SANTERIA (2002)

Dir: Benny Matthews

If the title made you think this was a look at the real-life Santeria religion, you'll be disappointed to find it's a boring, incoherent horror movie. If you thought it was going to be scary, you'll still be disappointed because it's a boring, incoherent horror movie.  That's right....it's a production that's sure to disappoint everybody.  It's one of those films allegedly "based on actual events", which I suppose is why there's no real plot, no explanation for anything and no ending.  It starts out telling us exactly what happened to its central characters, and then the rest of the movie is a long flashback showing what led up to the point at which the story began, so there's no suspense. You already know how it's all going to end, so you just have to wait until the frenzied amateur cast eventually drags the disconnected series of events to that point. It actually has very little to do with Santeria, since it's really about the phenomena of Virgin Mary sightings. You can tell you're in trouble right away, when the introductory captions repeatedly misspell the word "sightings" as "sitings".  (Everyone is entitled to the occasional typo, but didn't anybody have access to a dictionary, or pass 5th-Grade spelling?)  A little Hispanic kid keeps seeing visions of a strange, ghostly woman. Some people believe it's the Holy Virgin but others think the figure is really a malevolent ghost. The movie constantly jumps around to too many different characters and not a single one of them is interesting or has anything like a knowable personality. There's a superstitious mother, a half-crazy sister, a trampy atheist, a man who has terminal cancer and wants to believe in a higher power, and a TV evangelist named "Neil Jordan" (just like the director of INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE). Good luck figuring out what any of these people are all about or finding anyone to relate to. There's the occasional random horror image, like people with skull faces, but these are just aggravating because they invariably turn out to be dreams or hallucinations. The film has an infuriatingly choppy pseudo-documentary style but it never seems to be putting forth any educated theories or making any kind of real statement.  The ending is one of those captioned deals like in ANIMAL HOUSE, only here a series of freeze-frames of the various characters is accompanied by glum subtitles telling us how they all died.  It's tempting to say that writer-director Matthews doesn't know how to tell a story, but in truth that would be unfair. After sitting though this meandering feature, I don't feel like I've seen him try.

 SATANIC (2005)

Dir: Dan Golden

After a car crash, a 17-year-old girl wakes up with her head covered in bandages in a hospital where a kindly doctor (Angus Scrimm of PHANTASM fame in a rare, very relaxed sympathetic role) has performed miraculous plastic surgery to restore her smashed-in face. The bandages come off and, preidctably, she's beautiful. The trouble is, she has amnesia and isn't sure who she is or how the accident really happened. Unrealistic plotting has her sent to an unrealistic halfway house run by a lecherous creep and his unrealistically evil wife who steals her charges' belongings and sells them on eBay. On the way to dropping the heroine off at "Harmony House", which appears to contain only three other troubled kids, they stop by her house (!?) and find a handmade round ouija board there. Frequent, repetitious, annoying split-second cutaways to various violent situations indicate that the now nice girl may have been a murderous devil worshipper prior to the crash. A demonic spirit who looks like a musclebound Freddy Krueger and talks with the standard electronically deepened voice shows up now and again in the heroine's dreams but his identity and relevance are vague. Most of the cast get stabbed to death and the old cliche' of a pentagram drawn on a wall in blood is shown, although, strangely, the pentagram in this movie points up instead of down. SATANIC is slickly made, has better-than-average acting and even tells a fairly clever story with some surprising plot twists. But none of it is the least bit believable and the script lacks sufficient exposition to explain the increasingly complicated situation. Garbled and confusing most of the time, it's nice looking but empty genre product with a troublesome lack of realism in both the situations and the characters' reactions to them. Even going by the film's own logic, the murder of a janitor is senseless and doesn't jibe with the story. If you stop afterward and take the time to think back to all the clues given, you can actually make sense of the plot, but most viewers aren't going to want to devote that much serious thought to a movie that doesn't try any harder than this to present its story progression in an intelligent fashion. RE-ANIMATOR star Jeffrey Combs has a small role as a detective.  Not to be confused with the 1966 film SATANIK, which was also about a disfigured woman but had a very different plot.

 SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER (2004)

Dir: Jeff Lieberman

How would you like to see another movie about a masked, silent, quasi-supernatural serial killer who stalks and slaughters smalltown teens on Halloween for no reason?  If either your age or your IQ is over 18, you're probably thinking "Thanks but NO thanks".  But SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER, from the same director who made SQUIRM and BLUE SUNSHINE back in the '70s, actually does enough new things with the formula to make me give it a recommendation.  The people who script the always-disappointing Michael Myers sequels missed the boat by not thinking of this kind of concept.  A dorky little boy, obsessed with a tacky video game called "Satan's Little Helper", in which players earn points by killing innocent bystanders for the devil while trying to avoid being defeated by God, meets up with a devil-masked serial killer on Halloween and immediately assumes this "Satan" is his "master" come to him from the game. The psycho in the mask clearly relishes the chance to have a "helper" as he goes around murdering folks for fun. The acting is excellent, including star Amanda Plummer, and the fact that the killer is always standing right next to characters who have no idea of the danger they're in makes the suspense palpable almost from the start.  For the first two-thirds of SATAN'S LITTLE HELPER, I thought I might be watching the best slasher movie since HALLOWEEN. The element of mild satire helps too, as the story presents a wry indictment of the legions of pathetically out-of-touch American youths whose parents lazily sat back and watched them become hopeless video game geeks.  Sadly, the last third of the movie sees the creativity and logic run out and the whole film fall apart in its final reel, as things start to happen that require w-a-a-a-a-ay too much suspension of disbelief.  After a truly masterful buildup of suspense, character and plotting, people suddenly start doing implausibly stupid things and reacting in ways that don't make sense, in order to keep the plot rolling along. Characters (including the killer) start to behave illogically and do things that nobody would ever do in the real world, and it's a crushing disappointment to be reminded that you are watching what is only, after all, one more masked slasher flick... especially after one of the most clever and engrossing first halves in slasher history. Like most other shockers made around this time, the story ends on an infuriatingly unsatisfying and cynical note.  I hated to see this good of a movie fall back on the same kind of lame and desperate ending used by so many bottom-of-the-barrel slasher projects, but evidently the writer ran out of ideas late in the game.  (In one scene, the killer poisons the punch at a party by dumping a huge gallon jug of drain cleaner into the punch bowl in plain sight of several dozen partygoers, and no one notices. Yeah, right. )  Still, even with its crummy last reel and dumb finale, this movie is so totally enjoyable and imaginative most of the way through that it's still getting a pretty high rating from me and needs to be seen by every slasher movie fan.  As stalk-and-slash, slice-and-dice terror films go, this is far above average.  And mask fans should watch for masks by Death Studios (the "El Diablo" one worn by the psycho), Distortions Unlimited, and several other nice ones I didn't recognize during the various Halloween party sequences.

 SAVAGE WEEKEND (1976)

Dir: David Paulsen

Cheesy chunk of slasher sleaze with a couple of distinctions to make it mildly noteworthy. It's godawful boring until the last reel and the main  characters are non-entities, but it does feature good early performances by William Sanderson as a surly redneck idiot and David Gale as a macho lumberjack who's very different from his Dr. Hill character in RE-ANIMATOR. The other interesting fact is that this cheap stalker movie was made before the backwoods body count picture came into its own as a genre, which didn't really happen until after FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980). SAVAGE WEEKEND was shot as THE KILLER BEHIND THE MASK and also known as THE UPSTATE MURDERS but was so lousy that it didn't get released until '81, by which time masked slashers were big boxoffice business.  A group of dull, sexually frustrated Manhattan executive types who never saw DELIVERANCE head upstate to spend some time in the woods, where one guy is having a yacht custom built and where vaguely threatening ignorant yokels hang around eyeing the city dwellers with barely-concealed scorn. An outrageous stereotyped raving homosexual gets into a fight with two rednecks in a bar in a scene that has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The surprise is that the nauseatingly swishy gay guy mops up the place with the two mean hicks!  After what seems like weeks of your life crawl by, the city folks start to get killed off by a psycho wearing an old Be Something Studios "Bloody Merry" mask. There are a few gore effects but they're nothing to write to the asylum about. One character gets a foot-long hatpin through the head and about three drops of blood trickle out. There are one, maybe two, scenes that I admit were pretty suspenseful, particularly when one girl is in danger of having an electric saw give her a grand opening. And the climactic chainsaw-vs-machete duel was decent.  But most of the time this movie is excrutiatingly tedious. To keep yourself from nodding off, you can have some fun by counting the number of times the boom microphone shows up swinging around at the top of the frame. I counted six separate incidents, but another viewer who may have been a bit more alert than yours truly reported seven. (This might make a dandy drinking game: Take a drink every time you see the boom mike, and a smaller drink every time you only see its shadow.) Director David Paulsen's name doesn't even appear in the credits of most prints. Maybe he wasn't overly proud of this ugly, very base effort. His next genre entry was the slightly better SCHIZOID starring Klaus Kinski.   

 SCARY TRUE STORIES (1991-'92)

Dir: Norio Tsuruda

SCREAM (1981)

Dir: Byron Quisenberry

Long before Wes Craven started the popular in-joke horror franchise of the same title, there was this stillborn slasher stinker directed by a stuntman. Its only reasonably interesting moment comes at the beginning. The movie opens with a (painfully slow) panning shot along one wall of an unspecified house, past a painting of a ship at sea and on to a chest of drawers decorated with a clock and a set of three figurines who are clearly The Butcher, The Baker and The Candlestick Maker from the nursery rhyme. At this point all three figurines are unharmed. Then we cut to a closeup on the clock face, and the camera pans back to the figures to show the Butcher's little meatcleaver now has blood on it and the other two have been decapitated (one head is still rolling around a bit). Then the butcher figurine's eyes move. Why porcelain figurines would bleed is one of this dreadful film's many unanswered questions. Then we are shown the confused story of a group of hikers who elect to spend the night in an old western ghost town (or at least a movie set that resembles an old western ghost town). They are murderered one by one (generally offscreen) at the hands of an unknown psycho. Among the dull, interchangeable victims are several older folks including Hank Worden (who is as amateurish as ever) and Alvy Moore. Moore is the first to die, somehow snared by a noose, after which an obvious double fills in for his dead body. The rest of the dimwits in his party spend the remainder of SCREAM bickering, complaining and stating the obvious. This film deserves some kind of award for featuring the largest number of characters who wander off alone for the flimsiest of reasons even though there's a killer on the loose. There aren't any makeup effects to speak of, just the occasional smudge of stage blood, and the whole film is annoyingly dark and murky. After the incoherent ending, in which surprise pseudo-hero Woody Strode, who looks like a cowboy but insists he's a sailor, rides into town and shoots the offscreen killer, we see a final shot of the figurines. Only now, the Butcher has been beheaded too! Pretentious and amateurish at the same time! What more could one ask for? Well, maybe a decent story, some attempt at characterization, and sufficient lighting to allow the audience to see the action that isn't taking place. You'll fall asleep waiting for any of those elements to come along in this snoozefest. A better title would have been SNORE.

 SCREAM BLOODY MURDER (1973)

Dir: Marc B. Ray

 SCREAM YOUR HEAD OFF (1982/1997)

Dir: John Carr

 SCREAMING DEAD, THE (2004)

Dir: Brett Piper

 SCREAMS OF A WINTER NIGHT (1979)

Dir: James L. Wilson

 SEE NO EVIL (2006)

Dir: Gregory Dark

A generic SAW wannabe that, surprisingly, played in theaters. It has the same harsh, flickery look of SAW, HOSTEL, the TEXAS CHAINSAW remake and  many others made around this time. Pro wrestler "Kane" gets to play the latest mad slasher, a big mentally retarded sadist with the unlikely name of Jacob Goodnight. Jacob hangs out in a closed down hotel and murders a busload of young, good-looking Hollywood-style convicted felons who are there as part of some ill-prepared work release program. Sometimes he gets 'em with a meathook on a long chain, an idea he probably got from watching HELLRAISER, and he likes to pluck people's eyeballs out and keep them in jars. The kids in this one are much worse than those in the average Jason movie. They're a surly, cynical, trashy lot whose dialogue is made of filthy innuendos and hateful insults. The cumulative effect is that the movie hates the whole world and hopes you'll hate it too. Yet another Hollywood cheap shot at Christianity is taken by having Jacob's crazy self-righteous Bible-thumping Mother be the cause of his insanity. Predictably, he kills women right and left to please Mom until one girl he captures (but doesn't immediately slaughter) causes him to develop sudden feelings of sympathy, so in the cliche' ending he turns on Mom instead. From the moment she is introduced, you'll know which girl is the one who will survive. The plotting that isn't directly copied from other movies is incoherent and sloppy. A cop who had his arm chopped off in a showdown with the big oaf four years earlier is in charge of the work release project, but the witless script fails to make anything of this potentially interesting situation and settles for having his character get unceremoniously whacked just like the other victims. The movie introduces its cast of unconvincing criminals with unnecessary freeze-frames and captions giving their names and their specific crimes, but it's unimportant filler that doesn't add anything and seems to have been included here simply because somebody saw the technique in some other movie.  SEE NO EVIL does manage a few suspenseful moments and some okay stunt work when the camera isn't jittering, swinging, and wobbling around. But that's about the best that can be said of it. That, and the fact that it's kind of fun watching the killer get the crap beaten out of him by the few survivors who are still around for the big computer-animated finale. I guess anything along the lines of originality or unpredictability were too much to ask.

 SEEKERS, THE (2003)

Dir: John Bowker

A down-on-his-luck slacker with a trashy cheating girlfriend finds a weird blind girl who allegedly rents videos out of a nearly-empty building in the middle of nowhere.  She gives him a "cursed" videotape that causes people to go nuts and kill each other. There then follow two tedious, absolutely pointless vignettes (you can't really call them "stories") about bland twenty-somethings cheating on and killing each other, which are supposed to enlighten our hero by clarifying the philosophy that, to enjoy life, one simply needs to gruesomely murder anyone who causes problems.  This is a stupefyingly dumb amateur production, shot with a low-end camcorder, ruined by terrible acting, slow editing and the same depressingly cynical "everybody dies" attitude that poseurs always seem to think their horror movies need.  Just how dumb is it?  Well, the sexy demon chick is named "Tota Levil"...no, really, somebody actually thought that was clever.  Sometimes a Bible can destroy her and at other times she pays no attention to one, but it doesn't matter because even after the good book burns her up, she comes right back anyway to provide the world's least surprising surprise ending. The videotape that drives people to madness might have been a worthwhile idea, if they'd had anything to support it and if it wasn't so similar to the superior RING films, but with no budget and no internal logic, this is a waste of everyone's time. Seek something else to watch. 

 SEIZURE (1974)

Dir: Oliver Stone

 SERIAL KILLING 101 (2002)

Dir: Trace Slobotkin

Undistinguished teen slasher flick that harks back to the high school horrors of the 1980s like PROM NIGHT, FINAL EXAM and GRADUATION DAY, only without the onscreen blood.  All the usual tired stereotypes are here, like the muttering mentally-deficient janitor and the screaming malevolent gym instructor. A wimpy kid decides to become popular (and impress the school's sullen, death-obsessed goth chick) by announcing his intention to become a serial killer. His suitably impressed new girlfriend responds that she wants to be his first victim and agrees to help him study up on how the "pros" did it.  Meanwhile, a real serial killer bumps off a pretty blonde student, drunks argue at the local bar and a grumpy old cop hounds everybody.  This movie seems to think it's terribly clever stuff, but it would have taken a lot more insight into the psychology of murder than this oddly light-hearted script offers to make an interesting film. The ruminations on the nature of deranged killers is so sophomoric that any maladjusted teen outcast could probably express them just as well as the script does.  The murders we keep hearing about almost always happen offscreen, giving the movie the feel of an old Afterschool Special with some foul language added.  The acting is fine but the mystery is transparent, the characters are one-dimensional and the mood is far too frivolous to create tension or allow for any good scares. This seems to have been meant as a comedy, but someone should have told the writer that comedies generally contain jokes, not just an occasional line of silly dialogue.  One character is a balding middle-aged social sciences teacher who uses as much teen slang as possible in a feeble attempt to make his kids think he's hip and cool.  The students roll their eyes in embarrassment at his lame efforts to communicate "on their level", which is the reaction I'd expect brighter teens to have as they figure out that this movie is talking down to them in pretty much the same way.  The stars are Thomas Haden Church and Lisa Loeb and '80s icon Corey Feldman shows up in a sad cameo as a hardware store employee.

 SHADOW PUPPETS (2007)

Dir: Michael Winnick

Continuing a trend that got a kick-start with the CUBE movies and blossomed into an entire subgenre of derivative shockers after the smash success of SAW, this is yet another low-rent product that opens with people waking up to find themselves imprisoned in a creepy unfamiliar building with no memory of how they got there.   Thanks to a surprisingly good cast that includes Jolene Blalock (the Vulcan woman on STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE), James Marsters (Spike on the BUFFY and ANGEL series) and CANDYMAN starTony Todd, this uninspired movie is at least less painful to sit through than most of its peers.  The small cast spend most of the movie quarreling and restating the obvious as they wander the facility's corridors, the discovery of each new prisoner supposedly adding interest to what is at its core an uninvolving and senseless plot.  As in the 1999 HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL remake, the setting is a deserted mental hospital haunted by a murky black smoke cloud that kills people.  The only fresh idea SHADOW PUPPETS offers up is that the creature was spawned when an experimental computerized brainscan process was inadvertantly tried out on a patient who was already brain-dead, thus keeping the machine searching for some sign of consciousness until it focused on the guy's very soul and somehow caused it to materialize as a life-sucking shadow monster that impales people with wisps of smoke that suddenly solidify into stabbing weapons.  The reason the creature kills never makes much sense, and there's a laughable plot point about how wearing clothing attracts the shadow monster because it establishes an individual's specific identity, making his or her soul look that much more tasty to the life-hungry blur.   Why a creature made of pure lifeforce would need to rely on visual clues to choose its victims is hard to fathom, and since we see several unclothed lesser characters get slaughtered by the critter just as quickly as those who are fully dressed, the theory is never proven to have any basis in fact and is clearly just an excuse to keep the more attractive performers in their underwear the whole time.   Todd hams it up as a brutal ex-con while most of the rest of the cast do their best to look like they're reacting to a monster that never looks like anything more than exactly what it is: a mediocre computer-animated special effect superimposed onto the action.  Not only do the characters behave illogically on several occasions, the monster doesn't seem to be very smart either and is eventually destroyed by the world's fastest sunrise because, even though it can morph into puffs of smoke to the extent it can hide behind several trees at once, it doesn't think to move into the shade (which it has almost unlimited opportunity to do) when the sunlight starts to dissipate it.  Some of the character interaction works reasonably well and most of the actors are sufficiently skilled (and straight-faced) to sell the often hokey dialogue, but if you've seen the other movies mentioned above, you're not likely to get very caught up in this one. 

 SHADOW WALKERS, THE (2005)

Dir: Mark Steven Grove

Unambitious, undistinguished quickie goes through the motions without bringing any new ingredients to the recpie.  A group of bad actors who are too young and too good-looking for their parts (they're supposed to be brilliant chemists and geneticists but they look more like underwear models) wake up trapped inside a huge research center with no memory of how they got there or what they were working on.  The fact that the characters can't remember anything is never used in any clever way and doesn't add anything worthwhile to the story, but at least it kept the writers from having to come up with anything too complicated.  Most of the movie is comprised of dull footage of the kids-- er, "scientists"-- skulking around dark corridors, complaining, insulting each other and endlessly restating the importance of getting to the emergency exit on the other side of the building.  Along the way they get picked off by mutant monsters created as part of the project they were working on.  Of course it's all another plot by the big bad U.S. Army brass, who want to turn people into unstoppable monster soldiers for hand-to-claw combat like in the RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD sequels and numerous others.  There's absolutely no reason why the military would feel a need to massacre the installation's security personnel, trap the employees in the place with their own monsters, or wipe everyone's memory.  All this just lets us know the filmmakers consider all U.S. Army personnal to be evil, swaggering, heartless incompetents. This movie is so haphazard in its plotting that you'd think the script was nothing more than a rough outline.  The monsters, mostly former employees who have been contaminated and transformed into violent flesh-eating sex-crazed killers, mostly follow the rules of zombie movie lore.  With their enlarged mouths full of big sharp teeth, puffy cheekbones and heavy foreheads, the over-painted mutants look like escapees from an '80s movie.  Their faces are pale green but the poorly executed makeups stop at the jawline, so you get to see plenty of healthy pink necks, ears and arms.  The design is decent and they'd make great Halloween masks but they never look very convincing (and there's no reason for them to be called "shadow walkers", either).  Most of the acting is terrible and the only good line is when a character says "I'd hate to be late for my own vivisection."  The ending is one of the worst on record. Skip it.

SHADOWZONE (1990)

Dir: J.S. Cardone

At the isolated Jackass Flats research station (I kid you not), three scientists poking around at people's brain stems discover that dreams exist not just in people's minds but in an alternate dimension. An extra-dimensional monster bursts through and lurks in the darkened halls of the center tearing people limb from limb. Writer-director Cardone describes his creature as a being of high intelligence, mistaking instinctual self-preservation for a senseless hunger to slaughter everyone it sees. If this beast was really acting out of self-preservation it would only attack when being threatened, not just unnecessarily kill anything that moves. In its natural form the creature is humanoid with a head made of nondescript dripping blobs and scrawny arms with long spindly fingers. It can assume the form of its victims' worst fears, an angle that is largely ignored by the hurry-up-and-bump-'em-off nature of the second half of the script. You never get a decent look at any of its alternate forms, as when it transforms into a giant rat to kill an obese cook, a monkey-mutant to kill a female scientist (who, it should be noted, states that she likes monkeys and isn't afraid of them), or a lumpy-faced circus freak to attack James Hong, miscast as a character named Dr. Van Fleet. The big name star is Louise Fletcher, whose character spends so much time slathering on layer upon layer of lip balm that it's a wonder she can still speak clearly enough to be understood by the one-hour mark. Miguel Nunez gives the movie its most sincere and engaging performance as an electronics expert whose death is, disappointingly, indicated with a bucket of stage blood splashed onto a window. The science of the sleep experiments, the brain operations, the creature and its other dimension doesn't make sense if you give it much thought, so it's best to just take the characters at their word when they state that a doorway to dreamland has somehow been established, allowing a murderous beast to come into reality. Some of the stalking scenes are fairly scary and the gory mutilated corpses and body parts by Mark Shostrom are first-rate, but don't expect a coherent story or a big finale. The influence of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies is undeniable. Cardone also made the interesting THE SLAYER and the awful THE FORSAKEN.

 SHALLOW GROUND (2004)

Dir: Sheldon Wilson

It doesn't make any sense from a literal standpoint, but this enthusiastic low-budget rumination on the nature of true justice as it relates to simple revenge is so well crafted that you won't care. On the day when the sheriff's station outside a small mountain community is being closed up for good, things suddenly turn weird when a naked teenage boy covered with fresh blood comes walking into the building.  The kid has a sullen expression and staring eyes filled with hate but he seems unable to tell anyone who he is or how he got there. Attempts to run routine identity checks reveal that he has the fingerprints of more than one person!  Each one of his fingers appears to match the prints of a different victim of a sadistic serial killer who terrorized the area a year earlier. The creepy boy drips blood from his eyes and ears, and when people make contact with the oozing red puddles, they experience traumatic flashbacks and visions of the grisly murders. A great effect achieved very cleverly is the apparent ability of the blood to run across floors in specific directions as if it has a will of its own.  A bitter local man blames the harried sheriff for the death of his daughter at the hands of the killer, who is apparently still at large. Patty McCormack, THE BAD SEED herself, is perfect as a deranged middle-aged woman who imagines she can make things right by dealing out gruesome retribution on her own.  There are a number of problems with the plot and the ending hovers awkwardly between poetic justice and a standard cheap shock in the old "the evil lives on" tradition. Another blood-covered naked guy turns up in a nearby city, but he appears to be the ghost of one specific person who died wrongfully instead of being a sort of conglomeration ghost like the boy. A deputy casually murders a man in cold blood and his co-workers don't seem to care beyond registering some initial surprise. And I have no idea why some unseen something-or-other got the girl who gets pulled underneath her van (what the heck did she do?).  The last reel even includes one of those scenes that are reliably creepy and disturbing, namely a roomful of rotted corpses seated around a dinner table. As mentioned previously, the whole thing never really comes together as coherently as you hope it will, but SHALLOW GROUND is certainly never predictable and makes the most of its small budget. The movie looks great, with a perfect chilly color pallette of muted blues and rich greens contrasted against the many splashes of gleaming bright red blood. The acting is excellent overall (although some viewers might be distracted by the sheriff's strange Irish accent that comes and goes). This is a minor triumph of low-budget imagination, harking back to the days when Roger Corman was using real creativity and reckless enthusiasm to turn out movies that could compete with much more expensive big studio pictures. Despite some loose ends, SHALLOW GROUND is one of the most impressive and original independent horrors of the period.  I'm ready to watch the next project by director Sheldon Wilson.

 SHE CREATURE (2001)

Dir: Sebastian Gutierrez

One of a series of made-for-cable monster movies made in 2001 using the titles of old AIP drive-in shockers from the 1950s. This has no relationship to the original 1956 movie THE SHE CREATURE, although it does include one quick, blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual reference to that film's monster when a character is impaled through the back by rows of sharp spines which protrude through his abdomen, briefly giving the victim the appearance of the old movie's beastie with claws in its stomach.  The old SHE CREATURE had already been remade (horribly) by Larry Buchanan in 1966 as THE CREATURE OF DESTRUCTION. This SHE CREATURE is one of the better monster rampages in recent years, even though the plot isn't much.  Angus (Rufus Sewell from DARK CITY) is a carnival sideshow huckster in 1905 whose manipulative sleazy lover Lily plays a mermaid in their act, wearing a prop tail. In an inside joke for AIP fans, one of ther attractions is called "The Colossal Beast". After the show one night they're invtied to the home of a doddering old sea captain who shows them the real thing: an honest-to-goodness mermaid he captured some years before and keeps chained in a huge, great looking glass tank in his mansion. The way the creature is filmed in this sequence is ingenious, keeping her mostly backlit and only giving us glimpses of various parts of her weird form. Recognizing the ultimate sideshow attraction, Sewell steals the creature with plans to sail to America to exploit his new acquisition. From that point onward the movie is a lot lke the chapter from Dracula in which the ship's crewmen mysteriously die during the doomed voyage, with the mermaid replacing the vampire as the source of the horror. You might not normally think of mermaids as particularly scary, but this movie succeeds in capturing a sense of dread thanks to an excellent script, strong performances and subtle, atmospheric camerawork and lighting. Overall it has the same general feel as a Hammer horror film. The mermaid kills and eats people, which explains why the old legends always told of the creatures' determination to lure sailors into their clutches.(It's a bit hard to believe that she could eat every last remnant of a grown man, leaving no bones or anything, so credibility is strained when that happens.) The mermaid herself is a wonderful effects creation made convincing by a good performance from actress Rya Kihlstedt.  She's intense and seductive looking with red hair, an expression of curiosity, and haunting, constantly staring eyes. She occasionally speaks a few words but nobody can understand her.When angered she sports a set of very aquatic looking piranha type teeth. In addition to being a flesh eater, other new folklore includes superstrength, the power to read minds, a habit of turning into a normal (helpless) two-legged human woman during the full moon (sort of a reverse werewolf?), and an apparent ability to magically induce pregnancy in human women, even ones who are medically incapable of bearing children otherwise. The movie's final reel, when the mermaid morphs into a pop-eyed, full-fledged monster with shark teeth and enormous fins sprouting from the back of her head like the Queen Alien in ALIENS, is almost a letdown because she was already such a worthy monster in her half-human form.  The ending isn't very satisfying and I could have done without the whole ugly, underexplained pregnancy angle, but the film as a whole is unique and moody and has a gorgeous look and even some outstanding Stan Winston studios monster effects at the climax. It's nice to see a good old-fashioned monster movie that works this well made as late as 2001.

 SHE-CREATURE, THE (1956)

Dir: Edward L. Cahn

 SHOCKING DARK (1989)

Dir: Bruno Mattei

Bruno Mattei, the director who gave us HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES) and most of ZOMBI 3, returned with this racist, sexist ALIENS copy. In the near future, a toxic cloud settles over Venice. The government orders immediate evacuation and declares it a dead city. A team of typically mean, incompetent commandos called the MegaForce (no relation to the movie MEGAFORCE) is sent in to look for survivors, kill the mutant monsters that have rapidly evolved there, and walk around fog-shrouded old factories spouting cliches. The monsters are never shown clearly but they appear humanoid, with claws, big toothy mouths, and dangling tendril-like things. The closeups on their mouths make it look like they just got smacked in the kisser with a gob of contact cement and can barely get their jaws parted. In a similar bit of plotting to Mattei's own HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD, the team discovers the whole eco-disaster was planned by the outfit that hired them, in this case a company with the unlikely name of The Tubular Corporation. You just know any organization with the word "corporation" in its name is going to be the source of the trouble in a sci-fi movie. In sequences blatantly stolen from ALIENS, soldiers panic when their electronic indicator suggests the monsters are right on top of them although they still can't be seen, human victims are found wrapped in cobweb cocoons, and a traumatized little girl survivor is discovered and soon finds a mother figure in the heroic female member of the team and must be protected by her. Much of this parallels ALIENS so closely it's astonishing.  Of course one guy turns out to be a humanoid robot, and in the last 10 minutes or so the movie runs out of material to rip off from ALIENS and turns into a TERMINATOR copy, as a time-travel device is introduced into the plot and the robot guy walks around with pieces of his face blown off to reveal a silver metal skull underneath. He appears to be dead several times but gets back up repeatedly just like the Terminator.  This enviromentally aware stew of bits swiped from better films was actually released in some European markets as ALIENNATORS and (believe it or not) TERMINATOR 2 -!

 SHROOMS (2006)

Dir: Paddy Breathnach

A gaggle of American twenty-something idiots go all the way to Ireland so they can get a buzz from the legendary special high-potency 'magic mushrooms' that supposedly grow there.  The script makes a feeble attempt to make it seem like these people are would-be philosophers in search of some sort of mind-opening visionary shamanic experience, but they behave just like the argumentative pinheads in every slasher flick who just want to sneak off and get high.  When they start to die, there's never a feeling that the world would be any worse off without these people since they seem to be shallow self-absorbed cretins, eagerly risking their health and their lives just for the quick thrill of a chemical-induced freakout sensation.  This Irish-made snoozer is essentially just another bit of flotsam trailing along in the turbulence left by the success of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, meaning it's a no-budget entry that consists almost exclusively of footage of young twerps loping around in the woods.  The chief difference is that with this one you get a trite anti-drug message too.  One girl barely touches her tongue to the dreaded species of shroom that makes a person go instantly insane and experience cliche' hallucinations, an inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, very bad editing, and the same plot as HIGH TENSION.  The performances are adequate, the camerawork is up to par and there's even one good scene in which a hotheaded jerk sees a talking cow in the forest, but a sense of realism is missing from both the cast and the manner in which the whole mushroom thing is presented.  The idea wasn't really worth committing to film except perhaps as a 10- or 15-minute segment of an anthology, because there isn't nearly enough going on here to hold viewer attention for an hour and a half.  Don't do drugs, kids.  And stay in school.  And watch HIGH TENSION instead of SHROOMS.

 SHUNNED HOUSE, THE (2003)

Dir: Ivan Zuccon

 SILENT HILL (2006)

Dir: Christophe Gans

SIMON SAYS (2006)

Dir: William Dear

The most lame-brained use of the "evil twin" theme I've ever seen is in this poorly scripted slasher quickie. The people behind it must have thought a quirky performance from Crispin Glover would be sufficient to keep their muddled gore movie entertaining, but even the presence of the unique Glover doesn't compensate for the many insults to viewer intelligence. A standard-issue cheap horror movie group of surly teens ventures into the backwoods territory of twin brothers Simon and Stanley (both Glover), sadistic killers who have the forest strung with trip-wires that activate the least convincing movie maniac weapon ever, a Rube Goldberg contraption that fires dozens of pickaxes into the air. The understanding of physics displayed in any Wile E. Coyote cartoon is far more believable than that of SIMON SAYS. The hundreds of pickaxes (was there a warehouse sale?) that go flying through the woods in this movie never seem to get stuck in trees or simply hit the ground, but anyone who happens to be nearby who isn't Simon or Stanley is guaranteed to get one straight through the middle of the chest. There's plenty of talk about how Stanley has always been just plain evil while Simon was mentally deficient, and plenty of scenes in which the characters (and the audience) can't tell which of the brothers is which, or even if Simon is still alive after a childhood assault by his brother. But since they're both obvious homicidal nutjobs, it doesn't make any difference which one goes by which name nor even whether there's one killer or two. The gang of victims (which includes a habitual stoner whose sandy brown hair and pale green shirt mark him as a visual reference to Scooby-Doo's pal Shaggy) make a bad impression on Simon or Stanley or whomever early on by calling him "crazy" and "retarded" to his face as soon as they meet. "Not cryyyy-zy! Not re-taaah-ded!", wails Glover in his strange pseudo-Cajun accent. When he kills people he sometimes hollers "Yuh fergawt to say 'Sahhh-mon sah-yuz!'" whether it fits the dialogue of the moment or not. Yes, mental retardation is once again equated with violent antisocial behavior by an insensitive, amateurish screenwriter. Some of the kills are so horrific (such as an innocent guy being cruelly set on fire and burned to death in front of his horrified screaming girlfriend) as to come very near to crossing over into the torture-porn subgenre, and in the worst tradition of such films the movie keeps nudging the audience with dumb jokes that almost seem like a running apology for the extreme heartlessness the script shows toward its characters. Glover makes childish puns when he slaughters people, but they're so ill-timed and unfunny that you wish this character would take some joke-writing lessons from Freddy Krueger. One scene after another stumbles along the same familiar path toward one random death after another, usually involving computer-animated flying pickaxes. In one contemptible and completely unnecessary scene Glover stomps a tiny dog to death in front of its shrieking, sobbing owner (the special effect as the film cuts from a live dog to what looks like a Kleenex box covered with fur and loaded with strawberry pie filling, is one of the worst since the heyday of Herschell Gordon Lewis). The dog's name was "Reggie B.", presumably after PHANTASM series star Reggie Bannister. I'm a fan of most of Crispin Glover's wacky work but this must have been a case of taking a project strictly because he needed a paycheck. It's sad to see his talent in as crude and stupid a production as this. His dad Bruce Glover shows up briefly as a local hick. The same director helmed TIME RIDER (1982) and HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS (1987), neither of which were especially memorable but which both seem positively brilliant next to this downbeat nonsense. At least the color photography is nice.

 SINISTER INVASION, THE (1968)

Dirs: Jose' Luis Gonzales De Leon, Jack Hill

 SKELETON KEY, THE (2005)

Dir: Iain Softley

SKEPTIC, THE (2009)

Dir: Tennyson Bardwell

An unusually literate script brimming with insightful and believable dialogue distinguishes this gripping haunted house tale. A smug, arrogant lawyer (the superb Tim Daly) wears his lack of any kind of spiritual belief like a badge of honor. The script and the actor work together brilliantly to paint a nuanced portrait of a character who is by no means bad or even unintelligent, merely a well-meaning man who's simply convinced he's smarter than everyone else. Having gone through life scoffing at anything even remotely connected with the supernatural, he has no problem staying alone in his estranged aunt's sprawling mansion after her mysterious death. Almost immediately, his convictions are challenged by subtle (and very creepy) phenomena, real or imagined, which seem to hint that some kind of invisible presence is trying to make itself known within the walls of the old home. His concerned friend and co-worker (Tom Arnold, looking surprisingly healthy and delivering what might be the most convincing performance of his career) informs Daly that his aunt's will states that she legally left the house to a nearby institute for studies of the paranormal and apparently believed the property was haunted. Refreshingly, the scientist who runs the psychic research lab is far from the movies' usual caricature of an intense, cliched, nerdy nutball. This particular researcher is a skeptic himself and has been much more successful in debunking claims of supernatural activity than corroborating them. The fact that none of the major characters are quick to swallow ghosts or ESP as explanations for the escalating series of strange incidents gives THE SKEPTIC a feeling of verisimilitude that's missing from Hollywood's usual effects-driven ghost story fare. The situation here seems perfectly plausible throughout, which means this relatively quiet film earns points for establishing and maintaining a chilly kind of realism that never resorts to overdone visuals or heavy-handed horror action. The only possible drawback is the vague, abrupt ending. After such an exceptional job of presenting realistic characters who have believable reactions to the unexplainable, the film screeches to a sudden stop at the end in a muddled final twist that can be interpreted more ways than one. To say more would be to spoil the suspense of what is overall an intriguing and entertaining journey into the realm of psychological terror, but suffice to say that however one reads the finale, it involves redemption, reconciliation and forgiveness. Not a perfect film, maybe, but one that offers far more food for thought than the majority of its peers and even provides a few genuine chills along the way.

 SKINNED DEEP (2003)

Dir: Gabe Bartalos

Makeup artist Gabe Bartalos proves conclusively that a great monster doesn't guarantee a great movie.  An incredible monster nicknamed The Surgeon General, sporting a big wrinkly head, dark goggles and a bear trap for a mouth, is such a brilliant and scary makeup creation that the stills of him made me really eager to see the film.  Mr. Bartalos wrote and directed this lame, mean-spirited, completely pointless variation on HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES that's so predictable and derivative that it may as well have been called HOUSE OF 1000 MOTHER'S DAY CHAINSAW MASSACRES. As in every "city folks stranded out in the boondocks where the crazy retarded cannibals live" movie since the original TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, another funny- looking "family-from-hell" brutally slaughters unwary travelers for no reason.  When Tobe Hooper did it back in 1974, it was new, different, and shocking and soon gave birth to a legendary classic of nightmarish horror.  But now that backwoods massacres perpetrated by monstrous mutant familes constitute an entire subgenre, there really needs to be something new added to the formula besides a few makeup designs to keep audiences interested.  Something along the lines of a story would have been nice, for example. But this tired gorefest is content to simply pass the time with ridiculous looking people committing brutal gore murders without motivation until it finally falls back on the ending you'd most expect of an imitative, lowbrow project like this: the sole survivor escapes into the office of the local sheriff, who is naturally a crazy murderer himself.  And that isn't even giving anything away, because the sheriff's previous scenes telegraph the stock ending by making it clear that he's a few pages shy of a script.  SKINNED DEEP has a mean streak that's excessively wide even for TCM copies, including a real contempt for the elderly. Most of the victims are gray-haired old geezers who get chopped and blown to bloody bits.  Forrest J. Ackerman shows up long enough to frown a bit and suffer a weird computer-animated heart attack. An innocent little boy is horribly sliced in two, and lots of people scream and thrash about in agony. The family of killers is led by a woman called only Granny, and she's played by one of the worst actresses since the days of Ed Wood movies.  Most of the other actors are unconvincing too, although the talented Warwick Davis (the Leprechaun himself) gives it his all as a psycho who kills people by throwing china dinner plates at them. (I swear I'm not making this up.)  At least the script manages to avoid any obvious jokes about "flying saucers".  Or at least I didn't hear any....it's hard to be sure, because the incessant, loud, hissing, humming, droning soundtrack drowns out a lot of the dialogue, including much of Davis' impassioned, deranged rant.  Another character is a guy whose brain is the size of an ottoman but who seems to be one of the dumbest of the clan.  All the killers were, uh, 'created', or something, by a headless bodybuilder who is an absolutely amazing special effect, but whose own lengthy rant is rendered inaudible by a combination of an electronically deepened voice and that blaring score. ("You are a worthless mblblbmblmblblmbl...", he goes on and on and on.)  There are a few attempts at MTV-level surrealism and some fairly clever set decorations, if one looks past the skull-and-bone arrangements and strings of Christmas lights copied from TCM Part 2.  The behavior of both the killers and the victims is so unrealistic and downright stupid that it's impossible to care what happens, but that may be just as well, because this movie is so unbelievably hateful and cruel that if any of it had been done well, it would be really hard to sit through for its disturbing sadism.  As it turns out, it's only hard to sit through because it's so boring. That Surgeon General is one scary monster, though.  If anyone ever produces a mask of him, I'll buy one in an instant.  Great monster, shame about the movie.

 SKINWALKER: CURSE OF THE SHAMAN (2005)

Dir: Steve Stevens Jr.

An admirable attempt to tell a fairly logical story is sunk by bad acting, sophomoric scripting and an almost total lack of suspense and surprises. The plot progression is okay but there's only about ten minutes' worth of plot going on here.  The completed feature is only 74 minutes long, and they had to stretch the end credits out as long as possible to even reach that brief running time.  The scant story content concerns a girl who decides to investigate a small town's rumored "curse" that may have caused the deaths of some teens.  Every cliche' you'd expect is paraded out, including the unfriendly locals who refuse to reveal anything and the stereotyped over-the-top redneck sheriff who's ready to lock people up for even talking about the mystery.  It seems that a carload of teen bozos killed an Indian shaman back in 1969 and now, 35 years later, a relative who really knows how to hold a grudge has finally gotten around to avenging the misdeed by turning himself into a monster and slaughtering the children of the original culprits.  Why he doesn't just shoot them, I don't know.  There are psychic flashes, visions and red-tinted "monster vision" scenes but none of it is dramatic or frightening and the stilted dialogue is awful.  Surprisingly, the very amateur feature has a number of appearances by familiar faces, including Celeste Yarnall as somebody's mom, Rhino Video entrepeneur and nonactor Johnny Legend as a friendly old drunk, and STAR TREK's "Scotty", James Doohan, looking tragically weak and frail in his last role as the bigoted local judge. The briefly seen monster mask (which, by the way, looks nothing like the eyeless ghost face on the promo art) is excellent.  Too bad most viewers will have tuned out by the time it arrives onscreen.  Even the ending is a shopworn cliche' that won't win this one any fans.   

SLASHED DREAMS (1975)

Dir: James Polakof

SLAUGHTER OF THE VAMPIRES (1962)

Dir: Roberto Mauri

Also released in the U.S. under the even more ridiculous title CURSE OF THE BLOOD GHOULS, which means it had two exploitative, gory-sounding English language titles writing checks its tame script couldn't cash. Although the character names have been changed (or in the case of the vampire, dropped altogether), it's really the umpteenth remake of DRACULA. Or the last two-thirds of it, anyway. Popular German star Dieter Eppler is miscast and wasted as the peculiarly unidentified Dracula clone, who skulks around the castle home of young Count Wolfgang and vampirizes his attractive new bride. The Van Helsing counterpart is Dr. Nietzsche, an arrogant, cigar-smoking expert on matters of vampire extermination. After the usual nocturnal neck-biting and subsequent melodramatics, the dull leads race to rescue a little girl from the bloodsucker's clutches. The fine cinematography and careful lighting are no match for the poorly staged action sequences and stiff character reactions, and the crude English dub track offers too many unintentionally funny moments to ignore. An angle about a relationship between the vampire and the family's governess is never presented in enough detail for it to make sense, and the script offers no comment whatsoever about the fact that the family crest on the vampire's coffin lid is also seen on a wall in the castle, suggesting that the creature (who looks like an average middle-aged fellow sporting a long cape and very black lower eyelids) may have originally been written as a relative of the castle's current occupants. The vampire hunter and the gardener spend hours searching the cellar for the vampire's coffin when the audience can plainly see that they'd only have to walk around a few pieces of set decor to see it lying there in the open, giving the impression that these earnest heroes are about as sharp as Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker in THE GHOST BUSTERS. This may not be the worst film adaptation of Stoker's novel, but it easily qualifies as one of the least involving. The Italian title is LA STRAGE DEI VAMPIRI. Mauri also directed THE INVINCIBLE GLADIATORS and KONG ISLAND.

 SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS (2006)

Dir: "Lucifer Valentine"

Having trouble falling asleep at night?  Try staying awake through this talent-free amateur heap of wretchedly poor footage of people puking and occasionally getting slashed up. This is a sad example of what can happen when absolutely anybody can get his hands on a camcorder and find access to video duplication and distribution services. It seems harsh to describe any movie as "completely worthless", but there just isn't anything good to be said about this inept mess. It isn't even a real movie. There isn't any story or any point or anything else that real filmmakers try to put into their work. It's nothing but a feature length parade of sick sights, mostly of non-actors sticking their fingers down their throats and vomiting, adorned with the occasional caption or spoken attempt to blame the murders of talentless teen skanks on a cult of satan-worshipping miscreants, but these are half-hearted at best and don't come close to disguising any of this blurry, shaky, out-of-focus nonsense as a story. The bloody gore effects look very convincing, or at least I think they would if the camera had been mounted on a tripod or was ever held still long enough for anything to be seen clearly. You know you're in trouble when the director thinks it's cool to call himself "Lucifer Valentine", but even with that in mind you'd never be able to imagine just how totally artless and stupid this chunk of rubbish is.  This guy evidently thought he was doing something new and original, which must indicate that he's never seen any of the many Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian exploitation films that involved vomiting.  At least those scummy little movies generally had some production values, semi-professional actors, and something like plot progression to bolster their geek value. But not this tedious mess. It's just wall-to-wall ugly pointless footage that would insult the intelligence of a garden slug. Indefensible, reprehensible and slightly less entertaining than looking at a blank screen for an hour and a half.  People should only have to sit through SLAUGHTERED VOMIT DOLLS if they've lost some kind of bet. (Note: If you find yourself engaged in such a bet, you can be forgiven for going ahead and CHEATING to get out of watching it.) 

 SLAUGHTERHOUSE MASSACRE, THE (2005)

Dir: Paul Cagne'

Weak, terribly boring teen slasher that is completely indistinguishable from a hundred others like it.  The usual foursome of oversexed young dullards sneak into the old closed-down slaughterhouse where somebody died horribly 12 years earlier (but which still has its electricity hooked up). The movie never dares to deviate from formula by so much as a degree as the dopes recite a supposedly scary little rhyming verse (perhaps the dumbest one in horror history), thereby conjuring up a guy by the name of Marty Sickle (really) who chops people in half or beheads them with a weapon based closely on his own last name. The photography is so shabby that it's hard to tell exactly what you're supposed to be looking at in many shots. Scene after scene goes on too long. The acting is low-key to the point of flatlining except for a few instances wherein it switches to thickly-sliced ham. The murders are poorly staged and happen too fast. The story is pointless, there are no scary or surprising moments and the whole production is completely lacking even the slightest flicker of originality.  Another good slasher-themed remedy for insomnia.

 

 SLAYER, THE (1981)

Dir: J.S. Cardone

This is one of very few pre-Freddy movies to deal with a monster who lives in a character's nightmares. Shot on Tybee Island off the Georgia coast, it has a troubled artist trying to get away from her stressful lifestyle for a few days by spending a weekend on the secluded island with her husband and another couple.  Every time she falls asleep, she dreams of a horrible monster killing her loved ones in gruesome ways, and every time she wakes up, sure enough, corpses turn up bearing the same wounds she saw in her nightmares. The movie is cheap-looking and suffers from a lack of incident, as too much time is devoted to scenes of people creeping around dark places, but there's a successfully built eerie mood that will keep most viewers watching to the out-of-left-field ending. THE SLAYER may be slow-moving and cheap, but it does have a certain something that gives it the authentic feel of an ominous nightmare.  If only the characters had behaved a little more believably and reacted more like people really would react to such a situation, this might have become a cult classic. As it stands, there's some infuriatingly illogical behavior from some of the supporting characters that tends to distance the viewer from the situation.  Luckily, the isolated setting, atmospheric thunderstorms, shadowy cinematography and doom-laden mood help things along, as do the gory makeup FX and the scary appearance of the Slayer himself, who finally shows up at the climax to give the audience a good look at his ugly, mean-looking, fanged face.  It might not be a classic or even a legitinately "good" movie, but fans of quietly spooky dreamlike horrors are advised to look for this no-budget wonder.

 

 SLITHER (2005)

Dir: James Gunn

Good sick fun from the man who wrote the first live action SCOOBY-DOO feature and the 2004 version of DAWN OF THE DEAD . When a chunk of meteor crashes to earth at the edge of a small Southern community, you just know some poor schlemiel is going to come along and get himself infected by it. He does so, and rapidly starts transforming into a big tentacled meat-eating monster that's sort of a cross between himself and the animalistic alien intelligence. Before he becomes too unsightly, the man-monster uses his new appendages to impregnate an old girlfriend, who soon gives birth to a swarm of about 500 creepy red space slugs that slither into people's mouths and possess them. Soon the town is crowded with zombielike alien possessees, and in an interesting twist, they all share a single consciousness. Which means that when one of them finds out where you're hiding, they all instantly know. Comparisons to THE BLOB, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS,  THE HIDDEN,  NIGHT OF THE CREEPS and even THE DEADLY SPAWN are inevitable, but SLITHER does an admirable job of borrowing from all those sources without ever turning into a direct copy of any of them. Sure, there are some familiar elements, but the script is fresh, witty and unusually well thought out, bringing enough inspiration to the table to make sure it never feels like a ripoff or a simple homage. The local yokels are believably dimwitted, panicked and clueless and some of their uncomfortable exchanges, failed attempts at wisecracks and authentically desperate rants are absolutely hilarious.  The almost nonstop special effects are a flawless combination of CGI, latex puppetry and good old-fashioned gore. None of which is to say that SLITHER is an unqualified masterpiece. The language is a lot filthier than it needed to be and, predictably, the more physically attractive the characters are, the better their chances for survival. There's also a dumb post-credits coda that feels jarringly unimaginative and rote after a movie with so much energy and creativity, but you can miss it by smiply not watching the closing credits all the way through. The acting is excellent throughout, with performers who know how to deftly show both subtle realism and broad shrieking hysteria with equal skill, at all the right times and in all the right meausres. Fast pacing, well-staged action, plentiful gruesome effects, and an outrageous plot filled with believably human characters make this slime-dripping trip through familiar science fiction/horror territory a standout.

 SNOW CREATURE, THE (1954)

Dir: W. Lee Wilder

An early Yeti movie from the director of the fair PHANTOM FROM SPACE and the unintentionally funny KILLERS FROM SPACE.  This supercheap feature is his dullest.  The only thing it has going for it is the dark, shadowy photography, which imparts a spooky mood to many of the nighttime scenes.   But even that was probably more of an attempt to obscure the awful sets, props and costumes than a concentrated effort to make a visually scary film.  A know-it-all American botanist goes on an expedition to look for mold (?) in the Himalayan mountains, which turn out to be inhabited by Japanese extras. Purely by coincidence, a Yeti picks that very night to stumble down into the village to abduct the wife of one of the guides.  True to form, the Americans in the party (shown to have quite the superiority complex, although it's doubtful this was deliberately intended to make them appear unsympathetic) couldn't care less about the man's terrible personal loss and only agree to the Yeti hunt after the "sneaky foreigners" steal their guns.  They plod along until they find the monster living in a cave, at which point the cornered creature reacts by standing up, somehow causing an earthquake that kills his Yeti family. Since he already had a female Yeti as a mate, it's anybody's guess as to why he kidnapped the human woman. Maybe it's just too hard to find a babysitter up in the mountains.  Everyone forgets all about the man's missing wife and the arrogant Americans set about having the creature shipped to the U.S. for exploitation, er, I mean, for further strudy.  The beast is delayed at Customs because he's a monster, leaving U.S. officials unable to decide whether he should be classified as cargo or as an immigrant with rights.  (I know this sounds ridiculous, but much sillier gridlocks have occurred in real life where the U.S. Government is involved.)  The snow creature, locked in a box that appears to have been sat on a pipe running across the floor instead of on a flat surface, breaks loose and runs through Los Angeles (almost entirely off-camera).   He sneaks around in the shadows to avoid letting the audience see how pathetic his costume is.  Eventually he kills a couple of people (again, offscreen) before a total of about 4 cops close in for the (extremely easy) kill.  With the possible exception of the aforementioned nighttime photography, everything about this movie is inept, from the preposterous plotting to an amusing shot in which the camera pans across an empty street, is startled by the sound of someone screaming, and then stops and pans back across the same set, even though it's obviously just missed whatever action took place.  The actors barely register as anything more than warm bodies.  They know about what they're supposed to say and about when to say it, but that's the best that can be said of them.  Some of them don't even seem to be sure which way they are supposed to be facing when delivering their bland lines.  But THE SNOW CREATURE's biggest liability is the monster himself.  Inarguably one of the worst man-in-a-suit-creatures of the '50s, the thing is clearly a guy in clothes that seem to have been made by cutting up some moth-eaten old fur coats into a makeshift shirt, pants and hood.  They didn't even make him something like a jumpsuit to give the impression of a hair-covered body.  You can see the separations between his top, pants and mitts.  There's no monster mask, just a guy with a beard wearing a fur hood.  Letting the audience get a good look at one of the monster's hands was a serious mistake.  It looks like someone traced around his hand and then cut the general shape out of fleece like a simple glove, with absolutely nothing in the way of claws (or realism), yet some poor extra has to scream and try to look frightened when it flops into view.  More hilarity comes from the way the same few bits of Yeti footage are repeated over and over.  A shot of the beast taking a couple of steps toward the camera, solid black backdrop behind him, shows up every time he's supposed to be walking.  Each time he sees someone, the same clip is shown in reverse to give the impression of him stepping back into the shadows.  When he needs to stop moving forward, the scene stops and freezes on a single frame.  They obviously didn't have much in the way of usable monster footage, but the repeated use of this goofy forward-and-backward shot goes from annoying to hilarious fairly quickly.  Sporadically funny in its incompetence, THE SNOW CREATURE is an embarrassing low point in monster movie history.   

 SOFT FOR DIGGING (1998)

Dir: J.T. Petty

A student film made at NYU for $6,000., SOFT FOR DIGGING is more intelligent, more creative and considerably scarier than any half-dozen recent Hollywood horror extravaganzas. Careful attention to camera angles, moody lighting and cold, bleak landscapes combine to tell a slow and quiet but thoroughly involving supernatural tale with an uncommonly real feel. There's almost no dialogue in the gloomy story of Virgil, an old man who lives alone in a cabin in the middle of the chilliest looking woods you've ever seen. Following his "very bad cat" into the colorless, deathly forest one day, the old man witnesses the murder of a child by a mysterious young man. Police searches for the little girl's body turn up nothing, but Virgil is haunted by nightmare visions that eventually lead him to the horrible secret of the brutal killing. In spite of the lack of dialogue (or maybe because of it), you'll feel like you're right there with the solemn old hermit, experiencing his growing fear and confusion during his lonely quest to make some sense of the crime. The cleverly paced film breaks up its long, quiet stretches with sudden bursts of hallucinatory visual shocks. The horror imagery is conveyed via techniques that you've seen fumbled embarrassingly in any number of big-budget horror movies, but SOFT FOR DIGGING director J.T. Petty knows how to use them to their most nightmarish effect. After several surprises, the story ends with a cruel, sick joke that manages to work perfectly with everything that's come before if you're willing to give it a little thought.  An intelligent and well-crafted chiller that stands as a reminder of how much can be achieved, even on a next-to-nothing budget, when storytelling and mood are given prominence over special effects and bloodshed. Teenaged video game junkies with the attention span of goldfish might not have sufficient concentration skills to follow this one, but it comes heartily recommended to more mature viewers. It wasn't officially released until 2005.

 SOLSTICE (2008)

Dir: Daniel Myrick

One of the first movies shot in the New Orleans area following hurricane Katrina was this interesting ghost story that was unfairly derided by horror fans for not being a body count picture.   It's true that there's next to nothing in the way of blood and guts here, but there's no reason every movie about teens in the woods has to be a FRIDAY THE 13TH clone.   Helmed by one of the directors of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, it's basically a remake of a 2003 movie from Denmark called MIDSOMMER.   After her twin sister mysteriously commits suicide, a troubled girl travels with a group of friends to the family mansion in which she grew up, located on the edge of an unsafe expanse of swampland.   A local legend states that this particular weekend, that of June 21st, is the one time each year when the dead can communicate with the living, and our heroine starts catching glimpses of humanoid shadows and other omens that seem to indicate the presence of her late sister's spirit.  She repeatedly tries to throw away her sister's keychain (which has one unknown key on it), but the pesky thing keeps popping back up in the darnedest of places.  The story is surprisingly good, containing turns of plot that actually make perfect sense and behavior that, while not always smart, is at least reasonably believable.   The male lead is the actor who played Iceman in the X-MEN features.  The local creepy old man who may or may not be a threat is played by R. Lee Ermey (but I'm recommending the film anyway).  One turn of events that struck me as especially odd is that a whistlestop general store employee who is invited to come over to have dinner with the other kids somehow knows to dress formally for the very informal occasion, and when he gets there the other guys are in suits and ties just like him.  Are there really groups of teenage friends anywhere who go to this much trouble to dress for dinner in this day and age?   There isn't as much horror as drama in this tale, but the occasional shock images of mud, blood and flickery shadows are perfectly servicable. The stylish, green-tinted kaleidoscopic opening title sequence of SOLSTICE is so beautifully realized that it sets a high artistic standard which the movie is never again able to live up to, and there isn't much content that qualifies as scary, but if you're expecting a psychological mystery with macabre overtones rather than a gorefest, you ought to find this well-constructed feature highly satisfying.   

SORE LOSERS, THE (1997)

Dir: John Michael McCarthy

The main objective of this unprofessional comedy with horror and sci-fi themes seems to have been simply to reference as many of the appropriate influences as possible, with all other considerations (including storytelling, pacing, and performances) taking a back seat to the slew of psychadelic - psychotronic - rock-&-roll - rockabilly - exploitation checkpoints getting a mention. Devotees of the Something Weird Video company will recognize plenty of the '50s and '60s "trash culture" ingredients but most won't find anything of any particular interest here. The script gives an appreciative nod to EC Comics, Asian pop music, hillbilly movies and more but never does make room for any satiric points or interesting characters. Phrases like 'collective subconscious energy' and 'the decline of Western civilization' are tossed in but aren't used in ways that qualify as jokes or even observations. They're just examples of the meaningless genre box-ticking that characterizes this forgettable video feature. The plot has something to do with a guy sent from an alien planet to kill exactly 12 humans back in 1954. For some reason he only killed nine, so he's back in 1997 (still dressed like a '50s greaser) to bump off three more. He teams up with a guy dressed up to look like Prince and an evil woman (in an outrageous red wig) who likes to kill people just for kicks. The psycho chick kills her mother and they drive around with her rotting corpse in the car for a while. Random freakiness-as-humor clearly isn't something that can be successfully done by just anyone and THE SORE LOSERS proves that. Exploitation movie king David F. Friedman, demonstrating why he didn't take up an acting career, appears briefly as the cigar-smoking Elder of the Lower Frequency Planet. At the end he destroys Memphis with a comet (represented by a blurry red video effect in the sky). You won't care what happens, though, because the awful cinematography, undisciplined editing, amateur acting, absence of plot progression and inconsistent sound quality make this movie a watch-checking, seat-squirming ordeal. I'm sure the people who made it had some fun, though.

 SOUL OF THE DEMON (1991)

Dir: Charles Lang

 SPACE RAIDERS (1983)

Dir: Howard R. Cohen

 SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007)

Dir: Sam Raimi

Mainstream critics were merciless in their lambasting of this third entry in the Toby Maguire SPIDER-MAN series, but while their complaints were mostly legitimate, the movie on the whole is an entertaining, mostly satisfying and occasionally breathtaking adventure that should please hardcore fans.  The ill-advised decision to squeeze three (or, depending on how one looks at it, four) storylines into one feature means that things have to keep moving along at crazy speed, often at the expense of clear explanations for exactly what's going on. The complex plot hinges on the audience's acceptance of a large number of huge coincidences all taking place in the same city within the space of a few days.  But in the case of Peter Parker and his wall-crawling alterego, a character whose life has always been frought with unlikely situations, the endless procession of far-fetched events and instances of hard-to-believe timing eventually feels less like a writer's convenience than an indication that Parker is trapped in a neverending larger-than-life cosmic test of character engineered by fate itself.  As in the first two films, the acting is uniformly outstanding, including that of important returning characters like dear old Aunt May and perpetually and delightfully angry J.Jonah Jameson.  Thomas Haden Church is nothing short of wonderful as Sandman, a supervillain who has more complexity here than he was given in the comics.  (One of the things about this series that continues to impress me is the perfection in the casting of the villains and other supporting characters, who all look and act much more like their comic book inspirations than those in the BATMAN or SUPERMAN films.)  It's true that our hero's Spidey-Sense seems inexplicably shut off in this sequel, which sees him sucker-punched several times and frequently unaware of enormous, dangerous anomalies nearby, but Maguire and the rest of the cast are so good that it's easy to overlook the plot holes and roll with the emotionally charged action.  The bloblike alien entity that becomes "Venom" is the main visual attraction, although it (and the Sandman) are given almost nothing in the way of explanations.  The black space glop simply crawls out of a crashed meteor and Haden Church is turned into a morphing mound of living sand by an unspecified scientific experiment that somehow goes wrong, which allowed for some amazing special effects sequences but bothered many viewers who wanted at least a little discussion of the science fiction concepts behind these bizarre situations.  But SPIDER-MAN 3 elects to relegate the pseudoscience to the background so that it can focus on more emotional material.  At its heart a story about the crucial role of forgiveness in the lives of all human beings, the script deals with various characters' attempts to sort out the difference between justice and revenge, between fair play and personal vendettas, and their (and everyone's)accountability for the choices one makes in life.  The CGI imagery isn't up to the level of that in the previous movie, and in fact much of the large-scale action involving crumbling skyscrapers and other disasters looks surprisingly phony, like watching weightless cartoon figures being flung around on a video game screen instead of seeing real people in real danger.  Spider-Man appears more physically invulnerable than ever before, able to take prolonged terrible beatings without even registering any noticeable pain.  But on the filmmakers' behalf, it should be noted that the fight scenes were never the most interesting or accessible aspects of Spider-Man anyway.  He's much stronger and more resilient than an ordinary person, and while I don't know exactly what it feels like to him when he gets thrown through a brick wall, I can identify with his very human moments of humiliation, isolation and heartbreak, which are all very well handled here. Thus the character retains his capacity for feeling and gives the audience a hero to whom they can relate.  I admit it isn't as good as SPIDER-MAN 2, but fans of the comics and the first two films owe it to themsleves to see this remarkably complex, risk-taking and ambitious work from director Raimi.  Look at it fairly and I think you'll agree that the good far outweighs the bad.

 SPLATTER BEACH (2007)

Dir: John and Mark Polonia

Slow-moving, half-hearted stab at a '60s style beach movie about aquatic humanoid monsters.  A marine science nerd goes to a resort area where people have been vanishing or getting mysteriously torn to bloody shreds at a rate of a half-dozen per month but which is still open to the public and remarkably free of police presence.  The star's buddy is a teen dork stereotype of a kind that started to appear in genre films during the late '90s, namely, the white guy who thinks he's part of black gangsta culture.  His affected street slang and movie-style black mannerisms are funny at first but help to wear out the one-dimensional character's welcome in a hurry.   A man-in-a-suit monster comes shambling out of the surf and kills supposedly amusing cliche' victims every so often, and that's about it plotwise.  Other characters (and I use the term loosely) include a mean, bitter girl who tries to warn people away from the beach and a funny lunkheaded bodybuilder who apparently never does anything but stand on the beach 24 hours a day lifting dumbbells.  This sleepy movie is a spoof first and a horror tale second, but it only has about one-tenth the number of jokes it needed.   What humor there is frequently arises from simple-minded stuff like guys ogling girls or somebody calling somebody else gay (although the musclehead guy has some really funny lines that allow him to constantly use the wrong words for everything, as when he says "I could've been Mr. Universe if I hadn't blown out one of my bicuspids.").   The monster suit isn't on a par with the best movie fishmen, but it's pretty good.  The green scaly creature has big claws, gills like the Black Lagoon Creature, and a body covered in dangling strands of seaweed.   There are references to all the movies this copies, including CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, THE MONSTER OF PIEDRAS BLANCAS,  HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, and THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH, and Roger Corman's CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA is shown playing on a late night TV horror host show.  None of the references are funny, but they do let us know the filmmakers were at least familiar with the genre they were trying to re-create.  The trouble is that they haven't so much made a spoof as they have simply made one more generic film along similar lines.   As so frequently happens with low-budget "homages", this movie is far too silly to be scary but not original or witty enough to be very amusing either.  At one point the story is interrupted for a terrible music video combining previously seen footage with odd shots of a surf band and dancing teens all curiously superimposed over beach backdrops.  If you're still conscious at the end, you get to see this sequence again.  The biggest flaw... and it's a shocking one...  is that the climax plays out as if an entire reel of the movie were missing.  A dozen or so of the murderous fish monsters crawl out of the water and trap the heroes inside a small house, and then the film cuts in a series of black and white stills with some gunshot sounds, after which we are told that the characters simply shot all the creatures.  The surviving girl gets carried off by one of them, but at the end she reappears and calmly states that she blacked out and can't recall how she got away.  I figured they were going to say she was pregnant with fish-monster babies, but no, that's the end and that's all there is to it.  We never do find out how she got away, nor why they carried her off someplace instead of tearing her to pieces like they did all the previous humans they encountered.  The attacks are poorly edited, but this is still better than the Polonia Brothers' previous efforts like HELL SPAWN and PREYLIEN, which were so awful as to be unwatchable.  At least this one is just clumsy and pointless instead of so bad it's unbearable.  The improvement can probably be attributed directly to the participation of Brett Piper of THEY BITE! fame, who was cinematographer here.  

 STAKES (2002)

Dir: Joe Ripple

 STARCRASH (1979)

Dir: "Lewis Coates" (Luigi Cozzi)

 STAY ALIVE (2006)

Dir: William Brent Bell

Completely predictable addition to the "killer video game" subgenre. This one has decent direction for the most part but the messy script full of thick-skulled, unlikable characters is too much for director Bell to overcome.  The potty-mouthed teen jerks in this movie take a lot longer than you will to figure out what's going on, which is always a fatal flaw in a tale that's supposed to be a supernatural mystery. The usual collection of teen stereotypes (most of whom have ridiculous names) get involved with the latest online supernatural threat: an unpublished video game called Stay Alive, which is oddly (and very sloppily) based on the real-life history of Countess Elizabeth Bathory. When the empty-headed players die in the game, they die for real in exactly the same way soon afterward. Of the cast of goofballs, only Frankie Muniz (MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE) seems to be making a real effort to give his chatty science geek character any real personality. Everyone else seems a bit lost in trying to figure out how to play this very thin material that features one plot twist after another that's exactly what the audience expects (only slower). A sexy blonde girl shows up but the odd way in which she is brought into the story and the fact that she introduces herself to the others with a huge pack of lies about her life goes nowhere and adds nothing. They could have made her just another member of this dwindling circle of lowlife friends, thereby doing the audience a favor by shortening the movie a bit.  STAY ALIVE also includes the single worst, most inappropriate use of fast-motion photography I've seen yet, as a bloody murder scene turns unintentionally hilarious to watch as police and paramedics suddenly start scuttling around in silly speeded-up fashion.  I half expected to hear the "Yakety Sax" theme from THE BENNY HILL SHOW kick in. Seasoned crazy person actress Alice Krige makes a cameo as the author of a book about Countess Bathory, but she has little to do. There are several continuity errors and the well-known witchcraft tome the Malleus Maleficarum is incorrectly referred to by one of the bimbos as the Malleus Demonium.  Maybe the actress couldn't pronounce the actual title. There are a few nice visual touches and a good creepy sound effect (sort of a deep buzzing rumble) used whenever the game is about to kill somebody, but that's about the best that can be said of this generic entry, which will probably bore the youthful video game junkies it seems to have been made for.  

STAY AWAKE, THE (1987)

Dir: John Bernard

One of the dreariest, least involving stalker cheapies of the period.  In 1969 in "America", a serial killer is led to the gas chamber (which has an Oscar Night-style red carpet runway leading to it).  Clips of cops finding the bloody corpses of his female victims show them in hairstyles and clothes that look remarkably like what women would be sporting in 1987.  Before he dies, the psycho rants some routine Crazy Evil Guy dialogue, repeatedly stating that he can't be killed because he is "the angel of darkness", a fancy way of saying he kills women. He dies anyway. Having been gassed to death in the U.S., he decides to strike in Europe next. Exactly where in Europe isn't specified, as the caption simply reads "Europe".  There's no reason for the switch in locations and no reason for the almost 20-year delay before his next attack. He shows up in 1987 at St. Mary's School For Girls, an institute where shapely gals with big fluffy hair, colorful tights and leg warmers do aerobics and watch horror movies on TV during their all-night "stay awake".  The actresses appear to have been shipped in from another planet. One of them talks with what sounds like a man's voice, and one of them is repeatedly referred to as "fat" even though she's at least as beautiful as, and no heavier than, the others. (To make sure we understand she's supposed to be fat, the director shows her eating potato chips.)  The inexplicably resurrected murderer causes TVs to malfunction and lights to fade up and down as if someone were going berserk with a  series of dimmer switches. He makes a tape player explode, giving new meaning to the term "boom box".  The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies were an obvious influence, as evidenced when the back-from-the-dead killer talks in a Freddy Krueger voice, makes a telephone melt, and causes objects to catch on fire.  Sometimes children's voices chanting nursery rhymes are heard too but it's meaningless here, as are the crying baby sound effects. An enormous portion of the movie consists of killer's POV tracking shots that don't lead anywhere.  The weirdest thing is that the killer sometimes looks like himself but also occasionally turns into a shabby green rubber-suited monster with a dopey bug/rat/dog head that has big red lightbulb eyes and an extra long tongue like a slimy rope. Sometimes he can telekinetically manipulate fire hoses and other objects and even makes one guy's heart pop right out of his chest, but at other times he seems to need to attack people just like any human killer would have to.  He mostly sits in front of a fireplace and makes threats and only gets to kill a few of the lame-brained teens in the building.  The best scene (faint praise indeed) is when a girl picks up a rubber mask that a practical joker was using to try to scare the girls.... and realizes his head is still in it!  (Gotta admit, I did like that scene.)  None of it makes any sense and it's loaded with insultingly dumb situations. When the teacher in charge of the girls hears one of her students screaming her head off from another room, she decides it would be better for her and the half-dozen girls with her to just walk away and look for a phone to call the cops instead of doing anything to try to help. At the end, the all-powerful, invulnerable monster is defeated when somebody kicks a bottle of acid at his stomach, which makes him unable to walk. He lies on the floor growling "Kill her!" for a long time, until an explosion in the science lab causes him to be reincarnated (I guess) in the body of a rat. Then a love song plays during the end credits. You have to wonder how many critics reviewed this when it was new and made jokes about the fact that a film called THE STAY AWAKE was so painfully boring that it was likely to put audiences to sleep.  It must have been quite tempting to say something along the lines of "Good luck staying awake through THE STAY AWAKE", or how it should have been called BET YOU CAN'T STAY AWAKE, or telling viewers they'd need someone sitting next to them to keep repeating the title out loud while jabbing them in the ribs throughout the movie.  But not me.  No, that would be too easy.  I'm taking the high road here.  I'm just going to say that it's a dull pile of all-puprose horror elements thrown together into a weak and forgettable film, and leave it at that.

 STING OF DEATH (1966)

Dir: William Grefe'

 STUMP THE BAND (2006)

Dirs: William Holmes, JoJo Henrickson

After a creatively edited opening title sequence, this quickly settles into the routine business of copying THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, making it approximately the 43,000th cheap horror clinker to do so.   This time it's a loathsome all-female punk band slogging through the woods of Wisconsin who learn the hard way that America's backroads are teeming with imbecilic murderers and alarmingly low on law enforcement.  The women in this trashy offering are so repulsively hateful, slutty and foul-mouthed that you might find yourself on the side of the killers.  Clearly influenced by Rob Zombie's TEXAS imitations HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, the project's amateurish script takes the easy road of making everybody a detestable lowlife with a rotten and thoroughly stupid attitude, making it impossible to care about what happens to any of these disgusting people.  STUMP THE BAND's answer to Leatherface is a mentally retarded bald guy named Billy who thinks he's a dog.  Its version of the "man in charge" psycho is an axe-wielding bully called simply Coach.  Coach is a perfectly ordinary looking middle-aged guy (Larry Wyatt, who is excellent in the role and does everything he can to create some tension, unpredictability and authentic madness in a peurile plot).  He has a foot fetish, so he keeps his victims' chopped off feet in shoeboxes.  Coach and Billy are aided in their nonstop killing by Joe, a dopey gas station attendant with a retro-'70s look.  This script is lazy and careless in the extreme, so don't expect to ever find out what the relationship between these three not-particularly-interesting sociopaths is, nor any reason for their murderous behavior nor any explanation for how they might continue to get away with chopping up everyone who comes through the area year after year. The people who slapped this unimaginative dog together must have assumed that if it worked for Tobe Hooper it would work just as well for them.  It doesn't.  To be fair, there are a number of good jokes in the dialogue but they're slim compensation for all the boring "running through the woods" footage and the random nature of who dies when.  The big effects highlight, in which a man ends up with his arms and legs amputated like The Black Knight from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, is ruined by terrible computer-generated cartoon blood that sprays unrealistically around for far too long.  (One can only imagine what the victim's blood pressure must have been.)  One of the directors plays the band's equally repugnant manager, who expires with an axe in his head.  Several characters die simply because they're slow to react and dimwitted enough to pass up their chances to kill the crazies, a common situation in grade-Z slasher trashers like this.  Except for some fine work from the actor playing Coach, there isn't anything to recommend this by-the-numbers retread.  At least the psychos all die, so maybe the world will be spared a sequel. 

 SUBHUMAN (2004)

Dir: Mark Tuit

 SUBJECT TWO (2006)

Dir: Philip Chidel

This impressive independent feature acknowledges its debt to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein by naming its overzealous scientist "Dr.Franklin Vick" and using a character named "Adam" as the man who is turned into something not quite human through cutting-edge medical experiments. A disillusioned med student goes to the snowbound home of an unorthodox scientist in the mountains of Colorado, thinking he's been offered a job as lab assistant.  But what the doc really wanted was a living subject on whom to try out his still-in-development re-animation serum.  When the serum leaves the pathetic kid with strange and painful side effects, his cold but well-meaning host has to keep "killing" his increasingly confused subject in order to perfect the formula. The helpless young guy gets shot, stabbed, strangled and has his wrists slashed, in addition to undergoing several radical surgical procedures, but it's all in the name of science, of course. The actor who plays the doctor (Dean Stapleton) is one of the most well-rounded, believably aloof and detached scientific geniuses since Peter Cushing's Baron Frankenstein.  Coming off like a mixture of Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton and Bruce Greenwood, he carries much of the film and delivers his lines with a masterful balance of on-the-surface confidence and troubling inner doubt.  SUBJECT TWO is the sort of thing more low-budget films should aspire to: a small cast, a limited number of sets and effects, and a script that usually rings true even through some fairly improbable situations.  A quiet, melancholy little movie, it may disappoint attention-span-challenged video game junkies and fanatical gorehounds. But horror fans who appreciate sincere attempts to create new variations on classic themes should enjoy this unique, quirky tale of misguided good intentions and the often uncomfortable relationships between surgeons and their patients.  There are some clever twists in the final reel, although the movie's ultimate conclusion and final shot left me a little dissatisfied.  It may not have been much of an ending, but the fine performances, thoughtful direction and uniquely unpredictable script made it a journey well worth taking.    

 SWAMP OF THE RAVENS, THE (1973)

Dir: Miguel Cano

 SWIMMING POOL (2001)

Dir: Boris Von Suchowski

Better than average slasher film made in Prague.  The unwieldy dialogue and constant variety of assorted foreign accents (one character sounds like a Brit trying to sound American, one sounds like an Australian trying to sound British, another sounds like a German trying to sound Czechoslovakian, etc.) make SWIMMING POOL a bit hard to navigate at times, but the suspense is there, and that's the whole point. Combining attractive Italian giallo aesthetics with American teens-in-peril traditions, the movie offers a group of empty-headed kids, troubled by the usual petty jealousies and other insignifcant personal problems, sneaking into a state-of-the-art spa for an all-night party. A crazy murderer in a very stylish skull mask slices and dices his way through the cast with a machete he must have borrowed from Jason Voorhees.  Is the mad killer one of the teens in the group or someone else altogether? The story is nothing special but this movie is a lot more successful at being really scary than most teenkill pics.  There are some nail-biting stalking sequences, very intense and sometimes inventively staged murders and enough gory FX to keep the blood-and-guts lover watching. Not bad.  Not bad at all.  And not to be confused with the Charlotte Rampling suspense/drama of the same title. Good luck reading the artsy but near-illegible opening credits.

 TAMARA (2005)

Dir: Jeremy Haft

A pretty good teen horror flick in the CARRIE subgenre of stories about downtrodden nerds who are picked on by the popular kids once too often and take revenge with the help of supernatural powers.  Poor bookworm and would-be witch Tamara writes a story for the school paper that infuriates the school's mean football jocks, so they set her up for a cruel practical joke involving a teacher on whom she has a crush.  Of course things get out of hand and Tamara is accidentally killed... or so it seems. She reappears at school the next day with a sexy new image and the power to hypnotize her boorish classmates into various acts of degrading and fatal behavior. One nice girl who was innocent in Tamara's humiliation but who was present on that fateful night tries to intervene, knowing she's now on Tamara's hit list too.   The only real drawbacks here are the fact that most of the "kids" look too old to be high schoolers, the teachers look about the same age as the kids, and the central focus of Tamara's revenge is her sexiness, clarifying once again the outmoded message that active female sexuality is a terrible threat and a sure sign of evil intent.  That said, the lead actress and the makeup and wardrobe departments are to be commended for a job well done. The combination of clothes, makeup and attitude make for an impressive change in chacater, unlike many "worm turns" teen stories which present beautiful grils as allegedly homely and gross until they simply take off their Coke bottle-bottom glasses and reveal themselves as glamorous beauties. Thanks to an excellent performance, pre-trauma Tamara is a genuinely unappealing-looking girl with a constant Rick Moranis-style look of worried submission on her face. Once she acquires magic powers, she projects such total confidence and ruthlessness that you can believe the reactions she gets at school.  High school-set horror movies seldom offer such strong lead performances. There are a lot of opportunties for stupid behavior in a plot like this, but this movie has a good enough script to avoid making the same mistakes many similar films have made and gives us fairly realistic characters and reactions, keeping things interesting even though the story isn't the height of originality.  Oh, and if you were wondering, yes, there are some bloody special effects here and there and they're excellent.

 TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING (1958)

Dir: Don Fields

A seriously terrible, hour-long monster movie with a unique post-production history.  An archaeology professor takes six of his most boring students on a trip to some ancient Indian burial grounds.  The  wooden kids find a mummified body covered with hardened mud in an underground cave.  The prof thinks it's an example of early man, but thanks to some shabby opening narration, we know it's really a "missing link" type monster who's much older than mankind and who's spent eons slowly evolving from some unidentified lower life form (a fish, maybe) into a tall, jaw-droppingly ridiculous humanoid. While the gang is busy reading their cue cards in a cabin, the ancient whatsit revives and lopes away into a nearby orange grove.  The acting and dialogue are horrendous, but the monster is the most amazing aspect.  He looks like a guy who, perhaps as part of a fraternity hazing, was tarred and feathered and forced to parade around in a cheap Halloween mask.  The mask has oversized, poorly painted eyeballs a la Harry Thomas, two big silly fangs and no expression whatsoever.  It only gets to kill one woman, which it does unprovoked after smashing through a window of the house in which she's staying.  The attack scene is hilarious.  Despite the title, the closing "battle" is practically over before it begins.  The sheriff (who never thinks to call for backup even though he knows there's a dangerous monster in his town) waits forever at a clearing on the edge of the orange grove, hoping the thing will eventually wander out and find the sack of meat scraps he's placed there (even though there's no evidence that the beast is a carnivore).  Finally, the thing rears its big cardboard-and-cotton ball head, at which point it is easily set on fire and collapses, The End.  It never even occurs to anybody that a living, breathing creature like this might be a valuable scientific find.   The most interesting thing about this stinker is that, although it played some drive-ins in the early '60s in black-and-white, it turned up in full color in the 70s!  The 1976 release THE CURSE OF BIGFOOT uses nearly this entire feature as a long flashback padded with new opening footage designed as a framing story.  Of course the ancient mummified monster has nothing to do with Bigfoot, but in the '70s Bigfoot was a hot topic after the surprise success of THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK in 1973.  That no-budget wonder included a monster-smashing-through-a-window scene that's remarkably similar to the one in TEENAGERS BATTLE THE THING.   If you think that's astounding, consider that this isn't even the only non-Bigfoot movie that eventually got turned into a Bigfoot movie.  The very strange 1965 cheapie THE LEGEND OF BLOOD MOUNTAIN, a/k/a DEMON HUNTER, actually had its bizarre monster replaced by a Bigfoot type creature to cash in on the craze and was re-released in 1976 as BLOOD BEAST OF MONSTER MOUNTAIN!  But that's another story......

 TERROR IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE (1958)

Dir: Harold Daniels

 TERROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1977)

Dir: Calvin Floyd

Forget the hype about MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN (1993) and FRANKENSTEIN THE TRUE STORY (1974) being the most faithful versions. This neglected Swedish-Irish co-production is still the only movie that's a sincere attempt to accurately portray the characters, events and prevailing mood of Mary Shelley's novel.  In fact, it's a lot closer to the original story than any of the other movie versions. Victor Frankenstein (the perfectly cast Leon Vitali) is presented as an intense, moody, headstrong, somewhat neurotic medical student whose tunnel-visioned sense of righteousness is shattered when he sees his Monster awaken for the first time and suddenly feels only horror. As in the book, Victor is completely unable to face the consequences of his experiment, trying at first to convince himself that he must have dreamed the whole thing and then simply running away from it all and pretending nothing ever happened. It isn't that easy for the Monster (Per Oscarsson), who is also much nearer to Shelley's concept of the character than in most movies.  Instead of a mindless robotic killer, Oscarsson's Monster is an accurate portrayal of the confused, desperate and reasonably intelligent creature from the novel. He only becomes a hateful, bitter, resentful fiend after he's had plenty of time to think about who and what he is.  Oscarsson is one of the best Frankenstein Monsters in movie history in terms of his performance but he has to work hard to overcome the entry-level monster makeup he wears. There are no bloody stitches, neck bolts or misshapen features here, but one wishes they had made his appearance a little more monstrous. His main physical shortcomings are black lips, red-rimmed eyes and a sallow complexion, making it seem more likely that the 'normal' people he meets would view him as a sick person in need of medical attention instead of reacting with total revulsion and horror when they see him.  We learn almost nothing of the nature of Frankenstein's experiments in this telling, which eschews most of the medical/surgical/electrical details common in movies. About the only familiar element of the Monster's creation is the fact that Frankenstein uses a kite to attract a bolt of lightning to infuse his creation with life. The creation scene, usually the highpoint of Frankenstein movies, is handled in a strangely offhand, nonchalant manner here. It's mostly offscreen and happens very quickly with hardly any buildup.  Many passages have very little dialogue and even background music is used sparingly, creating an oddly sedate atmosphere. The period setting and scenery are superb and help to ensure that even the slow parts are watchable. Many of the indoor scenes have a nicely spooky, dramatically shadowy lighting scheme, one of this (very literal) film's few concessions to gothic horror tradition.  Don't expect a lot of action or spectacular visual effects, but if you'd like to see a thoughtful, authentic looking, well-acted version of the classic tale that faithfully follows the source material and treats it respectfully, this is definitely worth watching.  It's also known as VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN and it was released in the U.S. by Independent-International, even though it's a far cry from their usual horror fare (BRAIN OF BLOOD, DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS, etc.).

 TERROR TOONS (2001)

Dir: Joe Castro

A clever premise is once again shot down by poor scripting, indifferent direction and amateurish acting.  The title refers to a DVD created by the devil himself, who wants to take over the world with cartoon violence since it's dawned on him that pretty much anything can happen in a Saturday morning cartoon.   Evil cartoon characters "Dr. Carnage" (a giggling mad scientist with a green witch face and a great hypnotic spiral strapped to his forehead in place of a doctor's mirror) and his sidekick "Max Assassin" (a guy in what looks like an unfinished gorilla suit with purple fur and googly eyes) come out of the DVD and slaughter four bad actors who are supposed to be 17 but who look 35.  Narration that should have been left out tells us that the monkey-man rebelled against his boss and that the two characters are now mortal enemies, but they function as a team for the rest of the movie anyway.  The terms "cartoon" and "animation" are used a lot but the parts of the "Terror Toons" show we see are really just actors in goofy oversized masks superimposed against against drawn backgrounds.  The house in the "real" world looks almost as wacky as the cartoon-style backgrounds, with stars and flames painted on the walls and lava lamps all over the place.  So much for creating a contrast between cartoon reality and natural reality. There are some good ideas here but for this to really succeed at being either funny or scary it really needed true animated characters along Roger Rabbit lines.  The main attempt at establishing the feel of a cartoon?  Funny sound effects from old 'Looney Tunes' shorts are played every time anything happens (and sometimes even when nothing happens).  I liked it when the zany killers attacked people with oversized cartoon-style weapons, but most of the murders are a little too prolonged and sadistic to fit this material.  There's a lot of gore as people's insides are torn out and some of it looks convincing, but most of the blood and offal is too dark.  One victim gets her spine ripped out and her corpse used as a ventriloquist dummy, a gag borrowed from the vastly superior KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE.  The soundtrack copies Danny Elfman's score for BEETLEJUICE but actually does a fine job of it.  The worst flaw is the aggravatingly slow pace.  Every scene goes on far longer than it needs to, which dilutes the intended suspense and works against the effort to create a frantic Tex Avery style mood.  If the editing had been a little more disciplined, cutting the movie down to about half its length, this creative but slow-moving clinker would have been a lot more watchable.  As lousy as TERROR TOONS turned out, enough people eventually rented the DVD to allow a couple of sequels to be made a few years later.

 THEATER OF DEATH (1966)

Dir: Samuel Gallu

THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL (1981)

Dir: Ovidio Assonitis

Slapdash slasher shenanigans from the man who brought us the creepy BEHIND THE DOOR and the atrocious TENTACLES. This one differs from most of Assonitis' films in that it isn't a blatant copy of any one specific successful Hollywood movie (although it does bear some resemblance to Brian DePalma's SISTERS). Trish Everly (in her only film role) is good as a troubled teacher at a school for the deaf. Her insane disfigured twin sister escapes from the loony bin and comes after her on her birthday. Several innocent bystanders are slashed or stabbed to death, their bloody corpses adorned with party hats and seated around a dining table for the bland and extremely anticlimactic climax. The idea of a crazy, facially scarred woman wanting to disfigure her pretty twin to make them look the same is a potentially ingenious one, but this haphazard script does it no service. The characters aren't identical twins anyway (the ugly one is even played by a different actress), so all the blabbing about the sisters sharing some mysterious psychic bond and the bad one's goal of making the good one ugly like herself goes out the window. The evil sister is aided in her pointless killing spree by a large, inexplicably well-trained dog who somehow knows exactly whose throats to rip out to please his fresh-from-the-nuthouse mistress. The dog is scary when he's played by a real dog, growling and noisily rushing toward people, but in closeups he is replaced by an unfortunate hand puppet that resembles Triumph The Insult Comic Dog. The heroine's uncle is a Catholic priest who sings nursery rhymes as he chases people around with a steak knife. The audience isn't supposed to know the priest is a bad guy until it is casually divulged halfway through the film, but anyone who's paying attention will peg this wide-eyed wackjob as a psycho from his first frame of film. A couple of the murders are artistically staged and it must be admitted that there's a nice aura of dread hanging over much of the movie, but the story is an incoherent jumble of random elements that never come together and the ending is as weak as water. There's ultimately no reason for the heroine to be working with deaf children, no reason for the sisters to be twins, no reason for one of the maniacs to suddenly decide to kill the other in the finale, no reason for the sister or the uncle to be crazy murderers, and really no reason for the whole revenge plot in the first place. A quote from George Bernard Shaw concerning the arbitrary nature of real life is tacked onto the end in an attempt to excuse the fact that you've just sat through a movie that made no sense. The actress who plays the heroine's doomed friend was a regular on The Bill Tush Show around the same time. Unless you're a huge fan of '80s slasher flicks, you'll probably feel like Ovidio is wasting your time with this garbled tale. It is a/k/a MADHOUSE.

 TOMB, THE (2007)

Dir: Ulli Lommel

In the 1960s and '70s, Edgar Allan Poe was the celebrated (and long-dead) author of dark fiction getting his name opportunistically tacked onto cutprice movies that had little to do with his actual works.  A generation later it was H.P. Lovecraft whose name was being dragged through even deeper mud by being unfairly attached to mindless trash movies like this.  The actual title on the print of this dud is H.P.LOVECRAFT THE TOMB  (no, not even "LOVECRAFT'S", just "LOVECRAFT") but it bears no resemblance to anything the author ever created other than randomly borrowing a few of Lovecraft's character names.  It's a super-cheap SAW ripoff in which a man and a woman wake up locked inside a warehouse, finding themselves marked with toe-tags, unconvincing stab wounds and an inexplicable inability to navigate their way around what appears to be a fairly small, one-room structure.  They've been cut, beaten and otherwise injured (none of which woke them up) but instead of registering the excrutiating pain they would logically be feeling, they behave like they've extremely tired and can barely keep from dozing off.  After seeing the film, I can't say I blame them.  They're the prisoners of a spiteful idiot who uses a voice synthesizer to make himself sound like Billy the puppet from the SAW films, torments his captives by displaying his collection of decorations from Wal-Mart's Halloween department, and sets closed-circuit TVs around to broadcast grainy, static-laden images of people being sliced and diced.  Unbearably repetitious, the plot (such as it is) has another dull, bloodied-up victim character appear every so often with crushing regularity, each one either wrapped in plastic sheets or sealed in cheap plywood coffins.  No one in this movie, including the candles that burn inside the coffins, seems to require oxygen.  All the victims bear some kind of cherry jell-o injuries that never bleed enough and each of them dies from unspecified internal injuries at just the moment Lommel needs them to, with no regard for logic or probability.  The first guy to die evidently expires from sheer boredom.  It's possible that he's supposed to have bled to death, but since we only see about a cupful of fake blood, one supposes it must have been internal hemorrhaging that did him in, despite the lead actress's uncalled for exclamation of "There's so much blood!"  The editing and continuity are amusingly poor throughout, and the sets, props (including an alarmingly fake looking handmade Lovecraft book) and effects are so embarrassingly phony that it's hard to believe Lommel was once taken seriously as a filmmaker. Even the name of a motel written on the side of a building looks more like hurried graffiti than anything you'd see on a real place of business.  If you're ever unfortunate enough to have to suffer through this pitiful quickie, be sure to look for the shot (near the 49-minute mark) in which the cameraman's shadow is clearly visible on the heroine's rear end.  The big pointless finale is that the psycho is just some ordinary looking guy who holds personal grudges against each of his victims, all parties who wronged him in the past.  The director's slapdash script is far too lazy to try to explain how the culprit could possibly have pulled off all the kidnappings and other complicated shenanigans, and it's hard to tell if old Ulli was caught up in artistic pretense or common senility when he tacked on a double ending that has the last-minute events suddenly flip-flop and happen again slightly differently.  As unforgivably stupid as this cheeselog of a movie is, it's still not as bad as Lommel's video vandalization of Poe's THE RAVEN, released the previous year.  

 TOOTH FAIRY, THE (2006)

Dir: Chuck Bowman

A copyright battle between the makers of this movie and the people who made the similar DARKNESS FALLS (which had THE TOOTH FAIRY as its shooting title) resulted in the production of two disappointing features covering the same basic story. Weak as it was, DARKNESS FALLS looks like a masterpiece compared to this stale tale. A dorky guy moves into a closed bed-&-breakfast with his wife and 12-year-old daughter, intending to re-open the place to the public. Little does he know, in 1949 a wicked old woman with a rare disease that turns its victims into lumpy-faced, deep-voiced, homicidal, obvious men in drag was murdering local children in the building and collecting their baby teeth in a box for reasons that are never explored. The lazy script plays it safe by sticking to as many tried-and-true horror tropes as possible without ever daring to throw in anything fresh. We never even find out what happened to the witch between 1949 and 2006, so I have no idea whether she was supposed to be a ghost in the proper sense, or some other kind of evil entity. They don't even bother to tell us if she was ever captured, executed, managed to escape or anything else... she's just there to bedevil the 21st-century family in hackneyed slasher film style. The script keeps telling us she killed kids in order to collect the last remaining baby tooth from each one, but there's no explanation for why she slaughters every adult in sight too, often with power tools. The daughter befriends a little girl who is the ghost of one of the victims, leading to a confused showdown in a haunted cemetery full of understandably peeved child ghosts. The worst element is a pair of inbred redneck brothers who we're expected to believe can get away with assault, rape, and (as far as we can tell from the movie) even atempted child murder on a regular basis because the local sheriff is their cousin, and no law enforcement officers from anywhere else are ever called upon. Since they're not remotely believable, the hostile goons only drag the story down to the level of the phoniest TEXAS CHAIN SAW imitations and should really have been left out. The same goes for the equally useless time-filling character of their inexplicably disfigured older sister who staggers around in a red hooded coat and has nothing to do with anything.  It's depressing to see P.J. Soles (from ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL and the original HALLOWEEN) deliver an awful performance as a mean old neighbor who pops in long enough to deliver the predictable "get out of town before it's too late" spiel.  Some of the bloody makeup effects are good but the lack of believable characters, time-wasting plot detours and reams of bad dialogue will make this an endurance test for all but the most patient of horror viewers.

TORTURE GARDEN (1967)

Dir: Freddie Francis

 TOURIST TRAP (1979)

Dir: David Schmoeller

This mind-blowing backwoods horror tale starts out looking like it's going to be a garden variety TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE copy, but it soon turns into something very different indeed. Any movie in which mannequins come to life is bound to be creepy, but TOURIST TRAP really goes the extra mile, exploiting the inherently unsettling nature of life-size dummies to the fullest. A group of young disposable victim types (although more believable ones than in most "dead teenager" movies) have car trouble and end up stranded at an ill-defined roadside wax museum attraction owned by neurotic loner Slausen (Chuck Connors, who is marvelous).  The friendly but eccentric and vaguely threatening Slausen warns the kids to keep away from the nearby cottage where his crazy brother Davey lives.  Davey, it seems, is a deranged, childlike, telekinetic psycho who wears plaster masks and apparently has the power to bring inanimate objects to life simply by willing it. Before long, mannequins (and parts of mannequins) are moving around on their own, people are being turned into mannequins, and heads with blank eyes and huge gaping mouths are crying out in the darkness.  The odd sudden deaths are more dramatic and shocking than in most slasher movies. No real explanation is ever given for the film's many violent paranormal events, but it doesn't matter.  Even though the movie as a whole is pretty pointless apart from a thin "don't trust strangers" motif, TOURIST TRAP is so well constructed, with the story losing its grip on reality as its characters lose theirs, that it's never less than entertaining and is often brilliant in its depiction of the stuff of nightmares.  It's a rare film in that it sets up a scenario in which virtually anything can happen but is still capable of making the viewer care about what's going to happen next.  Since it was made well before the influence of the Freddy Krueger franchise on the genre, its surrealism is more unpredictable and less annoying than that of many of the senseless dream-horrors that came along after Elm Street's enormous success.  The devastating final image is unforgettable. Director Schmoeller went on to numerous other horror projects including CRAWLSPACE (1986), PUPPET MASTER (1989) and the cheesy but unuque NETHERWORLD (1991).   This low-budget descent into madness is still his most fascinating movie.

 TOWER OF BLOOD (2003)

Dir: Corbin Timbrook

Ever see those generic products that some supermarkets offer?  You know the ones...they have plain, simple labels that simply say "Paper Towels" or "Spaghetti Sauce" or "Frozen Peas", with none of the brand names, fancy package designs or colorful logos found on known brands.  TOWER OF BLOOD can be classified as Generic Slasher Film product, offering as it does a collection of 1980s horror cliches with none of the "extras" like a background for its murderer, personalities for its characters, any complex plotting or even a proper ending.   It's hard to believe that, a generation after HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH defined the American slasher movie, some people are still cranking out slavish imitations of them, but here's a prime example of just such a copy. This cheap slasher outing isn't particularly badly acted or photographed or edited, but it's amazing that at least a tiny little bit of originality didn't creep into it somewhere, even accidentally.  But no.  TOWER OF BLOOD simply goes through the motions, never straying an inch from the path already stalked many times by Michael and Jason, nor ever varying the formula by a degree.  After killing off a handful of idiots at an Asylum For The Criminally Insane that has no security system whatsoever, a big hulking goon in Michael Myers' blue jumpsuit and a cheesey sub-Jason face mask walks and walks and walks and walks until he makes his way to an old disused office building in which he finds a gang of the usual oversexed, beer-guzzling, pot-smoking, teenage nobodies.  In between boring music video style montages backed by thrid-rate rock by a band called Lithium, he eventually gets around to using a machete (I think he borrowed it from Jason) to stab and decapitate the teens in the blandest, least suspenseful murder scenes imaginable.  After they're all dead but one, this movie has the incredible gall to end with the last survivor suddenly sitting up in bed for the old "it was all a dream" thing, after which the masked murderer is shown to be right there in the room with him, just like you'd expect.  That ending was a desperate (and desperately tired) cop-out 20 years before. At least the FRIDAY sequels went to the trouble to stage some fairly inventive murders, but this movie just copies everything from previous slasher flicks and doesn't even offer much in the way of makeup FX or even gore.  TOWER OF BLOOD is guaranteed 100% devoid of anything remotely resembling the slightest molecule of original thought.  Which makes it a thoroughly useless movie but a potentially great cure for insomnia.

 

 TOY BOX, THE (1970)

Dir: Ron Garcia

 TOYBOX, THE (2005)

Dir: Paolo Sedazzari

 TRACK OF THE MOON BEAST (1976)

Dir: Dick Ashe

 TRESPASSING (2004)

Dir: James Merendino

TRICK 'R TREAT (2008)

Dir: Michael Doughterty

This admirable hymn to George Romero's 1982 hit CREEPSHOW took two years to get released (it was made in '07 and finally made an inauspicious DVD debut in '09). It's a sloppy, mixed trick-or-treat bag of standard horror ingredients that benefits from a superb autumnal feel and a perfectly cool color pallette that emphasizes chilly blue mists sweeping through a warm golden-lit suburban night. On Halloween, four (or perhaps four-and-a-half) muddled intertwining tales present people who hate or disrespect the holiday being punished by supernatural forces. The potential was here to create the greatest Halloween movie ever, but TRICK 'R TREAT falls far short of its goal because of distractingly poor characterization and a complete failure to ever show anybody behaving in a remotely believably fashion. I can live with one-dimensional characters in the context of EC Comics-inspired short stories, but the thick-skulled inhabitants of the community in this movie are infuriatingly irrational, cartoonishly short-sighted and can't seem to remain consistent from scene to scene, moment to moment, line to line. Thus a woman who hates Halloween with a passion is seen wearing an improbably elaborate, uncomfortable, cumbersome costume. Her yard is decorated elaborately enough to rival the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, which is also highly unlikely even though the script lets us know her husband is a Halloween fanatic. After allowing an incredible array of decorations to be erected in her yard for the big night, she abruptly chooses to start taking them all down while the streets are still crowded with trick-or-treating kids in their costumes. (??) A guy who was responsible for a terrible crime in the past and who officially disappeared afterward has actually been living right there in the same neighborhood for 30 years and nobody knows he's the missing miscreant (Didn't his neighbors and other local residents recognize him? Weren't there any police or government records? Didn't he have to pay taxes, or even have a social security number?). Another well-known local man is a serial killer but his behavior is so completely freaky that anyone with half a brain would suspect him immediately. A teenage girl is cruelly regarded by everyone as a "retard" and an "idiot savant" but she behaves like neither, acting instead like a nerdy brainiac (think Velma from SCOOBY-DOO). Some kids go to ridiculous lengths to scare a classmate they hardly know, and one of them suddenly changes his mind and decides it was morally wrong to prank the victim as soon as the gag he helped pull off starts to work. A gang of absolutely gorgeous young women act like they have to go to extremes to get men to look at them (this unrealistic behavior is eventually explained but it's still mighty hard to buy into their love-starved schtick along the way). Nothing is explained at enough depth for it to make much sense, but the wonderful look and feel of the film is enough to keep things entertaining most of the time. The film's greatest innovation is "Sam", a mysterious three-foot-tall sack-headed spirit who watches events from a distance, helps punish those who scoff at Halloween and basically serves as an all-purpose mascot for the holiday. The Sam character is memorable and artfully designed, but unfortunately his main participation is in an unacknowledged remake of an old TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE television episode in which a miserly, Halloween-hating old man was menaced in his home by a pint-sized goblin during trick-or-treat time. As in the TV version, the monster is never explained beyond being some sort of vague avenging spirit whose function is to enforce the observation of Halloween traditions. Its complete lack of realism prevents TRICK 'R TREAT from being very satisfying, but it does offer some good makeup effects, a few surprises (however trviial), at least one brilliantly staged and shot knife attack, and that great Sam monster to make it passable. Don't expect the masterpiece promised by the online pre-release hype, but do give this clumsy feature a look next Halloween. Most of it may be stale flavorless candy, but there are a few authentically tasty treats to be found inside.

 UNREST (2006)

Dir: Jason Todd Ipson

 URBAN LEGENDS: BLOODY MARY (2004)

Dir: Mary Lambert

The third entry in the unrelated "series" that constructs horror movies around old folk tales about events that never really happened but which persist as "true" in popular culture.  This time, a high school senior is killed by a macho jock on Prom Night 1969.  In modern times she shows up as a RING-style ghost to punish a gang of clods on the school football team who drugged and kidnapped (sort of) some ditzy girls. There's a perfectly servicable ghost story in here, but unfortunately the script is written in a primitive, simplistic manner that requires the main characters to make a lot of bad calls and do a lot of dumb things in order to keep the plot moving.  If anybody behaved with a realistic sense of how a human being with a functioning brain might really react to these situations in real life, the movie would have been 14 minutes long. So people have to keep doing stupid, illogical things in order to get themslves killed and to keep the ghost's secret from being revealed. Photography is excellent and there are some pretty eye-popping special effects, plus a magnificent graveyard set, but the nonsensical story is too much to swallow.  From the beginning, when a girl runs away from an assailant during the prom by making a bee line for a dark, empty, isolated storage room instead of simply going back into the well-lit room full of people at the prom, things are pretty hard to believe. Later we're asked to accept that an old trunk located in a perfectly accessible part of the school (a room that isn't even kept locked) could go 35 years without anybody ever opening it, and that the body rotting away inside would never cause a noticeable smell.  And that a girl could disappear from the Senior Prom and nobody in town would even bother to search the school grounds for her. And that a bright student trying to solve the recent crimes would find hard evidence and never think of taking it to the cops.  Another problem is that the story is frequently choppy and sloppy, as though some scenes that might have made things flow more smoothly were cut out in the interest of keeping things fast-paced or keeping the running time down.  This movie (from the director of the PET SEMATARY films) certainly looks good, but the story is too clogged with unlikely twists and by-the-numbers staging to stand out from the crowd of generic teen-kill stuff.