HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: MYSTERIES OF BLACK MAGIC (1958) ***

Egle Elohim (Nadia Haro Olivia) causes a sensation when she performs a black magic stage show in a small Mexican town.  Professor Tejeda (Carlos Riquelme) is skeptical of her abilities, but once he sees her show, he becomes convinced she is the descendant of a 15^th witch.  He investigates the matter, and Egle promptly kills him using that old black magic.  It doesn’t take long for his daughter Maria (Lulu Parga) to become suspicious too, especially once Egle begins casting a love spell on her boyfriend (Aldo Monti).

Mysteries of Black Magic is a stylish and entertaining Mexican horror flick.  What it lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in atmosphere as there are plenty of fog-shrouded crypts and torchlit-dungeons that add an eerie ambiance to the proceedings.  Egle’s magic shows are also a lot more macabre (and nastier) than the typical American mad hypnotist/magician movies of the era, which helps to set it apart from many similarly themed films. 

The film moves along at a reasonably steady clip too, and the plot-heavy dialogue scenes are short and sweet for this kind of thing, which is nice.  Although it starts to run out of gas near the end, the witch’s comeuppance makes for a solid enough send-off for the horrible hag.  The climactic appearance of a zombified, leprous sorcerer adds to the fun in the final reel. 

The only real downside is that the supporting performances are a bit stiff and/or reserved.  That’s okay though because Olivia makes a memorable impression as the scheming, brooding witch.  She more than compensates for her castmates’ lack of thespian prowess, especially when she’s conjuring demonic forces, performing black magic rituals, or barking orders at her assistant, who has ears so big they put Mr. Spock’s to shame.  Even if you didn’t enjoy the movie as much as I did, Olivia’s performance is sure to cast a spell on you.

AKA:  Return from the Beyond.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE INITIATION (1984) ** ½

Daphne (Spaceballs) Zuniga is a sorority pledge who must spend the night in her parents’ department store with her sisters as part of her initiation.  Too bad there’s an escaped lunatic lurking about who’s stabbing everybody in the throat with a three-pronged garden trowel.  Gee, do you think this ominous figure could be somehow connected to all those bad dreams Zuniga’s been having lately? 

Produced by the creators of the Buck Rogers TV show, The Initiation starts off with a scene of Clu Gulager banging Vera Miles, and let me tell you, it’s far and away the scariest part of this movie.  Sadly, this is one of those deals that is made of scrap parts of other horror films and then patchworked together in a half-assed fashion.  Among the cliched plot elements are an escaped killer, nightmare sequences, dream analysis, and long-buried family secrets.  Oh, yeah, and there’s a sorority initiation too.  There’s so much going on in the flick that it almost forgets what it’s about.

Which is a shame because once the action switches over to the shopping mall, The Initiation turns into a decent little slasher.  Heck, I even dug the last-minute twist ending.  It’s just that the first fifty minutes or so is rough going at times.

Zuniga does a fine job, all things considered.  Her character actually is allowed to have a little personality, which is a nice change of pace.  Future soap star Hunter Tyler also helps to brighten things up as Zuniga’s plucky pal.  Gulager is always a welcome presence in something like this, even if he doesn’t stick around very long.  Miles looks slightly embarrassed to be there (this came out the year after Psycho 2), but the pay must’ve been pretty good because she doesn’t phone it in. 

The gore is OK too.  The garden trowel kills are moderately bloody, but it’s nothing that would get gorehounds’ pulses racing.  To make up for that fact, we get a little T & A, although not enough to bump this up to *** territory.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: NECROMANCER (1988) **

While leaving campus one dark evening, college student Julie (Elizabeth Kaitan) is raped by her one of her fellow classmates.  Feeling powerless and looking for revenge, she turns to a local witch (Lois Matsen) for help.  She performs a satanic ritual and imbues Julie with a green-eyed succubus who roams around at night seducing and killing the men who wronged her. 

I’ve always been a big fan of Elizabeth Kaitan.  I think she really deserved a career outside of cheesy horror flicks and B movies.  With her raspy voice and crimson mane (although it’s dyed blonde here), she was always a welcome presence in even the worst cinematic offerings.  Here, she gets a decent topless scene, although it’s not nearly enough to make the often-laborious film worth sitting through.

Necromancer is one of those annoying types of movies when just when it should be over, it plods on about twenty minutes more.  All the plot threads have been wrapped up, but it conveniently finds new ways to drag on.  The superfluous nerd character (who looks like Keith Gordon in Christine, but with green streaks in his hair) feels particularly tacked on.  I’m not sure if the director lost a bet and had to give this guy a part or what, but he’s quite annoying and unnecessary. 

There is just enough stupidity to keep you watching though.  For instance, the witch’s place of business is hilarious.  It looks like an ‘80s version of a hipster pop-up boutique.  That is to say, the witch just pitched a tent in her driveway, decorated the insides with a bunch of witchcraft shit, and called it a day. 

Also, get a load of Russ Tamblyn as Kaitan’s professor (and former flame).  He really chews the scenery and makes his work in all those Al Adamson movies seem downright Shakespearean in comparison.  In fact, he even gets to perform Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in this and boy is it ever… something.  

The monster is really lame too as it looks like a bunch of strawberry jam wearing a blond wig.  I did like the green-eyed demon effects whenever Kaitan goes to kill somebody though.  They were sort of reminiscent of Bobbi Bresee’s transformation in Mausoleum.  If only Kaitan had a pair of monster boobs like Bobbi did in that picture.  Maybe then, Necromancer would’ve been worthwhile.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: TIMECRIMES (2008) ***

Timecrimes is the first film by Nacho Vigalondo.  While no means perfect, it’s much more inventive and fun than his later films like Open Windows and Colossal.  In some ways, it almost feels like a warm-up to his contribution to V/H/S:  Viral, “Parallel Monsters” as both films feature a hero foolishly messing around with time and space. 

Hector (Karra Elejalde) moves into a new house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernandez).  While relaxing in his backyard, he thinks he sees a damsel in distress (Barbara Goenaga) in the woods.  When Hector goes to investigate, he soon finds himself hunted by a menacing figure wrapped in bandages.  Our hero is then pursued to a nearby laboratory where a lowly technician (played by Vigalondo) is working on a time machine. 

Timecrimes is simultaneously complex and deceptively simple.  There are no real surprises here, but that’s because if there were, the film’s painstaking timeline would be disrupted.  While many viewers will be able to figure out how it all plays out, it’s still a lot of fun to watch Vigalondo slyly dropping all the pieces into place. 

Nacho is also able to milk a surprising amount of suspense out of what is ostensibly a forgone conclusion, which is pretty admirable.  While it often plays like an overlong short film, Vigalondo keeps things moving along at a steady clip.  There is no fat on the movie as every scene needs to be there in order to keep the film’s tightly structured premise afloat. 

The cloaked, bandaged killer casts a striking image.  He’s definitely one of the most stylish looking killers in recent memory as he resembles a low budget ‘70s Italian version of Darkman.  Even if you can easily guess his identity, the shadowy stalker will leave a memorable impression on you long after you see it. 

AKA:  Rewind.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR RX (1942) * ½

Whenever a high-profile murder suspect gets off Scott free by the courts, the vigilante “Dr. Rx” swoops in to see that justice is served.  Super sleuth Jerry Church (Patric Knowles) is urged out of retirement to catch the killer before he strikes again. 

The Strange Case of Doctor Rx feels like Universal’s attempt to create a detective franchise in the vein of Sherlock Holmes, Perry Mason, and Charlie Chan.  The fact that Mantan Moreland plays Church’s perpetually put-upon valet particularly makes it feel like a latter-day Chan adventure, but done in Universal’s B-programmer style.  This wasn’t a bad idea, but the problem is, the character of Church is thoroughly unlikeable. 

I’ve enjoyed Knowles in other films.  He did an especially good job in The Wolf Man, which came out the year before.  It’s just that his character is an utterly detestable blowhard that it makes it hard to care whether or not he ever gets around to solving the case.  What really makes it bad is the fact that he bosses Moreland around way too much.  When Sidney Toler was giving Moreland the business as Charlie Chan, it was generally good-natured, but here, the dialogue is often downright nasty. 

Although they make it out that Lionel Atwill is going to be the fiendish Dr. Rx, it’s another case of bait-and-switch.  Atwill is usually fun to watch, but unfortunately, he isn’t given very much to do this time around.  The same can be said for Shemp Howard, who plays a bumbling detective on the case.  It’s a shame when such gifted comedians like Shemp and Mantan have to play second (and third) fiddle in such a dreary flick, especially when they are both obviously far above the material.  At least the filmmakers were smart enough to let them share a scene together, which is far and away the best thing the movie has to offer.

Another reason to hate this movie:  The big horror-related sequence winds up to be nothing more than (SPOILER) a trick by the killer to scare Knowles off the case.  Seriously, why go through all the trouble of concocting a mad scientist lab complete with a killer gorilla in a cage for just a cheap scaring tactic? 

In short, the only side effect from this Rx is sheer annoyance.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE RING 2 (1999) *

In 1998, The Ring was released simultaneously with its immediate sequel, Spiral.  Spiral was so bad the producers got together and agreed it didn’t exist.  After that, they hired the original director Hideo Nakata to helm The Ring 2, the “true” sequel. 

As someone who didn’t mind the original and thoroughly detested Spiral, I thought this was a smart move.  As it turns out, The Ring 2 is nearly just (but not quite) as bad.  Heck, it’s even worse than the American remake and its sequel! 

The kernel of the premise is similar to Spiral as everyone is looking for the heroine of The Ring who promptly disappeared after the events of the first film with her young son.  Things dovetail once our characters finally catch up with the mother and son duo and learn there is something seriously wrong with the kid.

Even though Spiral was appallingly bad in just about every way, at least the set-up had potential.  This one similarly bungles whatever promise it had early on.  While Spiral made radically stupid storytelling decisions, at least they were so dumb that it was sure to stay (for better or worse) engrained in your skull for years to come.  The additions to the mythology in The Ring 2 are much more generic and uninspired.  Most of it deals with a lot of Stephen King/X-Men crap involving psychics and telekinesis, and none of it feels like it should fit in with the mythos of the original.  Things really go in the toilet once a doctor tries an experiment on the kid to draw the ghost girl Sadako out into the real world. 

There is one genuinely effective moment when a forensics expert recreates Sadako’s face by molding clay over her skull, but the rest of it is aggressively boring.  According to The Ring’s lore, if you watch the haunted videotape, you die a horrible death seven days later.  When you watch The Ring 2, you’re sure to die of boredom seven minutes in.

Nakata later went on to direct the sequel to the American remake, The Ring Two.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE CURSE OF THE KOMODO (2004) **

It’s been a while since I watched a Jim Wynorski flick.  As a fan of his work, I’m usually up for whatever genre he finds himself dabbling in at the time.  The Curse of the Komodo was made during Jim’s SyFy Channel phase, and as early-century CGI-heavy monster mashes go, you could do a lot worse.

Scientists working on a remote Hawaiian island get hoodwinked by the government who want to turn their giant formula into a weapon.  Naturally, a Komodo dragon gets into their stash and grows to enormous size.  After eating up all the wildlife in the area, the ravaging reptile soon sets its sights on making a hot lunch out of the scientists (not to mention a gang of thieves who are hiding out on the island).

It’s always fun seeing Wynorski finding ways to utilize his usual cast of stock players.  In this case, we have Tim Abell as the reluctant hero, Gail Harris as the sexy scientist, Arthur Roberts as a cop, Jay Richardson as the head of the operation, and Paul Logan and Melissa Brasselle as the thieves.  The most memorable bit comes from Glori-Anne Gilbert who goes skinny-dipping mid-movie and manages to steal the film out from under the Komodo in the process.  (The swimming hole location will look familiar to fans of Wynorski’s Busty Cops Go Hawaiian.) 

It must be said that the Komodo effects are pretty good, at least for a SyFy Channel flick.  What I liked about the creature was that it looked fake, but in the best possible sense.  Like the aliens in Mars Attacks!, the monster has a herky-jerky gait about him which is a nice nod to the ‘50s stop-motion monster movies that the film is clearly aping.  

Too bad the budget was so low that they could only afford to show him sparingly.  Yes, most of the running time is devoted to a lot of dull dialogue scenes.  The stuff with the thieves hiding out on the island eats up a lot of screen time (as does the subplot involving the Komodo’s saliva turning people into half-assed zombies).  If only Glori-Anne Gilbert managed to hop in that swimming hole two or three more times, it might’ve been worthwhile.  (Brasselle does have a couple of scenes where she walks around in a see-through T-shirt though.)  As it is, The Curse of the Komodo is a watchable, but inessential addition to the SyFy and/or Wynorski library.

Wynorski returned the next year with Komodo vs. Cobra.