Week 3 of my 31 Days of Horror Challenge for 2024 and I’ve managed to keep up so far.
This week:
- Ghost House
- Face of Evil
- Hemoglobin
- Despiser
- Psycho III
- Mr. Crocket
- Psycho IV
Day 12 – Ghost House
This one was a lot of fun. A ham radio enthusiast hears a mysterious transmission which he tracks down to a house, but it seems like the transmission might have been the sound of a murder that hasn’t taken place yet. It’s all very silly and non-sensical but a lot of fun. It was package as a 3rd Evil Dead movie in Italy. Oh and I do like how the ghost girl and her creepy doll look like the old television test card image.
Day 13 – Face of Evil
Sort of a Lifetime adjacent move with this CBS made for TV thriller. It plays out sort of like female version of The Talented Mr. Ripley with the lead character killing and taking the place of a collge student. This was a pretty good thriller even if it did have lots of the silly fun I want from a Lifetime movie as well.
Day 14 – Hemoglobin (AKA Bleeders)
This almost works but it’s all a bit too saggy and dull with very little happening. But it’s always neat to find a HP Lovecraft adaptation and I’d never heard of this one until now.
Day 15 – Despiser
Oh wow. This one was crazy. Absolutely woeful CGI throughout and usually for absolutely no reason. Whenever someone gets into a car everything turns into the old arcade game Hard Drivin’. It’s all incredibly funny. Just wish the overall film wasn’t quite so long and dull. Plot is crazy, an alien crashes on earth and dies and ends up trapped in purgotory as there is nowhere in heaven or hell for it to go. It takes over purgorty and plots to get out. The hero of the movie can move from real life into purgotory and back and is able to team up with a bunch of freedom fighters from different time periods.
Day 16 – Psycho III
Still working my way through the Psycho series after the surpirsing interesting Psycho II. But the third installment is very much more what you’d expect to be a standard sequel and doesn’t doing anything interesting or unexpected like the second movie. It’s still very well made though with Perkins great as usual and he’s joined by Jeff Fahey turing in a preatty creepy performance.
Day 17 – Mr. Crocket
I’ve been trying to watch at least one new release each week and this week was a real bummer. This was really bad. “What if Barney the Dinosaur was a serial killer?” is the kind of concept a 15 year old in 1995 might think was edgey. This looks okay for it’s budget and the actors are all doing a pretty good job but the script is absolutely attrocious, like I was getting very strong we had AI help out on the script vibes from this one.
Day 18 – Psycho IV: The Begining
The final Psycho movie. Very odd choice to have the framing device for this be a phone in radio show with the excellent CCH Pounder hosting a special on mother killers where Norman Bates rings in to the story of his upbringing and eventual murder of his mother. So most of the movie is flashbacks to young Norman and it’s not bad, but it’s not really bringing anything terribly interesting to table to justify this semi-prequel. The final act of the movie is absolutely terrible though and it dumps the flashbacks and the relevancy of the framing device for a badly put together cat and mouse sequence where Norman stalks his wife around the old Psycho house.