Category: Movie Discussions

  • The Monster of the Opera (1964)

    The Monster of the Opera (1964)

    The Monster of the Opera (1964), aka The Vampire of the Opera, has been on my watch list for quite some time, but I’m not sure how I first became aware of it. It’s inclusion in Severin’s Danza Macabre box set provided most of my excitement for purchasing it, especially since I already owned Lady…

  • Pandemonium (1983)

    Pandemonium (1983)

    As I sat through Pandemonium (1982), it dawned on me that if you took the funniest bits from all the horror comedies of the early 1980s and stitched them together, you might have a pretty good movie. (Or you could just watch Student Bodies.) With this one, though, there’s only one scene I’d bother harvesting.…

  • Saturday the 14th (1981)

    Saturday the 14th (1981)

    When Mary Hyatt (Paula Prentiss) is bitten by the vampire, Waldemar (Jeffrey Tambor), she explains her condition by saying maybe she’s pregnant. Van Helsing (Severn Darden) responds by saying: Remember Rosemary? She had a baby? Unless you count its title, this is the closest Saturday the 14th (1981) comes to spoofing a specific horror movie.…

  • Student Bodies (1981)

    Student Bodies (1981)

    Reflecting upon the past, it feels like Student Bodies (1981) was made during the early part of the Slasher Age when we had yet to see the majority of films that were coming. However, what we had seen by then were the true, iconic classics, which makes this spoof of only a handful of them…

  • April Fool’s Day (1986)

    April Fool’s Day (1986)

    If memory has ever failed me about a movie, it sure has with April Fool’s Day (1986), one of the best horror movies, if not movie-movies I’ve ever seen! It offers likeable characters, believable situations, unbearable suspense, and so many twists and turns that I suffered whiplash. I’ve never had so much fun. April Fool’s!…

  • The Mad Room (1969)

    The Mad Room (1969)

    Before watching The Mad Room (1969), I knew it was based on a play called, Ladies in Retirement; however, I didn’t realize until later that it is also a remake of the film, Ladies in Retirement (1941.) Director Bernard Girard was supposedly unhappy with alterations of this film during post-production, and I may be able…

  • The Mad Monster (1942)

    The Mad Monster (1942)

    In the book, “Hollywood’s Pre-Code Horrors 1931-1934,” Raymond Valinoti Jr. reports that during the production of Island of Lost Souls (1932), Production Code representative Jason Joy told Paramount: I assume that some thought has been given to the possibility of injecting the idea of crossing animals with humans. If this is the case it is…

  • The Mad Ghoul (1943)

    The Mad Ghoul (1943)

    Maybe it’s because I just watched a ratty old print of The Mad Monster (1942) on YouTube and a crisp new transfer of The Mad Ghoul (1943) on Blu-ray, but I enjoyed the latter… a lot. One of the “lesser” films among the Universal Horror Collections, I liked it better than some of the sequels…

  • Flesh & Fantasy (1943)

    Flesh & Fantasy (1943)

    When a man (Robert Benchley, I Married a Witch) has a “rough night” combination of a chat with a fortune teller and then a bad dream, his friend at the club (David Hoffman, The Beast with Five Fingers) attempts to snap him out of his jitters with three stories of the supernatural. Synopses of Flesh…

  • The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

    The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

    All good things must come to an end. Be careful what you wish for. I jinxed it. Insert the expression of your choice. The point is, after singing praises of mid-1980s horror films that I originally disliked, then rewatched and enjoyed, here comes The Return of the Living Dead (1985.) For me, this was the…