"Basketcase" (1982): What could be scarier than a misshapen blob of teeth and flesh, stored inside an oversized basket? Frank Henenlotter ("Frankenhooker") directs this tale of Siamese twins - one ordinary, the other hideously deformed - out for revenge against the doctors who so callously separated them. The brothers hit the Big Apple with bloodlust. Belial, the molten meatball of horrors, does the dirty work, leaving a trail of dead doctors and mangled hamburgers behind him. His brother Duane (Kevin van Hentenryck) does the heavy lifting, literally. "What's in the basket?" ask fellow boarders at the Hotel Broslin - nothing but the goriest, grossest, most gleefully demented schlock film of the early 1980s.
"I Spit on Your Grave" (1978): Feminists beware. This low-rent exploitation film, originally released as "Day of the Woman," stunned viewers when it first hit theaters. Thirty years later, it's not hard to see why. Camille Keaton stars as Jennifer, a young writer on vacation in her country home in the hills. She hopes to get a little work done. Instead, she's viciously and systematically brutalized by a pack of local men. Ravaged and left for dead, Jennifer recovers but isn't through with the men just yet. "I Spit on Your Grave" takes many cues from "Deliverance," crafting a tale of bloody revenge sick enough to turn the stomach of any viewer.
"Black Christmas" (1974): Before she was Lois Lane, Margot Kidder co-starred in this oft-forgotten slasher classic, which inspired a string of imitators, including "Halloween" (1978) and "Friday the 13th" (1980). Terror begins when a strange man enters the attic of a snow-covered sorority house, where a group of its sisters are spending Christmas. Strange phone calls begin to plague the girls, the caller breathing and moaning heavily into the phone. They joke at first, but soon realize that the calls carry deadly tidings. The image of Lynn Griffin in a rocking chair - a plastic bag wrapped around her lifeless, gasping face - makes for one of the most unsettling climaxes in horror movie history.
"Phantasm" (1979): A mortuary undertaker terrorizes a sleepy town in the surrealistic, original "Phantasm." Pallid and silent, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) lurks the halls of the Morningside Funeral Home; an army of cloaked dwarves wait at his beck and call. What are they made of? The mismatched, rotting limbs of the recently deceased. A set of flying silver orbs patrol the halls of the mortuary, drilling into the foreheads, sucking out brain matter of unwanted guests. The orbs are so bizarre and gruesome that they almost garnered an unheard of X-rating for the film upon theatrical release. Michael Baldwin and Bill Thornbury star as two locals who begin to suspect something is amiss at the funeral home.
"Zombi 2" (1979): George Romero may be the master of zombie gore in America, but in Italy during the 1980s, Lucio Fulci commanded that prestige. Originally devised as a sequel to Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," Fulci's zombie masterwork is anything but a shameless duplicate. The slow-ambling zombies first appear on a cargo ship to New York. Pulled into the harbor by strong gales, the almost empty ship leads a pair of intrepid travelers to an island. Mysteriously, the island has yielded scores of the living dead - putrid, decomposing, ravenous creatures whose hunger for flesh must be quenched. The New Yorkers don't stand a chance, and neither, do the remaining human inhabitants of the island. "Zombi 2" has some pretty incredible scenes, from an eye being gouged out by a wooden splinter, to an underwater showdown between a tiger shark and zombie. If you have to guess who wins, you haven't been watching enough zombie movies.
"Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962): It's hard to believe there was ever a soul in doubt of the incredible acting talents possessed by Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. But thanks to studio delusions, both actresses were considered has-beens by the early 1960s. In order to keep working, they were forced to accept acting jobs which, 20 years prior, would have been beneath them. Luckily for viewers, one such film became legend. Crawford and Davis star as sisters in the eerie classic, "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" Davis is Baby Jane, a former child star turned elderly alcoholic. Crawford is Blanche, a successful actress, now confined to a wheelchair and under Jane's care. Jane slowly tortures her sister, starving and siphoning off her cash supply, all the while harboring hopes of becoming a famous star again.
"Night of the Demons" (1988): Angela (Amelia Kinkade) is hosting a Halloween party, and she desperately wants you to come. She and a group of friends sneak into an abandoned mortuary with plans to party hard enough to wake the dead. After a fun-filled séance, the teens do just that: awakening a demonic force that then proceeds to possess their souls. Cute teens become red-eyed demons who levitate through the halls and sneak up on teens having sex in coffins. "Hey lady, I live in a nice house with plastic seat covers on the furniture," says one teen, before being pounced on by a topless demon covered in lipstick. Plenty of laughs and scares are had with "Night of the Demons." A habitually underrated B-movie of the 1980s, "Demons" is one film worth fishing in the discount bin for.
Shayna Murphy can be reached at skmurphy@student.umass.edu.
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