1985 – Horror Ghouls

Cat’s Eye (1985)

Posted on January 19, 2024April 10, 2024 by HorrorGhouls

This feline adventure starts with a stray tabby cat which is getting chased by a dog, and ends up hiding in a delivery truck. This truck drives to New York City, where the cat sees the vision of a young girl through a display window. She pleads for the cat to come and help her, but then a guy comes and pick the cat up and puts it in a cage, and here the first story of this film starts. The cat is taken to a clinic called “Quitters, Inc.”, where smokers are coming in order to kick their smoking habit. Dick Morrison, a smoker who has been advised by a friend to join Quitters, is signing up before he knows anything about what he’s in for: he’s told that from now on, every time he fails holding back the urge and smokes a cigarette, horrors will befall his wife and child. The sadistic counselor shows him a room, where Dick gets to see the tabby cat inside where electric shocks comes from the floor, causing the cat to jump around in fright and pain. After this display, he says it will be his wife in that room if the smokes just one cigarette from now on. If he fails a second time, it will be his child. And if he fails a third time…well, I’m not even going to say what he claims they’ll do to his wife then. What could possibly go wrong from here… but at least, in the end, our cat hero manages to escape the place so we can get to the second story of the film.

Next, the cat manages to leave Manhattan via the Staten Island Ferry, and ends up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he once again sees the disembodied image of the girl asking for his help. But then, the cat is taken home by a crime boss and casino owner, Cressner, whose wife plans to leave his abusive ass for another man named Norris. Cressner has Norris kidnapped, blackmails him, and gives him the chance to get away if he manages to successfully circumnavigate the exterior ledge of Cressner’s penthouse. Nothing goes smoothly for the people involved in this story either, of course, but once again the cat manages to get away of course.

Then we get to the final story, where the cat gets on a freight train and ends up in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he finally meets the girl that he’s been seeing visions of. Her name is Amanda, and she eagerly adopts the cat and names him General. The mother tries to protest, because she’s afraid the cat will harm their parakeet Polly. What they don’t know is that something else has gotten inside the house that will harm not only Polly, but Amanda as well: a malevolent little troll who kills the parakeet with a tiny dagger. Guess who gets the blame for that. But the troll is also after Amanda, trying to steal her breath while she sleeps, and General is the only one who can save her.

Cat’s Eye is a 1985 anthology fantasy horror film, directed by Lewis Teague and written by Stephen King. Teague also directed Cujo (1983), another film based on a Stephen King book. The three stories included are Quitters, Inc., The Ledge, and General. The first two are based on two short stories from Night Shift, while the third story was written for the film. It had a budget of $7 million, and grossed a little over $13 million at the box office. It was nominated for the International Fantasy Film Award for Best Film in 1987. The theatrical trailer for the movie actually claimed that this was Stephen King’s first motion picture screenplay, but that’s actually incorrect, as he previously wrote the screenplay for Creepshow (1982). This being a movie based on Stephen King’s stories, it comes as no surprise that it’s stuffed with several easter-eggs from King’s other stories, where the dog chasing the cat in the start of the movie is none other than Cujo himself, and the cat also nearly gets run over by Christine. The child actor who plays Amanda, Drew Barrymore, previously appeared in Firestarter (1984).

Now, Cat’s Eye is pretty much exactly what you would expect: fun, whimsical and overall very entertaining. It’s filled with 80’s magic. Prior to watching the movie, on a blu-ray release from 2022, we were greeted with a notification saying “Please note that this film reflects historical attitudes which audiences may find outdated or offensive“. Now, this ghoul woman is certainly not a youngster anymore and literally grew up with movies that are considered offensive today, but I honestly had problems finding what could be so offensive here. The smoking, perhaps? Er, well, whatever. Offended people will be offended, I guess. Talking about the smoking parts, there are some scenes in that story that is truly over the top where the smoke-craving guy starts hallucinating and sees a dude blowing smoke out of his ears while making train noises, and cigarette packs walking around the place with lady legs. Jeez! Overall the movie has a very lighthearted tone, despite a couple scenes that are rather dark, and it mixes the fantasy elements with the horror and humor quite well.

The effects are solid, where they used huge props for the girl’s room in order to make the little malevolent troll appear small. While the final story with the troll is a lot more cheesy and fantasy-themed compared to the other two stories, it still fits surprisingly well with the rest as the quirky tone from the very get-go makes us expect pretty much anything to happen. It’s fun, charming, and could easily make you purr over the fanciful 80’s nostalgia. The movie also includes a synth-score by Alan Silvestri, which bears some resemblance to his score for Back to the Future which was also released the same year. And who can resist the catchy theme song!

Director: Lewis Teague
Writer: Stephen King
Country & year: US, 1985
Actors: Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays, Candy Clark, James Naughton, Tony Munafo, Court Miller, Russell Horton, Patricia Benson, Mary D’Arcy, James Rebhorn
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088889/

Fortress (1985)

Posted on December 22, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

You better run, You better take cover, as some Men at Work once said. Because it’s not everyday a whole class of children gets the thrilling adventure of being kidnapped by Dabby Duck, Pussy Cat, Mac The Mouse and even Father Christmas himself.

This little and pretty much forgotten gem from Down Under is based on the book by the same name by Gabrielle Lord – a story that’s loosely based on the Faraday School kidnapping which took place in Victoria, Australia. The year was 1972 in the rural town of Faraday when the two men, John Eastwood and Robert Clyde Boland, kidnapped those from a one-teacher school with six female pupils and the teacher and demanded a $1,000,000 ransom. To cut the story short, the victims managed to escape and the kidnappers were eventually caught, which got a prison sentence of 17 years.

The story should have ended here, but there’s a part 2. One of the two the kidnappers, Eastwood, escaped prison in 1976, and since old habits die hard, he kidnapped another teacher with nine pupils in Wooreen State School in Gippsland, Victoria. The whole incident went in full GTA mode with five wanted stars already when he crashed his stolen van into a long truck and held the driver and his partner hostage. Another truck came where Eastwood waved and made it stop. He took the driver and the passenger hostage. But it doesn’t stop here: he made a campervan with two females pull over.

He now had sixteen (!) hostages. Not bad, mate! He demanded a ransom of US$7 million, guns, 100 kilograms of heroin and cocaine, and the release of seventeen inmates from Pentridge Prison. Surprised that he didn’t demand a pack of hookers while he was at it. Like in the first incident, one of the victims escaped and contacted the police. As Eastwood tried to flee with the rest of his hostages, the police managed to disable his hijacked campervan with gunfire. He got a wound-shot and was brought back to his orange jumpsuit. None of the victims was hurt or killed during these incidents. Eastwood was in-and-out of prison until he was a free man in 1992 and got a job as a truckdriver.

Now back to Dabby Duck, Pussy Cat, Mac The Mouse and Father Christmas.

Sally Jones is a teacher in the middle of nowhere in a small, primitive community in Australia, also called The Outback. It’s a regular hot sunny day and Sally gets herself ready for another day in the one-room school with her nine pupils. The youngest is six, while the oldest is sixteen and we have both boys and girls. A regular day gets suddenly interrupted when four armed men wearing furry masks, led by the one wearing the classic and creepy santa mask (Father Christmas), the perfect nightmare fuel for toddlers with santaphobia.

We’re going on a PICNIC, Father Christmas says, before they toss the kids and Sally back in a rusty van like they were pigs taken to the slaughterhouse. The six-year old seems to get the roughest experience as they treat him like a ragdoll, and the poor kid seems traumatized from the start as he has eyes like a shell-shocked WW1 veteran.

After some bumps in the road, and a toilet break that almost went catastrophic, they take them farther into rural wilderness where they force our captives to jump into a hole in the ground that leads to an underwater cave. And yes, we learn that they are taken for ransom and not doing this just for the hell of it. And today’s lesson from teacher Sally, who seems to have a far stronger psyche than the four kidnappers combined and a spine of iron, is to survive. In other words, Father Christmas and company will eventually learn that they fucked with the wrong teacher.

Fortress takes this hostage journey on a whole other path than the true story it’s based on, to put that mildly. It’s Lord of the Flies meets Far Cry Primal with some flavors of The Goonies. A pretty simple movie with a simple premise that was suitable enough for a television production made for American HBO. That being said, Fortress couldn’t look more cinematic. The cinematography here is pretty remarkable, already from the opening night scene with the tracking shot and the heavy 80s synth score, which sets the sinister and foreboding tone.

The gimmick with the masks gives the film a more unique distinctiveness rather than having four random dudes. Replace their saw-off shotguns with electric guitars and they’d look like a bizarre KISS coverband. However, as their main goal is to keep the teacher and her class as ransom, their demented and unhinged sociopathy oozes through their masks. They also plan to gang rape Sally. Because why not.

The acting is solid all the way, even from the child actors. Although Fortress may be predictable, the film is fast-paced with first-class tension with lots of adrenaline and no dull moments. It’s also a grim ride into the darker corners of the human psyche where the survival-mode instincts get pushed to the most extreme, primitive and barbaric red-zone level. The climax was originally longer and more graphic but was cut down before the film’s release, and it shows. Regardless, this is pure thrilling entertainment from start to finish.

Fortress was released on DVD by HBO Archives in 2006, which is still available at Amazon and CD Universe. No Blu-ray for the time being.

Director: Arch Nicholson
Writer: Everett De Roche
Country & year: Australia, 1985
Actors: Sean Garlick, Rachel Ward, Elaine Cusick, Laurie Moran, Marc Aden Gray, Ray Chubb, Bradley Meehan, Rebecca Rigg, Beth Buchanan, Asher Keddie, Anna Crawford, Richard Terrill, Vernon Wells, Peter Hehir, David Bradshaw, Roger Stephen
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0091069/

Making Contact (1985)

Posted on October 3, 2023October 3, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

Take a bunch of obscure deleted scenes from E.T., Poltergeist, and some unreleased haunted house movie made by Disney TV, stitch them randomly together with little to no context – and then you have Making Contact, written and directed by Roland Emmerich. Yes, the “master of disaster“ himself who gave us Independence Day.

And no, Making Contact, which Emmerich made eight years before his global breakthrough with Stargate, has nothing to do with making contact with space or aliens. I don’t exactly know what the movie is trying to make contact with… A cohesive plot it is certainly not, and I don’t even think that a young, struggling Roland Emmerich knew. He just wanted to make an entertaining movie, according to the film’s wiki page. And entertaining it is, but mostly for the wrong reasons. And that’s always something I can appreciate.

The film centers around the young kid, Joey, who’s just had his dad buried. Why, what or how, we never get to know. The same night, while he’s in his room, the house gets haunted by… something. All the toys start to move and a red-glowing toy phone in his closet starts ringing. On the other end is his dad, or that is what we’re supposed to believe. We’re only some minutes in when I can already picture this as one of the many unofficial sequels that got spewed out of Italy during the 1980s. And if that was the case here, this would be released as Poltergeist 2, without any questions.

Joey and his mother also happen to live next door to the same house from the Psycho films. Here it’s condemned and ready to be demolished. One day, Joey goes for an exploration in its cobwebbed basement, where he finds a ventriloquist dummy. The dummy’s name is not Norman Bates but Fletcher, and we soon learn that he’s possessed by a demon or something which should rather be locked up in a blessed cage in the occult museum of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Weird, supernatural shit also occurs at school where an egg rolls by itself over a ruler from one table to another. Some girls’ pigtails start to float just out of the blue… and when I thought I’d seen it all: instead of a bunch of chairs stacked up on each other in the kitchen, we have some sharp knives stuck in the kitchen cupboard.

Making Contact is a weird mesmerizing mess that can never decide what direction it wants to go with a tone that bounces all over the place. There’s a side-plot with the demon possessed-whatever doll that never gets explained. The other kids in Joey’s class set up a plan to kill him because…because. Joey suddenly has telekinetic powers. Scientists set up a lab at Joey’s house. Kids are running around in Norman Bate’s huge underground basement where a big hamburger-shaped monster pops up, and some other ghoulish creatures for a quick moment. The top of a big maze can be seen in the distance and I wonder if there’s a shrine in there as well. The visual effects look like scraps from Mr. Boogedy.

Almost the entire cast is of non-actors who’s only appeared in this film, most of which are Germans while the shooting took place in Germany, Virginia Beach and at the backlot of Universal Studios in California where the exterior of the Psycho house is located. The film got English dubbing for its DVD release with a new musical score which sounds very familiar to a certain John Williams. And now I’m almost tempted to claim that Steven Spielberg actually ghost directed the film in some bizarre alternative universe while he snorted lines with Tobe Hooper. Because the more I think of this film the more confused I get.

Making Contact is obscure for a reason, but the weird and goofy nature of it, and if not considering who’s directed it, makes it more of a morbid curiosity and something to at least have some fun with. Emmerich followed up with the horror comedy Ghost Chase, aka Hollywood Monster, in 1987 which is even more nuttier.

Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich, Hans J. Haller, Thomas Lechner
Original title: Joey
Country & year: West Germany, US, 1985
Actors: Joshua Morrell, Eva Kryll, Tammy Shields, Jan Zierold, Barbara Klein, Matthias Kraus, Jerry L. Hall Jr., Sean Johnson, Christine Goebbels, Ray Kaselonis
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0089378/

Lifeforce (1985)

Posted on September 15, 2023October 23, 2023 by HorrorGhouls

A space crew is on a mission to explore the coma of Haley’s Comet, a comet that’s visible from Earth and to the naked eye every 75 years. Something else that’s naked are three humanoid creatures in suspended animation within coffin-shaped glass containers, which the captain Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback) and his crew find as soon as they float onto the comet. Two of them being young males and a young brunette (credited as Space Girl in the 18 year old flesh of Mathilda May). They bring the containers back to the spaceship and head back to Earth. But something goes wrong as they enter the atmosphere. The crew gets burned alive and the only sign of life when the ship lands on Earth are the three humanoids, still sleeping in their coffins. An inventive little nod to the sailing ship Demeter, if you will.

We’re now in London where the containers with the space humanoids are transported to the European Space Research Centre, and the fun is about to begin. The naked Space Girl suddenly opens her eyes as she lies ready for her autopsy, stands up buck naked and sucks the life out of him (yes, from the mouth, sorry to say). She escapes as she just wanders out of the facility like a catwalk model while she flashes her tits and buttcheeks. We then learn from one of the doctors who also had an episode with the Space Girl that she’s able to seduce her victims with intense supernatural powers and french-kisses them completely empty of lifeforce, and … how can anyone say this with a straight and dry face: they then infect the victims with a virus that transforms them to rabid zombie vampires. It’s time to call Dr. Peter Cushing Van Helsing. Ha-ha, had it only been that easy…

A traumatized Dr. Carlsen, the only survivor of the space crew we saw earlier, heads over to London from Texas to join forces with the agent SAS agent Colin Caine (Peter Firth) to track down the space creature.

Lifeforce was supposed to be Tobe Hooper’s next big step after the mega success of the Steven Spielberg production Poltergeist (1982), which still asks the question who really directed that film. What the hell really happened to Tobe Hooper is also a good question. But what we know is that his destructive and downward spiral of drug use didn’t do any favors to the continuous fall of his career. He was fired from several film projects during the 1980s until he was picked up by Cannon Films which he signed a three-movie deal with: Lifeforce, Invaders from Mars and Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Even though Lifeforce was doomed from the beginning by starting the shooting with an unfinished script, the film has its many moments. The set-design of the comet is pretty inventive with an entrance that looks like a giant butthole. The effects are as 80’s as they can get which goes from being pretty spectacular to crispy cheese dinner. Then we have eye-rolling dialogues mixed with a hysteric over-the top performance by Steve Railsback. When he’s not overacting to the Razzie Award, he sits with a blank stare and just says his lines, while the rest tries to take this as seriously as they can. An enthusiastic Patrick Stewart has a short screentime where he got the great honor to mouth kiss Railsback in one of the more absurd scenes.

The rubber animatronics are comical, cartoonish and just delightfully cheesy that would fit far more in a film like The Return of the Living Dead. Dan O’Bannon co-wrote the script so that maybe explains a thing or two. There was no complete script of Lifeforce, as mentioned, and it shows, especially after the second half which slides further into a weird unfocused epic mess. Miniature buildings of London burn up in flames, there’s big explosions in the street and full pandemonium of rabid zombie vampires running around. Only thing missing is cats and dogs living together and we’d had double mass hysteria!

The studio also cut out 20 minutes for its theatrical release and the film was set up to be a blockbuster in the summer of 1985, but instead became the biggest flop of the year, barely earning half of its budget back. It was mocked and panned by most of the critics and Colin Wilson, the author of the novel The Space Vampires, which the film is based on, wasn’t much impressed either. Gene Siskel, on the other hand, gave it 3 out of 4 stars and called the film a guilty pleasure. And it’s not hard to agree on that. Lifeforce is available on a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack from Scream Factory.

Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Dan O’Bannon, Don Jakoby
Also known as: Space Vampires
Country & year: UK, 1985
Actors: Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart, Michael Gothard, Nicholas Ball, Aubrey Morris, Nancy Paul, John Hallam, John Keegan
IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt0089489/