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Reviews
The Outer Limits: Caught in the Act (1995)
Presumably this was intended as a comedy...
Ghastly episode in which some sort of alien spore in a meteorite crashes into the dorm room of a girl who is putting off sex with her boyfriend cuz... she's a virgin and wants to wait till she's married.
The spore zaps her and she starts screwing any guy she can get - and killing them by... uhh screwing them to death or absorbing their precious bodily fluids or something.
There's some nudity and sex (No. Duh.) to enliven the proceedings but it is fairly dull. Right up till the end when it's all capped with a love-conquers-all finale.
It's not actually funny but I can't help thinking the writer must have intended it to be. Apparently nobody else was in on the joke.
Nightmare in Blood (1977)
It's kinda fun, but...
This is a quaint cultural artifact of the early '70s. It's an independent film, made by people who loved horror films but weren't able to actually make a scary or terribly involving movie. There are endless references to horror film icons and fandom which are nice but unless you have fond memories of Count Yorga, this movie is bound to disappoint... Because it's on about that level.
The San Francisco locations (A murder at Lincoln Park golf course, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the BG - The Kerwin Mathews film-within-a-film was shot at a WWII gun emplacement in the Presidio - The theater where most of the action occurs was actually in Oakland)are nice and I have happy memories of Bob Wilkins, the San Francisco TV horror host on whom a character in the film is based. Beyond that, the film is slow, the characters are thin and the plot is weak.
The protagonists, who are involved in putting on a Horror Convention at a San Francisco movie palace, include a horror novelist, a Sherlock Holmes buff and a mystical hippie comic-book guru (No, really, he wears a Jesus robe and goes on about the "comic ethos".) The villains are a horror film star named Makakai, who plays vampires and "lives" his role off-screen, and his pair of PR men, who are actually Burke and Hare, the 19th century body-snatchers. Oh, and Malakai is a real vampire - Not much of a spoiler there.
The acting is good and, while it looks pretty dark on my TV, the film is technically well done... But, the writing is weak and despite a bit of gore, it never manages to be remotely scary.
The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
A silent film adaptation of the classic H.P. Lovecraft story!
This is not only a labor of love by earnest fans... It's also a very well done film; utilizing classic silent film techniques with a professional level of acting, editing, cinematography... Everything about this movie is astonishingly well done. Effects are not "realistic" but are sufficiently well done that you might well believe you are looking at a lost classic made in 1926 and you would excuse lost classic it's old fashioned effects if it was this entertaining.
It may not be for all tastes. It is a silent film with a musical score and title cards. But if you don't mind that, or if that sounds like a good idea to you, then this is a remarkable film. It is a very faithful adaptation of the story and it is pretty engrossing as a film.
BE WARNED: There are a couple of bizarre comments posted about this film. Posts that describe a scat scene, nudity, and other things NOT found in this movie. One such review even critiques the accent of one of the players... If these posts are menat as humor - I'm missing it.
Die Hinrichtung (1976)
Very unpleasant but well done...
This film is competently shot, well written and for the most part it is well acted. The problem is that what has been written and acted is so damned unpleasant. It's obviously based on the Richard Speck case which is a spoiler in itself if you are holding your breath to see how it comes out...
An American Vietnam vet with psychological problems and a pathological hatred of women has apparently been working his way home as a merchant seaman. He arrives in Belfast in the middle of a time of violence where armed soldiers move about the streets and Protestant and Catholic factions are shooting people daily. All of this is apparently intended to make some greater social comment but it would seem a bit obvious to state that violence begets violence or some such.
The nastiness of the film begins early with the young man's encounter with an aging whore whom he forces to dance nude in all her sagging wretchedness.
When the sick bastard finally enters the house occupied by eight young nurses he witnesses one of the girls making lesbian overtures to her friend. This leads him, later, to force the pair into performing sexually for him. I do not consider this a homophobic scene, as stated by a previous viewer, but it is a part of the intensely unpleasant sequence of rape, torture and murder which makes up about half the film.
The women are very passive and this makes the whole thing even nastier to watch. You want them to fight back. But I don't think any of Richard Speck's victims fought either, and their murderer was similarly armed with only a knife.
The violence is not terribly gory and there are no prosthetic blood-spurting wounds. The most graphic bit of gore comes almost at the end as the killer cuts his own wrist in a suicide attempt.