HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966) *** ½

In the future (1990), Earth receives a signal that they are not alone in the universe.  As the aliens make their way towards the planet, they wind up crash landing on Mars.  Scientist Basil Rathbone dutifully sends a rescue ship to greet them, and after they crash, astronaut John Saxon leads a mission to save the guys who tried to save the guys.  Saxon and his crew eventually pick up the stranded extraterrestrial traveler and are stunned to discover she is a total babe (Florence Marly).  The only problem?  She’s a space vampire.

Written and directed by Curtis (Ruby) Harrington, Queen of Blood is anchored by a terrific cast.  Rathbone played his share of scientists at this stage in his career, but for my money, this is one of his greatest late-era performances.  John Saxon is equally fine as he possesses a shade more human qualities than your typical space age square jaw type hero.  It’s also fun seeing a young, clean-cut Dennis Hopper (who also starred in Harrington’s Night Tide) as an astronaut.  He’s especially good in his scenes where he openly flirts with Marly (who is excellent in a silent role).  Look fast, and you’ll also spot Famous Monsters of Filmland creator Forrest J. Ackerman in a small role.

The special effects (which were taken from a Russian film, Dream Come True) are all over the place, but that’s what gives Queen of Blood its charm.  One scene you ask yourself, “How did they do that?” and then in the next, you quip, “My kid could do that!”  Some sequences use kickballs and paper Mache for planets and others utilize some damned fine rocket models.  Sometimes inconsistencies like that can be distracting, but here, it keeps you watching because you can’t wait to see what the heck kind of effects you’ll see next.

This would make a great double feature with Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, which came out the previous year.  Not only do both of them combine ‘50s Space Movie tropes with vampires, but they also have bright, poppy cinematography.  Bava’s film might be a little more polished than Queen of Blood, but I would give this one the edge based on the cast alone.

It may start off a little slow, but Queen of Blood definitely delivers.  Once Marly boards the ship, Harrington piles shock after shock and continues to do so as the film enters the homestretch.  The shots of the alien bloodsucker stalking the corridors of the ship are quite atmospheric, the close-ups of her glowing eyes are effective, and Harrington wraps things up with one heck of a final shot.  All in all, this horror/sci-fi hybrid is an out of this world experience.

Harrington and Rathbone also collaborated on another Russian paste-up feature, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, the previous year.

AKA:  Planet of Blood.  AKA:  Planet of Terror.  AKA:  The Green Woman.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE CURSE OF KING TUT’S TOMB (1980) *

What would Halloween Hangover be without a crappy Made for TV horror flick?  

Archaeologist Howard Carter (Robin Ellis) discovers King Tut’s tomb and its untold riches.  Shortly thereafter, people associated with the dig wind up dead.  Everyone seems to think the tomb is cursed, but Carter refuses to believe in such nonsense, even when the corpses begin to pile up.

The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb feels like a mummy movie without a mummy.  Not that a mummy could’ve saved this boring mess, but it would’ve given us SOMETHING to hang our hat on.  As it is, it’s chock to the gills with a bunch of scenes of stuffy British people digging in the desert, hanging out in tombs, and becoming victim to a series of “accidents”.  Since it’s a TV flick, it’s all tame and lame.  There’s a scorpion attack, death by snake bite, and even a killer mosquito!  Others die by suffocation and plane crash.  You might die of boredom.  All this is weak as shit, but there is at least one unintentionally hilarious freeze frame of a dog’s reaction to its master’s death.  

Eva Marie Saint is top billed as a reporter who becomes sort of a half-assed love interest for Ellis late in the game.  She’s obviously supposed to be playing a character much younger than herself, but she feels like someone’s grandmother that inexplicably arrived in Egypt.  Ellis is a total dullard and makes for an awful “hero”.  Doctor Who’s Tom Baker also shows up for a bit as his shady assistant with hidden motives, and Paul Scholfield provides the narration that adds absolutely nothing to the proceedings.

The scariest thing about the whole deal is the sight of Raymond Burr in brownface and wearing a turban as Ellis’ chief rival who wants to get his hands on King Tut’s treasure.  His scenes all boil down to grimly warning and/or subtly bribing officials about Ellis.  One or two of these scenes would’ve sufficed, but we get like eight or nine of them, further adding to the tedium.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLOOD MOON (2015) ** ½

Colorado, 1887.  A werewolf stalks a dilapidated ghost town whenever there is a blood moon.  A stagecoach stops to rest their horses and its passengers are taken prisoner by a duo of bank robbers hiding out in the town.  When the moon glistens blood red, a Native American “skinwalker” begins to take out the passengers one by one.  

I’m a sucker for western horror movies.  Most of the time, these things center around vampires, so it’s somewhat refreshing to find one about a werewolf in the Wild West.  Low budget westerns nowadays are a tricky thing to pull off, but director Jeremy Wooding does a fine job for the most part.  I think the most surprising thing about Blood Moon is the fact that it was able to sustain my interest for as long as it did even though the monster was kept off screen for much of the running time.  It is a testament to the actors (mainly, Shaun Dooley as the grizzled gunfighter, Anna Skellern as a sexy saloon owner, and Eleanor Matsuura as a Navajo guide) who are able to keep you invested in the drama during the werewolf-free passages.  

Unfortunately, once the werewolf shows up, things kind of fall apart.  While Wooding is adept at setting up the tension in the early stages, the third act when our heroes finally duke it out with the werewolf is sorely lacking punch.  Although the werewolf itself isn’t awful or anything (it’s certainly better than something you’d see in a Howling sequel) and the gore effects are surprisingly solid, the attack scenes in the last ten minutes or so fall flat,.  The final showdown with the beast is anticlimactic at best, and things are wrapped up way too quickly in the end.  Still, all things considered, it’s probably the best werewolf western I’ve seen in a long time.

HALLOWEN HANGOVER: SHUTTER (2008) ** ½

With original horror films being all the rage nowadays, it’s fun to look back at a time (not so long ago) when remakes ruled the scene.  Specifically, remakes of Asian horror flicks.  In 2008, no less than three Asian horror remakes flooded theaters:  The Eye, One Missed Call, and Shutter.  Even though I have more or less a distain for the subgenre, I probably liked all of them a little more than the general consensus.  (I certainly liked them more than the originals.)

Like many remakes of Asian horror films, Shutter is a rather watered-down PG-13 deal.  (Oddly enough, the original Shutter was a Thai film, but this American remake is set in Japan, I guess to ride the coattails of The Ring, The Grudge, and the like.)  Most of the scares come from blurry pictures, CGI-enhanced snippets of body horror, and split-second jump scares.  As far as these things go, it falls well short of being “effective”, but it is definitely more watchable than the rest of its ilk.  

Joshua Jackson stars as a photographer who just got married to the lovely Rachael Taylor.  His job moves him to Japan, and while driving, Taylor hits (or thinks she hits) a woman on the road.  Once they get settled into their new digs, the couple’s bliss doesn’t last for very long.  It seems every time either of them takes a picture, the specter of the woman appears.  Is she seeking revenge on Taylor?  Or does she have other plans?

Well, let’s just say I figured out the twist about five minutes into the flick.  Despite that, the performances by Jackson and (especially) Taylor keep you invested, even when the plot is spinning its wheels.  While most of the horror is your generic, run-of-the-mill PG-13 stuff, there is at least one solid sequence where the ghost tries to make Sexy Fun Time with Jackson.  One can only imagine how far this could’ve gone with an R rating, but this scene is memorable enough to give Shutter an edge over most Asian horror remakes of the ‘00s.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: LOST IN NEW YORK (1989) * ½

Three years before Kevin McAllister pulled the same stunt, a bunch of babes get lost in New York and wander around in this befuddlingly bad, cobbled together TV movie by horror maestro Jean Rollin.  

An old blind woman reminisces about when she was little.  She meets another girl, and together, they read a storybook and imagine themselves disappearing into the stories.  The stories mostly involve women in white masks being transported to various locations around New York City.  They could be the little girls from the prologue-within-a-prologue, but then again, they might not as we are told these scenes happened either before or after that.  (“OR NOW!”)  Segments include two women getting into a knife fight on a rooftop, a vampire babe biting an unsuspecting broad (the only real horror-related sequence in the entire film), and a lady doing a sexy dance.

Yes, this is a mess.  Watching it immediately after Dracula’s Fiancée, it certainly felt like a big comedown.  It’s only fifty-two minutes long, but it feels much longer thanks to the incoherent plotting and editing.  At all times, it just feels like an unfinished movie that was slapped together and released anyway.  I think Rollin was hoping to pass the fractured plot off as another one of his dreamlike features.  However, the visuals are just not compelling enough to tie everything together.  He's going to have to do a lot better than a bunch of babes hanging out on the beach wearing masks to make this work. 

I did like the funny scene early on where the little girls compare their adventures with a long list of classic movies like King Kong and Eyes Without a Face before tossing in a bunch of Jean Rollin films in there.  Sadly, you’ll be wishing you were watching any of the films the girls mentioned as they are all much better than this crap.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: DRACULA’S FIANCEE (2002) ****

I read a few reviews claiming that Dracula’s Fiancée was a lesser Jean Rollin film.  Ten minutes into the movie, we get a scene where a naked vampire chick stalks a foggy graveyard and bites a circus dwarf on the neck.  Now, I ask you:  How can any film containing a scene such as this be considered a “lesser” work of ANY filmmaker? 

Anyway, an old vampire hunter and his young assistant are on the trail of Count Dracula.  After hassling the dwarf in the cemetery, they go and bug the “village idiot” of a nearby town.  This village is pretty great because this gal is without a doubt the hottest village idiot in screen history.  (She even flashes the vampire hunter.)  I don’t know what the exact coordinates of this village was, but I am halfway tempted to book an Airbnb there this weekend.  

So, the vampire hunter and his manservant head on over to this convent where a bunch of nuns are looking after Dracula’s Fiancée.  Since she is Dracula’s Fiancée after all, her sexual powers have turned the nuns into horny, pipe-smoking basket cases.  Admittedly, this might be one of the film’s weaker sections, but it does contain what I believe to be the only filmed instance of a nun using belly dancing to ward off evil, so it is extremely vital, if only because it contains such a cinematic milestone.

After that, the dwarf, the vampire babe, and an “ogress” (who despite the name is a hot babe that walks around with her boob hanging out) take Dracula’s Fiancée to meet the “She-Wolf, The Mistress of Ceremonies” who is played by none other than Brigitte Lahaie!  To kick off the nuptials, one of Dracula’s henchmen takes out a nun’s heart… using a goddamned HAMMER.  A hammer!

Just doing a quick mental round-up of some of the Rollin movies I’ve seen—

Rape of the Vampire?

Requiem for a Vampire?

Shiver of the Vampires?

Night of the Hunted?

The Iron Rose?

Living Dead Girl?

The Grapes of Death?

FUCKING ZOMBIE LAKE?!?

Fly Me the French Way?

GUESS WHAT?  NONE OF THESE MOVIES HAVE A SCENE WHERE SOMEONE’S HEART GETS TAKEN OUT WITH A GODDAMNED HAMMER!

But it gets better.  A little while later, the nun wakes up, grabs her heart off the ground, stumbles around for a bit, and then LITERALLY KISSES HER HEART GOODBYE, and throws it on a burning pyre.

“Lesser” my ass.

Yes, Dracula’s Fiancée comes complete with all the stuff you’d expect from a Jean Rollin flick.  Namely, pale vampire chicks, abandoned castles, and pale vampire chicks wandering around abandoned castles.  However, what makes it even more impressive is the fact that even though he made it in 2002, it still looks and feels like a lost relic from his ‘70s heyday.  Incredible.  

In fact, I may be inclined to say that this is actually… my… favorite Rollin film?  Sure, it’s missing the poetic dreamlike lyricism of Requiem for a Vampire and the gut-punch ferocity of Night of the Hunted.  What it does have is the confidence of a genre director in his twilight years gleefully indulging us with his cinematic fetishes one more time.  I respect that kind of shit.  

Another thing that’s cool about this movie is its episodic nature.  You never know just who the heck is going to show up and add to the gaggle of already memorable characters.  In fact, it almost doesn’t seem like a big deal that Dracula doesn’t even arrive on the scene until the film’s halfway over.  If anything, he seems a bit lame next to the cast of characters that are running around elsewhere in the flick.  In fact, he spends most of his time imprisoned in a grandfather clock.  I’m not sure whether that’s supposed to mean Dracula is a timeless figure or that time is up for conventional cinematic creatures.  All I know is that if someone asks you if you want to watch Dracula’s Fiancée, your response should be “I DO!”

AKA:  Fiancée of Dracula.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #31: DEAD DUDES IN THE HOUSE (1989) **

(Streamed via Popcornflix)

A group of guys and their girlfriends buy a dilapidated house and try to renovate it.  When the asshole of the group kicks over the tombstone in the front yard, it awakens the ghost of an old woman who committed murder in the house decades before.  Whenever she kills one of the carpenters, they turn into killer wisecracking zombies who attack their friends and turn them into more… dead dudes in the house.  

Troma released this low budget horror flick and gave it a silly title.  Even though it wasn’t one of their in-house productions, the humor and gore is fairly consistent with their usual sensibilities.  The special effects, gore, and make-up (all handled by Ed French) are better than you might expect.  Hands are hacked off, people are skewered, and in the standout sequence, a guy is cut in half by a window.  

The granny killer (played by a guy in convincing old age make-up) is reasonably effective too.  She has a couple of memorable moments when she randomly appears and/or lurks just behind the heroes.  Too bad her hot daughter (who is also an evil ghost) doesn’t get nearly enough screen time.

Although Dead Dudes in the House certainly has its moments, much of the running time is an endurance test of the audience’s patience.  I mean half the fucking movie is devoted to never ending scenes of characters trying (and failing) to open doors.  Just when that becomes too much to bear, they take to trying (and failing) to open windows.  (You know, for variety’s sake.)  Seriously, if you played a drinking game and took a shot every time someone couldn’t open a door, you yourself would be a dead dude (or dudette) in the house at about the twenty-minute mark.  It also doesn’t help that too many of the characters are obnoxious and that the finale drags on for an eternity.  

AKA:  The House on Tombstone Hill.  AKA:  The Dead Come Home.  AKA:  The Road.

Well, folks, that will do it for this year’s 31 Movies of Horror-Ween festivities.  Stick around as there are plenty more horror reviews to come as Halloween Hangover will continue until the end of November.