Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

To be honest, I can’t imagine, besides the director who helmed it (Larraz; Vampyres), that Black Candles (1982) would be of much consequence if it weren’t for the involvement of cult actress Helga Liné as the “hostess” for a couple who happen across her, receiving a place to stay and soon learning of her ties to Satanists. Helga Liné is primarily known for earlier films such as The Blancheville Monster, Nightmare Castle, Horror Express (perhaps her most famous), and Lorelei’s Grasp (my favorite of hers; from Blind Dead series director Ossorio). She’s been in everything…a giallo here, a kremi there, with some haunted house and a loosened curse; there wasn’t a genre Ms. Helga Liné hasn’t starred in. The peblum and spaghetti western both have starred Ms. Helga Liné. Well, erotica is no mystery to her, either. Warning: Nudity My Imdb Review from 2009 Along with her Latin professor beau Robert(Mauro Ribera), Carol(Vanessa Hidalgo) returns to London to visit her dead bro...

Vengeance is mine... Katie is a model hoping to make it in NYC, but she has no idea that an audition that proves unsuccessful when she refuses to pose nude will lead to unimaginable horrors. ** ½

Like a lot of horror fans, I have been mulling over my "watch lists" for the first days of October. I have even set aside two vacation days about the 23rd and 24th specifically for all day horror marathons coming up next month. It is an exciting time for those of us who try to ridiculously cram as many horror movies as we can in each day, only to burn ourselves out by the third week. The fourth week comes around and a lot of us peeter out on our movie-watching. Many this year will take part in the imdb horror challenge, but I felt that I would take a one-year break from that to just watch movies that I want, not adhere to a specific set of rules. I have plenty of "new horror" (that is old horror I've never seen, along with some recent horrors like Sinister & The Woman in Black I have set aside) set aside for the occasion, this year, but I also plan to return to some films that haven't made the cut in the last two (Argento's Phenomenon will return...

I realize some are probably tired of horror fans (including myself) bitching about the heavy usage of CGI in "spook" horror these days, but I was already groaning ten minutes into Mama (2013), and it continued throughout the whole damned thing. I will have to really summon the inspiration to give this film a review of any depth because it just kind of left me with this constant gag-reflex. It was a ghost that couldn't look more cartoonish and unrealistic. Something out of a Harry Potter movie (except less impressive or creepy) but less-defined. And all those fucking butterflies. Eegad.

A radio disc jockey--part of a popular late night team--living in Salem, Massachusetts, never emotionally recovers after listening to the music of a vinyl record by a band simply called The Lords. When she begins a mental deterioration, and a historian begins to research her past, there could be a link to the curse of burned-alive witches. ***

For some inexplicable reason, teens in high school of a particular association (perhaps linked to a preschool where a gardener worked) are being tormented and killed in their dreams by a burn-faced man with razor-knife fingered glove, most of the time in some steaming, flaming boiler room. Will any of them survive? **

On what was supposed to be a fun bachelor party weekend soon descends into a nightmare when the prospective groom and his best buddies find themselves as potential torture toys for a club of sadists. **

Paolo is a writer who falls in love (and vice versa) with an aristocratic vampire, with the two soon having to endure the interference of her returning sister, a wild child with no filter on her vampirism. *** Vampires and Dark Romance are definite bedfellows, and Kiss of the Damned (2012) doesn’t invent the wheel. Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia) is a screenwriter who eyes the forlorn Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) in a club. Both are lonely. Djuna lives in a mansion and feeds off animals instead of humans while Paolo is in need of companionship. They both could complement each other in the department of love and sexual fulfillment. The vampire genre has pretty much at this point used up all its resources. I’m not sure what else we can expect at this time except doing the same rounds that have been tread since the likes of Murnau’s Nosferatu and Browning’s Dracula . Milo cracks a smile once he’s with Joséphine but the guy needs a personality because I couldn’t care less abo...