{"id":17944,"date":"2024-04-19T16:01:30","date_gmt":"2024-04-19T16:01:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattshorroraddiction.com\/?p=17944"},"modified":"2024-04-19T16:01:30","modified_gmt":"2024-04-19T16:01:30","slug":"body-count-night-of-the-demons-and-night-swim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/?p=17944","title":{"rendered":"Body Count, Night of the Demons, and Night Swim"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Body Count<\/em><\/strong> – 1986, Italy, 87m. Director: Ruggero Deodato. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Night of the Demons<\/em><\/strong> – 1988, US, 90m. Director: Kevin Tenney<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Night Swim<\/em><\/strong> – 2024, US, 98m. Director: Bryce McGuire. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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BODY COUNT<\/em><\/strong> (1986)<\/em> A group of monotonous friends on a wilderness excursion in the Colorado Rockies happen to pick the same campground where fifteen years earlier two teens were slaughtered by a masked madman. The land’s owner (David Hess) believes the place is haunted by the spirit of a Native American shaman, but when more bodies start to pile up it’s clear the killer is flesh and blood. A young woman is stabbed to death in an abandoned cabin while her boyfriend is thrown off a cliff\u2014the actor has blond hair but his stunt double has black. The characters are too stupid to notice their missing friends, and the sheriff (Charles Napier) is too busy sleeping with Hess’s wife (Mimsy Farmer) to care. Two additional characters engage in sexual acrobatics in the same cabin, but the makers of this limp noodle have no idea how to film the scene and rob the viewer of some much needed excitement. Those lovers are dispatched, but not before the woman discovers the killer’s hideout, complete with the requisite head-in-a-jar gag. More people are chopped up while the synth-rock music blares on the soundtrack and director Ruggero Deodato loses any credibility he build around his cult classic, Cannibal Holocaust<\/em>. Body Count<\/em> is an Italian production masquerading as an American slasher (the video release even used the tagline, “In the tradition of Friday the 13th<\/em> and Halloween<\/em>“) created by people who don’t understand how American teens\u2014or humans\u2014behave. D<\/strong>– (Currently streaming on Tubi.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NIGHT OF THE DEMONS<\/em><\/strong> (1988)<\/em> Teenagers looking for something to do on Halloween night are invited to a party at an abandoned, supposedly haunted funeral parlor. The teens are an assortment of typical horror movie personalities found throughout the eighties, including the virgin, the jock, the bimbo, the outcast, etc. Fortunately for the viewer, the material is written with care and the characters are played by a likable cast, most of whom become possessed, mangled, terrorized, and gored by demonic entities. Unfortunately for the viewer, the film takes too long to get going\u2014but once it does, the story delivers plenty of imaginative makeup FX, though not many surprises. Linnea Quigley provides the best moment when she’s turned into a “lipstick demon” and shoves the tube into her nipple\u2014this delightful scene is preceded by the gouging out of her date’s eyes as Quigley grunts, “Don’t look at me!” The plot is taken from The Evil Dead<\/em>, and especially Demons<\/em>, as the cast is slowly transformed into disfigured monsters who go about turning their friends into bloody stumps. Steve Johnson (Fright Night<\/em>) supplied the top-notch special effects, but in the end, one can’t help wishing they were part of a better movie. C<\/strong>+ (Currently streaming on Freevee, Peacock, Shudder, Tubi.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NIGHT SWIM<\/em><\/strong> (2024)<\/em> Psycho<\/em> screenwriter Robert Bloch once wrote an article about real horror lying in the out-of-place: a clown is just a clown\u2014but a clown outside your house is horrifying. This seems to have been the idea behind Night Swim<\/em>, in which a malevolent entity uses the mundanity of a suburban swimming pool as a place to hide. Unfortunately for the makers of Night Swim<\/em>, the idea proves fruitless. After being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an ex-baseball pro (Wyatt Russell, Kurt’s son) makes a fresh start with his family by moving into a picturesque two-story house complete with a backyard pool. At first the pool seems like the perfect form of physical therapy for Russell\u2014until his disease miraculously begins healing and his children start seeing specters around the water. It turns out the pool is a conduit for a parasitic, supernatural being that possesses the sick and drags others to a watery grave filled with otherworldly spirits\u2014sort of a soggy version of the Further from Insidious<\/em>. As with most family-oriented ghost tales, love wins in the end, but that doesn’t keep the viewer from suffering at the hands of waterlogged writers who infuse the movie with predictable jump scares and a formulaic story structure. Stale and utterly uninvolving. D<\/strong>+ (Currently streaming on Peacock.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Body Count – 1986, Italy, 87m. Director: Ruggero Deodato. Night of the Demons – 1988, US, 90m. Director: Kevin Tenney Night Swim – 2024, US, 98m. Director: Bryce McGuire. BODY COUNT (1986) A group of monotonous friends on a wilderness excursion in the Colorado Rockies happen to pick the same campground where fifteen years earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capsule-reviews"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matt.doppiavvu.it\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}