MONSTER MAYHEM: Tarot (2024)

A clichéd group of generic college students have AirBnB-ed a spooky mansion in the Catskills for a drunken (yet, admittedly, rather tame) birthday party for one of their number: Elise (Larsen Thompson).

Low on drink, the group search the house and discover - behind a "keep out" sign - a basement reminiscent of the Warren's 'storeroom of evil' from The Conjuring franchise.

Of course, the kids poke around. Of course, they find a deck of creepy, hand-drawn tarot cards in a wooden box. Of course, one of the students - Haley (Harriet Slater, aka Fran from Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny) - knows how to do readings.

Breaking the 'golden rule' of tarot (that you don't use someone else's deck), Haley does tarot readings - tied to the subject's horoscope - for all her friends and herself.

They all have a good chuckle, except Haley's ex-boyfriend Grant (Wrong Turn's Adain Bradley), and then settle down for the night.

After a long drive back to the university, the gang all go their separate ways... and that's when the killing starts.

Elise is the first to die, then Lucas (Wolfgang Novogratz).

Only then do the survivors realise that their friends are being bumped off in ways that are literal interpretations of Haley's vague, metaphorical tarot card readings.

Searching for answers online, the first name their Google search throws up is a discredited - and kooky - expert called Alma Astrom (Olwen Fouéré, the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre's Sally Hardesty).

Alma, of course, knows all about this cursed deck of tarot cards and their origin, and even has a personal connection to the cards - as a survivor of a similar murder spree to the one our protagonists are caught up in.

In a nutshell, the cards were cursed by a Hungarian peasant - known only as The Astrologer - who transferred her essence into the cards so she could kill any who receive a reading from them.

Now, our heroes have to find a way to remove the curse before too many of them are brutally slaughtered by The Astrologer's manifestations of the demonic forms she drew on the Major Arcana.

Written and directed by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg - based on the 1992 novel Horrorscope by Nicholas Adams - Tarot feels like an '80s throwback, direct-to-VHS, monster flick.

However, as the film is really on-the-nose with its unsubtle, supposedly spinetingling, goings-on it also comes across as a parody of the genre for the most part.

The characters are so two-dimensional that we can't really get invested in their fates beyond a surface level, yet - for some reason - all the kills (essentially the 'selling point' for this kind of teen flick) are either off-camera or overly shy about showing anything resembling gore.

The script oscillates between wanting to be the foundation of a serious horror franchise, stylistically suggesting Final Destination and Nightmare on Elm Street during its 92-minute runtime, and being a tongue-in-cheek send-up of the same.

As the plot gets increasingly silly, characters are forced to exposit about how these unconvincing twists could actually have happened, which compounds the suggestion that this really could be a parody.

To be fair, Tarot isn't awful (we've all seen a lot worse), but the most terrifying thing about this would-be horror movie is its mediocrity.

MONSTER MAYHEM: Prince of Darkness (1987)

When the last member of a secret Catholic sect, The Brother of Sleep, dies before he can nominate a successor, a nameless priest (Halloween's Donald Pleasence) discovers what the sect has been concealing under a seemingly abandoned church in Los Angeles.

He finds a subterranean laboratory containing a large, sealed cylinder of swirling green liquid and an ancient book of encoded warnings.

The priest seeks assistance from quantum physicist, Professor Howard Birack (Big Trouble in Little China's Victor Wong), who enlists a team of students and fellow scientists to investigate the impossible liquid.

As hordes of vagrant, street people - led by Alice Cooper - gather around the building, some of the liquid escapes, defying gravity and dripping upwards, before infecting one of the students, Susan (Anne Howard).

She then embarks on a conversion and killing spree in the shadowy corridors of the old building.

Meanwhile, Lisa (Ann Yen) translates the mysterious book, revealing a very HP Lovecraft reimaging of the Bible, with God, Jesus, and The Devil actually being extra-terrestrial entities.

The tightly sealed, millennia-old, canister - which, it turns out, can only be opened from the inside - is said to contain "The Devil" and should he escape he plans to open a portal to the "Dark Side" and liberate his imprisoned "father", The Anti-God.

Alice Cooper leads his horde of possessed street people to besiege the scientists in the old church

Prince of Darkness is the second - and weakest - in John Carpenter's Lovecraft-influenced, self-styled, Apocalypse Trilogy, bookended by two of the greatest horror films ever made, 1982's The Thing and 1994's In The Mouth of Madness.

Compared to Carpenter's better works, Prince of Darkness is narratively a bit of a mess, yet still highly entertaining, occasionally quite gruesome, and centred around a really intriguing concept.

From the first notes of the film's score, the font used in the credits, and the way it's shot, you know this is a John Carpenter movie.

Prince of Darkness shares tropes with the other parts of his Apocalypse Trilogy, such as the 'scientists in a base under siege' setting of The Thing, and the questioning of reality as evidenced in In The Mouth of Madness.

Given my love and admiration for these latter two movies, I'll admit it's a bit of surprise that this is the first time I've actually seen Prince of Darkness, but, honestly, it pales to comparison to those other flawless masterpieces.

While the core concept is a fascinating idea, Carpenter's actual script and some of the performances are not up to the level we'd normally expect from a piece of his art.

It's hard to believe that the "comic relief" character of student Walter Fong is played by the same Dennis Dun who was so good as Kurt Russell's co-lead in the previous year's Big Trouble In Little China.

Ignoring the mostly failed attempts at humour (such as the running "who's Susan?" gag and Walter Fong's casual racism), the characters don't feel as developed as one would hope (Donald Pleasence's priest doesn't even have a name, for crying out loud).

There's also an uncomfortable 'romance' between two of the main students, the reticent Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount) and moustachioed stalker Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker) that strongly suggested - to me - that Marsh was going to turn out to be a "bad guy" and get his well-deserved "comeuppence". But it turns out he was just an '80s dude!

Conversely, this frisson between Brian and Catherine heightened the heroic sacrifice of the movie's climax and certainly makes sure Prince of Darkness goes out with a bang.

MONSTER MAYHEM: The Tingler (1959)

Horror icon Vincent Price stars in director William Castle's The Tingler, a very Lovecraftian tale of weird science and creatures that feed on fear inside the human body.

The movie opens with Castle addressing the audience, warning them that some will feel similar effects to those experienced by the characters on the screen and the only way to shake this off is to scream!

What he doesn't mention is that when this delightful B-movie was first being shown in the 1950s some seats in the auditoriums were wired up with electrical buzzers to give anyone sitting in them "the tingles" at key moments in the film.

Price plays pathologist Dr Warren Chapin, whose experiments into the nature of fear reveal a parasite growing inside every human being - a tingler - that feeds off a person's fear until it grows strong enough to kill them (i.e. dying of fright).

Because he devotes all his time to his research, his wife, Isabel Stevens Chapin (Patricia Cutts), a rich heiress that he suspects of poisoning her father, is blantantly cheating on him, but the doctor draws her into a cruel experiment which helps him prove the existence of the tingler.

Through his work, he has befriended Oliver Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who operates a silent movie theatre with his deaf and mute wife, Martha (a stellar performance from Judith Evelyn).

The tingler's only weakness is the sound of a human scream, but Dr Chapin realises that because Martha cannot scream she would make a great test subject for his experiments.

After conducting a failed test on himself, with a shot of LSD (the drug's first depiction in a major motion picture) to induce fearful hallucinations, Chapin then turns his attention to Martha - little realising that the creepy vibes her husband is always giving off isn't just because he's a lush.

Dr Chapin trippin' on LSD

For an 82-minute weird science and monster movie from master showman William Castle - penned by his frequent collaborator Robb White - the story of The Tingler is surprisingly layered, and elements that could easily be dismissed as "that's just because it's a B-movie" are actually justified and explained in the script.

Other exquisite Castle touches include an unexpected splash of colour in this otherwise black and white movie and some delightfully meta sequences during the movie's climax in the auditorium of Oliver and Martha's movie theatre.

The cinema is screening an old silent movie, but every so often Dr Chapin has to stop the film - turning the screen we are watching black - and announcing in voice-over that there is a tingler on the loose. I can only imagine what a hit this trick was watching it all unfold in an actual cinema in the 1950s.

As to the tingler itself, it's a two-foot long, bulky, rubbery centipede creature with a pair of enormous pincers at its head, very similar to an enlarged version of the parasites that tried to take over Star Fleet in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy (and were never mentioned ever again!)

Yes, The Tingler is cheesy by modern standards and the monster effects quite basic, yet it still sits comfortably in the ranks of movies that feel like they were based upon the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft (like In The Mouth of Madness and The Thing) but have, in fact, tapped into their own, very similar, vein of horror.

The tingler in all its rubbery glory

MONSTER MAYHEM: The Vourdalak (2023)

Having been attacked by Turkish bandits while travelling through an Eastern European forest, French nobleman the Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), an emissary of the King of France, seeks assistance at the isolated home of an elderly man called Gorcha.

The man of the house is absent though and the Marquis instead meets his children: the eldest son, surly Jegor (Grégoire Colin), crossdresser Piotr (Vassili Schneider) and ethereal "fallen woman" Sdenka (Ariane Labed). Also present are Jegor's wife, Anja (Claire Duburcq) and their young son, Vlad (Gabriel Pavie).

The Marquis d'Urfé discovers that the elderly Gorcha left the house six days earlier to go fight the invading Turks, warning that if he returned after six days he would be a "vourdalak" and his family were not to let him in.

The Marquis (Kacey Mottet Klein) and Sdenka (Ariane Labed)

That evening, while the residents of the manor are dining outdoors, Jegor discovers what appears to be the corpse of his father, lying at the edge of the property.

However the old man (voiced by the film's writer and director Adrien Beau) is alive. Kind of.

This is where things start to get really weird. Despite Jegor's refusal to believe in folk stories, his father, Gorcha, is, indeed a vourdalak, an undead corpse-like being that's part vampire, part ghoul, that thrives by feeding on its loved ones (rather than random strangers).

However, that's not the weirdest part of this darkly, atmospheric Gothic French movie. It's the fact that Gorcha is portrayed by a life-sized skeletal puppet (also operated by Adrien Beau), with a limited range of movement.

Luckily, I had been forewarned about this fact, as it comes as quite a surprise when it pops up in this grounded, period piece, set in the 18th Century.

Yet oddly, once you've adjusted your brain to the idea that the antagonist of this claustrophobic horror tale isn't an actor in a rubber suit or a CGI creation, it is a rather effective depiction of a creature that's alien to our reality and yet was once human.

This isn't Muppet Christmas Carol territory, but something much creepier and more unnerving (more so even than the spooky Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come).

Coming in at under 90-minutes duration, The Vourdalak is a fascinating French-language work of oppressive horror, where the tension ratchets up methodically to a gory climax.

What could have come across as a "silly experiment" on paper, is, in actuality, an eerie and atmospheric movie about a largely unseen supernatural predator preying on his own family, trapped on their own estate by both familial loyalty and fear of the Turkish invaders.

While our POV character, the foppish Marquis starts the tale as "powdered courtier" and a bit of an ass, his story arc sees him grow a backbone - partly motivated by his attraction to Sdenka - to just about become the tale's hero.

Based up the 19th Century novel The Family of the Vourdalak, by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin of  the more famous Leo Tolstoy), the film is an interesting twist on the ubiquitous vampire mythology and is worth watching for that alone.