Director Joseph Zito really cranked ’em out in the 1980’s, with films like Invasion U.S.A., Red Scorpion, the original Missing in Action and 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. This one’s an interesting tweak to the slasher formula, plus it has what all gory movies need most: the imaginative grand guignol artistry of Tom Savini.

June 28, 1945: World War 2 may be coming to an end, but Rosemary Chatham is also ending her relationship with her boyfriend. The war’s gone on too long and she can’t wait for him any longer. As she attends the Avalon Bay graduation dance with her new boyfriend, they decide to slip out and make out at the point. Mid-tryst, a man in an army uniform impales them both, leaving behind a rose.

June 28, 1980: Pam McDonald has finally convinced the town to have a graduation dance, the first since Rosemary was murdered. Her boyfriend, Mark London (Christopher Goutman, who went on to be a soap opera director) is the town’s deputy and in charge as his boss, Sheriff  Fraser(Farley Granger, Strangers on a Train, What Have They Done to Your Daughters?, Amuck!) is heading to his cabin for the weekend.

Pam has some help — or well, she did — in Lisa, Sherry and Carl. The latter two are killed by The Prowler from the opening — Carl with a bayonet through his brain and Sherry by pitchfork. The blood is copious in both murders and the murderer leaves behind a rose.

At the dance, Pam gets upset when Lisa dances with her boyfriend and she gets a drink on her dress. Back at her dorm, the Prowler chases her, but at the last minute, she runs into Major Chatham (noted Hollywood crazy person rulebreaker Lawrence Tierney, who was arrested a dozen times in seven years and claimed he “threw away about seven careers through drink.” You may know him as the boss of the Reservoir Dogs and as Elaine’s dad on Seinfeld. During the shooting of that episode, he stole a butcher knife from the set and when Jerry Seinfeld asked him about it, he made threatening motions toward him while claiming he was just imitating Psycho. I could — and can and will and do — go on about Lawrence Tierney), a war veteran who grabs at her.

That’s when Pam realizes that the major’s daughter was Rosemary, the girl killed 35 years ago. Right around then, Lisa and Paul argue and he gets arrested for public drunkenness. Lisa decides to go swimming and gets her throat cut by The Prowler. Another girl, Allison, tries to find her and is killed as well.

Mark tries to call the Sheriff, but can’t get through. A shopkeeper tells the deputy that there are some kids up in the graveyard and when he investigates, Lisa’s body is in an open grave. They go to the major’s house to investigate and Mark is attacked and left for dead. Pam is chased through the house, learning that none other than the Sheriff is the Prowler. She is able to turn his gun on him and blow his head his shoulders.

After its all over, Pam returns to her dorm and discovers the bodies of Sherry and Carl. Carl comes to life and grabs her, but she’s just in the end of the movie hallucination shock scene that we all know and maybe love from Carrie.

The Prowler is mostly worth it for the extended gore sequences. It came out in the middle of the slasher cycle, so it has plenty of the hallmarks (maybe that’s not the right word) of the genre. You can catch it on Shudder and marvel at Savini’s handiwork for yourself. PLUS! They have it with Joe Bob Briggs commentary now!

Night of Fear and Inn of the Damned are two of Australia’s first horror films. Their director, Terry Bourke, would go on to create this film, a quasi-slasher stalker film that’s packed with plenty of weirdness.

Gordon Mason is a handyman that’s obsessed with Marie Coleby, a young singer who treats everyone around her with snarling contempt. The film starts with what seems like him taking care of her needs, but he really just has a blow up doll that he pretends is her. She treats everyone around her like garbage, but Mason demands an apology from her, unlike everyone else. Later, he spies on her being tied up by a boyfriend.

Later that day, he breaks into her apartment, continually plays one of her songs and rapes her, thinking that it’s what she wants from what he watched before. Oh yeah — this dude also spends much of the film wandering around in mirrored shades, wearing a speedo and showing off one hell of a porn mustache.

After all that, she ends up biting Mason, so he holds her upside down and drowns her in a fish tank. Welcome to Australian film!

Mason gets caught by a neighbor, so he kills the man and his dog, too. But the killer had no idea that Marie’s sister, Jenny, is coming to visit. She instantly finds Marie’s jewels in the fish tank and the neighbor’s dead dog. Soon, Mason has transferred his stalkerly affection to her and only two policemen (the younger one being Roger Ward from Mad Max and Turkey Shoot) can save her.

What follows are the kind of antics that set Australian films apart: cops being set on fire, dead bodies being hidden in sheds, people being shot over and over, cops trying to drown their suspects and so much more.

This film didn’t come out in the US until 1986 and has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray in this country. Is it worth a release? There have certainly been worse films put out. It’s cheesy and not a little ridiculous, but it ends up being pretty tense by the end.

If an old man tells you to not open the old mine, you should just leave the old mine closed. No one tells you these sorts of things without a reason. After all, there could be turtle creatures lurking in there, ready to kill everyone.

Our friends at Jensen Farley Productions took a break from In Search of Historic Jesus and The Outer Space Connection to produce this film that is a strange mix between 1950’s science fiction and a slasher. It’s also filled with one of the horniest male characters in the history of 1980’s horror and that’s saying plenty.

Awhile back, a silver mine closed after everyone in it but one person died. Brian Deering (John Crawford, The Towering Inferno) and Dan Ostroff are in town to make it happen, along with two young guys, Roger Lowrie and Mark Kinner. They’re making the closed mine modern and also find tons of bones, but no one complete skeleton. It’s at this point that I would move on to the next mine. But I’m not in The Boogens. I’m just a viewer. And I’m also a viewer who was five beers in at the drive-in while watching it.

Roger and Mark are soon joined by Mark’s girl Jessica (Anne-Marie Martin, Prom Night, the TV version of Dr. Strange) and another girl named Trish (Rebecca Balding, Silent Scream). While this is all going on, the landlady comes to open up their house, hits a deer, goes into a ditch, walks to the house in the freezing cold and then gets pulled into the basement and killed by what we can only assume is a Boogen.

Roger has, by now, been the horniest dude ever and mentioned how many times he’s going to have sex with Jessica and how long it’s been since they have had sex (twelve days, trust me, I heard it a hundred times). Through whim of fate, Mark and Trish also hook up and we’re treated to some heavy petting. But as Dr. Dealgood once told to the fine folks of Bartertown, “Dying time is here!”

Also: Greenwalt (Jon Lormer, who gets his cake in Creepshow) is sneaking around and it’s revealed that his father was the lone survivor of the mine. He’s gonna blow up the mine real good to get rid of the Boogens.

The last fifteen minutes finally being the energetic fun that Stephen King’s blurb about it promised. That is, if you find turtle monsters scary. Or whatever that are. But you know, I’ve fallen in love with this strange movie the more I’ve watched it.

Director James L. Conway also directed Hangar 18, as well as numerous TV shows (he’s currently working on Orville and The Magicians, was a producer on Charmed and even married Rebecca Balding during the filming).

If you want to check out The Boogens, you can grab the DVD or blu-ray at Olive Films.

This movie seems like it’s going to be a slasher, yet much like Eaten Alive, it exudes a level of real fear, sleaze and menace that few films reach. Yet it has a heart and joy to it that makes me love it. It’s also one of Becca’s favorite childhood films!

We open on Amy (Elizabeth Berridge, Amadeus) as she showers, but the killer isn’t a killer. It’s her little brother Joey, which is troubling on a few levels. He’s a horror film fan who loves practical jokes. And he goes along with Amy and her boyfriend Buzz, Liz and Richie to a traveling carnival.

They don’t follow any of the rules as they go to the event. Of course, they smoke weed. And then look at naked women. And heckle Madame Zena (played by Sylvia Miles, who was the original Sally on The Dick Van Dyke Show and earned Oscar nominations for Midnight Cowboy and Farewell, My Lovely before becoming close pals with Paul Morrissey and Warhol). And then sneak in and spend all night inside the Funhouse.

They decide to ride into the funhouse when they watch a man in a Frankenstein mask have sex with Zena. He comes too fast and then tries to get out of paying, at which point Zena makes fun of him. He goes crazy and murders her as the teens are trapped. And Richie is dumb enough to steal money from the carnival after all of that!

It turns out that the man in the mask is really Gunther, the son of the owner Conrad Straker. He’s hideously deformed, with long fangs and white hair. He’s played by The monster was played by Wayne Doba, a professional tap dancer and former mime who was also the otherworldly Octavio the Clown in Scarface.

His father riles him up and he kills Richie and goes after the rest of the kids. Liz is killed with an industrial fan. Buzz kills Conrad, but Gunther offs him. Finally, Amy is able to kill the monster with two gears. She barely escapes with her life as the robotic fat lady laughs at her. After all, it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

There’s a book version of the film by Owen West (Dean Koontz) which adds plenty of back story. As the film was delayed in post-production, it came out a long time before the movie.

Interestingly enough, Hooper would Tobe Hooper reuse several props when he directed the music video for Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself.”

My favorite scene here is the reveal of Gunther. And I almost forgot that William Finley from The Phantom of the Paradise shows up as a magician! This is a near-forgotten piece of horror film that is worth you finding and watching for yourself. You can grab a copy from Scream Factory or the Arrow UK import at Diabolik DVD.

In his series, My Year of Flops, Nathan Rubin said, “It’s telling that when a filmmaker succeeds in running his own studio, it’s because he’s learned to let his inner businessman veto his inner artiste. Coppola ran Zoetrope with his heart. It nearly destroyed him.” One from the Heart wasn’t just director Francis Ford Coppola’s dream project. It was his way of saying to producers like Robert Evans, who Coppola famously warred with as he made The Godfather, “Hey. I don’t need you. I can control costs and production and make a movie all on my own.”

Somehow, One from the Heart went from a personal love story to a $28 million dollar epic. It went from a movie to a Quixotic odyssey. Or was that 1979’s Apocalypse Now, a film that went from Joseph Conrad cover version to a sprawling epic that nearly killed several of the people in its orbit? From typhoons to nervous breakdowns, actors getting replaced mid-production, Martin Sheen having a heart attack, Marlon Brando showing up out of shape and not ready to perform, Dennis Hopper high on drugs before disappearing for days in the jungle and so much more, the film was delayed and delayed and delayed. The director himself succinctly put it this way: “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little, we went insane.” Yet the movie that emerged was a classic.

Now that Coppola was making a movie on his own terms, the odds were higher than they’d ever been before. The film had to be a winner with the public’s hearts, minds and wallets.

Coppola wanted to create something that he called Electric Cinema (I’ve also heard it called Live Cinema). There would be long takes, performances that felt like they belonged on the theater stage and cameras that would shoot from every angle to ensure coverage so that Coppola’s editing team could craft magic from the wealth of available film. This technique — which involves modern video editing years before it was used or even feasible — isn’t something that Coppola has given up on. He was part of what is said to be “an ambitious “Distant Vision” project as a “live cinema” experiment at his alma mater, the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television” in 2016 and published a book, Live Cinema and Its Techniques, in 2017.

Roger Ebert stated in his January 1, 1982 review, “Everybody knows that Coppola used experimental video equipment to view and edit his movie, sealing himself into a trailer jammed with electronic gear* so that he could see on TV what the camera operator was seeing through the lens. Of course, the film itself was photographed on the same old celluloid that the movies have been using forever; Coppola used TV primarily as a device to speed up the process of viewing each shot and trying out various editing combinations.” In short, Coppola did exactly what every modern production does today, particularly commercial shoots, using a more advanced version of the Video Assist that Jerry Lewis claimed to have invented (in truth, Jim Songer was the patent holder, read more in this fascinating article).

What emerged is a film that is just as much theater as it is a movie as it is live TV. It begins and ends with a curtain. And what is in-between is a mix between heartfelt passion and pure cinematic gloss. Everything that can be neon will be — even the names of the cast and crew. Yet the story that is told is between two people and could happen to anyone.

This isn’t the real Las Vegas, though. This is the Vegas of movies, of dreams, of what Vegas feels like but can’t be. It’s a world where the music of Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits provide their voices, as the film becomes a musical. Kind of. Sort of.

Hank (Frederic Forrest, The Rose, Apocalypse Now) and Frannie (Teri Garr, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Young Frankenstein) are a couple who’ve been together too long. Five years too long. They’re sick of one another, they’ve left another one too many times and now, this is the end of their story.

They spend their fifth anniversary with their dream lovers. Hank falls for Leila, who is youth and beauty and pure sex (it’s no accident that Nastassja Kinski plays her). Frannie picks the dark, handsome and mysterious Ray (Raul Julia, who I really don’t want to say is also in Street Fighter, but he was), a man who will give her what she always wanted: he will sing to her.

It’s not enough for Hank, who tracks down Frannie and tells her that he loves her, but she refuses his advances. He even follows her to the airport, where she is due for Bora Bora with her new lover, ready to leave reality behind for a life of idyllic passion. He tries to sing to her in his cracked voice but leaves in tears.

Back in their broken home, he’s lost, but she comes home to him, realizing that they are meant to be together.

My question is, “Why?” The film never shows us why the real world is better than a dream. Would you choose a ramshackle house and a life of arguments over dancing with Julia or a neon sign graveyard with Kinski gyrating against a Technicolor sky? No. You wouldn’t.

That’s my main issue with One from the Heart. Its heart seems in the wrong place, that these two mismatched souls belong together when the film repeatedly shows us that no, they belong with their fantasies.

Another nod to the stage is that the film features understudies, including Rebecca De Mornay. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t call out one of the best parts of the film — Harry Dean Stanton, who elevates every single piece of film he ever wandered into. Here, he’s the owner of the neon graveyard.

What amazes me is that Coppola would try to direct another musical, particularly after his work on 1968’s Finian’s Rainbow led many in Hollywood to brand him as someone who was hard to work with and hard to keep on budget. Again, I turn to the superior words of Nathan Rabin, who had this to say about the film: “As Coppola tells it on Finian’s Rainbow‘s shockingly candid audio commentary, he was the wrong man for the job in every conceivable way. Coppola fancied himself a New Wave-style auteur. Warner Bros saw him as a cheap gun-for-hire.”

While One to the Heart was intended as a small follow-up to Apocalypse Now, obviously things didn’t turn out that way. For Coppola, it meant going back to the studio system. Every movie he made for almost two decades — The Outsiders, The Godfather: Part III, Jack, The Rainmaker and even a return to working with Robert Evans (this one’s a whole other tale in and out of itself) on The Cotton Club was all to pay back the debts from this film.

Should you see it? You better after I wrote over 1,200 words about it! But seriously, the color palette of this film is something you won’t see outside of Suspiria. It’s a music video in an era where that art form was still growing. And it informs later works like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is even more overt in its reference to the works of Mario Bava than simply loving his brighter color choices. And if you watch this on DVD, you even get the choice to simply watch the musical numbers, which may improve on the film for some.

*Indeed, Coppola would direct a lot of the film from “The Silver Fish, a mobile HQ, fully equipped with a kitchenette, espresso machine and onboard Jacuzzi,” which had a loudspeaker that he could issue orders from. Insane. And by insane, I mean brilliance.

You remember that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to explain why he didn’t steal Queen/David Bowie’s “Under Pressure?”

I’d like to hear whoever did the music for this movie to explain how they added a “da na na” to the theme from Halloween. Then again, there’s plenty more that this movie owes to that film.

A killer with a kitchen knife is on the prowl, killing off college kids. And he’s on the way to Lanier College during finals.

Meanwhile, a fraternity stages a mass shooting to help their members pass a chemistry test. How does this plan work? Who comes up with such a plan?

While students prepare for the end of the year, the killer is hiding among them. We have Courtney, who is the Final Girl, of course. Her roommate is Lisa, who is all into the hot professor. Well, not really hot. He’s a professor, though.

For some reason, all of the pledges can’t dare anyone. But Gary is in love with Janet and pins her, so he gets punished by being tied up to a tree, his underwear filled with ice and then sprayed with shaving cream. What? Where did this ritual come from? Who goes through with this? Even the rest of the town, like the security guard, follow these rules. What is the deal with this school?

Well, he’s tied up and the killer gets him. Then it gets his girlfriend, too. While that’s going on, Wildman, a frat guy, is looking for pain pills when he gets killed by a Universal weight machine. His friend Mark tries to find him and he gets killed.

Then we have Radish, who isn’t gay in the movie but would totally be a proud out character if this was made after 1981. He’s constantly looking for killers and has a great poster collection of old films. All his knowledge of murder doesn’t help, as he’s instantly killed.

Lisa tries to model for her boyfriend in the nude, but she gets killed, too. And now we’re down to one and the killer even catches an arrow and stabs the coach with it when he tries to save Courtney. But then he falls into a hole and she stabs him to death. That’s it. That’s the fight he puts up.

Written and directed by Jimmy Huston (My Best Friend Is a Vampire), this is pretty much Halloween with a killer who was too lazy to get a mask (he was also the fight coordinator for the film).

That said, I wasn’t bored, I laughed out loud at many of the things that Radish did and said, and I enjoyed the arrow catching scene. If you want to see it for yourself, Shout! Factory has released it on blu-ray and you can also watch it for free on Amazon Prime. You’ll be filled with questions. Like, how much chaffing did the short shorts of the 80’s cause?

Real-life husband and wife Richard Benjamin (Catch-22 and the original Westworld) and Paula Prentiss (The Stepford Wives) play John and Mary, who have inherited his uncle’s house in Eerie, PA. If that line made you laugh, then Saturday the 14th is for you.

Along with their kids Debbie and Billie, they try and fix the house up. But they’re opposed by Waldemar (Jeffrey Tambor, Arrested Development) and Yolanda, two vampires who want the book of evil within the house. Billy finds the book and with each turn of the page, he unleashes monster after monster into the house.

Soon, the TV can only get The Twilight Zone, sandwiches, dishes and nosy neighbors all disappear and eyeballs show up in John’s coffee cup. It’s nothing out of the ordinary to our heroes, who seem blind to the supernatural going on all around them.

Waldemar gets into the house as a bat, so they hire an exterminator (Severn Darden, Kolp from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) who turns out to be Van Helsing.

After a housewarming party where the monsters kill every guest, we learn that the vampires are the good guys and Van Helsing just wants the book so he can rule the world. The good guys — now who include the vamps — win and Jon and Mary get an upscale home while Waldemar and Yolanda settle into the cursed home.

Director Howard R. Cohen also wrote Unholy Rollers, Deathstalker and Barbarian Queen before choosing this as his first film. He also directed Space Raiders, Time Trackers and Saturday the 14th Strikes Back.

Some trivia — every time you see Prentiss, look closely. She’s hiding the cast on her arm, as she broke it before filming began.

Also, this is Benjamin’s last feature film as an actor, as he started directing with 1982’s My Favorite Year.

While sold as a parody of slasher films, this movie more accurately makes light of monster movies as a whole. If you’re looking for other funnier horror films of a similar bent, I’d recommend Wacko, Pandemonium, Student Bodies or Class Reunion.

I remember this movie running on HBO quite often in my youth. It’s a pleasant enough diversion, almost an Airplane! version of horror or a Mad Magazine come to life. The monsters are way better than you’d think they’d be, too!