Fred Olen Ray has done a ton in his career. He was a still photographer on Shock Waves. He was a pro wrestler named Fabulous Freddie Valentine. He directed stuff like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Armed Response and several movies with Eddie Deezen. And then he made this, a haunted house movie that combines animation, David Carradine and adult movie stars. Somehow, Becca watched this movie multiple times before she was through puberty.

Ray pitched this movie to Roger Corman and said he could do it for just $250,000. Corman said that the budget was too low and turned him down. Using equipment from another production and leftover film stock, Ray made this movie his own for just $140,000 dollars.

A group of teenage girls (played by scream queen Monique Gabrielle, Vivid Girl Barbara Dare who is billed as Stacey Nix, Suzanne Ager and adult star Madison Stone) have been hired to clean an old mansion, but soon a stranger delivers an old book. It’s the very same book we see in the beginning before David Carradine hangs himself (seriously, this happens) while wearing the wig that he kept from the miniseries North and South.

Soon, a cartoon monster escapes from the book and begins eating the girls and killing everyone in the house. By the end, only the good girl and the owner of the book — David Carradine again — destroy it with fire. As he leaves, everyone comes back to life and Arte Johnson comes over with a TV that plays cartoons.

Dick Miller shows up as the boss of the girls and his wife is Michelle Bauer, another former adult star who ended up in a ton of movies as a scream queen, including Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama.

Evil Toons is pretty ridiculous. But it gives you all that it promises: a haunted house, plenty of nude girls and lots of blood. I guess if that’s what you’re looking for, it delivers.

Oh Canada. We’ve celebrated your movies for an entire week and you continue to deliver pure blasts of polite insanity to our streaming devices and DVD players!

Halloween night 1966. A priest named Zachary Malius kills seven frat boys from Winfield College for breaking into his family’s crypt and recreating an occult ritual. He’s placed into an insane asylum, where the laws in Canada are, well, insane. He’s never fed and has been in a catatonic state for years, surviving by eating bugs.

Kids have learned nothing in the intervening quarter century as they go right back and do the ritual again. Malius comes back to life and starts doing what slasher villains do best — wipe out people right after they get done having sex. At least he has the excuse of being a priest. One wonders why they decided to make him like Freddy Kruger, yelling things like, “No sex! No TV! No parking!” That said, the fact that the Catholic Church covered up these crimes should come as a shock to no one.

Sam Rockwell shows up briefly as the younger version of the character that Darren McGavin plays for the rest of the film. Jorja Fox from TV’s CSI also shows up.

Director Brian Owens is also behind 80’s video fave Brainscan. There is one genuinely unnerving scene where a crucified Christ comes to life and starts screaming, then falls to the floor and breaks into small pieces. Shades of Enter the Devil!

There are moments of slow motion flashbacks and hints of art here that are undermined by horrible looking titles. It’s like his movie got only so close to being well art directed. It’s not the best or worst slasher ever, but it won me over. Maybe I was watching it at 2:30 AM, which always helps matters.

You can get the Code Red blu ray of this movie at Diabolik DVD or stream it on Amazon Prime.

I don’t get to pick movies that we watch. If I did, we would just watch The Car or 1990: The Bronx Warriors every night. Rebecca picks the movies. Tonight, she picked this.

Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra, Cadillac Man) goes to get a routine check-up for her second pregnancy, which ends with her molested by her obstetrician, Dr. Victor Mott (John de Lancie, the Q from Star Trek!), who gets #metooed decades before that becomes a thing. He commits suicide rather than face a trial and his wife (Rebecca De Mornay, Risky Business) goes into early labor and loses her child. Upon seeing a TV story that calls out Claire as the person who started the accusations, she swears revenge.

Soon, she’s become Peyton Flanders, the new nanny to the Bartel family. And she goes nuts as she undermines the family, from breastfeeding Claire’s new son Joey to winning the confidence of her daughter Emma and turning her against her mother. Seriously, the lengths she goes to are amazing, like making it look like Claire’s husband Michael (Matt McCoy, Sgt. Nick Lassard from the last two Police Academy movies) is having an affair with his ex-girlfriend Marlene (Julianne Moore, clearly in a movie well beneath her talents) and having Claire scream “You’re fucking her!” before a horrified house full of surprise party guests. And the way she treats Solomon (Ernie Hudson, Ghostbusters), setting the mentally challenged man as a child abuser, makes her a near supervillain.

Let me stop right here and tell you that this is the kind of movie that has no idea how to be subtle. Every single take is obviously the one that has the most mugging and over the top reaction. Every extra has been hired because they go out of their way to chew the scenery and call attention to themselves, nearly destroying scenes and making them comical. Witness the surprise party guest who randomly brings a flute. Who the fuck brings a flute to a surprise party? And DeMornay is near Mommy Dearest level here, as she decimates a bathroom with a plunger in a fit of pure rage.

There’s also a scene where falling glass wipes out Marlene in a scene that’ll make you realize just how much you wish you were watching Suspiria instead. Every shot in this movie has been chosen to be the absolute most boring way to show action, lulling you into stupidity as you marvel at just how completely insipid this film is.

I’m making it sound like I hated this. I didn’t. I’m just explaining that this is the most unrealistic film ever, one where Rebecca DeMornay in lingerie gets turned down by a guy who looks like the shitty version of Ron Silver. It’s also a movie where windchimes become the clue that fingers a killer, which caused me to remark, “This is just like a giallo, except it totally sucks.”

It gets worse. The address for the house in this movie, 808 Yakima, is the actual address for it in Seattle. And Rebecca wants to go visit it when we’re out there. Look for a photo of that soon, I figure.

If you want to experience this for yourself, HBO has it streaming. Rebecca also chided me that when I saw this in a theater 26 years ago, she was 8 years old. I was 20. The hand that steals the cradle seems like a more appropriate title, huh?

“History is written by winners, baby. So let’s make a little of our own tonight. If you’re thinkin’ my idea of fun is a drag, then you’ve never been to paradise. Do my kisses burn? Do they take your breath? You’ve got a lesson to learn, now. I’m the kiss of death.”

There was a time in the mid-90’s when My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult was showing up in movies all over the place. Hey look — that’s them playing “After the Flesh” in The Crow! Oh wow, they’re on the soundtrack of Showgirls! That’s “Hit & Run Holiday” in The Flintstones! Heck, they’re even on the soundtrack of BASEketball! And they’re all over Cool World, too.

Between “The Devil Does Drugs”, “Holli’s Groove”, “Sex on Wheelz”, “Her Sassy Kiss” and “Sedusa,” TKK makes up a good chunk of this film, which is kinda like the band we’re talking about — a mix of the past, the imagined future, sex, violence, drugs and danger.

Cool World is the first movie Ralph Bakshi made after Fire and Ice. He’d been developing plenty of films, including an adaption of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and an animal version of Sherlock Holmes. He also turned down directing Something Wicked This Way Comes and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which he passed on to Ridley Scott who turned it into Blade Runner. After an attempt to film J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, he actually got the opportunity to speak to the mysterious author, who told him that the novel was unfilmable. This led to Bakshi’s brief retirement (he still ended up working with Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi on the Rolling Stone’s “Harlem Shuffle” video and TV’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures) before getting excited about Cool World.

In its original pitch, a cartoon and human give birth to a hybrid child who visits the real world to find and kill the father who abandoned him. Bakshi had longed to create a film that looked like a living, breathing painting that people could physically walk through. Designer Barry Jackson helped bring these worlds to life, which were created as gigantic paintings and the animation was to look like a mix of Fleischer Studios and Terrytoons.

Yet even as the expensive sets were being built, Paramount producer Frank Mancuso Jr. secretly had a new screenplay written and demanded that Bakshi direct the film, under threat of lawsuit (Bakshi punching him in the face may have had something to do with that). Even casting was changed, with Holli Would’s role switching from Drew Barrymore to Kim Basinger.

It got to the point that even Basinger was rewriting the script, because she wanted to show it to sick kids in hospitals. As for Bakshi, he just told his animators to do whatever they thought was funny.

So what ended up on screen?

Las Vegas, 1945. World War II vet Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) takes his mother on a motorcycle ride that ends in tragedy when a drunk driver hits them. He retreats to an animated alternate dimension called “Cool World” to deal with the loss.

Cut to 1992. Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) might have killed his wife after catching her in bed with her lover, but he’s also created a comic book called Cool World. In truth, he’s really just tapping into the other world. And inside that world, Holli Would (Kim Basinger) has kept trying to visit the real world but is continually denied by Frank, who is now a detective that keeps people from crossing over between dimensions.

Once he gets out of jail, Jack finds his way back to Cool World and meets up with Holli and Frank. Frank warns him that this world has existed way before he was even alive and that for years, noids from the human world have tried to have sex with doodles, or Cool World inhabitants. It’s never really stated, but something horrible will happen if this occurs.

Holli, of course, seduces Jack and becomes a human. This is in direct contrast to Frank, who has a rough relationship with a doodle named Lonette. His partner, Nails, doesn’t tell him about Holli’s crime so that Frank can try and patch up his latest fight with his girl. Unfortunately, Holli murders him and crosses over to our world.

Holli goes wild in the real world, performing onstage with Frank Sinatra Jr. and consuming every vice she can get her hands on. Yet she and Jack are now stuck between worlds unless they find the Spike of Power, a magic object that a doodle in the real world has left behind. She unleashes Cool World on our world, but Jack succeeds in stopping her. Holli kills Frank, but because she was a doodle in our world — who decides on these laws? — he can now be reborn as a doodle in Cool World, to the delight of his girlfriend. Plus, Holli and Jack end up as a toon couple.

Cool World feels like it wants to be an adult Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was how it was sold. They don’t explain much, but I feel like Cool World is where the imagination of our world ends up living (as symbolized by the sketches that show up out of nowhere). It feels like there is plenty of potential, but knowing what we know today, studio interference took the heart and soul out of the film.

Interestingly, Paramount Pictures created a publicity uproar by placing a huge cut-out of Holli Would on the D of the Hollywood sign. All they had to do was make a donation of $27,000 to the sign’s maintenance fund, another $27,000 to the Rebuild L.A. fund and the salary for two park rangers to guard the sign. Local residents were enraged, however, and demanded that the ad be taken down.

Back to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Even if you don’t enjoy the film, you’ll probably love the soundtrack. It also boasts songs by David Bowie, Thompson Twins, Electronic, The Future Sound of London, Ministry, The Cult, Moby, Brian Eno and others. It’s totally a time capsule of 1992 and worth listening to.

Want to watch Cool World? You can find it on Hulu and Amazon Prime.

You’d think I’d be done with House. Personally, I wish I’d stopped watching these movies with La Casa 3, because I have struggled through each of these. I’m nothing if not a completist and not watching one last film — after running the movie marathon that these films have become — shouldn’t be too bad, right?

Roger Cobb (William Katt, reprising his role from the first film for as long as it takes to get his paycheck) is now married to someone named Kelly and they have a daughter named Laurel. There’s no mention of his first wife, Sandy, or his son Jimmy. They visit the old Cobb house after Roger’s father dies — this must be a side universe, the universe where no one gives two shits about continuity — and have to deal with Burke, the stepbrother who keeps trying to get Roger to sell out on his promise to their father to never sell the house.

This isn’t the actual house from House, so that’s already a strike against this one. But if the interior of the house looks familiar to you, that’s because the same sets were used in The People Under the Stairs.

Were you excited to see William Katt? Well, he dies around five minutes in, the victim of a car crash that leaves his daughter in a wheelchair — the kind of wheelchairs that old ladies roll around in and leave in their bedrooms to haunt you (see Burnt Offerings). Like do they even make wicker wheelchairs any more? This also holds true for The Changeling!

Burke has the mafia making him try and take the house, as they want to dump illegal waste there. Their leader is a little person who needs a machine to remove all of the phlegm in his throat, I shit you not.

Roger is still in the house and various magical Native Americans are kindly enough to protect Roger’s family. Oh yeah — Denny Dillon, who was on HBO’s Dream On and the disastrous Jean Doumanian produced season of Saturday Night Live is in this as a maid.

I like one scene in here a lot, where snakes take over the minds of two mafia guys and they see one another as human snakes. The practical effects are great here, yet wasted for what’s a really quick scene.

There’s also a pizza that comes to life and sings a song before being tossed in a trash compactor. This scene is Troll 2 level inanity and stupidity. It’s also one of the few good parts of this slog of a motion picture.

PS – That’s Kane Hodder’s face in the pizza.

This is one of the late 80’s/early 90’s movies that has no real handle on when it should be a comedy and when it should be horror. If it was an Italian film, that would be forgiven because there’d be loads of gore.

You’ve seen worse movies — and worse House movies — than House IV. But in a world packed with strange new films to discover and old favorites to enjoy again and again, let me be the one to do the watching for you. You don’t really need to see this.

If you want to see it for yourself, Arrow recently put this out, along with some great box art. You can grab it at Diabolik DVD.

It’s been a year since Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) was left home alone. A year since Harry Lime (Joe Pesci, Casino) and Marv Merchants (Daniel Stern, the voice of Kevin from The Wonder Years) tried to rob his home and they went to jail. And a year since Kevin’s parents, Kate (Catherine O’Hara, Best in Show) and Peter (John Heard, Cat People, The Seventh Sign) forgot that most basic of parenting skills: keeping track of your kids.

No one has learned anything.

The film was written by John Hughes (pretty much the majority of 80’s movies were, as well) and directed by Gremlins scribe Christopher Columbus. It was 1992’s biggest film, earning $359 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. $20 million? Where did all that money go? For all the pizza? Actually, Culkin got $4.5 million for this!

A funny note: During the filming, Culkin asked Joe Pesci why he never smiled. Pesci told him to shut up and said, “He’s pampered a lot by a lot of people, but not me, and I think he likes that.”

We start in Chicago he McCallister family is preparing for another big Christmas vacation. Kevin has no interest in going to Florida, as he feels like it has nothing to do with the holiday. And an incident at a school pageant leads to him going to the third floor of the house. So you know exactly what’s going to happen: everyone runs late, Kevin gets left behind and he ends up going to New York City all by himself.

Once Kevin gets there, he uses his cunning to trick the Plaza Hotel staff into getting his own room. I’d say Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Shadow, Congo) deserves better than this, but his IMDB pages is replete with total pieces of shit. Throw in Dana Ivey (The Addams Family) and Rob Schneider (Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and who the hell spent so much time to make such a well-written Wiki page for him?) and Kevin gets pretty much everything he dreamed of. A giant room and bed all to himself, a limo ride and the chance to watch a movie he’d not be allowed to watch, the sequel to Home Alone’s film within a film, Angels with Filthier Faces. In fact, now you can have the experience for yourself at the actual Plaza Hotel.

Personally, I can’t watch Kevin without comparing him to Henry Evans, Culkin’s character in The Good Son. He cons and swindles everyone in his path while having saccharine sweet moments with a homeless woman who has pigeons and Mr. Duncan, the owner of one of those toy stores that you just know are going to be boring, packed with old-timey wooden toys and educational games. Fuck that. Bring us the G.I. Joe’s forthwith, Mr. Duncan!

Of course, Harry and Marv have escaped from prison and instantly run into Kevin, as if synchronicity has constantly kept them interconnected. And Curry’s character takes a near-pathological glee in kicking a young child out into the cold streets of the city (but not before Kevin scares the entire staff with the iconic “Merry Christmas, you filthy animal!’ scene from his TV).

Certainly, it all works out. Kevin foils the gang’s robbery of the toy store. He gets reunited with his family. He establishes a lasting bond with the homeless woman. And everyone gets plenty of toys (and Kevin gets $967 worth of room service, which buys you two chocolate cakes, six chocolate mousses with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream topped with M&Ms, chocolate sprinkles, cherries, nuts, marshmallows, caramel syrup, chocolate syrup, strawberry syrup, whipped cream, and bananas, six custard flans, a pastry cart, eight strawberry tarts, and thirty-six chocolate-covered strawberries).

Watching this movie 25 years after its release, one sees crass consumerism everywhere. Coke products are in nearly every scene (taking the place of Pepsi in the original), the Talkboy was created by Tiger Electronics just for the movie and American Airlines was a sponsor of the film.

In a post 9/11 world, it’s amazing to see people just walk up to the gate and Kevin being able to board planes at will with no real ID or boarding pass. And I haven’t gotten to the Donald Trump cameo! I’ll end up doing a week of movies our President has been in, including Ghosts Can’t Do It, Two Weeks Notice, 54 and The Little Rascals.

Oh, one more thing:

What’s a sleepwalker? How about shapeshifting energy vampires that survive off the energy of virgins, who can cast illusions, move things with their minds and transform into werecats? Oh yeah and their biggest weakness is cats, who can see them and kill them with their claws. And before we forget, the only way the males can feed their female mothers is by having sex with them. Got all that? Then if you can get your head around all of that, you’re ready for Sleepwalkers.

Charles Brady and his mother Mary (Alice Krige, the Borg queen!) are on the run, settling for a bit in Indiana. They’ve just escaped California, where they killed a young girl (who emerges as a screaming skeleton from a closet, shocking the police — including Mark Hamill among them) and left behind a house surrounded by dead cats.

Somehow, Charles is able to fake the necessary paperwork (this is pre-internet) and attend the local high school, where he chases Tanya (Mädchen Amick from Twin Peaks). Is it love or is he just trying to feed his mother? Well, on their first date, he tries to suck out her lifeforce, so she jams a corkscrew in his eye. If that’s not young love, what is?

Deputy Sheriff Andy arrives, having been searching for Charles ever since he was speeding and trying to run down young girls (not to mention slicing the hand off of a pedophile teacher). Oh yeah — the deputy has a partner. Clovis. A cat who sits in the front seat. As Andy attempts to save Tanya, Charles kills him, drawing the ire of Clovis, who scratches him. He staggers home, where his mother uses her powers to hide them from the police. However, the area cats are having none of this as they gather around the house.

Mary goes off — wiping out tons of cops (including Ron Perlman) and wounding Tanya’s parents (Cindy Pickett and Lyman Ward, who also played Ferris Bueller’s parents). She takes her back home, trying to get her life force to save her son. Tanya ends up jamming her fingers into Charles’ eyes as Clovis leads an army of cats. They destroy Mary, leaving her on fire in the driveway.

Directed by Mick Garris (the writer of *batteries not included, Hocus Pocus and Critters 2, as well as the director of The Shining TV mini-series and Psycho IV: The Beginning), this is one film that isn’t shy with the blood. Or the cameos, including King himself as a caretaker, John Landis and Joe Dante as lab techs, and Clive Barker and Tobe Hooper as forensic techs.

If you’re into spotting famous locations, there are plenty here. The Sleepwalkers live in the home of TV’s The Waltons, Tanya’s house is the DragonFly Inn from Gilmore Girls and the entire neighborhood is the same one as The ‘Burbs.

Garris would go on to helm plenty more King adaptions. Like Maximum Overdrive, this is a junk food horror film that you won’t get full on, but it will definitely answer your cravings for blood, incestual feline vampires and eye damage.