Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

Today’s theme: The Sweetest Taboo!

Hold onto your penmanship medals! Nobuhiko Obayashi (Hausu) brings us a version of The Bad Seed, with a child perhaps even more devious than Rhoda Penmark.

I would say that The Bad Seed was a gateway horror film for me, but I was born in the 1970s. The idea of gateway horror had not been invented. Or even considered. One of my earliest memories is watching Carrie on our little television in the trailer we were living in. The pig’s blood dropped and I ran out of the room. Carrie was aired on CBS in 1978. Sure, they made a few edits, but a 3-year-old me would not have been able to notice. The real question is why would my parents let me watch it in the first place?

Sort of the blessing and the curse of being Generation X. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. My mom loved Alfred Hitchcock and she would often tape his films or television show any chance she got, and we would watch it on the weekends (along with a week’s worth of All My Children). But the film I most fondly remember is The Bad Seed. Taped off of WGN, complete with commercials for K-Tel records and Empire carpet (588-23 hundred Empiiiiire), we would watch it all of the time. Oh, how I wish I still had that old VHS tape! The Bad Seed had so many aspects that fascinated me. I was too young to understand the concept of translating a stage play to film. We do not see the evil Rhoda commits. We just hear about it. It might have made the idea of such an evil child more effective. Also, I’m still not sure what excelsior is exactly. But apparently, it is highly flammable.

As much as I love The Bad Seed, it is possible that Obayashi’s version is superior in many ways. He totally cuts out the psychological mumbo jumbo that drags down a significant portion of the original film. Our child killer here, Alice, is just a sociopath from the beginning. Is it possible that the suicide of her father is the root cause? Who cares? It doesn’t matter. We are just here to watch Alice bludgeon her teacher to death in order to get a prized doll. 

Obayashi also deviates from the original story by bringing in an aunt as the main protagonist. Ryoko ends up in a mental institution after believing she has caused her boyfriend’s death. I mean, she did wish death upon him as he was walking out the door, only to be struck down by a car. On that same day, Ryoko’s sister Fuyoko is getting married (why Ryoko isn’t there is not explained, other than she is studying music in Vienna). After Alice asks Fuyoko if she can have her veil when she dies, Fuyoko says yes, not expecting to be violently tossed out of a window minutes later. Years pass, and eventually Ryoko is convinced she was not responsible for the death of her boyfriend. Her brother-in-law (I guess—he was only legally married to her sister for mere minutes—talk about early release) asks Ryoko if she would come and be governess to Alice, sweet Alice. She does, but quickly begins to believe that Alice is responsible for the mysterious deaths happening around the family.

We do not approach the insanity that is Hausu of course, but Obayashi does have plenty of tricks up his sleeve. He foreshadows this glass vase so hard that you know something is going to happen with it. But I could have never expected what actually does happen. I thought “there it is”, immediately thinking that it is something that would have easily happened to one of the girls in Hausu.

The Leroy character, the guy who knows the truth but would have difficulty proving it, is even scummier than the guy in The Bad Seed. And Alice does not need to rely on him sleeping on a bed of excelsior to ignite those flames. 

All around, a great companion piece to both Hausu and The Bad Seed. I could watch both of those films back-to-back right now. Similar to other remakes of The Bad Seed in the United States, Cute Devil was made for television. I seem to be stacking up MFTV movies this month. A seemingly endless fount of goodness that unfortunately does not seem to exist anymore. 

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Made for TV Movie

Ah man, Tracy Gold was always a good girl until this movie. She plays Darcy Palmer, an artist who loses her mind, leaves her man at the altar, takes all his money, heads to New York City and kills a college student named Brianne Dwyer (Mireille Enos). Then, she starts life all over again as a college student in New Hampshire.

She soon becomes friends with Jeanelle Polk (Shawnee Smith) and goes home to meet her father, Russell (Perry King). Before you know it, she has him fooled, and she’s cutting his ponytail off in the shower.

Directed by Mary Lambert and written by Gregory Goodell (lots of TV movies, but also the director and writer of the video nasty Human Experiments), this has the lovely daughter of TV’s Growing Pains stuffing dead bodies into her suitcase, ruining eyes with acid eyedrops and even trying to stab our good girl with scissors. She’s killed ten people in six cities and keeps changing who she is, somehow staying ahead of cops. If this were a Giallo, they’d be amongst the dumbest of all movie police, as a festering suitcase filled with a dead body can stay in a dorm for days and then at a construction site for months and no one notices.

Perry King also wears a jaunty scarf for the scene where Gold bites him and screams, “I’m an artist!”

Also: Total square up reel of all her crimes while Perry King is like, “I guess we were lucky.” And yet, he slept with her. I’m sure it was amazing.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

Today’s theme: Made for TV Movie!

“And maybe for the college boys, the truest mirror is the toilet bowl staring back at them in the morning after a toga party.”

This insightful line of dialogue is “uttered” by a faceless ventriloquist’s dummy during a set at a strip club in When a Stranger Calls Back, a copy/paste sequel produced by Showtime in 1993.

Starting with a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1984, Showtime produced many original films during a run that lasted until around 2007. Never reaching the acclaim of HBO Films, and never reaching the depths of Cinemax Friday After Dark programming, Showtime was able to carve out an interesting middle ground, particularly in the horror genre. The first film that comes to my mind when I think about Showtime is John Carpenter’s Body Bags. But Showtime was also the home of films such as Psycho IV: The Beginning, The Birds II: Land’s End, as well as Jim Wynorski’s remake of The Wasp Woman. Pursuing the list of films now, I feel the need to find some of these potential hidden gems. Once this month is over, I might have to seek out The Tiger Woods Story, a 1998 film directed by LeVar Burton, starring Keith David as Tiger Woods’ dad. 

When a Stranger Calls Back gets the gang from the first film back together. Carol Kane as Jill, the babysitter who was tormented in the original movie, but she has since turned her trauma into a career as a counselor, while finding time to take self-defense classes on the side. Charles Durning as Detective John Clifford, using his skills to track down men who harass babysitters (a very niche skill set). And director Fred Walton. Not much to say about Walton other than he also directed April Fool’s Day, followed by a string of made-for-TV films, including a remake of William Castle’s I Saw What You Did.

Not only did the director and main stars come back, but the basic template from the first film returns. The most often heard complaint about When a Stranger Calls is that the film loses steam after that iconic opening sequence. But what film could possibly match the energy and suspense crafted in that first 20 minutes? People rarely talk about how great the last 15 minutes are as well. Truly scary.

While the bookends of When a Stranger Calls Back does not match the intensity of the original, it makes a decent effort. We get a legendary scream queen as the tormented babysitter (Jill Schoeien), and a killer who is creepier than the one in the first film. Kind of a Francis Dolarhyde meets Peeta from The Hunger Games. And I think that the second act here is more interesting than the one in the first film. Of course having more Carol Kane is always a good idea in my book. Watching Carol Kane’s stunt double do a jumping scissors kick against her attacker? Peak cinema.