October Horrorshow

October Horrorshow: Click: The Calendar Girl Killer

For about two-thirds of Click: The Calendar Girl Killer, the movie flirts with being an erotic thriller, featuring a passel of middle-aged Hollywood b-listers cashing checks. Then, for the final act, the movie makes a hard turn into slasher horror. It’s a change in tone that’s unusual, only because there is no indication this will happen. It’s obvious to viewers that violence will be coming in the final act, but not the scale, and not how it is depicted.

Something of a vanity project in the world of b-movies, Click was written by Hollywood acting stalwarts Ross Hagen and Hoke Howell, with David Reskin and David Chute. Hagen also directed alongside longtime stunt man John Stewart. To make it a family affair, Hagen’s wife, Claire, co-produced. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Click: The Calendar Girl Killer”

October Horrorshow: Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte dellamore

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is drifting through life. No college degree — no high school degree, even. He admits that he’s only ever read two books in his life. One, he didn’t finish, and the other was the phone book. Did he finish that?

A dead end life inevitably leads one to a dead end job. In Francesco’s case, that’s as caretaker for the cemetery in the Italian town of Buffalora. His assistant is Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), a sensitive idiot whose only spoken words are the first syllable of his name, spat out like a child saying, “Nyaa!”

It would be a normal and dull job if all the pair had to do was bury the dead and keep graves clean, but, in Buffalora, the dead have the habit of coming back to life and clawing their way out into the light. So, every night, Francesco and Gnaghi have the unenviable task of smashing the brains of the undead and sticking them back in their graves. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Cemetery Man, aka Dellamorte dellamore”

October Horrorshow: Sorority House Massacre

Ecclesiastes 1:9 states, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Every single maker of slasher flicks in the 1980s must have read that verse and taken it to heart. Especially Carol Frank, writer/director of 1986’s Sorority House Massacre. Not only does her movie crib from a decade’s worth of slasher flicks, it also cribs from The Slumber Party Massacre, a film on which Frank worked. According to the internet, so it must be true, that similitude was intentional, as Roger Corman, the uncredited executive producer, wanted a flick with a slumber party theme. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Sorority House Massacre”

October Horrorshow: Alien Hunter

When is a ripoff of The Thing not a ripoff? When it changes just enough for plausible deniability. Alien Hunter did not change enough. In fact, it even reused footage from John Carpenter’s version of The Thing.

Released direct-to-video in 2003, Alien Hunter was directed by Ron Krauss from a screenplay by executive producer J.S. Cardone, a prolific b-filmmaker in his own right.

Alien Hunter stars James Spader as cryptologist Julian Rome, who is sent to a remote Antarctic research base after a mysterious signal is detected. After finding the location of the signal’s source, out in the middle of the frozen wastes, an object is found buried in the ice, just like in The Thing. Also just like in The Thing, the researchers chip out the surrounding ice into a block, and haul the whole thing back to base. There, debate ensues about what to do with this object, as it’s clear to everyone but one dissenting researcher, Dr. Straub (veteran performer John Lynch), that this object is alien in origin. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Alien Hunter”

October Horrorshow: Backwoods (1988), aka Geek!

Backwoods 1988 VHS boxWhat happens when a filmmaker doesn’t provide a regular stream of fodder in their cheap slasher flick? Not a lot of good, that’s what.

Backwoods, sprung from the mind of Dean Crow, who directed and has a story credit, is about as low rent as a slasher can get. The budget looks to have been somewhere in the four figures, and the majority of the film takes place either in the woods or in a rundown house. The movie has a total of six cast members. That’s it. Six. Including the slasher. That meant there were not a lot of bodies for the bad guy to pile up. Not only that, there was not a single on screen death attributable to the slasher. How does one make a slasher flick, and the slasher has the lowest body count of all the characters? That’s quite a storytelling challenge Crow set for himself.

From the waning days of slasher flicks’ golden era, 1988, Backwoods follows couple Karen and Jamie (Christine Noonan and Brad Armacost) as they hike into the low mountains of northern Kentucky for a bit of camping. The area they chose used to be home to a fundamentalist Christian sect that wanted to sever all ties with civilization. They died off, as so many of those sects did, leaving behind nothing but local legends about the spooky woods they inhabited. A local ranger (Gary Lott), tries to steer them elsewhere, but Karen is determined to head into that dark stretch of wilderness. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Backwoods (1988), aka Geek!”

October Horrorshow: YellowBrickRoad

Ideas are easy. Writing is hard. That’s why there are so many films with fantastic premises that don’t stick the landing. A case in point is YellowBrickRoad, from writing and directing duo Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton. This film has a strong premise. In 1940, all the residents of the small town of Friar, New Hampshire, decided to walk off into the forest one day, never to be seen alive, again. They left behind everything.

Now, in the present, a small group of researchers has decided to follow in the townsfolk’s footsteps, hiking up the same disused trail, in hopes of discovering just what it was that led them to their doom. They’re looking for a scientific explanation, perhaps based in group psychosis, but are also open to the idea that something supernatural was the cause. Perhaps something, some thing, resides in the pure, untouched wilderness, and lured these townsfolk away from hearth and home. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: YellowBrickRoad”

October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner

Shot on video horror flicks can generally be sorted into two camps. One, those made in Hollywood, but outside the studio system; and two, regional cinema. The main difference between the two is that the regional movies, made by filmmakers such as Tim Ritter, J.R. Bookwalter, and the Polonia brothers, are true outsider art, unconcerned with the way things are supposed to be done while making a movie, while those sprouted from the Los Angeles area have things like unionized crew, professional editing, etc. What both of these broad categorizations have in common is that the movies are objectively bad, no matter where they come from. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner”

October Horrorshow: Jeepers Creepers, featuring the Dumbest Decision By a Character in Horror History

I wouldn’t say that horror cinema was in the doldrums around the turn of the century. There was a strong direct-to-video market, independent movie makers were still churning out flicks shot on VHS, and there had been a revival of the teen slasher flick in theaters. But, there was a hangover from the golden age that was the 1980s. It felt like everything that could be achieved in the genre had now been done. There was nowhere left to go with gore, monsters, killers, ghosts, scares, etc. Horror had been stripmined and there were only a few original ideas on the horizon (not true, fortunately). Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Jeepers Creepers, featuring the Dumbest Decision By a Character in Horror History”

October Horrorshow: Cannibal Campout

Here it is! The first shot-on-video horror flick of this year’s Horrorshow. And it’s a good one…relatively speaking.

From way back in 1988 comes Cannibal Campout, from directors Tom Fisher and Jon McBride, working from a screenplay by McBride. No misdirection in the title with this flick. There is a campout, and there are cannibals.

The woods of New Jersey are the setting, as they are in many a horror flick. Four college students, Jon (McBride, who also produced and edited), Carrie (Carrie Lindell), Chris (Christopher A. Granger, who also handled sound, music, and was a camera assistant), and Amy (Amy Chludzinski) head off into the wilderness of New Jersey for a weekend away from the rigors of college life. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Cannibal Campout”

October Horrorshow: Bigfoot Vs. Zombies

Mark Polonia has been in the cheap movie game since the mid-1980s. Ultra low budget horror and sci-fi is an indelible part of his identity as a filmmaker. For almost forty years (previously with his twin brother, John — rest in peace), he has cranked out movie after movie, some garnering praise above and beyond expectations, while some are gutter trash. But, they are fun gutter trash. As of this writing, he has directed twenty-seven movies in this decade alone, and a whopping seven of them have IMDb ratings below 2.0. That’s not easy to do.

Mark Polonia reminds me of a fellow student at the School of Visual Arts, way back in my haughty fine arts days. He was a slightly below average artist, for what one gets at a place like SVA, but I felt that most of his issues could be solved by slowing down a bit. He was in such a rush to push out all these visual ideas he had bouncing around in his head that he never took the time to step back and refine what he was putting down on canvas. Just taking an extra day or two to stare at and think on a piece would have done wonders for its quality, I thought. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Bigfoot Vs. Zombies”