HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BODY PUZZLE (1992) ***

A serial killer who likes to listen to “Night on Bald Mountain” while he stalks his victims has been busy hacking people up.  He also likes to keep some of the body parts of his victims as souvenirs.  When Joanna (The Kiss) Pacula finds an ear in her refrigerator, she calls the police and a detective (Tomas Arana) sets out to capture the killer.

Directed by Lamberto (Demons) Bava, Body Puzzle feels like a warm-up to the glut of serial killer procedurals that proliferated in the ‘90s.  Because this is Lamberto Bava we’re talking about, he gives the stalking scenes an added bit of juicy gore.  The scene where a woman is attacked in a bathroom stall and her severed hand lands in the toilet is really something.  The standout scene though comes when the killer murders a teacher in front of her blind students.  I bet old Hitchcock would’ve been proud of this sequence.

Joanna Pacula is sexy in the lead, and she has considerable chemistry with Arana.  The supporting cast is full of familiar faces like John Morghen, Erika Blanc, and Gianni Garko.  Their efforts ensure you’ll keep watching, even when the plot is spinning its wheels.

As far as Killers Who Collect Body Parts movies go, Body Puzzle is a pretty good one.  It’s no Pieces, but then again, hey, what can be?  Fans of the cast, and Bava are sure to get their money’s worth.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE BELIEVERS (1987) **

Martin Sheen watches in horror as his wife is electrocuted by Mr. Coffee.  Instead of going on a Death Wish after Juan Valdez, he moves his kid to New York.  Pretty soon, Sheen’s son becomes the target of a child-sacrificing Santeria cult.

Directed by John (Midnight Cowboy) Schlesinger and written by Mark (Twin Peaks) Frost, The Believers has a solid pedigree both behind and in front of the camera.  The top notch supporting cast, which includes Helen Shaver (Sheen’s sexy landlady), Richard Masur (Sheen’s lawyer who does gratuitous magic tricks), Robert Loggia (asshole cop), and Jimmy Smits (crazy cop) are all fine in their roles.  However, the film is prone to many of the same pitfalls that similar horror flicks by classy directors face.

The big problem is it’s just not scary.  It’s slick-looking and well-acted, sure.  The only scene that threatens to raise any goosebumps is the part where spiders crawl out of a woman’s open sore.  For the most part, Schlesinger seems to frown upon this type of showmanship in favor of ominous warnings and tedious pacing.

Sometimes, Schlesinger plays things so deadly serious that it’s good for an unintentional laugh or two.  I cracked up during the scene where Sheen sees a cup of coffee and it reminds him of his dead wife.  You’ve also got to laugh when the stone-faced cult leader pulls a Jedi Mind Trick on customs agents so they won’t open his baggage full of voodoo paraphernalia.  

Clocking in at nearly two hours, The Believers is overlong and clunky.  The opening sets the stage nicely, but it just gets weaker and dumber as it goes along.  Like any ‘80s movie, it all ends with a showdown in an abandoned boiler room.  The little “GOTCHA” footnote at the end is really lame too.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: AFTER.LIFE (2010) ***

Christina Ricci gets into a fight with her fiancé-to-be (Justin Long) and flees the restaurant in tears.  She winds up dying in a car crash and wakes up on mortician Liam Neeson’s slab.  She isn’t ready to die yet, and he must assure her that dying is perfectly natural and that he’ll do anything he can to make her “transition” as easy as possible.

After.Life has an overly theatrical plot device that works surprisingly well thanks to the excellent performances by the two leads.  Ricci rarely gets the spotlight so it’s nice seeing her really sinking her teeth into a role that calls for her to bare her soul (and her body) and show a range of emotions.  Neeson is also great as the soft-spoken mortician who occasionally gets perturbed by his corpses' antics.  (He even calls them, “YOU PEOPLE!”, which is a little corpsist if you ask me.)  Rounding out the cast, Justin Long isn’t bad, just miscast as Ricci’s asshole boyfriend.

If you came expecting a horror movie, you might be a little disappointed.  The horror aspects are a bit subdued.  Most of the horror comes from Ricci’s inability to cope with her situation.  The scenes of corpses being prepared for their funeral are a bit icky too, but this is more or a spiritual drama (and a good one too) than a horror film.  

After.Life is overlong by about ten minutes or so.  There’s an unnecessary subplot that tries to make you think Ricci is actually alive and Neeson is merely playing a sick game with her that could’ve easily been excised.  All it does is junk up the third act.  However, when it works, it’s a quietly powerful little movie; one that deserved a wider release.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLOOD RAGE (1987) ** ½

A kid chops up a necking couple at a drive-in and blames it on his twin brother who is promptly sent to the nut house.  Ten years later, he escapes on Thanksgiving and returns home.  People start dying in a variety of gruesome ways, but which twin is doing the killing?

The gory death scenes are over the top.  Hands are hacked off, machetes are pushed through stomachs, heads are lopped off, and bodies are chopped in half.  I especially thought the shots of the still-wiggling body parts were a nice touch.

The stuff in between the slashing is hit and miss.  The big problem is that the tone is out of whack.  It’s almost like they were trying to make a camp classic on purpose, but it didn’t quite work out.  Louise (Frankenhooker) Lasser gets some laughs as the mother of the twins, but her acting is so broad that it feels like it came out of another movie.  We do get one legitimately funny scene where she chews out her son’s psychiatrist while the shrink’s recorded notes drolly play over her hysterical screaming.

Blood Rage features a decent body count and a good amount of skin.  The twin gimmick works well enough I guess.  The victims think they’re talking to the good twin, but it’s really the psycho, who just so happens to be hiding a sharp implement behind his back.  Your enjoyment of the cheesy and/or dumb parts (like who plays tennis at midnight?) will probably depend on your willingness to go along with the goofy tone.  Even at a relatively-brief 80 minutes; it wears out its welcome awfully fast.

AKA:  Slasher.  AKA:  Nightmare at Shadow Woods.  

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE PREMONITION (1976) **

Ellie Barber is an emotionally unstable carny who wants to kidnap her biological daughter (future member of New Radicals, Danielle Brisbois).  She enlists the help of her mime boyfriend (Richard Lynch) and discovers her daughter is living with a loving foster family.  Sharon (It’s Alive) Farrell is the foster mom who starts having weird visions.  When Barber finally kidnaps the kid, Farrell uses her second sight to find her.

Seeing the always kooky Richard Lynch performing a mime routine over the opening credits is about as creepy as The Premonition gets.  While the early scenes that set-up the premise are sound enough, the constant cutaways to the doctor explaining a lot of psycho babble really slows the momentum down.  These intrusions get on your nerves in a hurry and detract from the family drama at hand.  The freak-out scenes, when they finally do come, just aren’t that freaky.  The monotonous finale which heavily relies on Farrell endlessly playing a piano is lame too.   

All of this sort of plays out like a Lifetime movie with a hint of exploitation elements.  However, it’s all much too tame to really leave much of an impression.  Director Robert Allen (Rebel) Schnitzer lends a touch of atmosphere to the proceedings, but fails to deliver the goods in any sort of meaningful way.  The scummy performance by Lynch alone makes it watchable, although you may have trouble keeping your eyes open, thanks to the leaden pacing.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE BURNING MOON (1992) ***

The Burning Moon is a German horror anthology movie directed by special effects artist Olaf Ittenbach.  It contains two predictable, uneven, but mostly enjoyable stories.  However, it’s the wraparound segments that really make it memorable.

In the Wraparound (***), a punk (Ittenbach) deliberately pisses away a job opportunity so he can partake in a big gang fight.  He comes home, where he is less than enthused to have to babysit his sister while his parents are out of town.  She makes him read her bedtime stories and he cheerfully makes up some of the most grotesque shit imaginable to scare the pants off her.

The first story is called Julia’s Love (***).  A schizophrenic serial killer escapes from a mental hospital.  Meanwhile, a single woman goes out on a blind date with a guy who turns out to be the very same escapee.  She’s able to get away, but he follows her home to torment her further.

The Purity (** ½) is set in the ‘50s.  A priest rapes and kills a woman in the woods before sacrificing another woman and drinking her blood during a black mass ritual.  The locals blame a farmhand for the murders and routinely beat him up.  When they eventually go too far and kill him, he rises from the grave to get revenge.

The Wraparound is often very funny.  The scenes of Ittenbach standing up to authority are good for a few laughs, and the gang fight scene feels like Repo Man Meets The Outsiders.  These scenes are great, but unfortunately the ending is a bit underwhelming.

Julia’s Love is pretty basic.  Some of the effects are laughable (like the obvious dummy), but no more so than your typical Troma movie.  Still, the high body count and copious amounts of gore means you should be pleasantly entertained.  The shot of an eyeball being swallowed alone is worth the price of admission.  I also loved the serial killer’s pick-up line:  “I want you to absorb all of my love juice!”

The Purity has a much slower pace and is more serious in tone, which of course means it isn’t nearly as much fun.  There’s more of an emphasis on atmosphere here than in the previous story.  Other than that, it’s pretty slow going.  Things get quite gory by the end, but it’s not much of a payoff as much of it makes little sense.  While there’s still some squirm-inducing moments here (like the tooth drilling scene), it’s just not enough of them to put this story into the win column.

Qualms aside, The Burning Moon should please anthology horror fans as well as die-hard gorehounds alike.

BANDIDOS (1967) **

A quick draw gunfighter named Billy Kane (Venantino Venantini) bests trick shot artist Richard Martin (Enrico Maria Salerno) in a duel, crippling his hands in the process.  Unable to properly hold a gun, Richard trains a younger cowboy (Terry Jenkins) to get revenge for him.  He soon learns his protégée has plans of his own.

Bandidos is an amiable variation on Django.  The various gunfights and standoffs are slightly better than the typical spaghetti western shenanigans.  That’s largely due to the fact director Massimo Dallamano (who was the cinematographer for A Fistful of Dollars) gives us enough inventive camerawork to prevent the confrontations from getting stale.  (I particularly liked the cool shot of a bottle being slid down a bar.)

The double-crossing back and forth between the characters is interesting at first.  Their motivations for treachery are understandable, but they are doled out in a frustrating manner.  By the time the third act rolls around, the ever-increasing plot twists begin to get in the way of the action.  Because of that, the film pretty much runs out of steam before the final showdown even occurs.  

It also doesn’t help that Salerno and Jenkins have very little chemistry together.  They almost feel like a budget version of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.  If only the movie had those guys in their place, it might’ve been a winner.

AKA:  Guns of Death.  AKA:  You Die… But I Live.