ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

For a fun bit of science fiction horror with a 1980s aesthetic and an offbeat humorous vibe, you need look no further than director Sam Fox’s short-film blast of oddness The Blue Diamond (U.S., 2024). You know you’re in for a good time when Barbara Crampton is part of the cast, and that’s just for starters.

Crampton portrays Jacqueline, the recently deceased leader of a self-help cult based around, of all things, skiing. Her adult daughter Alison (Desiree Staples) travels to the group’s ski lodge for her mother’s funeral, and is understandably uneasy around the cheerful cult members, who behave in, shall we say, unusual manners and who dress in colorful 1980s ski outfits. The mother and daughter had a contentious relationship, and the more Alison learns the secrets behind Jacqueline’s freaky following, the worse things get for her.

Fox invests her unique short with interesting family drama, an engaging air of mystery, and plenty of highly entertaining bizarreness — wait until you get a load of the dance number. Crampton and Staples play off of each other marvelously. The short’s color palette and music scream “Soooo eighties!” and Fox directs with panache. 

The Blue Diamond is currently on the film festival circuit and screened as part of Beyond Fest, which ran September 25–October 9, 2024 in Los Angeles. For more information, visit https://beyondfest.com/

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Look, you had me at directed and written by Mark Polonia, never mind the fact that this is a Western set in Amityville when it was still being settled. This gets the first part of the Amityville equation right: It has a great title. It’s missing the second, which is having a tagline that gets you to watch it. “For God’s sake, get out! from the first movie?” Perfect. The third one has “Inside these walls, nothing is impossible … except survival.” And what does this give us? Nada.

That said, if all it had was the ending, where a puppet bat hovers in front of an explosion, as well as a scene where a severed head speaks with the voice of a demon and the time that a giant pentagram appears, it would automatically be better than 100% of the other Amityville movies I watch. The town looks like it belongs in the West, the costumes are good and the demonic noises sound like Sammi Curr being played backward.

The idea that this gets to Amityville before the house was even built is a decent one as well. Sure, there are too many scenes of people just talking, but at no point did I hate myself for watching this, which is so much more than I can say for most movies that start with Amityville and to me, that’s a win.

Gary Dauberman is one of the creatives that came out of the Conjuring series of films, writing Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, The Nun, The Nun II and directing and writing Annabelle Comes Home. He also wrote the remakes of It, It and It Chapter Two. This led to him directing and writing this film, another Stephen King remake.

Before COVID-19, this was to be released on September 9, 2022. Then, April 21, 2023 came and went, the next release window, and this was replaced by Evil Dead Rise. By October of that year, most people thought this would be another tax write-off for Warner Brothers. Even Stephen King wrote, “Not sure why WB is holding it back; not like it’s embarrassing, or anything. Who knows.” It went to HBO Max — well, are we supposed to just call it Max? — instead of playing theaters.

I was excited about it but also worried. After all, Tobe Hooper’s Salem’s Lot is one of the best horror films not just of the 80s, but all time. It’s near-perfect, a film that doesn’t even seem as long as it is and one that we watch in this house at least twice a year.

It feels unfair to compare this movie to that.

But then again, don’t you have to?

Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) is an author who has come home to Jerusalem’s Lot, where he grew up, to write a book about his childhood. He quickly meets Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh) as she works in the real estate office of Larry Crockett — thereby forgetting the entire subplot of Larry sleeping with Bonnie Sawyer or her husband Cully catching them in the act — and takes him to the town’s gathering place, the drive-in.

That drive-in is lame because it’s double feature is The Drowning Pool and Night Moves. I know this is set in 1975. but come on. It could have been showing I Don’t Want to Be Born and House of Exorcism or The Devil’s Rain and The Hatchet Murders.

Yes, this has many of the characters that you remember, like horror fan Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter) and teacher Matthew Burke (Bill Camp). Except that the schoolteacher was never Ben’s mentor and there’s no relationship other than the one that the movie shoves upon us. There’s none of the people in the boarding house or any of the numerous smaller characters that make up the town, which is difficult with a shorter running time, yet this movie feels like it crawls at times and is only interested in vampire violence.

Richard Straker (Pilou Asbæk) has bought the Marsten House for his boss Kurt Barlow (Alexander Ward), but it’s difficult — again — to not miss James Mason. It seems like we never even get to know Straker, as the movie quickly gets to killing off Ralph (Cade Woodward) and Danny Glick (Nicholas Crovetti), as well as gravedigger Mike Ryerson (Spencer Treat Clark).

This feels like its more about assembling a team to battle the undead, with Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) and Sheriff Gillespie (William Sadler) discovering the truth about vampires early. Dr. Cody even stops being turned by giving herself a rabies shot. If you’re wondering, did this come from the book? Nope. It’s new and a way of explaining away vampirism through science. And Mark finds out how to defeat vampires from an issue of House of Secrets like he’s the third Frog brother.

It’s also a movie more concerned with the action sequences than the fear of the unknown and the destruction of your small hometown, as well as the memories that are brought back by trying to come home again. Dauberman has said that he wanted to make vampires frightening and not sexy, but Barlow never had a probably being terrifying.

In King’s lifetime, he’s seen two mini-series (Mikael Salomon directed the 2004 TNT mini-series) and an attempt at a spin-off, 1987’s Larry Cohen-directed A Return to Salem’s Lot. I get it, diminishing returns, even if I have a soft spot for Cohen’s film. And maybe I shouldn’t expect all that much from this.

At no point is anything the least bit frightening in this. It doesn’t have enough time. There are so many characters that there’s barely time for anyone to be anything other than a cardboard cutout of an archetype: smart doctor, smart teacher, frightened cop, frightened priest, girlfriend and a smart writer. Straker barely even has any reason to be memorable.

Mark has a poster of Trog on his wall and after that, I kept thinking how much I’d rather be watching that movie.

Maybe this spoiled when it sat on the shelf so long. Or maybe it has nothing new to say other than glowing crucifixes. In truth, this barely even feels like Salem’s Lot and could have changed the character names and give Ben have a different job and it would be no better or worse. It just sits there. It just is.

And for something with this much potential, that’s a shame.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

I have a list of Bigfoot movies on Letterboxd.

I also have an Amityville list.

This movie put chocolate in my peanut butter.

In the woods of Amityville, scientists whose lab once occupied the very space that the house on 112 Ocean Avenue sat have somehow captured Bigfoot, conducting a series of experiments on him. He escapes and runs wild in the woods, all while a film crew is shooting their own Bigfoot movie, local birdwatchers seek an elusive species and protestors who want an end to Amityville movies all gather in one place to become victims.

This movie has almost everything that an Amityville movie should, which is a great name and a better poster, even if that looks like Kong exploding from the familiar windows of the De Feo home. It does not, however, have any taglines.

Directed by Shawn C. Phillips, who co-wrote it with Julie Anne Prescott and is on his ninth trip to Amityville, (he directed Amityville Shark House and Amityville Karen and acted in Amityville Webcam, Amityville Job Interview, Amityville Frankenstein, Amityville Thanksgiving, Amityville In the Hood and Amityville Hex) has put together yet another movie that has no ties to the original other than you’ve seen both movies.

He also plays Ian, the leader of the scientists who lose Bigfoot, leading one of them named Annie (Lauren Francesca, who was the Amityville Karen) to be assaulted by the creature, who she claims “Has the biggest dick I’ve ever had.” The Amityville Bigfoot which acts a lot more like the sasquatch in Night of the Demon than a friendly skunk ape. Is there such a thing as an amiable abominable snowman?

As for that movie in the woods, its director Claude (Brandon Krum) is having issues with his producer father Harv (Phillip Krum) and his main actress, Francesca (Ashleeann Cittell). And somehow, in the middle of all of this — Bigfoot sexual, fecal and urine assaults abound — Eric Roberts and Tuesday Knight appear. There’s also a scene where Bigfoot pushes a baby carriage with a dog inside it down a hill and this is played for comedy.

This wouldn’t be an Amityville movie without ten minutes at the end of videos sent in by people who paid to be in the movie, as well as news footage that pads out the running time. There’s also lots of ad libbed dialogue, people talking on and on when they never would in real life and so much screaming. Yet it looks a lot better than most Amityville or Bigfoot movies, so I guess that’s some faint praise.

You watch it on Tubi.

Look, this movie references The Entity so if that’s all it did, I would have liked it.

Go figure, Hollywood is haunted. Well, you know how many lives were ruined there, so you can only imagine that there has to be some paranormal activity or at least crazy people willing to tell you that there is.

There are no bigger BS artists than paranormal investigators, much less ones that show up for a Tubi Original. Can you believe the girl who got a sore throat from walking around Sharon Tate’s murder house? How about the house where they filmed American Horror Story that probably wasn’t haunted until they did the show there? And hey, the Comedy Store used to be a mob hangout called Ciro’s so there have to be ghosts there and here’s a podcast clip to prove it!

Even the Hollywood sign is haunted by Peg Entwistle, an actress who jumped off the sign. You can smell her perfume and hear her screams. And you may have been wondering, will we get to the Cecil Hotel? Of course we will. Will we talk about Lisa Lamb in the elevator and dying in the water tank and hotel guests drinking her body for weeks? We must.

This is filled with stock footage and I love it for that.

Also: A girl takes her doll Lola to a haunting.

There are professional paranormal investigators in this that say things like dark energy and heavy feeling and temperature drop. How do they get hired? How much do they make? These are the questions I want answered.

You can watch this on Tubi.

These movies are based on the book Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA’s Murderous Targeting of SDS, Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and Other Activists by John L. Potash. Within the pages of that tome, you’ll learn how a group of opium-trafficking families came to form an American oligarchy and eventually achieved global dominance.

Sure, they may have helped fund the Nazi regime and then saved thousands of the Third Reich during Operation Paperclip to start the CIA and push LSD through MK-Ultra, but in the midst of their war on drugs which was funding by drugs, they got into targeting the left leaning groups that sought to usurp their power.

And then, they went after rock ‘n roll.

Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists (2018): After going after so many of the younger politically radicalized types that made up organizations like the Black Panthers, the ruling class — according to this film, directed and written by Potash — went after the artists who inspired them.

How did LSD get into the public consciousness? Did MK-Ultra agents party at acid tests? Why did George Harrison and John Lennon’s dentist dose them? Why would the FBI give the Rolling Stones drugs and then turn around and bust them? Who killed Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin? Did this strange method of connecting with the youth culture also claim the lives of Tupac and Kurt Cobain?

As we hear from narrator Douglas Barron, the film contends that everyone from Yoko Ono and Timothy Leary to Ken Kesey and Courtney Love were government agents used to hook stars on different drugs and then kill them when they tried to get clean.

It all seems a little too simple, but this documentary reminds me of the times when conspiracy theories were ramshackle narratives that collapsed when you pricked the balloon of them too much. Sure, we’d love to believe that John Lennon wasn’t an egomaniac drug abuser and wife beater. We hope that Tupac is still alive. Maybe through conspiracy, we are able to get back to the parasocial relationships that we have with rock stars.

Or maybe not.

This also willy nilly rips off so many web sites, Nick Broomfield’s documentaries, Benjamin Statler’s Soaked In Bleach, YouTube videos and anything it can get its hands on to build its narrative which skips around so much and frankly skips so many things that you wonder if this is also a compromised conspiracy. Or, you know, if you’re like me, deny everything until finally you can’t deny the idea of reality itself.

I kind of do love the idea that the government created Courtney Love to be a James Shelby Downard-style wires out the butt honey pot exotic dancing in Japan before she could legally drive and getting Cobain hooked on heroin so that his stomach would stop hurting which is the exact opposite of how heroin usually treats its addicts before he heals his stomach and she pays El Duce to shoot him.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CIA Drugs R Us! A Drugs as Weapons… Sequel (2024): Listed as a “comic sequel” to the first movie, this covers much of the same ground with more focus on Lennon, Cobain and Tupac, as well as how MK-Ultra was connected with the Manson Family (never mentions that sex films including Sharon Tate and the Hollywood elites), the government infiltrating the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and finally, gloms on to The Keepers by exploring the Maryland’s Catholic Church sex abuse scandal and how it may be connected to MK-Ultra.

This has the same YouTube of the 2000s quality along with music by a band called ElectroCult Circus which I figure has director and writer Potash as a member. That may also because none of the many bands in this would be OK with their music being taken for it. Then again, there’s a Chris Rock joke taken directly from one of his specials.

This also goes deep into Amanda Claire Marian Charteris, Countess of Wemyss and March, who founded the Foundation to Further Consciousness (now the Beckley Foundation). This group uses psychoactive drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and addiction while enhancing well-being and creativity. She also trepanned herself in 1970 with a dental drill. That means she drilled directly into her brain to expand her consciousness. In the world of this film, this woman is behind so many things and that LSD can have no positive benefits no matter what because it was used by Nazis to kill your favorite rock star.

I’m paraphrasing.

Despite having a three-hour length, I watched and enjoyed all of it. Your mileage — like that of my wife — may vary, as she said that she felt that this lasted for a week and only cared when The Keepers was mentioned. The connection this movie makes, like all of the best conspiracy theories, is tenuous.

I yearn for the days when politics hadn’t yet invaded my safe space of fake moon landings and UPC codes being the Mark of the Beast. Yes, this is beyond left-leaning, but it made me wistful for Art Bell and wildcat lines.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from MVD.