The year is 1799, and Ichabod Crane is a New York police constable who has been dispatched to Sleepy Hollow: an upstate Dutch hamlet where there have been a lot of brutal murders involving people getting their heads chopped off. He is welcomed by the town elders, including the wealthy businessman Baltus Van Tassel who has a beautiful young daughter named Katrina, who immediately shows an interest in Ichabod. And vice versa. Once he starts his investigation, he hears the story about what the locals believe to be the cause of all the decapitations: the Headless Horseman, who was once a Hessian mercenary from the American Revolutionary War. Ichabod just scoffs of such superstitious nonsense, but his skepticism is put to the test over and over again as more people keeps dying.
Sleepy Hollow is a dark fantasy horror film from 1999, directed by Tim Burton and loosely based on the 1820’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It stars Johnny Depp in the role as Ichabod Crane, and Christina Ricci in the role as Katrina. Christopher Lee also has a supporting role here, as the Burgomaster, among some other well-known faces. The development of the movie started in 1993, where Kevin Yagher was originally set to direct the film as some kind of low-budget slasher horror film. There were some disagreements, causing Paramount to demote Yagher to prosthetic makeup designer instead, and Tim Burton was brought on board in 1998.
Originally, the character Ichabod Crane is described as a very unattractive man in the novel, and Johnny Depp offered to wear prosthetics on his face to carry on those appearance traits. Paramount didn’t want any of that, though (hmmm….I wonder why…) so the character is more based on Ichabod’s squeamishness and eccentricity, but turning him into a skeptic. A rather big contrast to the animated Disney film from 1949 where he’s kind of a dick, and superstitious to the core.
The relationship between Ichabod and Katrina is handled in a completely different way here, and the characters are given much more depth and backstory, and we are also getting the backstory of the headless horseman himself. Especially grim is the story of Ichabod’s childhood and his mother’s death, which gives us a very grisly scene involving an iron maiden. Speaking of grisly scenes, there’s actually a fair amount of them so I think they decided to keep a little bit of that slasher flair from the original idea. There’s bloody and visceral decapitation scenes, and one scene where the headless horseman decapitates the parents of a child hiding under the floorboards, where the kid makes eye contact with his dead mother’s head before meeting the same fate himself, is a particularly vicious scene.
Tim Burton also included some scenes which are homages to the animated Disney movie The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad from 1949. This includes the scene where Ichabod crosses the bridge and hears the frogs croaking his name, and the scene with the flaming pumpkin. There’s a mix of fairytale and gothic horror in a perfect balance, where the slumbering and spooky village of Sleepy Hollow consists of beautiful periodic sets with crooked, twisted trees and old buildings which is a mix of Northern European and American colonial architecture. And while most of the movie was filmed in Leavesden and Shepperton studios, they actually built the village at the Hambleden estate at Lime Tree Valley. Compared to the Disney movie which was very colorful, this one is bleak and misty and kicks up the gothic atmosphere to eleven, perfectly complemented by Danny Elfman’s score.
Sleepy Hollow is a fun gothic horror story that oozes Tim Burton from start to finish, and while very much removed from the original Irving classic, it’s an inventive and fun reimagined version of the story. It is peak Tim Burton, and a perfect Halloween watch!
Director: Tim Burton Writers: Kevin Yagher, Andrew Kevin Walker Country & year: UK/USA/Germany, 1999 Actors: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gambon, Casper Van Dien, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Griffiths, Ian McDiarmid, Michael Gough, Christopher Walken, Lisa Marie IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162661/
– Funerals, bad marriages, lost loves, lonely beds. That’s our diet. We suck that misery and find it sweet. We search for more, always. ― Mr. Dark
As the 1980s came, The Walt Disney Mouse had reached the puberty/goth phase and wanted to break free from the family-friendly image to focus on more “mature“ films. Mickey pulled pretty much a Miley Cyrus, you might say. The mouse still kept the tongue in its mouth though. And after the mouse dipped its toes into the more dark fantasy territory with The Watcher in the Woods (1980), he decided to take it a step further with Something Wicked This Way Comes, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Also, this time, a director with a horror background, Jack Clayton, got hired who directed the box-office success The Innocents back in 1961. Bradbury himself wrote the screenplay.
This was the first and last genuine horror film from Disney, although I’d say that Return to Oz (1985) is pretty close to being in the same category.
Something Wicked This Way Comes starts with a wicked foreshadowing and sinister tone as the title suggests, where we see a locomotive in the dark distance coming towards us during the opening credits, heavily spiced-up with a wicked score by James Horner. Something wicked is on its way, that’s for sure. This was my very first gateway horror, so yeah, that opening scene alone made an impression on my early ghoulish childbrain.
It’s October, the weather is crisp, the year is 1920 and the place is the quiet and peaceful little Green Town in Illinois, shot in the beautiful countryside of Vermont. We meet the two young boys, Will Halloway (Vidal Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson), who’s been best friends even before they were born. Nothing much happens in the town, until one October night a train can be heard in the distance. But that’s not just a train; it’s the train of Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium carnival. Will and Jim eagerly run after the train, which miraculously has turned into the carnival itself in a matter of some seconds. Uhm…did we miss something? Yes, we actually did, which I’ll come back to. The exploration gets cut short when the boys get spooked away by a big spider in one of the trailers, where also the Dust Witch (Pam Grier) sits in the shadows.
As they return the next day, it all just looks like a plain, ordinary boring carnival. I agree. Cuz where’s the haunted house, The Satan’s Den? There’s a mirror-maze over there. So? I wanna see some ghosts, not a bunch of mirrors! Oh, you will see some spooky shit soon, just you wait. The whole town is there, even Will and Jim’s mousy old teacher Miss Foley. When they sneak into a closed area to discover the classic horse carousel, they get grabbed by Mr. Cooger and handed over to Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce) ― a charismatic British magician who fits his name, just like Ritchie Blackmore. If he was a German, his name would be Herr Dunkel! And there’s nothing shady about him. Just look at his kind eyes and the cheerful smirk. Well, he’s kind enough to let them go with a warning and gives them a free ticket to the horses when it gets reopened.
The boys hide to see what’s going on after closing time, and spies on Mr. Dark and Cooger as they do a test run on the horses. And what in the actual tarnation… the carousel goes backwards and reverses Cooger into a little boy that would fit right in with the children of the corn. And, well… this is just a taste of Mr. Dark’s shenanigans. It’s also been ages since I read the book, but I can say that there’s some striking similarities to find in Stephen King’s Needful Things (1993). Townspeople there start to disappear after they’ve made some of their deepest, delusional wishes and unfulfilled desires, buried by time and dust, to come true ― granted by none other than Mr. Dark. And with the wishes comes a price/curse. Old Miss Foley wishes to be young and beautiful again. As she looks in the mirror and transforms into a twenty-five-year-old blonde, she loses her sight where “Looks can be deceiving“ gives a new brutal, ironic twist. And like the hardcore malignant narcissist that Mr. Dark is, who feeds on other people’s suffering, what’s better than to grant someone wishes and, at the same time, make them handicapped to live in a mental prison so they can never enjoy the magical fix? How wicked! A porn-addict would get a collection of all the porn magazines, but have both hands paralyzed so he can’t masturbate. Oof. The ultimate endgame is that it will be a thousand years to next Christmas. Fine with me, as long as we have Halloween.
We also have the son/dad relationship between Will and his dad, Charles (Jason Robards), who’s getting eaten alive by guilt and shame when he couldn’t save his son from drowning in a river when he was little. Instead, Jim’s dad had to step in. An incident that broke him as he talks much about death and dying, and that three AM is The Soul’s Midnight, where many people die. And then he means old people, of course. He’s the town’s librarian and maybe reads a lot of Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, dad is depressed while he smokes cigars like a chimney, has a bad heart, and Will just wishes he could be happy. But the thing is that he’s pretty old, and cutting the cigar and not smoking yourself to emphysema would be a nice start before you say to your son that Just tell me that I will live forever. Then I’ll be happy. But if dad couldn’t save his son back then, he gets a new chance when Will and Jim is getting caught in the web of Mr. Dark.
So, what we have here is a mix different layers like coming-of-age, on both sides, acceptance of mortality, to the bitter and shallow greediness where only thing counts in the end: What’s inside. Too mature for the kids to fully grasp and not so scary for the older audience. Caught between a rock and a hard place. That said, on the surface, there’s a lot to enjoy in Something Wicked. The overall atmosphere reeks of dead leaves where the crisp colorful autumn scenery is like watching a classic oil painting coming to life. Jason Robards, and at the time a relatively unknown Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark does a great combo as Good vs Evil, where their scene in the library is pretty intense just on a psychological angle alone. And no one rips books apart in a more classy way than Mr. Dark as each glowing page represents one lost year after the other of Mr. Halloway’s life. It’s also worth mentioning that Stan Winston is an uncredited effect-maker here, where he was behind a memorable scene at the end where Mr. Dark is having an extreme ghoulish makeover. Unfortunately, some of it was cut as it got too realistic. Well, that’s Stan Winston for you. Man, I hope we get to see all these deleted scenes one day, but I think that train has vanished into the lost media realm a long time ago.
Several other scenes that included some of the earliest uses of CGI combined with animation were cut from the film. Such as the scene where Mr. Dark’s carnival train arrives and becomes the carnival as it enfolds and builds itself up while the boys are witnessing the paranormal spectacle. The effects were made by the team who had recently worked on Tron (1982). But since it wasn’t convincing enough, we just have to use the imagination like when one of the boys says but how could it…
And then we have the scene where Mr. Dark uses his magic to make a green-glowing mist follow after the boys. The original idea was to have a big ghostly disembodied hand to reach for the boys inside their house. Since the effect wasn’t realistic enough, there was plan B: Spiders! A lot of spiders. Of course. And there’s no surprise that the two young actors would prefer the ghost hand instead of a chaotic shoot with 200 tarantulas. But like we always say: that’s showbiz.
Speaking of showbiz: Something Wicked This Way Comes was a pretty wicked production filled with bumps, hiccups and fights, that makes for some juicy stuff for the trivia section. Writer Ray Bradbury and director Jack Clayton wanted to stay as faithful to the novel as possible, while Disney wanted a more accessible, family-friendly film. And there you already have the door wide open for conflicts, bullshit and headaches. Jack Clayton was also notoriously hard to work with, and I doubt that working with drunk madman Sam Peckinpah would be much easier, who was considered to direct the film in the 1970s. After a disastrous test-screening, Disney fired the original editor, got rid of the original score by Georges Delerue, amped up the budget of 4 million, spent several months of polishing and hired James Horner to make a new score. A new narration was inserted, and the whole third act was re-shot along with the opening. The original score was scrapped because it was too dark — which is pretty baffling considering that Disney decided to keep the shot where we see one of the boys getting his head chopped off by a guillotine, with blood and all. And what could be too dark when you already have a villain called Mr. Dark? Huh… Disney Mouse was surely in an identity crisis here, but that comes with puberty. While all this sounds just like a normal day at the Marvel Studios (from the last five, six years), these movies from the Disney-after-dark era actually turned up to be surprisingly good that still holds up, despite the behind-the-scenes turmoils and bad box-offices. Bradbury also referred to the film’s final cut as “not a great film, no, but a decently nice one.“
Something Wicked is on Blu-ray, but from I’ve heard, it’s the same quality from the DVD’s, with no bonus content. The film has been a rarity for many years and got just recently its first streaming release on Disney+. Another rarity I have to mention, is the bizarre, zero-budget and somewhat trippy amateur film adaptation from 1972, made by the British underground filmmaker Colin Finbow. Watching this on LSD with headphones is maybe the best way.
Director: Jack Clayton Writer: Ray Bradbury Country & year: USA, 1983 Actors: Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards, Vidal Peterson, Shawn Carson, Royal Dano, Pam Grier, Mary Grace Canfield, Bruce M. Fischer, Richard Davalos, Jake Dengel, Ellen Geer, Diane Ladd IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086336/
We’re in the year 1957, at Alpine Lake Camp during the winter. A girl is making a call from a phone booth placed nearby the camp’s frozen lake, a conversation that later proves to be an important part of the movie’s plot. Then we head further ahead in time, to October 1982. It’s now been a while since Finney Blake was able to kill his abductor, the serial killer called the Grabber, and is trying to cope with the trauma in his own ways. Which seems to involve beating the hell out of other students who dares to even glance at him the wrong way, and smoke a ton of pot. It goes without saying that the kid is basically just spiraling further down the darkest misery-filled rabbithole at this point, but I guess he didn’t exactly grow up with the best role models for how to cope with shit in healthy ways as his father kept drowning his sorrows with whiskey and beer, causing him to often be abusive and mean towards his children.
In this movie, however, it is revealed that the father has reached a three year milestone of sobriety, but is still struggling with urges that he determinedly resists. All the power and kudos to him for that. Another character who is struggling is Finney’s sister Gwen, who keeps having strange dreams…all of which lead to a clue about their mother having worked at Alpine Lake Camp. Together with Gwen’s date Ernesto (the brother of Robin Arellano who was one of the Grabber’s victims in the first movie), they travel to the camp which is a Christian youth camp. Upon arrival, a heavy blizzard traps them at the place where there are only a handful of other people, which are only staff. And the phone booth back from 1957? It’s still there, of course, just not in a working order…but we all know that ghosts don’t need things to work in order to make use of them for communication. It doesn’t take long before Finney receives phone calls from the dead, including the Grabber who vows revenge. And it also seems that there were some grisly murders of a group of young boys at the camp sometime back in the day…and their bodies still haven’t been found.
Black Phone 2 is a supernatural horror movie directed by Scott Derrickson, co-written with C. Robert Cargill and produced by Jason Blum. It’s a sequel to Black Phone, and stars several of the actors from the first film reprising their roles. The first movie, which was based on a short story by Joe Hill, became a success and a sequel was soon in the works. Hill mentioned that his inspiration for a sequel was the “iconic imagery“ of the Grabber’s masks. And while Hill didn’t write a story for the film, he did provide the concept for it which was simply put into this sentence: “A phone rings, Finney answers, and it’s The Grabber calling from hell“. Plain and simple.
While the first movie’s plot was primarily about a real and living serial killer, the supernatural aspects were also present as the character Finney was able to communicate with the killer’s earlier victims through a disconnected black phone. In that regard, it’s not much of a surprise that the Grabber has now turned into a vengeful ghost, and the movie doesn’t need to invent some kind of explanation for how it turned into something supernatural. Those themes were already totally present in the first. And while Finney was the protagonist in the first film, this sequel leans its narrative a lot more on Gwen’s character with her nightmares meshed with visions of the past. The siblings both have the gift (or curse, depending on your point of view) of being contacted by the dead, but while Finney’s contact is restricted by phone calls, Gwen gets contacted while she’s asleep, often causing her to sleepwalk while having the nightmares.
And speaking of the nightmares: I really love the grainy look of those scenes, which were primarily shot on 8mm film using a Super-8 camera. Not only does it give the viewer an immediate heads-up when we’re in dreamland, but it also gives those scenes such a haunting vibe. The dreams also don’t work as some kind of tease or false threat like so often in many other horror movies. The threat here is very real once Gwen falls asleep, where the Grabber has become some kind of Freddy Krueger entity that can kill you in your dreams. Hmmm…a camp, and a dead serial killer threatening to kill you while you’re dreaming? Yeah, you don’t really need to be a horror buff to notice the obvious Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street references here. However, that doesn’t mean the film ventures into some kind of rip-off territory, it’s very much its own nightmare set in the coldest, bleakest wintertime, but with some nods and references to horror classics and 80’s horror. Oh, and the ice skating scene? Yup, Derrickson confirmed that this was a nod to Curtains from 1983.
The synthwave-infused music score by Atticus Derrickson (the director’s son) layers the movie with a perfect dreamlike mood, often more calm and brooding than fast-paced and aggressive, which gives it a slightly hypnotic flair. There’s also many effectively creepy scenes, including the vicious killings of the boys from the camp. The winter setting with all the snow and ice helps setting a more isolated and trapped feeling, and there’s even a scene with a snowman that manages to deliver a spooky moment.
Black Phone 2 is a strong sequel filled with supernatural and bloody carnage. It’s a new addition to the formula of serial killers and the dead refusing to stay dead, but a fun and gory one where I wouldn’t really mind if they decide that death won’t be final this time around either. Serial killers rarely stay dead in horror anyway (like Dexter‘s son also realized recently) so perhaps we’ll see a Black Phone 3 sometime in the close future.
Director: Scott Derrickson Writers: C. Robert Cargill, Scott Derrickson Country & year: USA, 2025 Actors: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Jeremy Davies, Anna Lore, Madeleine McGraw, Demián Bichir, Arianna Rivas, Miguel Mora, Graham Abbey, Maev Beaty IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29644189/
Moon’s fuller than usual tonight, says the old alcoholic uncle Ned, as he and his nephew Larry are driving the big Satan’s Den truck to a carnival. The same night, we also see a man running through the woods from a group of Satanic cult members with three ghoulies trapped in a sack bag. He hides in an empty gas station where he dumps the ghoulies in a gallon of toxic waste. The man falls down into the waste himself when he suddenly gets attacked by a bat ghoulie. Not only one or two, but FOUR ghoulies rise from the toxic waste, just because, to make sure that we’ll have a fun, cheesy and entertaining sequel for the whole family. And the kids should know by now that there are no monsters in the toilet, unless you happen to live in Australia. We also get introduced to a new type of ghoulie here, the Toad Ghoulie. Uncle Ned and Larry stop by the station where the little rascals hide in the truck, and something wicked this way comes to a carnival not so far away.
The carnival is an economic crisis, and all the attractions that don’t make any profit during the upcoming weekend will be closed down. And all of us ghouls can agree that a carnival without a haunted house is not a carnival. And if The Satan’s Den goes, it will be replaced with a ladies’ mud wrestling tent. Meh. The young and smug businessman, Philip Hardin, who owns the carnival with his company and thinks he’s Tom Cruise from Risky Business, will make sure of that. The trio who runs the haunted house, Uncle Ned, Larry and the littleman Sir Nigel, has a lot of work to do. Well, that goes for Larry and Nigel, as Uncle Ned is drunk all the time and believes everything will be solved by magic. Try black magic instead. Oops, someone already did. And that leads us to the ghoulies who are hiding somewhere in the Den, waiting eagerly for the audience to show up so they can have some kill counts.
Ghoulies II is this time directed by Albert Band, the dad of Charles and composer Richard, and this is probably the most polished film in the franchise. There’s also a couple of known faces here like veteran Royal Dano as drunk Ned, and Phil Fondacaro as Nigel, who looks like a shrunken Frank Miller in his older years. Even though the acting here is better than the first one, the rest of the cast are NPC’s, and the romance sideplots are just dead meat to flush down the toilet for the sewer rats. The good news is that the ghoulies themselves have far more screentime here both in form of puppetry and stop-motion by David Allen. The tone is also way more consistent with its blend of comedy and light-hearted silly horror where the carnival-setting amps up the fun-factor and some extra cozy/charming nostalgic atmosphere.
The film also works fine as an isolated watch as it has no connections with the first. The same can be said about Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College. And that one is actually what it sounds like: the ghoulies gets drunk on a college campus, filled with cringe humor and as little horror elements as possible where the only one missing is Pauly Shore. Haven’t seen the fourth one yet.
Director: Albert Band Writers: Danny Bilson, Dennis Paoli Country & year: USA, 1987 Actors: Damon Martin, Royal Dano, Phil Fondacaro, J. Downing, Kerry Remsen, Dale Wyatt, Jon Pennell, Sasha Jenson, Starr Andreeff, William Butler, Donnie Jeffcoat, Christopher Burton IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093091/
Let’s get high, have some good laughs, and unleash the Ghoulies!
This 1980s nonsensical and messy chees-o-rama fest from none other than Charles Band’s Empire Pictures starts pretty much how you’d expect, or maybe not: with a bizarre Satanic Illuminati-like ritual in Rob Zombie’s Halloween-basement dungeon where the baby boy, John, is ready to be sacrificed. The baby gets put on an altar where a demonic-looking dude with green-glowing eyes, Malcolm Grave, is about to kill the baby with a dagger. Among the small group of cult members, we also have the small grotesque troublemakers that are the Ghoulies who seem to enjoy the show. The ritual gets stopped by his wife because it turns out that the boy is actually their child. Ok, that’s some fucking dark shit! Whore! He’s mine, he says. A talisman is put around the boy’s neck so he can’t be touched by evil. Now that the baby is useless, it gets taken away and saved by Wolfgang, one of the cult members. Malcolm instead sacrifices the wife with his Satanic powers by bursting her chest open, off-screen, of course. And for what purpose? Who knows.
Then we jump to many years later where John has grown up, and has inherited his father’s mansion with his girlfriend Rebecca. And he was, of course, too young to remember what once happened in the basement. But one who clearly does is Wolfgang, who raised him and now works as a traumatized caretaker. Nothing much has been done with the place as it’s filled with rats and cobwebs. Down in the basement which the caretaker Wolfgang should have been clever enough to seal off already a long time ago, John finds the old ritual outfit of his dad and a Satanic diary. Nothing bad can happen now, nothing at all.
John and Rebecca are supposed to be in their college year, yet they look to be in their mid 30s. Rebecca wants to throw a party where we meet a bunch of goofy characters. The ones who stick out are the two stoned nutbrains, who must have been completely strung out for real during the making of this schlockfest. Can’t blame them. After some breakdancing and retarded pickup lines such as They call me…DICK! But you can call me…DICK! (go and fuck a cactus, dick, without rubber). John has an idea: Let’s do a ritual. But you, unfortunately, have to wait a little longer for the Ghoulies to show up, because… well, I guess he has to grow his Satanic powers up a few levels.
The original story for the Ghoulies was supposed to be very different from the final product, with a much darker and serious tone. But when director Luca Bercovici first saw the ghoulies in motion, he spat out his red wine, laughed and said: this movie should be a comedy! John Carl Buechler, who designed the cute little monsters, actually took offense. Because how dare you call these monster creatures, which I’ve worked so hard on, funny?! So, the script got rewritten to a comedy, a script that looks like it was made up as they went along while the cocaine floated in the air, and actors were recast. So yeah, it’s no surprise that the tone is all over the place at most times. In the midst of filming, the production got sued when some illiterate at Warner Bros claimed that the title Ghoulies was too like Gremlins, which was in production at the same time as Ghoulies. WB, of course, lost. The messy and bumpy history behind the film is enough to fill a whole book.
And if you’re expecting something like the aforementioned Gremlins or maybe Critters, you’d be disappointed. The ghoulies themselves are more of a sideshow here that pops up now and then just to show off some decent old-school puppetry effects. Here we have Clown Doll Ghoulie, the Fish Ghoulie (aka the Toilet Ghoulie), Bat Ghoulie, Rat Ghoulie, and then we have our personal favorite: the adorable Cat Ghoulie (heart emoji). The few scenes we have with the ghoulies are fun enough, and we get to see more of them in the sequel. Because here we also have to make room for… a dwarf warrior couple, from Nelwyn, I guess, because the script just said so. Malcolm the dead Satanist, who’s the main villain, rises from his grave outside the mansion. He then shapeshifts into a blonde milf to seduce Dick and strangle him with her tongue. No blowjob for Mr. Dick. The film finally gets flushed straight down the toilet by a bullshit ending that would fit more in a filler episode of Goosebumps. Not that it would make more sense, but still.
And speaking of toilets: the poster, which is way more iconic than the film itself, and had the first tagline They’ll Eat Your Ass!, caused some uproar when it scared the kids from using the toilet. Jaws made people afraid of swimming, Psycho made people afraid of showers, and Ghoulies made kids shit in buckets and stink out the whole neighborhood instead of sitting on the toilet. A mob of angry parents wrote letters to Charles Band’s office to let them know, in the middle of the Satanic Panic storm and all. Priceless! All these letters should have been added in the ending credits just to put the icing on the cake.
Director: Luca Bercovici Writers: Luca Bercovici, Jefery Levy Country & year: USA, 1984 Actors: Peter Liapis, Lisa Pelikan, Michael Des Barres, Jack Nance, Peter Risch, Tamara De Treaux, Scott Thomson, Ralph Seymour, Mariska Hargitay, Mariska Hargitay, Keith Joe Dick, David Dayan IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089200/
Albert Wilmarth is a folklore lecturer at the Miskatonic University in Arkham. Albert have been receiving letters from a man named Henry Wentworth Akeley, who lives in an isolated farmhouse in Vermont. In the letters, this man claims that he’s got proof that there are creatures surrounding his farm, and they start exchanging letters back and forth. Albert, of course, is a skeptic, and he’s about to enter a debate with Charles Fort about the strange events during some heavy rains in Vermont. Unexpectedly, Henry’s son appears with photos of the creatures as evidence, and it all ends with Albert heading out to visit the man, and is shocked to find him in a completely frail state, immobilized to his chair and preferring the darkness. Yeah…nothing suspicious going on here, not at all…
Henry starts telling Albert about the creatures, how wonderful they are and how much knowledge they have. He also tells Albert something rather disturbing…they can, apparently, extract the brain from a human and place it in a canister where it can live indefinitely. In such a state, a human could even endure the dangers of space travel. How tempting! Or maybe not. Before Albert may start suspecting all this rubbish is only the result of too much isolation (and perhaps too much moonshine), he gets to see one of these “living brains“, who tells him about the journey to Yuggoth, which is where the creatures originally reside. And they urge Albert to take the trip too…
The Whisperer in Darkness is a sci-fi horrormovie from 2011, directed and produced by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, and David Robertson, distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. It is based on the Lovecraft short story by the same name. It’s made in black & white, intended to capture the look of the classic horror films from the 30’s. And just like their previous film, The Call of Cthulhu from 2005, they’ve managed to capture the moody atmosphere tinged with an underlying unease of the terror of the unknown. Visually, it looks great, and they’ve really captured the 30’s aesthetics.
Plot-wise, the movie follows the original story quite closely until the latter part where originally, the story ends much earlier. It’s during this latter part that the tone of the film takes a kind of shift, where new material is introduced that were not part of the original Lovecraft story. Then we get what I can best describe as some kind of adventure plot, and we even have full-on CGI monster displays which I honestly didn’t expect. And yeah…at this point it ends up straying far from the moody, mysterious vibe which is all about atmosphere and fear of the unknown (which is, of course, the substance of most Lovecraft stories), and they definitely took more liberties here compared to The Call of Cthulhu. Now, I personally don’t think any of this ruins the film in any way, and most of Lovecraft’s stories are a bit hard to put into a full-feature film since the main horror elements in the stories are not really the monsters or creatures themselves, but the mystery surrounding their existence and all the things we don’t know and their implications.
A big kudos to the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society for bringing some of Lovecraft’s work to the screen while keeping so much of the original mood and atmosphere of the original stories. It’s impressive what they’ve been able to pull off with a very limited budget and mostly dedicated, talented amateurs. These movies are made with obvious love and affection for the original work, and that’s a pleasure to see.
Director: Sean Branney Writers: Sean Branney, Andrew Leman Country & year: USA, 2012 Actors: Stephen Blackehart, P.J. King, Zack Gold, Barry Lynch, Autumn Wendel, Annie Abrams, Daniel Kaemon, Matt Lagan, Casey Kramer, Sean Branney, Andrew Leman IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1498878/
Micheal Brower is a teen who lives a very lonely life. His mother was killed in a car accident, where his leg was permanently injured, and nowadays his father is mostly absent. He spends most of his days alone in the house, watching horror movies and playing video games, and spying on his neighbor crush Kimberly. His only friend, Kyle, is a misfit just like himself, and they’re both members of the school’s “Horror Club“. One day, Kyle tells Michael about this ultra-realistic horror game called Brainscan. Michael, of course, gets interested and soon has the first disc of the game in his mail. Upon starting the game, he is warned that the game is using what is similar to hypnotism, and soon Michael finds himself in a “game“ that looks just as real as life itself. The game’s host, simply referred to as “Trickster“, greets him in an exaggerated and almost clownish way, and encourages him to go on a psycho-murder spree. Why not…it’s just a game, right? The first level of the game includes Michael going into a stranger’s home, murdering him and taking the man’s foot as a trophy. Then, after finishing the game’s current mission and getting back to “real life“, he finds himself both a little confused and thrilled about the experience. That is…until the next day, when he discovers that the exact same murder happened close to his home. Did he really kill someone that night? When Michael refuses to continue playing the game, the Trickster materializes and torments him, until he’s got no choice but to continue playing…
Brainscan is a horror film from 1994, directed by John Flynn and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. The script for the movie was originally centered around a VHS tape, but producer Michel Roy did some uncredited re-writes which turned the VHS into a CD-ROM video game, which would suit the times better with the growing fascination of virtual reality. Even the Trickster was Michel Roy’s invention, as the original script only included a voice that kept calling Michael by phone.
The premise of Brainscan is definitely intriguing. Virtual Reality had its real take-off in popularity during the early 90’s, despite there being several other attempts much earlier, like Morton Heilig’s Sensorama from the 1950’s, which was an arcade-style theatre cabinet with stereo speakers, stereoscopic 3D display, generators for smells and a vibrating chair (ladies must’ve loved that particular feature), and Ivan Sutherland’s “Ultimate Display“ concept, for example. For a very long time, we have been fascinated with the idea of experiencing some kind of reality where one could experience things that are not possible in the real world…or do things without any consequences. So the idea of a Virtual Reality game, so real that it feels like life itself, is a concept that probably felt both near and far in the early 90’s. And this movie really tries to show Michael off as some real high-tech boy with all the latest gadgets, having a large room in the attic/upper floor filled with video game, heavy metal and horror memorabilia. He even has his own computer-“Igor“ answering his phone calls and all (if I had watched this movie as a kid, I would’ve been envious as fuck). Still, it’s one of those typical 90’s movie settings where the “high tech“ almost seem a little alternative-reality like…there’s just something so weird about movies where “imagined near future technology“ is presented in such an odd old-fashioned way. I kind of find it a little charming, in its own peculiar way.
While the video game itself is more or less the “villain“ here, there’s a personification of it through the character Trickster who looks like a mishmash of Alice Cooper, Freddy Krueger, Steven Tyler and Mok Swagger. Mostly an overtly jolly (and somewhat obnoxious) character that is all in for the fun and games, as long as you still wanna play. Once Michael wants out, it becomes clear that this is a game you’ll have to play until the end. Whether that means the game’s end or your own…
While the movie is cheesy as hell, it manages to be suspenseful enough during the scenes where Michael is trying to figure out what really happened and how he can possibly get out of this mess. It’s a fun ride from start to finish, and then, of course, the movie also offers a little bit of a surprise in the ending, which ought to get a little chuckle out of most people. Too bad we didn’t get the sequel.
Brainscan is one of those rather hidden 90’s horror gems, not a classic by any means, but one that has more than enough cheesy fun for you to enjoy which undoubtedly also plays in a bit on the nostalgia…at least for us older ghouls.
Director: John Flynn Writers: Brian Owens, Andrew Kevin Walker Country & year: USA, 1994 Actors: Edward Furlong, Frank Langella, T. Ryder Smith, Amy Hargreaves, Jamie Galen, Victor Ertmanis, David Hemblen, Vlasta Vrana IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109327/
Waxwork II starts immediately where the first film left us (spoiler alert if you haven’t already seen the first movie!) where Mark and Sarah are escaping the waxwork that’s burning down to the ground. While they board a taxi and get the hell out of there, we see that they’re not the only ones who were able to escape: the severed hand from the zombie exhibit is crawling out of the space, Thing-style, and follows Sarah to her home. There, we get introduced to her abusive a-hole stepfather, who gets killed by the zombie hand with a hammer. Who gets the blame? Sarah, of course, and then everything is turned into some murder-trial-defense scenario. Mark, desperate to save his girlfriend, tries to find a way to convince the jury that a zombie hand really killed her stepfather, but in order to do so he needs to prove that such a Thing exists in the first place, and thus Mark must travel through several worlds in order to gather evidence that can save Sarah. Aaand here we go into total sci-fi/fantasy/cosmic/something-something hodgepodge that only makes the slightest sense if you’ve been dosing on some magic mushrooms.
Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a dark fantasy comedy horror film from 1992, written and directed by Anthony Hickox who also wrote and directed the first film, Waxwork (1988). It premiered in the Philippines on March 26, 1992, and got a direct-to-video release in the US later that year despite originally having been intended as a theatrical release like its predecessor.
Like the first movie, there’s some familiar faces to see. Zach Gilligan reprises his role as Mark, the protagonist. David Carradine (well known as Bill in the Kill Bill movies) also has a role here as a beggar, and we have Bruce Campbell in possibly the best segment in the movie, shot in black & white which is a homage to The Haunting from 1963 (the segment even has the same title).
Overall, the movie is complete nonsense from start to finish. It’s a lot more goofy than the first, and paying tons more homages to horror classics of all kinds with more than a few nods to multiple fantasy films as well. Unlike the first film, there’s no Wax Museum here, just…portals to other dimensions or something like that, which are all homages to other films. And there’s sooo much here: nods to Nosferatu, Godzilla, Dawn of the Dead, Alien, etc. etc. Just like the first, it isn’t afraid to spill a bit of blood for us gorehounds, sometimes doused with a good amount of cheese, like the scene with Bruce Campbell getting his ribcage exposed, and Frankenstein doing a good old head-smashing with popping eyeballs and a brain flying straight out of the top of the skull. Great times! There’s also a rather lengthy medieval segment which does outstay its welcome a bit, but it’s also where most of the (nonsensical) story is progressing, and where the villain, Lord Scarabus, resides.
It’s hard to really get much into this movie plot-wise as it’s so all over the place and so silly and nonsensical that just trying to think too much about it makes me feel like my brain is going to take a flight just like in the Frankenstein scene. If you thought the first movie was too asinine for your taste, then gee whiz, are you going to have some trouble with this one…
Overall, Waxwork II: Lost in Time is a fun watch if you’ve already seen the first and can enjoy movies that are utter silliness. It’s got its fair share of charm and entertainment value despite being somewhat of a mess. One of the major highlights in the movie are the tons of horror references that’s bound to be a fun watch for most horror fans.
Writer and director: Anthony Hickox Country & year: USA, 1992 Actors: Zach Galligan, Monika Schnarre, Martin Kemp, Bruce Campbell, Michael Des Barres, Jim Metzler, Sophie Ward, Marina Sirtis, David Carradine, Alexander Godunov, George ‘Buck’ Flower IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105792/
Two college students, Sarah and China, have a strange encounter with an odd gentleman who owns a mysterious wax museum and invites them to have a look at the exhibit. Later, they bring along with them some of their friends: Mark, Gemma, James, and Tony. The museum has a lot of morbid displays, but nothing suspicious about that, it’s just the perfect ghoulish fun any horror wax museum should have. But of course, there’s something sinister at play…and the college students soon find out that if they get too close to an exhibit, they will end up in a pocket dimension where the scene unfolds in real life. Tony ends up in a werewolf exhibit where he encounters a hunter and his son, who is there to kill the creature. There’s no surprise that this doesn’t end well for Tony. China is sent to a castle where none other than Count Dracula himself turns her into a vampire. Mark and Sarah, however, never gets too close to any of the exhibits, and leave the museum while wondering where the hell their friends are at. Soon, they both realize something is very wrong with the museum, and they even try to make the police intervene. You can probably guess how that goes. Still, the museum has a lot more in store for its visitors…a lot more!
Waxwork is a comedy horror film from 1988, written and directed by Anthony Hickox in his directorial debut. It is partially inspired by Waxworks, a German silent film from 1924.
Waxwork is a very good mix of horror and comedy, where the tone is overall very whimsical but also offers a nice amount of decent gore scenes. It’s quite campy at times, but that only works in the movie’s favor. The practical effects here are pretty good, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when Bob Keen was brought on board to work on the visuals effects. His special effects can also be seen in other horror movies like Hellraiser (1987), Lifeforce (1985), among several more. Like a typical teen-slasher, though, the movie is set up with a lot of teen characters you couldn’t really give a fiddle about. So don’t expect any great in-depth personalities or anything…most of them are just there to get killed off by the exhibits. There is also a pretty bonkers finale, filled with chaos and absurd fun!
Some familiar faces can be seen here, including Zach Galligan as Mark, who is most known for his role in Gremlins (1984), David Warner as the Waxwork man, known for his roles in many films and series, including Omen (1976), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Ice Cream Man (1995) and many more. And there’s also Mihaly ‘Michu’ Meszaros who is most known for a full-body costume role where you’d never recognize him: ALF aka “Gordon Shumway“! Aside from some well-known actors, the movie includes a ton of references to many horror icons among the exhibits “coming to life“: there’s a werewolf, vampires, a Golem, a mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster, Jack the Ripper, and so much more! Even Marquis de Sade, a real-life french nobleman who was, and still is, notorious for his writings and from where the term Sadism stems from. Whether or not he was just a depraved monster or a misunderstood genius in a whole other debate, though, but in this movie he’s one of the major villains.
Waxwork is one of those 80’s horror movies where you just sit back, and more or less nods to yourself and thinking “yup, this is one of those movies that could only have been made back in the day“. Easily a typical comfort-horror. A nice 80’s horror film filled with nonsense of the fun and ghoulish kind!
Writer and director: Anthony Hickox Country & year: USA, 1988 Actors: Zach Galligan, Jennifer Bassey, Joe Baker, Deborah Foreman, Michelle Johnson, David Warner, Eric Brown, Buckley Norris, Dana Ashbrook, Micah Grant, Mihaly ‘Michu’ Meszaros, John Rhys-Davies IMDb:https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096426/
Just like the previous one, Phantasm III, also known as Lord of the Dead BooooOOOOYS, picks up right after the previous ended. So no, it wasn’t all a dream, after all. Or maybe a dream within a dream…who the hell knows. Reggie gets out of The Tall Man’s hearse while it’s moving, all messy and bloody before the car suddenly explodes. Liz dies instantly while Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) survives but gets knocked unconsciously. Reggie and Mike get surrounded by the evil Jawas and The Tall Man, who holds the severed head of Liz. Reggie unlocks a timer grenade to just end it all. I don’t want him in pieces (Mike), The Tall Man says. Well, as it looks like now, that’s the only way he’s gonna get him. The Tall Man backs off before he tells Reggie to take good care of Mike while he waits.
Mike gets taken to the hospital where he falls into a coma. It doesn’t look too good, as he’s walking towards the light in a bright blue hallway among other dead silhouettes. And I’m sure I spotted Tangina and Kane for a second. But one particular sticks out. It’s… Jodi, Mike’s dead big brother, again played by Bill Thornbury. And he looks bored of his mind. After a quick reunion, Jodi tells Mike to stay away from the light and go back. The Tall man shows up and orders him with his strict boooOOOY line delivery to turn back since he wants him alive. Mike wakes up only to get attacked by a ghoulish nurse. Mike shoves a metal pipe through her neck. Reggie comes in and gets her yellow blood spurted all over his face. A sphere forces itself out of her scalp and flies in front of Mike. An eye comes out of the Sphere (yes, they have eyes now) to take a good look at Mike before it flies out of the window. WTF. Just another day in Phantasm land.
Mike and Reg drive away to find an abandoned house to take shelter for the night. Jodi pops up again and transforms himself into a sphere. Why? Who knows. Reg is fed up with the bullshit and just wants to shoot it right away. Can’t you hear it? It’s Jodi. He’s in the ball, talking to me, says a robotic and not-so convincing A. Michael Baldwin. This is certainly not the same Baldwin we saw in the first film. His replacement from Phantasm II must have broken him. And now that Mike finally stands on his feet again, The Tall Man walks in to claim him. It’s time now, boy! Jody, or JodySphere, gets transformed by a rusty useless ball by The Tall Man, before he and Mike disappear into a dimension far, far away. Reggie takes JodySphere with him, drives through abandoned ghost towns, once again in Supernatural-style, with his 1971 Cuda to track down The Tall Man and save Mike.
A. Michael Baldwin’s return as Mike gets rather cut short as the plot takes a complete detour with a bloated but entertaining sideplot where Reggie joins forces with the boy Tim (Kevin Connors), the tough nunchaku chick Rocky (Gloria Lynne Henry) and gets some bumps in the road by a small gang of scavengers. The aspects with Tim is pretty fun though, as he lives alone in his house after his parents got killed by, yeah you guess it, The Tall Man, and rigged the whole place with death traps and small escape doorways. The idea with Tim could have worked as a movie by itself or a spin-off. There’s an awkward non-romance moment with Reg and Rocky at a motel where he gets tricked into having some kink time in handcuffs, only to dupe him so she can have a good night’s sleep. Then we have the obligatory mausoleum scenes where spheres show up and make a bloody mess. The spheres have gotten more upgrades, like eyes used as surveillance cameras, and they also have Homer Simpson-sized brains that are small enough to fit.
After the previous film underperformed, Don Coscarelli was back on the independent playground. Whether that was for the best or worse, is another question. Bringing back A. Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury was an obvious choice now that Coscarelli was free to do what the hell he wanted. Just too bad that the chemistry between the two brothers is like two wet socks. Things are far from what they once were in 1979, and not just with Baldwin. I bet that Coscarelli got cold feet, tossed the brothers in the backburner, rewrote the script and placed Reggie in the front seat with brand new colorful characters.
As a direct-to-video, Phantasm III looks pretty polished with some fun action, wild car chases, explosions, gore, zany sci-fi moments, nods to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and, overall, what makes a great Phantasm film. It doesn’t have much of the spooky atmosphere as the first two, but is still an entertaining ride with lots of 1990s charm. The leftovers of the bigger WTFs get saved for the last 15 minutes or so, where we only get more cryptic questions than answers just to open the doors for a quick cliffhanger. And honestly, the franchise could as well just have ended here, because the next two installments we got are just … bollocks. If you thought that these films weren’t confusing enough, you’ve seen nothing yet.
Just to quote The Tall Man himself: It’s Never Over!
Don Coscaralli followed up with Phantasm IV: Oblivion four years later. The only significant thing we get is a quick backstory to The Tall Man, which isn’t that interesting. Some regard this as the best in the series, for some reason, and others as the worst (that was until we got the fifth film). My main issue is that this is just a dull movie that tries to go back to its roots with a slowburn pace that goes nowhere. Poor Reggie gets a flat tire (if I remember right) and has a long dull fight scene with a zombie cop. And Mike? He’s… somewhere.
There’s no set-pieces here, just the empty desert environment of Death Valley, where Mike just drives through the dark ether, sleeps in the car and walks aimlessly in the sunny desert as if he is just having an existential midlife crisis. And maybe that’s the case. What the hell do I know. The leftover scenes from the first film, that were used for time traveling, could be a great idea if we got some more than just dead meat and fillertime to close the whole blurry mess with It was just the wind.
Then, after 17 years, we finally got Phantasm: Ravager. And, oh man… The “plot“ here is that Reggie is withering away in a nursing home with dementia where he dips in and out of dreamland where we follow him in different random scenarios to look for Mike… even though Mike visits Reggie regularly while he’s lying in his bed and looking confused. And drawing the parallels between the real Reggie Bannister’s unfortunate health condition makes this even more sad. Melancholia isn’t an unknown thick layer for the Phantasm universe, but this is just depressing, in a bad way. Another day in Phantasm land or not, I wanna go home now.
We have lots of terrible green screens in the most classy SyFy Channel-style, where you’re almost expecting David Hasselhoff to pop out and sing Hooked on a Feeling any minute. This is the worst kind of fan fiction slop one can shart out. Ravager was originally meant to be a series of short films with no other ambitions than dump it on YouTube. And it clearly shows and explains everything. The film was directed by David Hartman, and I’m a little shocked that Don Coscarelli actually was involved with the writing process here. Angus Scrimm died some months after the film was released, at the age of 89. RIP.
Sorry for closing the Phantasm reviews with such a sour note, but it is what it is. Watch the first three. They’re great. That being said, keep the balls in the air and peace out.
Writer and director: Don Coscarelli Country & year: USA, 1994 Also known as: Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead Actors: Reggie Bannister, A. Michael Baldwin, Angus Scrimm, Bill Thornbury, Gloria Lynne Henry, Kevin Connors, Cindy Ambuehl, John Davis Chandler, Brooks Gardner, Irene Roseen IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110823/
The year is 1799, and Ichabod Crane is a New York police constable who has been dispatched to Sleepy Hollow: an upstate Dutch hamlet where there have been a lot of brutal murders involving people getting their heads chopped off. He is welcomed by the town elders, including the wealthy businessman Baltus Van Tassel who has a beautiful young daughter named Katrina, who immediately shows an interest in Ichabod. And vice versa. Once he starts his investigation, he hears the story about what the locals believe to be the cause of all the decapitations: the Headless Horseman, who was once a Hessian mercenary from the American Revolutionary War. Ichabod just scoffs of such superstitious nonsense, but his skepticism is put to the test over and over again as more people keeps dying.
