Three Films Make A Post: For 500 years the secret lay dormant... Until now!

Ghost Town (1988): There’s a lot about Richard Governor’s only film (as finished by its DP Mac Ahlberg) Ghost Town that should make it an easy recommendation: the charm of its ghost town, how courageously it aims for the dream-like and the ambiguous, and more than one clever idea. But all that gets buried by a film that never actually finishes anything it starts, a plot that meanders all over the place without rhyme or reason, a big bad who never can shut up spouting his horrible, pseudo-creepy monologues and the damn one-liners, and a lot of the wrong kind of tedium.

Spooky, Spooky (1988): Tedium isn’t something happening in this Sammo Hung-directed horror comedy from Hong Kong, on the other hand. If you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect: characters with the emotional life of children, slapstick, martial arts, some mildly icky stuff, Chinese folklore, utter weirdness, a whole load of blue light, and a film philosophically and ethically set against being boring. This one actually starts a bit slow, but once it gets going, Spooky Spooky doesn’t stop anymore until it’s time for the credits to roll. On the way, Hung also somehow manages to include slapstick and martial arts based suspense scenes that are as tight as the ones in more earnest-minded films would be and teaches us the best use for a watermelon.

Creepozoids (1987): But let’s not end this post on too much of a high note. So who better to come to my help there than David DeCoteau, carrying an early epic about some non-entities played by non-entities and Linnea Quigley’s breasts wandering through a warehouse for fifty minutes or so. There’s some business about a virus that makes you allergic to food in the worst possible way, an adorable giant rat, and more tedium than you can expect from three movies of this sort. Why, even the big finale is a long slog. A long slog, that is, until the film’s horrid monster suit births a monster baby. Then, it’s ten minutes of hilarity during which one guy (seriously, using actor and character names would suggest an individuality that’s just not on screen) pretends to get attacked by the monster baby thing by shaking the doll around, repeated as often as necessary to get this thing on sort of feature length.