Filmmaker Dennis (director and writer Scott Friend) and figure skater Mia (Madeleine Morgenweck) are trying to enjoy a healing weekend when Dennis’ brother Roger (Will Brill) shows up and takes them on a hallucinatory journey that won’t end well for anyone.

I really can’t do justice to the elaborate push and pull between Dennis and Mia that happens in this movie and how their past comes slowly to light. There are so many things that have happened between them; addiction, a lost child and promises that have been broken. At this point, an accident skating has cost Mia her ability to stand on one foot. The relationship with Dennis may have taken even more.

Mia thinks that Roger could save their relationship. Dennis believes that his brother just wants to ruin his life. Yet David is also detoxing from a lifetime of drug use, so he is not a reliable narrator in any way. He has waking nightmares. And Roger isn’t to be trusted either. Oh yeah — there’s also a monk who keeps appearing in the woods.

This is a quick film, a deep one and a movie that does more with three characters than most movies do with a cast of thousands.

To the Moon is now available on VOD from 1091.

Hickspoitation is a genre I don’t get into all that much, but this is a fine example of it and feels like going down to the river (I almost wrote going down river, because Western Pennsylvania language eats all the verbs and connective words).

Look, if you have a girlfriend as hot as Kim Delaney willing to have sex with you at 4 AM and then let you go hunting, you should just skip the outdoors and stay in bed with her. Or the shower. Or anywhere she wants to go.

But yeah. David Rand (Sam Bottoms) leaves Melanie (Delaney) at home and heads off to get a buck with his dad (Clu Gulager), his dad’s best friend Big Al (Ken Swofford), Al’s brother Ralph (Mayf Nutter) and Marty (Joey Travolta). Every single one of them other than dad — Mason is his name — is a complete idiot. I mean, why would you drive to the woods that you own and then anger the people all around you, the people that have to live there and already resent you?

People like Charles Cyphers, Bruce Glover, Billy Bob Thornton and Micky Jones, all looking like they just want you to screw up so they can set you straight. Of course, the men from the civilized world will have to become uncivilized, as always occurs in these movies.

Director Robert Hughes also made Memorial Valley Massacre, while writer Emmett Alston would also create the script for Three-Way Weekend, Nine Deaths of the Ninja (which he also directed) and New Year’s Evil. This movie was based on a novel by Jere Cunningham, who also wrote Judgement Night, which is pretty much the same idea as this except in the inner city.

Beware! The Blob or Son of the Blob is a big idea to get your head around. While the original was presented as horror, this film pretty much leans in to how ridiculous it all is. Written by Anthony Harris and Jack Woods from a story by Richard Clair and Jack H. Harris, a lot of this was improvised on set and the script — even though it took all those people — was mostly ignored.

Harris was also the producer and Anthony was his college graduate son. They were next door neighbors with Larry Hagman — who had previously directed episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and The Good Life — who had never seen The Blob. Harris screened his print for the actor/director, who loved it and said that he could get a lot of his Hollywood friends to show up and get blobbed, as long as he could direct.

Fifteen years after the original Blob destroyed parts of Pennsylvania, Chester (Godfrey Cambridge) has brought a piece of that creature from its frozen grave in the North Pole, where he does the sensible thing and puts it in the fridge. It grows in size as it eats a fly, a kitten, then his wife Marianne (Marlene Clark) and finally, while Chester watches The Blob on TV, it eats him too just in time for Lisa (Gwynne Gilford) to watch him get claimed by the creature.

As she tries to get her boyfriend Bobby (Robert Walker Jr.). to believe what she’s seen, the red jelly eats its way through Los Angeles, claiming the lives of two hippies (Randy Stonehill and Cindy Williams) in a storm drain — were they looking for Simon? — as well as officer Sid Haig, chickens, horses, a bar, a gas station, Scoutmaster Dick Van Patten, a barber (Shelley Berman) and even some home-displaced folks (Hagman, Burgess Meredith and Del Close, who is wearing an eyepatch as his cornea was scratched by a cat previous to filming; he’d return with a similar look as Reverend Meeker in perhaps the best horror remake of all time, 1988’s The Blob).

It takes an ice rink — which was torn down shortly after filming — to stop the monster — maybe — this time. As for the bowling alley in this movie, it’s Jack Rabbit Slims from Pulp Fiction.

In the first movie, the Blob was made of silicone and dyed red. It had to be stirred throughout the movie to keep its color. This Blob was made from a red-dyed powder blended with water, as well as a big red plastic balloon, red plastic sheeting and a red drum of hard red silicone spun in front of the camera. Tim Baar and Conrad Rothmann created these effects and beyond working on second unit camera, Dean Cundey helped, years before he’d become such a force in filmmaking.

In 1982, when Hagman was on Dallas and the shooting of his character J.R. Ewing was the biggest moment in pop culture, this was re-released with the headline “The film that J.R. shot!”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was originally on the site on November 6, 2018 and is written by Bill Van Ryn. Now you can see it this weekend at the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

There was something great about growing up in the 70s as a monster kid. With VHS still a distant promise waiting over the horizon, TV was the only way you could access movies once they passed through your local theaters–and if you were a kid, seeing them theatrically usually meant pleading your case with an adult who was totally disinterested. TV was the last stand. Fortunately, local stations desperate for programming often filled their lineup with syndicated packages of older films. Horror movies often turned up as time-fillers on local TV, usually in late night slots meant for insomniacs and people who worked graveyard shift.  What this meant for us monster kids was, we scoured the TV Guide looking for movies noted “THRILLER”, and then you had to make a decision about whether or not it was worth staying up until 3am to watch.

1972’s Horror Express was one of those flicks that I *never* missed, no matter what. Not only does it star Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Telly Savalas shows up about halfway through the film as a Russian cossack (!), and it’s got a series of simple but gruesome attack scenes that were some of the goriest things I’d seen up until that point. The story is set in the early 1900s, and Lee plays an anthropologist who discovers a hairy ape-like fossil in the Himalayas. Believing it to be the missing link, he crates it and hurriedly books passage on the Trans-Siberian Express in order to return to England with it as quickly as possible. Cushing is a colleague of his who is also on board, and immediately senses that Lee is up to something noteworthy. Unbeknownst to anyone, the creature is actually the last vessel of an extraterrestrial intelligence that has the ability to lock eyes with its victims and drain their brains of all information contained therein. It gets out of the crate and starts absorbing people. Its victims die gruesomely in the process, bleeding profusely from the eyes, which turn white like a boiled fish. This alien presence can also transfer itself to another host in this way, allowing it to jump from body to body if necessary.

Horror Express is a British/Spanish coproduction directed by Eugenio Martin, who had just made the movie Pancho Villa starring Telly Savalas. Martin used the same train set from that previous film, and each different “car” of the train was actually the same set redressed for each new part of the train. That meant that the entire film had to be shot out of order, with every scene taking place in the corresponding car being completed before the set was taken down and redressed. The movie was shot silent, with the entire soundtrack dubbed in later, although Lee, Cushing, and Savalas all did their own dubbing, so their familiar voices are all present.

Most importantly, the story is engaging and clever, with the mystery of the creature being slowly unraveled by the protagonists using clues left behind. One of the more outlandish moments has Cushing obtaining the eyeball of the now dead fossil and extracting fluid from it — fluid that somehow contains actual images that the host observed, now visible under a microscope! This is how they determine that it was from outer space and had been on Earth since prehistoric times. Hey, it’s as good an explanation as anything, right?

Although not a Hammer production, this movie definitely feels like one, especially since we have Lee and Cushing together in the same film. It was perfect for late night television, and it was hard for me to forget those bleeding white eyeballs after I saw this movie. You’ve probably already noticed the similarities to the story Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, the basis for “The Thing”, and I always loved the way this movie sets up the hairy fossil as if it’s the villain. Eventually you realize that whatever the fossil was, it was just a shell, another victim of the real monster. Although we’re talking about the Chilling Classics public domain version of Horror Express, there exists a fabulous blu ray transfer from Severin Films, definitely worthy of your hard earned dollars.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can watch this movie this weekend at the Drive-In Super Monster-Rama! Get more info at the official Drive-In Super Monster-Rama Facebook page and get your tickets at the Riverside Drive-In’s webpage.

The Wicker Man begins with Christopher Lee, a Hammer star, talking to writer Anthony Shaffer about more interesting roles. Shaffer had read the David Pinner novel Ritual — which had first been written as a script for Michael Winner, and I can’t even imagine what he would have done — and turned that inspiration into his own story.

Shaffer’s vision for the film was unique. The story delves into the intersection of modern religion and ancient pagan practices. It departs from the typical blood and gore of horror, opting instead for a creeping, unknown terror that lurks in the shadows. This unique approach is what we now refer to as folk horror.

The Wicker Man stands at the crossroads of art and horror, somewhere between movies like Performance and The Devil Rides Out, but with a twist, as the traditional rules of horror no longer apply. The concepts of good and evil, as defined by Judeo-Christian beliefs, are absent in this story. Instead, it’s a journey into the unknown, exploring ancient ways that have existed long before the modern era.

Christian Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is initially presented as the virtuous hero. He is on the island of Summerisle investigating Rowan Morrison’s disappearance, yet the villagers refuse to admit that she ever existed.

He’s shocked at these people’s ways, which include putting frogs in their mouths to cure illness and dancing around phallic maypoles. He finds images of past May Queens. He meets Lord Summerisle (Lee), who leads this village. And he sees the answers that he seeks, despite perhaps not liking them.

There’s also tempted by Willow MacGregor (Britt Ekland, who was three months pregnant; she was dubbed by Annie Ross, and her body double was dancer Rachel Verney), and there’s a scene where she dances with a wall between her and Howie that is volcanic. It has no nudity, but it’s filled with sensual energy.

Director Robin Hardy also made The Fantasist and The Wicker Tree, a very loose sequel to the original movie. Hardy first published the sequel as a novel, Cowboys for Christ, about American Christian evangelists who travel to Scotland and end up in a similar situation. Lee plays the Old Gentleman, who is either Summerisle or not.

Shaffer also wrote The Loathsome Lambton Worm, a direct sequel that begins immediately after the ending of The Wicker Man. In it, Howie is saved by his fellow police officers. The movie features a fire-breathing dragon and is much more fantastic than the first one.

I read a review where someone said that this movie was “morally repugnant” and that made me like it more. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last few years that upset me, as it has some moments that are just overwhelming in their bloody fervor.

It’s funny though that in the rush to heap praise on this movie that no one says that it outright rips off the comic book Crossed to the point that I thought that this was an official adaption. Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows had been trying to sell a movie of their comic for some years and well, who wants to buy a movie that has already been made?

But what is in here — sorry, I just want to go back for a second and say that nose eating scene is literally panel for shot taken from Crossed — proves that director and writer Rob Jabbaz can create something brutal and horrific.

The Alvin virus has mutated and connects the part of the brain that enjoys sexual pleasure with the one that is aggressive. Those that have the disease have black eyes and are devoted to acts of erotic murder.

Jim and Kat become separated as the virus gets out of control and fight to get back across town to one another. Nothing works out. She comes across an obsessed businessman who is devoted to assaulting her once he becomes infected; there’s also a doctor who explains the virus and seems helpful yet he has an entire garbage bag full of dead babies.

I kind of hate that this movie was funded with a mixture of cryptocurrency and revenue from a producer’s cam girl business, but I do enjoy that it’s nearly all practical effects. It feels like a movie that watched Dawn of the Dead and said, “What if that movie had more fucking?” Well, it’d be called Shivers, but you get my point.

I’m usually against long movies, but this film is 159 minutes long and there’s supposedly a four-hour cut and I kind of wish there was an eight-hour one. Sometimes, you can eat too much candy and not get a stomachache and that’s how I feel about this; it’s near overwhelming how much Baz Luhrmann throws at you, nearly numbing your senses as much as dazzling them to the point where I couldn’t stop laughing at parts of the movie, but never at it. Laughing at the audacious nature of all of this, which is probably the best approximation of Elvis wearing his Captain Marvel Jr. suit standing in front of high rollers in Vegas, trying to escape and instead ranting from a darkened stage, saying things like “It’s called ka-ra-tay and only two kinds of people know it: The Chinese and The King and one of them is me.”

Elvis is a complicated thing. Chuck D. may have rapped “Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me you see/Straight up racist that sucker was/Simple and plain/Motherfuck him and motherfuck John Wayne,” but he also told the Associated Press, “…there was always a great deal of respect for Elvis, especially during his Sun sessions. As a Black people, we all knew that. My whole thing was the one-sidedness — like, Elvis’ icon status in America made it like nobody else counted. My heroes came from someone else. My heroes came before him. My heroes were probably his heroes. As far as Elvis being The King, I couldn’t buy that.” He also told The Guardian, “You can’t ignore Black history. Now they’ve trained people to ignore all other history – they come over with this homogenized crap. So, Elvis was just the fall guy in my lyrics for all of that. It was nothing personal – believe me.”

As a teen, I was living with that knowledge that Elvis did not invent his music while the only songs of his I knew were the ones that got played the most, like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog.” I didn’t know the Sun sessions as much nor the spiritual songs. My image of Elvis was an old drugged out man in a jumpsuit shooting TVs, dead on the toilet.

So — and this makes me seem old — but when I couldn’t sleep at night as a teen, I’d scan the AM radio dial looking for something to keep my insomnia company. I’d often find music I’d not heard and listened closely to Elvis songs like “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto” and sure, they can be schmaltz, but they felt earnestly real and raw even in front of their huge production. I grew fascinated with some of the wilder moments of Elvis’ life, like scandalizing the country with his motions, him being obsessed with karate and law enforcement, his films, the comeback special, the dying days and the Memphis mafia and the Fool’s Gold Loaf, a sandwich Elvis used to fly to Denver to eat right on the runway as restaurant workers brought him and his crew the delicacy, which is made from a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jam and an entire pound of bacon. It fed ten people. Elvis ate his all by himself.

So yeah, complicated. Why do I celebrate Elvis flying from Memphis to Denver just to eat his own sandwich rather than make it by himself or getting someone else to do it, thereby destroying our fragile ecosystem with his gigantic carbon footprint while I’d hate anyone else who did that? Why do I feel badly that he squandered his gifts so many times, choosing to make Hollywood silliness when he could still make vital music at any time? And how could a cultural living god so easily be snared by Colonel Tom Parker?

I had no idea who Austin Butler was other than playing Tex Watson in Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood but man, he’s Elvis as far as I’m concerned. I keep seeing Tom Hanks in Colonel Parker, but Butler is just great in his role. Then again, I wasn’t really around much for Elvis being alive, so maybe my aunt who loved him might feel different, but she also thought MCI was a super secret terrorist cell and not a phone company, so I’m not so sure I want to call and ask her.

Speaking of Tarantino’s revise on real life, I was kind of hoping at moments in this movie, even though I know the sad ending, that Elvis would figure it all out, fly around the world, make the music he wanted to make and not slowly die a doctor administered junkie’s death. But real life doesn’t work out that way, does it?

Also: this movie had no moments of Elvis inviting numerous groupies over to wrestle for him in white panties or in mud, but I think this was working really hard to make you love Elvis and not just for how strange — or normal, I mean, if you had all that money and fame you’d make some wild life choices too — he was.

The Crockett family, led by Jason (Ray Milland), may have great power and influence, but nature in no way cares about those things. Snakes, birds, geckos, alligators, turtles, butterflies and, yes, frogs, are prepared to end their lives for daring to abuse the ecosystem with pesticides.

Wildlife shutterbug Pickett Smith (Sam Elliot) picked the wrong holiday weekend to be in their Florida mansion.

Directed by George McCowan, whose career often found himself working in episodic television, and written by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees (Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Dr. Phibes Rises Again), I am sad that I will never live the life of drive-in aficionados of 1972 who got to see this with Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster.

I have no idea if the animals are turning on all of humanity — I mean, Jason’s dog remains loyal — or if it’s just this family, but I love the swampy world that this movie makes, one that makes nearly every creature in the world outside the Crockett home into a killer ready to work together and wipe out rich folks.

This also has tons of stock footage of animals which is how you make a low budget movie about a whole bunch of animals. As it was, the hotel everyone was staying in was adamant that no animals were allowed to stay in the actor’s rooms, as if that would be a thing.