Gory Flick – Missile Test

The Demon’s Rook

Had The Demon’s Rook been made in the 1980s or 1990s, it would have been shot on videotape. This is very much kin to the kinds of movies the Polonia brothers or Andreas Schnaas were making back then. All the bona fides are there. It was the passion project of an aspiring filmmaker and an amateur cast and crew. It’s very bloody and gory, yet the effects are inexpensive. And it took a long time to shoot, with this particular flick eating up weekends for two years, if the internet is to be believed.

Released in 2013, the driving force of The Demon’s Rook is filmmaker James Sizemore, who wrote (with Akom Tidwell), produced (with Tim Reis), directed, and starred. Reis contributed further as editor and cinematographer. The Demon’s Rook tells the story of Roscoe (Sizemore), who, when he was a young boy (played by Emmett Eckert), was recruited by a demon, Dimwos (John Chatham), to become an apprentice in demonic magic. The price is high, as Roscoe not only has to abandon his life, but his parents become blood sacrifices, and Roscoe is held prisoner well into his adulthood in a separate dimension. Continue reading “The Demon’s Rook”

Phantom Brother

The first line in my notes for Phantom Brother, the 1988 shot-on-video (SOV) horror flick from screenwriter Joseph Santi and director William Szarka reads, “Well, it’s trash.” That may be harsh, but my movie notes are written in the heat of the moment, without considering the trials and tribulations of the filmmaking process. Of course, like so many other low budget projects, Phantom Brother is a movie made despite the mountain of barriers that had to be overcome. It is a movie of passion, persistence, and…it’s trash. I’m glad it got made, but this is an obscure movie for a reason. Many reasons, in fact. Continue reading “Phantom Brother”

Terrifier

As of this writing, Terrifier, the 2016 gorefest from filmmaker Damien Leone, has a critics/audience rating of 63% and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. This flick is polarizing, and it really turned some people off.

A spinoff of a segment from Leone’s horror anthology film All Hallow’s Eve, Terrifier follows Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a mass murderer who sets his sights on a pair of young women who are wrapping up a night out on the town during Halloween.

Tara and Dawn (Jenna Kanell and Catherine Corcoran) are regular, everyday urban twenty-somethings who just want to drive home, but need to sober up a bit before one of them gets behind the wheel. It’s too bad for them, then, that Art the Clown happens to be out and about looking for some victims. Halloween is the perfect night for Art, as his creepy regalia isn’t out of place, although it garners a lot of side-eye. Continue reading “Terrifier”

Fatal Images

Fatal Images VHS box In the decades since the 1989 release of Fatal Images, filmmaker Dennis Devine has staked out quite a place in low budget, trash horror cinema. Of the thirty-four directorial credits on his IMDb page that have viewer ratings, the average score is 3.8 out of 10. That’s pretty bad. Any single movie that garners a score that low is probably not worth the effort to watch, and that number covers Devine’s entire career. Some would say he should have thrown in the towel a long time ago, but shit on that. Devine is a filmmaker. It doesn’t matter that he makes crap. He makes movies, and no matter how bad they are, there is an audience of mutants out there who reject force fed studio movies — who experience culture outside the big corporate stranglehold on media. Sure, his movies stink. But every blown line, every plot hole, every frame of bland, desaturated magnetic video is a ‘fuck you’ to the moneyed gatekeepers of cinema.

Fatal Images, also written by Devine, with Mike Bowler and Steve Jarvis, is a supernatural slasher flick. Shot on glorious videotape, the film tells the story of deceased serial killer Kurt Cosgrave (David Williams); the camera that holds his murderous spirit (played by a Panon Widelux); and the photographer who buys the camera at a pawnshop, Amy Stewart (Lane Coyle). Continue reading “Fatal Images”

A Chinese Ghost Story

A Chinese Ghost Story, from Hong Kong actor, stuntman, and filmmaker Siu-Ting Ching (screenplay by Songling Pu and Kai-Chi Yuen), is, according to the internet, a xianxia film. Xianxia are ‘closely related to the wuxia and shenmo genres.’ There is some cultural illiteracy here, on my part, but those strange new terms basically mean ‘based within Chinese mythology.’ Now we’re getting somewhere. If one has seen a Hong Kong martial arts flick that takes place before the emergence of modern China, one will be familiar with the look and feel of A Chinese Ghost Story. It’s a piece of fantasy, encompassing demons and the supernatural, with Hong Kong martial arts movie trickery thrown in, and comedy to keep things light.

The movie follows Leslie Cheung as Ling Choi San, a debt collector suffering from multiple slapstick maladies, who makes the mistake of spending a night in a haunted temple. There, he meets Yin Chek Ha (Wu Ma), a swordsman who retired from the civil service in disgust at the corruption, and now spends his time ridding the country of evil spirits. Yin Chek Ha is at the temple because it has recently been taken over by an evil tree demon (Siu-Ming Lau). All the inhabitants and caretakers have been killed and turned into stop motion zombies by the tree demon. It has also seized some recently deceased souls, which it uses to capture more innocent people to feed its insatiable appetite. Continue reading “A Chinese Ghost Story”

Silent Night, Deadly Night

People get all twisted over small stuff. We see it often. A large chunk of modern media thrives on the outrage machine. It drives engagement, sputters out after a week or so, then the talking heads find something else with which to rile up the masses. This has been going on for a long time. Even way back in 1984, before the World Wide Web kicked the machine into overdrive, we were carving out chunks of our lives to be outrageously pissed at something that didn’t matter.

Silent Night, Deadly Night, the classic slasher flick from director Charles E. Sellier Jr., caught the attention of the outrage machine. Groups picketed theaters that were showing it, and Phil Donahue dedicated an episode of his talkshow to it. Why? Because the killer in this movie dresses as Santa Claus. That was it. That was the outrage. Santa was such a sacred cow to enough people that they were offended by the very idea of a killer Santa. The behavior of a fictional character was an attack on an institution — Christmas — that they held dear. This is familiar ground today for a certain subset of cable news viewers, but what a stupid thing to get angry about. The anger got so intense that the film was pulled from distribution after only a couple of weeks, home video releases were few, and the intact film was in danger of being lost, despite cult success and a string of sequels. Anyway… Continue reading “Silent Night, Deadly Night”

Whistle

Whistle, the 2025 horror film from writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy, is something of a throwback. The conceit of a cursed object whose use brings unexpected, and sometimes ironic, death was a more common theme in horror of decades past. Paired with a cast of teenagers, films like this have been a rich breeding ground of explorations into coming of age and the sudden salience of one’s mortality. There’s a reason most of these films have young protagonists. Done correctly, these flicks give the young’uns serious chills. Done even more correctly, there is plenty of bloody mayhem for the gorehounds among us. Continue reading “Whistle”

Deadly Friend

Warner Bros. did Wes Craven dirty. Deadly Friend, from 1986, was Craven’s first feature since A Nightmare on Elm Street, which made a bucketful of money for New Line Cinema. Warners didn’t have the confidence in Craven that his previous success had earned. After a first cut of this film was poorly received by a test audience, producers and studio execs ordered reshoots. Nothing new there, but as originally shot, Deadly Friend was not a horror movie. It was a sci-fi thriller. Craven was forced to change the story, add in blood and gore scenes, and turn his film into something against his and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s intent. Continue reading “Deadly Friend”

Grizzly

Jaws was released on June 20th, 1975. Less than a year later, on May 12, 1976, Grizzly, a wild ripoff, hit theaters. According to the internet, so it must be true, producers/screenwriters Harvey Flaxman and David Sheldon made no secret about the film’s origins. They were very much looking to cash in on the success of Jaws. By October of 1975 director William Girdler was filming, and by the end of the next year, Grizzly became the highest grossing independent film up to that time.

I was surprised to learn Grizzly is an independent flick, because it has the look and feel of mid-budget studio schlock, or even a TV movie from the era. I couldn’t help feeling this was exactly the kind of movie Jaws would have been had it not been in Spielberg’s hands. Even the main cast is perfect for studied mediocrity. Continue reading “Grizzly”

Timesweep

Timesweep movie poster Someone out there, somewhere, owns the rights to Timesweep, the 1987 magnum opus from writer/director Dan Diefenderfer (screenplay credits were shared with Larry Nordsieck and John Thonen). As of this writing, Timesweep is nowhere to be found on streaming services, outside of the nooks and crannies where someone has uploaded an old VHS transfer. For shame. This movie is right up Tubi’s alley, and I’m sure whoever owns the rights could use the extra fifty bucks. Anyway…

Timesweep tells the tale of a bunch of mild-mannered 30-something Midwesterners who find themselves trapped in an abandoned building that is hopping through time. Monsters, aliens, zombies, a crazed hermit, killer bugs, and more abound, providing the audience with a surprising amount of gore for so moribund a budget.

The building in question is an old film studio that is slated for demolition. An architecture professor, Vincent Hill (Kevin Brief), a film professor, H.G. Lewis (Frank Vrooman), and students have gathered to explore the old edifice before it’s gone forever. Joining them is a local news anchor covering the story, Angela Markell (Denise Gray), and cameraman Mike Romero (Michael Cornelison). Mike is the rebel of the movie. One can tell because he shows up two minutes late, and he’s rocking a beige jacket. Yeah, there were some wild folks in Kansas City, Missouri in the 1980s. Continue reading “Timesweep”