Hauntedween (1991)

Hauntedween has a special place in my heart because it was filmed in my husband's hometown (and my former residence) of Bowling Green, Kentucky. It begins with a murder at a haunted funhouse, then cuts to twenty years later, when the killer who has been in hiding all these years comes home to kill some more. Giving him the perfect setting is a fraternity behind on their national dues who decide to set up a haunted house in the same location as the first one.

There's a lot to like here. It's a regional horror film, so it looks like it was fun to make. The Greeks seem like people who'd be fun to party with rather than the usual movie frat douchebags. It's a good thing, too, because we spend most of the movie partying with them. There's some timely general nostalgia, like a character watching Press Your Luck on a big floor model console TV, and a pretty good alt rock band playing at one of the parties. I loved checking out the fashions on the extras and minor characters who were probably wearing their own clothes. Also, in a scene after my heart, the characters sing a verse of John Conlee's "Rose Colored Glasses" at a bonfire accompanied by a guitarist who seems only to know the G chord.

Hauntedween has a couple of my favorite retro horror movie specific elements. There's a theme song that mentions the name of the movie (and a montage to go with it) as well as the ghost story around the fire that tells the story of the original legend, a la movies such as Madman.

As a visitor to a crappy haunted house in my college days where frat boys did nothing but chase us around in the woods, I was impressed with the haunted house itself. It had vignettes behind chicken wire which seemed like something real college kids would have set up. Also, and I don't want to say too much to spoil it because there are rumors of a DVD release soon, the killer gets pretty creative using the haunted house for his kills.

Although this was shot on video, it is filtered to look like it's on film, which is a plus in my opinion. They named the college in the movie Top Hill State, in a nod to the Western Kentucky University team, the Hilltoppers, and filmed on the WKU campus.

Hauntedween stars Brien Blakely as the frat president, Blake Pickett as his girlfriend, Brad Hanks as the ever popular horror character of the goofy friend, and Ethan Adler as the killer. There's a bit of gore, lots of comedy, and Ms. Pickett and some other fine ladies were kind enough to get topless, so this is just a fun college slasher from the old school. If you're not lucky enough to have an old VHS copy like me, go by and join the Hauntedween group on Facebook to find out when the DVD comes out.

Victim of the Haunt

In the deep dark 70s, there used to be a subgenre in horror known as the TV movie. These were highly anticipated events that scarred many a child for life. By the 90s, TV movies were most likely to be based on a true story of one woman's struggle with something boring as hell to anyone who's not fascinated with medical problems and spousal abuse. Victim of the Haunt combines these categories to make a solid night's entertainment.

Pattie and Charles Johnson (Sharon Lawrence and Beau Bridges) have just moved their little family (Emily Bridges and Alex D. Linz) to a new town and a house of their own. Former apartment dwellers, they're thrilled to see their big two-story with the picturesque backyard looking out on a lemon orchard. But if you caught the beginning of the movie (which they didn't, since it took place 75 years before) you know they are in for some scary shit. Their new home is the site of an old home where a creepy dude drowned his son in the tub before being blown to pieces by his angry, battered, shotgun-wielding wife.

Pattie just lost a baby at seven months, so when she and her son start seeing pretty lights in his closet and finding someone playing with the child's toys, they think their visitor is the baby. In truth they are seeing the murdered child from the prologue. And his daddy, of course, is the menacing presence that haunts the bathroom, and he wants to kill Pattie's son. Of course, Pattie must be crazy in a post-partum way, right? She enlists the help of local psychic Delia* (Shirley Knight) to oust the bad ghost and help the good one move on, but is thwarted by the skepticism of Charles and her shrink. Will the bad ghost get their son before Charles removes his head from his ass?

I enjoyed this movie, but I swear, we don't need a Poltergeist remake because in Victim of the Haunt we have already had one. There's some closet hijinks, desecrated graves, a suburb, neighbors who won't believe, lights all over the place when a character returns to the house to rescue everyone else, a kooky psychic, some kitchen stacking action, and even a station wagon! (Not driven by Pattie, of course; she has a badass classic convertible, but still). I won't say it's better than Poltergeist, because that would be blasphemy. But I will say the ghosts' motivations are clearer. It's okay to like ripoffs, in my opinion, but that may be because I'm such an Italian horror apologist. Also, in this case, the cheese factor is offset by the fact that I'm a huge fan of Beau Bridges. The man was in Honky Tonk Freeway!

Oh, I almost forgot. Like most TV movies centered around a lady, this one is based on a true story. The book the real victim wrote actually sounds like a good book to me. It's called The People in the Attic: The Haunting of Doretta Johnson and centers around a psychic who accidentally causes poltergeist activity in an old hotel she has bought.

Yeah, the TV movie genre is geared towards women and children. So what? It's still enjoyed by many people as a guilty pleasure. I may not be interested in watching shows about cancer; however, there's always room for a tale in which the love of a family conquers evil spirits. For whether or not you believe in ghosts, anyone can be at least figuratively haunted by the past.

*I have never met anyone personally who was named Delia, but in the movies they are always kooky, aren't they? Do you know a kooky Delia in real life?

Demon Possessed

Demon Possessed is a movie which embodies exactly the kind of quality I have come to expect from its makers, Action International Pictures. ::sneer:: That is not to say that I was not entertained by it, and I suppose that is all I can ask.

The film follows a day and a night in the lives of six very stupid snowmobilers who race across a frozen lake only to meet with an accident in the form of a tree. The tree just jumped right the fuck out in front of one of them, obviously. They take shelter in the only available structure, an abandoned camp for children which used to be run by Dominicans but now is home to a demon. As the title would suggest, one of the characters then gets possessed. Ta da!

But that's not the beginning. The story starts with one of the worst voice-overs I've ever heard, performed by a woman who sounds like Kathleen Turner after smoking a whole carton of cigarettes in one sitting. We gather that she is the future self of one of the characters, Jeannie (Dawn Laurrie with two r's). Future old Jeannie muses about the day her childhood ended (the day the movie happens in) and why her boyfriend Tom (Aaron Kjenaas with four a's), a handsome [sic] college boy, even bothered to propose to little old her. The voiceover's reasoning is that he proposed because his sister Karen (Connie Snyder) was going to get married to a med student named Chris (David Fields) and that Tom's best friend Ron (Jim Cagle) was engaged to a black girl (Lissa, played by Eve Montgomery). They had to throw it in that Lissa was black. I know I get engaged to someone not suited for me every time someone I know decides to marry a black person. This gets awkward, since I've been married for three years, but we gotta do what's expected in this world.

That's not the end of the racist comments. The first dialogue not spoken by future Jeannie is a bunch of racist crap out of a guy in the bar where they stop to drink beer before Tom runs into a tree and then gets demon possessed. Then Ron hears Lissa singing and complains that he's engaged to the only black girl who can't sing. Later, demon Tom taunts Lissa by saying that Ron (who is now dead, having clotheslined himself on barbed wire racing for help on his snowmobile in the dark but they don't know that except for demon Tom) is probably back at the bar snuggled up with some "hot blonde babe."

But the hatefulness doesn't end there. Before the tree and the barbed wire, back at the bar, Karen goes to get a map to the lake from the bar's owner and her brother Tom follows her and starts rubbing her butt slowly and seductively (as well as a bit absentmindedly, as if rubbing his sister's butt is just his regular thing). Jeannie and Chris see this, and nothing else is ever said about it, even when demon Tom is later fucking Jeannie in the ass and imagining she is Karen.

So, anyway, they get to the cabin with half-dead Tom, the rest of them play with a weird Ouija board that has a spinner and an eyeball, Tom gets possessed and magically heals, kills everyone but Jeannie, fucks the hell out of her, she escapes, Ron's reanimated corpse chases her, as she mentioned in one of her many voiceovers she can drive a sled better than any of them so she gets away, then she does a final voiceover telling us that she never tried to explain to the sheriff what happened and twenty years later she went back and the camp was burned down the end. Worst voiceover ever, right? It taunted me by its very existence, thinking it was added in post so that the movie would make sense, but the voiceover just raised more questions instead of paving over the holes. I was hoping for a demon baby or a demon Jeannie or more black people from the future, something, but all I got was Jeannie's admission that by playing with the Ouija board that she on some level wanted it to happen.

Excuse me, but I used to play with a Ouija board all the time in middle school, and I never wanted anyone to get an icicle in the eye or hanged with old undeveloped film or cut up by a ceiling fan; nor did I hope for a man to be clotheslined by barbed wire, reanimated, run over with a bulldozer and then burned up. However, if I had seen this movie at the time (impossible, I was in college when it came out but just go with it) I'm sure I would have wished for all those things to happen to these characters. And so would my future hag-voiced self.

P.S. The woman on that poster up top was nowhere near this film.

Metamorphosis

As a huge fan of Italian horror both good and bad I got excited when I started this movie and saw that it was put out by Filmirage. Ditto for the fact that it's written and directed by George Eastman of Anthropophagus fame. This movie may be filmed in Virginia, USA, with actual English-speaking actors, but it's Italian crap from the first frame. You can tell because the soundtrack of the beginning scene is dominated by Foley footsteps. They're not the clickety-clack ones in most Italian films, although there are plenty of those later. Nope, these are the unmistakeable squeak of athletic shoes on a gym floor during a game of basketball.

Schooling everyone in that game of basketball is hot shot young supergenius professor Dr. Peter Houseman (Gene LeBrock of La Casa 5), no relation to Baby Houseman of Dirty Dancing but an amazing young person all the same. Watch him teach his class on "spermatoza" to a group of college students who have no idea who Watson and Crick were! See him get pissed off because the university wants to see the results of the immortality experiment they spent 250 grand on over the last two years. Specifically, he directs his anger towards Sally Donnelly (Catherine Baranov), the woman sent by the New York branch of Virginia University (?) to investigate where the money has done went.

After an inauspicious first meeting, Sally and Peter for no reason start falling in luuuuv which leads to one of my all-time movie pet peeves, sexy eating. At a luncheon they sensuously chew their food while gazing at one another. Gross! Then they go to bed, but not until she has made sure he is all but cut off from the grant money (although he doesn't blame her, because she has red hair and went to Columbia).



Now is the time when we find out what this movie is really about. Is it a modern take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Heckle? The Incredible Hulk maybe? Well, sort of on both counts, but mostly it's about watching smart people act stupid.



Peter knows he is gonna lose his funding, so he thinks he can prove his theory in a last-chance rally by injecting himself with his immortality serum. Never mind that he just killed a poor defenseless monkey with the same crap plus he dreamed he killed a man whose heart was outside his body in a jar. Sally just met him, but she invites him to the zoo with her and her small son Tommy (Jason Arnold), and takes a photo of the three of them which she frames and moons over later in the picture after Peter turns into a monster. We're talking about a two day fling here.

Tommy is smart enough not to like Peter, and so are the monkeys at the zoo. Then, Peter remembers that he beat the shit out of some random woman after he took the stuff (but before banging Sally) so he goes back to the bar where she works and gets attacked by her co-workers. Of course, nobody calls the cops. Even the department head Prof. Lloyd (Stephen Brown) at the college is an idiot. While Peter is lying in the hospital, suddenly having turned 80-something years old, Lloyd taunts him and tells him to hurry up and die so he, Lloyd can dissect his body and continue his research. So Peter kills him and eats his liver.



Finally, Peter turns into a dinosaur and when the dinosaur is shot to pieces by the cops somebody finally remembered to bring, he turns into a tiny anole lizard and is kept as a pet by Tommy. The end.



Towards the end Peter had kidnapped Tommy, and after he is shot up but before we find out he's a lizard the camera focuses on Tommy a lot; I was hoping Tommy would turn into a monster next, or even that Sally would be pregnant and give birth to one. Alas. The best thing in the screenplay is between the covers of the Michael Crichton book a hospital guard is reading. I'm guessing the book was the inspiration for this crapfest? I don't know, but I will say that the music was okay, as most Italian soundtracks are, and the special effects were fine except the monster makeup. This is a B-movie, but still fun to watch. If you like B-movies, you'll sit through this one like I did.



P.S. I forgot to mention you take the serum by having it injected into your eyeball by a robot arm. A needle in the eyeball, y'all! Even without the whole "turning into a lizard" side effect, I'd still rather get old!

Uncle Sam (1996)

I remember the VHS box to Uncle Sam in the video store because it had a cool cover with a holographic pic on it. Anyway, the last half of this is B-horror at its best, a little gory and pretty funny. The first half you will want to spend drinking at least three beers, because when it hits the halfway point you will want to be ready to get silly.

The plot, what there is of it, is that Sam was killed in the Middle East, his body is shipped home, and before they get him planted, his nasty corpse comes to life to kill unpatriotic people during the 4th of July celebration. It's unique because it's both a zombie movie and a slasher; the zombie uses weapons and doesn't eat his victims. We get no explanation for how he reanimates, but that's most zombie films. If I had to guess, I'd say burning the flag over his open grave was what did it. So don't try that the next time you're partying in the cemetery on July 3rd. I would say it's a ripoff of Deathdream, but that might be assigning too much credit to the filmmakers.

Still, there's a lot to like here. As I said, the action gets going at the midpoint with a guy dressed in an Uncle Sam suit using seven foot tall stilts to peep in an upstairs window at a girl getting out of the shower in the movie's only nude scene; when he is busted and trying to make a getaway on those big old stilts I about giggled my ass off. So our zombie kills the perv and steals his costume.

Once we get to the picnic there's a lot of death: a decap, a face in the hot grill, a spearing, an explosion. Lots of broad satirical type humor among the partygoers, including Robert Forster as an evil congressman and P.J. Soles, dressed as a red hat lady and playing the angry mom of a kid who had a firework accident the year before. There's unintentional humor too, like Sam's nephew crawling away from the burning walking corpse of his uncle by taking one step and looking back, taking another and looking back, etc. Also, nobody seems interested in finding the killer. The only people the movie doesn't want you to hate are the two kids and Isaac Hayes, but you will hate the nephew anyway, as he is a sanctimonious little bastard.

The movie is a who's who of B-movies with appearances by Bo Hopkins as a lecherous military man who takes funeral duty to "console" widows, Timothy Bottoms as a former draft dodger, Tom McFadden as Soles's husband, Isaac Hayes as the one-legged WWII vet who encouraged Sam to go in the military in the first place, and of course David Shark Fralick as Sam.

One question: why do horror films always have to include a big celebration at which everyone gets killed? Is it convenient for the writer to get all the characters together in one place, or is it to show you how pissed off the killer is because he waits to start killing until he can really ruin the party?

Written by Larry Cohen and directed by William Lustig, Uncle Sam is a requirement for B-horror fans. I recommend only watching the second half, but if you're with friends watch the first half to riff on it while imbibing. Also, to you remake-happy fucks out in Hollywood, this one could fulfill some of your mental wanking needs. Update it so it's a vet of the Afghanistan asshattery of today and kill off more than just one politician.