Horror Part 06

Nosferatu - A

This is the mother of all vampire movies and the only one to get it right. Count Orlok is the real personification of the vampire of legend. In the Eastern Europe legends the vampire is disgusting, it is a walking corpse after all and its only purpose is to cause people misery in all forms, and Count Orlok fits the bill perfectly, the rat like teeth, the bat like ears, the long claw hands he really is one ugly guy. Orlok is played perfectly by Max Schrek who I assume wasn't all together in real life either, there are a lot of weird stories about him that have travled through movie land over the years and all you have to do is look at his eyes to realize that the stories may all be true. This a very loose telling of the Dracula story, mainly because FW Murnau didn't have the rights to Dracula had something to do with that. In 1921 Bram Stoker's widow wouldn't let anybody use her deceased husbands work but Murnau wasn't going to let that stop him so he changed all the names and set it in Germany. This is an amazing movie, mainly because it was the first movie to go on location to shoot. Normally everything was done in sound stages but Murnau was a visionary (and a complete egomaniacal ass, all visionaries are horrible humans) decided to go to Transylvanian to shoot a lot of the exteriors like the inn, the shrine, and the phantom carriage. The castle is in fact in Czechslovakia but what a wonderfully medieval castle it is. That is one of the real cool things about Czechoslovakia is that so much of the country still has medieval buildings in it. This is a great movie, one of the best silent movies of all time. The movie almost disappeared complete for after it was filmed Bram Stoker's widow sued Murnau and had all the copies in Germany destroyed. Thankfully a handful had been sent to England and France so a few copies survived. The biggest problem now is that 5 original copies exist and they are all different. The movie was 94 minutes long but most releases of the film are between 84 and 60 minutes long, the only complete release was done by the Germany Film Institute but it was never released to the public. I've personally seen all the movie just in three different movies, some movies have extra scenes in Transylvania, some have blue tint for the night scenes, some have extra scenes with the original german plates (those are the frames that have the words in silent movies). A must for any film fan.

To The Devil.... A Daughter - B+

The last Hammer Hit, and the second to last Hammer movie. This was made in the 70s and if you made a horror movie in the 70s especially the mid to late 70s chances are the villain was the devil. Starting with the Exorcist in 1974 until 1979 when slasher movies became the rage probably 80 percent of the horror movies made between 1974 and 1979 the Devil was the main villain or it was a pact of devil worshippers like this film. In this film Christopher Lee plays a heretical priest who wants to use sweet virginal nun Natassja Kinski to father the devil. Her father instead sends her to Richard Widmark who play an occult novellist loosely based on Dennis Wheatly whose book was the basis for the movie. He protects her from Lee and his legion of devil worshippers. The movie has a slower pace than most modern horror movie fans are use to but this is a prime example of a 70s European Horror movie, it is slower pace but has more atmosphere and much higher calibre of acting. My favorite thing about this movie is definitely Natassja Kinski, she is a really cute nun. Christopher Lee is always wonderful when playing a villain, he always gives a certain flair and gusto to his roles. A good devil worshipping, nun impregnating film, a little slow but still definitely a good watch.

Tower Of Blood - C

This about as average a slasher as you can get. It has boobs, it has gore, and actors in their late 20s playing teens, and a big masked machete weilding psycho. It touches all the bases but it doesn't hit a homerun nor did it pop foul, it was a solid double that bats in the runner on third. Now I'm not sure if I'm talking about horror movies or baseball but the movie isn't all that bad. A group of friends go to an abandoned building to drink and talk about sex and then a killer appears who hacks everybody to death. Now for the problems I had with the movie, one the building they chose for the exteriors of this so called Tower is three stories but when they talk about it having at least 14 stories. They shot the movie in LA and they couldn't find a building with more than 3 stories? You guys are just not trying. Secondly, they talk near constant about sex but only one couple fools around, thankfully the girl who gets naked has the biggest breasts. I do like who is the last surviving character it is not who you expect. Not a bad movie but this isn't going to revolutionize the world of slasher movies.

Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan - C

8 Jason movies in 8 years that is an accomplishment if ever there was one. This time another traumatized teen Rennie goes on a graduation boat ride from Crystal Lake to Manhattan aboard apparently the Titanic, the boat is nothing but a 40 foot ferry boat but the interior is gigantic. Jason is revived with electricity like Frankenstein once again and gets on board. It takes an entire hour for them to finally get to Manhattan where Jason just tears up everybody in his way, including muggers, a NY Staple, punks, cops, and cooks. This is a pretty average slasher, good deaths including death by sauna rock, and death by electric guitar. The nudity was a little light, the Friday the 13th movies were always considered so full of sex and nudity it is weird to see one breast in the entire movie, I mean the average comedy has at least two but they never take any shit for it. This movie is famous for being the first movie to star Kelly Hu. Like 99 percent of Asians in horror films she lives about an hour and becomes slasher bait. Jason meets future Jason in this movie, Ken Kirzinger who plays Jason in Freddy Vs Jason is the cook in the diner that Kane Hodder throws into the mirror. Talk about weird. Jason is finally melted by good old fashion New York Sludge and so ends an average slasher with an above average killer Jason.

Jason Goes to Hell: Friday the 13th Part 9 - D

New Line's first attempt at making a Friday the 13th movie is a complete failure. It starts off with so much promise, Jason gets lured into a trap by the FBI and they gun him down and blow him up with a tactical air strike. While his body is being autopsied his brain somehow possesses the coroner who kills his assistant, two guards and escapes. He heads for Crystal Lake killing all those who get in his way. He is out for the last surviving members of his family, which I guess happened because he was blown up. He jumps from body to body causing havoc and killing. This is so far left of typical it hurts. One of my biggest problem is that the entire cast is old, now normally Jason kills the sexy teens who go skinny dipping but now he is chasing after thirtysomething. I also didn't like Jason going from body to body, he is Jason not some pod creature. I understand New Line wanted to make something else out of their first Jason movie but they didn't learn rule one, people go to see Jason, not Jason possessing people, they want to see boobs and gore which they did good for the first third but when it turns into Jason hunting down his relatives the movie turned into some crappy Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Halloween 4 and 5. Thankfully they went back to old school in Jason X.

Prime Evil - D

Roberta Findaly's second to last movie which really shows she'd lost any interest in making movies. This sleeper is about a satanic cult who is kidnapping women so they can be sacrificed. The story focuses on a social worker who the cult has picked to be the next sacrifice. I always thought Satanic cults wanted virgins, not late 30s social workers and her friends. The movie wanders about with some big fat guy collecting the women to be sacrificed while the good guy boyfriend. There isn't one boob in the entire movie, we have like six sacrifices, one locker room scene, and there isn't a boob to be seen. Roberta must have had some serious depression or a major brain tumor, this is the woman that for twenty years made nudity filled explotation flicks, this is like Spielburg suddenly making foul mouthed porno movies. The movie sucks and it is really sad that I actually sat through 45 minutes of this movie without hitting the fast forward button.

The Hearse - D+

Jane Hardy decides to stay the summer in the house her aunt left her when she died, to try and recoup from a bad divorce. Little does she know, her aunt practiced witchcraft and is still thought of very badly by the town's citizens. As soon as she moves in, she is haunted by a old black hearse and it's creepy driver. Is she going insane or is she truly being menaced? She meets a friendly young man and becomes involved with him, but is he and the creepy driver one and the same? Of course he is, he is evil, very evil. You can tell because he is so sauve. This really reeked of TV movie, it has Joseph Cotton in his later years, it had a few TV actors and looked so incredibly cheap. The movie crawled, I mean crawled like a snail going up hill. This movie could have so easily been cut down to 60 minutes or even 30 and you would have still gotten all the plot you needed and probably would have enjoyed it more. This has to be one of the oldest casts for a horror movie I've seen in awhile, it was like the film makers raided a retirement community and put them in the movie. There are a lot better ghost movies and many that are shorter and easier to digest than this.

Terror - C

This is a really silly British Horror movie, a swinging 70s guy directs a movie about a family curse. Centuries ago they had a woman burned at the stake and she spouted a curse at the last moment, curing the family of course. Well at the party celebrating his crap film they have a hypnotist who puts the guy's girlfriend into a trance, which of course brings back the witch who was burned out to star killing off his friends. The movie owes a lot to Suspiria, lots of colour, lots of elaborate deaths with a little tongue in the cheek. My favorite death has to be window guillotine, if ever there was a more Argento death I can't imagine it. There is also this rather gooft subplot that makes fun of the low budget film making in Britain during the 70s with the movie within the movie Bathtime! This movie is a lot of fun, it takes ifself seriously when it needs to but then they are on the set of Bathtime! it is a total hoot. Good penny dreadful style movie and if you can find it, it is worth a watch.

Lurkers - F

Roberta Findaly's final movie and man does she go out with a whimper. This horrible Sentinel ripoff sucks on so many levels it actually hurts while watching it. Cathys mother killed her father and tried to kill her when she was ten. Her younger brother, a priest, holds her responsible. Fifteen years later Bob manipulates a clingy, drippy Cathy into falling in love with him. He lures her back to the apartment building of her youth for a so-called work party. There, he and his business partner Monica and a few of their oddly pathetic friends hold Cathy hostage for a few hours before forcing her off the side of the building roof. She becomes one of them, a 'lurker'. The building is supposed to be 'hell' and everyone born there is evil and is brought back there to die. Cathy becomes one of the lurkers who floats around town warning other people who the baddies try to get back to the building. This was so incredibly bad I actually felt bad about making fun of it.

Trepassing - A-

College students go into the wood to find a cursed house, they don't come out. That is the basic setup, little Blair Witch Meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the Big Easy. But there is a little twist, the house makes you go insane thanks to some voodoo curse. This is the first slasher movie I've seen that the lesbian character lives, we still haven't gotten far enough along to let the lesbian lover, who is truth looked and acted like a real lesbian, to live in the same as the hunk male love interest sometimes does. Estella Warren plays our heroine and marathon running lesbian. She was really good, I love her pouty lips, they perfect unlike Angelina Jolie's who look like she got them caught in a Shopvac. I also liked the girl who played her girlfriend, Sharon, she was a really good character. The two brothers I could have easily dealt with them if they wern't the crux of the movie. The funny guy has some really good speeches but being the funny guy his death comes early. The writing in this film was very good, the guy the made SLC Punk, one of the great slacker movies of the mid-90s also made this movie. A little odd choice but it works well with a few exceptions here and there with lighting but he did a good job all in all. Loved the cameo by Kurt Woodsmith, then again if he was on a soup can I would love it. My problem is with the math in the movie, we have 11 characters in the movie, 5 main characters, couple in the beginning, Kurtwood and the girl, and the killer, that is 11. In the credits there is 16 names. Now maybe I'm getting old or maybe I took one too many blows to the head as a child but 11 isn't 16, it isn't even close. Did I miss twenty minutes of the movie where these 5 characters appeared and disappeared? They all had names, like Ashley, Scott, and Latisha but I never saw them. Another thing a miss, in the rating on the box it says Rated R by the MPAA or the Movie Fascists, for Horror Violence, Sexual Content, and Adult Language. Unless you consider refering to lesbians as sexual content I must have missed even more of this movie. Maybe that is what those 5 missing characters were doing, fucking! That explains it all. Now really it was a good creepy in the woods going crazy movie. I would have easily survived in this film for the simple reason that I would not go into the woods. I am all for haunted houses that are off the beaten path, but not Haunted House in the Deep South. You want to know why? I'll let you in on my secret, Deliverance. When I must travel through the south, I do it at 35,000 feet there is no way in hell you can get me to go into the hillbilly woods in the hopes of find a haunted house no fucking way, the people that live in the woods down there are scarier and probably will lead to much worse deaths when encountered. So I would easily survive this film because even with the prospect of watching Estella Warren tongue wrestle her girlfriend couldn't get me to go along on that ride into Dante's Hell.

Camp Slaughter - D-

The Swedes try to make their own version of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and fail miserably. My biggest problem with the movie is that the actors are all Swedish but speaking English throughout the entire movie so they had to learn their lines phonetically so they all sound like they are either drunk or have been hit in the head one too many times. Add to that the acting gives community theatre a bad name. They get stalked by a killer dressed in a moo-moo with a sack over his head. Yah this entire movie is just one huge disaster, I mean on the levels that the federal government needs to step in and start handing out relief checks to the victims of this film. The only thing that saved it from the F is that the crazy family I'm faily sure weren't actors, they just brought real crazy people in and shot them in that creep old house. This movie shows why there is no tradition of Swedish Horror, the cold has done things to their mind.

Killer Party - B

On the surface this may look like your average Sorority Girls become slasher bait flick but you would be seriously wrong. The movie starts off as your average sorority film, jackass frat boys pulling pranks, weird overly ridiculous initiation rituals. But normally it is during the initiation that the killer strikes but no. It goes until the big April Fools Dance where the sorority and fratnerity in question play pranks on each other. It is then the killer strikes but it isn't who you expect it to be. The final girl isn't who you expect and the ending is something you wouldn't expect. It is less Halloween and more Night of the Demons something that I wasn't expecting but was happy to see. The movie is entirely about taking a veteran horror junkie on ride, making sure to screw up every expectation I had going in. Look for veteran actor Paul Bartel playing the literature professor. You won't find this on DVD, you'll be lucky to find this on VHS. I was lucky to stumble across it, the tape's condition was pretty bad, they really need to start putting these movies out on DVD, package them in bundles of ten or twenty slashers in a set, especially the ones from Vestron Video like this one. It is nice to stumble across rare gems like this that nobody seemingly knows about and to find it is actually good.

China White Serpentine - F

I'm not exactly sure if this belongs in this category I'm not even sure if this could be considered a real movie, but Netflix said this was a Supernatural Horror movie so it is here. The movie is about a 'writer' who does nothing but drink beer and watch Looney Toons. Then one day a guy shows up at his door with a DVD, then we have a five minute alterna-college rock phone scene where we don't actually hear what this fat skin head is saying at the end of the conversation we cut to his sister, who has visions of evil, and then we learn why the fat skin head was talking. It was his dead brother who was hooked up with a heroin dealer chick. Then the movie dissolves into a rock video style collection of shooting heroine and having pretty bad softcore style sex with two chicks. Then the brother and the other drug chick start to fall in love which pisses off the dealer chick and she kills both of them. Now she possesses the skin head's sister's girlfriend who kills and gets killed. Yes it is that muddled and the movie ends in about 5 minutes. This really reeks of a micro budget and was made by five people. This movie deserves the F more than most with no budget, no talent, no production value, no writng, it really doesn't deserve to even be a movie. It runs 70 minutes, which is too long for a short film, but too short for a movie and when half of the movie is a flashback which really could have been about two minutes long you know they had nothing.

House of Wax - A

A gifted wax figure maker gets horribly burned when his greedy business partner decides to burn down their wax museum to collect on the insurance money. Years later he return to seek vengence and to rebuild his ultimate wax figure, Marie Antoinette. But because he is so burned he can't sculpt like he use to so he uses dead bodies to make his figures look so lifelike. When Jarrad kills the friend of our heroine, Sue and she sees his horrible visage. Then she and her boyfriend, a up and coming sculptor himself, go to the museum rub by Jarrad and she sees her friend now in the role of Joan of Arc. She starts to get nosy and finds all the horrible secrets. This was the first movie shot in 3-D by Warner Brothers, upon learning that you will understand the weird baker with the paddle ball, they wanted to showcase their new technology, that would last all of 1 year and end with Creature of the Black Lagoon. This is a great movie that was also the first movie appearence of Charles Bronson as the aptly named Igor the mute wax museum assistant. The movie belongs, of course, to Vincent Price as Jarrad. This was one of his early big name movie appearences, over the next twenty years he would single handedly carry the American Horror movie on his back starting with this film. It is a good old school horror movie and worth a watch.

Delta Delta Die - B

The Delta Delta Phi sorority sells the best meat pies on campus, but much like Motel Hell and Soylent Green, it's people, it's people. The sorority is led by Julie Strain who is naked in every other scene she is in, and for being 42 she really looks great naked. Her sorority includes most importantly Tiffany Shepis, my personal favorite scream queen, she puts 100 percent into even the most absurd roles including this one. My favorite scene with her involves a near bar fight with two old broken down hookers, it is such a hoot I forgot I was watching a movie about cannibal sorority girls. This movie is very tongue in cheek, it is over the top and incredibly absurd but it is so, so enjoyable. Brinke Stevens, who is really getting old, plays the other founder of the Delta Delta Phi sorority. She is 51 and most of her aging is in her face but that does give her a new line of acting in horror movies, she would make a great evil witch character. The ending is completely out of left field, it goes one way, then another, and then takes a hard left. A very enjoyable, but not serious horror flick, with plenty of nudity including some incredibly rare male nudity in a non-shock situation (think Sleepaway Camp). If you want to laugh at cannibal sorority girls who get naked this is the film for you.

Darkwalker - C-

Hundred years ago farmer settled on cursed land, he and his wife are killed by a creature who looks a lot like the Swamp Thing so of course they decide to put a haunt house and haunted forest in the exact same spot. Throw in some stereotypes, cute blonde virgin, lovealbe guy, stoner, rich girl, black guy, and goth, and you got a horror movie. The movie isn't all that bad, they really tried and got some at least marginal talent in this. My number 1 problem is that it takes place over several days which violates one of the prime rules of slasher movies, in order to keep the movie in the realm of believablity all the murders can only take place with two days because after that in the real world people would be fleeing and lawyers would be litigating. The sheriff in this movie is really unique, he is built like a brick shithouse and when he encounters our swamp thing with sicle, he kicks the shit out of it. Another interesting twist in the movie is the relationship, however thin, between the black guy and the goth. Now that is a twist. I didn't like our heroine, the actress was way too weak to play that role. The Scooby Doo mystery solving was pretty good but it doesn't work well in a slasher because you need time to investigate. It was a good try but it broke one of the principle rules of slasher movies and that made it weak.

Last Slumber Party - F

My god I am not sure this actually counts as a movie, it was an hour and five minutes long and over 30 of it I spent totally and absolutely confused. I have watched a lot, I mean a lot of bad movies in my life but this one, it is a crime against humanity. I am serious we need to find all these people in this movie, send them to the Hague and try them for this crime against humanity. It is the end of the year, the long winded speech the monotone teacher gives twice, yes he says it twice, gives that away so three girls are going to have a last slumber party, at least these hockey helmet retards managed to get that right. Some boys come over, play some pranks and do some heavy fully clothed petting at the same time a psycho escapes and starts killing people with a scapel. There is no nudity in this film, they even have a shower scene and zero nudity. I've seen more nudity in shampoo commercials. Then once the killing starts everything gets completely confused and jumbled, so jumbled I'm not even sure if the movie has an ending or not. The only remotely positive thing I can say about this travesty on celluloid is the house 99 percent of the movie takes place in actually looks lived in. It was probably somebody's real house. The biggest problem with the film is that it appears to be a rough cut of the film like they never actually finished the film before releasing it. This would make sense because the second half of the movie is a completely jumbled mess. Just stay away from this movie, tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell complete strangers, nobody should never be forced to watch this movie.

Funhouse - A-

Kids go to a carnival, kids smoke pot and fool around, kids get killed by mishaped carnival freak. It is a fairly simple story but it is directed by Tobe Hooper which turns it into something much more interesting. Carnies make wonderful horror movie villains, they are so infinitely creepy. Those wiry, sun baked meth junkies sporting a few prison tattoos and you have the makings of a serial killer or some sort of Deliverance style toothless yahoo. In this movie the villains are the father and son that run the titular funhouse, the father is a greasy spook played by Irish actor Kevin Conway, who also plays two other carnival barkers in the same film, the son is a mishapened fiend in a Frankenstein mask who drools a lot. The teens decide to spend the night fooling around in the funhouse and while doing so witness the son kill the fortune teller after he pays for a handjob and doesn't get change. Now the teens are trapped in the funhouse with the father and son dynamic duo from hell. To make matters worse, the nerd jokester steals their money, that is never a good idea, stealing from banks is okay they won't trap you inside the bank and kill you in many grisly ways. Tobe Hooper has a gift for finding some real crazy actors to play these real freaks. Sometimes I think he just goes into the backwoods of Kentucky or Texas and just hired a bunch of inbred yonkles for his movies. The heroine in this film is pretty cute. My only problem is the annoying little brother subplot, he is really completely pointless to the story and is nothing but a pest. I don't know why they wasted the time with him. Good but underrated Tobe Hooper flick.

Return to Horror High - B

X number of years ago several students were killed at Crippen High now a film crew is at the high school making a movie about the crime. Of course members of the crew start disappearing like a good horror movie. But then there is the last half an hour of the movie, that is truly unique piece of slasher movie making, it really makes you question everything you think reality should be and that is really good, except for the very cliche first hour. The acting is really over the top and bad but by the end of the movie I was starting to believe it was meant to be bad, but it made the movie rough in several spots. This movie is now famous for being an early role for George Clooney who was sporting a curly mullet for his small role. Also Marsha from the Brady Bunch plays a ditzy cop. It is a pretty good all things being equal, it really screws with your head which is fun when you're watching the movie in the middle of the night. Best scene involves a death by this huge thing that looks like a giant kitty litter box, drowning in kitty litter is not the way to go.

The Burning - A-

Five years ago some campers decided to play a prank on their alcoholic camp counselor but it goes horribly awry, no prank in a horror movies does what it is intended to do, and he turns into a full sized man-barbeque. He gets out of the hospital, why they put these scenes in are beyond me, and returns to his old stomping grounds looking for... revenge, what did you think he came back looking for his lucky fishing lures? Well there is a new camp on the same lake which has the bounciest girls' softball game in history. The camp counselors are a soon to be famous bunch, including Jason Alexander, who actually has hair in this movie, Holly Hunter, who has all of two lines, and Fisher Stevens who dies a really cool death. So they set off on their annual three day raft trip and death ensues. This movie has one of the most amazing killing scenes of any slasher. There is a scene with 5 campers on a homemade wooden raft because to strand them, the killer let their canoes drift away, which I think is a really great idea, and they are trying to get back to camp. They get half way when he strikes and kills all 5 in one gory, bloody, assault. I have never seen 5 people die at once at the hands of the slasher before or since. Now if the killer blows up a building full of people it really doesn't count, in this movie he uses his gardening sheers to kill them all, including cutting five fingers off one of the campers. The only problem with this movie is it spends way, way, way too much time at the camp and not killing anybody. The burned loonie kills one hooker, again why I don't know, and then it is forty minutes of gore free movie. Excellent gore effects by Tom Savini, that man is a true artist. I also like that the final character up against the killer is a man and it shows. In the final fight, our burned psycho gets impaled on his own sheers, which if it was a woman would be enough, but not for this guy. He then splits the psycho's skull open with his axe and for good measure and to make sure there are no sequels to this movie the psycho is set on fire. Each of those deaths is enough to put away your standard slasher movie psycho but when you put all three together you have massive no-sequel overkill. Great movie, great gore.

Majorettes - D-

What do you get when you combine 2/3s of the creative staff of Night of the Living Dead? A really, really bad slasher movie. We have the dance squad, the Majorettes at some unnamed high school. They are being killed off by a psycho in camoflouge hunting gear who turns out to be the sheriff. We know this because at the 1 hour mark the movie the killer is revealed and the movie takes a turn. After the 1 hour mark we forget the entire slasher plotline and take all our attention and place it upon the two extremely weak and totally out of place subplots, one the evil drug dealing biker gang, and the evil German nurse who is planning on killing the old lady for her money, why a nurse is getting the money is beyond me. The movie turns into a revenge oriented action shoot em up. I think John Russo the writer, who also wrote Night of the Living Dead, must have had seven failed scripts on his desk and decided to shuffle them all together to make one really crappy movie. There is really no other explanation other than that, nothing in this movie works with anything else. We have a lot of religious overtones including a fundamentalist baptism and a length debate on religion then we have lots of naked girls and a very high body count for a slasher 14, but more than half of those deaths occur in the last half an hour. I'm not really sure if this counts as a slasher, one there is no final confrontation, there is no final girl or guy to fight the killer. It is really a bizarre disjointed movie that started off well enough, not great, but okay and then just goes left and straight off the cliff. I can't believe the same guys that helped make Night of the Living Dead made this, I guess some people really only have one good story in them.

New Year's Evil - C

A psycho killer calls in to the host of a punk rock new years eve show telling her that he is going to kill people she knows at midnight in each time zone and she will be the last victim. Pretty clever setup with a decent delivery. One of the few slasher were you see the face of the psycho more than the face of the main girl. My favorite part of this movie is when the psycho gets chased by the biker gang, it is nice to know that there are other psychos that can scare slasher psychos. The rest of the movie is pretty standard fare. The final act is not nearly as intense as they intended it to be because we already know who the psycho is. The movie is a pretty standard holiday base slasher flick but at least it uses a unique holiday with a unique gimmick.

April Fools Day - A

A group of college friends go to their pal Muffy, not making that up, and start to die off in mysterious accidents. Could this be the work of Muffy's evil twin Buffy, again not making it up, or one of them? This movie is one of the slasher greats, lots of atmosphere, great scares, intelligent writing and one of the biggest surprise endings ever. I remember the first time I watched this with my friends on a Friday night. When we were finished we looked at each other and said 'What the Fuck' but we rewound the tape and watched it a second time. The surprise ending is on par with Sleepaway Camp, I have since shown this movie to friends and I love watching their reactions, it is really great. This movie features a lot of Friday the 13th actors, which makes sense because it was made by Paramont and the producers were the bunch of guys that produced Friday the 13th 2 through 5. You will love this movie, watch it and you'll agree.

Side Fx - B-

This is a very generous B- from me mainly because I liked the concept of the film, the execution screamed low budget, especially the sound. When outside if the camera got too far away from the actor it became incredibly hard to hear their lines. I did like the concept the movie ran with, a medieval, more like renaissance, drug that made it to the present day which turns people into blood thirsty monsters. The drug makes it to a rave where bloody insanity ensues. It is a really decent low budget movie that really tried. Their biggest failing was that they shot it on handheld Digital cameras but decided against using boom mikes for outdoor sound. The final location, a farm house doesn't make the best place for a rave but it was shot in Texas. In LA they would have a myriad of great empty warehouses to use. The movie is good, the ending is a little weak but mainly because lot of the characters are not developed to their full extent. Worth a watch if you are into boobs and gore.

School Killer - A

A Spanish haunted school house slasher movie. The villain in this movie is Paul Naschy, the Spanish version of Christopher Lee, if you need a horror villain and you're filming in Spain, odds are he will be it. The story is half ghost story, half slasher movie that involes Ramon our main character and his father and the tie that binds both of them to the old abandoned school. It don't know why I liked this movie so much but from the first frame I immediately liked the movie. It is really an intangible factor, I don't know if it is the actors, who are a step above the average B Movie actor, if its the setting, that is one creepy ass school, or its the story, which is very clever but there is something that really got me to like this movie. The scares are really solid, especially when they first get to the school and the lights turn on for the first time or the first time they meet Paul Naschy. This is a great flick and if you like either haunted house movies or slashers this is definitely something for you.

Death Valley: The Revenge of Bloody Bill - D+

A group of students, not sure if they are supposed to be high school or college students, get car jacked in the absolute middle of nowhere by a guy looking for his drug dealing partner. They end up in the town of Summer Valley where Bloody Bill, a real person from the Civil War, is king of the local zombies. They are now trapped and getting killed left and right. It is up to the last girl, who looks a lot like Bloody Bill's dead sister who was killed by the townsfolk before they killed him apparently. This movie has more holes in it than five other movies combined. Guns appear and disappear from people as they flee the zombies, the one drug dealer says the other doesn't do drugs but his introduction scene involes him face first in a mountain of cocaine, and a bunch of other little things that by themselves are excusable but when all lumped in one movie it gets hard to ignore. The town is like fifteen buildings yet the character seem to lose one another incredibly easy. The town looks a lot like it was borrowed from the History Channel Show Wild West Tech, it looks way too clean to be a ghost town. The acting is pretty bottom shelf, Earl the drug dealing car jacking guy is obviously a stunt man who was given a chance to chew on some lines, he can do great action scenes but he really isn't dominating enough to hold everybody hostage. The rest are pretty typical horror movie fare. I went into this movie expecting a slasher, with Bloody Bill as the slasher but instead I got a crazy zombie movie that had really ambtious gore effects on a tiny budget. The zombies needed better direction on how to pretend eat somebody, this is pretty basic for a zombie movie of any budget, they need to really look like they are eating the victim not just bobbing their head up and down. Many better zombie movies, many better horror movies that use historical figures as the main villain. If you have seen it all watch this but not until then.

Night of the Living Dead - A

What can be said about this film that hasn't been said a hundred times before? It is about a group of strangers who are trapped in a farm house during the zombie apocalypse. /they fight with each other about as much as they fight with the zombies. Good movie that shows horror movies can make a politcal statement as well as be entertaining.

Dawn of the Dead - A

Ten years after Night of the Living Dead, George Romero uses zombies once again to look at social issues, namely consumerism. The zombie plague is still spreading and we are introduced to how bad it has become by showing you at shootout at a ghetto in Philadelpia. Two of the SWAT guys decide to leave the insanity for the city and team up with a helicopter pilot and his girlfriend and they end up at a mall where they turn it into their own paradise until the bikers show up to loot the place. This movie has a lot more action and violence than the first, the characters are still pretty much the same, some are able to deal with the situation the other crumble under the strain. Good movie, Tom Savini shines in both special effects and as one of the leaders of the biker gang. Best death has to be the screwdriver in the ear, that was a special effect that took time. It was recut into a shorter version with a much better score for Italian audiences and was called Zombi which was made by Dario Argento and a sequel/prequel would be made called Zombi 2 by Lucio Fulci which would later be called just Zombie.