Thursday Night Terrors | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Candyman [1992]

2021/08/192021/08/20 Jared Mobarak

Sweets to the sweet. An urban legend ghost such as Candyman (Tony Todd) doesn’t care about anyone besides those willing to keep his memory alive. His purpose in death is to be remembered through blood—turning his heinous fate from the late nineteenth century into a curse that haunts others into being too scared to naively follow in his own footsteps where it comes to the belief that someone who looks like him can escape the prejudice that targets the color of his skin. So when Chicago grad students Helen Lyle…

REVIEW: Maniac [1981]

2021/08/162021/08/16 Jared Mobarak

You’re so pretty. We’ve already seen Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) kill five people by the time Anna D’Antoni’s (Caroline Munro) viewfinder catches him in Central Park. Her photographer is simply taking shots at random to the point where she eventually walks off after another subject, leaving her bag unattended under a tree. Frank meanders over, pretends to tie his shoe, and takes a glimpse at the address tag to pay her a visit later. It makes sense. He’s the serial killer every front page is talking about. He can’t have…

REVIEW: Shivers [1975]

2021/08/032021/08/16 Jared Mobarak

Poor birdy. You almost want to say Dr. Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver) is on to something when telling Dr. Roger St. Luc (Paul Hampton) about his latest scientific experimentations between bites of his pickle. He and the late Dr. Hobbs (Fred Doederlein) have been funneling grant money into a project that hopes to put parasites to work for humanity. The pitch is as follows: Which is better? A faulty kidney? Or a working parasite? If the latter cleans your blood without needing to wait for a new organ, doesn’t it…

REVIEW: Prom Night [1980]

2021/07/252021/08/16 Jared Mobarak

The killers are coming. Built upon a story by a film student (Robert Guza Jr.) that director Paul Lynch knew, Prom Night delivers a grounded slasher focused on revenge. Written by William Gray, the script begins six years in the past as four children play hide and seek in an old, abandoned building without adult supervision. They play rough with chants about killers to try and spook each other into giving up their location—a style that might scare someone unfamiliar with the tone being set like young Robin Hammond. She…

REVIEW: Maximum Overdrive [1986]

2021/07/192021/07/19 Jared Mobarak

It turned itself on and it bit me! To read Stephen King‘s short story “Trucks” (from the compilation Night Shift) is to get embroiled in a nihilistic nightmare along the lines of a “Twilight Zone” episode. A few people are left stranded at a truck stop while diesel vehicles gain cognizance and begin killing any people they see until fuel stores run low and a truce must be met to acquire their victims’ pumping services. There’s little room for hope as the new order of things appears destined to continue…

REVIEW: The Funhouse [1981]

2020/03/152021/07/10 Jared Mobarak

God is watching you. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the pitch Universal Pictures used to court director Tobe Hooper for Lawrence J. Block‘s The Funhouse script was something akin to “think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but at a carnival.” That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Four kids looking for a good time stumble across a deranged family that has no qualms with killing them if they get in the way of living life way outside of the law. Rather than just be rednecks in the woods,…

REVIEW: Child’s Play [1988]

2019/06/062021/07/10 Jared Mobarak

I’ll be your friend to the end. The rough cut of Tom Holland‘s Child’s Play was around two hours and test audiences weren’t happy. Almost forty minutes were excised (and boy can you tell) before the film saw the light of day and eventually earned an insanely devoted cult following that’s seen six sequels (so far) with original screenwriter Don Mancini taking up the reigns for the last three. As such, it’s wild to think how different his initial draft was. Mancini first imagined a conceit that involved the transference…

REVIEW: Blood Rage [1987]

2019/05/222020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Here’s to the new family. Shot in 1983 but released in 1987 under a different name (Nightmare at Shadow Woods) and without most of its gore, the uncensored version of Blood Rage doesn’t even have its title intact. The word Slasher takes its place during a drive-in theater prologue instead—an apt name in its own right considering the murder weapon of choice is a machete wielded with a swing of the arm to inflict gashes into the faces of its victims. It ultimately doesn’t matter what you want to call…

REVIEW: Chopping Mall [1986]

2019/05/212020/03/27 Jared Mobarak

Absolutely nothing can go wrong. Only a 1980s horror could have a killer robot plot and intentionally gloss over artificial intelligence themes for lightning. Who wants a ton of exposition talking about hubristic irony when you can let Mother Nature provide a malfunction? Rather than show humanity as its own worst enemy flying too close to the sun, supernaturally sci-fi-inspired sentries wreak havoc with little more than a bolt of electricity flipping the switch that transforms these programmed protectors into autonomous predators. Now all you need is a few sex-crazed…

REVIEW: An American Werewolf in London [1981]

2019/05/182021/08/03 Jared Mobarak

Beware the moon, lads. It’s not hard to believe John Landis wrote his first draft of An American Werewolf in London at eighteen. The male gaze throughout is right in line with the comedies he would bring to life (The Kentucky Fried Movie and National Lampoon’s Animal House) to achieve the success necessary to secure a ten million dollar budget more than a decade later. By focusing on two co-eds crossing the Atlantic to backpack through the moors around his age while writing, he’d of course end up injecting a…

REVIEW: Le notti del terrore [Burial Ground] [1981]

2019/04/082020/03/28 Jared Mobarak

It’s a walking corpse! The earth trembles and graves open just like Ragno Nero (Black Spider) foretold when talking about a non-descript “they” joining the living as messengers of death. A professor (Raimondo Barbieri) catalyzes this event when an underground discovery releases a horde of zombies onto him and the three couples he had already invited to share his findings. They don’t know where he’s gone upon arriving so they capitalize on his absence with a night of sex to supply director Andrea Bianchi‘s audience with some nudity and half-hearted…