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!

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.