Written, directed, produced and edited by Jack Snyder, this movie was made in 1985 and released in 1990. It concerns a group of college students who must spend the night inside a haunted house in order for their supernatural and the occult class. So they do what college students do — they get drunk, high and laid — and just when they think they’re in the middle of a prank, a very real grim reaper begins killing them off.

To get there takes over an hour, time during which the forty-something twenty-year-olds in this movie drink lots of beer and talk a whole bunch and then drink some more and then chat some more and then wander around and then drink some more.

A warning — this movie is two hours long. Maybe more. And yet there are two minutes of stop motion demon that kind of make it all worthwhile, along with a synth score that just drones on. But mostly, it’s dudes with mustaches chatting and drinking, if that’s your thing.

Fatal Exam was barely released in any format and never officially made available on disc, Vinegar Syndrome restored it in 2K from the 16mm original camera negative and included it on their Home Grown Horrors Volume One box set along with Winterbeast and Beyond Dream’s Door. You can also watch this on Tubi.

This Australian slasher is pretty unique in that is set in a rich Catholic school and has plenty of coming of age and students versus townies story beyond the slashing, which also feels a little but closer to the giallo than the slasher, despite giving away who the killer is early in the film.

It was even released into Australian theaters with a Willian Castle gimmick: the fright break, which gave audience members the opportunity to walk out and claim a refund before the big ending reveal.

Actually, I say that this is set in Australia but many of the characters claim to be from America, yet the accents are most definitely from a land down under.

I’ve seen some bad reviews for this, but I obviously have no taste and I loved that it had a killer dumb enough to keep eyeballs in the classroom and that it had a streak of sleaze, such as the teacher’s wife who makes plans every Sunday to sleep with young boys and then insult her husband by revealing it all to him. It’s got a glossy look to it, an ending where even the nicest people in the cast kept destroyed and a nun throwing acid in someone’s face. These are all good things.

Cayce Bridges (Ally Sheedy) — nice first name — is a remote viewer and empath who can mentally find and link with murderers, allowing the police to catch them. However, once she meets the Shadow Man, she learns that there’s a psychic that is even more powerful than she is.

So much American giallo seems fixated on the psychic detective who can find a killer that ends up getting stuck inside her mind. That said, this film has a wonderful performance by Ally Sheedy to shore it up as well as a bonkers scene at a dinner where she suddenly links minds with the killer and begins ruins numerous rich folks’ fancy evening out.

Plus, Michael O’Keefe, John Agar and Lauren Hutton make for what is in our existence a pretty decent cast.

Writer/director Rockne S. Bannon’s career has mostly been in science fiction, as he wrote the theatrical and TV versions of Alien Nation, as well as plenty more TV like FarScape, the 90s Twilight Zone and Cult.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Dennis Paoli wrote Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon, The Dentist, Spellcaster and Castle Freak, so I would put his Full Moon work on the good side of the “Is it a good or bad Full Moon?” equation that we’ll discuss throughout this week of their films. I am thanking him for somehow getting Charles Band to make a movie with all non-small characters, save Phil Fondacaro, because Mr. Band just can’t seem to make a movie without someone short or miniature.

Unlike so many other Full Moon films, this one looks and sounds great, with a Pino Donaggio score and a lush and romantic feel, because hey, it’s the Full Moon version of Beauty and the Beast.

It’s also incredibly troubling, as Lawrence and his twin brother are under a curse and may only be killed by someone who loves them. I don’t believe that said curse gives them license — here’s the rough part — to drug and assault our main character Catherine Bomarzini (Sherilyn Fenn) and her friend Gina (Charlie Spradling, who was also in the Full Moon films Bad Channels and Puppet Master II).

Also known as The Ravaging, which is the re-mastered title, this movie also has a ghost girl, a faithful nanny and monster and human lovemaking. It’s kind of like the Cinemax version of a fairy tale — umm, no wait, that would be Fairy Tales — and I’m sure that lots of folks rented this before they could actually rent VCA movies and were rewarded with something even stranger than an actual adult movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Writer Vivian Schilling told Fangoria about this movie: “When I was 18, just out of high school, I went to a party with a girlfriend. A guy offered us a ride home, someone we thought we knew pretty well. He didn’t look wasted or anything, but when we got in the car he started driving really crazy. We were going very fast and hit a tree; I was in the front seat and was literally buried in the dashboard. It was bad. For a moment as I was sitting there. I thought I was going to die. I always felt lucky to have lived through that, but it also made me wonder. What if I was supposed to die and didn’t know it?”

So they made a movie where Robert Z’Dar played the Angel of Death and Joe Estevez was his Soultaker, years before Final Destination, and Schilling even appears in the movie as one of the souls chased by death itself.

After the surprising success of this low budget film, a sequel was planned with James Earl Jones, Faye Dunaway, Donald Sutherland and William Shatner discussed as being in the cast and director Tibor Takács being picked to helm the picture. Funding was never found and Schilling eventually turned that script into her book Quietus.

Director Michael Rissi also made Terror Eyes, which also starred Schilling.

The Willies has a cast that makes you keep into the movie. I mean, Sean Astin is one of three kids gathered around the campfire — Jason Horst and Joshua John Miller from Near Dark are the other two — telling urban legends like the old woman who microwaved her dog, a rat in fried chicken and death in an amusement park. Michael then says that he has a story that will give them all…The Willies.

In “Bad Apples,” Kathleen Freeman plays to type as the mean teacher and James Karen shows up as a kindly custodian, the only person who really cares about Danny, a bullied child. As things happen, Karen ends up being an alien who loves to eat bad kids. This segment as actually a short that writer and director Brian Peck (Victor from The Last American Virgin and Scuz from Return of the Living Dead) made in 1985.

In “Flyboy,” Gordy Belcher plays insect pranks on other kids before running into Farmer Spivey, who has super manure that can grow things faster. Of course, this all ends up with Gordy getting his arms torn off by super flies.

At the end, Kyle and Josh claim that their uncle can prove the stories are true. Well, he ends up being James Karen and he reveals the monster face from the first story.

The Willies also has cameos from Kirk Cameron, his wife Chelsea Noble, Tracey Gold and Jeremy Miller which almost makes this an episode of Growing Pains. Perhaps more exciting are appearances by Clu Gulager, Dana Ashbrook and even comedian Doug Benson.

This movie was for kids and is dark in ways that modern horror is not. I think 1990 was the last gasp of things getting to be this weird. The poster is super high quality and really feels like the style of art that slip cases and Fright Rags use today.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The advantage of a horror anthology is that you can afford James Earl Jones when you’re only using him for a day or so. That’s the trick of Grim Prarie Tales, which as far as I know is the only all-western horror anthology.

Writer/director Wayne Coe often worked as a storyboard artist (Se7en, Dead Man on Campus) before making this film. He’s currently making a movie called We Have Your Kids and planned to make a sequel to this called Grim Prairie Tales: Rescue Party.

Two men meet around the campfire to tell stories, with bounty hunter Morrison (Jones) taking in a body for money and Farley Deeds (Brad Dourif) coming back to see his wife. From a story where a Native American tribe gets revenge against a man who has disturbed their burial ground to Marc McClure helping a pregnant demon woman and a man haunted by someone he killed in a gunfight, the stories all fit the criminally underexplored supernaturally western genre.

There’s also a story about a man forced to become part of a lynch mob. The protagonist is played by William Atherton, who is quite literally the best jerk in the history of movies. The real life Atherton is somewhat suspect too, as he studied Eli Siegel’s aesthetic realism philosophy, which claims that homosexuality is a way of seeing the world that can be studied and changed. Atherton identifies as ex-gay and I’ve noticed that information about this keeps getting taken off of his Wikipedia page.

Regardless, Grim Prarie Tales is an intriguing entry in the horror anthology genre. Then again, I’ve also heard it being placed into the feminist western category and that fits as well.

Man, Frank Marshall picks some wild movies to direct. There’s the cannibal-themed Alive, the apes with lasers Congo, the Disney film Eight Below and The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.

If you ever wanted to walk around your house in bare feet again, you should probably skip this movie, which has spiders crawl into people’s ears via a football helmet and even live inside a dead nature photographer as his body is shipped back to America in a coffin.

It’s up to Dr. Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), a new doctor in town with the titular phobia, who has to protect his new town of  Canaima, California for an invasion of the spawn of prehistoric spiders mixed with old fashioned American creepy crawlers.

John Goodman shines as Delbert McClintock, an exterminator, and Julian Sands is as mean as ever as the villainous Dr. James Atherton. The small spiders used in the film were Avondale spiders, a harmless species from New Zealand, while the giant spiders were bird-eating tarantulas with eight-inch legspans. They were all handled by entomologist Steven R. Kutcher, who also was in charge of the locusts in Exorcist II: The Heretic, the bugs in Prince of Darkness and the mosquitos of Jurassic Park amongst many other films. As for the monstrous general spider, it was one of the first props made by Jamie Hyneman, who could go on to star on MythBusters.

This was written by Don Jakoby (Lifeforce, Double Team, Invaders from Mars), Al Williams and Wesley Strick (Cape Fear, The Saint, Doom). It was made under the Hollywood Pictures name instead of Disney, as it’s a pretty frightening film in moments.

What if the man who wrote Private Lessons — Dan Greenburg — wrote a book about a hamadryad, which is a tree spirit, and somehow William Friedkin made it his first horror film since The Exorcist?

It’s true. All true.

The original script — Sam Raimi was going to direct — was a lot closer to the book and was about a nannuy who steals the children she is charged with. Screenwriter Stephen Volk reworked the script for Friedkin, including coming up with the idea of making the villain Lilith, but then Friedkin wanted a straight and realistic movie, which Universal didn’t and Volk said “What if it was a tree monster?” And Friendkin went, “Yessssssssssssss.”

As a result of all that, Volk suffered a nervous breakdown and left the production, leaving Friedkin to finish the script.

Jenny Seagrove, who actually had to play this part, said that her role went from being a nanny to being a druid to actually being a tree. Or was she a wolf? Man, I have no idea and I’ve tried to watch this more than once and that’s probably why I kind of love it. This movie has no idea what it is even when it’s trying so hard to be it, like a kid in school who is fighting to be cool and has somehow made a persona of every single social group.

I mean, twatching Brad Hall get brutalized by wolves is something that I wish I could do more often. Yet this movie goes from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle to occult horror to an absolutely ridiculous scene with the evil nanny’s bark-like skin has baby faces inside it. Who would come up with this? Who would give them millions of dollars?

What if the man who wrote Private Lessons — Dan Greenburg — wrote a book about a hamadryad, which is a tree spirit, and somehow William Friedkin made it his first horror film since The Exorcist?

It’s true. All true.

The original script — Sam Raimi was going to direct — was a lot closer to the book and was about a nannuy who steals the children she is charged with. Screenwriter Stephen Volk reworked the script for Friedkin, including coming up with the idea of making the villain Lilith, but then Friedkin wanted a straight and realistic movie, which Universal didn’t and Volk said “What if it was a tree monster?” And Friedkin went, “Yessssssssssssss.”

As a result of all that, Volk suffered a nervous breakdown and left the production, leaving Friedkin to finish the script.

Jenny Seagrove, who actually had to play this part, said that her role went from being a nanny to being a druid to actually being a tree. Or was she a wolf? Man, I have no idea and I’ve tried to watch this more than once and that’s probably why I kind of love it. This movie has no idea what it is even when it’s trying so hard to be it, like a kid in school who is fighting to be cool and has somehow made a persona of every single social group.

I mean, watching Brad Hall get brutalized by wolves is something that I wish I could do more often. Yet this movie goes from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle to occult horror to an absolutely ridiculous scene with the evil nanny’s bark-like skin has baby faces inside it. Who would come up with this? Who would give them millions of dollars?

There’s also a cable TV edit that Friedkin hated so much that it got an Alan Smithee directoral credit. In this one, the tree woman known as Camilla is not killed by a chainsaw and is instead alive and naked at the tree as the movie ends.