Tag: 80s

Hellgate (1989) review

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Hellgate posterDirector: William Levey

Starring: Ron Palillo, Abigail Wolcott, Carel Trichardt, Petrea Curran

“Take this, you zombie bitch!” (Pam, Hellgate)

Have you ever suffered from PMS? I have. No, you fool, I don’t mean that. I’m talking about Plot Missing Syndrome.

You know how it works. Sometimes you’re watching a film and you’re slightly tired. You nod off without realising it and wake up 30 minutes later, none the wiser.

Slowly you start to realise that the film isn’t making sense any more. Characters are talking about things that haven’t happened. The hero and his love interest suddenly hate each other for some reason. One guy’s missing a leg.

It eventually dawns on you that you must have fallen asleep. You rewind back to the last scene you remember and, more often than not, are stunned that you managed to miss around half an hour without noticing.

When I first watched Hellgate, I thought PMS had struck again. So I watched the film a second time from start to finish and realised, to my bewilderment, that it actually hadn’t. Continue reading “Hellgate (1989) review” →

Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) review

Published on by Chris Scullion3 Comments

Sleepaway Camp III posterDirector: Michael A Simpson

Starring: Pamela Springsteen, Tracy Griffith, Michael J Pollard, Mark Oliver

CINDY – “Why are you doing this to me?”

ANGELA – “Because you’re a cheerleader, a fornicator, a drug taker, a nasty snotty bigot… and besides that, you’re real nice.”

Here’s some advice. If you’re ever at a pub quiz and one of the questions is “what do Sleepaway Camp and Back To The Future have in common?”, your response should be two sentences.

The first: “That’s a pretty fucking obscure film to be bringing up in a pub quiz, considering the public in general aren’t familiar with the Sleepaway Camp series.”

The second: “Nevertheless, the answer to your niche question is that both had their second and third movies shot back-to-back.” Continue reading “Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989) review” →

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) review

Published on by Chris Scullion1 Comment

Sleepaway Camp 2 posterDirector: Michael A Simpson

Starring: Pamela Springsteen, Renee Estevez, Tony Higgins

Also known as: Nightmare Vacation II (UK VHS)

ANGELA – “I did my time. Two years of therapy, electroshock, was on every pill you ever heard of, plus an operation. I’m completely cured. If I wasn’t they wouldn’t have let me out. How do you know so much about me?”

SEAN – “My dad’s a cop. He helped arrest you. You should have heard him the day you got out.”

ANGELA – “That’s too bad. Wait until he hears what’s happened to you.”

Warning: The following review spoils the identity of the killer in the original Sleepaway Camp. However, it does not spoil its big twist ending, so if you don’t mind knowing who the killer was you can feel free to read on, safe in the knowledge you’re still in for a shock when you watch the original. Which you really should, you know.

Sleepaway Camp caused something of a dilemma. When you end a film in such a shocking, outrageous manner, how exactly can you follow that up? Sleepaway Camp II decided the answer was to give the original’s killer a completely different personality.

Years after butchering a load of kids in Camp Arawak all those years ago, Angela Baker has gone through extensive electro-shock therapy and psychiatric treatment. She decides the best thing to do is get a job as a counsellor at a new summer camp, seeing as everything went so well the last time. Continue reading “Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) review” →

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood pic 1

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) review

Published on by Chris Scullion2 Comments

Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood posterDirector: John Carl Buechler

Starring: Lar Park-Lincoln, Terry Kisser, Susan Blu, Kane Hodder

“There’s a legend around here. A killer buried, but not dead. A curse on Crystal Lake. A death curse. Jason Voorhees’ curse. They say he died as a boy, but he keeps coming back. Few have seen him and lived. Some have even tried to stop him. No one can.” (Narrator, Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood)

The Friday The 13th series has jumped the shark so many times I’m surprised Jason Voorhees isn’t dressed like Evel Knievel.

After apparently killing their iconic slasher villain for good in Part IV, introducing a copycat killer in Part V then resurrecting the original as a zombie in Part VI and chaining him to the bottom of Crystal Lake at the end, Paramount decided it was time to fill an entire swimming pool full of sharks, jellyfish and piranha and jump that instead.

Enter Tina Shepard, the heroine of Part VII: The New Blood. Not content with merely being the latest in a line of sole survivors in Friday The 13th films, Tina is different because (drum roll) she has telekinetic powers. Yes, she can move things with the power of her mind. Continue reading “Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988) review” →

Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) review

Published on by Chris Scullion2 Comments

Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives posterDirector: Tom McLoughlin

Starring: Thom Mathews, Jennifer Cooke, David Kagen, CJ Graham

“I went to go cremate Jason… but I fucked up.” (Tommy Jarvis, Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives)

After pissing off long-time Friday The 13th fans by releasing a sequel in which Jason wasn’t actually the killer (see my review of Part V: A New Beginning), Paramount wasn’t taking any risks with the sixth film. That’s why Friday The 13th Part VI comes with a fairly definitive subtitle that states, yes, Jason is alive and well in this one.

Not that his resurrection makes a lot of sense, mind. After surviving a Friday film for the second time, Tommy Jarvis (now played by a third actor, the frustratingly spelt Thom Mathews) escapes from his mental institution, heading to Jason’s grave with his friend to convince himself he’s gone once and for all. After digging up the grave he sees Jason’s rotting body. Nice one, job done.

Except it isn’t, because Tommy decides he wants to drive a metal pole through Jason’s corpse, an act that comes back to munch on Tommy’s arse when a lightning storm hits the pole and brings Jason back to life, all zombified and annoyed and that. Continue reading “Friday The 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986) review” →

Psycho II (1983) review

Published on by Chris Scullion1 Comment

Psycho II posterDirector: Richard Franklin

Starring: Anthony Perkins, Meg Tilly, Vera Miles

“I don’t kill people anymore.” (Norman Bates, Psycho II)

NOTE: Spoilers for the original Psycho ahead – don’t read this if you don’t know (or don’t want to know) who the killer is in the original film.

When it comes to sequels created long after their predecessors, it’d take some doing to beat Psycho II. Released a massive 23 years after the original Psycho, the only thing even more amazing than this hefty gap is that despite the number of years that have passed the sequel still sees the return of Anthony Perkins in the lead role of Norman Bates.

Having spent more than two decades in a psychiatric hospital after the incidents of the first film, Norman is released on good behaviour and free to go back home. It doesn’t say much for the American justice system that he’s allowed to return to the house and motel where he committed two murders and start living there again, but there you have it. Continue reading “Psycho II (1983) review” →

Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) review

Published on by Chris Scullion5 Comments

Friday The 13th Part V - PosterDirector: Danny Steinmann

Starring: John Shepherd, Shavar Ross, Melanie Kinnaman, Dick Wieand

“Jason Voorhees? You’re outta your fucking mind. You’ve been out in the sun too long. Jason Voorhees is dead! His body was cremated. He’s nothing but a handful of ash.” (Mayor Cobb, Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning)

Picture the dilemma faced by the studio execs at Paramount. They’d just released the fourth Friday The 13th film, one which quite clearly drew a line under the whole series with the title Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter. And yet, people wanted more.

So, deciding to neatly brush the whole ‘final chapter’ business neatly under the blood-soaked carpet, Paramount greenlit a fifth film and decided to call it A New Beginning, the title implying that the first four films were still their own little series and now we were dealing with a brand new story arc. Continue reading “Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985) review” →

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) review

Published on by Chris Scullion5 Comments

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter posterDirector: Joseph Zito

Starring: Kimberly Beck, Corey Feldman, Crispin Glover, Peter Barton, Ted White

“Jesus Christmas! Holy Jesus! Goddamn! Holy Jesus jumping Christmas shit!” (Axel, Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter)

Oh, you poor, deluded fools. To think there was once a time when the fourth film in the Friday The 13th series was supposed to be the last one ever.

Of course, hindsight tells us this couldn’t have been further from the truth – Jason would go on to star in a further eight movies – but for now let’s treat The Final Chapter as the concluding part it was seemingly intended to be.

Following on from the end of the third movie, an apparently dead Jason is carted off to the local morgue where he rests with his victims. Predictably, it’s not long before he’s up and at them again, killing a couple of doctors on his way out of the building. Continue reading “Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) review” →

Cannibal Holocaust (1980) (Video Nasty review #8)

Published on by Chris Scullion8 Comments

Cannibal Holocaust posterDirector: Ruggero Deodato

Starring: Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Gabriel Yorke, Luca Barbareschi

TV EXECUTIVE – “Today people want sensationalism. The more you rape their senses the happier they are.”

PROFESSOR MONROE – “Ah, yes, that’s typical western thought. Civilised, isn’t it? That’s what Alan thought and that’s why he’s dead. The Yacumo Indian is a primitive and he has to be respected as such. You know, did you ever think of the Yacumo point of view? That we might be the savages?”

Note: Other then the official film poster above, the rest of the images in this review have deliberately been chosen to hide some of the film’s gorier, more offensive scenes. Despite this, the review still features descriptions of these scenes and as such those with a weak stomach may wish to just give this film their own score of zero and move on.

The story goes that when Sergio Leone – the legendary Italian director of Once Upon A Time In The West and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly – first saw Cannibal Holocaust, he felt compelled to write a letter to his friend Ruggero Deodato, the film’s director.

It read: “Dear Ruggero, what a movie! The second part is a masterpiece of cinematographic realism, but everything seems so real that I think you will get in trouble with all the world.”

He was right. Cannibal Holocaust was eventually banned in numerous countries (the unofficial estimate is around 50, including the UK and its native Italy), and such was the realistic nature of the on-screen deaths that Deodato was actually arrested and held on trial under suspicion of murder of the four main actors – a charge he was only able to drop after getting all four actors to appear at the courtroom. Continue reading “Cannibal Holocaust (1980) (Video Nasty review #8)” →

Friday The 13th Part III (1982) review

Published on by Chris Scullion4 Comments

Friday The 13th Part 3 posterDirector: Steve Miner

Starring: Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Larry Zerner, Richard Brooker

“Is that all you’re gonna do this weekend? Smoke dope?” (Shelly, Friday The 13th Part III)

After the second Friday The 13th movie ended with the doors left wide open for a sequel, that inevitable follow-up sauntered through said doors just one year later in the shape of the imaginatively titled Friday The 13th Part III.

The second film concluded with the survivor conveniently blacking out and having no idea where Jason had gone, so the third begins just one day later as a still very-much alive Jason heads to a lakefront property called Higgins Haven, where he takes solace in a nearby farmhouse to rest his wounds.

As Jason’s luck would have it, yet another group of sexually active teens are on their way to spend the week at Higgins Haven, blissfully unaware one of the horror genre’s most notorious slashers is camping out in the building next door. Continue reading “Friday The 13th Part III (1982) review” →