I was watching Amazon Prime the other night and thought I was watching Demon Seed with Julie Christie. Nope. I was really watching this film. I thought with the end of the rental era that box art would never confuse me again! I was wrong!
Lana (Lana Wood, elder sister of Natalie, who is better known as Plenty O’Toole from Diamonds Are Forever) is in a loveless marriage with Carl (Don Galloway, Detective Sergeant Ed Brown on TV’s Ironside). He treats her like absolute shit, as most 70’s husbands tend to do in occult movies.
So she does what you or I would do: she starts fucking Satan.
This movie is basically an excuse to get Lana Wood naked and having sex with an invisible demon. That demon eventually becomes a man played by Kabir Bedi, Gobinda from another James Bond movie, Octopussy.
A quick story from my childhood — I used to love how at the end of movies, it’d say, James Bond will return in… I was watching For Your Eyes Only on HBO while the rest of my family was outside. At pure excitement and mania, I ran as hard as I could for the porch to tell them all that James Bond was coming back (I hadn’t yet grasped the fact that everyone already knew that Bond had a movie every two years, but come on, I was nine). The problem was that my sentence, “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN IN Octopussy!” started inside and when I got outside, all anyone heard was “PUSSY!” Suffice to say I got smacked in the mouth pretty hard, as kids tended to get smacked a lot in the early 1980’s.
Britt Ecklund from Asylumand The Wicker Man also shows up as the psychic friend of Lana, Ann-Marie. She’s barely in it, looks great and gets top billing.
Later in the film, Anne-Marie introduces Lana’s husband to the priest that comes to talk to her psychic group — it was the late 70’s/early 80’s and again, these things happened — and I was thinking, man, this priest role is perfect for Joh Carradine. At that very moment, the priest turns to the camera to reveal good old skinny Dracula himself!
Also known as Dark Rage, Demon Eyes, Fury of the Succubus and Incubus, this movie is pretty much The Entity if the sex was consensual. And enjoyed. And more graphic. And happened more often.
I’m basically telling you that if you love movies about possession and demons having sex with attractive former Bond girls, this is pretty much the movie for you.
Writer/director James Polakof brought over several folks from this movie to make Swim Team, which also has original Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe in it. So there’s that. And he also did The Vals, a Valley Girl rip-off with Chuck Connors, Sonny Bonny, John Carradine and Tiffany Bolling in it. Of course, you know I’m going to track that down now.
Cirio Santiago was the president of the Philippines Film Development Fund, a position that charged him with improving the quality of Filipino films and encouraging the production of foreign movies on location in the Philippines. But you may know him better for movies like Firehawk, T.N.T. Jackson, Stryker or Vampire Hookers (or Cemetery Girls or Ladies of the Night or Night of the Bloodsuckers or Sensuous Vampires or Twice Bitten, title depending).
Let me see if I can sum this one up: fire-twirling women take part in rituals to keep a fish god happy. Illegal dynamite fishing ends the hibernation of this fish god, Akua, who wakes up and starts eating human flesh. A sheriff and female herpetologist must join forces and stop the beast, which they do by blowing it up real good.
I’m trying to think of one good reason for you to watch this movie. Hmm. Kathryn Witt has on tight 80’s jeans? The sheriff’s name is Keefer? It feels more like a travelogue film than something gripping and filled with drama? I’m doing a horrible job on these last two films. I mean, you start with Creature from the Black Lagoon and it’s all downhill from here this week, huh?
If this feels like you just read the review of Up from the Depths again, imagine how I felt watching both of these films on the same DVD from Shout! Factory!
Brought to you by the “father of redneck cinema,” Charles B. Griffith, this movie is more Jaws than Creature from the Black Lagoon. Griffith was told to make an action movie, but he got a depressing looking creature and decided to make a comedy. By the time he flew back home, producer Roger Corman had already recut it in into a horror movie.
Welcome to Maui, where the staff, tourists and locals are starting to disappear. Turns out that an underwater earthquake has released some very hungry prehistoric fish (I caught a bowfin once as a kid and it’s a trout with teeth, a horrifying beast that hasn’t changed much from its prehistoric version). Local fishermen all team up to hunt and kill the beast, just like Jaws, except everyone has guns.
Sam Bottoms, brother of Timothy, plays Greg Oliver, one of the locals. And so is R. Lee Emery, in an early role. Neither of them are the tourist who yells, “Oh my God, it’s a monster fish!” a line that made me so happy I nearly passed out.
Believe it or not, Corman’s New World Pictures double-billed this feature with Cronenberg’s The Brood, a fact that makes me happy if the audience was rewarded with The Brood first. If not, I’m not certain how many folks would still be in the theater.
Griffith called this film a “terrible experience.” He should have had to watch this piece of shit!
If you want to see it for yourself, Shout! Factory released this on a double disk with Demon of Paradise. And yes, I watched that. So get ready for more bile.
Slithis is a lot like Godzilla. He comes from radiation, he’s green and he wants to make humanity pay. But really, the comparisons stop there.
Shot over twelve fifteen-hour days, Slithis seems like it was hell for the actor who portrayed the monster, Win Condict. He had to be sewn into the rubber Slithis costume at the beginning of every day and stay in it until shooting was done. There were no buttons. No zippers. Only Slithis.
The monster’s rage starts with dogs, who frankly had nothing to do with his condition. Please join our dog Angelo in his protest of movies that use threatening and murdering dogs to cheaply draw our attention.
My biggest question is why is Wayne Connors’ (the hero of the film) wife named Jeff (Judy Motulsky from the little known Idaho Transfer)?
The entire first hour of this movie concerns the boring research and tracking of the creature. By the time they find him, it’s shocking just how well done the costume is. It doesn’t need hidden, so why did we have to wait so long to see it?
No, instead the film forces us to watch a turtle race. I shit you not. You know what? That’s actually kind of awesome that instead of telling a gripping, horror-filled tale, the directorial choice was to show the entirety of a race between animals that are classically known as the slowest around.
How do you survive a Slithis attack? Simple. Join his fan club. He’ll remember you when he’s in your neighborhood.
If you’d like to watch this film, Code Red has just released it. You can grab it at Ronin Flix on blu ray, complete with some great new art.
There are no human beings worse than those that confront the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or the Gill-man, as he is sometimes called. All the creature wants to do is swim around, eat flamingos and lounge. Yet humanity wants to impose their will on him and only tragedy ensues.
Our clammy pal was the brainchild of producer William Alland, who was attending a 1941 dinner party during the filming of Citizen Kane (he plays the reporter Thompson in that classic) when Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told him all about a mythic Amazonian race of half-fish, half-men. A decade later, Alland wrote the Beauty and the Beast-inspired The Sea Monster, which was expanded upon by Maurice Zimm, Harry Essex and Arthur Ross.
There’s some controversy over who designed the creature, as some say Disney animator Milicent Patrick drew the original look, but according to Andrea Ferrari’s book Il Cinema Dei Mostri. her role was “deliberately downplayed by make-up artist Bud Westmore, who for half a century would receive sole credit for the creature’s conception.” The bodysuit was created by Jack Kevan, while Chris Mueller Jr. sculpted the head.
When you see the merman on land, he’s played by Ben Chapman. When we see him swim, it’s Ricou Browning. The costume was rough to be in for an entire day, so we should really be thankful to these actors for enduring painful fourteen hour shooting days.
The first movie in the series, The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), opens on an Amazon expedition. A fossilized hand that shows webbed fingers points to a missing link between land and sea animals, so Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno, one-time rival to Rudolph Valentino during the Silent Era) leads an expedition to find a complete skeleton, which includes Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson, It Came from Outer Space, Hold That Ghost) and financial backer Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning, An Affair to Remember).
The first appearance of the Gill-man, as he frightens two assistants who then attack him, is startling. Even more so is how quickly he dispatches both men.
Soon, the expedition on the tramp steamer Rita is underway, with Lucas (Nestor Paiva, who also appears in the sequel) as the stereotypically coarse sea captain, joined by the aforementioned crew plus Dr. Edwin Thompson (Whit Bissell, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Time Machine and many more) and Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams in an iconic role), the girlfriend of Dr. Reed.
Despite the fact that no one has ever returned from the paradise the natives call the Black Lagoon, the crew decides to go deeper into the Amazon. They’re stalked by the Gill-man, who takes notices of Kay and is caught in a dragline, escaping but leaving a claw behind.
Like Jason Vorhees with gills, our antagonist wipes out the members of the crew. Only fire seems to harm the creature, who is smart enough to block the exit of the ship with fallen logs. Mark becomes obsessed with capturing or killing it, leading to him trying to fight the creature barehanded and getting his money having ass handed to him. The creature then takes Kay to his underwater lair, where David, Lucas and Carl hunt him down and shoot him multiple times.
The movie ends with the creature slowly sinking, possibly dead. This will not be the last depressing close in this series, trust me. There’s a real undercurrent of longing from the monster in this film, of which Adams said, “There always is that feeling of compassion for the monster. I think maybe it touches something in ourselves, maybe the darker parts of ourselves, that long to be loved and think they really can’t ever be loved. It strikes a chord within us.” This same emotional tie to the creature was expressed by Marilyn Monroe’s character in The Seven Year Itch, who remarks that the Gill-man “just wanted to be loved.”
While we value today’s props and love horror, to show you exactly how much Universal Pictures cared for their real stars, Forrest J. Ackerman bought the mask and claws of the Creature’s costume from a young man. And how did that man get them? It turns out that after production wrapped on the three films in this series, they threw everything away. A janitor — the boy’s father — rescued the claws and mask, as he felt that they would make a great Halloween costume for his son. thought the ensemble would make a good Halloween costume for his son. Other costume pieces were recently sold at auction by Bud, who was an assistant to Milicent Patrick, the original designer of the costume.
Originally shot in 3-D (although it played smaller theaters in 2-D), the original film was successful enough to merit a sequel, 1955’s Revenge of the Creature.
Somehow, the monster has survived and a new expedition — oh hey, there’s Lucas again — captures the Gill-man and brings him to the Ocean Harbor Oceanarium — thank SeaWorld — in Florida, where Professor Clete Ferguson (John Agar, Shirley Temple’s first husband, who appeared in tons of science fiction films along with many appearances alongside John Wayne) and ichthyology student Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson, who reprised the role in 2005’s The Naked Monster). Of course, Helen and Clete fall in love. Of course, the Gill-man falls for her, too.
The Gill-man eventually escapes, but he can’t stop thinking about Helen, even abducting her from a party. Clete and the police chase him down and, as is customary, gun our amphibian antagonist down. A slave to love, trapped until the end!
Despite being the screen debut of Clint Eastwood (in a blink and you’ll miss him appearance as a lab technician who misplaces a rat) and being shot in 3-D, Revenge of the Creature isn’t quite as good as the original. But it made the most money of the three, so that led to 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us.
Jack Arnold, the director of the two previous films, graduated to Universal’s A-list and John Sherwood, a long-time assistant director, took over. It’s the only film of the three not to be shot in 3-D.
Despite how we saw the Gill-man get shot to death, he somehow survived and is somewhere in the Everglades. Dr. William Barton (Jeff Morrow, This Island Earth, Octaman) is pretty much insane, a man driven to capture the merman and abuse his wife Marcia (Leigh Snowden, who was in the same Universal acting classes as Clint Eastwood, James Garner and John Saxon). The dude loses his mind any time she is near their guide, Jed Grant (Gregg Palmer, who appeared in many of John Wayne’s films).
For some reason, Marcia joins Jed and Dr. Tom Morgan (Rex Reason, who has a name like a pro wrestler or a Stan Lee character, but he was an actor who appeared in films like This Island Earth and TV’s The Roaring 20’s) on a dive, but she somehow goes crazy and overcome with the “raptures of the deep.” Also known as nitrogen narcosis, this creates a mental state similar to doing nitrous oxide. It causes Marcia to take off all her scuba gear and the guys have to rescue her.
Of course, the Gill-man follows her and he gets shot with a spear gun, to which he looks right at the crew and seems to want to say, “Come on, dude.” Then, they set him on fire!
This all leads to our underwater pal being in need of surgery from Dr. Borg and Dr. Johnson. And why do they do all this? They want to see if the Creature can help people survive in space! Well, all their work costs the monster his gills and now, he has lungs that can breathe our air. He also has more human skin, so he has to wear clothes.
The doctors try and get the Gill-Man to live among humans, but he gradually becomes depressed, staring at the ocean. He even tries to dive into it and swim back home, but he can no longer breathe as he once did. It’s horrible. Seriously, this movie makes me so upset, as they take everything from him and he gets nothing back in return. Even when he saves some animals from a lion or tries to attack Barton when he kills Jed in a jealous rage, everyone thinks the worst of our undersea friend.
At the end, he finally makes it back to the beach and just stares at the water, unsure what world he finally belongs in. It’s the most unsettling and upsetting of endings, on par with Son of Kong. There are no easy answers — man has put the Creature in this place and nothing can return him back to the home he misses so much.
Following his appearances in these three films, The Creature showed up as Uncle Gilbert on TV’s The Munsters in 1964.
Of course, a version of our clammy friend shows up in The Monster Squad. And there was also a stage musical at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park. But there have been remakes in the works for years that have never made it to production.
Let’s start with the effort made by John Landis in 1982. He commissioned Nigel Kneale (who of course, wrote Quartermass and the Pit but also scripted Halloween III: Season of the Witch) to write a script that original director Jack Arnold would return to helm. According to Andy Murray’s Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale, the script had a pair of creatures — one destructive and one calm — battling the U.S. Navy. As the film was to be shot in 3-D, Universal worried about its budget and that it would compete with their release of Jaws 3-D, so the movie was canceled.
In the 90’s, John Carpenter, Peter Jackson and Ivan Reitman were all attached to a remake. And in the 2000’s, Gary Ross (Pleasantville, The Hunger Games) nearly got on board, which is interesting as his father, Arthur Ross, was one of the original film’s writers.
Guillermo del Toro was also attached to the film for some time and wanted the movie to be seen from the Creature’s perspective and for him to finally have some romantic success. While the actual film never happened due to Universal’s rejection of these themes, del Toro saved these ideas to create The Shape of Water. Oh Universal. You had no idea what you had.
Breck Eisner (who directed the remake of The Crazies and was set to be crowned as Hollywood’s remaker, as he was due at one point or the other to direct new vesions of Flash Gordon, The Brood and Escape from New York) was also attached for some time to an eco-horror version about the rainforest being exploited. The 2007-2008 writer’s strike halted this effort.
There was another movie called The Black Lagoon that was to come out in 2014, but that also failed to surface. And while the Dark Universe reboot of the classic Universal characters is in some doubt, one would think that the Creature from the Black Lagoon would show up if that ever gets any more traction. The appearance of a hand of our finny friend in the remake of The Mummy was just too much! Come on! Stop with the teasing!
What I didn’t know was that there was an Abbott and Costello Meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon TV show, created to promote the first film!
There were also two memorable appearances by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in arcades, thanks to Bally Midway’s Creature from the Black Lagoon and Monster Bash pinball games.
The former of those two machine has a startling hologram of the merman that pops up throughout gameplay.
In case it doens’t come through, I love the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I even had this Remco figure as a kid and would carry it everywhere with me.
I vividly recall the 3D reshowing of the films in the early 1980’s, too!
Our amphibian hero never gets the girl. Never gets the love he deserves. And never even gets a remake! But here’s to him! Long may he swim!
Have you ever seen a pro-life horror movie? No? Well, then you’ve never seen The Suckling!
A teenage couple goes to a whorehouse to have an abortion — because you know, that’s where you go. After they flush the dead fetus down the sewer, it finds some radiation and comes back to life as an unstoppable monster. It covers the entire house in placenta, then kills the johns and prostitutes one by one.
Is it any good? Fuck no, it’s a horribly bad movie. But aren’t those the best? You bet. I loved every minute of this film, one that starts with an intro like The Texas Chainsaw Massacrethat makes it seem like this could have really happened. Throw in some ill-advised dream sequences, the worst fashion choices ever and special effects that are way better than you’d think and you have a great movie to watch in the middle of the night.
Also known as Sewage Baby (“all he wanted was a cuddle”), the film ends with the monster going back inside its mother’s womb. She goes into an insane asylum, but when some horny orderlies try to rape her, the monster returns. This entire paragraph may be the scummiest I’ve written since starting this site.
Today’s version of the video store, Amazon Prime, has this up for free if you’re a Prime member. I wouldn’t rush to watch it, but I wouldn’t skip it, either.
When discussing the Star Wars prequels, comedian Patton Oswalt said: “I was thinking the other day about a time machine…and the first thing I thought of doing if I actually had a time machine, is that I would go back in time to about 1993 or ’94, and kill George Lucas with a shovel.” So you as you can imagine, he has some strong feelings. After all, he also famously said, “I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from! I JUST LOVE THE STUFF I LOVE!”
George Lucas began developing a young Han Solo film in 2012 (he loves young versions of his characters, such as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles) and Lawrence Kasdan began work on a screenplay. Kasdan has a great history with Lucas, co-writing The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, as well as his own work on films like The Big Chill, Silverado and Body Heat.
The shoot was fraught with issues, with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie) leaving the movie in June 2017 after reportedly being fired over creative differences with Lucasfilm. Ron Howard took over directing duties after that and the budget soared to more than $250 million — making it one of the most expensive films ever made.
Let’s get into it: we start on Corellia, where a young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) and his partner Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke, Daenerys Targaryen from HBO’s Game of Thrones) are making an escape from a gang of criminals. They use coaxium, the McGuffin that fuels this film, to bribe an Imperial officer to help them escape. However, Qi’ra is detained and Han must escape on his own, as he is recruited by the Imperial Navy as a flight cadet (and given his last name).
Years later, Han is still fighting to get back to Corellia to rescue her. He’s been expelled from the Imperial Flight Academy and is now just cannon fodder on the mining world of Mimban. There, he meets Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, Natural Born Killers, HBO’s True Detective), who in Long John Silver fashion teaches Han to become a scoundrel. He also is set up for desertion and thrown into a pit where he’s due to be killed by a beast (shades of Luke in Jedi), which of course ends up being Chewbacca.
The scene here where Han speaks Wookie is a bit silly and took me out of the film. But after a slow start, the movie kicks into light speed and gets much better.
Soon, Han and Chewie have joined Beckett’s gang, which includes his wife Val Beckett (Thandie Newton) and pilot Rio Durant (voiced by Jon Favreau) and are part of a thrilling scene where they attempt to steal more coaxium from a train high above the planet Vandor. That plan gets blown up sky high by the Cloud Riders and their leader Enfys Nest, who end up killing everyone but the core crew and blowing up the contraband.
This puts a price on the heads of our heroes thanks to Crimson Dawn boss Dryden Vos (who is played by Paul Bettany, who is The Vision in the Marvel films. He ended up taking over this role from The Wire‘s Michael K. Williams, who couldn’t make reshoots. His version of the character was due to be a lion/human hybrid). At the same time, Han finds Qi’ra working as Vos’s top aide. I just want to call out how much I loved Vos and want to see more of him!
To get the price off of their heads, Han suggests stealing unrefined coaxium from the Kessel mining colony. And to ensure that it happens, Vos asks Qi’ra to go along with them.
They need a ship and what better one than the Millennium Falcon, which Han fails to win in a game of sabacc against Lando Calrissian (Community‘s Donald Glover, who shines in the role). He agrees to join the team and brings along his droid co-pilot L3-37, who may or may not be in love with him. She definitely wants to create a droid revolution everywhere she goes, including beating up Clint Howard! I absolutely adored this character, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who carries on the Rogue One tradition of a droid having the most personality of any character in the film.
After instigating a rebellion on Kessel, which includes Chewbacca freeing several of his Wookie people, Lando getting hurt and L3-37 being destroyed, our heroes make an epic escape through the Kessel Run, an event that Han Solo brings up in his very first appearance in Star Wars.
A note from one of my Star Wars obsessed friends, Jim Sloss, who I have seen every single canon film with on opening day since probably 1997. “They fixed the parsec issue. In episode 4, when Han the Kessel Run being done in less than 12 parsecs, people complained because they thought he meant time when a parsec is really a distance. In Solo, they explain that from Kessel to where they needed to go was a distance of 20 parsecs that Han cut to 12.” These are the things that grown men discuss.
The scheme ends with the several of the supposed good forces being not so good and the bad guys being not so bad. I’m a fan of this shades of the Force thinking, where there can be grey sides to what has previously been a black and white conflict. Even better, there’s a surprise villain appearance, the seeds of why Han went from an idealist to a jaded rogue and even the hints of how he ended up in the employ of Jabba the Hutt.
There are a lot of online issues with the film, as many feel that the female-centric and message-oriented scope of the film are detriments. It’s 2018, people. It’s time to just get with the times.
I went in expecting to not enjoy myself at all and after the aforementioned slow start, I had a blast. Again — I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was a kid. I’m predispositioned to like films like this, just as Becca is usually apt to ignore that they are even released. Take it from someone who bought a Ric Ollie figure at midnight before the first prequel was released: this isn’t the best or worst in the Saga. But it’s pretty entertaining. Does every film have to be a religious experience? Or maybe there are too many of these films every year after decades of nothing. Your feelings will temper how you view this one.
Potter’s Bluff is one of those perfectly gorgeous New England coastal towns. You know, the kind where visitors are beaten, tied to a post and set on fire while people take photos of them. And then, when they survive, nurses stab them right in the eyeball with a syringe.
Dead and Buried was written by the Alien team of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett and featured Stan Winston special effects, so the poster was justified in shouting, “From the people who brought you Alien…” Unfortunately, those people do not include Ridley Scott, as we have Gary Sherman directing this (he also helmed Poltergeist III). That said, O’Bannon disowned the film, claiming that Shusett had actually written it by himself but needed O’Bannon’s name on the project to get it made. He never made any of O’Bannon’s suggestions before it was produced.
Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino, The Final Countdown) is our hero and he is working with Dobbs (Jack Albertson, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and TV’s Chico and the Man), the town’s coroner/mortician to solve the murders that have gripped their small town. And with each one, a photo of the murder is found.
As Gillis rushes to a suspected attack, he accidentally hits a man, whose arm is stuck in the grill of his car. The man attacks the sheriff, then takes his arm and runs away. Further research shows that a tissue sample of the man shows that he has already been dead for four months.
The sheriff begins to suspect everyone, including Dobbs, who he learns was fired from his last job for conducting unauthorized autopsies, and his wife Janet (Melody Anderson, Flash Gordon), who has begun to teach witchcraft to her students.
It turns out that Dobbs has learned how to reanimate the dead and that nearly everyone in town — I’m looking at you, Robert Englund — are under his control. He considers himself an artist who improves the lives of the dead after he controls them. Just then, the sheriff notices that his hands are rotting and Dobbs offers to repair him. That’s because he’s been dead all along, as his zombie wife had killed him during sex, a scene he watches as its projected on the wall.
Dead & Buried has a great trailer that it lives up to. While it feels very Carpenter-esque, it lacks the style and verve of his films. That said, there are some interesting touches, such as the director avoiding the color red throughout the film so that the murders would be more shocking.
If you can find a copy, I’d certainly recommend this movie. I’d been wanting to see it for years and while it’s not the best horror film of the 80’s, it’s something different that isn’t so well known.
This movie has a big shock ending. It was probably a lot more shocking 34 years ago than it is today. But if you don’t want to know how it ends, you should probably skip this article.
For the rest of you, let’s take a trip back to 1975, when John Baker and his boyfriend Lenny took John’s kids on a boating trip. Those kids are madcap scamps that capsize their dad’s boat for fun. But on the swim back to shore, a waterskier kills John and his son Peter, leaving Angela traumatized.
Eight years later, Angela is living with her weird aunt Dr. Martha Thomas (who would be able to unite Superman and Batman, based on her first name), along with her cousin Ricky. They go to Camp Arawak for the summer. As someone who has never been to summer camp, nor ever wanted to go, I fail to see the fun that places like this promise.
Angela gets bullied at every turn, even when the counselors try to help her. And to top it off, the head cook even tries to rape her. Sure, he’s soon scalded by hot water. But it seems odd how many people have it in for this little girl. I guess the good news is that everyone that screws with her dies horribly — if that can be good news. Like Kenny, a kid that mocks her. She also finally gets a friend, Paul, who has the hots for her.
As Paul and Angela attend a movie at the camp, two of the boys throw water balloons at them. Billy, one of the throwers, is soon killed by bees. At this point, Mel, the owner, starts to realize that maybe there’s a killer in the camp.
Paul tries to kiss Angela, but she has a flashback to catching her father in bed with Lenny. Oh no! And it gets worse, as Judy — one of the worst behaved girls — kisses Paul and then throws Angela into the water. Ricky saves her, only for a bunch of kids to throw sand in her face! Will the torment ever end?
The film then descends into slasher film madness. Meg, a counselor who is sleeping with the owner of the camp, a man nearly fifty years or more her senior, is killed in the shower. The kids who threw sand at Angela? Nearly all of them are dispensed of with a hatchet. And the evil Judy? She’s raped with a hot curling iron (!) and smothered with a pillow, which feels like the roughest and softest kill ever. And finally, the owner of the camp blames Ricky and attacks him, only for the real killer to shoot him with an arrow.
The police come to investigate the murders while Paul and Angela decide to go skinny dipping. Two of the counselors find them and we learn that she has decapitated Paul and jumps up, fully nude and fully a dude, making a hissing sound and looking like a complete maniac. The truth? Angela is really Peter, the boy we thought died in the opening. Dr. Martha had raised him as the daughter she never got to have.
Director Robert Hiltzik had only directed this one film before graduating from the Hofstra University Law School and eventually becoming a partner in a New York City law firm. He had no idea how popular the film was until being contacted to do a commentary track for the DVD. While there have been numerous sequels made, Hiltzik returned to write and direct Return to Sleepaway Camp as well as promising to reboot the series.
It’s funny. In the early 80’s, so many people bemoaned how many slashers were playing in theaters and drive-ins. But today, we’re lucky to get a horror film into theaters. And truly odd films, like Sleepaway Camp, go direct to streaming or DVD. Let’s face it — none of today’s films are as goofy as this either. And by goofy, I don’t mean the SyFy or Troma movies that are made to be dumb. No, this is a film that appears to be an attempt at a legitimate, serious film that ends up being something wonderful batshit. It’s filled with ridiculous dialogue, over the top murders and that ending!
Since childhood, Kay has constantly suffered from horrifying dreams, some of which are just frightening landscapes that leave her feeling uneasy and others that show loved ones being killed by a supernatural force. Those dreams have come and gone, but now they are happening more often, growing in intensity and impacting her work as an artist.
Worried that all of this stress may hurt her newfound success as an abstract artist, Kay decides to vacation on a small island, along with her husband David (Alan McRae, Three Ninjas), her brother Eric and his wife Brooke. As their pilot drops them off on the island, he mentions that a hurricane is on the way and he has to leave as soon as possible. Even stranger is the fact that the island — which they expected to be a resort town — is a deserted ruin. And not just any ruin, but the one in Kay’s dreams, leading her to feel that everyone is in danger.
David, Eric and Brooke are then killed one after the other. But who killed them? The film gives us three possible stories, each of which are plausible: the pilot never left the island and just dropped them off there to kill them (a theory that is somewhat proved when the pilot is seen later); Kay believes that a monster from her dreams can cross over into reality thanks to the island (which could be true, as the murders only happen when she is asleep) and finally, that Kay is really the killer, falling into a trance and acting out repressed resentment.
After everyone else dies, Kay locks herself into the beach house and tries to stay awake, even burning herself with cigarettes. But that night, the pilot makes his way into the house. She shoots him with a flare gun, killing him and sending the house up in smoke. As she tries to leave, a flaming skeleton is waiting for her.
But wait! It was all a dream, as Kay awakes on Christmas morning in bed. After telling her parents about the dream, they hand her a black cat to her horror. Huh? Supposedly Kay is killed by the Slayer and this is a flashback, but it certainly doesn’t seem that way.
Director J.S. Cardone says that he was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and the idea of dreams versus reality, but the movie doesn’t have much to do with Lovecraft. That said, this movie looks way more expensive than its budget would lead you to believe, there are some good death scenes and it has a bleak atmosphere.
You can get the Arrow Video reissue at Diabolik DVD.
Here’s a drink.
Hurri-Kay
2 oz. white rum
2 oz. dark rum
2 oz. passion fruit juice
2 oz. orange juice
.5 oz. grenadine
.5 oz. simple syrup
.25 oz. lime juice
Maraschino cherry
Add all your ingredients — other than the cherry — in a shaker filled with ice.
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