THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #23: THE BLEEDER (1983) ***

When I’m picking movies to watch for The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween, I try to mix things up a bit.  I usually like to review a couple of low-budget Shot on Video slashers and at least one foreign film.  The Bleeder checks both boxes as it’s a low-budget Shot on Video horror flick from Sweden.  As a bonus, it belongs in one of my favorite subgenres, Rock n’ Roll Horror!

A crazed killer (played by rock drummer Ake Ericksson) escapes from a mental institution and lurks around a dilapidated resort playing with baby carriages.  An all-girl rock band called Rock Cats are on their way to a gig when their bus breaks down.  They go walking into the woods looking for help and eventually come upon the abandoned hotel where the killer begins picking them off one by one. 

The video cinematography is surprisingly crisp and looks very professional.  The camera movement and POV stalking shots are pretty good too, all things considered.  It looks especially polished when you compare it to other SOV horror flicks that were being made in America around the same time, like Boardinghouse and Sledgehammer. 

I will say that for a movie about a rock n’ roll band, the music is a little disappointing.  Rock Cats only perform one song, which is odd.  I thought they'd definitely play something once they arrived at the abandoned hotel (or at least rehearse).  Then again, they kinda suck, so maybe that was for the best.  (I was surprised to learn they were an actual band called Revansch.)  Also, the score just sounds like someone playing the theme from Halloween in the wrong key.  That said, this would still make a good double feature with Jess Franco’s Killer Barbys.

Do I wish the body count was higher and/or the kills didn’t mostly occur offscreen?  Yes.  However, there are countless other SOV horror films out there that score high marks in that department.  It’s much harder to make an SOV horror flick that looks fairly close to an “actual” movie and is this good to boot.  Besides, there’s a certain purity to the form of people splitting up and being bumped off until there’s only one left to confront the killer.  Shit like this is what October was made for. 

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #22: 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE (2026) *** ½

The Bone Temple picks up shortly after 28 Years Later ended with the young Spike (Alfie Williams) being picked up by a gang of tracksuit wearing zombie killers who worship their leader Jimmy (Jack O’Connell) like he was the Messiah.   Meanwhile, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) has seen some interesting changes in the zombie “Alpha” Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) and is trying to establish a line of communication between humans and the “Infected”. 

The Bone Temple is a lot more uneven than its predecessor, but the heights it manages to hit are awfully lofty.  Before we discuss that, let’s get into what doesn’t work.  The stuff with the “Jimmys” is pretty goofy.  I know it’s a common motif in zombie movies to have humans be more of a threat than the undead.  That doesn’t mean it exactly works.  The fact that you have such an interesting character like Spike and stick him in a blonde wig and let him more or less become a fly on the wall for much of the picture also kinda sucks. 

So, essentially that’s where my nitpicks end because the rest of the movie is aces.  The last one was more consistent, but this one absolutely rips when it finds its footing.  The scenes with Fiennes kick all kinds of ass.  His smallish role in the last film was a real highlight.  This time out, he gets tons more screen time.  The scenes where he strikes up an unlikely friendship with the hulking Samson play like a mix of the scenes of Frankenstein and the blind man in Bride of Frankenstein and the Dr. Frankenstein and Bub scenes in Day of the Dead. 

The best part about his character is that he’s a raging Duranie.  After a hard day of surviving the zombie apocalypse, our boy likes to strip down in his fallout shelter and play “Girls on Film” at full blast.  Respect. 

It gets better though.  I won’t spoil the end.  What I will say is that it culminates with Fiennes performing one of the greatest song and dance routines ever shown on the silver screen.  It won’t happen, but Fiennes should seriously be nominated for an Oscar.  I mean, he deserves it for his performance as a whole.  It’s just that he is so fucking awesome in this scene that I feel the Academy needs to take notice ASAP.  Even if he isn’t nominated, I feel confident in saying you won’t find a more memorable sequence all year.   

In fact, I kind of wish they could’ve taken all of Fiennes’ scenes from both films, edited them together, and released it as one big movie.  Oh well.  Fiennes also gets the best line of the year when he says, “Pride moves inside me like maggots in the corpse of Christ!”

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #21: 28 YEARS LATER (2025) *** ½

Nearly three decades after the zombie plague ravaged the United Kingdom, a band of survivors live off the coast in a small village in relative peace.  Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) takes his son Spike (Alfie Williams) to “The Mainland” to hunt his first zombie.  After a successful hunt, he is welcomed back to the clan and hailed as a hero.  Trouble brews when Spike ventures back to the Mainland on an unauthorized trip. 

I’ll leave the kid’s reasons for returning to the Mainland vague.  Just know that his father would not approve.  I liked that even after the zombie apocalypse, there’s still a Generation Gap.  Spike is hopelessly naïve but that’s kind of what makes him an interesting character.  The film’s theme of manhood is neat to chew on too.  Spike is performing a ritual to become a man, yet he almost immediately grows weary of his clan’s notion of manhood and sets out to do something way braver than his father would ever attempt. 

The film is almost neatly halved.  The first portion is essentially a father and son bonding during the zombie apocalypse.  (They hunt zombies instead of deer.)  The second half is a similar journey except with Spike and his mother (Jodie Comer).  This portion of the film cleverly undoes a lot of what we previously had seen and gives Spike an opportunity to look at the world through his own eyes instead of his father’s.  This half is also enlivened by the presence of Ralph Fiennes as a kooky doctor who lives among the “Infected”. 

The downside is that the film also weirdly takes a page from the Marvel Universe as it gratuitously sets up the next sequel, The Bone Temple.  It would’ve been a lot more impactful had it ended five minutes sooner on a more somber note.  The arrival of the Big Bad for the next film just feels cheesy and out of step with the rest of the picture. 

The zombie carnage is pretty good, even if their numbers are a bit sparse after 28 years.  Director Danny Boyle (returning to the franchise after sitting out in 28 Weeks Later) delivers a memorable opening scene where the zombie apocalypse occurs while a bunch of kids are in front of the tube watching Teletubbies.  The choppy editing is a little grating during the action, but it’s not nearly as bad as the shaky-cam shit from the original.  Besides, the gripes I have with 28 Years Later are few and far between, and many can be forgiven on account of the fact that the film contains the best zombie birthing scene since the Dawn of the Dead remake. 

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #20: ENTER THE DEVIL (1972) ** ½

A deputy named Jase (Dave Cass, who also wrote the script) heads into the desert looking for a missing person.  He eventually turns up inside a burned-up car.  The coroner says his wounds suggest he was crucified before he was set on fire.  Since it’s an election year, the sheriff (John Martin) wants it all swept under the rug.  Jase and a sexy doctor (Irene Kelley) do more digging, and soon, the bodies start piling up. 

Enter the Devil is a low-budget horror flick from Texas.  I’m not saying it’s great, but these kinds of regional horror movies have a look and feel that can’t be replicated no matter how hard you try.  Before what we now know as “independent cinema” came along, this is what a true indie used to look like.  It’s rough around the edges, features a no-name cast doing their darnedest, contains some unique location work, and has a handmade quality that is undeniable. 

It’s far from perfect.  I could make a laundry list about what’s “wrong” with Enter the Devil.  It suffers from too much padding.  The cinematography is often muddy.  It definitely could’ve used some gore or skin to spice things up.  However, I’m going to accentuate the positive here.  In doing so, I have to spoil the movie, so if your curiosity is piqued from this review so far, stop reading and go check it out. 

Okay, so if you can make it past some of the pokey passages and lackadaisical pacing, the end of the film is actually pretty interesting.  Our hero Jase gets Janet Leighed in the beginning of the third act, and his best friend is revealed to be part of the devil cult.  Just as the cultists are about to sacrifice the heroine, the sheriff, who has been dragging his feet the whole movie, bursts in with a bunch of deputies toting machine guns and blow the crimson robed worshippers away!  He also gets a badass line when he lights his cigar from a burning torch and says, “Maybe dynamite will put an end to all this foolishness!”

This is the equivalent of Mayor Vaughn saying, “Smile you son of a bitch!” and blowing up the Great White as he rescues Chief Brody.  The ineffectual sheriff gets his redemption.  I sort of loved it for that. 

So yeah, Enter the Devil is sure to frustrate viewers looking for something along the lines of The Devil’s Rain or Race with the Devil.  If instead you have an appetite for a quirky ‘70s oddity it should fit the bill.  Oh, and the theme song, “Green, Green, Green” is a certified banger.

AKA:  Disciples of Death.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #19: DARK WATERS (1993) ***

Elizabeth (Louise Salter) arrives at a convent located on a remote island.  It seems her dead father made regular contributions to the church, and she wants to see where his money was going.  Before long, she begins to suspect the creepy nuns may have sacrificed a friend of hers.  Elizabeth then teams up with a Sherlock Holmes-obsessed nun (Venera Simmons) to unravel the truth. 

Director Mariano Baino has the same philosophy as Dario Argento when it comes to atmosphere taking precedence over the plot.  Given a choice between a scene making sense or looking cool, he’d pick the latter every time.  I respect that.  It doesn’t always make for the most coherent moviegoing experience, but I respect that.  I can’t say it 100% “worked”.  I can say I was always entertained. I’ll admit some of the “plot” was a tad confusing.  However, I could honestly say I didn’t know where the movie was going to go next.  That’s not something you can say about dozens of other horror flicks. 

Dark Waters has a cool visual style reminiscent of other ‘90s horror films like Dance with the Devil, Cemetery Man, and Killer Tongue.  Baino also delivers some unique nightmare/freak-out imagery.  The shots of the crucified nun are atmospheric and the scene where Salter begins chowing down on a dead fish is quite memorable.  The sequences where the nuns hold their unholy sabbaths in the candlelit catacombs under the church are also appropriately moody. 

I will say that the final monster is awfully rubbery looking.  That’s probably why he’s only briefly shown.  That said, the payoff is still satisfying enough to make some of the more ambiguous passages feel justified. 

This is one of those movies where you have to turn off your rational mind to unlock the mystery.  Let your lizard brain take over and some of the more abstract breadcrumbs will begin to make sense.  If you can groove to Dark Waters’ dream logic frequency, it will sure to be a big splash. 

AKA:  Dead Waters.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #18: KEEPER (2025) **

The only Osgood Perkins film I’ve seen that I enjoyed was his last one, The Monkey.  I was hoping a little bit of that movie’s wacky momentum would carry over into his latest, Keeper.  Well, I guess the “Glass is Half Full” take is that this is, in my opinion, the second-best Osgood Perkins movie.  That is to say, it’s still not very good but it’s a lot better than something like Longlegs. 

Tatiana Maslany (who was also in The Monkey) and her boyfriend (Rossif Sutherland) go to a cabin in the woods for some R & R.  There, she eats some chocolate cake and soon begins seeing weird shit.  Is the place haunted or was the cake laced with some sort of hallucinogenic?  Or is it a bit of both?

One of the big reasons Keeper falls apart is the fact that Sutherland delivers one of the worst performances in recent memory.  He’s just a non-entity throughout the movie.  That wouldn’t be such a big deal if so much of the plot didn’t hinge on whether or not Maslany should trust him or not.  Even in the scenes where he’s supposed to be threatening or menacing, he’s just sort of…there.  Fortunately, Maslany anchors the film as best as anyone could’ve expected, given the circumstances.  She gives a good performance, but the film that surrounds her just isn’t worthy. 

Perkins does give the film plenty of atmosphere.  The cinematography during the final sequences is also quite striking.  The glass-walled cabin has a lot of personality too, which helps, especially during the scenes where Maslany is all by herself in the house. 

I don’t mind being a patient viewer on slow burn horror movies like this if my patience is eventually rewarded.  Well, there is a payoff to all the vague haunting and mysterious phenomena going on in the house.  Whether or not it was worth the wait will probably depend on the individual viewer.  Personally, I think it was a bit lackluster, but at least Perkins threw us a bone at the end.  It’s just a shame it didn’t have any meat on it. 

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #17: THE PHOTOGRAPHER (2011) *

I watched the sequel to this movie, The Photographer:  Inside the Dark Room a while back and I genuinely enjoyed it.  For whatever reason, it took me a while to circle around and check out the original.  I have a feeling that if I saw this one first, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the sequel. 

A model comes to a hotel room to pose for a geeky photographer.  She gets weirded out when he tries to rub baby oil on her and tries to leave.  Up until this point, I was totally with the movie.  However, at about the fifteen minute mark, it takes a nosedive and never recovers. 

The model mysteriously winds up on a deserted stretch of road.  Before long, a couple find themselves on the same road and have a run-in with the photographer.  It’s here where things devolve into a series of psych-out sequences.  Some play like music videos.  Others are overly artsy-fartsy. 

Of course, this winds up being one of those “It was All a Dream” deals, and the movie essentially starts over again at around the halfway point.  I was already starting to mentally check out by then.  Having to unceremoniously shift gears midway through did not help matters. 

It feels like this might’ve been one of those cases where the filmmakers made a short and then tried to expand it to feature length.  Some of the dreamy, obtuse shit might’ve worked in a short, but when you do it in a feature, your audience just feels like they’re being jerked around.  It’s a long time coming when the film eventually tries to win the audience back.  It gives us a couple of decent scenes of women in bondage including models wrapped in duct tape, bound with nipple clamps, and encased in shrink wrap.  Sadly, just when you think the movie has reclaimed its bearings, it shits the bed again. 

I guess I could also complain about the abrupt and unsatisfying ending, but hey, at least it ended. 

AKA:  The Photographer:  Inside the Mind of a Psycho.  AKA:  The Camera Killer.