April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.

Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.

Post-Carrie, we’ve seen so many films where people turn to the Devil to help them fit in or fight back against bullies. But let’s face it — when you dress up Carrie White or Sissy Spacek or Chloë Grace Moretz, they end up being attractive. But Clint Howard? There’s really no dressing up, Clint.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the man and his many, many contributions to film (Balok from the Star Trek TV series, Carnosaur, Apollo 13, Rock ‘n Roll High School, and so much more). But you can totally see how he fits his role as Stanley Coopersmith in this movie.

Evilspeak starts in the past, where Satanist Father Esteban (Richard Moll, who ends up in these reviews a lot, thanks to films like The Nightmare Never Ends and The Dungeonmaster) and his followers are exiled from Spain and denied the grace of God, unless they renounce Satan and his evil ways. We wouldn’t have a movie if they gave in, right?

Fast forward to the 80’s. Stanley Coopersmith is an orphan, a poor kid who has been allowed into a military school alongside the children of some of the nation’s richest and most powerful people. Everybody — including the teachers — pretty much uses Stanley like a punching bag. While cleaning the church cellar, he finds Father Esteban’s room, which is filled with black magic books and a diary. Stanley uses his 1981 computer skills to translate the book and learn more about Esteban. My words will not translate how great Stanley’s Apple II’s computing power is.

The next morning, Stanley’s classmates tie up his clothes and unplug his alarm clock, which leads him to be punished. As he cleans the stables, the school secretary finds Esteban’s diary. As she plays with the jewels on the cover, pigs attack Stanley. He returns to his room to find all of his belongings destroyed and his book gone.

Sick of running out of computer time, Stanley steals a computer and sets it up in the basement. He’s only missing a few ingredients — human blood and a consecrated host.

That evening, the cook takes pity on Stanley and gives him Fred, a puppy. Seriously, this is the only person in the entire film who treats our hero with an ounce of respect, unlike Coach Collins in Carrie, who tries throughout the film to treat her well.

Stanley gets the Eucharist he needs and notices Esteban’s portrait. As he begins the ritual, students in masks and robes attack him. Stanley’s woes are compounded when the caretaker accuses him of being a thief and attacks him. He yells for help, and the computer starts up, revealing a pentagram. Suddenly, the caretaker’s head is spun around, killing him. As he hides the body in the catacombs, Stanley finds decapitated skeletons and Father Esteban’s crypt.

The secretary tries to pry the jewels out of the black magic book, but bleeds all over it. As she takes a shower, demonic boars attack and eat her. This scene is gratuitous as fuck. It is also incredibly awesome because the movie is just about to stop torturing Stanley and go off the rails.

Stanley gets attacked by his soccer team, who tell him that if he tries to play in the big game, they’ll kill Fred the dog. After seeing him get beaten, the principal kicks him off the team. And it gets worse. As the team goes out drinking, they break into his hidden room and kill his dog.

At this point, I was screaming at the screen for Stanley to do something. It was as if he was listening. He steals another piece of communion and kills a teacher who follows him in by throwing him into a spiked wheel. The ritual begins, and Father Esteban takes control of Stanley’s body, taking up a sword and attacking the church service above.

What follows is a near orgy of destruction. A nail from the Crucifix goes right into the brain of a priest. Wild demon boars emerge while Stanley levitates above them and starts chopping off everyone’s heads in gory, bloody geysers. The lead bully runs, only to meet the zombie caretaker, who rips out his heart. Then, Stanley burns the church to the ground.

I’m not understating this — this is literally five or six minutes of pure Satanic revenge porn. Everyone who did anything to Stanley for the past running time of the film gets it good. It was enough to get this film classified as a “video nasty” in the UK, and there were even more gore scenes, but they have supposedly been lost forever after the MPAA cuts. The final UK release had none of the Black Mass text and none of the gore at the end — what a loss!

If the film ended here, it would be the best movie ever. But no, producer Sylvio Tabet was a devout Christian. That’s why he added a Khalil Gibran quote in the prologue and ended the film with a caption that states that only Stanley survived the attack, but went catatonic and is in Sunnydale Asylum. That said, Stanley’s face shows up on the computer in the basement and promises, “I will return.”

I discovered a great article that discusses just how Evilspeak was allowed to be shot in a Catholic church. Another urban legend of the film is that upon refurbishing part of the church, an aged priest saw the “new church” and dropped to his knees to thank God. I hope he never saw the film, one that Anton LaVey believed explained the Satanic faith (it appears on the approved films list of the Church of Satan’s website and Magus Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the COS, stated that the film is Satanic because it depicts “a fellow who is treated unjustly gets revenge on his cruel tormentors. But of course, there are some nifty jabs at Christian hypocrisy along the way…”).

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.

Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.

A movie about a socially awkward, totally obsessed film fan whose love of old films borders on the obsessive, with nights filled with movie after movie after movie? This one hits a little too close to home.

Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, Breaking Away) works in a Los Angeles film distributor warehouse by day and watches movies by night. He’s the guy I was referring to earlier — someone so into movies he gets bullied by his family and co-workers. And when he meets Marilyn O’Connor, who looks like Marilyn Monroe, he finally finds someone whose looks are similar to the movie ideal that life does not always achieve. Or maybe he’s just so crazy that when he sees her, he goes into a fantasy fugue state and only sees what his brain will allow him to see.

Somehow, Eric is able to ask her out, but she stands him up by accident. This drives him completely out of his mind, transforming him into various film icons to destroy his enemies.

First, he re-enacts Kiss of Death by pushing his Aunt Stella (who is really his mother) down the steps, then shows up at her funeral as Tommy Udo, the role Richard Widmark played in the film. No one gets it. No one has seen the movies that Eric loves. There is no one to discuss them with. They can’t even put her grave next to Marilyn Monroe’s grave in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.

Eric then becomes Count Dracula and attends a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead. Eric then goes to Marilyn’s house in a scene inspired by Psycho. She screams, he drops his pen into the water, and the ink becomes the blood. “I only wanted your autograph,” he yells as he runs.

Eric then goes back to find a hooker who had been rude to him. He chases her, she falls and dies, then he drinks her blood. Obviously, Eric has not seen Martin. Actually, the way this scene is intercut with scenes from old black-and-white horror films, I am certain the makers of this film have seen Romero’s vampire film.

Now that Eric has gone this far, why not dress up as Hopalong Cassidy and kill off Richie (Mickey Rourke in an early role), a co-worker who bullies him.

Oh yeah — Tim Thomerson is a criminal psychologist who is working with a policewoman (they’re having sex, because 1980 and all) to find what he believes is a serial killer. The big problem is that his captain wants all the glory for himself.

Eric talks to his aunt as if she were still alive, then, after watching Halloween (producer Irwin Yablans also produced that film), he pleases himself while looking at a photo of Marilyn Monroe.

Eric’s dream has been to own his own movie theater and to make his own movie. He tells a sleazeball named Gary Bially his idea, Alabama and the Forty Thieves, and you get the feeling that not much good can come of it.

Eric’s boss fires him and won’t allow him back into work to get his posters. As his everyday self, even when trying to talk like a movie character, Eric is impotent. But when he’s dressed as The Mummy, he can frighten his boss into a heart attack.

After seeing Gary Bially on a talk show, where he talks up the movie Eric created as his own, Eric shows up at the producer’s birthday party. Dressed as James Cagney’s character from White Heat, he fires a submachine gun at everyone in the room before killing the man who stole from him.

The cops are on to Eric, but he’s hired Marilyn for a photo shoot and is all set to re-enact The Prince and the Showgirl when Thomerson’s character arrives. Eric runs to Mann’s Chinese Theater and makes it to the roof before dying just like Cagney in White Heat, yelling, “Made it, ma! Top of the world!”

Director and writer Vernon Zimmerman also created Unholy Rollers, but this movie is way beyond that. It shows how seeing the world only through movies can be dangerous to yourself and everyone else. Eric goes from shy and withdrawn to dark and mean by the end of the movie, becoming a new character. I wonder what he would have thought about the movie made from his life?

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.

Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.

Sometimes, you end up loving a movie for what it could be, way more than for what it is.

Popcorn would be one of those films.

Buried somewhere in its slasher framing story and four films within a film, some great ideas should have been explored further. And the closer the film gets to its conclusion, the more it starts to explain itself. I’m more in the John Carpenter camp when it comes to too much information — I’m often just fine not needing to know every motivation of a film’s villain. To wit — I don’t need to know that Michael Myers made papier-mache masks to assuage his pain. I don’t even need to know that he’s a human being. I just want the story to thrill me.

Popcorn was filmed entirely in Kingston, Jamaica — which explains the later dance numbers. That’s right. Dance numbers. The more you watch this film, the more incongruous it becomes. The production was also fraught with changes, as Alan Ormsby was originally the film’s director before being replaced by Porky’s actor Mark Herrier several weeks into filming.

Ormsby has a crazy bio — in addition to working with Bob Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged and Death Dream, he also wrote Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People and My Bodyguard. And strangely, he’s also credited with creating Kenner’s 1975 action figure Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces!

At the same time, Jill Schoelen (The Stepfather) replaced the original lead, Amy O’Neill. In fact, Schoelen was barely in scenes with the rest of the cast because so much had already been filmed, so she mostly appeared in reshoots! Even the title had something to do with a plot element that was cut from the final film, but the producers and distributor liked it so much that it was retained.

The film begins with Maggie Butler (Schoelen), an aspiring screenwriter and college student, who has recurring nightmares in which she is a young girl named Sarah. These dreams — in which a strange man stalks her — happen so often that she has an audio diary of them. Those very same dreams may or may not be connected to the prank phone calls her mom, Suzanne (Dee Wallace Stone, The Howling, E.T., Critters and many more), has been getting.

Sarah is also dating Mark (Derek Rydall, Eric from Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge), who tries to get her to come to his dorm room. She can’t — the script that she’s writing based on her dreams is more important. And so is the all-night horrorthon (JOIN US FOR THE HORRO-RITUAL!) that the school’s film department is putting on. It’s all Toby D’Amato’s (Tom Villard, who was one of the first 90s actors to openly admit that he was dying from AIDS) idea — with the goal of purchasing new editing equipment. NOTE: One assumes that Toby is named for Joe D’Amato, director of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Antropophagus, Absurd, Troll 2 and the Ator the Fighting Eagle series, plus 200 or more films.

The kids convert the Dreamland Theater — due to be destroyed in three weeks — with the help of Professor Davis (Tony Roberts, Annie Hall, Amityville 3-D) and a quick cameo from Ray Walston as Dr. Mnesyne, the provider of the props for the films.

Ah, those films — these movies-within-a-movie provide the best part of Popcorn. They are:

Mosquito: This 3-D film is a tribute to nature gone wild and nuclear terror movies of the 1950s. Even better, it pays tribute to Emergo, the technology (well, as far as sliding a skeleton down a rope can be called technology) that William Castle used to gimmick up House on Haunted Hill.

The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man: A callback to films like The Amazing Colossal Man, while also a nod to German expressionistic camera angles (a certainly odd blend). There’s a great scene here where the Electrified Man battles a gang of greasers armed with switchblades. There’s another gimmick here called “Shock-o-Scope” which is another tribute to William Castle and his film The Tingler.

The Stench: This is obviously a dubbed Japanese film, ala The Green Slime, but with the added gimmick of Odorama. There have been actual movies that use this technology, such as Scent of Mystery and, more dear to this author’s heart, John Waters’ Polyester.

Possessor: Found within Dr. Mnesyne’s — his name translates as memory — equipment, this short film is the most interesting part of Popcorn. It’s supposed to be a snuff film made by a Mansonesque cult of acidheads, but it looks and feels like something straight out of José Mojica Marins’ oeuvre (known as Coffin Joe, he’s made some of the strangest and best-titled films ever, such as At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse). Seriously, this strange little film, in which a voice just repeats “possessor” over and over while blood fills the screen, is awesome. If only the rest of the film — and one scene I’ll get to shortly — had been as imaginative and odd as this, we’d have a real winner on our hands.

Just by watching Possessor, Maggie passes out and has another nightmare. Upon awakening, Professor Davis informs the class that the film comes from Lanyard Gates (Bruce Glover, father of Crispin Hellion Glover), the leader of the aforementioned cult, who ended his final film by killing his family onstage while the theater burned down in flames around the audience. There were no survivors and no explanation for why the film survived.

As Maggie grows increasingly obsessed with the film, her mother becomes upset, telling her to just quit the film festival. That night, her mother gets a call from Lanyard Gates, telling her to meet him at the festival and to bring a gun.

The next day, when Maggie mans the box office, a man buys a ticket and calls her Sarah. She freaks, thinking it’s Gates. Meanwhile, just as the Professor is about to launch the mosquito prop during the film cue, a shadowy figure takes control of it, impaling him. Then, we see the same figure making a mask of the dead man’s face.

Oh yeah — Maggie’s mom shows up at the theater with a gun, and in the film’s best scene, Gates takes over reality, transforming the marquee to read “POSSESSOR.” That said — this scene has NOTHING to do with the rest of the film, as our villain has no such psychic or reality warping powers.

No one will believe Maggie’s story, and the films continue. A student named Tina (Freddie Marie Simpson, who, along with Megan Cavanagh and Tracy Reiner, appeared in both the movie and TV series A League of Their Own) has been having an affair with the Professor, whose doppelganger kills her and then uses her body to electrocute wheelchair bound Bud while he sets off the buzzing seats during the next film.

When Maggie finds his body, she runs into Gates and has a flashback. Turns out that she’s really his daughter, Sarah Gates, and Suzanne is not her mother, but her aunt who saved her. She tells all to Toby, who turns out to not be Gates, but his imitator. He was badly burned at the only showing of Possessor and holds Maggie and her aunt responsible. He prepares them both for his final act…of murder!

While setting up the Odorama, Leon is killed by Toby (but not before he pees all over him), yet he stops from killing Joanie when she confesses her unrequited love for him — an odd choice for a slasher film.

Whew. There are so many unnecessary characters and extra girlfriends and weird asides like a landlord who wants to be an actor, which, honestly, take away from the film. Long story short, Toby reenacts the end of Possessor to the jeers of the crowd, revealing his full face — a gruesome visage of wires and burned flesh. Luckily, he’s killed by the Mosquito prop just in time to save everyone — which is either a cheap repeat or a previous kill or a sly comment on sequels. Let’s go with the former. That said, it has a really nice pre-GoPro-mounted camera effect as Toby dies, but not before hearing the cheers of the crowd.

Honestly, Popcorn is a mess. But it’s an enjoyable mess. It’s simultaneously a tribute to 1950s black and white gimmick films while attempting to be meta commentary on the slasher genre, with none of the teeth of a film like Scream. There are ridiculous parts, like death by toilet and a way too long musical number where a reggae band plays while a cosplay-heavy crowd dances and Toby going from quiet kid to Freddy Krueger clone in the too quick conclusion to the tale. Throw in a balls-out bonkers end song — “Scary Scary Movies” — that features lyrics like “psycho on the move got a blade two feet long, kisses for his wife while he slices the bitch….so long!” screamed at the top of the rapper’s lungs, and you have something worth watching.

As an aside, the rapper Kabal has been doing entire albums of cheesy rap songs from horror movies. He even covered the theme from Popcorn!

There’s a heart and inventiveness to the film. There’s a real love for movies in here, particularly the fun promotional style of William Castle. It’s definitely worth a watch, as the 90-minute or so runtime practically flies by. 

April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.

Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.

The second film in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” (preceded by The Thing and followed by In the Mouth of Madness), Prince of Darkness was the first fruit of Carpenter’s deal with Alive Pictures. The pact was a filmmaker’s dream: complete creative control provided he kept the budget under a lean $3 million.

This is likely the only horror flick you’ll ever encounter that masterfully blends theoretical physics and atomic theory with ancient religious orders and the Antichrist. The DNA of Nigel Kneale (creator of Quatermass and the Pit) is all over this script; Carpenter even paid homage by using the pseudonym “Martin Quatermass” for the screenplay. From transmissions from the future to ancient malevolence being uncorked in the modern age, it feels like a lost Kneale script. Ironically, the British writer was famously grumpy about the association, having previously clashed with Carpenter on the gore-filled Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

Donald Pleasence, Carpenter’s go-to for gravitas, plays a character simply named “Priest” (though fans often call him Father Loomis). He discovers a deceased member of the Brotherhood of Sleep just as a secret is about to leak. It turns out a dilapidated Los Angeles church is hiding a canister of swirling green liquid that represents the Anti-God. This sentient sludge begins transmitting data that requires the brains of Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his team of students to decipher.

One by one, those students are taken over by the Anti-God or killed by the homeless people and insects that surround the building, led by Alice Cooper.  Also, every single person who hasn’t been killed or taken over starts to have the same dream, one where a shadowy figure emerges from the church. Each time they have this dream, a warning sent from the year one-nine-nine-nine, they see more detail. This part of the film, shot on video, played on a television and then reshot with Carpenter’s voice intoning the warning message, is one of the strangest and most surreal sequences ever included in a mainstream film.

I can’t say enough about how much I love this movie. It has great little character bits, moments of true horror and even some great compressed storytelling. I love that, instead of a long explanation of how a physics professor and a Catholic priest could be close friends, one student just offhandedly mentions that they were both part of a BBC exploration of God’s existence. That’s all we really need to know and it lets us answer that and move on to more important matters.

Hw can you not love a film that theorizes that Jesus was an alien and the Catholic Church has known that all along and kept the secret that another alien, an evil one, was on its way…or has a scene where someone just keeps typing “I live!” over and over again, then this message: You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED.”