"Alone in the Dark" (1982) d/ Jack Shoulder

The pioneer release from New Line Cinema, director Jack Shoulder's first effort, is this tidy little slasher that features no less than three mammoth genre names among its cast members, with Donald Pleasence, Jack Palance, and Martin Landau all doing their respective part in raising this one above the standard stalk n' slash fare that permeated theaters of the day, despite the familiar "psychos are loose!" vein, as heavily mined as it had already been, to that point.


"Was that 'two Charlies, two Bunnies, and a Black and White'? Or 'a Charlie, no Bunnies, and two Black and Whites'?"
Dr. Potter (Dwight "Murdock" Schultz) lands a gig replacing Dr. Merton on the staff of  Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), a reefer-toking, left field psychiatrist with an unorthodox approach to his patients at the Haven mental hospital, with only electrically locked third floor windows and doors keeping the most psychopathic, homicidal cases from escaping into the general populace. It's a good thing, too, with the likes of  Hawkes (Jack Palance) the paranoiac, Preacher (Martin Landau) the pyromaniac, Fatty (Erland van Lidth) the child molester, and Bleeder (Phil Clark) the sociopath in there, and all under the impression that Potter killed Merton, one of their favorites...At home, Potter's got his hands full with his wife, Nell (Deborah Hedwall), young daughter, Lyla, and sister, Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan), fresh from a mental breakdown, herself, all occupying space in his pad. Toni drags her unreceptive brother out to a local club, where a punk band's set is interrupted by a state-wide power outage. The next morning at the institution, there's a dead security guard, and four inmates missing. Hmmm, I wonder which ones...


"...and I once saw a bee on a butterfly bush, while pounding Stegmaiers outside the Tomhicken recreational building..."
Pretty soon, Toni's meeting strange men while getting arrested at anti-nuke protests,  Lyla's learning how to make origami shapes from giant strangers, and when the teenage babysitter shows up to check on her, she and her horny beau end up getting added to the film's minimal body count. After a tense dinner, a visiting detective finds himself pinned to a tree by arrows, while the escaped lunatics have surrounded Potter's home. Dr. Bain makes the frantic scene, but his attempt at reasoning with the men leaves him one ear short, and but a bloody notch on Preacher's righteous axe in the end. After Preacher manages to set the basement ablaze and Fatty gets a back rub with a massive meat cleaver, Toni's new love interest turns out to be Bleeder, whose pesky nosebleed gives him away as he tries to strangle the young woman, eating  knife blade-inflicted death, himself, instead. Hawkes shows up in time to see Dr. Merton alive on television, storming out angrily after waxing poetic upon murder, and ending up at the punk rock club,  fitting in perfectly amid the regulars. Ba dum bump.


"Love lifts you up where you belooooong," sings Fatty (Erland van Lidth).
Interestingly, the two singers from "The Sic Fucks", opened the first punk rock boutique in America back in 1977, called Manic Panic, located on St. Mark's Place in the East Village; also providing the boldly hued hair dye of the same name that would decorate the heads of young top heavy playthings that often found themselves on all fours in front of me, in the throes of tantric multi-O's, for decades to come. You'll remember mountainous Dutch noble, van Lidth, as "Terror", the head of the Fordham Baldies in 1979's The Wanderers. Lin Shaye has a brief cameo towards the beginning here, and her older brother, Robert, who snagged a co-producer credit, also provided the story behind tonight's review. Also worth noting,  the era's Gore God, Tom Savini himself, serves up a practical FX nightmare along the way. On the scale, Alone earns two Wops, a highly watchable slasher in a genre already ripe with brainless carbon copies as early as 1982. Check it out.


A fine example of Camel(toe), domestic blend.

"Insidious"(2010)d/James Wan

I can't remember the last time there was as much positive net buzz about a movie's release in recent times, not that I read or buy into such propaganda very often(as it's usually totally wrong), but I felt like anything from the man behind the Saw franchise, especially such an ambitious project, as penned by Leigh Whannel, was worthy of a look from everybody's favorite narcissistic review blogger...well, definitely your mother's.The first half of tonight's review is a nearly flawless slice of haunted hijinks, chock full of apex jump scares and creepy atmosphere.It's in the second half of the movie where the plot gets bogged down in reality and logic with paranormal investigators and a demon that looks more than a little like Darth Maul's menacingly harmless half-brother.After seeing something like sixty-five hundred sweaty, grossly overweight Star Wars dorks garbed up like him, shambling to the nearest unoccupied corner of several Halloween parties with chubby hands full of candy corn and Snickers mini's at the start of the new millenium, not even Qui-Gon Jinn'd be frightened by that.Overall, it's still a better-than-average horror movie that manages to serve the viewer up some solid old school tension-packed scares despite running out of gas long before the closing credits roll.Wan does prove adept at freaking out an audience without intricate gore effects here, which isn't a simple task by any means, though, so let's give him credit for that.There just might be an excellent horror movie in the guy yet.He doesn't deserve the comparisons with M.Night Shyamalan's entirely scareless, largely worthless crap(If Rod Serling's Twilight Zone sucked, it'd be a lot like Shyamalan's movies)that he drew with this movie, I know that much.Let's get on with it, huh.

Blow that thing out, Grandma.You look better in the dark...
Renai and Josh Lambert(Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson) have just finished moving into some hype new digs with their three kids, one of which, Dalton(Ty Simpkins), is afraid of his new bedroom.Dalton hears noises in the attic, and upon investigation, viddies something particularly nasty up there, and abruptly plummets off of a wooden attic ladder-step as it breaks.The next day when his father tries to wake him, he finds him comatose in bed.There's easier ways to skip off school, really.Specialists can't explain why the boy is unresponsive, and three months later, with their son occupying a hospital bed at home, Renai is frequently schitzed out by extrasensory occurences in their abode and her other consternated children claiming to see their slumberous brother flitting around the place at night.This naturally leads the family to pick up and move to another residence.Things don't get any better.Josh's mother(Barbara Hershey...that explains it all, doesn't it?) seeks help from a paranormal investigator named Elise(Lin Shaye), who, while self-hypnotized,
describes a demonic presence in the home to one of her two ghost-hunting colleagues, who sketches the netherworld-dwelling beastie for the concerned parents, who are naturally skeptical of the woman's clairvoyant skills and tales of their boy's ability to astrally project himself out of his own body into a spirit world that she likes to call "The Further"(coincidentally, the original title of the movie), only he's projected himself too far this time and can't return to his body, trapped in a shadow world of unkind entities.

So long as that demon is standing in front of my deck, I'm gonna give practicing kickflips and ollies a rest for awhile.
Josh buys exactly zero of this, until he stumbles upon some drawings Dalton had drawn up pre-coma that resemble Elise's "Man with fire in his face"("Man who's just different enough from Darth Maul to avoid a hearty copyright infringement lawsuit from George Lucas" describes him better, I think).At this point, Josh's mom and her squirrelly buddy relate his own ability to astrally project as a child to them, and tell of the horrible candle-bearing old bag that had every intention of possessing him back then, as evidenced by her appearance in his childhood pictures; a bit nearer to him in each successive one, and the reason his mother stopped taking pictures of him altogether.Elise explains that Josh must use his special power to travel over into the Further and locate his son, who is being held prisoner there by the red-faced Sith L...uhh, demon, who also intends to possess the boy's physical body.He reluctantly agrees, and with Elise as a guide, is able to find his boy's soul, chained to a wall, amidst many unpleasant spirits and the aforementioned claret-hued bastard that's kept him there.There's a race to reach their physical bodies before they're captured by the otherworldly beings, but they seem to make it back alright, after Josh bravely confronts the evil old lady from his past and shouts her down.Later, while Dalton is eating in the kitchen with his mother and granny, Elise picks up a strange vibe from Josh while she and her associates are packing up.She picks up a camera and snaps a photo of him, which sends him into a murderous frenzy as he strangles her to death.Renai hears the commotion and runs in, calling to her husband with no response.She finds Elise's lifeless body and the camera on the floor, the last picture taken still present on the screen, only it isn't Josh in the photo, but the horrible old lady.She gasps as a hand grabs her by the shoulder.Fade to black...

"Suddenly, it feels like the red-bladed saberstaff of a Dathomiri Zabrak Sith Lord is poking me in my shorts.", thought Nite Owl.
Patrick Wilson, who's usually turning up in overblown duds like Schumacher's Phantom of the Opera(2004) and Watchmen(2009), has scored a genre credit in 2005's Hard Candy.Australian Rose Byrne has fared slightly better, genre-wise, earning credits in Danny Boyle's Sunshine(I liked it a lot, I just won't review it.There's enough Sci-Fi on the interwebz, don'tcha think?) and 28 Weeks Later in 2007.Lin Shaye, on the other hand, has a veritable cornucopia of genre credits to her name, appearing in everything from the original Nightmare on Elm Street, Andrew Dice Clay's underrated Brain Smasher...A Love Story(1993), and Jeckyll and Hyde Together Again, to 2003's Dead End and Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror(2006).Sorry about that last one, Lin.Let's not forget the always sexy bungalow-born Barbara Hershey who's appeared in everything from Last Temptation of Christ and Boxcar Bertha to Falling Down(1993) and Black Swan(2010), when she wasn't getting felt up by ghosts in The Entity(1981).Besides Saw(2004), Wan has also helmed Dead Silence and Death Sentence, both in 2007.I'm slapping three big ones on Insidious, but for a movie with such high hopes and truly excellent beginnings, the solid rating has got to be looked at with a certain degree of disappointment.Still, you're gonna wanna see it for yourselves, as it's mostly very good.

"ZOMGses! He totally videoed me singing into his pink microphone!!!"