I had no expectations of what this movie would be like when I discovered it on YouTube. I figured that it would be about a high school class menaced by some sort of slasher villain, but I had no way to prepare for the gritty and just plain weird film that I would be confronted with. This is an incredible feeling and why I keep writing this site, as I want to discover these experiences and share them with others.

Unlike the typical slasher, this film finds itself spending time with the victim — high-school science teacher Miss Brook Storm (Maureen Mooney), who is barely keeping it together after some repressed childhoos trauma. It’s also about a former quarterback named Jon-Jon who grows sick of the game and his sinister teammates, so he falls in with the delinquents like Dickens, Queenie and Smiler.

Speaking of that childhood trauma, it starts the film. In a swamp, a man and a woman are making love when he decides to start beating her with a doll that belongs to a little girl. The little girl watches and grabs some mud, waiting for the two to leave the swamp. As they do, she throws it in the man’s eyes and he wrecks, sending the man and woman into poles which impale them as the little girl stares at the accident she’s caused. Yes — that’s Ms. Storm and this murder has now become an urban legend as some believe a swamp monster is the real cause of these two killings.

As Jon-Jon becomes part of this new gang, they decide to ruin the football game by driving on the field in the middle of a play and stealing the game ball. It might seem like this movie has become a teen sex comedy at this point, but don’t worry. Soon, it will stop meandering and get even stranger.

The gang now puts on Halloween masks and belts Ms. Storm’s home with swamp mud before the shenanigans turninto full blown sexual assault on her. You’d think that Queenie, the lone girl in the gang, would be against this, but even she joins in, subverting the very slasher nature that you expect from this film.

Hey, but don’t take it from me how weird this movie is. Joe Bob Briggs himself did the intro to the DVD release of this film. And he featured it on his old Drive-In Theater show, too.

I agree with Joe Bobs’ commentary here. This is an amazingly original slasher that more people need to see. Please watch it and let’s talk about it.

I can hear you out there. You’re saying, I wish Umberto Lenzi made another movie in Florida right after Nightmare Beach. And I hope its a ripoff of The Hitcher but about a rich kid in an RV and that it’s so scummy that I feel like a Silkwood shower still wouldn’t make me feel clean.

Good news, friend. There’s Hitcher In the Dark, a film that crosses off every horrible thing on your deranged bucket list.

Mark Glazer wants to have sex with his dead mother.

If that upsets you, seriously, move on to another review.

He’s driving around in his rich daddy’s RV and picking up female hitchhikers to assault, murder and take Polaroids of. That’s when he runs into Daniela (Josie Bissett, who somehow moved on to the tamer — if that’s possible — Melrose Place), who he turns into a living version of his mother. And thanks to a cocktail of Stockholm Syndrome and Italian movie making magic, she starts to fall for our killer.

Originally, this movie ended with Mark getting away with it. But hey — they added on a little end where Daniela finally gets her revenge.

Amazingly, someone released this on a three pack with Hell High and The Majorettes. I can only imagine how people felt being confronted by this movie.

When this movie was being filmed, a psychologist was hired as an adviser to ensure that Gary Busey’s character of Tom Sykes was realistic. Busey was excited, as he felt that he already was the character.

Fives after filming, he crashed his motorcycle with no helmet and nearly died.

Busey, who campaigned against mandatory helmet laws for motorcyclists, flew off his bike headfirst directly into a curb. Neurosurgeons at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center needed to remove blood clots from his brain to save his life.

He told Oprah Winfrey in 2014 that “My bike hit sand and fishtailed. I hit the front brake and flipped over and hit my head on the curb.” The accident split my skull wide open. At one time they had me under 12 layers of drugs and strapped down to a metal table, naked, in the mental health alert ward — cause they were going to ‘Cuckoo Nest’ me.” 

Then, after saying a prayer, Busey said, “And I felt a white cloak cover around me, and I called that cloak faith. And that’s what got me out of the hospital two and a half months early. My brain got altered in a way that’s not normal and I have a different way of looking at things and feeling things. And I know how special life is.”

Recently released psychiatric patient Tom Sykes (Busey) has gone full-on Bad Ronald, hiding within the attic of the Dreyer family — Phil (Michael McKean, yes, from Spinal Tap), Julie (Mimi Rogers) and their kids Neil and Holly — and uses a baby monitor to listen in on their every waking moment.

His goal? To become the new father of the family, inventing an affair for Phil and slyly spying on Julie as she skinny dips in the pool. He even murders their dog Rudolph when he gets too close. And then when young Neal gets beat up at school, he teaches him how to fight back.

Phil and Julie get into a huge fight and he moves out, which gives Tom the opening he needs. Only one person distrusts him — their neighbor Gene. Do you know how creepy Gene is and why no one listens to him? Because he’s such a weirdo that he helped give birth to the ultimate weirdo — he’s Crispin Glover’s dad Bruce.

Of course, it all ends like Fatal Attraction, complete with Tom shrugging off bullets to keep coming after the family. But that’s not how it originally ended.

In the original script by Lem Dobbs (Romancing the Stone, The Hard Way with Michael J. Fox, Kafka for Steven Soderbergh, Dark City, The Limey, The Score with Robert De Niro, and the ill-fated Travolta vehicle, 2018’s Gotti), Sykes was an abused child and much more sympathetic. After trying to burn down the house with the family still inside, he realizes that he’s just recreating the way he murdered his own abusive family when he was young. He now realizes that he has become as evil as them and despite the rejection of the Dreyers and the fact that he can never be a part of their family, he saves them and allows the house to burn down all around himself. This ending is completely out there, which I love and wish had been filmed. 

Is there anything as Gary Busey making his own home within the walls of the place you feel most safe? No. There is not.

If you want to see this for yourself, you can grab it from VHSPS or watch it on Amazon Prime or You Tube Movies. Director Matthew Patrick also directed Raquel Welch in 1993’s Tainted Blood (free; You Tube) and Jennifer Beals in the radio-ghost story, Night Owl.

Witch Story may have been sold as a sequel to Superstition in many parts of the world. In Germany, it was retitled Tanz der Hexen Teil 2 and claimed to be the sequel to Larry Cohen’s Wicked Stepmother, if you can believe that.

It’s also the directorial debut of Alessandro Capone, who wrote the 1987 slasher Body Count for Ruggero Deodato. It was shot between Rome and Florida, which probably lends it the strange disassociated feel that it enjoys.

If you enjoyed Ghosthouse, good news. This movie could equally be a sequel to that film.

If you can hang on until the last part — getting past the product placement that isn’t product placement but is there to let you know that this was shot in America, as well as the farting and burping guy who lends an unnecessary air of frat humor — Witch Story will reward you with people getting possessed and killing one another with all manner of implements, as well as a small girl being killed by a tractor. And isn’t that what we all showed up for?

I posted the whole movie below, so go ahead. Enjoy.

A year after the second Sleepaway Camp, Angela is back to terrorize another camp full of teenagers. Now, after running over a young camp counselor named Maria with a truck, she’s assumed that identity and ready for even more murderous mayhem and flashbacks set to sing-a-long campfire songs.

Before things even get started, Angela (the returning Pamela Springsteen) kills news reporter Tawny Richards by giving her Ajax cleanser instead of cocaine. Then, she starts wipining out the troubled kids and counselors at camp.

There are some pretty inventive murders in this, like burying a woman up to her neck and then running her over with a lawnmower, dropping another teen off a flagpole, burning someone alive, blowing a firecracker in yet another camper’s nose and even some paramedics that get attacked with syringes. It’s pretty much open season on campers.

There is some star power — in my universe at least — as Michael J. Pollard (Four of the Apocalypse) plays camp counselor Herman Miranda and Sandra Dorsey, who was in Grizzly, plays his wife Lily.

There are plenty of easter eggs in this, like all of the characters being named for Brady Bunch, The Munsters and West Side Story characters. There were also originally going to be even more elaborate deaths, like Angela stabbing Herman in the crotch with a flaming hot poker and yelling, “A weenie roast!” But that’s probably just as well, as when this was screened for the MPAA, one of the screeners for physically ill during the flagpole scene.

You have plenty of options if you want to watch this. We’d advise getting the Shout! Factory blu ray, because physical media never gets taken away from you and streaming is unreliable. But if you want to see this immediately,  it’s free on Tubi, Vudu and Amazon Prime.

Scott Spiegel is the great uniter of the 90’s film scene. When he first moved to Los Angeles, he shared a house with film directors Sam Raimi, the Coen Brothers and actresses Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates and Frances McDormand. Not content with that star-packed household, he later shared a house with Bob Murawski, the Grindhouse Releasing co-founder. This may be part of the explanation for how Sam Raimi came to use a shot from The Beyond, a film that Murawski helped bring to the US, in his first Spider-Man movie.

To top all of that off, in the early 90’s, Spiegel introduced Lawrence Bender to Quentin Tarantino. Together, they got Reservoir Dogs off the ground.

But before all that, Spiegel worked at the local grocery market across from Walnut Lake Elementary School back in Birmingham, Michigan. His teenage best friends? Oh, only Raimi and Bruce Campbell.

Drawing on that grocery experience — and based on an old Super-8 film he created called Night Crew — Spiegel and Bender would make this film. Paramount Home Video hyped up that Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi and Ted Raimi were the major stars, along with Renee Estevez. They’re all barely in it and Renee is the first — SPOILER WARNING — to die. Hell, the DVD art gives away the killer!

As a supermarket closes, the crew begins restocking the shelves. Craig and Jennifer are broken up, but they get in a fight. This upsets Linda (Estevez, who yes, is Charlie’s sister and was in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers), who hits the panic button. Craig is chased away, the cops are called and then the bomb gets dropped — the store is getting sold and they need to do an inventory before the store changes hands.

As the night goes on, person after person is killed. Is it Craig? Or can it really all be that simple?

This movie is packed with gore, courtesy of KNB. In fact, five minutes of it was cut for its eventual VHS release. And look out — the police officers are Alvy Moore and Tom Lester, who played Hank Kimball and Eb Dawson on Green Acres. Intruder then raises the bar even higher on cameos that only I would care about by having Emil Sitka, the fourth Stooge and the only man other than Harold Brauer to work with all six Stooges. He even says his famous line, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.” That same phrase appears on his tombstone.

Spiegel wanted the final shot go all the way down Jennifer’s throat and inside her body to her heart, where the film would stop on a freeze-frame of her heart as it stopped beating. I would have loved that!

The director has gone on to create films like Hostel: Part III, The Temple, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, My Name Is Modesty and the completed yet never released Spring Break ’83.

You can watch this for free on Tubi. Or grab the uncut version from Synapse!