You remember that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to explain why he didn’t steal Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure?”

I’d like to hear whoever did the music for this movie to explain how they added a “da na na” to the theme from Halloween. Then again, there’s plenty more that this movie owes to that film.

A killer with a kitchen knife is on the prowl, killing off college kids. And he’s on the way to Lanier College during finals.

Meanwhile, a fraternity stages a mass shooting to help their members pass a chemistry test. How does this plan work? Who comes up with such a plan?

While students prepare for the end of the year, the killer is hiding among them. We have Courtney, who is the Final Girl, of course. Her roommate is Lisa, who is all into the hot professor. Well, not really hot. He’s a professor, though.

For some reason, all of the pledges can’t dare anyone. But Gary is in love with Janet and pins her, so he gets punished by being tied up to a tree, his underwear filled with ice and then sprayed with shaving cream. What? Where did this ritual come from? Who goes through with this? Even the rest of the town, like the security guard, follow these rules. What is the deal with this school?

Well, he’s tied up and the killer gets him. Then it gets his girlfriend, too. While that’s going on, Wildman, a frat guy, is looking for pain pills when he gets killed by a Universal weight machine. His friend Mark tries to find him and he gets killed.

Then we have Radish, who isn’t gay in the movie but would totally be a proud out character if this was made after 1981. He’s constantly looking for killers and has a great poster collection of old films. All his knowledge of murder doesn’t help, as he’s instantly killed.

Lisa tries to model for her boyfriend in the nude, but she gets killed, too. And now we’re down to one and the killer even catches an arrow and stabs the coach with it when he tries to save Courtney. But then he falls into a hole and she stabs him to death. That’s it. That’s the fight he puts up.

Written and directed by Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend Is a Vampire), this is pretty much Halloween with a killer who was too lazy to get a mask (he was also the fight coordinator for the film).

That said, I wasn’t bored, I laughed out loud at many of the things that Radish did and said, and I enjoyed the arrow catching scene. If you want to see it for yourself, Shout! Factory has released it on blu-ray and you can also watch it for free on Amazon Prime. You’ll be filled with questions. Like, how much chaffing did the short shorts of the 80’s cause?

A man who looks just like Sartana robs what has been — up until now — impossible to steal from. Now, bounty hunters are trying to cash in on the bounty on our hero’s head.

Giuliano Carnimeo (The Case of the Bloody Iris, Exterminators of the Year 3000) takes over the directorial reigns from Gianfranco Parolini with this film.

Sartana becomes less of an angel of death and more of a magician here. Yet he still seems supernatural. Surely he’s been shot so many times that only a dead man can survive having that much hot lead pumped into him!

The movie takes places in Poker Falls, a town devoted to gambling, and the bank robbed at the beginning actually has a gang of killers that seek out potential thieves and kill them before they get the chance to try to take money from them. Throw in Klaus Kinski as a card shark named Hot Dead and you have quite the pickle for Sartana!

This is the only film where Sartana has Buddy Ben as his assistant. Also known as Sartana the Gravedigger, this one didn’t grab me as much as the original. It’s certainly anything but boring, but I really liked the darker tone of the first one. Also, the theme music seems to reference “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” but in a Western banjo way, which seems quite odd to me!

The beauty of Predator is that it starts as a war movie and suddenly becomes a slasher before you even realize it. It subverts the macho tropes of Arnold movies by inserting a killing machine that is tougher, better armed and just plain unstoppable. And that killer? He’s just here for sport.

So why do I love Predator 2 so much? Because it’s literally a grindhouse or Italian exploitation version of Predator. Instead of the jungle, we get a literal concrete jungle. Instead of Arnold, Jesse and Carl Weathers, we get character actors galore, like Danny Glover, Robert Davi, Gary Busey and Bill Paxton. It has the feel of RoboCop with a non-stop media barrage led by real-life junk TV icon Morton Downey, Jr. (“Zip it, pinhead!”), and a populace that is constantly armed and always looking for a chance to use it. It’s one of the few slices of the future where it feels like today — the technology is only nominally better and everything pretty much sucks for everyone. And holy shit, is it fucking hot.

The 1997 of this movie is really 2018, to be honest. Except LA is in the midst of a war between the Colombian and Jamaican drug cartels. It’s a perfect place for a Predator to hunt — and once that alien sees Lt. Harrigan (Glover) in action, it seems like it’s playing a game to capture the lawman as his ultimate prize. That’s when we meet Special Agent Peter Keyes (Busey), who is posing as a DEA agent, and new team member Detective Jerry Lambert (Paxton at his most manic).

There’s a scene where the Predator interrupts a voodoo ritual (the girlfriend screaming for her life is former Playboy Playmate turned porn star (that was a rare thing in the 1990’s) Teri Weigel) and wipes out everyone, skinning them alive and taking pieces of them as trophies. One of the team, Danny (singer Rubén Blades) comes back to the crime scene, only to be killed by the camoflagued alien.

Harrigan starts tracking the killer, thinking he’s dealing with a human. He even consults King Willie (Calvin Lockhart, The Beast Must Die), the voodoo loving gang leader. That’s when we get that immortal line that Ice Cube sampled, “There’s no stopping what can’t be stopped. No killing what can’t be killed.” A short battle follows with an awesome two cut (literally) of Willie screaming and his severed head being carried away, continuing the scream.

Two massive action scenes follow: Lambert and team member Cantrell (María Conchita Alonso) battling a gang and the Predator on a train, then Keyes and his team battling the Predator in what they think is the perfect situation.

It comes down to Harrigan and the Predator battling one on one, from rooftop to buildings to a spacecraft. Harrigan overcomes the alien with its own weapons, then an army of other Predators appear (this made me stand up and cheer when I saw this 27 years ago in the theater) and one of them hands the cop an ancient gun as a trophy before they leave him behind. That gun is engraved “Raphael Adolini 1715,” a reference to the Dark Horse comic book story Predator: 1718, which was published in  A Decade of Dark Horse #1.

To be honest — a TON of this film is taken from Dark Horse’s Predator: Concrete Jungle. The first few issues feature  Detective Schaefer, the brother of Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, as he and his partner, Detective Rasche, fight a Predator in New York City. And the inclusion of the Alien skull was inspired by Dark Horse’s Aliens vs. Predator series.

I love that Lilyan Chauvin is in this as Dr. Irene Richards, the chief medical examiner and forensic pathologist of Los Angeles. How woke is Predator 2? The main cop is African American leading an ethnically diverse team when that diversity isn’t an issue at all? Then you have a woman in charge of all pathology? How ahead of its time is this movie?

Adam Baldwin from TV’s Firefly has a brief role as a member of Keyes’ team. Plus, Robert Davi plays a police captain, Kent McCord from TV’s Adam-12 is a cop, Steve Kahan (who played Glover’s boss in four Lethal Weapon films) plays a police sergeant and Elpidia Carrillo reprises her role as Anna Gonsalves from the original in a cameo.

If you read the book version, you learn even more: Keyes recalls memories of speaking with Dutch in a hospital, as he suffered from radiation sickness. However, the soldier escaped, never to be seen again. Arnold himself escaped, refusing to do this movie because of the script, and he was nearly replaced by Steven Seagal and Patrick Swayze!

Director Stephen Hopkins went on to direct The Reaping, Lost in Space, The Ghost and the Darkness and Judgement Night (he also directed A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child before this). He had to recut the film twenty times to get an R rating! I’d love to see the uncut version of this. Shout Factory, how about it?

For now, you can watch the film online on HBO Go.

One of my favorite things about the film is this outtake. Stick through it to see Danny Glover dance along with some Predators!

Also: Holy shit, Gary Busey. He is in character the entire time, discussing how they’re hunting the Predator while also talking about it as a film. If this doesn’t make you love him, nothing will.

For the first film in what would come to be the Sartana series, star Gianni Garko wanted a character whose motivation was more than just vengeance. After turning down script after script, Renato Izzi’s take on the character — a man free from sentiment who pits rivals against one another — Sartana was born.

What breaks the character away from the mold is both his air of mystery and his love of gadgets, which many attribute to director Gianfranco Parolini (God’s Gun) love of James Bond films. His first line of dialogue says all you need to know about him. When faced with an entire gang of killers, led by Morgan (Klaus Kinski, Death Smiles on a Murderer), one of them says, “You look just like a scarecrow.” Sartana coldly replies, “I am your pallbearer,” before ruthlessly killing everyone but the gang’s leader.

The first few scenes of this movie set up that everyone is looking for coffins filled with gold, from Morgan’s gang to a Mexican army led by General Jose Manuel Mendoza (Fernando Sancho, Return of the Blind Dead), who says, “How many times I tell you… that my name is Don José Manuel Francisco Mendoza Montezuma de la Plata Perez Rodriguez… but you can call me General Tampico!” Then there’s another group led by Lasky (William Berger, a frequent actor in Jesus Franco films), who uses a gatling gun to wipe out his rivals. He’s working with/blackmailing Stewal (Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie, who also appeared in Satan’s Cheerleaders) and Alman, a politician and banker.

Sartana remains the fly in Lasky’s ointment, taking his money in a card game and defeating Morgan, who is sent to kill him. He even wipes out Lasky’s entire gang. But then Stewal and Alman turn him in to Mendoza, who goes after both Lasky and Sartana.

What follows is an elaborate series of double-crosses, with Stewal trying to escape with the gold but being killed by Mendoza to Lasky killing Mendoza and his men and Alman’s wife killing him and taking Lasky to the gold before he kills her. Finally, Lasky and Sartana have a duel, which ends with our hero riding out of town with the coffin filled with gold.

This film sets up the character of Sartana quite well — no one is sure why he does what he does, appearing with the sound of a dead man’s watch, being able to seemingly disappear at will. He’s always a few steps ahead of his enemies and always appears unflappable in the face of sure death.

After all, I wouldn’t be spending an entire week discussing a hero who is anything less than awesome, right?

Want to learn more about Spaghetti Westerns? You can find no better site than the Spaghetti Western Database. It was so helpful as we put these reviews together all week long!

Real-life husband and wife Richard Benjamin (Catch-22 and the original Westworld) and Paula Prentiss (The Stepford Wives) play John and Mary, who have inherited his uncle’s house in Eerie, PA. If that line made you laugh, then Saturday the 14th is for you.

Along with their kids Debbie and Billie, they try and fix the house up. But they’re opposed by Waldemar (Jeffrey Tambor, Arrested Development) and Yolanda, two vampires who want the book of evil within the house. Billy finds the book and with each turn of the page, he unleashes monster after monster into the house.

Soon, the TV can only get The Twilight Zone, sandwiches, dishes and nosy neighbors all disappear and eyeballs show up in John’s coffee cup. It’s nothing out of the ordinary to our heroes, who seem blind to the supernatural going on all around them.

Waldemar gets into the house as a bat, so they hire an exterminator (Severn Darden, Kolp from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) who turns out to be Van Helsing.

After a housewarming party where the monsters kill every guest, we learn that the vampires are the good guys and Van Helsing just wants the book so he can rule the world. The good guys — now who include the vamps — win and Jon and Mary get an upscale home while Waldemar and Yolanda settle into the cursed home.

Director Howard R. Cohen also wrote Unholy Rollers, Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen before choosing this as his first film. He also directed Space Raiders, Time Trackers and Saturday the 14th Strikes Back.

Some trivia — every time you see Prentiss, look closely. She’s hiding the cast on her arm, as she broke it before filming began.

Also, this is Benjamin’s last feature film as an actor, as he started directing with 1982’s My Favorite Year.

While sold as a parody of slasher films, this movie more accurately makes light of monster movies as a whole. If you’re looking for other funnier horror films of a similar bent, I’d recommend Wacko, Pandemonium, Student Bodies or Class Reunion.

I remember this movie running on HBO quite often in my youth. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, almost an Airplane! version of horror or a Mad Magazine come to life. The monsters are way better than you’d think they’d be, too!

In 2020, most of Earth has been destroyed by sightless aliens that hunt via sound. But they aren’t the real danger that humanity faces. No, they’re facing nails. Upset pre-teens. And toys that make way too much noise.

But seriously…

Outside of Quest for Fire, this is the quietest, near dialogue-free movie that’s been released in mainstream U.S. cinemas. It’s interesting to me that John Krasinski wrote, directed and starred in this (he even is one of the monsters, doing some of the motion capture acting), as his star-making turn as Jim on the American version of The Office was marked by more of his silent reactions to events and longing for Pam than any words that he had to say. Along with real-life wife Emily Blunt, they form the emotional core of the tale, two parents trying to figure out how to raise children in a world where nearly everyone is dead and communication is impossible.

Millicent Simmonds from Wonderstruck is great as the daughter, whose deafness has helped her family, as their knowledge of American Sign Language has become an integral part of how they survive.

Originally, this film was intended to be a crossover or part of the Cloverfield universe. I’m glad that it was allowed to stand on its own merits. While some of the scares feel like Alien, there is still an originality to a movie that depends so much on sound design and subtle cues to bring out maximum suspense.

That said — as for originality, there’s a movie coming out in September called The Silence, where a family comes up against “a deadly, primeval species who have bred for decades in the pitch darkness of a vast underground cave system, hunting only with their acute hearing. As the family seeks refuge in a remote haven where they can wait out the invasion, they start to wonder what kind of world will remain when they’re ready to emerge.” Which is even weirder is that the movie stars Stanley Tucci, who is married to Emily Blunt’s sister Felicity.

This felt a bit slow to me, but I think that’s just the build here. For someone who wasn’t a horror fan growing up, Krasinski has a good feel for the genre. It’s intriguing to me that two of the biggest hits of the last few years, this and Get Out, came not from genre veterans but for creatives known mainly for comedy. Which is, after all, tragedy plus time.

PS – The scenes with the nail sticking out of the steps had me more upset than anything I’ve seen in a film in some time. This is from someone who can eat Chinese takeout while watching Fulci. Sometimes, the most real horrors are the most frightening of all!

9 years after The Strangers first came out, the sequel emerges. It started with actual hype, trailers and posters announcing its release and then it felt like the actual film came and went. Luckily, we caught it as a second feature at the drive-in. It’s a hard role for a second film to live up to the first, particularly when you love a movie so much that you get a tattoo of one of its characters like Becca has. So does the sequel live up to its predecessor?

We open in a trailer park, where The Strangers park their truck, enter a home and proceed to kill off everyone inside. Roll credits. Show based on a true story super.

Mike, Cindy (Christina Hendricks from TV’s Mad Men), Luke (Lewis Pullman, son of Bill) and Kinsey (Bailee Madison, the 2010 remake of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark) are on the road to Kinsey’s boarding school when they stop to stay with Cindy’s Uncle Marvin’s trailer camp along the way.

Arriving late, they are barely settled in when a knock comes at the door and we hear the familiar question: “Is Tamara home?” If you’ve seen the original, you know what happens next. And if you haven’t…

Family drama leads to everyone leaving their phones on the table and Kinsey storming off. Luke follows and as they wander the park, they discover the bodies of their uncle and aunt. They also just randomly let their relatives’ dog run away into the night like it’s not a big deal, which kind of makes me not care what happens to them.

As they run away in fear, they find their parents and decide to get out. But first, Mike wants to see the bodies. You know what? Just go. Just walk away. But nope, he goes and does that while Dollface stabs his wife and Kinsey barely escapes.

Mike and Luke find the body and start searching for Kinsey when Man in the Mask crashes his truck into them. As Luke runs off to get help, the killer gets in the car, cranks the stereo and kills dad with an ice pick. It’s the first welcome bit of true weirdness in what’s been up until now a relatively staid affair.

A massive chase ensues, ending with Like stabbing Pin Up Girl to death and battling Man in the Mask to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Music choice wise, this movie is great. And I find it really interesting that the two most devious, inventive and bloody scenes in the film, this pool sequence and later when Man in the Mask chases Kinsey in a flaming truck, are both scored to Jim Steinman-penned songs (the second is Air Supply’s Making Love Out of Nothing at All.” Both songs were originally written for Meat Loaf’s album “Midnight at the Lost and Found,” but the record label would not pay Steinman for his work. Hence, he turned them into hits for two other artists and thematically, they are so similar that it can’t be a coincidence they were used in this way).

Seriously, it’s not until the pool fight between Luke and Man in the Mask that this movie finds its footing. What follows is pure suspense, as if the film finally felt like anyone left at the party were its true friends and that it was time to embrace the crazy.

The only downside to all this is that Dollface’s answer to the question of why pales in comparison to the original film. And that the ending is pretty much a shot for shot remake of the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But how many kids on opening weekend are going to know that? How many have sat through slasher after slasher and miss the early 1980’s summers, knowing that they could be rewarded with a new murder-packed film every Friday?

This was directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Other Side of the Door) from a script by original writer and director Bryan Bertino. Also of note is that none of The Strangers are portrayed by the original actors. As for that based on true events legend, the movie was inspired by the Manson Family murders of Sharon Tate and her friends, the Keddie Cabin Murders and a series of break-ins that happened in Bertino’s neighborhood while he was growing up.

Some trivia: Before script rewrites, Liv Tyler’s character would return, only to be killed in the beginning. It’s better that she didn’t, as it allows the film to try and stand on its own. That said — if suffers in comparison. The original was a darker, dingier, more deranged affair. We kind of knew from the trailers that we weren’t getting what we wanted from this film, but it does deliver two great scenes, which is probably more than you can ask for these days. Also, as stated above, there are some really great music cues, which shows that at least the filmmakers were thinking! Which, I guess, is more than I can say for the folks that made some of my favorite bottom of the barrel 80’s slashers.