Welcome To Dog Island.

Hey-o! I did it, four weeks, four CanCon flicks! Again, you'll have to forgive that I don't own the VHS, it's not for lack of trying because this is one I've been meaning to watch for a while; Paul Lynch's 1982 joint Humongous.

Six young people get stranded on an abondoned island only to find that are not alone - and whatever it is is hungry.

Truth be told, I probably would have sought this out sooner if I knew it was Canadian. I guess I expected it to be spelt “Humoungous” eh? Seriously though, Paul “Prom Night” Lynch directing and Anthony “Thrillkill” Kramreither producing is enough pedigree for me to partake. So, our movie begins on Labour Day 1946 and it got me thinking that not many - if any - horror films take place on that holiday. I guess this was the era where every slasher - which I guess this objectively is - had to take place on a special occasion.

I didn't get to dwell on that for long, because I was hit with a particularly grody and drawn out rape scene and subsequent dog mauling. Fun. Then it was present day and we meet a bunch of aloof teens(?) who go boating for some reason I can't remember. Among them, is Joy Boushel as Donna, but unfortunately she doesn't get to do much expect rub blueberries on her tits and get verbally abused by her dick boyfriend. No matter, in a few year's she'd get to be in that iconic “be afraid, be very afraid” scene in The Fly. Boushel may have only been in a handful of films, but she sure made an impression. Anyhoo, after picking up a random dude Dead Calm-style, the aforementioned dick boyfriend gets wasted and crashes the boat by doing what he was expressly told not to. 

I think the character who probably should've been the Final Girl of this picture was Carla (Janit Baldwin), but she unfortunately disappears during the climax and is literally tossed aside. She had good energy and reminded me of a mix of Andrea Martin and Sam Hanratty (Young Misty from Yellowjackets). She deserved better, and perhaps Baldwin knew that too because she soon quit acting and became a fashion designer. Maybe that explains why she was half-wearing her lifejacket for a bunch of scenes. She was a trend-setter!

Joy Boushel (left) & Janit Baldwin in Humongous.

I don't know if I have a bunch more to say about this movie. It sadly falls into the trap of low-budget movies where you spend a lot of time watching the characters walking and searching, searching and walking. I'm assuming it was also the budget that caused half of the death scenes to be off-screen. I mean, I get it, a lot of the original Friday the 13th kills were off-screen too, but that had more than six characters. Humongous is pretty much a cross between Madman and The Unseen with the climax decidedly lifted from Friday 2. However, since those guys pilfered heavily from Bay of Blood I can't really scold Lynch now, can I?

“You've done your job well and Mommy is pleased.”

I don't want to harp on the actual Final Girl of the picture, Sandy (Janet Julian) as she is perfectly fine. I got some Jess Harper vibes from her and she does stab the big bad in the dick with a No Trespassing sign so... points for that. It may not be as badass as the throat fisting finale in Just Before Dawn, but what is, really? I can tell you what isn't badass though. When our so-called hero Eric (David Wallace) sharpens a big stick down to a point and then proceeds to use it like a bat.

I hope you enjoyed CanCon June and here's wishing you have a happy Canada Day! Raise a Moosehead and think of your favourite flick from the Great White North!

IYKYK

Never Trust the Doorman.

Well, another year. Another attempt to keep a regular VHS post schedule. We'll see how this shakes out, maybe I'll even get back to the Horror Movie Guide watch-through. Anyhoops, the next VHS off the pile was Tony Lo Bianco's lone kick at the can, 1984's Too Scared To Scream.

Tenants at a Manhattan high-rise are turning up dead and the gentlemanly doorman (Ian McShane) seems to be at the center of it.

Shot in 1982, but not released until a few years later, Too Scared to Scream was originally intended to be a TV movie, but never ended up finding a network. It was then that some new footage was shot (read: tits and gore) and it was sent out into the video market. I could tell Lo Bianco was trying to ape Hitchcock here, but any strength of this piece is not in the filmmaking or the story, but in the cast.

Ian McShane as Vincent in Too Scared To Scream.

In addition to the younger McShane, who still commands his usual presence and reminded me a little of peak Oliver Reed, there are many other notables here. Mike Connors of Mannix fame does the cop duties, the original Tarzan's Jane Maureen O'Sullivan shows up as McShane's wheelchair-bound mother and a young John Heard is a guy named “Steve”. Even Creepshow's Carrie Nye shows up as a fashion designer.

Tops in my mind though, is Anne Archer as Connors' partner, Kate. She is a real charmer, right on the cusp of stardom before such memorable thrillers as Fatal Attraction, Narrow Margin and (to an admittedly lesser degree) Body of Evidence. Val Avery also appears as the coroner and his one-liners are gold Jerry! Gold!

 

Too Scared To Scream is for the most part pretty standard, but the dialogue is what kept me engaged. I can't tell how much was scripted or improvised, but I have to admit it did have me chuckling quite often. Like when soon to be murdered Cynthia (Victoria Bass) addresses her pet bird, “you better shut up or I'm going to get arrested for molesting a Mina.” Like I said. GOLD! 

At the very least, this is one of those films that gives us plenty of Midtown Manhattan during the early eighties and I'll never get tired of that. I wanted to climb in the TV and go see that screening of The Burning being advertised on one of the marquees.

The Dark of the Forest.

Hello all. Happy Friday the 13th! In celebration I pulled the most relevant and unwatched camping slasher out of the pile, Don Jones' 1982 joint The Forest.

Two couples inadvisably go camping in the woods, not aware of the nefarious fate that awaits them.

Through the opening credits, I was serenaded with smooth trumpeting jazz as I watched a couple march through the serena Californian woods. I assumed these two were our protagonists, but nope, they got butchered within minutes. Okay, maniac in woods got it. I then wondered if this was going to be Don't Go In the Woods where people just get set up and knocked down like bowling pins, but no, we then shifted to another horror.

Traffic. The real horror of this movie. I've been attending TIFF all week and that means battling Toronto gridlock. Sometimes I think I'd rather eat a killer's knife than face that. It is at least quicker. But I digress. Two couples, who I wondered were actually married by the way they talked to each other, try to one-up each other about who is the better camper. Psst, the answer is none of them.

They all decide to go out into woods, but not together – because Battle of the Sexes – and it all goes tits up from there. Sharon (Tomi Barrett) & Teddi (Ann Wilkinson) leave, secretly hoping the men, Steve (Dean Russell aka wish JK Simmons) and Charlie (John Batis) are right behind them, which they are – until car trouble puts them a good half-day behind. After trekking several hours, our ladies set up camp and during the night things take a bizarre turn.

Yes, The Forest is about a crazy dude turned cannibal living in the woods, but it also about the ghosts of his dead family roaming around, as well. See, he murdered this wife for cheating – something makes me think Jones has issues with women and relationships – and ran off into the woods with his kids. Said kids then offed themselves for a number of reasons, the least of which could have been the trauma of being locked in the bedroom closet while their mom boinked the water heater, err refridgerator repairman.

The kid on the right is named Corky Pigeon, I shit you not.

I have to admit that even though this movie is fifty-percent hiking footage, I was slightly invested in whether these city slickers were going to be able to catch up with their wives in time. And surprisingly, even as chauvanistic as most of this movie is, it's Sharon who ends up saving the day.

So, even though it doesn't have the crap-tastic flair of Don't Go In The Woods or the cinematography or set peices of Just Before Dawn or the soon-to-be star power of The Final Terror, however it is still a mildly entertaning oddity with a theme song that slaps. Dude apparently put up his house to make this movie so the least I can do is give it a whirl. Bizarrely, at some point the renter of this tape - from Jumbo Video says the tag - recorded a 1995 episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show on the end. Oh, the horror...

Dud-ly Intruder, Amirite?

The next VHS in the pile was a tape I recently acquired from the basement of the Vinegar Syndrome store. It's a movie I hadn't seen, or even thought of for decades, but when I saw that cover I instantly recognized it. I'm speaking of John McCauley's 1985 slasher The Deadly Intruder.

A mental patient escapes custody and makes his way to Midvale, only to cross paths with Jessie (Molly Cheek). Who will survive, and will I still be awake?

Just as I'm now looking at it, I realize how similar this cover is to the 1989 flick Hider in The House, only that art director had the sense to turn a light on. But I digress. The Deadly Intruder begins promisingly with a score that doesn't even pretend it wants be John Carpenter, as two orderlies with no weapons or backup chase after a psychopath. Surprise! They both get offed and our maniac escapes into the night.

Perhaps it was because the Carpenter seed was already planted in my head, but the first fifteen-or-so minutes of this movie just felt like a Halloween re-enactment. Like, someone really dug that hot tub scene in Halloween II because it turns up here verbatim, subbing in a literal kitchen sink.

Frankly, the middle is just a haze of dad jokes, dog farts, extended scenes of food preparation and drifters skulking while Cheek's body double takes a bath. Oh, and the occasional kill. It really is quite amusing how unsophisticated this movie is. You know how every slasher has that scene where someone is sneaking up on someone else and it's framed like it's the killer, but it just turns out to be a friend pranking. Well, that doesn't happen here. It's just the killer killing.

Did you know that there is only one newspaper in BC, and it's called The Canadian Star? I admit I got a belly laugh out of that one. Danny Bonaduce looks like he's the one having the most fun here, at least until he gets his head rammed into a TV of course.

While watching the killer in the last act - the actual killer and not the bright red herring the movie waves in our face for an hour - I was reminded of Josh Hartnett's recent performance in Trap. There is an implausibility, an inherent disregard for logic and the laws of space and time, to this pair of criminals that after a while you just have to embrace it as comical if you're going to get any enjoyment out of it at all.

Anyhoo, The Deadly Intruder is not a winner and decidedly just filler for video store shelves. The Canadian Star rates this one, take off eh!

We LOVE It When Our Friends Become Successful

Hey all! I just wanted to give a quick shout-out to my buddy Chris Nash. His debut feature In A Violent Nature is hitting screens this weekend. You should go see it!

I've known Nash for close to two decades and after having worked on a half-dozen projects with him, I know what a talented and driven guy he is. He deserves the spotlight. I urge you to support indie films like this, so Shudder and other companies continue to foster unique voices like Nash, Kyle Edward Ball & Robert Morgan.

If you are a fan of slashers, this should be a no-brainer, as even if you're not down with ambient and deliberate narrative of IAVN, you'll at least be thrilled by the visceral kills. That's basically what I told Nash after I saw it, “Man, sure there's gonna be a bunch of people that say, this is fucking boring, but there's also gonna be sizable subset that really dig and appreciate what you were trying to do here.”

If you're the latter, make your voice heard!

May 29th Horror Trivia Screening Guide

To all those who came here from the event or Storm Crow's FB page, welcome! I am Jay, one half of the horror trivia quizmasters and this is my humble blog. Here's the selected list of titles mentioned at the last event. Click on the titles to be redirected to their Imdb listing.

Horror Trivia Night happens at Storm Crow Manor in Toronto. If you're in the area, come on down! Register here. If you're not local, we do occasionally stream the event on @ruemorguemag Instagram.

Hell House LLC (2015)

Puppet Master (1989)

The Witch (2015)

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

The Final Terror (1983)

Body Count (1986)

Backcountry (2014)

Pyewacket (2017)

The Ritual (2017)

The Crazies (1973)

Shakma (1990)

Stopmotion (2023)

Alice Sweet Alice (1976)

Dead Snow (2009)

The Voyeurs (2021)

Nocturne (2020)

The Perfection (2018)

Invitation to Hell (1984)

House of Usher (1960)

The Terror (1963)

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Forbidden World (1982)

Humanoids From the Deep (1980)

Piranha (1978)

Gifrific: Me at a New Bar.

 Source: Murder Weapon (1989)

My Girl Wants To Party All The Time!

Next VHS off the pile was the 1988 slasher Party Line. I certainly recalled the coverbox, but never got to it back in the day because it was one of a SLEW of titles that almost seemed interchangeable. Let's pick up the phone and call! I hear it's private, confidential, one-on-one and discreet!

Crazy sibling serial killers Seth (Leif Garrett) & Angelina (Greta Blackburn) cruise telephone chat lines for victims, while hothead detective Dan (Richard Hatch - the Battlestar one, not the gay Survivor one) remains one body behind.

Party Line was amusing, but this was admittedly not top-tier stuff. For those who were not alive in the eighties, there were all kinds of call-in services available, some not even for degenerates. I remember calling one called Dial-A-Joke a few times, until my father confronted me with the subsequent phone bill. Hell, there was even one to hear Freddy Krueger.

Anyway, I digress. For a movie called Party Line, the phone sex stuff actually makes up little of the movie. Characters would disappear for chunks at a time, tagging out for stretches of police procedure and generic nightclub revelry. I was being generous when I used the word slasher earlier. I guess technically it's accurate as the killer's weapon of choice is a straight razor, but it's really more of a tame erotic thriller. Save for a few slit throats, it is fairly anemic too.

We do get a lot of weirdo scenes with the "complicated" shenanigans of Seth & Angelina. It's a lot of simping and leering from the former and the latter slapping him around for it. It's... awkward. It sure was a banner year for Garrett, who also appeared in Cheerleader Camp in '88. 

Imdb tells me that viewers thought Hatch was miscast. I don't know if I agree, I think it more that the detective character as a whole was miscast. Everyone knows the "hard boiled cop who doesn't play by the rules" trope, but this was ridiculous. He pulled his gun out so much in this movie, he might as well have had fused to his hand ala Videodrome. And, since when do District Attorney employees visit crime scenes? Seems like a conflict of interest, but I guess Dan & Stacy (Shawn Weatherly) had to meet somehow.

Speaking of conflicts, when the teen using the party line in the beginning finally reappears again, Dan actually has the brilliant idea to have said sixteen-year-old help them in their investigation. Does any of this sound like it would hold up in court, people? However, after the inevitable plot twist and kidnapping of Stacy, I was happy that she didn't need to be saved at the end. She made short work of Mama's boy Seth, even with her hands tied. You go, girl!

Call me Nancy Lew-d.

Party Line was run-of-the-mill fare that needed more of a hook than just the passing fad it hung its hat on. Hider in the House had the wild card magic of Gary Busey and Fear had Ally Sheedy's psychic superpowers. This just has well, people perving on and off the phone. I want more for my dollar-ninety-five per minute, ya know?

Halloween Meets Three-Mile Island.

I just wanted to post about something really cool I discovered recently. I think a few sites wrote about this last year, but I didn't hear about until a friend of mine told me about a treasure trove of unproduced movie scripts over at archive.org.

So legend has it that circa 1977, John Carpenter took a job writing a script for a project called Prometheus Crisis. This screenplay, which was later called Meltdown, is essentially "Halloween in a nuclear power plant".

This script is fascinating for a few reasons. If you read it (you can find it here), you can see elements that would later end up in his future projects. The characters arriving and exploring the abandoned facility echoes that of MacCready and Doc Copper at the Norwegian camp in The Thing and there is a sequence that would be lifted verbatim a decade later for Prince of Darkness. I even saw a shot or two that would end up in Halloween II, but that could just be coincidence.

Perhaps most impressive is that the technical jargon sounds accurate - at least from my rudimentary knowledge watching Chernobyl and a few Netflix docs - even though it was written at a time when I can't imagine information of nuclear energy was readily available. Carpenter wrote this before meltdowns were a reality, as Three Mile Island or even the film The China Syndrome wouldn't happen for another two years. It's basically like when Stanley Kubrick made 2001 before anyone actually went to space. 

Aside from that though, Meltdown is  a pretty brutal slasher script with an atmospheric and unique location and some really good set pieces - one kill I've still never seen even to this day! It's a bummer this was never made. Carpenter & Co were trying to get it done as recently as 1997, but things just never came together. Oh well, at least we have the script. 

Dec 13 Horror Trivia Screening List

To all those who came here from the event or Storm Crow's FB page, welcome! I am Jay, one half of the horror trivia quizmasters and this is my humble blog.

If you heard a title while at the last event and thought “oh that movie sounds cool, I should check that out”, here's a selected list of films that were mentioned. Click on the titles to be redirected to their Imdb listing.

Horror Trivia Night happens at Storm Crow Manor in Toronto. If you're in the area, come on down! Register here. If you're not local, we do sometimes stream the event on @ruemorguemag Instagram.

The Prowler (1981)

The Burning (1981)

Bay of Blood (1971)

Maniac (1980)

Santa's Slay (2005)

Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 (1991)

Silent Night (2012)

Elves (1989)

Holidays (2016)

Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1972)

Ready or Not (2019)

The Boy (2016)

Deadly Games (1989)

Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

Dog Soldiers (2002)

Becky (2020)

Cemetery Man (1994)

The Devil's Backbone (2001)

TV: Channel Zero (2016-2018)

Dog's Breakfast

This week's VHS was one I've had for a while, but only now just got around to watching. Those familiar with crusty video store horror sections will no doubt remember this coverbox from back in the day.

A widow (Bennie Lee McGowan) and an out-of-towner (Patrick Wayne) investigate a maniacal cult that has been murdering people in the area.

Wow, Revenge stinks. I knew that it was a Z-grade SOV flick going in, but I thought Wayne and John Carradine might have been able to elevate it somewhat. It turns out I didn't know what I was walking into. At the hop, I was almost immediately reminded of Blood Cult and, until a few seconds ago, didn't realize that this movie was actually its sequel. It even has some of the same characters, but Blood Cult was such a fucking bore that I'd completely wiped it from my memory.

I'm bewildered by the fact that Wayne and Carradine signed on to this. Had they not watched director Chris Lewis' previous two movies?? I mean, to be fair, Wayne pretty much one-notes his way through and Carradine, bless him, I don't think he ever turned down a role in his life. I think I may have caught him reading his lines offscreen a time or two. 

The only one with any gusto in this, apart from Peter Hart - who had a German accent which makes for scenery chewing by default - was McGowan as the shotgun-toting farm owner Gracie. After her husband gets offed in one of the most hilarious pre-death moments in history...

...she teams up with Wayne to fight against the evil forces that mean to drive her from her property. As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that although not much happens, it's at least a lot more than its predecessor - if my 2016 post is to be believed. There's that scene where Wayne's “classy” squinty-eyed sister gets roasted by telekinesis, cuz that's a power this cult has, but only uses that one time for some reason. Then, there's that birdwatcher that mercifully gets hacked to death to avoid her friend's embarrassing steak(?) and eggs. Like WTF is that?

The motorcycle rider from Nail Gun Massacre shows up at points to harass McGowan, and also, in an amusing turn, disciples of the cult argue about the expanded recruitment because they are running out of ceremonial robes and dog amulets. You know, for a movie as shitty as it is, I saw a lot of firsts last night.

You know, it's been donkey's years since I saw The Ripper, but I recall the gore being pretty decent. Was Tom Savini helping out on that one, because the gore was really lacking here. It's either offscreen, super close-up or clumsily shot. It's frustrating because it would have made a big difference. 555 is a pile of shit, but those kills are impressive.

So yeah terrible movie, but I talked about it twice as much as Blood Cult so that's something, right? 

Valentine Reunion, Part Three

It seems like only yesterday, I was at Take One and Take Two of the My Bloody Valentine Reunion. Oh well, I guess technically it was;

Fun was had by all! 

Insert Medical Pun Here.

This week's VHS is the 1992 ham-fest Dr. Giggles. It wasn't exactly a first watch, but I hadn't seen it since it came out so it might as well have been. I probably snagged this copy from my video store prior to my exit.

A maniac known only as Dr. Giggles (Larry Drake) escapes from an asylum and heads to his hometown to wreak havoc (sound familiar?) on its inhabitants, including nineties cuties Holly Marie Combs and Glenn Quinn. I also don't know why he is shooting green lasers out of his eyes on the cover...

Ah, the early nineties. What a wasteland it was for American horror. With genre meal tickets Jason and Freddy waning after having put out their worst entries, studios were looking for fresh IP's. Meaning they basically threw everything at the wall and saw what stuck. Some did (Leprechaun for instance) and some didn't (Dr. Giggles).

Larry Drake as Dr. Giggles

This time was also when most slashers (again taking Freddy's lead) were camp fests, filled to the brim with one-liners. I think it may have been an attempt to curry favour with the censors - hey, gore can't be bad if it's funny, right? -  because Dr. Giggles has wall-to-wall, drinking-game frequency puns and more sight gags than you can shake a thermometer at. Admittedly, Drake is pretty great and plays his ridiculous role with the same weight he did as Durant in Sam Raimi's Darkman two years earlier.

And speaking of Raimi, I feel director Manny Coto was a big fan. I can see a lot of Darkman-era Raimi in this movie, not only in tone, but also camera style, especially the carnival set piece. Coto also enlisted Raimi cohorts KNB EFX to do the gore. I wager a good deal of it ended up on the censor room floor, but even in their truncated form, the over-the-top kills are the movie's most entertaining attribute.

Dr. Giggles is utterly dumb-as-fuck, but it also has its charms. It always gives me a chuckle to remember this wasn't some fly-by-night Full Moon production; this played theatres! I wasn't kidding when I said “wasteland”. Studios were so starved for horror content, it was just insane the stuff I was seeing at my local multiplex. The Lawnmower Man, for Christ sakes! Trust me, this was the stretch I was working in a video store and I saw it all. What a wonderful time to be alive!

Edit: I found out today that stuntman George P. Wilbur passed away. He was 81. Wilbur was the man who donned the white mask of Michael Myers in the Halloween films of my teenage years. He amassed over a hundred credits during his six decades in the biz, including Dr. Giggles! Rest in peace, George.

Rum Vs. Curacao

Here are some souvenirs from Serena's Freddy Vs. Jason Drunken Cinema screening last night.

Art by Tony Smerek.

Duelling cocktails were on offer. 

So I got both naturally!

Place Your Bets... on gettin' drunk.

The Jason was surprisingly the tastier of the two, despite not really liking either cocoanut or pineapple. Curacao. Who knew? I thought it was a country.

Z is for Zipperface (1992)

So here we are at the last letter with a movie I found while researching Carpenter Brut for a listicle in last month's Halloween issue of Rue Morgue.

A plucky detective (Donna Adams) persues a masked maniac who kills S&M hookers.

This is basically everything you would expect from a Z-grade (wink!) SOV slasher with less than stellar acting, story and boom mic control. Only this one, save for one beheading, was relatively bloodless so it didn't even deliver on the gore like equally trashy SOV's like 555 and Night Ripper. Jesus, that's two movies I've watched in the last week that were WORSE than Night Ripper.

Zipperface and Donna Adams (both would never act again)

 

The killer barely does anything but crunch around in his leather suit and get kicked in the crotch. I wonder if Wes Craven was one of the dozen people who saw this movie and thought, that's something Hollywood needs, more bumbling killers! I will give credit where credit is due and say that for a movie that probably cost a dollar-fifty to make, there were a pair of decent stunts in a high fall and a car windshield hit that were both culled, among other things, for Carpenter Brut's video for Leather Teeth.

The rest, well, you've got a detective fraternizing with a creepy photographer suspect, a parade of the reddest of herrings and a killer whose knocking off witnesses because they could recognize him, even though he was wearing a mask the whole time.

Yeah, not the best. I wager director Mansour Pourmand should be thanking Brut for saving his movie from complete obscurity.