It’s all Santo’s fault: his return to the Witchcraft series made me feel guilty about my own dangling franchises.

AMITYVILLE: A NEW GENERATION (1993)

In yet another sequel that obviously wasn’t meant to be one, a mirror from the notorious Amityville house brings mayhem to an artists’ commune and forces a young photographer to confront the truth about his father, and about himself. The film wastes a decent premise in its struggle to become “an Amityville film”, but is bolstered by a nice supporting performance by Terry O’Quinn as the cop on the case.

I have also re-formatted and added screenshots to The Amityville Horror (1979), and fixed the screenshots in Amityville 1992: It’s About Time. I had hoped to have spruced up The Amityville Curse, too, but a slack postal system means that won’t be happening until next week. Stay tuned.

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Rose and Norah are sisters dealing with different life crises who decide (well, Rose decides) to start a crime scene cleanup business. Naturally, they deal with their own pasts, discover something about themselves, and commit felonies with biohazardous materials.  It’s a comedy!

Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

CHINESE GHOST STORY: THE ANIMATION
Chinese animation, or at least what small amount is available for sampling, has proven to be high on imagination and somewhat rudimentary in execution. Actually, OK. I’m no Chinese animation expert. Before seeing A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation, my only exposure to an animated Hong Kong movie was the same as pretty much every other American Hong Kong movie fan’s exposure: Bruce Lee and the Chinese Gods. But heck, what that movie lacked in terms of accomplished animation it more than made up for with sheer weirdness. I mean, there you were with Chinese deities ripping around ancient China on motorcycles made of clouds. People were getting burned alive, and then Bruce Lee shows up with a third eye, makes weird noises, and battles all sorts of multi-headed demons and dragons. Indeed the quality of animation was on par with those “Stories from The Bible” shows, but maybe if those had been less about Jesus helping people and more about Jesus battling a saucy fox spirit, we would have overlooked the shoddy animation in those as easily as we overlook it in Chinese Gods. Hell, it’s not as if The Bible doesn’t have enough weird stuff in it. I’d pay good money for animated feature film of the Book of Revelations.

HO HO HO!

CALL OF CTHULHU
Cthulhu is almost as famous, if not more famous, than Lovecraft himself. I guess there’s something oddly personable about an anthropomorphic squid-jellyfish-bat monster from outer space. So it’s probably worth pointing out that the first appearance and development of Cthulhu marks a turning point, maybe even a breaking point, in Lovecraft’s fiction. There are certainly continuities that run across the entirety of his writing; even his earliest stories feature people whose minds are torn apart by unthinkable truths, although sometimes this truth is nothing more than that one’s great-grandfather was actually a gorilla. Much of his early work, though, owes a massive debt to Poe and Dunsany.

The murder mystery Who Killed Mary What’s ‘er Name was released by Cannon. Ah, you are thinking, it’s time for some Golan and Globus nonsense! Unfortunately, that’s not the case. This movie was released by Cannon before Golan and Globus took over the studio in 1979, when the company was best known for its dreary sex comedies. Although this movie is not a sex comedy, it is pretty dreary. Though its title asks you to care, you simply won’t long before the end.

Just a few short updates:

LASER MISSION
It’s obvious that while director BJ Davis is a director of limited skill, he knows exactly how to make a low-budget 80’s action movie. Every single thing you need in the movie is present, and if it’s not expertly realized, it’s usually at least delivered in a competently incompetent manner — a statement that will make perfect sense to anyone who watches a lot of these movies. A movie like Laser Mission can really only disappoint me by not delivering on the predictable formula to which it cleaves. That happens a lot with low-budget action movies, but not with Laser Mission. It may not deliver on the promised lasers of the title, but it delivers exactly what you’d want from a cheap, goofy 80s action movie.

KADIN DUSMANI
We come to the seedy Turkish thriller Kadin Dusmani via a circuitous but highly entertaining journey through a number of different types of film that built on a central theme — the simply murder mystery — and made it increasingly outlandish and bizarre. Picking a solid starting point is almost impossible — even if one could distill down to the “the first of its kind” in movies, there’s the fact that the early efforts were all based on various types of novels and pulp stories that underwent a similar evolution to the film that would eventually grow from them. So, for the sake of not falling into a bottomless pit, let’s pick a logical point at which to begin.

Plus, we added new pictures to GOLDEN BUDDHA and WORLD WITHOUT END

That’s right. Drink it in, people.

Well, once again, I got restless and redesigned Teleport City. A couple years ago, I split all the travel, book, and music stuff off into a separate site. At the time it seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t. So it’s back. And of course, all sorts of older articles are broken, but at least I didn’t have to rewrite every single link. Plus, Jenny Agutter now stares at yo invitingly from the top of the page.

We also reviewed CHRISTMAS EVIL.
1980’s Christmas Evil is, I believe, the first of the Killer Santa Claus movies, which is odd if true. Used properly, Santa can be almost as creepy as a clown or a ventriloquist dummy, yet is sadly underutilized in popular culture. Maybe Santa is still too powerful a symbol. Luckily, maverick writer/director Lewis Jackson decided to blaze a trail by creating one of the first psychotic movie Santa Clauses, opening the floodgates for killer leprechauns, Uncle Sams, and perhaps, one day, cupids.

MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)

   Having little to do with Poe and less to do with good film-making, Bela Lugosi’s first post-Dracula horror outing sees him cast as Dr Mirakle, part-sideshow huckster, part-mad scientist, who intends to prove the theory of evolution by letting his pet gorilla get up close and personal with a virginal young woman. Unfortunately, most of this plot gets lost in the midst of a tremendous battle for our attention between one of filmdom’s sorriest ape-suits, and a pair of false eyebrows with a mind of their own.

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[Edited to add: I have now slightly revised, re-formatted and added screenshots to The Mask Of Fu Manchu and White Zombie.]

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…the goat stares back at you. (Nietzsche, you know.)

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)