Posts Tagged ‘Slasher Search’
Tuesday, October 21st, 2014
I guess I should’ve known about this one, but I didn’t. 1981’s generically titled NIGHTMARE (sometimes called NIGHTMARES IN A DAMAGED BRAIN) is apparently pretty notorious due to getting banned in the UK as a “Video Nasty.” That’s not the same as being good. But it has a sleazy, unhinged feeling to it that makes it stand out. It feels like it is definitely not made by slick professionals, but possibly by actual crazy people.
It begins, appropriately, with a guy dreaming he wakes up in his underwear with a woman’s severed head in a pile of guts at the foot of his bed. This will be our killer, George Tatum (Baird Stafford), an often sweaty, always confused mess of a man constantly in agony because of his extremely messed up sexuality. He’s haunted by childhood memories of walking in on his mom (or a mistress or hooker, it seems like, but the credits say mother) in a corset on top of his tied-up dad, slapping him. And then he remembers Mom getting decapitated.
Not surprisingly this is a problem in George’s daily life. For one thing, he likes to go to the Times Square peep shows to jerk off, but he keeps seeing head stump flashes and falling to his knees in anguish. Ruins the whole night, I’m sure.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Slasher Search, slashers, Tom Savini
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 42 Comments »
Monday, October 20th, 2014
THE INITIATION is yet another sorority-themed slasher movie (see also HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW, SORORITY ROW, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE I and II, KILLER PARTY, BLACK CHRISTMAS, BLACK XMAS), but it’s toward the high end of that list as far as quality. “Introducing Daphne Zuniga” as Kelly (although she had already been in THE DORM THAT DRIPPED BLOOD), one of a group of new pledges beginning their Hell Week at a college in Dallas or Fort Worth while somebody possibly connected to her is going around stabbing people, mostly with a 3-pronged gardening tool.
It’s got a little bit of HALLOWEEN and a little bit of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. The HALLOWEEN is in the section that takes place in an insane asylum where the inmates all get loose at night and mob a nurse’s car. She gets stabbed, but we don’t see who did it, and none of these witnesses are gonna be able to explain it. They just giggle uncontrollably, suck their thumbs or flick their tongues like lizards. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas horror, Daphne Zuniga, shopping mall, Slasher Search, slashers, sororities
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Thursday, October 9th, 2014
“Shouldn’t you be bouncing a ball somewhere?”
CUTTING CLASS is the slasher movie starring Brad Pitt. It’s one of his first couple movies, so I figured he would just be a supporting character, like, smaller than Johnny Depp in A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. But he’s actually one of the three leads. There’s Final Girl Paula (Jill Schoelen) and two serious suspects for a series of murders that are going on around her school: her jock boyfriend Dwight (Pitt) or Dwight’s childhood best friend Brian (Donovan Leitch, THE BLOB), who was just released from a mental hospital after being blamed for the murder of his father. The movie does a good job of leading you back and forth about which one of these guys is the killer. Or if you want you can go ahead and believe the parts where the creepy janitor (Robert Glaudini, writer of the one movie Philip Seymour Hoffman directed, JACK GOES BOATING) acts suspicious. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Allie MacDonald, Brad Pitt, Jill Schoelen, Martin Mull, Robert Glaudini, Roddy McDowall, Rospo Pallenberg, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 28 Comments »
Wednesday, October 8th, 2014
“Hello, girls. Now what’s all this about a ear?”
Who the fuck needs Michael Meyers when we got John Hadley (Richard A. Buswell)? Well, everybody. This is not a very good movie. But if all the discs rot and HALLOWEEN gets erased from The Cloud and we as a society need to remember what it was like, I guess we could watch this knockoff and hope it would jog our memories.
The childhood prologue is different from original HALLOWEEN, it’s a little more like remake HALLOWEEN because John is a victim of bullying and abusive parents, though he does not wear a Kiss t-shirt. He doesn’t talk, and he’s good at checkers. But the neighborhood shitstains ride up on their bikes to taunt him, shame him into walking on the edge of a well, frighten him into falling in and then run away like bitches. 10 years later he’s a disfigured zombie in an asylum who they say literally chewed his mom to death. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 3 Comments »
Thursday, October 31st, 2013
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…)
Tags: Lisa Stahl, Richard Styles, Slasher Search, slashers, Spring Break, Tony March
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
Jackie Coogan is an iconic child star from the silent film era. He made his film debut at the age of 3 in the 1917 film SKINNER’S BABY. He played the baby. More famously he played the title character in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin movie THE KID.
His last movie to come out was 63 years later, and it was THE PREY. (If IMDb trivia is to believed, though, it was filmed in ’78, so it wasn’t the last thing he shot.)
I gotta admit, I kinda fell behind on Slasher Search here. I got into rewatching various horror classics, and I feel good about that. But I realized it was almost Halloween and I had done very few obscure slasher movies, so I got desperate. I rented 5 still-only-on-VHS movies that I knew little or nothing about, and by the time I got to watching them I didn’t even remember what most of them were. This was just on the top of the pile. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Carel Struycken, Edwin Brown, Gayle Gannes, Jackie Coogan, Lori Lethin, Slasher Search, slashers, Steve Bond
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 8 Comments »
Monday, October 28th, 2013
GIRLS NITE OUT would’ve been a decent title for KILLER PARTY. I’m not completely sure how it applies to this one. It’s another college movie, and it focuses at least as much on male basketball players angry about their girlfriends leaving them as it does on the group of sweater-wearing girls whose idea of a nite out is to follow along with a scavenger hunt contest put on by the campus radio station for part of the movie until it gets cancelled due to murders.
This is a lower-mid-level Slasher Search find. On one hand, it’s definitely not good, and doesn’t even have any heads chopped off or eyeballs poked out or anything. On the other hand it’s watchable. It has credible enough acting and production values, including some pretty good scoring at times (possibly from library music) and a couple decent oldies on the soundtrack because of the radio station. And of course there’s a little bit of the weird shit, which is absolutely required to get through one of these. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: bear costume, Hal Holbrook, Lynn Connors, Slasher Search, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
Thursday, October 17th, 2013
I didn’t like SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE, but man, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE II is not SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE caliber. This one is a Jim Wynorski joint, so I guess it’s not really meant to necessarily be a real movie. This is one of the five movies he did between 1989’s RETURN OF SWAMP THING and 1992’s 976-EVIL II. Another one was SCREAM QUEEN HOT TUB PARTY under the pseudonym Arch Stanton. He has his thing he does. He churns them out and has fun and they usually have a little likable goofy humor in them, and then there is the rest of the movie.
In this one, five interchangeable college babes have to spend the night in an old house they have just purchased for their sorority house. The power and phones are not hooked up, there’s no furniture and also the reason they could afford the place is because a bunch of people were murdered there 5 years ago. But they have to stay in this scary place to meet the movers in the morning. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Jim Wynorski, Melissa Moore, Slasher Search, slashers, sororities
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013
Here’s a crazy movie. It’s pretty unique but it has many of the standard elements of a slasher movie. It takes place in the world of young people, with adults not really catching on to what’s happening. At the beginning a teen couple are making out in a cemetery and get murdered. At another point a couple we’ve never seen before are having sex in a parked van and get murdered. There is a Final Girl (and Final Little Brother) and like in HALLOWEEN she’s a buttoned up, responsible babysitter with a wilder best friend whose dad is the sheriff.
But there’s not some unseen slasher, or masked maniac, or supernatural force. There’s just three little ten year old kids who are total assholes and love to murder people. They are not quiet, creepy killers like VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, CHILDREN OF THE CORN or young Michael Myers. They’re seemingly normal kids. The only explanation given is that they were born on the same day, during an eclipse. The Final Girl Joyce (Lori Lethin from RETURN TO HORROR HIGH) studies astrology throughout the movie, so you assume it has something to do with that. They were just destined to go on a murder spree. And to rack up pretty impressive numbers.
(read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Julie Brown, killer kids, Lori Lethin, Michael Dudikoff, Slasher Search, slashers, Susan Strasberg
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Here’s a much dryer and less fun sorority-pledge-in-house-where-somebody-died-a-long-time-ago movie than KILLER PARTY. Actually, I’m not sure Beth (Angela O’Neill, ALIEN NATION) is technically a pledge. She’s a family friend of the house mother or something? Her aunt who raised her died recently, she’s staying with this lady who’s going out of town and leaving her with the sisters, who are very welcoming and keep saying she’ll like it and want to stay. Like they’re trying to sell her on their sorority instead of scare her away like in other movies.
In the KILLER PARTY review I talked about the fraternity/sorority movies, but this one is different. It might be trying for a more positive portrayal of sororities, but my guess is the rookie filmatists just didn’t put much thought into the story, or just wanted to have “sorority” in the title, because there’s no reason why these girls can’t just be friends or roommates. There is no hazing, no competition, no parties other than an upcoming “Pow Wow” with teepee that never happens, little drinking, less sex than HALLOWEEN. They’re not jerks, they look after each other, or at least after their guest. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Angela O'Neill, Carol Frank, Roger Corman, Slasher Search, slashers, sororities
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 2 Comments »
