Directed by Stuart Stanton, who co-wrote the film with Karen Elgar, No Such Thing As Monsters places a young couple into the Australian outback, where a romantic weekend turns sinister thanks to an evil family.
Pretty basic set-up, right? So how does it stack up?
The strange family of Elmer, Amy, Nelly and Becca make this film, tormenting the young lovers, particularly the one member who is completely covered in bloody burn bandages. It’s an intriguing look that sets this movie away from normal, which I always appreciate.
Along with The Faceless Man, it’s cool to see more Australian horror coming our way. Keep it up! This is now available on DVD and on demand in the U.S.
DAY 27. ALKEBULAN: Watch something from the second largest continent.
Religious men try all ways to reach out to the unwashed. There were those that tried TV shows like Davey and Goliath. Jack Chick gave out billions of tracts. And then there are those like Ron Ormond and Estus Pirkle, whose If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?is a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie in ecclesiastical finery. Hal Lindsey, whose tabloid end times film The Late Great Planet Earth made me not sleep for most of the late 1970’s. Russ Doughten, whose apocalyptic saga that began with A Thief In the Night converted thousands. And pastor Kenneth Okonkwo, who seems to have inherited their willingness to go absolutely and wonderfully bonkers just to make you see the light.
Lucifer has sent his demons to Nigeria, impregnating a woman — in horrifying 1980’s direct to video gore detail — with the Antichrist, who ends up being a small child dressed in a bootleg Jordan jersey with glowing rainbow eyes.
Only Pastor Lazarus can stop him, as he and Pastor Chucks (Okonkwo) walk through the streets, screaming the word of God at real people like some Christian ministry version of Jackass while the demon child beats up homeless women and gets yelled at by his father before committing patricide, then engaging in Street Fighter style battle with the priest.
By the second film, gay sex is equated as always rape and often demonic possession and demons pay women $10,000 to lick their scabs. The demon child has also grown a horn and is able to leave the Mark of the Beast on the foreheads of anyone he touches.
Take it from someone who listened to Bob Larson’s Talk Back every single afternoon, this is the real deal. Everyone in this movie believes completely in what they are saying, despite having the effects budget of a trip to the grocery store. Imagine if the worst public access show decided to make a two-hour blockbuster and you have a good idea of what you’re about to watch.
There’s really no other movie-watching experience that can prepare you for this. Bouncy pop music plays alongside cheap flames that dance across cardboard visions of Hell while little kids smoke cigarettes. Also: a devil baby.
You know how you should build up to the really hard drugs? I recommend that if you haven’t watched enough religious films or handled snakes after drinking poison that you ease your way into this. Here’s the YouTube link, but trust me. This isn’t for everyone.
Also known as Horror House and The Dark, this proto-slasher promised “Behind its forbidden doors an evil secret hides!”
Written and directed by Michael Armstrong, who also made Mark of the Devil and House of the Long Shadows, this takes the traditional night in a haunted house story and turns it on his head. Armstrong originally wrote this when he was just 15 years old before rewriting at the end of the 60’s, saying that he worked to “further developing its darker psycho-sexual themes and sharpening characters and dialogue to reflect the current cynical underbelly beneath the superficial Sixties culture.”
A mix of Tigon and American-International Pictures, the Western side wanted more sex, a role for Boris Karloff (whose bad health switched the role to Dennis Price) and a role for Frankie Avalon, which ruined the chance for Armstrong to cast David Bowie as Richard. The two had worked before on a short film called The Image.
American Chris (Avalon), his girl Sheila (Jill Haworth, Tower of Evil), Gary (British teen idol Mark Wynter), his girl Dorothy (Carol Dilworth, The Trygon Factor), the on-the-make Sylvia (Gina Warwick), Madge (Veronica Doran, Screamtime), Richard (Julian Barnes) and Henry (Robin Stewart) have all left a boring party for a night at a haunted house, trailed by Sylvia’s jealous — and married — ex-boyfriend Paul.
A seance upsets Sylvia, who hitchhikes home, at which point Gary is knifed by someone unseen. As the group all have criminal records, Chris tells them they need to keep this a secret from the police. And even worse, he believes that one of them is the killer.
Sam Arkoff and Jack Nicholson of AIP hated the original cut of the film and added — and subtracted — plenty. What ended up on the screen isn’t all that bad and feels like a rough draft of I Know What You Did Last Summer. And hey — I’m all for Frankie Avalon in slashers (see Blood Song).
When we last saw Dr. Alan Feinstone (Corbin Bernsen), he was being sentenced to a maximum security mental hospital and being menaced by his wife Brooke (Linda Hoffman). However, he’s hidden a weapon inside his own skin and escaped, but his aforementioned ex knows that he’s gone to one of the towns that he’s kept postcards from and she’s going to get the money he owes her to pay back all of the teeth and the tongue she’s lost.
Of course, he’s still a maniac and all the issues he had in the first film all come raging back all over again, like his extreme jealousy when he falls for local Jamie Devers (Jillian McWhirter, Dune Warriors), who looks just like his last wife.
Also, much like the last time we saw the evil dentist, if you have to get any work done on your chompers, you shouldn’t watch this beforehand. There’s also a Clint Howard appearance, which is always welcome.
Alan Howarth did the score, so listen for stingers that sound suspiciously like the ones from Halloween 2. And I almost forgot that Big Ed Hurley’s eyepatch-wearing wife Nadine (Wendy Robie) is in this.
Brian Yunza directed this one, a movie that is ready to upset you even if you’re hardened to gore, because everyone hates the dentist. Seriously, if you’re about to get a filling, please avoid this movie, because it features major moments of molar malice. It made my teeth hurt just watching it.
Dr. Alan Feinstone (Corbin Bernsen*) is a man with it all: a successful dental practice, plenty of money and a gorgeous wife. Of course, she’s sleeping with the pool guy, which makes him go absolutely bonkers and start killing everyone that has ever upset him. It starts with shooting his wife’s friend’s dog and then only gets crazier from there. By the way, that isn’t even a dog. It’s a stuffed goat.
He hallucinates that an actress is his wife and starts choking her with her stockings before her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo!) flips out. And then he brings his wife in to show her a new opera-themed room and cuts her tongue out before taking out all of her teeth.
For most of the film, Alan is in-between reality and his delusions, so you have no real idea what’s happening. What is going on is plenty of death, like air getting injected into someone’s jugular and smashing out someone’s teeth with a drill**, this movie reminds me of how long it took me to get all my front teeth replaced with implants.
Hey — Ken Foree shows up as a cop. If you’re playing at home, that makes him a police officer in Dawn of the Dead, Terror Squad, True Blood, Blood Brothers and this movie.
The budget was so small that Yuzna did his own storyboards and gave the art department his credit card to get set decorations. Favors must have been called in, because Alan Howarth composed the entire score in one weekend (as well as doing the final mixing and foley work).
No, this isn’t a remake of the 80’s cicada on the loose movie The Beast Within. Instead, it’s the story of the launch party for an app called “Werewolves Awaken.” As the media gathers to learn all about the game, a priest condemns everyone as “marked for the beast.” Is it all a stunt for attention? Or something much worse about to happen?
Originally titled Hunter’s Moon, this was co-directed by Chris Green (Zombie Werewolves Attack!) and Steven Morana, who also plays August.
One of the party guests is a werewolf killing everyone else — and if any movie needed a The Beast Must Die werewolf break, it’s this one — and those that survive must figure out who it is before it gets too late — that is, if they can stop fighting over whose girlfriend is a cam girl and who has been looking at her online for long enough to make it out alive.
It has something else going for it beyond a fun script and decent effects. Art Hindle (Black Christmas) shows up and is welcome for every moment that he’s on-screen.
It’s not the best werewolf movie you’ve ever seen, but it’s on a level or slightly better than a sequel to The Howling. You can consider that a compliment.
A horror movie filmed entirely in Kalamazoo, Michigan including the Henderson Castle, WMU, Kalamazoo College and the Kalamazoo State Theatre, Housesitter sat on the shelf for more than thirty years before finally being finished, thanks to sound engineering from Skywalker Sound and final picture from Paramount Picture’s color department.
Andy (Richard Gasparian, who co-directed this and went on to work in animation) is an idealist medical student with an Elvis obsession. He’s obsessed with changing the face of modern science with his rat-to-brain transfer, which takes him to the Reinhardt Institute. Meanwhile, his professor and mentor Doc Crosby has a black and white lab that he’s been using to create something even more astounding than Andy’s goals — brain pyramid from 13 unwilling donors so that he can fix his severely damaged brain.
Directed by Robin Nuyen, who played a thief in Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, this 1950’s by way of the 1980’s hybrid that has an Elvis fan — who has a doll of the King that speaks directly to him — as the only person that can save us from science.
I wanted to love this movie, as it feels like it should be a perfect fit for everything that I love. And it also has a slasher kill where someone gets drowned in the toilet. But it never finds the right balance between horror and goofiness, which is a tough line to tightrope walk. You may find yourself enjoying it way more than me, however.
Housesitter is available on demand and on blu ray from Leomark Studios
DAY 26. DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: What to get? Watch one set, clap clap clap clap, deep in the heart of Texas.
What can one say about the movie that uses the tagline “It’s cheaper than a chainsaw!”?
Written and co-directed by one-time The Dukes of Hazzard stuntman Terry Lofton (along with Bill Leslie), this movie was inspired by a story that he heard about a nail gun fight at a construction site. While the original script was eighty pages, the final shooting only used twenty-five of those pages and went from a serious film to a sillier tone, as Lofton figured no one would ever take this movie seriously.
At a construction site in east Texas — yay, the theme makes sense — six men assault Linda Jenkins. Months later, a camoflaged killer in a black motorcycle helmet hunts down the men one by one.
This is honestly the only slasher I’ve ever seen where a victim accidentally urinates on the killer, which you think would have had to have happened by now.
Beyond just the men who wronged Linda, the distorted voiced killer is pretty much indiscriminate about who he kills. Usually, it’s people having sex, which seems to happen in every other scene. In fact, the director claims that John Rudder’s wife divorced him over his scene with Shelly York as she believed they were really aardvarking.
There’s an astounding scene in this where a cashier looks directly at the camera. That’s Lofton’s grandmother, who worked in the store they used for the shoot. She has the script near her — you can see it — and was really upset when she saw the movie and realized how much sex was in it. The violence, as always, is fine. Just don’t have any horizontal mambo, please.
I guess there was construction all over East Texas at this time, which is certainly reflected by this film, which also has a nail gun fight for fun, because why not?
This movie has the longest takes, the most penises, the biggest freakouts, the most Dairy Queen product placement and the strangest synth score I’ve seen in a film. Normally just one of those things would be enough to make me fall in love with a slasher, but somehow, this one manages to get all of those into the same movie.
Evil Dead Trap 2 has moments of absolute beauty and scenes of frightening horror, often within the very same frame. It’s about three people who are brought together by a serial killer who isn’t just murdering people throughout Tokyo, but tearing their organs out and leaving them in the open for all to see.
They are a projectionist named Aki Ôtani (Shoko Nakajima), who is forever behind the scenes of the movies she shows from the projection booth of her work, hiding from the world that she wants to love her but feels that they never will because she doesn’t have the body or looks that see as ideal. And oh yeah, she’s haunted by a small boy’s ghost who pushes her into scenarios of abject horror.
Then there’s Emi Kageyama, her best friend, who is more traditionally beautiful yet also someone who is sexually excited when she gets near the murder scenes that she crosses her legs, so overcome with passion that her hardened crew is disquieted.
And finally there’s Kurahashi, the man that Emi tries to set up with Aki, who ends up being married and that’s the very least of his secrets.
Then everything stops making sense and gets really interesting.
This is the kind of movie that you can watch and try to figure out the story and never really get there. That’s because at its heart it is just as much a giallo as it is a slasher. It wears its devotion to Argento not only on its sleeve, but in every frame, with a battle between Aki and another killer that emulates the white sheets sprayed with gore from Tenebre. There’s also a moment where the very theater itself comes to life as if it wants to destroy Aki, sending echoes of Demons through my mind (and yes, I realize that Argento didn’t direct that film, but let’s be honest, his vision is all of that one).
Director and co-writer Izô Hashimoto also wrote the script for the anime version of Akira, as well as the movie version of the manga Shamo.
This really has nothing at all to do with the original, but why should that both you? It also makes zero to no sense by the end of the movie, which made me love it even more.
There’s a moment in this movie where the neon of Tokyo is captured in one wide shot, but as you take in that colorful incandescent beauty, you notice in the corner of the screen that the killer is stabbing someone in the water over and over and over. It’s a near-perfect shot and close to something that even Argento would be proud of. If all this movie had was that one shot — and it certainly has so much more — I would still recommend it to you.
R. D Francis informed me that you can watch this on FShare.
Day 26: Don’t Mess with Texas: Watch one set deep in the heart of Texas.(Okay, we cheated . . . it starts in Texas and ends up in the pancreas of Texas, aka New Mexico.)
Yes, Sam . . . this does, in fact, fit into our “Slasher Month” for October. Although, technically, this is more of a serial killer “stabber-impaler,” but more on that later. . . .
One of the wonderful aspects of writing for B&S About Movies (i.e. cleaning the grease pits and dumpster pad out back) — besides the movie-themed drink recipes acquired during our Saturday Night Drive-In Asylum Double Feature Watch Parties brought to you by Bill Van Ryn, the publisher of the quarterly Drive-In Asylum and webzine Groovy Doom — are the rabbit holes: those wonderful analog white rabbits that lead us into a strange and absurd celluloid universe of once unwanted and forgotten direct-to-video gems. The “rabbit hole” in this case began with our review of Dennis Devine’s second film, Dead Girls, and his most recent film, Camp Blood 8, which lead to our upcoming “Drive-In Friday: Dennis Devine Night” tribute where we reviewed Get the Girl starring Danielle De Luca.
And . . . are we really inside a rabbit hole . . . or is it the psychedelic experience of the libations flowing forth from the B&S Bar n’ Grill? Whow, dude. I just blew liver . . . and my mind. Nope. Your mind and your optics’ rods n’ cones processed that DVD box correctly.
Joe Mantegna of CBS-TV’s long-running Criminal Minds (aka Joey Zasa from Godfather III, Warren Beatty’s Bugsy, Stephen King’s Thinner, and, most importantly, one of the greatest faux-DJ’s to ever grace the silver screen, Ian the Shark from Airheads . . . oh, okay, yeah, and Fat Tony in The Simpsons) did an “Eric Roberts” (i.e., appear in few scenes to get a “name” on the box for marketing purposes) to help his ol’ buddy, Thom Eberhardt. (But Mantegna is in more scenes that the usual Eric Roberts gig (The Evil Inside Her). In fact, Naked Fear is third time Eberhardt and Mantegna worked together: their other films are (the really good) TV movie Face Down (1997), with Peter Riegert (Animal House) and Kelli Maroney (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Chopping Mall), and I Was a Teenage Faust (2002), with Robert Townsend (The Meteor Man).
And, as we’ve said many times before in the digital ethers of B&S About Movies, that “Eric Roberts” casting-marketing works: if I didn’t see Joe Mantegna on the box, I wouldn’t have clicked deeper into the film. But wait a sec . . . no, it can’t be? It is! That’s under-the-radar directing-favorite Thom Eberhardt of the video rental and HBO subscription-favorites Sole Survivor and Night of the Comet (with Kelli Maroney; it’s “all in the family,” after all).
We say “under the radar” not as an insult to Thom, as we believe his name should be as remembered-revered as Tobe Hooper (Lifeforce), William Sachs (Van Nuys Blvd.), and Jim Wynorksi (Forbidden World). You’ve watched more of Thom’s movies than you realize. He directed the always-awesome Sir Michael Caine as a drunken Sherlock Holmes in the comedy Without a Clue (1988), Keanu Reeves (alongside the recently convicted Lori “Aunt Becky” Loughlin) in The Night Before (1988; which Thom also wrote), and Gross Anatomy (1989) with Matthew Modine and Daphne Zuniga (The Dorm that Dripped Blood). But the biggest film of his directing career, that is, the best-distributed and best remembered — courtesy of its star, Kurt “Snake Plissken” Russell — is Captain Ron (1992). Oh, and we can’t forget Thom wrote Disney/Touchstone’s Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992).
“Ahem. Sam?”
“Yeah, R.D?”
“Since your Christmas Movie goofy ’round ‘ere, did you know that the guy who made Soul Survivor and Night of the Comet wrote a Christmas movie, All I Want for Christmas (1991)? December’s coming up . . . so put that on your review’s shortlist for December.
Anyway, sadly, Thom drifted away from mainstream Hollywood courtesy of the negative reviews for Captain Ron — and the $22.5 million gross against its $24 million budget. (Personally, and in spite of Martin Short’s camera-mugging, I liked it; come on, it had Kurt Russell in another eye patch!) At that point, Thom transitioned into low-budgeted TV movies — with Twice Upon a Time, Ratz, and the aforementioned Face Down and I Was A Teenaged Faust — with Naked Fear being his last feature film, to date. But, as you can tell by the title, there’s nudity in this one, full-frontal nudity (of the non-sexual nature), so this one’s strictly a direct-to-video release (I’ve never come across it on subscription cable). In fact, that “nudity” aspect is pushed to the forefront in its overseas release. So, if ‘ol Joe doesn’t inspire you . . . it’s all in the marketing.
Geeze, did John Howard of Spine(1986) fame make this? Did the art deparment at 4-Play Video, Inc. and Xeon, Ltd. design the box?
Okay, so . . . now for the Halloween-cum-October theme month-cum-slasher purpose behind this review. And, no. While you may think this is all influenced by Cornel Wilde’s (Sharks’ Treasure) The Naked Prey (1965), which had its roots in the 1924 short-story by Richard Connell, which became the 1932 film of the same name, The Most Dangerous Game, and Robert Sheckley’s grandfather of sci-fi “death sport” films, the Italian-made The 10th Victim (1965), based on his 1953 short story, The Seventh Victim, you’d be wrong. In fact, another variant of Connell’s novel — with its production also inspired by a serial killer we’re about to discuss — is 1994’s Surviving the Game, a present-day variant starring Ice-T as a kidnapped homeless man hunted on preserve by Gary Busey and the late Rutger Hauer.
So, in our last week’s reviews for Black Circle Boys (and this month’s upcoming reviews for Deadbeat by Dawn andRiver’s Edge; search for ’em) we discussed the real-life serial killer/murders that inspired those films. And in the case of Naked Fear, screenwriter Christine Vasquez used the exploits of the “Butcher Baker,” aka Robert Christian Hansen (he was a baker-by-trade, learned from his father), who, between 1971 and 1983, abducted, raped, and murdered at least seventeen women (mostly prostitutes) in and around Anchorage, Alaska. His modus operandi: he flew them out to (he was a licensed bush pilot) and dumped many of them into the wilderness and hunted them down with a semi-automatic rifle and a knife — and he kept their jewelry as mementos. He was also an avid hunter who excelled at archery (which carried over into the movie) — and took up arson. Sentenced to 461 years and a life sentence without the possibility of parole, Hansen died in prison, in 2014.
So, yes. While you’ve seen the “human death sport” plot many times before, such as the sci-fi variant Predatoror the in recent, controversial-flop The Hunt (or the recent mocksploitation knock-off American Hunt), and all of the celluloid grandchildren born that we discuss in our review of Elio Petri’s aforementioned The 10th Victim, you’ve never seen the “human hunt” done so effectively on a small budget. Yes, it’s inherentlybetter than American Hunt, which attests to Thom Eberhardt’s directorial skill set.
Danielle De Luca (also of 2011’s worth-the-watch Grizzly Flats with Judd Nelson, 2009’s pretty cool, award-nominated horror based on The Donner Party, Necrosis, and the Dennis Devine rom-com DeWitt & Maria), who’s very good here in her physically-demanding role, stars as the new-in-town Diane Kelper. Also new to town is recently hired sheriff deputy Dwight Terry (Arron Shiver of George Clooney’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, and as Dean O’Banion in the awesome Boardwalk Empire with Steve Buscemi, and Billy Barnes in AMC’s Longmire), a big city disgraced cop.
Deputy Terry, of course, wants the hell out of Podunk, New Mexico, and sees career redemption in the town’s recent rash of missing women — and ulterior-motive driven Sheriff Tom Burke (Joe Mantegna) wants Duputy Terry to back off the case. Of course the Sheriff does . . . and no one in the town cares, either; the missing are (in a nice subtextual turn-of-the-script) just strippers, prostitutes, or drifters that are just as worthless as the deer that’s killed for sport in these parts; the girls are, like the deer, are just “meat” after all.
After winning a bar dance contest in her Texas hometown, the naive Diane is lured to this small, dusty New Mexico boomtown — where game hunting is its main industry — and discovers her “dancing job” is at a seedy strip club. The club’s owner and his agent promised Diane a dancing gig as a “stepping stone” to a prestigious job in Las Vegas — but not the one in Nevada, but in New Mexico, east of Santa Fe (“. . . there’s two? Shit!”). Then she comes to realize she’s been scammed into a twisted form ofindentured servitude of no financial escape. So, to make ends meet, she takes up prostitution as side job — which also benefits her bosses and was always their endgame. Her first client is Colin Mandle (as with the discussed Robert Christian Hansen), a successful food industry owner, avid bowhunter, and bush pilot who spends his evenings in strip joints and beds prostitutes. And Diane wakes up naked and alone in the wilderness. The hunt begins.
To tell any more would be to give away the effective, twist ending of who the newest serial killer to emerge in these parts — “The Southwest Slayer” — really is.
The upside to Thom Eberhardt’s direction is that, while those overseas video boxes push the nudity angle, and Danielle De Luca is fully nude for a (short) portion of the movie, the nudity is neither gratuitous or offensive and is essential to the plot; even the torture Diane endures before “the hunt” is downplayed. So, in the hands of a lesser, low-budget provocateur, Naked Fear could have degraded into a pseudo-soft core porn film (see Spine; yes, that was “the point” of that film, but work with me, here; while it bears similarities to Richard Speck’s July 1966 Chicago murders of eight student nurses, the film was not based on those killings). So kudos to Thom, not only for keeping the nudity at bay, but for dialing back the graphic horror to create a tight, survivalist thriller. And De Luca wasn’t cast because of how she looks in the buff: she illcits sympathy in her role, and pulls out all of the stops when the hunt is on. I’d really like to see De Luca her rise out of direct-to-videodom into smaller, featured roles in mainstream productions, or pop up in a Law & Order: SVU or Blue Bloods (you know my fandom for those two series). Ditto for Arron Shiver, who recently turned up alongside Christian Bale and Matt Damon in Ford v Ferrari (2019).
Yes, the film is a little long on the hour forty minute side, but since this wasn’t intended as a TV movie — which would require an 80-minute cut to fit into a 40-minute, two hour commercial block – Eberhardt’s frames aren’t superfluous. Changes are, as with most domestic TV movies or direct-to-DVD productions, and with Mantenga’s name, Naked Fear most likely had a limited, foreign theatrical release; thus, the length works.
The only issue I had with the plotting of the film: the cliff scene. After a blow to the head with a pretty large rock and a 30-foot cliff fall, our killer pulls a “Jason Vorhees” and come back, again — sans head wound, blood, disorientation, and nary a broken bone. Eh, that’s how all movies of this type roll (i.e., the victim has a false sense of victory-redemption). But it’s excused, thanks to Christine Vasquez’s solid scripting, Thom’s directing, and good acting against-the-budget from all that keeps you gripped in fear — and shocked that the story, while it seems preposterous, is actually based in fact.
You can watch Naked Fear as an account log-in on You Tube or as a non-log in, free-with-ads stream on TubiTV. Parental Guidance is suggested as result of the nudity.
Thom Eberhardt and Christine Vasquez have recently reteamed for the currently in-development Los Wildcats del Norte. You can keep abreast of that production’s developments at their official Facebook page. Some of the other films that you’ve seen from Naked Prey‘s producer and distributor, CineTel Films, include 976-EVIL (1988), Class of 1999 II: The Substitute (1994), Christmas Icetastrophe (2014), and Nic Cage’s Kill Chain (2019).
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes on Medium.
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