The Quick and Dirties: Late Night Horror

With only a few days left in 31 Days of Horror 2018, I've been busy packing in the fright flicks. This means I've spent some late nights in front of the TV. Your mind isn't always as sharp at the end of a long day, and especially during the wee hours of the morning. You're also a bit sleepy so you pick things you think have a decent shot at keeping you awake, no matter the quality. Nuttiness is appreciated. Let's see what I've found.

Terrifier

(2017)

Some movies, especially slasher flicks pretend to have a plot, but really don't. This is one such movie. It starts with a television interview of a woman with a severely disfigured face. We're told she is the lone survivor a massacre that occurred a year ago, on Halloween, of course. The perpetrator of the atrocities is only known as Art the Clown. Naturally, we flash back to that night and all the happenings. We meet two girls who are leaving a Halloween party and decide they're both too drunk to drive and had better get something to eat. They stumble down the block to the pizza parlor and guess who walks in? If you said Art the Clown, give yourself a cookie. Things spiral gloriously out of control from there. It's just Art stalking, taunting, killing the shit out whoever the script can find a way to bring into his vicinity. The movie is fast paced, short (84 minutes), gory as hell, and morbidly humorous. The latter is due to a magnificent turn by David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown. He sells it for all he's worth, getting tons of mileage out a character who never speaks a word. The one drawback is that it fails to get us to care about any of the characters. There are two people we might develop some feelings for, but the movie kills off one halfway through and undermines the other by what happens before the opening credits. But Terrifier isn't concerned about your empathy. The last few years have produced a bevy of creepy, unsettling horror films that get under our skin because of the greater implications they may have. This isn't that. This is simply here to gross you out. I cringed quite a few times before being set up for a sequel and I'm here for it.

Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill!

(2017)

A mostly girl rock band named, Kill Pussy Kill, is on their way to a gig when they get into a confrontation with a mysterious guy in a wheelchair with his face bandaged. We know that his face was literally cut off when he was a soldier in the Middle East. They don't. All they know is they all somehow wake up in a room in an abandoned warehouse and are told that they have to find their way out and told by our wheelchaired friend, from a remote location in the building, that they will have to find their way out and may have to sacrifice some of their group to do so. In other words, a really bad Saw rip-off ensues. It tries to be a more fun, horny teenage boy friendly version , but it fails at almost every turn. The campiness feels forced and the titillation is diluted by some poor attempts at social commentary. The one bit of joy is really for us older viewers. There is another person in that warehouse, some goober played by 21 Jump Street (the TV series) and bad movie hall-of-famer Richard Grieco. We get a kick out of seeing Richard Grieco put on a terrible southern accent and chew scenery with no remorse. Unless you just have to see that, skip this one.

Prime Evil

(1988)

After an opening set long ago, we wind up in 80s era New York City, where a coven of Satan worshiping monks has set up shop and, of course, start doing human sacrifices. A God-loving nun catches wind of this and infiltrates the group in hopes of stopping them. Some gore, some nudity, and sadly, lots of boredom ensues. It has all the elements necessary to be a great, bad movie, but it doesn't put them together in an effective package. It just trudges along to a not-so-exciting conclusion. It doesn't help that the acting is really bad. The lackluster script just highlights this fact. Unfortunately, the most interesting thing about the movie is not apparent while watching. When you click on the film's IMDb page, the piece of trivia you find is that director Roberta Findlay filmed in a real church and neglected to tell the people who ran it what kind of rituals she was going to be filming there. I'm sure a better movie could be made out of that.

Stanley

(1972)

This movie's not actually about Stanley. It's about Tim. Tim (Chris Robinson) is a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD. It's so bad, he's pretty much cut off all human contact and lives in an isolated cabin with his pet snakes. Of course, they're usually uncaged, silly. And ain't no cgi, here, folks. These are real snakes...except when they're rubber. Anyhoo, the other point about Tim the movie really, REALLY wants us to know is that he's a Native American from the Seminole tribe. The film leans hard on that fact, playing heavily into the trope of Indians being more in tune with nature than the rest of us. Tim soon finds out who murdered his dad and how, and this is where the horror comes in. Tim uses his favorite rattlesnake, Stanley, to take revenge on everyone who was involved. He also gets anyone who does anything bad to a snake. This includes a burlesque dancer and her slimy husband who decide the big finale to her show should be her biting the head off a live snake. No, really. As far as I can tell, Ozzie Osbourne did not have a hand in the script. Anyhoo, this movie is pretty much Willard, but with snakes. It drags in some spots, and star Chris Robinson is no Crispin Glover, but it's unintentionally hilarious enough to make it so bad it's awesome!

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Check out Brittani's review of Apostle