Movieline Online

Alfred Hitchcock never officially groomed a successor. But there were plenty of applicants eager to take over the title of “Master of Suspense” by the time his last film, Family Plot , ran through projectors in 1976. That same year, Brian De Palma’s Carrie used Hitchcock’s technique as a springboard to launch a stylistic assault of operatic pretensions. This amplified experience became De Palma’s cinematic signature, creating a Hitchcock highlight reel that only used the most grandiose and elaborate camera set-ups. Meanwhile, Australian director Richard Franklin launched his own bid to take over the master’s title with Patrick (1978), a film that steals just as much from Hitchcock’s bag of tricks, but on a more fundamental level. If Carrie co-opted the showy ingenuity of Vertigo , Patrick embodies the more down-and-dirty aesthetic of Psycho , filtering its thrills through cleverly defined characters and audience manipulation. Comatose for the last three years, Patrick (Robert ...

Borne of some bizarre ménage a trois between Halloween, Happy Days and Singin’ in the Rain , the New Zealand import Dead Kids (1981) is a genuine oddity no matter which genre you choose to file it under. Released in the U.S. under the title Strange Behavior and set in the American Midwest, teenagers in this small college town are being programmed to kill after signing up for experiments with the local mad scientist. These remote-controlled murders pique the interest of the local sheriff (Michael Murphy) whose family history is tangled up in this far-fetched medical conspiracy. At first glance, Dead Kids comes off as just another slasher clone. And an unusually clumsy one at that. But when teens at a party break into a choreographed dance number to Lou Christie’s 1966 hit “Lightnin’ Strikes,” suddenly all expectations go out the window. Co-written by Academy Award Winner Bill Condon (whose resume with Chicago and Dreamgirls confirms his musical aspirations), that scene is p...

Part of a trio of Ozploitation titles out this month (with Dead Kids and Patrick still to come), Thirst (1979) is one of the more unusual vampire films you’re ever likely to run across…and unusually well-made, to boot. Using a Rosemary’s Baby meets The Howling concept, director Rod Hardy manages to mess with your mind and the conventions of the horror genre all at the same time. We don’t know much about Kate (Chantal Contouri) before she’s kidnapped and brought to a commune-type facility. Her abductors are a mysterious, well-organized group who maintain a “farm” of human victims, using an on-campus medical facility to draw and store their blood while keeping everyone in a semi-stoned state of consciousness. Are they truly “vampires” or merely affluent weirdoes convinced that consuming human blood will give them power and influence? And why is Kate so important? Thirst doesn’t get around to answering every question, but that’s what makes it such a riveting experience. It’s ...

It’s tempting with a film as obscure as Meet Him and Die (1976) to write-up an entire history of Italian “polizieschi” (cop/gangster films) so one can understand how it fits into the bigger picture of Italian cinema’s propensity to run a good thing into the ground, creating one copy after another until the box-office returns finally dry up. But if you’re interested, the extras on Raro Video’s new blu-ray do a pretty good job of that for you. Suffice to say that director Franco Prosperi’s film sits right in the middle ground of a genre that had a few highs and a lot more lows, stealing most of its cues from American titles like The Godfather and Dirty Harry. It stars pretty boy Ray Lovelock as undercover cop Massimo Toriani, sent to prison to stage an escape for infamous crime lord Giulianelli (Martin Balsam, Psycho ) and get cozy with his underworld contacts. Massimo, however, has a more personal angle: getting revenge against the two bodyguards who shot and paralyzed his poor ...

Director Victor Salva will likely never read a review of one of his films that doesn’t mention his previous child molestation conviction, and question the fact that he is allowed to make movies at all. It’s not a fun story to re-tell (go Google the details if you must), but suffice to say even though he did his time behind bars, Hollywood seemed much more forgiving. Powder (1995) was a high profile success but brought attention to his crimes once again – on a Disney produced film, no less. Jeepers Creepers (2001) and its sequel in 2003 created one of the most interesting franchise monsters in a long time. And Salva seemed to have some momentum, only to step back into the shadows (too melodramatic?). But here he is again with Dark House , a direct-to-video, on-demand release about a troubled twenty-something whose search for his past leads to a broken-down estate in the middle of the woods. The only resident is a shaggy squatter (Tobin Bell of the Saw franchise) who warns him t...

Writer/director Larry Fessenden, the “buzzy” director behind indie horrors like Habit (1997) and Wendigo (2001) tries his hand at more traditional scares with Beneath (2013), a Chiller Network production about a giant fish stalking a boatful of annoying teenagers celebrating their last big high-school hurrah. This conventional set-up turns into an exercise in unconventional storytelling as Fessenden lets the teens kill themselves off. The monster simply cleans the tank. Make no mistake, Beneath isn’t that clever. But it definitely thinks it is. Deep down it’s just another dead teenager movie. Yet these teens turn on each other as the situation becomes more desperate, a switcheroo that challenges the actors and the viewers who probably just tuned in to watch Jaws in a rowboat. The movie itself isn’t always equal to the challenge, but it makes for more interesting viewing that most Mega Boa vs. Gatoroid fare. For genre fans, Fessenden’s choice to bring his monster fish to...

Not to get all “bloggy” on you, but Here Comes the Devil is a film that’s disappointing on a personal level. Everything from the poster to the synopsis to the critical praises on the front cover suggest it’s creepy little imported thriller about two kids who get on lost on a cursed mountain and return to their parents the next day somehow “changed.” You don’t have to be a whiz at Words with Friends to put this puzzle together and spell S-A-T-A-N. But from the opening prologue – a blurred lesbian sex scene whose inclusion is hard to justify – director Adrian Garcia Bogliano takes the wrong creative turn at almost every fork in the road, eventually driving us back to the very same cave where it all began. It’s a long, strange trip, all right…but the scenery is terrible and the radio is stuck on a death metal station. There’s a sexual subtext that is likely to blame for all the supernatural hokum going on. But it’s not handled well enough to come across as more than crude titillati...