BLOODY WEDNESDAY (1987) * ½

Phillip (Night Train to Terror) Yordan wrote this bleak, boring true-life story ripped from the then-current headlines.  It was based on the infamous San Diego McDonald’s massacre where a lone gunman killed dozens of people eating at the beloved fast food chain.  Incidents like that seemed surreal back when the film was made.  Now these incidents happen far too often.  It’s still a timely story.  It’s just not a very good movie.

Harry (Raymond Elmendorf) loses his job as a mechanic because he can’t keep his mind on his work.  The next day, he walks into church buck naked, which gets him sent to a mental hospital for evaluation.  He’s naturally released due to overcrowding (after all, he was only charged with indecent exposure) and winds up living in a rundown hotel.  There, he begins to lose touch with reality the more and more isolated he becomes.  He eventually turns his rage on a bunch of innocents eating breakfast in a diner.  (Come on, you didn’t think McDonald’s would allow them to film there, did you?)

The filmmakers try to put the audience in Harry’s shoes so you’re never sure what’s going on.  Sometimes he talks to the hotel staff and guests, who obviously aren’t really there.  However, what about those punks that are squatting downstairs?  Are they real, or is he hallucinating them too?  Some of the hallucinations are more obvious than others (like when he bangs his shrink).  Too bad none of this makes Harry a sympathetic character as Elmendorf is just too annoying for you to really care about.

The scenes of Harry interacting with imaginary people are so amateurish that the film fails miserably as a psychological study.  It never quite clicks as a horror movie either.  There is one memorable scene where Harry plays “courtroom”.  He ties up the punks and lets his teddy bear be the judge.  The bear, who talks in a voice only Harry can hear, presides over the scared shitless thugs screaming, “GUILTY!” in a creepy voice.  It’s just weird enough to be memorable, but not effective enough to really “work”.

The final diner massacre scene where Harry guns down dozens of people with a machine gun is effective though.  It just comes as too little too late.  As silly and off-kilter as the rest of the movie is, it feels cheap to have such a realistic depiction of a mass shooting as the capper of your film.  By then, whatever statement the filmmakers were trying to make was lost, especially when so much of what came before was so goofy and slapdash. 

AKA:  The Great American Massacre.

DOMINIQUE (1979) **

Director Michael (Logan’s Run) Anderson and producer Milton (The House That Dripped Blood) Subotsky teamed up for this elegant, moody, but kind of empty chiller.  Wealthy wife Jean Simmons thinks her hubby Cliff Robertson is trying to drive her insane.  Eventually, the poor gal hangs herself, but before long, it’s Cliff who starts seeing spooky shit around the mansion.  Is he going cuckoo or is his dead wife really roaming the halls at night?  I guess there’s only one thing to do:  Dig that broad up! 

Dominque is kind of like a mash-up of Gaslight and Diabolique.  (The title even rhymes.)  It’s all fairly straightforward stuff, but Anderson is able to inject a little style into the material to prevent it from feeling too stale.  Some stretches are very staid, like a TV Movie of the Week.  Others have an almost Argento-like use of color.  Unfortunately, it never quite comes together.  

After a fine set-up, the middle section drags far too much.  In addition to the pokey pacing, the script is a bit too predictable for its own good.  I mean it’s one thing for the audience to know exactly where the plot is going.  It’s another thing to make them wait forever to get there.  Even when we finally get there, it’s unnecessarily dragged out ten minutes longer that it had any right being.

Cliff plays his usual evil asshole character.  He does a solid job as the guy you love to hate.  Simmons is okay, if a bit miscast, although she disappears from the story in a hurry. We also have An American Werewolf in London’s Jenny Agutter looking fine, although she isn’t given much to do. 

Dominque isn’t bad exactly.  I didn’t hate it, but I wanted to like it more than I did.  Ultimately, it’s a tad too lightweight to appeal to die-hard horror hounds, but it’s a nice enough effort all the same. 

AKA:  Dominique is Dead.  AKA:  Dominique is Dead… Or is She?  AKA:  Avenging Spirit.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: WOLFGIRL (2001) ***

Tim Curry stars as the ringmaster of a traveling sideshow carnival of freaks.  Grace Jones plays the half-man/half-woman. Both perform musical numbers.  

What was that?  Was that the sound of you adding Wolfgirl to your Prime watchlist?  Good.  

Anyway, Tara (Victoria Sanchez) is the wolfgirl of the title.  She’s covered with hair from head to toe and is the star attraction of sideshow.  When a bully (Shawn Ashmore from the X-Men movies) cruelly taunts her, it makes Tara yearn for a normal life.  Ryan (Dov Tiefenbach), a teenage outcast whose mother (Lesley Ann Warren, who was also in Clue with Curry) is working in her basement laboratory to isolate genes, offers to help her.  He gives her an experimental drug that can potentially reverse her condition.

Of course, the side effects may include headaches, hallucinations, an unshakeable urge to drink from the toilet, and an insatiable bloodlust. 

I’m a sucker for a good freakshow movie.  I love the werewolf genre even more.  As such, I can honestly say the filmmakers did a much better job blending the two together than Howling 6 did. 

It helps that the characters are well drawn, likeable, and sympathetic.  Sanchez (who looks great naked whether she’s covered in hair or not) delivers a fine performance and Curry is particularly great as the ringleader father figure who looks after the freaks.  Director Thom Fitzgerald also does a good job at portraying Tara’s tormentors three-dimensionally.  Deep down, they feel like freaks themselves and are only lashing out because of their own insecurities.  That doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it does give Wolfgirl an added layer of tragedy a lesser film wouldn’t have had.

Wolfgirl is also interesting because it’s almost like a werewolf tale told in reverse.  Tara starts off like a normal girl, except she’s covered in hair.  When the drug’s side effects bring out the wolf in her, she becomes more animalistic the less hairy she gets. 

It doesn’t all work.  While some of the innuendo-laden musical numbers are amusing, there are frankly just too many song and dance routines that clog up the film.  There’s also a bit too many characters and subplots that get in the way.  Still, it’s a nice attempt, nonetheless.  After watching so many interchangeable, forgettable, and dull horror movies this month, Wolfgirl gave me something to howl about.

AKA:  Wolf Girl.  AKA:  Blood Moon.

THE OMEGANS (1968) ** ½

Valdemar (Lucien Pan) is an old artist married to hottie Linda (Ingrid Pitt), his favorite model.  He takes her out into the middle of the jungle to paint her against exotic backgrounds.  Naturally, she’s having an affair with their handsome (and much younger) jungle guide (Keith Larson) and the two of them plot to do away with Valdemar and steal his money.  Once her hubby finds out about their intentions, he lures them to a “cursed” river teeming with radioactivity to set them straight once and for all. 

The Omegans was directed by Lee J. Wilder (brother of Billy), who also made the supremely silly Killers from Space.  It doesn’t have the same cheesy vibe as that flick, but it does have a certain charm about it.  It remains entertaining, even if the pacing is a bit leaden.  Although it takes a while to get going, the scenes of the glowing monster are pretty effective, and the part where Pan discovers Pitt’s infidelity is quite amusing.  

It’s fun to see Pitt in an early horror role, although she looks a bit lost at times.  She hadn’t quite found herself as an actress yet (it sometimes sounds like she’s pronouncing her lines phonetically), but as we all know, she got much better as she went along.  Soon after this film, she was turning out memorable performances in Hammer movies.  Even if her acting is less than stellar in The Omegans, one thing is for sure, she looks great in a bathing suit.

Overall, The Omegans feels like a half-hour Tales from the Crypt episode stretched out to feature length.  It takes its time getting going and when it finally gets there, the ending is predictable.  Still, I kind of liked it, if only for Pitt and the cool “self-cremation” effects. 

SHE’S BACK (1989) *

Carrie Fisher was only six years removed from Return of the Jedi when she made She’s Back.  While Harrison Ford was working with Steven Spielberg on the set of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Fisher was starring in this painfully unfunny comedy ghost movie from the director of Robot Holocaust, Tim Kincaid and writer Buddy (Combat Shock) Giovinazzo.  Fisher’s history of drug and alcohol abuse is well-documented.  I’m not sure if she had hit bottom yet in regard to drugs and alcohol, but this is definitively the nadir of her acting career. 

Fisher and her hubby Robert (Death Wish 5:  The Face of Death) Joy move into a crime-ridden neighborhood.  The first night in their new home, they are immediately terrorized by punks who break in, rob the place, and kill Carrie.  She soon returns from the grave to convince her spineless husband to get revenge on the men who killed her. 

From then on, it becomes a comedy version of Death Wish, except starring a henpecked sitcom husband and a wisecracking ghost sidekick.  If you thought the scenes of Fisher in white make-up bickering with Joy were bad, wait till you see him and his idiot neighbor fighting back against the punks using makeshift homemade weapons.  The final confrontation with the punks is downright painful and even though there’s some OK gore, it’s just too dumb to even work.  (There’s a gun made from a sink that shoots coils that somehow drill through people’s skulls?!?)

Joy does what he can with the awful material and Fisher remains professional throughout, although neither of them come close to saving this mess.  What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on Fisher’s dressing room wall when she was making this.  I haven’t read Fisher’s memoir, Postcards from the Edge, but if there isn’t an entire chapter devoted to this movie, then what’s the point?

The comedy elements are woefully miscalculated.  Joy and Fisher are fine actors, but they visibly struggle trying to make the clunky premise work.  It doesn’t help that the movie looks like a cheap sitcom and the characters behave like they’re in a bizarre Off-Broadway play as they constantly shout at one another.  

She’s Back is an oddity to be sure, but not in a good way.  For die-hard fans of Fisher, it may work as a curiosity piece.  A morbid curiosity piece. 

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER (2004) ** ½

Douglas (Alexander Brickel) is a young trick-or-treater obsessed with the titular video game where you rack up points by helping Satan kill as many people as possible.  On Halloween, he stumbles upon a masked killer he mistakes as Satan who lets him tag along while he stalks his victims.  The kid also has an icky crush on his hot sister Jenna (Katheryn Winnick), so he gets Satan to do away with her new boyfriend Alex (Stephen Graham).  Eventually, Jenna comes to realize her brother is in grave danger.

This was director Jeff (Squirm) Lieberman’s first film in sixteen years.  Like most of his movies, Satan’s Little Helper is uneven as hell.  It’s sometimes clever, sometimes forced, but it’s all mostly entertaining.  He gets a lot of mileage out of a thin premise and delivers one or two memorable sequences.  There are enough little moments along the way to warrant a moderate recommendation from me.

The game cast certainly helps.  Winnick is great as the hot sister.  I especially liked the scenes where she cozies up to the masked killer thinking it's her boyfriend.  Pulp Fiction’s Amanda Plummer is equally fine as her quirky mom.  Heck, even the kid isn’t too bad. 

At a hundred minutes, Satan’s Little Helper goes on a good fifteen minutes longer than it really needed to.  By the time the third act rolls around, it’s already started to recycle some of the gags, and of course, the characters are so stupid they fall into the same trap twice.  It all leads up to a frustrating non-ending, but when it works, it’s a solid little chiller.  All in all, it’s probably Lieberman’s best film.

AKA:  Satanic Halloween.  AKA:  Halloween Killer.

THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: BLOOD REUNION (2012) *

As a young girl, Janeth (April Hartman) found the dead body of her mother, Winona (Paula Marcenaro Solinger).  Unbeknownst to Janeth, her mother had been turned into a vampire.  Fifteen years later, Janeth returns home and accidentally frees Winona from her grave.  She then goes around tearing into people’s throats, and it’s eventually up to Janeth to stop her. 

Blood Reunion is your typical forgettable no-budget horror movie.  The amateurish acting is all over the place.  Some of the actors recite their dialogue in a stilted manner.  Some barely get through their lines without stumbling over their words.  Others chew the scenery (badly, I might add).  

The lighting is flat and drab, and the sound is less than optimal (it’s particularly bad during the outdoor scenes).  The plot moves slowly too.  Since there isn’t much to it, it makes the slow pace feel even slower.  The overly simplistic musical score is annoying and is far too intrusive for its own good.  The one scene of gratuitous nudity is about the only thing to pull you out of the mire and inspire you to keep going, even though you know good and well nothing is really ever going to happen.  

I’m going to admit.  After 27 days of nothing but horror movies, I think I might’ve hit my threshold with this one.  I’m not saying it’s the worst one I’ve sat through this month.  It’s just the dullest.  Is it November yet?

Two sequels followed, although I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm to watch them.