Fresh Picks: 13 Newly-Added Horror Movies on Prime (Halloween-curated Marathon Festival for Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies)

In case you don't know, this was once a TV perennial much liked by we kids (it even had our beloved Riddler, Frank Gorshin), then it disappeared into the legal twilight never to be heard from on VHS or DVD, not unlike strange hits like Corman's The Undead and Bert I. Gordon's Amazing Colossal Man. And Now - viola! Here it is, on Prime. Just like the long-gone Night of Terror, above. You may not know it, but baby, it's a miracle!

The bad news: it turns out that, unlike Night of Terror, Saucer Men isn't very good after all. Most of it is spent with not terribly charismatic "teenagers" trying to convince the adults of their hick town that little green men are running amok in the fields of some farm they use as a lover's lane. These genius aliens kill you by injecting you with alcohol and are adept at hiding the evidence of their crimes to make it look like the work of drunk teens, what would the cops even do against them? Their fingernails you see, are hypodermics that inject their prey with alcohol. Officer, I swear it! Also, their hands detach and crawl around on their own, (with eyeballs on the top).  A bull has a blast though when he runs into one.

The aliens are actually pretty creepy from a distance, looking not unlike what the real greys have been described as (child-size, with bulbous heads -above right), which is a rarity for aliens in movies, making one wonder if. Seeing them all bobbing around in a group in the middle of the field lit only be headlights is pretty creepy, like if you've been abducted and had your memory wiped, maybe it would trigger total recall. The whole angle of the military covering it all up is on point too. Was this movie made with government assistance as disinformation, to make anyone who sees little green men seem crazy? Officer, why won't you believe me?

Seen through my adult eyes now that "why won't you believe me??" nagging at cops and parents gets really old and tired, but as a kid who loved this film I remember I really related to their frustration and desperation. Now I see more from the adult point of view. I never understood why people who see aliens and UFOs call the cops. What are the cops gonna do, arrest a gaggle of hyper-advanced aliens with detachable crawling hands and retracting hypodermic needle fingernails? They probably don't have finger prints. Either way, terrible or not, I'm glad it's finally back from the void.

I know this one's pretty well-known, but I wanted to give it a little shout anyway, as it doesn't quite get the respect it should as modern pastiche classic that offers one of the scariest opening stretches in recent horror memory. It starts innocently during a long car ride down a single lane highway through the South to (or from college), a brother and sister (Gina Phillips and Justin Long) bicker like any normal pair of siblings who've practiced the same time-killing games over and over on shared long car rides since they were kids, casually running razzing and nerve-grating gags on each other that don't permanently aggravate either one, so used are they to their rhythm (his made-up on-the-spot song about her boyfriend is hilarious) that we forget we don't know them, that we're not in the backseat, kicking it, staring out the window, half-listening. So when they run into trouble, it's organic to what we see and know, and we taste their fear in our saliva. All that and the grinding of the car gears, the tied down trunk, the sudden wing erupting from the roadkill demon --it's all prime stuff - overflowing in grand tick-tock momentum over one afternoon into the night. I love the way we follow characters like the car thief into the precinct where the siblings are already on the phone with their parents; Justin beholding the vast amount of missing persons notices on the police bulletin board; the termite attention paid to the precinct's cops and denizens, and the eccentric locals: the people at the diner, the cat lady. the crazy psychic black lady with her strangely calming terror; the tracking shot along the jail where they do the head count "show me some skin" - the bird being flipped just gets a fine "Thank you, I love you too" from the cop so we get a good impression of these local police, possessed of a good sense of humor without being weak or foolhardy, rather than as bad guy patriarchs who don't listen to stressed kids with wild monster stories.

The ultimate link in the chain between the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Terminator, it also has one of the great stealth actors of his generation, Justing Long. You can taste his fear after being run off the road by the crazy killer's car, his glaze of sweat and frenzied yelling - he takes it farther than Dennis Weaver in the entirety of Duel in just a few scenes. His and Phillip's gradual descent from sibling bickering banality to terror and--eventually--courage (she snaps into older sibling protectiveness) is all so vividly etched you can taste their adrenalin, sssssss. And it's all made the weirder when considering the personal history of its director, whose proclivities perhaps find the perfect artistic sublimation subject in the saga of a monster obsessed with certain bits of a young man's anatomy. Yikes. Whatever, it's a blast from start to finish, even if the finish is a bit on the downer side.

The realm of post-Romero zombie movies is vast - thankfully it's now dying out, so to speak, but in the midst of them all stands this, directed by Romero's co-writer on the original 1968 classic, Dan O'Bannon (who also wrote Lifeforce, below). The recently-departed and much beloved James Karen has one of his best roles as a medical supply company clerk who, on the first day of training amiable punk rocker Freddy (Thom Mathews), tries to freak him out by telling him Night of the Living Dead was based on a real event, then showing him the military grade containers containing the dead and the toxic substance that revived them, which--"in a typical military fuck-up"-- were accidentally mailed to their very company back in the 1969. In demonstrating how solid the canister is constructed, Karen kicks it, knocking a bolt loose and releasing the toxins and setting the wheels in motion. Meanwhile, Freddy's punk rock friends wait for him to get off work in the nearby cemetery, partying on the gravestones, with Linnea Quigley's death obsessed party-naked punk chick the highlight who dances on a gravestone while her friends dance around her waving flares (by then its dark out) and fantasizes about being ripped apart my a bunch of old, dirty men (which happens, as you may imagine, not too long afterward).

As if this couldn't get any better, there's also ace comic turns between Clu Gallagher as the supply company owner and Don Calfa as the funeral parlor owner next door. These adults somehow manage to be more punk than the kids without even trying, and I remember my punk friends and I who saw this in the theater at the time, all agreed on that point. The intergenerational ensemble comedy work is beyond compare. And it's scary too - these dead don't die from a blow to the head, dismembered hands and feet still wiggle, and this is the one where they talk and shout "more brains!" In other words, there's no escape. If you haven't seen it, you've been wasting your life. And if you haven't seen it again, lately, now's the chance - it holds up like glue and looks damned great.

(For more Groovy Punk Rock 80s horror comedy on Prime - see TERRORVISION and LIQUID SKY)


Make it a Dan O'Bannon double feature! Thanks to Cannon Films and Tobe Hooper, his script for this stupid-brilliant film gets full gonzo wings to fly fly fly. A full roster of capable British male thespians like Peter Firth, Michael Gothard, Patrick Stewart, Frank Finlay, and Aubrey Morris scream, scream and scream in terror at the presence of gorgeous, naked Mathilda May, a soul energy-vampire whose ship travels in the tail of Halley's comet (it was passing around this time, and sci-fi films like this and Night of the Comet were making the most of it). Raiding planets as they pass, storing up souls for the winter, the lead vampire girl uses Jung's concept of the archetypal unconscious anima (the female ego of the masculine unconscious) to take her luscious form. Steve Railsback is the Yank astronaut from whose mind she takes her idealized shape (though really, she could be taken from the unconscious desires of any straight male in the audience). Without her hot Mathilda May make-up comes off, so to speak, she's a giant Basil Woolverton-style bat monster, but what are ya gonna do? Just stay drunk, Steve! It's a pretty intriguing idea (the vampire myth originates from the past visits of Halley's comet) from a novel by Colin Wilson and featuring knowing nods to an array of movies like SHE and THE BLACK CAT (as per her blue ray aura above). It's easily the best film in Cannon's short-lived but memorably crass and entertaining oeuvre, and the Amazon print is sublime, though I'm not sure if it's the longer, better British cut or not. Either way, it's a hilarious three AM must. (See Ten Reasons)

(for more cult sci-fi horror so recommended it's great if not good, on Prime - Galaxy of Horror)

You'd be a fool not to make this a Halloween perennial, for Vincent Price alone --when he's clearly having a blast making a movie, it's impossible not to have one too. Add Peter Lorre, Karloff and Jack Nicholson, plus Hazel Court as the buxom Lenore--they all vibe together tremendously well-- and some beautiful massive art direction, with sprawling atmospheric Gothic sets, and there you are, the best AIP Gothic horror comedy of all time. I was trying to just focus on lesser-known works for this list, but who's to say who's seen what anymore? The canon is too sprawled out, and no one watches the same thing at the same time like we did back in the 70s, man, when this was on afternoon TV with some regularity, to every kid's flipper-flapping couch somersault delight. The Mickey Mouse-ing score by Les Baxter may get a little too pleased with itself in spots, but it does certainly cast a mood when it wants to and Lorre, Nicholson and Price especially invent all sorts of funny weird little bits of business as they go. Watch it again and feel yourself at the delightful center of Halloween ground zero, the ultimate in cool spooky parties. (See: Mephisto from Missouri)

Sugar, with her zombie