Leatherface, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and Amityville Cop
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Leatherface, Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and Amityville Cop
Horror Bulletin Week 144
Episode 144 Summary
This week, we’ll be watching some more scary stuff. We’ll watch four more horror films, including “Leatherface” from 2017, “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” from way back in 1982, “Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum” from 2018, and the brand-new “Amityville Cop” from this year.
News Item #1: November Movie Giveaway!
We have FIVE, count ‘em, FIVE copies of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old” to give away!
Find the details and how to enter at https://www.horrorguys.com/giveaway/
Follow the Twitter accounts, email us, or subscribe to the newsletter by November 22, and we’ll make our random selections then.
News Item #2: Email Newsletter w/BONUS reviews
We now have an all-new weekly email that contains all our reviews from the site, plus some bonus material. Over the coming week’s we’ll be beefing up the bonus material quite a lot— there’s just so much stuff to review!
Recent Bonus reviews include:
Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Begotten (1991)
Wolf (1994)
Wolfcop (2014)
Read them now, for free, no spam. Then sign up for future issues: http://horrorbulletin.substack.com
News item #3: New Book- “The Horror Guys Guide to the Horror Films of Vincent Price”
We have a new book! The Horror Guys Guide to the Horror Films of Vincent Price is available now. It covers every single one of Price’s horror films and several other significant films that weren’t horror. There are more than fifty films covered. Find it on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KQC59PR
Check out our books!
The Horror Guys Guide to:
• The Horror Films of Vincent Price
• Universal Studios' Shock! Theater
Here. We. Go!
Leatherface (2017)
• Directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
• Written by Kin Henkel, Tobe Hooper, Seth M. Sherwood
• Stars Stephen Dorff, Lili Taylor, Sam Strike
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 30 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
The eighth film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, this one is a prequel to the first film, making it chronologically the earliest film. If you like gore, this movie is for you!
Synopsis
At the Sawyer Farm, it’s little Jed’s birthday. The first piece of cake goes to the thief they have tied up in the corner. They kidnapped a man who may or may not have been stealing their pigs. For his birthday, Jed gets a chainsaw to kill the man with. His big brother helps him pull the cord and start it up. His mother, Verna, lovingly encourages him. They force him to cut the man’s leg, but he can’t go through with it. Instead, Grandpa smashes the man’s head in with a mallet. Credits roll.
Texas, 1955. A young couple almost hit an animal in the road but it’s no animal, it’s a boy wearing a cow head. He yells, “Help me, please!” And runs into the field, and Betty follows. Jed lures her into the barn, where she falls into a pit through the floor. They smash her by dropping a tractor engine on her.
Sheriff Hal arrives, and Betty was his daughter. He wants to arrest Drayton Sawyer, but there’s no evidence. Verna arrives and tells the Sheriff what’s what. Hal wants to take Jed away from her custody. “You take one of mine; I’ll take all yours, Verna,” he threatens. No, it’s not just a threat.
Ten years later (1965), at the Gorman House Youth Reformatory, the doctor warns new nurse, Lizzy, that most of the children at the home will end up in prison or institutionalized; they have serious problems. She makes friends with Bud and Jackson and runs afoul of Clarice, three patients there.
Jackson warns Lizzy about “Dr. Lang’s chamber of horrors,” and tells her to come back tonight and see what he means.
Verna comes to see Jed, but Dr. Lang doesn’t want her to see him. “He was taken from you for a reason.” She’s now got a lawyer and an injunction that allows her to see him. Lang is not cooperative, calling Verna “Hillbilly trash.”
Verna uses the bathroom but sneaks out and goes looking for her son. Meanwhile Bud is strapped to the chair for electroshock treatment. Verna gets the other prisoners riled up, causing a riot. Bud hears Verna’s voice and kills the attendants and Dr. Lang.
Clarice, Bud, Lizzy, Jackson, and Ike grab a car and get away. Sheriff Hal Hartman is called in to investigate the massacre at the hospital.
The escaped kids all go to a nearby diner for food. Ike and Clarice kill a few people, but Bud gets shot in the side. They hole up in a mobile home and find a dead man inside. Lizzy patches up Bud while Clarice has sex with the corpse.
Lizzy tries to escape in the middle of the night, but that just causes a fight. After the fight, Bud whacks Ike over the head and drags him away, re-enacting a very famous curb-stomping scene with him.
Clarice, while looking for Ike, finds a deputy instead. Sheriff Hal tortures her for information; he’s taking this all very seriously. Then he executes her.
Lizzy, Bud, and Jackson are on the run again. A cop shoots Bud, but Jackson and Lizzy take his car and drive away. Hal pursues and shoots some of Jackson’s face off. Their car crashes.
When Lizzy wakes up, she’s cuffed to Hal’s car. Hal pulls her out of the car and into an old barn. He explains that Jackson is Jed Sawyer. This is the same barn where Jed killed Hal’s daughter. Jackson was the boy in the cow mask.
Deputy Sorelle tells Verna what’s happened, and she has her other boys kill him. Verna goes to the barn with a chainsaw. The family soon overpowers Hal and rescues what’s left of Jed, who can no longer speak because much of his jaw is gone.
Back at the Sawyer farm, Verna sews Jed back together again, but he’s not a pretty sight. She puts a leather harness on his face to hold it all together until it heals.
Lizzy unties herself and helps Hal. They’re inside the Sawyer house, and it looks a lot like what we’ve seen before. They’re recaptured quickly, and this time, Jed/Jackson brings in the chainsaw, and now he has no hesitations about using it.
Lizzy runs into the woods, and everyone pursues. She gets caught in a bear trap and tries to talk Jed into letting her go. Verna tells him to kill her. Who will he obey?
Time passes, and we see Jed in the cellar sewing a face mask made of what’s left of Hal’s head…
Commentary
It seems obvious from the physique and mental capacity that Bud is going to be Leatherface, but that’s not the way it works out. Red herring time!
The stuff at the hospital is really good, but it slows down a lot once they’re wandering the countryside. Once Jed and Verna are reunited it picks up again.
It’s not the best film out there, but it’s a fun prequel and good origin story for the franchise. Lots of gore and gross-out moments with a strong cast.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
• Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace
• Written by Tommy Lee Wallace, John Carpenter, Nigel Kneale
• Stars Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O’Herlihy
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 38 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It’s not a continuation of the first two movies at all, but a standalone story. It’s still horror and suspense, with more than a bit of science fiction blended with magic. It’s not one to overthink, but it’s a fun and entertaining film. Not worth hating on just because there's no Michael Myers doing the killing this time around.
Synopsis
Credits roll as we watch a 1982 computer try to draw a jack o’lantern onscreen. Scary!
We open on a road in Northern California on October the 23rd. A man runs down the road, trying to evade a car. One of the suited men from the car attacks him, but he gets away.
One hour later, we go to a filling station and see a TV news report talking about one of the stones from Stonehenge gone missing months ago, and they still have no idea where it went. The show breaks away to give us a commercial for the Silver Shamrock mask company. “Eight more days till Halloween.” Well, you might know how the song goes by now. If not, you’ll hear it many times throughout the movie. The station attendant is leapt on by the man from earlier, holding one of those Halloween masks. “They’re coming,” he whispers before passing out.
Daniel Chalis stops by his ex’s place after work, and he brought his kids cheap Halloween masks. They aren’t impressed because they have the new Silver Shamrock masks. Chalis is a doctor, and he’s called in to look at the man from before. The suited man from the car sneaks into the hospital and kills the man with the mask. The man then goes out to his car and blows himself up.
The victim’s daughter, Ellie, comes in the next morning to identify the body. The police tell Daniel the murderer must have been on drugs, but he doesn’t believe that at all. The guy looked like a calm businessman. He asks a lady friend in the coroner’s office to take a look personally and see what she can find out for him.
Chalis runs into Ellie at a bar. He tells her what he knows about that happened to her dad. Harry ran a store that also sold Silver Shamrock Halloween masks. He was last seen heading to the Silver Shamrock factory. The two decide to investigate further.
They get to town, and it’s a weird place; everyone notices them as they drive in. The people of this small California town all have Irish accents, because they’re descended from immigrants way back in the day. Mr. Cochran owns the Silver Shamrock Novelty company and lords over the town as their benefactor.
Various people check into the same motel where Chalis and Ellie are staying. The whole town shuts up and goes dark at the six o’clock curfew. A bum tells Chalis some stories and then lumbers off into the darkness. The bum is executed shortly thereafter.
Marge, a businesswoman here to pick up an order introduces herself to Ellie. That night, Marge examines one of the little Silver Shamrock buttons that comes on every mask. She sticks a pin in the circuitry, and it lasers her face off and then bugs crawl out of what is left over. Meanwhile, Chalis and Ellie have sex. Cochran’s men arrive to clean up Marge’s remains, and Chalis gets to meet Cochran.
The Kupfer family is there for a tour of the factory, and they include Chalis and Ellie. It’s a big factory with an attached museum full of novelties and toys and automatons, and we see that Cochran has been building clockwork toys for decades. Ellie spots her father’s car hidden in one of the garages there. They also see a large number of slim, suited young men just like the one Chalis saw kill her father.
Chalis tries to call the police, or anyone out of town, but he can’t get an outside line. When he returns, Ellie has vanished and five of the suited men come after him. Chalis sneaks into the factory that night and learns that the suited men are robots. He’s captured.
The next morning is the 31st— Halloween. Cochran shows Chalis the heart of the operation, a big stone in the middle of a warehouse connected to a bunch of computers. The one that’s missing from Stonehenge, and Cochran chuckles about how they managed to get it there. Apparently, there’s a little speck of the stone in every mask disk. Cochran wants to give Chalis a demonstration, so he turns on a monitor. Which shows the Kupfer family locked in a room to watch TV - a metal, reinforced room with a locked door. Dad thinks Cochran just wants to get his input on some new ads or something. The TV plays the Silver Shamrock commercial, which tells their son to put on his mask. The mask then activates, which makes the boy collapse when his head turns into spiders, snakes, and bugs that kill his parents. The demonstration is a success!
We then see a montage of kids all over the country wearing those masks. This is gonna be big! Cochran gives Chalis a long monologue on what Halloween really means. The planets are in alignment, and it’s time again. Time for a sacrifice. The world is going to change!
Chalis escapes through the air shafts. He calls his harpy of an ex and warns her to get rid of his kids’ masks, but she won’t listen. He frees Ellie and sneaks back into the main control room and starts pressing buttons. He activates the flashing pumpkin sequence and then pours hundreds of the killer discs onto the robotic suited men and lab techs below, shorting them out.
The Stonehenge rock itself activates and disintegrates Cochran before blowing up the whole factory. As they drive away, Chalis and Ellie hear the Silver Shamrock ad on the radio; it’s still all going to happen in just a few minutes. Ellie attacks him; she’s been replaced with a robot.
Chalis runs to the service station and calls the TV station begging them to stop the ad. Nine o’clock rolls around and the ad is taken off the air. Almost. It’s still showing on one channel…
Commentary
This is easily the most hated and maligned of the Halloween movies, simply because Michael Myers doesn’t show up. If it had been named literally anything else, it would be much more fondly remembered. The music does get annoying at times, but the idea itself is pretty unique, harnessing the power of Stonehenge through modern technology. The technology is vague and non-specific enough that it actually does hold up fairly well today.
Dan O’Herlihy is creepy as Cochran - doing a great job of putting a false smile over a core of chilling hatred - with a little genuine glee thrown in for good measure. And Tom Atkins does a good job here as Chalis. The others are mostly just along for the ride.
It’s a fun movie, just don’t watch it expecting an unkillable murderer like Michael Myers.
Oh-- how many days till Halloween?
November Movie Giveaway!
We have FIVE, count ‘em, FIVE copies of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old” to give away!
Here’s how this is going to work:
• One Copy to a random Twitter Follower of @HorrorMovieGuys
• One Copy to a random Twitter Follower of @HorrorBulletin
• One Copy to a random subscriber on our new newsletter:
• TWO Copies to listeners of the Horror Guys Podcast who follow the instructions discussed in the podcast released on Nov 12, 2021.
Follow the Twitter accounts, email us, or subscribe to the newsletter by November 22, and we’ll make our random selections then.
Note that the HorrorBulletin Twitter and Newsletter are both new for us and don’t have too many subscribers yet— these have the best odd of winning.
November Movie Giveaway! We have FIVE copies of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old” to give away! Follow us on various social media sites to win. Details and links at https://www.horrorguys.com/giveaway/
Short Film: Saw: Intoxify (2021)
• Directed by Micah Groenevelt
• Written by Micah Groenevelt
• Stars Omid Harrison
• Run Time: 6:20
• Watch it at:
Synopsis
A man is chained to a chair with a lit lightbulb in his mouth. His hand is affixed to the chair arm with some kind of metal contraption over his ring finger.
Billy, the little doll-thing from the Saw movies pops up on a screen. It claims he regularly takes off his wedding ring to cheat on his wife. He drinks too much. He’s mean to others. He doesn’t appreciate what’s been given to him. He has to find a way out of the machine before the time has run down, or he will die.
Commentary
This looks great. The set, makeup, and the flashbacks all look good and are very well shot. The acting is excellent.
The only gripe I have is with Billy. I watched this short three times and could still only make out about a third of what he was saying. The effect they used to digitize his voice was not well done, and the YouTube video doesn’t offer subtitles. I’m still not quite sure of all the details surrounding the trap the man was in, although it was really interesting as well.
It’s definitely worth a watch!
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)
• Directed by Beom-sik Jeong
• Written by Beom-sik Jeong, Sang-min Park
• Stars Wi Ja-Joon, Yoo Je-Yoon, Seung-Wook Lee
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 35 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
Oh, no, not another found footage style horror movie, you might say. Well, it is one of the genre, but it’s really well done. Tense and creepy. The effects and acting are top notch - the cast really sells that they are jumpy and terrified.
Synopsis
A group of teens get to the fourth floor and look for room 402. “We’re real men, sucker!” One says into the phone camera. They open the door, laughing maniacally. We cut to “Horror Times,” a YouTube channel that shows paranormal investigations. They plan to go to Gonjiam, one of the seven most haunted places in the world. It was closed in 1979 after a string of murders and the disappearance of the director. It was said to be built over a place where Japanese invaders killed a bunch of Korean freedom fighters. Then the director was accused of being a mass murderer before she vanished. There are now countless rumors of ghost appearances.
We meet the seven people that are planning to go to the asylum; four guys and three girls. Everyone who saw a ghost at the asylum heard a ping-pong ball first. They all hope for a million views, so they can make half a million dollars. I suspect YouTube doesn’t pay anywhere near that.
We hear about the three boys trying to get into room 402. They went insane right afterwards. The group arrives and sets up a big tent as a base camp. It looks like they packed for a week’s expedition, not just one night. They are verywell equipped with cameras and equipment. A couple of the guys set up cameras inside the asylum before the rest go in.
They all go in when it’s time except for one guy in the tent to watch the video monitors, handle the live feed, and act as a director. One of the doors closes by itself, which gets everyone excited. They spread out in pairs, investigating various parts of the building. Finally, they come to room 402, which no one has ever been able to open. They decide to save that for later.
They set up a psychic ritual in the director’s room, which they have rigged with many strings and little bells as warning alarms. They do the ritual. The bells start ringing and the candle flickers. They don’t see anything, but now they all believe it’s real. We soon see that it was faked for the viewers— the director put a couple of the guys up to it.
Suddenly things start getting weird out in the tent where the director is. Inside, they find a doll in the lab that used to belong to a patient, and one of the girls gets completely hysterical when it’s not where she saw it earlier. Then they go into a room with little lockers that look like coffins, and that goes badly for them. Then, some graffiti that said, “Let’s Live” changed to “Let’s Die!”
A pair of the girls get scared and leave the building. The director lies to his accomplices about the changing sign, but they don’t really believe him. Meanwhile, the girls outside aren’t really outside anymore; then they run into something nasty.
Meanwhile, the last pair is still upstairs still trying to cut their way into room 402. The director straps on a camera and heads inside after them, not to rescue them but to cut that door open. Inside, they find the cursed ping pong ball. The door opens…
The director runs up the steps and approaches room 402. He doesn’t see any of his friends, which ought to be strange, but he goes on anyway. He gets his wish: to meet the asylum director.
Commentary
These guys don’t travel light for a bunch of trespassers. They have tons of equipment, far more than they could realistically even carry in that van.
Whenever there are blinky cameras and unreliable spotlights, you can count on jump scares. There aren’t any jump scares early on, but it’s filmed like there should be, which increases tension, even in the early scenes.
It’s all dark and shadowy, but you can easily see what you need to see. It’s a very creepy location, and the acting is very good. I’d absolutely recommend watching this one alone in the dark. I liked this a lot more than I expected!
Amityville Cop (2021)
• Directed by Gregory Hatanaka
• Written by Geno McGahee
• Stars Jason Tower, Nicole D’Angelo, Chris Spinelli
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 9 Minutes
• Trailer:
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
It’s a low-budget zombie cop movie. If that’s your thing, it’s as good as any other zombie cop movie, and it does have a couple of good laughs.
Synopsis
A man gets pulled over by a police car. He rolls down the window, the officer approaches, and the demon-zombie-looking cop kills him. Credits roll.
Officer Miller gets called into the boss’s office to explain some problems from Miller’s bust Friday night - it seems the suspect was roughed up a little excessively. We soon learn that Miller’s not the greatest cop. Val, his partner, corroborates the story and then calls Miller an asshole. It’s New Year’s Eve, and they’ll all be going to the party tonight.
The demon cop does bad things to a homeless guy and is seen by another homeless man.
A new cop, Lewis, is assigned to the station, and she’s partnered with Cooper. The governor has limited parties to under ten people, so the captain wonders what to do about the party tonight.
Miller and Val get briefed on the dead homeless guy who was butchered by someone “superhuman strong.”
Lewis and Cooper arrest the second homeless man, who is ranting and raving about the demon. Val recognizes him and asks what’s up. He tells them about the “Devil Cop.” The captain overhears this and looks like he knows something that upsets him.
Twenty years earlier, a bunch of Satanists sacrifice Officer Wilson on the pentagram. They torture him into submission. His partner, Officer Benson comes in and shoots some of the Satanists. Wilson gets up as a demon, and Benson fails to kill him. Wilson says, “I’ll return!” We flash forward to now-Captain Benson remembering all this.
Miller tells Cooper that something’s wrong with the captain. Homeless Gus sobers up, but his story doesn’t change. “I think he’s coming here!”
It’s time for the big party! Demon Officer Wilson kills a cop out in the hallway. Wilson trashes the captain’s desk and finds a newspaper clipping about himself from back in the day.
Lewis staggers off to the restroom, but Wilson kills her instead. Cooper finds her body and alerts the others. Gus tells Tom that he plans to get his life back together tomorrow but dies immediately after. Wilson then infects Tom, turning him into a thing like himself.
Captain Benson tells Miller, Cooper, and Val the whole story about what happened to Wilson. They all call the captain a coward, both back then and now as well. He agrees with them.
The captain confronts Wilson. Wilson wants him to feel the pain that he felt, so he pours gasoline all over the captain. Before he can light him up, the captain shoots a rocket launcher point blank at Wilson. The scene cuts to firework explosions outside, giving a picture of what transpired in that room just now.
Miller, Cooper, and Val wait outside and get chewed out by the boss’s boss who doesn’t believe any of this nonsense they’ve told her about what happened. She storms off inside to look for herself - and finds Wilson, still being an evil demon.
Commentary
It’s low budget, but the cinematography is good. The acting is fine, the basic story is fine, and the production values are good considering the budget. Several scenes are dragged out a bit too long, which makes the whole thing drag a little. The slow pace makes the first half of this short film really feel long.
Detective Miller is a stereotype, a harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, and a general ass, but he is fun to watch. Zombie-Demon-Wilson looks good in his closeups, it’s a decent makeup job. It works pretty well.
I wonder how many people watch these films just because they have the word “Amityville” in the title? Because that’s all it is; they didn’t even mention the word Amityville in the film. It’s almost like they made the film and then figured out that two other films were named “Zombie Cop.” They had to think of something else at the last minute.
Although it does start slow with annoying characters, by the time we get to the end, most of them become more likable. Overall, it’s well done, albeit a little poorly paced.
Closing Stuff:
And that’s our show. Thanks for joining us. Stop in during the week at our website, HorrorMovieGuys.com for news and horror updates, to comment on this podcast, or to contact us.
Get ready for next week, where we’ll be watching some more classics. We’ll watch four more horror films, including “The Werewolf” from 1956, "Howling II" from 1985, Children of the Corn from 1984, and "Dead and Beautiful" from 2021.
Stay tuned!
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