Only for the biggest lovers of slasher films

Girls Nite Out (aka "The Scaremaker") (1983)
Starring: Julia Montgomery, Hal Holbrook and Rutanya Alda
Director: Robert Deubel
Rating: Four of Ten Stars

A maniac in a bear suit ruins a campus scavenger hunt by brutally murdering the participants. Will the chief of campus security (Holbrook) leave his office long enough to keep the bodycount in single digits and avenge the death of his own daughter?


"Girls Nite Out" is a by-the-numbers slasher film enhanced by "After School Special"-style ups and downs in relationships. The first hour or so is intensely boring, and even when the mad killer gets going, things don't liven up much. The acting is okay, but the problem is that every character is nearly devoid of personality, being nothing more than a required figure in this type of movie (The Nympho, The Nerd, The Stoner, The Joker, The Jock, The Shrew, and so on...), so the actors have even less to do than is typical.

On the other hand, "Girls Nite Out" does warn the viewers up front. I think it has probably the most boring main titles sequence of any film I've seen; I almost didn't make it through them. Plus, the bear costume as modified-by-the-killer is pretty nifty... and I guess the film can claim originality by having a basketball team mascot outfit turned into a deadly weapon.

Thirty years later, 'The Fog' remains scary

While I had intended to post a review to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of John Carpenter's masterful horror film "The Fog," it is pure coincidence that I managed to post it on the very day that the film was released in 1980!

"The Fog" ranks among the all-time great horror movies, and it is ten times the film that the 2005 remake was. I doubt anyone will be writing reviews of that remake in 2035, but I wouldn't be suprised to see Carpenter's film still being watched and written about.


The Fog (1980)
Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Janet Leigh, and Hal Holbrook
Director: John Carpenter
Rating: Nine of Ten

As the tiny coastal town of Antonio Bay prepares for its 100th anniversary celebration, the dark secret of its founding comes back to haunt it in the form of a strangely luminecent fog that carries within it angry, murderous ghosts.


"The Fog" is near-perfect ghost movie. It establishes the isolated setting carefully, it introduces us to the cast of characters, it builds tension slowly, gives us a good reason for why the ghosts are angry and why they've chosen this particular moment to return and claim revenge, and it gives us several poetic reasons for why the current citizens of the town deserve to suffer the wrath for something that happened a century ago. This separate the film from the vast majority of ghost and monster movies where the filmmakers either don't bother thinking through the "why" of the events and instead offer weak or illogical explanations (if they bother putting any thought into that question at all) and as a result end up with a badly composed story that also feels weak and illogical.

From a technical point of view, Carpenter deploys every weapon in his filmmaking arsenal with perfect precison and timing. Imagery, special effects, sound effects, and the musical score all mesh with great effect, lifting the performances by the excellent cast to heights of excellence rarely seen in horror movies. Adrienne Barbeau is especially excellent as a DJ who watches the fog roll in and tries to use her vantage point above the city in an old lighthouse to warn the citizens of the danger.

"The Fog" also proves time and again that the scariest films embody the addage "less is more" in every way. The fact that the monsters and the kills are nearly always shrouded in the fog makes them even more horrendous, because the imagination fills in the details. Even the finale, which would have been a splatter-fest in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, is subject to the minimalist approach seen throughout the film and it is far more suspenseful for it.