John Saxon better have gotten paid well for being in this 1980s turkey, cause Blood Beach sucks. Oh does it suck in so many different and lame ways, taking a decent premise and making a terrible movie out of it. Jeffrey Bloom sounds like a made up director name in a MAD Magazine spoof making fun of low budget horror cinema anyways.
The monster never really gets shown and when we finally catch a glimpse it looks pretty dull, really. It took me two days to watch this movie, not because it’s long but due to me not caring about anything that happened onscreen. Burt Young also is in this movie if only cause he was in between Rocky movie gigs. Look view this movie if you must, but if you do so try to view it for free like I did. If I had paid for this at a theater I would have left very angry.
Poor John Saxon really needed a quick paycheck and this appeared in Hellmaster, a prime argument for those who dislike 1990s horror movies. I’ve often defended the decade, yet this flick is just awful in a hilariously inept way that must be viewed for one to believe. The characters in this flick not only fully embrace terrible decision making, they also have dialogue so bland even I couldn’t ignore it. I can envision someone finding Hellmaster at the local video store back then, renting it and wanting their money back soon afterwards.
This movie even has a halfway ok plot, yet the movie never fully realizes that potential. There are some good creepy moments, yet they are lost in the film’s inability to not swerve from scary to camp, often in the same scene. Pick a lane, movie. I already don’t recall the final woman, or why she takes the superman drug yet is perfectly fine while others mutate. There’s no logic in this movie, even by horror movie standards. I could see Netflix remaking Hellmaster and creating their own terrible mess in the process.
Finally after a decade Wes Craven returned to the A Nightmare On Elm Street series, which he created. It resulted arguably the best film in the series in my opinion and it also served as a dress rehearsal for his popular Scream franchise. This film also saw the return of Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon, only this time they played themselves in what is a meta style film about Freddy Krueger attempting to enter the real world.
Gone is the campy jokes and corny one liners-in this one Freddy is made scary again, which is a good thing. I never cared for joking Freddy and the menace that the character posses was almost ruined by some of the sequels. Plus the opening is properly gory and creepy, setting the mood for the rest of the film. Having Robert Englund play himself was also nice and there is an eerie scene where after he pops up dressed as Freddy people cheer for him. That’s a bit weird and even ghoulish to Heather as she fears the prospect of a new Freddy movie is driving her crazy.
Pushed into a final battle with an evil that is represented by Freddy, Heather deals with her son being under attack. One of the freakiest moments in this film is when Heather thinks she is witnessing multiple Freddy’s coming towards her in a busy city street. This film is the most interesting out of the series because of how it blurs the lines between reality and fiction in a strong meta sense. Despite some dated special effects and a few cheesy moments New Nightmare is a creepy and well crafted film that also did not end up being the last chapter either. That last scene did make it seem that way curiously enough. Evil only stops when the box office grosses go down, clearly.
Down The Rabbit Hole 