Dan (Max Woertendyke) and Jen (Dana Berger) are in the type of relationship where you start to wonder what it would be like without the other person. He’s embarrassed her yet again and as she runs to clear her head, he tries to follow her. The only problem? It feels like they keep going around again and again, around the same path, going through the same motions, the paranormal version of what it’s like to be with each other.
They’re not alone, as the trail around the pond has others who are trapped and doomed to wander in circles as well. Can they escape?
Based on director and writer Dane Elcar’s short film The Pond, this is a dark story that progressively gets grimmer. Some couples are like that, endlessly going through the motion, one trying to stay ahead of the other, both realizing that they are locked into this endlessly repeating unreality.
If you think your relationship is bad, imagine being forced to stay within the same time and place as your partner in a never stopping loop.
This film is big on ideas and low on budget, but when is that a problem?
Brightwood was watched at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
There’s a Trim Season comic book that came out in 2022, which was based on an original concept from Megan Sutherland, Sean E DeMott and Cullen Poythress. They were inspired by the story of several women who went missing in Humboldt County, CA during a marijuana harvest. That turned into a screenplay, written by David Blair and Ariel Vida, and then the comic book by writer Jake Hearns, pencils and inks by Mara Mendez Garcia and colors by Lorenzo Palombo.
Directed by Ariel Vida, Trim Season is about Emma (Bethlehem Million) and Julia (Alex Essoe), who get recruited by James (Marc Senter) to head up into Northern California for trim season and make $5,000 cash. They’re joined by Harriet (Ally Ioannides), Dusty (Bex Taylor-Klaus) and Lex (Juliette Kenn De Balinthazy) and when they get there, things already seem odd. There are guns everywhere carried by masked men. None of those men join them, because the only trimmers are women.
Then they meet their boss, Mona (Jane Badler, still terrifying me ever since she ate a rat in V), who looks like the kind of female villain that would once have battled and bedded James Bond. And as they work 16 hours days, they start to learn that this isn’t the job they were promised, what with Mona having some kind of magical powers thanks to a strain that only he can inhale and survive.
Somehow folk horror meets Suspiria meets body horror, Trim Season exceeded any expectations I had for it. Balder owns every moment she has on screen and man, how many costume changes did she get? As many as she wanted, that’s how many.
Subject was watched at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
Geoff and Rich Brewer (Graham Weldin and Andy Phinney) have always tried to outdo one another, but Geoff always finds himself in second place against his older brother. For example, Rich will always be the anchorman on camera and Geoff will always be the one holding the camera, never seen. Yet after Rich dies in a woodcutting accident, Geoff searches for help from his friend Colin (Cameron Perry) and a mysterious cult. Soon, not only will his life be changed, but so will the lives of everyone in the town of Eldritch.
That’s right. They have the Necronomicon and use it to bring back Rich, who instead of being the one who does everything right is now a flesh-eating zombie.
Also: This is a musical.
Thanks to music by the band Fox Royale, this has some catchy songs and tight directions — with near dayglo colors at times — from Ryan Smith (who also wrote the script) and Tyler Foreman. Geoff and Colin struggle to get Rich to remember human morality as his need to consume blood and brains begins to overwhelm him.
It’s a cute idea done well and also done on a small budget. There’s a ton of heart — and other organs — in this movie and I think it definitely has the potential to be loved on a big scale.
Eldritch USA was watched at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
When Max Causey (Jared Korotkin), he made the biggest mistake a kid can make. He accidentally killed Santa.
Now, 12 years later, Max has fixed that error by resurrecting Father Christmas but soon realizes the creature he created — Santastein (Michael Vitovich) — wants to kill everyone, naught or nice, and is on his way to Max’s friend Paige Byers’ (Makenzie Rivera) Christmas party.
Starting as a short made when the filmmakers — Manuel Camilion and Benjamin Edelman — were studying at the University of Miami, Santastein has become a full-length film.
After a decade without Santa, the world seems dark. And yet, as a result of Max — again — it’s about to get even darker. Christmas horror is a genre all to itself — I mean, I have a holiday Letterboxd list, I get it — and I think those that love the bloodier and more frightening side of the season are really going to enjoy this movie.
Plus, Camilion and Edelman have a great sense of humor, as evidenced by this line from the Kickstarter for this movie: “We only recently learned after making our short film that kills in horror movies aren’t real. So we need a new cast as well.”
Santastein was watched at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
José Mojica Marins directed movies for six years before making At Midnight I’ll Take YourSoul, the first appearance of Brazil’s national boogeyman, Zé do Caixão, or Coffin Joe.
Joe is a man with no morals but a devotion to Nietzschian philosophies and absolute hatred for religion with the goal of achieving immortality through the birth of a perfect son. And while he does not believe in the supernatural, he often finds himself walking through visions of the otherworld.
Coffin Joe came to Marins — the man who would often be referred to as the character interchangeably — in a very magic way. “In a dream saw a figure dragging me to a cemetery. Soon he left me in front of a headstone, there were two dates of my birth and my death. People at home were very frightened, called a priest because they thought I was possessed. I woke up screaming, and at that time decided to do a movie unlike anything I had done. He was born at that moment the character would become a legend: Coffin Joe. The character began to take shape in my mind and in my life. The cemetery gave me the name, completed the costume of Joe the cover of voodoo and black hat, which was the symbol of a classic brand of cigarettes. He would be a mortician.”
Awakening of the Beast begins in black and white, as a series of vignettes of the ways that drug users debase themselves are shown in lurid, sweaty detail. A TV panel debates the idea that sexual perversion is caused by the use of illegal drugs, with more stories that illustrate this point. The TV show needs an expert on depravity, so they ask Marins to appear on the show.
Afterward, the doctor who conducted the experiment doses four volunteers and asks for them to stare at a poster of The Strange World of Coffin Joe. Supposedly Marins didn’t know much about using drugs, but he intended this movie to speak against the fact that the uses of drugs are treated worse than the suppliers and that the Brazilian film industry saw him as no better than a long-nailed drug dealer.
The acid trip that follows is highlighted by Coffin Joe, ranting against anyone and everyone. Of course, this film was banned by the very establishment it rails against. So basically, Coffin Joe is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the maniac attacking belief structures created by an artist who only believes in the power of film.
“My world is strange, but it’s worthy to all those who want to accept it, and never corrupt as some want to portray it. Because it’s made up, my friend, of strange people, though none are stranger than you!”
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.
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 for 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.
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.
Shot with the ArriVision 3-D camera system, Silent Madness wasn’t just late to the 80’s 3D revival, it was late to the slasher madness too. It was directed by Simon Nuchtern, president of August Films. He brought over plenty of foreign films and had them re-edited for American tastes, like the film that the Findlays shot in Argentina called TheSlaughter, which was released as Snuff. He also brought Karate Kiba to U.S. theaters with a new open and called it The Bodyguard and that’s why we call marijuana chiba, as well as directing New York Nights and Savage Dawn.
You have to love how Wikipedia has the writer of this movie, Bob Zimmerman, linked to Bob Dylan. Nope. This Bob was part of the camera crew for Don’t Go in the House and Nightmare. His co-writer was Bill Milling, who may be better known as an adult director using the names Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather) and G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow). Some of the dialogue was written by Nelson DeMille, who would go on to write the book The General’s Daughter. They were all working from a story by Nuchtern.
The Cresthaven Mental Institute is, charitably, a mess. It’s also packed with patients, so they decide to just declare several of the patients cured, which means that Howard Johns (Solly Marx, Honcho from Savage Dawn, the Samurai from Neon Maniacs and plenty of stunt work too) is let go instead of John Howard. Years ago, after peeping on some sorority sisters, they had decided to strip for him — because that’s how we dealt with Me Too moments back then, kind of like giving someone a whole carton of cigarettes to smoke when all they wanted was one, and that’s a bad euphemism and I don’t condone this kind of behavior — and he lost it and killed them all. So to prove that the nature vs. nurture argument is a joke and the seventeen years of treatment did nothing, the very first thing John does when he gets released is kill an aardvarking couple in their van with a hatchet and a sledgehammer.
Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery, who has been the love interest for The Man from Atlantis, Crockett’s ex-wife on Miami Vice and Doogie Howser, M.D.‘s mother) realizes that something smells bad in Denmark — or Cresthaven — and starts looking into this, only to learn that Howard Johns was already dead when the computer snafu happened. She teams up with a reporter and goes undercover as a legacy at the sorority where everything when wrong all those years ago, because she obviously realizes that she’s in a slasher movie and the killer always comes back to the scene of the crime.
There are so many plot threads going on here. There’s also the conspiracy at the mental hospital and the cyborg experiments being done on the patients that goes nowhere. Additionally two killers hired by Dr. Kruger* (Roderick Cook, who shows up in two of Becca’s favorite childhood films, 9 1/2 Weeksand Spellbinder, movies no seven-year-old should be watching and that’s why I love her) are on hand to kill off our protagonists. And there’s the killer coming back to the sorority house.
I’ve gotten this far and forgotten to inform you that Sydney Lassick (sure, he was Mr. Fromm in Carrie, but he’s also in Skatetown U.S.A.; 1941; Alligator; The Unseen and shows up as Mr. Lowry in Lady In White) plays the law in this and the house mother is Viveca Lindfors (The Bell from Hell, Creepshow). And two of the teens — Janes and Paul — are played by Katherine Kamhi and Paul DeAngelo, who we all know better as Meg and Ronnie from Sleepaway Camp.
Shot under the title DarkSunday, with alternate names thrown about like Beautiful Screamers, The Omega Factor” and The Nightkillers, I have really no idea why this is called Silent Madness.
Teens are killed by vice, by steam, by nailgun and by aerobicide, while drills and crowbars and broken mirrors take out some of the antagonists. You’ll wonder, when we knew that toxic masculinity and the health care system were both the biggest issues we’d be facing as a society way back in 1984, why did we just concentrate on making sure the slasher killer was dead instead of working on the root cause? And that’s why we are where we are, except you know, there’s no real Jason Vorhees. Or Howard Johnson. Or John Howard.
*Seeing as how this was really shot in 1983, it’s prescient that the bad guy has that name and works out of a boiler room.
Here’s a drink to go with the movie.
Watermelon Madness
1 1/2 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. Watermelon Pucker
1/4 oz. triple sec
4 oz. cranberry
Really easy. Just pour alcohol together over ice, then top with cranberry juice.
Silent Madness played in actually 3D at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
If you are a regular visitor to our site, you may realize that we love shark movies. We have a whole Letterboxd list devoted to them. While Sam’s taste may veer toward the ripoff side of the Jaws equation, Becca’s heart is with the sequels, even Jaws: The Revenge.
After a career as a production designer — he built the awesome New York City model in Escape from New York — Joe Alves took his experience onJaws 2 to make this one. Earning the 1983 Golden Raspberry for Worst Director, he went back to production design for movies like Starman and Freejack.
But this wasn’t even the movie the producers wanted to make.
David Brown and Richard Zanuck, the producers for the first two Jaws films, brought in Matty Simmons, who produced National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Lampoon writers John Hughes and Todd Carroll to write a script called Jaws 3, People 0. With Joe Dante directing, it would have started with author Peter Benchley being devoured in his swimming pool. The studio didn’t want to turn what was fast becoming a joke into a joke and demanded another legitimate film. Brown and Zanuck responded by quitting the studio.
Richard Matheson was brought on to write this script, which was filled with studio demands, including needing to have Brody’s sons in the movie and a part for Mickey Rooney. The studio heads had never checked to see if Rooney was available so that shoehorning was all for naught. As for anyone from the previous films, Roy Schnieder said, “Mephistopheles couldn’t talk me into doing it. They knew better than to even ask.” He specifically took the movie Blue Thunder so that he would be unavailable.
“The third dimension is terror.”
Yes, in 1983, 3D was back, thanks to movies like Comin’ At Ya!Any movie in its third iteration — I’m looking at you Friday the 13th Part 3 and Amityville 3-D — were made ala Dr. Tongue, with things coming directly at your face.
Back in the days before Blackfish, Seaworld was a big name. Somehow, the producers were able to talk the brand — specifically SeaWorld Orlando — into being the location for this movie. I remember as an 11-year-old seeing ads all over the Cleveland park for this movie and wondering, “Why are they advertising something that scares everyone inside a place that is supposed to be making us happy?”
Young Mike Brody has grown up to be Dennis Quaid, who told Watch What Happens Live that this movie had the biggest cocaine budget of any film that he worked on. He told Andy Cohen that he was on cocaine in every frame of the movie. He and Kathryn Morgan (Bess Armstrong) are in charge of the park, which has somehow allowed a great white shark to swim on in and kill people, including some dudes who are there to steal some coral.
Louis Gossett Jr. is also here as Calvin Bouchard, the park manager, who for some reason is best friends with a hunter played by Simon MacCorkindale, which feels counter-intuitive to running a park that is all about the love of animals. Then again, knowing what we know about SeaWorld today, it all makes sense.
There are also two dolphin stars, Cindy and Sandy, who were not on blow but have a bigger role than many of the humans, including Kelly Ann Bukowski (Lea Thompson) and Sean Brody (John Putch). You have to admire the stupidity of someone who wants to ride in bumper boats when the deadliest predator known to man is on the loose.
Somehow, the stupidity continues to the point where a second and much larger shark gets in the park, which seems like the kind of thing that should get everyone fired and the park closed. There’s only one way to deal with this kind of thing: we gotta blow another shark up real good*. Luckily, the 3-D effect is here to show us this in graphic — and below-average even in 1983 — detail. You know how some effects look bad years afterward and you attribute them to the fact that the movie has aged? This looked bad in the time it took from filming to playing in theaters.
Ironically, this movie has a lot in common with Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Both of their original films were big successes in the 70’s that made their directors big names. Those directors didn’t come back for the sequels (well, Carpenter did reshoot plenty) and both were directed by the production designers of the original movies. They also moved the location and tried to do something different. While the Silver Shamrock caper is today much more well-regarded, Jaws 3D is still a joke to many.
By the way, for all the scorn through at Bruno Mattei for outright ripping off shark footage for Cruel Jaws, this movie had to pay a lawsuit to National Geographic for taking scenes from its 1983 documentary film The Sharks without authorization. Strangely, that makes me love this movie even more.
*Some of the entrails that fly out of the screen in 3-D are actually a brown leather ET doll.
Jaws 3D played in 3D at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.
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