3) Hell Night (1981)

"Pray for day!"

Director
Tom DeSimone

Cast
Linda Blair - Marti
Vincent Van Patten - Seth
Peter Barton - Jeff
Kevin Brophy - Peter
Suki Goodwin - Denise


Hell Night. It's the perfect title. It's the slasher flick anyone would think of when they hear "slasher"; young college kids filled with booze and hormones being hazed by having to spend the night alone in a spooky abandoned house with large beds (wink, wink). This is quintessentially the horror hack and slash flick.
I see a little Friday the 13th in this movie, sprinkled with a few elements from The Shining.
It wouldn't surprise me if this movie helped set some horror stereotypes - useless cops, naïve kids, illicit sex, gore, and the maniac lurking in the shadow that the audience knows is going to kill someone. Just wait for it.
This flick isn't too obscure, but it's obscure enough to make it on this blog. Its biggest claim to fame has to be Linda Blair as its star. She's no stranger to hell and all that goes with it. Blair played the possessed Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973). And she has since received a Razzie Award for worst actress in this movie. Blair certainly was no stranger to bad movies at this time. She previously starred in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) - a movie much, much worse than Hell Night. It's a movie that has to be among the top five worst sequels ever made. 
It's safe to say that by 1981, Blair had a lot of hell going for her.
In Hell Night, Blair plays sorority pledge,Marti Gaines who, along with three other Alpha Sigma Rho pledges, takes part in an initiation.
She, along with rich kid Jeff (Peter Barton), gorgeous blonde Denise (Suki Goodwin), and surfer dude Seth (Vincent Van Patten), is prompted to spend the night in a haunted mansion called Garth Manor.
There's an entire caravan of giggling college girls, buff college guys, nerds, and lots of beer taking the new pledges to the house. During this time, Alpha Sigma Rho President, Peter, tells the ever-so-standard tale of how the home's former owner, Raymond Garth, killed his three deformed children and his wife. Garth also ended his own life by hanging. On top of that Shining-esque macabre story, Peter mentions that the youngest of the children, Andrew, was never found. Que the predictability!
So, finally the parade of dorks and other useless people arrive at the house. While the new pledges are settling in, their fellow students are outside rigging up scares and pranks to get them on edge and see how long they'll last.
Little do they know that Seth and Denise hopped into the sack pretty damn quick. And Marti and Jeff are...just getting acquainted. Everyone in the house is aware of the pranks and tricks, so they adjust to it fairly quickly.
All the while, one by one, those outside are getting slaughtered. Heads are getting chopped off. Girls are getting taken. Blood and guts are spilling! And the horror lurks inside as well. Denise gets her head cut off, too. It's hell!
Did I mention, to add to the disorientation going on outside, there's a hedge maze. Where have we seen that before?
We slowly began to see that the murderer is a towering, deformed man.
The pledges inside struggle all they can to get out of the house. And it all comes down to the one 

Linda Blair in Hell Night

pledge that's left.
The ending was suspenseful and played out really well.
Hell Night has its fun moments. It carries out the suspense nicely.
I mean, the audience knows what's going to happen. But when? And how? Let's see it! The intrigue certainly lasts.
It's such the archetypal horror movie. There's just no other way to put it.
One scene (among many) that make it the perfect image of a horror movie is when Seth makes it out of the house, runs to a police station, frantically tells the cops people are getting murdered, and then gets reprimanded by the police as they think he's playing a joke. "As useless as a cop in a horror movie" the old saying goes.
Seth's reaction is fantastic after he leaves the station. He steals a rifle from the police department (quite easily, I'll add), climbs through a window and hi-jacks a car. It's hilarious, though not meant to be.
Hell Night definitely has one thing going for it. It's entertaining, and that's the whole point of a movie like this to begin with.
Being that quintessential 80s horror flick does the trick. It may be predictable. It may be campy at times. But it's exactly the kind of movie to quench that Friday night thirst for a "bad, but good" popcorn movie.
Chuck Russell is the executive producer. He must have learned something during production because he later directed A Nightmare on Elm Street III; The Dream Warriors (1987) - the only best Elm Street sequel hands down!
Blair's rooftop chase in the movie (inspired by Jamie Lee Curtis's chase scene in Terror Train) was a splendid sequence definitely unworthy of the Razzie she won.
And despite its reputation of schlockiness, though still excellent as popcorn entertainment, Hell Night was a career move for Frank Darabont who served as production assistant. Darabont later directed The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist - all based on Stephen King stories.
He was also the executive producer for The Walking Dead season 1 and some of season 2. Oh, and like Chuck Russell, he worked on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 - Darabont was a screen writer. I could go further into that, but I don't want to digress.

Hell Night needs resurfacing as its been buried deep in the recesses of pop culture.

2) The Wasp Woman (1959)

"Janice Starlin Enterprises is going to bring the most fantastically saleable product ever developed by modern cosmetics to the public."

Director
Roger Corman

Cast
Susan Cabot - Janice Starlin
Fred Eisley - Bill Lane
Michael Mark - Eric Zinthrop
Frank Gerstle - Les Hellman


As far as obscurities go, this flick isn't too obscure. It's a film by the legendary Roger Corman. I've wanted to check it out for a long time. I knew the poster image was deceiving. SPOILER: There is no wasp with the head of a woman in this movie. Quite the disappointing opposite, really. Nevertheless, The Wasp Woman may be well known among horror fans, and not so much among general movie audiences. Film critic Leonard Maltin gave it two and a half out of four stars, so it's half-bad...but not half bad.

The year The Wasp Woman was released, the horror genre was in its silver age. Hollywood was getting passed monsters like Dracula, and Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolfman. It was time for aliens, mutated fluke-of-nature type creatures (like the one from the Black Lagoon), and other science fiction monstrosities. America was on the cusp of the atomic age, and mutations and such were the perfect fear for audiences to overcome of that time.

A whole new line of monsters like Godzilla (from Toho in Japan), and the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and the Blob were next in line to scare audiences.

Movies like Them (A monster movie), Earth vs. The Flying Saucers  and The Day the Earth Stood Still (alien movies), and Forbidden Planet (a SciFi flick) were the on-screen attractions at the cinema. No doubt The Wasp Woman just buzzed her precious little self into the hearts of Americans, coughed up a nest, and laid her eggs of nostalgia to sting us...where...she...I don't know where I'm going with this?

She's really more of a female version of the fly. In this movie, Dr. Eric Zinthrop, who has been experimenting with wasps at a honey farm, gets fired from his position. I guess if you can't get wasps to make honey, you serve no purpose at a honey farm. One thing he was able to accomplish was extracting enzymes from the wasp queen's "royal jelly." This royal jelly somehow reverses the aging process.

Meanwhile, over in New York City, Janice Starling, who owns a huge cosmetics company, is seeing her sales decline because her customer base doesn't like the fact she's getting old.

Zinthrop takes his findings to Starling, and she agrees to fund his research so he can carry on with it, and potentially use it to her advantage. So, he has to agree to allow her to be his human subject. What could go wrong?

He agrees, of course. And after a short while, Starling isn't happy how slow the results of the reverse aging process are going. So, she steals his formula, and gives herself a little more than his boring ol' recommended dosage.

The results are amazing...for a while. Little does Starling know that Zinthrop's test subjects are growing violent. When he goes to tell her, he's in a car accident, and winds up at the hospital.

No one at the company knows he's there, and Starling and others at the cosmetics company assume he's missing.

Luckily, they find him and Starling takes over his care. All the while, she's still secretly injecting

herself with extra formula, and maintaining her gorgeous, young look.

Then, as formulas often do, it makes her change into a hideous, angry wasp creature every so often. When this happens, she ends up attacking someone, ultimately killing them.

I have to say, for a movie with tropes that are considered cliche' by today's standers (serums turning people into mutations that kill people) it does have a good story line, and I was intrigued to see where the story was going.

Sure, by today's standards, the effects are laughable, but Roger Corman (often referred to as the "Pope of Pop Cinema") is an American classic. Many, if not all, of his films are the stuff of drive-ins. His movies really focus in on the story, and this is no exception.

I was drawn in from the moment a hive of bees came on the screen while the credits rolled. If there's one thing I'm personally afraid of, it's hornets and wasps, and the idea of getting caught in a wasps nest, and potentially being swarmed. Being squeamish and fearful is the whole point of a movie such as The Wasp Woman.

The actors really seemed to put in great effort in their roles. Susan Cabot for instance has Starling look more and more worried throughout the movie, yet trying to maintain her composure, as she realizes what the formula is doing to her. She's invested in getting sales up, and maintain her youthful appearance despite the horrific knowledge of what the formula is doing to her. The turmoil gradually builds, and you can see it in the character's face and body language. Cabot was fantastic in pulling it off.

This is more of a SciFi movie with guys in lab coats performing experiments, but there is a real element of horror in this, too. It has some blood and such it. And sex appeal! I mean bees, stinging, royal jelly, honey. The euphemisms are there! Oh, 1950s...you weren't really that innocent.

One thing I like is that once she turns into the wasp, there's no hiding it, or any sort of slow reveal. She becomes a wasp, and not only do we see her in all were gross appearance, but we get her coming straight towards the camera.

Slow reveals can certainly help build the suspense and keep an audience scared. Had it been done like that in this movie, it would have really dragged the movie on. The audience already had several minutes of psuedo-scientific terminology. Let's get to the mutated woman!

Despite its being dated, this movie has a solid foundation which I'm willing to bet horror movies that came afterwards had pulled from. If not from this movie, then most definitely from Roger Corman's style of movie making.

Thanks to this movie, I'm quitting royal jelly for good.