Category: Horror

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

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Not as deliriously loopy as the similarly-themed Bloody Pit Of Horror, this movie is still able to generate some laughs that rapidly turn into groans with its tale of supposedly sexy dancers crash landing on an island inhabited by a giant spider. (There may have been a whole bunch of giant spiders, but all I saw was one frail looking thing hanging from some very visible rope.)

Gary hires a bunch of girls to go over to Singapore and dance. The hiring process consists of these women coming into his office and showing off their chunky legs to him and his female assistant. The girls are mainly distinguishable by their hair color, though there were two blondes so I had to go to the secondary identifier which was each one’s badly dubbed voice.

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Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice (1988)

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When you find out that Catacombs sat unreleased for a couple of years before someone retitled it Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice, you can’t help but wonder what sort of theatrical tragedy is heinous enough that it was thought the film could be enhanced by pretending it was the third sequel in a movie series that was marked at once by both its obscurity and its progressively worse unrelated tales of killer meteors, radioactive snakes and African witch doctors.

And as soon as you realize it’s the sort of movie where Salami (Timothy Van Patten) from The White Shadow plays a priest battling a demon in the basement of an abbey, you quickly understand everything, and thank whatever benevolent god you choose to worship that Satan was never allowed to release a Curse V: The Really Final Ultimate Sacrifice. Continue reading “Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice (1988)” →

Curse III: Blood Sacrifice (1991)

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Curses involving goats have always haunted mankind. The most infamous is of course the one that Billy Sianis unleashed upon the Chicago Cubs when he and his billy goat were ejected from a World Series game involving the Cubs in 1945. Rightfully angered (because everyone knows farm animals are huge baseball fans), Sianis declared that the Cubs would never win again. And guess what? To date, they not only went on to lose the 1945 Series, but have never been back to the Series since!

Curse III: Blood Sacrifce smartly takes this most primordial of fears (goats ruining our sports), not so smartly eliminates the sports angle, but redeems itself by substituting a witch doctor and a machete-wielding sea monster! Continue reading “Curse III: Blood Sacrifice (1991)” →

Curse II: The Bite (1989)

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Vacations are a funny thing. Depending on the circumstances they can go from awesome to disaster and back again with little warning. For example, when I was a kid in Chicago, my parents threatened each other with divorce while we stayed in some flea bag motel, but then my sister had to ruin all those good vibes when she threw a tantrum at the Field Museum.

Likewise, for Lisa (Jill Schoelen only two years removed from The Stepfather and her greatest success) there are break ups and screaming that mark her cross country holiday with her boyfriend Clark (soap opera legend J. Eddie Peck). Of course those involve Clark mutating into a snake, eating her pet birds, and worst of all, going on a murderous rampage and not killing Jamie Farr’s character. Continue reading “Curse II: The Bite (1989)” →

The Curse (1987)

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Something is terribly wrong with the cabbage! And the tomatoes have gone freaking postal! As if Frances didn’t face enough horror in the bedroom when Claude Akins rebuffs her advances thus sending her into the hideously hirsute arms of the local handyman, now she can’t even make a salad without being infected with an extraterrestrial element that turns her into a pus-oozing demon!

How in the world is she going to save the family farm and help heal the rift between her son Zack and his hyper-religious step-father while she’s so crazy she starts to sew her own hand? That’s easy! She’s going to disintegrate into a tarry black pool of bio-ick while Zack runs “you’re not my real dad!” Nathan through with a pitchfork as the entire house is collapsing around all of them! This is my favorite evil crashed meteor ever! Continue reading “The Curse (1987)” →

Monster on the Campus (1958)

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This movie about a big, dead, smelly fish has the kind of pedigree that would make you think it was one of those big, dead, smelly fish movies from the 1950s that was really good. Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man) directed from a script by Daniel Duncan who also scripted The Time Machine. And Joanna Moore is the female lead. She was Tatum O’Neal’s mother!

Instead of an interesting rampaging monster epic though, you have a movie hampered by its silly premise. Even worse, the monster hardly rampaged at all, making only a few off screen appearances until the very end when a guy in caveman make up starting running around the woods, chucking axes at park rangers and causing pretty gals to faint dead away. Continue reading “Monster on the Campus (1958)” →

Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958)

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This updating of the Frankenstein story to 1958 sensibilities means that you’ve got long-in-the-tooth actors playing people in their late teens and monsters running around in bathing suits.

Johnny and Trudy are a couple of cool cats who are in love and are going to be married once Johnny gets that promotion to assistant manager. The snafu (other than her husband-to-be’s limited goals in life and his Frankie Avalon hair) is that she keeps having nightmares that she’s a monster that prowls the city streets in a blue negligee. The movie’s in black and white, so I’ll have to take Trudy’s word for it that it was blue. Continue reading “Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958)” →