50 Nights of Horror Challenge: Weeks Seven and Eight - The Terminus Equation

50 NIGHTS OF HORROR WEEKS SEVEN AND EIGHT!

The past two weeks have been a mess.  I've spread my time between work conferences, hurricanes, and visiting in-laws.  The horror-movie momentum slowed a bit, but I hit my goal of 50 movies, and I've kept pushing.  Today is Halloween, the last day of the challenge.  Looking back, I'm kind of proud of what I've accomplished, but also kind of embarrassed.  Some of these were gems, but many of the movies were garbage.  I really could have spent my time with a better hobby.  Still, there's a good chance I might never have seen some of these films, so I'll take the hit and say that the challenge was worth it.  Also, I've had more blog views than ever before with the challenge, and that is kind of neat.  So I'm doing something right.

Without further adieu, here are the last reviews of the challenge.

Terror Train (1980)
Format:  Bluray
Genre:  Serial Killer
Subgenre:  Murder Mystery, Revenge

With a title like Terror Train, this movie had every right to be awful.  However, it was a really fun post-John Carpenter's Halloween masked killer movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis.  And even though the premise is kind of silly, it doesn't take away from the mood of the movie.

The premise?  These movies have a premise?  Well, many of them don't, but Terror Train's is interesting.  A fraternity's worth of dudes and their girlfriends have a New Year's Eve party every year, and every year the dudes try to throw a better party than the year before.  The movie opens on a New Year's Eve party where several of the frat dudes trick a pledge into making out with the corpse of a dead woman.  Pledge goes nuts. Jamie Lee Curtis screams and cries because of her tertiary involvement in the prank.  Some sexy college babes bounce and jiggle.  And a couple of the frat dudes are implicated as being severe assholes.  All of this happens before the title screen.  And it sets things up nicely.

The bulk of the movie takes place four years later.  The fraternity's New Year's Eve party is taking place on a party train (awesome), and it's a costume party (super convenient for a serial killer), and there's going to be a magician (what?).  And it's not just any magician.  It's David Copperfield!  (wtf)

Because no horror movie is complete without (!!!) illusions...

Before the train even leaves the station, we see there's a killer among the group.  So I'm not ruining anything by telling you that some psychopath is working its way through a hit list.  I'm also not ruining anything if I tell you that the guys that were a-holes at the beginning of the movie haven't achieved any character value during their college years, so they're all a-holes, but to an even great extent now.  So, that's the plot.

The movie itself doesn't have too much gore or nudity.  Most of it is implied, and for that reason I suspect this movie could have been PG.  It was ultimately released with an R rating, but I don't know why.  Yes, the college kids love to drink and screw and listen to rock and roll music ("to hell with you, mom!"), but most of that is shown off camera.  And it doesn't take away from the creepiness or the scares of Terror Train.  It just seems to me that if you're going to limit your audience by earning an R rating, go for it, and earn that R.  Show some guts and blood and boobs.

Conductor conducting.

But that's my only real complaint.  The ending was solid.  The creepiness was there.  The relationships between the characters seemed real enough.  There were some unexplained plot lines and questionable deaths in the movie, but that's ok.  The conductor character was cool, but I don't understand why he was needed in this movie.  I suppose he made for good filler, and a decent source of exposition for the movie.  He's a kind, old man who seems to enjoy having a train full of drunk college kids.

Ultimately, I enjoyed watching this movie.  I was fortunate enough to have good company while I was viewing it (my fellow horror-blogger-adventurer Patrick), and that always helps.  Neither of us could guess at what was coming next.  We both agreed that there was a super creepy shot towards the end of the movie.  Neither of us shivered or jumped at any scares, though.  With that in mind, know that this is an ok horror movie, but not one that demands repeat watchings.  I'm glad I saw it, but I can't imagine buying it.

Prime Evil (1988)

Format:  DVD

Genre:  Devil Cult, Satan

The premise here was promising:  there's an ancient Satanic cult operating within the Catholic church, and its congregation sacrifices their children/grandchildren to Satan in exchange for another "x" amount of years of life.  The problem here is the execution of the movie.  Not a single thing worked.  I suppose that could be blamed on the plot.  It scrambles in two dozen directions and then tries to come back together at the end.  It could also be blamed on the dialogue (at one point a detective tries to halt a psycho killer by saying "stop right there, fart breath").  Or it could be blamed on the god awful acting, the bad logic of the movie, or just the complete waste of everything that this movie is.  Everything is a waste here.  If you couldn't tell, I disliked this one.

For as much of a jumbled mess this movie is, it does follow a pattern that I picked up in some earlier giallo films, though this is no Italian sleaze.  This American sleaze introduces a female, emphasizes her cleavage, then has a killer strip her, beat her, and then take her away.  That is the one consistent theme in this movie.

What is most frustrating about this, though, are all of the interesting ingredients at play.  Imagine giving a chef a cuisine's worth of ingredients and then being handed crap goulash for dinner.  That's what's going on here.  Really cool idea of vampire-like devil cult.  There's a power struggle inside the cult.  The cult has a hypnotized mercenary/serial killer.  The cult is lead by an ancient dude with the powers of charisma/seduction and super strength.  A woman who survived an attempt on her life by the cult grew up to be a nun who wants to infiltrate and take down the cult.  A man is convinced that his fiancee is being seduced by a Satan cult, but he can't convince the police to intervene.

Super-Anti-Priest overpowers super-strong serial killer.  Why?  Unknown.

Any of these could really have been plots in its own movie.  Delicious ingredients for horror movies!  Unfortunately, the director wobbled it all together and effed it all up.  To be fair, the director previously worked on pornographic films, and those movies don't really have plot lines...from what I've been told.  Like a porn (from what I've been told), we're treated to loads of thrilling scenes that aren't particularly coherent.  The ending is bad.  The acting is bad.  I can't believe I have this in my collection.  To be fair, it came in a collection from Anchor Bay, and I had bought that collection for Hell Night (which is a much better film).  If you wanted to see the movie so you can see the Satan(?) puppet featured at the end of the movie, save yourself the trouble.  Here's the demon puppet from the end of the movie.

Satan(?) puppet

Don't Answer the Phone (1980)
Format:  DVD
Genre:  Serial Killer

For the life of me, I can't figure out why the title of this movie is Don't Answer the Phone.  There is one scene here where a woman is surprised by the serial killer when she answers the phone.  But she's not killed because she answered the phone.  She's killed because she was targeted by the killer.  I can only think of one other scene where a phone is involved in a murder.

This movie can be summarized quickly:  a deranged man finds attractive women, kills them, and then sometimes calls in to a radio personality's therapy show using a Spanish accent.  The police try to find him.  The end.

Pardon me.  Could I interest you in not answering the phone?

The killer is a really bad man who loves to deliver WWE-style monologues into thin air.  Sometimes they're directed at his dead parents.  Sometimes they're directed at women (both intangible and tangible).  Sometimes he does this while looking at himself in the mirror.  Sometimes he does this while he's lifting weights.  I don't think we're really given a reason why he does this or why he hates women.  I think it's hinted that he has PTSD.  He also loves pornography.  Maybe this is an extension of his perversion.  I don't know. It doesn't really matter to this movie.

If someone had told me that Lucio Fulci had directed this movie, you might have convinced me.  It is almost identical to the New York Ripper.  I imagine it played in the same grindhouses.  The detectives are just as ignorant.  The music is just as weird.  The audience isn't really sure why the therapist is the main character.  And it has the same senseless violence and nudity.  The biggest differences are the Los Angeles setting (as opposed to NYC) and the fact that the killer is established early on instead of a mysterious POV killer.

I didn't care for the New York Ripper, and I don't much care for this movie, either.  The lead detective/hero of the movie is a very poor actor who tries to make up for his bad acting by making his eyebrows jump all over the place.  His partner is a slime bag who is supposed to be charming.  The biggest joke of the movie comes when the detectives enter a whore house and all of the workers and their johns scramble to run away.  One homosexual man wearing leather, Saran wrap, and a mustache runs to the detectives screaming "It's a raid" before jumping through a window.  Those hilarious, promiscuous homosexual deviants.  What will they think of next?

When I'm not stripping and killing, I'm actually quite pleasant.

Admittedly, the movie does have a minor amount of charm to it.  I mentioned earlier that the killer gives a lot of WWE-style monologues.  I have a sweet spot for 1980's WWF.  Hence, charm.  And this scene where the killer walks into a model's home saying he's been contracted to take pictures of the model.  Not knowing any better, she lets him into the home.  He strips and kills her.  Then he strips and kills her roommate.  But before the killings, he's kind of charming in a 1980's WWF monologue kind of way.

Before I forget, this movie also has Porky from the movie Porky's in it.  He plays a porn publisher.  Done.

The House on Sorority Row (1983)
Format:  DVD
Genre:  Serial Killer

Holy smokes, this was a pleasant surprise!  I really liked this one from top to bottom.  As you can guess with a title like this, there is a squad of beautiful women that undress frequently.  They're each fun characters, though, and each one is being chased by a killer.  The setup is fun, too.

Well this is definitely going to end well.

Before the end of the semester, the girls of Theta Pi are going to throw a party.  They don't have much money, so instead of renting a hall, they're going to throw the party in their sorority house.  What they don't know is that something nutty is going on with their mean, old house mother.  When she tells them NO, they rebel and decide to pull a prank on her.  The prank goes awry, they accidentally shoot her (or do they?), and now they're all implicated in a murder.  So now a dozen disparate girls with their own feelings of guilt have to figure out what to do with their house mother's body all while throwing one hell of a party and while also trying to dodge a killer.  There's also a Dr. Loomis-like character chilling in a background story, and his presence really adds to the suspense.

This movie really encapsulated what I saw on VHS box covers in the local video rental's horror section growing up.  Scary clowns, babes, gore, violence, humor...this kind of movie is worth all of the classless attempts at exploiting it's chemistry.  It could be argued that this is a direct result of the success of Halloween or Friday the 13th.  And that's fair.  But I feel like this is probably one of the premier 80's college slasher movies.  There's just as much Halloween here as there is Meatballs, and that's something that I really appreciate.  I mean, how many movies can you think of where a big scare turns out just to be a drunk fat guy in a swimming pool.  The humor isn't limited to fat guys.  It also plays on the stereotype of sorority girls being susceptible, insecure bimbos, and that's a guilty pleasure of mine.

"I'm a sea pig!"

The gore here is solid.  The tool implemented more than others is the house mother's cane.  Apparently it has a very sharp point, and the point is regularly driven into people's bodies, faces, hands, etc.  And like most good slasher movies, we see an accumulation of bodies towards the end of the movie to show what the killer has been up to.  My favorite scene comes when our heroine is drugged (I won't explain why), but she begins imagining all of the things she's seen in the house since she realized she was being stalked by a killer.

Somebody ate some bad sorority girl.  I bet it was undercooked.

Good gracious.  This movie just hits all the right notes on all the right levels.  The acting is solid.  The conflict is fun to watch.  The situation the girls are in is not really relatable, but you can sympathize with them.  You can also sympathize with whoever is killing them because, well, they're each kind of bitchy.  For one reason or another, they have it coming.

I'm going to buy this for my collection. I liked it that much.  It remains to be seen if I will like the 2009 remake, but I have it kicking around here somewhere...

The Evil Dead (1981)
Format:  DVD
Genre:  Cabin in the Woods
Subgenre:  Haunted House, Demons

So much can be said about this movie.  It is not just one of my favorite scary movies of all time, but it is one of my favorite movies of all time.  This movie is the result of putting together a group of movie-loving dudes with their hearts set on making a movie.  From what I've read, the creators of the Evil Dead franchise originally wanted to make a comedy.  After several meetings, they realized that making a comedy was not financially viable.  Then they realized that they were better at making a horror movie.  After a couple revisions, this was the product they released.  And while there are elements of comedy here, I think it's a pretty damned scary movie, and I love to share it with people with the ONE CAVEAT that they watch the second installment of the movie with me.

There's more I could type about the film, but if you've made it this far in my blog, there's a good chance you've already seen the film.  The Evil Dead franchise is worth a post of its own some day.

Evil Dead 2:  Dead By Dawn (1987)
Format:  Bluray
Genre:  Cabin in the Woods
Subgenre:  Haunted House, Demons

For the 50 movie of my challenge, I watched this movie with my fiancee.  She'd never seen this or the first Evil Dead, so I coordinated to share everything with her.  Unfortunately, she fell halfway through the first Evil Dead.  With that in mind, I poured more than enough alcohol and pushed through.

Where the first installment in the trilogy is pretty scary, this movie mixes the fear and the funny in a way that I had never seen.  It is often imitated, but never truly realized.  Shaun of the Dead has a different sense of humor about it.  Dead Snow is a dear, close imitator of Evil Dead 2, but it uses a bit too much of the Evil Dead 2 gags.  Dead Alive is another great comedy/horror, and it probably comes closest to the Evil Dead 2 vein.  Sam Raimi and Co. released Drag Me To Hell a couple years ago, and it does a great job mingling the scariness with fun, but the one thing missing from that film is a great physical comedian that ED2 has (Bruce Campbell).

Again, I could go on and on about the Evil Deads.  More than anything else, I credit this movie with turning me on to the horror genre in general.  I'll never forget visiting with my friend Patrick in his parents' basement to watch all three movies.  At the time, I wasn't much into horror movies.  The only one I had really seen and enjoyed had been Jaws, Poltergeist, and Scream.  As a kid, I'd been turned onto dark comedies like Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, Hocus Pocus, and Death Becomes Her, and I'd really embraced those movies.  This was the first movie, though, that sent me spiraling into the horror genre.  After this, I started asking for zombie movies and slashers for Christmas.  I started to read as much as I could about the directors and their works.  Coincidentally, I saw this right around the same time that my parents signed up for AOL.  And wouldn't you know, Evil Dead 2 had quite the online fanbase (and that was quite a feat for 1998).  Since then, the movie has attracted a larger and larger audience.  I'll type more about it at some later date.  But I would be remiss not to gush over the movie.  I love it.  And I couldn't think of a better endcap for the 50 NIGHTS OF HORROR CHALLENGE.

The Initiation (1984)
Format:  Netflix Streaming
Genre:

To be perfectly honest, I jumped into this movie due to how much I enjoyed The House on Sorority Row.  Thirty minutes into the film, though, and I could safely say that this is a much different animal.  After thirty minutes of movie, though, it fails to live up to its promises, and it becomes a movie very much like The House on Sorority Row.  For a while it looked like there were Nightmare on Elm Street-ish dream sequences with dream murders actualized in reality.  Instead, and any casual horror viewer will figure this out, Kelly's "dreams" are actually repressed memories.

Creepy sorority activities?  Creepy sorority activities.

From this point we're given an above-average slasher movie.  The gore is great.  The acting is right where it ought to be for this kind of movie.  There are a handful of neat twists.  Otherwise, though, there's not much that separates this from the pack.  There is one redeeming quality, though:  the horror movie takes a turn and puts the main characters inside a locked shopping mall after hours.  This has been done in Dawn of the Dead and later in Chopping Mall, and I am a sucker for it.

I can't remember the first time I encountered post-apocalyptic themes.  It very well could have been reprints of the EC comic book Weird Science, it could have been any number of comic books or Twilight Zone episodes for that matter.  Regardless, the thought of surviving alone in the world always sounded fun.  I suppose there's something of a Huck Finn aspect to it that sounds like a good challenge.  And when I thought about where I would hole up in some dystopic future, I always thought of hiding in a shopping mall or large retailer (Wal-Mart or Meijer for example).  There's so much to do and so many supplies to hold one over.  And when The Initiation wandered into the survivors-being-stalked-through-an-empty-mall...I got hooked again.

Under NO circumstances should you go to SEARS after hours and screw in the bed department.

There's not much else to be said about the film.  It comes across very similarly to The Houses on Sorority Row.  There's similar humor, similar beautiful women, similar gore.  The aspect that sets THOSR ahead of this is the plot device.  Here we only have college kids running from a killer.  It's not awful, by any means, but it makes you appreciate THOSR that much more.

Penis costume?  Penis costume.

There was one scene in particular from The Initiation that still scares me.  One dude is alone, having imbibed a bit too much, and he decides to shlep to the men's room.  Alone, mid-stream, someone turns the lights out in the bathroom.  To me, that mess is HORRIFYING!  Forget the embarassing fact that one could piss all over themselves, forget that I casually, audibly fart when I'm pissing by myself...someone could EASILY come up behind any man while said man is enjoying the warm release of urination.  It's a simple, fragile pleasure, and it could so easily ruined.  Scary stuff for realz.

Cropsey (2009)
Format:  Netflix Streaming
Genre:  Documentary
Subgenre:  Serial Killer

This is scary because it is true.

It's truly all speculative.  That's the weirdest thing about the movie.  The creators spent 90 minutes (give or take) introducing a real world unsolved mystery with a 110+ creepy factor, and then they keep the damn thing anchored in fact by making sure the viewer knows that everything presented is an urban legend and most of the movie is speculation.

Cropsey grabbed my attention and did not let it go.  The rattles in my spine rattled a bit louder because the urban legend in question took place/takes place in Staten Island.  There is some grim archival footage of Geraldo (?!) exploring an aged asylum.  And that asylum is the breeding ground for the creepy urban legend.

Grim is the best way to describe the documentary.  There are loads of facts here, and ultimately the viewer is given the option to decide how creeped out they want to be with the story.  It's an ala carte horror film.  I can't remember the last really scary documentary I watched.

I do recommend this.  I don't want to reveal too much about the documentary, because it would potentially lead you to do your own online investigation which would ruin the movie.  WATCH IT.  I dare you.  Because, really, the movie is an on-screen dare to go explore an abandoned building.

The Girl (2012)
Format:  TV
Genre:  Historical Drama

The Girl piqued my interest because I'm an Alfred Hitchcock fanatic.  The Girl pissed me off because it paints Alfred Hitchcock as a legit creep instead of a lovable creep.  Toby Jones does an alright job impersonating Hitch, but I've seen too many Toby Jones movies to get past the fact that this is not really Hitch.  Sienna Miller is beautiful, and she does a great job being beautiful.  I can't compare her much to Tippi Hedren because Hedren didn't have much of a career, and I haven't seen her in much.

Mr favorite parts of the film were the recreations of The Birds.  It was well recreated.  I don't know what else to say about it.  The pace of the movie was slow.  There were plenty of nods to other Hitchcock films (particularly Psycho), but I got the impression throughout the movie that it was trying to make Hitch look like the character of Norman Bates.  And for better or for worse, I don't want to see one of my favorite directors/cult figures portrayed as a legit bad guy.  That is my hang up with this movie.

I did jump at one point.  And the movie did make me do some further reading.

Lake Placid (1999)
Format:  TV
Genre:  Monster Movie

Lake Placid is supposed to be a horror comedy.  Unfortunately, the jokes fall flat more often than not, and the relationships that are supposed to be funny between the characters (nobody likes each other) come off more as obnoxious than endearing.  Bill Pullman isn't horrible, but his character is Michael Douglas-light from Romancing the Stone, but without the machismo.  Bridget Fonda is Kathleen Turner-light from Romancing the Stone, but without the sex appeal or sympathy.  Oliver Platt and Brendan Gleeson just deserve better (and both have made much better movies since).

There are true thrills to this movie, but not enough to separate it from any other mid-80's to late-90's major studio monster movie.  It doesn't try to be Jaws, and that's a good thing.  It's more along the lines of Tremors or Critters.  Betty White provides the brightest performance in the film, and that should tell you just about everything you need to know.

Ultimately, this is a fine movie, one that is good to have on in the background while you're only giving it half of your attention.  I will fondly watch this again someday when I'm warming up a frozen pizza in the oven and playing video games on my phone or tablet.

SPOILER:  This movie does get kudos for one sweet scene where the crocodile eats a bear!  BOOMSHAKALA!  My inner 9-year-old fist pumped and played air guitar when this happened!

Cat's Eye (1985)
Format:  VHS
Genre:  Anthology

For a PG-13 horror anthology written by Stephen King, this movie really excelled.  Two of the three episodes were suspenseful tales of violence, danger, and sexiness not unlike what I used to read in old EC comics like The Vault of Horror or Tales of Suspense.  The third episode made me flip out.  To say I liked it was an understatement.  I popped when I saw the mini-monster scooting around Drew Barrymore's bedroom.  I kept looking to Kelley and telling her how scared I would have been if I had seen this as a kid.

A young Displaced Kentuckian would have had nightmares from this story.

Another sweet thing about the film is all of the references to other Stephen King works.  In the first five minutes of the movie we see Cujo and Christine.  And there are other references to The Dead Zone and Pet Semarary if you look for them.  I read online that there's a reference to Maximum Overdrive, but I think it's a loose one.

James Woods - chiseled machismo with a smoking problem.

I've stated before my appreciation for Tales from the Crypt.  This movie seemed like an extension of that ideal.  Short stories with twists and scares and loads of fun.  There was good humor sprinkled throughout these stories and enough tension and conflict to make even Kelley watch with anticipation.  James Woods plays a handsome father/husband, too.  I forget how awesome James Woods is sometimes.  He's a smooth operator here.

So with this grouping of movies I surpassed my goal of 50 horror movies before Halloween.  It was a fun journey, albeit disturbing at times, and I'm sure it's made an impression on my character.  I amassed a large collection of horror VHS tapes and DVDs, and I've received a large number of recommendations for movies to watch.  I'll have to get to them all eventually, and I imagine this type of blog post will continue for a while.

I'll type up a better summary of this experience in the next couple of days/weeks.  For now, though, this is the End.