5. CAKE IN FRIGHT: To celebrate the birth of Donald Pleasence, light a candle, eat a slice and watch one of his many.

You can read another take on this movie here.

If you want to see what Donald Pleasence movies I’ve seen, here’s the Letterboxd list. I love him because he was a working actor. Like John Carradine, he was there when you needed him. And at times, he’d show just how good he was. But he’s a workmanlike — in a good way — presence in so many movies.

Directed by Lee Madden (The Night God Screamed, the Alan Smithee who made Ghost Fever) and written by Hugh Smith (second unit director of Abby, writer of The Glove), Night Visitor has Pleasence as Axel MacGregor, a writer and big game hunter who has unleashed a deadly black panther and doomed everyone around him which is a real problem as his daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan, Wonder Women) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes) have just come to town along with Ross (Ross Hagen, who also produced this movie), a guide who seems pretty sleazy.

All this movie should be about is Pleasence hunting this animal that has already hurt him and he’s brought it to his turf for one last battle. You have the great thespian monologuing and trying to imitate the big beast and man, his eyes bugging out and him snarling and that’s the best.

At times, I’m given to just yelling out Pleasence line reads, like “The evil is gone” and “I shot him six times.” I celebrate him eating at a salad bar in 90s giallo. I’ve read that he drank through this entire movie and I in no way want to judge him for that. My memories of the actor are always wonderful and he lives again every time someone watches one of his films, whether he’s playing a President, the devil or a preacher who turns into a warthog.

4. MASKED MANDATE: We’re still wearing them and so shall tonight’s antagonist.

Directed and written by Scott Schirmer, based on the book by Todd Rigney, this is the story of Marty (Gavin Brown) and his brother Steve (Ethan Philbeck). Marty is bullied in school, so he does what so many of us have done. He escapes the real world with comic books and horror movies.

Marty also has something else going on in his life. The day he tried to borrow a bowling ball from his brother, he learned that it had a human head in the bag instead. Every week, there’s another new female head in that bag.

There’s one movie that Marty can never find at the store, Headless, because he soon learns that it’s inside his brother’s room. It’s also marked with time codes to call out the moments in the film that inspired Steve to kill. That knowledge nearly makes Marty physically sick and he shuts off the movie. His friend David makes fun of him, so he grabs the bowling ball bag and pulls out a severed head. It’s Marcus, the bully who has been making his life so horrible.

The end of this movie really shocked me. So much so that I don’t want to give it away, but there’s no wish fulfillment. There’s only annihilation and bleak realitization. I was actually shocked how much I enjoyed this, as it seems like a 2000s slasher from the artwork. It’s anything but.

Headless actually became a movie three years later and from all accounts, it’s even more upsetting than this movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

DAY 2. TROUBLE IN THE TUB: Bath time ain’t always relaxing.

The Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel Celle qui n’était plus had been already made in 1956 as Les Diaboliques. But was it made in Pittsburgh? And did it star Sharon Stone, who skipped being in The Flintstones to make this?

Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, whose career includes Benny & Joon, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and then this and The Avengers, this has a script by Don Roos, who also wrote Single White Female so you’d think he’d understand that whole concept of American giallo.

This is a movie with the absolute worst threeway relationship ever. Mia Baran (Isabelle Adjani) is a devout Catholic who works at a school with her husband Guy (Chazz Palminteri), a man so abusive that even his mistress Nicole Horner (Stone) feels badly for Mia, who we first meet as she nearly dies in a bathtub.

The two women decide that they’ve finally had it with Guy and lure him to an apartment of one of Nicole’s friends. Mia drugs him, they drown him in a bathtub and then carry his body out in a wicker box that they can barely get into the trunk. They toss his body in the swimming pool and when it disappears and photos of them killing him are mailed to the school, things get tense.

Also: that’s not just Donal Logue filming the school, but also J. J. Abrams. Kathy Bates shows up as an investigator, Spalding Grey — who died by a suicidal drowning — is a teacher and Bingo O’Malley — it’s a bigger deal if you’re from here — is in this too.

There are twists and turns — as you can imagine — as well as Stone hitting Palmieri in the head with a rake. I laughed out loud when that happened. It’s not good, but also it’s good because it’s Sharon Stone in a bad 90s remake of a movie that inspired so many other movies to the point that a remake feels beyond without reason.

Also: if you live in Pittsburgh, you realize that they’re just throwing names of cities out there. Come on, Sharon Stone. You’re from Meadville.

I always discuss that Stone would have totally been in an Umberto Lenzi giallo if she were around in the 70s. Her career path proves this. But as I keep track of what movies are Yinzer giallo — psychosexual murder movies made in the Steel City — this does not qualify. Sure, it has sex and murder, but it doesn’t get the geography right, theree are no accents and no one goes to a bar and has an IC Light. Nor do they visit a single landmark. You mean to tell me that Sharon Stone couldn’t walk past the Oyster Bar?

DAY 1: START SMALL: It may seem cute at first, but these little ones are always a challenge. Watch one with an evil offspring in it.

You know, I thought I was made of some harder stuff, but the credits to this movie absolutely decimated me, setting up a mood of pure dread I haven’t seen in many movies, juxtaposing real photos of dead bodies in mass graves with children at play.

Based on the Juan José Plans novel El juego de los niños (The Children’s Game) and adapted by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador under his pseudonym Luis Peñafiel, this escapes what feels like the way a mondo can punch you in the face and make you feel badly for being entertained and drops us — and Tom and Evelyn (Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome) — on an island where they had hoped for a vacation yet have found no other adults. Only children. Grim, unsmiling children.

How dark is this movie? So dark that Evelyn is murdered by her unborn child from the inside out and then Tom is forced to gun down a whole bunch of little tikes before the military kills him, thinking that he’s the Duane Jones of this movie. They pay for this mistake in seconds and then the kids are heading off to Spain, sneaking in one or two at a time and getting ready to teach the young folks that they’ll meet a whole new way to play with mom and dad.

Serrador also made The House That Screamed and the TV series Historias para no dormir (Tales to Keep You Awake) that has recently been released by Severin.

This movie has many names — Island of Death, Island of the Damned, Death is Child’s Play, Trapped!, The Hex Massacre and The Hex — and while it didn’t come out in the U.S. until 1978 and Children of the Corn was published in 1977, it had to have some collective consciousness influence.

I’m also fascinated by the remake of this movie, Come Out and Play, which was supposedly directed by a masked Russian named Makinov who I am completely convinced was a certain director who keeps remaking 70s movies.