Reviews

Don't Open the Door could be S. F. Brownrigg's most technically accomplished and proficient film and the story is compelling even if there are a full dull stretches of padding or downtime when the stakes should be getting higher.

It's about a young woman who returns home and start receiving creepy phone calls from a pervert who's obsessed with her and her murdered mother.

Brownrigg employs many of his usual group of engaging actors and they do a good enough job in bringing a little pep to the proceedings when the pacing takes a dive. It doesn't have the manic, anything goes atmosphere of Don't Look in the Basement, but when it finally gets going, it does deliver.

Upon first glance, Carnival of Souls appears to have a lot of stuff going against it. It's low budget, the cast is full of eager but unknown talent, and it has its fair share of technical quirks such as spotty dubbing and sound quality. In spite of all of this, the film creates an effective eerie atmosphere while telling a captivating and spooky story that feels like an extended Twilight Zone episode.

Candace Hilligoss might not be a household name, but she did give us this one monumental performance that stands the test of time as Mary, an awkward church organist who survives a car accident that killed all of her friends. Soon, she's being stalked by ghouls who follow her wherever she goes.

Carnival of Souls has the uncanny dream logic of a David Lynch film and I wouldn't be surprised if he considered this film a great inspiration.

Pieces won't be winning awards for writing or performances, but it does stay consistently entertaining throughout its 90 minutes.

As best I can explain, the plot of Pieces revolves around a young boy so traumatized by his mother asking him to throw away his porn stash that he chopped her up with an axe. Years later, he has another mental break and decides to reconstruct his favorite childhood toy - a puzzle of a naked woman - from the real body parts of several coeds on a Boston college campus.

Dubbing and dialogue are a scream with characters saying and doing some of the wildest things before perishing at the end of knives and chainsaws, but the general vibe is so silly and fun that it becomes part of the experience.

David Cronenberg tells one of his most personal stories with The Brood - a tale about the horrors of divorce and intergenerational trauma as it gets passed down to our children and tears our families apart.

Oliver Reed stars as an intense doctor who runs a clinic where his patients begin to manifest their inner stress and trauma into physical deformities. Some get bumps and bruises, but Samantha Eggar gets large tumors that turn into murderous children who attack anyone who has done her wrong and, right now, she's most angry at her family who she believes have left her in the dust.

Performances are beyond solid and the wintery atmosphere is appropriately chilling. Violence and gore are used sparingly, but when they arrive, they pack a vicious punch.

As with every anthology, Tales of Terror has some good segments and some less memorable ones. Thankfully, they get the worst one out of the way with "Morella" - a bland tale about an estranged daughter coming home to tell her father that she doesn't have long to live and discovering he still blames her for her mother's death.

The middle segment is the best one with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in a mashup of The Black Cat and The Cask. They're both hammy delights in their roles and it probably has the best all-around script to work with that's filled with dark humor and interesting characterizations.

The final story involving The Case of M Valdemar where Price plays a man hypnotized right before death which leads to some spooky results. It's similarly undercooked along with the first story, but there's some attractive Mario Bava-esque lighting thrown in.

The whole film looks much bigger budgeted and attractive than it has any right to, so even if the stories don't move you, it's always nice to look at.

Uneven pacing and some bad acting detract from The Velvet Vampire's bizarre and dreamy tone as a modern vampire lures a young married couple to her isolated desert home for a weekend of debauchery and neck biting.

Thematically very similar to the better Daughters of Darkness, but there's a lot of new stuff here. For one, the titular vampire has no problems with sunlight or mirrors. For all we know she might not even be a real vampire and could just be some insane woman.

There's not a lot of narrative drive in the film, so if you're someone more interested in plot driven horror films, you might want to think twice before giving this one a spin. If you like slower, more dreamlike films, you'll like it a lot.

Stunningly beautiful to look at, but the pacing is too uneven to even get into the story. It's still the basic story of Hansel and Gretel with two siblings forced to fend for themselves after being abandoned by their parents (this time, it's just their mother who literally screams at them to leave the house in an abrupt sequence) and they're taken in by a seemingly kind woman who lives in the woods who might have more sinister intentions in mind.

You'd think things would get more exciting in the 2nd half once the title characters encounter the witch, but it's the opposite in this film. I found myself pretty interested in the story for the first 30 minutes only to be let down by everything that unfolds once they get to the witch's house where the pacing comes to an abrupt stop and the film begins relying on bizarre dream sequences to remind the audience that they're watching a horror film.

At least it looks beautiful and the music score is creepy. There's just so little going on after they arrive at the witch's house that it's easily to check out.

The time jumps could use some finessing and a lot of the scares don't land, but Trick is a lot more entertaining that most modern slashers I've seen recently. It's about a masked killer who keeps appearing and reappearing every Halloween and it's up to Omar Epps' detective to figure out who's doing it and how to stop him (or is it her?)

The ending goes off the rails with one too many twists, but it's very entertaining it its own silly Scooby Doo way.

A movie star's daughter who can telepathically communicate with insects moves into a Swiss boarding school and helps an entomologist figure out who's behind the series of brutal murders that have been terrorizing the town.

Phenomena might be similar in setting to his Suspiria, but the tone is very different and it feels the most 80's of any of his films. Argento gleefully throws in his classic black gloved gore murders, insect detectives, razor wielding chimps, deformed children, and pits of maggot infested corpses and hopes it'll all stick together if he plays some heavy metal music loud enough over the images. It might not always make the most sense or feel like the most realistic horror film ever made, but it's never less than entertaining. Even at this young age, it was obvious that Jennifer Connelly had the potential to be a full blown movie star. She's captivating.

While not as strong as its predecessor, Suspiria, Inferno has a similarly bright and garish color scheme that sucks you into even the duller scenes of the film. Neither film has a very strong script with memorable characters, but Inferno is much more lackadaisical in its structure. It follows essentially 3 different stories - the story of a young woman who thinks witches inhabit her New York apartment building, her brother who is a music student in Rome, and his friend who gets sucked into this bloody wonderland accidentally.

By the middle of the film, all stories have intersected in some way and it's up to Mark, the brother, to find out what's going on at his sister's apartment building after she goes missing. The only problem is that the character of Mark and, in turn, the performance by Leigh McCloseky is really boring and vacant and it's hard to relate to him. Blessedly, Dario Argento serves up enough of his trademark murder set pieces to distract us and keep us interested.

The Honeymoon Killers is one of those films that wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful had it been made by traditional Hollywood standards. The cast looks like real people, the characters are never likable in that cheesy Hollywood way, and the subject matter can be downright repulsive at times. in spite of (or perhaps because of) that, the film has a unique power and it's not one you'll be forgetting anytime soon.

A lonely nurse falls for a con man she meets through a matchmaking service and decides to accompany him as he marries a bunch of spinsters, steals their money, and moves on to the next victim. Eventually, their robberies turn to murders.

I Could Go On Singing might be a mushy and not very effective drama, but it's one of Judy Garland's rare opportunities to shine as a dramatic actress and shine she does. Rarely has one seen Garland firing on all cylinders like this. She feels real, raw, and and gives an incredibly moving performance.

It's just sad that the film never really matches up to Garland's tremendous performance and one waits for Garland to belt out another showstopper.

For those who think Marilyn Monroe was nothing more than a sex kitten, Don't Bother To Knock might throw you for a loop. Monroe delivers one of her best and most interesting performances as a mentally unhinged nanny babysitting a young girl in a hotel who starts to believe the man across the street is the love of her life who disappeared years ago.

Things build to a fever pitch and Monroe goes further and further off the deep end and other residents and people in charge threaten to destroy her fantasy. It's a slow burner, but once it gets cooking, it's very thrilling.

Anthony Perkins plays a man who has been institutionalized for setting fire to a house (he had his reasons) and who suffers from many delusions. Still, he seems affable enough and not a huge threat to society, so he's released, gets a job, and meets a high school girl played by Tuesday Weld who ends up only furthering his descent into insanity.

While Perkins is indeed wonderful, it's Weld who steals the show here as the seemingly wholesome high school girl who turns out to have quite a thirst for blood. It's well worth checking out.

Don't Look Now might not be a movie for everyone. Less patient viewers will be put off by the slow, deliberate pacing and lack of actual scares, but powering through it will still make you appreciate you saw it even if it doesn't totally land with you.

There are many little tiny scenes that could have easily been trimmed here and there, but the performances of Sutherland and Christie as grieving parents are so great, Roeg's atmosphere is so thick, and Donaggio's lush score is so beautiful that you can forgive just about anything.

The ending is still a sucker punch to this day and one of the most haunting sequences ever filmed. It's so good that it can almost make you forget about any pacing issues. It most definitely makes it worth seeing along with an incredibly frank sex scene between Sutherland and Christie that's still shocking in its explicitness and tenderness.

For the first half of Max Dugan Returns, you have a charming comedy about a hard working single mother, her son, and her estranged father who returns, saying that he's dying and wants to make amends. It's somewhere mid way through that the lead character (Marsha Mason in fine form) starts struggling and the conflict of the film dries up. Things are going ok with her students, her son, and her father. Things are going so well that her father has taken to buying her new cars and furniture for her house. The biggest conflict she has is with her new boyfriend (Donald Sutherland) who happens to be a cop and happens to be on the lookout for her father. This could have led to some interesting tension, but it doesn't. Things become to simple and easy for our protagonist and things just sort of happen to her, which doesn't make for a very interesting story.

Max Dugan Returns has a strong premise, an A-list cast, and Neil Simon as the screenwriter. So, what went wrong? It's still not a bad movie, but it's hard not to pine for what it could have been.

Maybe Black Christmas is just one of those movies that's impossible to remake considering both remakes have missed the mark in major ways. Whereas that 2006 remake felt like a candy-colored, studio re-tooled fever dream of nothing but gore scenes and poorly drawn characters, this new stab at the story feels disjointed and in the middle of an identity crisis.

There are scenes in this film that work when isolated from the film itself, but the film's biggest issue is that it has no idea if it wants to be a serious-minded film about sexual assault and toxic masculinity or an over the top parody of social justice warriors and cults that worship the bust of a racist old white guy that drip black goo which brainwashes young men into hating women. Somewhere in the middle of these two are about 5 cursory minutes worth of scenes trying to remind us we're watching a slasher movie.

One could easily see both variations of this film working in their own ways, but together, it's like watching The War of the Roses as the mismatched couple realizes they just can't live with each other and are completely incompatible together.

I couldn't help but picture a film where sexual assault is still addressed and toxic frat boys still hold a sorority under its grip of terror for naming one of their own as a sexual abuser, but without all the silly cult stuff and poor attempts to be woke with that awful friend of Riley's who bristles every time a man walks by her or opens his mouth.

I'll give the remake of Unhinged this - it definitely does its own thing. Related only superficially to the little seen 80's slasher flick of the same name, Unhinged starts off on just the right foot with a group of friends heading to one of their weddings and being accosted by an angry man. They accidentally kill him and load his body in their trunk. They run out of gas, so they stop off in a small village where a spinster seems all too happy to take them in. As luck would have it, said spinster might have some demons of her own that will bring about their untimely demises.

For about 15 or 20 minutes, the only major fault I could find in Unhinged was the terrible American accents that the English actresses felt the need to use. If we're being truthful, it makes even less sense for them to be American than it would for them to keep their normal dialects. Besides that, things were rolling out at a nice pace, acting was decent, cinematography was pleasant, and the music score was above average for a film of this type. Heck, there was even a jump scare or two that actually worked.

Once the major incident incident happens, Unhinged starts to...well...unhinge. At least in the original film, the girls had an actual car accident, making their stay in this random house a little more sensible. In this film, this crazy woman just randomly offers to let them stay in her house even though she has no idea who they are. Shouldn't that have been a bigger red flag to the main girls?

Unhinged also trades stalk/slashing with surprise and torture sequences. It's not as effective although the killer's get up actually is. The first appearance of the killer on the stairs with that wedding dress billowing in the wind was a very striking image.

It should be applauded for going in a different direction and at least attempting some decent character development for the lead girls, but it's just not as memorable as it could have been. All the elements were in place, but a few things keep it from being as great a remake as one might have hoped.

Rob Zombie asks us to do something very strange with The Devil's Rejects. He asks us to fall for a family of depraved rapists, murderers, necrophiles, and perverts. It's subversive as can be and, you know what? It works.

The Devil's Rejects is a follow up to his first film, House of 1,000 Corpses, but while it follows many of the same characters, the tone and style couldn't be more different. 1,000 Corpses was bathed in neon and technicolor terror, feeling more like a meth-infused funhouse than anything else. Rejects opts for a much more realistic approach, making most of the film take place in the colorless heat of the south.

The Firefly family wake up to the siren call that they're surrounded by police. Soon, they're under siege and they have to flee through their underground tunnels. They're on the road, taking hostages and victims as they see fit as an equally deranged policeman tries to find them so he can dish out his own form of vigilante justice for the murder of his brother.

Besides one poorly timed and useless scene involving a Marx Brothers expert, The Devil's Rejects is a well paced, intense action film with exploitation film leanings. The horror lands better than it did in 1,000 Corpses due to the realism it's presented with. Make no mistake - this is one nasty movie.

Despite its mile wide mean streak, it's surprising that our leads come across as almost lovable as they do. In some ways, we root for them. They are a family after all and we can see that the man terrorizing them is just as demented as they are in many ways.

I grew up with the Scary Stories books and my older brothers would scare me with them every chance they got. Needless to say, they were a big part of my childhood and I was thrilled to see them finally come to life on screen. The good news is - the creature designs seem to have been done with minimal CGI and they are as unnerving and uncanny as the ones in those infamous illustrations we all grew up with. The bad news is - they're attached to a somewhat meandering and un-engaging wrap around story that gives its characters a personality a little too late.

Three young kids and one random drifter break into the abandoned home of a suspected child killer on Halloween, find one of her rumored scary stories books, and fairly soon after that, new stories begin to form in the book as bizarre creatures come to claim new victims.

It's not a bad idea to use as a springboard for all these creepy creations to show up, but the main characters don't give us much to hang on to and the film feels like it takes a bit too long to get to the good stuff and, once it does, we wait in anticipation for the next story to appear in between tedious scenes of the kids sleuthing in the local library or mental hospital to find clues about how to stop the evil from claiming them.

There's lip service to issues of believing victims, money having the ability to bury wrongdoings, war violence, corrupt politicians, and people of color being thought of us bringers of black magic, but it doesn't say much profound about any of those and just feels like window dressing to make the film seem like it's more relevant than it really is.

Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark is still pretty decent as PG-13 horror goes. It has enough imaginative creature designs and sharp ideas to write it off completely.

A Chorus Line was a masterpiece of a musical on stage. It's funny, moving, and as tuneful as musicals can get. It seemed like an obvious choice to adapt into a film, despite its stage-bound origins (and there's no getting around that). Instead of embracing its claustrophobic stage roots to enhance the intensity, the film version of A Chorus Line decides to sporadically "open up" the film, cutting away from the main action on the literal chorus line and focus on one of the dancers - Cassie. We discover that Cassie was once in love with the director of this show and was a big star on Broadway for a spell before going to L.A. to make it in film and TV. She's returned after she realized that they weren't looking for her type out there in California and needs a job. Even though she's "too good" for the chorus and has already proven herself as a star, she bursts into the audition, demanding to be seen for one of the roles.

Making Cassie the lead makes sense. On stage, ensemble pieces tend to work better as the audience can choose to focus on whomever they want for the duration of a scene, but film usually demands one or two main characters at the most and these characters are supposed to dominate the film and have a goal to either attain or give up by the end of the film. Cassie was just one of the many hopeful dancers in the stage show, but putting her front and center here (and giving her the show's best known song - "What I Did For Love") makes the film feel off balance. It also doesn't help that the chemistry between Alyson Reed and Michael Douglas simply isn't there and Reed is saddled with a dud of an 11 o'clock number called "Let Me Dance For You" which replaces "The Music and the Mirror" from the stage show and has exactly the same thing to say, except in a less interesting way.

The Cassie subplot might be the film's biggest downfall, but A Chorus Line also features some of the worst musical arrangements in the history of movie musicals which robs many of the numbers of their personality, charm, and excitement. They've all been re-arranged to sound as 80's as possible and some numbers have been brutally edited down to nothing (if you're a fan of "Hello, Twelve, Hello, Thirteen", you're out of luck) or replaced with far less interesting numbers such as "Surprise" which becomes a showcase for only one of the dancers instead of giving us a number where everyone gets to have their say and we get to learn a little bit about them.

It's a great surprise that, out of all the performers in this film, Audrey Landers comes across the best. She nails the sassy sex kitten Val, has a pleasant singing voice, and isn't a half-bad dancer to boot. Other performers have their moments, but some of the stronger singers are less impressive actors and some of the better actors are less impressive singers and vice versa.

A Chorus Line is rightfully known as one of the worst movie musicals of all time, but it's not without a few bright spots.

This is such great trash. As a straight woman, I was insanely distracted by Serena Grandi's breasts throughout. I really don't know how she walks, let alone runs, with those things. I hope her back is ok. There were times when I was more concerned that she'd topple over and hit her head on a coffee table than get stabbed by the psycho killer who was after her.

It's fairly typical giallo stuff and feels a little like a less psychic Eyes of Laura Mars with a well off magazine editor finding out that her models are being killed off one by one. But this one comes with 100% more Daria Nicolodi, which is never a bad thing even if she gets nothing to do.

There's a suspenseful sequence in a department store, a wacky killer monologue/motivation, and some really surreal murder sequences where we see them through the killer's P.O.V. where he or she sees the victims as different kinds of strange insects or giant eyeballs. If someone can figure out what the creators were smoking or shooting up when they thought of this, I'd like some, please.

Jeanne Crain plays a woman suffering from PTSD after seeing her preacher husband brutally murdered by a Manson-like cult. She ends up babysitting for the children of the judge who convicted the Manson-like cult leader and strange things start happening. Could this man and his followers have returned to settle the score?

The Night God Screamed has been unfairly hidden and buried since the VHS days. It's not exactly a lost masterpiece of terror, but there's a lot of great suspense on display and a really downbeat and spooky ending that I didn't expect. This seems to be Jeanne Crain's attempt at a "hagspoitation" film and she does well with her role.

If you're expecting buckets of blood, this movie might not be your cup of tea. It's still incredibly brutal and intense at times for a PG movie.

There aren't many things worse than a horror movie devoid of original ideas and with several pacing issues. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre seems to think it's a clever dark comedy, but it's actually just an exercise in pure tedium and homage that goes on for far too long.

We should have been warned within the first 10 minutes once we meet what passes as our characters and they're as boring and unrealistic as any teen slasher film I've ever seen. One girl won't shut up about her philandering boyfriend and constantly tries to pull a Scream and talk about how many bad decisions they're making and how they'd be dead if this was a horror film. Our heroine is blatantly obvious, because they make fun of her glasses and her virginity (and because she's played by future Oscar winner Renee Zellwegger).

The rest feels like a scene by scene homage to the original film. Girl runs through woods from Leatherface, finds shelter and realizes that person is in on it as well, returns back to the house, jumps through a window, etc. It's all accounted for. Watch the original instead.

Todd Solondz has a rare skill. He can find humor in the darkest, most depressing subject matter. In Storytelling, he answers his own critics who tell him that certain subjects should be treated with kid gloves and not made fun of. In this film, he makes fun of disabilities, race, death...all the good stuff.

The first 30 minutes of the film focus on a creative writing student (Selma Blair) who's having a hard time finding inspiration. After breaking up with her disabled boyfriend, she had a fling with her African American professor and uses the experience as a basis for her next story.

The rest of the film is about a failed actor (Paul Giametti) turned documentarian who decides to make a high school slacker and his family the focus of his next project. It becomes obvious that the documentarian is the stand in for Solondz himself and he gets to answer the critics who call his work mean spirited or like a freak show where he's making fun of his subjects.

In classic Solondz tradition, there are tons of moments you'll feel bad for laughing at, but you won't feel too bad, because this is one of his best works and it's not as if he's not telling the truth.