I thought I would try to stay awake until the new year rolled around by watching some more of those Midnight Movies DVDs that I picked up at the Family Dollar for 4 bucks each. There's a pair of movies in each DVD. Both the stories in this pair are about infecting people with something bad. The other nice thing about them is I hadn't seen the first one and that brings my Watched Movies List up to 226 for the year. I hope to get two more in before I hit up Morpheus for some nod time.
The Beast Within is a 1982 horror film with Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch. It's based on a book by Edward Levy. Hadn't heard of him or his book but I'm not much of a horror reader. I like my horror on film, it leaves less to my imagination. Ronny and Bibi are traveling when he runs the car off the road. She stays in the car while he goes down the road to a gas station to get a tow. The dog leaves the car and encounters something shambling through the woods. Bibi comes looking for the dog, finds the dead body, then is attacked and raped. It's rather grim and I fast forwarded through some of it. Seventeen years later their normal enough son becomes sick. His pituitary gland is working over time and they don't know what to do. Ronny and Bibi return to the scene of the crime, Nioba Mississippi, and start trying to figure out what is going on. It takes a while for them to dig out what happened and it's pretty fucked up. The son turns into a monster and there's plenty of killing. The startling revelation by the last victum was about average for this sort of movie. The goofy make of the son in full on monster mode made me laugh a bit. There's a clip in the title above of the transformation. That's about the best part of the movie. It's a fairly good effect for the early 80's and it's over the top enough that it works. Too bad the rest of the movie isn't this goofy or entertaining.
The Bat People is a 1974 AIP film about a doctor who, while spelunking with his wife, gets bitten by a bat. He transforms into a bat man over the course of the movie. I thought I hadn't seen it until I put it on and it seemed familiar. The Wikipedia page filled me in. I'd first seen this movie when it was a Mystery Science Theater 3000 selection under the name It Lives By Night. I missed logging in some of the movies that played on MST3K when they first aired and this was one of them. If I cared more I would cross reference the MST3K list against my WML and fix that. Sounds like more work for me. There are some boring bits at the beginning and then there's some troubled man stuff while the doc gets worse and worse. He starts killing, after he gets into bat mode, and that isn't much exciting either. His poor wife goes nuts and the doc escapes, luring his wife into the cave that is his new home. His bat man makeup is fair and there is some bit of nice cave footage but for the most part the movie is below average. The IMDb gives it a 2.2 and that isn't far off.
Sadly this pair of movies isn't close to being worth the $4 and I wouldn't take a bit that I'm going to be watching them again anytime soon.
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