EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this more slasher than giallo movie on Thursday, Jan. 19 at 7:30 PM ET at The Little Theatre in Rochester, NY (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.

There was a moment two minutes into this movie, when a slasher-like scene turned into a Cats-like play, that my mind was blown. And there was a moment halfway through when a body was torn in two that I jumped off my couch, screaming, “Soavi, I love you!”

There’s no other way to say it — this movie is completely crazy. Is it because of Michael Soavi’s (The Sect, Cemetary Man) direction? Or the script from George Eastman (better known Nikos Karamanlis from Antropophagus and, well, kinda sorta Nikos in Absurd, a movie so brutal that it inspired a murderous black metal band)? Why ask questions? Why not just sit back and enjoy the mayhem?

The entire movie takes place in a theater, where actors and a crew are creating a musical about the Night Owl, a mass murderer. Alicia (Barbara Cupisti, The Church, Cemetary Man) sprains her ankle, so she and Betty sneak out to a mental hospital to get some help. While there, they see Irving Wallace, a former actor who went on a murder spree, which has continued in the insane asylum. He uses a syringe to kill an attendant and hides in Betty’s car.

Because Alicia left, the director fires her while Betty is killed with a pickaxe outside. Alicia finds the body and calls the police (one of them is Soavi, who spends an extended scene asking if he looks like James Dean), who lock them inside the theater and guard the premises. Because, you know, that’s the way the police handle these things.

The director is inspired — the play will now be about Irving Wallace and everyone must stay the night to rehearse, even the rehired Alicia. While rehearsing the first scene, Wallace dons the killer’s owl costume and strangles, then stabs one of the other actors in front of everyone.

Then, Wallace cuts the phone and starts killing one person at a time. It’s at this point that this movie goes off the rails and does some rails. A power drill going through someone? Yep. Hacking someone up with an axe? Yep. A woman cut in half that sprays blood all over an entire room full of people? It’s got that, too. A dude getting chainsawed until the saw runs out of gas and then getting decapitated? Oh yes.

Wallace takes all of the bodies and blares the theme from Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin while feathers fall. Alicia finds the key to escape and a gun while Wallace pets a black cat, his face covered by the owl mask.

Alicia has no idea how a gun works and can’t take the safety off. Wallace chases her, even stabbing him in the eye ala Halloween. The higher in the theater Alicia climbs, Wallace keeps following, in a POV shot that makes it feel like he’s climbing toward us. She cuts the cord he is climbing and he falls to his death. But this is a slasher — albeit one through the eyes of Soavi — and the killer comes back until he is set on fire.

The next day, Alicia goes back to the theater to find her watch. Willy, the janitor, tells her that they took eight bodies out, which makes her realize that Wallace is still alive. He shows up, unmasked, and tries to kill her all over again. After hearing Willy tell her how she didn’t even have to think to kill him and that the gun would do it all once the safety is off, she unloads a bullet “right in-between the eyes.”

Alicia wanders out of frame, toward a bright white doorway that we first saw just before Wallace attacked her. And in this scene, we can really see why Soavi stands ahead of the pack when it comes to horror. That doorway offers escape, not just from Wallace, but from the film itself, as her fictional character, her final girl, is removed from our minds. The killer lives long after the victims and survivors, so the camera pans down to reveal Wallace, blood pouring from behind his eyes, and he begins to laugh. Soavi said that he intended this to be a wink to the conventions of the slasher, where the killer never really dies.

This film was produced by Joe D’Amato, who had a scene from this movie play within his 9 1/2 Weeks rip-off Eleven Days, Eleven Nights. Also known as Aquarius and Deliria, it features an amazing soundtrack by Simon Boswell. And Soavi — in his first time as a director — shines with intricate camera work (it’s very Argento), complete with a wordless final twenty minutes of Alicia fighting against Wallace.

The end of this film approaches near surrealism within the horror narrative. This gets the highest review I can give. It’s a slasher that transcends the genre to become real art.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Garbage day! This was first on the site on December 24, 2019.

Remember Silent Night, Deadly Night? Well, that movie was a big deal before it was pulled from theaters and then became an even bigger deal on home video. A sequel was demanded and it was delivered, but it was made on a shoestring, with director Lee Harry trying to make something other than a greatest hits reel of the first film. Seriously, though, this movie is nearly the entire first film with a couple of new scenes.

Ricky Caldwell, the 18-year-old brother of Billy from the first movie, is in a mental hospital after a series of murders. He’s being interviewed by psychiatrist Dr. Henry Bloom, which allows us to watch pretty much the entire first film before Ricky goes off on his own rampage.

Ricky did have a chance once, because he fell in love with Jennifer Statson (Elizabeth Kaitan, Savage Dawn, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood and several of the Vice Academy films). However, her ex-lover Chip sends Ricky over the edge, which ends with Ricky hooking his head up to some jumper cables and then him killing his girlfriend just because. Then he goes even crazier, causing cars to nearly hit him (an incredible stunt) and then yells, “Garbage Day!” and wipes out everyone.

Ricky is captured by the police, but now we flash forward (or back) to the beginning of this film, where he kills the doctor and goes after Mother Superior, whose face now looks like Catholic school lunch pizza. Billy gets stopped, but he isn’t dead. And why should he be? After all, it’s Christmas.

You have so many options to watch this movie with. You can see it for free on Tubi or Amazon Prime. Or watch it with or without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. Finally, you can get the collectors set from Shout Factory, complete with an action figure.

Roberta Findlay knows how to make movies that entertain me and here, she takes a possession movie, sets it during the holidays and fills it with berserk set pieces and man, this movie got me through the day before all the family Christmas craziness begins and you know, Roberta has never let me down with a single thing she’s made.

Parker Brothers wouldn’t let this movie use Ouija, so there’s a stone hand that writes from the spirit world but who cares? This is so many times better than the Ouija films that got made by Hasbro years later and that’s because this is so strange. Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers, in the only movie she ever made) and her husband Ray (Roger Neil) have moved into the apartment of a dead psychic who has left behind that fortune telling object which allows Jennifer to be taken over by industrialist William Graham who gets her to figure out who killed him.

You can’t destroy that hand. A garbage man tries and strange creatures appear all over his body and he ends up stabbing himself in a scene that kind of destroyed my mind and when Ray tries later, he literally loses his head. All this happens while Findlay shoots in the New York City apartments that could be next door to The Sentinel or Inferno and certainly have the Argento lightning style intact from that movie. Plus there’s a gender switching killer played by Pam LaTesta on the loose like a John Waters character in a Bill Lustig movie and there’s even a scene set in the legendary occult store The Magickal Childe.

I realize that Roberta hates her own movies but I won’t hold that against her. I always find something to enjoy, like how the heroine has the wildest clothes, all berets and puffed-out sleeves and even a pair of red overalls. She dresses like a lunatic and it’s frankly charming, plus she screams nearly as much as a woman in a Juan López Moctezuma movie.

There are people who will say that this movie is trash and boring and those are people you want nothing at all to do with. Yes, this is trash, but it’s glorious. It’s the kind of movie I leave on when people come over and hope they ask me what it’s all about so I can talk about it with them. Just writing about it now I want to go back and watch it again. Will you sit down and check it out with me?

You can watch this on Tubi.

PRESCRIPT: Credit where it’s due. I wouldn’t even know about this movie if I didn’t see that White Slaves of Chinatown planned on posting it on YouTube this week. Follow them and if you can, donate because they haven’t had the easiest time of it the last few years.

Released in Poland as Nocni goście (Nocturnal Guests), in Germany as a sequel to Don’t Open ‘Till Christmas titled Fröhliche Weihnacht 2 and in nearly every other country in the world other than right here where it was made, Night Visitors is something else, a movie that predates Funny Games in its home invasion theme but unlike other films in that genre like The Last House On the Left, it remains completely bloodless. There’s even a line on some box covers that claims “This year, Halloween has come early,”  yet because it’s set on Christmas Eve, wouldn’t Halloween be late?

Director David Fulk has one other directing credit, 2000s Road to Flin Flon and that’s it, which is a  shame. He co-wrote this with Norman Smith, who edited the films Dead Ringer, Streamers, Graveyard Shift and the videos for “Time After Time” and “She Bop.”

Fulk shot a trailer for the film with actor Daniel Hirsch playing the mysterious Travis, which he also played in the final project. He’d just played the villain in The Zero Boys but this was a role that may have a similar concept but would need some more mental edge and less physicality. Continental Film Group agreed to produce and changed the name from The Whitmores Are Having Company to the much more provocative Night Visitors.

It was shot in February of 1988 in Sharon, PA which is minutes away from my hometown. Sharon is also the home of The Club, that locking mechanism that keeps thieves from stealing cars, and also the device that pays for much of the town staying alive, keeping tourist places open such as Reyer’s, which was once the largest shoe store in the U.S.; the original Quaker Steak and Lube, a chicken wing restaurant that local Trent Reznor (well, Mercer, PA close enough) eats at every Christmas Eve with his family; the Buhl Manor; a cemetery with crosses for every day a hostage was in Iran; Kraynaks, which has an annual Christmas tree walk and The Winner, a place that sells fancy dresses to old women while a dude plays piano for them. It’s an odd place yet perfect for this film.

In the book A Scary Little Christmas: A History of Yuletide Horror Films, 1972-2020 by Matthew C. DuPée, Fulk got into what inspired him: “Not to go into too much personal history, but I did grow in kind of Whitmore-esque environment. At that time in my life, I felt a need to skewer the artificiality, the denial of emotion, the removed-from-the-real-world nature of that milieu. So I aimed to bring the “real world” to them in the form of these four characters — archetypes, really — embodying the aspects of life they most denied and feared. And Christmas seemed to be the logical time to set it, since that’s when families with adult children are most likely to be together and a time when all that phony good cheer can be magnified. As for the “vibe” of the film, I was always partial to dark comedy during and after my college days in theater and film and it’s a style that lent itself to that story. I didn’t want to do just a mad slasher type of movie. That certainly would have been off-putting for the intended audience and it wouldn’t jibe with the vibe I was trying to get across…I was kind of toying with the viewer’s expectations.”

The film takes place in Shaker Heights — to quote the Hold Steady, “We used to shake it up in Shaker Heights” and also the hometown of WWE jerks the Beverly Brothers, but not really because those guys were from Minnesota and not even brothers — where the Whitmores have gathered for Christmas Eve. Lloyd (David Schroeder, who was in 150 plus movies and is still acting as of 2021) is the father, a man who seems like he’s a sitcom dad from the 50s, while Carolyn (Rochelle Savitt) is the strict mother. They’ve worked hard over the years — “We’ve done the best we can” — to raise their three children, accountant and 26-year-old virgin Tad (Joe Whyte, whose voice you may recognize as Chris Redfield in the remake of Resident Evil; he’s also in Assault of the Party Nerds), Holy Trinity College freshman and ham radio enthusiast Robbie (Richard Gabai, who directed, wrote and starred in two films for Menahem Golan’s 21st Century, Virgin High and Hot Under the Collar, as well as Vice Girls; he also acted in plenty of memorable films like Demon Wind, Nightmare Sisters, Thirteen Erotic Ghosts and Glass Trap) and high school senior Katie (Jeralyn Fabre), who is expected to also attend the same college as everyone else. There’s also the grandmother (Billye Ree Wallace, who is also in Shrunken Heads and was Nana on Seinfeld) who constantly complains about how dirty the house is.

As they prepare for their holiday festivities, we see how the other half lives, that is the antagonists led by the aforementioned Travis, who lords over his assembled family which is made up of his crimped-haired, Madonna-styled lover Lucy (Michele Winding, who is also in Gabai’s Blood Nasty), the bullying Earl (Richard Rifkin, who has nearly thirty movies on his resume, including non-sex appearances in Private adult films and blockbusters like Eragon and The Martian; like many folks here he’s also in Blood Nasty) and Reerah (Gregory Carlton Battle), who surprises dad when he reveals that despite being black, he came from wealth and learned everything the real way on the streets.

Travis and his — well, use the Manson form of family — visit as if they are carolers and burst inside the house, pulling a gun, ruining the traditional dinner and unwrapping all the gifts. The family is led downstairs and one by one brought upstairs as they are interviewed by Travis who has one wish: for someone special to kill him so he can go to Heaven and meet God.

It’s not Tad, who finds himself unable to rise and then does rise in other ways as he shares a bed with Lucy, surprising her with how good he is despite a total lack of experience. Also, as an aside, the JC Penney’s in Sharon’s Shenango Valley Mall once had a big display of MTV fashion in 1984 with the guy’s side basically being neon and sleeveless Union Jack shirts like Joe Elliot and the girl’s side was all push-up bras and lace gloves so even pre-teens could be Material Girls and I always think about the videos playing while kids begged their parents for rock and roll clothes in the middle of a dying steel town mall.

Robbie is lost inside his world of ham radio — which if you think about it is the less socially respectable social media of the past –and physically can’t compete with Travis, puking all over the doily covered furniture and being sent upstairs to be watched by Earl.

Reerah is in the basement, watching over mom, dad and grandma, who shares a kiss with Travis that shakes her to her core. It turns out that six months after marrying her husband — she never says Lloyd’s dad — she made love to a working man who stole him briefly from her. A man that looks exactly like Travis but 51 years later. As Travis tries to seduce Katie — which isn’t hard, as she wants to scream at baseball games, sing in elevators and dance in New York City — the family attacks, knocking out Earl and Reerah, which brings down a barely dressed Tad and Lucy just in time for Lloyd to push Travis into the Christmas tree, killing him.

Or does he? Because moments later, he’s been transformed, saying how he touched the face of the Almighty and is a changed man. Strangely, the whole family has been transformed by this night and not by violence; this is kind of like their Christmas Carol except, you know, one warped by sex, strangness and a lunatic who might be the sanest person in the story.

Night Visitors never came out on VHS in the U.S., nor is it streaming anywhere other than YouTube and it’s also never been on DVD or blu ray. This is a movie where not much happens, a lot of talking occurs, everyone is absolutely strange and there’s not really a protagonist or antagonist as much as there are characters that interact. I find it incredibly fascinating, a holiday horror movie that is not a horror film at all, one I had never heard of that had somehow been made just feet from where I was often in 1987.

At one point, there were double-digit drive-ins in the greater Pittsburgh area. Today, we’re lucky to still have The Comet, The Brownsville Drive-In, The RiversidDrive-InIn Theatre and, as always, The Dependable, now playing first-run movies and friendly to families after decades of being literally a pit of lust and sin. Sigh.

In 1987, Tom Ferrante (who also worked on the music for Raiders of the Living Dead) directed and wrote this film and not only was he able to get James Karen to narrate it, he got a who’s who of horror at the time, everyone from Bobbie Breese and Linnea Quigley to Forest J. Ackerman, George Romero, John Russo, Tom Savini, Russell Streiner and Sam Sherman all talking about the days of drive-ins as well as their horror careers, intercut with trailers for Terror Is a Man, The Blood Drinkers, Theatre of Death, Brides of Blood, Girls for Rent and clips for Nurse Sherri, Blazing Stewardresses, Night of the Living Dead, Don’t Open the Window, The Green Slime, Satan’s Sadists, Ghoulies, The Human Duplicators, Horror of the Blood Monsters, Assignment Terror, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, Psychos In Love and From Beyond.

There’s a moment where you get to hear Russo and Romero discuss There’s Always Vanilla, which if you’re a Pittsburgh movie fan is worth watching this whole thing for.

Once, I was looking for a drive-in in White Oak that had a swimming pool and you could swim under the screen and pick what movie you wanted to watch, as a different one was shown on each side. An older gentleman noticed me wandering and asked what I was looking for. When I told him, he laughed and said, “You’re standing on it. This parking lot is where it used to be.”

The past is gone and further back in the rear view every day. All we can do is try to capture it today, write about it and keep those warm memories. As a wise man has said — and will say — many times, “The drive-in will never die.”