This film was inspired by the 1955 French film Les Diaboliques and was originally titled  Screamer and Seven Sisters by its writer and director Mark Rosman. It also has the alternate title House of Evil, but none of those are as evocative and interesting as The House On Sorority Road.

Vincent Perronio, who often works with John Waters, was the film’s production designer. It was shot in Pikesville, Maryland and used the University of Maryland for its establishing shots. The crew used a house that was being foreclosed on for shooting and discovered two squatters living there, who were hired to be video assistants on the film.

The movie opens with a flashback sequence that was requested by its distributor, Film Ventures. It was shot in black and white, then tinted blue. We see a baby being delivered via c-section, but the mother is told that the child died.

Fast forward to today, as seven sorority sisters are drinking up at their own small graduation party. Katey (Kathryn McNeil, Monkey Shines), Vicki (Eileen Davidson, who went from acting on soap operas to appearing in the real-life soap opera The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), Liz, Jeanie (Pittsburgh’s own Robin Meloy Goldsby, who is now a piano player in Germany), Diane (Harley Jane Kozak, Parenthood) Morgan  and Stevie want to spend a few more weeks in their sorority house before heading out into the real world, but their house mother Mrs. Slater isn’t having any of their shenanigans.

Seriously, Mrs. Slater is a real pip. For example, when Vicki is batter dipping the corn dog on a water bed with her boyfriend, Slater bursts in and stabs the bed with her walking cane. So that leads to the girls playing a prank — making the old woman jump into the swimming pool to get her cane at gunpoint. There’s a stumble, the gun goes off and the old woman dies. The seven sisters all decide to hide her body in the pool until after their big blowout.

Of course, that’s when the killer shows up, who is Slater’s deformed son Eric. Turns out that doctor from the beginning had given her an illegal fertility drug that led to him turning out like this. So the doctor drugs Katey — our final girl — and tries to kill Eric to cover up his crimes, but Eric easily dispatches him. This leads to a showdown between a clown-costumed maniac — who has even decapitated one of the other girls and left her head in the toilet — and Katey which ends inconclusively.

Film Ventures also asked for the ending, where Katherine is discovered floating dead in the pool, dead at the hands of Eric. They felt like that the ending was too downbeat, so that’s why we got the ending we did, where Katey stabs Eric but his eyes open right before the final credits.

This is a movie filled with not just plenty of murder, but lots of party scenes too. The Washington, DC-based power pop band 4 Out of 5 Doctors shows up to play five of their songs. If you’ve ever seen The Boogeyman, they’re in that too.

Ronin Flix was selling a limited edition blu ray of this film earlier this year, but it’s currently sold out. It’s definitely worth a watch, as it predates films like I Know What You Did Last Summer where the teenagers are as much victimizers as victims.

You can watch this for free on Popcorn Flix or with Rifftrax commentary on Tubi.

“The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they’re dead.”

Has any movie so perfectly been a synthesis of the gore aesthetic of the 1980’s and the science fiction angst of the 1950’s? I doubt it — Night of the Creeps takes on those genres and adds zombies to the mix, making for a crowd-pleasing bit of popcorn filmmaking.

Between writing the story for House and bringing The Monster Squad to the screen, Fred Dekker’s name generally signifies that you’re about to watch something pretty darn interesting. This was his directing debut, working from a script that took him only a week to write.

Back in 1959, a fight on board a UFO leads to a mysterious canister being shot out into space, crash landing on Earth. It looks like a falling star to a couple on lover’s lane. As they try to see where the star has landed, the girl is killed by an axe-wielding mental patient and a small slug jumps into the boy’s mouth.

Decades later, Chris Romero (Jason Lively, Rusty Griswold from National Lampoon’s European Vacation) is trying to get over being dumped. His friend J.C.  is trying to help him out. Luckily — or perhaps not — our hero falls for Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow, Twice Dead). 

To try and win her heart, he decides to pledge a fraternity. Unfortunately, he decides to pick the Beta Epsilon house — the very one that Cynthia’s boyfriend is in charge of. He charges Chris and J.C. with stealing a corpse from the morgue as part of their initiation.

That’s when the plot kicks in. That corpse is still alive and they run from it after setting it free. That dead body — now very much alive — is the boy who ate the slug in the opening

now detective Ray Cameron (Tom Atkins, making this movie his own) is on the case.

The reanimated dead kid heads back to the sorority house where its head explodes, releasing more of the slugs. Soon, they’ve started to take over more bodies who then start killing everything in their path. Meanwhile, Cameron reveals his stake in all this — the girl killed in the beginning was the woman he never fell out of love with. He’d hunted down and killed her murderer way back in the late 50’s and buried the body near the sorority house. Now that axe killer is back among the living thanks to the alien slugs.

Things move even faster now, as the slugs infect a dog that causes a bus crash filled with frat boys that transform into zombies that come after our heroes. Can the suicidal and bitter Cameron, Chris and Cynthia survive?

I’ve always been struck by the relationship between J.C. and Chris in this film. It’s really obvious that J.C. is in love with his best friend and he pretty much says so in the message he leaves for him after the bugs infect him. It’s not presented as humorous, but as very much matter of fact.

There’s also an alternate ending that showed Cameron transformed into a zombie, causing more slugs to worm their way into more graves before the spaceship from the beginning of the film returns. That ending is somehow even darker than the one that made it into the released film.

Back when I was a teenager, this movie ran on Cinemax at 5 AM nearly every night. I remember that it would still be one when my dad and I ate breakfast together. It’s packed with so much head exploding gore that I was worried that I might not be able to keep my toast and cereal down.

Also — if you didn’t notice from the character names, Dekker named every character after famous horror directors — George A. Romero (Chris Romero), John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper (J.C.’s full name is James Carpenter Hooper), John Landis (Detective Landis), Sam Raimi (Sgt. Raimi), David Cronenberg (Cynthia Cronenberg), James Cameron (Detective Ray Cameron) and Steve Miner (Mr. Miner is the janitor’s name) And the college setting is named for Roger Corman.

This movie remains Tom Atkins’ favorite role. It’s obvious he’s loving every moment, stopping to smell the flowers and dreaming that he’s on a beach when he’s not saying. “Thrill me” and “It’s Miller Time” while shotgun blasting zombies to oblivion.

I pretty much consider this movie required viewing. It’s a roller coaster ride that must be experienced.

You can watch this on Shudder or grab it from Shout! Factory. Sadly, you can no longer get the deluxe version that came with a Tom Atkins action figure. I still can’t believe that they made that!

BONUS: You can listen to us discuss this movie, Night of the Comet, Night of the Living Dead and Flesheater in the video below.

For some reason, old Hollywood actors often show up in slashers. Jackie Coogan, whose career stretched from silent films to playing Uncle Fester on The Addams Family to, well, The Prey appears in this, his last film. Coogan also was the reason for the California Child Actors Bill, the first known legal protection for the earnings of child performers, which is better known as the Coogan Act.

The Prey didn’t play theaters until nearly four years after it was made. It was created by the husband and wife team of Edwin and Summer Brown, who had previously worked on the video nasty Human Experiments. This was their first non-adult movie.

Back in the late 1940’s, a fire raged through the Rocky Mountains and wiped out a family of gypsies that all lived in a cave. Of course, one of them survived.

It all starts with two old people getting killed as they cook around a campfire. Then, the film alternates between an increasingly intense pace and long stretches of nature footage that was supposed to prove the difference between killer and his prey, but also padded the film so it had a decent run time.

Let’s meet our teen couples. There’s Nancy and Joel, played by Debbie Thureson and Steve Bond, who we all know better as Travis Abilene from Picasso Trigger. Here’s Bobbie and Skip, played by Lori Lethin from Bloody Birthday and Robert Waid from Summer Camp. Finally, we have Greg and Gail, who are played by Philip Wenckus in his lone acting role and Gayle Gannes from Human Experiments.

They’re helped on their camping trip by hunky ranger Mark O’Brien (Jackson Bostick, Shazam! himself!) and crusty older ranger Lester Tole (Coogan). Gail’s convinced before too long that someone is watching them and before you can say Jason Vorhees, she’s dead and so is Greg.

That burned up gypsy boy goes after everyone with a real vengeance, including a scene where he leaves Gail and Greg’s bodies for the vultures, a moment that’s poignantly intercut with the group’s first meeting.

I love the ending of this film, where it feels like Ranger Mark has taken out the clawed and disfigured killing machine, only to have his neck snapped as if it were nothing. Then, the killer slowly approaches Nancy and caresses her hair.

After some nature footage — get ready for so much nature footage — we move several months into the future, where we see the cave where the killer’s family died in the fire and hear the cries of a baby. Now that’s dark.

The monster in this is played by Carel Struycken who would go on to play not just Lurch in the modern Addams Family movies, but also the Giant in Twin Peaks.

You can grab the Arrow Video re-issue of this film from Diabolik DVD. It’s packed with all manner of extras, from cast Q and A’s to a tour of the shooting locations. It even has two cuts of the film: the U.S. theatrical cut and the so-called gypsy cut with the extended beginning. You can run a composite cut of the film so you get the ultimate version of the film. Plus, there’s an audience reaction track from this year’s Texas Frightmare so that you can pretend you’re sitting with a rabid crowd!

Seeing as how this was shot around the same time as Friday the 13th, it may have been seen as imitator when originally released, but it totally stands on its own. After all, what movie has a better tagline? “It’s not human and it’s got an axe!”

Inspired by Friday the 13th, Stephen Carpenter and Stacey Giachino wrote the script for this film while students at UCLA under the title The Third Night, which later became Death Dorm.

We start with a man running from someone, then hiding in the bushes, before he’s attacked from behind and murdered. Yep — get ready to meet one of the more downbeat slashers you’ll find. To quote Jim Morrison, “Nobody gets out alive.”

Laurie Lapinski — in her one and only role — plays Joanne, a college student staying behind over the holidays to clean up Morgan Meadows Hall before its demolished.

Of her friends, only Daphne Zuniga, in her very first role, may be the only actor  you’d recognize. She plays Debbie, whose parents show up only to be murdered with a spiked baseball bat and strangled (not at the same time, mind you). Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the killer drives their car over poor Debbie’s head.

This movie sets up more red herrings than a giallo, with drifters and traveling salesmen fingered as the manic.Along the way, a drill and a pressure cooker get used as the real killer uses the confusion to continually kill more innocent people.

So what was the motive? Love. Well, the kind of love incels have for women that we didn’t understand all the way back in 1982. Of course she should be happy he killed all of these people for her!

I won’t tell you who the killer is, but I will say that you have to like a movie willing to end on the down note of its final girl shoved into an incinerator and leaving behind foul-smelling smoke.  You also have to love a movie that completely apes its title from The House That Dripped Blood.

This movie was released in the UK as Pranks, where it was placed on the category 2 video nasty list. It must have been all the nail-covered baseball bats. UK censors are particularly squeamish about weapons that kids can easily get their hands on.

Synapse has released the Death Dorm director’s cut and all of the censored gore on a great blu ray release. It’s not the best slasher you’ll ever see, but it’s certainly worth a watch.

Seven years after the original film, Wes Craven would return to the desert, bringing more folks back into the near apocalyptic territory lorded over by the mutants from the first film. In fact, if you liked that movie, you’re in luck, because clips from it play throughout this one’s running time.

Wes Craven has disowned this movie, which started filming A Nightmare On Elm Street. Though it was released after that film, only two-thirds of it was finished when the studio halted production due to budget issues. Once Freddy Krueger became a household name, that convinced Craven to finish the movie using only the footage that he had in the can. That’s why so much of this film comes from the original, a point I will continually bludgeon throughout this article.

Robert Huston, who played Bobby in the original (and brought Lone Wolf and Cub to American screens) returns, as does Janus Blythe (she’s also great in Eaten Alive). She was Rachel in the first film and now everyone calls her Ruby. They now own a motocross team and have invented a super fuel. The team’s latest race takes them through the same stretch as…yes, I know I keep saying the original film, but this movie keeps referencing it.

Bobby’s psychiatrist wants him to go, but he chickens out with Rachel taking his place along with Beast the dog. Yes, from the first film.

The team — blind Cass (who brings a blind girl motocross racing?), her boyfriend Roy (Kevin Spritas from the Subspecies films and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood), Harry (Peter Frechette, The Kindred, The Unholy and T-Bird Louis DiMucci in Grease 2), Hulk(John Laughlin, Footloose and The Rock), Foster (Willard E. Pugh, Harpo from The Color Purple), Jane (Colleen Riley, Deadly Blessing) and Sue (Penny Johnson from TV’s Castle and 24) — head off to the desert but get lost.

Harry takes a shortcut through an old bombing range, which Ruby should have protested way more than she does. This leads them to a mining ranch where Pluto (Michael Berryman) comes back — yes, from the first movie — and attacks her. Everyone thinks she’s crazy until he also steals one of their bikes. Roy and Harry give chase but Harry gets killed by a boulder and a new cannibal named Reaper (John Bloom — who isn’t Joe Bob — the Frankenstein’s Monster from Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein) knocks out Roy.

Reaper is Papa Jupiter’s older brother and he isn’t here to mess around. Seriously, he wipes out everyone — including Ruby or Rachel or whatever she was calling herself these days — in short order, using spearguns, machetes and improvised traps. However, Craven didn’t like John Bloom’s voice, so he’s dubbed by Nicholas Worth, who we all know as Kirk Smith from Don’t Answer the Phone!

Sadly for Pluto, he’s still no match for a dog and gets dropped off a cliff.

The end of the film gets pretty thrilling, as the survivors use the bus itself as a trap for the gigantic mutant leader. There’s an amazing fire stunt at the end, which made me really happy. And hey — Kane Hodder was one of the stunt people for this!

You can buy this from Arrow Video but keep in mind that it’s limited to 3,000 copies! It’s packed with extras, like brand new audio commentary with The Hysteria Continues and Blood, Sand, and Fire: The Making of The Hills Have Eyes Part II, a new documentary that has interviews with Berryman, Blythe, composer Harry Manfredini and more.

Like everything Arrow puts out, it’s a high quality release well worth your money. And despite being told for years how bad this sequel is — it’s certainly not the dark and brutal classic that it’s forebearer was — it’s entertaining.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by Arrow Video, but we would have bought it anyway. That has no impact on our review.