SHALLOW GRAVE – not the Danny Boyle one – is another mysteriously odd ’80s slasher movie to add to the list. This is about four Catholic school girls headed to Fort Lauderdale for Spring Break who get a flat tire in South Carolina and get stalked by a psychotic sheriff (Tony March) after they witness him murdering his mistress. Basically it all comes down to this girl Sue Ellen (Lisa Stahl)’s “weak kidneys.” If she didn’t have to piss they just woulda had ordinary car troubles to deal with and maybe would’ve missed out on the beach parties.
To me the strangest part of the movie is the opening. You have a long pan around a house, spying on these college girls through the windows. On one hand it’s a well-executed John Carpenter type shot like I love. On the other hand a horror movie that has a bunch of girls hanging around in their underwear for no reason generally does not have respect for its characters or viewers. (read the rest of this shit…)
MOTHER OF TEARS was Dario Argento’s backburner project for years. I never really watched them close enough together to pick up on it, but SUSPIRIA and 
RE-ANIMATOR is one of those good old ’80s college buddy movies, you know? You got the tall, blandly handsome star student Dan (Bruce Abbott), he’s fucking the dean’s daughter Megan (Barbara Crampton), there’s an uptight professor, Dr. Hill (David Gale – the one from 
After the massive success of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET in 1984, you’d think Wes Craven would’ve been sitting comfortably atop the horror director pyramid. Yet his directational followups were just the ’85 TV movie CHILLER, the ’86 silly robot movie DEADLY FRIEND, and a couple episodes of the new Twilight Zone. It wasn’t until ’88 that he did something he seemed passionate about, the pretty respected voodoo thriller THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW. By ’89, only five years after the birth of Freddy, he was already at that sad “time to come up with the next Freddy” stage you’d expect him to go through eventually. 
Before he did PHANTASM, a 22 year old Don Coscarelli wasn’t even looking to be a horror director. He got together the people he knew and filmed in his neighborhood and made this sweet coming-of-age type comedy about growing up in the California suburbs of the ’70s. Kenny (Dan McCann) is a kid about 12 or 13, his company is Doug (PHANTASM star A. Michael Baldwin) and Sherman (Jeff Roth), a goofy younger kid from across the street who they pick on but start becoming real friends with when they see him getting beat up by Johnny Hoffman (Willy Masterson), the same neighborhood bully they live in terror of.
WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Somos lo que hay) is a one of a kind horror movie out of Mexico. Well, it was one of a kind until they just did an American remake, but it sounds like they changed things up for that one anyway.
If you haven’t seen the blog 
THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE is a Dario Argento movie I hadn’t seen before. This is his directational debut, so it shows what he was up to before the ones I’m most familiar with, DEEP RED, SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. He’s not yet the sicko artiste who made those three, but you can see him headed in that direction.
