Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)

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In elementary school I can remember bragging about how many times I’d seen the original Star Wars. I’d even brag that my brother had seen it more than me, something like 27 different times. My mother says it played constantly on HBO, and we’d watch it every time it was on.

But then I also remember when I was a young teenager renting the original trilogy, and it felt like new. I knew I had seen the films before, but I only had vague memories of them. And I can remember excitedly talking to my friends about it like it was a new discovery. 

Yet I also remember watching Return of the Jedi in the theater. I would have been seven years old.  

I don’t know what to make of all that except that memory is a weird thing.

I don’t remember ever seeing Poltergeist II: The Other Side before. I’d never logged it on Letterboxd or IMDB. For the first two thirds of the film, nothing was familiar. And then the family ran into the garage to flee the ghosts. Suddenly I remembered that they were about to get attacked by power tools. Suddenly I remembered talking about that scene with my friends right after we watched the movie. We felt it was the best scene in the entire film.  Clearly I had seen the film before; I just couldn’t remember it.  

Like I say, memory is a weird thing.

Truth be told, other than that garage scene, most of the movie is rather forgettable.

Poltergeist was so popular a sequel was inevitable. The trouble was how do you make a sequel to a haunted house movie when the haunted house was completely destroyed at the end of the movie?

The reasoning for the haunting in Poltergeist was that they built the house on top of an old cemetery and only bothered to  move the headstones and not the actual corpses.

For the sequel, they retcon some business about how underneath the Freelings house not only was there part of a cemetery but also a big cave where an insane preacher incarcerated his flock because he felt the end of the world was nigh.  They all died there, and the preacher has now turned into a spectral beast that’s now hunting poor Carole Anne (Heather O’Rourke) because of her time spent in the netherworld, and maybe she can help get him out.

Or something. It is all a lot of silly hogwash.

The preacher (Julian Beck) can manifest into a physical form and looks a bit like a reject from Children of the Corn. He’s actually quite creepy and makes for the second-best part of the entire film.

The Freeling family has moved in with Diane’s (JoBeth Williams) mother. They are trying their best to forget about the past and move on with their lives. But Carole Ann keeps having psychic visions, and that darn preacher keeps showing up. Then the old psychic from the first movie, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), shows up declaring all sorts of terrible things to come.

The thing I loved about the first film is that it slowly revealed what was happening. It allowed us to get to know the Freelings, and the scares were doled out a little at a time. That built the tension over the course of the movie.

It isn’t that things come too fast in this movie, for it too takes its time before the real scares come, but the buildup just isn’t interesting. Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg made those early scenes fun to watch. Here it’s just a lot of myth building that the first film didn’t need.

There are some good scares. The preacher is creepy, and that garage scene is great. There is another moment where Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) eats the worm in a bottle of tequila, and things get really nasty. 

But mostly this feels like a sequel that was rushed into production without much thought being given to why it should exist at all.

The Life of Brian is the Pick of the Week

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My church youth minister turned me on to Monty Python when I was in high school. He showed us Holy Grail first, and when we loved that, he showed us Life of Brian. By us I mean me and a few of my friends – older kids in the youth group who he thought could both enjoy the material and wouldn’t make a fuss (or, more likely, whose parents wouldn’t make a fuss if they found out.)

In typical youth minister fashion, he tried to tell us that Life of Brian was actually an incisive critique of certain sects of Judaism and could be applied to Christianity if you looked at it right.  Or some such thing. 

I also remember him standing in front of the television set during a brief nude scene. 

I loved both films and later watched The Meaning of Life and lots of the TV series. I watched them a lot in college, and then they kind of vanished from my life. It wasn’t so much that I stopped liking them but that I’d had enough of them and moved on. Then I kind of forgot about them.

My wife randomly turned on Holy Grail the other day, and my goodness, that movie is funny. It was wild how much I could still quote even though I haven’t seen it in decades.

I still haven’t watched Life of Brian again, but I know it is still funny, and now that Criterion is giving it the UHD treatment, I’m totally on board for it being my pick of the week.

Also coming out this week that looks interesting:

The Phantom: The 1990s were a weird time for superhero movies. Tim Burton’s Batman made a splash in 1989, but the sequels were less than great. There were some good ones like The Crow and Blade, but there were a lot of films that just didn’t seem to know what they were doing. 

The Phantom stars Billy Zane as a hero from Bengalla who must travel to New York to protect some magic skulls and fight bad guys. It bombed upon release, but like so many things from the 1990s, it has been reappreciated and is now getting a UHD release from Kino Lorber.

Trouble in Paradise: Ernst Lubitsch is one of those guys who many of my film loving friends absolutely adore. I’ve only seen a couple of his films, and while I’ve enjoyed them, I didn’t fall head over heels for them or him as a director. But I need to watch more. This one is about a love triangle between two jewel thieves and their intended victim.  Criterion has the UHD release.

Becoming Led Zeppelin: Documentary about the band.

Remo Williams: Fred Ward stars in this silly attempt at creating a new action hero from some old stories. You can read my full review here.

Death Ship: Goofy horror film about a Nazi torture ship cruising the ocean looking for new victims.  You can read my full review here.

Hearts of Darkness: The Making of The Final Friday: Documentary about the making of one of the more interesting Friday the 13th movies.

My Life In Music: “The Roof is On Fire” by Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three

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Growing up, I was a big fan of late-night talk shows. As a kid I watched Johnny Carson whenever I was allowed to stay up that late. I didn’t always get the jokes in the monologue, but sometimes I did. I loved the silly skits, especially Carnac the Magnificent. And I usually enjoyed the various celebrity guests. 

But while Carson had been cool, he was also old when I started watching, and for a young teenager, old meant decidedly not cool.  At some point Carson was old enough he couldn’t do it every night, and Jay Leno became the permanent guest host, taking the reins on Monday nights. I loved Leno. I made sure I always watched when he was hosting. 

In eighth grade I took a drama class at school, and one of our assignments was to read up on the celebrity of our choice and then pretend to do an interview with them. I chose Jay Leno to interview. I thought that would make me cool.

It amuses me to no end to think that back then I thought Jay Leno – who I would now consider to be the blandest and most vanilla celebrities – was the coolest guy around.

At some point I discovered David Letterman. I don’t think I ever thought he was cool – he was more nerdy and weird, like me. He was hilarious. With his Stupid Pet Tricks and doing things like wearing a Velcro suit and jumping onto a wall, he was like nobody I’d ever seen before.  I learned a lot about my own sense of humor from David Letterman.

And then there was Arsenio Hall.  Now he was cool. His guests were cool, his musical acts were cool. His audience was cool doing the whole “whoof whoof” thing instead of clapping and The Dogpound.

He wasn’t just cool; he was hip. He was tuned into a part of the culture that guys like Carson or Leno and even Letterman just didn’t understand.  I loved it.

One night, during his monologue, Arsenio started chanting, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” the crowd ecstatically joined in. He continued, “We don’t need no water no…” and as the crowd started to say the next line, Arsenio smiled, waved his hands back and forth emphatically, and told them to stop. He couldn’t sing the next line, or he’d get in trouble. The audience went crazy.

I think he did the same thing the next night and maybe a few times more over the next couple of weeks. I was intrigued. I had no idea what song they were singing. But I liked it. I was especially curious about what that next line was. What could be so bad that they couldn’t say it on Arsenio?

Sometime later I discovered it was “…let the motherfucker burn.”

I don’t remember ever listening to the song. It certainly didn’t become a staple. It is possible my brother simply told me what the line was, and I never actually heard it.  But that moment on Arsenio stuck in my mind. I loved the way the audience shouted it with glee.

To this day I’ll periodically say, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire” just to see if anyone responds.  I did that the other day while I was on a walk with my family. They had no idea what I was talking about.  This made me want to listen to the song.

Pulling it up on Spotify made me realize how little of the song I actually know. The famous part doesn’t come in until the very end, and everything before that is rather repetitive and annoying. 

I get why it became a hit and why Arsenio was singing it that day. It would be a fun song to have playing in a club or at a party, or indeed singing on late night TV. It has a good beat, and it has these sing-along lyrics where it asks the audience to repeat back and forth, and then there is the roof. That’s a crazy fun thing to shout. That’s cool on a dance floor but rather tedious listening in your car. I swear I almost turned it off before it even got to the part about the roof and it being on fire.

Still, those memories are good ones, and you can bet I’ll still be repeating those lines even as an old man.

The Awesome ’80s in April: Poltergeist (1983)

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I was too young to have seen Poltergeist in the theater, but I discovered it not long after on home video and cable television. It became one of the defining movies of the 1980s for me. But unlike films like The Goonies or Harry and the Hendersons, Poltergeist still holds up remarkably well all these years later, even watching it as an adult (and I say that as someone who still enjoys The Goonies but recognizes its many flaws).

It certainly helps that it had Steven Spielberg as a cowriter and a very hands-on producer. This is Spielberg in the 1980s, the absolute peak of his powers. There is actually a bit of controversy over how much work he did on this film. Tobe Hooper is the credited director, but it has long been rumored that Spielberg did most of the helming. He was in the middle of making E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial at the time, and his contract on that film said he couldn’t direct anything else while making that film.

As far as I can tell, Hooper did direct it, but Spielberg was on set most days, was very enthusiastic about the picture, and likely persuaded Hooper to his way of directing in numerous moments.

Whoever directed what, this is still a great movie. I made my daughter watch it with me last night, and she loved it. I still do, too.

Something I noticed this time around was that the Freeling family are good people. They all clearly love each other, and there aren’t any real problems going on between them. Spielberg’s parents divorced when he was 19 years old, and it had a clear impact on him and his art. Many of his films deal with broken homes, so it is interesting to see how solid the marriage is in this film.

I love how deliberate the film is with its storytelling and the manner in which it doles out the horror. It begins with Carole Ann (Heather O’Rourke) putting her hands on the TV playing static just after the patriotic sign-off (and I had to explain to my daughter that TV used to shut down for the night) and talking to it. The next night she’ll do it again and utter her famous “they’re here.”

Before that, the boy Robbie (Oliver Robbins) will get frightened by a storm, the creepy tree just outside his window, and a clown doll (that freaking clown!), both of which will come back later in terrifying ways. But then we’ll see the dad, Steve (Craig T. Nelson), come in to comfort him. He explains how you can tell a storm is moving away by counting the time between the lightning flash and the thunder (something I did for years after watching this.). When the storm moves closer, the two youngest will wind up sleeping with Steve and their mother, Diane (Jobeth Williams,) but not before Steve tells his oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne), to get off the phone and go to bed.

All of this allows us to see that this is a real, loving family. We’ll later see Diane fixing the kids breakfast and Steve trying to sell a house to a nice couple. These are nice, normal people.

The frights are slowly dropped into these domestic scenes. The dining room chairs stack themselves onto the table. It gives Diane a fright, but then she’s curious about it. She experiments with them. By the time Steve gets home, she’s figured out if you place a chair in one spot, it will slide to another. She’s even marked the starting spot with a circle on the floor and drawn arrows down to indicate its path. She’s more fascinated by this than scared. She’ll even allow Carol Anne (with a football helmet on) to slide across the floor.

This is the most Spielbergian moment in the film to me. There is a sense of wonder about what’s going on here. It reminds me of that scene in Close Encounter of the Third Kind where the little boy stands in front of a doorway with this immense bright light shining down on him. His early films always had this sense of marvel and delight at the unexplained and unknown.

Then, of course, all hell breaks loose. The ghosts come, Carol Ann disappears, that freaking clown attacks. The horror amplifies. As an audience member, I am thrilled. They bring in parapsychologists to study the phenomenon. A powerful medium, Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), comes to try and contact Carol Ann. She gets a great entrance, marching into the house as everybody moves out of her path until she comes into the living room, her hair pulled back, her big glasses shining, her small stature feeling so big.

All of this allows the film to pull back a little from the horror. So many horror films lean into the monsters; they push them into our faces so we’ll be scared. This film studies the phenomenon, allowing the audience to feel slightly safer. That sense of wonder remains. But then again the scares come, and we are unsettled. It is a brilliant balancing act, pushing and pulling us between that sense of wonder and being scared out of our wits.

I forgot how much I loved this film, but watching it again with my daughter made me relish just how brilliantly it is made and how fantastic it still remains.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: TerrorVision (1986)

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I love 1980s movies. In particular, I love 1980s horror movies. Sandwiched between the gritty, no-holds-barred horror of the 1970s and the more self aware horror of the 1990s, the 1980s was like the Wild West for horror. Literally anything goes.

The ratings system allowed 1970s horror to be more gruesome than ever before, and the 1980s horror films picked that up and ran with it. The home video market allowed for even more flexibility in terms of violence and sexuality. But it also allowed independent studios to make low-budget films and find an audience like never before.

And while certainly there are all sorts of no-budget, terrible-looking films from the 1980s, the decade also saw a lot of fascinating horror films made on a shoestring by craftspeople who cared about what they were doing and had the artistry to create something fun.

TerrorVision is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is lovingly made and well crafted. It is a mix of goopy horror and goofy comedy.

On an alien planet, a worker bee periodically converts a monstrous mutant into energy beams and launches it into deepest space. One day he accidentally sends the beams down to Earth, where they are picked up by the Putterman family’s new DIY satellite dish.

Mom and Dad Putterman are pretty careless parents and big-time swingers. Their house is full of sexed-up pop art, she wears tight leather skirts, and he’s all unbuttoned shirts with bit gold necklaces. The grandfather is a conspiracy theorist gun nut who sleeps in a bomb shelter. The daughter is a punk rocker who’s dating a metalhead named OD, and the son is learning to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps.

The alien who accidentally sent the monster to Earth keeps showing up on their TV screens begging them to destroy the satellite dish and turn off the TV. But everybody just thinks its some dumb sci-fi flick being shown by an Elvira-esque TV hots who mostly exists to show off her cleavage.

It is basically one of those alien-invasion sci-fi 1950s movies with a totally ’80s bent. The alien comes in through the TV and starts eating everyone. The effects are wild. It in no way looks real, but it is imaginative and well-made.

Maybe it is my age, but I much prefer practical effects over CGI. The monster here looks fake. Obviously it isn’t a real alien monster, and you can tell it was made with rubber, wire, and latex. But it feels tangible in a way that CGI never does. With these types of effects, someone had to sit down, come up with the concept, and then try and figure out how to make it with real stuff. That gives it a real quality that some kid sitting down at a computer can never duplicate.

Anyway, there are lots of dumb gags, a whole lot of silliness, and plenty of goopy monster violence. Like I say, it isn’t a great movie, but I appreciate its existence anyway.

The Movie Journal: March 2026

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I watched 45 movies in March. 29 of them were new to me. 14 of them were made before I was born. It was Westerns in March, and I watched seven of those. That’s a piddling number. As I’ve mentioned a couple of times now, I’ve been trying to up my game in terms of writing for Cinema Sentries. The more “official” reviews I do, the less time I have for watching what I want. You would think I’d want to watch whatever theme I’m doing in a given month, but that winds up feeling like work again, and so I just watch other stuff. I may be winding the whole monthly theme thing down. Or, more likely, I’ll just plan on writing about one theme movie a week or something like that.

It was a good month. It felt like a weird month, and looking back on everything I watched, I was a bit all over the place. I caught two movies in the theater (The Bride! and Project Hail Mary), which is rare for me. Favorite new-to-me watches included Project Hail Mary, Hamnet, Bleeder, and Hidden in the Fog.

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The actors list changed quite a bit. I watched three films from director Nicolas Winding Refn, which tied him for second place, but those three films had actor Zlatko Burić in them, and apparently he is also in The Bride! and Wolfs, which put him in the top spot, even though I’d never heard of him before. We’ve been watching some Tom Baker era Doctor Who, and he’s tied for number one with five films. I’m glad to see Lino Ventura in the list as well. He’s one of my favorite French actors.

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I got a boxed set of Yves Boisset films the other day.  Technically I watched them this month, but since Letterboxd doesn’t break them down like that, he gets counted in this journal.  I’ll have a review of that boxed set soon.

It is nice to see the director’s list getting filled out even if I haven’t seen a lot of movies from any one person.

Anyway, here’s the full list.

Bullet in the Head (1990) ****
Project Hail Mary (2026) ****
The Deadly Companions (1961) ***1/2
Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen (1985) ***1/2
A Perfect Murder (1998) ***
The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974) ***
Pusher II (2004) ***1/2
Dial M for Murder (1954) ****
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) ****
Tea and Sympathy (1956) ****
Bye Bye Morons (2020) ***1/2
Once a Thief (1991) ****
A Bridge Too Far (1977) ***1/2
It All Came True (1940) ****
The Dancing Hawk (1978) **1/2
The Funhouse (1981) ***
Maigret Sees Red (1963) ***1/2
Hidden in the Fog (1953)
Hamnet (2025)
Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)
Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate (1981) ****
The Bride! (2026) ****
Big City Blues (1932) ***
Decision at Sundown (1957) ****
Doctor Who: State of Decay (1980) ****
The Marvels (2023) ***1/2
Jason X (2001) **
Ganja & Hess (1973) ***
Re-Wind (1988) ***
The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) ****
Dead for a Dollar (2022) ***1/2
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) ****
Doctor Who: Full Circle (1980) ****
Pusher (1996) ***1/2
Dead Again (1991) ***1/2
Bleeder (1999) ****
Valdez Is Coming (1971) ***1/2
Suspicion (1941) ***1/2
Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004) ***
Excalibur (1981) ****
The Quick and the Dead (1987) *1/2
Hour of the Gun (1967) ***

Awesome ’80s in April: Out of Control (1985)

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It is April 7, and I’m just now doing an Awesome 80s in April. That’s not entirely true; my last Friday Night Horror Movie was from the 1980s, and I’ve watched a couple of other movies from that decade. I’ll have those reviews up sometime  soon. But this is my first real mention of the theme, and we are a week into it. As I mentioned last week, I’ve been trying to write more official reviews for Cinema Sentries, which means my time to work on my themes is lessened.  But I’ll try to do a few more before the month is out (speaking of which, I realize I still haven’t written my movie journal for March… I’m so behind.

Anyway, I had a little free time this afternoon after watching and reviewing half a dozen movies for CS over the weekend, and I was happy to sit down with something I didn’t have to watch. The question then becomes, what do I want to watch?

I was tired and not in the mood to spend a lot of time deciding, and I definitely didn’t want to watch anything complicated that would make me think too hard.  I found this film on a streaming service; read the blurb:

“Wild teens (Martin Hewitt, Betsy Russell, Sherilyn Fenn) crash-land on an island of drug smugglers.”

And figured, why not? A big, dumb, wild teenagers movie should hit the spot. And it stars Sherilyn Fenn, who I loved in Twin Peaks, so that was a bonus.

I definitely got the dumb part right. This movie is utterly stupid.

It begins with basically a music video. A song called “Out of Control” plays while a bunch of teenagers (or probably twentysomethings made up to look like teenagers) smile at the camera, dance, and shake their heads. The entire song plays, and we realize this is a music video created by one of the teens being played at the prom. Weirdly, the video quality of that video is better than the actual film we are about to watch. Weirder still is that after several minutes of watching a video where teens dance to music, we get more music and more teens dancing at the prom.

Eventually several of the teens slip away, jump on a small boat, which takes them to  a small plane that is flying them to a small island for the weekend.  The plane crashes, and the kids swim to a deserted island. 

They freak out for a bit, and then one of them finds a hidden stash of booze and SPAM. So they settle down to a night of drinking, which leads to a game of Spin the Bottle, which leads to a game of Strip Spin the Bottle. Contrary to what my church leaders taught me, this does not lead to a lot of sexing. Almost everybody just passes out. One couple almost goes all the way, and the cool kid called Cowboy tries to get his girl down, but she says she wants her first time to be special.

This whole scene takes an incredibly long time. Music plays, and we see them spin the bottle and kiss, spin the bottle and kiss. Many times over, it’s spin the bottle and kiss.  Then dance. Then someone recommends stripping, so it’s spin the bottle and take off some clothes. Over and over again.

Clearly this movie had no budget, so they had to pad out their run time with dancing and half nakeness.

I paused the movie at some point, which moved it into my queue of “Now Watching” on our streaming stick.  My wife saw it, read that blurb, and asked me with a smile, “Are you enjoying your movie?  It sounds like its just an excuse to have a bunch of teenagers run around in their bikinis.”

I corrected her that it was really just an excuse for a bunch of teenagers to run around in their underwear. She gave me that knowing smile (knowing that I’m a complete dumb-dumb) and I finished the flick.

Eventually, something more happens. The drug smugglers show up. The kids think they are there to rescue them and climb aboard their boat. Then things get nasty.  The bad guys pull out guns, slap some of them around and attempt to rape one of the girls.  Luckily that cowboy kid didn’t get on the boat, and he comes to the rescue. The boat burns, then explodes, and the kids are stuck on the island again.

No kidding, the girl who was nearly raped was the girl who told the cowboy she was waiting for something special before she had sex. Naturally, after that horrifying experience, she has sex with the cowboy.

I threw my remote at the TV.

Some more bad guys show up, and there is a little gunplay. This actually isn’t half bad.  It isn’t good by any means, but it is better than dancing, kissing, or talking about kissing.  Blah, blah, blah, our heroes win, and they take this plane to safety.

I probably just spoiled the entire movie for you, but really and truly there is no reason to watch this. The few moments that are interesting aren’t worth all the really boring bits.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Invitation to Hell (1984)

Wes Craven’s debut film, The Last House on the Left (1972), was quite successful financially, but its brutal violence led it to be censored and banned, and didn’t exactly make it easy for him to get financing for another film. He actually returned to his porno roots, making the hardcore incest film The Fireworks Woman, before he was able to get financing for another horror film, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It was also a big hit, and from there he started to get really noticed.  He moved to Los Angeles and made several modest hits before directing A Nightmare on Elm Street, which made him a horror icon. 

Just before that film came out, he made this one for ABC TV. It is unbelievable that he made those two movies back to back. One is a horror masterpiece; the other is this film.

Invitation to Hell is like a mix of The Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt Winslow (Robert Urich), is a brilliant computer scientist who prefers to work alone. But there isn’t a lot of money in that, so he eventually agrees to work for some big tech firm with his fraternity brother Tom Peterson (Joe Regalbuto). This involves a lot more money than he’s ever made before and a big office. This allows him, his wife Pat (Joanna Cassidy), and two children, Chrissy (Soleil Moon Frye) and Robert (Barrett Oliver), to move into a big, fancy house in the suburbs. 

He loves his job. The company is building a fancy spacesuit for NASA, and Matt is in charge of fitting it with lots of computer stuff so the astronauts will be able to do things like tell the surface temperature and determine if the living creature in front of them is human or alien.  The suit is also fireproof and shoots lasers.

Everyone at the office keeps pressuring him to join the Steaming Spring Country Club run by the beautiful Jessica Jones (Susan Lucci). But Matt isn’t a joiner, and something seems fishy at the club, so he keeps declining. But the wife and kids like the place, so they keep going to it, and eventually join.

With a title like Invitation to Hell, I don’t think it really counts as a spoiler to say that Jessica is some kind of demon or maybe even Satan him (or her) self. When people join the club, she gets your soul, which she keeps in Hell, and some kind of replicant comes out. The mechanics of all that are left to the imagination.

All of this is reasonable well done. If you recognize it is a made-for-TV movie from the early 1980s and keep your expectations real low, then you might find you can enjoy yourself. The final 15 minutes are pretty great. Sort-of spoilers ahead for (again) a movie called Invitation to Hell – Matt finds a portal to Hell at the club, dons his fancy space suit, and goes in to save his family. Hell looks amazing. Craven saved all his budget for this scene. There are some great matte paintings and killer set designs. The climactic battle with Jessica (who wears an amazing dress) is, well, not all that climactic, but it doesn’t matter because the sets are so darn cool.

I can’t really recommend this film except to Wes Craven nerds, but if you dig the man, then there is enough here to allow me to recommend it.