Video Scripts: Salem’s Lot, Versus, Judgment Night

A few more of Cody's JoBlo videos.

I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last few years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered 

- Frailty, Dead Calm, and Shocker 

- 100 Feet, Freddy vs. Jason, and Pin 

- Night Fare, Poltergeist III, and Hardware 

- A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and It's Alive

- Dark City, Mute Witness, and The Wraith

- Army of Darkness, Cannibal Holocaust, and Basket Case 

- Halloween timeline, The Pit, and Body Parts

- Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, and The Thing (2011)

- The Monster Squad, Trick or Treat, and Maximum Overdrive

- A Fish Called Wanda, Night of the Creeps, and Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI

- Race with the Devil, Speed, and Romancing the Stone

- Maniac Cop 3, WarGames, and Night of the Living Dead (1990)

- The Rock, Witchboard, and Friday the 13th Part 2

- Intruder, Saving Private Ryan, and Big Trouble in Little China

- The First Power, Psycho (1960), and Hot Fuzz

- Cat People (1982), Bride of Re-Animator, and Con Air

- Moulin Rouge (2001), The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1985), and The Stuff

- Children of the Corn (1984), Bone Tomahawk, and Fight Club

- The Departed, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and Ginger Snaps

- Silver Bullet, Last Action Hero, and Children of Men

- FleshEater, Christmas Vacation, and Lethal Weapon

- The Thing (1982), Monkey Shines, and Friday the 13th (1980)

- P2, Lethal Weapon 2, and Frozen (2010)

- Lethal Weapon 3, The Blob (1988), and Lethal Weapon 4

- The Fast and the Furious, Dance of the Dead, and The Rage: Carrie 2

- Puppet Master, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and Castle Freak (1995)

- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch

- Fast Five, Dog Soldiers, and Tremors 3: Back to Perfection

- Drag Me to Hell, 3D '80s Horror, and unmade Mission: Impossible sequels

- Sleepaway Camp, Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, and 2001 Maniacs

- Gremlins, Furious 6, and Lone Wolf McQuade

- The Last Showing, Grindhouse, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

- Christmas Horror, Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys, and Furious 7

- Drive (2011), 1986 horror comedies, and Alien: Romulus

- Murder Party, Twisters, and Hellraiser

- Black Phone 2, Super 8, Red State

- Longlegs, The Mummy (2017), Dead-Alive

- Mission: Impossible 8, When a Stranger Calls (2006), MCU Blade

- Stardust, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Gladiator II

Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below, one for the JoBlo Upcoming Movies channel, one for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel, and one for the JoBlo Originals channel.

A new adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot has been sitting on the shelf at Warner Bros. for a while, so we put together an Everything We Know article on the film on JoBlo.com and it has been turned into a video. These things have a short shelf life, because someday Salem's Lot will probably be released, but for now this is what we know about it.

For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I wrote about director Ryuhei Kitamura's action-packed 2000 zombie movie Versus: 

Versus script: 

Horror fans have had a whole lot of zombie entertainment sent our way in the last couple decades, much of it broadcast on television by AMC. There have been so many flesh-eaters and brain-munchers on our screens, some of us are feeling zombie overload. But if you’re still looking for zombie stories that do things a little differently from the others, we have a recommendation for you: a Japanese film that mixes the walking dead with shootouts, swordfights, and lengthy martial arts fights. It’s called Versus – and if you haven’t seen this one yet, it’s the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.

Versus was an independent production made by a bunch of unknowns, and many of the people involved with the movie remain unknowns to this day. It marked the feature directorial debut of Ryuhei Kitamura, who has gone on to have a solid career, directing movies like The Midnight Meat Train, Aragami, Azumi, and Godzilla: Final Wars. If you get hired to make a Godzilla movie, your career is definitely a winner, even if your Godzilla movie doesn’t turn out to be one of the better ones. Kitamura wrote the Versus screenplay with Yudai Yamaguchi, who has built a directing career of his own over the years. Together, they crafted an incredibly simple story.

The movie begins with text appearing on screen to provide the only set-up that’s really necessary. It tells us there are six hundred and sixty-six portals scattered around the planet that connect our world to “the other side.” One of these portals – the four hundred and forty-fourth, to be exact – is located in the Forest of Resurrection in Japan. Once we’ve been given that information, we’re treated to the extremely cool sight of a samurai taking down a large group of zombies in the Forest of Resurrection. Then things move ahead to modern day, where another zombie outbreak is about to occur within the woods.

A pair of escaped prisoners make their way to the forest for a meeting with a carload of organized crime types. Our hero is Prisoner KSC2-303, played by Tak Sakaguchi. We’re told he was locked up for first degree murder, robbery, manslaughter, and excessive self-defense, but we know he’s our hero because he doesn’t react well when he sees that the gangsters have taken a young woman hostage. The Prisoner refuses to take part in the kidnapping, and is willing to fight the criminals to protect the girl, played by Chieko Misaka. She’ll say he saved her, but he’ll say he wasn’t actually standing up to the others for her. The other guys just pissed him off. Whatever his reasons may be, he does help her. A fight breaks out, one of the gangsters is killed… and then that dead gangster rises as a flesh-eating zombie. This all happens in the first fifteen minutes, and the movie is off and running from there. The entire rest of the film is about the Prisoner and the Girl fighting off zombies and gangsters as they try to escape from the woods. And there is a lot of fighting in this movie. Enough that the original version sported a running time of one hundred and twenty minutes. Four years after the initial release, Kitamura and his cast and crew returned to the forest to film new scenes and enhance the action sequences, resulting in what’s called the Ultimate Versus cut, which is ten minutes longer.

Kitamura and Yamaguchi didn’t bother to name any of the characters in their script. Aside from Prisoner KSC2-303 and The Girl, most of them are credited based on their appearance, their clothes, or their weapons. Versus was the first screen acting credit for the majority of the cast members, and many of them haven’t done much in the film industry since this movie. A few have only worked on Kitamura projects. Sakaguchi and Misaka are two exceptions who have gone on to do a lot more film work. So are Kenji Matsuda, who delivers a wonderfully over-the-top performance as Yakuza Leader with Butterfly Knife; Minoru Matsumoto, the Crazy Yakuza with Amulet; Ryosuke Watabe, the Yakuza Zombie in Alligator Skin Coat; Shoichiro Masumoto, who played the One-Handed Cop; and Hideo Sakaki, who lurks around as a mysterious, supernatural character called The Man. One actor who should have gotten a lot more work after this is Yukihito Tanikado. He only has a couple other credits, but he’s hilarious as Masumoto’s fellow Cop, a guy who is highly confident and arrogant. He says he’ll have no trouble tracking down the escaped prisoners because he was trained by the FBI. The fact that they’re in the forest is no trouble because he grew up in Yellowstone. When challenged, he claims to be the master of all martial arts, with reflexes five hundred times faster than Mike Tyson’s. He even thinks he’s faster than a bullet.

While growing up in Japan, Kitamura discovered he enjoyed watching movies more than anything else, so he figured he should become a filmmaker. Tired of wasting his time on things that didn’t involve movies, he dropped out of high school, then moved to Australia, since it was the home of many of his heroes, like George Miller, Russel Mulcahy, and Peter Weir. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, he was able to talk his way into attending a school for visual arts. After two years of schooling, he had to make a movie to graduate. So he went out into the woods and shot a short film that involved zombies, punching, kicking, and knife fights. Step one on the path to making Versus. Returning to Japan, he made the fifty minute crime film Heat after Dark and the forty-seven minute horror film Down to Hell. Then he was ready to extend his running times. Down to Hell really paved the way for Versus, as it was about criminals abducting people, setting them loose in the woods, and hunting them down. But this forest turns out to be a place where the dead come back to life. When Kitamura started developing Versus, it was meant to be a sequel to Down to Hell, but it gradually evolved into a separate story.

Since Down to Hell was made for three thousand dollars, Kitamura figured he could get the follow-up made for ten thousand. But as it became an original idea, it also became a bigger project. It took several months of filming for Kitamura and his cast and crew to complete Versus, and they had to keep scraping together more money as they went along. It had to be an independent production because Kitamura wasn’t able to find any supportive producers. They said an action-heavy Japanese movie wouldn’t do well, because audiences preferred to get their action from America and Hong Kong. So Kitamura had to prove them wrong. This was such a big undertaking that it could have broken him financially. It could have ended up being the only feature film he ever made. So he had to try to pack as much into it as he could. As he told Midnight Eye, “I just put everything I loved into the movie. People categorize things too easily. They say it’s a horror movie, so you shouldn’t add comedy or action. They want to limit it too much to one genre. … The inspiration for Versus came from the films of the 1980s, Sam Raimi movies, John Carpenter movies, George Miller movies. Everything I like: zombies, gun fighting, kung fu fighting, sword fighting. I wanted to do car action, too, because I love Mad Max so much, but I didn’t have enough money for it. So, aside from the car action, everything is in there.”

Kitamura found his lead actor, Tak Sakaguchi, by being in the right place at the right time. Sakaguchi was a streetfighter, and Kitamura met him when he was out on the street, beating someone up. The filmmaker told the fighter he should be brawling in movies instead of on the street. So they made it happen.

Versus was first screened at the Tokyo International Fantastic Film Festival in October of 2000. Then it slowly made its way out across the rest of the world over the next couple years. To Kitamura’s delight, and the surprise of the producers who had turned him down, it did very well in Japan. Allowing Kitamura to start making bigger movies, to the point where he was even given the chance to direct the fiftieth anniversary Godzilla movie. A film that, at the time, was being marketed as the final Godzilla movie. Then he moved on to making American productions, mixing in the occasional Japanese film. But as his career goes on, Versus still manages to linger over everything else.

At one time, Kitamura considered directing an American remake of Versus, and even wrote a script for it, but it never went into production. Then, he set his sights on making a sequel to Versus. Again, he put together a script. He has Versus 2 written and ready to go, and has revealed that it starts out with a thirty minute action sequence. A car action sequence, to be exact. The one thing he wasn’t able to work into the first movie. Unfortunately, it’s being held back by budget issues. Kitamura told Dread Central he intends for the sequel to be “big and insane, and I’m not going to do a watered down version of that. That means I need to have a much, much bigger movie than the original. When I do it, it’s gonna be like Versus: Fury Road. That’s what it is. I’m trying to do an even longer car battle than Mad Max: Fury Road, so obviously you need a lot of money to do that. I’m working on it, so I’m going to do it someday. I just don’t know when.”

Even though we’re a couple decades away from the release of Versus now, there’s still interest in a sequel because Kitamura made the first movie such a fun ride. For two hours, it just throws action scene after action scene at the audience. It never gets old because there’s so much variety to the action. For example, one scene might be a lengthy martial arts fight between the Prisoner and one of the gangsters. Then we’ll see the other gangsters emptying their guns into a large group of zombies. The number of zombies is increased due to the fact that this forest has been the gangsters’ dumping ground for the bodies of people they have killed. And they have killed a lot of people. Along the way, some depth is also added to the story with the revelation that Prisoner KSC2-303, The Girl, and The Man are all reincarnations of people who have been in the forest before. In fact, all three of them were involved with that “samurai vs. zombies” situation at the beginning of the movie. And their connection might continue on far into the future as well.

It’s evident that Versus was made on a small budget. Which makes it all the more impressive to see how much action Kitamura was able to pack into it and how stylish his direction of the action is. The inspiration he drew from Sam Raimi really comes through in some of his shot choices. At this point, there’s also a bit of a nostalgic edge to the film, because it’s saturated with a sense of cool that is very much of its time. You can tell that it was made around the turn of the millennium, especially when the Prisoner puts on a black leather trenchcoat during his struggle to survive. He gets his hands on a pair of sunglasses as well, but he can’t pull off the look as well as Keanu Reeves did in The Matrix or Tom Cruise did in Mission: Impossible 2, so he ditches the sunglasses pretty quick. There’s an even funnier Matrix reference when the arrogant cop tries to do some back-bend bullet-dodging. But he’s another character who just can’t live up to Keanu.

Versus is a non-stop onslaught of gunfire, martial arts fights, gore, comedic moments, and hilariously over-the-top performances. So if you enjoy seeing those things in movies, you’ll probably have a blast watching this one. We usually like to cover one or two of the best scenes in these write-ups, but it’s difficult to decide which of the action scenes is the best, since they’re all so cool in their own way. You can’t really pick and choose with this one. You just have to take it all in and bask in the glory of its two hours of violence.

Watching Versus, you’d think Ryuhei Kitamura was on his way to becoming one of the biggest action directors in the entertainment industry. But right now, it sort of seems like his career reached its peak with the Godzilla movie. He’s gotten a couple major opportunities since then, but has never reached the level he deserved to. The Midnight Meat Train is the biggest English-language movie he has gotten to make. That one has its fans, but it’s a shame he has never been given something larger so he could really follow in the footsteps of his heroes Sam Raimi and George Miller. Who knows? Maybe there are still bigger things ahead of Kitamura. Maybe he’ll even get the budget for the long-awaited Versus sequel, with its thirty minutes of car action right up front. In the meantime, we still have the original film to go back to, and we can watch it over and over any time we’re in the mood to see a legion of zombies get slashed, blasted, kicked, and punched in the Forest of Resurrection.

And for the Revisited series, I wrote about director Stephen Hopkins' 1993 action thriller Judgment Night:

Judgment Night script: 

INTRO: It’s a story we’ve all heard before. A group of friends stray off the beaten path and end up having to fight for their lives. This has served as the set-up for many classic horror films and thrillers. Back in the early ‘90s, director Stephen Hopkins used it as the set-up for an action movie that has an awesome cast. Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven, and Stephen Dorff play the friends fighting to survive. Denis Leary is the leader of the criminal gang out for their blood. Unfortunately, not a lot of people went to see the movie when it was released… but they did make the soundtrack a hit. The movie is called Judgment Night, and it’s time for it to be Revisited.

SET-UP: Judgment Night started out as a spec script written by Kevin Jarre, whose other credits include Rambo: First Blood Part 2, Glory, and Tombstone. Working from a story idea by Richard DiLello, Jarre wrote the initial script – copyrighted under the title “Judgment Night, a.k.a. Escape” – in the late 1980s. It was dark and violent, but production company Largo Entertainment snatched it up quickly and found a home for the project at Universal Pictures. Then the script went through a whole lot of rewrites. Halloween and Escape from New York filmmaker John Carpenter wrote his own draft of the script. So did The Terminator and Terminator 2 co-writer William Wisher. Braveheart writer Randall Wallace. Christopher Crowe, who worked on The Last of the Mohicansand the Mark Wahlberg thriller Fear. And novelist Jere Cunningham, who had written Hunter’s Blood. A similar story about friends on a hunting trip being menaced by backwoods psychos. All of the writers presumably held onto the basic idea of outsiders running into trouble with a gang of criminals. But the scope of the action sequences and the settings varied wildly. There were drafts of the script that involved bikers in the desert outside of Los Angeles. And motorcycle chases across rooftops.

Universal spent so much time developing and rewriting the project, they were in danger of losing their option on it. According to the website That Shelf, 20th Century Fox was interested in acquiring Judgment Night if Universal lost it. And since they didn’t want Fox picking up their scraps, Universal finally gave the film the greenlight. 

Director Stephen Hopkins had just worked with Largo producer Lawrence Gordon on Predator 2, which set a skull-collecting alien loose in Los Angeles. So Gordon brought him over to Judgment Night to have him tell another story of terrible things happening in a big city. Before the Predator sequel, Hopkins had directed the horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. After making those two outlandish movies back-to-back, he was interested in doing something more down-to-earth. Gordon had also produced the Walter Hill classic The Warriors, which was about the lead characters being pursued by gang members in New York. But Hopkins wanted to go more realistic than that film. Chicago was chosen as the setting for Judgment Night. The action was scaled down. The rooftop motorcycle chases were removed. They got Lewis Colick, who was working with Largo and Fox on the thriller Unlawful Entry, to write a fresh draft of the script. Judgment Night went into production in 1992 – and the script had changed so much in the three years since Jarre copyrighted his version of it, he’s not even credited. Colick received the sole screenwriting credit and shares story credit with Jere Cunningham. During filming, Larry Ferguson of Highlander and Alien 3 was brought on to do some uncredited rewrites.

The story all these chefs cooked up centers on a group of four friends from the Chicago suburbs. Frank Wyatt and his wife recently had a baby, and after sitting at home for over three months, Frank is stir crazy. So he heads into Chicago to see a boxing match with his hot-tempered younger brother John. Ladies man Mike Peterson. And Ray Cochran, who has lied his way into test-driving an RV for the night. When they get stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the venue, Ray decides to get around it by taking the nearest exit. In the age of GPS, getting back to the expressway would probably be quick and easy. But since this is the early ‘90s, they can’t find their way back. They get lost in a rundown, desolate neighborhood. Things get worse when a young man runs out in front of the RV and gets clipped. And that’s not the only injury he has sustained, as someone shot him for stealing the money he has in a small bag. That money was stolen from a criminal kingpin named Fallon, who shows up with three of his lackeys and puts the RV out of commission. The thief is executed in front of Frank and his friends. And, of course, Fallon has a strict “no witnesses” policy. The rest of the film consists of Fallon and his goons pursuing our heroes through this bad neighborhood where the police rarely venture.

For the role of Frank, Hopkins was originally considering John Travolta. But this was before his career was revived by Pulp Fiction, when Look Who’s Talking movies were his main source of income. So Hopkins wasn’t able to convince anyone that Travolta could carry a thriller at that time. Ray Liotta, Tom Cruise, and Christian Slater were offered the Frank role and passed on it. When Universal turned to Emilio Estevez, they were desperate. Judgment Night needed to start filming before they lost the rights. So even though Estevez asked for more money than expected, four million dollars, they agreed to it. Cuba Gooding Jr. and Jeremy Piven were cast as Mike and Ray, and Stephen Dorff as Frank’s brother John.

The first choice for the lead villain, Fallon, was Kevin Spacey, as Hopkins had met him and found him to be suitably creepy. But then comedian Denis Leary came in and impressed with his intensity. So he became Fallon, with Peter Greene as his right hand man Sykes and Michael Wiseman as Travis, who isn’t fully on board with everything Fallon wants to do. Cast to play henchman Rhodes was Erik “Everlast” Schrody fromHouse of Pain, the group that had just had a huge hit with the song “Jump Around.”

The characters are out of their element in a rough neighborhood. And the same could be said about the cast and crew. As Hopkins told Consequence of Sound, filming in Chicago was, “pretty dangerous. I was sending dailies to Universal to show them what we were shooting, and they thought it was all matte paintings. These were areas that were destroyed in the 1968 riots, really close to downtown. We went to some extreme places. We were in a dark basement looking around, and it seemed like the whole room was moving. We got out our flashlights, and it turned out the entire floor, walls and ceiling were covered with rats. You’d be driving down these areas, and there would be people sitting on porches with their rifles out.” There was a shooting near the set one night, and the next day the authorities moved in and closed the area down.

REVIEW: The movie benefited from being filmed in these parts of Chicago. But, of course, Hopkins and his go-to cinematographer Peter Levy didn’t present the areas in an entirely true-to-life way. Their Elm Street and Predator sequels had a Gothic look and feel to them, and they carried that over to this film as well. It may be an action movie, but they tried their best to make it look like a horror film. Putting characters in locations with deep, dark shadows. Almost presenting the film as if it could have been shot in black and white. But instead of black and white, a lot of the film has a yellow look to it. Because Hopkins and Levy were trying to match the yellow lighting of the sodium-vapor streetlights in the area. The horror movie look and Gothic vibe help Judgment Night stand out among action films. But it also delivers plenty of action at the same time.

It’s a very simple movie that goes through its one hundred and ten minutes at a good pace. It only takes fourteen minutes for the story to get our suburbanite heroes into the wrong neighborhood. And it’s off and running from there. The movie becomes one long stalk, chase, and fight sequence, during which the thrills and suspense never let up for too long. It almost starts to feel like a video game, with the characters moving from one level to the next. The killers track Frank and his buddies through a railyard. Into an apartment building. Across rooftops. Into the sewer. And end up in department store after hours. The standout set piece involves the group making their way across a rickety ladder from one roof to another. The ladder doesn’t hold together, threatening to drop them into the alley far below.

While the characters run and fight for their lives, each of them reacts differently to the dangerous situation they’re in. Ray is scared to death, in a total panic. And he finds out that his fast talk doesn’t work in this situation. Mike always wanted to see how he’d do in combat, and he goes a little too far into that mindset. John realizes he isn’t as tough as he thought he was. He can pick road rage fights on the expressway, but gets frozen in fear when he’s being stalked by armed criminals. Everyone says that Frank has gone soft since he got married and became a father. He finds the fight he used to have in him, but also figures out that home life with his new family isn’t something he should be seeking to escape from.

We know from the start that Frank is going to become our lead hero. And not just because he’s played by Emilio Estevez, who got a major payday. Throughout the movie, Frank is always the most sensible and level-headed character. But it does take surprisingly long for him to fully switch into hero mode. We’re more than an hour into the movie before Frank steps up and brings back some of the man he used to be. But Estevez is great no matter what mode Frank is in, and Gooding, Piven, and Dorff do great work around him.

Denis Leary was an unexpected choice for the lead villain in a movie like this. But when you see him in action, it’s clear why he won the role of Fallon. Critic Bobbie Wygant described Leary’s work in the movie as a “red hot performance,” which is a fitting way to put it. It’s red hot due to the burning rage he is barely able to contain most of the time. And which he gets to unleash in a few scenes. Hopkins said Leary’s anger is what made him so appealing. He used it to turn Fallon into a very memorable character.

LEGACY/NOW: Judgment Night wrapped production in January of 1993 and was sent out to theatres that October. And given the horror influence, a Halloween season release didn’t seem like a terrible choice. But apparently it was, because not many people were interested in seeing Judgment Night on the big screen. It landed at number five at the box office its opening weekend and quickly sputtered out from there. Made on a budget of twenty-one million, it only earned twelve million during its U.S. theatrical run. Hopkins has saidthat one of the reasons why it didn’t do well was because there was a shootout at a Bronx screening of the movie. So it was blamed for inciting violence and pulled from cinemas. Whatever the case may be, it did poorly enough that there was a time when Hopkins simply wrote it off as “a real, absolute, total bomb.” Thankfully, he seems to have grown more fond of it over the years.

But even while few people were showing up to watch the movie, music fans were making its soundtrack album a hit. The film’s music supervisor Happy Walters – drawing inspiration from the Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. collaboration “Walk This Way” – decided to put together an entire album of rock and hip-hop team-ups. The result proved to be so popular that it made its way to the number seventeen spot on the Billboard 200. And there were four singles released. Helmet and House of Pain brought us the song “Just Another Victim.” Faith No More and Boo-Yaa Tribe did “Another Body Murdered.” Biohazard and Onyx teamed up for the title track. And Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul did the song “Fallin’,” which plays in its entirety right at the beginning of the movie as a slow-motion shot moves through Frank’s neighborhood.

The other artist collaborations featured on the album were Living Colour and Run-D.M.C. Slayer and Ice-T. Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill. Mudhoney and Sir Mix-A-Lot. Dinosaur Jr. and Del the Funky Homosapien. Therapy and Fatal. And Pearl Jam and Cypress Hill. Tool and Rage Against the Machine also recorded a song called “Can’t Kill the Revolution” for the album. But they weren’t satisfied with how it turned out, so it wasn’t included. That didn’t stop fans from getting a hold of the track and sharing it, though. Speaking about the album, Hopkins told Consequence of Sound, “I wasn’t even sure how we were going to use the tracks at first, but then when I started hearing it, it just felt fresh. I don’t think there’s been an album quite like it. I guess it sold huge numbers of records. My daughter thinks it’s the greatest album ever made. I think the only reason she likes me doing the film is because of that.”

A lot of listeners would probably agree that the album was the best thing to come out of this production. But Judgment Night was able to gather a cult following once it hit home video. You don’t often hear it being referenced as an action classic, but it has its appreciative fans. Now, more than thirty years after its release, it also has a nostalgic edge. Becoming a movie thatpeople like to put on because they remember watching it in their younger days. Decades ago. It does feel like a movie that was very much of its time. And while it doesn’t exactly have any really mind-blowing sequences in it… it does still hold up as an entertaining viewing experience. So if you haven’t seen Judgment Night yet, seek it out. And if you have seen it, it’s definitely worth revisiting.

More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!