

An unexciting, uneventful flop fom Universal, THE CLIMAX was originally intended as a sequel to the previous year's Technicolor hit, the Claude Rains version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  Somewhere along the lines the project was watered down to this dull adaptation of an old stage play. The colorful look and feel of PHANTOM are in evidence but there isn't much in the way of high drama or scares. Boris Karloff is wasted as grouchy, one-dimensional bad guy Dr. Hohner, an opera house physician who strangled his opera singer girlfriend ten years earlier because her career was coming between them. Her murder, shown in flashback, ranks as one of the most casual and least dramatic killings in any Universal shocker.  Susanna Foster (the heroine of the '43 PHANTOM) is a new singer who incurs Karloff's senseless wrath when she dares to perform a particular song that he feels should belong exclusively to his late sweetheart. Boris has invented a lighted spinning hypnosis machine, a remarkable device that should have made him a millionaire, but he can't think of any better use for it than to convince the impressionable Foster that she can't sing.  His snoopy housekeeper is Gale Sondergaard, who ends up helping the girl to escape. Gale took the job with gloomy old Karloff strictly because she belived him guilty of the diva's murder and has been biding her time until she could find solid proof.  She has been living with Karloff for ten years but in all that time she has never noticed the large room in which he keeps the corpse of his late love surrounded by billowing curtains and flame pots that turn out to be a very bad idea on his part.  The decade-old dead body looks perfectly preserved, so apparently Boris' character is an expert embalmer too. Turhan Bey is Foster's silly mincing boyfriend, a geeky fan-boy that's quite unlike his usual "exotic foreigner" movie roles. The acting is decent but a lot of the casting choices seem strange, the broad comedy doesn't work, and the whole tired tale is predictable and lifeless. The meager story is frequently interrupted for lame musical production numbers that don't have the authentic sound nor spectacle of real opera but provide lengthy passages of ear-splittingly shrill onstage shrieking that could shatter wine glasses, send dogs howling and have electronic garage doors going up and down. Poor viewers who saw this in a theater didn't even have the advantage of a fast-forward function. The script never specifies what the setting is supposed to be, but since the King is a 12-year-old boy, I was fairly certain we weren't in Paris any more. A thriller with zero thrills, this obvious PHANTOM rip-off is easily one of  Universal's worst movies of the period.

 CLIVE BARKER'S SAINT SINNER (Saint Sinner) (2002)

Dir: Joshua Butler

Weak, ridiculous horror based, surprisingly, on a story by the usually inspired Barker, creator of HELLRAISER.  At a California monastery in 1815, a special outbuilding houses various artifacts the Catholic Church deems cursed or otherwise too dangerous for the world to see.  Into this early version of the Consumer Product Safety Commission come two dopey monks who unwittingly release two female demons from their imprisonment in a rather comical and very undignified little squished-up ball. Once un-squished, the succubus sisters escape into modern day L.A. thanks to a time machine that was conveniently locked away in the same room. One of the monks dies but the other has to hop into the time machine and follow the she-demons to the future, so he can stab them with the magic dagger that will cause them to shrink down into that little wadded-up ball again.  In the present, our time-hopping monk encounters the usual batch of dull TV-movie stereotypes, including the hard-edged disbelieving cop, the tough but vulnerable female detective haunted by a family tragedy, and an array of mindless victims. Borrowing ideas from TIME AFTER TIME and WARLOCK but with a pervasive aura of fakery, this plods unconvincingly from one dumb incident to the next without ever becoming scary or involving. The she-demons pose as hookers (of course) and have no problem finding an endless supply of male victims who don't notice their slimy gray complexions, scary deep voices and other physical anomalies. The mythology here is so hokey that it would barely have passed muster for a BUFFY episode, much less an entire feature.  The succubi kill men by tearing their spines out through the back of the neck and sucking their blood in an awkward, implausible manner. We're told that they are forbidden to drink blood directly from a victim's heart, but since this never comes into play, I'm not sure why it was felt the audience needed to know this. The demon women are also able to trap people in big lumpy cobweb-like sacks of unexplained gloppola, although we never see how they produce the rubbery-looking stuff.  One demon becomes pregnant by a human male and gives birth a few hours later to a big squidlike thing that immediately wants to kill its mommy, but this whole plot turn was unnecessary and only adds to the confusion.  SAINT SINNER is a prime example of everything that's wrong with horror from this era, saddled with a stupid title and consisting of stale ingredients presented with indifference.  Don't bother.   

 COLD & DARK (2004)

Dir: Andrew Goth

Another unwanted addition to the tired buddy-cop genre, this time with the supposed twist that one of the cops is some kind of monster. I'm all  for inventing new monster mythology, but this sorry attempt at a vampire-werewolf-zombie thing is so underdeveloped and illogical it's absurd. The normal cop goes on a vigilante justice spree alongside his monsterized chum, who is a bloodsucking something-or-other with a cheesy computer-animated snake that pops out of the palm of his hand to exsanguinate his victims. He eventually morphs into a guy without a face for about two seconds. Big deal. This incredibly tedious and insufferably pretentious exercise in empty stylization is so bad it's nearly unwatchable. It's all blue filters and awkwardly framed images, giving it the soulless look of an expensive car commerical.  There are no truly sympathetic characters, just a cast of people doing their best sullen burnt-out cops and crooks, all delivering their lines in the same quiet, slurred, ponderous monotone, relieved by the occasional irrational outburst presumably thrown in to wake up the audience. A large number of the cast members are fat men with shaved heads, and the police commissioner is an angry half-senile old fool.  It's frequently hard to hear what the stars are saying but I doubt if it's any great loss, because what dialogue can be heard is generally the same old shopworn cynical big city tough guy crud you've heard too many times before. You'd think a film about two cops waging a private campaign to wipe out smugglers and thugs by supernatural means would at least offer some good action sequences, but not COLD & DARK. Things move at a snail's pace as people sit in dark rooms smoking cigarettes and mumbling their lines like they hate the world. Maybe they just hated appearing in this self-indulgent snorefest.  Occasionally a mangled bloody corpse is seen, but there aren't any decent scares or even startles. Directed by someone called Andrew Goth (!), who can't even think of an ending.  You'll fall asleep before then anyway. It'll be a cold and dark day on the sun before I'll sit through this one again.  

 COLD, THE (1984)

Dir: Bill Rebane

 COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK, THE (1958)

Dir: Eugene Lourie

The idea of a human brain struggling to stay sane inside a powerful robot body didn't become big boxoffice until ROBOCOP added hyperviolent action to the formula, but this early, quieter tale along similar lines is an outstanding example of imaginative '50s sci-fi that deserves to be better known.  Ross Martin is an altruistic scientific genius who is killed in a tragic car accident, only to end up having his brilliant brain installed in a towering metal robot body by his grief-stricken scientist father and a worried colleague.  The sequence in which Martin "wakes up" in his monstrous new body is genuinely scary, and the sound of his electronically recreated, rasping, moaning voice is pretty chilling as he gradually realizes the nature of his new existence as something not human.  His grieving wife is kept in the dark about the experiment and his desire to be near her only adds to the robot's internal conflicts. The way he slowly goes mad from having to deal with his bizarre situation is intelligently depicted and comes off as more convincing than you might expect.   The Colossus itself is an eight-foot-tall humanoid with huge plated hands, metal leg braces,  a pseudo-Roman cloak made of what looks like rubberized canvas, and a creepy metal head with glowing eyes and an eerily blank, vaguely helpless facial expression.  He's a unique creation and ranks among the best movie monsters of the 1950s. The somber piano score gives the story just the right air of intellectual tragedy.  The perfectly legitimate presence of a small child (Martin's character's son, who is blissfully unaware of what's going on) seems to have caused quite a number of reviewers to write the movie off as a "kiddie flick", and that's a shame, because although the kid is an important part of the plot, the bulk of the film is far from childish.  A few implausibilities remain--- such as, exactly what kind of humanitarian work were the scientists planning when they decided to equip the robot with Laser-Death-Ray Eyes?---  but overall COLOSSUS is a smart and thoroughly entertaining thriller with a tight script, an effective monster and plenty of emotional punch.

 CONJURE (2004)

Dir: Matt Busch

Matt Busch is a talented illustrator who has provided outstanding promotional artwork for major Hollywood studios. He's done wonderful book covers, poster art, and various package designs and portraiture for licensed merchandise from STAR WARS, THE CROW and other movies plus a great deal of album cover and t-shirt art for rock bands.  With CONJURE, he made his own video horror movie. It's an insufferable exercise in self-promotion, an embarrassing vanity project which Busch has designed as a love letter to himself first and foremost, giving secondary consideration to all aspects of filmmaking and storytelling.  The "film" opens with an unbelievably lengthy autobiography comprised of various home video clips in which Busch goes out of his way to  make sure we know how great and talented and successful and popular he is. Then when he reaches present day and you think he's finally going to stop bragging and get to the movie, he instead goes on about how pretty his girlfriend Sarah Wilkinson is, how successful her modeling career is, etc., until even the most faithful Matt Busch nerds will be reaching for their fast forward buttons. Besides being a shameless display of egotism, the opening chapter relating Busch's personal life history also adds an unintended note of sadness to the proceedings as we see a bright-eyed, long-haired, vibrant young man morph into the pot-bellied Matt of today, with a shaved head that only makes him look fatter and the predictable little strip of chin fuzz that lets you know he's an Artist. There's no denying the man's tremendous talent for illustration, but a gift for two-dimensional reproduction is not synonymous with creativity.  It takes talent to paint a beautiful dead-on accurate portrait of C-3P0, but the real creativity came from the party who designed what C-3P0 should look like in the first place. Busch flunks where it counts with his shaky horror scenario. Strolling through a cemetery, he finds a photo of an old mansion lying on a grave. He takes the photo home and decides to do a painting of the house, which somehow allows transparent ghosts into his home. Then he and Sarah suddenly find themselves trapped in the real house depicted in the photo. Matt finishes the painting there and the two are promptly returned home. The end. The two stars give stiff amateur performances and never even look sincerely scared. The ghosts are double-exposed women, one of whom is made up to look like the girl in the cellar in THE EVIL DEAD and another one who inexplicably crawls around on her hands and knees the whole time. There are so many speeded-up shots of her crawling toward the camera that it threatens to become parodic. Busch's girlfriend has supposedly been with him for years but she doesn't know he has a burglar alarm or that he keeps a gun in the nightstand next to his bed. The ghosts' scenes are ruined by lame video tricks like jerky movement and flickering image schtick that only makes the double-exposed phantoms look like  holograms projected by faulty equipment. The couple shoot the ghosts over and over, long after they should have noticed the bullets go right through them. Interspersed with the awful dialogue and somnambulistic acting are random shots of stock horror imagery that imitate the cursed videotape in THE RING. It is unclear whether the protagonists are seeing any of this stuff or if it is just being thrown in every few minutes to keep the audience awake.  One embarrassing (repeated) shot shows Matt spastically shaking his head around in fast motion, an idea copied from JACOB'S LADDER, not to mention the thousand previous movies that copied it from JACOB'S LADDER. As presented here it makes the star look goofy. His attempts at action scenes are worse, as when he knocks a knife out of someone's hand in a shot that looks like it belongs in a spoof. The story doesn't make any sense at all and Busch never bothers to decide who the ghosts are, what they want or why they want it, deciding instead to lazily chalk it all up to mysterious dark forces that mankind wasn't meant to understand. An odd double crop circle type symbol keeps popping up here and there but it has no significance either. It's clear that telling a story (even a surreal one) wasn't on Busch's mind. His real purpose was to create a lasting tribute to himself that serves as both a video resume' and a feature-length commercial for his overall greatness. To that end, we see his name printed out any number of times plus plenty of footage of him working. Promotional materials played up an appearance by Anthony Daniels, who played C-3P0 in STAR WARS, but he only shows up in about 15 seconds' worth of home video footage from a convention at which he expressed appreciation for a nice portrait Busch did of the famous gold droid.   What an excuse for a movie.  "Self-indulgent" and "narcissistic" don't begin to cover it.

 CONTAMINATION POINT SEVEN (1990)

Dir: "Martin Newlin" (Fabrizio Laurenti)

In Alaska, a nuclear power plant that seems to be in the middle of nowhere tosses barrels of unspecified radioactive waste into a big open space near the woods. Since nobody in the area has a small plane or helicopter or ever goes hiking, the easy-to-find dumping site goes unnoticed by the braindead locals long enough for toxic goop to leak out and bring the roots of trees to life as grabbing, strangling killer vines that pop out of the ground and kill for no reason that is ever made clear. (Why would sentient tree roots be compelled to kill people?)  All the tired stereotyped characters are in place, including the crazy plant manager who authorizes the illegal waste disposal, the corrupt, mentally deficient sheriff, the researcher who staggers around with a Geiger counter, and the headstrong teen ciphers whom nobody will listen to. The story is poorly fleshed out and the film as a whole is almost turned into comedy by the ear-punishing dialogue and horrendous acting. The cast consists mostly of Italian actors who spoke their lines phonetically in English. Their emotionless mouthings were later looped by voice actors who had to try to make their readings of the lines match the (terrible) cast's slow, awkward, hammy mouth movements. The result is a movie that appears to be populated mostly by the mentally retarded. The effect is heightened by the jaw-droppingly stupid behavior of heroes and villains alike. Even with nearly unlimited options available to them, the people in this ludicrous movie keep choosing to pursue whatever course of action is most likely to get them killed.  When one moron is attacked by the killer roots, he tosses the shovel he was holding away rather than trying to whack the thing with it.  A gang of rednecks hoping to save the day goes to the dumping site with no clear plan formulated. They load a couple of the big yellow barrels onto a truck without even putting gloves on, even when they know about the radioactive hazard.  At the supposed climax, the EPA sends some earth-movers and bulldozers to push the barrels aimlessly around for a while, as if that would serve any real purpose. Nobody ever offers any method of disposing of the vicious vines, which makes the "surprise" ending completely unsurprising. Some of the soundtrack music also turned up in other bottom-drawer Italian schlockers like KILLING BIRDS.  We're never told what "Contamination .7" means, so perhaps ALTERNATE ROOTS might have been a better title for this nonsensical feature, which was released in a slightly shorter cut version as CRAWLERS. Somebody also apparently released this somewhere under the title TROLL 3 (?!!). 

 COOKERS (2005)

Dir: Dan Mintz

Marvellously acted and eerily atmospheric independent feature doesn't make much literal sense but will hold your interest throughout. Three white trash drug dealers set up their makeshift crystal meth lab in a shadowy old isolated farmhouse.  During the course of the next few days, things fall apart as the losers fall victim to their own childhood fears and personal demons, which may or may not be manifesting themselves through the agency of the house itself.  There isn't a lot of action in COOKERS and little blood is spilled, but the study of mental breakdown is impressively presented and the old dark house is, unlike in most other movies from this era, genuinely creepy. The lead actor, who is excellent, plays a really interesting guy.  Even though we know he's basically a lowlife with not much to lose, he does seem to be trying to hold it together, remain in control and inspire confidence in his chums. His Joe Cool veneer is gradually stripped away in a vicious cycle of drug use, which makes him paranoid, which makes him crave more drugs, which only makes him more paranoid, and so on until you know there's no hope for the poor dope.  The occasional brief glimpses of ghostly figures and odd hallucinations are sure to make viewers jump.  Be warned that the script features the F-word about every three seconds, but by now most audiences are probably sadly used to that.  The ending reminded me of Fulci's THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY in that it made me ask "Uhhh, what, now?" in much the same way. This won't be to everyone's liking, but I'm going to recommend it anyway. These days it's unusual to see a spooky movie that actually manages to be spooky, and it's also good to see any horror movie from this era that isn't tinted blue and isn't shot all grainy and out-of-focus.

 

 CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1958)

Dir: Robert Day

 COUNT DRACULA (1970)

Dir: Jesus Franco

 CRAWLING HAND, THE (1963)

Dir: Herbert L. Strock

 CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961)

Dir: Roger Corman

Rancid flop made in a few days with a next-to-nothing budget because Corman finished his THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH early enough to crank out one more cheapie with the same cast and crew.  This completes a loose trilogy of ramshackle horror-comedies Corman made with writer Charles B. Griffith, including THE LITTLE SHOPPE OF HORRORS and A BUCKET OF BLOOD.  This one is by far the worst, as it lacks even the minimal flair of LITTLE SHOPPE and BUCKET. More devastatingly, it lacks any gifted comic performers to carry it along the way the talented and eminently watchable Mel Welles and Dick Miller carried those other films. There are some cute spoken gags now and then in the narration, but the viewer has to sit through oceans of the most uninvolving, uninspired tedium to hear them. Most of the time it's just unbearably dull and too strained to be amusing. Anthony Carbone is a crook who agrees to sail a stolen treasure out of Cuba to start a counter-revolution after Castro's takeover. Along with his dopey criminal companions, he schemes to kill the Cuban loyalists during the voyage and blame their deaths on a local legend about a sea monster. Of course the monster is real and starts killing off everybody in sight while the dumb events are recounted to the audience by the American spy hero. It's hard to believe anybody would go to the trouble to stage and shoot underwater sequences for such an empty project as this, but Corman goes for it. One running joke is about a guy who communicates by making animal noises. He opens his mouth and various real animal sound effects are dubbed in. Hysterical, eh?  At least a similar character in the POLICE ACADEMY movies was really doing it.  The monster suit is a total embarrassment. It looks like a cardboard box under a pile of dirty dishrags. The head appears to be a smaller pile of dishrags with two grapefruit halves with a dot painted on each one stuck on the front to suggest eyeballs. Maybe someone thought that since the film was a comedy, it would be acceptable to use a terrible monster suit.  It wasn't.  If you ever watched the Fox TV sitcom MALCOM IN THE MIDDLE you got a quick glimpse of it during the opening titles, which included the scene wherein it pops out of the water to attack Betsy-Jones Moreland and Carbone.  In one of its few clever moments, the film ends with most of the cast dead and the satisfied monster sitting at the bottom of the ocean with the stolen gold, smugly picking its teeth. Today, CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA is all but forgotten, which is a shame. It ought to be completely forgotten.

CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION (1967)

Dir: Larry Buchanan

The 1956 film THE SHE-CREATURE might have been a little on the cheesy and incoherent side, but compared to this hysterically poor retread it looks like CITIZEN KANE.  Sporting bottom-of-the-ocean production values and acting, it's another one of the wretched remakes of '50s monster movies carelessly belched out by Larry Buchanan in 1966-'67.  Dr. Basso is an evil hypnotist who prowls the California beaches in a moth-eaten tux and top hat that make him look like Snidely Whiplash. The grumpy, short-fused old creep makes for a very uninteresting villain. He has a woman under a spell that causes her to materialize in the very first form in which she ever walked the earth, namely, a guy in a skindiving wetsuit and a ridiculous Halloween mask with lopsided ping-pong balls stuck on it for eyes.  Inarguably one of the least convincing monsters ever used in a movie, the dimestore demon was nevertheless used in another Buchanan disaster called IT'S ALIVE!  It clomps laughably along making a noise like an electric motor in need of maintenance and occasionally kills people who wander around the beach at night even though there have been numerous unsolved murders there.  The sort-of hero is a dorky Air Force psychologist (sometimes he's called a parapsychologist) who is described as "a national hero".  The science-versus-supernatural doubletalk is preposterous and never makes enough sense to invite serious consideration.  At a beach party, a rock group does a song about Batman. When the goofy creature advances toward the camera, the fin sticking out of the left side of its head frequently refuses to stand out like it's supposed to. Since the beast is an early version of a reincarnated girl, it's repeatedly referred to as a female, but, just like in FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1958), the suit is obviously being worn by a man.  Cops always find trails of seaweed leading to and from the locations of the creature's attacks, but there's never an inch of seaweed hanging on the beast when we see it. In at least one scene you can hear the director whispering instructions to his actors, and at one point a strange echo effect kicks in, so bits of dialogue can be heard twice. The whole movie is grainy and sometimes suffers from severe color shifts or goes momentarily out of focus.  Many shots go on too long and the actors deliver their lines in slow, stiff, aggressively unrealistic monotones.  (It's probably unfair to entirely blame the actors for their weak performances, since they had only Larry Buchanan to direct them.)  When a man fires a gun, we see a closeup of his hand holding the weapon but clearly NOT firing it, and a noise like someone slamming a door is dubbed in to suggest the gunshot.  The script says the victims are horribly mutilated, but one dead body is found propped up on a sofa without so much as a drop of blood visible on it. Larry Buchanan used to complain about how little time and money he was given to make these things, but even taking his limited resources into account he should have come up with something a little less awful than this. There aren't any interesting camera setups, effects, or anything else that might have added a little professionalism. As with his other features, Buchanan directs with his typical stunning personal balance of incompetence and indifference.  Another fine mess brought to you by Azalea Pictures, a company with a name that sounds significantly like "assail ya". 

 CREEP TALES (2004)

Dirs: Ken Mandel, Roger Nygard, James Salisbury, Steve Hegyi, Rod Slane

 CREEPSHOW 3 (2006)

Dirs: Ana Clavell, James Glenn Dudelson

If you thought CREEPSHOW 2 was a disgraceful followup to George Romero and Stephen King's fabulous 1982 tribute to the grisly horror comic books of the '50s and '60s, wait till you endure this crass attempt to cash in on its title.  A half-hearted effort at best, this dud has no relation to the original apart from being an anthology of ghoulish vignettes.  At an hour and 44 minutes, CREEPSHOW 3 is far too long.  Its simple-minded tales are padded with so much filler that even though a total of five stories are presented, it still doesn't feel like anything is happening most of the time.  An insultingly stupid wraparound, struggling to establish a series connection by continuing the use of cartoon animation from the first two films, features some of the poorest, ugliest, cheapest looking computer animation imaginable, which might have been forgivable if it had been even a tiny bit clever, scary or funny.   In the first illogical segment, a snotty teen girl is changed into a bloody mess covered with oozing bumps, and then into a rabbit, by a TV's remote control.  Next, a lonesome loser acquires an old radio that talks to him personally, advising him to steal and kill.  Then a sexy hooker who's also a serial killer stabs a different lonesome loser who turns out to be some kind of unexplained monster with big fangs.  The End.  After that, just when you think it can't get any dumber, two guys visit their old college science professor, whose beautiful fiancee' they believe to be a robot.  The ending is far too obvious and too slow to arrive to come close to qualifying as anything like a surprise or a twist.  The last (and longest) one is about a mean, crooked doctor who gives a homeless man a hot dog that somehow poisons him.  He then sees the street person's ghost over and over and over again.  It's basically a reworking of the hitchhiker segment from CREEPSHOW 2.  After he has already seen the apparition like maybe 7 or 8 times, he sees it one more time and finally drops dead, apparently because the movie was getting too long by this point.  There are so many long, tedious, supposedly funny examples of the hateful doctor (Kris Allen, the best performer here) treating his pathetic terminally ill patients with cruelty and insensitivity that after a while you'll want to shake the director and scream, "Okay, I get it, he's a bad guy and we're supposed to dislike him!  Now will you please have something HAPPEN?!"   Sheesh.  The big finale is that you get to see a guy made up to look like the unneeded host (non)character The Creep (a contrivance made up for CREEPSHOW 2) for about one second before he inexplicably dissolves via a chintzy CGI effect.  There's no style or artistry to the way any of this tired material is presented and all the segments feel like sophomoric foolishness that would have been rejected by mid-1980's TV shows like TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE and MONSTERS for being too trite and predictable. The only, and I mean only , thing this travesty has going for it is the (can't believe I'm using this word in this review) clever way the same characters turn up in each other's stories, thus linking all the events together. But that idea is small compensation for a project that's this great of an insult to its audience and to the ingenious instant classic that was its alleged inspiration.  The same writer-directors, who are more interested in turning a quick buck than telling real stories or providing sincere entertainment,  were responsible for other imitation Romero like DAY OF THE DEAD 2: CONTAGIUM and the 2007 DAY OF THE DEAD remake.   

 CRONOS (1992)

Dir: Guillermo del Toro

You might have seen Ron Perlman in the title role of Guillermo del Toro's blockbuster American comic book adaptation HELLBOY (2004), but did you know the actor and director had already worked together in this unjustly obscure Mexican horror movie that puts a fresh spin on vampirism?  A kindly old antiques dealer (Federico Luppi, who is excellent) discovers a strange artifact hidden inside an old hollowed out statue. Called the Cronos device, the object is a small ornate golden box with working gears and sharp prongs.(It looks like something that could have been made by the designer of the puzzle box in the HELLRAISER films.)   Operating on a combination of scientific principles and ancient magic, it's powered by a live beetle entombed inside. The bizarre little machine was created some 500 years before by an alchemist who had apparently succeeded in his quest for eternal life. When the old man innocently touches the device, sharp clawed needles pop out and imbed themselves in his skin, which grants him immortality but also has the unwanted side effect of turning him into a pseudovampire who starts sleeping in a coffinlike box and requires human blood to survive. His only confidant is his little granddaughter (she never speaks), who helps him deal with (and cover up) his strange new lifestyle. Dying industrialist Claudio Brook (from DR. TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON, ALUCARDA and many others) has spent years looking for the Cronos device himself.  When he thinks he's figured out where it is he sends his violent, stupid thug of a nephew (Perlman) to acquire it at all costs. Perlman is wonderful (as always) playing an offbeat but scary bully who has a terrible temper but is self-conscious and sensitive about his looks.  Everything comes together in a satisfying way in this unique feature that shows a winning warmth and sentimentality (not to mention a quirky sense of humor) that shines through the gruesome nature of the story.  Rarely have the themes of violence, regret, family loyalty and the tragic inevitability of death been worked together in such an entertaining way, especially in what is basically a vampire movie.  Highly recommended. Not to be confused with the 1950s giant robot film KRONOS (spelled with a "K").  

 CRYPT OF DARK SECRETS (1976)

Dir: Jack Weis

 CURIOUS DR. HUMPP, THE (1967)

Dir: Emilio Vieyra

 CURSE OF THE DEVIL (1973)

Dir: Carlos Aured

 CURSE OF THE STONE HAND (1964)

Dir: Jerry Warren

 CURSE, THE (2000)

Dir: Jacqueline Garry

Frustrating, clumsy werewolf  movie equates PMS with lycanthropy to no real effect in this low-budget distaff variation on the Jack Nicholson vehicle WOLF.  A mousy, self-conscious she-nerd suddenly finds self-confidence and becomes sexually active after being bitten on the arm by another woman during a lingerie sale. She grows larger breasts, starts dressing more attractively, no longer needs her big thick eyeglasses, and believes she's a PMS-activated werewolf who tears men to shreds (off camera) after sleeping with them. This clumsy movie is plagued with dull subplots that go nowhere and only serve to waste time, as well as a sappy sense of humor that finds too many werewolf themed puns worked into the dialogue.  (Well, OK, a few of them were actually pretty clever.)  The music is a pompous stew of well-known classical themes, and Moonlight Sonata is used about three times too often. An investigating cop who coincidentally happens to be obsessed with wolves (and who even collects silver bullets) falls in love with the dull heroine, and the script requires him to be a complete idiot in order for the so-called story to proceed. Individual exchanges of dialogue are above-average for an independent production, and the acting and direction is just good enough to make you want to stick with the movie in spite of its dumb ideas. But overall this must be classified as a failure. Once again sexuality in women is shown to be a sign of monstrous evil, and once again women are depicted as scheming sexual predators while guys are shown to be thick-skulled sex-hungry pigs. THE CURSE is too far-fetched to be believable, not nearly wacky enough to work as a comedy, and much too gross to be sexy. There are no special effects, as the girl never actually transforms into a werewolf on camera.  She just talks about it a lot, reads books about wolves, and occasionally notices patches of hair on her arms. Not one scene is scary or suspenseful. Yawn. Not to be confused with the '80s film called THE CURSE, which starred Claude Akins and Wil Wheaton and was a semi-remake of DIE MONSTER DIE! 

 CURSED (2004)

Dir: Yoshihiro Hoshino

Not to be confused with any of the at least three other films with the same title.  This particular CURSED is a generic Japanese knockoff of JU-ON and other popular Asian horrors. It has no real story, just a series of random events centered in and around a haunted convenience store. The writers seem to have exhausted their supply of creativity in coming up with the idea of using a brightly lit, perfectly ordinary looking mini-mart as a setting for supernatural shenanigans. It's pretty interesting for the first half hour or so, when it appears that the new part-time clerk will be our heroine, but after that the disjointed structure and a lack of anything that hasn't been seen before in similar films start to wear away at viewer patience. Customers of the store are either followed home by ghosts and/or meet grisly fates upon leaving. There's a child's white rubber ball bouncing along in slo-mo, a cell phone that receives calls from a dead man, long strands of black hair that appear when a character takes a bath, a crazy old man who kills a guy for no reason, and the completely insane owners of the store, who spend their time either standing around staring at people or laughing at others' misfortunes. Time is wasted talking about meaningless trifles like packs of noodles that have passed their expiration date, and in a move that almost pushes the scenario over the line into comedy, customers' purchases keep ringing up to a total of 666 yen by the cursed cash register. The explanation for all this empty shock imagery is provided by a throwaway line explaining that the contractor who built the store used ground-up tombstones for the foundation, but nothing more is ever revealed and there's no climax or plot progression. The scariest scene is one in which a woman is stalked by a big hulking goon with a bandaged face and a sledge hammer. Other meaningless weirdness includes a store employee who inexplicably develops a bulgy throbbing eyeball after an encounter with a guy in a parka with a fur-lined hood that hides his face,  a girl crawling out of a refrigerator in a scene that copies both JU-ON and RINGU, and glowing eyes peeping out of freezer cases and toilet tanks.  The movie looks decent enough but the fact that it's so bereft of any original thought makes it the sort of film you'll likely forget all about the day after you've watched it.   

 CYBORG (1989)

Dir: Albert Pyun

DARK CITY (1997)

Dir: Alex Proyas

Rufus Sewell is superb as a desperate man who wakes up with amnesia in a dirty hotel room in a strange city that looks like a mixture of architectural styles from several different time periods. He's wanted for the murder of a prostitute but has no memory of where he was the night before. Determined to learn the truth and clear his name, he goes on the run, but as if eluding the police wasn't enough to worry about, he finds he's also being pursued through the gloomy metropolis by some weird characters with cold blue faces and black leather coats who can float and, thinking with a collective intelligence, have the power to tinker with humans' memories and literally alter space and time to their own design. Also involved are lounge singer Jennifer Connelly, who might or might not be Sewell's wife, and Keifer Sutherland as a nervous psychiatrist with a strange halting manner of speech and a shameful dark secret of his own. DARK CITY is one of the best of the 1990s, a brilliant, gripping, fast-paced science fiction epic that captures the tense, ominous feel of an inescapable nightmare better than practically any other movie I know.  If you've ever had dreams in which you were lost in a huge unfamiliar city or being chased by dangerous people you don't know for reasons you don't understand, you'll definitely relate.  It's also a thoughtful and literate adventure that's filled with incredible special effects, brilliant set design, intriguing plot twists, intense action scenes and interesting characters. Some parts might at first appear to be random surrealism, but there's no empty weirdness for weirdness' sake here, so viewers who give the movie their full attention will be rewarded with a plot that gives its audience credit for enough intelligence to appreciate that it sticks to its own twisted internal logic and cleverly ties all its odd sights and events together. Overall it's a better and more satisfying film than THE MATRIX, another altered-reality hit that came out two years later. THE MATRIX got more attention and was a much bigger boxoffice success because it required less audience concentration and emphasized a more accessible kind of glamorous movie violence and straightforward shoot-em-up fantasy to entertain viewers who might or might not have really "gotten it". (I'm not knocking THE MATRIX here. That was a clever and solidly entertaining film too. But this one is a little smarter, bolder and more consistent.)  If DARK CITY has any real flaw, it's in the design of the otherworldly "Strangers" who are after the hero. With their blue faces, bald heads and black leather costumes, they look too much like the Cenobites from Clive Barker's HELLRAISER movies, which is a shame because a more original visual style for the creatures might have helped this otherwise outstanding movie to establish its own complete identity. One of the Strangers is played by ROCKY HORROR creator Richard O'Brien and William Hurt is the confused police captain trying to solve the case while becoming marginally aware that something is horribly wrong with the city and with his own memory. A fascinating film and an unheralded classic from the director of THE CROW.

 DARK FIELDS (2003)

Dir: Mark McNabb, Al Randall

As bad as it gets.  This Canadian attempt to make an American style dead teenager movie is so jaw-droppingly incompetent that it's hard to believe even Lionsgate would release it.  Completely bereft of anything resembling a plot, it simply plunks a carload of bickering teen dimwits in the middle of a deserted stretch of highway at night and then lets them walk around in the dark calling out each others' names for what feels like a year of your life.  The kids were supposedly on their way to a rock concert but this destination is quickly forgotten by all of them and never mentioned again. The imbecile driving the car didn't think to tank up first, so they run out of gas near a farm with some gas pumps, a spooky looking old house and several silos, barns and other outbuildings. The driver goes to look for gas and when he doesn't return (we never see what happens to him), the other morons decide to go trespassing inside the house and the other enclosed structures to look for him. The nearby area where the gas pumps are located is the last place they think to look.  They all walk around re-e-e-eally slowly while nothing happens.  Finally old farmer Brown, an inbred goon with his hair completely covering his face (it's flopped forward from the back of his head, so I guess they couldn't afford an extra wig) starts killing them because his family was slaughtered by some criminals a few years back.  At least that's what somebody speculates at one point.  The killer never talks and we never see what he looks like. To show us how ruthless and evil and violent he is, the movie opens by showing him cutting the head off a chicken. Note to the filmmakers: this happens every day on real farms all over the planet and is not an indication of psychopathic mental illness. The unscary nobody of a villain is ultimately done in by a 90-lb. chick with a nail gun.  There's no forward momentum, no suspense, no worthwhile makeup effects and not a single scary moment.  The characters are so monumentally dumb and incapable of anything like logical thought that the film often comes very close to parody.  One girl complains about a wood-burning stove not even being warm, and then two seconds later we see a roaring fire burning away inside it.  Every time the murderer is out of the girls' direct line of vision, they seem to assume he's miles away and it's safe to relax.  Cheat editing allows him to go from one place to another in impossible fashon, as when he appears inside a meat locker (which is where one girl was going to look for a phone).  The performers give it their best shot, but it's hard to tell if any of them can really act or not because they're constantly required to say and do such stupid, generic, unnatural things.  Even Lionsgate should be ashamed of this one.  

 DARK HARVEST 2: THE MAIZE (2004)

Dir: Bill Cowell

Watching this six or eight minutes' worth of story stretched into an hour and 43 minute time slot made me wonder: Is this some kind of a joke?  Almost the entire running time consists of footage taken by a cameraman who simply walked through a corn maze, moseying along paths and turning corners and looking around aimlessly, occasionally aided by pretentious split-screen effects that only make it even harder to watch. What passes for a plot concerns a hapless guy who must be the world's worst psychic. He gets intense feelings of immediate danger when his obnoxious little daughters are in peril, but he walks right up to obvious ghosts (two little girls copied from THE SHINING, who stand motionless, speak in tandem and are illuminated by red spotlights) and starts casually chatting away as though there was nothing unusual about them.  He spends practically the whole painfully long movie walking through the rows of corn, calling out his kids' names a hundred thousand million billion trillion times.  Trouble is, the local crazy murderer is in the maze too and is in the mood to bump off some more folks in order to cover up a previous murder. The killer's backstory makes no sense and is so thin it wouldn't even make for a good spook story for kids to tell around a campfire. Not one character in this whole silly mess ever behaves in a way that approaches realism or even rationality, and you'll marvel in amazement at how incredibly stupid everyone's behavior is in scene after long, long, long scene.  The only possible thing that can be said in favor of DARK HARVEST 2: THE MAIZE is that it does at least provide a fairly satisfying ending, in which the hero does exactly what we wish every hero of a slasher movie would do but which we seldom get to see.  Too bad 99% of viewers will be fast asleep or will have switched over to something more gripping, such as The Weather Channel, before it arrives. You might think you've seen boring movies before, but this one is so utterly lifeless it's almost funny. Almost.  It's incredible that even  Lionsgate would release this home movie onto DVD at all. This stinker stands as solid proof of why the good Lord, in His mercy, gave us the Fast Forward button. I double-dog-dare you to sit through DARK HARVEST 2 without ever using it!

 

 

 DARK HARVEST 3: SCARECROW (2004)

Dir: Ben Dixon

DARK HOURS, THE (2005)

Dir: Paul Fox

Not so much scary as simply unpleasant, this pretentious Canadian feature makes a superficial stab at ruminating on the delicate relationships between doctors and their patients and the dangers risked by those in the medical profession who become too emotionally detached and cease to see their subjects as human beings. This complex topic must have been too deep for the writers to dare exploring at length, so instead they devote most of their film's running time to showcasing cruel, antisocial behavior a la THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT or THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK. A female doctor with a rare type of inoperable brain tumor is held hostage at her husband's snowbound cabin by a former patient who happened to be a completely evil, violent sexual predator. Aidan Devine is outstanding as the sadistic madman who relishes every moment of psychological and physical torture he can inflict on his whimpering victims. Other characters include the heroine's cheating husband and bimbo sister and a confused teenage idiot who assists the maniac. The performances are all quite good and the editing and cinematography are ably accomplished, but it's not enough to make the slow-moving and hateful feature palatable. And now, a Spoiler Alert for those who might sit through this without having seen any of its predecessors. Viewers who have, however, seen OCCURENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE, CARNIVAL OF SOULS or JACOB'S LADDER will see the alleged twist ending coming by a few minutes in, and will also realize that all the odd visual parallels and multiple interpretations of events (an injury to the heroine's hand, a sex scene) and objects (a lipstick becomes a syringe, a bottle of perfume becomes a vial of an experimental drug) aren't worth sorting out in terms of their relevance or symbolism because ultimately nothing that happens in this movie is ever going to matter one way or the other. Since the lead character is obviously mentally unstable from the beginning, it's just a matter of waiting for the script to come right out and admit that pretty much everything after the first three minutes is just one hallucination or another. I suppose one could kill some time trying to ascribe deeper meaning to the movie's many minor riddles, but the filmmakers don't seem to have had a clear vision of exactly what they wanted to say, so why should you finish writing their movie for them? In the end it's all just a tiring parade of repellant behavior, ugly imagery and a flatly depressing world view.

DARK RIDE (2006)

Dir: Craig Singer

A virtual remake of Tobe Hooper's THE FUNHOUSE (1981), this by-the-numbers teen slasher flick was offered as part of the "After Dark" horror series.  It supplies reasonably efficient direction and camerawork, eye-pleasing imitation Argento lighting, adequate acting and absolutely nothing that could ever be mistaken for original thought. Another vanload of bickering, pot-smoking college chumps heads out for a road trip, this time ending up spending the night in an amusement park's haunted house ride just for kicks like in Hooper's film. Also as in FUNHOUSE, the attraction appears to be a product of Doctor Who's dimensionally transcendental TARDIS technology, since it looks roughly the size of a small house from the outside but has enough rooms and corridors to fill the Waldorf Astoria on the inside. The attraction is "home" to a deranged murderer who just escaped from a poorly lit (and absurdly poorly staffed) mental institution. The literally mentally retarded goon murdered some children inside the ride in 1989 and now he's back and in just the mood to slaughter again.  The killer fits the standard Jason/ Michael Myers profile, to wit: he's a big hulking bully, he wears a face mask, he never talks, he has no real motivation, and he's able to sneak up on his victims with ease.  He supposedly has an ugly deformed face but we never get to see it.  The park isn't scheduled to open to the public for another three days but the lights on the ferris wheel and other rides are on, even late at night, and no one notices anything strange about it.  The teens are more bearable than in most movies of this type but once they realize they're in jeopardy they experience a sudden drop in I.Q. points and make some amazingly dumb calls as they stumble and blubber their way through the various sets (which look more like they were designed for a walk-through attraction than an actual dark ride with cars on tracks).  Once the power in the ride is turned on, characters are somehow able to remove prop lights from their sets and carry them around to use as flashlights. Early on, in an apparent reference to HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, the gang picks up a sexy, daffy, laughing blonde female hitchhiker wearing a cowboy hat.  DARK RIDE always looks nice, shows off some neat mechanical prop corpses and creatures and such, and the smattering of gore effects are very professional, but the way the characters behave and some of the specific incidents fall short of believability.  There's a minor twist at the end but it doesn't really add anything interesting to the story and feels like a desperate attempt to come up with something, however insignificant, that the audience might not be fully expecting.  Maybe not the worst slasher film you've seen, but disappointing in that it refuses to do anything that hasn't been done before.  In other words, a nice try but not really worth an hour and a half of your time. 

 DARK WALKER (2003)

Dir: Danny Draven

The photography is good, the colorfully moody lighting is excellent and producer Chuck Williams is very energetic and impressively ferocious in the role of the monster. That's the good news. The bad news is, well, everything else. At the Hobb's Grove Haunted House, a (real) seasonal Halloween attraction, a killer monster inexplicably pops up out of the ground and butchers a gaggle of stereotyped high schoolers in uninspired, by-rote slasher film fashion. The monster is a nifty creation, with fangs, tiny horns and a suit made of rags, but the script's half-hearted attempts to give him an origin story are so sloppy and meaningless that they seem to have been concocted solely to kill time. None of the incoherent details, which include a senile old lady who sits outdoors in a rocking chair, some vague satanic symbols and a pair of allegedly creepy little ghost girls copied from THE SHINING, ever fit together or add up to anything interesting.  The monster (who knows how to use power tools) kills people simply because he's a monster and that's what monsters are supposed to do.  In the plot tradition of JAWS, the guy who owns the attraction is determined to cover up the murders to avoid bad publicity, so much time is devoted to his repetitive dialogues with the local sheriff as he repeatedly begs for permission to keep the place open to the public in spite of the growing number of severed heads and other human remains that litter the grounds. (I did like the amusing character of the sheriff, though.)  Most of the killings are depicted in tired slasher movie manner, like quick cutaways from a closeup of a weapon about to come down to a shot of a nearby wall onto which somebody tosses a bucket of stage blood. (Someone should have reminded the effects department that people merely bleed when stabbed or slashed; they don't actually explode.)  The casting director must have been blindfolded, since most of the "teens" on view here look to be about 27 and the heroine, who is supposed to be a withdrawn Plain Jane type who never gets noticed by boys, is played by a glamorously beautiful actress. They didn't even give her thick glasses or frumpy clothes, or pull her hair back, or do anything at all to make her look the part. She has a perfect face, a gorgeous figure and great hair, all of which combine to make her role in the script seem puzzlingly inappropriate. Most of the dialogue is terrible too (as he lies dying in a pool of his own blood, one feshly-mangled guy helpfully advises the girlfriend who has just watched the creature tear him to ribbons to "Leave this place."). The special effects low point comes when the monster crushes a girl's head with a  styrofoam prop tombstone. Not only does it look like a styrofoam prop, but in the context of this setting-- a Halloween themed tourist attraction-- it would logically be a lightweight prop rather than the real McCoy. Instead of smashing the girl's head flat, which is what would really happen, the resulting injury leaves her looking like someone dumped some raw hamburger meat on her face. I'd like to be able to recommend this enthusiastic Halloween horror feature, since it has a great setting and even features a brief voice cameo by Daniel Roebuck as a radio announcer, but the underdeveloped story, poor characterization and dull pace make DARK WALKER just another insult to horror fan intelligence. An excellent licensed latex mask of the creature was offered by Bump-In-The-Night Productions. Promotional materials spell the title as DARKWALKER (all one word) but the movie itself has it divided into two separate words onscreen.  It was shot (and announced) as HOBB'S GROVE.  

 DARK WATER (2005)

Dir: Walter Salles

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 DARK, THE (2005)

Dir: John Fawcett

A compelling, well-produced and flawlessly acted supernatural tale set in a bleak little village on the coast of Wales.  Maria Bello is excellent as a rather selfish, shortsighted mother who travels to her estranged husband's lonely farm along with their troubled 10-year-old daughter. The little girl soon disappears by the eerie nearby cliffs, leading everyone to conclude that she fell to her death. A different little girl appears out of nowhere almost as if to replace her, and after studying local folklore on the history of the cliffside Bello is convinced that the mysterious child is a ghost who escaped from a legendary Welsh land of the dead when her daughter was killed, somehow changing places with her. She believes she can restore her lost daughter to life by forcing the ghostly child to return to the beyond. The tormented, pathetic ghost girl is understandably reluctant to give up a second chance at a life among the living. The mythology here is unusually well thought out, including a backstory about a crazed preacher who basically made up his own religion and persuaded his entire congregation to jump to their deaths from the cliffs. People who die there wake up in a creepy parallel world where everything is bathed in an unnatural, dead brownish-green light. The actors all play their parts with conviction and are perfect for their roles.  The photography is superb and manages to bring a constant chill to the sparkling, clear water below the cliffs for a great look that's both beautiful and haunting. The story has some very gruesome twists but doesn't rely on gory effects, choosing instead to convey a feeling of dread through its melancholy mood. At one point a sudden (non-violent) shock is achieved by bringing a startlingly abrupt end to the incidental music on the soundtrack.  Things get a bit muddled in the last reel, wherein a little more exposition would have helped sort things out, but if you pay close attention and give it some thought it really does all make sense in its own way. The DVD also includes the original ending as an extra. It's very similar but slightly more coherent and would have fit the story a little better. Presumably the "official" ending was concocted to provide a traditional style cheap shock for the final shot. Watch the alternate ending after you've watched the official one and decide for yourself. Even though the finale lacks clarity, THE DARK is highly entertaining and offers an interesting story presented with a flair for chilly atmosphere.  It was based on a novel entitled Sheep. This is the third horror movie to use THE DARK as a title.  It's also by far the best.

 DARKNESS BEYOND, THE (2000)

Dir: Ivan Zuccon

 DAUGHTER OF DRACULA (La Fille de Dracula) (1972)

Dir: Jesus Franco

Typical Franco film heroine Louisa Karlstein arrives at the spooky old family castle just in time for her dying mother to reveal that the original Count Karlstein was a vampire, or maybe was Dracula, or something like that.  Taking her deceased mum's key, she enters the creepy old chapel/dungeon under the castle. A coffin flips its lid, revealing poor old Howard Vernon (sometimes known as Spain's answer to Boris Karloff), who appears ever so briefly as one of the screen's worst Draculas, wearing a dusty tux, a red-lined cape, and a ridiculous bug-eyed fang-baring smile. At least he isn't sporting the green makeup he wore when he played the Count in DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN. He vampirizes Louisa, and off she goes to find both fresh blood and stale lesbian fumblings. Most of the remainder of this slow, dreamlike, largely improvised production consists of naked women (including the very beautiful Britt Nichols) rolling around, a tired Police Inspector investigating the usual round of murders that left fang marks on the victims' necks, and director Franco himself as the Van Helsing substitute, a duplicitous family employee named Cyril Jefferson.  If you've ever seen Franco, try to imagine how little he looks like his name would be Cyril Jefferson.  Made around the same time as DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN and the outrageous THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN using many of the same sets and actors, this disappointing answer to Hammer's Karnstein vampire trilogy is one of Franco's dumbest and dullest efforts of the period.  The camera moves are clumsy and a lot of the music sounds far too light and breezy to work with either the horrific or erotic elements.  Most disappointingly, the feeble Count never speaks and is never seen leaving his underground crypt (problems which also hobbled some of the Hammer Dracula sequels). Technical errors and bad staging in the Franco tradition keep things reasonably entertaining, though.  Watch Lina Romay faint in terror at the sight of the vampire but still move in such a way as to help another character undress her even while she's unconscious, and laugh outright when a vampire is destoryed in the worst-filmed staking sequence ever, wherein a guy drives a spike through the fiend's forehead and obviously brings his hammer down a good three inches from the top of the spike he's supposed to be hitting.  There are a few good individual scenes and moments and that odd dreamy mood that only Franco can create, but only diehard devotees of the director will need to see this marginal and slapdash addition to the immortal Count's filmography.

 

 

 

 DAWN OF THE MUMMY (1981)

Dir: Frank Agrama

 DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1963)

Dir: Steve Sekely

 DEAD CALLING, A (2006)

Dir: Michael Feifer

Laughable mad slasher thrills combined with ghost cliches to double your boredom.  Rachel is a TV reporter with a whiny personality, an unflattering hairstyle and a tendency to handle things in the dumbest way possible.  Her boyfriend is murdered by a burglar (who disappears from the movie, never to be seen again) because idiot Rachel was calling the police on the phone while standing there watching the guy kill her lover in a badly botched scene. (Yes, I know the burglar was probably stronger than a 100-lb. blonde, but you can't tell me a girl couldn't at least slow a guy down by knocking him on the head with something.)  If Rachel had ever expressed any guilt over her contribution to her boyfriend's death, she might have come off as a little bit likeable.  As it is, she never seems to feel any sense of responsibility whatsoever, and the lousy way she treats other characters while obsessively feeling sorry for herself makes her one of the weakest heroines I've seen in years.  She breaks into an old house to do a story on architecture (?).  The place looks bright, spotless and perfectly kept up on the outside but is a filthy rundown wreck inside.  She wanders around until she sees a ghostly re-enactment of a triple murder and sure enough, the guy who did the killing, and who by an amazing coincidence has just broken out of jail. Of course he is soon on her trail.  This incredibly poorly constructed movie features surprise twists that you'll see coming well before you're supposed to, lots of bad acting, and some of the worst sound and foley work outside an Andy Milligan film.  Many scenes are plagued by unwanted squeaks and buzzes in the background, and the attempts to simulate the sounds of people walking on hardwood floors never match their movements.  Bill Mosely is the town sheriff (another character who's a dope), and Sid Haig is (interestingly) cast against type as the heroine's nice, reasonable, ordinary guy dad instead of his usual over-the-top psycho.  I usually enjoy Haig's performances, but he doesn't seem comfortable in this low-key role.  At dinner, Haig's plate is loaded with food while everyone else's is empty.  In one scene the murderer takes time out to drive to Sid's house and shoot him, then gets right back in his car and drives on, without even going inside and looking to see if the girl he's actually hunting for is there (and he knows it's where she's staying).  This is the kind of script in which people's attitudes and personalities sometimes have to awkwardly change to fit certain scenes, and in which a gray-haired 56-year-old psycho with a beer belly is infinitely stronger, smarter and faster than anybody else.  It's the kind of script in which a guy who is shot and falls unconscious in a puddle of blood magically regains consciousness half an hour later and has the energy to climb onto a roof (never mind about that whole loss-of-blood thing). There aren't any scares or good shocks, and the ghosts are just old-fashioned double-exposures.  Even the setting is phony: the parts that are supposed to be set in New York City leave rows of palm trees visible in the background.  A waste of time on the part of everybody involved, including mine, since I was dumb enough to sit through it.  Don't make the same mistake I did.  At least not unless you're called upon to supply features for your community's next Insultingly Predictable Unscary Horror Film Festival.

 DEAD DOLL (2004)

Dir: Adam Sherman

 DEAD MARY (2007)

Dir: Robert Wilson

I know a lot of horror fans won't care for this movie, because it takes quite a long time to get to the scary part.  But I'm going to recommend it anyway, for one very simple reason: I thought it was scary.  The story might be no great shakes, essentially a CANDYMAN meets THE EVIL DEAD kind of thing, but DEAD MARY has plenty of merit in other departments. The acting is very relaxed and natural, making the group of thirtysomethings gathered at an isolated cabin in the woods seem a lot more like real people than the one-note caricatures found in many low-budget horror films. This particular gang's little reunion goes downhill rapidly because of two problems. First, one couple has just broken up on the way to the get-together, causing strain and discomfort to everybody, and second, because someone has the bright idea to try out an urban legend about the evil ghost known as  "Dead Mary".  It's the old "look in a mirror and call out her name three times" routine, and each member of the group tries it in turn. Surprisingly, Mary herself is never seen. But some kind of evil presence takes over the minds of certain characters, leading to gruesome murders and at least one very surprising return from death.  None of this is particularly original, but the story honestly feels like it's taking place in the real world, in which inexplicable things like mutilated corpses regenerating wounds and limbs and friends suddenly turning homicidally against one another without provocation just don't happen. The result is a simple story full of real horror and disturbing violence. Nothing scary happens during the first third of the movie, but the lack of slam-bang action early on pays off by giving the cast members enough time to let the audience get to know and sympathize with their characters. And that's nice because the dialogue is more complex and believable than usual for what's basically an EVIL DEAD wannabe.  When the first character dies, his death carries a much greater sense of shock and loss than in most slaughter-in-the-forest movies, wherein the actors are often nothing more than death fodder for the effects department. The gore effects here are good and, for once, the matter of who's going to live and who's going to die is not a foregone conclusion. More often quiet and creepy than noisy and bloody, this has its drawbacks but is a good bet for fans of all those low-budget tales of the horrors that take place in the dark, chilly woods at night.

 DEAD SILENCE (2007)

Dir: James Wan

There had already been quite a few movies about evil ventriloquism dummies (DEAD OF NIGHT, THE DEVIL DOLL, MAGIC, etc.), but this stylish shocker from the makers of SAW is one of the best.  Outstanding cinematography and ingeniously creative editing make DEAD SILENCE a visual treat even during its slower passages.  A young man tries to unravel the mystery behind the gory murder of his wife.  He uncovers a gruesome ghost story about his family's involvement in the lynching of old Mary Shaw, a lady ventriloquist whose ideas about what sort of materials to use in the construction of her puppets was, shall we say, innovative.  The deranged woman not only had all of her dummies buried in their own little graves surrounding her own, but her will even gave specific instructions on how she wanted her own body "custom embalmed" to turn her corpse into a puppet itself!  Mary's ghost is still seeking revenge on the families of the townspeople who did her in, and she's getting help from some very creepy little assistants.   A concept like this could easily have turned into a farce but this movie wisely plays it deadly seriously and maintains a sad, somber mood for its classic style ghost story set in a chilly, dreamy, blue-tinted world of hopelessness.  The effects are excellent and are used sparingly enough to make an impression each time an image of shocking horror splashes onto the screen.  The main flaws lie in the script, which gives us a hero who has all the personality of a bag of stale pork rinds and pits him against a totally unconvincing movie-style detective who is so unnecessarily cruel, sarcastic and belligerent that he belongs in the Negative Law Enforcement Stereotypes Hall Of Fame (right next to Arthur Kennedy in LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE and Clancy Brown in PET SEMATARY 2).   The prominence of the two dullards, who both seem to be incapable of saying anything worth listening to, are really the movie's only major weakness, which is a shame since the entire film follows them and their points of view.  Luckily the gorgeous visuals and the intriguing nature of the weird plot should be sufficient to hold your interest in spite of a lack of interesting characters.  One scene after another is so brilliantly designed and artfully staged that you can't help but feel both entertained and creeped out.  There are a few great sequences designed to make your skin crawl, as when each murder is preceeded by a disturbing cessation of ambient sound, and the surprise story twists are never telegraphed, making for some authentically shocking moments.  There are a few plot points that don't quite make sense (the kind of thing that hits you two hours later and makes you think, "Hey, wait a minute... if this was the case, then how could that have happened?"), but in a modern horror movie that does so many things right it's easy to forgive a little sloppiness around the edges.  The first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET may have been an influence, and the famous spiral-cheeked puppet from SAW (whose official name is Billy, just like the featured dummy in DEAD SILENCE) makes a cameo in a nightmarish chamber filled with eerie, wide-eyed staring puppets in glass cases. 

DEAD WOOD (2007)

Dirs: David Bryant, Sebastian Smith

Not to be confused with Showtime's foul-mouthed TV western series which ran 2004-2006. Comparisons to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT are inevitable, but this British horror-in-the-woods movie is at least a bit more than a one-note gimmick film. Unfortunately it's only slightly more. Four exceedingly dull young people go off to spend a weekend in a remote forest area, apparently having tired of having sex and wandering around complaining within city limits. Characters have strange names like Milk, Webb, Ketsy, and a girl called Larry, but the overflow of odd names among such a small cast only makes the whole scenario seem all the more unlikely. After a seemingly interminable period of walking along making irrelevant smalltalk, the movie eventually gets around to having its main bores killed off by an invisible attacker that turns out to be none other than the woods itself, much like in the original THE EVIL DEAD. When the few brief shock sequences finally arrive, they are well-staged and professionally shot, giving the impression that at least one of the project's two directors knew how to effectively generate terror onscreen. But none of it makes any sense and the entire budget appears to have been blown on one supposedly show-stopping special effect, which looks pretty ordinary in an age of elaborate CGI visual trickery. The sentient forest inexplicably wants to entrap people and turn them into trees. Perhaps the forest is mad at these people for accidentally killing a deer at the beginning, or maybe it's just thinking the more the merrier. After being subsumed by the fiendish foliage, the victims (or at least some of them) reappear periodically as phantom images of their former human selves, now bent on recruiting others into becoming permanent woodland fixtures. This is never discussed at length nor speculated upon in any intelligent way. I was never sure whether the girl who turns most of the cast into trees near the end was helping the spirit of the forest all along or was innocent up until the point at which she became part of the landscape. The acting is amateurish and the characters come off as awfully dim and slow to react, making DEAD WOOD a frustrating and unsatisfying experience despite a fairly off-the-wall interpretation of ancient folklore (and that one nice special effect). Even people who are caught totally unaware when Michael Myers gets back up at the end of the umpteenth HALLOWEEN sequel will roll their eyes and groan when this one trots out its lame "shock" ending. Even Ed Wood would be bored by DEAD WOOD.

 DEADLY SPAWN, THE (1982)

Dir: Douglas McKeown

 DEATH BED (THE BED THAT EATS) (1977)

Dir: George Barry

DEATH BY DIALOGUE (1988)

Dir: Tom DeWeir

 DEATH TUNNEL (2005)

Dir: Philip Adrian Booth

DEMENTED (1980)

Dir: Arthur Jeffries, Alex Rebar

A common staple of every tape rental shop in the '80s, this is a boring exploitation movie written and co-directed by the actor who played THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. The dialogue is so bland and repetitious that it's hard to believe the cast members weren't ad-libbing most of the time. Linda, the most annoying woman you could possibly imagine (an actress credited as Sallee Elyse) is raped in a horse stable by four oafs with stockings on their heads. She loses her marble, goes to the mental hospital and is released a few years later even though she's obviously still seriously unbalanced. She spends the next few reels whining, complaining and generally feeling sorry for herself in a shrill, irritating voice while her two-timing husband (played by a porn star named Harry Reems, who is credited as Bruce Gilchrist) pretends he's working late every night so he can hook up with his greedy, selfish, oversexed mistress. If you had to live with this loud, shrieking, self-pitying, neurotic motormouth you'd probably cheat on her too. At long last some teenage boys in masks break into the house to rape and terrorize Linda, at which point she goes all the way off the deep end, cackling madly as she pretends to seduce the boys and then violently kills them. Every opportunity to make this unlikely story frightening is missed, but it is kind of fun to watch the dopey would-be assailants' stunned behavior once their intended victim turns the tables on them. It would have been even better if anything she did made any sense. She drugs one guy's drink, ties him to a chair, feeds him a bite of round steak (which she calls pepper steak) and then blasts him in the chest with a shotgun. Two guys get whacked in the head with a meat cleaver and one attacker has his privates sliced off with...uh, a piece of wire or something. (The photography and lighting are pretty bad.) With nothing in the way of suspense, next to nothing in the way of makeup or effects, a lead performance that's off-putting and a buildup to a nothing ending, this ugly little would-be shocker has nothing to recommend it.

 DEMON HOUSE (1996)

Dir: Jimmy Kaufman

This is really the second sequel to Kevin Tenney's NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (1988) under an alternate title. It was also released as NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 3.  As with the first two entries in this emptyheaded series, it's a by-the-numbers EVIL DEAD copy with above-average photography, lighting and makeup effects. For a movie made in the '90s, this one has a distinct '80s vibe. Another vanload of idiot teens who are supposed to be friends but who all act like they despise each other get into trouble on Halloween night. An attempt to buy beer with a fake I.D. turns ugly and the meanest and stupidest of the kids ends up accidentally shooting a cop. The black kid takes a bullet and is pretty much out of the action from then on. The morons hide out at the cursed Hull House, where sexy evil demon babe Angela (Amelia Kinkade again) puts up Halloween decorations and kills cops. An aging police detective with a knack for card tricks investigates while Angela kills the kids and resurrects them as demon zombie types. A good (but underused) idea here has the possessed kids turning into "real" versions of their Halloween costumes. A guy in a red devil mask turns into an actual red devil with the mask melding into his face, a girl in a cat outfit develops a cat-creature face, and a slut with a silly snake hand puppet watches as her hand morphs into a real snake, which turns around and bites her!   The worst part is that the house is surrounded by an invisible barrier which won't permit the demons to leave the property but the characters are too dumb to escape even after they know this. A brainless cheerleader discovers it but actually goes back onto the property and never even remembers to tell the others. For quite a while near the end, you can see that all the survivors would have to do is just run through the front gates and they'd be safe, but instead they do stupid things like wasting time trying to start a car when it would obviously be much faster to just walk out.  Angela says she can't steal people's souls and that they have to give them to her voluntarily through either spoken words or evil deeds. As far as I could tell, the poor black guy never did anything to qualify him as one of her victims but he gets possessed anyway. There are continuity problems with the makeup, like the undead policeman who has a large head wound that keeps moving from one side of his head to the other.  As you might guess, the film as a whole is something less than spectacular. But this series was never concieved as anything more than an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the EVIL DEAD films anyway. Amelia Kinkade, desperately trying to make something of her poorly developed non-character, still looks great eight years after the original. Now if they'd just write an actual story around her.

 DEMON, THE (1981)

Dir: Percival Rubens

Staggeringly plotless, slow-moving slasher tries hard to imitate HALLOWEEN but stumbles with every step. First off, the killer isn't exactly a demon in the true sense. He's more like a big dumb boring thug who kills random people for no reason. He wears dark clothes and a pale, expressionless mask to make himself look more like Michael Myers. In some shots you can see the actor's face, painted a light color to make it look like he's wearing the mask.  Maybe nobody remembered to bring it to the shoot on those days. He never talks, but we do see him doing pushups in his dark apartment littered with girlie mags. He kills people by suffocating them with plastic baggies and occasionally slashes them with surprising pre-Freddy knife-bladed gloves. He probably used them to edit the film too. This movie must have set some sort of record for having the largest number of establishing shots in a single film. It seems like every 10 seconds we're looking at a busy street or the outside of some building or other. Cameron Mitchell is Colonel Carson, a retired Marine with psychic abilites that are ultimately of no help. Much time is wasted on Cameron sniffing a victim's pillowcase, driving around and jabbering on about how his psychic sense helps him solve crimes. He warns that "the hour of the demon is at hand", but evidently all he meant by this was that the killer was going to chase one more woman around. The disgruntled mother of a victim, growing tired of having so much of the movie's running time wasted on Mitchell's pointless subplot, finally shoots him. More time is wasted on the sappy romantic adventures of various young twerps who are only in the movie to be victims. In spite of the talk about the killer being a demon, he's ultimately done in by a frightened topless woman who stabs him with scissors, causing him to die pretty much like any ordinary mortal would.  The ending feels every bit as unfinished as the movie's many meandering situations.  The survivor runs into the streets still screaming, some cars pull up, and suddenly the credits roll. We never find out the killer's name, origin, motivation or anything else in the confused feature, which was shot in South Africa.  Funky Town and Rapper's Delight are heard in a disco and a theater marquee advertises THE AMITYVILLE HORROR.

 DEMONS OF LUDLOW, THE (1983)

Dir: Bill Rebane

Laughable low-budget lunacy from Wisconsin, where film is, apparently, cheap. The New England community of Ludlow, population 47, is celebrating its bicentennial. You wouldn't think a cluster of 47 people would qualify as a village or a hamlet or anything else, but Ludlow somehow has a mayor, a town hall, and evidently its own radio station (?!). Unfortunately, the 47 residents of Ludlow have the collective I.Q. of a dog biscuit. They all seem to know the town is cursed, but despite the long history of unexplained tragedies, it's never occured to anyone to just leave. Thus, the imbeciles living there in 1983 are direct descendants of the original imbeciles who were there in 1783. The town's founder, old Ephram Ludlow, was an evil type who had his hands cut off as punishment for being a bad guy. He returns to kill local morons during the ill-advised "celebration", in the form of a flying haunted piano that drips blood. (I swear I'm not making this up.)  The piano, which was shipped to England after Ephram's death, dates back to the town's beginning and even though everybody seems to know it's an instrument of evil (get it?), it is inexplicably welcomed back into town when persons unknown send it back. Characters refer to it as both a piano and a harmonium, even though the terms are not interchangable and refer to two different types of instruments. The music it makes sounds suspiciously like that of a synthesizer.  The script talks about old Ephram as if he were the sole villain and the only source of the curse, but an entire crowd of extras in rented period costumes (some from the wrong period) materialize to help him, presumably just because there wasn't anything to do in hell that night. People are attacked by glowing hands that reach out of floorboards, and in one strange scene an alcoholic woman picks up a glass that the audience has just seen float through the air and plunk itself down on her nightstand. I think this was an attempt by the ghosts to poison the woman, but since she takes a drink from the floating glass and is just fine afterward, a ghost has to come in and shoot her.  The amateur acting and weak special effects can be forgiven in a low-budget film, but the Neanderthal script completely ruins everything with its avalanche of infuriatingly stupid lines and next to nothing in the way of logic. With a few tweaks this could have been turned into a comedy spoof, but it wants you to take its nonsensical story seriously. Unfortunately it's a bit too slow-moving to be enjoyable in a PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE kind of way. It's mostly just tedious and makes you feel embarrassed for the participants. There is one surprisingly good severed head prop, though.  The grainy feature, which includes at least one good clear shot of the cameraman's shadow, is from the director of THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION and INVASION FROM INNER EARTH, so that might give you an idea of what you're in for. 

 DEMONWARP (1988)

Dir: Emmett Alston

In the 1800s, a preacher is walking along preaching to his horse.  Someone off-camera throws a rock into the air and when it comes back down we're supposed to think it's a meteor landing. A century later, George Kennedy is staying with his estranged daughter in a cabin in the woods, playing Trivial Pursuit and flubbing his lines.  He says, "You know, it's been a long time since we were together, no thanks to your mother."  What?  Then Bigfoot smahses in the cabin door and kills the daughter.  Some teens show up and walk around in the woods, so Bigfoot kills them too.  Kennedy tries to help and explains that he only wants to find the beast that got his daughter, but since the leader of the kids is a complete creep, everything goes wrong. The Bigfoot costume, with long dark hair and a mean apelike snarling face, is excellent. His attacks are very awkward, though, and sometimes he seems unable to decide if he'd rather yank people's heads off or just fumble with their faces until they die.  He kills one extraneous character by poking around in his guts for a while with a stick.  Most of the film plays out like a FRIDAY THE 13TH sequel with Bigfoot as the slasher, but then things go berserk at the end.  When Bigfoot is shot, he turns into one kid's missing uncle, and then all of a sudden some rotted zombies (one of whom wears a Residents t-shirt) are found working on a hundred-year-long spaceship repair project inside Bronson Caverns.  The preacher from the beginning, inexplicably still alive, is now the crazy minion of a pebbly-faced space demon with a big metal claw for a hand.  He brings it victims, feeds it human hearts, and believes it's some kind of diety.  The big ugly creature seems mostly immobile but he does have a big tentacle with a sharp prong on the end that can turn people into Bigfoots, or, um, Bigfeet.  The hairy monster's victims (or what's left of them) are resurrected as docile zombies who, from the look of it, aren't particularly good with electronics. They toil away trying to fix the (mostly unseen) spacecraft so the evil E.T. can return home. The same basic idea had appeared before in such films as IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, ENEMY FROM SPACE, THEY CAME FROM BEYOND SPACE and NIGHT SLAVES. Makeup man John Carl Beuchler's ambitious story, which might have made a great DOCTOR WHO episode in the hands of more clever, mature writers, is here turned into a barely cohesive stew of slasher cliches and absurd situations. The greatest of DEMONWARP's many flaws is probably the fact that the central character, a macho dork who brings his innocent friends into terrible danger under false pretenses and who sits with a gun in his hand and watches while a monster tears his buddy to pieces, is an unsympathetic jerkwad.  I think we're supposed to feel for him but the fact that he's a hot-headed idiot who never seems to think of anyone but himself makes you despise the guy. When Kennedy's character is thrown away, the movie runs out of even remotely watchable characters.  At least you get to see a lot of nifty monsters and better-than-average makeup, masks and gore effects along the way to the senseless, annoying (we-couldn't-think-of-an) ending.  Michelle Bauer, an actress famous for appearing topless in cheap horror and exploitation films, shows up to run around topless for a while in this one.  It's by the director of one of the most boring, unscary slasher films of the '80s, NEW YEAR'S EVIL, and at least it's a big improvement over that.  

 DESCENT, THE (2005)

Dir: Neil Marshall

Frequently dismissed as a copy of THE CAVE (2005) in America, this English film was actually made first.  It isn't as action-oriented or visually extravagant as that film but it is in many ways more memorable, thanks to a number of slightly odd elements that were added to the standard story and an absolutely suffocating sense of claustrophobia. A group of female adventurers go exploring in some uncharted underground caverns. The group has some serious personal issues to work out but things soon get a lot more uncomfortable when they find themselves getting picked off by weird, pale-skinned humanoid freaks after a cave-in leaves them unable to escape the way they came. This movie's dark, clammy, airless settings must have made some viewers want to run out of the theater for a breath of air after a while. The script's attempt to weave a complex web of interpersonal relationships between its troubled heroines is probably too complicated for its own good, but it's nice to see a film in which women are treated as characters worthy of serious consideration and respect instead of shrieking victims or sex objects, and Marshall does get most of his chatty character development established and out of the way in time to avoid letting it interfere with the monster movie thrills of THE DESCENT's tense second half. The flesh-eating "crawlers", as they are called in the end credits, have supposedly spent their entire wretched lives in the pitch black environment of the caves and are thus naturally blind, but that leaves one to wonder how they could periodically go above the surface to hunt for victims as the script describes. The U.S. version has a slightly happier ending than the U.K.'s depressing "the last survivor has gone bonkers" coda, but although both endings feel like let-downs, neither is bad enough to seriously detract from the movie's grim dramatic power. I have to admit that I liked THE CAVE'S idea of focusing on an organized rescue party better than this film's setup, which has the foolhardy girls place themselves in serious danger (even before anybody is aware there are monsters) for no reason other than to give themselves a thrill. The acting is top-notch, but the hollow sound quality combined with the rushed, nervous, slurred delivery of the dialogue might make the heavily-accented cast difficult for many U.S. viewers to understand.  There's also a problem with some of the action scenes being shot too dark and too close up and edited too abruptly to allow for clear understanding of exactly what's happening, but at least on video you can always freeze the frame or run the scene back a bit if you miss something.  Reservations aside, this effort from the director of DOG SOLDIERS is still highly suspenseful and recommended viewing for fright film fans.

 DESECRATION (1999)

Dir: Dante Tomaselli

DESTINATION INNER SPACE (1966)

Dir: Francis D. Lyon

After getting off to a clunky start that has more the feel of a weekly TV series than a feature film, this little-known underwater adventure introduces Scott Brady as Naval Commander Wayne, the tough, no-nonsense, beer-bellied male chauvanist hero whose uncanny knack for always being right about everything rivals that of Adam West's in BATMAN, only this aging grouch is a lot less fun to watch. This particular Wayne character is called to head the investigation of a mysterious unknown object picked up by the sonar equipment of a high-tech research station (made up of noticeably sparse sets) at the bottom of the ocean. The scientific method in this script is unbelievable in more ways than one. Using the flimsiest reasoning, Brady and the renowned but thick-skulled scientists determine that the object is a flying saucer from an alien planet. I'm not sure how they figured this out so quickly, since the craft never displays any especially otherworldly qualities and appears to be constructed out of ordinary metal. An exploratory team is sent out in a tiny, bright red two-person minisub that looks like it was swiped from a Coney Island roller coaster. (A strange continuity error in one shot reveals an unmentioned third person popping in out of nowhere, apparently to help the tiny vehicle get moving.) Inside the spaceship is a single room with a row of small triangular doors (those darned triangles are always a sure sign of extraterrestrial presence) and a red warning light that could have come from the roof of an old police car. Once the possibility that this craft came from another planet is mentioned, it is immediately accepted as fact by all and sundry. A two-foot-long alien capsule is unwisely brought to the lab, where it soon hatches an alien fishman monster whose startling appearance is the unquestionable reason to watch. An incredible creation by Richard Cassarino (the artist who created THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON in'59), the amphibian man is a highly detailed full rubber bodysuit that shows terrific imagination and ranks as one of cinema's best rubber-suit monsters after the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Cleverly designed to hide an air tank in its humped back, this bug-eyed, multi-finned rainbow fish monster with oversized claws and covered from top to bottom with individually painted imbricated scales is a minor classic of monster design. Even the way it moves underwater looks completely natural in all but one or two shots. A big plus is that the filmmakers had sufficient confidence in their creature to allow him plenty of screen time and let the audience get a good look at him from a variety of angles. The dialogue and its style of delivery is stiff as can be throughout this unimaginatively shot, cheap-looking, implausible (and embarrassingly sexist) tale, but the underwater photography is good and the unforgettable scaly beast makes it worth a watch for every monster fan as well as an excellent choice of monster movies to share with young children, since the creature never appears too frightening (even though he kills), creating instead the impression of a great big, supercool monster toy. Check out the middle-aged actor in the radio room, whose pants seem to have been too small for him. There's a big obvious wedge of extra fabric sewn into the seat. (Couldn't they find a pair of pants a couple of sizes larger?) Director Lyon made CASTLE OF EVIL (also starring Brady) the same year.

 DEVIL STORY (1986)

Dir: Bernard Launois

The English language title of this flop from France fibs twice: there's no devil and no story.  The original title is IL ETAIT UNE FOIS...LE DIABLE, which must be French for AVOID THIS MOVIE...IT STINKS.  The French countryside is terrorized by an old witch and "her idiot son", a deformed maniac known only as The Monster.  He looks like a blend of Jason from FRIDAY THE 13TH, Grandpa from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and Bozo The Clown.  Clad in a military officer's uniform, he's an uncoordinated stumblebum of a monster but he's still able to slaughter everybody who gets near him. He usually stabs people with a hunting knife or slashes them with a glove covered in sharp spikes, but when he feels really lazy he simply shoots them. The result is always the same: a closeup of an unconvincing wound with big phony gouts of blood squirting out ridiculously.  He has a steady supply of victims because practically everybody who passes through the region has car trouble of one kind or another. A nearby chateau is where a grouchy old man and his chatterbox wife allow a doomed married couple to spend the night. The husband is a non-entity who soon vanishes from the movie.  The wife is beautiful and has a great figure but she already seems to be half nuts when we first meet her. Equipped with all the personality of a Bartlett pear and half the intellect, she encounters various horrors while walking aimlessly around at night in a nightie and a raincoat.  The area is also haunted by the devil's horse, a black steed who makes the same pre-recorded whinny about every 4 seconds until viewers will want to kill either the horse, the sound effects man or themselves. The old man, who must surely be the worst hunter in all of Europe, grabs his shotgun and goes out to kill the evil animal.  He shoots at it for what seems like forever, sometimes not even aiming in its general direction. The Elmer Fudd of European horror, he blasts away at the horse for what must be hours on end and always misses. Meanwhile, the side of a cliff crumbles away and a toy sailing ship comes bursting out. It's supposed to be a ghost ship that was run aground by wreckers (pirates on land) centuries before.  Among the ship's cargo was an evil Egyptian mummy.  The budget didn't allow for an entire sarcophagus to be fabricated, so he has to step out from behind a lid that swivels open to reveal there's no case behind it.  The witch and the Monster decide to seal the heroine up in a stone vault because she looks just like the witch's dead daughter.  The mummy resurrects the Monster's sister, played by the same girl in a silly wig. The female zombie stands around saying and doing nothing whatsoever for the rest of the film.  The girl is attacked by the mummy, and when she pulls a few strips of bandaging off his face, he responds by spitting up quarts of blue mummy puke.  No two scenes in this talent-free monster rally fit together in any sensible way, there's no sense of forward momentum, and no characterization to speak of. The editing is rock-bottom, with little to no care given to why anything is happening or in what order.  In a scene inspired by CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1964), the mummy steps on a guy's torso, causing about five pounds of ground beef (surprisingly bloodless at that) to ooze out from under his shirt.  Most of the time, when something actually does happen it's so haphazardly shot and assembled that the viewer has to basically guess what was supposed to have gone on.  ("I guess the horse is supposed to have kicked him in the groin... I guess he's supposed to have gotten smashed against a power pole... I guess he's supposed to have thrown a body down the well,".... etc.)  Every few minutes the beginning of Bach's Toccata En Fugue In D Minor kicks in, reminding us that this is a horror film and providing still more unintentional comedy.  Nothing is ever explained, and at the 72-minute mark DEVIL STORY ends as we see the next couple of unsuspecting saps arrive at the chateau, as all the various monsters and psychos who had gotten killed off are, apparently, inexplicably alive again.  In truth, if I had seen this pathetic mess of a horror film when I was a child it probably would have scared me to death, as there's something disturbingly nightmarish in watching a presentation that doesn't seem to have been under the control of any guiding hand.  No director, no writer, no editor, no cameraman, nor anybody else having the slightest familiarity with filmmaking, storytelling or art in general ever makes his or her presence felt.  Assorted horror scenarios simply come along and stumble over each other at random until somebody starts the end credits rolling, signalling that the feature is over.  The director had acted in a few Eurocine films and later directed a few minor comedies. Truly unbelievable. 

 DEVIL TIMES FIVE (1974)

Dir: Sean McGregor

Before CHILDREN OF THE CORN there was this inept, tedious attempt to exploit that naturally alien and inscrutable quality that many small children have. As adults, we know that kids can be terribly cruel and often tell lies for no apparent reason, so a story about kids who don't distinguish reality from fantasy and whose little games are homicidal ought to be fairly chilling. But the molasses-in-January pacing and superficial scripting send this one to the scrap heap early on. The five demented children shown are all so controlled by their respective psychoses and neuroses that it's highly unlikely they could function as a team the way the plot requires them to. At a snowbound mountain lodge, a group of bickering adults find the quintet of seemingly innocent kids and take them in, not realizing the bus crash that freed them was on its way (to where??) from an insane asylum!  One of the kids thinks he's in the army and says everything in milirtary terms. Another one dresses as a nun, another obsessively clutches a toy fish, and teen idol-to-be Leif Garrett is a nasty little snot who dresses in drag at one point. By the end, every last adult has been killed off and the evil kids go off in search of more victims. Like most '70s movie psychos, the kids kill for no reason at all. The murders are so incompetently shot and edited that they have almost no dramatic impact. Ruined with jerky slo-mo, the killings are, for the most part, every bit as boring as the rest of the film. The combination of blurry slowed down movement and choppy editing tries to hide the fact that there aren't really any effects to speak of.  When one guy is hanged by a booby trapped wire hooked to a generator, you can't even see the wire. The victim simply stands up abruptly, then the camera cuts to a closeup of the generator, then to a shot of the victim's dangling feet.  The only really horrifying murder happens when a woman is set on fire. A soundtrack replete with tinkly, chilidsh sounding music was intended to be creepily ironic but it more often undercuts the horror by adding an unwanted note of camp.  (It also gets irritating after a while.) The acting is up to par but the awful editing and a script constructed almost entirely from pointless small talk spoil the chances of a good scare factor. This was also released as PEOPLETOYS and THE HORRIBLE HOUSE ON THE HILL, although it isn't really the house that's horrible. It's the filmmaking.

 DEVIL'S DEN (2006)

Dir: "Andrew Quint" (Jeff Burr)

A fun and funny imitation of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN which, in many ways, improves on its model.  DEVIL'S DEN is better paced, has more realistic action, funnier gags and a much more assured sense of how to tell a story than its ugly, noisy inspiration.  Devon Sawa (who has an impressive horror career that also includes FINAL DESTINATION and IDLE HANDS) is one of two dopey, wisecracking smalltime drug dealers who stop at the title establishment, an incongruously clean and slick-looking little strip club near the U.S.-Mexico border.  The gorgeous exotic dancers there are really ghouls, flesh-eating subhumans who have sold their souls to the devil in exchange for immortality. Ken Foree, miraculously looking about five years older then he did in the original 1979 DAWN OF THE DEAD, is typically excellent as a professional monster fighter sent to kill the "queen" ghoul, whose destruction will cause the instant deaths of all her she-monster followers.  But which of the many curvaceous creatures at the club is their queen?  The script offers a lot of good sarcastic quips, amusing running gags (Sawa is deathly afraid of squirrels) and even some good ideas about the pliable nature of good and evil and the fact that one is always free to make one's own choices.  Kelly Hu, as a kick-boxing, gun-happy assassin, plays the type of smug cynical bitch I usually hate in action movies, but she deserves kudos for doing a superb job of it, making her obnoxious character at least bearable.  Will her determination to wipe out dope pushers and other criminals serve her well in a fight against undead monsters, or will her killer instinct and cold heart cause her to lose her humanity to the contagious nature of the demonic creatures' evil?  Will Ken Foree survive an encounter with the living dead, as he did back in '79?  Will Devon get over his personal phobia concerning squirrels?  There are a few plot twists that don't work as well as they should have and the monster makeup when the girls transform from beauties to beasts is substandard at best, but DEVIL'S DEN is still one of the better post-BUFFY action/horror/comedies.  The sequence in which two guys fantasize about what famed Japanese action hero Zatoichi the blind swordsman would do in this situation (we get to see this unlikely scenario acted out as they're describing it) is on its own worth the price of a rental.

 DEVIL'S HARVEST, THE (2004)

Dir: James Shanks

The top-notch professional cast all do their best, and it's a good thing, too, because this derivative British dud certainly doesn't have much of a story going for it. It seems to be leading up to a big spectacular climax that never really arrives. A young struggling artist and his insecure wife go to live in a spooky old mansion in his old hometown near Cornwall at the invitation of the guy's childhood girlfriend, who's now wealthy and lands him a job doing paintings for a local church. Tired haunted house shenanigans like drawers that open by themselves kill some time, and a pile of maggots crawling on an old glove is found. What the haunted house material has to do with the actual plot is anybody's guess. The real story (and I use the term loosely) has to do with Brian Blessed as a defrocked priest who pops up in odd places and moments and who knows that evil diety Dagon is about to rise from the ocean nearby and....erm... maybe enslave mankind or destroy the world or sink a few ships or something. The Dagon concept (and name) is swiped from H.P. Lovecraft, who isn't even credited. We never do get to see Dagon. The only special effect is the unexplained globs of killer tar that occasionally turn up here or there. Even they aren't very scary and don't involve any real effects.  Basically you just get a couple of scenes in which people yell and then fall into the water. In a ridiculous scene, a man takes a rowboat out onto the pitch-black water in the middle of the night to read a book. I guess he was counting on there being a handy camera crew with a movie light to read by. Eventually some unwholesome family secrets are revealed but none of it leads to anything particularly interesting. The ending is senseless and depressing rather than scary.  The opening title sequence copies I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, which was a far better film.  

 DEVIL'S MESSENGER, THE (1961)

Dir: Herbert L. Strock

 DEVILS OF DARKNESS (1965)

Dir: Lance Comfort

 DEVIL'S REJECTS, THE (2005)

Dir: Rob Zombie

Rockstar Rob Zombie's followup to his somewhat overrated TEXAS CHAINSAW copy HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES is such a boring, meandering, self-indulgent mess that it makes the first film look like the work of pure genius. You could watch any five minutes of THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and safely conclude that you've seen the whole thing, since the general atmosphere of shrieking hysteria never varies by a degree. You could also cut the movie into five-minute segments, toss them into a hat and edit them back together in random order and have pretty much the same movie, since there isn't any story and no sense of buildup or pacing. Among the many ways in which this disappoints is its failure to function as a real horror movie. There isn't any aura of mystery or any supernatural element here; it's really just a crime caper-road movie sort of thing in which people drive around ugly desert locations swearing at the top of their lungs, almost from beginnng to end.  Only the great Sid Haig shines as evil clown Captain Spaulding, and he gives his madman plenty of character and a good sense of humor despite the lack of inspiration all around him. As far as the rest of the cast, it's hard to judge the acting when nobody is called upon to do anything but holler swear words for an hour and a half. Cameos from talented performers like Mary Woronov, Daniel Roebuck and Michael Berryman are welcome reliefs from the one-note level of angry tedium but they can't salvage this production.  All interesting elements from HO1000C are gone. There's no more Dr. Satan, the unforgettable immortal mad scientist who was clearly the ringleader in the first movie but doesn't even get a mention here. Also absent are the pit full of zombies, the bizarre medical experiments, the serial killer museum and the creepy nightmarish mood that HO1000C strived to create. This time it's just a lot of high-pitched screaming minus any logic or any sort of point. Occasionally some walk-on victims get shot, stabbed or bludgeoned by the family of killers, but there's really no suspense since there's never any real question of anyone surviving: it's a foregone conclusion that everybody the killers meet will be offed for no reason at all.  I don't object to cruelty in the telling of a horror tale, but THE DEVIL'S REJECTS contains absolutely nothing but simple-minded cruelty seasoned with a steady deluge of swearing and gross sexual slang.  On the maniacs' trail this time is a deranged, hotheaded, sadistic sheriff clearly modeled on the character Dennis Hopper played in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. The film seems preoccupied with paying homage to Quentin Tarantino, but since everything Q.T. does is already an homage to one movie genre or another, this comes out as a third-generation knockoff.  You'd expect a lot more creativity than this from a guy who professes a lifetime love of horror and who even calls himself Zombie, for crying out loud!  You don't even get to hear any of his music in this movie, which is one more disappointment. (You are invited to spend ample time ogling Rob Z.'s stunningly beautiful wife, though. By anyone's standards, she's a real knockout.) I've enjoyed a lot of R.Z.'s past work and own a couple of his albums, but his well would appear to have run dry by the time of this tedious feature. Sadly, it may be time to come forward and point out that this particular emperor is no longer wearing any clothes. 

DEVON'S GHOST- LEGEND OF THE BLOODY BOY (2005)

Dir: Johnny Yong Bosch, Koichi Sakamoto

Uninspired high school slasher movie can be called 'routeen' at best.  The awkward title is a bit of a cheat, as Devon isn't a ghost at all, but a crazy idiot in a baseball jersey who kills other idiots using a baseball bat with a saw blade attached to the end. The ad art said "Only his victims know why", and that isn't true either. Most of his victims are innocent bystanders who have no clue why they're getting their heads bashed in, and the only "why" is because Devon is nuts. Dimestore pop psychology is trotted out but it's unlikely that you'll care much about the plot. Devon is this idiot kid who was raised by his white trash idiot parents. All the local idiots think Devon was killed by his idiot parents years earlier, but in fact his crazy idiot grandmother has been taking care of him. They live in the house across from the just-reopened high school but none of the neighborhood idiots notice. Most of the movie consists of various idiots talking about just what really happened on the day Devon was supposedly murdered, but all of the characters are such total...let's see, what's the word to describe them?...Oh yes: morons... that the film is an exercise in frustration as nobody ever reacts the way they logically should.  The height of idiocy comes when a heroic good guy teen suddenly develops Jackie Chan-like fighting abilitiy, enabling him to beat up three well-meaning idiot cops (who must have forgotten their guns), which gives his troubled idiot girlfriend time to sneak around looking for Devon herself, alone and unarmed, for no reason other than that it was time to put the heroine in immediate danger.  Some of the action is slowed down and some of it is speeded up, but both techniques look silly and pretentious. The ending is as far-fetched, illogical and derivative as everything that has come before.  Despite all this, DEVON'S GHOST isn't really all that bad of a movie, at least offering OK photography, direction, fight choreography and (most of the time) acting. But there wasn't any real reason to make this movie, as there's nothing new or different here. It's just a combination of HALLOWEEN, PSYCHO, PROM NIGHT, SCREAM and other better-known maniac movies. Ho-hum. 

 DEVOUR (2005)

Dir:David Winkler

The title makes it sound like a cannibal movie, but this smart and scary thriller is actually about a killer website used by a Satanic cult. Similar concepts have been used before but this one gets it right. Jake is a college student who experiences gory waking nightmares. After his despicable violent lowlife buddy enters Jake's personal info onto an online gaming site called The Pathway, horrible things start happening to people around him. "Players" who have joined The Pathway receive strange personal phone calls telling them what they must do in order to "win" the mysterious game, but the instructions often include murder and self-mutilation. Jake somehow resists the site's hypnotic commands, which brings him to the attention of a coven of high-tech devil worshippers who have been looking for the son of Satan incarnated in human form. The confused but determined kid's weak alcoholic father and feeble institutionalized mother are of no help so he tries to put a stop to the cult's evil plans on his own. Everything is complicated by some terrible revelations about his family's past and by the fact that he's gradually losing his grip on reality. He sees odd visual echoes of gruesome images from his nightmares, including an ugly female demon and visions of various other characters as mangled bloody corpses.  This all works surprisingly well in the capable hands of director David Winkler. The script is much better than average for a direct-to-video horror project, offering well-rounded characterization and believable dialogue. DEVOUR even tells a complete story that makes sense on its own terms and never telegraphs its scares. The Satanists are completely expendable to their supposed master, and even the rich and successful leader of the coven, a self-deluded corporate slimeball who thinks he's important in the devil's scheme of things, is killed off just as easily and casually as anybody else, thus underscoring the folly of devil worshippers trying to get on the good side of an entity that doesn't have one. The ending is one of those typical depressing bummers that just about all horror movies made around this time have, but it works better here than in most because the clever closing monologue makes it possible to see the whole story in an entirely different light.  You also get first-rate gore effects (including one very nasty mutilation scene that's guaranteed to make you squirm) and a cool demonic monster along the lines of the one in THE UNNAMABLE. The opening titles sequence looks great and the cinematography throughout the whole movie is way above average too. Check it out.

 DISTANT LIGHTS (1987)

Dir: Aurelio Chiesa

Recently widowed and redundantly named Bernardo Bernardi is troubled by his 9-year-old son's claims of having visited his mommy in the woods near their home several times in the four days since her death.  One night Bernardo catches a glimpse of his late wife too, and shortly thereafter a transient who was just found dead by the police is also seen to be up and about.  The area's newly dead are being resurrected by bodiless aliens who have been searching the universe for vessels to inhabit and thus hate to see corpses go to waste. An odd looking guy with a congenital heart condition might have made an amazing recovery or might be another deceased human host to an alien intelligence. This melancholy Italian sci-fi tearjerker is slow moving, has weak acting and terrible English dubbing, and never explores its own ideas with any depth, but somehow it still manages to be a watchable, often affecting film.  The whys and hows of the aliens are only discussed in the most cursory way, but the story's emphasis on loss, loneliness and desperation as opposed to slime, fangs and lasers make it unusual for a 1987 science fiction picture. What's here is thoughtful and literate and even quite moving in a few scenes. What's missing is any feeling of background behind what's going on and any direct contact with the alien race, elements that could have made DISTANT LIGHTS a real hit.  The aliens' presence is, rather inadequately, represented by simple smoke-and-blue spotlight effects that were commonplace in music videos in the '80s. Spaghetti Western regular William Berger is a sympathetic doctor we last see in a truly heartbreaking scene near the end.  If you can get past the lack of interesting visuals and the stilted performances, you just might like DISTANT LIGHTS for the quiet, quirky, gentle little fantasy/tragedy it is. The same idea-- extraterrestrials needing Earth people's corpses to inhabit-- later turned up in a (very good) first season episode of Showtime's OUTER LIMITS series revival.    

 DISTURBIA (2007)

Dir: D.J. Caruso

I've seen more than enough movies about teenagers being harrassed by serial killers, but I liked this one anyway.  It's basically REAR WINDOW updated for the technological age, with cell phones, camcorders and PCs powering the plot.  A hotheaded teen (oddly named "Cale") is sentenced to spend his summer under house arrest for punching a teacher.  After his long-suffering mom (Carrie-Anne Moss, playing a role that suits her much better than her Trinity character in THE MATRIX) takes away his TV and video games, he turns to spying on his neighbors for entertainment.  As happens in a great many movies but never in real life, everybody in the neighborhood does everything while standing in front of large curtainless windows in well-lit rooms, so he gets to see the usual movie cliches like people cheating on their spouses, women taking their clothes off, etc.  Another only-in-the-movies development is that a beautiful, smart, witty, confident teenage girl just happens to move in next door and almost immediately takes a romantic interest in her troubled, nosey, convicted-of-assault new neighbor.  News reports tell of a police manhunt for a crazed murderer of young women, and of course our angst-ridden antihero begins to suspect that the quiet middle-aged guy who lives alone nearby is the killer.  You can pretty much guess everything that's going to happen in DISTURBIA and the story takes a long time to get going, but the performances are first-rate, the dialogue is clever enough to be bearable and the film's last third, in which everybody chases everybody else around in the dark, is tight and suspenseful.   A water-filled chamber packed with rotted corpses should have been a lot scarier than it is here, but at least it steers the later portion of the film into demented, pseudo-Argento territoty. It's kind of a shame that the plot relies upon one outlandish coincidence after another, because the finished film falls far short of plausibility, thus making it an easy movie to forget.  But if you don't mind psychokiller tales being a little on the mild side and if you can get past the problem of some phony-baloney Hollywood contrivance setting the action in motion, you ought to find DISTURBIA fun and entertaining.  

 DOCTOR DRACULA (1981)

Dir: Al Adamson, Paul Aratow

 DOLL GRAVEYARD (2005)

Dir: Charles Band

 DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE (1979)

Dir: Joseph Ellison

 DON'T GO NEAR THE PARK (1979)

Dir: Lawrence D. Foldes

A sophomoric plot, terrible lighting, bad acting and amusingly phony makeup effects are only a few of the drawbacks to this ridiculous supernatural gore item. A man and his sister, English-speaking caucasians who lived in what is now Los Angeles 12,000 years ago, are cursed by their ancient witch mother (an actress in awful makeup and a dimestore witch wig) to live forever and grow 10 years older for each passing year unless they kill people and eat their guts and hearts.  Basically, the witch is punishing her kids for killing innocent people by sentencing them to an eternity of killing innocent people. Sort of like how some schools punish kids for skipping school by suspending them from school.  In modern times, the 12,000-year-old guy, who still looks young and handsome but can't act, hypnotizes Linnea Quigley, marries her and has a daughter he names Bondi. (?) When Bondi turns 16, he plans to sacrifice her because the planets will be in the proper alignment to end the curse, or some such drivel. When a van full of would-be rapists crashes, the resulting explosion looks very convincing and out of place in a movie that generally looks like it was made by rank amateurs. Linnea's character disappears from the story around the halfway mark and we never do find out what happened to her. At what can kindly be termed the climax, the ancient evil siblings suddenly acquire the ability to shoot laser beams out of their eyes, Bondi easily swallows a magic amulet the size of a wallet, and then predictably destroys the evildoers (thanks to a gang of zombies that suddenly shows up) just in time to become an evil cannibal herself. Since she's only 16, you wouldn't think she'd be in any hurry to consume human entrails in order to make herself younger, but, heck, I dunno, maybe she wanted to look 12.  None of the dialogue sounds remotely believable, the lighting consists of a single bright floodlight pointed directly at the action, and a girl who is gruesomely murdered has a rubber torso with no breasts. Aldo Ray hangs around the periphery as Mr.Taft, an occult expert researching "the Griffith Park curse".  One of the briefly-seen zombies looks like the Teenage Frankenstein. This colossal embarrassment for all concerned was also released on video as CURSE OF THE LIVING DEAD and NIGHTSTALKERS. Under any name it's one of the worst of the late '70s, although you might find that it's good for some unintentional laughs.

 DONT OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS (1984)

Dir: Edmund Purdom

Most of the witless mad slasher flicks of the 1980s were made in America, but here's one from Great Britain. It suffers from many of the same weaknesses as most of its Yank cousins, including contrived situations, stilted dialogue, dull characters, a transparent mystery and murky photography. It's a few days before Christmas and a maniac is running around London killing anyone who happens to be wearing a Santa Claus costume. Most of the victims are therefore drunken middle-aged males on their way to or from various holiday parties, but the killer breaks his routine every now and again by slaughtering a few good-looking women, probably just to keep in practice. Guys in Santa suits are stabbed, strangled, set on fire and mutilated because the psycho saw a drunk dressed as Santa kill his mommy when he was just a lad, which should give you an idea of the depth of psychological insight that went into the script. His unlikely childhood trauma is related via the traditional poorly wrought flashback. Actor Edmund Purdom, who stars as a cop trying to crack the case while covering up an embarrassing little secret of his own, made his directing debut with this nasty and predictable horror programmer. The murders are, for the most part, crudely staged and clumsily photographed, and nothing in the movie is very believable. People who are stabbed in the stomach seem to die instantaneously and don't bleed nearly enough. Don't expect elaborate Savini-style gore effects, because most of the gruesome slaughter is conveyed in the most simplistic way, with red paint flung onto walls and windows. Supporting player Alan Lake committed suicide shortly after the film's completion. It was also shortly after the death of his wife, popular actress Diana Dors.  The ever-lovely Caroline Munro, always a good sport about appearing in cheap horror projects to give them some measure of legitimacy, makes a brief appearance as herself. She performs a disco number and finds a dead Santa.  There's also a nifty (but brief) look inside The London Dungeon museum. Aside from that, the film doesn't have anything interesting to offer.  The title, as it appears on the prints, manages to omit the apostrophe that belongs in "don't". 

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 DOOM (2005)

Dir: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, a pro wrestler who can act far better than most, barks his way through a dark ALIENS copy based on a popular video game.  The ol' Rock leads his ragtag team of space commandos to a futuristic lab where ill-explained genetic engineering experiments have led to the discovery of a formula that was supposed to give people superhuman strength and stamina, but which (surprise!) turns them into mutated bloodthirsty monsters instead.  The science fictional aspects of DOOM, which involve rapid mutation due to the addition of extra pairs of chromosomes, don't make any sense from a scientific standpoint and the script is weighed down with reams of by-the-numbers Macho Tough Fightin' Soldier Dude cliche's, but in spite of its roughly 63,000 disadvantages, this is an enjoyably tense, cleverly-filmed action movie.  The tissue-thin characters have lame-o nicknames like Sarge, Destroyer, Reaper, Pinky and The Kid, so don't expect much in the way of realistic character development. The monsters, on the other hand, are effectively scary in their brief scenes and the action is nicely handled and for the most part is pretty gripping.  Dark slimy creatures pop out from around corners and attack the soldiers, the soldiers fire rounds of ammo into the angry beasts, and that pretty much sums up the plot. If any explanation was given for why the formula invariably transforms its human subjects into deranged murderous monsters all except for the heroine's brother, who somehow acquires the intended super strength, I must have missed it. The ending is abrupt but keep watching for one of the most amusing ending credits sequences ever.  I know this is a dumb movie, but I have to (almost grudgingly) give it a recommendation on the basis of its fine effects work, fabulous sets and consistently well-choreographed action scenes.  It ain't high art, but it is effective in its own way.

 DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, THE (1981)

Dirs: Jeffrey Obrow, Stephen Carpenter

It's hard to understand why anybody with a cheap American slasher movie to sell in the 1980s would want to give it a title that would make it sound like a sequel to a British supernatural anthology flick from a decade earlier, but this movie (originally made as PRANKS) was apparently renamed to disguise it as a followup to Amicus' THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD.  At least that movie was entertaining if not exactly classic.  DORM is strictly dullsville, a dreary, uninvolving chunk of generica that must have taken all of 20 minutes to script.  A maniac stalks the halls of a dormitory during winter break, killing the handful of young doofuses (or is that doofi?) who are supposedly emptying out, cleaning up and closing down the building for its scheduled demolition.  You can almost hear the vacuous cast members going "Du-u-uh..." as they wander off alone for the lamest of reasons.  One guy gets clubbed in the head with a spiked baseball bat, a woman is strangled, a man has a power drill shoved into his head, a girl is tossed into a giant pressure cooker, and a young Daphne Zuniga is run over by a car.  The gore effects are okay but there's nothing especially noteworthy about them and most of the attack scenes are too dark and happen too fast to work.  The best effect is when a victim's hand is sliced apart.  Most prints were heavily cut to remove the bloody violence, which had the effect of making an already boring movie seem even more pointless.   For many years the only uncut version fans could hope to find was a murky VHS release from Media Home Video.  The film does work up a creepy mood for a while, but the effect soon wears off as people walk around and around through poorly lit corridors and mumble the blandest dialogue imaginable.  The red herring here is a big, crazy, quiet guy who nobody trusts because he lurks around acting nervous and annoying people with his ridiculous Bozo The Clown hairdo.  He appears to have the IQ of a softball, so how he got into college is anyone's guess.  You won't care who the murderer is, but his final identity and motivation are too dumb for words.  A character who's behaved perfectly normally throughout the film suddenly starts acting like a two-year-old at the end, explaining that he killed everybody in sight because he had a crush on one of the women.  It doesn't make one bit more sense than that in the movie either.  The downbeat ending isn't scary, just depressing.  The whole project, which now feels like a painful rellic of the days when every aspiring filmmaker with a free weekend and a little cash was ponying up for another teenkill quickie to rush onto waiting video store shelves, has very little going for it and isn't likely to be enjoyed by anyone who didn't originally rent the video back in the '80s.  A sign inside the institute of higher learning misspells the word "eligible",  one idiot gets shot because it doesn't occur to him to say anything intelligent (or anything at all, really) when the cops show up, and nobody in the movie has any dialogue that makes it seem like they're capable of expressing themselves in any believable way.  You might find it kind of eerie for a while but the lack of action and the homely cinematography will lull you to sleep before the dull finale. 

 DR. ALIEN (1988)

Dir: David DeCoteau

 DR. CHOPPER (2005)

Dir: Lewis Schoenbrun

It never ceases to amaze me how movies as uninspired as this one can manage such a slick, crisp, professional look. Seasoned TV actor Ed Brigadier, who doesn't seem to have been told whether he was in a comedy or not, is Dr. Fielding, an eminent plastic surgeon whose midlife crisis gets so out of hand that he goes berserk, trying to acheive immortality by transplanting various bits of unwilling donors into and onto his own aging body. Maybe he got the idea from Dr. Freudstein, the villain of Lucio Fulci's THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, who had pretty much the same schtick. At one point Brigadier gets his hand lopped off, which also happened to Freudstein in HOUSE BY. Nicknamed "Dr. Chopper" because he rides around on a custom motorcycle (unusual for a 67-year-old doctor) and also because he hacks people to pieces, he hides out in the woods for 20 years with his pair of crazy killer nurses, who act like they belong in THE HILLS HAVE EYES. A quintet of good-looking, angst-ridden, talkative college age travelers make their way to a nearby cabin and end up dead along with some generic victims including a carload of sorority girls and a pair of lesbians, all of whom display intelligence and personality roughly equal to that of an order of burnt toast. Like many cheap slasher films, this one asks viewers to accept that dozens of deaths and disappearances (not to mention the constant discoveries of severed limbs in the area) could go unsolved practically indefinitely just because the authorities wouldn't bother to explore a forest.  In the real world, the disappearance of one reasonably attractive white girl causes a media frenzy that gives the major news networks something with which to kill half their airtime for weeks on end. But in the world of low-intellect horror, an enterprising psycho can get away with murder for years in the same location and never worry about police, the FBI or anybody else looking for him. In the brainless reality of this movie, the cops can't follow a trail of cut off arms and legs found in the same small area or locate a killer who makes his getaway into the forest on a very loud motorcycle, even over a period of two decades. The marginal hero is Forest Ranger Tyrell (Costas Mandylor, an Australian-born actor who takes his role seriously and who is much better than this script deserved), a troubled ex-chiropractor who doesn't seem to know how to load his gun and who doesn't even remember to take it with him when he goes out on the back roads at night. The large, burly man drinks, cries, and runs in panic from a 100-pound girl with a knife. Some creative murders might have saved the film, but sadly most of the kills are nearly identical stabbings to the stomach, all clumsily staged and crudely shot. Some characters thus injured die instantaneously, while others mysteriously stop bleeding long enough to allow more poorly staged action to be played out. One might argue that DR. CHOPPER was meant as a parody, but like too many other horror cheapies it falls in that uncomfortable middle ground, too dumb to be taken seriously but not nearly clever enough to work as satire. When the evil doctor flubs a line, saying "reverse the regeneration process" when what he obviously meant to say was "reverse the rejection process",  you know you're watching a carelessly made production. The final shot is one of the lamest ever. DR. CHOPPER is strictly for the most forgiving fans of low-budget stalk-and-slash antics.

 DR. FRANKENSTEIN ON CAMPUS (1970)

Dir: Gil Taylor

 DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE (2002)

Dir: Mark Redfield

This umpteenth version of cinema's most-told story suffers from the usual limitations of videotaped productions but scores points for a literate, thoughtful script (based on the director's own stage play adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story) and an excellent performance from its star.  Clearly a labor of love for writer-producer-production designer-director-star Redfield, it overcomes its meager budget (and even some terrible acting from much of the supporting cast) with straight-faced sincerity.  Redfield does an outstanding job of sharply delineating his Jekyll and Hyde into two very different personalities, perhaps one of the best such jobs in any movie version.  Elena Torrez is also excellent as Hyde's plaything, frightened prostitute Claire.  The time period has been bumped up to the year 1900, allowing for references to Jack the Ripper and early motion picture equipment developed by the Lumiere Brothers.  The idea that Jekyll's frustrated sexual urges are the main catalyst for his experiment isn't as prominent here as in the 1932 Frederic March film, although that angle does eventually surface.  Most of the character names are carried over from Stevenson's tale (Utterson, Poole, Lanyon, the Carews).  Some of the changes seem a bit strange.  An unnecessary new character named Parker has been added, but his presence contributes nothing to the story.  Rather disappointingly, it is this insignificant peripheral character who first sees Hyde's physical transformation into Jekyll rather than the close friend and colleague of Jekyll who witnessed the shocking sight in the original story.  Jekyll's fiancee's father has been rewritten as a helpless, senile old man suffering from what is today called Alzheimer's disease.  Perhaps the oddest touch unique to this version is the inclusion of elements from FRANKENSTEIN.  Jekyll's laboratory features crackling electrical devices, for example, in addition to a system of chains and pulleys connected to a skylight in the ceiling as in most Frankenstein lab sets.  This Jekyll even uses human organs in his work and deals with thuggish body snatchers, further strengthening his connection to horror literature's other top mad doctor, and Redfield's Hyde even goes so far as to borrow a line from Mary Shelley's Monster when he promises to "be with (Jekyll) on his wedding night".  The best sequence is a clever juxtaposition of Jekyll's heartbroken fiancee penning her farewell letter to him and his enthusiastic recording of the latest entry in his scientific diary.  This version's Mr. Hyde (who racks up a higher body count here than in most tellings) is a fascinating villain with a commanding presence.  His makeup is subtle but sufficient to make you believe the doctor's friends might fail to recognize him, especially with such very different behavior and mannerisms.  He grows progressively uglier with each transformation, so he's pretty unsightly by the violent and dramatic finale.  Some viewers might be put off by the unconvincing miniature work and the occasionally distracting matte lines resulting from some curious green-screen process shots (not to mention some entirely inappropriate haircuts for 1900 and at least one appallingly phony looking joke shop beard), but the intention to tell the story in a mature way and the determination to treat the source material with reverence wins out over the production's shortcomings.  Good storytelling and carefully written dialogue are fairly rare commodities among 2002-era horror movies, making this DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE a refreshing viewing experience deserving of your attention.

DR. SHOCK'S TALES OF TERROR (2003)

Dir: Lance Otto Smith, Douglas G. Agosti

DR. TERROR'S GALLERY OF HORRORS (1967)

Dir: David L. Hewitt

Hewitt, in the early stage of a long career that included directing incoherent flops such as JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF TIME, THE MIGHTY GORGA and THE WIZARD OF MARS as well as handling FX chores on SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE and SHOCKER, was at his all-time laziest when he helmed this ridiculous collection of five dull little tales written by veteran Creepy and Eerie magazine writer-illustrator Russ Jones. Jones' dialogue is as flat and lifeless as a cardboard Halloween skeleton, and almost never makes any sense. The movie was obviously churned out in great haste on a very low budget, which might excuse the barren and incomplete look of the sets, the ill-chosen costumes and the lack of special effects, but it doesn't explain why the stories are so stultifyingly boring even at their short lengths. John Carradine, sporting a moth-eaten tux and a curiously bent right arm and matted in next to a still frame of a castle borrowed from the AIP Poe movies, is the unnamed host. He is forced to prattle on and on about how people have belived in witches and vampires "all down through the ages" and make other sweeping statements which make it clear that neither Jones nor anyone else on board took the time to do any cursory research into authentic folklore. The first story is "The Witch's Clock", which is misspelled as "The Witches Clock" in the credits. A young couple buy an enormous old mansion which they plan to clean up and renovate with no help. They start up an old grandfather clock, causing Carradine to show up at their door, rather confusingly playing a different character, a centuries-old warlock who has some vague connection to "the world's only real witch", who never even shows up. Evil old Carradine hypnotizes the young wife, an appallingly poor actress who speaks in the same monotone whether she's hypnotized or not. The husband stops the clock and the house immediately burns down courtesy of more footage from those AIP Poe films. Next up is "King Vampire", a quickie that offers some amusingly bad British accents and a twist ending that will only be seen coming by those viewers who are conscious and facing the screen. After that you get the bizarrely titled "Monster Raid", a confused bit about a dead scientist whose experimental hypnotism drug somehow keeps his heart, brain and lungs alive while his body rots. He awakens as a decrepit rotted corpse who's so feeble he can barely walk without help from his Renfield-like assistant, but that doesn't stop him from taking a carriage ride lifted from the Roger Corman version of THE RAVEN, killing his unfaithful wife (offscreen) and burning his castle down, courtesy of still more AIP Poe film footage. One wonders why his loyal assistant didn't free the doc from his coffin before he decomposed. The next tale ("Spark Of Life") is the saddest, starring a sick, bloated-looking old Lon Chaney Jr., hysterically miscast as science professor Dr. Mendell, a former student of "Dr. Erik Von Frankenstein" (who?) teaching medicine in an 18th-century Scotland that has vintage 1967 telephones and decor. Listen to the crazy dialogue in this segment. Mendell is supposed to be a brilliant researcher but he seems to change his mind about what he knows and what he doesn't, along with whether or not he wants to bring a dead man back to life, about every 30 seconds. He ends up restoring life to an executed murderer named Amos Duncan, after which he changes his opinion of the project several times in under two minutes. His character comes across as entirely likable but so inconsistent and childlike that he's basically Homer Simpson in a labcoat. To call the ending "predictable" is to flatter it, since it concludes exactly the way you think it will. If you haven't found something better to do by this time, you'll get to see the final vignette, an inane adaptation of the opening chapter of DRACULA, with a terrible actor named Mitch Evans doing an unidentifiable foreign accent as the Count (called "Alucard" by narrator Carradine but "Dracula" in the credits). The same handful of inadequate performers show up in each story in different roles, and the whole film has the feel of a bunch of adults dressing up and putting on a spooky show for children. There are almost no closeups or camera movement and a great many master shots last long enough to make you squirm as you wait for something, anything, to actually happen. If it weren't for the unsavory subject matter, this could pass for a filmed play put on as a fundraiser in a church basement or a high school classroom. If you get a kick out of hopelessly incompetent features like those made by Ed Wood or Andy Milligan, you'll find this one a laugh riot. It was also released as RETURN FROM THE PAST, THE BLOODSUCKERS snd simply GALLERY OF HORRORS. The "Dr. Terror" name was no doubt tacked on to try to pass this off as a sequel to Amicus' impressive DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965).

 DRACULA 3000 (2004)

Dir: Darrell Roodt

An astonishingly foolish attempt to send the immortal Count into outer space, where he can stand in for the creature from ALIEN by killing off the members of a spaceship crew one by one.  The idea worked a lot better for Jason (and even the Leprechaun) than it does here, that's for sure. Casper Van Dien, whose career took a nosedive after STARSHIP TROOPERS, stars in this travesty and would be well advised to leave it off his resume. It feels so poorly planned and hastily thrown together that it's surprising the necessary funds for actors, cameras and lights could be scraped together.  As the title indicates, it's set almost a thousand years in the future, yet there are virtually no attempts at showing any technology that has advanced beyond that of 2004, other than the fact that it takes place aboard a spaceship.  The "Professor" character, who programs the high-tech ship with a 2000 style keyboard, is confined to a wheelchair, which not only seems awfully unlikely for a story set so far in the distant future, by which time you'd think science would have perfected working artificial legs, or at least a highly advanced motorized wheelchair, but the wheelchair seen here is the same old-fashioned kind you'd see in a film made in 1947.  The interior of the spaceship looks like the inside of a warehouse or a steam power plant, complete with pipes running along the walls and very simple metal catwalks. Instead of being armed with high-tech plasma or laser weapons, the crew of this brick-and-mortar space cruiser are armed with standard 20th-century guns, even though you'd think firing bullets or other projectiles inside a craft that's drifting along out in the vacuum of space might be a bad idea.  The ship's storage area houses some old-fashioned wooden coffins, in which Dracula and his vampire brides sleep (which is what most viewers willl be doing). The black and Latino characters are portrayed as ugly stereotypes, crude slackers who just want to smoke dope and get into the pants of the female crew members. Nice. Stupid racial stereotyping aside, there's also the problem that the Dracula in this disaster looks like a guy going to a Halloween party as Dracula, right down to the cape with a big pointy stand-up collar. He has no presence and comes off as phony as everything else. To make sure your intelligence gets thoroughly insulted, the awful script adds inanity to ineptitude by naming its characters after those of Stoker's novel. Which means you get to hear names like Lucy, Mina, Arthur Holmwood, and, most absurdly, "Captain Van Helsing"!  About the only positive thing that can be said of DRACULA 3000 is that one character's turning out to be an android, which of course is also copied from ALIEN, is mildly clever here since it saves her from getting bitten in the neck by Drac. (One assumes he sticks to human blood, and has no taste for machine oil).  Unquestionably one of the worst, most mind-bogglingly inept and unconvincing movies ever to use the name Dracula.   

 DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972)

Dir: Alan Gibson

 DRACULA RISING (1992)

Dir: Fred Gallo

 DREAM HOME (2005)

Dir: Amir Valinian

This amateur movie is so incompetent that it's hard to believe the people who made it weren't kidding.  There's not a single moment that's scary, suspenseful, original or dramatic in this simple, cliched quickie about a young couple who move into a supposedly spooky old house and occasionally see ghosts of the family who lived there 75 years earlier. The ghosts, described as "the old man" and "the old lady", both look like ordinary people who are about 48 years old. The entire cast acts like they're in a high school stage play, trying to project to the back row. The heroine addresses her friend as "girl" so often that after a while it sounds hilarious. The script requires everyone to keep talking about how creepy and run-down and decrepit the house is, but the fact that the structure in which they shot it looks perfectly bright and cheery and wouldn't stand a chance of giving an 8-year-old kid the creeps keeps things unintentionally funny.  Everything is lighted in bright, flat, TV sitcom style, so don't expect anything that looks atmospheric. There's also no action.  Ninety per cent of the time absolutely nothing is happening. The editing is among the worst you'll ever see, with strange closeups of people's ears and shirt collars adding unwanted comedy effects to serious conversations. During a scene that's supposed to be out in the middle of a remote forest, you can hear traffic going by.  During a conversation between two women sitting on a park bench, the sound quality changes drastically (and distractingly) with every cut. The dialogue is agonizingly repetitive, as virtually the same conversations are replayed over and over (someone tells the wife something, then she goes and tells it to her friend, then she tells it to her husband, then he tells it to the guy at the hardware store, etc.).  The editing is so atrocious that you can actually hear the director saying "Cut!" at the end of a scene three different times. One of the worst of the film's many problems is the fact that it originally turned out to be only a little over an hour long. To pad it out to something more like feature length, they added a tortuously long, ugly, sleep-inducing opening title sequence with blurry eye-tiring titles and interminable black and white footage of kids running around in the yard in front of the very bland looking house. I guess it was still far too short, because the scene changes are mostly made with the slowest, longest-lasting fades-to-black on record. Then, after there's no climax or proper ending other than the casual announcement of who perpretrated an unmotivated crime 75 years ago, they still had to kill 15 minutes by drawing out the end credits well past the point of absurdity and then capping that off with about 11 minutes of bloopers showing the cast failing to keep a straight face as they try to recite their painfully bad lines. You'll have a hard time keeping a straight face through this tedious embarrassment too. It was produced by a former rap duo, and if this is their idea of a movie they should really go back to music.  Peeeeeeeyooooooo. 

 DRIVE-THRU (2007)

Dirs: Brendan Cowles, Shane Kuhn

Stop me if you've heard this one: high school kids are being murdered by the wisecracking burned-up ghost of a local weirdo who was killed in a fire caused by a group of the victims' parents 20 years earlier.  Yes, it's a seriously belated, undistinguished NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET ripoff cranked out by people with no imaginations.  The maniac in this flop is "Horny the Clown", the idiotic and unfunny mascot for a ridiculous hamburger chain with a satanic clown-from-hell theme (yeah, right).  If you're expecting clever satire of the McDonald's or Jack-In-The-Box chains, forget it.  This insultingly bad movie can't think of anything witty to say about anything, other than in an amusing opening that showcases a carload of whitebread middle-class teens doing their best to adopt inner city gangsta culture and only succeeding in making themselves look like total idiots.  Apart from that brief example of inviting the viewer to laugh at the behavior of teen poseurs, DRIVE-THRU is such a tired and hackneyed piece of work that you'd think the script had been lying around since the mid-'80s.  Said script seems to despise teenagers more than most of its peers, presenting them all as insufferably selfish, irresponsible vandals with nothing on their tiny minds beyond the never-ending quest for sex and illegal drugs.  The main premise isn't the only bit cribbed from NIGHTMARE, either.  We also get a scene in which the killer scares his next victim by dragging his sharp-bladed weapon along a metal surface to create a small squealing shower of sparks, plus the inevitable sequence with the outraged teen heroine demanding the truth from her useless worried mother, who knows the real story behind the tragedies but won't talk about it.  The dialogue includes quotes from the 1980 version of THE SHINING to let you know the writers saw that movie too.  The evil Freddy--er, I mean "Archie"-- threatens the heroine at one point by supernaturally communicating with her through her novelty fortune-telling 8-Ball.  Later, when she finds another such toy in the killer's home, she remarks, "That explains a lot", as though it were possible to send text messages with the things.   The only two cops assigned to the case are named Chase and Crockers (ha ha) and the actress playing Detective Chase is about as miscast as you can get.   DRIVE-THRU occasionally goes for laughs at the expense of the teen slasher genre, but since the writer-directors are unable to find anything funny about the genre's cliches, they have to settle for simply running through them. As in a thousand other slasher-trashers, people get instantly slashed to ribbons by the killer throughout the film, all except for the Main Girl, who only gets captured and tied up, thus allowing some extra time for somebody to show up and rescue her.   At the brain-damaged climax, the killer clown is holding a lit candle in front of his face and the heroine spits a mouthful of alcohol at him, which causes his back and arms to burst into flames... but not his face!   Poor in almost all departments, DRIVE-THRU is the kind of generic slop that gives horror movies a bad name.  Please pull around.

 DWELLER (2002)

Dir: Jon McBride, John Polonia, Mark Polonia

People who still think history's most laughable science fiction movies came from Ed Wood need to sit down and watch something by the Polonia brothers.  This excruciatingly dull and poorly made backyard alien massacre is pretty typical of the lot.  Since most of it is footage of amateur actors walking self-consciously around in the woods, DWELLER really defies you to watch it without hitting your fast forward button from time to time.  In a story that makes Don Dohler seem like Joe Ezsterhaus, a space battle between (unseen) aliens results in a damaged spaceship coming down in a quiet wooded area.  An invisible creature, represented by some ineffective white electrical arcs that appear when he's attacking, tears bad actors apart for no reason, even though it apparently had the intelligence to operate a spacecraft.  The opening computer-animated space battle isn't partcularly involving since we know nothing of the conflict and never see the interior of any of the ships or their inhabitants, but it is remarkably well done, features some cleverly designed space vessels that move and morph impressively and basically just looks cool.  Unfortunately it's over in a couple of minutes, after which we setlle on earth, where various people who act as if they're mildly mentally disabled trudge through the woods until the electricity effects kick in, at which point they yell "Aaaagghhhh!" and get splattered with stage blood.  Every time a character who appears to have even the slightest potential for being remotely interesting shows up, he or she is quickly killed off after uttering a few lines of pointless filler dialogue.  The only characters (and I use the term loosely) who get much screen time are a trio of idiot criminals on the run with their stolen loot.  A hilarious misuse of stock footage tries to imply that they blew up a large office building in a busy downtown area.  One of the intellectually-challenged goons occasionally sees B-&-W flashbacks of prior atrocities, which are probably scenes left over from unfinished projects starring the same guys.  The acting, dialogue and pacing are unbearably bad (to call this script's psychology "dimestore" is to flatter it) and the finale makes no sense.  It turns out the spaceship was still operational after all and was piloted by a floating eyeball (also used in another one of the Polonia brothers' efforts) that speaks perfect English.  Was it the eyeball who was out there hovering in the woods invisibly slaughtering passers-by?  Or was that supposed to be a second monster?  Why were people getting cut open and gutted by zaps of electricity?  Did the eyeball actually mean to land on Earth in the first place?  How could three men who appear to have the collective I.Q. of a bowl of Froot Loops pull off a $100, 000.00 heist and successfully evade police all this time?  These and other questions will be the only things keeping you awake during DWELLER, a rock-bottom addition to the micro-cinema genre.  Even the title doesn't fit.