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Julie Darling (1983) / Them aka Hellmaster (1992)



From the YouTube channel 42nd Street Films Grindhouse, I watched this twisted thriller about a young girl with an unnatural and creepy fixation with her father, and her attempts to get rid of anyone who threatens to take away his attention.








Julie has a strained relationship with her mother, causing fights and arguments with her. She seems to be disturbingly attached to her father Harold (Anthony Franciosa), who also seems to have a strained relationship with his wife, but appears clueless about his daughter’s creepy fixation with him. One day while he’s away, the mother is attacked and killed by a delivery guy. Julie, armed with a gun, watches the entire thing from upstairs, doing nothing to come to her aid. With the mother now dead and out of the picture, Julie is happy to have her father all to herself. Her newfound joy is shattered when Harold, who’s been having an affair with a woman named Susan, decides to marry this woman, inviting her and her young son to live with he and Julie. Filled with rage and jealousy, little Julie devises a plan to get rid of her new step mother Susan.









The acting is pretty decent, and Julie, played by Isabelle Mejias, comes off as a sociopath, with her sometimes dead stare, and evil smile when she’s scheming. The plot takes some interesting turns, with Julie putting her murderous plans in motion. The film is filled with dramatic music, giving the entire affair that retro, cheesy feel that you would expect from old made for TV movies of the early 80’s, though this one is clearly not, with scenes of nudity, bloody violence, and a sick sequence in which Julie peeks in on her father making love to his new wife, and fantasizes about him getting it on with her (wtf?!?). The ending is funny, as the plot takes a slightly predictable but still fun twist.









From that same YouTube channel, I next watched this early 90’s nonsense called Them (but also known by the title of Hellmaster).




The plot, if you can figure it out, is some nonsense about evil experiments on a college campus that turned some of the students into mutant killers in the past. Now in the present, the evil Professor Jones (genre actor John Saxon) and his mutants have reappeared and are terrorizing the school and its occupants. Several of the students band together to keep themselves safe, while a reporter goes around with a crossbow armed with some type of drug needles to try and stop Jones and his mutants.















Holy crap, was this movie God-awful! The script doesn’t bother to even superficially explain the premise or flesh out the characters, so you won’t know what the fuck is going on most of the time, how the events relate, or why you should even care. Characters just randomly appear with little to no backstory, so you don’t really give a damn what happens to them. Not that it matters, because the acting is so bad that you’ll find yourself praying for them all to die, to be spared the horror of witnessing their atrocious non-acting skills. You just sit back in disbelief as one bizarre event after another occurs, with zero understanding of how any of them relate to one another. The entire thing feels as if you started watching a movie at the last half hour, having missed most of it, so you’re unclear of what’s going on. You could fast forward and skip around to various scenes, and it won’t matter. I hope John Saxon was paid well to star in this crap, because he’s much too good an actor to be stuck in this mess. I imagine the writer/director who made this abomination was a fan of films like John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and wanted to fill his movie with a bunch of creepy, cool things. Unfortunately, he forgot to bother writing a coherent script, so you end up with this shit. It’s not even one of those “so bad they’re good” flicks. This definitely falls into the category of “WTF did I just watch??”.














 

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