A Car Wash of Death If you ever thought “Hmm, what if the scariest place on Earth wasn’t a haunted house but a car wash,” then congratulations — you’re José Ramón Larraz. The film opens with a nurse getting axed to death while her car goes through the sudsy rinse cycle. It’s meant to be … Read More “Edge of the Axe (1988): When Slashers Pick Up a Mouse and Keyboard” »
A Killer Workout Nobody Asked For If you ever wondered what would happen if Flashdance and Poltergeist had a love child during a cocaine binge, the answer is Death Spa. This film is living proof that the 1980s were a dangerous time — not because of nuclear war or Reaganomics, but because health clubs apparently … Read More “Death Spa (1988): Where Aerobics Meets the Occult and Everyone Loses” »
Chucky: The Doll That Ruined Birthdays Forever On paper, Child’s Play sounds like a solid horror premise: what if a doll was possessed by the soul of a serial killer and went on a rampage? Spooky, right? In execution, it’s more like a PSA warning parents not to buy cheap knockoff toys from peddlers in … Read More “Child’s Play (1988): When Your Kid’s Best Friend is a Psychotic Plastic Ginger” »
The Setup: A Closet Full of Nonsense Ah, Cameron’s Closet. A movie that dares to ask the bold, cinematic question: “What if Poltergeist, Carrie, and a Saturday morning cartoon about Mayan demons had an awkward, underfunded baby?” Spoiler: the baby was ugly. Directed by Armand Mastroianni—whose name you’ll immediately forget after this review—it’s a supernatural … Read More “Cameron’s Closet (1988): Where Demons, Decapitations, and Decaf Dreams Collide” »
Intro: The Title Is the Best Part Let’s be honest—when you see a movie called Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls, you expect something wild: a sweaty grindhouse fever dream where biker dominatrixes rampage through suburbia, leaving trails of gore and neon lipstick. Instead, you get a micro-budget, half-satirical, half-incoherent student film that looks like … Read More “Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (1988): Exploitation Without the Payoff” »
Intro: Deliverance With Knitting Needles If you’ve ever stared at Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic and thought, “What if these pitchfork-wielding weirdos were cannibal hillbillies in Washington State?” then congratulations, you share a brain cell with director John Hough. American Gothic is what happens when a backwoods slasher tries to dress itself up in … Read More “American Gothic (1988): Where Vacation Plans Go to Die” »
Intro: Freddy Phones It In In 1988, the world collectively asked: What would happen if Freddy Krueger directed a movie? The answer, sadly, is 976-EVIL, a supernatural horror flick so slow, clunky, and unintentionally funny that it makes dial-up internet look like high-speed broadband. This was Robert Englund’s first shot at directing. Instead of creating … Read More “976-EVIL (1988): A Premium-Rate Call You’ll Wish You Never Made” »
Opening Pitch: The Only Horror Is the Acting Let’s be honest: Zombie Nightmare is less a movie and more a cautionary tale about what happens when you give a bodybuilder, a few Canadian suburbs, and a dusty Motörhead cassette $180,000 and tell them to “make cinema.” The film desperately wants to be a horror-revenge classic. … Read More “Zombie Nightmare (1987): When Baseball Meets Voodoo and Loses Badly” »
The Setup: When Politics Meets Pornhub Search History In the late 1980s, Japan’s bubble economy was booming, anime was mutating into every genre under the sun, and Yoshiaki Kawajiri decided that the best way to explore diplomacy between humans and demons was through a neo-noir horror sex thriller with more slime than a Nickelodeon studio. … Read More “Wicked City (1987): Tentacles, Treaties, and the World’s Worst Blind Date” »
A Killer Setup—Literally On paper, White of the Eye looks like your standard serial killer thriller. Swap in an Arizona desert backdrop, a hi-fi audio obsession, and Donald Cammell’s fever-dream direction, though, and you get something closer to Twin Peaks if David Lynch had taken a detour through a RadioShack clearance aisle. The story revolves … Read More “White of the Eye (1987): Hi-Fi Sound, Low-Fi Morality” »