October 15: A Horror Film Set in the Fine Art World

Massimo Dallamano — as Jack Dalmas — was the cinematographer for For a Few Dollars More and A Fistful of Dollars and also wrote and directed A Black Veil for Lisa, What Have You Done to Solange?, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, Colt 38 Special Squad and many more. He also co-wrote this movie along with Marcello Coscia (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue), Günter Ebert and Renato Romano.

Dorian Gray (Helmut Berger) once had his portrait painted by Basil Hallward (Richard Todd). The modeling session is interrupted by Henry Wotton (Herbert Lom) and his sister Alice (Maria Rohm), which sends Dorian into the evening, settling on a theater where he quickly mates with actress Sybil Vane (Marie Liljedahl) before abandoning her, which causes her to kill herself. Dorian won’t be young and vital forever, so why settle for anything?

He wishes that the painting could age for him and somehow, incredibly, it does. While the rest of his friends settle down, he’s still devoted to a lifestyle of excess in 1960s and 1970s London with all of the wild fashions that you need to make this movie incredible. Throw in a guitar score by Giuseppe De Luca and you have a freakout version of a classic novel made sleazy.

Is it any surprise that Harry Alan Towers produced this?

October 14: A Czech Horror Film

The Damned House of Hajn is about Soňa Hajnová (Petra Vančíková), who now has all of the money and power of the Hajns, a noble Czechoslovakian family with soap business. She is married to Petr Svejcar (Emil Horváth), who wants to grow in social circles no matter how crazy his new bride’s family is. That includes Uncle Cyril (Petr Čepek), who lives in the attic and wants everyone to think he can’t be seen, which is hard when he keeps showing up out of every curtain and door while trying to bed his much younger niece, who is married and oh yeah, his niece.

Based on Jaroslav Havlíček’s novel Neviditelný, this movie takes place inside a giant mansion that feels like it was made for a Mario Bava movie, filled with mazes of hallways, a spiral staircase and so many places to get scared in.

After the uncle finally gets what he wants — sexual assault with Soňa — he and his strange paintings are sent to the sanitarium and she assumes the true place at the head of the family. And that role is someone out of their mind, seeing waking nightmares of sexual encounters with Cyril throughout the never-ending gigantic house she will never leave. Now in love with the ghost of the man who destroyed her life, she even believes that the infant in her womb belongs to him.

There are also very real monsters in this, as the money and power are always for the stealing. Conspiring to murder relatives and the curse being passed to the next generation are just a few of the issues this family will deal with.

This is the type of movie that needs its own genre: Czech gothic noir horror that’s a mediation on the impossibility of human happiness.

October 13: A DTV Horror Sequel released by Dimension Films

After the death of their father, Eli (Daniel Cerny) and Joshua (Ron Melendez) are adopted by William (Jim Metzler) and Amanda Porter (Nancy Lee Grahn, Julia Wainwright Capwell on Santa Barbara from 1985 – 1993 and Alexis Davis on General Hospital since 1996), moving from a farm to Chicago. Eli seems like he’s going to have a harder time than Joshua fitting in, as he reads a prayer at dinner that goes like so: “Let us give thanks to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, who protects our crops and keeps the infidel and unbeliever in the torments of hellfire eternal. Amen.”

I laughed like a maniac.

Eli also has a suitcase filled with corn that he plants in an abandoned lot in the middle of urban Chicago, where the boys also have to go to Catholic school, which goes about as well as you think. T-Loc (Garvin Funches) gives the young Amish-like kid a hard time while his brother goes off and plays some b-ball and becomes friends with neighbors Malcolm (Jon Clair) and Maria (Mario Morrow, Oneisha from Family Matters).

The secret is that Eli is from Gatlin, Nebraska and hasn’t aged since 1964. By this point in the movie, he’s fed his corn with the head of a homeless man, murdered his adopted mom by knocking her down and having a pipe go through her head and set a social worker on fire. Luckily, his new dad just wants to make money on his corn, which can grow anywhere and never rots.

Eli takes over most of the students when he feeds them his corn and then goes about killing adults with bugs and by crucifying Father Frank Nolan (Michael Ensign). Joshua learns that his brother has a secret bible — it’s a hardcover of U of M grad Steve King’s Night Shift — that keeps him alive and oh yeah, we get to see the kaiju that is He Who Walks Behind the Rows.  If you look closely, you may see Ivana Miličević and Charlize Theron in the thrall of Eli and that cornshucking beast.

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest was the first film in the series made under Dimension Films and Miramax Films, who also made Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering, Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac’s Return, Children of the Corn: Revelation and Children of the Corn: Genesis.

Director James D.R. Hickox was the editor of Waxwork, Waxwork II, Masters of the Universe, Beastmaster 2 and Greystoke before he made Children of the Corn III. He hadn’t seen either of the first two movies. He’s the brother of director Anthony Hickox.

October 12: A Horror Film in which William Shatner appears.

Created by ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, Esperanto is supposed to be a universal second language for international communication. In English, the name means one who hopes and it’s the largest constructed international auxiliary language with a few thousand speakers.

Zamenhof had some big dreams that go past making an easy and flexible language. He thought that this new way of speaking would lead to world peace.

Incubus is the second film to be made in the language, following Angoroj. This was directed and written by The Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens, who used the cancellation of that show to make an art house movie with that show’s cinematographer Conrad L. Hall and composer Dominic Frontiere.

This is the story of a spring in Nomen Tuum that heals the sick and makes ugly people ravishing and oh yes, there are many succubus and incubus there to lure humans to Hell.

Kia (Allyson Ames) wants a pure man to be her perfect target, but her sister Amael (Eloise Hardt) tries to tell her that if she falls in love, she will lose so much. Then she goes after Marc (Shatner), a soldier here to heal his wounds of battle. He’s with his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar) who is so dumb that she loses her sight by staring at the sun.

This gets wild, as Marc’s purity defiles the demons, who call upon an incubus (Milos Milos, whose life is insane; he was the bodyguard for Alain Delon and a friend of Stevan Marković, who died owning sexually explicit photos of Claude Pompidou, wife of French President Georges Pompidou, causing a big scandal and an unsolved crime; Milos went to America where he married Cynthia Bouron, who had a paternity case against Cary Grant, and was beaten to death and found in the trunk of her car outside a grocery store. As for Milos Milos, he was dating Barbara Ann Thomason, the wife of Mickey Rooney, at the same time he was married to Cynthia Bouron, and they died in a murder suicide that many believed that Rooney engineered) to kill Marc and defile and murder his sister.

This was thought to be a lost film, shown only at the San Francisco Film Festival — where Esperanto speakers laughed at how bad the actors spoke — and in France. Between the language and the scandal over Milo killing his girlfriend and himself, the movie was kind of dead. It was found in 2001 when it was reassembled from existing materials.

October 11: A Horror Film That Features Many Tentacles

Tentacles usually menace women, but in Decoys, directed by Matthew Hastings, who wrote this with Tom Berry, men deal with being knocked up by evil aliens.

In what other movie would you see men made icey from the inside out and their mouths open in a death mask of sheer horror? And oh yeah, they still have boners after the end. Yes, these female aliens are sick of dudes being the ones who want to have sex with their throats and are turning the sexual battleground on them.

This movie looks like a teen sex comedy more than a horror movie. I think that’s probably why it’s so surprising when the attractive girls that two college guys meet in a laundromat turn out to have tentacles that emerge from their breasts.

The one constant in all alien battles is that man has invented the flame thrower and this will be our best weapon in the war against titty extraterrestrials.

October 10: A Horror Film Produced by Debra Dion

Harry Potter (Michael Moriarty) has moved his family — his wife Anne (Shelley Hack), son Harry (Noah Hathaway) and daughter Wendy (Jenny Beck) — into a new place in San Francisco. As they get their stuff unloaded, a troll takes his daughter and begins to show up disguised as her, turning the building into a fairy tale.

Harry starts hanging out with Eunice St. Clair (June Lockhart), a witch who once dated Torok, the wizard who led the fairies to take over from humans and was turned into a troll. Torok is doing this all over again, using the apartment building — he’s destroying Sonny Bono — to fight the world once again.

Directed by John Carl Buechler, who also did the creature design, this was shot at the same time as TerrorVision in Italy’s Stabilimenti Cinematografici Pontini studios near Rome. The same team worked on both productions, like Romano Albani (Inferno) as the cinematographer and Richard Band writing the music.

You may have noticed that a character is named Harry Potter.

Producer Charles Band spoke to MJ Simpson and stated, “I’ve heard that JK Rowling has acknowledged that maybe she saw this low-budget movie and perhaps it inspired her. Who knows what the story is? Life’s too short for a fight as far as I’m concerned but, having said that, there are certain scenes in that movie, not to mention the name of the main character, and this of course predates the Harry Potter books by many, many years. So there’s that strange connection.” John Buechler’s partner in a planned remake Peter Davy, which had to deal with legal issues over the name, would also claim: “In John’s opinion, he created the first Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling says the idea just came to her. John doesn’t think so. There are a lot of similarities between the theme of her books and the original Troll. John was shocked when she came out with Harry Potter.”

October 9: A Black and White Comedic Horror Film that takes place in an Old Dark House

A remake of the 1932 Universal movie, The Old Dark House doesn’t have a gimmick. It does have animated credits by Charles Addams and is the only movie that Castle made with Hammer. Both were making a remake at the same time and decided to just work on one movie. Sadly, the reserved Hammer wasn’t one for the insane marketing tools of Castle, which may be why he never mentioned this movie in his biography.

While it was released in color in the UK, America only got it in black and white. Most people like it better that way.

Tom Penderel (Tom Posted) is a car salesman and a fish out of water. He’s a U.S. citizen pretty much lost in England, delivering a car to an old mansion for his roommate Casper (Peter Bull). The car gets damaged in a storm and he has to go inside, only to discover that Casper is dead and his family — twin Jasper (also Peter Bull), ark carpenter Uncle Potiphar (Mervyn Johns), Cecily (Janette Scott), Roderick (Robert Morley), Agatha (Joyce Grenfell) and Morgana (Fenella Fielding) — invites him to stay.

They all have to remain in the mansion or lose their share of the inheritance, which increases as one of them dies every hour. Of course, one of them is the killer.

If you feel like you’ve been at this castle before and it was raining, that’s because the outside is Oakley Court from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The song that plays in the credits of that movie, “Science Fiction Double Feature,” references one of the cast members of this movie: “And I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills…”

You can watch it on YouTube.

October 8: A Horror Film Shot in South Africa that passes it off as America (there’s a lot)

Director William A. Levey (Blackenstein, Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!, Slumber Party ’57,  The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, Skatetown, U.S.A., Lightning the White Stallion) filmed Committed in South Africa — it would come out after this movie — with Jennifer O’Neill and Ron Palillo in South Africa. Yes, people wanted to see the star of The Psychic and the beloved icon of Welcome Back, Kotter in a movie together.

That led Levey to get hired to make Hellgate, which was shot in a real abandoned town in South Africa with a cast of South African actors, even if this is said to be America.

I always talk about twenty and thirtysomething teenagers in these movies. Palillo is a fortysomething teenager in this.

He plays Matt, who is heading out to meet his girlfriend Bobby (Joanne Warde) and her friends Pam (Petrea Curran) and Chuck (Evan J. Klisser) at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. While they’re waiting for him to show up, Bobby tells the urban legend — it’s a long one — of the Hellgate hitchhiker. Yes, on a night just like this, thirty years ago, Josie Carlyle (Abigail Wolcott) — the daughter of a rich gold miner named Lucas (Carel Trichardt) — was kidnapped, assaulted and killed by a biker gang.

After her father killed all of them with an axe, a prospector found a crystal that can do magic, magic that allowed Lucas to reanimate his daughter’s corpse because he never heard that sometimes, dead is better. Maybe the terrifying giant fish they messed with should have ended all of this.

As this story is being told, Matt has picked up Josie, thinking she’s a hitchhiker, and been chased out of her father’s house when caught getting ready for spicy ghost time. Despite being warned by Zonk (Lance Vaughan), the teens all decide to go into Hallgate, where they see a ghost dance with Josie nude among them, as well as the ghost of the man who killed her, Buzz (Frank Notaro).

Before all that long, it’s just Matt and Pam, as Bobby has strangled and turned into a ghostly vaudevillian and Chuck has had his head torn right off. After all this, Matt still decides that it would be a good idea to test the humidity with the spectral Josie — to be fair, she’s stunning — just in time for Pam to shotgun last her out the window. They run from their now zombie friends and steal Josie’s car. To get out, they literally knock a building down on her dad. And now, Josie just wanders the streets.

This movie looks way better than it should and has some good effects. If you ever wanted to see Horshack nude, well, this movie is for you. I’m kind of astounded by this movie, because man, that fish scene is completely soul destroying.

7. A Horror Film That Features a Fox Spirit

The kumihois a nine-tailed fox that appears in many classic Korean folktales. It is similar to the Chinese huli jing, the Japanese kitsune and the Vietnamese hồ ly tinh, which are ancient creatures that live on the flesh of humans and often shapeshift into female form.

As the film begins, Yeo-hwa is banished fby the queen. She walks the wilderness with her baby. Bandits attack her, killing the baby — by stomping it to death — and as she escapes, she drowns in a lake. However, the fox spirit raises her and takes over her body, using it to seduce and destroy men. Back in the kingdom, Yeo-hwa’s husband wants to save her, but he is being seduced by the queen.

This was picked up by Shaw Brothers and distributed in Hong Kong. It has some really cool wirework fights as well as a near-genre jumping feel.

Director Shin Sang-ok is, of course, the same man who was taken from his country to make Pulgasari and then, after escaping, came to America to produce all of the 3 Ninjas movies and direct 3 Ninjas: Knuckle Up. Life’s weird.

You can watch this on YouTube.

October 6: A Horror Film That Includes Time Travel

Vincenzo Natali, the director of this movie, was drawn to it because all he had to do was shoot it and not develop it. After spending 12 years bringing Splice to life, that seemed like a great plan. Haunter was written by Brian King, They’d also worked on Cypher several years before.

Natali said, “Out of the blue I came across my friend Brian King’s script for what was then called Company Man. Ultimately it was named Cypher. And then that came together very quickly. It took maybe…I don’t know, it was another 6-8 months and we were shooting the movie. And almost an identical thing happened with Haunter because I had these sort of long-standing, very ambitious projects, High Rise and Neuromancer that I’d been trying to do after Splice. And, invariably, it takes a long time. So, in the interim, Brian came up with this new script, entirely his creation. And I really loved it. We put it together in probably about the same time period, like eight months or less and we were shooting. So Brian keeps saving my ass. That’s how it works.”

Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin) lives with her father Bruce (Peter Outerbridge), mother Carol (Michelle Nolden) and brother Robbie (Peter DaCunha) somewhere in northern Ontario, sometime around 1985. Except that she’s the only one of them that realizes that they’re all dead.

Ignoring the warnings of a being known as the Pale Man (Stephen McHattie), she starts to contact the spirits of the multiple dead families that have lived in the house, traveling to their own timelines, as well as one where Olivia (Eleanor Zichy) and her family are still alive.

She awakens her family and they help her to battle who the Pale Man really is, a serial killer named Edgar Mullins who has possessed each family’s father to continue his murder spree. She helps her family to escape the time loop that they are in yet remains behind to save Olivia and her family, hoping to finally end the cycle of killing.

Man, this movie is everything Blumhouse movies try to be and fail, unable to have a coherent beginning, middle and end. This is how it’s done. And it’s always nice to see David Hewlett, who plays Olivia’s father.

Also: A Ouija movie to add to my Letterboxd list!

You can watch this on Tubi.