Dominick Brascia was Joey in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, as well as writing and directing Evil Laugh and this film. He moved into radio and sadly died in 2018. But hey — he did three slashers, counting this one, so let’s take a look.
When John was a little kid, his grandfather would constantly tell him that he was a vampire, so he did what I would have as a child. He grabbed a stake and dropped that bloodsucker. Except, you know, his grandfather was just joking and as a result, John grew up in a mental hospital.
But hey, things worked out OK. Now he’s in a rock and roll band and once the cops tell him they’re too loud for the garage, he heads to the house his grandmother left him. That said, his bandmates are getting killed off one by one, possibly by a werewolf who was once his grandfather, so maybe things aren’t so great.
So I guess the Bad Boys are never going to make it, despite their willingness to sound more like Bryan Adams than you’d expect from a movie with hard rock in the title and wear women’s lingerie.
Actually, this movie is a lot like Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare, except you don’t get to see Thor fight a demon or drive around for 35 minutes. If I was making a scale of metal horror films, with Trick or Treat as the top of the scale, I’d probably use this as the bottom. It is also no Black Roses, Rocktober Bloodor Blood Tracks, either.
Also known as Slasher In the House, this is one of the few Thanksgiving slashers that I can think of — that said, I can tell you others are Deadly Friend, Blood Freak, ThanksKilling, ThanksKilling 3, BloodRage, the remake of The Boogeyman, Kristy and Intensity — and it’s also a section 3 video nasty, so it has that going for it.
It also stars Body By Jake star Jake Steinfeld, who legend says refuses to discuss that he was ever in this movie. Dude, if he had Cameo, I’d pay to ask about this movie every single day. He plays PCP addict Jay Jones, a guy who has already destroyed his parents.
Harold Bradley should have never made Thanksgiving dinner for the nine victims in this movie, including his heavy metal son “Mistake.” But here we are, with car trunks getting slammed onto heads, stabbing nice young ladies and the aforementioned KISS loving son getting electrocuted.
Director Nettie Peña was an editor and associate producer on Dracula Sucks, so there’s that.
This is also the first role for Vanessa Shaw, who was Allison in Hocus Pocus (and also appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, Ladybugs and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes).
Seriously, Mistake should have been the killer, or better yet, he could have just run away and survived, heading off to Wisconsin where he and Marvelous Mervo would start a band that would destroy minds and reap souls when they both weren’t playing practical jokes, peeping on women and crying about how tough life was for them.
Also: more movies should have killers that inject PCP directly into their tongue before grunting like maniacs and killing everyone around them. Remember when people did PCP and would go nuts and turn into criminal supermen? Whatever happened to it after the video game NARC?
Every year that we go without another appearance by Jason Vorhees is another that makes me sadder at the loss. Sure, we got a great box set by Shout! Factory this year, but the lawsuit has kept a new film from hitting theaters.
Luckily, there are some really innovative fans, like writer/director Vincente DiSanti and Womp Stomp Films.
Set three months before 2017’s Never Hike Alone, this prequel explains what happened to Jason Voorhees (DiSanti with stunts by co-star Bryan Forrest) and Tommy Jarvis (Thom Mathews, the very same actor who played Tommy in the sixth installment and Freddy in Return of the Living Dead) before that cat and mouse film. But Jarvis isn’t the only character to return from the original films, as Vincent Guastaferro returns to play former Deputy and now Sheriff Rick Cologne, also from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.
This film does not shy away from brutal gore and gets the stalk and slash part of the equation right. It really does feel like it could fit into the series and it’s a true shame that there’s not a chance that we’re getting anything new for a while. Until then, this will more than do.
Spoiler warning: I hate found footage movies. I see them as flimsy excuses to either put handcuffs on a production or a cheap way to cut costs. It rarely, if ever, works for me and I’m often bored within minutes. Why shoehorn yourself into one way to tell the story when cinema offers so many other ways? Ah well, I realize I’m writing a losing battle.
Watch Me Die was once called Murder Death Kill. It’s been released by our friends at Wild Eye as part of their Wild Eye Extreme line (and they were kind enough to send it to us).
A killer named The Surveyor spends most of the movie taping the murders of gorgeous young women he’s hired to make adult movies. However, he just might be the main character in someone else’s film.
Thomas Banuelos wrote, directed and stars in this. If you’re into a movie where a dude makes women drink wine glasses full of drain cleaner, I can’t stop you. I might not invite you over for dinner, but I can’t stop you.
I mean, long scenes of murder and torture with no story to really tie them together is less my jam than even found footage. But hey, different strokes, I guess. Probably literally.
The sequel to 2014’s The Redwood Massacre finds writer/director David Ryan Keith (Ghosts of Darkness, The Dark Within) returning to the titular Redwood Farm, a place where the owner went insane before killing his family and himself. Now, a stranger has brought together several family members to prove whether or not the burlap-masked killer was real or just an urban legend.
Of course, as things often happen in these movies, the killer is very much real and turns the tables on those looking for him. Where the film makes a real jump for originality is by adding in a conspiracy element, as the hunters find a place where serial killers are born and bred. Then, they’re trapped there and forced to battle perhaps more than one maniac (the death of the first movie’s final girl at the hands of someone other than The Burlap Killer will give you a clue).
The filmmakers were also smart enough to cast Danielel Harris (Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Hatchet II, Hatchet 3) as one of the leads. I like the idea of a heavily armed group trying to get payback on a killing machine and this surely delivers on the concept.
You can learn more on the official site and official Facebook page.Redwood Massacre: Anninhilation is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment, who kindly sent us a review copy.
DAY 28. OREGON TRAIL: A road tripper where people get picked off one by one. Kind of like this challenge, eh?
When I first saw The Hitcher, I was probably 14 years old and saw it as a straight-ahead story of violence on the highway. I probably cheered at the end when Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) blew a hole into John Ryder (Rutger Hauer). But age and the miles wear on every man and now when I watch it, it does more than make me raise my fist in the air and shout. It makes me ruminate on the journeys life has taken me and how I’d rather be launched through a window and blasted down a hillside than live a slow, tedious and quiet death.
Halsey starts the film with the kind of confidence that someone at the end of their teens has. He picks up Ryder, who immediately confides to him that he’s killed someone else. But he says something else. Something we don’t expect. “I want you to stop me.”
That’s the whole point of this film. Ryder will transform Halsey into the empty man he is, whether through attrition or forcing him to blast him into oblivion. This road only goes one way.
What does it take to get Halsey to realize this isn’t a nightmare, but reality? Of course, it’s easy to think that this could all be a dream, in the same way that long stretches of drives with no one speaking seem to be visions that last and last. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m still driving and every moment up until here, up until this realization, is just me imagining my life and any moment now, I’m going to wake up with my fiancee asleep next to me.
For our hero, it takes seeing trucks plow into truck stops, station wagons filled with the blood of all American families and the typical movie love interest torn in half by two semis.
Halsey is stripped of his identity, not just because his license and keys — let’s face, the manhood of most red-blooded boys — have been taken away. Everything he may have believed was true — the goodness of giving someone a ride when they need it, that love can conquer fear, even that the role models and lawmakers that society sets up can protect us against one lone man who isn’t just unafraid to die but willingly chases it — is a lie.
Not even suicide can save our hero.
So who is at fault for all the crimes that come out of this spree? If Halsey just shot Ryder in the truck, while Nash (Jennifer Jason Lee, looking like the gorgeous girl who surely will survive all of this madness, right?) is tied between it and another, life would be different.
Look, when a killer says, “I want you to stop me,” you listen.
Eric Red wrote this story while traveling across America, wondering about the lyrics to The Doors “Riders On the Storm.” Pretty simple, really: “If ya give this man a ride, sweet memory will die. Killer on the road, yeah.”
Critics hated it. Both Siskel and Ebert gave it zero out of four stars, with Ebert even decrying the film by saying, “I could see that the film was meant as an allegory, not a documentary. But on its own terms, this movie is diseased and corrupt. I would have admired it more if it had found the courage to acknowledge the real relationship it was portraying between Howell and Rutger, but no: It prefers to disguise itself as a violent thriller, and on that level it is reprehensible.”
Whatever.
The end of this film, as Halsey stands against the sunset and smokes as we process what has just happened just attacks the viewer. The credits just stand there as we feel no celebration or victory. Maybe not even relief, because while it seems like this is over, there’s no way it is over.
The fact that this movie spawned a sequel and a Michael Bay remake are two things that I have added to the many things that I have tried to forget so that I can keep on living my life*. Kind of like how director Robert Harmon makes the Jesse Stone TV movies for Tom Selleck now instead of getting to create more movies like this (that said, I’ve heard good things about They, a movie he did with Wes Craven and I kind of don’t mind his Van Damme film Nowhere to Run). Red would move on to write a few other films that break the mold and are on my list of favorite films: Near Dark and Blue Steel.
The last thing that this movie makes me feel is loss. Rutger Hauer is such an essential part of my film nerd stable of actors, someone who always makes a movie way better than it seems like it will be just by his presence. Nighthawks is so intense because of him. Films like Wanted Dead or Alive, The Blood of Heroes and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (with Hauer getting to finally play the vampire lord that Anne Rice, who always wanted him as Lestat, saw him in) are actually great because of Hauer. And Blade Runner means nothing without him as Roy Batty.
Hauer astounded the stunt people in this movie, pulling off the car stunts by himself. And he also intimidated Howell, scaring him even when they weren’t acting. He even knocked out a tooth when he flew through the windshield himself. There is no one who could have played this character quite so well and stayed with me so long after the film was over.**
*The fact that René Cardona III made a Mexican version of this called Sendero Mortal does give me the energy to keep on living. I’d also like to recommend the absolutely insane Umberto Lenzi in America Hitcher In the Dark, which makes me wish that more Italian directors made their own versions of The Hitcher.
**Hauer said in his autobiography, All Those Moments, that Elliott “was so scary when he came in to audition that Edward S. Feldman was afraid to go out to his car afterward.”
If you saw Shocker, Prison and House 3/The Horror Show, yet wanted more movies where killers supernaturally survived the electric chair, let me introduce you to 1988’s Destroyer, which is also a slasher with one of the genre’s pioneers, Anthony Curtis, in a supporting role.
Ivan Mozer (Lyle Alzado!) has been convicted of the rape, torture and murder of 23 — he claims 24 — people. An electrical storm breaks out during his electrocution and a riot breaks out. Supposedly, he dies, but we all know better. He’s now in a feral state — still smoking, too — and can regenerate from any injury.
Meanwhile, a movie called Death House Dollies is being made in the prison. What are the odds? And how about the fact that a jail guard named Fingers is really Ivan’s dad and has been keeping him alive?
Beyond Perkins as the director of the film within a film, Clayton Rohner from I, Madman and Deborah Foreman from Valley Girlare on hand. Between this, April Fool’s Day and Waxwork, she had a pretty good run as a scream queen.
Destroyer is way better than it has any right to be, a very late in the game direct to video slasher that still gets in some cool effects, a decent — if overdone — premise and a fun cast. It’s a great Saturday late afternoon watch and you can find it on Tubi.
Charles Band bought a castle, Castello di Giove, to make movies in*, which gives this movie a great look. It’s so 1988 that it hurts, featuring an MTV-style channel that creates a contest where viewers will compete to find a $1 million dollar check hidden in the walls of the estate of the enigmatic Diablo (Adam Ant!), like some demented Willie Wonka or Amazing Kreskin trying to find his payday.
Let me tell you all right from the start, I absolutely love this movie.
This whole scheme has been created to help the career of music video vixen Cassandra Castle (Bunty Bailey, herself a music video girl with appearances in OMD’s “Talking Loud and Clear” and most famously in a-ha’s “Take On Me” and “The Sun Always Shines on TV,” as well as showing up in another Band film, Dolls) and VJ Rex (Richard Blade, who was a KROQ DJ and is now on Sirius XM’s First Wave channel).
Along with the heroic orphans from Cleveland named Jackie and Tom (Gail O’Grady and Harold Pruett), there’s also a moron from Jersey and several stuck up female contestants like Myrna, Teri and Yvette (Tricia Lind, Fright Night Part 2) who seem to be in this only to drive Tom insane.
The scheme is that Cassandra is holding the check so that she and Rex can split the money. But nobody counted on Diablo really being a spellcasting demon — hence the title — and killing off the contestants one by one.
Director Rafal Zielinski also made Screwballs, Screwballs II, Screwballs Hotel, Recruits and State Park, all video rental and cable favorites that I’ve watched more times than I’d care to admit.
Remember the 2000 internet? Get ready to relive it in this South Korean slasher, which posits a chatroom meet-up in the sun and fun, where great looking teens who just happen to use the internet — not everyone was on it like this in 2000 and trust me, as someone who did many meet-ups, not everyone was this gorgeous — all get together to have sex and die.
Everyone except for Nam-kyeong is gruesomely murdered by a slasher named Sandmanzz, who has two z’s in his name because he’s either from the streets or this is how we talked in the 2K.
Supposedly, Sandmanz committed suicide when he was kicked out from the chatroom, a subject which has divided the group. Some think that he was ousted for no reason, but most think he had it coming. Regardless, like a cyber Korean I Know What You Did Last Summer, emails start coming from the killer, as do the bodies.
This has seriously the cheeriest soundtrack and the happiest teens ever. And it could have been filmed here and wouldn’t rate a second look, but that fact that it’s been transplanted to the other side of the world is pretty interesting.
Notably, none of those movies relate to one another at all. So go figure, the one film in the series that I never watched ended up the only actual sequel.
That said, the start of the film completely ignores everything we’ve learned before. Mary Lou, now played by Courtney Taylor instead of Lisa Schrage, has been in Hell since she died at a school dance in 1957. But she has a nail file and has been chipping away at the chains that bind her for decades, finally escaping back into our world. As she returns to Hamilton High School — totally in Canada, but overly American thanks to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and flags a plenty and non-Canadian football — she starts off on the right foot by killing a janitor and using a jukebox to blast the pacemaker out of an old lover’s chest.
Speaking of those American flags, one night totally average high school student Alexander Grey leaves his girlfriend Sarah Monroe (Cynthia Preston, who is in another beyond wild Canadian film, Pin) behind as he soul searches about his total average-ness. He’s discovered by Mary Lou and after some two person push-ups on the stars and bars, he’s under her spell.
It works. His grades go up. He becomes a football hero. And he’s never had better sex ever.
So what’s wrong? Well, Mary Lou is killing everyone in his way.
Like the guidance counselor who doesn’t believe in our protagonist? She gets her face burned off with battery acid. His football rival gets a ball thrown through his stomach. And soon, even Alexander’s slacker best friend Shane gets his heart ripped out.
Alexander is conflicted. He loves his average girlfriend, but she’s already dumped him for a nerd. Well, a nerd who gets killed by AV equipment. And as we’ve already learned about Mary Lou, she will not be stopped when she wants something, even if her female rival has learned how to use a flamethrower.
Ron Oliver wrote the screenplays for the second and third films in this series (and directed this one). The original title was The Haunting of Hamilton High, as there was no plan to connect these to the Prom Night series. The money for this came from Live Entertainment. A few days before filming started, Oliver ended up going to dinner with the family that owned that company, only to learn on Monday that production had been delayed because the sons had killed their mom and dad. You know them as Erik and Lyle Menendez. Another Oliver fact: he and his partner were married by Udo Kier. One more? He wrote and directed several installments of the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark?
This can’t live up to the proceeding version, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t try. I’ve always loved that Mary Lou is the lone slasher that embraces sex and forces men to become the final survivor — but never lets them live.
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