Posts Tagged ‘Slasher Search’
Thursday, October 24th, 2019
LADY STAY DEAD (1981) is a rare VHS I have considered and backed away from for many a Slasher Search because the dude on the cover… I don’t know what it is about him, but his picture suggests the slimiest and most unpleasant of backyard filth-wallowers. This year after checking IMDb ratings and plot summaries on the more obscure VHS available I decided to check it out, and then I discovered I could watch it on a Blu-Ray released by Code Red. They’ve put out some pretty seedy stuff, so it’s hard to know if that’s a good sign or not.
Turns out this is not at all the no budget regional sicko movie I pictured. It’s an Australian film, a pretty slick one with good production value, though with disturbing content. It opens in a beautiful beachfront villa (filmed in Palm Beach, Sydney), where 24 year old singing sensation Marie Colbie (Deborah Coulls, ROBBERY UNDER ARMS) – who just goes by her first name, like Tiffany – starts her morning with a naked dip in her pool that overlooks the actual water. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Australian cinema, Chard Hayward, Deborah Coulls, James Elliott, Louise Howitt, Roger Ward, Slasher Search, stalker, Terry Bourke
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019
My original goal with Slasher Search was to find the ‘70s and ‘80s slasher gems that I (and maybe everybody) had been missing. That’s still my hope, but as the pickings get slimmer and the years move on I might as well open it up to a movie like this – it’s from 2006, but I never heard of it, and it seemed promising from the box. The premise sounded potentially fun (Crispin Glover killing campers in the woods with elaborate contraptions) and it was even by a known director, Bill Dear, the co-writer of T2.
Or that’s what I was thinking, but that’s William Wisher. Bill Dear is the director of HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS, IF LOOKS COULD KILL and ANGELS IN THE OUTFIELD. And in many ways this does live up to what you expect in a gory horror movie from a guy known for cheesy family movies. It’s about a vanload of horny youths going on a camping trip, and they’re about as broad as they come. They’re all complete assholes who are trying to cheat on their girlfriends or steal their friend’s boyfriends. They like to stick their junk in each others’ faces and trespass and act obnoxious to the locals. It seems like there’s a rule that any scene where the viewer went more than a minute without wanting to punch one of the characters in the face had to be excised. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Artie Baxter, Bill Dear, Blake Lively, Carrie Finklea, Crispin Glover, Greg Cipes, Kelly Vitz, Margo Harshman, Slasher Search
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Thursday, October 17th, 2019
POSSESSION: UNTIL DEATH DO YOU PART is a 1987 low budget slasher movie that’s not, as far as I can tell, a sequel to Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION. That’s too bad, because there’s plenty of room for DTV type followups to that one. It could just be in the rehash style of WILD THINGS 2 or CRUEL INTENTIONS 2 – some other couple breaking up with one of them fucking a weird blob of tentacles. You could gender swap or you could have it be the two blobs are breaking up and one is fucking a human, there are many ways to mix it up. Or of course if it was me I would try to get Sam Neill to come back (or recast with Billy Zane) and lean heavily into his character’s background as a spy. More of a shitty cloak and dagger thing but with relationships and slime and what not. This movie has none of that.
It opens with a dude dragging a dead woman by one arm from the yard of his big house to a spot just inside the surrounding woods, where he digs her a grave. At first they’re not showing his face, but then they do, and he’s babbling animatedly about having thought she was different or some bullshit like that. His name is Frankie (John Robert Johnston, who became an executive producer of reality shows including Rampage, When Vacations Attack, Pranked and Bad Dog!), and he’s got a bunch of other dead women in his closet, plus he kidnaps a live one named Madeline (Sharlene Martin from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN) from a parking garage. He brings her home, says weird things to her, forces her to put on his mom’s dress, yells at her when she pulls down her top for a second because what if Mother saw her do that!? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Lloyd A. Simandl, Michael Mazo, Monica Marko, Sharlene Martin, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019
One problem with doing Slasher Search every year is that I’ve watched so many vaguely similar movies that they really blend together. It’s disturbing how many times I’ve looked at a box having little idea if I’ve seen it or not. So when I came across RUSH WEEK I had to think it through. I’d seen FINAL EXAM, THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, KILLER PARTY, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE, THE INITIATION, GIRLS NITE OUT… but no, this was an ’80s college campus slasher movie I had not seen.
At least it was supposed to be an ’80s movie. It was made in ’88, but it went straight to video in ’91. So it’s from when Chucky and Maniac Cop were born, HELLRAISER, PHANTASM, SLEEPAWAY CAMP, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and FRIGHT NIGHT were at Part II, and Michael Meyers was returning, but it came out when SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was best picture and they were killing off Freddy and moving on to finding people under the stairs and shit. It was left over from another era, not just in its approach to horror, but in its glorification of dumb fraternity assholes. It sort of centers on frat president Jeff Jacobs (Dean Hamilton, who went on to write, direct and produce such films as SAVAGE LAND starring Corbin Bernsen and BLONDE AND BLONDER starring Pamela Anderson and Denise Richards) and his rivalry with some other more preppie frat. They play such hilarious pranks as going to the other house’s presentation to tell parents “we’re the first homosexual fraternity on campus” and replace part of a film they’re showing with gay porn. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bob Bralver, fraternities, Gregg Allman, Kathleen Kinmont, Pamela Ludwig, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 19 Comments »
Thursday, November 8th, 2018
I’d like to end this not-as-rockin-as-I’d-hoped Slasher Search Rocks! mini-series with an extreme obscurity I never could’ve seen if not for the maniacs at Bleeding Skull! Video, who for some reason love shot-on-VHS movies. Though “never 
distributed properly on home video” (the director just sold it through ads in the back of heavy metal magazines), Bleeding Skull! gave HEAVY METAL MASSACRE (1989) a limited edition 250 copy, VHS only re-release in 2016.
This is the mostly-filler-about-a-killer story of an unnamed (as far as I noticed) loner who looks like he could be in Poison with his long, bleach blond, meticulously teased hair and studded bracelets and what not. He goes to one small brick wall bar where he picks up big-haired leather-jacket-wearing women. He sometimes uses the promise of cocaine, but very few words, and when he does talk it’s more of a working joe kinda voice than I expected to come out from behind that makeup.
He brings them to his place, which is one small room full of posters, but it supposedly connects to a series of industrial hallways and garages where he takes them to handcuff them up and then hit them with a sledge hammer.
Despite the overall ickiness of it it’s not very graphic at all – not much in the way of FX. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Bleeding Skull! Video, David DeFalco, shot on video, Slasher Search, Slasher Search Rocks
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 18 Comments »
Friday, October 26th, 2018
TERROR ON TOUR is about a band called The Clowns, who wear makeup kind of like Kiss, as well as black leotards, red capes, afro wigs with two white stripes, and sometimes Phantom of the Opera type half-masks. This is important because someone is going around doing the murders and we don’t know if it’s a lookalike or a band member and which band member or which lookalike.
The movie contains “original music by The Names,” who I have determined to be the one from Rockford, Illinois, not the one from Brussels. And I believe they are playing the band in the movie, which is why (just like Easy Action as Solid Gold in BLOOD TRACKS) they don’t really do that much acting. Instead the story focuses on these two guys in the green room, roadies or something. One guy likes to put on makeup so he can trick groupies into thinking he’s in the band (approved by the band), and his main job seems to be buying drugs for the other guy.
The title is slightly misleading because although I guess they’re technically on tour we only see them in one town, one venue, where they’re playing shows on multiple nights and also having parties. The police are suspicious of the band and their shindigs even before they find a dead lady in the alley, yet they have no security and only a couple suit wearing cops including Lieutenant Lambert (John Green, DEMENTED) occasionally standing in a quiet part of the building looking at documents and stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Don Edmonds, Slasher Search, Slasher Search Rocks, slashers, VHS
Posted in Horror, Reviews | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018
HARD ROCK NIGHTMARE is an account of the tragic events that befall the up and coming rock ‘n roll band The Bad Boys when they stay at Jimmy’s grandma’s farm for the weekend. They “gotta get ready for the concert” so at first they practice in their garage with one girlfriend watching. But she accidentally bumps the garage door opener just as three other young female rock ‘n roll aficionados are walking down the sidewalk, so they stand and watch and swoon. But also it attracts a police car and they get shut down.
They’re kind of an unlikely band because there are two dudes with slicked back hair, leather jacket and jeans, others are standard long hair dudes, and a guy with a trenchcoat, and one guy is a Mike Mills looking nerd often wearing a Nike sweatshirt. Like they’re a couple different bands accidentally combined. I’m not sure if all their music is like this, but the song we hear is funny because the chorus is “It’s a nightmare!” but the lyrics are all about wanting to start a band and “work really hard.” The first line is “It started when I got my first guitar at the age of ten…” So the band and “a couple of hot babes” from the sidewalk head out to the farm. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Dominick Brascia, Slasher Search, Slasher Search Rocks, Tape Raider, Troy Donahue, VHS, werewolves
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, October 17th, 2018
I noticed there are a couple still-only-on-VHS horror movies that are heavy metal themed, and that also seems to be a motif through some of the modern horror I’ve been enjoying like DEVIL’S CANDY and MANDY, so I decided to take a look at them in this special Slasher Search investigation (in association with Tape Raider). This first one is from 1985 and it’s about a hair metal or whatever type of band who make two major mistakes
1) For some reason thinking that a remote mountain area is a cool place to film their new video
2) Choosing the remote mountain area that’s protected by a family of anti-social brutes.
3) You know what, I’m gonna count #1 as two mistakes because why they hell did they think this would look cool in a video? It doesn’t even look cool in a horror movie. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: metal, Slasher Search, Slasher Search Rocks, Smart Egg Pictures, Swedish cinema, Tape Raider
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Tuesday, December 26th, 2017
Happy Boxing Day to all of the boxers out there. I have a new review today that to be frankly honest is not gonna be very exciting for anybody because it’s a total obscurity that you never heard of and I’m not recommending it. But for some reason I wrote it, so I thought I should post it before it’s 2018 and I have to stop using the Slasher Search 2017 logo.
Ordinarily when I’m slasher searching I pin my hopes on movies from the ’80s. That was the prime time for filmatists to have caught the bug from HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, before they stopped the outbreak of Tom Savini fever and everything got too clean and slick and bland. If a slasher movie came out in the 2000s and I never heard of it I gotta assume it doesn’t have any of the things I’m looking for in the genre.
But I found this random one from 2005 that had a quote from the late great Dan O’Bannon on the box:
“…A CUT ABOVE THE COMPETITION… A THINKING MAN’S SLASHER FILM.”
So I decided to give it a shot. You can’t blame a guy for trying.
At first it’s unclear if there will actually be a slasher involved. The premise (explained concisely in first person narration at the beginning) is that Cassandra (Bobbie Jo Westphal, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP) once dreamt of her mother being murdered, and then what she dreamed really happened. Now she’s having dreams of old friends from school dying, so she’s invited them to an old farm house to try to keep these prophecies from coming true. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: anthology, Michael Hawkins-Burgos, Slasher Search
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Monday, November 20th, 2017
BITS & PIECES (1985) is another only-on-VHS obscurity that should teach me a fuckin lesson about Slasher Searching. Like HOLLYWOOD’S NEW BLOOD it’s made in California (San Fernando Valley and Burbank, according to IMDb) but clearly not by actual professionals in the movie industry. If their goal was to prove you could make a movie as icky as MANIAC but with no single element from scripting to cinematography to acting that in any way comes even remotely close to being as good, they have succeeded wildly.
Like PSYCHO, DERANGED, DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE, etc. it’s a killer with mommy issues. Like MANIAC he abducts women and brings them to his apartment and has a female mannequin there that he pretends is alive. His name is Arthur (S.E. Zygmont, no other credits) and there is no indication that he has a job besides murder but he’s always dressed like he just got home from work, or is cosplaying the guy from THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Slasher Search
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
