I thought that I had watched every Mark Gregory movie there was. I’d made it through 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Escape from the Bronx, Adam and Eve vs. the Cannibals and even Thunder. But now you’re telling me that he’s playing a terrorist who goes up against Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson in a movie written by Dardano Sacchetti (Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, Blastfighter, Demons, Demons 2, Hands of Steel)? Holy shit, it’s like getting a Christmas gift months after the holiday is over!

Latin American revolutionaries — led by Mark Gregory, who still hasn’t learned how to walk properly but has cut his hair — invade a military base on Puerto Rico, steal a nuclear bomb and kill Lt. Tony Turner’s (sure, Brett Baxter Clark was in Teen Witch, but he’s also the gardener who sexes up Harlee McBride in the Cinemax After Dark classic Young Lady Chatterley II) pregnant wife.

Lt. Tony decides to steal a jet and its pilot: Captain Beck, played by Fred “the Hammer” Williamson! They follow the terrorists back home, take them out and almost die when the weapons are due to go off. Funny story — it was just a training weapon and a story to get the U.S. media excited about the Delta Force again.

Your enjoyment of this film is based around how much you enjoy seeing Mark Gregory loopily walk around with a nuclear weapon on his back and Fred Williamson wiping out an entire army while dropping one liners like, “Hey, this beautiful brown body’s got a lot of living left to do, pal!” This is a movie that has a puke grenade. This is a movie that has Fred driving a bus while a helicopter shoots at it point blank. Me? All in.

Good news. Not is this movie amazingly and ridiculously awesome, there’s a sequel. And you can watch both of them for free at Amazon Prime or buy them at Revok.

The Nun is the fifth movie in The Conjuring Universe, which are dramatizations of the real-life cases of paranormal investigators and authors Ed and Lorraine Warren. As the true story of the Warrens gets controversial* — Ed Warren has been accused of having had a lover live in their house for four decades, starting when she was underage — not to mention Gerald Brittle, author of a book about the Warrens called The Demonologist, suing Warner Brothers claiming they stole his idea, it’s only natural that the storyline move to only tangentially involves the main characters.

The series begins with The Conjuring, directed by James Wan, during which the Warrens investigate the haunting of the Perron family. There’s some tremendous art direction in this film, particularly when it comes to the Warren’s occult museum where they keep all of the objects they come across, kind of like the trophies in Batman’s cave. There are also some genuinely frightening moments, giving one hope that true scares still have a place in the multiplex.

The first spin-off, 2014’s Annabelle, was seen by many as a misstep. I enjoyed the film’s Manson Family allusions if not the entire story. 2016’s The Conjuring 2, which dealt with the Enfield Poltergeist incident (and offered potential spinoffs like The Crooked Man and Valak the Nun, who we’ll get to in a second, I promise) got the series back on steady ground. And 2017’s Annabelle: Creation was a box office success.

Becca disliked both Annabelle movies at first, yet has come to enjoy both of them on video and has tattoos of Valak and Annabelle, so that should tell you how excited we were for the potential of The Nun, a movie that has been teased for over a year with effective trailers and artwork. Just look at that poster that’s part of this article. Kudos to the PR and ad team that worked on this — you got us in the theater. But did we have a good time?

Funny aside — the theater where we went is often my favorite to see a new horror film in. It’s always packed with raucous teenagers who shout, scream and go crazy during the jump scares. None of that happened here. Perhaps it was the fact that the air conditioning didn’t work on a 90 plus degree day (we were offered the chance to see something else or wait an hour to see another showing, but we decided to stick with it). Or perhaps it was the fact that someone brought a baby with colic to see the movie and that child coughed throughout, continually giving us the real world worry that someone was insane enough to bring a child to a 10 PM movie. Then again — if a movie is really engaging, it defeats its environment and captures you. I’ve seen some great movies in fleabag theaters, after all.

The Nun starts in 1950’s Romania, as two nuns are being attacked by something we can’t see. They’re searching for an artifact, yet one nun is dragged into the darkness while the other hangs herself to that she can’t be taken by the demonic force. Her body, partially devoured by crows, is found in the morning by Frenchie, a villager who brings the nuns supplies.

When the Vatican learns of these events, they send “miracle hunter” Father Burke and novitiate nun Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who is the actress who plays Lorraine Warren in these films) to investigate. There, they learn that Sister Victoria’s body has moved from where she was laid to rest and that she’s holding a strange key.

While they stay at the abbey, all hell breaks loose. Irene has more of the visions she’s had her entire life and Burke is haunted by a possessed child (spin-off alert) that he failed to save. Valak appears and buries Burke alive, with Irene saving him at the last minute by digging him up. There’s a moment here where I thought, “Surely they’re not going to rip off the scene in Fulci’s City of the Living Dead where Christopher George uses a pickaxe to rescue the girl.” Of course they do. But it’s also framed and presented in a way that has none of the visceral impact of the way that Fulci shot it. Perhaps this is your first clue that I didn’t like this movie very much.

The next day, the nuns reveal that they’ve been praying non-stop to keep some evil at bay. After all, the abbey was built in the Dark Ages by an evil duke who worshipped the devil and summoned Valak, just at the moment that Crusaders broke in, killed him and sealed the gateway to Hell using the blood of Jesus Christ. The flashback that happens here presents us with a glimpse of a film that would have been much better and more exciting than what we’re currently enduring, a film that necessitates constant looks at your watch and math to determine just how many minutes are left before you can escape the theater.

Bombing runs during World War II broke the seal and now, the evil of Valak has been slowly leaking into the abbey and the surrounding village (again, a much better idea for a film that we only get glimpses of). Nun by nun has fallen to Valak’s evil and now, the nun who seemingly runs the abbey has transformed into Daniel, the buy who Burke failed to exorcize, and is attacking him.

While all that’s going on, Frenchie comes back to help and Irene joins a prayer circle of nuns who were never really there in the first place. Valak carves a star into the shoulder of Irene before taking her to a room filled with dead nuns whose heads are covered by bloody rags, making one long for a better nun film such as Alucarda.

This is where the film shows it has no concept of the occult, kind of a cardinal sin when it comes to making a movie about it. Valak traps Irene inside a pentagram, instead of the center of the pentagram being used to protect and ward off the evil spirits. Everything up to here is shown to be Irene’s visions. Keep in mind that devout Catholics believe that feeling the presence of spirits would be heretical, but this is a script that doesn’t understand anything that it’s writing about, so just go with it.

Finally, our heroic trio find the Blood of Christ (and a woman is entrusted with it, showing again that this film has no real understanding of the Catholic Church) and use it to stop Valak (again, with that Blood of Christ being spit out of a human mouth in an act that a devout Catholic would find completely against their belief).

Because every movie in this series has to tie back to the others, it turns out that Frenchie is the possessed man that appeared in the footage the Warrens show when we first see them. That said — the dialogue where Ed says, “They called him Frenchie,” was added and did not appear in the original film.

Let’s cut to the chase. This is worse than a bad movie. It’s a boring movie that squanders the promise of great scares. At no point was I worried for anyone’s safety. There’s no real story arc for any of the characters, nothing that moves them through other than interchangeable forces of good and evil for the sake of telling us about this great evil that we’ve already seen in a better movie.

The Catholic Church has been through some rough media in the past few weeks. Completely justified bad media, mind you. The Nun seemingly takes place in some alternate world filled with free thinking nuns like Sister Irene who believe that we should question everything and who are presented as being seen as on the same level as a priest. I loved that in the midst of all the Satanic panic at the end of this film, she takes the time to finish her vows and become a full nun, as it’s a great advertisement for a church that wants nothing to do with a movie like this that claims that exorcisms and possession are real. It’s another one of God’s mysteries: a film that is the best sales pitch for the Catholic Church in years is one that they’d abhor. Take it from someone who angrily yelled at the Pittsburgh Catholic** and their reviewer Father Peter Horton from the age of 9.

My first film critic enemy.

I know that I’ve been down this same path so many times, determined not to be an old man yelling that movies used to be so much better when I was young. But time and time again, I get all excited about something new only to be crushed by the resulting boredom and ennui that modern horror delivers. I should have to watch The Other Hell three times in a row as my penance.

*The Warrens have always been controversial. Skeptical investigators have said that while the couple was very nice and genuinely sincere in their beliefs, pleasant people, they were “at best, as tellers of meaningless ghost stories, and at worst, dangerous frauds.” They also determined that some of their most famous tales, such as Amityville never happened. That said — that battle against skeptics has been a major part of The Conjuring Universe.

**The Pittsburgh Catholic also featured a list of what films good Catholics should avoid. Notably, favorites like Amityville II: The Possession, The Howling and Halloween were rated O for morally offensive. Therefore, they’re the movies you want to see.

When Becca and I first started dating, we looked for this movie on DVD everywhere.  That’s when we learned one of the mysteries of collecting films. Once you find something, it seemingly shows up everywhere.

The Entity was directed by Sidney J. Furie (Iron Eagle, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace) and written by Frank De Felitta (who wrote Audrey Rose and The Edict, which was filmed as Z.P.G. He also directed Dark Night of the Scarecrow). It was based on the true story of Doris Bither, who alleged that the ghosts of three Asian men were raping her.

Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey, Insidious) is a single mother who is continually attacked by a poltergeist who rapes her and then tries to kill her at every turn, including taking control of her car in traffic. She tries to work with Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver, one of the best heels ever in a rare babyface role) to solve her issues.

There’s a bonkers scene here where a room of smoking male doctors mansplain away the ghost rape and insult her every step of the way. After all, Carla has endured sexual and physical abuse, teenage pregnancy and the motorcycle riding death of her first husband.

But how can you explain away the fact that she’s been attacked in front of her kids and scientific witnesses? That the ghost zapped her son with electrical energy? Or that her boyfriend (Alex Rocco!) has even seen these attacks?

That’s when the movie descends into madness. Parapsychologists create a model version of her home as a trap, with liquid helium to freeze the entity. It tries to turn the experiment on her, but the doctor saves her and there’s a brief moment where we can see the entity trapped in ice before it vanishes.

The next day, she comes home only to have the front door open by itself and a demonic voice say, “Welcome home, cunt”. Unlike every character in any horror movie before or since, she calmly opens the door, walks outside and drives away with her kids.

There’s a disclaimer at the end that says “The film you have just seen is a fictionalized account of a true incident which took place in Los Angeles, California, in October 1976. It is considered by psychic researchers to be one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of parapsychology. The real Carla Moran is today living in Texas with her children. The attacks, though decreased in both frequency and intensity…continue.”

Interestingly enough, Sidney J. Furie dropped an entire dream sequence and plot thread from The Entity which featured Carla being forced by the entity to have incestuous thoughts about her own son. David Labiosa (who played Carla Moran’s teenage son Billy) said that those aspects were too controversial and sex-charged for the early 1980’s. I guess he’s never seen Amityville II: The Possession!

The Entity is a scary, rough and only in the early 1980’s horror movie. The actual attacks are brutal in their intensity and the sound design of each scene sound like staccato bursts of industrial noise. It’s well-worth hunting down. But be warned! Once you find it, you’ll find it everywhere!

Before directing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI – a divisive film in the series due to its humor but also one of the better Friday films — Tom McLoughlin wrote for Dick Van Dyke, worked with Woody Allen on his science fiction comedy Sleeper, appeared as the robot S.T.A.R. in The Black Hole and played the Katahdin in Prophecy. This is the first film he directed and it’s been somewhat forgotten over the years.

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and a vacation that took him Paris’ catacombs, McLoughlin and writer Michael Hawes spent four years trying to sell this movie to studios before finding a group of Mormon investors who demanded that the movie start production within three weeks. Unfortunately, the film was also taken out of McLoughlin’s hand and his original ending was nixed. What remains is still pretty good, however.

Karl Raymarseivich Raymar has killed at least six women — all found within his apartment — but the Russian occultist is now dead. As he’s taken away, electricity comes out of his body. Samuel Dockstader (Donald Hotton, The Hearse) tells Raymar’s daughter Olivia and husband Allan (Adam West) that her father had become a psychic vampire that fed off the bioelectricity of the young women that he had kidnapped.

Then there’s a snobby clique of mean girls called The Sisters — Carol, Kitty and Leslie (teenage crush E.G. Daily, who was Dottie in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Baby Doll in Streets of Fire, as well as being part of the band in Better Off Dead and providing the voice for the pig Babe and Tommy Pickles for Nickelodeon’s Rugrats). Julie Wells (Meg Tilly, Psycho II) wants to be part of the cub, but she’s also dating Carol’s ex-boyfriend Steve. To get revenge, The Sisters send her to spend one night alone in a mausoleum before she can be part of their group.

Carol and Kitty dress up and chase Julie, who hides in the chapel as Raymar awakens, opening coffins and vaults filled with the dead. Soon those reanimated corpses surround the popular twosome and murder them.

Everyone converges on the mausoleum — Steve wants to rescue Julie and Olivia wants her father’s powers. Can our young lovers survive? Will Olivia gain the vampiric energies of her father? Will lots of shambling corpses make scary noises and stagger all about?

One Dark Night was actually finished long before Poltergeist, a film that its special effects were often compared to. In fact, they both use real skeletons for some of their corpses. But production issues kept the film out of theaters long enough that it seemed to come off as a copycat.

I’d been looking for this film for some time, so I was happy to be able to finally get to see it thanks to Amazon Prime. It’s fun, quick and filled with jump scares — everything a decent horror film should be. You can also get the Code Red DVD at Ronin Flix.

During a storm in Tennessee, a meteorite lands a farm all H.P. Lovecraft style. Soon, a teenager is in the middle of a plague that destroys crops, animals and even his family.

Directed by David Keith, who acted in An Officer and a Gentleman and Firestarter amongst others, this late 80’s film was released theatrically in the U.S. as The Farm and then came back out on video as The Curse.

Zack (Wil Wheaton, Star Trek: The Next Generation) lives on a farm with his younger sister Alice (Will’s real-life sister Amy), their mother Frances, stern stepfather Nathan (Claude Akins, Sheriff Lobo and Murder, She Wrote) and their bullying stepbrother Cyrus (Malcolm Danare, Flashdance, Christine).

One night, Frances sneaks out to have sex with one of the farmhands. As luck would have it, a meteor lands in the field, starts to glow and begins to leak into the soil. A local scientist wants to tell the authorities, but just like Jaws, local businessmen put a stop to that. After all, the TVA is building a new reservoir in town!

The farm goes to hell. The water grows cloudy and gross tasting. Food grows way too big and is way too inedible. And the livestock have become violent. Meanwhile, Frances goes insane and begins to grow boils and attack her family. Nathan believes that all of this is God’s curse because his wife cheated on him. Zack and Alice stay away from the infection by drinking clean water from anywhere but the house.

Willis, a TVA surveyor played by John Schneider from TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard, comes to the house to get a drink when he is attacked by Frances. Meanwhile, feral dogs on the property start to kill people.

The Curse consumes everyone — Zack’s mother turns into a gooey liquid mess, Nathan and Cyrus become zombies who are nearly unkillable and the house sinks into the ground. If you’re wondering how this movie got so gory so quickly, guess who was the producer and gore consultant? Lucio Fulci!

Willis gets The Curse too, slowly dying in a hospital bed while the virus mutates further outside. There’s no happy ending, even if the kids survive.

There are two sequels to this film and in true Italian tradition, none of them have anything to do with this one.

It’s not great. But the parts that you can recognize as Fulci are.

You can grab this from Scream Factory. You get the second one, too!

You know when they say that something is loosely based on something? I just read that this movie is loosely based on The Monkey’s Paw. Sure, they both have wishes that go wrong, but I think the similarities stop there.

Directed by David DeCoteau, who went on to bring us Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge, Puppet Master: Axis of Evil, Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper and the completely unhinged Eric Roberts voiced A Talking Cat!?!, this movie delivers everything its title promises (which is a much better one than its original name, The Imp).

Three frat guys spy on three sorority girls (Babs, played by Robin Rochelle from The Slumber Party Massacre; Rhonda and Frankie, who is Carla Baron, now a real-life psychic profiler) as they prepare two new members (Taffy is scream queen Brinke Stevens and Lisa, Michelle Bauer, the scream queen who was Penthouse Magazine’s July 1981 Pet of the Month and also known as adult star Pia Snow) for an initiation, which consists of paddling and whipped cream. The boys get caught and to make up for it, they have to go with the girls to steal a bowling trophy.

While they try and get said trophy, they run into a burglar named Spider (scream queen supreme Linnea Quigley), who helps them break in. They quickly screw up and break the trophy, freeing Uncle Impy. That wacky little guy promises three wishes for freeing him. One of the guys wants gold, Taffy wants to be prom queen and one of the dudes just wants to have sex with Lisa (well, you can see his point). Impy senses that the sorority girls are watching him (indeed, Babs’ dad runs the mall) via cameras and he possesses both of hem.

Hijinks, as they say, ensue, with human heads being used as bowling balls, sorority girls getting turned into demons, bowling ball-fu (as Jim Bob would say), all-knowing janitors, Molotov cocktails, more severed heads and so much more.

Most of the cast stuck around to be in another DeCoteau film, Nightmare Sisters. Both are very much Charles Band direct to video films — a bit of gore, a little comedy and some T & A. And they’re the only two movies that have all three of the major scream queens — Quigley, Stevens and Bauer — appear in the same movie together.

I mean, if you like demons, bowling and attractive women, this movie would have everything you’re looking for. You can watch this on Shudder and even get commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

While other men hunt, an intergalactic hunter has come down from the stars to track the most dangerous game, invisibly hiding until it can kill them with its throwing star weaponry. The creature is played by Kevin Peter Hall. But this isn’t Predator! This came out seven years earlier! This is Without Warning!

The film opens with a father and his reluctant son hunting. In moments, they are killed by flying creatures that have tentacles that pierce their skin.

Meanwhile, four teens ignore the warnings of Joe Taylor (Jack Palance!) and decide to camp here. Is this a dangerous area? You bet. Not even F-Troop‘s Larry Storch can survive, as he is killed and his Cub Scout troops run into the woods.

Two of the teens die pretty much instantly and their bodies are found in a shack. As the survivors run, one of the creatures tries to attack them through the windshield. They go back to the truck stop and no one believes them except for PTSD veteran Fred “Sarge” Dobbs (Martin Landau, Ed Wood, Space: 1999).

Landau is great in this, as he descends into paranoia, sure that everyone is an alien. He’s a villain who is acting like the heroes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live.

It turns out that the shack is where the creature is keeping his trophy kills. Only Sandy survives, as Sarge goes nuttier than ever and Taylor sacrifices himself to stop the gigantic alien.

Greydon Clark directed this. You may know him from acting in films like Satan’s Sadists. Or perhaps you’ve seen one of his films, like Satan’s Cheerleaders.

Cameron Mitchell, Neville Brand and Ralph Meeker all show up to add some Old Hollywood to the proceedings. And then there’s a young David Caruso as one of the teens. Don’t blink or you’ll miss Cinemax late night icon Darby Hinton (Malibu Express)!

The majority of the film’s budget went to having Landau and Palance on board, as well as having Rick Baker design the creature’s head. And hey! Dean Cundey (Halloween) makes this movie look way better than it’s $150,000 budget would lead you to believe!

Scream Factory put this out on blu ray and it’s seriously way better of a production than this film probably deserves. But that’s why those guys are awesome and why so much of my paycheck goes to them.

Bill Van Ryn from Groovy Doom/Drive-In Asylum explained this movie short and sweet: “It’s like an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker without Kolchak.” It’s also about the press freaking out about an eight-foot-tall alien who is killing people who eyebeam lasers in the dirty and dingy streets of Los Angeles. It was originally about an autistic child who never met people before. It was also originally to be directed by Tobe Hooper. Things kind of didn’t happen that way.

John “Bud” Cardos (Kingdom of the Spiders, Gor II) stepped in to direct. And realizing that his movie now had an alien instead of a child, he hastily put together an opening narration that talks about electric eels and Venus fly traps. If our planet has those, what about other worlds? What that has to do with the rest of the film, well, your guess is as good as mine.

What we end up with is a monster that beheads people while someone chants, “The dark! The dark!”  William Devane (Greg Sumner from TV’s Knot’s Landing) and a TV anchorwoman (original Wonder Woman and That’s Incredible host Cathy Lee Crosby) finally figure out how to catch the monster. Oh yeah — there’s also an ancient psychic who believes that a young actor will be the next to be killed, so we get some 70’s Hollywood parties along the way. Casey Kasem shows up. Keenan Wynn and Richard Jaeckel, too.

Roger Ebert referred to this movie as, “the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.”

I really didn’t think it was that bad. It’s not the best movie ever, but I was certainly entertained. Not riveted. But entertained. But how can you hate a movie where a giant alien shoots laser beams out of his eyes and rips peoples’ heads off so that the coroner can put them in body bags (along with mini head bags)?

You can watch it yourself on Amazon Prime or grab the Code Red blu ray at Diabolik DVD.

By 1980, slashers ruled the movie theaters. Yet every once in awhile, a traditional horror film would emerge. A film like The Hearse. A movie that’s more about an evil house and a ghost boyfriend and an evil woman and the occult just as much as it’s about a car that drives around and haunts people.

Jane Hardy (Trish Van Devere, the widow of George C. Scott who also appears with him in The Changeling) just got divorced and just left San Francisco. While she gets her head together, she’s decided to live in the old country home in Blackford that her aunt willed to her.

From the minute she arrives in Blackford, everyone is hostile to her. That’s because her aunt was a witch. Meanwhile, a large black hearse begins driving past her house, stalking her when the evening grows dark. But also, her aunt’s home is haunted and by her spirit. There may also be a coven stalking around, too.

Goerge Bowers didn’t direct many films (he also did My Tutor), but was better known as the editor of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, A League of Their Own, The Good Son, From Hell and many more films. Here, he creates a film that harkens back to classic horror versus modern slashers.

Joseph Cotten (The Abominable Dr. Phibes) is also on-hand, as are several people who were important to the music and art worlds. Like Med Flory, whose Supersax band won a Grammy for their translations of Charlie Parker’s music. He’s also in The Boogens! Then there’s Al Hansen of the Fluxus artist collective, who would give birth to Warhol protege Bibbe Hansen and is also the grandfather of rock star Beck.

Luke, the teen who has a crush on Jane, is played by Donald Petrie, who would grow up to direct How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Miss Congeniality, Mystic Pizza and Grumpy Old Men. He’s in a subplot here that goes nowhere, other than to show Trish Van Devere in a tight 70’s jogging outfit. And the sheriff is played by character actor Chuck Mitchell, who played Porky Wallace in the Porky’s series of films (he also shows up in Don’t Answer the Phone! and Frightmare.

For more pop culture reference, The Hearse also has Christopher McDonald (Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore!), David Gautreaux (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and Allison Balson (Nancy Oleson from Little House on the Prarie).

I have a beat up cheap DVD copy of this that I paid $1 for. But you should totally spring for the new re-issue from Vinegar Syndrome, complete with new artwork, TV and theatrical trailers and an interview with David Gautreaux. It’s newly scanned in 2K from the 35mm negative. I can promise you my bottom of the barrel copy is not.