I’ve had Hack-O-Lantern on my list for years, always meaning to get to it. The cover spoke to me for some reason, but I never got to it. Luckily, Joe Bob Briggs selected it for his Halloween Hideaway and I realized that this movie is exactly what I love most in films. It’s made by foreigh filmmakers chasing a trend that have no idea what they’re doing or the new culture they’re part of  — see The Last American Virgin — while bringing in their native ideas of what does work, which in this case would be Jag Mundhra bringing Bollywood to Hollywood, filling this film with musical numbers and comedy, while learning that to sell it to even more foreign markets, particularly Japan with their fascination with bare pubic regions*, which means hiring adult video stars.

I’m nearly delirious with film geek happiness.

Hy Pyke doesn’t just chew the scenery in this as Grandpa Drindle. He practically treats this film like a buffet. Perhaps you remember him as the bus driver in Lemora or from Slithis? Well he was positively restrained in those movies, as here he’s the old man leader of a backwoods Satanic cult that has knocked up his daughter Amanda (Katina Garner, who was Mother Speed, the leader of the rollerskating nuns in Roller Blade, a movie that strangely enough is even more bonkers than this one) with one boy named Tommy (Gregory Scott Cummins, who is also in Phantom of the Mall and Click the Calendar Girl Killer, as well as appearing in all kinds of TV to this day, like It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia), a juiced up thirty year old who is supposed to be eighteen. That’s who the devil wants to lead the cult, but then there are also two other siblings, a cop named Jeff and nice girl Vera (Carla Baron, Necromancer, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and a former Joe Bob mail girl).

Grandpa’s goal is to do everything he can to ensure that Tommy ends up making the ritual on Halloween night, which is celebrated with music from The Mercenaries and comedy. All Tommy wants to do is dream of metal bands like D.C. La Croix and have rough sex with his pentagram tattooed girlfriend Nora (Angel Rush, who the more astute — and perverted among you — may recognize as adult video legend Jeanna Fine, at this point in-between her transformation from blonde bombshell to short haired brunette butch ballbreaker goddess). Grandpa takes care of that by stabbing her in the head with a pitchform (but not before a lengthy scene of full frontal nudity).

And so it goes — with Tommy in his basement lifting weights, keeping his multicolored and candle festooned Satanic altar lit and hanging posters of Dead-End Drive-In and Killian’s Irish Red (a beer that has semeed to disappear). There’s also sex on a grave, dead boyfriends, dancing Satanic rituals and bad guys who have confused the symbol for “I love you” (which I learned from Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka) for the devil’s horns.

This is exactly the kind of movie that 16-year-olds in the video era were looking for, a film where Jeanna Fine makes a bloody mary at 3 in the afternoon before lounging back nude and telling a killer not to bruise her up like last time, punctuated with never signed hair metal bands, laser beans and a shower scene for every female character.

Mundhra would sadly die in 2011, but not before he left behind thirty one movies, including Open House, The Jigsaw Murders , Shades of Gray and Night Eyes, which was the movie that pretty much invented Cinemax After Dark.

This is a movie that’s going to obsess me for a while, what with a basement that has a poster for Romero’s Season of the Witch with just the word witch on it, a mom who thinks she’s in either the 1950’s or the 1800’s but in no way the late 1980’s, a town that allows a Satanic gang to kill people at will, grandpa’s truck filled with pumpkins that never fall out despite him driving like an absolute maniac, Satanic garb that combines overall, flannel, capes and Ben Cooper-level masks and friends who put spiders in your bathtub and come on in when you’re fully nude like it’s no big deal.

Hack-O-Lantern is complete junk. Perfect complete junk, that is.

You can watch this on Shudder and grab the blu ray from Massacre Video.

*Thanks Joe Bob!

A remake of the 1953 Vincent Price movie, which is itself a remake of 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum, this is one of the few slashers this month that has moments that bother me, mainly because of the moment when a character nearly falls into the pit where all the highway’s roadkill is stacked up high.

It’s directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, whose Orphan has equally as upsetting moments. He’s also directed Liam Neeson in three movies (Unknown, Non-Stop and The Commuter), as well as the COVID-19 delayed Disney movie Jungle Cruise and the upcoming Black Adam.

A group of friends — Carly (Elisha Cuthbert, 24), her brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray, One Tree Hill), her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki, Supernatural) and friends Paige (Paris Hilton), Blake (Robert Ri’chard) and Dalton (Jon Abrahams) — are on their way to a football game when they decide to camp overnight. A truck comes to screw with them and leaves when Nick smashes out one of its lights.

The next morning, their truck can’t start and they’re stuck in the town of Ambrose, which doesn’t have much except for Trudy’s House of Wax, the home of formerly cojoined twins — and current maniacs — Bo and Vincent Sinclair (Brian Van Holt).

If you know the story of, well, any wax museum movie, you know what’s coming next. What the film does have that many of those are missing are incredible art direction and a willingness to fill the screen with gore, including impaling Paris Holton directly through the forehead (Becca said that when this happened during a teenage viewing of this in theater, there was a standing ovation). The end, as the entire museum melts*, is astounding.

Hilton won that year’s Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress, which really just feels like an attack on her for even making this movie. She’s not all that bad and really all she has to do is show up and get killed. It is a slasher, after all.**

*Village Roadshow Studios and Warner Brothers Movie World Australia sued special effects expert David Fletcher and Wax Productions because of a fire on the set during production, which destroyed part of the Gold Coast’s Warner Bros. Movie World studios.

**That said, it has one of the better soundtracks for a slasher this side of Dream Warriors, if you were into the newer metal of 2005. There’s “Mineva” by the Deftones, “Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World” by Marilyn Manson and, in defiance of my previous statement, “New Dawn Fades” by Joy Division and “Dirt” by The Stooges.

Woah boy, this movie.

As a child, Olivia (Suzanna Love, a DuPont heiress, which doesn’t explain why she’s in this movie, and the wife of the director, which does) watched as her mother was murdered by an American army john who was way too into S&M.

Fifteen years later, she’s trapped in a loveless marriage and the ghost of her mother guides her life, but not in any positive way. She tells Olivia to hit the streets and take a man home, then commands her to kill him by bludgeoning him with a vase.

While getting rid of the body, Olivia meets an American engineer named Mike (Robert Walker Jr., Hex) who is in England to help dismantle the London Bridge and bring it to Arizona (a plot point of the Hasselhoff vs. Jack the Ripper film Terror At London Bridge). Finding true passion, Olivia finally finds happiness, until her husband finds out and assaults her. He also shows up on the bridge and confronts the couple and ends up thrown off, presumably to his death.

Four years later, Mike is back in Arizona and obviously didn’t get charged with manslaughter. That’s when he meets Jenny, a tourism director who looks exactly like Olivia, except for her hair color and accent. Ah, if only this would all be easy for Mike, but the mistakes of the past — and the ghost of Olivia’s mother — are not so easily forgotten.

Released as Prozzie, Double Jeopardy and the very roughie sounding A Taste of Sin, this was written, produced and directed by Ulli Lommel, who may have started his career working with Warhol, Fassbinder and the New German Cinema, but is probably best known for his movie The Boogeyman.

This was co-written by John P. Marsh, who took a student film he made about a woman being fascinated by the oldest profession and added it to Lommel and Love’s idea to have the moved London Bridge play a role in the story.

This movie was completely unlike what I was expecting. It’s somewhere between giallo and slasher and totally in the middle of strangeness.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

“Violence beyond reason. Victims beyond help.”

This section 2 video nasty was directed by Don Gronquist, who also wrote Stark Raving Mad and directed The Devil’s Keep, and has a cast of Portland, Oregon kids who never made another film. It was remade in 2017 in the UK, which surprised me because I usually keep on slasher reboots.

Even though this movie is barely 80 minutes, it still feels like nothing happens for a good stretch of time. That’s because, well, nothing does. There’s a lot of talking and sleeping, punctuated by moments of murder. Oh yeah, you can also spot the clapboard numerous times here, so don’t expect a technical masterpiece.

It does have a killer that — SPOILER WARNING — is a man posing as a woman, an early example of gender repression. Yet he still sees himself as a man, but a man who must wipe out all of the weak females that he finds. Don’t look for answers or political correctness here — this is a grimy slasher made in 19 nights way back in 1982. I’ve just never seen a movie before where — SPOILER AGAIN FOR A MOVIE MADE 38 YEARS AGO — the final girl gets eviscerated while the killer laments just how hard it is to be a woman.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Nico Mastorakis has a pretty good resume filled with VHS rental faves, including Island of Death, The Greek Tycoon (ironically, when he was a reporter, he went underground as a musician for the group of popular singer Yanni Poulopoulos and invaded Aristotle Onassis’ yacht, the Christina, where the Greek, well, tycoon was hosting Jackie (before they married) and Ted Kennedy), Blood Tide, Blind Date, The Zero Boys and many more.

Also known as The Edge of Terror and Terror’s Edge, this one has one hell of a cast.

Novelist Sian Anderson (Meg Foster, Evil-Lyn herself) has decided to write her new mystery novel on an isolated Greek island named Monemvasia. She’s warned to stay inside because the night winds are so strong that they could very well blow her into the ocean. That sounds fine, as all she wants to do is work.

That’s when she catches Phil the handyman (Wings Hauser!) killing landlord Elias Appleby (Robert Morley, Theater of Blood), which places her directly in his way. Well, at least she’s about to get material for her next book, what with everyone getting stalked and killed around her.

You also get appearances by Man from U.N.C.L.E. and NCIS star David McCallum and Steve Railsback, as well as some astounding scenery and a truly tense ending, as Phil chases Sian throughout the island, brandishing a sickle as the howling winds grow in fury and danger.

Want to see it for yourself? Grab a copy from Arrow Video themselves.