Gary Dauberman is one of the creatives that came out of the Conjuring series of films, writing Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, The Nun, The Nun II and directing and writing Annabelle Comes Home. He also wrote the remakes of It, It and It Chapter Two. This led to him directing and writing this film, another Stephen King remake.

Before COVID-19, this was to be released on September 9, 2022. Then, April 21, 2023 came and went, the next release window, and this was replaced by Evil Dead Rise. By October of that year, most people thought this would be another tax write-off for Warner Brothers. Even Stephen King wrote, “Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows.” It went to HBO Max — well, are we supposed to just call it Max? — instead of playing theaters.

I was excited about it but also worried. After all, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot is one of the best horror films not just of the 80s, but all time. It’s near-perfect, a film that doesn’t even seem as long as it is and one that we watch in this house at least twice a year.

It feels unfair to compare this movie to that.

But then again, don’t you have to?

Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) is an author who has come home to Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write a book about his childhood. He quickly meets Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) as she works in the real estate office of Larry Crockett — thereby forgetting the entire subplot of Larry sleeping with Bonnie Sawyer or her husband Cully catching them in the act — and takes him to the town’s gathering place, the drive-in.

That drive-in is lame because it’s double feature is The Drowning Pool and Night Moves. I know this is set in 1975. but come on. It could have been showing I Don’t Want to Be Born and House of Exorcism or The Devil’s Rain and The Hatchet Murders.

Yes, this has many of the characters that you remember, like horror fan Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) and teacher Matthew Burke (Bill Camp). Except that the schoolteacher was never Ben’s mentor and there’s no relationship other than the one that the movie shoves upon us. There’s none of the people in the boarding house or any of the numerous smaller characters that make up the town, which is difficult with a shorter running time, yet this movie feels like it crawls at times and is only interested in vampire violence.

Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk) has bought the Marsten House for his boss Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward), but it’s difficult — again — to not miss James Mason. It seems like we never even get to know Straker, as the movie quickly gets to killing off Ralph (Cade Woodward) and Danny Glick (Nicholas Crovetti), as well as gravedigger Mike Ryerson (Spencer Treat Clark).

This feels like its more about assembling a team to battle the undead, with Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) and Sheriff Gillespie (William Sadler) discovering the truth about vampires early. Dr. Cody even stops being turned by giving herself a rabies shot. If you’re wondering, did this come from the book? Nope. It’s new and a way of explaining away vampirism through science. And Mark finds out how to defeat vampires from an issue of House of Secrets like he’s the third Frog brother.

It’s also a movie more concerned with the action sequences than the fear of the unknown and the destruction of your small hometown, as well as the memories that are brought back by trying to come home again. Dauberman has said that he wanted to make vampires frightening and not sexy, but Barlow never had a probably being terrifying.

In King’s lifetime, he’s seen two mini-series (Mikael Salomon directed the 2004 TNT mini-series) and an attempt at a spin-off, 1987’s Larry Cohen-directed A Return to Salem’s Lot. I get it, diminishing returns, even if I have a soft spot for Cohen’s film. And maybe I shouldn’t expect all that much from this.

At no point is anything the least bit frightening in this. It doesn’t have enough time. There are so many characters that there’s barely time for anyone to be anything other than a cardboard cutout of an archetype: smart doctor, smart teacher, frightened cop, frightened priest, girlfriend and a smart writer. Straker barely even has any reason to be memorable.

Mark has a poster of Trog on his wall and after that, I kept thinking how much I’d rather be watching that movie.

Maybe this spoiled when it sat on the shelf so long. Or maybe it has nothing new to say other than glowing crucifixes. In truth, this barely even feels like Salem’s Lot and could have changed the character names and give Ben have a different job and it would be no better or worse. It just sits there. It just is.

And for something with this much potential, that’s a shame.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Look, if all director and writer Nathan Rumler (Fangboner, Gay for Pray: The Erotic Adventures of Jesus Christ) had done was write this movie’s tagline, “For God’s sake, get off!” and never even made the movie, we’d be fine.

However, I made a deal with a lesser demon to get Arrow blu rays for free, which means that now I must review every Amityvlille movie or pay for their latest releases with something worth way more than my paycheck.

Cathy (Corella Waring, CarousHELL) has done the unthinkable. She’s bought a marital aid at a yard sale, which may be the most wrong of the many wrong things in this movie. The more she and her girlfriend Roxi (Mallory Maneater) use the titular evil wand upon one another, the more chance that the demons that possessed the residents of 112 Ocean Avenue will find their way into their loins. And their souls, I guess.

Also, the vibrator can talk.

Also, there’s Spanky, a possessed ventriloquist dummy that rips off a man’s face and then has sex with a woman.

Also, there’s a murder scene juxtaposed with a sex scene.

Also, a character asks “Perform an exorcism on my (slang for part of anatomy).”

Also, two characters take mushrooms in the woods for real and in real time we watch them wander all over the place.

Meanwhile, Chad (Rumler) — the ex-boyfriend of Cathy — and his partner Mallory (Emily Hilborn) are kind of cosplaying Friday the 13th the Series except they are hunting down all of the cursed objects from the DeFeo house and only have one object left. Yes, the magical vibrator.

That said, in no way is this movie for anyone easily offended by, well, anything. It’s exactly what it promises to be and much, much worse. It’s a grimy, gross and upsetting movie that’s definitely going to have an audience. And well, I guess I’m in it because I have to see every Amityville movie and write them up if I want that UHD of They Call Her One Eye without suffering in Hell for all eternity.

Mitigating factor: a male cover version of the spraying amputation in Tenebre, copious amounts of well-done gore and people who are all obviously having fun making this. Honestly, this movie gave me the same feelings I had watching Cannibal Holocaust and that says to me that despite watching every Bruno Mattei and Joe D’Amato movie this year, I am still human after all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Goliath and the Vampires was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 5, 1968 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, August 29, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 23, 1973 at 11:30 p.m. It played as The Vampires.

Released in its native Italy as Maciste control il vampiro, American-International Pictures thought no one in the U.S. knew who Maciste was. He’s also been called Hercules, Samson, Atlas, Ulysses and Colossus with several of his films being part of the Sons of Hercules TV package.

The character first appeared in the 1914 silent film Cabiria, has been in more than fifty movies and has been played by Mark Forrest, Reg Park, Gordon Mitchell, Reg Lewis, Kirk Morris, Samson Burke, Alan Steel, Richard Lloyd, Renato Rossini and Frank Gordon. This time, the man carved from rock is played by Gordon Scott.

Even Jess Franco made two Maciste movies, Maciste contre la Reine des Amazones and Les exploits érotiques de Maciste dans l’Atlantid.

Directed by Giacomo Gentilomo (Hercules Against the Moon Men, Slave Girls of Sheba) and Sergio Corbucci (Django, The Great Silence and, yes, Super Fuzz) and a script by Corbucci and Duccio Tessari (one of the fathers of the Italian Western), this movie is totally incredible. Seriously, it slowly built into something that exploded my brain.

Nearly all of the men in Goliath’s village are killed and the women and children taken. He swears to kill everyone until learning that they are all under the spell of the vampiric monster Korbrak (Guido Celano). Yes, pirates who are controlled by a vampire demon who set villages on fire and killing the mother of a demigod as well as kidnapping his girlfriend!

Korbrak is turning all the people he has killed into faceless monsters that serve as his foot soldiers and when Goliath finally meets him face to face, he learns that they are twins. Well, not for long, as Korbrak’s face gets ripped off revealing a horrible visage. There’s also a scene where Goliath is trapped inside a giant bell, as well as everything in the realm of the vampires being colored with gels.

There are also good guys with blue skin and a rubber spider that is one of the best giant spiders you’ll see. This would be the best peplum ever made if it wasn’t for Hercules in the Haunted World but you know, Bava and Christopher Lee together is a tough customer.

Goliath is pretty much a blank slate as a hero but everything else in this movie is just plain weird and by weird, read that as perfect. Monstrous bone and body eating bad guys, even the heroes threatening to send a beautiful woman into a pit filled with monsters while she begs for her life, a sultan who has become the ruler because he sold his soul, people falling on spikes, children being menaced by flaming trees and so much blood. Like, this has all the gore — in 1961, mind you — that every other peplum film not named Conquest wishes that it had.

This movie demands to be seen.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Teenage Caveman was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 26, 1964 at 1:00 a.m.

Robert Vaughn thought that this was the worst movie ever made. Roger Corman wanted it to be called Prehistoric World. In England, they called it Out of the Darkness. Yes, Teenage Caveman is something.

The early humans live amongst the rocks and suffer, despite there being a lush grassland on the other side of the river. There’s also a terrifying monster of a god over there, so they keep happy in the dirt.

It turns out that the god is an old white haired-man who was all burned up. One of the young cavemen (Vaughn) makes him a peace offering while another attacks the man, killing him. The tagline of this movie gives it away — “Nuclear holocaust has destroyed the world as we know it – and now the future of humanity is in the hands of TEENAGE CAVEMAN!” — because this movie does Planet of the Apes without the apes or the budget. Just the end of all things and cavemen coming back after nuclear destruction.

Robert Vaughn, despite playing a teenage caveman, was 26 when this was made.

Beach Dickerson tops that by dying three times — he’s the boy who drowns in quicksand (and the guy playing drums at his funeral) as well as a bear and the caveman who gets speared by the old man.

And that monster costume? It also shows up in Night of the Blood Beast.

When this title was used for a series of made for cable movies on Cinemax, Larry Clark directed it. Yes, the director of Kids.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night Tide was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 4, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, February 20, 1971 at 11:30 p.m.

Written and directed by Curtis Harrington — one of the leaders of New Queer Cinema and also the director of Queen of Blood, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, Ruby and so many more — this film was always one I wanted to see as it features Marjorie Cameron in a small role.

Harrington had also shot a documentary about her — The Wormwood Star — and I’ll forgive you if you have no idea who she is. Cameron was many things — an artist, poet, actress, and probably most essentially, an occultist. A follower of Crowley’s Thelema, she was married to rocket pioneer and nexus point of all things 20th century occult, Jack Parsons. In fact, Parsons believed that he had conjured Cameron to be the Whore of Babylon/Thelemite goddess Babalon as part of his Babalon Working rite, which he conducted alongside L. Rod Hubbard. No, really. It may have also opened our world to the aliens that have obsessed us since Kenneth Arnold reported a UFO in 1947.

After a suicide attempt and being institutionalized, Cameron gathered a group of magic practitioners around herself that she called The Children, whose sex magic rituals were to create a moonchild. She was now pregnant with what she referred to as the Wormwood Star, but that ended in miscarriage. Many of The Children soon left, as her proclamations of the future had grown increasingly apocalyptic.

Cameron’s orbit — much like her husband’s — unites both the worlds of art and the occult, straddling appearing in the films of Kenneth Anger, working with UFO expert and contactee George Van Tassel and appearing in Wallace Berman’s art journal Semina.

Why did I tell you all this? Because it fascinates me that she’s in Night Tide.

Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper!) is a young sailor on shore leave who meets Mora (Linda Lawson, who is also in William Castle’s Let’s Kill Uncle), a woman who makes her living appearing in a sideshow. They fall in love before he learns that her past boyfriends have drowned under mysterious circumstances. That may — or may not — be because Mora is a siren, a legendary creature who exists to lure men to their deaths. Adding to her suspicions is the mystery woman (Cameron) who calls to her and demands that she follow her destiny.

One evening, under a full moon, she invites him deep sea swimming, but cuts his hose, forcing him to surface so that she isn’t tempted to kill him. She then swims into the depths of the ocean, fulfilling the call of the mystery woman. And when he returns to the boardwalk, her dead body is still in the mermaid sideshow, now there for visitors to gawk at her dead eyes.

Despite a police confession as to who the killer is, the strange woman in black and her call to the sea is never explained.

Anton LaVey discussed this film in Blanche Barton’s The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey. “There’s a whole genre of films that are just little evocative low-budget gems that I certainly wouldn’t call schlock but that are also being revived as a consequence of more attention in those directions. Director Curtis Hanington’s first movie, Night Tide filmed around the Santa Monica Pier and Venice. California in the late ’50’s, is a psychologically intricate story about a young sailor (Dennis Hopper) who falls in love with a mermaid It’s just wonderful to see these precious works of art being finally given the attention they merit.” This also appears on the Church of Satan film list.

According to Spencer Kansa’s Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Anger introduced Cameron and LaVey, who was delighted to meet the actress, having been a fan of the film.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive.