Mansion of the Doomed (1976)

The movie opens with a desperate man on a mission. His name is Dr. Leonard Chaney, and he is an eye specialist. This is ironic as due to an accident his lovely daughter Nancy is now blind. Partially out of love but more so out of guilt (he was driving the car) he is determined to restore her sight. But how can he accomplish that? He decides the only way is to transplant the entire eyeball from a living donor! I bet you can see where this is going.

The first donor/victim is Dr. Bryan who is not only a colleague of Dr. Chaney but was also his daughter’s boyfriend/significant other. It is hinted at that he has left her after she lost her sight, so Chaney seems to think it is a good place to start. Amazingly enough she can see again, but it only lasts for a couple of weeks and her father is back starting all over again. By that I mean he keeps going out and finding victims so he can knock them out and remove their eyes. Though it seems futile because none of the other surgeries even temporarily restore her vision. But being a doctor, he won’t just kill the donors so soon he has a cage full of them in his basement. This leads to an attempted escape, his nurse being murdered by an angry victim, and eventually them being released to get their bloody revenge. Sounds like a good time, no?

I enjoyed the heck out of this movie. I was a bit worried when the credits started off with “A Charles Band” production but this was back when he cared and was trying to make a good movie. The voice over from Dr. Bryan lets us know what he is thinking and sets his desperation up to heal Nancy right away. That then leads to him slowly becoming more and more monstrous as he keeps pushing. In his own mind we see him try to justify the blinding of his Guinea pigs with the “I’ll fix them once I have this perfected” only to conveniently forget that would mean blinding someone else. This total lack of logic as well as the performance from Veteran actor Richard Basehart sells the character and the story.

Speaking of actors selling the story we get a very young Lance Henriksen as the first victim and eventual ringleader of the blind Dr. Bryan. He disappears for a long stretch until his eyeless face is revealed in a cool jump scare. Once that happens we see a lot more of the basement and the caged victims interacting with each other. This makes what has happened to them so much worse. The script also takes the time to show different reactions from comatose, to wanting to escape, and finally homicidal rage for what has happened to them. I was shocked that the script has us spend that much time with them. I was expecting an exploitative drive-in movie, and this was far more than that.

We should talk special effects. This movie doesn’t have many kills as again the doctor tries to be humane; I mean other than ripping their eyes out and keeps them alive. When they do die it is tame with an escapee getting hit by a car and the nurse being strangled. Where the movie shines is the makeup used to show the eyeless prisoners as well as some gruesome gags with the surgeries. I was again shocked and surprised to see a familiar name connected with the work. This is a Stan Winston flick! He manages to make the audience squirm on a low budget, and I dug it.

The final thing that I wanted to note was the director. Michael Pataki is more well known as an actor appearing movies like Graduation Day, Halloween 4, The Return of Count Yorga, and my personal favorite Grave of the Vampire. He only has three directorial credits to his name with this being his first. From what I see here he had some talent as a director, and it is a bummer that we didn’t get to see more from him. If you haven’t figured it out yet I’m recommending Mansion of the Doomed. It is a fun, creepy, and at times gross movie that checks all the boxes I want from a drive-in horror flick with the bonus of an excellent script.

 

© Copyright 2023 John Shatzer

Why? (2019)

I was digging thru my to watch pile when I found this movie and thought I’d check it out. From what I could find online it was pitched as a slasher movie, but really isn’t. What it is or at least is trying to be is a psychological thriller with most of the movie a cat and mouse game between a woman in an isolated cabin and a crazed killer who likes to wear faces. Well, that sounds familiar doesn’t it?

After showing us a woman getting killed in a parking garage the action moves to a woman and man in bed talking about their big weekend at “the cabin”. They seem to be in love and shit so that is a thing. Then the action moves to a lady and her guy having sex in a tent in the woods. Someone sneaks up on them and hacks them to death with an axe. At this point I had no idea what is going on, but the movie had my attention. Three solid kills right away, maybe this was a slasher flick. Then it all goes sideways.

The woman from earlier in bed is named Blake and we see her driving to the cabin when she gets a phone call. This serves two purposes. One to establish that cell service is crappy where she is headed and two to give us our first glorified cameo. Natasha Henstridge shows up for a hot minute on the phone as her editor. After promising to work on her new book Blake stops at a store and the locals get weird when she tells them she is headed to the Conrad cabin. I suppose they know there is a killer running around. But if so, why not say something? Yeah, I know horror tropes and all.

As you have probably figured out the killer is around and starts to mess with her right away. He even breaks in the house and watches her sleep. Though I found it annoying that he is always magically able to be right there in the shadows and she never sees him. I can forgive a couple of times, but they do it again and again. At some point she had to know he was there. Even more annoying is when she sees the killer, she drops her phone and runs away… aimlessly thru the woods. It was at this point I began rooting for the killer just to get this movie over with.

Other things happen like her boyfriend calling the local sheriff for him to do a welfare check. This allows Lance Henriksen to show up on the phone in yet another glorified cameo. He sends his deputy out and blah blah blah… You know what? I really didn’t like this movie.

Clocking in at only seventy-eight minutes this movie had to work very hard to be this boring. After some fun kills in the first ten the rest of the flick is nothing more than an uninteresting killer in a hoodie walking around the woods/house. All the characters are bland, including said killer, and I honestly didn’t care what was going on. Henstridge and Henriksen are obviously cashing paychecks as both are phoning in their performances… literally! Some of the kills look decent and there is a fun gag with a faceless woman, but that doesn’t save the movie.

I have no idea what they were trying to make here but whatever it was they failed. There clearly was some talent here as the movie looks good and is shot well. The makeup was also fine, and I don’t think the cast was too bad. They just had no plot and not even enough ideas to fill up the short runtime. Oh, and they only got to that length with the inclusion of an obvious nightmare scene and tacked on gag with a babysitter that had absolutely nothing to do with the main story. Why? I guess the title is referring to the audience looking at each other and asking, “Why did I waste my time watching this?”. I don’t recommend wasting your time on this one.

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

 

 

Harbinger Down (2015)

There is nothing that I enjoy more than a good old fashioned monster movie. This looks to be just that with the added bonus of Lance Henriksen in a starring role. You heard that right it isn’t just stunt casting, but he has an actual damn role! Not only that he plays a grumpy grandpa doing battle with a terror from space. Damn movie you get me…

The movie opens in nineteen eighty-two with a Russian spacecraft crashing into the ice. We see that something was going horribly wrong, and I don’t mean just the crash. The action moves to present day with a group of science types led by a douchey professor with grad students in tow. One of those students is the granddaughter of the crab boat captain. They head out to check the migratory patterns of Beluga whales and how it is impacted by global warming. While poking around the granddaughter discovers the Russian space craft in the ice and they pull it onboard. At first the only argument is from the professor trying to claim the discovery as his.

I did say he is kind of a douche. But when the body of the cosmonaut disappears, and something starts picking them off one at a time ownership becomes less of an issue. There is a monster onboard that can change its shape and mutate/consume anyone it comes in contact with. We find out thru a twist which I won’t ruin that the Russians were experimenting on Water Bears aka. Tardigrades that can live in just about any environment. The critters mutated into a monster that is now stalking them. If that weren’t bad enough if you become infected by them, you eventually become part of the monster.

The rest of the movie is a familiar creature feature with the diminishing group of survivors trying to escape as well as destroy the monster. If it gets loose humanity is doomed. While Harbinger Down doesn’t break any new ground, it does execute the formula with relish. They quickly establish the creepy environment of the crab boat isolated in frigid waters. Everything feels dirty and wet so when they need to creep around the ship in the dark it works. The characters fit the archetypes that we are used to, but the actors do very well with what they are given making it feel fresh. Henriksen is the

Creature looks awesome

highlight as the crusty captain and grandfather. He also has the best line in the movie. When they eventually come up with a weapon to freeze the monster, they load up the coolant in buckets. Finally tracking down the now much larger monster, it ate a few people and absorbed him, he drops “We’re gonna need a bigger bucket.” Normally I’m not the kind of guy that laughs at stuff like but they nailed it.

The special effects work is stellar and is all practical. The creature is amazing and has several different shapes as well as sizes. They even take the time to show at least one of the characters who was killed as part of the creature. There is a decent nine kills with some of the highlights being an arm frozen off, a mutating/exploding character, someone is grabbed and squished, and death by metal grade. They effectively get pulled thru it… ouch. Though my best is another character getting yanked into a tube that is clearly not large enough for the human body to squeeze thru!

Good creature, fun kills, old school actor given something to sink his teeth into. What isn’t to love here? Harbinger Down is a great throwback to the squishy monster movies of the eighties, and I dig it. I especially love the fact that they went out of their way to not use CGI. All of this makes the movie feel like it belongs to a time twenty-five years before it was made. I highly recommend this one.

 

© Copyright 2021 John Shatzer

Mom and Dad (2018)

While prowling around the internet I stumbled upon the announcement that there was a new movie coming out starring Nicolas Cage. I can’t lie and pretend that I wasn’t interested. As bad as most of his recent outings have been there is some enjoyment out of seeing him overact and chew on the scenery. Then I read that Selma Blair was co-starring and that the movie was about an epidemic of parents killing their children. Now this has some potential!

Things start off nicely enough. Cage and Blair play the parents of a teenage daughter and elementary aged son. The movie follows the family on its normal day that is derailed by media coverage of kids being killed. This prompts the parents to track down their children to protect them… and of course as soon as they see the kids, they become homicidal. The daughter, Carly, jumps into action to protect her little brother with the aid of her boyfriend, Damon. Eventually Carly and her brother end up in the basement where Cage and Blair’s characters try to gas them by messing with the supply line to the furnace. They are so going to blow up their Dad!

Much mayhem and violence ensue. This includes the paternal grandparents showing up for a planned supper and going apeshit as well. I guess it doesn’t matter how old the kids are you just got to kill them all! Who could they possibly have cast as Cage’s father? God dang Lance Henriksen! Things get really crazy really fast with some kitchen cutlery and a prized muscle car. After some deaths and more terrible stuff happening the movie just sort of ends and does so in a perfect way.

I rather enjoyed Mom and Dad. There are some horrific and disturbing scenes in it. Oddly enough they don’t have much to do with gore. There is a scene in a hospital where Blair’s sister is giving birth and the buildup to giving her the baby to hold for the first time was gut-wrenching. The audience knows something bad is up, but the characters don’t. This also leads into a quick bit with fathers starring at their newborns thru the glass. The look on their faces is creepy as hell.

Cage is always awesome not matter how bad the movie.

When we finally get to the meat of the plot with the parents coming home to kill Carly and her brother it gets crazy. Mostly because Nicolas Cage is awesomely over the top. Dude is singing the Hokey Pokey while trying to kill them which is a call back to him being lovingly goofy early in the day. It was also really funny to see Mom and Dad fighting over him bringing a gun into the house that she didn’t know about. I mean the kids could get hurt! Sure, they are trying to kill them, but he needs to be responsible I guess? The dialogue and the normal conversational way that Cage and Blair deliver it only adds to how bonkers this whole setup and situation is.

Most of the kills are implied or off screen. You see a bit of gore, but this isn’t the kind of movie that is going to linger on it. The direction and editing are solid and keep the action moving along and slowly building tension. You can see something coming but aren’t sure what. In fact, the movie ends in a totally abrupt and surprising way. But I liked it a lot. The opening credits have a very retro feel to them and was a nice way to start off. I also noticed a lot of cool older songs that as a child of the eighties I really dug. The highlight for me was when Erasure’s Chains of Love pops on during a big fight in and around the muscle car. It was an odd choice but this is an odd movie so it works.

Honestly, I haven’t even scratched the surface with Mom and Dad. There are so many cool things going for this one that all I have left to say is check it out. Good flick that is worth your time.

© Copyright 2020 John Shatzer

Gehenna: Where Death Lives (2016)

So, when I saw that Lance Henriksen and Doug Jones were the top billed stars of this movie I immediately thought to myself that someone was cashing a paycheck. Especially Henriksen who has made a career out of showing up for a few minutes to get paid. That annoys the heck out of me, and I don’t know why so many filmmakers think that his name is going to sell the movie. We fans have figured this out. Spoiler alert Henriksen only shows up on the other side of a phone call for maybe ninety seconds in the first five minutes and that is it. So, I was already not pleased with Gehenna: Where Death Lives. Though Jones has more to do, albeit buried under a ton of makeup.

The movie follows a group of some corporate bigwigs and their guides as they check out property on the island of Saipan with the possibility of building a resort. Right away we meet the locals and hear the stories of it being sacred land and that they shouldn’t desecrate it. At that point most rational people would turn tail and locate somewhere else to build. Instead this group finds a creepy underground complex left over from the Second World War and decides, ‘hey let’s check this out’. Do I have to tell you that choice doesn’t end well? Not only is the ground sacred, but it also is home to ghosts and some sort of evil spirit from a couple hundred years earlier when a European angered the local tribes a bit. This is a bad place, a very bad place.

Be warned that I’m going to have spoilers in my review. I can’t really tell you about the best parts of the movie without them and yes there is some good stuff here. As much as I didn’t want to like Gehenna: Where Death Lives it does have moments where it is fun. The underground bunker setting is spooky and leads to many scares. The place is testing/torturing our characters by haunting them with the choices they have made and the people they lost in their past. This makes for some creepy drowned kid and torso twisted dead sister action that looks decent. The evil forces also turn more than one of them against the others and has them do its dirty work.

Doing his five minutes work.

This is typical stuff that most of us have seen already in other ghost movies. The twist here is that they travel back in time to when the tunnels were being shelled by the Americans during World War II. This has them meeting up with the Japanese survivor who then gives them some insight to what happened, as it was them who released the evil. Now we have characters who aren’t just trapped underground but are also lost in time. How does that work, and can they return home? Well the answer is sort of. I can’t really say much more than that without ruining the movie. This is a flick that is all about the big twist, so I don’t want to do that.

Do I recommend Gehenna? This is the kind of movie that you want to rent or wait to show up on a streaming service. It is a fun watch once, but once the big twist is revealed and the fate of the characters shown I can’t imagine it holding anyone’s interest a second time. I picked up a used copy of the movie from my local rental store for five bucks and am planning on passing it along to a friend. In the end I’d say this was a decent flick but nothing special.

© Copyright 2020 John Shatzer