Unusual and old-fashioned at the dawn of a new age of horror, Ghost Story (1981) nevertheless has its chilling moments, and I’m not just talking about the fact that most of it takes place during a snowy New England winter. Documentary and TV director John Irvin delivers the jump scares but favors nudity over gore.…

Each time I watch The Evil Dead (1981), I increase my rating. One more time and I may be giving it a perfect ten. (Do these go up to eleven?) In between viewings, I forget how raw and exciting it is, its effectiveness amplified by Sam Raimi’s kinetic filmmaking. As the camera moves low across…

Soon after its release in March of 1981, I wrote about The Funhouse for my movie review column in The Quill, the Enid High School newspaper. After rewatching the film for the first time in over (gulp) 40 years, I located my original review and remembered that I didn’t like it much then. Some things…

With The House by the Cemetery (1981,) I’ve now seen two of the three films in Lucio Fulci’s unofficial “Gates of Hell” trilogy. I haven’t watched them in the order they were made, but no matter; they are connected only thematically. When I wrote about The Beyond, I stated that it was a simple, straight-forward…

Warning! This review contains spoilers… When I think of big Hollywood studio sequels to innovative independent films, I think of Halloween II (1981.) Like it, Phantasm II (1988) delivers more of the same thing as its predecessor, just more polished and shinier. Both make valiant attempts to continue their stories, yet just miss on the…

In the lower right-hand quadrant of the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland #180 (cover date January 1982) appeared a close-up picture of a zombie-like man with a moustache, blood coming out of his mouth, and a distant stare in his eyes. The caption read, “The Grim Reaper, You’re on His Menu!” It provided a…

All these years and I’d never seen Hell Night (1981.) I’m not going to say it was a revelation when I finally watched it; however, I will say I enjoyed it much more than I ever anticipated. It’s a typical Slasher, which is to say it’s imperfect, but there are enough interesting things about it…

Gamera: Super Monster (1980) is the Robot Monster (1953) of kaiju films. Both films feature a child’s dreams and, if you look at the movies as products of juvenile dream logic instead of straightforward storytelling, they’re a lot of fun. What if Gamera: Super Monster is entirely a dream with the boy reliving the giant…

When Richard and I recently appeared on Nightmare Junkhead to debate the worthiness of either Creepshow or The Thing to advance to the next round of “Into the Mouth of March Madness,” I asked how much credit we should give to the writer of the latter, Bill Lancaster. Sure, we all praise John Carpenter for…

Yesterday, I ended my review of Grizzly (1976) by writing that for two years it was the highest-grossing independent movie ever. The film’s distributor, Edward L. Montaro, took the money and ran. Literally. He never paid any of the SAG actors residuals and fled the country. He also kept the profits without paying the director,…