Skip to main content

Retro Horror Double Feature

 


October is about 1 week away, and it’s around this time that I start watching a lot of horror movies (though I usually watch them all year round anyway). I always try to catch old, obscure, lesser known flicks I’ve never heard of or seen, and a bunch of them are available on YouTube, so tonight I watched a double feature. First up was 1979’s The Meateater.








This movie was hilariously bad. It begins with a frustrated shoe salesman who gets an offer on an old movie theatre he wants to buy. His wife is hesitant, but since it’s always been his dream to run his own cinema, she agrees, and so they pack their 2 kids and move to open and operate the theatre.





They get it up and running, but there ends up being a mysterious person who wants to sabotage it, and sets about to terrorize them and ruin their opening night. I’m not sure why the movie is titled The Meateater, other than an early scene that shows someone eating a rat. Then again, the dialogue is filled with a bunch of random, bizarre references to meat, including roast beef, Jimmy Dean sausage, and a few ridiculous lines where the wife makes it a point to list off the nutritional ingredients of hot dogs. It’s due to cheesy touches like this that make the film so much fun, in between the funny murders and shenanigans, which include an electrocution, a rotting corpse, and a crude detective that offends everyone with his no filter talk. I enjoyed The Meateater, a goofy oddity that had me laughing its entire runtime.




As for the 2nd film I watched, Death Screams, it was a tedious bore.






Made in 1982, it’s your basic, run-of-the-mill slasher. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it’s not very memorable. A group of teens are terrorized by a machete wielding psychopath. The story drags along, spending too much time on the characters hanging out at a carnival and generally goofing off. It’s not until they meet up at the lake and then cemetery later at night that the murderous fun begins, though by then you may be bored to death by all the dullness that comes before.





Since none of the characters are very interesting or likeable, you enjoy when they start getting picked off. It’s just too bad that it takes so long to get there. There are a few early killings, but they’re not enough to keep you engaged. Though one scene is so bizarre it’s laughable, where some girl gets shot in the back with an arrow, then stumbles onto a carousel and sits on a horse, before the killer turns it on and suffocates her with a bag over her head. The killings at the end are decent, including a decapitation, throat slashings, someone falling into an open grave and having their hands cut off, and a head being blown to pieces. It’s too bad you have to wait until the last few minutes for most of that.




Death Screams is mostly forgettable, save for the few bits of carnage at the end, not to mention the ridiculous out of place music that blares during the climax. If you’re an 80’s slasher completist you might want to see it, otherwise, feel free to skip it, as you won’t miss much.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Titanic Creations Yongary 1967

This figure was released in late December, and I got it about 2 days before the New Year, so I'm counting it as a 2025 release. It is the Titanic Creations version of the Korean kaiju Yongary, Monster From The Deep. The film was released in 1967 as a Godzilla ripoff, with several ideas copied from the Gamera series, such as his tusks, his ability to fire a stream of flames from his mouth, and even firing a laser beam from his horn, similar to the slicing one used by Gyaos. The film is pretty goofy, but Yongary, like most of those Asian monsters, was pretty cool (to me, at least), so I was psyched that someone finally made a figure of this lesser known kaiju. When Titanic Creations put it up for pre-order, they announced a series of tiers, where they would add accessories when a certain number of orders were met. Enough fans ordered him, so that Yongary ended up with a shit ton of stuff, making him absolutely worth the price. In addition to the kaiju, you get a flame breath effect, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RicSan Custom Toys Kyōrū Kaiju (Titanosaurus)

My latest kaiju figure purchase is the Titanosaurus made by Ricsan Custom Toys. I own and love the Varan & Gabara, so of course I had to preorder this one when it was available. He was delivered earlier this week. This kaiju hails from the last Godzilla film of the Showa era, 1975's Terror of Mechagodzilla. The Black Hole aliens are back, rebuilding their robot in another effort to take over the planet. They enlist the help of an ostracized Earth scientist named Mafune and his daughter Katsura, who are able to control an aquatic dinosaur named Titanosaurus. They plan to use both kaiju and mecha to attack Japan. Titano was a cool monster, with his tail that opened into a fish fin, and he would use it to create whirlpools in the sea, and high winds on land. I'm hoping that S.H. Monsterarts makes one for the 50th anniversary of the film, but when I saw this Ricsan Custom version, I couldn't pass it up. Titanosaurus (called the Kyōrū Kaiju), comes in a white box, with its n...
Post a Comment
Read more

Help Me… I’m Possessed (1974) / #Missingcouple (2024)

I've watched some weird, obscure horror movies throughout my life. I can now add this lurid 1974 schlockfest to that growing list. In a castle in the desert, Dr. Arthur Blackwood runs a sanitarium filled with mentally disturbed patients (as well as staff). He claims to be working on finding a way to cure people of any violent tendencies they have, and brags about his younger sister, innocent, child-like Melanie, as evidence that his treatment works. When she was a child, their parents had to keep her locked up and chained in the basement, to control her violent fits. Now that he's cured her, Arthur has his wife Diane come to the castle to meet Melanie, so that they can be one big, happy family. Diane begins to grow suspicious that something is amiss after a Sheriff shows up investigating the murder of 2 local teens, and sets about on her own investigation, hoping to uncover the sinister secrets that she feels her husband is hiding. Help Me... I'm Possessed is an outrageous,...
Post a Comment
Read more