SATURDAY THE 14TH (1981) **

Richard Benjamin and his real-life wife Paula Prentiss inherit a rundown old house and move in with their kids.  Jeffrey Tambor is the vampire who wants a book of evil that’s located somewhere in the house and is always hanging around in hopes of finding it.  When Richard’s kid reads the book, he accidentally unleashes a bunch of monsters that can bring about the end of the world on the titular date. 

This tame horror-comedy is mostly for kids.  Adults will find it dumb as the humor is painful and the monsters are rubbery, poorly lit, or just plain bad.  The good news:  It’s only 75 minutes and it moves like lightning.  In fact, it flies by so fast that it sometimes feels like whole scenes got lost on the editing room floor. 

The biggest problem though is Richard Benjamin.  He’s just fucking terrible.  I’ve enjoyed his work in other movies, but he just has one expression here that says, “I can’t wait to quit acting and start directing!”  Prentiss fares slightly better as the mom who gets bitten by the vampire.  Speaking of which, Tambor isn’t bad, but he could’ve been great if the material wasn’t so thin. 

In fact, the script feels like a first draft.  There’s a solid (if silly) idea here, but it really needed more (funnier) jokes and stronger characters.  In all honesty, this is probably a One Star movie...

HOWEVER.  (And that’s a big however.)  There is one awesome scene that almost makes it all worthwhile.  When Benjamin’s daughter takes a bubble bath, she’s interrupted by a Gill Man-looking monster who rises from between her legs and scares her out of the tub.  As a kid, I stumbled upon this scene while channel surfing and it freaked me out.  Heck, I couldn’t even use Mr. Bubble (the same brand of bubble bath the girl uses in the movie) afterwards.  I had nightmares for weeks and was scared shitless of the bathtub for months.  As a kid, just a few fleeting seconds of this movie scared me.  Seeing it as an adult, I can admit that it still has a little bit of a kick to it.  I have to admit, seeing this scene after all these years brought a big-ass smile to my face.  That smile alone is worth Two Stars.  The rest of the movie, not so much.

GOG (1954) ** ½

The creator of Flipper, Ivan Tors teamed up with the director of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Herbert L. Strock for this sporadically amusing 3-D Sci-Fi horror thriller.  Scientists working to cryogenically freeze monkeys for a top-secret space project become victims of their own work when the machine malfunctions and freezes them to death.  Richard Egan (from Love Me Tender) is sent to the underground facility to investigate the accident.  More scientists die in freak accidents and it’s up to Egan to figure out if it’s the work of saboteurs, or if the facility’s resident super-intelligent robots, Gog and Magog have obtained a murderous mind of their own.

Gog is slow to start.  Egan kind of makes for a dull lead, and the fact that most of the dialogue is filled with a lot of scientific gobbledygook doesn’t help either.  The mawkish romance scenes between Egan and Constance Dowling is stuffy too.  At least Herbert (The Fly) Marshall lends the flick some gravitas as the head of the project. 

Once the robots get loose, the movie picks up in a hurry and becomes a lot of fun.  There’s also a great sequence that plays like a precursor to Moonraker’s G-Force simulator scene.  What makes the scene a blast is that the “high-tech” machine looks like a piece of kid’s playground equipment.  I will say the robots themselves don’t have much personality to them.  (They look like silver parking cones with a lot of flailing arms.)  Fortunately, the carnage they create in the last reel is memorable.

The 3-D is utilized well enough.  There’s plenty of separation between the actors and the background, so you always know you’re watching a real 3-D movie, and not haphazardly thrown together rush job.  That said, not a lot comes out at the screen.  The first shot is of a needle going into the audience’s eyeballs, which is always a good sign.  However, the use of in-your-face effects are only intermittent as the film goes on.  Luckily, the 3-D gags featured in the climax are simply awesome.  It almost makes sitting through an hour and change of science jargon worth it.  

Here’s a complete rundown of the 3-D effects:  

·         3-D Hypodermic Needle

·         3-D Flames 

·         3-D Tuning Forks

·         3-D Gog

·         3-D Magog

·         3-D Antenna

·         3-D Gun

·         3-D Flamethrower (multiple)

·         3-D Magog (again)

AKA:  Gog:  Space Station:  U.S.A.  AKA:  Gog, the Killer.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963) **

After directing a bunch of Godzilla movies for Toho, Ishiro Honda decided to try his hand at a monster movie on a much smaller scale for a change.  The results are frustratingly uneven.  Ishiro, buddy.  Stick to big ass monsters instead.

Passengers on a yacht get lost in a storm.  They wind up shipwrecked on an uncharted island where the only vegetation seems to be giant mushrooms.  After their rations run out, they resort to eating the mushrooms, which turns them into living mushroom men.

The early scenes made me yearn for the directness of She Demons.  At least with that movie, it began with the characters already washed up on shore.  These opening scenes on the ship aren’t bad per se, just perfunctory.  The part where the supposed famous songbird warbles a tune is good for a laugh though as she sings “la, la, la, la, la” over and over again.

From then on, it’s a slow burn, with the emphasis on slow.  The subplot about the desperation and mistrust growing among the survivors was to be expected, although honestly, I was expecting a bit more.  When all the characters are at each other’s throats, it leaves little room for likability among the cast. 

There’s certainly plenty of atmosphere to go around as the fog-shrouded beaches and fungus-covered ships are appropriately creepy.  You just have to wait an awfully long time for the mushroom people to finally do their thing.  Even then, it’s not exactly worth the wait (although the first appearance of the mushroom monster is effective).  The fungus-faced toadstool terrors are memorable creations, but ultimately, they don’t get much screen time and aren’t given a whole lot to do besides stumble around.  If you stick around, there’s a good little twist at the end, although it comes too little too late. 

AKA:  Matango.  AKA:  Zombi 14:  Mushroom Zombies.  AKA:  Matango:  Attack of the Mushroom People.  AKA:  Curse of the Mushroom People.  AKA:  Fungus of Terror.  AKA:  Matango:  The Fungus of Terror.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: SCALPEL (1977) ** ½

Dr. Reynolds (Robert Lansing) is a brilliant but psychopathic plastic surgeon who is furious when a big family inheritance goes to his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman).  Problem is, she ran off a year ago when she saw her daddy murder her boyfriend and hasn’t come back since.  When Reynolds discovers a stripper with a mutilated face lying helpless in the road, he hatches a diabolical scheme.  Using his medical know-how, he makes her over to resemble his daughter just long enough to get his hands on the money.

To tell any more would spoil the fun.  All I’ll say is that there’s a twist halfway through that complicates their situation dramatically. Needless to say, it throws a monkey wrench into his plan.  There are other twists and turns too.  Some are expected.  Some not.  

Scalpel offers up nothing overly explicit, but it’s definitely disturbing and sometimes shocking the lengths to which Lansing will go through to get his hands of the family fortune.  It helps immensely that Lansing plays a twisted character with such nonchalance, which gives him real menace.  Chapman is also quite good.  You have to believe she’d go along with such an outrageous plot partly out of fear, and partly out of greed.  Or maybe because she’s just as warped as he is.

A few surgical scenes aside, the horror elements are really quite minimal.  Instead, director John Grissmer (who went on to helm the classic Thanksgiving slasher, Blood Rage), goes for more of a Hitchcockian style thriller.  I think even old Hitch would’ve enjoyed the section of the film in which Lansing makes over Chapman, as it resembles Vertigo in some respects.  I also liked the flashback scenes that contradict what Lansing has said on screen, exposing the doctor’s misdeeds to the audience, but not the characters around him. 

All of this is absorbing for an hour or so.  However, the movie kind of plays its cards a bit too soon, and the last half-hour sort of dawdles when it should really be ramping up the suspense.  The climax, though appropriate, is just allowed to go on far too long to be fully effective.  Maybe Grissner should’ve used the titular tool in the editing room to trim things up a bit more.

AKA:  False Face.  AKA:  Woman of the Shadows.

ZOMBIE HIGH (1987) * ½

Andrea (Virginia Madsen) gets a scholarship to a fancy prep school.  Her boyfriend Barry (James Wilder) thinks the place is creepy and tries to get her to come home.  She ignores his warnings, but soon learns things aren’t what they seem.  Problem students suddenly turn into boring preppies overnight.  Andrea eventually discovers her professor (Richard Cox) is centuries old and has been performing lobotomies on the students and using their brain tissue to keep himself and the faculty eternally young.  Andrea and Barry then team up to take down the sinister staff and the brainless student body once and for all.

Zombie High plays like a horror comedy with all comedy cut out.  It tonally feels like a comedy, but with no real gags or jokes to speak of.  There are lines like, “You two need a chaperone!” that seem they should be a punchline, and yet it’s not funny at all.  It’s almost like one of the zombies from the movie wrote the script.  The closest the film comes to an actual laugh is the shot of the zombie students shuffling in unison at the school dance.  Even then, there’s no set-up or payoff.  It’s just a little throwaway shot.

It’s also really tame.  In fact, only a couple of F-Bombs separate it from a PG-13 rating.  The horror elements are weak too.  It would’ve been better with the gut-munching variety of zombies instead of the boring mind-control zombies we’re stuck with.  Because of that, Zombie High is more like a dull preppie version of The Stepford Wives than the Ghoul School fun the title suggests.  (Disturbing Behavior did the same concept much better a decade or so later.) 

Madsen is good, even if she looks way too old to be a teenager.  Her energetic performance makes it watchable.  I also enjoyed seeing Sherilyn Fenn as her bubbly roommate.  The most fun comes from seeing future Ghostbusters director Paul Feig in his movie debut playing an easygoing, likeable nerd character.  He has chemistry with Madsen but stands around most of the time eagerly looking for something to do.  Sadly, the movie never obliges him.

The best part is the funny end song, “Kiss My Butt”.  It sounds like the producers wanted to use “You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party” but couldn’t afford the rights.  Instead, they just used the same beat and wrote their own lyrics.  I’m not saying it’s good, but it’s certainly more straight-up cheesy (and fun) than the rest of the movie.

AKA:  The School That Ate My Brain.

JAY AND SILENT BOB REBOOT (2019) ***

After dabbling in the horror genre for the past few years, writer/director/star Kevin Smith finally returns with another installment starring his two most famous creations, Jay and Silent Bob.  As far as the films within the “View Askewniverse” go, it’s probably the weakest.  That’s mostly because it hinges so much on being a reboot of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.  However, there are plenty of laughs to be had, tons of funny cameos, and just enough tugs at the old heartstrings to make it all worthwhile.  

It probably won’t win any new converts, but for someone like me who was a fan of Smith’s since Clerks, it’s akin to attending a high school reunion.  You get to see some folks you’ve been hoping to see for a long time.  You even get to see some people you honestly thought you might never see again.  Seeing them flourish and grow, or in some cases, not changing one iota, you can’t help but stop a moment and take stock of where you are in your own life.

Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe I just feel this way because I’ve grown up with these characters.  Maybe it’s because I see parts of myself in many of them.  It’s hard to believe that twenty-five years has come and gone since Clerks came out.  A lot has changed since then.  A lot hasn’t.  Twenty-five years used to sound like a long time when you were younger.  Now it feels like yesterday.  

I don’t want to get misty-eyed here.  I just want to say I’m glad to see these characters back on the big screen where they belong.  I enjoyed catching up with them immensely.  

As for the movie itself, well… it’s awful thin.  It’s telling just how thin it is that the best moments are just characters from Smith’s other movies reminiscing about old times and telling us what they’ve been up to since then.  The plot has Jay and Silent Bob going to Hollywood to stop a movie from being made about them… again.  The new wrinkle in the formula is that Jay has a daughter he never knew he had (played by Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn).  It would be like shooting fish in a barrel to say that she is the weak link here.  Smith, sensing this, is able to head off any such judgment by addressing it straight-on by making the theme of the movie the passing the torch to the next generation.  He pokes enough fun at himself to know his shortcomings (there are multiple jabs at Cop Out) while simultaneously playing to his strong suit.  

I won’t spoil the gags for you.  (Although I will say there is a great Glengarry Glen Ross homage.)  I won’t spoil the cameos either.  I won’t spoil the ending, although I will say that the last scene of the movie could very well be the first scene of Clerks 3.  If that is indeed the case, I think we’ll all be happy.  One thing is for sure, I can’t wait to see all these characters again.  The sooner the better.  

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: WAR WOLVES (2009) **

Jake (Michael Worth, who also directed) is part of a group of soldiers who are attacked by a pack of werewolves while fighting in Afghanistan.  He has few memories of the attack and returns home with a severe case of PTSD.  Jake drowns his sorrows in drink and attends support groups (under the name “Lawrence Talbot”) to suppress his newfound murderous instincts.  Meanwhile, three of his sexy soldier sisters in arms go around cruising the countryside turning into werewolves and murdering people indiscriminately.  They are hunted by two Army cronies (John Saxon and Tim Thomerson) who are trying to cover up the Afghanistan attack.  Eventually, the she-wolves come looking for Jake to make him a member of their pack.

As a director, Worth’s earnest approach regarding his character’s PTSD is admirable.  As an actor, he’s just not quite capable of pulling it off.  Worth is a veteran of many action movies, so his strength (both in front of and behind the camera) lies in the war and/or action sequences.  When it comes to the actual werewolf scenes, the horror elements are too just underplayed to really pop. 

The capable cast of genre vets certainly helps.  In addition to Saxon and Thomerson, we also have Adrienne Barbeau as one of the support group members, and the great Martin Kove as one of Saxon’s cohorts.  Sadly, he disappears from the proceedings far too quickly.  On the plus side, Saxon and Thomerson make a terrific team.  Why didn’t somebody think to put them together sooner?  They bounce off one another beautifully and their grumpy old men schtick gets a few laughs.  

Unfortunately, the werewolf makeup is too restrained for its own good.  (They look more like vampires than wolves.)  That’s probably due to the budgetary limitations that also hamper the action sequences.  There are fight scenes that can only be labeled as “Wolf Fu” that are moderately amusing, but it’s painfully obvious that the lack of time and money prevented them from reaching their true potential.   

In the end, there’s not enough exploitation goodness here to please horror fans.  Action fans looking for something with slight genre trappings will probably enjoy it more.  Oh well, at least the title is fucking awesome.

Thomerson gets the best line of the movie when he punches a liberal and says, “He was a little to the left, so I gave him a right!”