Three Films Make A Post: He's not just in your mind...he's in your house.

The Vagrant (1992): This is the second and final feature film special effects guy Chris Walas directed, and, despite being a marginal improvement on his “sequel” to Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, if only by virtue on not pissing on a classic, it’s really no surprise to me his directing career didn’t go anywhere. Though, to be fair, Walas, didn’t write the script (that was Richard Jefferies), so it’s not exactly his fault that this supposed horror comedy only ever aims for the most obvious joke and eschews the social satire its set-up (Yuppie versus possibly imaginary vagrant! Intense homeownership!) suggests, instead playing out like a long, long, looooong episode of the “Tales from the Crypt” show. Walas’s direction, while certainly professional enough, doesn’t add anything of note, so it’s the job of Bill Paxton’s enthusiastic (if again puddle-shallow but what is he supposed to do, re-write the script?) performance to keep an audience awake to the end.

The Lightning Incident (1991): This TV movie by Michael Switzer featuring a cult that really needs to acquire and sacrifice our heroine’s (Nancy McKeon) baby for reasons of post-colonial shenanigans, isn’t terribly great either. A couple of times, it hits upon an effective moment or two – usually involving dream visions or very standard conspiracy tropes done alright - but the pacing is draggy and the filmmaking not terribly involving. Even though there’s a lot of material in the basic plot to make an interesting little horror film about colonialism featuring a heroine who is actually closer connected to the people she has to fight off than she knows and/or children paying for past sins of their parents, in practice, the whole she-bang sits awkwardly between classic pulp racism and a more complex treatment of the questions its script begs. The heavy hints of the film having ambitions on being a less exciting Rosemary’s Baby don’t help.


Rumpelstiltskin (1995): Finishing today’s trilogy of not terribly great 90s horror films is this example by Mark Jones, that finds a revived Rumpelstiltskin (Max Grodénchik) also doing some baby stealing, though in this case, to acquire a soul. Fighting against Rumps are the baby’s mother (Kim Johnston Ulrich) and the most horrible man alive (one Tommy Blaze). To nobody’s surprise, this is exactly the kind of movie you’d expect, with a bog-standard (fairy-tale background or not) quipping 90s supernatural horror villain in an okayish monster suit, murdering people with okayish special effects while doing nothing exciting whatsoever. Don’t even ask questions like how Rumps learned all the stuff about 90s pop culture he never stops referencing when he was transformed into a rock for the last thousand years, or how someone making a tearful wish in the presence of his rock is entering into a pact that sells a baby soul to him, or what the hell a Tommy Blaze is – nobody involved in this part of 90s horror ever cared about these kinds of questions, because all they were interested in were the quips (which are all horrible) and the effects (which won’t turn anyone’s head). Making an actual movie was just too much effort in the wild 90s world of Leprechauns, Wishmasters (yes, I know, there’s one good Wishmaster film) and Rumpelstiltskins.