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.

Feed Shark

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.