Leprechaun (1993)

A man returns from Ireland drunk in a limousine with a tiny pouch of gold.  When asked by his wife what's going on, he tells her some cockamamie tale about tricking a leprechaun of his gold, and that they'll be shopping for "mansions" the next day.  Shortly after that, the wife is killed and the man suffers a debilitating stroke in a suspicious Leprechaun-related incident.  Could there be a connection?

LEPRECHAUN is a fun comedy slasher that came out toward the end of a horror wave of nasty but fun slashers, just a couple of years prior to the next massive horror wave, this time of slick and bloodless slashers like SCREAM (1995) and its many imitators.  You'd think that it would be something in between the two, but instead it's a total throwback to the late 80s, complete with a nasty, wise-cracking monster not too dissimilar from Freddy of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

And it's a good throwback, that feels like it was made with an honest love of the genre.  The characters are likeable, there's some fun '90s humor, and the leprechaun is of course now a legendary horror villain who, much like Jason from the Friday the 13th movies, has gone everywhere and done it all, having adventures IN SPACE and IN THE HOOD, and even going BACK 2 THA HOOD for more.

The reason why you watch a horror movie called LEPRECHAUN is to see a leprechaun killing people in inventive ways while cracking jokes, and LEPRECHAUN delivers.  The kills are fun and bloody without being nasty or gory, so it's fun for all ages.  And you will never forget death by pogo stick.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

 

Released just one year after HELLRAISER, HELLBOUND continues right where the first movie left off, and even includes a digest version of the final scene of the first movie in case you completely forgot what happened in that, or maybe just randomly decided to see this horror sequel and need to know what happened during the last 10 minutes of the first movie but absolutely nothing before that.

HELLBOUND is an entertaining movie but an underwhelming sequel.

It is entertaining because of how imaginative it is; with a few changes here and there, it would make for an excellent fantasy adventure film.  You could say it's an ultra-violent and sadomasochistic version of THE GOONIES (1985)—or, perhaps more appropriately, RETURN TO OZ (1985) due it focusing on a young girl who is wrongly kept in a mental institution and has the ability to travel to a fantasy world.

It is an underwhelming sequel because, although it is a direct continuation of the story, it is a typical horror sequel that attempts to add unnecessary backstory to characters and situations that were wisely left vague in the first movie.  HELLBOUND therefore explains in some detail from where the Cenobites come and what they were before they became Cenobites.  The first movie presented the Cenobites as completely alien beings, so I expected them to hail from a similarly alien reality.  Much of the second half of the movie takes place in this reality, and while the atmosphere and effects are both excellent, it's a bit of a letdown to find out that these explorers of human experience who are beyond pain and pleasure live in a spooky scary maze where you are confronted with your worst fears.

Having said all that, this is very fun movie.  The effects are just as good if not better than those in the first movie, but the higher budget means that everything is of a much larger scope.  The acting is all around better as is the pacing, suggesting that having Tony Randel replace Clive Barker in the director's chair was a good idea (Barker is credited with the story only for this one).

There is, however, one major problem with this movie and that's the script.  A lot of the dialog is poor, and it only gets worse when a new Cenobite is introduced toward the end of the movie.  Spitting out one-liners like some kind of lame doctor version of Freddy Krueger, this guy is awful.  He's also got a ridiculous design as he's tethered to the Cenobite realm with a tentacle attached to the top of his head... I was hoping for a scene where the heroines escape by running just out of reach of his tether.  Sadly, that doesn't happen, though the way he is killed is pretty awesome.

This suggests that HELLBOUND was an attempt to go mainstream and get some of those Freddy bucks, which is a shame.  This would only get worse (much worse) as the series continued.  But that is a story for another day.

Hellraiser (1987)

A sweaty, sweaty man sits in a room, playing with a tiny box.  He seems to be struggling, but suddenly his thumb catches some hidden switch and the box begins opening on its own.  However, instead of G. I. Joe action figures and candy, this box is full of spiky chains that shoot out and embed themselves in the man's flesh, pulling and eventually tearing him apart.

Hell having been raised, we are transported into another movie as a married couple step into their new house.  Who was that guy with the box?  What connection does he have with the married couple?  It is a mystery to this day.

---

HELLRAISER is a great low-budget shocker with a fascinating concept and some of the best gooey effects ever put to screen.  The box, it turns out, is a sort of key to an alternate dimension that is home to the Cenobites, sadomasochistic beings who have explored the peaks and valleys of ecstasy and agony so thoroughly that concepts such as pleasure and pain no longer apply to them (they still have no problem with exploding your head though).

The story focuses on a man (Larry), his daughter (Kirsty), his evil scumbag second wife (Julia), and his evil scumbag brother (Frank).  Julia and Frank have a history together, and it turns out that Frank was the guy from the intro that got torn into bits... he still survives, to some extent, as a quivering sack of meat under the floorboards in the attic, and when Larry mistakenly bleeds on the floor like a total buffoon, it sets in motion Frank's resurrection.

The rest of the movie involves Julia seducing and killing men so that Frank can drink their blood and slowly regenerate his muscles, flesh, etc.  I have a major problem with this premise as Julia is depicted as some sort of seductive vixen, but in reality she's sort of a frumpy middle-aged lady that you'd expect to see doing some weeding in her garden, and definitely not seducing men at the local bar.  Her poofy 80s haircut doesn't help matters, although I suppose back then it was irresistibly sexy.

The HELLRAISER series would go on to focus more and more on the Cenobites, specifically their leader "Pinhead" (he's the one with pins in his head).  In this movie, they are just a menacing presence lurking in the background and are better off for it.  They're played here as completely disinterested in what they do, almost bureaucratic, and it is actually quite a chilling contrast with the typical maniacal killing machines (Jason from the FRIDAY THE 13TH series or Michael Myers from the HALLOWEEN series) that were popular at the time in horror movies.

The movie itself is well-paced and a bit of a special effects tour-de-force.  It is not without its problems though.  The quality of the acting outside of Claire Higgins (Julia), Andrew Robinson (Larry), and Doug Bradley (Pinhead) is uniformly awful.  Sean Chapman (Frank) and Ashley Laurence (Kirsty) are MUCH better in the movie's sequel, so I suspect that this was an issue with the direction on the part of writer/director Clive Barker.  A second problem is the overall structure, which feels episode with a rushed ending, as though no one involved had any idea how to make this awesome concept into an actual story.

However, these are minor complaints as the movie works perfectly fine as a "nightmare captured on film" akin to THE BEYOND (1981), SUSPIRIA, or the entire PHANTASM series.  Highly recommended!

Creepshow 2 (1987)

Creepshow 2 is the extremely inferior sequel to the awesome horror anthology flick, Creepshow.  Unlike the first movie, which contained five stories in just about two hours, a star-studded cast, brilliant direction by George A. Romero, an atmospheric score, and charming animation spots here and there... Creepshow 2 has three stories at just over 90 minutes, a cast of nobodies (with the exception of George Kennedy and Dorothy Lamour), pedestrian direction by a guy, a score that makes everything even worse, and horrible animation that goes on too long and looks like it was outsourced to starving kids in third world hellholes chained to animation desks in the basement.

In the first story, "Ol' Chief Woodenhead," nothing happens for five hours, and then a wooden statue kills three guys in five seconds while buttrock plays in the background THE END.

In the second story, "The Raft," a bunch of kids go to the titular raft and are eaten by a sentient oil slick.  Nice touch: the part where the "hero" just decides out of nowhere to molest his friend's girlfriend while she is sleeping (!), even though his friend/her boyfriend and her friend/his girlfriend were just hours ago eaten horribly (!!) by an oil slick that is right beneath their raft (!!!).  Our hero!

In the third and final story, "The Hitchhiker," a lady runs over a guy over and over for 20 minutes while a guy goes NEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW on his electric guitar whenever something "extreme" or "scary" or "stupid" happens. When the guitar guy gets tired of quote-unquote shredding, some guy starts playing music that old people probably consider to be "funky." Good gory effects on the hitchhiker, though.

I first watched this movie as a kid on HBO at a friend's house, and even then I knew that "Ol' Chief Woodenhead" was lame.  "The Raft" terrified me then, and it's still a scary little story.  I liked "The Hitchhiker" much much more when I was a kid, and now I just find it to be tedious.  The less said about the animation parts, the better.

Worth watching for the "Raft," but be sure to bring a crossword puzzle or something for the rest of the movie.

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

Jason is back! But this time he's in a camp killing some adult teenagers!

Fans hated (and continue to hate) Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning because Jason is not really in it (instead, it's a guy pretending to be Jason)... but, come on.  If not for the last 30 seconds of the movie, no one would know any differently.  Besides, I liked how, instead of killing a bunch of camp counselors, "Jason" was killing a bunch of crazy kids at some mental home.

Well, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood has got to be the low point in the series, at least until Jason got a case of wanderlust and started going to places like Hell and outer space.  The only thing that makes this movie stand is that the heroine (Tina, which is the perfect 80s name for your horror movie heroine) has telekinesis and the power to raise the dead (!), but the script does absolutely nothing with this until the last scene of the film.

I did, however, appreciate how evil and slimy Tina's psychiatrist is.  By far the best part of the movie is where he is running away from Jason with Tina's mom.  Jason catches up to them, and the guy grabs the mom, pulls her in between him and Jason, and uses her as a human shield.  Although she dies rather painlessly from just getting stabbed, the psychiatrist gets what he deserves with probably the most horrible death in the film.

Other than that one scene and a great stunt where Jason falls backward not down but through some stairs, this movie has absolutely nothing going on.  With a bad horror movie, you can usually look forward to some inventive lighting or camerawork, and of course some great gore effects. 
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood has none of that, as it looks like a high budget TV movie, and the MPAA demanded that basically all gore and blood be cut from the film to get an R rating.  It's a miracle they even allowed the movie to have a Jason in it!

As far as I'm concerned, this is the low point of the series.  Friday the 13th Part 3, while awful, at least had some good effects and its laughable attempt at 3D, while Friday the 13th: Jason's Space Adventure brought some excellent gore effects to keep you awake.

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

A bunch of high school kids and their chaperones take a cruise ship to New York to celebrate their graduation.  Little do they know... Jason is on there.

This movie is absolutely ridiculous, but so much fun.  It begins with a couple enjoying a relaxing night on a boat on Crystal Lake—the very same Crystal Lake that Jason was banished to in the previous movie, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood.  What's interesting is that, Crystal Lake must apparently connect to the Atlantic Ocean, because that boat somehow ends up drifting into some port in New Jersey, where it is completely ignored.  You see, it is this port that the high school kids are disembarking from, to make their trip to New York.  What kind of school are these kids going to, that arranges to rent a full-sized cruise ship to take like 10 kids from New Jersey to New York??  The ship has a DISCO in it fer chrissakes.

The vast, vast majority of the movie takes place on this cruise ship, and while the movie takes a lot of flak for that, I really don't mind.  Unlike the boring Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, which just takes place in another bunch of cabins on Crystal Lake, I really appreciated that this movie finally introduced a unique environment in which Jason could kill a bunch of unlikable kids.

It helps that the movie is just overall more interesting.  The kids are all hateful, but at least they have some quirk to tell them apart—and I actually got a kick out of how each of their quirks basically defines them as characters and there is zero character development whatsoever outside of that.  This girl plays an electric guitar, and that's how she dies.  This guy is an amateur boxer, and that's how he dies.  This other guy walks around the entire movie holding a video camera, and that's how he dies.  Contrast that with the previous movie in the series, where you had the psychic girl, and then that guy that gets killed, and this girl that gets killed, and this other girl that gets killed.

The last part of the movie takes place in "New York," but it was actually somewhat infamously shot everywhere else but New York (with some minor exceptions toward the end), including Vancouver and Los Angeles.  Jason manages to take the entire cruise ship down, but a few survivors climb into a little rowboat and escape (the movie gets major points for a part where a teacher tells another group of survivors to wait in the kitchen while she gets help, and then she is told five minutes later that, basically, all those kids drowned so forget about them).  Somewhat hilariously, Jason apparently just swims alongside that rowboat in the middle of a massive storm because the very minute the boat arrives in New York, Jason climbs out of the ocean—this is the guy whose origin story is, he drowned as a kid cuz he doesn't know how to swim.  It's nice to see Jason grow as a person.

The New York depicted in this movie is... unique to say the least.  It's ultra violent and filthy, and in one alarming scene the heroes are told to get out of the sewers because the city floods them with toxic waste every night at midnight!

Having said all of that, this is a criminally underrated F13 film.  Sure, it's not as good as the very best the series has to offer (that would be parts 1, 2, 4, and 6), but it is far, far better than any of the others.

Sadly, outside of some great gore effects in the unrated version of the following film, Friday the 13th sadly has very little to offer to pretty much anyone from here on.

Blood Sabbath (1972)

Oh god, Pure Terror why do you punish me so?  Did I not purchase you from the cruel Amazon and give you a home?  Did I not put you on my media shelf?

Blood Sabbath, aka Aquelarre Sangriento, tells the story of a Vietnam vet named David wandering around and getting menaced by a van of no good dirty hippies.  But these hippies are a bit different!  Instead of love and peace, they prefer brooms to fly on and black cats!  Cuz they are witches!!!!

I'm not sure if this movie was cut or something, because I had a hell of a time following it.  At one point the guy is being assaulted by a group of naked ladies, the next he is frolicking with a lady from the lake, then hanging out at a bar with a priest and some hobo guy.  The priest character is hilarious as he's got this great mustache and is constantly getting angry and shouting at people for the lamest of reasons (like the evil witch queen attempting to seduce him with naked ladies, or the "hero" begging him to steal his soul [can priests do that???]).

David is the lamest of heroes.  He just wanders around, having some flashbacks, dreaming about his lady from the lake, menacingly kicking over buckets of water whilst shouting.  I don't recall him really doing much of anything other than trying to find a way to get rid of his soul so that he can be with his water nymph.

The movie is just an excuse to show naked ladies running around for like 80 minutes—hey guys, no complaint here AM I RIGHT—but other than that there is really nothing here.  Not worth a watch.

The Manster (1962)

I knew it was too good to be true.  After the excellent Hands of Steel, here comes Pure Terror with another one of those boring, talky early 60s sci-fi horror/sci-fi flicks.

Larry, an American foreign news correspondent, is in Japan on his latest assignment to interview the eccentric Dr. Suzuki.  Before you know it though, Dr. Suzuki has injected Larry with some experimental drug and Larry is growing an extra head out of his shoulder and going around killing people.

Don't get me wrong.  That part is cool.  The problem with this movie is that I have pretty much summed up everything worth mentioning about this movie in just under 50 words.  And yet the movie is, like, 70 minutes long or something.

So in between what passes for action or even plot in this movie, you get the standard scenes of people standing there in a room expositionin' at one another.  There's also this subplot about how Larry's marriage is on the rocks, so you get some heated phone conversations.  Rather than being some comical misunderstanding where Larry is cleared in the end, actually he is over in Japan getting drunk and cavorting with women, the slug.

So I don't know if you are supposed to relate to Larry, or feel bad for him or what, because he is kinda sleazy (and murders people and has a monster head growing out of his shoulder).  Who are we rooting for here?

Well, this movie was terrible, and now a picture is forming in my mind to explain why I gave up watching this set for so long.  Disc 2 was a complete wash, with garbage like The Thirsty Dead and (shudder) The Werewolf of Washington, and Disc 3 is not looking much better.

Hands of Steel (1986)

Oh wow.  Oh.  Wow.  What was I thinking?  Right after the horrible The Thirsty Dead, we have this masterpiece.  Do some basic research and you will see that this movie was originally titled Vendetta dal futuro, and if you are familiar at all with the kinds of movies I cover on this blog, you will realize that we have struck ITALIAN GOLD.

Hands of Steel is the story of a guy with robot hands who is programmed to assassinate a political rival of the evil government.  He then goes into hiding, falls in love, does a lot of arm wrestling, and then has to face the government that created him if he wants to hold on to his humanity (using his robot hands).

So this movie is like Over the Top combined with, uh, one of those cyborg movies where the Over the Top.  So yes, just another example of Hollywood shamelessly copying cheap Italian genre flicks.
cyborg has to fight evil to hold on to his humanity.  Or at least, I was going to say that, but this came out BEFORE

You better like arm wrestling, because that is like 30% of the movie.  It's like Terminator 2 but instead of shooting people, Arnold just arm wrestles them.  Or West Side Story where the gangs arm wrestle instead of dance.  Unfortunately there is no point to the arm wrestling, because our hero has robot hands so he is destined to win.

Even without any suspense whatsoever and all that pointless arm wrestling, this is a fun one to spend a boring night watching.  Highly recommended.

The Thirsty Dead (1974)

Somebody get these dead a drink!

Alternate opening "joke."
SO ARE THEY THIRSTY OR DEAD? WHICH IS IT FELLAS?

This Pure Terror set has really demotivated me.  Disc 1 had some really fun movies on it, but from then on its been discs and discs of horrible movies.

The Thirsty Dead starts off strong with a title that makes you think you will be in for some great Italian zombie ripoff movie.  I even liked the title screen.  Then you get some go-go dancing and you are certain you are going to be in for a great 70 minutes or whatever.

BUT WAIT.  This movie actually just sucks.  Women are getting kidnapped and brought to a magical island with some cult of people in futuristic clothes.  Turns out it's a cult of vampires or something because they need the blood of women to stay young and alive.

UGHHHH this movie is horrible.  I've watching it two or three times but I lose interest and end up doing research on wikipedia on different types of potatoes or detailed production history notes on Family Ties.  It has single-handedly stopped me from posting on my beloved blog for, like, five years or something.

Well, I am not gonna let this movie control my life!  I am taking the reins of my own destiny sled and driving that sled on through the snow and the rain of these horrible movies.

There.  That should be long enough so that the text all wraps around that poster.  Next movie!