EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

I’ve said it before, I’ll certainly say it again, but if your parent — who you have been estranged from — calls you repeatedly with strange messages and then they die and you need to set their affairs in order, just stay away. You don’t need the money, the aggravation or the supernatural onslaught.

Nathan (Nathan Wallace) and Mirra (Jenna Sander) are in no way close. The only thing that connects them would be the same parents and now that their father is dead, that connection is in the past. In town to handle the old farm — where everyone in town worked, so there’s already some resentment — they soon both live out the Thoreau quote that begins this movie: “I believe men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung.”

Nathan starts having vivid nightmares of a woman rising from the sea and soon starts feeling the same dread that his father felt; the family had long ago stolen the land and then used the people around it for decades to help them make their livelihood. This causes him to spiral back into addiction with the help of old enabling friend Greg (Samuel Dunning) — nice Bolt Thrower shirt by the way — while his sister grows close with the very people who once toiled in her father’s fields, Alice (director Eliese Finnerty) and her sister Scarlett (Estelle Girard Parks).

This is Finnerty’s first full-length film and it moves quickly — it has a 70-plus minute running time, which I love — and the closing visuals are gorgeous. It made me think that while we truly own nothing, everything that we try to put on a mark on was owned by someone before us and worse, probably taken by force from them. Everything is cursed, when you think about it, but some worse than others.

Many years ago, an ancestor made it to the final degree of brotherhood and was taken to an island for his last rite and initiation. When he came home, he didn’t look the same, his eyes didn’t have any life and he just sat in a chair facing the window, miserable and depressed in a chair, telling everyone he was waiting to die. I thought about that story as I watched this and if I had any opportunity to claim his heritage, trust me, movies have taught me to run long, hard and fast. And never, ever steal anything from a woman.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

Directed, produced and written by Adam Lenhart, Eric Griffin and Jake McClellan, the star of HeBGB TV is HeBGB TV itself, “a multidimensional cable box installs itself into a neighborhood and slowly, the world.” A brother and sister are soon taken captive by their host The Purple Guy who shows them everything from a talking pumpkin named Squash on a home shopping channel to a skeletal standup comedian named Dick Tickler (the web site calls him Rib Tickla) and Monster Girl, a former horror host turned live on TV phone sex operator having a “breakthrough during a breakdown.”

Imagine if there was another Nickelodeon in the 90s that didn’t care about theme parks and mass merchandising its cartoons and instead stuck with weirdness like Turkey TV, Are You Afraid of the Dark? and You Can’t Do That on Television but with monsters, anthropomorphic candy corn getting mutilated and no small amount of wonderfully queer content.

This is it. And it’s exactly as awesome as you dreamed.

HeBGB TV rewards all the short attention span I’ve built over the and feeds it lots of sweet, sweet candy. Commercials parodies, cartoons, weird bursts of half-watched TV, all through a pulsating cable box — eXistenZ for kids! — that should not be and yet is.

Ten thousand stars out of five.

You can learn more about HeBGB TV at its awesome official site.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

There are people that are just going to watch this movie — which combines Freddy Kreuger, Michael Jackson, Bollywood song and dance numbers and a low budget — just to laugh. And you know, I kind of dislike that foreign remix cinema is seen as such a joke. You try making a movie that lives up to a Hollywood big budget movie within a country that can’t raise those funds while working within the confines of the way movies are presented. Most of u slack the imagination and sheer nerve to do it.

So when Seema has a nightmare of a scarred man wearing steel claws, our western minds instantly see this as a cheap knock-off. But the film plays with expectations, as the villain is not some average custodian, but the evil magician Shakaal, who needed children to increase his magical powers and was only stopped by Anita’s father, who has kept the claw glove in a drawer all these years later.

An American — even an Italian — remix film would not take everything. Bad Dreams may have a burned up villain and Taryn from Dream Warriors, but it is very much its own film. Night Killer only takes the mask. Mahakaal takes everything, even the actual music from the first two A Nightmare on Elm Street movies and keeps on giving.

There’s also the Michael Jackson-loving Canteen, who becomes a werewolf by the end of the movie because, well, who knows. This isn’t the kind of linear cinema that you grew up on. Strangely — or not that much when you think of it — there’s another Bollywood Elm Street cover called Khooni Murdaa that even takes the end of Dream Warriors but redeems itself because it tells the origin story of Ranjit — Fareed Krueger — who escapes prison and gets thrown into a campfire, creating the dream version that destroys everyone else.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

Jess Peters (Dani Barker, who also wrote the film) is a struggling actress and live streaming influencer who has been getting somewhat famous answering job listings from creepy men and then sneak filming and either revealing their behavior or kink-shaming them.

Now, she’s found a job that asks her to go to a remote cabin and co-write a script with Tom Brady (Luke Cook) — not the athlete — and playact as the two main characters in his psychosexual murder mystery. She finds herself attracted to him but plans on using this as content for her streaming channel. But what if she’s someone else’s content?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBl3nV1A74?

Originally known as Classified Killer, this is the full-length debut of director Sylvia Caminer. I really don’t want to get much deeper into the twists and turns of the movie, except to say that the first one actually got me. This film gets more intense as it goes on and it totally took me for a ride. It works hard to get you to like Jess, who has a pretty unlikeable online character and makes you wonder who is behind the people that you live vicariously through social media.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest. You can still get a weekend pass for weekend two. Single tickets are also available. Here’s the program of what’s playing.

Three years and plenty of therapy later, Charley Brewster now believes that Jerry Dandrige was a serial killer and that vampires don’t exist. Now a college student with a new girlfriend, Alex Young (Traci Lind, who dated Dodi Fayed before Princess Diana), Charley sadly discovers that Peter Vincent is back to hosting Fright Night. As they leave Peter’s apartment, a new nemesis, Regine steals Charley’s attention. There’s even a new version of Evil Ed, a vampire named Louie (Jon Gries, who is great in everything he’s done from Joysticks and Real Genius to The Monster Squad and TerrorVision) who is making Charley and Alex’s lives hell.

It turns out that she’s Jerry Dandrige’s brother and here for revenge. Now, the tables are turned and Peter Vincent is the one who has to convince Charley that vampires are real. Even worse, she’s turning Charley into a vampire and has stolen the Fright Night hosting job away from Peter! There’s also a transgender rollerskating vampire, putting this movie years ahead of others in presenting LGBT roles (even if Belle is evil).

One small trivia note: the vampire form that Regine transforms into at the end was modeled after 45 Grave lead singer Dinah Cancer. If you don’t know her band, they sang the song “Partytime” from Return of the Living Dead.

There’s no way that this movie could live up to the original, but it tries. It hasn’t really been seen much, as LIVE Entertainment barely released it on home video. Artisan Entertainment released it on DVD in 2003, but it’s been out of print for a long time and commands big bucks. You can often find a bootleg of the high definition TV edition of the film at conventions (that’s where we got it!).

Written by Holland and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace (Halloween III: Season of the Witch and the original It, as well as the writer of Amityville II: The Possession, a movie I never cease trying to get people to watch), this movie suffered at the hands of a very real tragedy.

McDowall loved playing Peter Vincent and was eager to bring Holland back to make a third film, so he set up a meeting with the two of them and Carolco Pictures chairman Jose Menendez. Legend has it that the meeting did not go well. Later that night, Menendez and his wife were infamously murdered by their sons, Lyle and Erik. When McDowall learned of the news, he called Wallace and said “Well, I didn’t do it. Did you?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie plays at Salem Horror Fest tomorrow night!

Directed by Colton David Coate (who also wrote the film) and Micah Coate, Guys at Parties Like It is all about what happens when a virgin — no members of this frat can be virgins or they get hazed — takes a wasted sorority girl upstairs only to discover that getting laid won’t be as easy — or bloodless — as he thinks.

Mary (Monica Garcia Bradley) is our heroine. Sure, she’s in a sorority, but she thinks she’s above it and just using her years there to advance her career. And she’s all about flirting, having a drink and even getting the boys hot under the collar. But when she gets behind closed doors, she’s still able to say no, which is her right, and not anything that these boys want to hear.

Brad (Anthony Notarile) is one of them. He’s the virgin who is getting into the frat because of his big brother Tony (Pablo Sandstrom), a guy who’ll do anything to get his friend ahead. Even spike the drink that Mary asks for, all so Brad doesn’t need to get that hazing.

There are others who play into this psychodrama: Sorority queen Trixie (Jacqueline O’Kelly), who is still smarting that Mary leaking a video of them making out; Kyle (Haulston Mann), the closeted frat boy who is having a secret affair with the frat’s only gay member Connor (Yuhua Hamasaki); Mart’s roommate Mags (Paige Sciarrino) who is stuck being the sober one. Trixie’s BFF Monica (Vianca Peguero) and the way too enthusiastic frat brother Rick (Jackson Trent).

Not all of them will survive the night.

My friend told me that she’s seen so many movies that have a moment where a triumphant woman walks away from a house or building on fire; beaten down but triumphant. She really needs to make a Letterboxd list for those movies — The Menu and Ready or Not are two to get her started — and she can add this as well.

Guys At Parties Like It is terrifying because there’s no saying that it didn’t happen last weekend. Or that it won’t happen this weekend. The moment when the cop gets so happy seeing the old frat house says it all: these men are protected, no matter what, unless something horrible happens to them.

Luckily, it does.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest. You can still get a weekend pass for weekend two. Single tickets are also available. Here’s the program of what’s playing.

Fright Night was the first modern horror film I ever watched. I remember painting in my parent’s kitchen and my father telling me not to be afraid and just watch it with him. It’s a great start — combining the Hammer films that I loved that didn’t scare me with new school special effects and metacommentary.

The very first film in the series, this one really speaks to me as I was part of the last generation to grow up with horror movie hosts on UHF channels. Sure, there’s Svengoolie today and some internet shows, but it’s not the same. Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) is one such host, a washed-up actor who was in a few great movies decades ago and now goes from town to town, playing the same old 1960’s Z list horror films, saying the same lines. 

The defining moment for him is that Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale, Mannequin 2: Mannequin on the Move) believes in all his bull. And when Jerry Dandrige (the untrustable Chris Sarandon) moves in next door and shows all the signs of being a vampire, Charley finds he needs Peter Vincent more than ever before.

Plus, you get a pre-Married with Children Amanda Bearse as Charley’s love interest and a pre-976-EVIL Stephen Geoffreys as Charley’s best friend/worst nemesis Evil Ed. And I just love Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark, House II) as Jerry’s thrall.

This is a movie made for those who love horror movies. After all, Peter Vincent is named after horror icons Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. Creator Tom Holland wrote the part for Price, but the acting great had stopped appearing in horror movies at this time in his career. As they made the film — and the sequel together — Holland and McDowall became life-long friends, with McDowall introducing the young director to Price, who was flattered that the part was written to honor him and thought that Fright Night “was wonderful and he thought Roddy did a wonderful job.”

He’s right — this is a movie that taps into the mind and heart of horror fans, as so many of us have wondered, “What if the monster — and the monster hunter — was real?” The lighthearted yet dangerous tone of the film is letter perfect. That scene in the nightclub, where Jerry takes on the security guard? As good as it gets.

Also of note: I’m glad the original ending wasn’t used. It was to close with Charley and Amy making out with Peter Vincent coming on the TV to host Fright Night, saying “Tonight’s creepy crawler is Dracula Strikes Again. Obviously about vampires. You know what vampires look like, don’t you? They look like this!” Then, he would transform, look into the camera and say, “Hello, Charley.”

After the unexpected critical and financial success of this film, a sequel was inevitable. Holland and Sarandon were both making the first Child’s Play, so they couldn’t commit to the film, although the actor did visit the set. Stephen Geoffrey’s didn’t like the script, opting to star in 976-EVIL. Ultimately only Ragsdale and McDowall would return.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

Deaf Crocodile Films, in association with distribution partner Comeback Company, has restored this little seen in the U.S. late 1960s Czech occult/horror anthology. Prazske Noci (Prague Nights) is inspired by Black Sabbath and features episodes directed by Milos Makovec, Jiri Brdecka and Evald Schorm.

I love how they referred to this movie: “a gorgeous and supernatural vision of ancient and modern Prague: caught between Mod Sixties fashions and nightmarish Medieval catacombs, and filled with Qabbalistic magic, occult rituals, clockwork automatons and giant golems.”

I mean, I’m already in love.

Filmed during the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, Prague Nights begins with a businessman named Willy Fabricius (Milos Kopecky), lonely and lost in a foreign city, but looking for not love but some form of lust. And then he encounters the much younger, more gorgeous and way more mysterious Zuzana (Milena Dvorská), they travel through the sleeping city in her vintage limousine. As her driver Vaclav (Jiríi Hrzan) pulls into a cemetery, she begins to tell him the three stories that make up this movie:

In Brdecka’s chapter “The Last Golem,” Rabbi Jehudi Löw (Josef Blaha) has already created and used a golem, a gigantic silent homunculus from living clay. Emperor Rudolf II (Martin Ruzek) hears of this and wants to use the supernatural being for his own aims and even when told it can’t be revived, a less moral young rabbi named Neftali Ben Chaim (Jan Klusak) claims he can make it happen. But will his lust for the mute servant (Lucie Novotná) and need to inspire her be his undoing?

“Bread Slippers” — directed by Schorm — introduces us to a countess (Teresa Tuszyńska) who indulges all of her passions, whether for kisses from the maids, the sweetest of cakes or affairs that would scandalize her town. She’s pushed twin brothers into a duel for her heart that killed them both and now she’s led Saint de Clair (Josef Abrham) into death at his own hand. And all because he couldn’t get her the shoes she asked for, shoes made of — you read the title — bread. While the peasants go hungry, the countess literally steps upon what they yearn to eat.

Yet a strange shoemaker (Josef Somr) can and once he delivers them, he steals her away to an abandoned mansion, a place filled with mechanical servants, dust and cobwebs. A place where she will dance forever with her many victims.

Makovec’s “Poisoned Poisoner” shares the adventures of a murderess in the Middle Ages who kills off sex-crazed merchants set to the music of  60s Czech pop star Zdeněk Liška. Yet what happens when a woman who kills men and takes not only their money and jewelry but their hearts falls for one of her victims?

Prague Nights ends with the truth of Zuzana and why she needed the businessman so badly on this — and only this — night. What we have experienced is pure gorgeous cinema, a world that is so unlike so much of what we’ve seen that it very nearly feels animated. Colors change from black and white to monochromatic to more colors than we can nearly stand; cars drive into graves; lovers can be trapped in Hell forever. Yet it all makes your heart and mind and eyes sing. This film is pure magic and yet another film that Deaf Crocodile has put in front of me and won over every fiber of my being with.

There’s also another Czech anthology, Pearls of the Night, that I now need to track down!

You can get this from Deaf Crocodile, whose blu ray release has a new video interview with Czech film critic and screenwriter Tereza Brdečka on her father, Jiří Brdečka (co-director and co-writer of Prague Nights, covering his famed career as a filmmaker, animator and screenwriter; new audio commentary by Tereza Brdečka and Czech film expert Irena Kovarova of Comeback Company; two superb and haunting Jiří Brdečka animated short films: Pomsta (Revenge) and Jsouc na řece mlynář jeden (There Was a Miller On a River); a new essay by Tereza Brdečka on the making of the movie and new art by Beth Morris.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

V chorniy, chorniy kimnati is directed and written by Denis Sobolev and tells the story of Volt (Artur Novikov), Tomcat (Anton Sokol), and Petiunia (Illia Vyshnevetskyi), three teens explore an abandoned archaeological dig site of a pagan origin in their small hometown. Inside, they find an amulet and get the idea to start wishing upon it. Volt asks for what’s in his heart: he wants to want wild dogs tear his history teacher to bloody chunks.

The substitute teacher that replaces her, Gottlib (Rei Yeremii), is more than just someone able to teach a class. He’s been after this group of pagans for decades, swearing revenge for the curse they placed on his mother. And yes, while the three teens hide in the woods, ashamed and fascinated by their wishes, everyone learns that this small Ukranian town has been filled with witches for hundreds of years and that hasn’t changed.

The main issues most reviewers have had with this movie are that it takes big leaps back and forth in time which makes it seem quite disjointed. And, well, if you don’t speak Ukrainian, the subtitles aren’t going to help you at all.

That said, I enjoyed seeing a movie that doesn’t depend on being set in the past to be a folk horror film. The Ukraine is a country that so many of us have thought about and the idea of a long-forgotten horror being so close to Kyiv is incredibly intriguing. The lure of wishes fulfilled exists everywhere, in every time, and rarely leads to positive ends.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was watched as part of Salem Horror Fest.

Directed and written by Scott Goldberg and produced by Kevin Smith, The Forest Hills follows Rico (Chiko Mendez), who has been battling mental health issues since he was struck on the head somewhere in the middle of the Catskills. He has no idea what is a dream and what is reality, but he’s sure of one thing: he’s a werewolf. And Billy (Edward Furlong) keeps trying to convince him to transform.

The cast is the real draw here, as the film brings together werewolf actress par excellence Dee Wallace, slasher queen (and mangled dick expert) Felissa Rose, scream queen Debbie Rochon, Stacey Nelkin (Halloween III), Marianne Hagan (Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers) and, most amazingly, Shelley Duvall, who returned to acting to be in this movie to play Rico’s mother. Marc Summers from Double Dare even shows up!

With a mix of both psychological and actual horror, The Forest Hills is an intriguing movie filled with practical effects. Goldberg also made a short film by the same name in 2007 in which content creators Michelle and Elaine Torrance — do you think he likes The Shining? — seek the urban legend of the Forest Hills in Prestonsfield, Kentucky.

You can learn more at the official site for the movie.

Thanks to Esteban De Sade for reminding me — twice — that I confused Shelley Long and Shelley Duvall. I’m quite embarrassed.