Halloween Horror Marathon 2019

[Monterey Jack]

-Addams Family Values (1993): 8.5/10


Even more enjoyable sequel has the Addams clan introducing a new member into the household, baby Pubert (sporting daddy Gomez’s slicked-back hair and pencil mustache), as well as a voluptuous new nanny (the terrific Joan Cusack), who catches the eye of Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd), who swiftly courts and marries her…unaware she’s a serial killer who offs her husbands in order to abscond with their money. Meanwhile jealous older siblings Wednesday (Christina Ricci) and Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) are sent off to the most tortuous environment imaginable…summer camp. I tend to prefer this second installment to the first. The gags are wilder, the pacing more consistent, and Cusack is clearly having a blast as a bosomy Black Widow contriving various ways to do away with her besotted new husband, only to be foiled at every turn. And Ricci becomes the MVP of the series, taking down the vaguely Aryan perfectionism and forced community of her summer camp surroundings with deadpan glee.

-The First Power (1990): 7/10



Slick mixture of standard-issue cop thriller and religious horror about a dogged L.A. detective, Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips), who chases down the “Pentagram Killer” (Jeff Kober), and is glad to see him go to the gas chamber for his crimes…until more corpses mutilated with satanic symbols carved into their chests start popping up. With the assistance of an attractive psychic, Tess Seaton (Tracy Griffith, Melanie’s half-sister), he comes to realize that the killer has the ability to pass his spirit into the bodies of others at will, and it’s up to the two of them to end his reign of terror once and for all. Stylish and well-paced, this films traffics in the usual clichés of the cop action movies of the 80s and early 90s, but the addition of a body-swapping supernatural element (in a gimmick that would later be co-opted by a good X-Files episode in that show’s first season) keeps things interesting, and Phillips is tersely convincing as he goes through the usual cop-movie paces (yes, he does light up a cigarette in nearly every scene and eventually end up in a bar).

-Waxwork (1988): 6.5/10


Horror pic about a group of young people (including bland-o lead Zach Galligan, from the Gremlins pictures) who attend the midnight opening of a new wax museum (with the great David Warner as the enthusiastic M.C.), only to find themselves projected into the displays once they cross the rope barriers, where they fall prey to a variety of obligatory horror demises (mummies, werewolves, vampires, zombies, the Marquis De Sade, etc.) and become a permanent addition to the museum’s collection. Fairly amusing and well-made, with some affectionate genre touches and a slam-bang climax with the various display monsters coming to life in a manner that’s like a proto-The Cabin In The Woods.

[Monterey Jack]

Go West, young vampire…

-Near Dark (1987): 9/10

-Vampires (1998): 7.5/10





Given the sun-drenched, wide-open vistas that most westerns showcase, you’d think the genre would be an odd choice to insert those nocturnal fiends vampires into, but two modern-day riffs on the idea turned out to be a surprisingly deft mixture of the two. In Near Dark, a young man named Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) finds himself bewitched by an alluring girl named Mae (the luminous Jenny Wright), who, in a fit of passionate necking in the cab of his pickup truck, ends up nipping him on the neck. Caleb stumbles home afterwards, the rising sun making him feel sick and weak, until Mae’s fractious “family” abducts him en route and reveals they’re a clan of bloodsuckers who have been travelling cross-country for decades, feasting on unwary folk while keeping a low profile. There’s “patriarch” Jesse (Lance Henriksen, bringing his hoarse gravitas to the role), his wife Diamondback (Jeanette Goldstein), wild-card Severen (a highly-entertaining Bill Paxton) and Homer (Joshua John Miller), an old soul trapped forever in the body of a twelve-year-old and with a perpetual chip on his shoulder because of it. Director Kathryn Bigelow (who co-wrote with Eric Red) may have set the film in the modern day, but, if you swapped the cars out for horses, it was as well have taken place in 1887 and opposed to 1987. Her film eschews the usual gothic trappings of vampires (crosses don’t work, no one sleeps in a coffin, and the actors never even sport fangs!), and the resulting film is stylish, violent and full of the type of western tropes (including a pip of a shootout with “the law”) that fans of sagebrush sagas will savor. A low-budget gem.

Meanwhile, John Carpenter’s Vampires shares a similar visual look and style, with James Woods as Jack Cross, a tersely effective vampire killer who, at the behest of the Vatican, roots out nests of vamps (he disdainfully refers to as “goons”) around New Mexico along with his seasoned crack team of fellow “Slayers”. But when his team is single-handedly slaughtered by a power “Master” vampire named Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), Jack is convinced they were set up, and along with his sole surviving team member (Daniel Baldwin) utilize the services of a prostitute (sexy Sheryl Lee) who was bitten by Valek but has yet to “turn”, thus acting as a psychic conduit between the two. Carpenter has long wished to make a western, and his films have showcased the influence of vintage filmmakers like John Ford, so this is the closest he’s even come to realizing his dream. With his low angles emphasizing those Ford-esque “Big Sky” shots and a twangy, Morricone-style score, Vampires is another film set “today” that, with a minimum of script changes, could have easily been set a century earlier. It’s also the most satisfying post-80s movie Carpenter ever made, with Woods holding the proceedings together with his profane charisma (although I wish he’d been afforded some wittier dialogue. It’s easy to notice the moments where Woods clearly improvised some lines, because they stand out like a neon sign compared to the endless yells of ‘DIE, DIE. DIE…!!!” that quickly grow tiresome). Still, compared to most of the crap he did post-Big Trouble In Little China, Vampires still stands as one of his most entertaining films in the last 25 years.

-Deadly Friend (1986): 1/10



Did Wes Craven have a much more talented twin brother he only let out of a shipping container once every three or four movies to ghost-direct his latest film? Because I can’t think of another “name-brand” horror auteur with so many TERRIBLE movies to his credit. Yeah, the dude created Freddy Kreuger and the Scream franchise, but aside from those and The Serpent & The Rainbow, I can’t for the life of me find a movie he’s made I could consider even competent, let alone “good”. This 1986 turkey is a perfect example, a deeply stupid “thriller” about a teenager (Matthew Labourteux) who moves to a new neighborhood with his mother (Ann Twomey) and his advanced robot buddy “BB” (before he took the surname “8”, one surmises), and who puts BB’s robo-brain into his comely neighbor (Kristy Swanson) after she’s killed by her abusive father in a rage. Not scary, not funny (aside from a memorable scene where mean neighbor lady Anne Ramsey gets decapitated by a basketball!), and with a bizarre tone that’s like a genteel, Amblin-style teen fantasy spiced up with spurts of R-rated gore, Deadly Friend is awful on every conceivable level.

-Deep Red (1975): 8/10



Stylish Dario Argento murder mystery about a concert pianist (David Hemmings) who witnesses the gruesome demise of a neighbor (Macha Meril) and who gets sucked into an investigation over Whodunnit. I’m not terribly familiar with Argento’s oeuvre (the only movie of his I’ve seen before this was the slick but incoherent Suspiria), but Deep Red worked far better for me, a suspenseful, engrossing thriller brimming with memorably surreal and gruesome shocks, elegantly sinuous camerawork and a pulsating rock score by “The Goblins”.

[Monterey Jack]

Nature strikes back…

-Grizzly (1976): 4/10

-Piranha (1978): 7.5/10





Two examples of the 70’s “when animals attack” horror subgenre that flourished in the massive wake left behind by the blockbuster success of Jaws. Grizzly was one of the first such rip-offs of Spielberg’s film, and managed to scrape up a surprisingly hefty box-office take due to it. It’s not much of a movie, though, a rote Xerox about a man-eating bear tearing through campers in a national park, and how a grizzled Ranger (Christopher George) and helicopter pilot (Andrew Prine) team up to take down the marauding ursine threat. Directed by 70’s schlock horror specialist William Girdler (Day Of The Animals and the indescribably bizarre The Manitou), Grizzly has some scenic wilderness footage (sadly compromised on the version streaming on Amazon Prime, which cropped the Todd-AO image slightly to a more TV-friendly 1.85) and a terrific score by Robert O. Ragland, but the bear attack scenes look ridiculous and are poorly-shot, and the resulting film lacks any sense of genuine dread or suspense.

Meanwhile, Piranha (the first major film from director Joe Dante) is a far more enjoyable effort, a tale of genetically-enhanced flesh-eating piranha fish who escape from a government lab into a nearby river and who turn it into a buffet of blood as they munch their way up through a summer camp and towards a newly-opened water park. Dante, as usual, treats the material with a wink, cramming the film with eccentric comic touches, genre shout-outs and his usual stable of stock players (Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller). It lacks the polish of his later Amblin productions from the 80’s, but offers up some gristly fun, even if Alexandre Aja’s 2010 remake took the basic idea and spun something far wilder and more imaginatively disgusting out of it.

[AndyDursin]

Paul and I checked out GRIZZLY last year, I had bought it years back. We both found it very disappointing and didndt even produce much in the way of laughs, which we were both hoping for. Certainly no PROPHECY!

[Monterey Jack]

Paul and I checked out GRIZZLY last year, I had bought it years back. We both found it very disappointing and didndt even produce much in the way of laughs, which we were both hoping for. Certainly no PROPHECY!

Yeah, it's a snooze, aside from the location footage and Ragland's very nice score. Girdler's Day Of The Animals and especially The Manitou are far more enjoyable in a "good-bad movie" way.

[Monterey Jack]

Kids V Monsters…

-The Monster Squad (1987): 8.5/10

-ParaNorman (2012): 10/10




A pair of superior Amblin-esque spook-fests appropriate for anyone with some ankle-biters looking to watch something “scary” this Halloween season. In The Monster Squad, a gaggle of 80’s kid stereotypes (the Leader, the Cool Kid, the Fat Kid, the Girl, etc.) team up to ward off the invasion of their Spielbergian small town by real-life versions of the classic Universal Monster archetypes, including Count Dracula (Duncan Regehr), Doc Frankenstein’s woeful Monster (an ideally-cast Tom Noonan), the Mummy (Michael MacKay) and The Creature From The Black Lagoon’s Gill-Man (ace Hollywood monster-maker Tom Woodruff, Jr.), who are after an ancient amulet that can swing the balance between good and evil. Director Fred Dekker (Night Of The Creeps) and his co-screenwriter Shane Black pay due homage to the kind of Creature Double Feature genre fare any monster-loving kid grew up on during the 70’s and 80’s, and the excellent production values (including Stan Winston’s monster designs, Richard Edlund’s top-notch F/X and Bruce Broughton’s lively score) keep the film racing along to its whiz-bang climax in a tidy and economical 82 minutes. Compare this to Stephen Sommers’ manic, overstuffed and charmless 2004 feature Van Helsing, and you’ll see just how badly Monster Mash horror cinema nose-dived in the nearly two decades that separate them, and how genre filmmakers totally lost sight of what really made those creaky yet charming beasties of yesteryear so endearing in a morass of expensive but inert CGI frippery.

On a more modern front, 2012’s ParaNorman (from the animation geniuses at Laika Studios) is a flat-out masterpiece I’ve talked up numerous times over the last seven years, and will continue to make a staple of every Halloween season. A whiz-bang stop-motion feature crammed to the gills with astonishingly detailed visual wonderments, and yet it’s the resonant screenplay (brought to life by the skills of the animation team and a fantastic voice cast) that really makes this film a new classic of middle-school morbidity. It’s just dandy to start with, when it’s just a Goonies-esque adventure crammed with lite horror elements and witty visual and verbal gags, but, in the last half-hour, it takes a narrative turn that’s a true throwback to “80’s PG” kid’s movies that weren’t afraid to play hardcore. It’s not only bracingly dark, but also the rare kind of horror movie that can make you “ugly cry” as the plot resolves itself. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet conclusion to a film that will delight kids and their parents, and even if you don’t have kids, it receives my highest recommendation as a brilliantly-crafted piece of pop art, even for those that disdain animation as “kid’s stuff”.

-Effects (1980): 5/10



A movie crew working on a low-budget exploitation picture find themselves getting a little to close to the gristly action in this half-interesting exercise in meta self-reflection. Mainly noteworthy for how many stock players and behind-the-scenes personnel from George A. Romero’s films of the 70’s and 80’s make appearances, including Day Of The Dead’s Joe Pilato, John Harrison (composer of DOTD and Creepshow) and makeup master Tom Savini. Just too bad the audience knows what’s coming long before the characters in the film do. Not bad, but not very good, either.

[Monterey Jack]

Hey, French and German guy, want to watch a pair of movies about demonic possession via a Hasbro board game…?

Oui! Ja...!

-Witchboard (1987): 7/10

-Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016): 9/10





A pair of possession thrillers via a common sleepover game comprised tonight’s twofer. In Witchboard, the usage of the familiar Ouija board at a party invites a deceptive, malign spirit to inhabit the mind and body of a young woman (80’s sex kitten Tawny Kitaen), causing her boyfriend (Todd Allen) and ex (Stephen Nichols) to investigate the spirit’s origins and intentions before the effects of his presence become irreversible…and dangerous. Not bad by the low-budget horror standards of the day, with some stylish direction and adequate performances. Also nice to see how it flouts genre expectations at the end. Only a couple of cheesy dream sequence shocks fall flat in an otherwise solid piece of supernatural suspense.

In 2016’s Ouija: Origin Of Evil, a sham psychic named Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) and her two daughters utilize sleight-of-hand trickery to give closure to those who have lost loved ones and to make a few bucks on the side to keep bread on the table. But when older daughter Lina (Annalise Basso) brings home a trendy Ouija board to spice up the tired flickering candles and rattling tables of their usual act, they quickly find out that they can use this new tool to actually commune with the dearly departed, only their usage of younger daughter Doris (Lulu Wilson) as a conduit is having an increasingly ill effect on the girl, and a sympathetic priest (Henry Thomas) at the girls’ catholic school helps them to find out what’s really going on. Director/co-writer/editor Mike Flanagan – one of the most talented filmmakers in modern horror – takes a project that should have been a stinker (a mercenary prequel to a strenuously lame 2014 film, Ouija), and manages to make something authentically artful out of it. The disparity in quality between the 2014 film and this one are akin to if the first Superman movie ever made were Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, and the sequel that followed it were Superman: The Movie. Flanagan has a gift for teasing out expected payoffs with an almost surgical skill, and manages to craft some screw-tightening suspense setpieces with a minimum of the obnoxiously shrill music stingers and bowel-rattling subwoofer bashes and crashes that you’d expect from a modern-day PG-13 horror movie. The film – set in 1967 – also has some pleasingly retro touches in the filmmaking style, like some nice, deep-focus split-diopter shots (very vintage Brian De Palma) and even some faux-“cigarette burn” reel-change markers that will make older viewers who grew up in the pre-digital projection era smile. It’s a terrific little spook story that’s FAR better than it had to be.

[Monterey Jack]

When animals attack, part deux…

-Alligator (1980): 7.5/10

-Cujo (1983): 9/10





More critters on the loose in today’s double-feature. In 1980’s Alligator, the cute l’il title character gets flushed down the john, and a dozen years later, after feasting on the bodies of laboratory animals illegally dumped in the sewers, has ballooned in size to over 36 feet long, and is now beginning to munch of human prey, causing a slovenly L.A. detective (the late, great Robert Forster) and a comely reptile expert (Robin Riker) to team up to take down the scaly menace. Scripted by John Sayles (clearly on a “killer animal” kick at the time, just coming off of Joe Dante’s Piranha) and efficiently directed by Lewis Teague, Alligator has some stylish touches and enthusiastic spurts of gore, enlivened by Sayles’ humorous screenplay touches (like a Great White Hunter played with a wink by Henry Silva hired to hunt down the marauding reptile). This movie scared the CRAP out of me watching it on TV as a kid, but viewed today, it’s just an engaging B-movie monster flick, with some terrific setpieces (particularly the alligator turning a lavish outdoor wedding party into a moving buffet lunch) and anchored by Forster’s no-nonsense gravitas.

One of the people who enjoyed the film at the time was author Stephen King, who lobbied for Teague to direct the film adaptation of his 1981 novel Cujo, and when that film’s original director, Peter Medak, was fired from the production barely a week into filming, Teague stepped in and crafted one of the best King adaptations of the decade. The story about a friendly St. Bernard stricken by rabies via a bat bite, and a crumbling marriage, and how the two collide in a dusty dooryard in the small Maine town of Castle Rock one sweltering summer day, Cujo is a film that disturbs on both a dramatic and visceral level. Dee Wallace is superb as Donna Trenton, a bored housewife who engages in a torrid affair with a local handyman (Wallace’s future husband Christopher Stone), despite a doting husband, Vic (David Hasselhoff doppelganger Daniel Hugh-Kelly), and an adorable moppet of a son, Tad (future Who’s The Boss sitcom star Danny Pintauro). When Vic finds out, their marriage gets stressed to the breaking point, but the diseased nature of their union crashes headfirst into TRUE horror when poor Cujo’s disintegrating hold on sanity is eroded by the Rabies percolating in his system, and he traps Donna and Tad in their stalled out car in the year of his now-deceased owner (Ed Lauter). Isolated in the middle of nowhere, unable to exit the suffocating interior of their vehicle by the vicious Cujo’s endless circling, Donna and Tad begin to break down physically and mentally under the strain, until Donna has no recourse but to face down the slavering jaws of her canine foe once and for all. Cujo is a brilliantly-crafted thriller, visualized with a stylish eye by Teague and cinematographer Jan De Bont, who manage to shoot half of the movie’s entire running time inside of a car while still finding endlessly clever ways to keep their camera constantly roving, constantly tightening the screws of suspense. Aided immeasurably by Charles Bernstein’s alternately pastoral and pulse-quickening score, Cujo is a gem of a thriller that, while well-liked enough amongst King fans, Is till feels is one of the more underrated adaptations of his books (and one that thankfully alters the mercilessly downbeat nature of the source material’s bleak conclusion).

-Scream (1981): 0/10



Dreadful slasher movie about a group of no-name actors who raft through a pristine wilderness, bed down for the night in an abandoned, 100-year-old prospector ghost town, and begin getting killed off(screen) in various unimaginative ways. Crashingly boring, with no good character development, interesting gore or even any explanation for what’s going on! Great character actor Woody Strode rides into town as a spectral(?) figure out of an old Spaghetti Western, gets like five lines, and rides off again, to no apparent purpose other than cashing a check. Only noteworthy as “the other Scream” (not to be confused with Wes Craven’s 1996 genre-reviving classic), this is as dull and inept as these films get.

[Monterey Jack]

Am I the only one watchin' horror movies, here...?

Call the Orkin Man…

-Phenomena (1985): 7/10

-Arachnophobia (1990): 8/10





Cree-eee—eee--py Crawl-errrrrrrrrrrs! In today’s double feature. In 1985’s Phenomena (directed by Dario Argento), a teenage girl named Jennifer (a pre-Labyrinth Jennifer Connelly) arrives at a school for girls in Switzerland where a series of disappearances have occurred, with mutilated body parts of the missing girls showing up months later. An eccentric, wheelchair-bound entomologist (Donald Pleasance), who has a helper chimpanzee(!), is engaged with the police to estimate the approximate time of death for the remains, while Jennifer is tormented by vivid spells of sleepwalking, which seem to dovetail with her innate ability to – yes – communicate with all forms of insect life!

Typically daft exercise in surreal horror by Argento, who’s more interested in concocting imaginatively gruesome death scenarios and flooding the viewer’s senses with an overheated visual style (with accompaniment by Goblin’s throbbing rock score) than crafting a screenplay that makes much sense. This plays like two or three abandoned screenplay drafts that got smooshed together into a semi-coherent jamboree of Hitchcockian shock effects and shudderingly gross imagery (you won’t forget the subterranean pool filled with moldering corpses and writhing maggots anytime soon). Still, what the film lacks in cohesion it more than makes up for in sheer eeriness, and the young Connelly (despite a performance that is as flat as the rest of her is not) makes for a presence that has a spectral luminosity. The movie was slashed to pieces for its U.S. debut, losing 20 minutes (which must have made it even HARDER to follow!) and being re-titled Creepers. It’s a curio, but a stylish, fascinating one.

Meanwhile, the 1990 Amblin/Hollywood Pictures joint Arachnophobia is about a deadly, highly-toxic new species of spider discovered in the jungles of Venezuela by another entomologist, Dr. James Atherton (Julian Sands), and who hitches a ride in the coffin of a photographer the Doc hired to chronicle his findings back to his hometown of Canaima, California, where he mates with a common house spider and spawns a brood of deadly offspring who quickly spread out and infest the small, rural town. A new doctor, Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels) – who has just moved there with his wife and two young children – finds himself stymied by a series of deaths from people seemingly in perfect health…until he discovers the minute bite marks on their toes, their hands, on the backs of their necks. And, in the tradition of small-town horror movies leading back to the 1950’s, he’s unable to get anyone to believe the threat to the populace until it’s…too…late!

Debuting director Frank Marshall (a longtime Amblin partner) makes a solid first impression with a film that generates an adequate array of skin-crawling frights. Spiders are inherently repellent even to those who do not suffer from the titular phobia that Daniels’ character does (he claims his very first memory was of a spider crawling into his crab around the age of two, and that he’s had a paralyzing revulsion to arachnids ever since), and Marshall and his insect-wranglers create some palpable suspense in how they orchestrate the spiders’ movements, creeping towards unaware feet, hands and heads with silent eeriness. I wish the movie’s comic elements were a bit funnier, though (it was cringingly billed as a “thrill-omedy!” in its initial theatrical run)…compared to the same year’s similar 50’s monster-movie throwback Tremors, the film’s jokes fall a bit flat, and when you cast a spry comic performer like John Goodman as the eccentric local exterminator (doing what sounds like a wan impersonation of Bill Murray in Caddyshack) and can’t generate much in the way of chuckles, you’re doing something wrong. Plus, I wish the film had the scale and/or budget to show the entire town infested with marauding spiders…it builds to what should have been a wham-bang climax, and yet the general populace never seems in as dire a situation as the lead characters keep expositing about. Still, Arachnophobia delivers the goods, and when Daniels has his final showdown with the spider patriarch in his wine cellar, it’s a pretty well-staged and satisfying climax.

[AndyDursin]

When you have a Kindergartner there's not much Halloween viewing to be had. I have to turn off the TV during football games just to make sure he doesn't see an ad for IT CHAPTER TWO

Enjoying the wrap up though as always!!

I haven't seen ARACHNOPHOBIA in ages and re-bought the Blu-Ray during that Disney Movie Rewards sale last month...might be time to crack that one open. The zenith of Frank Marshall's short directorial career.

[jkholm]

Am I the only one watchin' horror movies, here...?

I've been watchin' horror movies...but first an anecdote about Arachnophobia.

I've always liked this movie and own a one-sheet poster. It was the first movie i ever saw at an Advanced Screening. The audience was really into it, especially some guys who were apparently members of the local chapter of the John Goodman Fan Club. When he first appeared on screen, they suddenly stood up, cheered and started chanting "John! John1 John!" It was certainly strange but made for a memorable experience.

Now my horror movie mini-reviews.

Nightmares 7/10

Enjoyable anthology film. Best segments are the second (the evil arcade game) and the last with the giant rat.

Happy Death Day 7/10
Happy Death Day 2 U 7.5/10

Surprisingly fun horror comedies with clever plot twists and good performances. I'd like to see a third entry.

Waxwork 4/10

Did not enjoy this as much as MJ did. The premise is fine but completely undermined by weak direction and acting. You could tell in every scene what the director was trying to do but it was so flat. And what's the deal with the lengthy Marquis de Sade scene? There wasn't another monster that could have been used?

And finally one TV show

Scream (Season 1) 6.5/10

Better than you might think TV adaptation of the 90's classic but hampered by a predictable plot (I guessed the identity of the killer and I hardly ever do that) and a few terrible performances. On the other hand the lead actress (Willa Fitzgerald) is charming, believable and attractive. She carries the entire show.

[AndyDursin]

ALLIGATOR is one that inexplicably remains unavailable on Blu-Ray. Must be some kind of rights issue.

Also, I reviewed WAXWORK 1 & 2 back in 2016:

http://andyfilm.com/2016/10/19/10-25-16 ... e-waxwork/

WAXWORK came out when I was in 8th grade and I remember enjoying it a lot at the time, mainly because horror and comedy were not a common mix back then. The "genre mashup" stuff was fun too. While I still found it entertaining, it wasn't as good as I recalled when I saw the Blu-Ray. WAXWORK 2 was even more striking -- I remember thinking it was OK (I rented it in high school when it debuted on VHS) but this time around I noticed just how hampered the sequel was by the threadbare budget.

Part of the problem is so many horror movies have comedic components now -- and since then -- that the principal novelty of those films is gone. Back when I was in 8th grade and high school, though, they were quite popular on the VHS circuit and "fresh" for what they were.

[Monterey Jack]

ALLIGATOR is one that inexplicably remains unavailable on Blu-Ray. Must be some kind of rights issue.

I would have expected Scream Factory to release that ages ago. The DVD looks fine, but I'd love to have it in HD.

[Monterey Jack]

I haven't seen ARACHNOPHOBIA in ages and re-bought the Blu-Ray during that Disney Movie Rewards sale last month...might be time to crack that one open. The zenith of Frank Marshall's short directorial career.

This is actually the first time I have ever watched it. I was still in the waning days of my adolescent "chicken" phase when it came to scary movies in the summer of 1990. And, for whatever reason, I never caught up with the film until now, but when DMR had their recent Blu sale, I had no excuse. It's a fun flick, I just wish it showcased more of the town itself getting slowly infested and had some punchier humor.

Plus, this is one of those 90's scores where it's clear that conductor/co-orchestrator Shirley Walker did some uncredited ghost-scoring to punch up Trevor Jones' music, which -- with the exception of a nice, sweeping main title piece with ethnic woodwind flourishes -- doesn't add much to the movie, aside from the scoring of the basement climax, which sounds a lot more like Walker's typical action style than Jones'. Sadly, that was Walker's lot in life, always tasked with beefing up some other composer's work instead of being allowed to score these type of genre films she would have excelled at. Listening to the great new CD of Child's Play 2, it's SO not Graeme Revell's usual style, and sounds like one of Walker's Batman: The Animated Series scores pumped up with a 90-piece orchestra. Naturally, there's zero mention of just how much input Walker must have had in the liner notes. Just regrettable Walker died before the #MeToo era, because she'd probably have gotten a crack at some of the female-driven superhero/action movies based more on her gender than her actual talent.

[Monterey Jack]

King done right, and King done wrong…

-Creepshow (1982): 7.5/10

-The Mangler (1995): 1/10





Has any author of the past fifty years had MORE of his work adapted to the big screen than Stephen King? From Oscar-winning classics to direct-to-video garbage, the quality of his various adaptations on both the big and small screen has varied wildly over the decades, which makes today’s pairing an interesting case of duality. Creepshow, sporting King’s first screenplay written directly for the screen, was directed by George A. Romero (who had previously given King and his wife Tabatha and amusing cameo in his 1981 film Nightriders), and stood as a loving homage to the type of EC horror comics of the 1950’s that both men cut their teeth on as impressionable youths. An anthology of gleefully gruesome terror tales that springs from a introductory segment about an irate father (genre fave Tom Atkins) berating his young son (King’s own child, Joe, who is now a very successful novelist in his own right, penning books under the nom de plume Joe Hill) over the “crap” horror comic he catches him with. The boy’s vivid imagination then conjures up a quartet of stories, including a pair of revenge-from-the-grave tales (“Father’s Day”, “Something To Tide You Over”), a story about a meteor-spawned plague of extraterrestrial vegetation leading to “The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill” (the titular hick played by a hilariously cartoonish King himself), a fed-up husband (Hal Holbrook) doing away with his shrill harridan of a wife (80’s scream-queen babe Adrienne Barbeau) utilizing the ravenous contents of “The Crate”, and a hateful millionaire (E.G. Marshall) who finds his hermetically-sealed apartment besieged by an army of filthy cockroaches (“They’re Creeping Up On You”). Like all anthology features, the various segments of Creepshow are a mixed bag, and fans of the movie have their own rankings of their favorite and least-favorite ones (“Something To Tide You Over” is my favorite, sporting a marvelously malevolent turn by Leslie Nielsen[!]), but I’ve always found the movie just okay, at least one segment and 15-20 minutes overlong. Had they dropped a segment (my vote’s for “Father’s Day”) and trimmed down the overlong “The Crate”, I would have rated the overall film higher, but it’s still a cheerfully chilling/cheesy Whitman’s Sampler of a movie, and even the weaker segments are cleverly designed by Romero to evoke the saturated colors and framing of those old EC comics. While I actually prefer the later King anthology feature, 1985’s Cat’s Eye, Creepshow still offers up plenty of fun for fans.

On the other side of the coin is The Mangler loosely “adapted” from a King short story featured in his 1978 collection Night Shift by director and co-writer Tobe Hooper. This, frankly, is dreadful, arch and campy and witlessly gruesome, taking a silly concept (a possessed laundry press!) that could barely sustain 20-someodd pages and pads it out to a disastrous 105 minutes. The acting is risible (including a wildly over-the-top Robert “Freddy Kreuger” Englund as the laundry’s leering owner, lurching around on stilts with his legs entombed in rickety braces and Ted “Buffalo Bill” Levine as a much-mouthed detective investigating the series of deaths the titular “Manger” has been involved in), the special effects cut-rate, and Hooper’s direction is alternately overwrought and lethargic. Considering how Hooper made one of the best made-for-TV productions of a King novel (1979’s superb miniseries Salem’s Lot), this comes across as a catastrophic botch in comparison, and proves that Hooper, along with Wes Craven was a “master of horror” with alarmingly few good movies to his credit (and one of those, Poltergeist, had a lot more Steven Spielberg DNA in it than Hooper’s). Absolute trash.