October 5: A 2D Horror Film (Up to interpretation!)

The Creeps was shot for 3D and I probably would have loved it more had I seen it popping out all over the screen. That said, it’s a Charles Band movie, so I already have some level of affection for it.

Dr. Winston Berber (Bill Moynihan) has been stealing famous manuscripts and first editions of horror classics, including a copy of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley that gets stolen from the rare book room of a library run by Anna Quarrels (Rhonda Griffin, Hideous!). She hires a detective named David Raleigh (Justin Lauer) to track him down.

Soon enough, Berber has Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris, James Putnam’s Mummy and only needs Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to have everything he needs to start his Archetype Inducer, which will bring them all to life.

As for David, he’s behind on the case because he also runs a video store. Anna is the one who catches Berber but she gets knocked out and captured. She’s the last thing he needs. A virgin to be sacrificed to bring the monsters to life. Somehow, even though she isn’t killed, they do arise. Except that they’re half the size they should be. Dracula is quite cross, but is told if he gets Anna, he’ll be back to his normal self.

Dracula figures that he can get any virgin and brings back lesbian librarian Miss Christina (Kristin Norton) who is in love with Anna. Only Anna can unlock the creature’s full powers except, well, she’s not a virgin. But David is…

I love the ending of this movie. The monsters decide that in our world, they will eventually die. But in the pages they came from, they can live forever.

In payment, Anna gives David the first English language edition of Venus in Furs, who replies that he likes the Jess Franco movie with Klaus Kinski, as well as the one directed by Larry Buchanan. She shuts him up with a kiss.

Writer Neal Marshall Stevens also was behind Head of the Family, Curse of the Puppet Master, Thir13en Ghosts, Hellraiser: Deader and many more. He also directed Stitches and Possessed.

Come for the mini-monsters, stay for the many posters and VHS box art in the video store.

You can watch this on Tubi.

4. A Horror Film Shot by Aristide Massaccesi.

Directed by Michele Lupo (The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid) and written by Sergio Donati (thank you Orca), Walter Patriarca (thank you the costumes in Zombi) and Gianfranco Clerici (thank you for Cannibal Holocaust, The Last Match and so many more), Seven Times Seven is the Ocean’s Eleven of Italian late 60s genre cinema.

Look at the cast. When else would you have Gordon Mitchell, Raimondo Vianello, Terry-Thomas, Ray Lovelock and Lionel Stander, Gastone Moschin and Adolfo Celi all in the same movie and actually be the stars instead of the bad guys or the supporting cast? And when you see Erica Blanc is in it, you may — if you are me — audibly sigh in happiness.

Anyways, this gang of crooks plans and plans a heist to rob the Royal Mint, then all sneak back into prison. I wish I could make awesome heists like this in real life, but I can’t even shoplift without getting nervous.

This may as well be another in the series that started with Seven Golden Men. Even better, it has some incredible poster art.

3: A Horror Film That’s a Poltergeist Rip-Off.

Hawa is a 2003 Bollywood movie that has plenty of influences — well, outright things to steal — and got a review that said, “Self-respecting moviegoers looking for quality film rather than shameful sexual exploitation should steer far clear of this compost.”

I mean, a movie with shots cribbed from Poltergeist and a plot so close to The Entity that it even copies its sound design? Was this made for me?

Sanjana (Tabu) is a divorcee who can’t afford to live in the city any longer — to be fair, the hillside house she has is absolutely huge and gorgeous, so I don’t know how poor she is — that runs an antique shop. When a Tibetan woman gives her a locket, she soon sells it to be able to make her mortgage. On the way home, she finds that old woman dead and the couple brings back the locket because they keep seeing the woman.

Directed by Guddu Dhanoa and written by Sutanu Gupta and Sanjay Masoomm, Hawa starts slowly and you may think that it’s going to be classy, as Tabu is a major actress. Just hold on, because this movie suddenly remembers that it’s trying to be The Entity soon enough, giving you numerous scenes of human and sex couplings. And because the well on her property is filled with dead souls — not unlike the burial ground in Poltergeist —  Sanjana is dealing with more than one ghost. She even enjoys the demonic sex once, which upsets her so much that she nearly loses her kids to the demons.

There are even hints of Cujo, as the demons possess the family dog.

Unlike many of the Bollywood remakes that you may watch, there are no songs in this movie. I have no idea how that happened, to be honest, and wish that it did have something catchy. It does, however, take a lot of Charles Bernstein’s ideas from the score to the movie it’s stealing from.

Well, I mean, The Entity. Because just as I typed that, there’s a dimension that opens up and takes Sanjana’s daughter as if she were the Bollywood Carol Anne and a scene in the bedroom with winds and toys blasting around that my way walked into, looked at the screen and said, “Is this Poltergeist now?” There’s also an exorcist, a demon in the well and the kind of open door ending that would make Hollywood producers happy.

I’m easy, but I thought this was great. I say that because it’s the first Bollywood movie I’ve seen that felt and looked like it could have been made by Filmirage.

How about those Commando and Michael Jackson posters?

2: A Horror Film Directed by Todd Sheets

When I talked to Todd Sheets a few months ago, this movie came up and how much he wanted it to be a tribute to Lucio Fulci.

“When I made House of Secrets, it was made it as a tribute to him. I got to work with Fabio Frizzi who did so many of those great soundtracks. That turned out to be a fantastic time. I just wanted him to do the theme song and he said, “Send me the script and send me the rough cut.”

And then I didn’t hear anything back.

I’m like, “Oh, God, he hates that. He’s not gonna do it.”

All of a sudden I hear back. He says, “Okay, I’m gonna do the whole movie for that same cost.”

He said that Fulci would be so proud of this movie and well, it was my homage to the Maestro and my big comeback after my heart attack and everything.

I almost died and that was my comeback movie. And I wanted it to be special. So I wanted Fabio to do the theme song and it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. He was fantastic.”

Jacon Hunt (Antwoine Steele) has had some bad luck in life but now it looks like things are looking up. After all, he has a new job doing security at ShadowView Manor. The bad news? His first night is the anniversary of a great tragedy.

Working for building manager Cane (George Hardy, a welcome face even when he tightens his belt), Jacon and maintenance man Jackson (Bryan David) walk through the building, meeting the residents, who include Cassie (Nicole Santorella) and Hanna (Michaela Paxton Tarbell). These young psychics have been hired by Dorothy Fremont (Iris Runyon) to reach her husband from beyond the grave. As you can imagine, on this evening of such great terror, the spirits of those killed in a brothel massacre many decades ago come back, including Madame Greta (Dyanne Thorne!) and an insane priest named Elias Solomon (Lew Temple).

You know what happens when real Enochian Keys are used during the seance? The dead come to our world and want to kill the living. As always, Sheets moves fast and isn’t afraid to get gory. And look out for First Jason Ari Lehman as a guy working in the building and Allan Kayser from Mama’s Family and Night of the Creeps.

The only thing that took this down was that it ends with a Lloyd Kaufman cameo that isn’t just pointless, it destroyed the end of the film. After all that gore and so many great moments, I hate that this ends with such a goofy and inane moment.

You can watch this on Tubi.

1: A French Canadian Horror Film.

Vincenzo Natali made Cube and he proved that he was more than just one film. Actually, he keeps on doing that. But man, Splice has creatures and moments that upset me and I thought I’d seen it all.

Genetic engineers Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody, as creepy as he was when he tried to be rasta) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) are creating hybrid creatures by splicing animal and human DNA. Employed by N.E.R.D. (Nucleic Exchange Research and Development), their assignment is to create new proteins for the next wave of prescription drugs. What they create are Fred and Ginger, two Cronenbergian creatures that are going to mate and then create a wonderful new form of life.

One problem. N.E.R.D. owners Joan Chorot (Simona Maicanescu) and William Barlow(David Hewlett) want them to start dissecting Fred and Ginger and get on with making drugs.

Elsa wants a child and through Dren, the creature that they create — she even gets her DNA into it — is that baby. Or something. It refuses to die, constantly evolving to become something new each time it seems that its life is in danger. Yet it’s more animal than human, unwilling to learn that a cat is something you keep and not kill with your stinger tail. Of course, once Clive cuts it off her in a horrifying scene, the humans are even worse than a creature that only has the instincts that it was given, much less the sociopathic tendencies of Elsa’s family tree.

This movie also has one of the most upsettingly awesome sex scenes I’ve ever seen, one that somehow gets interspecies mating and incest into one frothy mix of torment.

I’m glad that Natali, who also wrote this with Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, was able to keep this movie from getting sequel after sequel. And I had no idea Dren was played by an actual human, Abigail Chu as a child and Delphine Chanéac as an adult, because there’s an uncanny valley about the way she appears. She really does look unlike any other life form. Howard Berger and Greg Nicotero designed eleven different versions of her and there is some digital art there, as her eyes — those are really the eyes of the actress — have been spaced further apart.

30. A Horror Film Covered in the ShockMarathons Books.

In his book, All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, Troma president Lloyd Kaufman lists this among the five worst films in Troma’s library. Yet another reason for me to say it: Fuck Lloyd Kaufman.

Director Tony Malanowski and star Steve Sandkuhler had already made this movie a year before as Night of Horror. Yet the idea that a bunch of zombie Confederate soldiers could rise up and destroy some hippies in a Winnebego seemed to be too good of an idea to pass up. So they went back and made it again, this time putting six twenty-something teens — Wyatt (Sandkuhler), Mel (Christopher Gummer), Sarah (Rebecca Bach), Bill (Jim Ball), Blind Kiyomi (Mimi Ishikawa) and Lin (Judy Dixon) — up against the South as it rises once again.

Yes, who knew that deer hunting would lead to this? This movie is a lesson for us all. If you stay in an area that has a Confederate graveyard, don’t steal their stuff and don’t read the book they left behind. Nobody — not even the cops — can survive once those zombies come back and want back their stuff. That’s why the other title for this film, Curse of the Cannibal Confederates — is so truthful.

Look, I get that this movie is shot in complete darkness, no one knows how to act and the story has been done before. If that stopped me, I wouldn’t watch anything. There’s a hiss and echo on the bass heavy soundtrack to this movie that makes me convinced that somehow this movie exists on the same collective unconsciousness place as the second wave of black metal. Everything is as dark as it can be, day for night but night for day, and in the same way that some people laugh off corpsepaint and bad production on those albums, they are also filled with moments of drone drug floating out of our reality abilities that this finds and seizes on. I mean, the zombie attacks are legitimately unsettling, the sounds of zombies masticating their prey beyond disgusting. And that church set! In Norway, they would have burned it down. Here, we turn it into the setting for a zombie film.

If this came out today, it would have the tagline “We are going to eat y’all.”

Malanowski went on to edit Dr. Alien and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it.  and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it. I’d love if he made this one more time.

29. A Horror Film Shot by Tokushö Kikumura.

Hirohisa Sasaki also directed Gore From Outer Space, but this movie, wow. A man may have killed several women and the press line up outside their family home, needing to know the truth. One of his sisters decides that she must prove her brother’s innocence, so she goes to a psychic but that’s when things get really bad, as the psychic and his assistant brutalize the family, using their own trauma to get inside and then destroy them.

This is in no way recommended for sane people or those with any level of morality. Also, you may be confused whether this is a comedy — what with all the singing and kung fu scenes, as well as the weird FBI agents — or a movie out to shock you with necrophilia, assaults and incest or just something that could only come from Japan, which is probably the best answer to “What did I just watch?”

Japan —  you embrace a bleak ending like no one else save 1970s New Hollywood directors.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on October 23, 2018 and you can also read Bill Van Ryn’s amazing breakdown that was posted on November 9, 2019. Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Cauldron, Severin — I beg you — release this movie.

31. A Horror Film You Love, But Don’t Think Enough People Watch

Dr. Otto Frankenstein works in his lab all day and to the normal daytime world, he seems like an ordinary doctor. But at night, he works on perfecting his own form of life, Mosiac, putting together this inhuman human from several dead bodies. Then, once completed, Mosiac repays him by killing him and we still have an hour left.

Directed by Mario Mancini (who was the cinematographer for Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks and The Girl in Room 2A), this is a film featuring real surgical footage, nonsensical dialogue and a total lack of plot. Suffice to say I loved it.

Mosiac spends the rest of the movie replacing his constantly failing organs, which means that he must murder and murder and murder some more. Have you ever wondered, “What if someone used a giant leg bone to kill someone?” this would be the movie that answers your inquest.

Also, in whatever nameless city in some unknown country that this is supposed to be set in, possibly Germany, the women in the night have no issues with a gigantic monster in a leather Nazi-esque outfit picking them up with merely a few grunts. No money discussion — he kills them way before they tell him how much a half and half costs.

This movie was inspired by Italian horror, sex and gore comics, like Oltretomba. If you’re offended by the blood and guts and books of this film, consider this a stern warning: avoid these comics at all costs if you have. any morals. They take it even further. And then further. And then some.

There’s a new blu ray of this that’s been released — the film is in public domain — that finally fixes the rough prints that are out there right now. It’s nearly impossible to find, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop looking. For all the foibles of this film, it has a certain something. It’s a sex roughie about a monster like Frankenstein, made by filmmakers who do not in any way care just how sleazy they’re getting.

You can watch an absolutely battered version of this movie on Tubi.

As a bonus, here’s some artwork that I did of the film.