HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THRILL KILL (1994) ***

Cinnamon (Christine Cavalier) wakes up and goes to work at a strip club owned by her father “Pops” (Sal Longo).  She’s set to inherit the club when she turns twenty-one and “Pops” doesn’t want that to happen.  He hires Nick (Aven Warren) to bump her off and make it look like the work of a serial killer.  Before he can do that, he decides to have some fun with Cinnamon.  They bang, then take turns spanking each other.  But will Nick ever find time to complete the job?

This W.A.V.E. movie comes from their In Dire Straits line.  It's short (only a half-hour long), but it's rather strong as the fetish material takes a backseat to the storytelling.  Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of bondage and spanking to be had.  It’s just that it works as a seedy noir story just as well as it does a bondage video.  The twist ending, while predictable, is pulled off in rather fine fashion too.  In fact, this might work as a feature if director Gary Whitson ever decides to expand and/or remake it. 

Like in many W.A.V.E. movies, the “strip club” is just a tiny stage with a stripper pole set up in someone’s basement.  (Probably Gary’s.)  That’s okay though, because little touches like these are what make W.A.V.E. films so endearing.  Oh, and while the body count is low, the serial killer subplot makes it (barely) fit the Halloween Hangover theme. 

The small cast is aces.  Sal Longo delivers a fun turn as the owner of the strip club, “Pops”.  Even though he has his daughter working in his strip club, he kind of makes it all seem perfectly normal, which is quite a feat.  Warren also puts in a fine performance as the hitman.  It’s Cavalier who’s the reason to check it out.  She looks hot wearing nothing but suspenders, panties, nylons, and heels and plays her character’s arc in a surprisingly believable manner.  Put another way, her performance in Thrill Kill will thrill you.  

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: RETURN TO BLOODY CREEK (2022) **

Laura Giglio stars as a true crime podcaster preparing an episode on the murders of Bloody Creek.  While she does research, a copycat killer wearing a pumpkin mask begins claiming new victims.  Incensed, the original killer comes out of retirement and tries to compete with the body count.  It doesn’t take long before both killers come after Giglio. 

It took nearly thirty years for W.A.V.E. founder Gary Whitson to concoct this sequel to Bloody Creek.  While I think this is a slight improvement over the original, that doesn’t exactly make it “good”.  The big problem is that even with a relatively short seventy-five-minute running time, it drags considerably.  I mean if you ever wanted to watch a couple put up a tent in real time, then this is the movie for you.  The ending is rather laborious too as Whitson piles on twist after twist with more killers being revealed than a Scream sequel. 

If you’re a fan of the W.A.V.E. method of filmmaking, it will go down smooth enough.  W.A.V.E. starlet Giglio gamely carries the movie and Debbie D is memorable as a forest ranger who gets strangled while topless.  Jacqueline Che and John Coulter give the best performances though as a pair of religious farmers who live on the property adjacent to the creek and want to keep “fornicators” off their land. 

The deaths are decent.  One victim is stabbed with a pitchfork, another is drowned, and as with the original, one of the best death scenes winds up being a dream.  You also might get a laugh from the “corpses” that move when they’re supposed to be dead. 

The biggest laugh is reserved for the hilariously bad CGI decapitation.  You know, it’s strange.  Whitson made a similar scene in the original that used much more antiquated techniques, and it looked so much better than this.  The greenscreen effects to make it look like the cops are at the police station are pretty bad too. 

I think the most amusing part though comes when Giglio accidentally falls out of a raft and into the creek.  They obviously didn’t have time to do another take, so they just rolled with it.  Sometimes in a movie like this, it’s the happy accidents that are the most entertaining. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLOODY CREEK (1993) **

Question time:  Would YOU go camping in a place called Bloody Creek?  That’s like the actual name of the creek too.  We’re not talking about a nickname like “Camp Blood” in Friday the 13th or something like that.  It is legit called Bloody Creek.  Anyone with any sense wouldn’t go near that place.   Fortunately for us, this is a W.A.V.E. movie and sense is in short supply. 

An author is preparing a book on a series of murders.  A cop relays flashbacks to the various victims.  A girl goes hiking alone in the woods (She tells her worried mother, “I’m just going camping at a state park!  It’s not the Amazon jungle!”) and is promptly decapitated by a psycho.  Other women fall victim to the killer.  Eventually, the writer finds herself face to face with the psycho. 

The first half hour or so of Bloody Creek is pretty good.  The decapitation scene is a lot of fun, but it’s a shame that the other big gore scene just winds up being a dream sequence.  I have a feeling that if this had just been one of the company’s half-hour shorts, it might’ve been a winner. 

It’s not until the focus switches over to the killer’s perspective that the wheels begin to fall off.  It also takes a good hour to get to the creek (it looks more like a giant mud puddle) and once we finally do, it’s not particularly all that bloody.  The pacing really drags in the back end of the picture too, and the double twist ending was also unnecessary as it eats up a lot of screen time. 

You know, for a company who makes disreputable movies by mail, this one is awfully chaste.  Any time a girl gets naked, we just see her from the back.  That’s fine and all, but if you don’t intend to show any nudity, then why make the sex scenes go on for so damned long?  (There is a brief nip slip elsewhere in the film though.)

Overall, Bloody Creek isn’t bloody awful.  It just shoots its wad way too early.  The dialogue is kinda funny though.  A beleaguered cop gets the best line when he finds a needle mark on a corpse’s butt and says, “You don’t take intravenous drugs through your ass!” 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLUE BLOOD (1974) **

Beate (Meg Wynn Owen) is hired to be the nanny to the children of the skeevy Lord Gregory (Derek Jacobi) in his giant mansion.  His right-hand man Tom the butler (Oliver Reed in a wonderfully tweaked performance) shows her the lay of the house, and it instantly becomes apparent that both men seem to be off their rocker.  Beate does her duty for the sake of the children, but she soon begins to have visions that something ominous is afoot. 

If it wasn’t for the fact that the nanny has red-tinted psychic flashes of Reed in Satanic garb every reel change, you’d think Blue Blood was just a boring run of the mill British drama.  It really isn’t a horror movie either, although it has just enough thematic material to work as such.  It’s more about the class struggle between the servants and the Lord of the house than it is an out and out horror show. 

There’s some interesting themes here, but it takes an awful long time to get to them.  The biggest question the film poses is that if your servants run your household, does it make it “their” house?  Reed has a good monologue about the difference between “ownership” and “possession” and there’s sequence that juxtaposes how the rich assholes and the lowly help get their kicks.  Ultimately, the movie needs more than just themes to work, especially when the horror elements arrive a day late and a dollar short. 

The movie is worth a look though based on the strength of Reed’s performance.  He bobs and weaves between dutiful servant and egoistical Satanist with ease.  Fiona Lewis also leaves an impression as the sultry lady of the house and has a nude scene or two as well. 

I guess your enjoyment of Blue Blood may depend on what side of the class coin you fall on.  If you’re lower class, you’ll probably be rooting for the servants all the way. I’m sure it will work better if you’re rich, as you’ll be watching the film through your fingers as the help slowly take over the household. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLOOD CULT (1985) **

Blood Cult was not the first Shot on Video horror movie, although it was advertised as such.  Boardinghouse and Sledgehammer actually came before.  This one is slightly better than those two formative SOV slashers, but that’s not saying a whole lot. 

A killer wearing black gloves is going around a small college hacking up women with a meat cleaver and stealing various body parts.  The fact that he leaves gold coins at the scene leads the sheriff on the case to believe the slayings are linked to a witch cult.  His daughter and her idiot boyfriend both work in the college library and he enlists their help to put an end to the cult. 

At first, this feels like it’s primed to be a classic as the set-up has echoes of both Pieces and Blood Feast.  I’ll admit that the gore scenes are good.  An arm is chopped off, a leg is hacked off, there’s a decapitated dog, and severed fingers are found in the school cafeteria salad bowl.  My favorite bit was when a girl was beaten with the severed head of her dead friend.  Too bad the gore almost completely dries up in the second half. 

The slow-moving scenes with the senior citizen sheriff really let the air out of everything.  I don’t know who the casting director was, but couldn’t they find a younger leading man?  At the risk of sounding ageist, all I’ll say is that this guy is older than the dirt in Jesus’ sandals. 

Blood Cult might’ve been okay if it ended at about the hour mark.  However, it uselessly plows on for another half hour.  The shit with the sheriff convalescing in the hospital also eat up a lot of precious screen time late in the picture.  It also doesn’t help that the identity of the killer is a foregone conclusion. 

On the plus side, it looks better than a lot of SOV slashers from the same era.  That’s hardly a ringing endorsement though.  I’d say only die-hard SOV gorehounds would want to join up with Blood Cult.

AKA:  Slasher.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: DEEP UNDEAD (2005) *

After appearing in many W.A.V.E.  Productions, actor Dave Castiglione jumped ship and founded his own low-budget video company, Sharkey Video.  For this film, he also was able to nab such W.A.V.E. starlets as Pamela Sutch, Dawn Murphy, Laura Giglio, and Debbie D.  Their presence is about the only saving grace in this bloated, overlong slog. 

In the ‘20s, vampires attack flappers on a boat, and it promptly sinks to the bottom of the ocean.  Eighty years later, the government hires some divers to look for a pair of missing divers near a toxic waste spill off the coast of Virginia.  Plucky reporter Pamela Sutch eventually discovers the vampires have survived and now lurk around the area feeding on swimmers. 

Deep Undead is pretty terrible in just about every department.  It also contains the most laughable special effect I’ve seen in some time, which I guess is worth something.  We are supposed to be under the impression that the prologue is taking place on a cruise ship, but for a few minutes, it’s hard to get any real confirmation on that.  Eventually, Castiglione cuts away to a toy boat in the middle of a mud puddle.  Wow.  I mean.  Wow. 

The main issue is all the boring underwater scenes.  The green-tinted underwater photography is pretty hard on the eyes as it is, but things get even worse when Castiglione switches to the black and white POV from the divers’ cameras.  Plus, the underwater scenes go on forever.  We get it.  You rented the diving equipment.  I’m sure it was expensive, so you’re going to showcase it in the movie.  It’s just that Castiglione should’ve trimmed these scenes way back.  The scenes on dry land aren’t much better, especially the ones that are loaded with dialogue consisting mostly of diving gobbledygook.  If you’re a seasoned diver, you may appreciate all this attention to detail but anyone who just wants to watch an aquatic vampire movie is going to be up shit creek. 

Deep Undead is certainly ambitious for a shot on video horror flick.  I’ll give it that.  That doesn’t mean it’s good though.  Even worse is the fact that it takes forever to reveal its soggy bloodsuckers and even then, it’s not worth the wait. 

Laura and Debbie are pretty much wasted as the underwater vampires and don’t get nearly enough screen time to make much of an impact.  At least Pamela delivers a good performance.  Whenever she wasn’t on screen, my interest in Deep Undead sunk like a stone. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER

Halloween may be over, but its spirit lives on.  That is just a fancy way of saying I didn’t get to watch all the horror movies I wanted to in October, so I’m going to keep watching them into November.  As is the tradition, The 31 Days of Horror-Ween gives way to Halloween Hangover.  Twice the tricks.  Twice the treats.