Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

  In Praise of Pip is the episode I'm very glad I kicked off my Memorial Day marathon with. The love of a father for his son comes across really well thanks to Klugman's ache. The amusement park content really worked for me. Despite all his character flaws, Klugman makes his bookie likable still. That man regrets a lot and tries to make right by episode's end. I really hadn't planned to watch Ninety Years Without Slumbering , but I guess I needed my Ed Wynn fix today. Later during my first half of marathon episodes, I went ahead and watched One for the Angels from the first season. Both dealing with Death, one Wynn unable to escape the inevitable demise and the other him getting some time to be a great grandfather, Ed's age seemed like meat on the bone TZ writers took advantage of. The big question that persists with Ring-a-Ding Girl is how is Bunny Blake on the plane to New York that eventually crashes and in her hometown of Howardville trying to keep her loved ...

Rod Serling introduces From Agnes With Love  I was looking over the fifth season of Twilight Zone, deciding on which episodes to watch for my Memorial Day marathon this year, using Netflix for the final time to watch the show. I knew going in, though, there would be exceptions I wouldn't bother with this year. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" was watched just recently for the millionth time during SYFY's own TZ Day marathon. The same for "Living Doll" and "The Masks". I have just recently revisited a few episodes such as "Spur of the Moment", "Night Call", "Black Leather Jackets", "The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms", and "Probe 7, Over and Out". I do remember a January marathon featuring plenty of 5th season episodes in the afternoon before SYFY unloaded the "greatest hits", and that feeling of appreciation for some of the less discussed episodes, gaining renewed interest when discussed by many on ...

So as I've documented on the blog over the last week or so, my daughter and I have been watching the Child's Play films. We were all over the map, not in any order, sort of going by whichever films she wanted to watch at any given time.  Child's Play 2 Child's Play Child's Play 3 Curse of Chucky Bride of Chucky Cult of Chucky Seed of Chucky Child's Play 2 (1990) : the doll warehouse ending, an entire film featuring Dourif-voiced Chucky terrorizing a family and those in contact with Andy, that famous poster, the best side character in Kyle as Andy's big help, the vibrant direction, and memorable quips. This is classic Chuck at his most entertaining without too much meta comedy. The finale is my choice for the best sequence in the entire franchise. 4/5 Child's Play (1988) : this was the biggest surprise of the series during the revisit. I was impressed with the use of the rugged urban Chicago locations, really effective Chucky work in the final chapter, a...

  While Charlie sleeps, Regine prepares for a taste Mimicking Jerry and Amy's dance in their club in Fright Night Peter Vincent looks on in amazement at Regine I love the vampire designs in the film. Regine responds to Charlie's blood My daughter and I watched Fright Night (1985) just a few weeks ago, and I had started on Fright Night Part II (1988) one Saturday night not long after. She interrupted my viewing taking me to task for not asking if she could watch it as well. This is where I'm at in my horror viewing now as my teenage daughter inquires on almost every horror film I watch. She wants those same experiences I had as a teenager, but I, as a dad, am a bit reticent to just let her watch anything. Not too long ago, I had Clive Barker's Nightbreed (1990) on in the background. Shudder had the film on its It Came from Shudder channel -- the Director's Cut, which I had never seen in its entirety but always planned to -- and she was curious. This is one of th...

  This was one of several 80s films part of a Saturday afternoon/evening lineup.  There are genuine moments where I actually giggled at certain jokes in the film, but even I can admit that for the most part, Saturday the 14th (1981) is just plain silly. For whatever reason, I just enjoy watching this film. It goes down easy, I embrace the product placements so splashed in the kitchen you have no choice but to notice them. Richard Benjamin as the straight-faced and oblivious father never cracks to all the zany theatrics of what is happening around the house he inherited or to his family. I mean most might react in shock and awe to not being able to leave out the front door or that their son happened to open and read a Book of Evil that brought about a lot of their current problems with monsters. That Van Helsing is actually the bad guy and vampire Waldemar ends up the good guy was a rather amusing reversal to me...I just liked the decision to change up the formula. When you see...

This was one of several 80s films part of a Saturday afternoon/evening lineup.  Michael Moriarty goes off into a Karaoke Dance to a song, but while his daughter is kidnapped, put into a Sleeping Beauty like coma, encased in a type of forcefield bed, left in a wilderness dimension, and imitated by a Troll named Torok (the great Phil Fondacaro, who has a wonderful role as a professor dying of degenerating cells and decaying marrow), he's quite bewildered with how bonkers she acts (one of those veggie burgers he picks up from a restaurant in the city seems to cause Torok quite a hyperactive reaction, to say the least) but hardly breaks a sweat to determine why. Shelley Hack, as the wife of Moriarty, seems quite confused by how sudden and overt her daughter's behavior is, too. I'm astonished that these caliber of actors wound up in Troll (1986), a fantasy produced by Charles Band and directed by monster-makeup extraordinaire, John Carl Buechler (R.I.P. to an icon of horror) th...

 This is part of the Warner Archive, but it being available on HBO Max and shown on HBO Zone was still surprising to me. Seeing it available, I mean. Leatherface (1990), the third film in a oft-struggling franchise that seems destined to look for that lightning seemingly firmly entrenched in the bottle, that Tobe Hooper masterpiece from the early 70s that has influenced so many. This third film just remains too generic and unexciting to me, despite the casting of Ken Foree as a journeying former military guy in a jeep encountering Hodge and Butler as they are being pursued by the newer Sawyer clan. Leatherface, in the form of R.A. Mihailoff, was always okay, I guess. He has the look down, with a leg brace for that last injury thanks to the chainsaw, the decaying, raggedy teeth, and skin mask. The Saw is Family chainsaw seems to be one of the film's lasting highlights, though everyone brings up Viggo, of course, as Tex, the charmer of the Saw clan who gains the trust of women (Hodg...

  This is where the series really went off the deep end with me personally. Look, I get it that Bride of Chucky (1998) is very popular with a lot of Chucky and even Child's Play series fans. I do. But Chucky, the doll, giving the tongue to another doll possessing the spirit of Jennifer Tilly before the two "consummate their new lease on life" was just a bit too silly to me. Yes, saying that after describing a series about a serial killer who used voodoo to implant his soul into a Good Guy doll at a department store...I get it, the series was already more than a bit far-fetched to begin with. I told my daughter as we were watching Bride of Chucky , I guess after watching Holland's really good first film in the series just last Saturday, this 1998 "reboot" (or refresh of the series), going for dark comedy and meta humor (this wasn't long after "Scream" and during the era of its contemporaries) didn't exactly go over the same as it did in the ...

 That final scene where a little girl sings a tune to the departing of her heroic father as the military guard wait to see if the pregnant adult survivor accompanying her is a viral zombie had me tearing up for sure. Being a father, having to pull away from your daughter as she pleads with you to not leave her...ugh, that hurts so much. The businessman who does whatever he can to survive, throwing teenage girls and guys at zombies just to break a door window and escape, turning on a conductor who actually left safety of the train to help him, and biting on the hand of the film's lead out of spite: who is so deserved of our hatred than this tool? The businessman is a marvelous plot device: he moves that emotional needle when the contorting zombies aren't charging at anyone not yet bitten and turned on board of a train or in a train station. The incredible set pieces -- the horde of zombies trying to grab on to a lone train car, slowing it down as sparks come off the wheels, with...

 I was going to leave behind the description below as a small edit and drop a past write-up for this post after watching Tetsuo on Joe Bob's Drive-In, but I rather liked it too much for the IMDb user comments section. Hitting a metal fetishist with your car and trying to get rid of him after doesn't help an office guy or the lover with him...once they dump his body, office guy starts to notice metal and machinery coming out of his body, turning him into scrap iron with a spinning drill for a penis. I think that lays it out as plain as I'll ever be able to in any coherent way. This is about experience. It's about the wallop of the film's content and presentation. My wife asked me what on earth I was watching. Trying to explain it to her as she caught a brief snippet of Tsukamoto's Tetsuo as Taguchi was "being chased" by a subway phantasm scratching a scrap heap arm was futile. A squirting little tube sticking out of Taguchi's face splattering liqu...

  Yes, the wifey might have taken you to the cleaners and fucked the pool guy, but you would have been better off without the murder charges and mental hospital, right? Brian Yuzna's The Dentist (1996) and its sequel were set to leave Shudder so I was like, "What the hell..." I have been trying to determine if the 90s was such a bad decade for horror. The Dentist was made by Yuzna starring Corbin Bernsen, an actor I'm surprised would take on such a rather grotesque role considering his career sort of remained respectable. That he would come back to the role for a sequel with Yuzna is even more surprising. I guess he had fun in the role of psychopathic dentist, Alan Feinstone, performing horrifying teeth pulling, mouth and tongue destruction, bloody drilling, etc.  This film is every person's worst nightmare delivered on screen if you suffer dentophobia, and Yuzna goes all in, making sure it is realized in grisly detail. Earl Boen's sleazy IRS agent, Marvin Go...

 Since I've been watching films on the 1932 year list, I realize how rich the list is of Pre-Code content. Whale pushed that, for sure, with his film, The Old Dark House , where you have and elderly sister and brother in an isolated castle located in some unknown hilly, muddy, landslide-heavy countryside arguing about atheism and death, a locked room containing a deranged arsonist who cackles and appears momentarily harmless until that switch flips, and a scar-faced, mute butler with a serious alcohol problem who becomes quite dangerous after downing enough liquor. So you have obvious city affluent types lost in a rainstorm, having no choice but to disembark at this castle after landslides trap them. And two others also halted by the storm and muddy slides eventually join them. Not to mention another family member is actually a male actor in disguise as a female character, speaking about the locked room brother who must not be freed or else. There is a family dinner with a lot of a...

 The inevitable has a date. One more month on Netflix and Twilight Zone will leave the popular streaming platform for good. It's disappointing for many of us who loved the fact TZ was available for such a large user base to have access to the show. I liked that I could go to Netflix if I was lazy about popping out a DVD from the series set or wanted to just throw up an episode on my tablet or PC at a moment's notice. To bid adieu to the site and since my Memorial Day is free after a refreshing vacation to Florida, I'll have myself a fifth season marathon in memoriam of the closing window TZ has left on Netflix.

 No matter how many times I watch Maniac Cop (1987), Tom Atkins' death remains just a bummer that sinks me. I have to recover from it as if a punch in the stomach took the wind out of my sails. This was a case where Campbell, a straight, no-frills performance and character, isn't actually the choice many would prefer to make it by film's end as Atkins, a no-nonsense, grizzled cop who investigates Sheree North after Laureen Landon, an undercover-as-hooker street cop, tips him off to her; this coming after Z'Dar nearly chokes Landon to death. Atkins gets too close to the humongous, undead psycho and is tossed out a second story window into a car below. I remember a member of our IMDb message board community telling me the theater folks attending when he was gasped when Atkins was killed. On In Search of Darkness II , Atkins brought up how weird it was that he was killed off so early in the film. That Lustig went for a big shock to the audience, while he was built as a bi...

The film that brought us the red-headed Good Guy doll possessed by the sadistic, psychopathic serial killer, Charles Lee Ray, played by Brad Dourif. Still going as of 2021, with a series titled Chucky for SYFY, involving Don Mancini, the creative driving force since 1988. Don Mancini's presence in In Search of Darkness II actually inspired me to revisit the Chucky series, with my daughter badly wanting to watch them with me. This is the only uncut version of the film, though, we watched. I have never had a special edition of the films, so it was just the ole DVD release I picked up from Best Buy during an October sale.  This revisit was a good one. Except that one scene where Chucky visits a voodoo practitioner who taught him the use of "soul/body swap", breaking the poor guy's limbs by twisting on a voodoo doll, then stabbing the doll in the heart, killing that guy. The guy who told Chucky that he perverted the religion taught to him, corrupting the magic, doesn'...

  It was cool to get the chance to revisit the film after decades of not knowing where to find it. I did read it got a DVD release through Lionsgate, but I've never seen it available. It's a weird little film in the minuscule "dollhouse horror" subgenre. This isn't an Amityville film, so its reputation might immediately suffer because of the idea to distribute this as a film tied to the Long Island house of notoriety. But that was the way for many producers and distributors to market films, sort of like how so many of those direct-to-video horror films were shoehorned into the Hellraiser franchise despite not featuring much material even related to the Cenobites or anything Clive Barker. Thanks to Tubi TV, which seems to resemble the old rental stores of my youth, I was able to finally watch Amityville Dollhouse (1996) after quite an absence. It is one of the horror films featuring Starr Andreeff (the wife of contractor, Robin Thomas, primarily known for his many ...

 Yep. I'm about to take that path many fear to tread: watching Full Moon Features.. How many will I consume after embarking on this journey. Anyone's guess. Probably until my brain snaps, where I'll be more or less an automaton similar to those poor humans Myron might have experimented on as he looked to gain access to a new body in Head of the Family (1996).

 Nearly concluding my SYFY (TV-14) Chucky series with my daughter, these two were her choices for Friday evening. I sort of remain the same on Child's Play 3 (1991), a film set primarily at a teenage military cadet academy, with director Jack Bender and writer Don Mancini aging Andy seven years, casting a new actor in Justin Whalin as the young man Chucky once again pursues despite having his melted wax head exploded in the previous film. Don Mancini was in a dilemma because Andy and Kyle really did a number on Chuck, so bringing him right back to life without even a year of the second film being out was certainly a chore I can imagine. Blood from the gooey remains of Chuck leak into a vat of wax when a hook pierces them. Voila, another doll with Charles Lee Ray's soul takes care of the toy CEO up in his high rise by choking him with yo-yo string. Chuck killing folks with toys never gets old to me. Don really had to come up with a doozy to get Chucky all the way to that militar...