During a storm in Tennessee, a meteorite lands a farm all H.P. Lovecraft style. Soon, a teenager is in the middle of a plague that destroys crops, animals and even his family.

Directed by David Keith, who acted in An Officer and a Gentleman and Firestarter amongst others, this late 80’s film was released theatrically in the U.S. as The Farm and then came back out on video as The Curse.

Zack (Wil Wheaton, Star Trek: The Next Generation) lives on a farm with his younger sister Alice (Will’s real-life sister Amy), their mother Frances, stern stepfather Nathan (Claude Akins, Sheriff Lobo and Murder, She Wrote) and their bullying stepbrother Cyrus (Malcolm Danare, Flashdance, Christine).

One night, Frances sneaks out to have sex with one of the farmhands. As luck would have it, a meteor lands in the field, starts to glow and begins to leak into the soil. A local scientist wants to tell the authorities, but just like Jaws, local businessmen put a stop to that. After all, the TVA is building a new reservoir in town!

The farm goes to hell. The water grows cloudy and gross tasting. Food grows way too big and is way too inedible. And the livestock have become violent. Meanwhile, Frances goes insane and begins to grow boils and attack her family. Nathan believes that all of this is God’s curse because his wife cheated on him. Zack and Alice stay away from the infection by drinking clean water from anywhere but the house.

Willis, a TVA surveyor played by John Schneider from TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard, comes to the house to get a drink when he is attacked by Frances. Meanwhile, feral dogs on the property start to kill people.

The Curse consumes everyone — Zack’s mother turns into a gooey liquid mess, Nathan and Cyrus become zombies who are nearly unkillable and the house sinks into the ground. If you’re wondering how this movie got so gory so quickly, guess who was the producer and gore consultant? Lucio Fulci!

Willis gets The Curse too, slowly dying in a hospital bed while the virus mutates further outside. There’s no happy ending, even if the kids survive.

There are two sequels to this film and in true Italian tradition, none of them have anything to do with this one.

It’s not great. But the parts that you can recognize as Fulci are.

You can grab this from Scream Factory. You get the second one, too!

Herbert Buckingham Khaury was better known as Tiny Tim. To most of the general public, he’s been forgotten. But at one point, he was the hottest celebrity in the country.

He started his stage career under a series of names like Texarkana Tex, Judas K. Foxglove, Vernon Castle and Emmett Swink, growing out his hair and wearing pale face paint. His mother thought he was insane and nearly committed him Bellevue Hospital.

He persevered, becoming Larry Love, the Singing Canary at the also now forgotten Hubert’s Museum and Live Flea Circus in New York City’s Times Square. He was soon playing six nights a week throughout Greenwich Village as Darry Dover and finally settled on the stage name Sir Timothy Timms.

After an appearance in Jack Smith’s Normal Love and on the ultra hip show Laugh-In (by his third appearance he would arrive and depart surrounded by a procession of hangers-on), Tim began making appearances on The Tonight Show. On December 17, 1969, he married his first wife Miss Vicki on a set decorated with 10,000 tulips from Holland, with 40 million people as guests watching on television. This event was second to only the moon landing when it comes to TV ratings in the 1960’s.

So what was it that made the public fall in love with a strange man who sang old standards with a high falsetto while playing a ukelele? Maybe he just hit the pop conscious at the right time, seemingly aware and unaware of the joke.

The only movie that Tiny Tim ever starred in was 1987’s Blood Harvest. To say that this is an incredibly odd film should surprise no one.

Jill Robinson, returns to her peaceful hometown to discover her childhood home defaced, her parents missing and every single person hating her father, whose bank has foreclosed on all of their farms. Only one man — Marvelous Mervo the Clown (yes, Tiny Tim) — is happy to see her. Almost too happy.

Why is Mervo a clown all the time? Why does his clown suit have a plaid dress shirt as part of it? Why do people allow this to happen?

Mervo’s brother tries to win back Jennifer as everyone around her is killed in the barn, turned upside down and allowed to bleed out like animals. Who is the man with the stocking on his head, killing everyone? I mean, this movie starts out with a silly clown and ends up as brutal and demented as any giallo, including a scene where someone who we believe could be the hero gets fully naked and just stares at the final girl while she sleeps. There’s also way more nudity than you’d expect. And this is a slasher. So you expect plenty.

Unlike most slashers, this movie feels like real maniacs made it. It feels you’re a voyeur even watching it. And having Tiny Tim comment on the action by having scenes where he tearfully sings songs that seem to comment on the action only push this further into true art. Why is this movie not more celebrated? Where is the high end blu ray re-release?

Keep in mind that this isn’t post-modern goofiness or Troma look how silly this all is strangeness. This movie is the kind of strange that makes you wonder if people were really murdered as it was created. That’s high praise.

How did Tiny Tim get into this? Well, at a personal appearance at a beer carnival in Lincoln County, Wisconsin, he met local filmmaker Bill Rebane. Rebane had an idea for a film, wanted to know if Tim wanted to be in it and that’s how this got made.

Rebane was also responsible for films like Monster a Go-Go, The Giant Spider Invasion, The Alpha Incident and Demons of Ludlow. All of those films are strange and worth exploring, but they can’t hold a candle to the pure bonkers nature of this one.

Sadly, Tiny Tim would have a heart attack on stage while performing his most famous song, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Today, people know it as the scary song from Insidious. But once, it meant so much more.

You can find Blood Harvest on Shudder. We included a second look at Blood Harvest as part of our weekly “Drive-In Friday” featurette with a “Musician Slashers Night.”

Killer Workout is not the same movie as Death Spa. Sure, they’re both about a killer let loose inside a health club, but they’re totally different movies.

Originally titled Aerobicide, this is all about a fitness club in LA owned by Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr, Savage Streets). The co-owner is her twin sister who was burned in a tanning salon two years ago and is presumed deceased. The action kicks in when members of the gym start getting killed in horrible ways. And by that, I mean a giant safety pin. Yes, this is the second movie I’ve seen in the last few months where a pin is used to kill people (Lucio Fulci’s Murder Rock, stand up and take a bow).

This is the second David Prior movie I’ve endured in the past few days (The Final Sanction will be posted soon enough). It’s also worth mentioning that even after the final kill and reveal, there is still an extended aerobics number. If you miss the 80’s, particularly spandex and people wearing outfits that put their entire butt on display, I’m pretty much telling you that this is the exact movie you’re looking for. Unless you were thinking of Death Spa.

You can get the Slasher // Video blu ray at Amazon or watch this for free on Amazon Video with a Prime membership.

One of my interns at work asked me the other day, “You watch all of these horror movies. Don’t they scare you?” No, they really don’t. Not anymore. Some of them disturb me, like the cannibal films. But only one still kind of scares me. And that would be Hellraiser.

There was a time, before the eight sequels to the film and BDSM became well-known fodder on shows like Law and Order that Hellraiser seemed like it came from some alien land more than its true origins. The monsters of the piece, the Cenobites, looked like nothing we’d never seen before, all leather, blood and open festering wounds. The idea that sex and pain could be united wasn’t trite back in 1987, so it’s difficult to convey the power and fear this film had. It feels wrong. It feels dirty. It feels evil.

How this movie was made for $900,000 blows my mind. It looks lush and gauzy at times and at others, like when we see Frank’s heart and veins being formed, positively nightmarish. It shouldn’t be this good — it was Clive Barker’s directorial debut after seeing two of his stories, Underworld and Rawhead Rex, get made into films he didn’t agree with. What kind of deal with the devil did this guy make to turn out something so perfect on his first try?

The misconception that many people have of this film is that the Cenobites are the villains or the horrific part of the film. If we go to the poster for proof, it says “Demon to some. Angel to others.” Pinhead and his gang are there to move the story forward and certainly look frightening, but they are bound by the rules of Hell and the Lament Configuration, the puzzle box that sets the events of the film in motion. Matter of factly, these rules aren’t truly defined yet — is Pinhead a tortured soul stuck in the wheels of some hellish bureaucracy? Who created these boxes? None of this matters — “You solved the box. We came.” Yes, it can be that simple. You don’t need to know all of those answers right now. When Frank buys the box and Morocco and solves it, he gets the answer to limitless pleasure and the drug of all drugs — as Frank says, “I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible.”

That’s one of the real horrors of this film: people will do anything to chase a high. That high may be drugs. It may be pain. It may be a sexual experience that makes the mundane life you’re stuck in — like Julia, bored with a suburban life with a husband she never really wanted in the first place. The chance to be with Frank again, no matter if she has to seduce and kill for him, is everything. Notice that as he gains more muscle and skin with each drop of blood, she becomes more and more attractive, her skin gaining new color.

The main horrors of this film are family and other people. The Cotton family had issues before the Cenobites took one step out of Hell. The most horrific part of the film comes when Frank wearing Larry’s skin, stares at his niece in a moment of sexual longing and says, “Come to daddy.” Sure, there are horror film trappings, but this type of morally bankrupt behavior isn’t something confined to the cinema. So much of the betrayal and madness of Frank and Julia could happen. It happens every day.

Hellraiser exists on the border of reality. It’s fantastic, but it feels like it could happen. It’s the dangerous fiction that could overwhelm your truth if you go too far. In that it’s quite similar to Barker’s Candyman, which posits that saying the name of its titular character three times in a mirror is all it takes for him to come for you. That seems too unrealistic, but do you want to take the chance? And much like the black leather garbed creatures in this film, Candyman must adhere to a dream logic that only comes into our reality when you allow the genie from the bottle.

Ready to experience this movie? Grab the Arrow Steelbook release of Hellraiser at Diabolik DVD or watch it on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

After directing several giallo films in a row (Macabre, A Blade in the Dark, You’ll Die at Midnight), Lamberto Bava began to dislike the genre and wanted to do more works like Demons. That was the inspiration for this film, where he used the killer’s point of view to show fantastic images of the victims, from a woman with a giant eyeball to another that looks like a human insect. He also claimed that this was one of the few times that he had the time and budget he needed to get it right.

Gloria (Serena Grandi, the “Dolly Parto” of Italy who also appears in Antropophagus and The Adventures of Hercules) is a former model who has inherited the magazine Pussycat from her dead husband. The magazine takes off once a killer begins murdering whatever model is on that month’s cover, starting with Gloria’s friend Kim.

Her neighbor Mark, who is in a wheelchair due to a mental condition, sees the murder and alerts her, but all she finds are photos of Kim’s body. Soon, Kim’s body is found in a dumpster.

Gloria’s brother Tony is a photographer for Pussycat and does a photoshoot with Sabrina (Italian glamour model, singer and songwriter Sabrina Salerno) and tries to have sex with her, but he’s impotent. After he leaves, killer bees sting her to death and sends the photos to Gloria.

Flora (Capucine, the famous French model and actress), an old friend of Gloria, is trying to buy the magazine and Gloria finally agrees, hoping that the murders will finally end. I wouldn’t say that she’s a friend actually, as she has all this old footage of Gloria back when she was a model and did porn and horror movies, which keep showing up every time we go back to her office.

Tony and Gloria start another photo shoot with Susan in a department store, but Tony ends up dead. The killer taunts them over the loudspeaker and kills Susan. When the police arrive, there are no bodies, but Gloria gets the photos and her friend Evelyn (Daria Nicolodi, ex-wife of Dario Argento, mother of Asia, writer of Suspiria and the star of Shock) finds Susan’s body.

The police go to question Roberto and discover the backdrops of Gloria that were in every one of the killer’s photos. He shows up at her house and she runs, just as a car hits him. The police now consider that the case is closed.

The magazine is finally sold and Evelyn quits. Tony’s body is floating in the pool and the killer shows up…but it’s Tony. He explains that he committed these murders to protect his sister, but he’s cutting off her clothes with a butcher knife while he’s doing this. So at the last second, Mark shoots him in the groin. He then visits her in the hospital at the end, seemingly recovered from his mental issues.

Completely unrelated to the plot, George Eastman shows up as one of her old boyfriends. I’m not complaining — George can be in every movie.

I’m not pretending that this movie is any good. You can tell when making a movie like Demons that Bava really cares. Here, things sloppily head toward its ending. A movie about a porn magazine filled with murder, gore and nudity that ends up boring you has to be a total failure. There’s just enough here to stay enjoyable, but it’s borderline at best.

You can watch this for free with an Amazon Prime membership.

I couldn’t think of a movie to watch for Father’s Day and then I remembered this, the kind of movie that puts the fear of God into kids who are in blended families.

Henry Morrison (Terry O’Quinn, TV’s Lost, Silver Bullet) is introduced to us as he washes away the blood from killing his family, changes his appearance and leaves them — and his past life — behind. He throws all of the objects of his past life into the ocean and disappears for a year, resurfacing as a real estate agent named Jerry Blake.

Now, he has a new wife, Susan Maine (Shelley Hack from TV’s Charlie’s Angels) and a rough relationship with his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen from Popcorn). His biggest worry, though, is Jim Ogilvie, a wannabe detective and his former brother-in-law.

As Henry/Jerry discovers an article from the newspaper about the death of his old family, he flips out at a neighborhood barbecue and flips out in his workshop. Unbeknownst to our hero, such as he is, his stepdaughter is listening to the entire episode.

She goes to her therapist, Dr. Bondurant, who tries to get Henry/Jerry to talk about the past. It doesn’t go too well, to say the least, and the doctor is murdered. That death ends up bonding stepfather and stepdaughter, believe it or not. That is — until he catches her making out with her boyfriend Paul.

The stepfather deals with things the only way he knows how. He starts setting up another identity and gets ready to kill this family. This leads to him starting to confuse his many identities and smashing his new wife in the face with a telephone.

Somehow, despite being shot twice and stabbed in the heart, Henry/Jerry survives and returns for not one, but to sequels. Spoiler warning: At least one of those will be up on this site later on today.

Loosely based on the life of John List, this movie rises above simple slasher to cult classic based upon the acting skills of O’Quinn, who can go from tender and nice to pure mania in the very same line of dialogue. Can anyone make working on birdhouses seem so evil?  I mean, all he’s trying to do is find the perfect American family!

Shout! Factory has recently released this one on blu-ray and it’d make a fine Father’s Day gift. That is, if your dad likes horror and you guys have a great relationship.

Boris has just been released from jail and has been agreed to do just one more heist — rob the mansion of paraplegic millionaire Lord Breston, who just so happens to be his ex-girlfriend Wendy’s boss. That’s the simplest explanation for a movie that is so much more.

This piece of Canadian strangeness was directed by B. D. Benedikt, who is also the “inventor of a brand new literary style, popularly called RELIGIOUS THRILLERS. But instead of OUR SPIES over-smarting THEIR SPIES, the invisible GOD’s and SATAN’s agents fight for our souls!”

Boris is played by Lazar Rockwood, whose name is nearly as amazing as his screen presence. It’s as if someone got a time machine and went back in time after saying, “You think Tommy Wiseau is strange? How my Molson.”

Seriously, Lazar is something else. So few of the things that he says are comprehensible to Western ears. He seems nervous and fidgety on screen, yet the things he mumbles and screams (yes, at the same time) are gloriously repeatable. He’s also wearing the finest Canadian tuxedo ever.

Our hero has been convinced by his ex-girl that her boss’s house would be easy to break into. However, when they sneak into the basement a few days later, a door slams shut behind them and a loudspeaker says that they must make their way past seven doors and through six chambers of elaborate deathtraps and deadly puzzles. That said — if they survive — they will gain the reward of their dreams.

So imagine if Indiana Jones was in a movie made by David Lynch with little to no budget, shot like a TV movie and with a virtual unknown in the lead instead of Harrison Ford. Now, ingest as many drugs as you can find in your home. There — you have a small idea of what this movie is like.

Can Boris make it through the various deathtraps? Will it have an insane ending? Are the extras on the disk even weirder than the movie itself? You’ll have to get the DVD yourself.

If it’s Canadian weirdness, Intervision usually releases it. Good news — they put this out this year and you can grab it on the Severin website. You should do so as soon as possible.

If I’ve learned anything from Cathy’s Curse, it’s that when someone in Canada gets possessed, they just end up being rude and swearing a lot. This movie — no relation to Prom Night — only adds to my theory.

Originally entitled The Haunting of Hamilton High, this film is rife with horror trivia, such as lockers that look exactly like A Nightmare on Elm Street, allusions to Carrie and a character who references The Exorcist. Several characters are named after famous horror folks, too.

Back in 1957, Mary Lou Maloney goes to confession and doesn’t follow the rules at all. She’s disobeyed her parents, used the Lord’s name in vain and had sex with many boys — and she loved every minute of it. Then, she leaves her number for the priest.

At the prom that night, her boyfriend Billy (soon to be played by Michael Ironside) gives her a ring, but she just tells him to get her some punch. That’s so she can have sex with Buddy Cooper. They get discovered by Billy, who grabs a stink bomb and throws at her when she gets crowned prom queen, ala Carrie. Her dress goes up in flames and she dies in front of the entire class.

In 1987, thirty years later, Vicki Carpenter is having a rough time getting ready for the prom. Her mother refuses to allow her to buy a new dress and doesn’t approve of her boyfriend. She searches the school for a dress in the prop room and finds Mary Lou’s doomed gown. It starts claiming victims right away, like Vicki’s best friend Jess, who is killed by a beam from the tiara. Seeing as how she was despondent about being jilted while pregnant, everyone figures her death was just a suicide.

Vicki has nightmares every night and confides in her priest, who ends up being Buddy. He believes Mary Lou may be back, a fact that’s confirmed when a Bible bursts into flames at her grave. He tries to warn Billy, who is not the principal and the father of Vicki’s boyfriend Craig.

Vicki is at war with Kelly Hennelotter (Terri Hawkes, Killer Party), the meanest girl in school. Mary Lou takes over Vicki’s body at a detention caused by a fight between the two girls. She goes to confession at Buddy’s church and unleashes a torrent of obscenities before stabbing him in the face with a crucifix.

Mary Lou makes over Vicki to be a 50’s girl just like she was. When Monica tries to get to the bottom of everything, she’s killed by being crushed inside a locker.

Mary Lou seduces Craig, something that the virginal Vicki would never do. His father rescues him just as Mary Lou reveals herself. He knocks out his son once he ensures that he is safe and digs up Mary Lou’s grave. Inside? Buddy’s dead body.

Then it gets really crazy. Mary Lou takes Vicki home and makes out with her father and then tosses her mother through a door.

At the prom, evil girl Kelly gives Josh, the geeky horror movie fan, a blowjob in order to win the prom queen crown. Too bad for Josh, as Mary Lou electrocutes the poor geek and switches the outcome. As she takes the stage, Billy shoots her. That’s when all hell breaks loose, as Mary Lou turns into a charred corpse and tries to bring Craig into hell. His father saves him at the last minute by returning Mary Lou’d crown and kissing her.

That’s not the real ending, though. It turns out that Mary Lou is now inside the principal and he drives off with his son and Vicki!

I wasn’t expecting much from this movie, yet it more than entertained me. It surprised me with its sheer lewdness and language in the confession scene. There haven’t been many horror movies with a villain that doesn’t punish those that have sex but wants more of it.

Here’s a drink for this movie.

Prom Night Virgin (from Tipsy Bartender)

• 1 oz. Southern Comfort
• 1/2 oz.peach schnapps
• 3 oz. Mountain Dew
• 1/2 oz. grenadine

1. Fill a glass with ice and pour over the Southern Comfort, schnapps and soda.
2. Drizzle in grenadine…like blood.

Cirio Santiago was the president of the Philippines Film Development Fund, a position that charged him with improving the quality of Filipino films and encouraging the production of foreign movies on location in the Philippines. But you may know him better for movies like Firehawk, T.N.T. Jackson, Stryker or Vampire Hookers (or Cemetery Girls or Ladies of the Night or Night of the Bloodsuckers or Sensuous Vampires or Twice Bitten, title depending).

Let me see if I can sum this one up: fire-twirling women take part in rituals to keep a fish god happy. Illegal dynamite fishing ends the hibernation of this fish god, Akua, who wakes up and starts eating human flesh. A sheriff and female herpetologist must join forces and stop the beast, which they do by blowing it up real good.

I’m trying to think of one good reason for you to watch this movie. Hmm. Kathryn Witt has on tight 80’s jeans? The sheriff’s name is Keefer? It feels more like a travelogue film than something gripping and filled with drama? I’m doing a horrible job on these last two films. I mean, you start with Creature from the Black Lagoon and it’s all downhill from here this week, huh?

If this feels like you just read the review of Up from the Depths again, imagine how I felt watching both of these films on the same DVD from Shout! Factory!

In a perfect world, Creepshow 2 would be even better than the original. But sadly, the world is not perfect and we often have to make due with what we have.

Directed by Michael Gornick, who was the cinematographer for Romero’s Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Knightriders, Day of the Dead and the original Creepshow, this follow-up is based once again on King stories (but screenwritten by Romero).

Creepshow 2 was originally going to be five stories (Pinfall and Cat from Hell went unfilmed, although Cat does appear in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie), but a lower budget forced the film to only include three tales.

PInfall was to be about the rivalry between two bowling teams with one coming back from the dead to kill the other. It reminds me a lot of the story in Haunt of Fear #19, Foul Play!

Instead of what wasn’t filmed, let’s get into what was: In Dexter, Maine, a delivery truck pulls up and drops off the latest issue of Creepshow, with the driver being the Creep himself!

In Old Chief Wood’nhead, an elderly couple named Ray and Martha Spruce (George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour in her last role) live in an old town on its last legs. No one in town has money and soon, the store they own — and their lives — will fade away, too. Chief Whitemoon comes to visit and gives them sacred jewelry to pay back his debt. It’s not money, but the thought is what counts.

As the wise old man leaves, the wooden Indian that stands guard in the store nods to him, which frightens him. It foreshadows what happens next, as that night, the chief’s nephew Sam and his gang rob the store and kill the kindly old couple. Their blood splashes all over the old wooden chief as they depart with the stolen sacred jewels.

The gang plans to go to Hollywood, where Sam thinks his long hair will make him a star. But he and his entire gang are killed, with their scalps and the jewelry left for the old chief.

In The Raft, four teens (one of them is Page Hannah, the sister of Daryl and all of the characters share the surname of the actor playing them) try to go swimming but have to contend with a black blob that wants to kill them all. Again — this is an incredibly simple tale told well. I’d say it’s the highlight of the film, but the more I write about these, the more I remember how much I truly enjoy this movie.

Finally, The Hitchhiker concerns a businesswoman who is trying to get home from a tryst with her lover before her husband notices. Along the way, she hits a man who keeps coming back. And coming back. And coming back. Again, simple idea, but told really well. Ironically, the hitchhiker is played by Tom Wright, who played the civil rights activist who comes back from the head in Tales from the Hood. It’s an amazingly similar role! Even stranger is that Barbara Eden was to play the woman before her mother’s illness caused her to drop out.

Ed French was the original effects guy for this, but got upset when director Gornick asked Howard Berger for advice, as he wasn’t happy with the look of the creature in The Raft. Greg Nicotero and Berger ended up finishing the movie and they enlisted Tom Savini to play The Creep.

Creepshow 2 doesn’t have the gloss of the original. That doesn’t make it a horrible movie. But the original sets a bar that’s incredibly high.

Now that I think about it, there are some great moments in this film. It’s worth checking out. Diabolik DVD has the Arrow blu-ray, which has some gorgeous packaging. Fright Rags has you covered with an entire series of t-shirts and pins for the movie! And Waxworks Records has you covered with the soundtrack!