April 24: Polonia Bros — Whether alone or with his brother John, Mark Polonia has made so many movies. Pick one off this list.
John and Mark Polonia and Jon McBride made this movie for $500 and it has more heart in it than anywhere near its budget will tell you.
Derek (McBride) and Bennett (John Polonia) are driving through Pennsylvania — home of the Polonias — and have no idea that a small UFO just landed and ate a park ranger. Even when they’re on a date with Michelle (Melissa Torpy) and Donna (Maria Russo) — the daughter of the now digested man — they have no clue. Then they hit a man with their car, and before he dies, he keeps telling them about little men.
By the end of this movie, most of this small town has been chewed on, Bennett has been cloned by aliens and — spoiler — Derek kills the wrong one before multiple UFOs descend.
Say what you will about the puppet aliens in this, but this movie was distributed by Blockbuster Video shortly after the release of Independence Day. It was the most popular independent release of the year and has had two sequels, Feeders 2: Slay Bells and Feeders 3: The Final Meal. Keep in mind this was made by teenagers with a video camera.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
You know how slashers go: you need to get the horny teens to wind up in a secluded place with some promise of sex and drug hijinks. An abandoned mental hospital? That’s not frightening — it’s a good place to screw!
Of course, inside the walls of this old asylum, there’s more than just a place to party hearty. There’s also a deformed maniac who just so happens to be the attorney that split final girl Kiki’s parents up and caused her mother to die a decade before. Again, in slashers, there are no coincidences. Everything has been ordained, as if by freakish fate.
Now, the former Attorney Mitch Hansen has become The Coroner, a serial killer who uses surgical tools to wipe out anyone in his way.
The dual roles of Kiki and her mother Judy are played by Patty Mullen, Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1986 and 1988’s Pet of the Year. You may also remember her from playing the title role in Frankenhooker and being married to Joey Image, one of the drummers for The Misfits.
However, Jane — one of the many friends of Kiki set up to die, as is the wont of the slasher — would grow up to be Kristen Davis. Yes, from Sex and the City. So if you ever wanted to see her get her face sawed off…
There’s also a punk band played inside the asylum named Tina and the Tots. Tina is played by Ruth Collins, who was also in Witch Academy and was paid $100 extra to show her breasts. Because you know, you can’t have a slasher without them (actually you totally can).
This was all written by Rick Marx, who also was behind the movies Taboo American Style 1: The Ruthless Beginning, Wanda Whips Wall Street, Blonde Justice #3 and Christy In the Wild. In case you didn’t guess, those are all adult films. He also wrote Snapped for Chuck Vincent, Warrior Queen, a biography on WOR late-night fixture Joe Franklin and the two Gor movies.
Behind the camera? None other than Richard Friedman (Scared Stiff, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge). This movie is all over the place in tone and presentation, but if you rented it back in the late 1980s- it’s pretty much a perfectly goofball slasher that would go well with a six-pack and pizza- you probably have much fonder memories than I do. After all, if you went and watched Bloodsucking Freakswithout seeing it through the lens of being 15 years old and landlocked in a small town, you probably wouldn’t understand why people liked it either.
You can get this on Blu-ray from the fine folks at Arrow Video or watch it for free on Tubi!
April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.
Yes, there’s the 2011 direct-to-video film Boggy Creek and The Legacy of Boggy Creek, as well as this unofficial sequel. Still, the only real continuation of The Legend of Boggy Creek is Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. And, wow, that movie isn’t good.
Throughout this movie, we’re told just how terrifying Boggy Creek is and if you don’t respect it, you’ll die. So why not allow children Evie-Jo (Dana Plato), her brother John-Paul (David Sobiesk) and their non-speaking friend T-Fish (Marcus Claudel) to get in a canoe and paddle down that creek? Sure, a hurricane is on the way and the monster that lives in the waters, Big Bay-Ty, only killed Evie-Jo and John-Paul’s father. How could anything bad happen?
A lot of this movie is about a fishing competition and Cat-Fish Kool-Aid, which allows our child heroes to win. And as for Big Bay-Ty, it turns out that he didn’t kill their dad after all. A snake did. And their mom is played by Dawn Wells, who at least didn’t get chased through the night by the Phantom Killer again this time in Arkansas.
I don’t know why so many regional horror movies decided to make Bigfoot movies for the kids, because even the idea of Bigfoot and that grainy Patterson–Gimlin footage made me terrified as a kid. Even more frightening is that these movies often use a gorilla costume for their monster.
Directed by Tom Moore, who also directed the much better movie “Mark of the Witch,” and co-written by John David Woody, this film didn’t involve Charles B. Pierce. I bet he sent a Bigfoot to everyone’s house.
April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.
Revenge of Bigfoot was also released as Rufus J. Pickle and the Indian and was produced by Harry Z. Thomason and Joe Glass from a screenplay by S. Dwayne Dailey and Rosemary Dailey. Thomason is credited as the director of the movie, but according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Dwayne Dailey was the principal director with Thomason directing only the final scene.
This is partially a lost movie. Hackworth claimed that almost all copies of the film were seized by federal agents investigating a financier who was using stolen funds, and that those copies were subsequently destroyed. Then, one of the executive producers, James W. Hughes, found a copy and it was converted to videotape. Dailey’s son Cody, who is in this as Rusty, uploaded this version of the movie to YouTube.
There is also a rumor that the Attorney General of Arkansas at the time, Bill Clinton, was involved in this, and that’s why it was pulled. That makes no sense, as he wasn’t in power enough in 1979 to do that.
There was a budget, no matter how small, as Rory Calhoun was hired to star as Bob Spence, a local rancher. The Native American of the alternate title, Okinagan, is T. Dan Hopkins while Mike Hackworth is local small-minded man Rufus J. Pickle. Hackworth was also in another regional film made in the area, The Town That Dreaded Sundown.
Bigfoot appears to attack farms, but only Spence’s place remains unharmed. That’s because the magical Native American has created a talisman to keep him from harm.
Producer Harry Z. Thomason would go on to create Designing Women; he also made So Sad About Gloria, Encounter with the Unknown, The Great Lester Boggs and The Day It Came to Earth.
I love that even parts of this exist and I hope that more is found. When a Bigfoot is really a man in a monkey suit in a film intended for children, part of my heart comes back to feeling right.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a bioelectrical scientist who works at a power plant. His life in New Jersey was going so well until his fiancee Elizabeth’s (Patty Mullen) father (J.J. Clark) gives him a lawnmower as a wedding present. It goes wild — yes, really — and mows down Elizabeth.
Anyone else would move on or kill themselves. Not Jeffrey. He gets into self-trepanation, drilling holes into his own skull to take the edge off, as well as eating dinner surrounded by all of Elizabeth’s body parts that he could find. But hey, he knows circuits. So maybe he should leave New Jersey and go to New York City and kill sex workers to build his wife the perfect body, because that’s worked out so well in so many movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.
Jeffrey rents all of Zorro’s (Joseph Gonzalez) girls for one night but gets second thoughts about giving them the super crack he’s invented. They find it, they smoke it, they blow up real good. And now Jeffrey has to assemble a puzzle of bloody body parts to create the perfect new body for his fiancee. She’s impressed but angry at where the parts came from and that she’s slept with — and blown to pieces — several clients before she got her memory back.
This ends with a monster made of sex worker parts dragging an evil pimp to a dungeon and Jeffrey’s head on another woman so that he and his bride can be in love forever. That’s creative.
Another trip into the hellish New York City of Frank Henenlotter, this was a movie that screamed at you in the horror department of your mom and pop video rental place. Literally. The box could talk. The movie that was inside more than lives up to the marketing.
This has an awesome cast. Beverly Bonner shows up as Casey, the same character she played in Brain Damage, Basket Caseand Basket Case 2. Elizabeth’s mother is Louise Lasser, the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Horror host Zacherly is the weatherman. The girls of Zorro are played by Kimberly Taylor (Bedroom Eyes II), Charlotte J. Helmkamp (Playboy December 1982 Playmate of the Month), Jennifer Delora, Lia Chang, Susan Napoli (Penthouse Pet of the Month February 1986, AKA Stephanie Ryan in mainstream movies and Carrie McKayan in adult films), adult legend Heather Hunter, Gittan Goding, Vicki Darnell, Sandy Colosimo, Kathleen Gati and Sonya Hensley.
As for Spike the bartender, that’s the awesome Shirley Stoler from The Honeymoon Killers.
April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.
Two couples – Mike (Jerry Albert) and Jeri (Celea Ann Cole) along with Daniel (Kenny Miller) and Kim (Toni Crabtree) – decide to stay for a few days at the hunting lodge that Mike inherited from his father. It’s the 1970s and the Deep South, so things get bad. How bad? Bigfoot bad.
Well, maybe.
With a score by an uncredited member of Blood, Sweat & Tears, this proto-slasher starts off so sweet that you may think about not watching it. Stay with it. There’s something here.
Director and writer Robert W. Morgan creates a movie that has slasher tropes before they existed, like the warnings in town — “Bloodstalkers. That’s bloodstalker country now. Nobody been out that way for five, maybe ten years.” — as well as bears that give six heart attacks, a dark figure watching the cabin from outside, couples walking in on couples making love — come on, they were totally there to swing — plus a hero who was in the shit back in Vietnam, a furry arm just tearing through the wall, a small dog being killed by friendly fire — Cubby was enraged — and most of the cast killed horribly, leading to the lone survivor doing the same to everyone else.
It’s so much better than you expect. Like I said, stay with it and get ready.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
I’ve often written off all of these films after the first three—one being the originator, two being a strange metaphor for growing up gay, and the third being a bravura Dokken soundtrack sporting a thrill ride that was amongst the first slasher films I ever watched.
After the final battle in the last film in this series, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Wes Craven intended to end the franchise. With the original protagonist, Nancy, sacrificing herself to stop Krueger, the rest of the Dream Warriors have been released from the insane asylum and are back to being normal teenagers.
However, Kristen (Tuesday Knight, replacing Patricia Arquette) believes that Freddy isn’t dead, drawing Joey, Kincaid and Kincaid’s dog Jason into her dream, where they show her that Freddy’s boiler is cold. There’s been a rift between these former friends, as the boys are seen as freaks and Kristen has joined the popular crowd with her martial arts practicing boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones, Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), Alice, Sheila and Debbie.
Soon, Kincaid has been killed in the junkyard from Dream Warriors, where Freddy comes back after a dog pisses fire onto him. Yes, that really happens. Then, Joey finds a naked girl swimming in his waterbed in a sequence that’s glossy, ridiculous and awesome all in equal measure. He’s soon dead and Kristen passes out when she finds out, bringing Freddy after her. She swears to get revenge, but once her mother gives her sleeping pills to ensure that she gets rest, she is felled by the “Bastard Son of a One Hundred Maniacs.” However, she is able to give her dream power to Alice which she’s gonna need because with each kill, Freddy gains the abilities and personalities of Alice’s dead friends.
Sure, these movies would get much worse, but if you’re looking for a film that’ll make the middle of the night just fly past, you can’t go wrong with this one. I was surprised how much I liked it, which is kind of the point of this challenge, right?
This movie is filled with plenty of out-there kill scenes and flip dialogue that finally makes Freddy the actual hero of the film. There’s a girl who gets turned into a cockroach and smashed into a Roach Motel. Then, there’s the scene where Freddy shows Alice all of his victims on a “soul pizza” that must be seen to be believed.
Say what you will about Renny Harlin, but in this follow up to his American debut Prison, he really takes the series all the way into the surreal, basing each of the murders on actual nightmares that he had, as well as crazy moments that push the film into meta territory when Alice goes from a movie theater into an actual movie while the rest of the cast watches.
This was the highest grossing movie in the series until Freddy vs. Jason, which it earns with an all-star team of special effects artists, a soundtrack boasting bands like the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Blondie, and the Fat Boys, and an ending that boasts a twenty foot tall practical model of Freddy being destroyed by the souls of those he has taken.
For even more fun, here’s a video from fast food lovers The Fat Boys that features them getting Freddy’s house as an inheritance and having to spend the night there.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
After the much-criticized second installment (I actually really enjoyed it, as it has a lot of European flair and its subject matter seems like a middle finger in the face of teenage boys who would seem to be its biggest audience), Wes Craven returned to write the inspiration for this script, which was initially about the phenomenon of children traveling to a specific location to commit suicide (think Japanese murder forests).
Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell took that direction and convinced New Line that the series should go further into Freddy’s dream world. The success of this film proved that A Nightmare on Elm Streetwould be a franchise, as this film made more than the first two movies put together. The team would go on to create 1988’s remake of The Blob before Darabont went into making Stephen King adaptions and Russell would direct The Mask, The Scorpion King and Collateral.
Kristen Parker (Patricia Arquette) is obsessed with the abandoned house on Elm Street (which one assumes is the last house on the left), making papier-mâché sculptures (which makes for a tremendous compressed credit sequence, showing headlines of what has gone on before) and dreaming of Freddy chasing her. She awakens from her nightmare to discover that she’s slicing her own wrists as her mother Elaine (Brooke Bundy) has to interrupt her sleepover date to save her daughter’s life.
Kristen ends up in Westin Hospital, run by Dr. Neil Gordon (Craig Wasson, Body Double), battling the orderlies and doctors who want to sedate her. Check out a young Laurence Fishburne here as orderly Max Daniels! She’s eventually helped by the new therapist — Nancy Thompson! — who recites Freddy’s nursery rhyme to her. Continuity be damned, Nancy’s grey streak is now on the opposite side of her head.
We meet the rest of the patients, who will soon become the Dream Warriors: Phillip the sleepwalker (Bradley Gregg, Class of 1999), wheelchair-bound Will (Ira Heiden, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), streetwise Kincaid, actress Jennifer (Penelope Sudrow, After Midnight), the silent Joey and Taryn, a former drug addict (Jennifer Rubin, who is also in a movie that totally rips off this one, Bad Dreams).
The Dream Warriors is pure entertainment. Freddy moves toward being more of a joking character while transforming into a snake, a TV set, a gigantic puppet master and even turning his fingers into drug-filled hypodermic needles. Kristen can pull the rest of the teens into her dreams, which they’ll need as Freddy and all of their doctors are pretty much against them.
Dr. Neil learns from Sister Mart Helena the true origins of Freddy, the bastard son of one hundred maniacs, and how he can stop him. Enlisting Nancy’s dad (John Saxon returns!), Neil digs up Freddy’s bones, which are still deadly, while Nancy tries to save as many of the kids as she can within the dreamworld.
This is probably the best New Mutants movie ever made; much better than New Mutants.
The film ends Nancy’s saga while setting things up for a new cast of characters to battle Freddy. At least that’s what you’re supposed to think, as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master pretty much wipes the slate clean within the first ten minutes. We covered it briefly, so follow the link to read more.
I’ve been way too lax in reviewing this movie, which I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. Sometimes, when I love a filmmaker, such as Christopher Bickel, whoseThe Theta Girl and Bad Girls are both incredible watches, or an artist, I always worry about their next work.
What was I thinking?
This movie is so perfect for me. Just imagine, a more well-thought-out Midsommar that has actually seen The Wicker Man — and on drugs, mind you — but also knows about collecting records, the joy of finding lost media and understands the allure of strangeness like the Arica, Source Family/Father Yod/Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Process Church and how today’s youth only gets the cool veneer of these lost groups — well, The Process is now kinda sorta Best Friends Animal Shelter — and not the at-times harsh reality. It’s easy to love black metal for its aura of kvlt, yet I doubt you’d participate in the burning of a stave church.
Made for the price of a used car, this movie finds Pater Noster and his band/church lying low after recording several albums in the distant past, one found by Max (Adara Starr), a record store employee that probably only is there to get the discount and build up her own collection of albums. Store owner Sam (Shaley Renew), co-worker Abby (Sanethia Dresch), Gretchen (Shelby Lois Guinn), and Jay Sin (Josh Outzen) get obsessed with the songs. When an invitation to visit the actual Pater Noster compound comes to Max, they all decide to go. Armed with info from cult podcaster Dennis Waverly (Tim Cappello, not playing a sax), they think this is going to be a laugh.
Maybe they haven’t watched the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis or I Drink Your Blood.
Meeting Pater Noster (Mike Amason) may be the last thing they do.
Even crazier is how perfect the music is for this film, featuring The Restoration, Brandy & the Butcher, Turbo Gatto, EZ Shakes, Stagbriar, Ass/Bastard, In/Humanity, Transonics, Hot Lava Monster, Marshall Brown and Larb as well as Tim Cappello playing that sax.
Here’s how the movie was sold on Indiegogo: “The movies we make are punk rock demo tapes. We operate outside of Hollywood and traditional distribution routes. We make movies for people looking for something different, not defined by focus groups and corporate interests. You won’t find this movie in a Walmart because it doesn’t belong in a Walmart.”
That couldn’t be more true. This feels truer to the insane spirit of drive-in movies that you wonder, “Who is this for, other than me?” than any movie I’ve seen in years. Yet it feels real, lived in, authentic. This is, quite literally, the actual shit. A movie where you feel for the victims just as much as for the victimizers, a place where you think that you too could be trapped, because as much as I love the cults of the 70s, I know I would never survive.
A near-perfect film. Find it and live in it now.
Pater Noster and the Mission of Light screens as part of the 2025 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 17–27. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org
April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end-of-the-world disaster movie with us. You can also take care of the planet while you’re writing.
When they were kids, Madolyn and Quinn watched Snakes on a Train, as their grandmother was fooled by The Asylum and rented the wrong movie. Instead of being upset, they bond over mockbusters before growing up to be Lieutenant Commander Madoyln Webb (Jhey Castles) and Dr. Quinn Ramsey (Lindsey Marie Wilson). Even though they are no longer close, they quickly realize that the monsters attacking Earth in 2025 are all from the movies they watched when they were young.
The threat comes from aliens who have misinterpreted Asylum films as real-life mythology and are 3D printing the monsters to invade Earth. Great idea, but as usual for these movies from this studio, well, it’s an Asylum movie.
That said, Michael Paré is in it.
Directed by Michael Su, this was based on a story by The Asylum’s effects artists, Tammy Klein and Glenn Campbell, and written by Marc Gottlieb. It gives you the robots of Transmorphersand Atlantic Rim, a Sharknado, Mega Shark, Crocosaurus, koalas from Zoombies, multiple-headed sharks, a giant octopus, Mega Piranha, Mega Boa, Mecha Shark…everything that the studio still had effects of and could easily re-use the CGI.
But hey — it’s an end-of-the-world movie, set in 2025, not even about 2025.
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