Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.
Once upon a long time ago — well, the 90s — there was a little horror theme park, built in the middle of a Massachusetts cornfield, called SpookyWorld. This is the story of that place.
Directed by Quinn Monahan and executive produced by Tom Savini, this tells the story of SpookyWorld, which this movie makes the case for the idea that it “set the template for the multi-billion-dollar industry of terror.”
David Bertolino was the creator, making the park the first-ever multi-attraction Halloween theme park. He started by selling X-rated greeting cards and gag gifts before figuring our how to make a haunted house that could make money. He brought along horror celebrities like Savini, Alice Cooper, Linda Blair and Kane Hodder. And he had a major bit of insanity with Tiny Tim.
You may have seen some of Spooky World in Snapper: The Man Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made yet this movie will give you the real story. Well, the story that its creator wants to tell, but if you wanted to get an unbiased view, you don’t have anything else. This is everything the people who made and worked there would like you to know about a place that is sadly gone.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Castle, William or actual
We need more people like William Castle.
As he starts the movie explaining how the gimmick works — Illusion-O — we learn that we will have the chance to see ghosts. Or not.
Most scenes of the movie is in black and white, but scenes involving ghosts let you watch them with special viewing glasses. If you want to see the ghost, you look through the red filter. If you don’t want to see them, watch through the blue filter.
Occultist Dr. Plato Zorba has given his house to his poor nephew Cyrus (Donald Woods), who moves in his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) and children Medea (Jo Morrow) and Buck (Charles Herbert). They find out from their lawyer Ben Rush (Martin Milner) that they share the house with 12 ghosts and they must stay there and not sell it or the state gets everything.
There’s also a seance-happy housekeeper called Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton!) and somewhere, if they can find it, a fortune.
How could you live with twelve ghosts? There’s a floating head, a screaming woman, a set of hands, a skeleton on fire, a chef who keeps killing his wife and her lover, a lynched woman, an executioner with a head that he’s chopped off, a lion (Zamba, who played Kitty Cat on The Addams Family) with a headless lion tamer and Dr. Zorba, who has left behind goggles to help them see the ghosts and an Ouija board that soon warns that death is coming.
Who killed Dr. Zorba? Where is the money? Will the family stay alive living here? Who will become the thirteenth ghost that frees all the other spirits? And how cool is it that the exterior shots are the Winchester House, an actual haunted place?
As much as I dislike remakes, I really dig the newer version of this, Thir13en Ghosts. Dark Castle, who produced that film, has been talking about doing a series about each of the ghosts. I’d love to see that.
Fantastic Fest 2023 was from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is played here.
Eladio (Víctor Clavijo) watches over the hunting grounds of the estate of Don Francisco (Pedro Casablanc) and has divided them into ten hunting stands. When Don Carlos, Don Francisco’s assistant, asks him to add three more stands — which would place them too close to one another — for money, his wife Marcia (Ruth Díaz) finally convinces him to take the money.
That’s when things go wrong. So wrong that his son Floren (Moisés Ruiz) is accidentally hit with a bullet and soon dies. Marcia kills herself. And Eladio is the one who is punished, not the rich elites that he has worked for.
Directed and written by F. Javier Gutiérrez, this finds Eladio soon descending into paranoia and the center of an occult conspiracy which may all be in his head. It’s an interesting film that combines the western — it’s shot in Spain, home of many an Italian Western — and folk horror.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Frankenstein Conquers the World was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 12, 1968 at 11:20 PM. It also aired on January 31, 1970 and January 9, 1971.
Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon (Frankenstein vs. Subterranean Monster Baragon) was directed by Ishirō Honda with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. It was released in the U.S. by American-International Pictures as Frankenstein Conquers the World.
Toho had always been interested in a movie about Frankenstein’s Monsters, even hoping to have him in a sequel to The Human Vapor in which Mizuno would revive the legendary monster to help him save his dead girlfriend Fujichiyo.
That didn’t happen.
In 1962, Toho purchased a script from an independent producer from America named John Beck called King Kong vs. Prometheus. Willis O’Brien was the real writing and the movie was to be called King Kong vs. Frankenstein. This was how Toho ended up working with RKO so that they could create the meta King Kong vs. Godzilla.
Two years later, Henry Saperstein wanted to co-produce Frankenstein vs. Godzilla with his company United Productions of America. In this idea, the heart of the original Frankenstein’s Monster would become radioactive and cause him to grow to the size of a kaiju. Toho chose to make Mothra vs. Godzilla as they didn’t like the logistics of the story and yet they came back to it in 1965.
I’m so happy that they did.
Nazi officers found the living heart of the Frankenstein Monster from send it on an Imperial Japanese Navy ship to a research facility in Hiroshima for further experimentation just in time for America to drop Little Boy.
Fifteen years later, that heart has grown into a feral child that eats small animals. He’s studied by Dr. James Bowen (Nick Adams) and his assistants Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno) and Dr. Ken’ichiro Kawaji (Tadao Takashima). They save him from a crowd of villagers and notice that the boy can’t be stopped by radiation. They soon figure out that he’s the Frankenstein Monster when they chop off his hand and it grows back.
As always in kaiju movies, one scientist does the wrong thing and the media causes the monster to go nuts. At least it battles and defeats Baragon just in time to get swallowed up by the ground. Of course, he could still be alive. Actually, he totally is and becomes two monsters in time for War of the Gargantuas, which may be my favorite kaiju film.
When I would watch this movie as a kid, I would get super hyperactive. If the extra ending that Harry Saperstein had been included where Frankenstein fought an octopus, I probably would have broken every chair in my parent’s house.
In Germany, this was a big deal. Released as Frankenstein: Terror with an Ape-Face, it’s the reason why every Godzilla — and even Kamen Rider — movie was released as a Frankenstein movie and had it explained in the dubbing that the monsters had been made by Dr. Frankenstein.
Note to self: Frankenstein is a kaijin, not a kaiju, which is a giant human not a giant monster.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Scars of Dracula was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 28, 1974 at 11:30 p.m. It also played on February 21, 1976 and December 16, 1978.
Directed by Roy Ward Baker and written by Anthony Hinds, this Hammer film starts with Dracula’s dead body on a stone plinth in a chamber in his castle, defeated after Taste the Blood of Dracula. A bat flies in, gives him blood and Dracula is back and he even survives his castle being burned down. Weirdly, that’s the same footage from that movie played backwards because, you know, the budget.
He soon hs a new servant named Klove (Patrick Troughton) and a mistress named Tania (Anouska Hempel). Well, he did, because she tries to get with his new captive Paul Carlson (Christopher Matthews), so Dracula stabs her and tosses her into acid because, you know, he’s Dracula.
Paul’s brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) and his fiancee Sarah Framsen (Jenny Hanley) come to save him but you know how smart Dracula is about these things, even if Klove chooses Sarah over him, which gets him punished.
This one has perhaps the dumbest death for Dracula ever, as he holds a metal spike and gets struck by lightning. He catches on fire and just keeps burning, but come on. That doesn’t kill a vampire. That ending is forgotten about by Dracula A.D. 1972.
Warner Brothers and other American major studios didn’t want to deal with Hammer’s Sir James Carreras, so the budgets were cut to $200,000. Many think that the decline in Hammer movies starts here.
Christopher Lee said, “I was a pantomime villain. Everything was over the top, especially the giant bat whose electrically motored wings flapped with slow deliberation as if it were doing morning exercises.” Sure, he was sick of playing Dracula. You would be too if you played him four times in the same year in Count Dracula, One More Time and Taste the Blood of Dracula. He almost didn’t do this and would have seen John Forbes-Robertson take the role earlier. He eventually played the count in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires.
If you look close, Peter Cushing is one of the milkmaid in the opening village scenes. There was a delay on Scream and Scream Again and Lee dared him to sneak into the movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dimension 5 was first on Chiller Theater on July 21, 1973 at 1 a.m. It also was on the show on August 3, 1974; April 5, 1975; January 3, 1976 and May 13, 1978.
Directed by Franklin Adreon (who also directed the similar Cyborg 2087) and written by Arthur C. Pierce, Dimension 5 is about time-traveling secret agents Justin Power (Jeffrey Hunter) from Espionage, Inc and Ki Ti Tsu (France Nuyen). It was going to be a TV movie but ended up being released to theaters.
Together, the two agents battle an Asian crime ring, Dragon, led by crime lord Big Buddha (Harold Sakata), who will destroy Los Angeles if the U.S. doesn’t leave Vietnam. However, Power is able to preview time, which allows him to keep people safe from Dragon’s killers.
Kitty has her own reasons for wanting to battle Big Buddha, as he was the executioner during the Nanking Massacre who killed her parents. The bad guy plans on building a nuclear bomb in the U.S. by placing it inside owl-shaped incense burners and Christmas decorations.
Nuyen is great in this, but man, Jeffrey Hunter was sleeping or so it seemed. Maybe he could use that time travel to get a few extra hours of nap before coming back and being the superspy in this movie.
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.
I had the opportunity to watch some of the SLASH Filmfestival 2023 shorts and here’s what I think:
From the FANTASTIC SHORTS COMPETITION – CHAPTER I
Hole (2023): Directed and written by Hwang Hyein, JeongMi (Lim ChaeYoung) is a child services worker in South Korea who comes to check on Jun-seo (Kwak SooHyeon) and Jun-hui (Son JiYu). They’ve been missing from school and no one can find their parents. The secret soon comes out, as a manhole opening has appeared inside their bedroom.
A dark and strange movie from the very first moment. This feels like a movie that should be a full feature and I hope that happens.
Magdalena (2022): Czechoslovakia, 1971. A Slovakian woman (Susan Angelo) is trapped by her past as it seeks to destroy the new life that she has worked so hard to build for her family.
Director Michael Lazovsky, who wrote the story with Max Hersh, based this story on his Jewish grandmother’s experiences growing up in communist Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Storyboarded on an iPhone, shot in Los Angeles but yet looking like the sterile world of a Communist country and made by someone whose family lived these lives, Magdalena is a very rough watch yet a film that looks completely gorgeous. What a perfect short!
Demon Box (2023): After festival rejections pile up, director Sean Wainsteim revises his intensely personal short film about trauma, suicide and the Holocaust. After ten years of painful work, it has become a dissection of the movie he wanted to make and may end up being more of a film than he intended.
This film is almost too honest and I mean that as a compliment. It made me feel uncomfortable, reminding myself of how I feel about the stories I heard growing up and how I joke about the continual negative darkness that came out of them, how it feels like everyone always has cancer and everyone is always dying.
If you feel like putting yourself through that journey, as well as Wainsteim’s, watch this.
The Old Young Crow (2023): Liam LoPinto has created this movie — which has some animation and some live action — about an Iranian boy befriending an old Japanese woman at a graveyard in Tokyo.
We hear the story told by Mehrdad (Naoto Shibata as a young one, Hassan Shahbazi in his older age) who remembers the Japanese woman and how he learned about grief and loss. It’s an incredible mix of media that creates this film, a joy to watch and experience. As I always say, I cannot and will not live these lives, so the chance to do so through film is so important.
From the FANTASTIC FUTURES:
Remove Hind Legs Before Consumption (2023): Even in a hopeless insect food farm — where millions of crickets are being bred, frozen, packaged and fried — one cricket survives and escapes.
Leslie Herzig, Finn Meisner and Lukas Wind have come together to create a violent and yet heartwarming film that teaches us that yes, even a cricket can do something important.
Also not that I was planning on eating tons of friend crickets but this movie has convinced me not to do so because they have souls. I feel bad for all of the one that I have chewed on before I watched this.
Chef Gustav (2023): This movie is simple but a lesson worth learning: never ever mess with a cat in the kitchen. You will be murdered.
This looks like near stop motion but I’m certain it has to be computers. However it was made, I love that orange cat and believe that it is innocent of all of this bloodshed, even if I saw it with my own eyes.
The Law Of The Jungle Gym (2023):Somehow, lunch and tag on the school yard gets transformed into the end of the world. This is some of the finest animation I’ve seen in some time and I was struck by both how realistic and unreal it is. I have no idea where this ideas came from, but Yoon Hei Cho, who seemingly did all of this themselves, is beyond a talent. Mindblowing.
On the 8th Day (2023): A gorgeous blast of color and fabric, an apocalyptic 3D short that drew me in with its cuteness before destroying every moment of it, then sending its purple people lilting upward into space. I can’t describe it more but it made me emotional.
Perfect City: The Bravest Kid (2023): In the second part of the Perfect City series, a paper boy has a horrific dream in which a gigantic iron knife hand and a series of other sharp objects are chasing him all the way to his bed. The even worse realization? His parents are not paper, but also knives. I can’t even imagine seeing this when I was a kid, as I would have been awake all night.
Director Shengwei Zhou also made Perfect City: The Mother which is just as strange as this, which is a compliment. This is the type of stop motion animation that I haven’t seen since the days of Liquid TV, which is much missed.
The Third Ear (2023): Sammy (Devin Burnam) has an issue. In his job as an art model, he often likes to look at the work that artists create from his body. But what if they draw him incorrectly? Does he really have an ear in the back of his head?
Director and writer Nathan Ginter has created something really intriguing here, a quick and fun tale of a man’s fight for his own self-image.
The Hand That Feeds (2023): Irina (Anca Cipariu) is a single mother who moves in with her former mother-in-law Trudi (Inge Maux), who constantly cooks meals and gives her gifts. Yet something feels wrong.
Directed and written by Helen Hideko, this makes you feel the unease that Irina feels as she attempts to create her own life within the one that Trudi has. This leads to visions of absolute terror that begin to tear at her and she feels a rage that she can’t explain.
I get the feeling that if I were a mother, this movie would totally trigger me.
The Taster (2023): Sometime in the future, in Romania, Ozana (Silvana Mihai) is chosen to work as the new taster girl for the occupying forces. On her first day, she breaks the most important rule. And that’s to never look the leader in the eye. Soon she finds herself alone and face to face with the man destroying her country.
Director and writer Sophia Bierend has created a future movie that is based in reality, such as the idea that the world’s ecology is destroying and the Danube is one of the few places that can produce food for the powerful.
Into this horrible world, Ozana is cast, made to taste each of the meals for the leader. If she dies, he will know that someone is trying to kill him. She must not make any friends. Just sit and eat. She hasn’t even had a solid morsel for two years, as she lives on a nutrient formula. So this position allows her to be part of the world of the elite, even if all she’s doing is possibly dying for their dining enjoyment.
SHORTS BEFORE FEATURES:
La Vedova Nera (2023):While cycling through the streets of Marseille, Alfredo (Siro Pedrozzi) crashes his bike. He goes into a porn cinema for help and finds an old giallo playing that creates the scene for a predator who either wants him for his body or murder or, well, both.
Directed and written by Fiume and Julian McKinnon, this film looks absolutely astounding. The title means The Black Widow, which easily feels like a callback to the animal-themed post-Argento giallo of the early 70s. Beyond just being a homage, this feels like a creative team that intimately understands the genre and uses it to tell their own movie. There are hints of the past intricately woven with today.
I can’t say enough about this short. More work from these filmmakers now!
Chomp It! (2023): In a society founded on social hierarchy and privilege, two crocodile men ople are trying to cool down at a swimming pool. One of them is seemingly of a different and special kind; the other is unable to control his desire.
Shot on 16mm and directed by Mark Chua and Li Shuen Lam, I think that this would mean so much more to me if I understood the weirdness of life in Singapore. As it is, the colors and look of the film — I mean, a child’s riding machine powered by a heart? — are incredible.
Every House Is Haunted (2023): The realtor told them the house was haunted but as the title tells you, every house is haunted in its own way. Maya (Kate Cobb) and Danny (Kevin Bigley) move in anyhow, because to find a house like this, in this market, well…
And she’s used to not even knowing what she wants any longer.
Director and writer Bryce McGuire shows us that not every ghost is evil and not every living person is alive, if that makes sense. I really enjoyed the effects in this, as well as the way that Maya found a way to bond with the spirits that live in her home.
Content: The Lo-Fi Man(2023):Brian Lonano, who co-directed this short with Blake Myers and wrote it, just wants to tell you about Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Yet he’s been replaced by the new and improved Brian Lonano (Clarke Williams) who is now a streaming content aggregator and influencer, asking you to smash that like button and ring the bell so you get the updates. Breaking free from the mouse-eared androids that have him locked up, he battles the Content Seeker by, well, kind of becoming Tetsuo and joining up with film revolutionaries Kino, B-Roll and Wild Track.
We live in a strange place now, a reality where you can get almost every movie you want but may not have the time to watch it. Or maybe you do and when you want to break it down and discuss it, you get lost in the machine of likes and shares. I try to keep my mind open to both sides, as sure, it’s nice to have the most perfect quality home media ever, as well as streaming materials and everyone deserves the opportunity to find and appreciate pop culture in their own way. But man, if I see another listicle or YouTube video that posits theories like “maybe all the shot in the Eastern Bloc SyFy sequels in the 90s were high art” or ten slashers you never saw before and #3 is The Burning, well…
4. WORKING REMOTELY: One that takes place out in the cut somewhere.
Directed by Kevin and Michael Goetz and written by Kyle Killen, Scenic Route — AKA Wrecked — is about Michael (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) broken down in the California desert, an event created by Carter so that he can finally hash it all out with Michael.
For most of this movie’s running time, these two lifelong friends either fall to pieces or come back together, often just moments between those diametrical events, while trying to figure out how to get the truck running again.
Shot in twelve days all in the same location with both leads occupying all of the screen time other than flashbacks and the ending, this was a real test for both actors, including Duhamel appearing with his hair cut into a mohawk. It’s really unlike any role I’d seen either in before.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Series episode
“Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques. But he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. Now, his niece Micki, and her cousin Ryan have inherited the store… and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back, or the real terror begins.”
Friday the 13th: The Series was created by Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams and was going to be called The 13th Hour. Mancuso Jr. never intended for there to be an outright link to the Friday the 13th film series, but instead referenced “the idea of Friday the 13th, which is that it symbolizes bad luck and curses”.
That said, the creators did try to tie-in Jason Vorhees’s hockey mask but the idea was discarded so that the show could exist on its own. Mancuso Jr. was afraid that mentioning any events from the films would take the audience away from “the new world that we were trying to create.”
That said, the title was what was needed to sell the show. It did so well in late nights that some stations moved it to prime time. In all, it lasted 72 episodes over 3 seasons.
An antique dealer named Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) got wealth and power from Satan for selling his soul, along with being the conduit for people to purchase cursed objects from his store Vendredi’s Antiques. When he tries to get out of the deal, the devil has him killed and gets his soul anyway.
The store is inherited by his niece Micki Foster (Robey!) and her cousin Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay). They sell off many of the cursed antiques before being stopped by Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), who once collected antiques for Lewis before learning that he was evil.
Airing on October 26, 1987, “Hallowe’en” was directed by Timothy Bond (The Lost World, Return to the Lost World) and written by Bill Taub. The cursed object in this episode is the Amulet of Zohar and it can transfer a spirit into a deceased body.
Jack thinks that Micki and Ryan should have a Halloween party at the antique shop to try and fit into the neighborhood. The basement — where all the evil things exist — is off limits, but you know that they’ll soon be used and for the first time in the series, Uncle Lewis will appear. Well, the ghost of Uncle Lewis, who tries to come off as a hero and say that just wants to save the soul of his wife Grace, whose corpse is in a secret room in the store that they have never been to.
Now that he has the Amulet, Lewis has three hours to find a new body and escape back into the real world. He leaves behind Greta (Victoria Deslaurier), a demon who will do anything he asks, to battle Micky, Ryan and Jack.
I was let down that this show wasn’t part of the Vorhees saga when I was young but now I love it. At all times, I have had a major crush on Robey. Come on. Who didn’t?
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