Reviews

DREAM NO EVIL is the perfect example of regional, independent features being far more interesting than Hollywood films from the same age. When studios and producer moguls get involved in a film, they ask questions. "Where are these people? How does any of this advance the plot? Why are they doing an Irish jig now?"

DREAM NO EVIL doesn't want to answer those questions, steadfastly refuses to, and is all the more interesting because of it. Notice I say "more interesting" and not "better": this misses the majority of shots it takes, the narration eviscerates the mood, and the shots and performance are stilted. But an undeniable charm still radiates, as long as you're into this kind of thing.

Could work as the B-side of LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH or MESSIAH OF EVIL for a double feature of outside-reality Americana horror.

D-grade action/comedy/horror/kung-fu hybrid obviously modeled after better Hong Kong fare like Mr. Vampire. Difference is, those films are clever and this has a scene where a black magic ritual is interrupted by a smelly bowel movement. Ech.

There's some decent fight choreography, but the plot is so nonsensical that it's not even clear who is fighting each other most of the time, let alone why. This is available in the Mill Creek Spirited Killer trilogy box set under the name Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles, but I wouldn't recommend searching this one out any other way.

100 MONSTERS?! What a great film title, bringing to mind one hundred yokai (traditional Japanese monsters and spirits) wreaking havoc on an Edo-period village. The real film doesn't quite live up to that promise, but it's a fun entry into the '60s Japanese popcorn horror canon.

As is the case in many Japanese flicks from this time, the bad guys are powerful landowners who push around the good guys and take their land, their women and even their lives. But after the lords fail to complete a ritual after a "hyaku monogatari" (monster story-telling) event, they are haunted and hunted down by bloodthirsty monsters.

I love yokai to death, so any cinematic representation is fun for me. And what monster action we get here is fittingly awesome; we get a long-necked woman (rokurokubi), long-tongued umbrella monsters (kasa-obake) and faceless humans (noppera-bo), all of which look fantastic. The special effects are surprisingly good and hold up perfectly after 50+ years. Whenever the creatures are the focus of the camera, the film is fun as hell.

The problem is they are not the focus very often. Instead, we're treated to a pretty basic "samurai vs. landlords" plot that proceeds in a rather cliche fashion. It makes for passable watching, but it's not too exciting and not what anybody started watching a movie called 100 MONSTERS for. This is to be expected from a budget flick from the '60s, but it does affect the enjoyment factor of the film.

Overall, though, it's an easy, fun watch with wonderful creature design and delightfully odd moments. Recommended for yokai fans or monster movie lovers, even if it won't become one of your favorites.

After watching TRUTH OR DARE and KILLING SPREE and enjoying the hell out of both of them, I downloaded Tim Ritter's first directorial effort in hopes it would be a bizarre, inept slice of psychotronic cinema. It definitely IS that, but that doesn't mean watching it is any fun whatsoever.

Released straight-to-video in 1984, DAY OF THE REAPER was shot when Tim Ritter was still in high school. He cobbled together some friends from school, a Super-8 camera and $1,000, then sold the final project door-to-door to video stores in his home state of Florida. It got the attention of the right people, and Ritter went on to be a minor cult icon in the horror world. It takes a lot of guts to do something like this, and he should definitely get some recognition for doing it.

Unfortunately, DAY OF THE REAPER is damn near unwatchable. Half of the shots are too dark to make out what's happening and the other half are tinted a bevy of strange colors. The film was dubbed after the fact with mumbled, nonsensical dialogue delivered by high schoolers who wouldn't make the cut for their senior play. The gore scenes are so ineptly shot that you're unsure if someone is actually being killed. And don't get me started on the "plot."

Finally, it commits the deadly sin of being utterly boring. It's, like, 60 minutes long, and 58 of them are filler. I actually fell asleep watching it and only finished it the next morning due to an obsessive-compulsive habit of completing any film I start. The version I found has text commentary written by Ritter that lambasts the film and occasionally mutes the pain of viewing it, but it doesn't help nearly enough.

If you're looking for the next BOARDINGHOUSE or THINGS, this is most definitely not it. Watch Ritter's later work and pretend this doesn't exist. 4/10 for the effort and the synthtastic score, but, oh lord, is this bad, and not in a charming way.

Three years after an adaptation in 1965's KWAIDAN, the classic Japanese ghost story of the yuki-onna (snow woman) gets a feature-length telling. While Tokuzo Tanaka's film might feel a little redundant after the wonderful adaptation of the story in KWAIDAN, KAIDAN YUKI JOROU is still well worth a look for fans of Japanese folk horror.

Extending the tale to eighty minutes doesn't feel like stretching it too thin; the feature-length story gets to focus more time on character development and crafting emotional connections, which helps the climax reach surprisingly emotive heights. You almost forget it's a horror flick in the middle, with the vibe lying somewhere between fantasy and family drama, but these portions don't drag like they could have.

The film is beautifully shot and has some wonderfully memorable visual moments, especially near the end. These '60s Japanese horrors do such a wonderful job creating a spooky atmosphere, which is amplified by the setting and time period. It's like you're seven years old, telling ghost stories around the fire, except you're in rural Japan and wearing a kimono for some reason.

It is rather predictable and features a lot of the missteps of Japanese cinema from this time period (overacting, a tendency towards ham-fisted asides and monologues, etc.), but if you enjoyed the likes of KWAIDAN and ONIBABA, this should tickle your fancy.

You know a film's going to be good when it starts with a three-minute bologna sandwich exchange.

Truly bizarre, essentially plotless '60s family flick that should've been a 10-minute short, but is instead padded out by endless scenes of newspaper reading, lawnmower starting, and pointless dialogue read by a boy with the most over-the-top, '50s-educational-film voice in the world ("WOW, GOSH, GEEZ!"). After about half an hour of actually nothing happening, the boy gets his magic Christmas tree which will grant him three wishes, but the boy has NO IDEAS. He has had a magic ring for TWO MONTHS and can't think of a single thing that he wants. Just awesome.

The whole thing looks and feels like it was improvised completely on the spot. Aware of its own pointlessness, it randomly becomes a morality play for five minutes (a morality play with a random forest giant, no less!) before wrapping things up as haphazardly as they started. MAGIC CHRISTMAS TREE is as delirious and disastrous as they come and is probably at least partially responsible for the higher suicide rates during the Christmas season.

Best line: "I guess I'll have to find another selfish boy to be my slave!"

As soon as I saw the words "Directed by Godfrey Ho" flash on screen in the first few minutes of THE DRAGON'S INFERNAL SHOWDOWN, I audibly groaned. Despite being a bad film connoisseur of sorts, I've never been able to get much entertainment out of Ho's output, which usually consists of two or three different ninja flicks sloppily edited together with incompetent direction and ho-hum fight scenes. But, miraculously, INFERNAL SHOWDOWN is relatively well-done (by C-grade Taiwanese ninja flick standards), with plenty of laughs and solid fighting.

The plot exists solely to introduce fights every 90 seconds, but I'll introduce it nonetheless. A brother/sister duo whose family was killed by a gang of ruthless land owners ("I'd die to make more money!", says one) come back when they're older to exact revenge. There's also a mysterious man in a blue hat who looks to be doing the same thing. Who is he? Will they find their revenge? Will the awkward, incestuous sexual tension between the brother and sister ever be resolved?

As should be the case with a film starring a man double-billed as Dragon Lee AND Bruce Lei, INFERNAL SHOWDOWN never takes itself that seriously. The main baddies wield a "magnetic sword" which is exactly like a normal sword except it brings out different cheesy sound effects. Dragon Lee has a habit of running his hands up and down his enemies and randomly douses himself in oil during the climactic fight scene. And, as is to be expected, the British voice-over cast sound like they received their lines 5 minutes before recording started.

Outside of a really fun final 20 minutes, most of INFERNAL SHOWDOWN is business as usual if you've seen a few of these '70s/'80s kung-fu flicks, but it's damn near a masterpiece by Godfrey Ho standards and should inevitably bring some entertainment to anyone looking at reviews for martial arts flicks with 100 votes on IMDb. 5 light-up utility belts out of 10.

I knew this was going to be a good one (and by that, I mean a worthless piece of trash) when the film began with not one, but TWO, flashback sequences of meaningless characters being murdered. Indeed, the entirety of SPLATTER UNIVERSITY is a strangely paced, horribly edited and utterly stupid slab of slasher garbage that should be featured in your next bad movie night.

Directed by Richard W. Haines, most famous for his co-directing post on CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH (and his demotion to second-unit director of the film after only a week), SPLATTER UNIVERSITY tells the tale of random college students who are introduced and immediately murdered. Meanwhile, a new teacher tries to solve the mystery of who's spilling all this university blood. The VHS cover's cheerleader mysteriously never shows up to class.

The film features many wacky college-kid antics (which are damn near impossible to hear because of sound issues), murders (which are almost all uninspired stabbings), and a mystery that is face-palmingly obvious from very early on. Still, the film never takes itself that seriously and there are quite a few intentional and unintentional laughs to be had. As long as you find rampant misogyny and bloody killings funny (and who doesn't!).

It's only 78 minutes long, and I can safely say I enjoyed most of them. I'm a little surprised at the largely negative reviews here which don't mention how dang fun the whole thing is. Great to pair with FINAL EXAM or THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD for a trashy double feature of dead collegians.

In the 1980s, seemingly endless numbers of movies dealing with black magic and the undead were streaming out of Hong Kong. They pretty much all fell into two categories: gross-out black magic gorefests (BOXER'S OMEN, BLACK MAGIC) and goofy supernatural kung-fu comedies (MR. VAMPIRE, ENCOUNTERS OF THE SPOOKY KIND). MY MASTER'S NECKLACE II (a quasi-sequel to the just-as-forgotten EXCUSE ME, PLEASE), falls into the latter category and, while vaguely entertaining, does nothing to distance itself from the conventions of its genre.

A rich man is killed by his wife and a black magician, only to be accidentally revived by a graveyard worker. With the help of the graveyard worker's policeman brother, the ghost attempts revenge on those who wronged him. Various kung-fu spirits and other spooky goings-on plague our heroes, but between a lack of plot explanation and typo-littered, barely comprehensible English subtitles, I can't really tell you why.

Most of the film is more-or-less a D-grade MR. VAMPIRE, except with blue-faced ghosts instead of hopping vampires. It's gore-free and less unhinged than some of its contemporaries, though it has its head-scratching moments. Its most promising idea is when the film switches gears to a supernatural buddy cop movie, a device that brings a couple of laughs and some entertainment before the filmmakers bring back the rather uninspired kung-fu sequences.

It's definitely not a lost classic, but all Hong Kong genre films from this era have a fun, madcap rhythm that does a pretty good job of escaping viewer lethargy. Its nonchalant view of the supernatural (possessions and door gods must've just been a part of everyday life in '90s H.K.) is entertaining, and there's a sick Casio score. It's not really worth searching out (and it seems to be a pretty rare one!), but I've seen worse. 4 out of 10.

After watching Linda Blair's HELL NIGHT and discovering a lost '80s gem, I decided to check out another of her post-EXORCIST works, hoping to find something almost as cool. Unfortunately, I chose GROTESQUE, a film about as cool as plunging your hands in boiling water.

A special effects man in Hollywood (who should've been out of a job years ago based on the quality of his work!) takes some time off to spend a quiet weekend with his family in the mountains. But trouble comes knocking in the form of a homicidal Billy Idol and his friends, looking for some Hollywood money and willing to kill for it. But the punks might find more than they're bargaining for...

GROTESQUE has absolutely no idea what kind of film it wants to be. It starts off with a light horror-comedy exposition before abruptly switching gears to a brutal home-invasion thriller. Then it's a cop drama. Then it's a monster movie. Then it's a revenge thriller. Then it decides it wants to be tongue-in-cheek. It's almost as if the director realized his original film was a complete, utter failure and then rewrote the second half, then rewrote it again... and again... and again.

Trouble is, its tone is completely off. Grim home-invasion scenes are soundtracked by bouncy, cheesy synth work. Comedy is abruptly cut off by brutality, and major characters are suddenly disposed of and never brought up again. There's 90 minutes of plot in the first half an hour, then endless sequences of walking through the woods and interrogation scenes in the second. And the film waves goodbye with one of the most head-scratching, incompetent endings I've ever witnessed.

I realize bad movie lovers might get excited reading this review, but it doesn't even deliver the so-bad-it's-good goods. It's mind-numbingly dull, so inept that its ineptness doesn't even provide entertainment. GROTESQUE is one of the worst horror flicks of the decade, and a gung-ho Linda Blair can do nothing to save it.

It's always a bad sign when a film was produced in 1977, but not even officially released in its home country until 1986. That means the producers of DARK ECHOES had a finished product, but thought it would be a waste of everyone's time to even release it. Ouch! Indeed, DARK ECHOES is pretty much a complete waste of your time; it's not scary, not entertaining and a much, much inferior version of THE FOG or SHOCK WAVES.

Many moons ago in a small lakeside Austrian town, Captain Manfred Gohr led a failed voyage which ended with his ship at the bottom of the water. The townspeople have always blamed the captain for the sinking, and as fitting for a man named Manfred Gohr, he comes back as a zombie with excellent swimming skills and terrorizes his old home. It's up to the police chief and a martini-swigging detective who can see the future for some reason to save the day!

If you decide to unearth DARK ECHOES from its deserved obscurity, prepare for an endless stream of badly written conversation scenes for the first hour of the film. Watch a detective get a ride from a nice teenager! Watch the mayor discuss the town with the local barkeep! Listen to a bunch of people with radically different accents all speak English in an Austrian town! Not only are the scenes dull as dishwater, they are poorly written as well, so you get plenty of wonderful lines like, "You may be the world's worst reprobate, but you're loyal!"

The deaths are almost all off-screen, there's a random cult subplot that never explains itself, and the climax is a dull whimper of an ending. While you do get one fun decapitation, a gooey villain and some wonderful lakeside scenery, it's hard not to spend most of DARK ECHOES' running time daydreaming about a Balkan vacation. It's probably better than ZOMBIE LAKE, but so is gouging out your own eyes.

Skip it. 3 out of 10, +1 for a sick score that deserves a vinyl re-mastering!

Even though I'm a massive horror fan, I've never been particularly fond of the haunted house sub-genre. With a few wonderful exceptions, most recent entries in the field are dull knock-offs of THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, a film which was bad to begin with. Still, I've seen very few Swedish horror flicks and THE VISITORS seems to be well-regarded by the few who've seen it, so I figured I'd give it a shot. My feelings are mixed.

Plot-wise, it's what you'd expect. A family moves into a new house in the middle of the countryside. There's a lot of marital drama and the father figure (played rather well by Kjell Bergqvist) is slipping into alcoholism while losing his grasp on job security. When weird happenings start occurring in the house, the father brings in a psychic specialist and it all goes south from there.

What struck me as odd about THE VISITORS is how mild a case of haunting the family experiences. One room in the house rejects wallpaper and the cellar door keeps opening, but that's about it! It really seems like a livable case of possession to me! This makes for a slow start to a film, one only kept moving by entertaining, surprisingly solid performances by the main and supporting cast.

Unfortunately, there's not too many scares to be had. There's a couple solid suspense sequences and moments of shock, but the film mostly floats along towards its conclusion, which ups the ante a little too much far too quickly. The ending feels rushed and doesn't hit with any real impact. Factor in TV-film-level direction and a horridly cheesy music score, and THE VISITORS really falls a bit flat. It's not the worst I've seen in the genre by a long shot, but it didn't make me believe there's a lost canon of wonderful '80s horror flicks from Sweden floating around, waiting to be found.

I had found a copy of SKIN STRIPERESS (aka SEXY GHOST) back in the days when I was very into CAT III black magic flicks from Hong Kong (i.e. BLACK MAGIC, BOXER'S OMEN), but I quickly fell out of favor with the genre due to most entries' monotonous, paint-by-numbers nature. Expecting the same from this almost completely forgotten 1992 entry, I avoided watching it for years. Well, I finally watched it, and color me pleasantly surprised!

The flick works mostly due to its "anything goes" plot: it's part CAT III possession flick, part MR. VAMPIRE living-dead comedy, part lurid sexploitation, and part raunchy sex comedy. You never really know where the story will go next, because it feels like the filmmakers didn't either.

This leads to a decent amount of laughs. Early in the flick, two teenage boys are randomly possessed by an ancestor, then cured by a Taoist priest on a boat, but nobody finds it strange or ever mentions it again. There's an endless sex scene with a waterfall a decade before THE ROOM. The most '80s musical score of all time plays in the background over endless scenes of lame physical comedy and teen hijinks. A lot of people scream the name "Wancy" over and over again. Say what you will about SKIN STRIPERESS, but it's never boring.

Basically, it all plays out like a B-grade '80s sex comedy in a world where possession and black magic are plain-as-day normal. An '80s sex comedy that just happens to have the legendary Lam Ching-Ying and a ghost that likes sex of the lethal variety. If that sounds fun, give it a shot. You could do worse.

This late-80s stinker tries to carve out a Nordic-mythology niche in the rapidly-declining slasher genre, but fails to do literally anything else of note.

A group of teenagers, personality-free even by '80s horror standards, goes for a weekend camping trip, but unfortunately, there's a "berserker" about -- a cannibalistic Nordic hunter who wears a bear snout on his face. Not to mention a giant brown bear! And a kindly old man with a bad Swedish accent named Pappy! So much to be scared of! Actually, I'm genuinely confused who is actually killing these teenagers. By the title, it's assumed the Berserker is the one at fault, but there's also endless footage of the bear stalking the teenagers and running away after kill scenes. These scenes are all incompetently filmed and lit and give no clue to the mystery, either.

Not that it really matters: both killers seem incompetent at their job and the flick has a pitifully low body count. Instead, you're treated to overlong chess scenes, horrid rock songs ("HE'S A COOOOOOOL DUDE!"), and endless shots of people walking through the forest. It's 82 minutes long and feels like it should be half that.

For Odin's sake, they even make a fist-fight between a Viking and a brown bear dull to watch! All but the most ardent slasher completists will find BERSERKER damn near unBEARable. Skip it!

This post-AMITYVILLE HORROR haunted house film directed by porn director Armand Weston occasionally delivers the goods, but is more-often-than-not lame, overpadded and a little cheesy.

Writer Lauren Cochran goes out to the country to try and get past her agoraphobia, but when she moves into a frighteningly familiar octagonal house, she finds that there's things to be afraid of inside as well! First off, I'm rather disappointed that the film didn't make the main character's agoraphobia more of a main plot point. The idea of an agoraphobe renting a haunted house, unable to leave because of crippling panic attacks but unable to stay because of haunting specters, would make for a pretty claustrophobic watch. Instead, Weston's script takes the plot in many different directions, implementing slasher elements, prostitute ghosts and a CHANGELING-like mystery unraveling.

Sometimes, it works; there are some actually pretty spooky scenes here and there, and the mystery moves deftly enough to keep you involved. There are also some really fun set-pieces involving sickles and high-rise rescues.

Unfortunately, the over-the-top acting and dialogue from most of the supporting characters ruins any atmosphere the film could've created (the writer's quippy boyfriend had me about ready to turn off the film 20 minutes in). The unraveling of the mystery reaches a silly, melodramatic conclusion. And I often found the sound design to be distractingly amateurish, a gripe I do not have very often. Overall, you could do a lot worse with '80s haunted-house flicks (HOUSE WHERE EVIL DWELLS, any AMITYVILLE film), but you could also do better (CHANGELING, SILENT SCREAM).

Fun fact: The octagonal house where the film was shot is still standing in New York state and may be the only domed octagonal residence still in existence in the United States!

Only for the most well-versed of cinemasochists, MAD MUTILATOR (a.k.a. OGROFF) is one of the unique Z-grade chillers of the 1980s that is inept enough to transcend the barriers of this world and exist in a reality completely its own.

Almost completely silent, MAD MUTILATOR doesn't have a plot, per se. There's a forest. There's a killer in the forest. Random people without names happen to find themselves in the forest and then get killed. But plot isn't the point here. The point is the almost-psychedelic atmosphere of a film possessing no talent, an atmosphere that seems not to be part of the world as we know it.

No, MAD MUTILATOR isn't set on Earth, it's set in an alternate universe only tangentially like Earth. A universe where people do not act like normal human beings. One where instead of helping screaming women, civilians in cars get out, curse at them in French and keep driving. Minimal synthesizer music showers the fields like rain, and potential victims of Ogroff are just as likely to consensually sleep with him as be killed by him. It is an existence outside our own, one where sense is not taken into account.

It is delightfully bizarre, but is often a bit of a drag. For every axe/chainsaw fencing match, there is a 5-minute scene of an old scrap car being destroyed. The film decides at the one-hour mark that it is now a zombie flick, and everything after that is wasted celluloid (except for the truly out-of-the-blue ending). Probably worth a watch if you're into movies like BOARDINGHOUSE or THINGS, but it won't mess with your sanity nearly as much as those two films will.

A slow-burn (or should I say slow-freeze) chiller set deep in the snowy mountains of Canada, GHOSTKEEPER is effective at creating an atmosphere and not very effective at doing anything with it.

Three friends snowmobiling around the middle of nowhere for New Year's Eve soon find themselves stranded at a strange hotel, abandoned except for a mysterious old woman who seems to be keeping something from them. It sounds like a solid set-up for a generic '80s slasher, and I've seen the film often categorized as such, but I'd hesitate to call it one.

It's certainly not a "teens in the woods get picked off one by one by a madman" movie. It's instead a "slow descent into madness" type of movie; imagine if THE SHINING had a no-name Canadian cast and wasn't really very good.

That being said, icicles of atmosphere hang all over this thing. I always felt Paul Zaza to be an underrated player in the composer game, and his score here is wonderful. Understated and mysterious, GHOSTKEEPER would be practically nothing without it. It's also decently well-shot and the locations are beautiful.

A solid build-up unfortunately melts away in the second half. Characters who acted very similarly the entire film suddenly act completely different. Other characters show up randomly just to be immediately slaughtered. Everything feels very scattershot and aimless.

I feel like the film is very close to becoming a spot-on representation of a certain kind of Wendigo myth: a Wendigo that does not hunt as a beast, but instead rattles the aching, snow-addled minds around it into a cabin fever psychosis. Unfortunately, GHOSTKEEPER just doesn't quite get it right. Worth a look for fans of atmospheric horror, but by no means a must-see.

ROCKTOBER BLOOD, one of the myriad of glam metal horror flicks from the mid-to-late-'80s (BLACK ROSES, ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGHTMARE, HARD ROCK ZOMBIES, etc.), is possibly the worst out of all of them. It's a D-level slasher with only one saving grace: the rockin' soundtrack.

Basically, the set-up is the singer of a hair metal group goes nuts and kills some people (only two on-screen, but later on, they say 25??). He gets sent to the electric chair, and the singer's ex-girlfriend starts the band back up again. Only trouble is, the '80s-handsome singer is still out to get her... even though he's dead! The acting is painfully bad, especially the mumbling, uncharismatic killer character. 45 minutes in the middle consist only of a woman swearing Billy "Eye" is back from the dead and people telling her she's crazy. No other characters do anything the entire film, and the body count is surprisingly low. The first 70 minutes are honestly really hard to get through.

If you make it to the end, you're treated with a killer performance scene by Sorcery (better known for STUNT ROCK), some fun kills and some catchy hair metal tunes. But ten good minutes out of ninety is not enough, and I would recommend all but the biggest '80s metal/horror fans give this one a hard pass. Check out TRICK OR TREAT or ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGHTMARE to see this sub-genre done right.

CASSANDRA, one of the last films by LONG WEEKEND helmer Colin Eggleston, is a supernatural slasher about a young woman (helpfully named Cassandra) who is being plagued by terrifying nightmares of a woman shooting herself and a scary little boy. Her parents are both being rather unhelpful about the problem, but when people in town start getting sliced and diced, it's revealed they've been keeping a lot from young Cassandra...

The film starts promising with a creepy, visually arresting dream sequence, and it's obvious that Mr. Eggleston knows what he's doing in the director's chair. When it wants to be, CASSANDRA is atmospheric and good-looking.

Unfortunately, it's relentlessly over-padded with snoozy scenes of photography shoots and marital drama, then spoiled by predictable plot happenings (I hesitate to even call them twists, due to how obvious they are). By the end, the film has become a ho-hum late-80s slasher, and not a fun one to watch either.

Not easy to recommend to anyone outside of Ozploitation and slasher completists. It's really not too bad, but you've seen it all before many a time and it's definitely not worth tracking down a VHS copy. Just watch LONG WEEKEND again instead.

Jag Mundhra's second stab at the slasher film (after 1987's snooze OPEN HOUSE) isn't an '80s Halloween-season classic like TRICK OR TREAT or NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, but schlocky horror fans will probably have a good time with it.

Hy Pyke (what a name!) is delightfully over-the-top as the grandfather (who is described as 'kindly' in the IMDb summary, but you're never given the impression he's anything but a scumbag) hell-bent on getting his eldest grandson to devote himself to his Satanic cult, a lame-o group that flash gang signs to each other and wear flannels under their devil robes. Meanwhile, someone in the cult is randomly killing people, and it's up to the other grandson, a boyishly handsome cop, to figure out what the hell is going on.

It's gorier than a lot of the slashers from this time period (though the body count is low), and just about every female cast member gets naked at some point (except, bafflingly, the most attractive one). Most of the leads have fun with their silly roles. It feels super padded, even at 90 minutes, what with random five-minute glam metal dream sequences and a head-scratching, unfunny stand-up comedy routine that grinds all the Satanic action to a halt.

Watchable for sure, whether or not it's worth watching could go either way. Don't spend too long tracking it down, but you could watch way worse.

Stumbled upon this on On Demand, and was intrigued: NIGHT VISION is an '80s horror I'd never even heard of (which means it's REAL obscure) and it was shot and set in Colorado, where I've lived all my life. So, obviously, I watched it, and was slightly impressed and more-than-slightly dumbfounded.

It's about a shy, whiny writer from Kansas that moves to the seedy underbelly of Denver to get story ideas. He makes friends with a criminal-type named Vinny, who soon gifts him a VCR that once belonged to a scary cult. The VCR leaves Mr. Kansas able to write scary, violent short stories that end up coming true. Oh, and he works at a video store for some reason.

So, to clarify, many of you looking at '80s C-horror movies on IMDb may be looking for so-bad-it's-funny material, and NIGHT VISION really won't be your cup of tea. There's sporadic laughs, but it's actually very slow-moving, nothing much really happens, it completely shies away from gore and nudity, and it's not really even a horror movie. Perhaps the funniest thing about the film is its portrayal of Denver as the seediest, most crime-ridden city in the world, one that is seemingly physically impossible NOT to get robbed, stalked or killed while walking its streets. Even as a current resident that knows this is far from the truth, NIGHT VISION made me want to get the hell out of this black hole of a city.

But no, this is not Bad Movie Night material. Instead, it's a slow-burn oddity that aims more to be a Cronenberg or Lynch-style psychological thriller than a gory cheesefest. It never completely hits the mark, but it does manage to sustain a weird, slightly unsettling atmosphere (mostly due to its home-movie qualities) and is compulsively watchable. Almost nothing happened in its 100-minute running time, but I still found myself intrigued by NIGHT VISION from start to finish.

I'm not sure whether to call the main actor horrible or great; he's whiny and annoying the entire time, but you do get an air of sociopathy about him. One reviewer here compares him in looks to David Byrne, but I got more of an Ian Curtis vibe. He's really not good at all, but he adds to the odd atmosphere of the film. But the ending is really effective, muddling the plot-line even more than it previously was and leaving the film completely without answers. It worked surprisingly well.

I can't really recommend NIGHT VISION to most people and it's certainly not an unjustly forgotten classic, but viewers in the mood for something off the beaten path and zero-budget might find something to like here.

Alright, take a look at that box art. We've got a creepy puppet in a leather jacket riding a pizza above the heads of a guy with a sexual predator mustache and a kid desperately attempting and failing to be Macaulay Culkin. How awesome you find that box art will probably directly correlate to how much you'll like MUNCHIE.

Which is to say MUNCHIE is not a very well-made movie, but it is quite entertaining when watched in the right state of mind (alcoholic beverages may help!). The acting is wooden across the board, the Munchie puppet looks like a dated, cheap children's toy that nobody bought because it was creepier than a Furby, and it's got a generic mom's-new-boyfriend character that rocks hideous '90s track-jackets. Everything feels slightly porn-y for a children's flick as well; there's much cleavage on display and one scene involving the school principal and his secretary feels distinctly softcore (tell me that actress isn't straight outta porn!). This is probably due to the director's seat being occupied by Jim Wynorski, a filmmaker much more at home directing exploitation and softcore flicks than children's movies.

It all comes off as a low-rent creepy E.T. (not, like, BADI-level creepy but certainly not cute), sans the emotional depth and filmmaking skill. Bad movie fans will have some fun with it, and little kids might too, I guess (they might need some kid beer though). Look for a preteen Jennifer Love Hewitt in her feature film debut, though she's not given anything to do but smile and look cute.

P.S. For those of you who greatly enjoyed 1987's MUNCHIES (anyone? anyone?) and are looking for a sequel, this is completely unrelated despite the trailer's claims. There is, however, a sequel to this one: 1994's MUNCHIE STRIKES BACK.

So if you've somehow ended up on REVENGE OF MR. WILLIE's IMDb page, I'll go ahead and assume you're a little weird and find the idea of a movie about a killer wang incredibly amusing and entertaining. I'm glad I'm not the only one. Unfortunately, MR. WILLIE didn't leave me completely satisfied, though I did still have a fun time with it.

Basically, this guy is screwing practically every chick in town, but while messing around with one of his main squeezes, he has a heart attack and dies. Then a couple of his lovers accidentally chop off his tootsie roll and the dismembered member comes back to wreak havoc on females everywhere (or, rather, in the film's three shooting locations). Sounds fun, right? But the problem is MR. WILLIE is just too soft. While the premise promises plenty of humorous phallic deaths, the schlong here doesn't do much other than fly around and be a general nuisance. All the characters are convinced the flying dong is a threat to their well-being, but in the end, MR. WILLIE comes up short and doesn't get a whole lot of action. Also, unlike real-life wieners, MR. WILLIE simply lasts too long; the film's over 100 minutes long and it starts to get painful by the end.

That's not to say MR. WILLIE is a complete waste of your time. There's still some good laughs to be had, and some drinks can make it a little more tolerable. I definitely had a few chuckles and had an enjoyable time with the ridiculous plot elements, the awful acting and the fun nods to past horror films (a reference to THE FLY is particularly great). So while MR. WILLIE won't leave you screaming with joy, you shouldn't be completely disappointed with your decision the morning after.

While the Shaw Brothers are definitely best-known for their martial arts flicks (as evidenced by a couple peeved reviews on this website), they did dip their fingers in other genres here and there. BLACK MAGIC was one of their forays into the horror sub-genre, telling the tale of a black magician and his various customers looking for love, murder or both.

BLACK MAGIC contains some nastiness and some awesome here and there: we've got rice given magical qualities by female genitalia, breast-milking, dead folks dissolving into maggot-infested skeletons and laser beam-shooting skulls. The problem, however, is that in between a few awesome scenes, the movie does really drag and gets quite repetitive (the black magician sets a curse, the good magician reverses the curse, then the black magician reverses it again, etc., etc.). It's all watchable, but it gets pretty run-of-the-mill near the middle. Luckily, the last 5-10 minutes are fantastic and worth wading through the mediocrity.

Overall, this is worth a look for Hong Kong horror fans, but you could do better if you looked around. For example, just a year later, the Shaw Bros. put out a (name-and-theme-only) sequel, BLACK MAGIC 2, which cranks the crazy factor up a couple notches and is basically an improvement in every way.