After failing to sell Halloween producer Irwin Yablans on his pitch for a movie, director Paul Lynch ran with the suggestion that he set his film during a holiday. A prom seemed like a pretty big event and it tied in well with a story writer Robert Guza had created that was all about childhood trauma coming back to haunt people. Once Jamie Lee Curtis signed to be in the film (Brady Bunch star Eve Plumb was also up for the role), all that was left was to make the movie.

The film starts in 1974, when Wendy, Jude, Kelly and Nick are playing some weird game that seems like hide and seek but has them screaming, “The murderers are coming!” Maybe this is a game that kids play in Canada that teaches them that if they are not polite, they will be killed.

Another girl, Robin, tries to join in but they start chasing her while yelling, “Kill! Kill!” They back her up toward a window which she falls out of to her doom. Instead of telling the police, the kids make a pact to never reveal the truth. After Leonard Mench, a sex offender, is caught in the area, he is blamed and jailed for the crime.

Six years later, Robin’s family celebrate the memorial of her death while her twin brother Alex and teenage sister Kim (Curtis) prepare for the prom. Their parents will also be at the prom, as Mr. Hammond is the school principal He’s played by Leslie Nielsen, adding some star power before everyone would only know him as a serious actor. In fact, Airplane! would come out the same month as this movie.

Kelly, Jude and Wendy (Anne-Marie Martin, billed here as Eddie Benton, former wife of Jurassic Park creator Michael Crichton) have all started getting obscene calls while Nick never answers the phone. They’re all too worried about the prom, after all. Kim and Nick have been dating, Jude is going with goofball Slick Crane and Kelly is going with Drew (and he cannot wait for afterward, so they can have sex). Wendy used to date Nick and now, she is going to the prom with school bad boy Lou to embarrass her former friends.

There are so many bad omens: the locker room mirror is cracked and a shard is missing; Leonard Mench has escaped; and Wendy, Jude and Kelly have discovered their yearbook photos stabbed with glass and placed in their lockers.

Everyone still goes to the prom, where most of the drama is the triangle between Kim, Nick and Wendy. Disco was still somewhat around — it’s never really died to be honest — when this was released. Dig that dancing goodness.

Kelly and Drew are getting hot and heavy, but she refuses to go all the way. He leaves just in time for a giallo-style black-clad killer to slit her throat with a shard of the mirror. This same killer kills Jude and Slick after they share a joint and do some dancing — horizontal style — in his van.

The sex offender has been caught, so the police stop scrutinizing the prom. Yep, three kids are dead under their noses and they just move on. Maybe this really is a giallo with a police force this bad at their jobs!

Actually, that number is increasing, as the killer has an axe and he chases Wendy through the school, finally killing her just after she finds Kelly’s corpse.

Will Prom Night only be a slasher movie? Nope. It’s going to have a Carrie scene as well, in addition to trying to be Saturday Night Fever! Kim and Nick are just about to be crowned king and queen when Lou and his gang tie up Nick and steal his crown. Lou gets ready backstage and the killer thinks he’s Nick and well, his head rolls as the prom dancers run in abject terror.

Kim frees her boyfriend and they run from the killer, who only attacks him. She grabs the axe and hits the masked man in the head before realizing who it is — her brother! Turns out he watched the kids kill their sister and has been waiting for revenge. She tries to stop the cops from shooting him, but the axe wound does him in and our heroine cries at the death of her brother.

Wow. Who knew Canadians were so nihilistic? What a dark ending! Prom Night is a great slice of 80’s fun that really has nothing in common with any of its sequels. But that’s fine.

There were tons of deleted scenes that actually revealed that Alex and Robin were twins and others that made Mr. Hammond look like the killer. To pad the running time and make up for censored gore, many of these missing scenes and characters were added back into the film for the TV version.

If you really think about it, Halloween starts with Jamie Lee Curtis’ sister getting killed and then her brother ends up being the killer. The same thing happens here — except no one would know the family relationship between Laurie Strode and Michael Meyers until 1981’s Halloween 2.

Want to watch it for yourself? Grab the Synapse blu-ray or watch it on Shudder!

Oh Canada. Your horror movies are so strange, so unlike anywhere else, as you remain such a polite country, our neighbor to the north. What strange horrors have you brought to me today? Oh look — it’s 1980’s Funeral Home, otherwise known by the much better title Cries in the Night.

Heather (Lesleh Donaldson, Curtains, Happy Birthday to Me) is spending the summer in a small town with her grandmother, who has turned her home, which was once a funeral home, into a quaint inn. Her husband’s been missing for several years, so she also makes ends meet by selling artificial flowers. She even has her own handyman, Billy, who is mentally challenged.

The only problem is that when people check in, they end up missing. Like that unmarried adulterous couple. And that real estate developer. And when Heather comes home at night, she hears her grandmother talk to someone who isn’t there.

Well, it seems like Heather’s grandfather was having an affair with Helena Davis, which her grandmother denies to everyone, including Helena’s husband (Barry Morse, the Inspector from TV’s original The Fugitive)  — who is soon murdered with a pickaxe.

Heather and her boyfriend Rick start investigating, finally finding the corpse of her grandfather. Now, Maude speaks with his voice and comes after them with an axe. Luckily, the police arrive just in time.

As the credits roll, the cops explain all of it to us. It’s such a weird ending, with an overly long explanation fighting for screen time with the names of the gaffers.

This movie just felt like a slog. I continually kept checking to see how much more time was left. I hate when movies make me do that.

Sure, I may not have enjoyed Funeral Home. But you can check it out for yourself. It’s on Shudder and Amazon Prime.

Oh, and if you’re a purveyor of films with ripped off artwork, then check out Through the Fire, which steals Funeral Home‘s theatrical and VHS artwork. Becca, the “B” of B&S About Movies, chimed in with her insights as part of the film’s inclusion on Mill Creek’s Chilling Classics box set.

Jamie Lee Curtis. A train. A murderous slasher. And David Copperfield. Yes, Terror Train is unlike any other slasher that ever came before or since.

Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who was also in the chair for Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, this movie was totally conceived as Halloween on a train. Jamie Lee had just finished filming Prom Night, so she jumped back on the slasher, err, train one more time.

Much like Slaughter High, a prank puts all of this in motion, as Alana (Jamie Lee) is coerced into pulling a joke on frat pledge Kenny Hampson that uses a female corpse, because you know, humor. Kenny doesn’t get the joke, goes nuts, gets put in a mental asylum and then, of course, breaks out and kills nearly everyone.

But what about David Copperfield, you may ask. Well, he’s all over this movie, both doing illusions and being a red herring. His scenes with Jamie Lee make the screen smolder with pure sex. I’m totally lying to see if you’re paying attention.

Ben Johnson, Captain Morales from the original The Town That Dreaded Sundown shows up as a train conduction. And hey! There’s Vanity (credited as D.D. Winters) years before she’d meet up with Prince, star in Action Jackson and Tanya’s Island, then got heavy into drugs and dating Rick James, Adam Ant (who wrote the song “Vanity” about her on the Strip album), Nikki Sixx and Billy Idol. After that, she went into renal failure, found God and later died because her body had endured a lifetime of drug abuse.

I really like the killer’s gimmick of continually switching masks. It’s pretty effective and leads you to wonder who really is behind things, even if the opening totally gives the identity away.

Shout! Factory re-released this on blu-ray recently, but it’s already out of print! Oh man! If you find a copy, grab one!

Did Roger Corman sit in a room screaming, “Make me more amphibian monster movies NOW!” into the telephone? Because this week, that’s the feeling that I’m getting. This time, Barbara Peeters got the call (Joe Dante turned this one down), although the final film was nothing like she wanted it to be and she tried — and failed — to get her name removed from the credits.

Fishermen catch what looks like a monster. Then, the son of one of them is dragged under the waves by an unseen beast. Another fisherman fires a flare gun that sets the whole boat on fire, killing everyone. Pre-credits, this movie is already meaner and better than most of what we’ve watched this week.

Jim Hill (Doug McClure, TV’s The Virginian) and his wife Carol (Cindy Weintraub, The Prowler) see the boat blow up and then their dog gets eaten (and his remains thrown up on their porch). So yeah. Things are off to quite the start.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Peggy (Lynn Schiller, Without Warning) are swimming and fooling around, but Jerry ends up torn apart and a fishman rapes the girl, causing the director to want to leave the picture. Seriously — they kept her name on the film. Time’s up, Roger Corman.

That scene is repeated with Billy (future ventriloquist David Strassman) and Becky, with yet another fish on female rape. All manner of folks are attacked, but Peggy somehow survives.

Meanwhile, Canco is opening their new canning operation in town. It turns out that the monsters that are fucking everyone to death are the result of Canco using HGH on salmon that were in turn eaten by larger fish who then turned into humanoids. From the deep? Yes. Humanoids from the Deep.

Luckily, Jim and Dr. Susan Drake are on the case. Their big plan? At the town’s fish fest, when the beasts attack, they dump gasoline in the lake and set it on fire. So not only is there no safe zone for women, fuck the environment, too. While all this is going on, Carol is attacked by two monsters but survives. Oh yeah! Vic Morrow is in this mess, too. And if you think Peggy is going to give birth to a fish baby, then you haven’t been watching this film.

Actress Ann Turkel chose to do this film — originally titled Beneath the Darkness — because: “It was an intelligent suspenseful science-fiction story with a basis in fact and no sex.” She was enraged as well at what the final film ended up being.

Corman remade this film for Showtime in 1996, with the sex and violence scaled down. That said, he of course reused the Salmon Festival footage for the remake. Why actually shoot something new?

Well, if you’re looking for a grimy, fishy film, this is it. It’s certainly more entertaining than the last two Roger Corman fish films I suffered through. You can watch the Shout! Factory release to get the best possible version. It’s also on Amazon Prime.

I was watching Amazon Prime the other night and thought I was watching Demon Seed with Julie Christie. Nope. I was really watching this film. I thought with the end of the rental era that box art would never confuse me again! I was wrong!

Lana (Lana Wood, elder sister of Natalie, who is better known as Plenty O’Toole from Diamonds Are Forever) is in a loveless marriage with Carl (Don Galloway, Detective Sergeant Ed Brown on TV’s Ironside). He treats her like absolute shit, as most 70’s husbands tend to do in occult movies.

So she does what you or I would do: she starts fucking Satan.

This movie is basically an excuse to get Lana Wood naked and having sex with an invisible demon. That demon eventually becomes a man played by Kabir Bedi, Gobinda from another James Bond movie, Octopussy.

A quick story from my childhood — I used to love how at the end of movies, it’d say, James Bond will return in… I was watching For Your Eyes Only on HBO while the rest of my family was outside. At pure excitement and mania, I ran as hard as I could for the porch to tell them all that James Bond was coming back (I hadn’t yet grasped the fact that everyone already knew that Bond had a movie every two years, but come on, I was nine). The problem was that my sentence, “JAMES BOND WILL RETURN IN Octopussy!” started inside and when I got outside, all anyone heard was “PUSSY!” Suffice to say I got smacked in the mouth pretty hard, as kids tended to get smacked a lot in the early 1980’s.

Britt Ecklund from Asylum and The Wicker Man also shows up as the psychic friend of Lana, Ann-Marie. She’s barely in it, looks great and gets top billing.

Later in the film, Anne-Marie introduces Lana’s husband to the priest that comes to talk to her psychic group — it was the late 70’s/early 80’s and again, these things happened — and I was thinking, man, this priest role is perfect for Joh Carradine. At that very moment, the priest turns to the camera to reveal good old skinny Dracula himself!

Also known as Dark Rage, Demon Eyes, Fury of the Succubus and Incubus, this movie is pretty much The Entity if the sex was consensual. And enjoyed. And more graphic. And happened more often.

I’m basically telling you that if you love movies about possession and demons having sex with attractive former Bond girls, this is pretty much the movie for you.

Writer/director James Polakof brought over several folks from this movie to make Swim Team, which also has original Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon Buster Crabbe in it. So there’s that. And he also did The Vals, a Valley Girl rip-off with Chuck Connors, Sonny Bonny, John Carradine and Tiffany Bolling in it. Of course, you know I’m going to track that down now.

When Willy and Lacey were kids, they watched their mom and her boyfriend — who wore her stockings on his face — make out. Their mother was so upset, she sent Lacey to her room and tied Willy to his bed. It didn’t work, though. Willy would get out and stab the guy to death with a giant knife in front of a mirror. And that’s only the first few minutes of this one!

Now we’re in the present and Lacey (Suzanna Love, who was married to the director of the film Ulli Lommel and appears in all the sequels) is married with a young son, living with her aunt, uncle and Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna’s real-life brother)on a farm. Willy’s never gotten over killing a man, so he doesn’t talk and often steals knives.

Over dinner, Lacey announces that their mother wants to see them one last time before she dies. Willy burns their letter and this starts off a series of dreams where she is tied to a bed and nearly stabbed, which makes her husband send her to a shrink.

And that shrink? Skinny Dracula himself, John Carradine, who shot everything in one day. He tells them that she has face her fears and go back to her childhood home. As they look at the house, we see the dead boyfriend reflected in the mirror he died in front of. Lacey goe shithouse and smashes it, which is totally not what you should do. Nor should you take those pieces and try and fix the mirror. Mirrors are cheap. Go to Wal-Mart. Buy a new and uncursed mirror.

The pieces left behind start to glow red and kill everyone in the house after Lacey and Jake leave. Speaking of mirrors, Willy hates them. One of them made him strangle a girl, so he paints them all black.

The shards of glass start doing evil things, like levitate pitchforks, rip off Lacey’s shirt and impale young lovers with a screwdriver. I was cool with the shards of glass until then. You’ve taken it too far, shards of glass! I guess we can blame them for the aunt and uncle dying too, right?

This being 1980, Jake decides to bring a priest in to fix everything. This causes Lacey to get possessed by a mirror shard and attack everyone. She kills the priest, too, but not before he removes the mirror’s control over her.

That’s when the best solution comes up — let’s just throw the mirror in a well. This releases all of the souls, with Lacey, Willy and her son happily exiting a graveyard. Oh no — a piece of the mirror is on her son’s shoe!

I was wondering where so many of the plot points of this movie would go and they’re often lost as if this were a foreign film. But it isn’t!  So I did a little digging into the director, Ulli Lommel.

Lommel had one crazy career, starting with appearing in Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill, then acting in Fassbinder’s surreal western film Whitey (as well as several other of the director’s films). Moving to the U.S. in 1977, Lommel became connected to Andy Warhol, who became involved in his films Cocaine Cowboys and Blank Generation, a movie that starred Richard Hell and was filmed at CBGB.

Seriously — a movie that rips off Halloween, The Amityville Horror and Argento lighting while feeling like more than two movies mashed up into one that also features a girl cut her own throat with scissors, a child get his neck broken and a priest get his face melted? The acting is horrible — but are you here for that? Nope. You want to get freaked out when people’s eyes get replaced with a piece of a mirror.

Part of me wants to make fun of this movie. But another part of me wants to protect it from mean people who say things like its lack of attention to details. Or horrible editing which cuts on action. Or the fact that none of its characters appear to be actual human beings. And the camera angles are more dad doesn’t know how to use the video camera than art. But yet, I love this. I want to love it more, but I love what it can be more than what it is.

The Boogeyman was followed by two sequels that use footage — a lot of footage — from the original. Supposedly, a Boogeyman Chronicles web series is due this year.

You can find this streaming on Amazon Prime or grab it from Diabolik DVD.

Want to learn more? Author Stephen Pytak wrote a way better piece than I did in the new Drive-In Asylum. Grab it now!

I could tell you that Inferno is about a man searching for his sister. I could also say that it’s about a New York City apartment building that is the gateway to evil, as well as the home of an ancient alchemist. But I could also tell you that it is the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp, a swirl of images and colors that conjures mood and menace like no other.

A sequel to Suspiria in spirit, this film is also based on the concept of “Our Ladies of Sorrow” (Mater Lachrymarum, Mater Suspiriorum and Mater Tenebrarum) from Thomas de Quincey’s book Suspiria de Profundis. These three witches rule the evil of our world — Mater Lachrymarum as Our Lady of Tears, Mater Suspiriorum as Our Lady of Sighs and Mater Tenebrarum as Our Lady of Darkness.

Rose (Irene Miracle, Midnight Express) is a poet in New York City who discovers The Three Mothers, a book that tells the tale of the three sisters and how they rule our world through sorrow, tears and darkness. Each of them has been built a home by the author, Vaerlli, with Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sorrows, living in Freiburg (hey there, Suspiria).  Mater Lachymarum, the Mother of Tears, resides in Rome (hey there, Mother of Tears). Finally, Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, is right there in NYC (you’re watching her flick).

Rose realizes that she’s living in Tenebrarum’s home and asks for her brother, Mark (Leigh McCloskey, TV’s Dallas), to come see her. She also starts exploring her apartment building, finding a ballroom filled with water in the basement. Dropping her keys, she has to swim through the water to find her them. Then, a corpse rises from its watery tomb, but she escapes.

Now we’re in Rome, where Mark tries to read Rose’s letter, but he keeps getting thrown off by a gorgeous student (Ania Pieroni, The House by the Cemetery) who leads him on a chase. He leaves the letter behind and his friend Sara reads it. She’s both frightened and fascinated, going to the library to find her own copy of The Three Mothers. Well, you’re in an Italian horror film, Sara, so a mysterious man is going to attack you. That’s just how these things go. She gets away and asks Carlo, her neighbor, to stay with her. Again, Sara, you are in an Italian horror movie, so chances are that you are about to be murdered by a black-gloved killer.

Mark finds the dead bodies of Carlo and Sara, along with two pieces of his sister’s letter. After speaking with the police, he walks outside to see a taxi with the mystery woman staring at him. You never see the woman again, but she’s really the Mother of All Tears. Mark calls his sister, but cannot hear her due to the connection. He promises to visit just as two shadowy figures chase her, finally using broken glass to slice her throat.

Mark makes good on his promise, heading straight to Rose’s building where he meets all manner of folks: the nurse (Veronica Lazăr, The Beyond), the old man she takes care of (Feodor Chaliapin Jr., Cher’s grandfather in Moonstruck), the concierge (Alida Valli, Miss Tanner from Suspiria) and Countess Elise De Longvalle Adler (Daria Nicolodi, wife at the time of Argento and uncredited writer of the film) who tells him that Rose is missing.

Mark follows bloodstains he finds outside his sister’s door, but suddenly he passes out and is dragged away by a black-robed man. Elise sees this and the man follows her. She’s overcome by cats before the man stabs her to death, just as the concierge and nurse help Mark go to sleep.

Later, Mark finds the antique dealer who sold Rose the book in the hopes of discovering more clues about his sister’s whereabouts. The man has no info for him, but we follow him throughout the night, where he has a nice evening of drowning cats in Central Park. However, he falls into the water and an army of rats attacks him, shredding and gnawing on him. A hot dog vendor hears the commotion and walks across the water to stab the antique dealer with a knife. What does this have to do with the rest of Inferno? Your guess is as good as mine!

Meanwhile, Elise’s butler tries to steal her possessions, but he’s killed. When the concierge finds his corpse, she drops a candle and sets the room ablaze. She gets tied up in some curtains and falls out a window to her death. As the house burns, Mark finds the secret crawlspace in the basement. He follows a series of passages until he finds the old man in the wheelchair, who ends up being Varelli, the author of the book. He tries to kill Mark with a needle, but is choked to death before telling Mark, “Even now, you are being watched.”

Mark follows one of the shadowed figures until he ends up in a luxurious chamber, where the nurse reveals herself to be Mater Tenebrarum and becomes death itself. That said — the fire from above sends debris crashing down and the film ends.

After Suspiria became a surprise success for 20th Century Fox, they bankrolled this film. However, a change in management at the studio led to the film never receiving the release it deserved. While it played in Italy, it sat unwatched in the U.S. for five years before a VHS release in 1985 and a one week New York City theatrical run in 1986.

This is not Argento’s favorite film, due to painful memories of an extreme case of hepatitis that he suffered during the filming. At times, he was in so much pain, he had to direct on his back. At other times, only the second unit scenes could be filmed by Mario Bava! That’s right — Bava also worked on the film’s optical effects, matte paintings and trick shots! For example, the skylines in the film? That’s Bava using photos glued to milk cartons. And the apartment building itself is an optical illusion, as it was only a few floors high and had a Bava-created sculpture to cheat the eye. Bava also was a camera operator and lighting technician for the film — all uncredited — with his son serving as assistant director.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I love Inferno. If it’s your first Argento or Italian film, you’re about to be overwhelmed. This is a poetic, lyrical, erotic blast of cinema, unafraid to go off into a thousand directions at once with the thinnest of storyline thread to hold it together. It’s a union of the new — Argento — with the old master Bava providing one last gasp of his brilliance. Fuck every critic who savaged this movie. Time has proved what fools they were.

Enough words. Watch this at once! It’s available on Shudder and Amazon Prime. You can also buy it at Diabolik DVD.

Sure, Jaws was frightening. But now, “just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…you can’t get to it!”

A woman walks her dog along the beach before she is pulled under the sand by an unseen creature. Her screams alert Harry Caulder, a harbor patrol officer who is swimming in the ocean. He reports her disappearance to LAPD detectives Royko (Burt Young, Amityville II: The Possession) and Pianadosi, who can do nothing without a body.

The woman’s estranged daughter, Catherine (Marianna Hill, Messiah of Evil) calls Henry about her mother. Even after she finds a dog with a severed head, no one can figure out what has happened. The cops believe that a serial killer is at large, but much like the aforementioned Jaws, the powers that be want them to keep a lid on it after the media starts using the term “Blood Beach.”

After another attack on a teenage girl, Captain Pearson (John Saxon, making every movie better just by his presence) begins digging up the beach to discover the killer.

Meanwhile, Hoagy (no, not Michael Caine, but a co-worker of Henry) is closing the harbor patrol when a man attacks his girlfriend. She knocks the rapist to the ground and the creature castrates the man. And then the beach devours Marie, the French stewardess who lives with Henry, leaving only her hat and an eyeball.

Oh yeah — Harry and Catherine used to be lovers and now try to reconcile.

Finally, someone survives an attack, a man who was using a metal detector on the beach. However, he’s in shock and unable to explain what happened. And when Hoagy tries to warn Mrs. Selden, who has watched the murders throughout the film, he’s pulled under while she simply looks on.

Catherine decides to investigate the access tunnel to the beach where they found the survivor. She discovers the remains of every victim as Captain Pearson installs motion detectors, cameras and explosives all over the beach. Soon, a giant worm emerges and the cops blow it up real good.

That said — Dr. Dimitrios believes that because it’s a worm, it can regenerate. With small sinkholes showing up all over the beach, he just might be right.

Blood Beach does what we expect from Jaws but inverts the danger. There’s some fine character work by Burt Ward, Marianna Hill is as lovely as ever and there are plenty of monster attacks to keep everyone in suspense. It’s not the finest in horror, but it’ll do once a few beers have started to work themselves into your brain.

Co-written and produced by Charles Kaufman, brother of Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, this is a rough affair all about an insane woman and her two even crazier sons capturing and torturing three young women. It’s our thank you to mothers everywhere — happy Mother’s Day!

A bunch of hippies are about to graduate from a Growth Opportunity workshop, which is a very 1970’s affair. Two of them, Terry and Charlie, plan to rob and kill an old woman who gives them a ride home. They didn’t expect Ike (Frederick Coffin, Alone in the Dark) and Addley, the woman’s two sons, to come out of the woods and cut off Charlie’s head. And then Mother herself chokes out Terry.

Now it’s time to meet our heroines, three women who have been friends for a long time (the Rat Pack!) who reunite every year for a camping trip. Abbey, Jackie and Trina are having a blast in the woods when the boys abduct them in their sleeping bags, then torture and abuse them.

The next day, Abbey and Trina make their escape, yet discover the dead bodies of Terry and Charlie, as well as Jackie who has been destroyed and left in a drawer. Meanwhile, Queenie, Mother’s deformed and werewolf-like sister who feeds on dead animals, has been sighted in the woods.

Jackie dies of her wounds as the Abbey and Trina make a plan of revenge against the brothers. They dispatch of Addley and then Ike jumps out of a window to attack them, but gets Drano poured down his throat, a TV dropped on his head and is finally killed with an electric carving knife. Then, they use inflatable breasts to suffocate Mother.

I liked how the girls have a strong relationship and defend one another, somewhat defying the Final Girl convention.

After burying Jackie in the woods, the girls attempt to leave, but Queenie leaps to attack as the credits roll. This would be surprising if it wasn’t ruined by so many of the trailers.

If this film looks like it was shot in a grimy murder house, well, it’s because it was. It was shot in an abandoned house in Newton, New Jersey that had been empty for 15 years, with the original owner being killed inside the home and another body had been found just prior to filming.

Beatrice Pons was billed as Rose Ross and Frederick Coffin was billed as Holden McGuire due to their membership in the Screen Actor’s Guild prohibiting them from appearing in non-union films. In fact, Beatrice was supposedly so eager to accept the lead role that she voluntarily breached SAG’s “Global Rule One” policy, by changing her name!

There’s also an insane Hollywood party opening, packed with old men and young women hooking up, roller skating, coke snorting and a butler with a long coat and no pants. This scene feels like it inspired the Boogie Nights pool parties scenes at Jack Horner’s house.

Mother’s Day was kind of, sort of remade in 2010 with Rebecca De Mornay as Mother. It isn’t as well regarded as this film.

While this is a Troma movie, I tried not to hold it against this film, It’s a pretty simple, quick moving affair. And well worth checking out. Maybe you shouldn’t share it with your mom, though. Get her some chocolates or something.

Have you ever paused a movie and yelled aloud, “I LOVE THIS MOVIE!” and you’re all alone in the room? If you’ve answered in the affirmative, you understand the pure joy that I felt while watching this movie.

Dean Miller, an American reporter, is waiting to interview a nuclear scientist when a military plane lands and mutated men emerge, killing everyone in their path. Even the worst wounds only slow them down as they hack their way through their victims, pausing to drink the blood of those they kill.

General Murchison (Mel Ferrer, The Visitor) shuts down any news stories about the attack. Meanwhile, the city is overrun with the killers and their victims, who soon join their ranks. Miller saves his wife at the hospital where she works as the city’s power is shut down.

It turns out that they’re fighting humans who have been contaminated by a leak in the nuclear power plant (that’s why the scientist was meeting with Miller in the beginning) and now they have strength, speed and reflexes beyond the range of normal humans. However, because they can’t regenerate red blood cells, they must consume blood. There’s only one way to kill them, which will be familiar to zombie movie fans: shoot them in the head.

No one is safe — the general is looking for his daughter and her husband, but by the time they are discovered, they are infected and must be killed. And Major Holmes warns his artist wife to stay in the house when two infected men break in and kill her friend and almost murder her. By the time he gets to the house to save her she’s been infected and he must kill his wife.

That’s the theme of this movie — everyone gets turned into something horrible, even a priest at the church where Miller and Anna try to hide. Finally, they make a last stand in an amusement park, using submachine guns and grenades to keep the attacking horde at bay. Major Holmes tries to save them, but Anna can’t hold the rope and falls to her death. This being an Italian movie, we see every moment of her demise.

Miller then wakes up. It was all a dream, except he goes back to the airport and the movie starts all over again!

Known as City of the Walking Dead in the U.S., this is a fast-moving, down and dirty gore packed film. Directed by Umberto Lenzi (Eaten Alive!, Cannibal Ferox), this film feels like it’s out of control from the first scene. Once that plane opens and the mutated fiends emerge, it’s an orgy of heads being opened up, breasts being eaten, gunshots galore and eyes being ripped from their sockets. In short, this is. a true crowd pleaser. How can you not love a movie where a studio full of disco dancers are mauled and murdered by an army of mutated killers?

There was a remake announced in 2015, which was to have been directed by Tom Savini. While that movie hasn’t shown up yet, you can always watch the original on Shudder!