#1839 Halloween 2023: The Chilling (1989)

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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)

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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%

#1837 Halloween 2023: Rocktober Blood (1984)

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During this journey of watching through all 80s movies I’ve come across a few Heavy metal themed horror movies. Trick or Treat is still the top contender with its outrageously entertaining storyline, with Black Roses being a good runner-up. Hard Rock Zombies falls behind both, but at least it tries to be interesting in its own weird way.

Rocktober Blood ends up the last in this best-of list. The movie is pretty much just your basic slasher, accompanied by a few musical numbers.

It’s only the last few minutes of the movie taking form of a concert that is of any real interest here. And frankly, that could have been done directly as a music video to save everyone’s time.

80s-o-meter: 80%

Total:37%

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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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%

#1827 Halloween 2023: Iced (1989)

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By 1989 you would have thunk that there was enough slashers for the filmmakers to take notes of, stand on the shoulders of the greats and deliver something new.

For the team behind Iced this certainly has not been the approach.

An amaterish slasher taking place in a small cabin in some ski resort, the movie fails to deliver on all fronts: originality, suspense, horror and gory deaths, and it’s really hard to think of anyone outside the close family and friend circle of the movie crew to enjoy this train to Dullsville.

80s-o-meter: 70%

Total: 8%

#1826 Halloween 2023: Buried Alive (1989)

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Buried Alive is such incoherent mess that I’m really quite not sure where to even start. There’s some juvenile delinquent schooling centre with just girls in it, run by lunatic personnel and with a new teacher being dropped in the middle of all of this.

The movie draws random horror movie elements from left, right and center and nothing of it really seems to fit together. There’s disappearance of the girls, a murky basement, visions of tormented people and people being trapped behind brick walls. And if all of the previous sounded cool, I assure it was not.

The movie is shot in South-Africa with some veteran actors like Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence and John Carradine hired just for their name and I can’t help but to think that three gentlemen would have come up with a much better horror movie brainstorming just 15 minutes together.

80s-o-meter: 80%

Total: 31%

#1825 Halloween 2023: The Kindred (1987)

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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%

#1824 Halloween 2023: The Dorm That Dripped Blood aka Death Dorm aka Pranks (1982)

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This Halloween begins once again with a slasher – a sub genre I’ve learned not to expect much from.

The Dorm That Dripped Blood gives you pretty much what you’d expect from a slasher of the era, teenagers played by too old actors getting eliminated one by one by a deranged killer in a distant location.

Where the movie stands out though is that it doesn’t seem to carbon copy any other slasher out there but manages to carve its own space inside the genre; the killer is not an invincible super human and the ending does not follow the often seen last minute jump scare approach. Despite the low budged the effects feel well done, landing The Dorm That Dripped Blood ends up on the higher end spectrum of the slashers.

80s-o-meter: 80%

Total: 60%

#1820 My Dinner with Andre (1981)

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I like movies that invite you to a share a moment or night with some people you don’t know and by sharing that time with them you get to know them and enjoy a small slice of their lives just for a bit.

My Dinner with Andre takes the concept to the most minimalistic approach I’ve encountered so far by following a conversation of two friends – a struggling playwright and a director – over a meal in a Manhattan restaurant.

There’s a lot of ways this could have turned into a complete disaster and a bore of a movie of two intellectual talking heads, but the way that the dialogue effortlessly flows out makes this one interesting passing moment to witness.

80s-o-meter: 12%

Total: 75%