Oh, and I somehow forgot to include one film in the first half of the 70‘s list that deserved to be here, so you’re getting eleven films this time out!
Once again, I am emphasizing lower budget films, specifically ‘cheesy’ and ‘scary’ examples. You will find, however, a lot less cheese and a lot more scare. If I discussed these films during the earlier Halloween Horrorfests or on Dread Media or The Honeywell Experiment, I’ve provided links.
So here we are--once more into the breach!
Honorable Mention from Part One: SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970)
GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)
Larry Cohen is one of my heroes, a New York City boy like myself who was so compelled to make movies he would drive around Los Angeles with a trunk full of scripts he wrote, going from producer to producer to sell them. This is one of a number of films he shot in my home city and while it’s not my favorite (we’ll get to that in a later part of this series), it’s definitely the weirdest. It concerns a rash of people that commit spree killings (including a young Andy Kaufman!) and claim God told them to it...only God is an alien hybrid creature! It’s nuts and has a lot to say about belief!
WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976)
Spain had some quirky little horror films that came out in the 70‘s--I could also point you to the Blind Dead series and A Bell From Hell--but this film is a Creepy Kids Film at its creepiness. A group of vacationers end up on an island off the coast of Spain where the children have gone mad and slaughtered everyone. Unlike some of the other Creepy Kids film, there’s no explanation; they’re just Pure-D-Mean and they’re looking for bloodshed. Very, very intense.
SHOCK WAVES (1977)
I know some people will poo-poo this choice, but while it’s low-key and not particularly violent, it is atmospheric and novel. A ship full of vacationers runs aground on an island inhabited by a former SS commandant who commanded a ‘death corps’ of aquatic zombie Nazis...and those zombies are still active and killing everybody off. The sequences of the zombies walking along underwater are genuinely erie, and there are good performances by Peter Cushing and the stunning Brooke Adams, who should have been a bigger star than she was.
BLUE SUNSHINE (1977)
This is a ludicrous horror film about a specific brand of LSD that, years later, causes its users to lose their hair in alarmingly quick fashion and kill everyone around them. It’s debatable whether the scariest thing in this film, which treats its story as a 70‘s paranoid conspiracy thriller, is the bug-eyed, bald murderers or the lead, played by future Red Shoe Diaries impresario Zalman King. Some of the set pieces are spooky, and some are hilarious!
MARTIN (1978)
This is a movie George Romero made between Night of The Living Dead and Dawn of The Dead...and it is not only my favorite in his cv, I think it’s his best film. Martin (played with a heart-rending numbness by John Amplas) comes to live with his grand uncle in a deteriorating Pennsylvania town. Martin also thinks he’s a vampire--or maybe he is--who drugs, rapes and slits the wrists of women so he can feed off their blood. His grand-uncle also believes Martin is a vampire, and is just waiting for him to slip up. This is an emotionally exhausting, powerful character study that can be interpreted to be about severe mental illness, or could be interpreted as being more fanciful. Either way, it’s a must see.
LONG WEEKEND (1978)
Remember I mentioned my fondness for Ozploitation? This is an Australian take on the ‘Man v. Nature’ genre that was so popular throughout the 70‘s, and it. Is. Brutal. A couple behave like assholes on a long weekend in the wild....and the wild strikes back. If you like to root for unpleasant people to die, this is the film for you. Yes, the special effects aren’t that special (watch out for that bird!), but the story is compelling as Hell.
THIRST (1979)
This Australian oddity has been pretty much been obliterated by the shadow of Park Chan-Wook’s excellent vampire noir....but man, it is bug fuck insane. A woman (played by Chantal Contouri, who I always suspected was cast for her weird, keening scream) is abducted by a mysterious cabal called The Brotherhood of Hyma and told she is a direct descendant of Countess Elizabeth Bathory...which gives her the right to drink the blood of her lessers. What makes it insane is how the Brotherhood uses ‘farms’ of pale, out-of-it...patients?...who get milked daily, their vital fluids distributed to the members of this cult in milk cartons. There is some insane imagery here, and an amazing cast--this may be the only place you’ll get to see David Hemmings and Henry Silva in the same room--and it is not boring.
TOURIST TRAP (1979)
Before there was Full Moon Features and Puppet Master, Charles Band and David Schmoeller collaborated on this crazed variation on the slasher film, featuring Tanya Roberts wearing the most revealing-yet-modest tube top ever and a wonderfully vigorous performance by Chuck Conners as a roadside attraction proprietor who’s also a telekinetic, sadistic madman with a fetish for mannequins. The film is a little ramshackle, but it’s also fun and creative--even when it collapses into crazy nonsense for the final act.
WITHOUT WARNING (1980)
I recently had director/producer Greydon Clark on The Honeywell Experiment. Clark was responsible for a number of great grindhouse features--all for less than a million dollars--and perhaps his most noteworthy film is this science fiction/horror mash-up about an alien utilizing fuzzy starfish with neon lights to hunt humans in the woods...and how said alien in turn in hunted by a PTSD suffering Martin Landau and his friend Jack Palance. It’s really entertaining, gory at times and has some really effective acting from Palance and Landau.
CHRISTMAS EVIL/YOU BETTER WATCH OUT (1980)
While a lot of people hold up Silent Night, Deadly Night as the ultimate Killer Santa film, I love this tiny film shot in and around my home town featuring Brendan Maggart (father of Fiona Apple) as a man who loves Christmas and slowly starts to believe and behave like he’s Santa Claus when his life falls apart. It’s got more of a character study feel to it, but that approach gives us a surprisingly uneasy feeling of sympathy for the main character--and the surreal ending makes you look at the entire film in a new light.
Next Time: Ten Cheesy Horror Films from the beginning of the 80‘s!
If you’d like me to recommend a list of stuff especially for you, please buy me a Ko-Fi and message me with your request. If you’d like to support me further, please consider becoming a Domicile of Dread Patreon and receive lots of free goodies throughout the year including exclusive essays, movie commentaries and podcasts.
No comments:
Post a Comment