The Spooktacular Eight # 5: Land Of The Minotaur/The Devil’s Men (1976)

While Greek mythology is arguably the most overrepresented in media (followed closely by Norse mythology as one of the many “free idea buckets”), you don’t exactly think of horror when you think of Greek cinema, as the many monsters from that mythos often are more used in videogames.

But of course, there are exceptions, odd relics that surface when you start digging hard and long enough, and Land Of Minoutar does have the allure of starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance, which is enough to have it featured here.

Even if this isn’t the first time the two beloved actors worked together, as The Flesh And The Fiends is from 1960.

And because this is a very obscure film, it has alternate titles, like just “Minotaur” and “The Devil’s Men”, the latter being used for its UK release, and my copy as well.

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The Spooktacular Eight #3: Evil Of Dracula (1974)

We gotta have a vampire film in here, but i’m not feeling like talking of Vampyros Lesbos, the old Hammer Dracula films have been done to death, and Yakuza Apocalypse is pretty well known, so let’s compromise and by that i mean feature something not quite from left field, but close enough.

So let’s take a look at a 70s japanese vampire movies clearly going after the western depiction and aesthetic, with Evil Of Dracula, which is actually the last piece of the so called “Bloodthirsty Trilogy” (later rereleased worlwide by Arrow Video) of vampire movies, beginning with Bloodsucking Doll/Vampire Doll, continuing with Lake Of Dracula, then Evil Of Dracula.

I should have done the entire trilogy, i guess that’s what happens when you pick a movie for a random Halloween selection without doing any proper research on it beforehand.

That’ll learn me.

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The Spooktacular Eight #2: The Slayer (1982)

I did promise i would cover more Arrow Video releases.

I didn’t specify or pointed out that they also re-released a lot of slasher flicks, so we’re not talking about the works of Park Chan-wook, Miike or Buttgereit, not today.

Today we’re talking about one of the many cult slashers from the 80s (really, what slasher from that era ISN’T a cult sensation today?), The Slayer, the debut feature from genre director J.S. Cardone, and yet another one for the “video nasty” list, which in retrospect helped these movies gain more notoriety than they ever could wish for, so yeah, good one Thatcher and co.

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Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City trailer dropped, words and reaction ensue, etc.

Yesterday we finally got to see the first trailer for the Resident Evil film reboot, known as Resident Evil Welcome To Raccon City for a while, and people aren’t exactly going gaga for it.

Color me not surprised, since fanbases are notoriously both easy and fickle to please, and years of Paul W.S. Anderson brand of action have clearly rotted some people’s brain overtime, i haven’t seen them all, but i did witness the vomit inducing unwatchable mess of Resident Evil The Final Chapter in theathers, and that already should set the stage for things to go inevitably up. Or at least avoid triggering motion sickness in moviegoers.

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[EXPRESSO] There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021) | Mid Slashing

Netflix is ramping up the horror output in October as expected and as usual i test my luck choosing what actually sit and down watch by using a bit of the old “eeny meeny miny moe” strategy.

There’s no telling if it’s good, just that it’s on Netflix…and will actually remain there since it’s an exclusive.

A fresh release (debuted worlwide on Netflix 3 days ago), There Is Someone Inside Your House is a slasher film written by Henry Garden and directed by Patrick Brice, following Makani Young, a transfer student from Hawaii that made the terrible mistake of moving to Nebraska, it’s no wonder she founds herself caught up in a case of gruesome murders happing in her new town.

Aside from the title being both straightforward and a shoe-in for a weird ass Adult Swim short film, the set up is pretty typical, with a killer going around targeting people apparently connected to a hazing ritual in an american football college team, wearing replicas of the soon to be victims’ faces, the characters are the expected ensemble of teens…. actually acting like teens, the killer exposing the victims’ secrets, the main character and her friends trying to figure out who’s the killer, etc.

Some good gore effects, decent acting, some decent setpieces, but there’s….. not really much to it, and the execution it’s a messy, misguided affari. You do the usually game of watching people die, the likeable teen characters bite the obvious bait,, until it’s actually revealed who is the killer and why, as the narrative loses focus after the first act and kinda meanders about the usual throdden path without nteresting things happening. Even the reveal of the killer’s identity is a doozy.

It’s not BAD, it’s just…. fairly forgettable, kinda throwaway average slasher fare.

[EXPRESSO] Intrusion (2021) | Expected Unexpected Invasion

More Netflix perusing, so far it’s often a 40-50 % chance of getting some good, at least in my attempts, so whatever, let’s see this new exclusive Netflix horror thriller about home invasion, simply called Intrusion, which i find to be a bit too simple and descriptive, but whatever.

Premise is also fairly straightforward, about a couple moving into their dream house only to have an attempt home invasion, leading the wife to search for answers and find out that what happened is only the beginning of more creepy things to come.

Intrusion has definitely some ambition, as it tries to nest surprises and twists into what initially seem a set up for a home invasion thriller, since the intrusion itself happens very early and the bulk of the movie is about the wife eventually learning more than she bargained about his architect husband and his secrets.

Problem is, it’s too committed to try and thwart your expectations, to avoid becoming predictable and surprise you, even going as far as trying to make an anti-climax…. problem is even that isn’t very convincing, as there’s half a hour of movie left, where the movie eventually goes into what you expected to it go from halfway through, as not to completely waste the long build up, so the script kinda sabotages itself in a quest to avoid being predictable, making the characters and the pacing worse in a transparent attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.

I feel bad because there’s definitely effort put into the movie, decent atmosphere and acting, but it focuses too much in trying to be not predictable at the expense of pretty much everything else, while ultimately being fairly easy to read and see where its going (and goes), making for a predictable, overall middling result.

[EXPRESSO] Prey (2021) | Die Freischutz, Die

Let’s go Netflix diving once again, with this german horror-thriller.

First, really, you couldn’t find another title for your movie?

Then again, i don’t expect people to confuse this with the 2007 killer lion movie, or the other killer lion movie from 2016, also called just “Prey”.

Premise it’s as stock as it gets for horror, as it’s about five friends escaping from someone hunting them down with a rifle in the woods, where they came just to make an excursion and relax.

A cabin of sorts gets involved somewhere down the line, sure, but don’t expect any subversion or satire of genre diktats, and while it’s not technically a “slasher” since the murdered uses a hunting rifle, it’s just that, a technicality, and expect some answers in the end, but not a twist.

The execution it’s not totally stock since it relies on atmosphere and tension, the mystery of why they are being hunted, and while on paper i do like the concept of not relying on obvious answers and trying to make the raw execution of a simple idea work without trick or convenient cliches… the execution here gives way to mostly boredom and not much to go on or look forward, with some substories and some drama just there to add something to the movie.

While there are some moments of decent tension, the acting is decent and it’s not completely boring or worthless (it’s not), it feels way longer than it is for a movie barely under 90 minutes, and it’s definitely not the kind of movie you wanna fire up if you’re already feeling sleepy or doozy, this isn’t made to “wake you up” to begin with, but it being fairly dull doesn’t help.

Mediocre and forgettable, you decide if it’s worth watching even once.

Ice Spiders (2007) [REVIEW] | Ski Spiders

As promised in the review of Spiders 3D, here’s the review of the spider creature feature TV movie Tibor Takacs directed before the 2013’s Nu Image/Millennium Film one that happened to pretty much be a remake of the 2000’s movie Spiders, produced by the same company.

You might argue i maybe should have done this before Spiders 3D, and you would be correct, but i didn’t even find out Ice Spiders existed before doing research for the other one, so here we are.

I should have guessed that a movie like this would exist, because i do believe this type of genre B-movies (especially if made for TV like this one) will eventually fall victim to what i call the “Pokemon Singularity”, with desperate filmakers mixing and matching animals with a random element/type, and if we can have sharks made of ice, sand (so “earth”), fire (atomic), even ghostly “dark” sharks, sure as shit we can have a movie called Ice Spiders. Possibly about literal spiders made of ice.

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Drive In Massacre (1976) [REVIEW] | Get Out Of The Car

September, perfect time for looking at some slasher movies, even lesser known (but not quite obscure) ones, like today’s Drive In Massacre.

It’s basically Targets, as in both movies have a drive-in as the central scenario of the action, and as a motif. IF Targets was directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis instead of Peter Bogdanovich.

Yeah, this one has a cult status and was quite popular at the time, i’m willing to guess in the drive-in circuits, which i always wondered about, but since that type of cinema experience never took foot here in Italy, i will just have to witness its depiction in american movies. Oh well.

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[EXPRESSO] The Swarm AKA La Nueè (2021) | Zorak Disapproved

The international localized title, The Swarm (the original being “La Nueè”, which can be directly translated as “The Plume”), threw me a bit off, as it’s the same one for the older 1978 movie with Michael Caine, but this recent Netflix exclusive movie it’s not about killer bees, it’s about locusts.

Ok, more Locusts: The 8Th Plague. Or The Exorcist II: The Heretic, i guess.

Plot it’s a little less hockey than one would assume, as it’s about a single mother that raises locusts for a living, but just isn’t able to make them breed, until she discovers that the animals react well to human blood…

Obviously, this happens as an accident, and you can tell this isn’t an american b-movie because it’s not actually just about killer locusts, but the drama of a single mother desperately trying to make ends meet, ready to do many sacrifices for her family.

Still, it’s a bit unelegant the way in which the locusts acquire this bloodlust, or how the narrative it’s both too slow moving and forced in various points, because you were kinda promised a swarm of killer locusts rampaging, so here’s a character doing an obviously stupid thing for the sake of setting that up. Except… not really.

And even so, there’s no real pay-off or much in the way of horror until the last 15 minutes, most of the movie it’s spent with these…. kinda detestable and unlikeable characters, not much happens in general, so it’s really drawn out and when something does happen it’s way too brief, often feels forced or done more out of obligation than anything else.

There are worse movies, but this is so disinterested about its subject material and such a slow moving, boring pile of pointless that i would simply suggest skipping it.