New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Dreamscape (1984)
Who: Dennis Quaid, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, David Patrick Kelly, Kate Capshaw, George Wendt, Redmond Gleeson
What: Quaid plays a psychic prodigy, who, with the help of think tank researchers (von Sydow and Capshaw), learns how to enter the minds of others during REM sleep. A novelist (Wendt) reveals that the scientific study is actually a dirty program run by the CIA. Quaid's character then faces threats from both real-world persons as well as the monsters created in the minds of the sleeping persons he links to.
Availability: DVD, online on demand, and Netflix streaming
Why: The most memorable part of the movie for me was Quaid's battle with a snake-headed monster. A little boy has been having nightmares so terrible that Quaid's predecessor went crazy trying to link to his mind. The snake monster in this movie gave me reoccurring nightmares for years. Think of this movie like Flatliners meets The Cell meets Insidious meets Inception. Wikipedia reports that this was the second movie ever released with the new PG-13 rating.

Night of the Creeps (1986)
Who: Jason Lively, Tom Atkins, Jill Whitlow, David Paymer, director Fred Dekker
What: Lively plays a college kid who wants to join a fraternity. He's instructed by the frat to steal a corpse, which he does, not realizing it contains a brain-eating parasite that thaws out, spreads, and infects the campus and townspeople, turning them into zombies.
Availability: DVD and online on demand
Why: This movie is shot kind of the style of 1950s teen horror movies; it reminds me of Animal House that way. The slimy parasites do a good job of triggering that "bugs, gross" instinct. One of my favorite elements of the movie is the hardboiled detective (Atkins) investigating the initial deaths, who uses the catchphrase "Thrill me." whenever he answers his radio or phone. Dekker wrote the story to House (above), and later worked on The Monster Squad, Tales From the Crypt, and RoboCop 3. Most of the characters are named in an homage to famous horror movie directors and writers.

Critters (1986)
Who: Dee Wallace Stone, M. Emmet Walsh, Billy Green Bush, Scott Grimes, Billy Zane, Terrence Mann
What: Small, furball aliens land in a small town. They look cute but in fact sport sharp teeth and will eat anything (including humans) around. This might be the typical horror threat, but here come some alien bounty hunters (Mann) who try to stop the Critters from spreading, but it's hard for the townspeople to know who's the enemy when the shooting starts.
Availability: DVD and online on demand
Why: You can see this as a Gremlins clone (which apparently the producers dispute) because of the cute-to-dangerous aliens, but it brings into play the the third-party alien to make the story more interesting. It's a fun comedy-horror action movie rated PG-13. The movie was followed by three sequels.





Once Bitten (1985)
Who: Lauren Hutton, Jim Carrey, Karen Kopins
What: Carrey plays a regular guy who becomes the target of a vampire countess because she needs the blood of a virgin to stay young. Carrey's biggest problem up to that point is just trying to get his girlfriend (Kopins) in bed.
Availability: DVD
Why: Jim Carrey hit it big in 1994 with Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb & Dumber. He'd had some notoriety prior to that by appearing on In Living Color, but some of his fans might not realize he had appeared in half a dozen movies in the '80s, including two with Clint Eastwood. Once Bitten is probably the most comedic of all the picks here, both for Carrey's antics, Hutton's sultry advances, and her disaffected assistant's side comments. Basically a fun mashup of teen hormones with vampire 'horror'. Kopins might be recognizable for playing Kay Lloyd in the original Dallas TV series. I would have liked to have seen her in more movies.

Cat's Eye (1985)
Who: Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, writer Stephen King
What: A Stephen King tale combining three stories - a man trying to quit smoking resorts to a company that uses extreme tactics to help him, a troll that tries to steal a young girl's breath while she sleeps, and a millionaire who makes the lover of his cheating wife walk a ledge - all tied together by a mysterious cat.
Availability: DVD and online on demand
Why: There are a number of Stephen King projects that would probably be listed first on more mainstream lists, but Cat's Eye is my favorite. ("Stephen King's It" freaked me out so much I didn't even want to profile the miniseries - it's surely the source of many people's fears of clowns). My favorite segment is when James Woods is trying to quit smoking, and the program he enters is ruthless enough to threaten his wife and enter his home in order to get a successful result. Maybe a good horror story in light of recent national healthcare developments.


Happy Halloween!

Continued:       1       2       3