From a village in Lancashire, the elderly Ballantyne sisters stick to the traditions they know best: tea time, neighborhood gossip, monster hoarding — you know, that sort of thing. When soldiers at a nearby base begin dying “vicious, brutal” deaths, forthright Joyce (Flora Robson, The Shuttered Room) and batty Ellie (Beryl Reid, Psychomania) start to wonder and worry that perhaps their, um, “housemate” is to blame.
There’s not much to this Tigon production from James Kelley, writer and director of the pervo thriller What the Peeper Saw. Much of it takes place in the Ballantyne household, which wouldn’t necessarily be a negative if more happened besides talking. Conversations more mundane than macabre fill the film to its brim, even after a fall confines Joyce to bed — and sedatives — for an extended period.
The scenes of slaughter are brief and bloody, yet shot with whiplash-inducing camera movement to retain a semblance of mystery, although viewers can read Cellar’s cards before it dares show them. When it does, the reveal is even more abrupt than it is underwhelming, especially preceded by a good 10 minutes of Ellie’s exposition dump, which not even Reid’s wonderful performance can save. After that kind of buildup, you deserve better. —Rod Lott
Hard to believe, but until the iPhone opened the floodgates for anyone to make a movie, we had the spread of Amityville Horror sequels pretty well contained. Of those pre-remake efforts, none is widely considered great, but none is worse than The Amityville Curse.
Made in Canada and supposedly based on Hans Holzer’s book of the same name, the fifth series entry has some set of balls in using a house that looks nothing — and I mean nothing — like the iconic, attic-as-eyes, real-life residence of 112 Ocean Avenue. It’s this film’s version of a soap opera’s cast switcheroo, but at least those shows pass it off as the result of plastic surgery. Curse has no excuse.
Married couple Deborah (Dawna Wightman, The Psycho She Met Online) and Marvin (David Stein, Hangfire) buy the abandoned abode as a fixer-upper. Being terrible hosts and even worse friends, they invite a few pals over to stay at the shithole, which has holes in the floor and rust in the pipes. To homeowners on a fixed income, those structural problems are frightening enough — and sadly more frightening than anything else Curse tosses our way: A barking dog! A hairy spider! A wine glass that breaks upon the clink of a toast! Another hairy spider! It’s enough to make Deb and her ESP exclaim, “There’s something evil in this house!”
To be fair, yes, we’re shown supernatural elements as well, but if director Tom Berry (the Shelley Hack vehicle Blind Fear) can’t be bothered to be invested in them, why should we? More attention seems to be paid to the batty, cat-lady psychic with a glass eye (Helen Hughes, The Peanut Butter Solution). Points to Wightman for enacting the hardware-store defense strategy nearly a quarter-century before Denzel Washington made it famous, but too little, too late: The Amityville Curse is one mundane movie. It might work rebooted as a “reality” series for HGTV. —Rod Lott
After years of viewing constant cinematic monsters, Race with the Devil is the first film in a long time to give me not only chills, but thrills and spills. A classic of ’70s satanic film starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as a pair of motorcycle enthusiasts who run afoul of demon cultists on vacation, it awoke those sleeping memories of farm-boy fears growing up in rural Texas.
Sure, nothing like this ever happened to me but, possibly due to numerous episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that said it would, I was always terrified of robed devil worshippers in our old pasture during the dark ages of the satanic panic; Race really does play into those night terrors the only way a flick written by exploitation engineer Lee Frost possibly could.
Taking their (then) state-of-the-art RV off-road for a drunken night with their wives near a familiar Texas river, in the distance a group of Luciferians not only hold a typical nude ritual, but sacrifice a woman to whatever gods they choose to worship. When Fonda and Oates get spotted, they take off in a pulse-pounding race where, it turns out, everyone in Texas is a damn satanist.
From local swimming pools to area bus accidents, the sweet RV gets torn to shreds as devilish evildoers jump from trucks to smash out the windows, douse with gasoline and, saddest of all, to hang whatever random animal is just hanging out. With nowhere to escape to, you can bet this’ll have a completely downbeat Fonda-era conclusion, though it is creepily earned.
Both Fonda and Oates are, of course, always watchable, but it’s the killer script by the aforementioned Frost — of Love Camp 7 and The Thing with Two Heads fame — and his usualcollaborator, WesBishop, that is a true test of suspenseful fear and unabashed terror that, like an unearthed memory, has unwillingly taken me back to a freaky time when followers of the cloven hoof were around every corner and there was nothing I could do about it. —Louis Fowler
Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is a documentary about — what else? — Antrum, an European horror movie from the 1970s reportedly so cursed and evil, it quite literally claims viewers’ lives. As a result, the movie never made it past festival screenings and into general release before being pulled and lost … until now.
Of course, it doesn’t truly exist, because Antrum: TDFEM (as we’ll abbreviate it) is a faux documentary. The sequences setting up its premise of legitimately malevolent celluloid achieve that rare mix of being credible and exciting, working just as these things should. Co-directors David Amito and Michael Laicini then succumb to temptation and show us the movie in its entirety.
Grainy, scratched, softly focused and entirely Caucasian, it certainly looks the part. In this fake film within the fake doc, towheaded teen Oralee (Nicole Tompkins, from the fake Amityville Horror sequel The Amityville Terror) takes her mop-headed little brother (Rowan Smyth, from a real 2015 movie titled Fake) deep into the woods on a special mission: to dig a hole to hell in order to save the soul of their newly dead pup, because their terrible mother told them most assuredly, all dogs do not go to heaven. They push their shovels into the dirt where Satan himself was rumored to land after being kicked out of those Judeo-Christian clouds. And as the adage on good intentions goes …
The problem with showing Antrum within Antrum: TDFEM? Amito and Laicini’s preface so expertly builds the sordid history of the cursed film, anything that follows is bound to disappoint your mind’s expectations — and the title’s use of a superlative sure doesn’t help their cause, either. It implies what you’re about to see is more disturbing than The Exorcist, is scarier than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or out-spooks [insert legendary horror film of your choosing here]. On that ladder of fear, Antrum stands one rung above ground level. In fact, I was so bored by its inertness that I fell asleep, even though I had just finished two cups of coffee. Starting over proved no better.
Although Antrum doesn’t satisfy as a movie, I can recommend it as a puzzle. Like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, it is full of subliminal messages and imagery, and Easter eggs galore. Those who enjoy scouring frames to unearth such things should have a field day — maybe even two — with this one. —Rod Lott
Years in the making, Hollywood Horror House (aka Savage Intruder) represents the singular vision of Donald Wolfe — its writer, director and producer — in his one and only feature. That he never made another is a damn shame, but perhaps it’s not for a lack of trying. This one, after all, was funded by his Movieland Tours business, a virtual ad for which bookends the film, as a bus pulls up long enough for the driver (The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser) to point out the old mansion up the hill and in disrepair.
There lives faded matinee idol Katharine Packard (the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Miriam Hopkins, in her final role), her days now drowned in vodka, fairy-godmother gowns and clouded memories of being somebody. Off the tour bus hops homeless hippie Vic Valance (John David Garfield, White Line Fever) and gets a job as Katharine’s live-in caretaker. She’s thrilled to have such a handsome young man around; he’s thrilled to have lucked into a meal ticket, even if that means becoming her sexual plaything. It does.
Katharine is completely oblivious to Vic’s true self: a Satan-worshipping, smack-shooting serial killer who favors the electric carving knife. A former foster child, Vic projects his considerable mommy issues onto Katharine the more he undergoes drug-induced freakouts-cum-flashbacks, rendered onscreen in rather intoxicating kaleidoscopic visuals using every color of the Crayola box — the 64-count with built-in sharpener, of course. These effects are quite good, as are the practical effects depicting viscous torrents of blood jutting from lopped appendages.
A lot goes on under the roof of Hollywood Horror House, a real generation gap of a film. It’s a study in contrasts, particularly of artifice and honesty, starting with a shot of the glamorous landmark Hollywood sign, revealed to be heavily decayed as the camera switches to a close-up. No instance is accidental; hitting most wickedly is a family enjoying a Christmas parade while an L.A. business behind them advertises in bright orange-red letters, “TOTAL NUDITY.”
On that note, Hopkins briefly bares her sexagenarian breasts in one scene, part of her total commitment to a bravura performance, because if the one-time Academy Award nominee held any reservations about appearing in a B picture late in her career (Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill being another), she doesn’t show it. In fact, given the awards success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Hopkins thought she had a solid shot at an Oscar nod.
Wolfe’s film is hagsploitation without the marquee name value. It’s also a nice surprise. The last half grows incrementally more sluggish as the cast thins … until Vic goes totally bonkers, and the movie willfully, wonderfully follows. —Rod Lott
From a village in Lancashire, the elderly Ballantyne sisters stick to the traditions they know best: tea time, neighborhood gossip, monster hoarding — you know, that sort of thing. When soldiers at a nearby base begin dying “vicious, brutal” deaths, forthright Joyce (Flora Robson, The Shuttered Room) and batty Ellie (Beryl Reid, Psychomania) start to wonder and worry that perhaps their, um, “housemate” is to blame. 
There’s not much to this Tigon production from James Kelley, writer and director of the pervo thriller What the Peeper Saw. Much of it takes place in the Ballantyne household, which wouldn’t necessarily be a negative if more happened besides talking. Conversations more mundane than macabre fill the film to its brim, even after a fall confines Joyce to bed — and sedatives — for an extended period. 
