Show Review: Van Morrison – Vienna, Austria (12/29/01)

Van Morrison
2001-12-29
Museumsquartier – Vienna, Austria

01 – Inarticulate Speech Of The Heart #1
02 – Celtic Swing
03 – Whatever Happened To PJ Proby
04 – Meet Me In The Indian Summer
05 – Naked In The Jungle
06 – Days Like This
07 – Have I Told You Lately
08 – Satisfied
09 – In The Afternoon > Ancient Highway > Joe Turner Sings > Louis Prima Sings > Raincheck > Hamlet
10 – Stop Drinking
11 – Jackie Wilson Said
12 – Jump Jive And Wail
13 – And The Healing Has Begun
14 – All Work And No Play
15 – It’s All in the Game>You Know What They’re Writing About>Rainbow 65>Make It Real One More Time
16 – Star Of The County Down
17 – Brown Eyed Girl
18 – Gloria

Comment: 1h35m

Lineup: Richard Dunn, Ned Edwards, Lee Goodall, Matt Holland, Pete Hurley, Bobby Irwin, Martin Winning

Guest: Candy Dulfer

Lineage: ? > CD trade > EAC > FLAC > SBE check > you

The Midnight Cafe Review

I’ve posted a Youtube clip of this show and more over at my Substack.

Several reviews ago, I noted that my reviews come slowly because I just don’t have that much time to listen. I do my best listening in my car to and from work. I do listen at home, but usually when I’m doing something else and thus not paying close attention. This means it usually takes me the better part of a week to listen to an entire show.

Well, I’m getting better at listening but worse at writing. I don’t know if I’m riding around more for work, or more likely I’m not letting myself pause the music for any reason. Often, when I have something on my mind, I’ll talk it out to myself (and yes, I really do talk to myself). Usually, when I do that, I’ll stop the music because I know I won’t be paying attention. But for the last couple of weeks, I’ve forced myself to listen and not talk.

I now have a couple of shows fully listened to with notes, but I haven’t taken the time to review. If I get good at this, I might get two or three reviews in a week, which would be cool.

In my last Neil Young review, I complained about crowd noise. For that recording, there were a few folks talking rather loudly through the entire show. And the mics picked them up. For this recording, there is still some crowd noise, and it has that typical audience reverberation where it sounds like the show is happening in the next room, but I can’t hear any specific people talking (except for the occasional shout). I don’t know why that is. I do know there are directional mics that are designed to only hear sounds coming from one direction, which should help cut out crowd noise from around the microphone (except from directly in front, I guess).

Is that what happened on the Neil show? Were the talkers directly in front of the mics? Or did the taper have bad mics? Or maybe this crowd at the Van show was less talkative? I don’t understand any of that. Maybe our good friend OldNeumanntapr can explain the details. His recordings always sound wonderful.

The show begins with two instrumentals. Van apparently doesn’t come out until after “Inarticulate Speech of the Heart #1” as he gets announced just before “Celtic Swing.” “Whatever Happened To PJ Proby” and “Meet Me In the Indian Summer” are well played. They are very mellow and laid-back.

“Naked in the Jungle” is killer. Big jams, high energy. The audience recording doesn’t do it justice. He’ll do this several times throughout the night – play a couple of laid-back, mellow, or soulful songs and then just absolutely let loose.

“Days Like This” is very good. “Have I Told You Lately” is very jazzy. “Satisfied” has a great little groove. The whole show is very well played. The band and Van are syncing really well. “Jackie Wilson Said” is big and jazzy.

“Jump Jive and Wail” is fine. It is one of those songs that was probably a lot of fun to listen to if you were in the audience, but on tape you lose some of that energy. But it’s perfectly fine.

“And the Healing Has Begun” is gorgeous. So soulful. In the middle, there is this section where the strings solo for a bit, then the guitar, then the piano all get solos, and it’s just wonderful. Sometimes when they trade solos like that, it gets a little tedious, but here it works. Then they come together to create a wonderful groove. You know Van is into it because he does his whole “Digga Digga Dig” thing.

“All Work and No Play” is light and jazzy. It makes for quite a contrast to the soulfulness of “And the Healing Has Begun.” “It’s All in the Game” is wonderful, then he slips into a medley of several songs. All of which are sung very soulfully, but they wind up taking away from the beauty of “It’s All in the Game.”

“Brown Eyed Girl” is spirited. Van’s voice is in such fine form here. “Gloria” has some great sax from Candy Dulfer and a fun little outro. I’m thinking Dulfer being present all night added to that jazzy feeling I keep mentioning on several songs.

This really is a great show. The sound is quite good, and the performance is wonderful.

31 Days of Horror: The Conjuring 2 (2016)

The Conjuirng 2

I often lie in bed at night thinking about a movie I just watched. I’ll think about the things I want to say about it and mentally compose a review. Normally, the next day I’ll sit down and actually write that review. Every now and again, I’ll wake up thinking that I actually did write the review instead of just thinking about it. This is one such occasion. I would have sworn I wrote and posted a review to The Conjuring 2, but no such luck. It has now been a couple of weeks since I watched the movie, so my memory of it has faded a bit. Normally, I’d just let it go and not write a review, but I made a promise that I’d review all the Conjuring films this scary season, so here goes (being that it is October 24 and I haven’t watched the two other films in the main series, I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to keep the promise, but I’ll try).

The first time I watched this sequel, I was disappointed. It wasn’t nearly as scary as the first one, and the family being haunted wasn’t nearly as interesting or well developed. But on this watch, my appreciation grew.

Plot-wise, this film is very similar to the first one. It begins with a story that is mostly unrelated to the main plot. This one begins with the haunting at Amityville. That’s an interesting choice, for before these films, the Warrens were best known for participating in The Amityville Horror. But that story has been told a couple of times before, and in truth, the Warrens didn’t show up until after the Lutz family had split. So here we get just a bit of a séance and indications that the horrors of that house are some of the most intense the Warrens have ever dealt with (that will be a recurring theme with these films, every story is the most crazy story they ever experienced.) Also, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) gets a vision of an evil nun.

Later, Ed (Patrick Wilson) will get some visions of that same nun and will paint a horrifying picture of her (one that he’ll hang in his office for some reason). The Nun will, of course, be the antagonist of a series of sidequal films. We’ll see more of her in the Warrens’ part of this film before they meet up with our family.

That family is the Hodgsons, led by Peggy (Frances O’Connor ) and her four children. They live near London in a rundown house. The oldest girl, Janet (Madison Wolfe), plays with an Ouija board and accidentally summons a demon. We get the same sort of jump scares as in the first one, though they amp them up a bit here. There are a variety of demons at play in this one, including an old man, The Crooked Man, and something else. Like most sequels, everything gets jacked up a bit.

But this time I found the slower parts with the Hodgson family to be good. They are a kind, working-class family just trying to get by. The father left some time ago, and Peggy is struggling to keep everything afloat. There are some nice character moments with the children and we get a real sense of who they are as a family before all hell breaks loose. I was less enthused about what the Warrens are up to at home. The nun stuff has some good scares, but isn’t all that interesting (and definitely doesn’t make me want to watch those films). And I’m already growing tired of them wrestling with whether or not they should continue this line of work. Here, Lorraine has visions of Ed being killed, and so she doesn’t want to take the case, but of course they take the case because there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. I don’t need that constant drama.

Once the two families get together, the scares get crazy. But like the first film, they are dolled out slowly at first. The two families get to know each other. WE once again see how kind and loving the Warrens are. Ed will help fix a leaking pipe, etc. All of that stuff works for me. I like the smaller scene and the smaller horror. Once things reach a fever pitch it starts to fell like so many other horror movies at the end.

It isn’t quite as good as the first film, but I’m still on board with this franchise.

The Friday NIght Horror Movie: I, Madman (1989)

I Madman (1989)

Virginia Clayton (Jenny Wright) is an aspiring actress who works at a used bookstore. She likes horror novels, and one night she scares herself while reading an obscure book by the deceased author Malcolm Brand. She calls her detective boyfriend, Richard (Clayton Rohner), over to comfort her and have a little sexy time. While the book did scare her, she liked it and attempts to find the only other book Brand wrote, I Madman. She has no luck finding it for herself, but one night it shows up on her doorstep.

The book is about a crazed man who decides the best way to express his passion for the woman he loves is to cut off his ears, nose, and lips. When she rejects him, he begins murdering people to get those body parts back. His first victim is an actress whom he stalks, murders, and cuts her hair off.

Back in reality, a woman in Virginia’s acting class has been brutally murdered; her hair was cut off. Virginia becomes obsessed with the book and believes the killer to be its author. He has come back to life and is enacting the murders he wrote about. She begins seeing him on the street. She thinks he believes she is the girl from the book that he was obsessed with.

Meanwhile, more folks are getting killed and facially mutilated just like in the book. When she witnesses one murder that happens across the street from her apartment, she calls the police. She tells her boyfriend everything. At first, they are excited to have a witness, but when she starts talking about characters jumping out of a book, they think she’s crazy. The film plays it close to the vest for a while as to whether or not she is crazy, or if this madman has come to life.

I’ve watched quite a few dumb horror movies lately. Movies that felt like the filmmakers were searching for a quick buck rather than any sort of artistic vision. Movies that give the audience some gore and boobs and call it a day. That might have caused me to rate this one a little higher than it perhaps deserves. I really appreciated that I, Madman was actually trying to make an interesting movie. It put in an effort.

I do, genuinely, think it is a good movie. Director Tibor Takács, fresh off making his cult classic The Gate, infuses the film with a wonderful sense of dread. We spend a lot of time in Virginia’s (really quite spacious) apartment, lit with nothing but lamps, giving it a cavernous feel full of shadows. He blends fiction with reality, creating an eerie dreamscape. Jenny Wright is quite good as Virginia, giving her an innocent quality that makes her feel quite vulnerable.

It isn’t a perfect film. The ending is a little silly, and Takács falls back on some of the special effects he used in The Gate. But I came to this knowing absolutely nothing about it, and I came away more than pleasantly surprised.

The Complete Kubrick is the Pick of the Week

cc The Complete Kubrick

A little late with this, but Criterion has just released a massive Stanley Kubrick boxed set that looks amazing. Right after it came out, they did a little 24-hour flash sale, and the sucker sold out. Not permanently; they will make more, but that’s pretty amazing. It is rightfully my pick of the week, though honestly it is a little more expensive than I can justify purchasing at the moment. Maybe on the next sale I can find some coupons. You can read about it and everything else coming out this week over at Cinema Sentries.

31 Days of Horror: Friday the 13th (1980)

Friday the 13th

I’ve talked before about how I grew up in the 1980s watching slashers. Though I watched all the horror movies I could get my hands on it was the Friday the 13th series that really did it for me. I wasn’t old enough to watch them in the theater, and my parents certainly wouldn’t rent them for me so I had to watch them on basic cable. Luckily, those films were played pretty regularly. Every Friday the 13th the USA network would play two or three of them, and other stations would randomly put them on for their late-night viewings.

As such, I watched them both edited and out of order. I really don’t know if I saw them all as a teenager. I know I watched the one where Corey Feldman shaves his head, the third one with the terrible 3-D effects, and Jason Takes Manhattan. I think I saw the first one at some point, but I feel like cable stations didn’t play that one all that often, as Jason isn’t actually in it and he became the main attraction.

I remember watching Scream in college, and when Drew Barrymore answered the killer’s question about who the main bad guy in Friday the 13th was, I answered “Jason Voorhees” along with her and was surprised when that was the wrong answer. I can’t remember now if I then remembered it was his mother in the first film that was the killer, or if it came as a surprise because I had not yet seen the film. I definitely watched it soon after.

A good ten years later, not long after I got married, Wal-Mart was selling the films as DVDs for five bucks a piece. I bought the first three, with plans on watching them and then buying the others later. I remember watching the first film and thinking it was really bad. By that point I had discovered the horror films of the Italians and Japanese and watched a whole lot of other horror films. Slashers seemed kind of old hat by then. Boring and derivative. I was also a bit more of a cinephile, and so Friday the 13th just seemed like an excuse to show tits and blood on screen and little else.

Another couple of decades have passed, and I find myself back to being able to enjoy them (I reviewed the first eight films over at Cinema Sentries). With a new Peacock series, Crystal Lake, which brings us the backstory of Jason and Mrs. Voorhees, I decided to revisit the first film.

It is amazing how slow this film is to get started. We do get a kill in the first ten minutes – a flashback to 1957 sits with a happy sing-along at Camp Crystal Lake; a horny couple slips off to get sexy, only to wind up murdered. Then we move back to the present. The camp was closed a few years back when a young boy drowned, but now they plan to reopen it. Annie (Robbi Morgan), the camp’s new cook, is hitchhiking her way to camp. She comes into the nearby town and asks around about how to get there. She’s met with stares and mean glares. She shouldn’t go to “Camp Blood,” they say. A crazy man warns her that she’ll die if she does. Eventually, a trucker agrees to take her close to the camp. On the way, he warns her of the camp’s terrible past. He drops her off at a crossroads where she’s picked up by an unknown person in a Jeep. She gets herself dead.

But then we go a long time before another murder happens. We meet the rest of the counselors. They do some work around the camp. They swim in the lake and generally clown around. Some of them (including a young Kevin Bacon) get sexy with each other, while others play strip Monopoly. It is all fairly tame and rather silly. It is kind of a hang-out movie for a while.

Then the killings begin proper. None of them are particularly memorable. There are some cut throats and a pretty gruesome arrow through the neck, but the later films will do a much better job of bringing the kills. The reveal that it is Jason’s mother (Betsy Palmer) who is the killer comes out of left field. Jason is barely mentioned in the film. There are a couple of lines explaining how the counselors weren’t very attentive, and Jason drowned accidentally, but the film doesn’t make a big deal out of it. His mother is barely mentioned at all. Then, all of a sudden, there she is as the killer. It’s funny, too, because she’s an older-looking, middle-aged woman with short hair and a church lady sweater. She looks nothing like a killer. But Palmer’s unhinged performance absolutely sells it.

It is curious to realize that this film launched a massive horror franchise. It’s not a bad film; I find myself quite liking it (though I can’t really remove all the nostalgia from my mind while watching it now). But I can’t say that it is better or more interesting than any number of other slashers that came out at the same time. We don’t even get Jason in a hockey mask in this one (Jason wouldn’t really show up until the next film, and it would take the third one before the hockey mask shows up.)

But it made a lot of money and spawned sequels, and here I am talking about it some forty years later.

Show Review: Jerry Garcia Band – Santa Cruz, CA (02/02/82)

Jerry Garcia Band
The Catalyst
Santa Cruz, CA
1982-02-02

Set 1

01 How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)
02 Catfish John
03 Let It Rock
04 Simple Twist Of Fate
05 I Second That Emotion

Total time: 54:51

Set 2

01 I’ll Take A Melody
02 (I’m A) Road Runner
03 Russian Lullaby
04 Valerie
05 Tangled Up In Blue

Jerry Garcia – electric guitar, vocals
Bill Kreutzmann – drums
Jimmy Warren – keyboards
John Kahn – electric bass
Julie Stafford – vocals
Liz Stires – vocals
Melvin Seals – keyboards

Originally posted on my Substack, where you’ll get even more info, posters, and music.

The Midnight Cafe Review.

After our last show in San Francisco on January 13, Jerry Garcia took a couple of weeks off from playing in front of a live audience, but did spend at least five days in the Grateful Dead’s studio working on what would ultimately be his last studio album as a solo artist, Run for the Roses. He’d spend the rest of February and March playing gigs with the Jerry Garcia band all over California (and one gig in Reno) before heading out on the Spring Tour with the Grateful Dead.

At this point, the band consisted of two keyboard players: Melvin Seals and Jimmy Warren. They were a duo with the band from early 1981 until Warren left in the summer of 1982. Melvin Seals, of course, was around until the end, and he continues to play in the JGB band as a tribute to Garcia.

This show is the first time I’ve really paid attention to the duelling keyboards. I’m guessing I’ve listened to some shows with them from 1981, and I certainly listened to the two shows from earlier in 1982. With those shows, I definitely noticed there were a couple of different keyboards being played, but I don’t think I could ever hear them played at the same time and just assumed it was Seals playing two different keyboards. Which is dumb, I know, especially since I listed the band members. No one ever said I was a very smart listener.

But here you can really distinguish the playing, and they are both awesome. You’ll hear that a lot in this review.

They get things rocking with a nice “How Sweet It Is.” There is some nice interplay between Jerry and the keyboards. For part of “Catfish John,” Jerry guitar tone sounds different, almost like a steel drum. There is lots of great jamming.

“Let It Rock” rumbles on for nine minutes, and it feels like just one long groove. Garcia gets in some great solos with the band interplaying underneath him. “Simple Twist of Fate” is fine, nothing spectacular, and it ends on a long, pointless bass solo.

“I Second That Emotion” is killer. I love that song, and it’s got some terrific energy here with the whole band on point. Great way to end the set.

“I’ll Take a Melody” begins pretty lifeless, but between the verses, Jerry revs things up, and the band kicks right in. It is a short burst, and things settle back down for the next verse, but once it is over, Jerry jumps right back in, and the band follows. It is interesting to see how very much Jerry is the leader of this band and the rest of them follow his example.

I’m not much of a fan of “Russian Lullaby”; it is too slow for me, and the lyrics don’t prick my ears. This version is quite good. Probably not good enough that I won’t skip it the next time I listen to this show, but it is better than a lot of the versions I’ve heard. Jerry’s throws in some nice licks, and John Kahn does a hot solo that gets the audience screaming and clapping.

“Valerie” is another song I don’t love, but this version is energetic. “Tangled Up In Blue” is a fantastic closing song with some really great playing by everyone.

Overall, this is a very good show. Completely enjoyed it.

Jerrybase lists six sources for this show. I listened to SHNID 110350, which is an excellent audience recording. There is a soundboard recording of the second set, but I found that one of the keyboards was way too high in the mix – drowning out Garcia’s guitar and making it unlistenable to my ears.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Tingler (1959)

William Castle was one of the great B-movie showmen. His movies often came with gimmicks. For The Tingler, he set up certain seats with a vibrating device that was set to go off at certain times in the movie, giving the audience a real jolt.

The movie itself is goofy and wild and wonderfully fun.

Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, because of course he’s played by Vincent Price) is a pathologist who has become obsessed with fear. He’s been autopsying the corpses of folks executed by the state, and he believes that the tingling in your spine when you are afraid is caused by some kind of creature – a parasite living in your spine. He calls this thing the tingler.

Chapin believes that the only way to stop this parasite from paralyzing and even killing you from fear is to scream.

One day he meets Ollie (Philip Coolidge), a nice man who runs a silent movie house with his deaf and mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn). Chapin is fascinated by Martha, for she cannot scream, and thus she cannot tame her tingler.

Meanwhile, Chapin has a wife named Isabelle (Patricia Cutts). Theres is an unhappy marriage, to put it mildly. She openly cheats on him. She has dates every night. She brings men home when she thinks he is working, and makes out with them in the driveway when she thinks he’s home.

But she’s not really portrayed as a homewrecker or shrew. She’s just tired of being alone. He is obsessed with his work. He never wants to go out. He doesn’t like socializing. He falls asleep at the opera. When her sister falls in love with Chapin’s assistant, she refuses to let them marry. Her reasons are that she doesn’t want her to have the same fate with a husband who is never around.

None of this is all that interesting. In some ways, it seems like just something to wrap around the whole tingler concept. The story needed some padding. But it is also kind of thematically interesting. We’ve seen lots of movies where the husband is too busy with his job to pay attention to his wife, but this is so open about it. Her infidelities are spelled out, which seems strange in a movie from 1959.

Chapin never seems all that bothered by it. He truly is too obsessed with his work to care about anything else. At one point, he does seem to break. Not over her cheating on him, but over her not wanting the sister to get married. He threatens Isabelle and even brandishes a weapon, but once again all of this is actually in service to his work. He wants to see what the fear of being murdered will do to her.

His obsessions seem to be taking him over the edge. He seems more willing to do anything to actually discover the tingler. At one point, he drops some acid to fool his body into absolute terror so he can measure the feelings for himself.

He visits Matha again, ostensibly out of concern for her health. You see she fainted the first time he visited her because he cut his finger and the sight of blood terrifies her. Or rather, she didn’t faint, but because she cannot scream and thus exorcise her tingler, her body just completely shut down. He wonders that there could be such an extreme circumstance that she would literally be frightened to death.

Then that’s exactly what happens. On his second visit, he gives her some sort of shot to calm her nerves. Then he leaves. But sometime later, someone wearing a creepy mask comes in and threatens her with a knife. Doors slam shut. A bathtub is filled with blood (and Castle makes great use of color in this scene – the movie is in black and white, but the blood is bright red)

She literally dies of fright.

Not knowing what to do, her husband takes the corpse to Chapin, who begins an autopsy of her and discovers the tingler! It is a magnificent, creepy-crawly rubber thing pulled around by strings and wires.

Eventually it will escape and find its way into Ollie’s silent theater. And here we get back to William Castle being a great showman. At one point, the screen fades to black, and Vincent Price tells the audience about the monster and that they must scream to kill it. No doubt the real audience was feeling those vibrations at the time.

Castle actually introduces the film, warning the audience that we might feel a tingling sensation while watching the movie. He gives us permission to scream with abandon.

This isn’t by any means a great film, but it is a wonderful B-movie.

31 Days of Horror: Halloween II (1981)

I have always thought that John Carpenter directed Halloween II. Up until today, I would have told you that he didn’t want to direct it, but after the massive success of the first one, he was told by the studio, the producers, or some such higher-up that they were going to make a sequel with or without him, and he decided it would be best if it was with him.

Turns out I was wrong on the first part, and the second part I guess I just made up. It is true that Carpenter didn’t really want there to be a sequel, had no interest in making one, but was pressured into making it. But he was never given an ultimatum, and he never agreed to direct. That job fell to Rick Rosenthal. Carpenter did write the script, along with the original film’s co-writer Debra Hill. He was also a producer and, depending on who you believe, Carpenter either came in during the filming stage and directed a few scenes himself, or had a large hand in post-production, adding in some extra violence and gore.

It is easy to see why I believed this was a John Carpenter film. His name is featured prominently in the credits (I guess I always overlook the Directed By card), he did write and produce this one (he basically completely bowed out of all the other films featuring Michael Myers after this – he did produce Halloween III, but Myers isn’t in that one), and this looks and feels like a John Carpenter film. That feeling is helped by the plot of this one taking place immediately after the original one; it stars most of the same cast and utilizes the same cinematographer, and Rosenthal has stated he intentionally mimicked Carpenter’s style in the first film.

This one gets a lot of hate in certain corners of the internet (and I now wonder if that isn’t because it was helmed by Rosenthal and not Carpenter), but I unabashedly love it. True, it isn’t as good as the first one, but it looks fantastic, has some great deaths, and the hospital setting is terrific.

It really does begin just as the original ends. Actually, it begins a couple of minutes into the ending of the first one. We revisit Michael Myers getting “killed” by Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), but from a slightly different perspective. Then we watch him walk away.

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to the hospital with some cuts and bruises and a pretty banged-up leg. Weirdly, Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t have a whole lot of screen time in this film. She’ll spend the first half of it basically lying in a hospital bed. She gets plenty of action in the back half, though. But first, we’ll spend time with various nurses and staff members of the hospital. They will mostly become cannon fodder for Michael Myers.

Myers will spend that first half of the film wandering around the town of Haddonfield, randomly killing folks. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers) will do a poor job of hunting him down. Eventually, Myers will hear someone say something about how Laurie was sent to the hospital, and he’ll head that way. It all leads to a long showdown between Laurie, Loomis, and Michael Myers.

The stuff in the town is fine. There are some good kills, and it helps build tension to the hospital showdown. Pleasence plays Loomis even more hysterically than he does in the first. Having shot the man multiple times at the end of the first film, he’s now more sure than ever that Michael Myers is not human but something like a demon.

The hospital stuff is well done, if a little silly at times. One of the nurses, after getting yelled at for being late, decides to slip off with a boy to the lower decks, where there is some kind of therapeutic hot tub where she gets sexy (and dead). It always drives me a little crazy when hospital lights are turned off or dimmed. Sure, you can turn your room lights off, but hospitals are notoriously bright. They have to be. Doctors, nurses, and staff can’t function if they can’t see. But yeah, it makes the movie a lot moodier.

Those long hallways are used effectively, and Michael Myers still has a way of popping into a scene seemingly out of nowhere. I’d argue that Halloween is not only one of the greatest horror movies, but is a great movie on its own merits. Halloween II is a great slasher, but not a particularly good movie.

Still, I love it so.

31 Days of Horror: Sweet Sixteen (1982)

At the heart of this relatively obscure, early 1980s slasher is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell), a teenager and daughter of the town’s sheriff (Bo Hopkins). She’s bright, outgoing, and a bit of a detective herself. When Sheriff Burke comes across a murder scene, she is with him. But she doesn’t recoil from it; she’s enthralled. She gives her Dad ideas on how to best investigate. He calls her Nancy Drew and tries to keep her away from the gore.

The scenes with her are delightful. I could watch a whole movie of her and her dad solving crimes in this small town. But this isn’t a fun little mystery movie; this is a slasher horror, so of course we don’t stick with those two.

It is Melissa Morgan (Aleisa Shirley) who is our protagonist. She’s the fifteen-year-old who thinks of herself as much older and wiser than the kid she really is. She’s also new to town; her father has moved her there for some kind of Native American archeological dig. And she’s a big flirt. The film begins with her walking to the seedier side of town, talking a boy into giving her a ride home, and almost immediately making out with him.

The thing is, every boy she flirts with gets himself brutally killed. Naturally, she becomes a suspect. But Sheriff Burke is a good cop. He’s not going to arrest a 15-year-old girl right before her Sweet Sixteen birthday. Bo Hopkins has such a natural screen presence. I immediately like him, and he plays the Sheriff with real warmth.

There is a lot of typical 1980s slasher nonsense in this film. We get a skinny dip in the local pond, a bit of sexing, some blood-soaked gore, and a whole lot of racism. The film tries to be on the right side of history for that last part. There is a native American character, Jason (Don Shanks). He is repeatedly harassed by some local rednecks. The film clearly depicts them as racist, but it still seems to delight in those scenes. He’s also a little too stereotypical for my tastes.

Most of the men in this film, including some of the “good guys,” do an awful lot of leering at Melissa. Jason practically wags his tongue at her.

If you can overlook those things (and admittedly it is quite a lot to overlook), there is a pretty good film underneath. Seriously, I would have loved a whole series of films with the Sheriff and his daughter solving crimes.

Friday the 13th 8-Movie Collection

For many years, I wrote for Cinema Sentries and never posted any sort of links to those reviews on this site. In those days, The Midnight Cafe was music only; I figured movie reviews would only muddy the waters. That has changed, of course, many times over, but I’ve still not linked to all my Cinema Sentries reviews.

I try to keep up with the new stuff, and sometimes I go back to the earliest reviews and systematically try to link to them. Or I start at the end and do the same. But there is still a surprising amount of stuff in the middle that I haven’t got to.

This boxed set of Friday the 13th movies, for example. I wrote this in August of 2021. Which seems like forever ago. You can read my review here.