Bike-mare Beach

 

The snow might be falling. The temperature is dropping. We're thick in the dregs of 4PM sunset and the winter blues but damnit, that's why film exists as an escape. You want fantasy? You want saltwater breezes and carefully curated tanlines? We got this. Throw on your best fire red mesh t-shirt. We're going swimming.

Quick Plot: It's spring break  - 

Sorry, required reaction when those two words are spoken

- in the wilds of Florida when a biker named Diablo convicted of multiple homicide is executed via the electric chair. His crew insists Diablo was innocent, but when his body disappears and the murders resume, tensions rise higher than the tan lines you get from an above-the-waist thong.

Enter Skip and Ronny, two failed college football would-be stars who come to town to party. Ronny quickly becomes the mysterious Maybe-Diablo's victim, prompting Skip to team up with a bartender named Gail to solve the crime.

And WHAT a crime! This isn't your stabbing, machete swinging slasher. CHILD'S PLAY Nightmare Beach says to that! Our killer, you see, rides a juiced up motorcycle with its very own pop-up electric chair built into the passenger rear.

It. Is. Metal.

This is the kind of sleazy beach slasher that lacks even the restraint it takes to keep a woman's wet, nipple-showing top on during any of its MULTIPLE wet t-shirt contest time fillers. Directed by the aptly named James Justice (aka Harry Kirkpatrick, but James Justice is SO much more fun to say) after Umberto Lenzi lost a battle with the producers, is certainly one of the stranger slashers to battle it out on the shelves of your beloved VHS rental store. Naturally, I mean that in the best of ways.

You get bikers that feel like refugees from the bar in Pee-Wee's Great Adventure. John Saxon shifting his eyes as a dishonest cop. Murders far more creative than anything Jason Voorhes could cook up. And best of all, an actual point to the killings that genuinely does tack on an actual theme to the glorious chaos of the 90 minutes that came before. What more can you ask for from a cheap '80s slasher?

High Points

I'm a simple, simple woman, one made exceedingly giddy by such filmmaking decisions as "let's use as many dummies to simulate murder victims as possible." Folks, Nightmare Beach uses a LOT of dummies, and the world is a better place for it

Low Points

This is a very dumb thing to be mad about, but in such a glorious chunk of low quality but delicious cheese, I find it perfectly valid to be most angry that the token PRANKS guy (you know the type if you've watched any horror or horror-adjacent film from the '80s) who CONTINUES to throw on prosthetics and pose himself as dead even AFTER multiple homicides, just doesn't get NEARLY a painful enough or grand demise. This is a guy who dons greasy fake bullet wounds IN A PUBLIC POOL FOR GOODNESS SAKE, and yet all we get is the discover of his actual real body, while our most lovable character (the ridiculously cheerful and savvy sex worker) is brutally set fire to before our eyes

Lessons Learned
When you're 18, you can do what you want

Men were telling women they'd be prettier if they smiled since at least 1986, though back then, the price of such assholery was a cruel and immediate death

Less a lesson and more a question to keep you up in the middle of the night: who's dumber? The PRANKS guy who does the fake-Jaws shark swim on a crowded beach, or the police officer who fires his pistol at the water?

Rent/Bury/Buy
Nightmare Beach is gloriously steaming on Kanopy, the free-through-your-library service more commonly associated with educational documentaries and Criterion releases. What a time to be alive folks. What. A. Time.

Mi Casa Es Su Casa Fantasma!

The Shortening should always include a few key elements of miniature horror, primarily, evil children and homicidal dolls. Imagine my joy upon discovering today's feature has both!

Quick Plot: Henrietta is an ill-behaved little girl. When her father Sam discovers she's killed the family cat -- on her own birthday, no less! -- he grounds her and her creepy toddler-sized clown doll to the basement. Back upstairs, her parents are brutally murdered by an unseen, axe-wielding force.

Twenty years later, in nearby Boston, college student/ham radio enthusiast Paul is playing with some toys when he hears a mysterious transmission crying for help. He traces the source back to the same house poor Henrietta's family once occupied and decides to make a road trip out of it with his girlfriend Martha. 

Partying on the same grounds is a quartet of fellow 20somethings led by Jim, who knows a fellow ham radio fan when he sees one and quickly bonds with Paul, who even more quickly realizes the voice he heard on the tape is Jim, who doesn't remember such an event. They decide to investigate, riling up some ghostly energy and the meat cleaver-wielding caretaker in the process. 

Written and directed by Umberto Lenzi (despite being credited to fake names), Ghosthouse is a fun slice of late '80s cheese. A haunted house, evil, staring child, AND killer clown doll? That's a LOT to like, and I haven't even mentioned the film's best/worst character, PamPam.

Look, IMDB lists his name as Pepe, but I CLEARLY heard PamPam and will die on this hill

What to say about PamPam, an obnoxious, petty thief hitchhiker who travels with a prank skeleton arm in the hopes of...landing at empty houses with open boxes of croutons? 

Don't think too hard about PamPam, or the suspiciously chatty funeral director who reveals the true cause of Henrietta's haunting: her own mortician father had a bad habit of stealing his late customers' goods, and the Poltergeist-y clown doll was meant to be buried with a child. Instead, Sam gifted it to his kid, sparking a chain of violence that includes death by mirror, death by unplugged fan blade, death by pool of pasty goo, and more!

High Points

I don't always love a mean-spirited ending, but Ghosthouse's final stinger is joy campily over the top that it left me one satisfied streamer

Low Points

I suppose Ghosthouse could have been a little more memorable if its characters were able to have more personality or even clear relationships to one another

Lessons Learned

Hitching is fun, but the hiking part sucks

Data processing is best described as "computers"

In Denver's battle for the hottest, it's a close race between Kelly LeBrock and Kim Basinger

If it's an '80s horror movie that includes a handful of attractive young people, one of them just has to be named Tina

Rent/Bury/Buy

Not surprisingly, Ghosthouse is streaming on Amazon Prime. It's certainly a fun, disposable time, filled with some bizarre murders and a plethora of creepy clown doll cutaways. What more do you need?

Take Me Down To the Nightmare City (where the zombies are mean and they sure ain't pretty)

Few sub-genres have such a vast range in quality as zombie cinema. From the satirically brilliant Dawn of the Dead and modern panorama of the apocalypse in 28 Days Later to the straight-to-not-even-good-enough-for-the-SyFy-channel vaults of homemade horror, documenting the undead is truly a toy for any filmmaker. It’s only fitting that George Romero’s black-and-white classic belongs to the world in the realm of public domain.


When it comes to shamblers, life truly is a box of chocolately brains; you really never know what you’re going to get. Hence, it was with some trepidation that I approached Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City, a 1980 entry into the Italian zombie canon. While I enjoy my share of 70s spaghetti guts with a large dollop of mozzarella, I rarely find them to actually scare me on any genuine level.


And thus, with some raised expectation and more than a little doubts, I sat down for some old school zombi action, courtesy of Mr. Lenzi's dubbed bloodfest. I was not disappointed.


Quick Plot: Journalist Dean Miller (Hugo Stiglitz, no visible resemblance to the Inglorious Basterd) arrives at a landing strip to interview a big shot scientist. Instead, an unidentified plane arrives and the military surrounds it with guns aimed. The doors open and a few grayish men stumble outside, followed by some messily rotted faced sprinters who quickly tear their way into the fleshy army, eating, stabbing, and shooting every human (save for the conveniently immune reporter) in their path.

What follows is a typical genre film, but with a mix of added bonuses that make it hold up with grisly glee thirty years after Nightmare City’s premiere. I don’t know that this is the first appearance of running zombies, but they make their mark like Olympians with high doses of national pride. Some massacres are committed with extra servings of cheese--like the televised aerobics attack, which features leotards, dubbed New Yawk accents, and, just because, several pairs of bare breasts. Other moments contain true suspense and enough horror to keep the audience holding their breaths.


That being said, Nightmare City is not without its flaws. Upon watching a 13 minute interview with Lenzi (the sole extra on my DVD), I realized that these “zombies”--much like the infected of 28 Days Later--are not actually supernaturally undead, but are meant to be products of a radiation leak. I may not have been paying close enough attention to get this bit the first time around, which, in hindsight, makes the very setup of the film much more interesting than the common zombie flick. There is some attempt to provide a government/military angle to the story, but it never really takes us anywhere. At the same time, there is a splattering of characters set throughout the city, few of whom earn enough of our sympathies to let us care about their fates. Then again, any film that provides a zombie priest wielding a mean altar candle gets my seal of approval.

High Points
The first attack is shocking, fast-paced, and actually scary


Kudos for utilizing a roller coaster in a unique and disturbing shot

Low Points
After hearing Lenzi’s explanation of his zombie look, the rotting roasted marshmallow look makes sense, but during the film, they just kind of seem crunchy


The whole “Oh thank God it’s you!” moment, followed by the ‘you’ being a fresh-faced zombie about the chomp his or her way through the daft human works fine the first time, but by the fifth or so repeat it gets a tad predictable


Lessons Learned
Contrary to what nearly any other film would like you to believe, climbing your way up a rope is not nearly as easy as it looks


Zombies are not fans of modern art


To avoid copying Romero-isms, use synonyms like “bullets can damage the cranium” in place of common phrases like “Shoot it man, shoot it in the head”

It is quite possible to shoot a man’s arm off and beat someone to death with a broom


Nurses are well-versed in evolutionary patterns and the consequences of entering the Age of the Robot, but also subscribe to many superstitions about vampires. And, most importantly, they’re quite talented when it comes to freshening up with the right lipstick in the middle of a citywide cannibalistic massacre


Nobody in Italy wears a bra


Rent/Bury/Buy
Although the extras are limited, Nightmare City will probably find its way into my personal DVD collection should I find it at the right price. This is not the most horrifying 70s zombie film of all time, nor is it laughably enjoyable. It’s a solid, scary, and unusual take on what quickly became a tired genre.