NIGHTMARE BEACH (1989)
An Italian production that was filmed in Florida, Nightmare Beach (a.k.a. Welcome to Spring Break) was either directed by popular Italian filmmaker Umberto Lenzi or at least had him on board as a supervisor - either way, he was on set the whole time. Going by the credits, this was the only directorial effort for screenwriter James Justice (under the name Harry Kirkpatrick), but there's some disagreement over who was actually at the helm. Regardless of who was calling the shots, they made a movie that provides a good amount of dumb fun. I wouldn't say this is an overlooked gem, but I do think it deserves a bit more attention from fans of horror's slasher sub-genre.
The story begins with the electric chair execution of a biker called Diablo, who was convicted of killing the sister of a young woman named Gail (Sarah Buxton). Diablo claims he was framed and vows revenge, but that's not enough to stop the switch from being pulled. Immediately after the execution, 100,000 people come flooding into the beach community where Gail lives, there to celebrate Spring Break. This is the worst possible time for so many people to be around, because Diablo's body disappears from the cemetery and soon a homicidal biker, their identity hidden under a helmet and leather clothes, is riding through the streets, killing people at random.
Mayor Loomis (Fred Buch) and Chief of Police Strycher (John Saxon) try to make it appear like there's nothing out of the ordinary going on, but there's an unusual amount of corpses for coroner Doc Willet (Michael Parks) to examine. While the authority figures are secretly panicking, it falls on Gail and Spring Breaker Skip (Nicolas de Toth) to really figure out what's going on and bring this killing spree to an end.
Between kills, the film likes to focus on various types of Spring Break shenanigans, from shark pranks to a wet T-shirt contest. We meet characters like the Reverend with the wild child daughter, the girl who works as a prostitute out of her hotel room, and the pervy desk clerk. It also establishes some possible suspects, that clerk being one of them. If we don't have a supernatural killer on our hands, it's easy to imagine that the killer biker could be someone from Diablo's biker gang or even one of the authority figures.
Whether or not Diablo has returned from the grave to do the killing, since the movie starts out with his electrocution it is fitting that the killer biker prefers to electrocute people to death. They'll branch out and use a different method occasionally, but they like electricity so much that they have even turned the pillion on their motorcycle into a portable electric chair that can fry a passenger with the flick of a switch. Lenzi and/or Justice/Kirkpatrick should have worked that into the movie a couple more times. The body count is plenty high, but not enough people are killed on that electric chair pillion.
BLISS (2019)
Bliss is a change of pace for writer/director Joe Begos, literally. Although the movie is only 80 minutes, it still doesn't move along as quickly as his previous two features, Almost Human and The Mind's Eye. While those movies were primarily driven forward by sequences of violent action, this one is more of a character study... and I don't know if the viewer is meant to connect with the lead character more than I did, but I found her to be intolerable.
This does have the colorful cinematography that I enjoyed in Begos's other work, but another thing that sets it apart from its predecessors is the fact that it doesn't take place in the '80s or early '90s. This is the first Begos movie modern enough to feature a cell phone. Even if the one the lead character has happens to be an old flip phone.
That intolerable character is Dezzy Donahue, played by Dora Madison. Madison does some strong emotional work in the role, but Dezzy was just not likeable at all to me.
Dezzy is a painter but hasn't been able to finish a painting in three months, and she's also having trouble paying her rent, so she figures she needs some chemical help to get through her creative block. She hits up her drug dealer (played by Graham Skipper of Begos's other movies) for a fix of a drug called Bliss, which is described as a mix between uncut cocaine and DMT. The drug dealer has a variety of Bliss, but Dezzy goes for a batch called Diabo, which the dealer says he doesn't even touch. Once she snorts some of that Diablo Bliss, her life begins to get very wild. She parties hard, she does more drugs with her friend Courtney (Tru Collins), she has a threesome with Courtney and Courtney's boyfriend Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield), she is inspired to paint again... and she starts freaking out, because the high she's on is too extreme, and with the feeling it brings also comes a craving for blood. A craving Courtney seems to share, since Dezzy has witnessed her chomping on a woman's neck.
Begos started The Mind's Eye with text on screen saying THIS FILM SHOULD BE PLAYED LOUD, which he lifted from Abel Ferrara's 1979 film The Driller Killer. That movie was about a painter slowly (too slowly for my liking) going insane, so Bliss is sort of like Begos's version of The Driller Killer, with a vampire twist. Are we watching Dezzy go insane? Has she fried her brain with drugs? Or is she really becoming a bloodsucking creature of the night?
Bliss wasn't really my type of movie, I don't like spending time with the kind of characters that it has. My favorite things about it were the lighting and the fact that George Wendt and Abraham Benrubi showed up in it. But, despite it not being to my taste, I did think it was visually and technically impressive, it features some good acting, and in the second half it delivers some terrific gore.
RITUAL (2013)
Writer/director Mickey Keating's film Ritual wasn't a satisfying viewing experience for me, and yet I feel compelled to write about it anyway because I was with the movie for most of its 89 minute running time. This is the second film on Keating's IMDb filmography, but apparently he doesn't count the first one, 2011's Ultra Violence, as his first feature because it was a student film - so since it doesn't seem to be readily available to public and Keating wishes he could get it removed from his IMDb page, we'll ignore it and agree that Ritual is his first feature. And it does feel very much like a first feature. The majority of the movie focuses simply on two people talking in one room.
Those people are Tom Moses (Dean Cates) and his troubled wife Lovely (Lisa Marie Summerscales). While Tom's flashbacks to meeting Lovely on a beach have a sort of 1950s postcard look to them, the reality of living with Lovely really seems to be a bummer, and she keeps going off with other guys. It was another guy who brought Lovely to the motel room she calls Tom to at the start of the film, and when Tom arrives at the room he finds that Lovely has stabbed the guy dead for getting rough with her.
As Tom and Lovely debate how to handle the situation, they find out that this guy wasn't just a handsy douchebag. The tape in the video camera he had with him also indicates that he's part of a cult that sacrifices young women while wearing skull masks.
I was totally going along with Ritual through all of this. Just like Keating's next feature Pod, which I wrote about a few years ago, the movie is a slow burn. Pod didn't get to the action until around 50 minutes into its 76 minute running time, so I was prepared for Ritual to do the same. It does. The problem is, once the guy's skull-mask-wearing buddies show up at the motel 50+ minutes into the movie, the payoff is not worth all the build-up. I was very disappointed that the cultist action was so quick and lackluster. It was clear from the beginning that Ritual was made on a minuscule budget, but things still could have been handled better once the action kicked in.
The only thing I liked about the last 23 minutes of this movie was the fact that Roger Bartlett's song "Fool for a Blonde", which was featured in the 1974 classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, was heard playing on a radio. Ritual had me, then it fell apart on me.
THIS NIGHT I'LL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE (1967)
Writer/director/star José Mojica Marins' 1964 film At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul, the first horror film to come out of Brazil, followed an evil undertaker called Zé do Caixão, a.k.a. Coffin Joe and played by Mojica (people call him Mojica instead of Marins), as he embarked on a bloody quest to find a woman who was worthy of bearing him a son and willing to go through with giving birth to his spawn. At the end, he was confronted by the spirits of the people he had murdered along the way, and in the final shots of the film he looked to be quite dead himself. He was covered in blood and his eyes were popping out of his head.
But you can never trust that a horror villain has been defeated, and three years later Mojica brought his character back in the sequel This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver in its native Portuguese). How did Coffin Joe survive? Well, his injuries just weren't as bad as they looked. He was taken to the hospital, his eyes were pushed back into their sockets, and by the time this film's title sequence is over Coffin Joe has been nursed back to full health and acquited of murder due to lack of evidence.
With that, he can get right back to trying to find a woman to mate with. If he would just approach this like a regular person, everything would be fine, but Joe is a maniac who thinks he's superior to everyone around him, plus he thinks love is a weakness. He doesn't want the mother of his child to love him. So at this point his idea of courting involves abducting atheist women (he despises religion) and then testing them to determine which is the strongest among them. Then two perfect beings, himself and the woman who passes his tests, will unite to create the perfect male offspring. Reminiscent of the Universal monster classics, Joe is aided in his endeavor by a disfigured, hunchbacked man named Bruno (Nivaldo Lima).
Coffin Joe hurts and kills a lot of people while trying to carry out his plan, and does things like release spiders and snakes on them, but shockingly he also picks up a couple more acolytes along the way, meeting women who are actually willing to go along with him. Simply by being his creepy self, he attracts them. It makes no sense, he's a horrible, repulsive human being... and yet, yeah, I could see some women going for a guy like this. If you're into the bad boy types, Coffin Joe is up there with the worst.
But while the lead character is despicable, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse is an entertaining film with a cool horror vibe and some very twisted things in it. Just over an hour into the film, Mojica even brings his vision of Hell to the screen for a sequence in which Coffin Joe dreams that he has been dragged into the underworld where people scream in constant torment, demons whip them and prod them with pitchforks, and the devil, who looks just like Joe himself, sits on his throne. The movie is primarily in black and white, but when Coffin Joe goes to Hell it gets very colorful. This is still impressive to see today; Brazilians who saw the movie on the big screen in 1967 probably had their minds completely blown.
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul was a perfect standalone film and effectively killed Coffin Joe off, but Mojica didn't ruin anything by resurrecting the character for this sequel. This is a worthy follow-up.
This article is being posted on what would have been Mojica's 84th birthday. Born on March 13, 1936, he sadly passed away in February of 2020.
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