SQUIRM (1976)

Did you know that electricity makes worms go nuts? Lesson learned. This movie is crazy! It’s so much fun! Nature strikes back when a power line in a tiny Georgia town goes down and turns normal earthworms into crazed flesh-eating fiends! They attack everybody! They burrow into a guy’s face! They come out of a shower head! Why are there so many worms? Who cares??? Let go and get into it!

MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)

You know how I said that PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE isn’t the worst movie ever made? That’s because THIS IS. My best friend told me that he saw the MST3K version of this and that it was hilarious. So I picked up the DVD of the real version at the comic store because it was only $3.99. OH MY GOD. You know how I said that EQUINOX got past all the limits (money, acting, effects) because it felt like the people making it loved making it? I think everyone involved with MANOS was sentenced to make it. Nothing works. Music? Bad. Acting? Bad. Effects? Non-existent. Stupid painting? Bad. Dogs? Bad. Script? Was there one? Ending? Not soon enough. I sat through it, but only because I couldn’t believe just how much worse it could get.

THE RAVEN (1963)

If you want a movie with the best guys in horror starring, this is it. But it’s not a horror movie, it’s one of the first horror comedies. Roger Corman had been making movies out of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories for a while, and decided to do something to poke fun at them. So he got Richard Matheson (who wrote a lot of the best TWILIGHT ZONE episodes) to write it, and got Vincent Price (who’s in a lot of the other Poe movies), Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff to star in it. They’re all hilarious! Price and Lorre especially. Jack Nicholson shows up looking like he’s my age or something! It’s got nothing to do with Poe’s poem, but it’s about a war between three magicians, and it all builds up to a showdown at the end. I love it!

EQUINOX (1970)

Holy crap. My dad suggested I check this out, because he used to see it on TV all the time growing up, so he picked up the DVD online. It’s put out by the Criterion Collection, who normally just do art-house stuff, so I was kind of wary of it being all slow and boring. But man, this movie is all kinds of amazing. There’s two different versions on the DVD, and they’re both pretty different, but the basic story is the same (and pretty much the same as THE EVIL DEAD) – college kids go to see their professor at his cabin in the woods, and there’s an evil book that conjures up demons and opens up portals to the “other side.” The story is really simple, the acting isn’t all that great, the effects are all classic stop-motion style but are really cheap…so you’d think with all this that it wouldn’t be worth watching. But like THE EVIL DEAD, it gets past all that and just works! You get the feeling that they made this movie just because they loved doing it, so if it’s not particularly scary or anything, it just makes you feel kinda good.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)

All right! Another one of those Amicus anthology pictures. This one is all based on stories from horror comics in the 1950s (geeky note: only two of the stories are from Tales From the Crypt! The others are from The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror, but they all came out at the same time by the same people, so it’s kind of like splitting hairs.). I’ve got a few of the reprints of the comics, and they’re all GREAT. This movie isn’t as much fun as the comics themselves, mostly because just about everyone’s very British and very stiff-upper-lipped, and the artwork in the comics is a lot more ghoulish but it’s still pretty fun on its own. There’s a Christmas story about a deranged madman dressed like Santa. There’s one about a guy who has a car wreck with his mistress and things only get worse. One’s about a poor, kindly old guy (Peter Cushing!) who entertains the neighborhood kids and gets pushed into killing himself (this one is really sad!!!). One is about a monkey’s paw that grants wishes, but the wishes all turn out in the worst way possible. And the last one is about a horrible old jerk who takes over a home for the blind and treats everyone like crap. In the end, they get their revenge, and it makes me squirm just to think about it. This is one of the best of these anthology movies, but if you really want something fun, check out the comics. They’re AMAZING!

INFERNO (1980)

Okay, since I saw SUSPIRIA last time, I figured that I needed to follow up with the sequel. It’s not really a sequel, though. It’s another story about the Three Mothers, but it’s really kind of the same story. It’s like if this story was a reoccurring dream, and this is the one you have on the second night. Same kind of stuff happens here, but the main star is a guy, and it’s set in Rome and New York instead of Germany. You kind of get to see the Mother of Tears for a second in Rome at the beginning, but this one’s mostly about the Mother of Darkness and the goings-on in an old apartment building. There’s more elaborate killings, a really amazing scene that’s in a ballroom completely underwater with dead bodies floating all around in it, and again, MORE REALLY LOUD MUSIC. This time it’s not by Goblin, but by Keith Emerson. He was in this rock band called Emerson, Lake and Palmer back in the ‘70s, and judging from my dad’s reaction to the soundtrack, I guess they’re pretty similar to this. Says he, “I never want to hear from this guy again as long as I live.” I don’t know, I didn’t mind the soundtrack. I’d have preferred Goblin, but what am I gonna do about it?