Kategoria: Horror

#1842 Halloween 2023: Cameron’s Closet (1988)

Posted on by admin

Cameron’s Closet as a title seems like ringing a bell, as if I’d been exposed to it somewhere in the past. But more likely it just resembles some other sumilar sounding title I’ve gotten it mixed up with.

The movie works fairly well as long as the monster is kept in the closet of the young Cameron who possesses telekinetic and telepathic skills, and some of the scares are genuinely effective.

But as the movie wanders too far into the dream world, it soon starts to become a pill far too big to swallow. Keeping things low key and building upon the premise of an entity in the close would have likely yielded better results, and the movie quite unfortunately looses its footing in the third act.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 50%

#1840 Halloween 2023: The Attic (1980)

Posted on by admin

The Attic is probably the first movie this Halloween that takes an effort to be an actual movie. You know, one with story, building up characters and all that.

And it was a nice surprise! Carrie Snodgress who was earlier unknown to me creates a wonderful character of an old maid librarian living with her tyrannical father, and it’s easy to grow attached to her, her fears, self-doubt and small scale dreams to have the courage to take a possession of her life.

Ray Milland as the father and Ruth Cox as the unlikely young friend and confident both make for interesting, multi-faceted characters. Director George Edwards holds up the horror elements to the last minutes of the film – but they feel even more impactful at that point.

80s-o-meter: 70%

Total: 84%

#1839 Halloween 2023: The Chilling (1989)

Posted on by admin

The Chilling is one of those B-movies that fell in between of being of a good enough quality for the masses, while also failing to gain a cult status for themselves as many horror movies do.

While the story of people in cryogenic sleep waking up to terrorise a facualty was never a contender for Oscars, I did enjoy the overall theme and atmosphere here. And while movie is cheaply put together, there’s nothing totally bad in here. The reanimated corpses are vicious and look menacing.

The handsome, chiselled Dan Haggerty makes for a great charismatic hero who single handedly manages to bring up the movie a notch or two.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 72%

#1838 Halloween 2023: Dreamaniac (1986)

Posted on by admin

The award of least effort in a horror movie seems to go to Dreamaniac this year.

Haphazardly put together slasher with no real storyline and taking a place in a younger’s party with a summoned succubus doing all the killings is pretty much as uninteresting as movies come. The former porn director David DeCoteau even failed to get any of the females undressed for the gratuitous nudity the movie was clearly going after.

And yes, that VHS cover needs also addressing, touting to frame this straight to video release as something too gory for the silver screen, when we all know it was just plain too bad to ever see a theatrical release.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 72%

#1836 Halloween 2023: Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants (1986)

Posted on by admin

I’ve seen the premise before: country hicks getting infected by virus turning them into undead creatures. Bloodsuckers from Outer Space and Redneck Zombies were both surprisingly entertaining zombie movies, but Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants unfortunately falls far behind of both.

The movie makes a maximum effort of being just plain disgusting. There’s endless scenes of people turning into zombies, gushing black ooze and puking yellow excrement. On top of this the movie has been dubbed completely, with voice actors really working for their money adding all kinds of moaning, gushing and cacophony, making the movie really hard to watch through.

The zombies look, well, passable, but that’s just about the only good thing I can say about the movie.

80s-o-meter: 72%

Total: 2%

#1835 Halloween 2023: Family Reunion (1989)

Posted on by admin

I believe there is an ok horror movie somewhere to be found in Family Reunion; I like most of the individual pieces presented here like the setting of the ghost town, mysterious cult and an old forgotten secret.

But Family Reunion can never quite put these elements into order that makes sense for the viewer and the storytelling lacks the depth needed to make us empathise with the characters and comprehend their choices. I found myself constantly excited of events on the screen, but then ending up trying to connect the dots between events and people in a hope that it would all make sense somehow.

Despite all of this the movie did have a good atmosphere to it, and was never too much of a chore to watch. Rather, it was the constant feeling of the movie not fully living up to its potential that felt the disappointment for me.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 59%

#1834 Halloween 2023: Psycho Cop (1989)

Posted on by admin

Piggybacking on the success of Maniac Cop, Psycho Cop strips out pretty much everything that made its paragon great, keeps what doesn’t and introduces elements that nobody asked for.

For example turning the concept to a basic teen slasher taking place in a remote location, at the time where slashers were already a yesterday’s story.

While Maniac Cop played it smart with its antagonist police officer and kept him as something of an enigma, Psycho Cop is nowhere near as smart. Here he is just a stupidly grinning police killing people in the daylight, armed with an irritating laughter laughter that could peel paint off the walls.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 21%

#1833 Halloween 2023: Lurkers (1987)

Posted on by admin

Lurkers takes some patience to plow through; right until the last act nothing in the movie seems to make sense, and feels really disconnected. It’s as if the writers had a good idea for the start and the end, and did not have anything to fill up the 80 minutes in the middle.

Which is probably why the ending with the protagonist entering the party in her birth apartment is prolonged to the max. The ending does pay off and tie the story together nicely, but with this little of actual content the movie would worked much better as a 30 minute short story in a horror anthology.

80s-o-meter: 75%

Total: 60%

#1832 Halloween 2023: Dracula’s Widow (1988)

Posted on by admin

Dracula movies were never my cup of tea, but then again Dracula’s Widow really isn’t one – or at least it takes quite the artistic freedom over the subject.

The wife of Dracula gets accidentally shipped amongst other antique in a wooden crate from Romania to a waxworks in Hollywood, wakes up and starts to take demonic forms and killing people – not by biting but quite literally ripping them apart. So, all of all this could just be a monster movie rather than a Dracula one, which is a strange choice since FX isn’t really the strong suite of the movie. In fact, it’s pretty awful most of the time.

The movie ”stars” Emmanuelle actor Sylvia Kristel, who can’t bring any life [sic] to the character. Maybe some other actor could have been able to save the movie, since some of the other aspects here aren’t half bad. Lenny von Dohlen as the confused waxworks owner and Josef Sommer as the detective on the case both do their roles with a charm and add to the vintage look & feel of the movie.

80s-o-meter: 55%

Total: 58%

#1831 Halloween 2023: Attack of the Beast Creatures aka Hell Island (1985)

Posted on by admin

Attack of the Beast Creatures has one interesting aspect going for it: the atmosphere. Set in the 1920s the movie shares the same look and feel like the 1940s and 50s creature movies, which makes the (otherwise tame) gore effects much more impactful.

But it’s also in this same FX department where the movie fails the biggest; the little dolls thrown towards the actors for them to hold and pretend struggling is downright ridiculous, and the movie would have gotten much farther by just hinting the existence of the creatures.

80s-o-meter: 14%

Total: 28%

#1830 Halloween 2023: Blood Beach (1980)

Posted on by admin

Riding in the wake of Jaws, Blood Beach makes an attempt to frame the sand – or more precisely a creature therein – as the antagonist to fear.

…aaand it by large fails to do so. It is very hard to take this particular threat seriously.

On the positive side the movie itself, along with its early 80s beach scene and detective cast led by the late John Saxon and the Burt Young are all sufficiently entertaining to watch. All in all, Blood Beach is more of a mystery what dunnit story rather than a horror movie.

80s-o-meter: 72%

Total: 60%

#1829 Halloween 2023: Epitaph aka Mommy’s Epitaph (1987)

Posted on by admin

For me the movies of a family member – someone you ought to trust – turning out to be evil is one of the most effective forms of horror. This is the premise Epitaph is built upon.

And there’s a lot going for the movie. The family protecting the secret of a psychopathic mother and hoping that everything will end up well, the young daughter balancing between the horrors of the family and making an attempting to fit into her new school all work well. The movie also invites the viewer to witness the madness as sort of a voyeuristic, documentary style.

It’s only too bad the movie isn’t very well made which unfortunately spoils a lot of what the movie could have offered. The pacing and endless zooms in and out of the mansion feels tiring and the feeling of the team working at the very edge of their skills steals the viewer’s focus of what could otherwise been a nice little horror story.

80s-o-meter: 80%

Total: 58%

#1828 Halloween 2023: Grotesque (1988)

Posted on by admin

Grotesque is like a gas station buffet, with little bit of everything sub par quality thrown on the plate, with hopes of someone finding even something to fill their tummies with.

At first this feels a bit unbalanced, but once you get the hang of what hodgepodge the movie is by design, this experience with deformed killers and maniac punks that look straight out of a cheap Benny Hill sketch becomes much more tolerable. Grotesque is not officially categorised as a comedy, but clearly this is the undertone throughout the movie and its surprising events.

80s-o-meter: 83%

Total: 61%

#1825 Halloween 2023: The Kindred (1987)

Posted on by admin

On her deathbed, a scientist urges her son to destroy her lab notes from her experiments. As the son visits the her mother’s ancestral home, he uncovers the existence of a lost brother, and the horrifying secrets of genetic research gone wrong.

The Kindred is a horror creature movie whose strongest suit is by far the uncovering of the mystery and typical to the monster movies, the creature itself feels almost underwhelming compared to the mighty fine atmosphere the movie manages to create completely without its monster fx. In other words: here as well it’s more scary what you don’t see than rather than what you do see.

Also typical to the similar movies, it turns from a mystery horror thriller to a pretty standard action movie without managing to capitalise the original eery atmosphere. Still, there’s a lot to be liked here and The Kindred is a fine example of a horror movie done mostly right.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 75%

#1803 Confessions of a Serial Killer (1985)

Posted on by admin

Based on the true story of Henry Lee Lucas, Confessions of a Serial Killer follows the interrogations of a serial killer speaking openly to the investigators about the horrific acts performed before getting caught.

The documentary style works well and the depictions of killing just for fun are quite devastating to watch, and especially the suspension in the last part of the movie is almost too much to take in.

80s-o-meter: 65%

Total: 72%

#1788 Girlfriend from Hell (1989)

Posted on by admin

An evil spirit possesses a nerdy girls who becomes a vamp draining the life out of all the few guests taking part in a teen get together.

Here’s a part of Girlfriend from Hell that actually works to an extend, and I wished the movie would’ve double downed on this premise, with party guests missing one by one, upping the ante as the last few ones figure things out. Unfortunately the latter half of the movie concentrates on the God’s bounty hunter after the spirit, depicted in the spirit of a cheapo scifi movie.

The scifi part I don’t mind, but the character is just too weak and out of place to carry the movie that quite disappointingly comes to a total halt in a moment where it should really take off.

80s-o-meter: 92%

Total: 60%

#1786 Troll (1986)

Posted on by admin

Do you know which movie stars the brown haired pre-teen boy called Harry Potter Jr who’s interested in all kinds of magical and superstitious and gets sucked into an adventure full of weird mystical creatures, witches and such.

If you answered Troll, you are quite right! If you answered something else, you must have mixed up this masterpiece with some less known trivial pulp.

The house getting overtaken by Trolls and other magic creatures is bit of a weird mix made a bit in the vein of Gremlins, but does not manage to hit the same buttons in terms of adventure, scares, thrill and humour – but it does a pretty good job attempting it. While the Troll figure is well made, it’s not a strong antagonist lead in any sense of the word, but the remaining visual effects are actually executed much better than in your average movie of the era. Speaking of humour, there is a little song with wonderfully weird atmosphere to it, performed by the Troll army – something I will be looking to listening soon again.

80s-o-meter: 85%

Total: 71%

#1755 Luther the Geek (1989)

Posted on by admin

Luther the Geek (geek referring to a circus freak) is a horror movie that revolves around a psychopathic killer released from prison, only to immediate resuming his killing spree.

The makers of the movie aimed to create a character that would be off-putting and revolting, and they certainly succeeded as Luther is one of the characters I hope never to see in another movie. His appearance is reminiscent of the classic movie villain, Nosferatu, but with a much more gruesome method of killing, as he bites off the heads of his victims and even chickens he catches.

But there are positives here as well: The movie really manages to create a haunting and suspenseful atmosphere and as such is an above the average horror movie. I have to say I was surprised to find the movie rated as comedy as I did not find anything comedic about, other than the almost ridiculous amount of gore presented.

80s-o-meter: 70%

Total: 65%

#1711 Halloween 2022: Watchers (1988)

Posted on by admin

Finally wrapping up this year’s Halloween with Watchers that I’ve had in my peripheral vision for a few years now, being one of the last Corey Haim movies of the 80s I haven’t yet seen.

My expectation was a supernatural movie with certain Watchers lurking in shadows, but to my surprise the movie was about a boy running into a stray dog whom he then adopts, later discovering that it is in fact a runaway experiment from a genetic research lab with mental powers equal to a human, being followed by a dangerous creature from the same lab.

And meeeeh, I did like my first impression better than this quite far fetched scifi story the movie presented to me. The movie is based on a seemingly solid book by Dean Koontz, so my only guess is that something got lost in translation here. The movie is ok, but its core audience leaves me puzzled as the movie feels thematically geared more towards 12-year olds, yet boasts R-rating.

80s-o-meter: 87%

Total: 68%

#1710 Halloween 2022: My Demon Lover (1987)

Posted on by admin

There’s little fun to be had with movies that introduce a concept doomed to fail, and then fail, but amazingly lot of entertainment when the opposite happens.

My Demon Lover is one of those cases where something I absolutely hated on paper – A street musician becoming a demon when sexually aroused and attacking women – surprises and finds an interesting tone of its own, ending up more of a romantic comedy, sprinkled with some dark, grim humour.

80s-o-meter: 90%

Total: 71%