THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #12: CAPULINA VS. THE MONSTERS (1974) **

(Streamed via Canela TV)

If you’re unfamiliar with Capulina, he was an extremely popular but painfully unfunny (at least to me) Mexican comedian.  The only other Capulina comedy I’ve seen was Santo vs. Capulina, and that was only because I am a die-hard El Santo completist.  Naturally, the only reason I watched Capulina vs. the Monsters was for the monsters.  I’m a sucker for shoddy South of the Border monster movies, even if they do star annoying comedians.

A mad scientist uses the brain of a dim-witted newsstand attendant (Capulina) to revive Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man.  Predictably, they break out of the lab and chase Capulina all over town.  Eventually, Capulina bands together with a bunch of kids to thwart the doctor’s plan.  

The first twenty minutes or so did not inspire hope.  These monster-less passages rely heavily on Capulina’s awful slapstick shtick (which requires him to make silly faces, run around in fast-motion like Benny Hill, and… uh… that’s about it) and have zero laughs.  Thankfully, once the monsters show up, things improve considerably.  While their interactions with Capulina aren’t exactly laugh-out-loud funny, they are at least somewhat amusing.  One fun touch is that garlic has no effect on Dracula, but all the monsters pass out after Capulina eats a bunch of onions and breathes on them.  There’s also an odd scene where Capulina gets into an inexplicable pillow fight with the titans of terror.  The best non-monster scene happens when Capulina mistakes some dwarf criminals wearing Halloween masks for Trick-or-Treaters.  I can’t say “hilarity ensues”, but I think I did crack a smile.  

The monster make-up and costumes are terrible, which only makes the whole thing even more enjoyable.  The Mummy is the worst.  If you thought the Mummy from Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was bad, wait till you get a load of this guy.  He looks like he’s wearing a repurposed El Santo mask and baggy white pajamas.  However, I dug the scene where Dracula completely unwraps him in order to tie up Capulina and then uses all of his bandages to lower him from a second story window.  Say what you will about this movie, but it has a naked mummy in it, something that possibly might be a cinema first.  

One missed opportunity though:  There’s a scene where the Mummy fights the Wolf Man, and he bites him on the neck.  According to accepted monster lore, shouldn’t the Mummy now turn into a werewolf?  If anything could’ve pushed this flick into *** territory, it would’ve been a Were-Mummy!  Sadly, it was not meant to be.

It also helps that the mad scientist’s assistant Mephistophela (Irlanda Mora) is foxy as all get out.  Wearing a slinky skintight red jumpsuit, she struts around the mad doctor lab looking hot to trot.  One thing’s for sure:  Capulina’s idiotic mugging is certainly easier to take whenever she’s on screen.  

As fun as the middle section of the film is, things get pretty dire as it enters the homestretch.  The finale is especially weak as the monsters are dispatched by Capulina incessantly chanting about his love for chocolate donuts.  (I think, or perhaps my Spanish was rusty).  The demise of the mad scientist is also WTF as he is electrocuted and turned into a turkey!?!  Oh well, at least when Mephistophela loses her job as a mad scientist’s assistant, she bounces right back, and gets a job as a nanny where she gets to wear sexy nanny outfits.  That’s about as happy of an ending as you can get with something like this.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #11: YOKAI MONSTERS: SPOOK WARFARE (1968) *** ½

(Streamed via Shudder)

Treasure hunters accidentally awaken a bat monster from its tomb in the desert.  It makes its way to Japan where it drinks the blood of a local magistrate and takes his form.  Soon, the monster begins racking up more victims and turns them into his minions.  When he sets his sights on draining children of their blood, the monsters that lurk in the dark decide to band together and stop the bat-vampire-thing once and for all.  

Yokai Monsters:  100 Monsters was a fun flick, but it had a bit too much samurai drama and gratuitous asides that prevented it from firing on all cylinders.  This sequel is a straight-up horror show, and it’s all the better for it.  The monsters from the first movie make a welcome return (including my favorite, the Umbrella Monster), but the new monsters are really cool too.  I think the best addition to the cast is the monster who puffs out his belly and shows flashbacks on it as if it was a projection screen TV!  Another fun moment occurs when a pair of comedy relief guards (who are sort of playing an off-brand Japanese version of Abbott and Costello) have a run-in with a monster who resembles a cross between Gonzo the Great and Gabriel from Malignant.

I also liked how the monsters pull a ‘70s Godzilla and become a friend to children in this one.  Despite that touch, it’s a much darker film than its predecessor, even if the monsters are pretty much “the good guys” this time around.  The finale is quite rousing too as the villain becomes Godzilla size and our monster heroes have to call on the “100 Monsters” to help defeat him.  (Unlike the last movie, it actually looks like there’s a hundred of them in this one.) 

AKA:  The Great Yokai War.  AKA:  Ghosts on Parade.  AKA:  Yokai Monsters 2.  AKA:  Big Monster War.  AKA:  The Battle of the Spooks.  AKA:  Big Ghost War.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #10: EVIL TOWN (1987) * ½

(Streamed via American Horrors)

Evil Town had a long, painful, strange production.  It was started in 1973 under the direction of Curtis (L.A. Confidential) Hanson.  He wound up getting fired and replaced by the producers (Death Game’s Peter Traynor and Larry Spiegel).  Production was eventually halted due to lawsuits and the film wasn’t completed until the mid ‘80s by producer Mardi Rustam (who added a bunch more nudity to make it commercially viable).  

The results are far from seamless.  Then again, the seams are expected when a film took fourteen years and four directors to finish.  The plot threads are all over the place.  There are two families camping whose car breaks down in the titular town.  We also have two horny gas station attendants who like to sneak off and rape coeds.  Then, there’s also the matter of a nuthouse where a sexy doctor is performing illicit experiments on her patients.  

You can probably guess what’s going on, thanks to the fact that the town is mostly populated by old people.  Yes, they are luring young folks into town and performing experiments on them in order to prolong their life.  Although it’s pretty obvious, the shoddy new scenes kind of make the whole thing kind of confusing.

Incredibly enough, there are some name stars in the cast.  James Keach and Robert Walker, Jr. are the paternal figures taking their family camping, and poor old Dean Jagger (in his final role) is the head mad scientist behind the insidious plot.  Sadly, he makes the whole thing even harder to watch as he is noticeably frail, often looks as if he is in pain, and flubs his lines a lot.  

Yes, Evil Town is a fucking mess.  The film stock, hairstyles, fashions, and cast changes often.  The various plots feel like they were stuffed into an UNO Attack game and then spit out at random.  The overuse of slow motion in some scenes is downright laughable too, but I’m sure it helped the distributors pad out the running time.  At least there is a lot of T & A.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #9: SAINT MAUD (2021) ***

(Streamed via Paramount+)

Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a home hospice healthcare worker tending to the needs of a former dancer (Jennifer Ehle) stricken with terminal cancer.  It soon becomes apparent Maud is more than a little touched.  Devoutly religious, Maud fears her hedonistic patient is in danger of going to Hell, and she sets out to do anything in her power to prevent that from happening.  

Saint Maud has a great set-up that first at makes it feel like it’s going to be one of those ‘90s thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.  However, it doesn’t take very long for it to dovetail into some very different territory.  Fortunately, writer/director Rose Glass changes gears so subtly that you never quite notice the slight of hand at work.  

I hesitate to get into spoiler territory, so I will try to keep this review as brief as possible.  The second half is pretty wild and features moments that reminded me of everything from Taxi Driver to The Exorcist to Carrie.  Somehow, Glass manages to make all those nods feel organic and fresh and not just a filmed checklist of tried-and-true horror tropes.  

Saint Maud never quite steps over the line into balls out horror, but whenever it tiptoes around those parameters, it’s often very effective.  It’s less an arthouse horror show and more of a character study of a sad, broken, and possibly insane loner on a slow, painful, and tragic journey to an inevitable, horrific fate.  The reason all this works as well as it does is because of Clark’s performance.  Like Sissy Spacek in Carrie, you feel for her every step of the way, even though you know she’s going to pull some heavy shit in the final reel.  It’s a powerhouse performance that keeps the movie afloat, even through its draggier passages, and makes it well-worth watching, even if it isn’t exactly a home run.  Sometimes (especially in October), a ground-rule double is all you need.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #8: THE WEREWOLF OF WOODSTOCK (1975) **

(Streamed via Beta Max TV)

Dick Clark produced this inane mess, a TV movie that was broadcast as part of “The Wide World of Mystery”.  If you’re expecting to see a werewolf attack the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Grateful Dead, The Who, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, forget it.  There’s only about ten seconds of actual concert footage (which may or may not have been Woodstock) in the beginning.  In fact, the Werewolf attacks the TOWN of Woodstock… and by “TOWN” I mean “the woods”.

After three days of peace, love, and music at Woodstock, everyone goes home, but nobody bothers to tear down the stage.  The hippie-hating town drunk gets shitfaced after the festival, wanders onto the stage, and winds up getting electrocuted.  The freak accident causes him to turn into a werewolf (!?!?!?!?!) and before long, he is stalking a rock band who have shown up to the abandoned stage just so they can say they “played at Woodstock”.  After the wooly werewolf kidnaps their favorite groupie, the band agrees to help the cops lure the loathsome lycanthrope out into the open using the rock n’ roll music the monster despises so much.

The werewolf is shoddy as all get out.  It looks just like a Halloween mask you’d see at a five and dime.  I guess they tried to do something different with the accepted werewolf lore (he transforms whenever there is an electrical storm rather than a full moon), but the changes are just as dumb as the make-up.    

Michael Parks brings his typical offbeat energy to the role of a detective, but honestly, he looks embarrassed to be there.  (Can you blame him?)  The only other names in the cast are Andrew Stevens as the hotheaded band member who acts like a prick to everybody and Belinda Balaski (who later faced off against werewolves in The Howling) is the groupie who has psychic premonitions.

I was tempted to give this One Star all the way through, but in the third act something so mind-bogglingly awesome happened that I just had to tack on an extra Star.  It occurs when the werewolf is being pursued by the authorities and he steals a dune buggy and high tails it out of there.  Ive seen a lot of shit in my time but I've never seen a werewolf in a dune buggy before.  It doesn’t make up for the awful effects, lethargic pacing, and constant fade-in and fade-outs for TV commercials, but it does make it memorable.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #7: DEATH GAME (1977) ***

(Streamed via R Flix)

Seymour Cassel stars as a happily married man celebrating his fortieth birthday home alone on a dark and stormy night.  When two beautiful young girls (Sondra Locke and Colleen Camp) show up asking to use the phone, he chivalrously obliges them.  It doesn’t take the lovely ladies long to seduce the poor dope with a three-way in the bathtub.  Problems arise the next morning when they refuse to vacate the premises.  When Cassel eventually threatens to call the police, the girls counter and claim they’ll say they were raped if the cops show up.  They then perpetually harass, manipulate, and eventually kidnap him, which naturally leads to more complications, including murder.  

Apparently, Death Game had a tumultuous production.  Cassel and director Peter Traynor fought so much that he refused to come back to record his dialogue.  The producers were then forced to get cinematographer David Worth to loop his lines.  If Cassel didn’t have such a distinctive voice, it might not have mattered, but the dubbing is painfully obvious, and much of the suspense is lost every time he opens his mouth.  

Luckily, Locke and Camp make a lot of the film’s shortcomings seem like a moot point.  They are a lot of fun to watch and are hot to trot (especially Camp) during their love scenes.  Heck, they still manage to look foxy as Hell even in the midst of their psychotic rantings and ravings.  (Like when they put on way too much make-up and put Cassel on “trial” for his various crimes.)  Even though you know from the get-go they are up to no good, it’s hard to fault Cassel for letting them in.  I mean, duh.

The biggest debit is the annoying music.  The theme song, “Good Old Dad”, which is played way too often will get on your damned nerves almost instantly.  The ending is way too pat, which also knocks the rating down a bit.  However, whenever Locke and Camp are front and center being psychotically sexy, Death Game is a game worth playing.

Eli Roth later remade this as Knock Knock, with Locke and Camp returning as producers.

If you’d like to know my thoughts on the remake, I reviewed it in my book, The Bloody Book of Horror:  The Bloody Book of Horror: Lovell, Mitch: 9781542566629: Amazon.com: Books

AKA:  Make-Up.  AKA:  The Seducers.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #6: GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2022) ** ½

(Streamed via Prime)

If you’ve already seen directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy, you probably know where this gratuitous, yet sporadically effective Hollywood remake is going.  Since you’re likely to know the twist before it happens, you can amuse yourself by seeing just how director Matt Sobel has updated it for American audiences.  Even though it has been noticeably watered down, I still think I enjoyed it more than the original, mostly thanks to Naomi Watts’ performance.

Elias (Cameron Crovetti) and Lukas (Nicholas Crovetti) go to live with their movie star mom (Watts) in the middle of nowhere.  She had a surgical procedure done on her face, so she has to walk around the house wearing a scary white mask.  The kids are subject to her increasingly erratic behavior and slowly begin to suspect that it might not be their mother under the mask.  

This is a good role for Watts, who is quickly changing gears from Hollywood It Girl to Direct to DVD Schlock Queen.  It’s a fun performance and she gets to act a little gonzo, as the anonymity of the mask allows her to cut loose when needed.  I don’t know many actresses that could’ve pulled off a role like this (or who would’ve wanted to), but Watts certainly goes for it.  (There are times she looks like a female version of Diabolik… except in a negligee.)  There’s a particularly unsettling scene where she does a sexy dance in front of a mirror unaware one of her kids is watching.  

It may lack the nasty edge the original had, but it’s more straightforward and better paced, and benefits from Watts’ performance.  There’s also some decent horror imagery here and there, although it usually turns into one of those irritating “It was all a dream” scenarios.  It’s not great, but I liked it better than the original.  It’s certainly much better than Watts’ other Hollywood remake of a foreign language horror flick, the overrated The Ring (or even Funny Games, for that matter).  

If you’d like to know my thoughts on the original Goodnight Mommy, check out my book, The Bloody Book of Horror:  The Bloody Book of Horror: Lovell, Mitch: 9781542566629: Amazon.com: Books