THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993) ***

Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is celebrating its 25^th anniversary and in those 25 years, I had never seen it.  You might think it odd since Burton is one of my favorite filmmakers (even though it was actually directed by Henry Sellick, Burton’s fingerprints are all over this thing).  I guess when it first came out, I was a broody teenager who felt I was “too old” to see an animated movie.  My daughter, who is nine, and is obsessed with all things stop-motion, hadn’t seen it, so what better way for both of us to experience it for the first time than in a theater?

You all probably know more about the movie than I do, but it’s all about Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon, with a singing voice provided by Danny Elfman), the Pumpkin King who lords over Halloweentown.  He’s gotten bored with all the skeletons, graveyards, and ghosts and shit, so he’s become even more despondent than usual.  When he finds a door leading to Christmastown, he gathers all his ghoulish friends together to do Christmas their way… which leads to some predictably disastrous results. 

The world Sellick and Burton creates is a thing of beauty.  It’s kind of like Mad Monster Party, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas all rolled into one.  While the plot may be as thin as Jack is, the film is visually dazzling, fast-paced, and enormously entertaining.  The standout sequence comes when Jack kidnaps Santa and leaves ghoulish gifts to all the girls and boys, but the throwaway moments like when he plays fetch with his dog using his own rib are equally amusing. 

If there is a problem, it’s that some of the songs sound the same.  Because of Elfman’s talk-sing delivery, many of the songs have a tendency to blur together.  Only “What’s This” and the opening number “This is Halloween” have any pizzazz.  (Part of me just wishes he was still singing the way he did when he was in Oingo Boingo, but that’s just me.)

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: TERROR AT BLOODFART LAKE (2009) ***

Terror at Bloodfart Lake is another foulmouthed, grade Z, no-budget horror flick from Chris (Mulva:  Zombie Ass-Kicker) Seaver.  Since I’ve seen a good number of Seaver’s films going in, I kind of knew what I was getting myself into.  But let's face it:  How could I not watch a movie called Terror at Bloodfart Lake?  The surprising thing is, I found myself laughing quite often during the mercifully short running time.  I can honestly say without a doubt this is Seaver’s best picture yet.

A group of friends go to a cabin in the woods to party all weekend.  One by one, they are picked off by a supernatural wisecracking scarecrow.  Naturally, the only ones who can stop it are a sexy biker babe and a bumbling redneck.

If you brace yourself for the amateurish acting and obnoxious dialogue full of juvenile potty humor, you should have a good time with Terror at Bloodfart Lake.  Some might be annoyed by the constant ska music and gratuitous plugs for Fright Rags T-shirts.  Stick with it though, and you’ll find some truly funny stuff here.  Most of the foulmouthed humor is hit and miss, but the oddball throwaway lines are often funnier.  (“Do you know the Dark Arts and listen to Evanescence?”)  There’s also a funny bit where a guy from Jersey talks about “The Boss”, but “Not Springsteen!  Tony friggin’ Danza!”

The highlights though are the murder sequences.  In most of them, the scarecrow killer uses ears of corn to dispatch his victims (including shoving it into one guy’s “cornhole”).  My favorite bit though was when he uses a liposuction machine to kill a big girl.  Many killers in movies would suck fat out of a girl’s body to kill her.  This one doesn’t stop there.  He actually shoves the hose in her mouth and feeds her own fat back to her.  That folks, is when I knew Terror at Bloodfart Lake was something special… or at least a notch or two better than your average low budget, shot-on-video, gory, horror-comedy. 

PRIME EVIL: CLASSIC HORROR TRAILERS (2007) **

(By the way, this is the thumbnail picture on Amazon Prime for this compilation, but the movie doesn’t even have a trailer for Frankenstein, which should give you an idea of the quality of this flick.)

You all know me.  You know movie trailer compilations are my kryptonite.  I’m especially susceptible to compilations of horror movie trailers.  When I stumbled upon this compilation on Amazon Prime, I knew I had to get my trailer on.  Now, I don’t ordinarily mind compilations that cross over various genres, particularly if they’re of the grindhouse and/or exploitation variety.  It’s just that… well… Classic Horror Trailers is one of the most confounding compilations I’ve ever seen.

It all starts out just fine and dandy with trailers for such classics as Tales of Terror, The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Unearthly, The Cyclops, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, From Hell It Came, She Demons, The Bride and the Beast, The Cosmic Man, The Fiendish Ghouls, and The Raven.  Then, about twenty minutes in, there’s a trailer for… Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night?!?  What the what?  

Okay, maybe the editor fell asleep at the wheel and one of his art house buddies slipped it in.  I mean, I guess you could consider it a cult movie.  It’s certainly far from a “Classic Horror” flick though.

After that, it’s back to business.  There’s Queen of Outer Space (sure, it’s Sci-Fi, but there’s giant spiders in it, so I’ll allow it), Carnival of Souls, Tarantula, Black Sunday, Black Sabbath, The Mole People, and… High Plains Drifter?!?  I mean, I guess it could be considered a horror movie if you believe Clint Eastwood’s character is a ghost (which is possible because of the movie’s ambiguity), but still…

Okay, so after that brief detour into Clint Eastwood territory, we get back on track with trailers for The Masque of the Red Death, The Village of the Damned, Macabre, Dr. Cadman’s Secret (AKA:  The Black Sleep), Black Sunday… wait, didn’t we already see a trailer for Black Sunday?  Yup.  I’m not really complaining because who wouldn’t want to pass up an opportunity to see the sultry Barbara Steele, but it reinforces my theory that the editor had a case of narcolepsy when he was cobbling this together.

That’s followed by trailers for Caltiki the Immortal Monster, Frankenstein 1970, Black Pit of Dr. M, Monstrosity (AKA:  The Atomic Brain), Daughter of Horror (“Not one word is spoken on screen!”), Blood Man of the Devil (AKA:  House of the Black Death), The Vampire Lovers, and The House on Haunted Hill.  We also get a second trailer for The House on Haunted Hill, which plays up the “Emergo” gimmick.  Unfortunately, it’s also around this time where the audio gets out of synch and the actor’s dialogue rarely matches their lips, which gets quite annoying.

Trailers for Diary of a Madman, Flower Drum Song… FLOWER DRUM SONG?!?, My Name is Nobody… MY NAME IS NOBODY?!?, Privilege… PRIVILEGE?!? I’ve got to stop and go lay down to get my head straight.

Okay, I’m back.  What’s next?  Mondo Balordo (a Mondo movie narrated by Boris Karloff… Okay, I’ll guess I can accept that), The Last Wagon (a western with Richard Widmark), Taras Bulba (a Cossack action flick with Yul Brynner), The Projected Man (another Sci-Fi flick, but certainly closer to the theme of the compilation than Flower Drum Song), Long John Silver (WTF), and The Big Gundown (a western with Lee Van Cleef).  Seriously, why wasn’t this called Classic Horror Trailers with a Bunch of Western Trailers and Other Shit Thrown in?  Or, even better, just cut out all the trailers that weren’t remotely horror related?  And would it have been too much to ask for to have the audio synched up correctly?  Jeez. 

Things wrap up with trailers for Colossus:  The Forbin Project, Hammer’s version of The Mummy, The Brain Machine, Money, Women, and Guns (another western, but at least Lon Chaney, Jr. is in it), The Haunted Palace, A Bucket of Blood, 13 Ghosts, Man of a Thousand Faces, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Dementia 13, The Hanging Tree (a western with Gary Cooper), The Curse of the Faceless Man, Marnie, and The Tingler.  

If the compilation ended at about the hour mark, this would’ve probably have been a *** or *** ½ movie because some of the trailers are really quite cool.  I particularly liked seeing trailers for familiar movies under their alternate titles.  Too bad the inexplicable use of non-horror trailers in the second hour, coupled with the out-of-synch audio eventually did a number on my brain and drove me batty.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: AMITYVILLE 1992: IT’S ABOUT TIME (1992) **

The Amityville sequels tend to blur together after about Part 3, so it’s always helpful when the subtitle reminds you which one it is.  In Amityville 1992’s case, it’s about time.  Or rather, a clock.

This was the sixth one in the series.  Like Part 4 it’s about a piece of furniture from the old Amityville Horror house bringing the evil upon another family.  It’s a little bit better than that entry, thanks mostly to some offbeat special effects and a smidge of T & A, but it’s no less uneven.

Stephen Macht comes home after a business trip and gives his girlfriend (Shawn Weatherly) a clock.  It doesn’t take long before his son (Damon Martin) is having weird visions.  While out jogging, a neighborhood dog bites Macht on the leg.  The bite gets infected, and he slowly transforms into a psycho.  His usually demure daughter (Megan Ward) also undergoes a transformation into a deadly sexed-up femme fatale.  Weatherly eventually learns the clock came from the Amityville house and sets out to stop her family from trying to kill one another.  

Amityville 1992 isn’t exactly great, but there are some definite highpoints.  We get a Final Destination-y death involving a diaper truck and the scene where Ward seduces her boyfriend into stepping into a puddle of slime has a distinct Elm Street vibe.  My favorite bit though was when Ward gets it on with her reflection in a mirror.

It’s About Time is a little more fun than your average Amityville sequel, thanks to the playful tone and director Tony (Hellbound:  Hellraiser 2) Randel’s staging of a handful of amusing set pieces.  It’s a shame the lackluster finale goes on too long and suffers from some pure stupidity.  (The scene where the clock turns the family old and young is just plain dumb.)  Also, the accompaniment of a ticking clock during the scenes of weird goings-on get repetitive quickly.  

It’s always nice to see the underappreciated Stephen Macht in a leading role, but unfortunately, he spends most of his screen time in bed nursing a leg wound.  It’s up to Weatherly to do most of the heavy lifting and she is well-equipped to do so (and I’m not just saying that because of her hot sex scene).  Ward does a fine job selling her transformation from goodie two-shoes to vamping vixen too.  It was also fun seeing Dick Miller pop up in a bit role.

Are you craving more reviews of horror sequels?  Well, you can read all about them in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  Get your copy  HERE

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: AMITYVILLE HORROR: THE EVIL ESCAPES (1989) **

You might not remember, but a few weeks ago, I was all jazzed to see a double feature of Amityville Horror:  The Evil Escapes and Amityville 1992:  It’s About Time on the big screen.  Due to lack of interest, the screening was abruptly cancelled, and I was left missing two Movies of Horror-Ween for the month of October.  Thanks to longtime reader Venom for providing me with copies of both films.

After the fun Amityville 3-D, the Amityville Horror franchise went straight to TV with Amityville Horror:  The Evil Escapes.  It was written and directed by Sandor Stern, which makes sense when you consider he wrote the screenplay for the original movie.  It’s silly, borderline stupid, and has some passages that feel like something out of a Lifetime Original.  However, there’s enough nuttiness here to keep die-hard Amityville addicts amused.

Jane Wyatt’s sister buys an ugly lamp at a yard sale at the Amityville Horror house.  She sends it to Jane out in California as a joke, but the joke’s on her because the old bag cuts herself on the lamp and dies a week later from tetanus.  Wyatt’s widowed daughter (Patty Duke) moves her family into her house and almost immediately, her young daughter starts seeing her dead dad.  After that, parrots are being found in the toaster oven, chainsaws start taking a life of their own, and phones are melting.  The only thing that can stop it are the priests who did the exorcism of the house in Amityville.

The Evil Escapes starts out with that very same exorcism scene.  Lights go on and off, chairs fly around, and black gunk runs down the walls.  Most of the shocks are just your standard issue Made for TV junk, but we do get one gnarly scene in which a guy’s hand gets stuck in a garbage disposal that is fairly gory for a movie starring Patty Duke.

The movie sort of plays like an overlong episode of the Friday the 13^th TV show in that antiques from a haunted spot carries the evil with it to another house.  The big problem with all of this is that your main villain is… a GODDAMN LAMP.  Sure, they try to make it spooky looking (it looks like a tree with a fishbowl on top), but it never works out.  

The Evil Escapes is dumber than a bag of hammers, but like most Part 4’s it has a bigger body count than the original.  Superfluous characters such as electricians and nannies are all introduced only to be killed off.  Because of that, it’s not exactly boring.

Now, I’m sure you’ll probably want to pull your hair out during the family strife scenes of the widowed Duke trying to get along with her crusty mother.  This shit is worse than your typical Lifetime Movie.  Hang with it though, because no matter how bad it gets, I find it hard to hate any movie that ends with an exorcism, levitating killer kids, and electrical cords attacking like cobras.  There’s also a positively hilarious set-up for a sequel that I’m sure never got paid off properly, unless The Amityville Pet Shop Horror is a thing.

AKA:  Amityville 4:  The Evil Escapes.  AKA:  Amityville Horror 4.

Are you craving more reviews of horror sequels?  Well, you can read all about them in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  Get your copy  HERE

PANDEMONIUM (1982) ** ½

In 1978, Halloween kicked off the slasher movie craze.  By 1982, the genre was in full swing, so much so that not one, but FIVE slasher parodies had flooded the market.  Those films included Saturday the 14^th, Student Bodies, Wacko, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion, and Pandemonium.  Out of all of them, I’d say Student Bodies is the most successful, but Pandemonium certainly had the best cast.  

In 1963, a group of cheerleaders at It Had to Be U are turned into (literal) shish-kabobs.  Twenty years later, Bambi (Candy Azzara) returns to the school start up a cheerleading camp.  The cheerleaders die off one by one at the hands of a psycho killer, and it’s up to an eager Mountie (Tom Smothers) to stop him.

Directed by Alfred Sole of Alice, Sweet Alice fame, Pandemonium is a bit all over the place.  For every joke that lands, there are two or three that crash and burn.  For this sort of thing, that’s not a bad average at all.  I liked the scene where Bambi tells her backstory while a subtitle reading “EXPOSITION” flashes at the bottom of the screen, the entire “House of Bad Pies” sequence is hysterical, and even though it’s racist AF, the Godzilla scene made me laugh.

The cheerleaders are all well-cast and likeable.  Judge Reinhold (with a bad blond dye job) gets some laughs, Debralee Scott is quite sexy, and Carol Kane is amusing as always.  The supporting cast is loaded with stars, many of whom are reduced to a walk-on part (or worse, completely wasted).  There are a lot of Groundlings involved (including Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens, and John Paragon) which makes me wonder why Elvira wasn’t called in to at least cameo.  The best cameo comes from Eileen Brennan, doing a mean Piper Laurie impression during the scene that spoofs Carrie.  Speaking of Carrie, the ending manages to predate the telekinetic vs. slasher battle in Friday the 13^th Part 7 by six years, so that’s worth something at least.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: GODZILLA: CITY ON THE EDGE OF BATTLE (2018) * ½

Godzilla:  City on the Edge of Battle picks up immediately where Planet of the Monsters ended.  Our heroes, defeated by the massive Godzilla, encounter a race of tribal humans with psychic powers.  They learn the whereabouts of the remains of Mechagodzilla and try to get it up and running to fight against Godzilla.

This new series of Godzilla movies was originally intended as a TV show but were eventually strung together as a trilogy of features.  (The conclusion of the trilogy is supposed to be released to Netflix later in the year.)  Like Planet of the Monsters, there is a LOT of talk and the whole thing suffers whenever The G-Man isn’t on screen (which is most of the movie, I’m afraid).  Part of the fun of the Godzilla series is seeing giant monsters stomp on cities and fight other giant monsters.  Setting this trilogy in a future where Earth has become a desolate pseudo-metallic jungle was a bold choice.  The downside is that it doesn’t offer much for old school fans like me.  I mean, I can accept a CGI monster, even though I love men-in-suit ones.  It’s just that they never find very much for Godzilla to do.

Godzilla certainly looks cool.  I don’t know about his massive frame in this one (which makes him by far bigger than any of the other previous Godzillas), but the animation is such that it’s hard to get a sense of his scale, so it doesn’t really matter anyway.  The revisionist idea that Mechagodzilla is a nanotechnological entity is intriguing.  The problem is, the set-up is laborious, and the payoff is anticlimactic.  

It’s not all bad though.  The twin tribal girls are probably the best part of the movie.  They’re kind of like a blend of the twins from Mothra and Jaylah from Star Trek Beyond.  Maybe they’ll get something worthwhile to do in the conclusion of the trilogy.

Speaking of which, I’m sure all of this will get wrapped up eventually.  There’s a post-credits stinger that teases the return of a fan favorite monster.  Maybe the final installment will also contain some of the old school monster mashing that’s sorely lacking in the first two entries.  As it stands, City on the Edge of Battle is a step down from Planet of the Monsters.  It’s mostly a talk-fest, and what little Godzilla action we do get is disappointing and unsatisfying.

Are you craving more reviews of horror sequels?  Well, you can read all about them in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  Get your copy HERE