Mayday! Mayday! A Coast Guard chopper sent on a rescue mission for a small ship in the Bermuda Triangle find quite a ghastly sight: A dead guy hanging from the mast by his feet, another dead guy chucked through a window and, inside, yet another dead guy — suspended in midair! Only a former prostitute in a purple sweater lives to tell the tale.
That reformed call girl, Eva (Kim Novak, the Hitchcock blonde of Vertigo), relays her harrowing story of survival to her rescuer, Lt. Haig (Doug McClure, Tapeheads), making Satan’s Triangle first and foremost a flashback. One would think that a day of innocent marlin fishing wouldn’t go to hell once you come upon a priest (Alejandro Rey, The Ninth Configuration) floating in the ocean. Alas, ’tis not the case …
Just about any review the curious can find of this made-for-TV movie makes particular mention of its twist ending — namely, that it terrifies and induces shivers, if not pants-wetting. The big problem is that director Sutton Roley (Chosen Survivors) forces the viewer to sit through an awfully tedious hour to get there, where a bigger problem awaits: that the ending is vastly overrated and ridiculously predictable. It would work in the 30-minute span of a Twilight Zone.
I suppose Satan’s Triangle could have possessed the power to chill in its prime-time day, when real-life fear of that stretch of North Atlantic Ocean had crested to a tabloid peak. But I don’t wanna dwell on it; you’re better off watching Mexico’s Bermuda Triangle anyway. —Rod Lott
Although little Eddie Burber (Craig Bitterling) was told he was too young to participate in the Kentucky family’s haunted house, he dons a mask, slips in through the vents and does it anyway … and accidentally impales a pigtailed girl in the process. Oopsie! Time to flee the state!
A predictably even 20 years later, Eddie’s mother (a near-Xerox of Vicki Lawrence in full dress rehearsal for Mama’s Family) keels over and dies, making it time for a now full-grown Eddie (Ethan Adler) to return to his hometown of Regawas for Halloween — er, we mean HauntedWeen. (Apparently, Halloween already was taken as a night-he-came-home title.)
Eddie’s homecoming coincides with the financial foibles of Tophill State College fraternity Sigma Phi. As their leader, Kurt (Brien Blakely, Diary of a Serial Killer), explains, they face a revoked charter if they can’t pony up some $3,700 in unpaid dues ASAP. (It is worth noting that Kurt is the only one who looks like an actual member of the Greek community.) Fate — or perhaps all-too-convenient screenwriting — intervenes when the mysterious, mute Eddie shows up at the frat house’s door just long enough to deliver a key to the old Burber house in the hands of the cornpone-accented Hanks (Brad Hanks), who makes Gomer Pyle sound like a master of elocution. Hanks is also considered the frat’s resident “funny” guy. He is not funny, but he does make Jim Varney’s Ernest character look subtle in comparison.
Suddenly, the Sigma Phi bros have a can’t-miss plan: Revive the Burber family’s House of Horrors for one night and charge $5 admission! (Okay, so they’re not the brightest at math. Dudes, did you learn nothing from your $3-a-head beer blowout?) Andy Hardy-style, the guys and their gals in their ALF and Edie Brickell & New Bohemians T-shirts chug down some refreshing RC Cola and get to work. Even Kurt’s on-again/off-again girlfriend (Blake Pickett, The Erotic House of Wax) pitches in, despite them being squarely in the “off” position.
What these crazy co-eds somehow don’t know is that Eddie — whose face is not revealed until the final scene, for no logical purpose — also is working on his own room within the House of Horrors, which he will turn into his personal Grand Guignol stage. He paints “The Kill Room” on the wall and decorates the place with promo material purloined from the local video store, including posters for Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II, not to mention the coup de grâce of a Pumpkinhead cardboard standee. Look, no one ever accused of slashers of excelling in interior design.
No one ever accused Wm. Douglas Robertson of being a fine writer, director and/or producer, either. Just as his lone IMDb credit fails as a slasher, much less a feature film, words cannot quite convey the rotted fruit of the Sigma Phi labors. It’s as if the guys never had attended a haunted attraction, because each room the patrons walk through requires them to pause and watch a skit. The only stop that matters, of course, is Eddie’s Kill Room. Even with its noggin-bonked collegians tied up for mortal torture, customers assume it’s all part of the show; one braces-faced boy even goads, “Batter up, dude!” as Eddie swings a baseball bat at a Sigma Phi, causing an instant decapitation and a neck geyser of blood that looks like chocolate pudding.
Although utter trash, HauntedWeen makes for enjoyable viewing any time of year, because it is utter trash, shot on 16mm film for an estimated $65,000. Not only could that amount eliminate nearly 18 of the frat’s IOUs, but it represents a fraction of the sheer entertainment value silly-seeking viewers will gain. —Rod Lott
What’s an upstanding British chap like Mark Baines (Roy Jenson, Soylent Green) doing in a place like Guanajuato, Mexico? To strike it rich through plundered oil! But when the superstitious locals he’s hired refuse to enter the mine in question, he goes in himself, with wife Jennifer (Samantha Eggar, The Uncanny) in tow. Inside, they find dusty mummies and a hidden slide that deposits its unsuspecting riders into Satan’s chamber, where a 300-year-old hand is swiped as some sort of prize — the archaeological equivalent to finding a plastic kazoo in a cereal box.
The Baineses know they’ve found something special; what they don’t know is that the crispy claw has a mind of its own. However, unlike the Addams Family member named Thing or yesteryear’s animated Yellow Pages logo, the Guanajuato hand is neither nimble nor evolved enough to run along its fingers. What it lacks in speed, it makes up for in slaughter. Ergo, Demonoid, Alfredo Zacarías’ follow-up to 1978’s The Bees.
For phalanges-based horror, Demonoid is markedly better than Oliver Stone’s The Hand, which came out the same year. Both films involve a disembodied mitt killing people, but only Zacarías’ picture can boast Stuart Whitman (Guyana: Cult of the Damned) co-starring as a priest. Trust me: Watching a panicked Whitman stumble about the room with a supernatural paw clutching his face is Something to See. (Perhaps those of you with the DTs have seen it before.)
The swift, schlock shocker is Eggar’s show and she goes to town with it like an ol’ pro. Never is this more apparent than the real sour apple of a surprise ending. I’m sure she felt like a idiot doing it — and a dumber one when she watched the dailies — but Eggar sells it, making that final scene truly memorable, even if the whole of Demonoid is so, so not. Folks, let’s give her a big … well, you fill in the blank. —Rod Lott
Following his 1964 breakthrough, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, and its ’67 sequel, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, José Mojica Marins tried a different approach with his alter ego of Coffin Joe: hosting his own anthology film. Hey, even international horror icons have their off days.
The Strange World of Coffin Joe is indeed strange, but good? Not at all; it’s black and white and bored all over. For viewers still holding minor interest, precious little point exists venturing past the first story, “The Dollmaker.” Its title character is a kindly old man who crafts lifelike dolls, with the assistance of his four lovely daughters, all “of age” and yet sharing a bedroom. Conveniently, four drunks hungry for money and sex interrupt their night of slumber, until … well, you’re not stupid.
Although the middle segment, “Obsession,” represents a leap up in the grotesque, it also marks a step down in quality. A hunchbacked balloon salesman is smitten with a young woman named Tara; he delights in the time gazing longingly at her from afar. After shopping one day, she fails to realize she has dropped a package on the sidewalk — a fact not unnoticed by him, who can use it as his one-shot ticket into her good graces. Alas, that opportunity never comes, because Tara is stabbed fatally at her own wedding! But death isn’t about to stop the lonely balloon man’s hormones. Points awarded to “Obsession” for artistic touch (it’s wordless) are sacked for a languid, half-speed pace.
In the closing “Ideology,” Marins casts himself — not as Coffin Joe, but Oãxiac Odéz, a professor who posits to his guests that love does not exist. He then backs up his suspect theory with solid evidence: a variety show of torture, sadism and other debaucherous acts, like a guy sticking pins into another guy, all while a girl licks the first guy’s bloody eye. Ah, yes, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? —Rod Lott
If my best friend dared to wear a fall-foliage shirt around me, I might be so inclined to murder him, too. In Tim Ritter’s gore-rific Killing Spree, however, at least Tom Russo has a few more compelling reasons on top of that.
The lanky, wild-eyed Tom (Asbestos Felt, Girls Gone Dead) has a cute and sexy wife in Leeza (Courtney Lercara, Slaughterhouse), a former stewardess who now stays at home. But Tom also has an inability to let go of the past — specifically, the pain lingering from being cheated upon in his first marriage; therefore, he’s paranoid over what — or whom — Leeza does while he toils away at his blue-collar job.
When he finds written evidence that Leeza laid his closest pal, Ben (Raymond Carbone, Ritter’s Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness), despite the guy being grossly overweight, old enough to be her grandfather and all-around repellent, Tom loses his shit. And I mean loses it. Okay, so maybe the 40% pay cut at work is partly to blame, but pissed is pissed, so Tom wreaks vengeance on Ben … but only after separating the head of Ben’s new teen girlfriend (fellow Truth or Dare alum Rachel Rutz) from her torso and tossing it his way.
While that should put an end to things, alas, it’s only a warm-up. Tom keeps finding new diary entries: the electrician who came to fix the ceiling fan, the TV repairman who knows karate, the Mexican drapery deliveryman, the dopey lawn-care dude in the Pretenders tour T. At one point, our hero hilariously freaks out by screaming what we’re all thinking: “Why is she writing all of this down?”
Infidelity is a bell that can’t be unrung, and as Tom grows more and more unhinged and untethered from reality, Felt takes his character gloriously over the top, back ’round the planet, and over the top once more. As the man’s name conveys, Felt is something else; he devotes his all — novelty thong included — to the part. Without him, Killing Spree still might be a hoot to watch, but that’s an alternative I don’t wish to picture. When Tom goes into cuckoo-cuckold mode, Ritter assists his leading oddball with the simplest and cheapest of special effects for 16mm film: flipping the switch of the red lightbulb to saturate the room. It’s like the True Value version of the Dario Argento gel.
It’s also a fine example of Ritter doing what he can with what one assumes was a sack of spare change saved from a month’s worth of cigarette runs to the Circle K. Although transparently cheap as Bazooka Joe bubble gum — and even less nutritious — the direct-to-VHS Killing Spree is never not deliriously, deviously and devilishly entertaining. —Rod Lott
Mayday! Mayday! A Coast Guard chopper sent on a rescue mission for a small ship in the Bermuda Triangle find quite a ghastly sight: A dead guy hanging from the mast by his feet, another dead guy chucked through a window and, inside, yet another dead guy — suspended in midair! Only a former prostitute in a purple sweater lives to tell the tale. 
Just about any review the curious can find of this made-for-TV movie makes particular mention of its twist ending — namely, that it terrifies and induces shivers, if not pants-wetting. The big problem is that director Sutton Roley (Chosen Survivors) forces the viewer to sit through an awfully tedious hour to get there, where a bigger problem awaits: that the ending is vastly overrated and ridiculously predictable. It would work in the 30-minute span of a Twilight Zone.
