By 1980, every holiday was taken. All writer and director Emmett Alston had left was New Year’s Evil. It would have to do.

TV’s most beloved punk, Diane “Blaze” Sullivan (“Pinky” Tuscadero from TV’s Happy Days) is getting ready to count the night down from a Hollywood hotel. Things are great until Evil himself call, saying that in each timezone, he’ll be killing a naughty girl, with Diane being the last to die.

In an insane asylum nearby, a nurse is the first victim, with the killer audiotaping each kill and replaying them. Who is he? A crazy fan? A religious nut? Her son? Her husband?

Whomever it is — I won’t tell — he dies by jumping off the roof of the hotel. But as Diane is loaded into the ambulance, her son (Grant Cramer, Killer Klowns from Outer Space) is at the wheel, wearing the mask of the killer.

The big selling point of this movie for me? Fake 1980’s punks. There is nothing like the Hollywood mainstream ideal of what punk rockers are like, because it is always far from the truth and always awesome.

This is fine, I guess. I wanted it to be something more, but maybe I demand too much from 1980’s slashers. There are good ones out there. This isn’t one of them. But you can always find out for yourself with the Scream! Factory blu-ray or watch it on Amazon Prime.

Damian Seryph (Leo Wyatt from TV’s Charmed and Sleepwalkers) is a police detective with a haunted past and a head full of visions he can’t understand. As he investigates a series of cult murders, he learns that they worship the four king demons of Hell and are planning on bringing them to Earth to start the Apocalypse. Can he come to grips with both his birthright and destiny?

With a name like Damian Seryph, he better! He soon learns that “The stories are real and Lucifer came to Earth to start his bloodline. To protect all of us!” By the end of the film, he’s the “devil of devils,” arms tattooed with symbols that can become filled with fire and ready for a few sequels.

Along the way, there are plenty of Satanic rituals and even some Elizabeth Bathory style bloodletting into a bathtub, for those that enjoy that sort of thing. It’s a pretty decent film — sure, it’s made on a smaller budget, but if that stops you from enjoying movies, why are you even on our site?

The Demonologist will be available on Demand starting January 1.

DISCLAIMER: I was sent this movie by its PR team, which has no bearing on my review.

If you’re looking for unique deaths, Blood Theater has them. Fried by a popcorn machine, electrocuted by a film projector, smoke inhalation from burning film and various stabbings ensure that the Beverly Warner Theater — where Xanadu was filmed — is awash in the blood.

The only good reason to watch this one is Mary Woronov, who plays Miss Blackwell, who is either in on or oblivious to the evil intentions of the theater. It doesn’t really matter, as most of her role is to sit on a desk and stretch out her legs. No complaints here!

Throughout the film trailers for other films appear: Clown Whores of Hollywood, Chainsaw Chicks, Amputee Hookers and Nightmare Of The Lost Whores. Obviously, Rick Sloane is a respectful lover of the ladies.

I must really have great admiration for Ms. Woronov, as I made it through this dreck because she was in it. But just barely.

You can watch it for free with your Amazon Prime subscription.

If you ever meet me in person, there’s a 90% chance I’ll be wearing a t-shirt of this movie. Therefore, I find it near impossible to be objective about this film. I love it too much. I can only share my adoration with you, dear reader.

Alternatively known as Paura Nella Città dei Morti Viventi (Fear in the City of the Walking Dead), Twilight of the Dead, The Gates of Hell and Ein Zombie hing am Glockenseil (A Zombie Hung on the Bell Rope), this is the first unofficial chapter in what has become known as Lucio Fulci’s Gates of Hell trilogy, along with The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

It all begins with a seance in the apartment of a medium, where Mary Woodhouse (Fulci heroine supreme Catriona MacColl, who appears in all three of the Gates of Hell movies) has a vision of Father Thomas as he commits suicide and opens the gates to the City of the Living Dead. That priest must be destroyed by All Saints Day or the dead will walk the Earth.

The images that she sees send her into a coma, which everyone else believes is her death. She’s buried as the police and journalist Peter Bell (Christopher George, Pieces) investigate her murder. As Peter visits her grave the next day, he hears her screams as the gravediggers discuss porn where a guy has sex so much that he dies (one of those guys is pornstar Michael Gaunt, who was in Barbara Broadcast and the other is an uncredited Perry Pirkanen from Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox).

Peter uses a pickaxe (!) to smash his way into the grave, nearly killing her as he saves her life. This scene has been ripped off twice that I know of, once informing the scenes of the Bride in the coffin in Tarantino’s Kill Bill (also look for a scene that takes Rose’s tears of blood later in that movie) and in this year’s abysmal The Nun. Neither of these have the frightening power that Fulci pulls of in this scene or the painful closure at the end, where Mary screams and pants in the open air, her eyes filled with pure terror.

Once Mary recovers, she and Peter visit the medium who reveals the answers behind her visions. As that’s all going on, a weirdo kid named Bob (Anyone named Bob is a Fulci movie is one to be feared) find a sex doll that somehow inflates itself before being scared off by a rotting fetus. And at Junie’s Lounge, a discussion of how weird Bob is leads to the mirror behind the bar shattering. As they say, strange things are afoot and this is just the start of Fulci’s descent into surrealism.

While all this is going on, psychologist Gerry (Carlo De Mejo, Manhattan Baby) is consulting Sandra (Janet Agren, Night of the Sharks, Hands of Steel) about life and how she used to want to marry her father before he ran out on her family. Just then, his girlfriend Emily arrives and tells him that she’s on the way to try to help Bob. When she finds him, he’s crying on the floor and shoves her away, just as Father Thomas appears and smothers her to death with a hand full of maggots.

Obviously, if you think anything is goign to make sense in this movie from here on out, you aren’t ready for this era Fulci. There are no filters left, just a demented Italian madman let loose in America with tons of fake blood, guts and film to burn.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Rose and Tommy (a young Michele Soavi ) are making out in his car and she thinks she hears a noise. It’s a total slasher moment that any other director would handle in a rote way. Instead, Fulci has the couple turn on the headlights and there is no joke or defusion of the tension. Instead, we see the priest hanging by the neck in front of them as Rose’s eyeballs bleed and she throws up her intestines (Daniela Doria is pretty much decimated by Fulci in every movie she did for him, including being knifed through the back of the head in the opening of The House by the Cemetery, has her chest and face sliced up brutally in The New York Ripper and asphyxiated in The Black Cat. I have no idea what he ever did to her, but you can read a great interview with her here. And yes, she did this scene by throwing up tripe and fake blood.). Then, Tommy’s head is ripped open.

Everyone suspects that Bob is behind the many disappearances in Dunwich, which totally isn’t going to keep Peter and Mary from heading there.

We’ve fully descended into Fulci world at this point. Bob is seeing visions of Father Thomas, a mortician gets bitten by a corpse when he tries to steal her jewelry, Emily’s zombie visits her little brother John-John, the same corpse that bit the mortician shows up in Sandra’s kitchen and broken glasses fly all over her house, spraying the room with blood. Meanwhile, Bob’s just trying to hide out and smoke a joint with Mr. Ross’s teenage daughter when the man comes in, nearly insane, and kills him with a drill press.

Yep. In any other movie, they’d tease death by drill or show you the moment before impact. Fulci revels in this scene and makes it last. Yes, that drill is going inside Bob’s head. And it’s coming out the other side, too.

Peter and Mary make their way to Dunwich, where they meet up with Gerry and Sandra. While they’re talking, a storm of maggots — oh that Fulci! — rains down on them. To top it of, Gerry gets a call that his dead girlfriend has risen from the grave and killed John-John’s parents. Sandra offers to take the kid to her apartment, but Emily is there and rips her scalp off before they save the boy just in time for a state of emergency to be declared.

Remember that bar at the beginning? Zombies invade it and kill everyone just as All Saints Day begins. Peter, Gerry and Mary (not Peter, Paul and Mary) go into the family tomb of Father Thomas, filled with skeletons, cobwebs and fog. Just to prove that this is 100% a Lucio Fulci film, Peter, who we’ve been led to believe is the main male hero, is killed when a zombie rips his brains out. Mary and Gerry battle Sandra and an army of zombies until they encounter the sinister priest, who makes Mary’s eyes bleed.

Before she can throw up her innards, Gerry stabs him with a cross and his guts fall out as he and the rest of the zombies go up in flames and become dust, with the Gates of Hell closed.

Mary and Gerry exit from the tomb to discover John-John and the police, but she soon screams as he comes near her and the film shatters to blackness. Wait — what just happened?

There are a ton of stories about the true ending of this movie. Some say John-John was supposed to be a zombie and the negative of the original recording was destroyed by a lab. I’ve also heard that the editor spilled coffee on the footage, forcing Fulci to improvise. And then some stories claim Fulci changed his mind about the end after the shooting was complete and just went with this. Interestingly, the Danish version of the film ends with a dark move across the graveyard and this text: “The soul that pines for eternity shall outspan death, you dweller of the twilight void come Dunwich.”

Trivia note: The movie Uncle Sam ends exactly the same way with the only exception being a title card that says, “For Lucio.”

Who knows how it ends! Who knows what the hell is going on for long stretches of this movie! It doesn’t matter! as Fulci would say, this is an absolute movie of images, a triumph of style (and gore) over substance.

The first time I saw this film was a third generation — or worse — dub on Hart Fischer’s American Horrors ROKU channel. As much as I love having 4K versions of things on blu ray, this is just about a movie made for the fuzzy quality of an old VHS tape.

Obviously, this was written by Dardano Sacchetti, who was behind so many of Fulci’s scripts, like Zombi, Manhattan Baby and Conquest, as well as so many other awesome movies like Thunder and Demons.

Eibon Press has put out two issues of a comic book adaption of the film that you should check out. I’m interested to see if issue #3 will feature the real ending of the story (or if there even is one)! You can also grab the new Arrow Video reissue of this movie at Diabolik DVD.

Don’t feel like leaving the house? You can watch this for free on Vudu or Amazon Prime. It’s also on Shudder and their version looks great.

Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) watched a strange film in her childhood called “Footprints on the Moon,” where astronauts were stranded on the moon’s surface. Now, as an adult, the only sleep she gets is from tranquilizers and she starts missing days of her life. Get ready for a giallo that skips the fashion and outlandish murders while going straight for pure weirdness.

After losing her job as a translator, Alice find a torn postcard for a resort area called Garma. That’s where she meets a little girl named Paula (Nicoletta Elmi, Demons, A Bay of Blood) who claims that Alice looks exactly like another woman she met named Nicole, who is also at the resort. Slowly but surely, our heroine starts to believe that a huge conspiracy is against her.

This is the last theatrical film of Luigi Bazzoni (he has directed some documentaries and wrote a few films since), who also directed The Fifth Cord. There are only two murders, but don’t let that hold you back. There are also abrupt shifts in color and a slow doomy mood to the entire proceedings. It’s unlike any other giallo I’ve seen and I mean that as a compliment.

Klaus Kinski also shows up as Blackman, the doctor who was behind the experiment that Alice saw as a child. He’s only in the film for a minute or so, but he makes the most of his time, chewing up the scenery as only he can. And cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, beyond working on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, also was the DP on films like Apocalypse Now, Reds, Last Tango in Paris and Dick Tracy.

Shameless Films, who are the folks to order this from, referred to it as “the loneliest, most haunting and beautiful giallo you will ever see.” I have to agree — especially with its shocking ending. This isn’t like any of the films that came in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and it’s a shame that its director didn’t make more films in the genre.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, Gangster Squad), Venom has appeared on plenty of worst of lists this year. I held back judgment until I saw the movie. I can sum it up in one word: underwhelming. But after all, who was clamoring for a Venom movie after Spider-Man 3? Who was needing one in 2018? And after the magic of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, why do filmmakers feel they can still be so lazy with superheroes?

That said, Venom is critic proof. After all, it was a box office success, ultimately earning $855 million worldwide, becoming the fifth highest-grossing film of 2018.

It all comes down to one good thing: Tom Hardy. It’s like this dude has to have the craziest voices in movies. His Eddie Brock voice is just the most need to please accent ever, while Venom, in his own words, is a “James Brown lounge lizard.” The relationship between these two characters — who become one person — is the best part of the movie. Hardy also improvised a lot, such as when he jumps into a lobster tank to cool down. I kind of love that the dude was pretty much making up his own film. The actor claimed that he based his performance on Woody Allen, Conor McGregor and Redman.

Everything else — from the villains to Eddie Brock’s relationships — is as generic as it gets. Big points for having Jenny Slate in here, even if she does nothing. It’s like the film felt it had to give us an origin when all we want to see is Venom break stuff. The end of the film, where he eats a criminal and meets Cletus “Carnage” Kasady (and come on, who doesn’t want to watch Woody Harrelson against Hardy in a battle of accents and overacting) is exactly what everyone really wants, not nearly two hours of generic soldiers and Venom battling Elon Musk.

In the spin of selling this movie, Columbia Pictures president Sanford Panitch claimed that “Venom was considered a spin on a horror film, inspired by the works of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, but with more pop and fun.” People that say these kinds of things have never seen films by these two directors. Get their words out of your mouth and make better movies.

The hard part of this whole thing is that there’s a tease of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which will either make you say, “I should have just watched that” or “Man, that was such a better movie.”

You know what is great about this movie? The Asian ad campaign, that promised that Venom was the best boyfriend ever. This ad above? It says, “Life’s most beautiful moment is the instant when I hold up an umbrella for you.”

The non-awesome thing? The Eminem theme for the movie. It gets stuck in your head. But it’s so bad — va-va-Venom? Wow. Really?

If all Ruggero Deodato did was make Cannibal Holocaust, he’d still be lauded — or despised — for his work. But he also directed cop films, like the violent Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, The House on the Edge of the Park (which owes such a debt to The Last House on the Left that it even has the same actor as the villain, David Hess), jungle violence like Cut and Run, adventure films, erotic thrillers and even a movie starring The Barbarian Brothers called, well, The Barbarians.

For a director who changed genres and sought out his own versions on what was commercial at the time, it’s little wonder that eventually, Deodato would make a slasher. Sure, he was around 6 years later to the slasher craze party, but let’s forget that and just enjoy.

It all starts with two teens, Tony and Rose, who skip basketball practice to make out in the woods. Obviously, they haven’t learned the first rule of surviving a slasher film: do not screw in the woods. The craziest thing is her father knows that she’s going to do this and has a total “oh well, what can you do?” reaction. He does say that the woods are dangerous and there has been this urban legend of a Native American shaman killing people, but kids will be kids.

They’re quickly killed, in case you may have thought the first people we’d meet in a movie would be the main characters. The only witness to their murder is the child of the camp’s owners, who sees everything while he’s in the process of searching for his teddy bear.

Charles Napier is in here as Sheriff Charlie and go figure, he has a teddy bear on his dashboard. Look out! Deputy Sheriff Ted is Ivan Rassimov, a welcome sight to these tired eyes. And is that Doctor Olsen played by John Steiner? Why yes, it is!

Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, The Perfume of the Lady in Black) and the aforementioned David Hess play the owners of the camp, who also have a strange love triangle — or so it seems — going on with Sheriff Charlie.

There’s also an RV filled with teenagers willing to break every law of the woods and court their violent deaths. This film lives up to its title — people are murdered horribly every few minutes — while proving that Italian exploitation directors have no compunction about doubling down on stealing things. Steal the doomed camp idea from Friday the 13th? That’s a good start. But what if that camp was built on a Native American burial ground like Poltergeist? Now you’re talking!

The dialogue in this film is exactly how you would imagine an Italian middle-aged man would think American teenagers talk, as they loudly yell about how much they like Iron Maiden in front of a campfire. They also loudly do Jazzercise, throw Frisbee, have sex, race dirtbikes (and make out on them!) and take plenty of showers to a non-stop blaring synth score courtesy of Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti.

Seriously, if there’s a man who knows what his audience wants, it’s probably Ruggero Deodato. There’s not really any story that you need to follow all that well, but if you stick around for a few minutes, you’ll be rewarded with either copious strangeness, nudity or gore — and often a combination of all three!

Even better, this all wraps up with the kind of out of nowhere twist ending that you’ve come to expect from Italian horror. Whew — this is the kind of movie that I can’t wait to watch again and I just finished it.

I’d like to thank Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum for continually reminding me to watch this and my Twitter pal eye von rassimov for finding a copy for me. Trust me — it’s difficult to get and I’m kind of shocked that Severin or Vinegar Syndrome haven’t released this on blu ray yet. I really hope that happens because as far as I know, every print available is so dark you can’t tell what’s going on.

It’s on Amazon Prime if you want to see it.

Have I ever mentioned how much I love Predator? Maybe. I definitely mentioned how much I love Predator 2. Hell, I even talked about how much I like Predators. So when it comes to a reboot of the franchise, it better be something amazing. I’ve heard so many bad reviews of this movie — directed and written by original writer Shane Black with help from Fred Dekker — that I avoided it until it came out on DVD.

The truth is, it’s fine. But for a Predator movie, it better be way better than fine. It’s a movie that has trouble trying to figure out if it’s a buddy comedy, an alien movie or an action film. The original film went up against those odds and knew when to subtly go from a testosterone-fueled epic to a horror movie. This one doesn’t manage that quite as well.

It all starts with a Predator ship crashes on the Earth in the middle of Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna’s (Boyd Holbrook) team’s hostage rescue mission. You know how snipers work in the field in the middle of hostage rescue instead of being off on their own taking out targets. That isn’t the only military error here — Nettles discusses flying Hueys when the Army discontinued their usage in 1984 and switched to the UH-60 Blackhawk.

But anyways, McKenna hurts the Predator long enough to send its armor to his PO Box so that he has proof of alien existence when he’s taken by government agent Will Traeger (Sterling K. Brown) and sent to military prison.

Meanwhile, evolutionary biologist Casey Bracket (Olivia Munn) has been recruited to study the Predator alongside Sean Keyes, the son of Peter Keyes (Jake Busey, whose dad Gary played Peter in Predator 2). The alien wakes up and wipes out the lab, except for Casey who finds the bus full of military prisoners and escapes.

Those escapees include former Marines Gaylord “Nebraska” Williams (Trevante Rhodes, Moonlight), Coyle (the always welcome Keegan-Michael Key), Lynch (Alfie Allen, brother of Lily), Baxley (Thomas Jane, this character was named for the stunt coordinator of the first movie and whose Tourette’s was as a tribute to Black’s wife) and Nettles. They go to find McKenna’s ex-wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovski from TV’s Chuck) and son Rory (Jacob Tremblay, who was amazing in Room), an autistic child who found the package and has already used to blow up a house on Halloween. 

When they arrive, the Predator’s dogs ambush them. Just when they are about to give the alien his armor back, a larger Predator arrives to kill the first and lets them go. Soon, however, it realizes that the stolen alien equipment it seeks is with the military men.

Because no one can leave well enough alone, it turns out that the Predators are taking DNA from different planets and using it to make themselves better, faster, stronger and more like the Hulk. This goes against the theme of the Predators looking for sport in their hunt, which is presumably why the first Predator was here to give something to humans.

The big green Predator kills just about everyone other than Quinn, his son and Dr. Casey before they figure out how to take him out. In the end, Rory is helping the government translate the Predator’s language and it turns out that the equipment is a suit of armor that can kill Predators.

There were two different reshoots of the film, with the entire third act being reshot after test screenings hated the original finale. Black wanted there to be two versions of the home release — Predator AM and Predator PM, as the film’s original ending was during the day — but the studio didn’t want to pay to complete the special effects.

The original ending had the military prisoners and the army teaming up with even more good Predators to fight the upgraded Predator and other hybrids, which the fugitive was trying to steal and keep from the upgraded Predators. Edward James Olmos was a general in these scenes, as are plenty of moments in the trailers, which were all cut. Supposedly this third act was too talky, but cutting it out resulted in plenty of holes in the story and continuity errors.

Sadly, the original script ended with Quinn, Casey and Rory healing after defeating the upgraded Predator when a helicopter lands. Dutch, played by Arnold himself, would step out and say, “Come with me.” Sadly, Arnold read the script and turned it down.

Behind the scenes, this wasn’t without controversy. Director Shane Black hired his longtime friend, Steven Wilder Striegel for a minor role, despite Wilder being a registered sex offender since he pled guilty into trying to lure a 14-year-old girl into having sex over email. A few days before the film was finally edited, Olivia Munn learned of this and asked that he be removed from the film. At first, Black defended his actions until the backlash forced him to go back on his arguments. Of the actors in the film, only Sterling K. Brown initially stood with Munn.

The other issue is that there’s a thesis in the film that kids with Asperger’s and autism are actually the next level of evolution, which would be nice if it had any science behind it. I’m certain that parents of these children may not agree with this story.

I wanted to enjoy this movie. I did, but throughout, it felt like a failed opportunity for one of my favorite film series to be essential. Instead, it’s a throwaway that I won’t remember for long. And that’s pretty sad.

The Bride was once called just that — a title that makes a lot more sense. But after Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, we got a plethora of movies renamed to seem close to that film, even if they’re nothing like it at all. Like this one — which is about when you start getting weirded out by how your new wife seems like a borderline insane daddy’s girl, the best choice of action is to not bang a bridesmaid on your wedding day.

That’s exactly what David does. But he’s just a part of Barbara’s dream life: a perfect house that daddy just for her and a perfect man to fill it. There are a bunch of match cuts that show her kiss her new husband just like she kisses daddy, so if you’re starting to feel weirded out, stick around.

David decides to hook up with his old girlfriend Helen on his wedding day, which is in the very house that his wife has made for them. Barbara stabs the old flame with scissors, walks out in a blood-strewn wedding gown past all her guests and disappears.

David then does what anyone else would. He moves his new girlfriend into the house and keeps working for Barbara’s dad, who has a friendly meeting with him with no anger at all. Well, he does relate a story about how his daughter used to enjoy cutting the heads off of chickens as a child. Of course, a chicken head is soon in the bed he should have shared with his wife. Trust me, things are only going to get worse.

Also, it’s going to get much weirder. I mean it. This is a legitimately strange film. It’s not like Wes Craven, whose film inspired the retitling of this. With his films, I often see an academic studying weird people and making a film versus real weird people who gathered together to make a movie that confounds you on every level.

Those strange people are John Grissmer (who also did another weird movie, Blood Rage, which features Last House on Dead End Street/The Bride as the movie playing in the drive-in that starts the film) and Jean-Marie Pélissié, who only directed this singular movie. This is the kind of strange magic that could only come from the early 1970’s. And much like another freakout from that decade, The Baby, this movie is also rated PG.

You can watch this for free with your Amazon Prime subscription.

Those Canadians — they’ve made four Prom Night films, starting with, well, Prom Night, where Jamie Lee Curtis confronts disco dancing and a murder in the past. Then there’s the utterly insane Prom Night 2: Hello Mary Lou, where a former prom queen comes back to tempt and murder the children of her classmates. And then there’s Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, which is a comedy continuation of Mary Lou’s story. Finally, we have Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil and it’s the craziest one of them all.

Hamilton High School. 1957. Lisa and Brad leave Lisa’s date behind to go heels to Jesus in Brad’s car, but are distracted by someone putting candles all over the hood. That’s when Lisa gets killed by a metal crucifix to the throat and Brad gets stabbed in the chest, his car set ablaze. That’s when we meet Father Jonas, who has been abused by multiple priests (keep in mind this was made in 1991) and now is showing signs of stigmata. Those priests now believe that he is possessed, so they jail him inside St. George Church.

33 years later, that’s where Father Colin is told by one of those priests that he won’t be going to Africa for missionary work. No, he’s going to stay right here and be Jonas’s new guardian, keeping him in a drug-induced coma. The problem is that Colin gets a mind of his own after Father Jaeger dies and he decides to stop drugging Jonas. Within hours, the evil priest kills the young man and makes his way to his old home. Cardinal Tourette is sent by the church to clean up matters, staging Colin’s murder as a suicide and hunting down Jonas.

Meanwhile, the old St. Basil Seminary is now Mark’s (J. H. Wyman, who would go on to create TV’s Fringe and Almost Human) family’s summer home, where he’s taking his girlfriend Meagan (Nicole de Boer, Cube), Laura (Joy Tanner, who is the voice of Candy Kong from Donkey Kong Country) and Jeff (Alle Ghadban, who would go on to be part of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) to celebrate their graduation and skip prom. 

There are some issues — Meagan was in love with the now deceased Father Colin. She’s also a virgin who is finally going to give up her modesty to Mark. And everyone wants to have sex with her, even Laura (yes, this is a scummy exploitation film, so these things happen). Also, all the of the electronics and applicances in the house have been stolen and Jonas is already living inside the house, claiming Mark’s younger brother Jonathan as his first victim.

Somehow — don’t ask me how — Jonas starts making obscene phone calls when he’s not killing off people. Just to show what a maniac he is, he walks around with Laura’s scalp after offing her and then crushes Jeff’s head with just his bare hands. Then he crucifies the young lovers’ bodies and sets them on fire because, well, why not?

Jonas then kills Mark and chases Meagan all over the grounds, only being stopped by bug spray (yes, I was amazed by this as you are reading it) and even uses his priest powers to interrupt phone calls to the police. Magical priest powers! She finds Mark’s gun and shoots the priest dead, only to have him come back and try and kill her as she prays for forgiveness. The dude has the Holy Water scepter from church, but it shoots out flames instead of water, which is perhaps the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen in a movie. Megan isn’t so impressed, as she beats him to death again with a shovel, then runs outside and blows a shed up real good.

The next morning, Meagan is placed in an ambulance while Jonas’ body is placed in another surrounded by the Cardinals of the church. He opens his eyes at the same time she does, tickling me with the feather of a promise that there would be a sequel to this.

If it doesn’t come through, I loved this movie. It’s total slasher ridiculousness a decade after everyone decided to stop making them. I love that when the kids drink to skipping the prom, they say, “Cheers Jamie Lee Curtis!” And with his role as Father Colin, Brock Simpson has been in every single Prom Night.

Killer abused priests with stigmata that can make prank phone calls with their mind and set up candles on cars before they kill. You can’t get that anywhere else, you know?

You can check this one out on Amazon Prime.