Category Archives: Horror

Skinner (1993)

skinnerParents, as tempting as it is, do not conduct an autopsy on your spouse in front of your 6-year-old boy. He’ll only grow up to be the kind of man who kills prostitutes just so he can slice off their faces and wear them over his own like dime-store Halloween masks. This probably goes double if your last name is Skinner.

In the sleaze-oozing Skinner, Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi, Intruder) embarks on that low-in-demand career path. (Thanks, Pa!) Drifting into town, Skinner rents a room from a lonely housewife (Ricki Lake, Hairspray).

skinner1Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, a smack-addled mystery woman (played by former porn star Traci Lords) checks into a nearby hotel. She’s dressed like Carmen Sandiego at a funeral and her coat hides the fact that her left arm and leg are as veiny and shriveled as an octogenarian who forgot how to get out of the bathtub. She’s “hunting” Skinner to get her revenge for past transgressions, but is obviously terrible at it since she’s already spent five years doing so.

Also terrible: this movie, directed by Ivan Nagy, a large-looming figure in the Heidi Fleiss scandal of the 1990s and a man whose work has gone from an all-American superhero (1979’s made-for-TV Captain America II: Death Too Soon) to all-access porn, so Skinner‘s entirety is tainted with a coat of feculence.

Surprisingly, its most distasteful bit doesn’t even involve a female body part. Rather, it’s a blackface routine — well, so to speak — as an African-American man who upsets Skinner finds himself short one visage. Skinner doesn’t merely put it on — he also adopts a stereotypical shuffle and ebonics dialect! It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen since any email forwarded by my dad to his entire address book during either Obama campaign. Viewers might be able to forgive one line (“Yeah, baby!”), maybe two, but the shtick extends from one scene into another, with Raimi pouring his life into it as if auditioning for a Sanford and Son reboot.

As Al Jolson famously said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” —Rod Lott

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Eaten Alive (1977)

eatenaliveGiven the left-field phenomenon that was 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, anything director Tobe Hooper had chosen for a follow-up was bound to be met with disappointment. Eaten Alive was. That’s too bad, because it may be an even weirder work. It doesn’t stray too terribly far from Texas’ brand of rural terror, either, where the math is simple: redneck = scary.

Also inspired by a true story, the low-budget pic is almost confined to two locations: a two-bit brothel run by ol’ Miss Hattie (Carolyn Jones, the former Morticia of TV’s The Addams Family) and the fleabag Starlight Hotel run by the unwashed Judd (a super-skeevy Neville Brand, Killdozer). It’s a miracle the latter does any business, as it backs up to a swamp — plus, Judd has a nasty habit of killing practically everyone who crosses the lobby’s threshold, and feeding their bloodied bods to his pet crocodile. Like vermin to a Roach Motel, they check in, but don’t check out.

eatenalive1Among the Starlight’s guests are a runaway hooker (Roberta Collins, The Big Doll House), the father desperately searching for her (Mel Ferrer, Nightmare City), a henpecked husband (William Finley, Phantom of the Paradise), his wife (Marilyn Burns, following Hooper from Texas) and their young daughter (Kyle Richards, The Watcher in the Woods) who won’t stop screaming after her yappy little dog (Scuffy) becomes an evening snack for that backyard croc.

As unpolished as its predecessor, the better-acted but lower-powered Eaten Alive proves bothersome on its own strange frequency, from overpowering gels that run red (and accentuate the set’s artifice) to Hooper’s music score — if you can call it that — disturbing enough in purposefully agonizing discord. Add to that the pre-Freddy Krueger role of Robert Englund as a p-hound itchin’ for anal (“My name’s Buck and I’m ready to fuck,” he says in the movie’s opening line, as if to warn the particularly skittish), and you have a flick obsessed with poking at your scabs.

Slasher fans may enjoy Judd’s slicing shenanigans with his trusty scythe, but for me, it’s all about the instances of crocodile chomp (although not to Judd’s orgasmic extent). Eventually — the year 2000, to be exact — a career-nadir Hooper made a whole movie about that — Crocodile, to be exact — to far less hurrah. —Rod Lott

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The Uninvited (1944)  

Given its reputation as a superior Gothic shocker, The Uninvited struck me as disappointing. In fact, the spookiest thing about it is that the plot hinges on a brother and sister buying a house together. Asexual the Fitzgeralds may be, the act still smacks of incestuous undertones. Ick! Er, I mean, aaaaiiiiieeeee!

The residence in question is the seaside Windward House, a glorious mansion atop a cliff from which a previous owner fatally fell. The adult siblings are Rick (Ray Milland, Dial M for Murder), a music critic and would-be composer, and Pamela (Ruth Hussey, Another Thin Man), who doesn’t work because a woman’s place is in the home — a haunted home.
 
Soon after moving in, the Fitzgeralds experience strange phenomena, including but not limited to sobs at night, wilting roses, fluctuating temps, slamming doors, flickering candles and the overpowering smell of mimosa. A séance helps brings buried secrets to light, because the aghast neighbors sure don’t like to.

While competently staged by first-timer Lewis Allen (who later helmed Suddenly, a small gem of an assassination thriller starring Frank Sinatra), the parts of The Uninvited fail to merge in a way that brings about goose bumps. Switching tones from serious to silly aggravates the problem, and silly wins out; the film’s last line is a mother-in-law joke, which may as well say all. —Rod Lott

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Nurse Sherri (1978)

nursesherriFour years before Barbara Hershey infamously got raped by a ghost in The Entity, Al Adamson had it done (poorly) to Nurse Sherri, his attempt at cashing in on the then-popular possession-pic craze.

Sherri (Jill Jacobson, The Jigsaw Murders) has the unfortunate position of working the ER when a cult leader (Bill Roy, Black Samurai) with occult powers dies on the table, and passes his soul into her. That night, as she lay on her bed, a barely animated patch of green dots and squiggly lines enters her room, parts her legs and goes to town.

nursesherri1From then on, Sherri’s literally not herself, speaking in a deep register reminiscent of third-rung Looney Tunes characters and slaughtering those responsible for her possessor’s death. His disembodied, superimposed head occasionally pops up to laugh manically at others. Meanwhile, all her fellow RNs can do is think of sex — and acting on it, as if they’re in one of Roger Corman’s Nurses movies.

Adamson’s reputation is that of an inept, bottom-of-barrel filmmaker à la Ed Wood — a position not quite accurate if one considers the entirety of his work, but wholly warranted if one were to judge him on Nurse Sherri alone. It’s an ambling, scattered-focus potboiler made for all the wrong reasons, and given that Adamson’s usual starlet, real-life leading lady Regina Carrol, is absent from the cast, one can’t help but wonder if he just couldn’t harness any passion this time. Viewers who are able to might want to watch both cuts; the theatrical one plays up the horror, while the alternate amps up the copulation. —Rod Lott

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Cellar Dweller (1988)

cellardwellerDon Mancini created two horror villains in the fall of 1988. One, of course, was Chucky, as seen in Child’s Play. The other was Cellar Dweller, as unseen in Cellar Dweller, a dirt-cheap creature feature from Empire Pictures and Troll director John Carl Buechler. For his first credit, Mancini went under the nom de plume of Kit Du Bois — a name with more style than the movie.

Thirty years ago, horror comics artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator) died when a monster he drew on the page came to life. Thirty years later, Childress is idolized by cute brunette Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino, Storm of the Century) who attends the Throckmorton Institute for the Arts in order to create “the ultimate monster.” The school stands on the site of Childress’ former home, so Whitney is hot to use his basement studio to create her “populist tripe” (as comics are dubbed by the school’s administrator, played by Yvonne De Carlo of TV’s The Munsters).

cellardweller1Whitney draws what Childress did: a hairy demon with a pentagram carved into its chest. For no good reason, she draws separate stories of the monster attacking and eating her classmates, and whatever she draws actually happens. (“I told you so!” cries Dr. Wertham, from hell.) As George A. Romero proved in Creepshow, incorporating comic-book elements can be cinematic; as Buechler certainly learned, however, simply cutting from the action to a motionless panel is like applying the emergency brake to the story.

There’s a scene in which a scheming filmmaker (Pamela Bellwood, Hangar 18) folds a vintage comic book in half to hide it in her jacket, and I can imagine any fanboys cringing at the damage she does. I bring that up because that’s the most reaction Cellar Dweller can muster. The titular beast is a nifty practical effect, which was Buechler’s bread and butter, but the movie itself — all 78 slow-going minutes of it — makes his Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College look like high art. Cellar Dweller is so stupid that Whitney foils the hirsute varmint with white-out correction fluid. —Rod Lott

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