Another straight-to-video movie. Babysitter, Halloween, deranged slasher escapes from a lunatic asylum... Sound familiar? Unfortunately this movie stopped there when it came to emulating more famous slice-n-dice slasher movies themed around Halloween. Bloodless, boob-less and brain-less. with a weak story-line that's padded with the child being baby-sat playing pranks on the babysitter. With the addition of low-lighting (they obviously didn't have the budget to even pay the electricity bill), low-body count, low-quality and it would seem low expectations even of itself.

Bizarrely, and for any cult film fan this maybe the selling point, the movie features a whole 3 minutes of David Carradine. Apparently the Carradine footage was spliced in having been filmed a couple of years previous. Or some rumour has it.

There literally nothing redeeming about this painting-by-numbers so called slasher flick, apart from checking it off the list.

A straight-to-video piece low-budget horror. So what you'd expect, full of bad special effects, and slow-paced lacklustre story-line that's been seen a dozen of more times before. Demonic scarecrow rises-up from the dead to take revenge of the ancestors of the man that killed his warlock creator. Oh and it features scream queen Linnea Quigley again, only mentioned in the post before last about the Night Of The Demons.


This is a so-bad-its-bad movie, and one possibly for only the die-hard schlock horror fan. Cheap doesn't cover it. And low-budget is no excuse. I guess what little budget they had was spent getting drunk every night after filming, as there is little other explanation for what they spat onto 16mm celluloid. 


All that said though, there is something endearing about this little known piece of horror. Whether that is the comfort that the well trodden clichéd path the story takes, or whether its just a reminder of those halcyon days of watching every horror movie the local video store had on offer, revelling in such horrendous finds as this.  

The third instalment and the "what were they thinking?" part of the franchise! A blip on the radar of the Halloween movies, that for some reason best known to the makers doesn't feature Michael Myers. And in fact has no reference or connection to the other two Halloween movies that came before it. The whole slasher theme which made the original Halloween such a successful cult film is ignored, and instead the movie is about witches with some quasi-sci-fi thing going on. The story involves androids and masks with electronic chips that are supposed to have a fragment of Stonehenge in them. I'm already confused and will leave the story-line there. Although I do remember the commercial that was played on TV that activated the chips was creepy. But apart from that I really remember little else from this movie. But saying that, I do remember something, which is a lot better than many (and there has been a a lot) of horror movies I've watched. over the years. So maybe, just maybe, it isn't as bad as it seems. If you take it as a tongue-in-cheek parody that is.

Also entitled Halloween Party, Night Of The Demons is a first in a short lived teen-horror franchise series of movies based around Halloween. The typical teen horror of, who is dating who, who is having sex with who, who is the demon possessing now! And how will this teen we are screaming at the screen to die, going to be killed off?

A classically bad 80s teen don't stay in the haunted house you idiots horror, where you are just waiting for the kill scenes. (Note: Nudity usually means there's a kill coming up very soon.) Though there are some fun and imaginative kill scenes, and it does feature one of the ultimate 80s scream queens Linnea Quigley. Still Night Of The Demons is what it is, a cash-in churned out formulaic horror flick. 

Now as fans of such flick know, there is nothing wrong with formula if all the ingredients are there. And with this piece of schlock horror they are. A wonderful vintage ride into a world when horror was good clean fun, and not some self-referential trying too hard idiocy.  

It's Halloween night, so what better a movie than the cult classic from the 80s Trick Or Treat?! What better a movie that featured guest appearances by Ozzy Osbourne as a crazy evangelical preacher, ranting about the evils of rock music. With Gene Simmons as Nuke a radio DJ (who was originally offered the role of protagonist Sammi Curr), and almost starred Blackie Lawless from the band W.A.S.P in the role of the Sammi Curr. (Now that would have been the cherry on the icing on the cake.)

In the movie Eddie Weinbauer hears his hero Sammi Curr has died in a hotel fire. Devastated he visits his DJ friend Nuke who knew Sammi Curr personally. Nuke gives Eddie the only copy of Curr's last and as yet unreleased album, Songs in the Key of Death. Nuke plans to play it in full at midnight on Halloween in tribute to Curr. Eddie takes it home and falls asleep listening to it. He wakes-up as the album is skipping, and decides to play the album backwards. 

This year Halloween just happens to fall on a Friday, so we can have a full weekend of horrific film fun. There are a multitude of movies out there that are great Halloween watching, but many movies that lay forgotten. So over the day Weird Retro will bring you some of the best and the absolute worst of Halloween horror movies.

Just the cover art itself would have been enough for any gamer back in the late 80s to at least pick this beauty off the shelf, and consider buying it. Back before Street Fighter II came out, and changed the world of  side-scrolling beat 'em ups forever, gamers desperately sort out games to fill their need to kick the shit out of each other and the computer. In 1989 Activision obliged them with the deeply weird Tongue Of The Fatman. 

Actually the game was only called by that bizarre title on the PC version of the game. When the game was ported across to other formats, they changed the name for some unknown reason. The Commodore C64 version was called Mondo's Fight Palace, the Sega version was Slaughter Sport, and the Japanese release was simply called Fatman. 

Not originally made for TV, though it was later shown on TV Chico The Rainmaker was made for the Children's Film Foundation in the UK. First shown as part of the regular Saturday Matinees held at cinemas across the UK during the 70s and early 80s.

Also known as The Boy With Two Heads, the show featured a boy called Chris who come across a box in an antiques shop. In the box is the shrunken head of Chicopacobacowana (Chico), a deity of an Amazon tribe. Chris and his sister Jill accidentally play some notes on a flute that brings Chico magically to life.

The series ran for 7 episodes, in which Chris and Jill help Chico return back to his tribe in the Amazon. While being pursued by two would-be thieves of the antique shop, who hear there is a cash reward for Chico  being offered by unscrupulous antiques dealer Thornton. 

The series was shown on PBS in the United States, and had an oddly catchy if yet weird intro theme. 

Originally written as a screenplay for a cartoon that wasn't produced in 1967, Ray Bradbury turned The Halloween Tree into a novel. Through the eyes of a group of kids, in search of their lost friend, the story travels through space and time telling the story behind Halloween. The tree in the title, is used as a metaphor for all the branches of of myth and legend coming together to form the holiday we all know today as Halloween.

In 1992, Bradbury finally wrote and narrated an animated version of the story, produced by Hanna-Barbera for TV. The animation won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in an Animation. The voice of Mr. Moundshround, who guides the kids through their journey, was played by actor Leonard Nimoy.

"Weebles Wobble, But They Don't Fall Down!" Was the tag-line of the famous egg-shaped kids toy, popular during the 70s.  A sing-song line, that you'd catch yourself singing each and every time you came across one of the odd little creatures. Originating from Hasbro's Playskool range in 1971. The Weebles Haunted House from 1976, was a 4 room play house that came with a creepy attic, revolving bookcase/haunted mirror, leading to a secret hiding place, a trunk with bats, creaking doors and a chimney chute to drop Weebles into the creepy attic. 

The Haunted House is brilliant, with influences of the Psycho house, the Addams Family, and The Munsters all rolled (or wobbled) into one creepy piece of plastic fun. The play-set came with a witch character a glow-in-the-dark ghost and a Brad & Janet or Hansel & Gretel pair of sappy unsuspecting innocent victims. "Don't go in the creepy looking house you pair of limbless bum-shuffling numb-skulls!!!"