For Halloween night, or for any late Saturday night for that matter, Horror Fan Zine would like to recommend ten of some of the cheesiest horror movies ever put down on celluloid.

If you’re feeling particularly cheesy this evening, grab yourself some Fontina and settle down with these, um, “classics”

Ten Cheesy Horror Movies

10. I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Well don’t just stand there! Grab a plate!

I Drink Your Blood came out in 1970 on a double bill with I Eat Your Skin. It was the first film to be rated X by the MPAA based solely on violence. This is probably because of the nude Satan worshiping, rabies-infected zombies, grandpas force-fed acid, violence done to pregnant women, heads ripped off, and extreme water-hosing.

Yes, a bunch of Satanist hippies (really, are there any other kind?) attack a local family in various ways until little Pete decides to feed them rabies-infected meatpies. Big mistake - pretty soon a rabid plague has spread to the entire town.

Fortunately, the infected have an intense fear of water. This is where the water hose comes in. Obviously, this exploitation film was meant to cash in on both Night of the Living Dead and the whole Manson debacle. It was pretty twisted for its time. Hell, it’s pretty twisted today.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Johnny Depp, Amanda Wyss, Ronee Blakley, Jsu Garcia

(out of 4)

WARNING: SLIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD

Some 22 years later, Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street still manages to offer up a creepy supernatural atmosphere and retain its ability to disturb through its creative dream sequences, even if, in 2007, I can no longer be “scared” by it (having seen the film countless times as well as its innumerable offspring and knock offs). But it is necessary to point out the importance of the film in the realm of both horror and 80s cinema. Most people today know who Freddy Krueger is, but the first Elm Street is the only one where the character is kept truly dangerous and frightening, and paradoxically, it’s the one with the smallest budget but the biggest ambitions.

How about a big hug for Uncle Freddy?

A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns a small group of 80s teens who are haunted by the ghost of dead child killer Fred Krueger (played with gusto by Robert Englund) in their dreams. The catch is that if they die in their dream, they die for real. Eventually, it’s up to resourceful Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) to stop Freddy by bringing him into the real world and finishing him off.

The main plot of the film makes for a superb jumping off point for Craven to work all sorts of literal and subtextual magic. If nothing else, you have an intriguing take on the 80s slasher movie, post Friday the 13th. The boogeyman comes to your dreams - no longer “out there” (woods), the danger is now with you everywhere. He has burn scars all over his body, wears a dirty hat and red-and-green sweater, and uses a glove with knives for fingers. Not only are your parents part of the problem (all the parents in A Nightmare on Elm Street are either delusional, self-absorbed, drunks, or a combination of all three) but they caused the problem in the first place (torching Freddy in his boiler room). Consequently, the movie is a perfect example of the “sins of the fathers” being visited upon the sons (Exodus passages as well as Euripides, Horace, Shakespeare). Speaking of Shakespeare, there is an effective dream sequence where just before Nancy sees her dead friend in a body bag being dragged across the school hallways, her classmate whispers a passage from Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

You might as well throw those sheets out.

It cannot be overstated how much the movie represents (criticizes) the era in which it was made. The parents (John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Donna Woodrum, Ed Call, Sandy Lipton) of Elm Street are worn out, tired. Nancy’s parents are divorced and they hide things from her; their brand of paternalism is not to be trusted. They have to deal with blowback from things they did in the past. The small town suburb is no longer a source of protection, and it harbors dark secrets. It’s an anti-Reagan film alright, but it also plays upon suburban paranoia, predating films like Blue Velvet and Arlington Road.

The teens, played by Amanda Wyss, Jsu Garcia, and a new-at-the-time Johnny Depp, are likeable, and their death scenes are effective and gory. England, of course, is the one who holds it all together. Here he plays Freddy with a subdued menace, which would be thrown away in subsequent sequels in favor of silly one-liners. But this Freddy is a repulsive killer, and Craven wisely keeps him in the shadows most of the time, for a more unnerving effect. Another good move is how the editing delivers seamless flowing between the dream world and the real world. The result is disorientation regarding whether a character is dreaming or not. The suggestion that the entire film may be a dream plays into the idea that Reagan’s America, in Craven’s view, was collectively asleep. A Nightmare on Elm Street is a classic of the genre.

- Bill Gordon

Maybe try Open House another day…

The new release of the Nightmare DVD sports a nice remastered 1.85:1 print with DTS and Dolby 5.1. The commentary track featuring Wes Craven, John Saxon, and Heather Langenkamp is the same as in previous releases, but there is a new second commentary track carrying interviews with Wes Craven, producer Robert Shaye, co-producer Sara Risher, and others. There are new Infinifilm segments, the most interesting of which is the history of New Line Cinema and how the Elm Street movies made it successful. Different versions of the ending are included, but it’s really just the same ending but edited in slightly different ways. (My personal opinion is that the ending can be interpreted as both Nancy’s dream and her mother’s. This seems apparent when Nancy is driven away but the camera still focuses on her mother and her mother’s point of view. )

Sad news today:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Film director Bob Clark, best known for the holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” was killed with his son Wednesday in a head-on crash with a vehicle that a drunken driver steered into the wrong lane, police and the filmmaker’s assistant said. Clark, 67, and son Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, were killed in the accident in Pacific Palisades, said Lyne Leavy, Clark’s personal assistant.

In Clark’s most famous film, all 9-year-old Ralphie Parker wants for Christmas is an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle. His mother, teacher and Santa Claus all warn: “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” A school bully named Scut Farkus, a leg lamp, a freezing flagpole mishap and some four-letter defiance helped the movie become a seasonal fixture with “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34th Street.”

Clark specialized in horror movies and thrillers early in his career, directing such 1970s flicks as “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things,” “Murder by Decree,” “Breaking Point” and “Black Christmas,” which was remade last year.

His breakout success came with 1981’s sex farce “Porky’s,” a coming-of-age romp that he followed two years later with “Porky’s II: The Next Day.”

Among Clark’s other movies were Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton’s “Rhinestone,” Timothy Hutton’s “Turk 182!”, and Gene Hackman and Dan Aykroyd’s “Loose Cannons.”

1974’s Black Christmas is an extremely influential film and one of the best horror movies of the 70s. How funny that he would later make A Christmas Story, that movie’s polar opposite (and a film I loved as a kid). I also look upon the Porkys movies quite fondly. May Bob Clark and his son Ariel rest in peace.

Videodrome (1983)

Director: David Cronenberg

Starring: James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits

(out of 4)

I had a brain tumor. And I had visions. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the reverse. I could feel the visions coalesce, and become flesh… uncontrollable flesh. And when they removed the tumor, it was called Videodrome.

Futures… made of… virtual insanity

My favorite of all Cronenberg movies, Videodrome is a mesmerizing experience, not unlike the kind of hallucinations suffered by its antihero. A horror movie, and at the same time an essay on the ability of video and television to create new worlds - to shape the minds exposed to their signals, the film is fascinating in its depiction of a society’s coming evolution (devolution?) brought on by technological changes instead of natural ones.

James Woods plays Max Renn, owner of a small Canadian public television station with a fondness for the “next big thing” in broadcasting - most notably, sex and violence. Hooking up with a radio talk show host (Harry) with a fondness for kinky S&M, he soon comes across via pirated signal a strange broadcast called Videodrome, which depicts nothing but torture and murder - Snuff TV. But Videodrome is not what it appears to be, and soon Max begins to suffer hallucinations that get increasingly more bizarre the longer he is exposed to the show’s signal. “It has a philosophy” says Max’s friend Masha (Lynne Gorman), “and that’s what makes it dangerous.”

Fab Five Freddy told me everybody’s high

Once again, Cronenberg shows off his fondness for body mutation (Max develops a vaginal-like slit in his belly, suitable for hiding things like pistols) and biological/technological symbiosis (Max’s gun merges with his hand, massive doses of Videodrome’s signal result in the creation of a brain tumor/organ) but he goes the other way too- infusing technology with biological properties (like Bill Lee’s living typewriters of Naked Lunch, Max’s Beta cassettes pulsate and breathe). There is also discussion on the nature of reality (another Cronenberg staple, seen in Naked Lunch and Existenz), as the philosophy of Berkeley’s idealism is touched upon by the movie’s Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley - the movie’s Marshall McLuhan), who has died from Videodrome exposure but communicates from the dead via videotape:

A new outgrowth of the human brain will produce and control hallucination, to the point that it will change human reality. After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?

Pulls in more viewers than CSI

The film’s messages are thorny - Cronenberg seems to be taking the side of his detractors who bemoan him for the violence and sex in his movies. Does constant exposure to violence really change the viewer’s behavior patterns? Or does it simply render the viewer numb and susceptible to more dangerous suggestion? (The film’s villain Barry Convex, played by Leslie Carlson, refers to S&M as opening up certain receptors in the brain, allowing the signal to sink in, although we are told that Videodrome could be broadcast under a test pattern). I definitely noticed a kind of detachment to Woods’ performance, which seems intentional - as his condition progresses he becomes less the character of Max and more of a blank slate, stuck in receive mode. We don’t so much place ourselves in his position as we observe and follow him - to his inevitable destination as brainwashed assassin. Speaking of brainwashed, there’s a great sequence involving Brian O’Blivion’s “faith-based” ministry called “Cathode Ray Mission”, where the city’s homeless are herded into cubicles to watch television, to “patch them back into the worlds mixing board” as Bianca O’Blivion (Sonja Smits) says. Eerily prescient, despite Cronenberg’s assertions that he wasn’t trying to play prophet, and smart in its theological application of TV culture.

While the gore in the film is plentiful and impressive (still superior to most CGI garbage being thrown out today), it doesn’t function as the film’s raison d’être; it fits the movie’s hallucinatory tone. It also adds to the feeling of chaos and confusion - and like in the denouement where the “body” dies to give rise to the “new flesh”, we can never be sure that we are really seeing what we are seeing. But that’s part of Videodrome’s charm - it’s about a new way of seeing (”The eye is the window to the soul” as Barry Convex quotes da Vinci) and it ties to the rise of a new religion (the new flesh and its required death/rebirth). An entertaining and challenging film; I see no reason why 20 years from now it shouldn’t be just as timely as it is today, in the age of the Internet.

- Bill Gordon

homeboy got played!

The Criterion Collection does it again with the 2 disc DVD set in a case made up to look like a Betamax cassette, with 3 good written articles and two audio commentaries - one track by David Cronenberg and another track by James Woods and Debbie Harry. In 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the film has been digitally restored and looks great. My only complaint is the lack of Dolby Stereo, but I can at least run the mono track through simulated surround on my receiver. A really cool short called “Camera” is included (featuring Les Carlson again), and disc two has a new documentary, an audio interview with special effects maestro Rick Baker, the Samurai Dreams/Videodrome footage featured in the movie, trailers, and finally, a kick-ass roundtable discussion featuring Cronenberg, John Landis, and John Carpenter. This is an amazing release.