Night of the Creeps (1986) starts strong. In glorious black and white, an alien (“that experiment”) escapes its spaceship and crashes on Earth near “Sorority Row,” circa 1959. At a nearby make-out spot, Johnny (Ken Heron) and Pam (Alice Cadogan) witness the crash and investigate. Meanwhile, the radio reports that a criminally insane man has…

There’s not much I feel like I can write about Chopping Mall (1986.) My instinct is to say it’s just good, dumb fun. But you know what? It’s not really dumb at all. For a movie about robot security guards at a mall that are called “Protectors,” and that a character says look like the…

If I’m not careful, it would be all too easy to cross to the dark side with my comments about Jaws of Satan (1981.) Let’s be clear up front: despite all its flaws, I really did enjoy it. It’s one of those movies where the flaws are what make it interesting and set it apart…

In an unapologetic attempt to capitalize on the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween a year and a half earlier, Paramount Pictures released its contribution to the slasher genre, Friday the 13th, on May 9, 1980. Then, something unexpected happened: instead of being dismissed as a blatant rip-off, it was successful in its own right, spawning…

Silver Bullet (1985) isn’t a bad werewolf movie, but it suffers from coming near the end of a series of much better ones. After The Howling (1981), An American Werewolf in London (1981), and The Company of Wolves (1984), it’s kind of hard to compete. This was my first time watching it since its original…

Here’s one of those bizarre coincidences that lead me to believe I’m at least a little bit psychic… After watching The Hunger (1983) Thursday night, I awoke on Friday morning to a headline in my New York Times daily newsletter that read: Scientific breakthroughs could soon start slowing the aging process, David Brooks argues. It’s…

The Beyond (1981) is as straightforward a movie as any… really. In fact, it’s so simple that you might think you’re confused or missing something when watching it. All you need to know is that a young woman named Liza (Catriona MacColl) inherits an old hotel in Louisiana that was built on one of the…

Because I am taking a different approach to discussing Halloween II (1981) it’s going to sound like I don’t like it. Let me be clear: I love this movie. It’s just that when I watched it recently for the Nightmare Junkhead podcast, its flaws really showed. After watching something so many times, you hope to…

If you were a monster kid at the time and asked to pick your favorite werewolf movie released in 1981, you were faced with a real Sophie’s Choice between An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. The latter was released four months earlier and is the one to which I declared my love. Conversely,…

The opening scene of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981) was filmed with a different director and cinematographer than the rest of the movie. Michael Miller (Jackson Country Jail, 1976) reportedly took too long making it, so was replaced by William Asher. The cinematographer was Jan de Bont (Speed, 1994; Twister, 1996, The Haunting, 1999.) He…