HorrorGhouls – Page 4 – Horror Ghouls

Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

Posted on February 20, 2024March 15, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Now, time for some J-splatter horror insanity to make your hair wet n’ sticky. Director Yoshihiro Nishimura had primarily worked as special makeup effects supervisor on numerous films since the early 1980s. After working on The Machine Girl, he was asked if he wanted to direct his first full-length feature for the American distributor Media Blasters. The result was a remake of his earlier student film Anatomia Extinction from 1995. Like most people in the Asian movie business, he worked fast and furiously and completed the film in only two weeks, and with some pretty amusing results.

We’re in a futuristic dystopian Tokyo where the police force has been privatized, and the city is now an out-of-control violent gore-zone. Tokyo is also being threatened by a scientist under the name “The Key Man” who, with a key-shaped virus, injects people around the city and turn them into mutants called “Engineers”. It’s even worse than it sounds and there seems to be an army of them that spreads like banana flies. So, who’s here to save the day? Say hello to Ruka (Eihi Shiina), the most skilled, cold-blooded and dangerous of the special police squad of “Engineer Hunters” who slices her targets in half with her blade like it was just a regular day. The actress behind Ruka is the same shy and quiet lady we saw in Takashi Miike’s Audition. Yes, that lady. She’s also deeply traumatized after witnessing her father, who worked as a police officer, getting his head blown to pieces like a big watermelon by an unknown assassin. The motive? Who knows. She deals with the pain by some self-mutilation while she’s obsessed about one day catching the one who killed her father.

And good luck with that. We get invited on a crazy, red-soaked journey where blood pours endlessly out of wounds like garden hoses, an effect that gets pretty old after a while as it gets overused to death. The use of blood was so messy and all over the place that the cameras had to be covered in plastic. So in that regard, the film surely lives up to the title.

It also has to be pointed out that Tokyo Gore Police is not to be taken one bit seriously. The film has a zany manga vibe in the same style as Meatball Machine and The Machine Girl, where we have silly fight scenes filled with video game logic and some other, bizarre, mind-bending WTF moments. There are many highlights and unique scenes here that include a cute mutant girl whose half body is formed like a hybrid of a snail and the mouth of a crocodile that chews some poor guys’ dick off. We also have a mutant guy with a big elephant trunk as a penis which he uses as a machine gun. A chair urinates on a crowd in a fetish club. Yes, really. And there’s much more. Also watch out for a minigun that shoots fist knuckles. To amp up the madness all up to eleven, the film is sprinkled with some spicy satire aimed at Japan’s extreme trend of suicides. The most notable is the cute, colorful billboard commercials around the city where pre-teen girls in school uniforms joyfully promotes the new hot thing on the market The wrist cutter. Kawaii! Only in Japan, as we say.

And of course, the big question is: Is this the goriest film ever made? No, but it’s certainly on the top ten list. Tokyo Gore Police is overall a fun watch, but drags somewhere in the middle. It’s wild and experimental, which mostly works best as a creative showcase of old school special effects.

Yoshihiro Nishimura was planning a sequel at some time, but that doesn’t seem to happen. Anyway, he’s had a pretty fruitful career as director since TGP and made films such as Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl and Helldriver, which also seems worth checking out.

Director: Yoshihiro Nishimura
Writers: Kengo Kaji, Maki Mizui, Yoshihiro Nishimura
Original title: Tôkyô zankoku keisatsu
Country & year: Japan, 2008
Actors: Eihi Shiina, Itsuji Itao, Yukihide Benny, Jiji Bû, Ikuko Sawada, Cay Izumi, Mame Yamada, Ayano Yamamoto, Akane Akanezawa, Tsugumi Nagasawa
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1183732/

Tokyo Gore Police Trailer from Derek Lieu on Vimeo.

7 MINUTES IN HELL – Horror Short

Posted on February 18, 2024February 18, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

A game of seven minutes in heaven turns deadly when two teens are attacked by a monster in the closet.

7 Minutes in Hell is a creepy horror short where some teenagers break into a haunted house, and decide to play a seemingly innocent game which turns out deadly.

Director: Justin Reager, Shane Spiegel
Writer: Brian Lonano
Country & year: USA, 2022
Actors: Samantha Cormier, Christian Weissmann, Luke Georgecink, Paige Searcy, Jalen Thomas Brooks, Madison Shamoun, Lize Johnston
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt11840426/

Galaxy of Terror (1981)

Posted on February 16, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

After making fifty-plus films since 1955, Roger Corman was tired of directing and stepped down as a producer. The guy is now 97 years old and is still working in the business. Salute! With his company, New World Pictures, he hired young talents who would later work in big Hollywood films. And Galaxy of Terror is more or less his trademark film with the ingredients Corman got notoriously known for: schlock and awe with tons of entertainment value. Galaxy of Terror had a budget of 1.8 million dollars and was filmed in Roger Corman’s backyard in Venice, California.

The film starts with a space guy who runs from someone, or something, in a spaceship which has crashlanded on the mysterious planet Morganthus. He gets brutally killed by an unseen force which we soon learn comes from a huge, futuristic-looking pyramid not so far from the crashing site.

We’re not on Earth, however, but on planet Xerxes where an obscure ruler called Planet Master whose face is covered with a red, gloving dot is ordering the crew of the spaceship Quest to go on a mission on the same planet we saw in the beginning. Why? That’s a good question. We meet our crew of ten: Cabren, Alluma, Kore, Baelon, Ranger, Dameia, Quuhold, Cos, Captain Trantor and Commander Ilvar. The two most familiar faces we see here are Sid Haig, 22 years before he became a more household name as the killer clown Spalding. The other one is Robert Englund, three years before he wrote film history with his killer glove.

As the crew lands on the planet, they are quick to discover the pyramid, which they decide to investigate. And what they encounter as soon as they even touch the pyramid are not scary aliens, but a manifestation of their own deepest fears which are ready to kill them in the most brutal ways.

Visually, the film takes a lot of inspiration from Alien and copies the style of H.R. Giger with some mixture of 1950s sci-fi. So it’s no wonder it’s been called a rip-off of that film. But that’s only on the surface. Plot-wise, Galaxy of Terror goes in its own unique direction whereas Event Horizon took the concept to the more extreme.

The most remarkable thing here is the set-design and overall look of the planet, which was constructed by a young workaholic by the name James Cameron. He worked day and night on the set, also as a second-unit director, to prove himself, and so he did. Much of the visual style was also used some years later in Aliens which explains some of the similarities. The spaceship hallways were set up in Roger Corman’s own house.

And with that being said, the film has enough of schlock and fun B-movie moments to get entertained by. There’s some very wonky and eye-rolling dialogue here and no one can blame Sid Haig for demanding to play his character as a mute. That was only until he had to say his one line “I live and I die by the crystals.” And sure he did. RIP. The acting is overall decent and they do the very best of what they had to work with. We have some great and fun death scenes that include a victim getting sucked by some tentacles with the most cartoonish slurping sound effect. Robert Englund fights an apparition of his dark self (an early glimpse of Freddy, perhaps?) while the others among the crew get burned alive and blown to pieces.

And, of course, what is Galaxy of Terror without its classic rape scene? And not just any rape scene, but with a huge, slimy maggot! Director Bruce Clark refused to film it, so Roger Corman had to step in and do it instead. He’d already gotten some flak for filming a rape scene in Humanoids From the Deep the year before where a fish monster fucks one of the victims. So this was clearly right up his alley. The blonde actress Taaffe O’Connell got the pleasure of almost getting killed when the thing almost squeezed her to death, completely naked and covered in slime, during filming. Luckily, she survived and looks back at the incident with a great sense of humor. This scene had to go through the editing process three times before it got an R rating instead of an X. This was originally meant to be a morbid love scene where Taaffe moans like a porn star and literally dies of an orgasm overdose. Anyway, it became the film’s big money shot, which Robert Englund can tell when a film critic in a suit and tie once came to him shortly after the release and said: “You were MARVELOUS in that film where the giant maggot FUCKED THE GIRL!”

Director: Bruce D. Clark
Writers: Marc Siegler, Bruce D. Clark
Country & year: US, 1981
Actors: Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston, Bernard Behrens, Zalman King, Robert Englund, Taaffe O’Connell, Sid Haig, Grace Zabriskie, Jack Blessing, Mary Ellen O’Neill
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082431/

Popcorn (1991)

Posted on February 13, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Popcorn is the title and popcorn is what you get – with a lot of cheese and confusion. On the surface, if not judging by the movie poster itself, this may look like one of the numerous slashers from the mid 1980s. It managed to trick me until the very distinct early 90s hip-hop music hit the speakers.

Popcorn starts off with some strange nightmares from the head of the young teenager Maggie (Jill Schoelen, The Stepfather‘s girl, here at age 28) about a younger girl who gets trapped in a fire and chased by some guy who tries to kill her. This is not just some random nightmare, however, as Maggie has subconsciously developed psychic abilities. Unlike her lost twin sister, Lydia Deetz, she can’t see dead people, though. But yeah, her nightmares and visions have some more relevance later in some way or another.

But enough of dreaming, because a big event is just around the corner. You see, Maggie and her film student classmates are preparing for an all-night horror movie marathon-screening at the old local and out-of-business movie theater, Dreamland. Here they’ll show a bunch of schlocky public domain films in the hope of funding some money for the university’s film section. To make it more eventful, they’re adding some inventive gimmicks in the purest William Castle style with three of the films. We have Mosquito in 3-D with a big mosquito model that flies on strings over the audience. The second is The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man with the use of “Shock-o-Scope”, or simply called electrical “buzzers” in seats. The third one is called The Stench with Smell-O-Vision and you can just imagine that one.

The theater also has a dark history of the film director Lanyard Gates, who killed his own family while he shot the final scene of the film The Possessor – a short, cryptic avant-garde reel that looks much like the nightmares Maggie has recently been having. So, the question is why and how. Well, she’s soon to find out when a killer is lurking around the theater, who’s also stealing the victims’ faces.

Popcorn had a troubled production, which shows more and more as the film progresses. The film was first helmed by Alan Ormsby, a veteran who’s already worked on films such as Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972), the Ed Gein flick Deranged (1974) and Cat People (1980). After the first weeks of shooting, he was gone, just poof, and replaced with first-time (and last time) director and Porky’s actor Mark Herrier, of all people. Uhm…okey, then. Porkman does a steady job, though, despite the hiccups and a script that gets more convoluted. The third act is quite messy where we have twists and turns with a Saturday Morning Cartoon goofball of a villain that I would guess came out of the fart pipe of Freddy Krueger while he was playing Nintendo. We also have an intermission in the middle where the audience gets entertained by a reggae band to keep the party-mode going. Quite fitting considering that the whole film was shot on location in Kingston, Jamaica.

That Popcorn was released in a time when the slasher genre was more or less dead, didn’t do the film much favor. Despite the box-office failure, the film has since grown a cult-following and was also an inspiration for films like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994), In The Mouth of Madness (1995) and Troma’s Shock-O-Rama (2005). In other words, Popcorn is overall an entertaining and fun little oddball flick with an original take on the genre. It’s also far more light-hearted and jovial than the average slasher with little to no blood n’ guts. With a theater packed with teens, you’ll have some expectations, but the film doesn’t grab that opportunity, sorry to say. What we have is a scene where a body count gets stabbed by the mosquito model with its stinger and a cheesy electrocution scene just to add an extra flavor to the gimmick shtick. But what really does the film is that we get the pleasure to see some scenes from the films featured in the theater. Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man is already a personal favorite where a manic Bruce Glover alone steals the whole show. I’d love to see the full version of that film.

Directors: Mark Herrier, Alan Ormsby
Writers: Mitchell Smith, Alan Ormsby
Country & year: US, Canada, 1991
Actors: Jill Schoelen, Tom Villard, Dee Wallace, Derek Rydall, Malcolm Danare, Elliott Hurst, Ivette Soler, Freddie Simpson, Kelly Jo Minter, Karen Lorre, Ray Walston, Tony Roberts, Bruce Glover
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102690/

THE MECHANICAL DANCER – Horror Short

Posted on February 11, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

In a run-down part of town stands a small theater, owned by an eccentric old man. His spectacle The Mechanical Dancer is a sight to behold, although it has seen better days.

The Mechanical Dancer is a beautiful animated horror short, inspired by German Expressionism and particularly The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Director: Jenna Jaillet
Writer: Jenna Jaillet, Josh Jaillet
Country & year: USA, 2021
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt14223664/

Rats – Night of Terror (1984)

Posted on February 9, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

– They’re here! They’re coming!

– God! No!

The year is 250 A.B. in a distant Mad Max world where the planet Earth has been blown to dust by nuclear bombs. A group of bikers are on the look for food and shelter and discover some decayed, empty laboratory in the city. But don’t get too comfy cuz the place is crawling with rats! Big, fat rats. Thousands of them! And like our group of bikers they’re hungry as well and takes a bite out of every human flesh they can jump on. It’s already time to find the flame thrower.

The only believable aspects about this very cheese-smelling low budget apocalyptic flick is the abandoned city set-designs which also was used in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. And with a pretty decent cinematography, despite the circumstances, the film at least gets the atmosphere and the sense of the apocalyptic environment and surroundings. We also have some gory and graphic moments here as well, the most notable being the lucky rat which we can assume crawls straight into someones vagina and eats itself out of the dead victims mouth. Yum!

And then there’s the… rats. We have some hundreds of them running around the actors feet as they try to make us believe that they fights against them while they also do their very best to not harm them. Because no rats where harmed during the making of this motion picture. And it looks as inept and retarded as it sounds. Not that I want to see rats, or other animals, getting killed, but still. Several rats died of natural causes during the making, though (RIP), but director Bruno Mattei had no budget to waste them. Instead the genius used them as props by throwing them at the actors to make it look like they jumped on their victims. Pure movie magic.

We’re also entertained by a group of actors who mostly couldn’t look a bit scared even if they were paid a million. Instead we have goofy faces, monotone screams and just overall bad acting. All of course Italians which was poorly dubbed with stiff cartoonish lines, like most of the older bad Italian horror films. And if you sense the smell of cheese getting stronger, you’re not wrong. Claudio “Troll 2” Fragasso co-wrote and co-directed (without credit) the film. Other sources says that he didn’t direct a single scene. But just pretend he did, cuz that makes it even funnier. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him that came up with the batshit twist at the end.

Director: Bruno Mattei
Writers: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, Hervé Piccini
Original title: Rats – Notte di terrore
Country & year: Italy, France, 1984
Actors: Ottaviano Dell’Acqua, Geretta Geretta, Massimo Vanni, Gianni Franco, Ann-Gisel Glass, Jean-Christophe Brétignière, Fausto Lombardi, Henry Luciani, Cindy Leadbetter, Christian Fremont
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0086176/

Below (2002)

Posted on February 6, 2024March 8, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

It is 1943, and the USS Tiger Shark, a U.S. Navy submarine, patrols the Atlantic Ocean during World War II. They suddenly get orders to pick up survivors drifting in the sea, and they end up rescuing a British Nurse (Claire Paige) and two wounded men. They tell the crew that they were aboard the hospital ship Fort James, which was sunk two days earlier from a torpedo hit. Tension starts to arise when the crew of the submarine finds out that one of the wounded men is a German prisoner of war, ending up shooting him, much to Claire’s dismay as he was his patient. A German destroyer also approaches them, and the submarine ends up suffering damage from depth charges. However, that’s not all that’s wrong here, and both the crew and Claire becomes aware of strange supernatural happenings on the submarine. Claire also finds the captain’s journal, where she notices missing pages and a different handwriting in the latest pages. She’s told a story about the death of the former captain, which comes off as somewhat unconvincing. What has happened on the submarine, and why does it appear to be haunted?

Below is a supernatural horror film from 2002, directed by David Twohy (known for directing Pitch Black and several of the Riddick movies) and written by Darren Aronofsky (director of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan). It was originally intended to be a historical sci-fi thriller, but after the success with Pitch Black the director decided to go for a horror film instead. It was shot on location in Lake Michigan for the exteriors, using the World War II-era U.S. Navy submarine USS Silversides, and at Pinewood Studios. Miramax/Dimension Films wanted Twohy to edit the film so it could get a PG-13 rating instead of an R, but he refused, which ended up giving the film a limited theatrical release with very little advertising. It also flopped tragically, not only due to limited release and lack of advertisement, but also due to rather mixed reviews.

Now, your typical “haunted house” has been changed into different settings before, and the claustrophobic narrative of having it set in a submarine during World War II is definitely effective. The atmosphere is tight and creepy, nailing the mood while showing off just enough of the spooky stuff to keep it chilling. The supernatural effects and scenes are very subtle, and everything plays more around how the characters are spooked by it while also becoming slowly aware of its hold over them. Much of it is embraced with uncertainty and keeping you guessing.

Much like in Twohy’s Pitch Black, much of the story is carried on by the characters and the tension between them. You already realize from the first minutes of the film that some of the characters are a bit off, and are definitely hiding something. We just don’t know what, but their reactions to the supernatural events makes it easy to guess that something awful happened which they do not want to come to the surface. Much due to the underwater scenes and the submarine interior the atmosphere gets just right, clammy and stifling filled with apprehension.

Below is an underwater chiller that is actually quite decent, with its claustrophobic environment and the rising tension between the crew as the supernatural events enfold, all building up to a reveal and somewhat poetic ending.

Director: David Twohy
Writers: Lucas Sussman, Darren Aronofsky, David Twohy
Country & year: UK, US, 2002
Actors: Matthew Davis, Bruce Greenwood, Holt McCallany, Dexter Fletcher, Nick Chinlund, Olivia Williams, Scott Foley, Andrew Howard, Christopher Fairbank, Chuck Ellsworth, Crispin Layfield
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276816/

CONTENT: THE LO-FI MAN – Horror Short

Posted on February 4, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

“Filmmaker” Brian Lonano tries to talk about a beloved cult film. What happens next will shock you.

CONTENT: The Lo-Fi Man is a hilarious and insane horror short where a “content creator”, Brian Lonano, is trapped in a facility where machine-gun wielding guards wearing Mickey Mouse ears demands everyone to be “content with the content”. He manages to escape, meets a group of filmmakers outside who gets attacked by the facility’s robot who wants these content creators to “submit their ideas for experience and exposure” (the oh so classic thing some corporations tell content creators when they want their skill and efforts while giving practically nothing in return for it), ending up killing and maiming them. Then Brian finds a VHS of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and, well…watch the video to find out for yourself what happens next.

And to quote one of the ladies struggling with the AI/Robot who tries to make her submit to it: “fuck your experience and exposure“!

Director: Brian Lonano, Blake Myers
Writer: Brian Lonano
Country & year: USA, 2023
Actors: Clarke Williams, Soleil St. Louis, Marilyn Chung, Jessica Shipp, Brian Lonano
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt26771199/

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

Posted on February 2, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Paul and Helen Curtis moves into a manor located in rural England, together with their two daughters Jan and Ellie. The manor is owned by an elderly woman named Mrs. Aylwood, and she lives in the guest house next door. Mrs. Aylwood once had a daughter, Karen, but she disappeared in an abandoned chapel in the woods thirty years ago. Upon seeing a photo of Karen, Jan notices that she actually looks a lot like this girl. And she also starts sensing something strange about the place, witnessing strange lights in the woods, glowing objects, and visions of a blindfolded girl in the mirror. When getting to know some of the townspeople, Jan wants to find out more about Karen’s mysterious disappearance in the woods all those years ago, and finds that she was together with a bunch of friends that night. What they were up to and what happened to Karen is something only they would know, but none of them are willing to talk about it.

The Watcher in the Woods is a supernatural film from 1980, directed by John Hough and Vincent McEveety, and Produced by Walt Disney Productions, being one of several live-action films from a time when the studio focused on targeting young adult audiences. It is based on a novel from 1976 by Florence Engel Randall, and it was filmed at Pinewood Studios and the surrounding areas in Buckinghamshire, England. The building that’s being used in the film is called Ettington Park Manor, and it was also used in The Haunting (1963).

Upon its release, the film had to be pulled from the theaters pretty fast as the response was overwhelmingly negative, both from critics and audiences, and many considered it “too dark”. Thus, the studio made the decision to make changes to the movie, with extensive reshoots and a brand new ending, and re-released it eighteen months later in 1981. Despite the critical response being so harsh, the film still ended up gaining a cult following over the years.

Now, this movie is certainly not one to watch if you want something scary. It’s from a time when Disney started dipping their toes into PG-rated films, with…well…rather mixed results. Something Wicked This Way Comes is probably one of their best and most memorable efforts among these. While The Watcher in the Woods is more aimed at a young audience, it still does have a certain appeal with a gothic teenage mystery vibe to it, and it is of course heightened by the performance of Bette Davis, who plays Mrs. Aylwood. There are some spooky goings-on, with some charming old-school supernatural effects, and I can easily imagine that seeing this as a kid during the 80’s would make a certain impact. Then again, the director John Hough previously directed the 1973 horror film The Legend of Hell House, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is at least some spookiness here.

So I’d say that overall, The Watcher in the Woods works as a family suspense thriller, layered with a certain old-school charm.

Director: John Hough
Writers: Brian Clemens, Harry Spalding, Rosemary Anne Sisson
Country & year: UK, US, 1980
Actors: Bette Davis, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Kyle Richards, Carroll Baker, David McCallum, Benedict Taylor, Frances Cuka, Richard Pasco, Ian Bannen, Katharine Levy, Eleanor Summerfield, Georgina Hale
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081738/

The Resurrected (1991)

Posted on January 30, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

Charles Dexter Ward is showing increasingly bizarre behaviour, and his wife Claire hires a private investigator to look into his strange affairs. The investigator, John March, starts peeking around the isolated farmhouse which Charles recently started using after uncovering his family history and discovering that this abandoned farmhouse belonged to his ancestor. Said ancestor’s name was Joseph Curwen, to whom Charles bears an uncanny resemblance. John notices that there are numerous deliveries made to the place, and upon asking Charles himself, he explains that he is undertaking some chemical tests where he uses animal cadavers. While certainly showing off eccentric behaviour, there’s nothing John can use here to offer any explanations to the worried wife. Then, after a man in a neighboring house ends up brutally murdered, where his remains have been attacked and eaten as if by a crazed animal, John starts to believe it’s not a coincidence. He brings Claire with him to the farm in order to confront Charles, but find him in a state where he ends up committed to a hospital. The doctors find that his metabolism is inexplicably high, which causes him to become extremely hungry, and his cravings are for blood and raw meat. John decides he must uncover the secrets of the old farmhouse and what Charles was doing at the place.

The Resurrected (aka The Ancestor and Shatterbrain) is a 1991 horror film directed by Dan O`Bannon, and it’s an adaption of the H.P. Lovecraft novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The screenwriter, Brent V. Friedman, had developed a version of the script which was titled Shatterbrain, while O`Bannon wrote his own ideas and had imagined the title to be The Ancestor. Friedman’s script was mainly used, but O`Bannon also incorporated some of his own ideas into the movie. Interstar Releasing planned for a wide theatrical release in 1991, but they went bankrupt before it could happen and thus it ended up straight to video in 1992. This movie was O`Bannon’s second and final movie as a director, after his directorial debut in 1985 with The Return of the Living Dead.

The Resurrected is not the first film to be based on Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In 1963, Roger Corman made a film called The Haunted Palace, starring Vincent Price, which also provides a take on this story but very loosely and mixed with the Edgar Allan Poe’s story by the same name as the film. I haven’t yet seen this one, so can make no comparisons here. I have read the Lovecraft novella, and while it should go without saying that movie adaptions rarely manages to capture the essence of horror and wonder in Lovecraft’s stories (there are, of course, exceptions), this movie actually does follow the original story for the most part, just setting it in more modern times. Many Lovecraft adaptions tend to change so much that the original story is barely recognizable, and some just doesn’t really do the original stories justice. However, this is something I’ve come to terms with a long time ago, I don’t expect any Lovecraft adaption to be on par with the source material. I just want to be entertained. And some of the movie adaptions (both the decent and the bad ones) often manages to do exactly that, so I’m not gonna complain.

Now, most horror movie fans are well aware of O`Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead, and have most likely witnessed some of his screenplay work in several of the movies in the Alien franchise, and other horror films like Lifeforce. Just like the original Lovecraft story, it starts in a mental asylum where Charles is incarcerated, and then the story moves backwards in order tell what happened. It’s set up a bit like a detective mystery, with a pretty blonde wife begging the investigator for help and all. Set in the modern times, which were the 90’s when the movie was made, works well enough. The opening scene which includes a bit of blood and gore before getting a scene where the investigator starts retelling his experience, helps fuel the story as the next parts are, unfortunately, a little bit too slow before it finally picks up the pace and delivers.

While there were some issues with the pacing, the viewing experience was upheld by a constant feeling of mystery. You keep wondering what Charles has been doing at the farmhouse, but it takes a little too much time to actually get there. Once secrets are revealed we get some really nice shots of monstrous creatures and a hellish underground basement lab. While apparently trying to veer away from your typical B-Horror cheeseflick with a more serious approach, there’s no doubt that once the blood, guts, and otherworldly creatures fill the screen we get to see that this movie doesn’t stray too far away from the B-movie range. And I mean that in a positive way, of course. Originally, O`Bannon actually planned for the movie to have more humor, but it was re-edited and re-cut which removed this, much to his disapproval.

Despite a few flaws, The Resurrected is a decent horror film with an ominous mystery-fueled atmosphere, great creature-effects by Todd Masters, and a fitting music score by Richard Band.

Director: Dan O’Bannon
Writer: Brent V. Friedman
Country & year: US, 1991
Actors: John Terry, Jane Sibbett, Chris Sarandon, Robert Romanus, Laurie Briscoe, Ken Camroux-Taylor, Patrick P. Pon, Bernard Cuffling, J.B. Bivens, Robert Sidley, Des Smiley, Eric Newton
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105242/