You can pish posh this movie by its title or the fact that it rips off A Nightmare on Elm Street or that it’s ridiculous that it has a slasher who has a Warlock guitar with a giant drill at the end. Or you can just do what I did: utterly enjoy every single minute of it. Also, of note, this is the only slasher series to be completely directed by women.

I never saw the original film and I’m here to tell you that I don’t think that matters at all. All you need to know is that Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard from Wings) survived, teaming with her sister to kill the dreaded Driller Killer (and no, not the one from the Abel Ferrara film.

Now that she’s in high school, Courtney is dealing with nightmares from the ordeal from the first film. She’s also made friends with Amy (Kimberly McArthur, Playboy Playmate January 1982), Sheila (Juliette Cummins from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the scummiest of the entire series) and Sally (Heidi Kozak, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, who noticed during filming that her jean shorts got shorter every day, due to a costumer literally doing that each night, continuity be damned), who have all started an unnamed band (although the songs are performed by the very Go-Go’s-sounding group Wednesday Week).The girls decide to go away for the weekend so they can work on songs, but they end up watching Rock ‘n Roll High School (director Deborah Brock would go on to direct the sequel to that movie) which leads to a pillow fight and Sheila ripping off her bra, because women can make exploitation movies too.

Surprise! Bros Jeff and T.J. sneak up and spy on the girls before busting in and frightening them. The house is a mess as a result. This image sums up everything there is to know about this movie:

If it seems strange that this movie often focuses on name brand sodas. Mostly Pepsi, but also New York Seltzer. Yet I know that there’s also no way that any of those brands want to be associated with this film.

Later that night, Courtney and Valerie fall asleep in the same bed and our heroine has a dream that the killer murders her friend, then she wakes up in the kitchen floor. Her visions get more and more intense, but the arrival of potential boyfriend Matt makes her happy.

I say that and then within moments, she sees Sally’s zits burst her entire head open. No one can find Sally, so the cops get called. Officers Krueger and Vorhees show up — this is also a film that refers to the last movie’s house as the Cravens and Courtney’s last name is Bates — but assume the teens are all on drugs when Sally shows up alive. Oh yeah — Sally has the last name Burns to pay homage to Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who was played by Marilyn Burns.

Everyone else goes to town for dinner, leaving Courtney alone with Matt. He surprises her with a cake, like he’s the Jake Ryan to her Samantha Baker, and they start to have sex. Keep in mind that she never blows out the candles and we keep cutting to the cake, blazing away. The killer appears and impales Matt, throwing one of his bloody appendages onto the burning candles. He chases Courtney downstairs right into her friends, who call 911. Of course, the cops blow them off, so they’re on their own against a 1950’s rockabilly greaser with a total 1980’s guitar, trapped in a neon-hued house with Patrick Nagel prints on the walls.

Just as Sally argues with the cops, we see the drill come through the backside of the wall, covered in her blood. Sheila and T.J. get injured and almost get away, but the killer catches them after an angry neighbor (producer Don Daniel as Mr. Damnkids) tells them to get off his driveway and T.J. bites the big drill.

Meanwhile, Courtney, Amy and Jeff try to leave in a car, but the killer drills right through Jeff. The girls run into the house and barricade themselves inside, which means that they don’t come to the aid of Sheila, who gets killed after the killer breaks the fourth wall, saying “Now it’s time for the fun part,” and sings a song called “Let’s Buzz.”

Should every slasher have musical numbers? Nope. But at this point of the movie, I was inclined to follow this wherever it led.

Amy falls to her death as the girls run away through a construction site, while Courtney uses a propane tank to light the killer up. In the morning, the police come and we think it’s all over. No, this movie has more endings than a Tolkien film. First, Amy comes back to life and laughs in the killer’s voice. Then, Courtney wakes up in Matt’s arms, who ends up being the killer. Finally, she is in a mental asylum and the killer’s drill appears near her bed.

Originally called Don’t Let Go, this is probably one of the strangest slashers I’ve seen that doesn’t have Bigfoot kill someone with an oven (Night of the Demon, please stand up). There’s also a scene where a dead and frozen chicken leaps from a refrigerator ala the zombie head in probably Fulci’s only contribution to Zombi 3, then proceeds to leak chocolate sauce/blood all over our protagonist.

Slumber Party Massacre 2 is 77 minutes of your life that you’ll be glad you wasted. From catchy 80’s singalongs to softcore dreams that descend into graphic violence and a killer who owns every scene of the film — and has nothing to do with the first or third movies in this trilogy — this is why I stay up all night and watch movies.

You can get the Shout Factory release at Diabolik DVD or watch it for free with your Amazon Prime membership.

PS – Don’t steal anything from this movie. The notice at the end reads: Any unauthorized exhibition, distribution or copying of this film or any part thereof [including soundtrack] is an infringement of the relevant copyright and will subject the infringer to severe civil and criminal prosecution as well as a midnight call from the Driller-Killer.

Mara Cecova is a diva and the star of a whole new way of performing Verdi’s Macbeth. But when she’s hit by a car as she argues with the director in the middle of the street, her role goes to her understudy, Betty. Ironically, in his book Profondo Argento, director Dario Argento claimed that the person playing the role of Betty, Cristina Marsillach, was the most difficult actress he would ever work with.

Despite her initial worries, Betty becomes an instant success on her opening night. At the same time, a black-gloved killer sneaks into one of the boxes to watch before murdering a stagehand with a coathanger. Grab your barf bags and motion sickness pills, everyone, Argento is behind the camera!

Of all the powerful shocks in Opera, perhaps the one that means the most to the viewer is that we share Betty’s torture — she’s repeatedly gagged, tied up and forced to watch the killer at work again and again as he tapes needles under her eyes. If she blinks too long or shuts her eyes, they’ll be shredded. It’s like Fulci’s wettest dream ever. In the same way, we are nearly complicit with the crimes we are forced to watch, particularly because they get more and more artfully composed.

Throw in the fact that Betty believes that the hooded killer is the same person who murdered her mother, she follows the giallo path for a protagonist and confides in someone else rather than the police. Her reason? The killer may know who she is.

Inspector Alan Santini (Urbano Barberini, Demons) is on the case, because there are so many clues, like the fact that the producer’s pet ravens were found dead after the show. As for Betty, she runs from the police and calls her agent Mira (Daria Nicolodi, Argento’s former wife and the writer of Suspiria and star of Shock) for advice.

Betty’s costume gets cut to ribbons, so she asks the wardrobe girl for help. While she works on the dress, they find a gold bracelet that they can almost read. But here comes the killer and his needles again, forcing her to watch him kill one more time. The wardrobe girl accidentally swallows the bracelet, so of course, we watch as the murderer slices her throat open to get it back.

Betty runs back to her apartment where Santini is waiting. He promises to send a detective named Soavi to watch over her (yep, The Church director Michele Soavi), but she doesn’t trust the man and leaves her apartment. That’s when her agent answers the next knock on the door by looking through the peephole. What follows is the most grand kill in the entire film — which is saying something — as we follow the bullet POV-style out of the gun and directly through her eyeball. Again, Fulci is somewhere wringing his hands.

Nicolodi had just ended a long relationship with Argento and did not want to be in this film. However, the shocking and complicated murder of her character changed her mind, even if she had to deal with an explosive device being put on the back of her head to achieve the final shot.

Betty escapes the killer again and runs to the opera house, convinced there is a connection between the murderer and her long dead and totally abusive mother. The next night, as she performs, the producer unleashes what is left of his ravens in the hopes that they’ll find the killer. Oh, they do alright — tearing his eyeball out of his head — FULCI ARE YOU THERE, IT’S ME DARIO — and rewarding you, the viewer, with POV shots that threaten you with vertigo. I’m getting dizzy even typing this.

I don’t want to give away the killer or even the second ending where the killer isn’t really dead. I just want to talk about the sheer Argento-ness of the final scene, where Betty wanders in a field and releases a lizard, giving him his freedom. Argento claims that this ending was inspired by Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Of interest, the director does NOT like the Michael Mann movie Manhunter. Me? Well, I love that movie. But I’d love to see Argento’s take. There’s was also a thought to another ending where Betty would fall in love with the killer.

Your enjoyment of this film really comes down to how much you like shocking amounts of bloodshed and Argento’s arty side. He based the film on his own failed staging of Macbeth, basing the role of the nervous producer on himself. And the idea of pins under the eyes? It comes from a joke about how Argento hated when people looked away during the death scenes in his films.

Believe it or not, Orion Pictures planned on releasing an R-rated version of this in the US called Terror at the Opera with eleven minutes of mayhem removed, as well as the Swiss Alps epilogue. Argento refused and Orion was losing money at a fast clip, so the movie only saw a limited video release. 

Opera is something else — filled with style and brutality. I loved it, but remember my warning as to how much you can handle. You can check it out on for free with an Amazon Prime membership.

Before Renny Harlin did Die Hard 2 (or The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). Before Viggo Mortensen was in the Tolkien films. Before Tiny “Zeus” Lister was Deebo in Friday. Before Kane Hodder played Jason for the first time in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.

Before all these things, there was Prison.

In 1964, inmate Charlie Forsythe (Mortensen) is electrocuted for a crime he did not commit. And thirty years later, when the Creedmore Prison is re-opened, his spirit is there and ready to get revenge on Eaton Sharpe (Lane Smith, district attorney Jim Trotter III in My Cousin Vinny), who knew he was innocent. Now, he’s the warden!

Unless Forsythe repays the debt he owes, every inmate will die, including  Burke (also played by Mortensen). And what a cast of felons, including Lincoln Kilpatrick (Chosen Survivors), Tom Everett (Death Wish 4: The Crackdown), André De Shields (The Wiz himself!), the previously noted Lister, Larry Jenkins (Fletch), Hodder and more. And according to IMDB, “Most of the inmate extras in the film were portrayed by real-life inmates from a nearby prison to add realism to their performances. The armed guards on the towers were, of course, armed with live ammo at the time. Stephen E. Little (Rhino) was a former Hollywood stuntman, who was still a member of SAG, who happened to be serving time for manslaughter that he committed during a bar-room brawl.”

Helping the convicts is a doctor who advises the prison be closed, played by Chelsea Field (Teela from Masters of the Universe and wife of Scott Bakula).

Sure, it’s the same idea as Destroyer, Shocker and House 3/The Horror Show. But it’s entertaining enough and has a surprising amount of gore. It won’t bore you, that’s for sure. There’s a great scene of a convict’s guts exploding onto the mess hall as everyone tries to eat that I loved!

Scream Factory put this out awhile back. You should grab it and see what you think.

George Henderson (John Lithgow) and his family are heading back from a trip to the Cascade mountains — the first trip where he hasn’t bagged an animal. That’s when he hits a big critter with his Ford Country Squire. More than that, he’s hit a sasquatch. And once he gets it strapped to the roof, he learns that it’s not dead. Nope, now it’s part of the family.

Harry soon escapes their suburban home before going wild throughout Seattle before becoming part of the family — just in time to leave them behind and go back home. He just has to avoid being captured or killed by Jacques LaFleur, a hunter who has been after Bigfoot so long that he’s become a joke.

This is another of the films that Becca watched nearly every single day, along with every Halloween film. She knows every character by name, every beat of the story and is able to explain each and every nuance of the story.

Hey — I’m always happy when Don Ameche shows up in a movie. Since my childhood, he’s always been known as John, half of The Bickersons with Frances Langford as Blanche. Here, he plays Dr. Wallace Wrightwood, a man whose life was ruined by his search for Bigfoot.

Rick Baker did an amazing job on the FX here, placing Predator actor Kevin Peter Hall into a complex costume that makes him look exactly as we imagine a Sasquatch to look like. I love the sequence at the end where Harry’s real family reveals themselves in the forest, including a child! No wonder this movie won an Academy Award for Best Make-Up.

Here’s some trivia for you. Co-writer Bill Martin also wrote songs for Harry Nilsson’s “Harry” album and can be seen wearing a bear costume on the album’s art. That’s where Harry gets his name — he’s named for Nilsson (Son of Dracula). Plus, cryptozoologist Loren Coleman claims that David Suchet’s Jacques character is based on Rene Dahinden, a Canadian by way of Switzerland researcher who was a big advocate for the Patterson-Gimlin film. He also claims that Ameche’s character is a combination of Sasquatch researchers John Green, Peter Byrne and Dr. Grover Krantz.

This led to a TV series and will be, one imagines, one day remade as an inferior reimagining. You can watch it for yourself on Netflix.

Cry Wilderness comes from that most painful of all movie genres — the earnest family-friendly film with a message. This is the kind of movie that your church youth group would show on a Saturday afternoon after some lessons on Jesus. But see, I grew up Catholic, so my Saturday afternoons were spent watching Hammer films and hoping that my family would go to church that night so I could stay up watching Chiller Theater and sleeping in.

Once you grow up, some of those movies seem cloying and ridiculous. I didn’t encounter Cry Wilderness as a kid. No, I got blasted with both barrels of its strangeness as a fully grown adult.

This is the kind of movie that demands that you be OK with the fact that Bigfoot can show up and visit young Paul Cooper and warn him that his father will die unless he leaves his fancy school behind and, well, cry wilderness.

It’s also a movie where seasoned outdoorsmen have no idea how to properly handle weapons, continually pointing them directly at people, planting the muzzle of rifles into dirt and even running with their fingers directly on the trigger.

There are also mystical Native Americans, a park ranger who never wears his uniform, raccoons who know how to knock on doors, a child who is obsessed with said raccoons to the point where he allows them to get in the kitchen sink and eat, a bad guy principal who is the worst Xerox of William Daniels ever, a school that’s cool with a student wearing a Bigfoot medallion as part of his uniform and moments where the film goes completely out of focus. Make those numerous moments.

Are you cool with seeing Bigfoot’s zipper? How much b roll footage is too much? And are you ready for earnest country rock and a movie that feels like it was made in 1978, not 1987?

Topping it all off is the fact that many of the people in this film were also involved in one of my favorite bits of sheer lunatic filmmaking, The Nightmare Never Ends, which is also part of the even more manic Night Train to Terror.

You can watch it yourself by grabbing the DVD from Vinegar Syndrome. Or, if you enjoy Mystery Science Theater 3000, you can check out their take on the film on Netflix.

The second film in John Carpenter’s “apocalypse trilogy” (The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness are the other two), this was the first movie in his deal with Alive Pictures, which guaranteed him complete creative control if he made each film at a budget of $3 million dollars.

This is probably the only horror movie that you’ll see that is all about theoretical physics and atomic theory, as well as secret religious orders and the Antichrist. There’s also plenty of Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit) influence here, which Carpenter tips his hat to by using the alias Martin Quatermass for the screenplay. From messages from the future to ancient evil finally being unleashed on the modern world, it could be a Kneale film, but the British writer was displeased with being associated with the film (he had previously worked with Carpenter to script Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, although his name was removed when he objected to producer Dino De Laurentiis adding more gore to the film).

A priest (literally, that’s his name, but he’s played by long-time Carpenter associate Donald Pleasence, although I’ve also heard him referred to as Father Loomis) discovers that a member of the Brotherhood of Sleep has died just before an important meeting with the Pope. It turns out that an abandoned church in inner city Los Angeles contains a container of green liquid that is the secret to the inverse side of God, literally an Anti-God.  Whatever is inside that container is alive and able to transmit long streams of complex data that needs to be analyzed by Prof. Howard Birack (Victor Wong, Big Trouble in Little China) and his students.

One by one, those students are taken over by the Anti-God or killed by the homeless people and insects that surround the building, led by Alice Cooper.  Also, every single person who hasn’t been killed or taken over starts to have the same dream, one where a shadowy figure emerges from the church. Each time they have this dream, a warning sent from the year one-nine-nine-nine, they see more detail. This part of the film, shot on video, played on a television and then reshot with Carpenter’s voice intoning the warning message, are some of the strangest and most surreal sequences ever included in a mainstream film.

Soon, one of the researchers has been transformed into a vessel for Satan and the evil forces are attempting to pull the Anti-God out of a mirror. Much like Ghosts of Mars and Assault on Precinct 13, this is another Carpenter riff on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, with a group of survivors stuck inside a building, trying to survive an evening worth of attacks.

I can’t say enough about how much I love this movie. It has great little character bits, moments of true horror and even some great compressed storytelling. I love that instead of a long explanation of how a physics professor and a Catholic priest would be close friends, one student just off-handedly mentions that they both were part of a BBC exploration of God’s existence. That’s all we really need to know and it lets us answer that and move on to more important matters.

You just need to watch this movie. Luckily, Shout! Factory has released a great version of it. I mean, how can you not love a film that theorizes that Jesus was an alien and the Catholic Church has known that all along and kept the secret that another alien, an evil one, was on its way…or has a scene where someone just keeps typing “I live!” over and over again, then this message: You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED.”

In the first forty minutes of Thunder 2, the movie recaps the first film, is a rookie cop drama, tells us about corrupt cops and then becomes an Italian exploitation version of Cool Hand Luke. If you’re not in, you’ll never be in. This is why I watch movies.

Remember the last time we saw Luis Martinez — Thunder to you and me? He was blowing up an entire town and fucking up cops. Well, now he is a cop! How did this happen? How could this not happen?

Even crazier — he gets assigned to the town that he fucked up and has to work with the same cops who ruined his life. That said, Thunder proves to be a pretty good cop, even winning the trust of his old archnemesis, Sheriff Roger (Bo Svenson). He even busts a transgender person who nearly knocks him out!

Of course, the cops are still corrupt. Deputy Rusty Weissner still has it out for Thunder and sets him up, making it look like he’s a drug dealer. Thunder has to go to prison and try to survive the box. If only he didn’t have the worst drunken attorney ever!

Thunder breaks out, taking a cop car with him. He tries to get a fair trial, but Rusty attacks him and flips over the jeep carrying Thunder, his pregnant wife and the drunken lout. Thunder’s wife loses the baby and he goes on the run again. When he meets her at the hospital, she tells him to get revenge.

Oh he does. There’s an army on Native Americans, exploding crossbow weaponry, tomahwaks and Mark Gregory stiffly walking around wearing warpaint. Holy shit, this movie! It’s everything fabulous about Italian exploitation without zombies or sex crazed killers.

Fabrizio De Angelis returned to direct the sequel and he brought along the most prolific writer in Italian sleze with him, Dardano Sacchetti. Magic ensued.

In the end, the sheriff just lets Thunder go as he’s innocent. He tells him not to ever come back and his drunk lawyer laughs and take a shot. In front of a cop. They pull away and the sheriff takes out a rifle, watches them in the scope and shoots. The end.

Were they trying to make a Billy Jack ending?

Take my word for it. This movie is perfect. I mean, Mark Gregory hanging off a helicopter? Slouch walking around dressed as a cop? Native Americans having their own special doctors? This movie says it all.

You can find this at Revok or if you look around on YouTube hard enough.

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