While making a documentary for a community college project, four students suddenly switch subjects when they learn about a serial killer known as Mister Creep. Possibly an urban legend, he’s said to have slain 200 people in 20 years. He broadcasts unnerving videos starring his victims and a creepy puppet. And he has a clown mask permanently fused to his face. I mean, coulrophobic chillers are so in right now; what enterprising filmmaker wouldn’t pivot?
Living up to its title within minutes, Mister Creepy is twisted enough to make you wonder if a true madman isn’t plucking the strings. It’s only Texas-based Isaac Rodriguez, whose A Town Full of Ghosts earlier this year also impressed with enough menace to make up for deficiencies elsewhere.
Like that movie, Mister Creep falls under found footage, but segmented to move quickly through its 67 minutes. A nighttime sequence inside an “abandoned” police station plays particularly spooky, containing one of the movie’s two alarmingly good shocks; the other, you likely won’t see coming. —Rod Lott
Lasting all of six episodes, Late Night Horror was Britain’s first TV horror anthology to be broadcast in color. Unfortunately, because the BBC regularly wiped tapes, only one episode survives. Fortunately, that ep, “The Corpse Can’t Play,” is a fantastic example of the modern macabre, where the monsters are human.
Opening with a round of musical chairs, the kid’s birthday party setting belies where the next 25 minutes take you. The birthday boy, Ronnie (Frank Barry, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors), is a spoiled brat. Arriving late to the celebration — because he wasn’t invited — is class outcast Simon (Michael Newport, The Naked Runner), who’s bespectacled, well-mannered and not accepted.
I need not tell you kids are cruel; Ronnie is especially hateful toward Simon, twisting the knife (so to speak) over the latter’s father’s current place of residence: six feet under. Where prolific BBC director Paddy Russell (Z Cars, The Moonstone, Doctor Who, et al.) goes from there won’t be revealed here. That said, even with Chekov’s drama theory top of mind, the denouement still may surprise you in how much a 50-plus-year-old episode is able to revel in such grisliness. And if not, hopefully the show’s unsettling title sequence wins you over.
“The Corpse Can’t Play” comes as bonus DVD with Colin Cutler and Steve Rogers’ book, Late Night Horror: A Complete Guide to the BBC Horror Series. The paperback features wavering typefaces and point sizes as it delves into what is assuredly the most complete history of the show, both now and in the future. The disc alone justifies a purchase. —Rod Lott
Released under a myriad of titles — Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, Don’t Open the Window and so on — the Spanish-Italian film The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue calls itself a comedy, but in the 44 years of watching subpar movies, I never thought it was a comedy. Boring, maybe … but a comedy? I don’t think so.
As the swinging, swanky theme plays, a buxom lass flashes her wares to no one in particular. I don’t know who that is or what they want, but that’s replaced with chemical runoff, overflowing trash bags and a stiff upper lip. I guess it’s an ecological film now?
After a fender bender with with Edna (Cristina Galbó), George (Ray Lovelock) hitches a ride with her to the English town of Windermere. While asking for roadside directions, some of the local farmers are testing some machinery utilizing sound waves. It wakes the dead and, thank God, one of the character’s heroin habit. Yeah.
Meanwhile, the inspector (Arthur Kennedy) has some serious anger issues that should be dealt with, until he is barely strangled in the finale.
With the exception of a few well-executed zombie designs, this tries to be five or six films and, as we learn, Manchester Morgue can barely get one off the ground. The mixing of ecological themes, zombie dirges, police procedurals, ill-fated drug drama, British sex comedy and some sort of weird ritual to revive the dead via their eyelids, it is too much.
I did like the randy breasts, though. Pip-pip, my good sir! —Louis Fowler
Of all the escape room movies I’ve seen, the obscure Escape: Puzzle of Fear seems the least interested in its exploitable concept. Directed by the basically and justifiably anonymous J. Jones, the film takes half an hour to get its vapid characters into one … and then, within minutes, out of it, switching gears so abruptly, it has to have damaged the clutch.
(To be fair, a brief prologue takes place in the desired environment. Harried contestants battle against the clock and say, “Oh, snap” and “Hey, I found another weird thing.” Yet this place isn’t the one Puzzle of Fear’s participants will tackle, so it reeks of “tacked-on in post.”)
Our main man is Matt (Tommy Nash, who also produced), a contemptible dude-bro talent agent we meet as he wakes in bed. Immediately, he gets blown by his girlfriend (Aubrey Reynolds, 2018’s Frenzy) and only reaches climax by thinking about a potato sack with eyeholes pulled over someone’s head — a weird fetish, if you ask me, but you do you, Matt.
Later that day, he’s mansplaining “escape room” to her when his Cuba Gooding Jr.-esque best bud (Omar Gooding, Ghost Dad) comes bearing tickets to the Escape Hotel. He hypes these tix like they’re for the Super Bowl sidelines or in the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards’ splash zone.
At the über-posh, white-gloved Escape Hotel, they play the “crime and justice room.” Objective: Find the two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. It takes Matt a ridiculously long time to make the connection between the mission and a real-life event in his past involving two 8-year-old girls gone missing while trick-or-treating. When he does, you can see recognition wash over his face. I mean, what are the odds?
And what kind of trouble is two-time Emmy nominee Nicholas Turturro in that he has to take a sixth-billed part in this trash?
And why did scripter Lizze Gordon (#Captured) type the line, “Ew, it stinks in here. Did you do a wee-wee?” much less leave it in?
For narrative structure, story leaps, character behavior, infantile dialogue, atonal performances and much, much more, Escape: Puzzle of Fear is top-to-bottom baffling. Let me out. —Rod Lott
I used to hold Roddy McDowall’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes absence against him. Now that I’ve learned — and, more importantly, seen — the reason, all is forgiven. It casts an enchanting spell.
In the only film he directed, The Ballad of Tam Lin, Ava Gardner stars as Michaela Cazaret, a self-described “immensely rich” and “immensely old” woman whose tissue box of younger lovers keeps her young. Currently up — in more ways than one — is Tom (Ian McShane, Too Scared to Scream). He pledges allegiance to her heart until he meets the age-appropriate Janet (Stephanie Beacham, Inseminoid). Living at a clergy house, Janet is the virgin to Ms. Cazaret’s whore.
Still immensely foxy in middle age, Ms. Cazaret is like a house mother to the parade of a dozenish mod hangers-on cavorting about her country manse. Theirs is a careless life of Frisbee, vibraphone jams, tarot cards, parlor games, puppies and intoxicants. When Tom tries to leave, Ms. Cazaret uses her witchy ways to turn their petulance predatory.
It may not sound like much on paper — its 16th-century Scottish source material certainly doesn’t — but The Ballad of Tam Lin is a folk-horror masterpiece. McDowall exhibits a firm grasp on credibly establishing a pastoral, ecumenical mood, then injecting it with hallucinogens. For example, Tom’s night flight from the Cazaret mob astonishes at least half of one’s senses as he transforms into a bear and then aflame — as eerie and nightmarish as it is gorgeous. Earlier touches are comparatively simplistic, yet no less gratifying, like bathing the viewer’s POV in a golden yellow when either lead slips on color-tinted sunglasses.
While McShane is great as the protagonist who doesn’t quite start as such, the picture belongs to Gardner. The sheer vulnerability of her performance can’t be accidental. A classic beauty of Hollywood’s golden age, Gardner stood in a sort of cinematic purgatory at the time of Tam Lin: just past what studio execs consider to be a woman’s prime and, therefore, on the cusp of entering the disposability stage demanded by disaster-movieensembles, where she would spend most of the decade. Just because she was no longer “bankable” doesn’t mean she wasn’t luminous, and so good at playing Cazaret’s three switched-on moods: evil, seductive and fragile. —Rod Lott
While making a documentary for a community college project, four students suddenly switch subjects when they learn about a serial killer known as Mister Creep. Possibly an urban legend, he’s said to have slain 200 people in 20 years. He broadcasts unnerving videos starring his victims and a creepy puppet. And he has a clown mask permanently fused to his face. I mean, coulrophobic chillers are so in right now; what enterprising filmmaker wouldn’t pivot? 
Lasting all of six episodes, 
