John Irvin directed Arnold in Raw Deal and Swayze in Next of Kin, as well as Hamburger Hill and several documentaries. He was asked to direct the film by producer Burt Weissbourd, who loved his direction of Haunted: The Ferryman, a British made-for-television movie.

Based on Peter Straub’s book and written by Lawrence D. Cohen (Carrie, The Tommyknockers, the TV mini-series version of It), Irvin saw the story as one of hypocrisy and man’s fear — and even hatred — of women.

He gathered an all-star cast of classic actors, including Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Patricia Neal and John Houseman, to tell the story, as well as Craig Wasson and Alice Krige to play the younger characters. The director said that the filming was emotionally turbulent for Astaire, who confided in him that he felt he was going to die or be murdered, even considering leaving the film. Luckily, he stuck it out and finished the movie, turning in a great performance.

Businessman Ricky Hawthorne (Astaire), lawyer Sears James (Houseman), Dr. John Jaffrey (Douglas) and Mayor Edward Charles Wanderley (Fairbanks) are the Chowder Society, a group of elderly men connected by a past tragedy who now meet for drinks and tales of horror. While they’re meeting, Edward’s son David (Wasson) falls from his NYC apartment after seeing his girlfriend turn into a corpse, bringing brother Don (also Wasson) home.

Days later, Edward follows the ghost of his son to a bridge, where a female ghost causes him to fall into the water and die. And Gregory and Fenny Bate — two escapees from the insane asylum — start living in a ruined mansion on the edge of town.

While the authorities think his father committed suicide, Don believes otherwise, leading to him joining the Chowder society. To get in, he must tell a tale of horror. He tells what happened to him when he was a college professor and began an affair with a girl named Alma (Krige). The sexual nature of their relationship is pretty aggressive for a mainstream film, but Don soon realizes that there’s something really wrong with her. For one, she feels like a corpse.

Breaking things off, he soon learns Alma had begun dating his brother and plans on marrying her. Despite warning him of how dangerous she is, his brother is soon dead. And even worse, Don has found a photo of the Chowder Society with a woman who looks exactly like Alma.

Jaffrey wants to tell the truth, but the Chowder Society has kept the secret for too long. After a nightmare, he’s dead as well. That leaves Sears and Ricky to explain the horrible tale that has brought us to now.

In the spring of 1929, the men who would become the Chowder Society had all fallen for a mysterious woman named Eva Galli. Edward was the first to take her to bed, but he was unable to get aroused. However, he still told his friends that he successfully bedded her as they drank. They return to her home and all but Sears dance with her before she nearly tells the men that Edward was impotent. He jumps toward her and she smashes her head against the fireplace.

Thinking that she’s dead and not wanting to ruin their lives, they load her into a car and push it into the lake. However, she’s not dead and screams for them to save her, but faster than you can say Chappaquiddick, the car is under the icy water.

Due to Eva’s reputation as a woman of loose virtue, the townspeople were relieved when she’d gone missing. Yet her death has haunted them. Now, Ricky and Dawn are convinced that Alma and Eva are one and the same. After going to her home, Don gets a broken leg and Sears is killed by Eva’s ghost and Fennt stabbing him. 

Ricky leaves to get help and ends up defeating Gregory Bate. He goes to get the authorities to drag the lake for Eva’s body. As that happens, the rotting corpse of Eva menaces Ricky until her dead body is revealed, stopping the curse. 

While this film is a bit slow moving — keep in mind that it was made in 1981 — it still has plenty of tension and terror. The Dick Smith effects are wonderful and it really feels otherworldly in parts.

You can watch Ghost Story on Shudder or get the blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Al Adamson should have never made a children’s film. This is the man who made Psycho a Go-Go, two different softcore movies with flying hostesses (The Naughty Stewardesses and Blazing Stewardesses), the staggering Dracula vs. Frankenstein and a Filipino horror movie that was dubbed, tinted in neon hues and released as Horror of the Blood Monsters. And oh, by the way, his film Satan’s Sadists was shot Spahn Ranch and he was not shy about using that fact to promote the film. And how can we forget his rip off of Eddie Romero’s Blood Island films, the impressive Brain of Blood?

But yeah. So then he decided to make a movie for the kids, it failed, he went into real estate and then ended up murdered by a contractor and buried in the cement under a new hot tub.

So are you ready for Carnival Magic? No. I really don’t think you are.

According to an article in the Austin Chronicle, even the way that film was discovered is unsettling. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson said, “I didn’t know about the movie until I already owned it. It was an entire movie on one giant reel, and written on the side of it, in Sharpie, it said Carnival Fucking Magic. It completely decimated everyone. We couldn’t understand what the movie was, because although it’s made under the guise of a children’s film, it features domestic abuse, vivisection, and, even more uncomfortably, it just has this pervasive air of stale, alcoholic uncles. It’s the most quietly inappropriate kids’ movie ever made. You can tell it was made by people who have never spent any time around children.”

At face value, the movie is all about Markov the Magnificent (Don Stewart, who was on the soap opera Guiding Light for sixteen years), a magician and mindreader whose career has hit the skids. However, when he teams up with a talking chimp — after a while, no one is really all that amazed that monkeys can speak — named Alexander the Great, their dirt poor Stoney Martin Carnival finally has a chance to be a success. Then again, Kirk the alcoholic lion tamer (Joe Cirillo, who played cops in everything from Maniac Cop 2 to Splash, Ghostbusters and Death Wish 3) and the doctor who wants to examine Alexander’s brain may screw it all up.

Of course, Al’s wife Regina Carrol shows up. But what you don’t expect is that the monkey loves women’s bras and stealing cars. You might wonder what child would want to see this or how they’d react being dropped off at the theater in 1981 by their parents and having to confront this film. I’m in my forties and barely survived it with my insanity intact (to be fair, I’ve gone back more than a few times to try and watch it again).

See, there’s a war brewing between Markov and Kirk. Our hero doesn’t like telling many people, but he was raised by Buddhist monks who taught him hypnosis, levitation and how to talk to animals. The main problem is, the more he talks to Kirk’s animals, the less they take our villain as their master.

Speaking of talking, that’s pretty much all this movie does. Everyone talks, about losing their wives, potentially losing their daughters, leaving behind their old lives and worries of their future. I’m not really sure what children want to see the inner workings and turmoil of a ratty circus. After all, we’ve all come to realize just how sinister the big top is and this movie will do nothing to dissuade you from that notion.

I really have no idea who this film is really for. But yet, that’s part of the charm. Every year, there are so many movies made for kids that just fade away. Somehow, this oddity won’t go away, even if the print for it stayed hidden for decades. Beyond all rational reasoning, Carnival Magic is available to watch on Netflix — albeit with riffing from Mystery Science Theater 3000 — and ready to mess with anyone’s brain that stumbles across it.

UPDATE: You can get this now from Severin. 

You think that American genre cinema is the absolute peak of weirdness? You study Italian horror, post-armageddon movies from the Philippines and Japanese musicals about murderous families and you think you’ve seen it all. Then you discover this movie, straight out of Indonesia, where low-budget exploitation films like this — that said, there’s no real movie like this — were released domestically and then sent to Japan.

H. Tjut Djalil is probably the foremost director of Indonesian grindhouse, if there’s such a thing. He’s also known for Lady Terminator, which we’ll be getting to soon. Here, he focuses on the Southeast Asian and Balinese mythology of the Leyak, a paranormal creature which takes the form of a flying, disembodied head with entrails and internal organs intact and hanging down from the neck. Get ready. Mystics In Bali is about to ruin your brain.

Catherine “Cathy” Kean (Ilona Agathe Bastian, who was not an actress but a German tourist on vacation) has traveled to Bali to write a book about voodoo and black magic. Her lover Manendra offers to help her study further and takes her to several rituals. The following evening, they meet the Queen of the Leák, an ancient witch with an ever-changing face. Before she leaves their first meeting, a handshake between her and Cathy ends up leaving our heroine with a severed arm in her grasp.

Cathy wants to learn more, so the next night, she and Mahendra bring blood for the Queen to drink. That evening, the Queen appears in the form of a tongue that orders Cathy to strip before carving a spell into her upper thigh. Cathy is to return the next evening alone.

This is where a normal human being would just stop and walk away. But no — Cathy returns and she and the Queen transform into pigs before destroying a wall of fire. That means that somewhere, someone has been killed. However, she grows sick with the Queen telling her to return to be healed the next evening.

This is when Mahendra starts to think something weird is going on, so he asks his uncle to teach him how to combat the Leák’s magic. But it’s too late — this movie is about to go off the rails in a way few movies can live up to.

The Queen tells her that she’s going to borrow her head and Cathy becomes a leyak, which means that her head, organs, and entrails detach from her body and fly away to the home of a pregnant woman, where she sucks an unborn baby right out of that poor woman’s womb by positioning herself between the thighs and just going to town. If you thought a severed head performing oral favors in Reanimator was the limit, Mystics In Bali is ready to turn your brain into Ayam Bakar Taliwang.

The blood from the fetus cures Cathy and makes the Queen young and strong. Together, they become snakes and escape before Cathy wakes up and throws up mice. Yep, this movie doubles down on a severed head eating a baby through someone’s vagina and raises you vomited up vermin.

After killing someone else while in fireball form, Mahendra and his uncle decide to bury Cathy’s body so her head can’t find it. A climactic battle in a graveyard ensues, with the Queen electrocuting Machesse and slicing his neck, killing the old man. Mahendra’s former girlfriend also is killed by the Queen before another of Mahendra’s uncles, Oka, stabs the Queen — now a humanoid pig — in the heart, turning her into a masked figure. The old wizard and the Queen blast energy at one another which explodes, just as the sun kills both Cathy and our villain.

Mystics In Bali is said to be the Holy Grail of Asian cult cinema. Brought to Western attention by the maniacs at Mondo Macabro (you can get it at their site), this is a movie that can still shock and excite nearly forty years after it was made.

The film was made on the Indonesian island of Java rather than on location in Bali, as locals were too superstitious about the black magic rituals it depicts. The roles of the Queen and Machesse (and Oka) were played by the husband and wife duo of Sofia W.D. and W. D. Mochtar, who each appeared in many, many movies. Sofia even directed her own movie, Badai-Selatan, which played the 1962 Berlin International FIlm Festival.

While I highly recommend the Mondo Macabro release, you can also watch this movie on the Internet Archive. But be warned: once you watch this, you can never truly go back. This is the darkest of film craziness, where you are forever changed by the movie you just witnessed!

Tom DeSimone started his directing career in gay porn as Lancer Brooks, creating the first homosexual film with dialogue and a plot with 1970’s The Conversation before going mainstream and making Chatterbox. After this film, he’d be behind such greats as Reform School Girls and Angel III: The Final Chapter, as well as uncredited direction on another fabulous Linda Blair movie, Savage Streets.

Oh Linda Blair. By 1981, Linda was eight years past The Exorcist and a few years past a major drug bust. While some people may say they lived their lives, I get the feeling that Ms. Blair really lived her life, starting to date Rick Springfield at fifteen after seeing him play the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, as well as relationships with Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes and Styx frontman Tommy Shaw. And a year after Hell Night, a nude pictorial in Oui magazine would lead to her dating Rick James, who spoke of her in glowing terms in his autobiography: “Linda was incredible. A free spirit. A beautiful mind. A mind-blowing body. She liked getting high and getting down as much as I did.”

But hey — we’re here to talk about Hell Night and lots of teenagers are basically begging to get killed. Let’s get to it!

Spoiler before we go any further: I was basically two minutes into this movie before declaring my pure love for it.

During a college costume party, Peter (Kevin Brophy, who played the main character in the TV show Lucan) is all fired up about initiating the new pledges of Alpha Sigma Rho: rich kid Jeff (Peter Barton of TV’s The Powers of Matthew Star), Marti, a smart girl from a poor family (Blair); party girl Denise (Suki Goodwin in her only movie role) and stoner Seth (Vincent Van Patten, son of Dick, former pro tennis player, star of the failed pilot The Bionic Kid and current World Poker Tour commentator). They’re forced to spend the night at Garth Manor, the abandoned mansion when Ramon Garth murdered his wife and three deformed children before hanging himself. Then, the fourth child Andrew somehow survived and still roams the grounds.

The moment they get there, Marti and Jeff have sex, just before a ghost shows up to frighten her. Unbeknownst to them, beyond that ghost, Peter and two other students have been setting up traps and scares all over the house. As soon as they finish, the denizens of the house attack, decapitating one of them and then stringing another up on the roof. Peter tries to prank Denise, only to be chased into a hedge maze and killed with a scythe.

Seth and Denise respond to all of these murders and pranks by getting high and having sex, which really seems to be the best possible solution. When Seth leaves Denise to go to the bathroom, he returns to find a severed head in their bed.

Of course, it all goes very slasher and the kids each gets killed off in various ways after discovering the remains of the Garth family in the tunnels under the house. The police have no interest in helping them, so they try and survive the night themselves. Marti is the final girl, hot-wiring cars and slamming strange killers into spiked gates to make it through the night.

I love the end of the movie, where she wakes up as the sun rises and just gets out of the car, which has a dead killer on the hood and walks away.

There are some weird things about Hell Night beyond the actual movie, like the two actors who played the Garth killers being unlisted in the credits because they were unknown German nationals that spoke little English. The bearded one died soon after the film wrapped and the other is gone to history.

Even stranger is that when a man in Illinois named Ray Fulk died, he asked for his estate to be split between Hell Night stars Kevin Brophy and Peter Barton, despite never meeting the actors. That’s right, they split a million dollars just for him being a fan of their work.

It’s also the last movie that Irwin Yablans’. Compass International Pictures would release. They had some hits — Halloween, Tourist Trap, Fade to Black and Blood Beach, as well as some smaller films like Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula, The Day Time Ended and Roller Boogie. They’d soon reform as part of Universal Studios and be called Trancas International Films, where they’d produce all of the Halloween films.

Hell Night also had Kevin Costner working as a grip and was one of the first films Frank Darabont worked on. It’s another example of the fact that a movie that wasn’t thought of all that fondly in 1981 appears to be an utter classic once you watch it in 2019.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or get the blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Also known as Anyab, this is a movie that can start with red lips in blackness ala The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then remind you of that film with one of its leads putting on a shirt of that seminal film while he sings. But this Egyptian film is no mere cover version — it has a lot of its own strangeness to share with you.

The lead couple — the Brad and Janet if you will — battle an evil vampire (played by singer Ahmed Adaweya) who becomes an evil doctor, butcher, plumber, a tutor, cab driver, and realtor. At the end of each scene, he smiles, looks at the camera and bares his fangs. He also battles the film’s narrator and loves to host parties.

Director Mohammed Shebl may have died at the young age of 47, but he left behind a life of many careers — diplomat, film critic, Egypt’s foremost expert on The Beatles, screenwriter, talk-show host, radio DJ and director. This is but his first, a movie that liberally borrows music, themes and scenes from any number of Western films.

Yes, the music from movies and shows like The Munsters, The Pink Panther and James Bond are literally stolen and mixed into a soundtrack that combines traditional Egyptian melodies with new sounds like funk and synth. It’s staggering actually, like a swirl of influence and remixing on a scale unrealized until much later in the Western world.

Who knew that an Egyptian musical about vampires would instead be a think piece on consumerism? I’ve also never seen a movie where a dance sequence ends with a real chicken being killed and bleeding all over the floor.

Like nearly every other movie this week, this film was a massive bomb. Shebl lost most of his family’s fortune making it, but did direct three more movies: The Talisman (which features The Bangles “Walk Like An Egyptian” on its soundtrack), Nightmare and Love and Revenge…With a Meat Cleaver.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show may have failed when it was first released, but somehow, midnight showings have kept it in limited release four decades after its premiere, making it the longest-running theatrical release in history.

In 1979, writer/cast member Richard O’Brien wrote a sequel called Rocky Horror Shows His Heels. I remember reading about this in an issue of the teen magazine Bananas. If you remember this magazine, you are officially old. Anyway, this script would have featured the return of all of the characters from the original film, even the ones who died. However, director Jim Sharman didn’t want to revisit the film and Tim Curry had no interest in coming back.

Two years later, Sharman and O’Brien reunited for this movie, which had the tagline “It’s not a sequel… it’s not a prequel… it’s an equal.” This infuriated fans, as they wanted Curry, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick instead of new cast members. And where Rocky is strange, Shock Treatment is near lunatic in its depiction of the town of Denton.

Complicating matters was that the Screen Actor’s Guild strike led to the entire being shot on a sound stage in the UK, which I feel adds to the proceedings. Your mileage may vary, but there’s plenty to like here if you keep an open mind.

Brad and Janet Majors have gotten married and settled into the town of Denton, USA. Brad is now played by Cliff De Young (The Hunger) and Janet is Jessica Harper (seriously, do you think she was tired of playing in films that only maniacs like me enjoy, like this one, Suspiria and Phantom of the Paradise?).

Denton is really owned by fast food magnate Farley Flavors, also played by De Young, and is now totally encased within a TV studio to create a strange reality where town residents are always on TV, either as stars, cast, crew, regulars or audience members.

Our heroes are selected for one of the TV shows that make up the life of Denton called Marriage Maze, which is hosted by the supposedly blind game show host Bert Schnick (Barry Humphries, who you may know better as Dame Edna). For winning, Brad gets placed on the soap opera Dentonvale, where brother and sister doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley (O’Brien and Patricia Quinn, pretty much playing similar roles from Rocky Horror) conspire against him, while Farley molds Janet into a singing superstar.

Meanwhile, Betty Hapschatt (Ruby Wax, the script editor for Absolutely Fabulous) and Judge Oliver Wright (Rocky Horror narrator Charles Gray) learn that everyone is just a character actor and that Farley is Brad’s evil twin, out to take Janet for himself.

The cast of Shock Treatment is pretty amazing and absolutely filled with talent:

Little Nell comes back as Nurse Ansalong, Young Ones star Rik Mayall is around as “Rest Home” Ricky, while Officer Vance Parker is played by Chris Malcolm, the first Brad from the Rocky Horror stage show. Betsy Brantley, who played Neely Pritt, was the body model for Jessica Rabbit as well as playing Dolph Lundgren’s girlfriend in I Come In Peace. And you can catch Rocky Horror fan club president Sal Piro in a brief cameo.

Barry Dennen, who plays auto dealer Irwin Lapsey had an interesting career. He helped Barbara Streisand develop her act and lived with her romantically for a year before learning that he was gay. He’s in a ton of movies, appearing as Mendel in The Fiddler on the Roof and Pontious Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as Claude LeMont in the “High Adventure” segment of The Kentucky Fried Movie. He’s also in The Shining, Dark Crystal, Madhouse, The Shadow and Trading Places, as well as voicing tons of video games and cartoons. Sadly, he never recovered from a fall in July of 2017 and died a few months later.

Ironically, Brad from this movie and Janet from Rocky Horror — DeYoung and Sarandon — are a couple in The Hunger.

Shock Treatment never achieved the levels of fandom that Rocky Horror did. But man, it has some great songs, Jessica Harper in gothy makeup and a “Little Black Dress,” and predates the world’s fascination with reality TV by several decades. It’s worth tracking down — it’s really something else.

Ralph Bakshi made The Lord of the Rings years before Peter Jackson, but his animated version has often been forgotten. After that film, he decided to create something more personal, which would feature an extensive soundtrack that would all have more meaning when seen with the film.

American Pop was the result, again taking advantage of the technique of rotoscoping, which uses an already filmed movie as the basis to animate over to capture more lifelike movement. Beyond Bakshi, the film’s other artists contributed their own individual art styles and experiences to the finished product.

Starting in Imperial Russia during the late 1890s, this movie follows the journey of the Belinksy family from escaping to New York City all the way through the turmoil of the next century. When Zalmie’s mother dies in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — which went a long way toward ending sweatshops in this country — he begins to work in vaudeville, even after his throat is injured during World War I. Now with no singing voice of his own, Zalmie pushes the career of his wife Bella no matter what it takes, even working with mob boss Nicky Palumbo. She’s killed by a bomb and a gang war begins in earnest (Bakshi freely samples from other films here, basing the artwork on scenes from The Public Enemy).

Zalmie and Bella’s son Benny becomes a jazz pianist but is forced to marry the daughter of Palumbo. Seeking some sort of redemption for his mobbed out family, he enlists in World War II but is killed by a Nazi soldier.

His son Tony must watch as the mob bosses curse his grandfather for testifying against them. He grows up to drive across the nation, meet up with a band and become their writer before descending into drug addiction along with their lead singer, Frankie Heart.

At a tumultuous show in Kansas, Frankie overdoses backstage while Tony meets Little Pete, who he recognizes as his son from a one night stand with a waitress. He takes the boy to New York City as he goes deeper into drug dealing and addiction. Pete then becomes a dealer himself, selling to bands until he demands that they listen to his music before he sells them any more cocaine. The story ends with Pete playing Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” while we see images of all the members of the Belinksy family that have come before him.

The real actors in this movie include Ron Thompson as Tony and Pete; Lisa Jane Persky as Bella; Mews Small, who originated the role of Frenchy in Grease on Broadway as Frankie; Roz Kelly, better known as Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days, as Eva; Richard Moll, who must be in every 1980’s movie plays The Poet; Joey Camen, the voice of McGruff the crime dog, is Freddie; Lynda Wiesmeier, the July 1982 Playboy Playmate of the Month, as The Blonde who Frankie meets in Kansas and Lee Ving and Fear as the punk rockers.

American Pop is packed with bands and performers like Bob Dylan, George Gershwin, The Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Lou Reed and more, but tying up the music rights meant that this film wasn’t released to home video until 1998.

This film played repeatedly late nights on VH1 throughout the 2000’s. While heavy-handed in parts, it’s still worth a watch to see how music and violence equally shaped America over the last hundred years.

The last time I saw this movie, I was 7 years old and watching it under the stars at the Spotlight 88 drive-in theater in Beaver Falls, PA. Sadly, that theater was destroyed by a freak tornado that tore through the Pittsburgh/Southwestern PA area on May 31, 1985. This was a seminal location for my childhood, a place where I saw tons of double features and built memories that would provide the foundation for the movie love that I still hold dear today.

Woodrow “Woody” Wilkins (future Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom Michael Crawford) is a comic book artist whose devotion to realism extends to creating his own Condorman suit and attempting to fly off the Eiffel Tower. Instead of arresting him, his friend Harry (James Hampton, Uncle Harry the werewolf from the Teen Wolf movies), a CIA file clerk, asks him to exchange papers with someone in Istanbul.

Woody finds KGB spy Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera, Wicked Stepmother), who he tells that he is really Condorman. Impressed by how he protects her and how poorly she’s treated by her KGB boss Krokov (Oliver Reed!), she defects to the U.S., but only if Condorman helps her.

Woody’s already in love — he’s added Natalia to his comic as Laser Lady. When he’s asked to help her defect, he only agrees if the CIA designs him gear like his comic. Amazingly, they agree and the adventure is on.

Imagine James Bond crossed over with the Adam West-era Batman and you have an idea of how Condorman plays. For a Disney movie, Carrera is really sultry, which probably had an effect on my nine-year-old mind.

Before the days of licensing, Condorman had two cool tie-ins. A daily strip by Russ Heath and an ice cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins!

Mining town Valentine Bluffs hasn’t had a Valentine’s Day dance for over twenty years — ever since the accident. Two supervisors messed up and left several miners trapped below just so they could go to that dance. They didn’t even check the methane levels, which led to the explosion that trapped the men. Only Harry Warden survived, living off the bodies of his co-workers, until he could escape and kill the supervisors. He was committed for two decades and finally forgotten. Now, the dance is back on. Someone, somehow, is going to pay.

My Bloody Valentine right when slashers were king, complete with so much gristle that nine minutes of offensive violence was removed. Just imagine — the film starts with a nude woman impaled on pickaxe, so it still got worse than that.

Even after officials decide to close down the dance, a bunch of young miners have their own party at a bar. Why would you do that when Harry Warden wants to kill everyone? This movie is packed with death, from nailguns to the face and beheadings to people being impaled on shower heads.

It’s also a giallo-esque story, with the murders in the past warping one of the characters so badly that he or she commits the murders in the present. The mystery of who this character would end up being was kept hidden even from the actors until the final scene was filmed.

Interestingly, once the producers decided to shoot in the Sydney Mines in Nova Scotia, the town cleaned the sets up so they would be more presentable. This led to a set that looked like Disneyland, according to reports. The filmmakers had to go back and make the sets look darker to fit the script. That said, because the movie was filmed in legitimate mines 900 feet underground, special lighting devices were required because of the danger of methane explosions.