31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 - Day 26: DANGEROUS ANIMALS (2025)

Welcome to Captain Tucker's shark experience! Welcome....and goodbye.

Off the Gold Coast in Australia, weirdo sea captain Tucker (Jai Courtney) operates a shark cage diving experience for tourists, taking them into the middle of nowhere in the ocean and chumming the water to attract any of the area's numerous varieties of man-eating sharks. Tucker also happens to be an unhinged serial killer who has murdered dozens of innocent tourist who come for the shark diving thrill, trussing them up and dangling them over the side of his boat like they were bait (which, let's face it, they are), chronicling  their terrified, agonized screams on videotape as the carnivorous fish eat them alive. American surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) has come to Australia to escape her hard previous existence, hooking up with nice guy real estate agent Moses (Josh Heuston) and forming a connection, but her deep mistrust of people after years in foster homes and juvie lead her to leave in the wee hours after their tryst, and she goes to a remote beach to surf alone in the night. There she falls prey to Tucker, and from that point onward she must use  every bit of her hard-earned toughness and survival skills to try and make it out alive. Good luck with that, as Tucker has his twisted serial killer methodology down pat, and his sadistic operations are conducted on the high seas, where no one is watching...

Forced to witness a fellow prisoner's agonized consumption by sharks.

Making a decent shark movie in the wake of the genre-defining JAWS (1975), even fifty years later, is a daunting task, and only a few films in the sub-genre have managed to pull it off. DANGEROUS ANIMALS is one of the better of this breed, featuring solid performances, a tense vibe, a tough as nails protagonist in Zephyr, and a vile killer in the hulking Tucker. He equates himself with sharks, takes locks of hair from his victims and makes deep-sea fishing lure with them, souvenirs that he preserves in the cases of the library of his videotaped murders, and he nonchalantly eats meals while watching the video evidence, which he considers "the greatest show on earth." He's a vile piece of work who one can't wait to see get his just desserts.

                                                       Arts and crafts with Captain Tucker.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS is not a classic, but it is very entertaining, and you really feel for Tucker's innocent victims. I I were to describe this film to knowledgeable horror fans in one sentence, I would simply say "PEEPING TOM meets JAWS." If you get that gene-spliced reference, you get what DANGEROUS ANIMALS is, so proceed from there. It's a fun way to spend 98 minutes, though I. could have done with more graphic depictions of sharks eating people. What we get is pretty good, but when it comes to man-versus-man-eaters stories, I prefer things as visceral and nasty as possible. DANGEROUS ANIMALS earns its R-rating mostly for profanity, though there's a good deal of nastiness that killed any possibility of a PG-13, which is fine by me. Give me R-rated horror and beyond, not watered-down pablum that brings in the lucrative younger audience. I want my horror with teeth, goddammit, and a proper shark film must possess said dental appendages. That said, DANGEROUS ANIMALS joins my short list of quality shark flicks, a roster that includes JAWS, DEEP BLUE SEA, and the superlative THE SHALLOWS.

Poster for the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 - Day 25: MAGIC (1978)

                              "Abracadabra, I sit on his knee/Presto chango, and now he is me."

As his star rises, stage magician/ventriloquist Corky Withers (Anthony Hopkins) is offered a series of specials by a major television network, but network policy demands that he submit to a medical exam. Adamant in his refusal to be evaluated, Corky flees to where he grew up in the Catskills, and he encounters Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), whom he had a crush on during high school. She's stuck in a loveless marriage, and she and Corky become lovers while her husband is away on a business trip. It all looks rosy, but Corky's facade of normalcy periodically cracks, revealing a twitchy, short-tempered, and frighteningly volatile side, and as he slides headlong into outright unstable territory, he regularly engages in conversations with his creepily aggressive dummy, Fats, with the back and forth between them being a clear marker of his escalating insanity. When his agent (Burgess Meredith) tracks Corky to the Catskills and witnesses one of the ventriloquist's meltdowns with the dummy, he realizes Corky's reluctance to undergo the network's medical exam was due to fear over his mental state being discovered. The agent makes it clear that Corky is not mentally sound and offers to get him help, but the influence of Corky's Fats persona prompts Corky to murder the agent, and from there things only get worse when Peggy's jealous husband, Duke (Ed Lauter), returns from his business trip. Corky — as Fats — stabs Duke to death while Peggy is away in town, and he resolves to run away with Peggy to Paris, but Fats doesn't want to be left alone, so he threatens to tell everything...

Fats gets stabby.

I clearly remember TV ads for MAGIC when I was in 8th Grade, and I wanted to see it, thanks to the "Is the ventriloquist crazy, or is his dummy actually alive and homicidal" trope being a tried and true scary gut punch since at least as far back as DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), and it's an aspect of horror that many kids my age were first exposed to via reruns of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, specifically the episodes "The Dummy" and "Caesar and Me." Ventriloquist dummies in general are visually unnerving, and when deployed in a horror context, they can be downright terrifying. That's what I was hoping to get with MAGIC, but while it was well-made and packed with solid performances, I found it to be quite a tepid affair that wishes it were as hair-raising as "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" segment of DEAD OF NIGHT. Admittedly, that one's a high bar, but I was hoping that a film nearly 35 years after that British classic would bring some shattering scares in a far more permissive era of cinema. Not bad by any means, but nothing I will revisit.

                                                         Poster for the theatrical release. 

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 -Day 24: MARK OF THE WITCH (1970)

In the 1600's, a witch talks mad shit before meeting her fate at the end of a hangman's noose.

In the 1600's, in order to save his own ass a member of a coven betrays the witch who leads the group, and she is sentenced to be hanged. However. before the noose dispatches her, the witch curses her former coven colleague. 300 years later at a college book drive, a coed finds an ancient read book that's full of all manner of witchy spells and formulas, and when she reads from it at a party held by her professor of occult studies, she unwittingly summons the vengeful spirit of the witch, who promptly possesses her and sets about enacting her diabolical agenda. 

 The witch, after her 20th Century glow-up. 

Mind-controlling the occult professor — who happens to be the latest descendant of the man who sentenced the witch to hang — and the coed's boyfriend into doing her bidding and helping her blend in with the rest of the students and adjust to the 20th Century, the witch immediately embarks on a series of ritual sacrificial murders of students. The professor and boyfriend, despite being bound by her spell, work tirelessly at researching a way to break the spell and boot the witch out of the coed's body.

MARK OF THE WITCH is an obscure little zero-budget flick that bears the look and feel of a community theater one-act play. It stars no one anyone's ever heard of, features several over-the-top laughably try-hard performances, and has the air of a film about a half-decade before its release date. It's not scary at all, but it at least presents its story in earnest and doesn't wear out its welcome. (It's under 80 minutes long.) It's not bad for what it is, but witchery fans like myself will find it rather tepid, and the only reason for a witch fan to sit through it is for the sake of obsessive completism. It means well but, sadly, it will likely be forgotten not long after being seen. It's a passable enough diversion if watched on home video, but I would have been quite vexed if I had paid good money to see this during its theatrical release. When it comes to witchy yarns, ROSEMARY'S BABY it sure as hell ain't.

 Poster for the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 -Day 23: THE FACULTY (1998)

 Staying hydrated.

An Ohio high school finds itself as Ground Zero for an alien invasion by aquatic lifeforms that possess human hosts, in this case the school's students and faculty, and from there the creatures intend to spread and take over the world. Only a disparate handful of students stands in opposition, and the odds against them grow with every passing minutes. Parents and the authorities don't believe them, and pretty soon our heroes realize that the aliens have infiltrated their group. With all of that to contend with, our heroes must also figure out the identity of the queen invader and destroy it before it infests the globe.

THE FACULTY is a late-1990's take on the tried and true basic template of "alien invasion via replacement" set in stone by INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) and its remakes (the most notable being the landmark 1978 iteration), and it's a lot of lively fun. Its vibe is very much that of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER teevee series, which was super-popular at the time, only with R-rated shocks and gore thrown in for good measure. The cast, led by a pre-Frodo Elijah Wood, is engaging, and although our gaggle of mismatched heroes would be right at home on pretty much any teen show of its era, the story's teenagers are quite engaging and not obnoxious in the least.

The aliens start off as tiny aquatic creatures but the more water they absorb, the larger they become, with their forms being defined by loads of sharp teeth and masses of wiggly tentacles. One they have inhabited a human host, they can withstand outrageous amounts of what would otherwise be fatal damage, with a memorable sequence involving a possessed faculty member getting beheaded in a fiery car crash, only for her head to extend tentacles out of the gaping neck wound and crawl to its headless body, which blithely leans over, picks up its head, and reattaches it, leaving it as good as new. Just one of several moments that evoke shades of John Carpenter's game-changing remake of THE THING (1982), which I am absolutely there for.

Shades of THE THING.

 

It's a welcome throwback to old school cre4ature features, with the benefit of advanced practical and digital effects, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as an entry-level shocker for tweens. 

 

The queen invader.

I went to see THE FACULTY on opening weekend, but it wasn't until it hit home video that I saw the film uninterrupted from start to finish. What happened was that it was playing at a crappy hole in the wall theater on Flatbush Avenue, a theater known for its low-rent ambience, and as my friend John and I sat there among opening weekend attendees, about fifteen minutes into the film, the movie abruptly stopped, the screen went blank, and sounds of some sort of a kerfluffle could be heard from the projection booth. After a few minutes, the obviously stoned projectionist addressed the audience, noting technical difficulties, but he promised to have the film repaired in just a little while, so he beseeched us for patience. Another ten or fifteen minutes passed with no results, but the projectionist addressed us again, once more assuring us that he was working on sorting the problem. Another fifteen minutes passed, and by that point the audience was getting restless, with some even giving up and walking out. Finally, the projectionist (shamelessly reeking of weed) came down again and sheepishly admitted defeat, then he directed us to hit the box office for a full refund, which we all did. A memorable moviegoing experience, to say the least.

Poster for the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 - Day 22: TENTACLES (1977)

Shark...giant octopus... Who'll know the difference?

 

When JAWS opened in 1975 to unprecedented worldwide box office success, arguably becoming the first summer blockbuster in the process, a deluge of international copycats was inevitable, and of course Italy,  perhaps the world leader in cinematic ripoffs (slightly edging out Turkey and Japan), contributed a few notable and utterly shameless examples, with GREAT WHITE, aka THE LAST SHARK (1980), getting my vote as the most hilariously brazen of the first wave JAWS clones, but arriving two years after Spielberg's landmark was this stultifyingly dull cinematic sedative.

 

Easily the film's most memorable scene. Was this meant to elicit laughs?
 

As expected, TENTACLES takes the basic JAWS template, swaps out a Great White shark for an humongous cephalopod, and mayhem and gory deaths do not ensue. What we get instead are a number of victims disappearing with little or no visceral action, and the few times we see a full-scale animatronic of the colossal sea monster, it's in the dark and barely visible, basically because the puppet, much like Spielberg's mechanical shark infamously did during filming, sank. 

 

One of the film's few shots where you get anything even close to a good look at the monster.

 

To remedy this, the filmmakers instead resorted to using a living octopus that they shot from closeup, which at no point works to make the creature look monstrously massive. Instead it looks like footage from a cheap 16mm reel that one might be forced to sit through in a junior high school biology class. Oh, and the octopus is defeated at the end by a pair of highly trained orcas, but it's too little too late. Meanwhile, the moviegoing audience has found itself lulled into a torpor.

 

TENTACLES also features several American actors, some of impressive pedigree, and utterly squanders them. We get Shelley Winters, Claude Akins, John Huston, Bo Hopkins, and Henry Fonda (who was only available for one day of shooting because he was recovering from recently having a pacemaker installed), and at no point will you care about any of their characters. Each pretty much sleepwalks through their roles, to vary degrees, and by the time the film reaches its overdue climax, it's more than clear that this was just a paycheck for the Americans who were involved. 

 

Bottom line: If you must watch a JAWS ripoff, I recommend THE LAST SHARK instead. Sure, it has its dull patches, but it sports a ludicrous giant animatronic shark and some hilarious kills. With TENTACLES you get bubkes.

 

Poster for the American theatrical release. The poster is more scarier and more exciting than anything found in the actual film.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 - Day 21: QUEEN OF THE DAMNED (2002)

Akasha (Aliyah), the titular queen of the damned, on the loose after millennia.

This adaptation of the third novel in Anne Rice's genre-redefining VAMPIRE CHRONICLES is widely and not unfairly lambasted as squandering the source novel's rich material, as it alters and/or dumbs down what was my favorite in the series after the superlative INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE. Seriously, the novel is a superb and highly entertaining sequel with multiple subplots and a legion of fascinating characters, some introduced in this novel and who return in subsequent installments and spinoff series, so there was no way to cram so much into a film with a run time of less than two hours, so a lot was sacrificed, and I do mean a lot. The end result is pretty much just a hollow shell of Rice's story that I have to admit I did not hate. Having loved the book and also being fully cognizant of everything that was excised for the screen, I was entertained by seeing familiar characters, but at the end I was saddened to think of what it could have been if it had been split up into two or three films to tell the fully fleshed-out tale. It also didn't help that the second book in the series — and also arguably the most wildly popular entry — THE VAMPIRE LESTAT, was never adapted. That's a problem, because that book retcons the events of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE and sets up everything going forward. In other words, with this film it's like being dropped into a detail-rich serial that's already in progress and we missed the important second chapter. And, perhaps most egregiously for longtime fans of the books, the film goes out of its way to pull a massive "no homo" when it comes to Lestat and his romantic entanglements. One of the key selling points of the novels is their in-your-face homoerotic content, and there is no trace whatsoever of that here. Anyway, here's more or less what you get with the film:

                                                     The vampire Lestat (Stuart Townsend).

 Lestat (Stuart Townsend), the self-absorbed vampire hero of the chronicles, rises from a long slumber, awakened by the intriguing sounds of 20th Century rock music, installs himself as the front man for the band that awakened him, and re-crafts their content to reveal the ancient secrets of the vampire species in song. In short order, Lestat and his band have taken the world by storm, and when. they announce a massive outdoor concert, vampires from all over the world plan on converging there with plans to assassinate Lestat foremost in their minds. Vampires thrive on humans not believing they are real, so Lestat flaunting what he is on an international scale simply cannot be allowed. Meanwhile, Lestat is being pursued by a fascinated member of an international society of observers of the supernatural, but what is her agenda? And let us not forget that at one point Lestat finds himself in the tomb/throne room of Akasha (Aliyah) and Enkil, an ancient Egyptian queen and king who have existed as living, unmoving statues for millennia, and Akasha is awakened by Lestat's violin playing in the throne room. The pair were the world's first vampires, and their very involved back story is pretty much completely ignored, along with the stories of some other important characters in the novel, and more's the pity, but once revived, Akasha seeks Lestat with a mind to make him her new king. Everything comes to a head at the big concert and much mayhem ensues. By the end, Lestat has gained godlike levels of vampiric power, after which he wanders off with the paranormal observer, who is now a newly-minted vampire.

                                                                           "NO HOMO!!!"

When it comes to adaptations of Anne Rice's works, I greatly enjoyed the film of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, even with the odd casting choice of Tom Cruise as Lestat, but I must say that I prefer Stuart Townsend as Lestat. He looks pretty much like I pictured the character when reading him, and his look and performance in the part didn't take me out of the movie like Tom Cruise did. (I got used to Cruise in the role, but Townsend is better.) 

Like I said, I did not hate it and I was entertained, but so much was lost in translation to the screen, including a sub-plot involving a young vampire named baby Jenks, and a detailed and utterly savage origin of vampirism, an explanation I never knew I wanted, but what the novel gave me in that department was riveting and memorable, and its loss is a goddamned shame. If anything, sitting through the movie makes me want to dig out my first edition hardcover of the novel (I bought and read it when it first came out) and reread it. I urge you to do likewise.

Poster for the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2025 - Day 20: THE HYPNOTIC EYE (1960)

Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) commands the audience to look into the hypnotic eye.

A string of eleven horrifying self-mutilations by women is investigated by Detective Sergeant (Joe Patridge) and his psychiatrist buddy Dr. Philip Hecht (Guy Prescott), with the meager clues pointing toward Desmond (Jacques Bergerac), a stage hypnotist. Using his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) as bait, the detective soon unravels the mystery with the trail taking some very dark turns indeed, inclduing a very much hypnotized Marcia falling into the clutches of the hypnotist, but is Desmond the true mastermind behind the mutilations? And if not, then who is, and what is their twisted motivation?

Released the same year as PSYCHO and PEEPING TOM, THE HYPNOTIC EYE is a more humble, less impactful shocker, but it's still pretty dark and sick for its era. I first heard of it somewhere around 1986, when I saw the bad movie documentary IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD (1982) late one night on cable, when its intriguing trailer was included among a slew of clips from notable examples of terrible cinema, and I only just got around to finally seeing it for myself. It was worth the wait.

The film opens with a hypnotized woman returning home from a Desmond performance, drenching her hair in a flammable substance thinking it's shampoo, and setting her head on fire with the burner on her apartment's stove. 

The film's horrifying opening shock.

The film opens abruptly with this, and when I realized what was about to happen, I let out a spontaneous "HOLY SHIT!!!" The effect is rather cheesy, but it's shocking nonetheless, and it must have been quite a jolt for audiences sixty-five years ago. And though we are told of mutilations involving a woman drinking lye, one obliviously washing her face with pure sulfuric acid, another stuffing her face into the spinning blades of a fan (thinking it was some kind of face massager), one slashing up her face with a straight razor while believing it was a makeup pen, and yet another who gouged out her eyes, we thankfully do not witness those dire events, as they likely would have been too much for the 1960 audience, plus to say nothing of the censors.

Clocking in at a brisk 79 minutes, THE HYPNOTIC EYE has little fat on it — the lone bit of filler is a performance by Desmond during the final act, but it serves the climax — gets right to the point, the plot moves at a lively pace, and it concludes in a satisfying manner without wearing out its welcome. Now largely forgotten, especially in the wake of its two game-changing contemporaries, THE HYPNOTIC EYE is worthy of rediscovery, and its sleazier aspects would make it a good double-feature with THE THING THAT COULDN'T DIE (1958).  

                                                       Poster from the theatrical release.