Starring: Paul Bentzen, Debbie Pick, Nick Holt, Karl Wallace, and Robert Arkens

 Four men and one woman are in a remote wilderness when they hear reports of some strange calamity that has gripped the rest of the world. While trying to contain their own panic, they attempt to reestablish contact with the outside, but all they can raise on their shortwave radio is a strange, haunting voice.

 "They" is a movie that starts with a mystery and ends with a mystery. It never bothers to explain what's going on, although clearly SOMETHING is, because the filmmakers here don't understand the concept of P.O.V. and voice and they keep cutting away to show what's happening in nearby towns. Are aliens fumigating Earth in prepration for a takeover? Are people being "vanished" into the Inner Earth? Is this movie only watchable if you're really, REALLY stoned? None of these questions are answered.

 Although it did keep my interest to the point where I kept watching, the film doesn't have a single good actor in it, the dialogue is lame, the music soundtrack atrociously inconsistent and inappropriate for many scenes, the special effects terrible, and the whole film ultimately pointless.

 Starring: Stafford Morgan, John Goff, Carol Irene Newell, George Flower, Paul Betzen, John Alderman, and Ralph Meeker

After a dimwitted, clumsy railroad worker (Flower) breaks open the badly secured samples of a Martian virus being moved from one government lab to another, the agent escorting it (Morgan) must keep himself and a small group of local yokels at an isolated trainyard until a cure can be found.

 I should have stopped the DVD when the words "A Film by Bill Rebane" appeared on the screen, but. I didn't, and I witnessed a movie even worse, even more pointless than the other Bill Rebane films I've subjected myself to.

While the acting is a little better here, the story goes nowhere, the characters never even rise to the level of figures they're so badly developed, neither the writer nor the director seem to have much of an ear for dialogue, or a sense of how to tell a good story. Whenever the film seems to start making a point--it repeatedly flirts with what stress and danger does to transform a person--it either backs off from it, or does it so ineptly the viewer (and just one viewer.., the person so wired on coffee and chocolate they've not been bored into a stupour, so they are still paying attention) must wonder if anyone involved with the production side has ever had any relationships with real people.

The acting here is generally better than what might be witnessed in the other Rebane opus I've seen, but the story is worse and even more pointless. Its slow, and, like the train featured in it, seems to start a trip but ultimately ends nowhere.

Starring: Tom Blair, Stuart Obsorne, Donald Arthur, Debbie Martin, and Carol Perry
 

Three bored millionaires (Arthur, Osborne, and Perry) invite a group of strangers to take part in a mysterious contest at a resort that is closed for the season. The winner will get one million dollars... if he or she survives!

Until the final reel, this movie is a solid 4, which makes it one of the best Bill Rebane movies I've had the dubious pleasure of sit.ting through. The "game of fear" that the oldesters launch on their greedy guests is pretty juvenile, but tension starts to rise when it seems as though someone is playing for keeps... someone is eliminating players with extreme prejudice. However, as the movie comes to a close, it's as if everyone involved forgot what hade happened in the previous 70 minutes and some lame, unfounded twists get thrown in.

Bill almost had a mediocre bad movie here, and then he blew it. Perhaps he was going for a "third-wall" sort of effect, a situation where the game being played by the characters in the film applies equally to the viewers. If this was his intent, however, he blew the film even worse.

 Starring: Paul von Hausen, Stephanie Cushna, Carol Perry, James R. Robinson, C. Dave Davis, and Angailica
 

 A curse that's haunted a small New England town since its founding two hundred years ago is brought fully to horrible life when a piece of its secret history--a piano that sounds like a harpsichord (or is that a harpsichord that looks like an upright piano?)--resurfaces. Will the town preacher (Von Hausen) and a pair of young journalists (Cushna and Robinson) stop the curse, or will they fall victim to it? 

 I have inadvertently subjected myself to a Bill Rebane mini-filmfest by watching two of his works in a row. I don't know wether my ability to tell crap from quality has finally started to erode, but "The Demons of Ludlow" was actually pretty good for a low-budget horror film. Compared to some of Rebane's other efforts, it's downright brilliant.

 Unfortunately, like another of his almost-good movies--"The Game" (aka "The Cold")--he and his writers simply can't seem to pull off the ending. Remember my question as to whether the preacher and the journalist escape the curse? That remains a question at the end of the movie, and it's not a question that hangs there in a good way. The ending is so abrupt that seems as though Rebane ran out of film and had no money to buy more. The film simply feels like the creators forgot the ending.

 If a little more care had been taken to construct a story with a decent end, this could have ben a solid 5, or maybe even a low 6. The soundtrack is decent, the acting is better than most of what you see in films of this kind, and there are even some pretty scary scenes--the sequences where the preacher's alcoholic wife is being tormented by the ghosts' of Ludlow's past are particularly well done. But, again, Rebane screws up the ending.