The Bigger and Badder Halloween Top 13: #8: Village of the Giants (1965)

So far on the B&B H13, we've had a huge snake, a dinosaur on the loose, a gaggle of deadly enlarged rabbits, and a colossal croc, but today I have one of the scariest things to ever reach enormous proportions, teenagers. Thankfully, today’s movie was made in the 1960s because they don't make an iPhone big enough to quell a tremendous teen of this day and age. Back then, all anyone wanted to do was make the scene and go-go dance with some oversized ducks, but not everyone could make that kind of happening get to happening. I'm getting ahead of myself though. Today is the first time (and possibly not the last) that I'll be talking about Bert I. Gordon, the master of the B grade giant creature feature having directed 10 such films in his forty five year career behind the camera. (Editor's Note: I know this doesn't make sense because Food of the Gods was yesterday, but, to make in clear, in layman's terms, I fucked up and reversed the order on these two films.) Of course, if your initials spelled out B.I.G (and you were not Notorious), you might have a certain affection for the overly large in life as well. The flick I'll be talking about today came out in 1965, right at the height of the “Beach Party” movie craze, and grafting elements of this style onto an extremely fast and loose adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel, Gordon created a film with great comedic moments, some near scandalous special effects, and maybe even a thing or two to say. I hope you’ll join me now as I take a trip to the nice, quiet town of Hainesville which is just about to become The Village of the Giants! 

The American Scream (1988) Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Slasherness

One of the only things that are more authentically American than Mom’s apple pie is the horror comedy. I now you don’t hear them mentioned in the same sentence as often as one should, but it’s true never the less. All the way back in 1820, American author Washington Irving founded the subgenre with the slapstick tale of Ichabod Crane “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” which featured as many laughs as screams. Flash forward to the 1920s, and while horror films were some of the first made, horror-comedies were not far behind with 1922’s Ghost Breakers and 1926’s The Cat and the Canary leading the pack. In the 1940s and 50s, Abbot and Costello brought about a new realm of horror comedies with the 1941 film Hold that Ghost, and thus began a franchise which would see the comedy duo meet everyone from Frankenstein and Dracula to The Invisible Man and Boris “The Killer” Karloff. The sixties saw such titles as Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors and Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers. However the real heyday of horror comedy was the 70s and 80s which saw diverse films such as Theater of Blood, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Love at First Bite, Motel Hell, Evil Dead, Gremlins, The Stuff, Vamp, and many, many more combine laughter and nightmares. So when I ran across a VHS copy of a horror comedy called The American Scream, from 1988 right in the thick of the sub-genre’s boom, I knew this could go one of two ways, I could be standing up to salute when the credits rolled or wondering if Homeland Security had a toll free number.

Little Darlings (1980): A Camp with Virgins & No Slasher?

When I was a young girl going to camp, oh wait, I’m not a young girl and I have already established I didn’t go to camp. Let me try this again. When I was a thirty something guy sitting on his couch preparing to watch a movie about young girls at camp, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The film’s two young stars were both names I recognized, but I wasn’t sure if I was in for the female version of Meatballs or something more akin to an Afterschool Special. Surprisingly it was neither, and a bit of both. The film in question is Little Darlings, a movie I had heard about, but it was long out of print and never released on DVD. I finally recorded the flick when it played on TCM a few weeks back, and heads up, it’s playing again next Saturday (6/23/12, 2:15 AM) if this review inspires you to want to check it out. I could easily now write something titillating about the film’s man conceit, a race between two girls to lose their virginity, but Little Darlings isn’t crass. It tries to paint a picture of the secret life of teen and pre-teen girls, and, at least in this old guy’s opinion, it works.

Friday the 13th Part 3: A New Dimension in Mediocrity

Camp, I’ll be the first to tell you that I never went. My one aborted effort ended up with me coming home in the middle of the night rather than staying one moment more. While some may say that I missed out, and that I would never know the joys of making a wallet or swimming in a muck filled lake, I think I’m good with that. Over the years here at the Lair, I’ve talked about a lot of campers, but I’m still making my way through the most famous group of all, alumni of Camp Crystal Lake. So today I’m turning an eye to the Voorhees clan’s hat trick, and first appearance of the hockey mask,  Friday the 13th Part 3. Presented in 3-D, or 2-D with some rather silly scenes intended for the third dimension, which is how I watched it, this third entry (like the fourth after it) was intended to bring to franchise to a close. Yet, how can it, when every year there’s a waiting list for parents looking to send their snot nosed kid off to Voorhees country for a summer of terror. As long as they keep making teens and sending them into the woods, Jason is going to be there to hack them up.

Deadly Doll's Choice Baltimore Edition: Step Up 2: The Streets (2008)

In only a few short days, I, along with several other bloggers, podcasters, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells, will descend upon Baltimore for a weekend of conversation, BBQ, and assorted silliness at the home of a generous (though possibly foolish) friend. One of those attending the weekend is none other than Emily of The Deadly Doll's House of Horror Nonsense. So for this month's movie swap, we decided to swap movies set in our destination, Baltimore, Maryland. The easy way would have been to trade a couple of movies from Baltimore's sleaziest son, John Waters, but who wants to do it the easy way. Instead, we swapped a couple of lesser known Charm City based titles. For my pick, I selected the dramady Tin Men, starring Richard Dreyfus and Danny DeVito as rival aluminum siding salesmen in 60's Baltimore. So head over to The Deadly Doll's to check that out.For Emily's selection, she picked a movie I never thought there would be any set of circumstances in which I would need to view it. She chose for me Step Up Number Two Colon The Streets. I know the filmmaker chose a briefer name than I have given it, but I think my version may well be more accurate.

Hide and Go Shriek (1988) Ready Or Not, Here I Kill!

When it comes to ‘80’s slashers, there’s nothing I like better than the non-franchised one offs that spewed forth in hopes of getting some of that Freddy and Jason money. In the past week I’ve talked about three very different ‘Me Decade’ slashers in Trick or Treat, The Horror Show, and Maniac. Today I’m turning my attention to another one of these one shot wonders, and this one has to have one of the best names in movie history, Hide and Go Shriek. While the movie poster might bring to mind a scene from Liam Neeson’s Taken, the film itself is pure eighties nostalgia. From the girls puffy hairdo to the nerdy kid outfitted in an Opus t-shirt and jams, this flick took me right back to those years of bad fashion choices. It also took me back to those last few years of the eighties when horror films could just be fun.

After graduating high school, a group of eight teens decide to have an all night blow out in John’s father’s closed furniture store. They plan to be up all night drinking, eating chicken, and having plenty of sex, but when they discover that they’re not alone in the store, panic sets in on the group. They soon find themselves menaced by an unseen killer, but is it the creepy ex-con who lives in the basement, one of their group, or someone completely unrelated whose story will have to be filled in at the last moment? (Spoiler alert, it’s the final choice there.) If they can hide through the night, they can look forward to all the opportunities of a post-high school world, but with a crazy killer seeking them out, they may never make it.

Though Hide and Go Shriek will never be counted among the classic slashers of the ‘80’s it does deserve to be remembered. Especially for such a late entry into the genre, the film feels very influenced by giallo style with the set design and plot both featuring a nod to the Italian thrillers. Numerous scenes are awash with shadows lit by green and red gelled lights bringing to mind Mario Bava’s stunning work in Blood and Black Lace, and the film’s ultimate reveal smacks of the same sort of perverse sexuality so popular in gialli. Hide and Go Shriek also does a really fine job of misdirection, and my suspicions went from one place to another until the final, albeit nonsensical, reveal. I suppose that is not really fair. The ending does makes sense, but it comes out of nowhere. Even so, it leaves the film with a satisfying conclusion that pays off the whole picture. Unfortunately, it happens so very late in the film that I can’t discuss the details or the character who ultimately is the killer. That in and of itself is a real shame, and if anyone has seen this film, then they know why.

Hide and Go Shriek was the first and only film directing from former Halloween II and Megaforce editor Skip Schoolnik. (He would go on to direct episodes of K-Ville and Angel) It’s a real shame that he didn’t get a chance to direct more cinema. While the film suffers in part from having a pitch dark locale as the setting, Schoolnik and Evil Dead 2 cinematographer Eugene D. Shlugleit did a really good job exploiting the shadows and rarely losing any of the action to them. I would love to see this title get a home on DVD where a brighter, more defined print could really clear up the film’s small technical foibles. Where it did really suffer was the acting department, while most of the kids are serviceable none really impress. They were just your typical group of ’80’s movie teens, the jock, the slut, the nerd, the class clown, and so forth. Only future Karate Kid 3 and Bold and the Beautiful star Sean Kanan and Ria Pavia (Candyman, Dream a Little Dream) had any kind of career to speak of after this film.

Hide and Go Shriek is a great slasher to check out f you have a chance. I’ve been looking around and I can’t even find a low end DVD anywhere. While it won’t make you forget films like The Burning or The Prowler, it will satisfy any slasher fans who love good old cheesy VHS goodies. If you can’t get enough of me talking about out of print horror from the VHS era, make sure you check out The Gentlemen’s Blog to Midnite Cinema and the 412ft Review. Every week I’ll be featuring obscure films that didn’t survive to the digital era, and for the next month, just like here at the Lair, it’s going to be all horror all the time. So check that out, and come on back here tomorrow as we roll one day closer to the Halloween Top 13 (Don’t forget to get those entries in!)

Bugg Rating

I couldn't find a trailer out there for the flick, but I did find this compilation of the all the deaths from the film. Obviously it's pretty spoiler-iffic, but if you don't care about that kind of thing or just want to see some movie deaths, here it is....