Teenager Scott Howard has some growing pains. Living with single dad Harold and working part time in his hardware store; Scott is already fearing mediocrity and dreading it. He’s playing for the lousy school basketball team who haven’t won a game in years and pining for popular girl Pamela who won’t give him a second look. His lifelong friend Boof adores him but he doesn’t think of her in the same way. He just ain’t as popular or successful as he’d like to be.
Financial advisor Chris Thorne takes a road trip headed for Atlantic City with sexy Diane and two Brazilian friends. On the way they take a detour and inadvertently wind up in a small town called Valkenvania. Chris is pulled over and the quartet is brought before the justice of the peace in Valkenvania. Then all hell breaks loose for the gang.
High school underdog Hoax fills up the idle hours in his seedy little hometown fending of the local leather-jacketed thugs, avoiding his overbearing mother Lucy and dreaming of a date with trailer park temptress Suzie. But his quietly desperate life takes a terrifying turn when his cousin Spike introduces him to an unusual new hobby…
“Night of the Creeps” is mostly comically driven, at least in the beginning, but once the threat becomes apparent there’s some grisly gore on display and a few well realized suspense set-pieces. It’s never really scary but it is well paced and has enough enjoyable lulls that add tremendously to the characters and it’s a gamble that more than pays off due to the terrific lead performers.
In the town of Fairwater seemingly healthy citizens are dropping like flies due to mysterious and sudden heart conditions. Frank Bannister, a fake psychic investigator, discovers that an entity resembling the Grim Reaper is literally stopping the hearts of people and carving numbers in their foreheads detailing it’s amount of fatalities…
Eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain invites five of the most renowned and respected detectives in the world to his isolated mansion for a dinner and a murder. Greeting them is blind butler Bensonmum who only receives help from a hired deaf/mute maid who has a long list of things she doesn’t do; among them cooking. Before the night is over Twain promises that a murder will occur and the five best sleuths will be completely stumped.
Director Joe Dante is one of my favorites. He’s delivered some bona-fide classics like “The Howling”, “Gremlins” and “Innerspace”.
He’s simply an imaginative filmmaker who can play in more ways than one with the material at hand and, therefore, make them fairly unique and original.
Like many of Dante’s other films, “The ‘Burbs” pays a great deal of homage to a particular genre while also carving out a satirical standpoint that gives it it’s own identity.
A nasty demon is awakened at Hull House, an abandoned mortuary, where a group of teenagers are partying on Halloween night. The demon possesses two of them and soon bloody carnage ensues as the pair kills, and then possesses, the rest of the group.
A few years later students are preparing for a celebration where a few of them decide to visit Hull House. This new group of teens catch Angela’s attention and some more demon mayhem is unleashed.
Theatre director Alan leads his acting troupe, whom he continually refers to as his “children”, to a graveyard on a remote island to perform a necromantic ritual in order to raise the dead. At first it seems the ritual is a bust … But then the dead start to rise and the living have a survival fight on their hands.
When Agatha Christie wrote and published “Ten Little Niggers” in 1939 (imagine that title today!) she couldn’t have fathomed how influential her relatively short book would become. The film adaptations are numerous, but the basic plot has been copied too many times to count.
