Directed and written by Raul Lopez Echeverria, this is — as the title tells us — the story of Domingo (Eduardo Covarrubias), who lives in a poor neighborhood in Guadalajara. He has lost his wife to divorce and only has work in his life until he learns that his passion for announcing soccer matches can change his entire neighborhood.

While soccer may not be as popular here in America — it’s making strides and the World Cup is a big deal here no as well — you can substitute any sport for what Domingo loves. The idea that he sits on the sidelines of a barely complete pitch and is as passionate about the games as anyone commenting on the biggest matches in the world is why everyone loves him.

I like that Tubi is getting these foreign movies and giving people in our country a chance to see what the rest of the world is like. I may not be a soccer fan but I can feel the passion within this movie and the joy that the characters feel.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The original Thanksgiving trailer that played during Grindhouse was so memorable that for years, people have asked when a real one was coming. After all, Machete and Hobo With a Shotgun — which won a competition of fake trailers and actually played with the movie in Canada — got made.

Director Eli Roth said of the trailer, “My friend Jeff (Rendell), who plays the killer Pilgrim — we grew up in Massachusetts, we were huge slasher-movie fans and every November we were waiting for the Thanksgiving slasher movie. We had the whole movie worked out: A kid who’s in love with a turkey, and then his father killed it, and then he killed his family and went away to a mental institution and came back and took revenge on the town. I called Jeff and said, “Dude, guess what, we don’t have to make the movie, we can just shoot the best parts.” Shooting the trailer was so much fun because every shot is a money shot. Every shot is decapitation or nudity. It’s so ridiculous, it’s absurd. It’s just so wrong and sick that it’s right.”

Directed by Roth and written by Rendell, it took 16 years to make it to screens. Could it ever live up to the trailer?

Yes. It totally does.

As people line up for Black Friday at the RightMart in Plymouth, it’s obvious that something bad is going to happen. Should Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) even open the store and be greedy? Shouldn’t there be more than two security guards? Should Jessica (Nell Verlaque) have let her friends Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), Gabby (Addison Rae), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport) and Yulia (Jenna Warren) into the store early, which causes people in the crowd to see them and push through the doors, killing one of the two guards? Could anything have calmed these lunatics and kept them from killing manager Mitch Collins’s (Ty Olsson) wife Amanda (Gina Gershon) and several others? How can the town ever fix things?

A year later, they have tried. Jessica is now dating Ryan (Milo Manheim), as Bobby left everyone when his baseball arm was broken in the tragedy. As Right Mart gets ready for another Black Friday, images of the teens are shared on social media by John Carver, the first governor of Plymouth Colony and one of the people credited with the first Thanksgiving, as well as video of the riot itself. Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) works with Jessica but people are killed left and right, like the other security guard Manny (Tim Dillon), students Amy (Shailyn Griffin) and Lonnie (Mika Amosen), and waitress Lizzie (Amanda Barker), all people involved in the evening.

That’s pretty much all you need to know. This is a film closer to Happy Birthday to Me than the most crass of the slashers, as the killer means more than the kills. That said, this is a movie that does not shy away from some incredible moments of gore and explosive violence, perhaps the most that’s been in a slasher since the end of the classic era in 1981.

There haven’t been many Thanksgiving horror movies — Blood Rage, Home Sweet Home, The Boneyard, Amityville: A New Generation, The Granny, Intensity, Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, the 2005 Boogeyman, Seance, ThanksKilling, Kristy, Escape Room, Blood Harvest, Fractured, The Last Thanksgiving, Happy Horror Days, Thankskilling 3,  Deadly Friend, Derelicts and Blood Freak — so this is probably the best one there is by default. However, I have to say that this is the closest to an actual slasher I’ve seen in decades. It gets things right because it’s made by someone who actually loves slashers. It feels authentic and true.

It’s the best movie I’ve seen Roth make, way beyond his Knock Knock, Death Wish and can we all just admit he was the Makinov that made Come Out and Play? Instead of remaking something, he’s making something new taken from what has worked in the past. The stalking, the slashing, the idea that so many people could have been the killer are all perfect. It’s something that every praised slasher of the past few years — the revived Scream and Halloween movies, I’m staring a bloody hole through you — should learn from. By this point, just give Roth the Halloween franchise. It can’t get worse after the last five movies.

My favorite actor in this movie is Tonic, one of the cats from the remake of Pet Sematary. That whole scene is incredible, as John Carver kills a man and still feeds his cat.

A movie that has scenes from Krull and Death Wish 3, a rant about Dio in Black Sabbath, songs from Sorcery and Sammy Hagar’s “Three Lock Box” on the soundtrack, multiple heads exploding, a turkey timer stabbed into someone, an opening that references Halloween, The Car‘s horn during the parade…I am so happy with this movie.

When do we get Don’t and Werewolf Women of the SS?

Sure, Coffin Joe was dragged into a pond by the skeletons of his victims and had accepted God, but now he’s back and seemingly as filled with hate for the human race as ever before. Instead of his search for the perfect woman, he’s here to tell you three stories, as if he’s an EC Comics character. Well, a year after this movie, he would have his own comic book series with the same title. It was also the name of his much later TV talk show.

In “The Doll Maker,” a man and his four gorgeous daughters make the most realistic and sought after dolls. Criminals rob them when they learn that they don’t keep their money in the bank. After the doll maker faints, the robbers assault the daughters, who actually start to accept and encourage their advances after remarking about their eyes. And soon enough, we learn how the dolls have such human-looking eyeballs.

“Obsession” is about a poor balloon seller with a foot fetish and a love for a beautiful woman well above his station. After her wedding, which he watches from afar, he learns that she has been murdered. Too poor to attend her funeral, he comes to her body in the mausoleum where, well, he makes love to her and her feet before returning the shoes he saw her lose when she was still alive.

Finally, “Theory” has Professor Oãxiac Odéz (José Mojica Marins, also Coffin Joe and this film’s creator) bring a rival professor and his wife to his home. Soon, he has imprisoned them and forces them to go through a series of sadistic experiments to prove if instinct can overcome reason and love.

So yes, Coffin Joe is in this for about three minutes. But his fingerprints — and long fingernails — are all over every frame.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is haunting my shelves and I can see Zé do Caixão in the shadows of my basement. The Strange World of Coffin Joe has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also an alternative ending with commentary by Marins. You can get this set from MVD.

Four years later, Coffin Joe has returned from the end of At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and has recovered from shock, blindness and being accused of a series of murders. Now it’s time to get back to finding his perfect woman and continue his blood.

Together with a hunchbacked assistant named Brono, he kidnaps six gorgeous women and puts them all through a horrific series of tasks to determine who will bear his child. Only Marcia doesn’t scream in the face of the madness Coffin Joe puts them through, so only she can be the one. Yet even though he takes her to his bed — and kills the other five with snakes — she refuses him. He releases her, claiming he knows that she will never tell anyone what she has seen.

That’s when he meets the Colonel’s daughter, Laura, who actually returns his affection. The military man and his son try to break off their union, but Coffin Joe acts as only as he can to such an offense: he has Bruno kill Laura’s brother and blames the colonel’s henchman Truncador.

Yet now comes the dark night for the man who has no soul, as he goes to Hell after learning that one of his six brides was pregnant when he killed her. Dooming her child, he wanders the technicolor nightmare that is the abyss and comes upon Satan himself, who is also Coffin Joe. Our world’s version renounces his ways in light of this revelation.

Coffin Joe resists all the killers the colonel and his men send after him and finally impregnates Laura, just as Marcia kills herself by drinking arsenic. Yet before she dies, she tells the townsfolk of Coffin Joe’s crimes and they form a lynch mob just as he must decide who will survive, his bride or the baby, as the pregnancy has complications. Together they agree that the child must live, but fate is cruel and both Laura and Joe’s scion die. Destroyed by this, he is no match for the lynch mob that arrives, shooting him in the cemetery where he drowns in the same pond where he drowned so many of his victims.

At the point of death, a priest offers to hear Joe’s confession. He accepts God as his Savior and drowns as the skeletons of his victims claim him.

Brazilian censors forced filmmaker — and the human avatar of Coffin Joe — Jose Mojica Marins to recut and redub the end of this movie. That’s why the strange ending of salvation is in here. It enraged Jose Mojica Marins and put a curse on his career, or so he felt, to the point that he could never finish his planned trilogy of three Coffin Joe movies. It took until 2005 and filmmakers who grew up as his fans before Embodiment of Evil closed out the story and showed how Coffin Joe survived.

In The Wizard of Oz, a better world is in color instead of black and white. In This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, Hell itself is the only place to get the full color gel Mario Bava treatment and that says something about the nihilistic worldview of its creator and his creation. I grew up in a small town too, Coffin Joe, but I wasn’t brave enough to grow out my fingernail to absurd lengths, go on and on about my superiority and make out with a woman while throwing snakes at others. I can only watch you and see how it could have been.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is everything. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse has commentary with Marins, Paulo Duarte and Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles. There’s also a new interview with Stephen Thrower on Marins’ influences and a new video essay by Miranda Corcoran about Coffin Joe as a horror host. You can get this set from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by AC Nicholas, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. His idea this time was for a series on movies that started as one film and were dubbed into something else.

Would you like to have me write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!

1. Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
2. Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
3. As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
4. For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?

Directed, written and produced by William Edwards, this movie starts with this line: “I saw a panorama of beautiful hills. However, as beautiful as it may seem, death lurked behind those beautiful hills and beautiful women. I don’t know which came first.”

Count Alucard (Vince Kelly) has brought a reporter named Mike (Billy Whitton) to his cave and turned him into Irving Jackalman, a werewolf henchman who brings him women to both feed on and make love to. The jackal or werewolf mask is from another movie that Edwards wrote, The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, which has five minutes of John Carradine in it.

The problem is that Mike’s girlfriend Ann (Ann Hollis, who was also in The Ravager) is so attractive that the vampire must have her even after a whole movie of him tying up women, making out with them and then drinking their hemoglobin.

Producer Whit Boyd also was behind 60s sleaze like Spiked Heels and Black Nylons, Hot Blooded Woman, The Sex Shuffle, Scarlet Negilee, The Office Party, Party Girls and Eat, Drink and Make Merrie. In April 1970, sheriff’s deputies in Pensacola, FL seized prints of this movie and I Am Curious (Yellow) from the Ritz Theatre and charged the manager with two counts of unlawful showing of an obscene film and maintaining a public nuisance.

Where this gets even better is that the original sound shot with the movie was so bad and didn’t match the footage that the entire thing was dubbed in the studio. As well as additional footage shot in Dallas, using local talent, there are only two voices in this movie and both sound like old vaudeville comedians talking over some jazz instead of any dialogue for most of the film.

It makes this roughie feel almost cute, I almost said, then I looked up and a werewolf was strangling a naked women, who was covered with blood, and still raw dogging — I guess, right? — her.

One of the few actresses in this to do anything else is Sue Allen. She plays Carol in this and is also in the X-rated 1970 movie Cindy and Donna. She would go on to sing in several cartoons, including Yogi’s First Christmas.

You can watch this on YouTube.

How badass is Zé do Caixão or as we know him, Coffin Joe?

Can you imagine the audacity to not just create this character but to become him in the midst of a country where more than 60% of the population is Catholic?

Can you even comprehend how upset people were when José Mojica Marins become the long-fingernail-wearing amoral undertaker driven to continue his bloodline by having a son with the perfect woman while murdering and ruining everyone in his wake? How did they deal with a boogeyman who filled their head with doubletalk and Nietzschian statements?

As Coffin Joe would yell, “I challenge your power! I deny your existence! Nothing exists, but life.”

The first appearance of Coffin Joe is in this movie, a film in which the evil undertaker searches for his perfect woman who will bear him the child that will make him immoral. After all, his wife is infertile, so he decides to murder her with a spider. And not just on any day. On a Catholic Holy Day. And then he decides to break another Commandment, coveting Terezinha, the fiancée of his friend Antonio.

Joe and Antonio visit a gypsy who foretells that a tragedy will keep Antonio and Terezinha from being married. This causes Joe to scream at the woman about how the supernatural is a lie, then he makes her warning come true by strangling his friend before drowning him. The very next day, he starts to court Terezinha by giving her a canary. When she resists his advances, he beats her and then assaults her. She curses him and reveals that she will kill herself — one of the gravest sins in the Catholic Church — and come back to pull him into Hell. He laughs, but the next day, she has hung herself.

The police just can’t seem to figure out why all this death is happening in this small village, but Dr. Rodolfo does. Coffin Joe responds by tearing out his eyes with his long fingernails and lighting him on fire. Problem solved. He remains unpunished and even starts to fall for another woman, Marta. On their date, he sees the gypsy who warns him that he will be punished. That night, as he walks home, the cemetery calls him, the place where all of his victims are burning. He opens the grave of Antonio and Terezinha and they begin to open their eyes as their mouths are filled with worms and insects. Coffin Joe begins to scream, as he is trapped between life and death, finally paying for his crimes as the church bells ring at midnight.

This is just the start of how strange these movies would become. If you liked the last ten minutes of this, just get ready. It gets really good from here.

Arrow Video’s limited edition collection of the movies of Coffin Joe is something I’ve been waiting for and it does not let me down in the least. Each movie is packed with so many extras. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul has commentary with José Mojica Marins, filmmaker Paulo Duarte and film scholar Carlos Primati in Portuguese with English subtitles, a new video essay by Lindsay Hallam, Damned: The Strange World of José Mojica Marins a documentary on Marins by André Barcinski and Ivan Finotti as well as Bloody Kingdom, Marins’ first short film with director’s commentary and excerpts from early works by Marins. You can get this set from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by AC Nicholas, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. His idea this time was for a series on movies that started as one film and were dubbed into something else.

Would you like to have me write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!

1. Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
2. Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
3. As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
4. For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?

Where could Steve Martin and Carl Reiner go after The Jerk and The Man with Two Brains? How about to the world of film noir?

At lunch with Reiner and screenwriter George Gip, Martin discussed using a clip from an old film as part of a story he was writing. From that came the idea to use old clips throughout a movie to remix, recut and reframe an entirely new narrative that would place Martin into the world of film noir, using some of those that helped make those classic films, like costume designer Edith Head*, who made more than twenty suits and production designer John DeCuir, who designed 85 sets for the film.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid casts Martin as Rigby Reardon, who comes to the aid of cheese heiress Juliet Forrest (Sela Ward) after the mysterious death of her father. Throughout the narrative, they come into contact with all manner of famous actors and characters, including Alan Ladd as The Exterminator who attacks Martin (taken from This Gun for Hire), Barbara Stanwyck from Sorry, Wrong Number, Ray Milland from The Lost Weekend, Ava Gardner footage taken from both The Killers and The Bribe, Burt Lancaster from The Killers, Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe using scenes from The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place and Dark Passage, Cary Grant from Suspicion, Ingrid Bergman from Notorious, Veronica Lake** from The Glass Key, Bette David from Deception, Lana Turner footage from Johnny Eager and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Edward Arnold from Johnny Eager, Kirk Douglas from Walk Alone, Fred MacMurray from Double Indemnity, James Cagney from White Heat, Joan Crawford from Humoresque and Charles Laughton and Vincent Price from The Bribe. Whew!

These eighteen movies*** — plus footage shot at Culver City’s Laird International Studios, the same place where Suspicion, Rebecca and Spellbound were all made — create a narrative all its own, much how beats and samples come together to make a new song within the world of hip hop.

There’s so much detail in this movie, which is because of the talents of the filmmakers, including  director of photography Michael Chapman , who worked with Technicolor to seamlessly match the old film clips with his new footage.

I find it really intriguing that Martin came out of another period piece, Pennies from Heaven, into this movie, while Sela Ward played the woman at the center of the modern noir Sharky’s Machine before this.

* *The film was dedicated to Head, who died soon after it was completed, with the credits saying, “To her, and to all the brilliant technical and creative people who worked on the films of the 1940’s and 1950’s, this motion picture is affectionately dedicated.”

**Cheryl Rainbwaux Smith also was the double for Lake in this scene, which I heartily endorse.

*** Nineteen if you count the car crash in the beginning, which came from Keeper of the Flame.

Steve Oedekerk helped Jim Carrey with Ace Venture Pet Detective and directed and wrote Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. He’s also known for his Thumbmation parodies. But Kung Pow! is probably what he’s known best for.

Tiger & Crane Fists (also known as Savage Killers) is a 1976 directed by and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, a former Shaw Brothers actor who was “the biggest star of Asian martial arts cinema until the emergence of Bruce Lee” and the star of The Chinese Boxer, a movie that made his name famous and led to Chinese kids wanting to know more about Shaolin Kung Fu. After that movie, he broke his contract with Shaw Brothers, got sued and was banned from making movies in Hong Kong. That led to him going to work for Golden Harvest and making movies in Taiwan.

He also had ties to organized crime and when Jackie Chan needed to get out of his contract with Lo Wei — one also with Triad ties — Wang made it happen. That’s why Jackie is in Fantasy Mission Force and Island of Fire. Wang also associated with members of the Bamboo Union, a Taiwan-based triad, and was even part of their war with the Four Seas triad. He also had a stroke in 2011 and refused to listen to doctors, doing five times the rehab they told him to do, eventually regaining a lot of his muscle and memory. Sadly, he died in 2022, but man, what a life both on the silver screen and off.

So how strange is it to see Steve Oedekerk’s face and voice superimposed over a legit killing machine?

He is The Chosen One — identified by a sentient tongue called Tonguey — who is trained alongside  Wimp Lo (Lau Kar-wing, one of the most important people in Hong Kong martial arts movies and the choreographer of Master of the Flying Guillotine, King Boxer and Armour of God) and Ling (Ling Ling Tse, ). He also has the chance to battle Master Pain — or Betty — his enemy who is played by Fei Lung (Hand of Death), a man he can’t defeat until more training from Master Tang (Hui Lou Chen) and a one-breasted woman named Whoa (Jennifer Tung).

He must also fight Moo Nieu, a cow that knows martial arts, and his need to battle his enemy causes the death of Ling’s father Master Doe (Chi Ma). Then there’s advice from Mu-Shu Fasa — The Lion King Hong Kong version — and learns that Master Pain is powered by French aliens.

Your love for this will depend on how much you like people making fun of kung fu movies. Then again, Odenkirk at least does martial arts. He claims that he wanted to make three of these movies with one being a peplum and the other an Italian Western. Now that I want to see.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by AC Nicholas, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. His idea this time was for a series on movies that started as one film and were dubbed into something else.

Would you like to have me write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!

1. Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
2. Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
3. As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
4. For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?

International Secret Police: Key of Keys is the fourth of five James Bond parody movies in Japan known as Kokusai Hhimitsu Keisatsu. Yet once Woody Allen got hold of it — it’s his directorial debut — the story turned into a battle for the world’s best egg salad recipe.

Originally intended to be just an hour-long made for TV movie, Henry G. Saperstein and American International Pictures took more footage from International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder, an actor imitating Allen’s voice and music numbers from The Lovin’ Spoonful to pad the running time of the film and get it into theaters. Allen had no control over that, a mistake that he wouldn’t make in any of his future projects.

The voices in the film include Allen’s writing partner Mickey Rose (he’d go on to write and direct Student Bodies), Julie Bennett (Madame Piranha’s voice in King Kong Escapes), Frank Buxton (a story editor on Love, American Style), Len Maxwell (the voice of Punchy, the Hawaiian Punch mascot) and Allen’s wife at the time, Louise Lasser.

After some nonsensical action about the mob and the secret agents vying for the egg salad recipe — intercut with Allen himself speaking about his work on the film — the credits include China Lee, Playboy Playmate of the Month for August 1964 (and the then-wife of Allen’s comic idol Mort Sahl) stripping while Allen explains that he promised her a role in the film. She’d go on to appear in an episode of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. and as one of the robot girls in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, while we’re on the subject of spy films.

Speaking of spy women, two of the secret agents in this movie — Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama — would also show up in You Only Live Twice.

Hi EDITOR’S NOTE: When Bill Van Ryn asked me if he could write something for the holidays, I was overjoyed. This is such a gift for all of us. Check out Bill at Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum.

Nothing can derail a festive holiday with the relatives like dark family secrets bubbling up to the surface, and there’s likely to be at least one of those loved ones that are downright ornery. This is the case in one of my favorite holiday horror films, the 1972 film most commonly known as Silent Night, Bloody Night. Originally released in 1972 as Dark Night of the Full Moon by the Cannon Group, they reissued it in 1973 with the new title and ad campaign that emphasized the Christmas connection in the story, and it played grindhouses and drive-ins throughout the rest of the 1970s, often as a co-feature to other Cannon releases such as I, Monster, It first appeared on TV in 1974 as a CBS Late Movie, but it also screened on WOR-TV more than a few times, including their beloved Fright Night time slot on Saturday nights, which is where I saw it as a kid. It was resurrected for theatrical release yet again in 1981, The Year of the Slasher, as Death House, or Deathouse as appeared on the title card. I can’t imagine what it felt like to go see this movie in 81 and realize that you’d seen it on TV seven years ago, but nobody should have complained, because seeing it a few times makes the convoluted plot a little more clear. I know that it was very confusing to ten-year-old me watching it on WOR in the middle of the night.

It’s hard to imagine this low key film appearing so often in front of glassy eyed moviegoers and TV-
watching night owls. It’s got a few shocking moments, but it was a weird experience to be confronted with this at 1 in the morning. It’s a murder mystery involving a big old mansion with a sinister past.
Jeffrey Butler, the grandson of the now-deceased proprietor, Wilfred Butler, inherited the house after the death of his grandfather about 20 years prior. Jeffrey intends to sell the place, but when this news get out, an unseen inmate of a local mental hospital breaks out and returns to the house, murdering anyone who dares step inside. The first to go is the lawyer closing the sale of the house, who makes the mistake of sleeping there overnight with his young ladyfriend. Since he’s played by Patrick O’Neal, the moment when they get graphically axed is the Janet Leigh shock of the film.

O’Neal was likely the highest profile in the cast at the time, but there are numerous actors in the film who would later become well-known cult icons. Mary Woronov plays Diane, a young woman from town who happens to be the daughter of the Mayor. She helps Jeffrey unravel the mystery of the house, and all sorts of unsavory history is exhumed while the killer slashes his way through several other cast members. Together they learn that Jeffrey is actually Wilfred Butler’s son AND his grandfather, since Wilfred raped his own daughter, Marianne. The baby was spirited away to another state, while Marianne suffered a psychological breakdown. Rather than institutionalizing her, Wilfred set up his mansion as an insane asylum, where he could keep a close eye on her. Eventually he became disillusioned with her so-called doctors, and turned the violent inmates loose on them, resulting in a Christmas Eve massacre where Marianne herself was killed. Diane doesn’t escape the curse of the mansion either, as she learns some unpleasant information about her own family and her connection to the tragic events.

Director Theodore Gershuny (“Sugar Cookies”) was married to Woronov at the time, and he displays
some style with his camera and his concepts. The most breathtaking and frightening sequence of the
movie is the moment when the inmates of the asylum silently surround the drunken doctors and their party guests before murdering them. This scene is full of Warhol personalities, including Ondine and Candy Darling -although technically her final film, this was actually filmed in 1970 and not released until 72. John Carradine also appears in this, because of course he is in every movie. His character is mute, so we don’t hear his distinctive voice, but he communicates by ringing a bell, as if he’s summoning a missing clerk to a vacant drug store counter.

The holiday imagery is not quite as pronounced as it is in movies like Black Christmas and Silent Night Deadly Night, but we do get some very yuleish (as Barb Coard would say) moments. The characters listen to Christmas carols on the radio, Woronov wraps gifts in front of a fire, and the tone of the film is very wintry. Certain outdoor scenes look as if they were filmed some time after a snowfall began to melt, as portions of the ground seem to have a thin layer of snow and others are muddy. This isn’t the scenic kind of winter, it’s the unpleasant kind that has you tracking mud into the house. Whether or not this was intentional, it takes the romance out of Christmas just a little. And incidentally, it seems as if the Black Christmas game plan of menacing phone calls placed by a killer on Christmas may have been inspired just a little bit by this movie – or perhaps that’s just another Christmas miracle. I love the muted, downbeat atmosphere of Silent Night, Bloody Night a lot, and it does seem to be the movie that knows the most about how family dysfunction can easily lead to an eyeball being gouged out with a wine glass on Christmas Eve. Happy holidays!