Lost Horror Movies Nobody Talks About Anymore

If the title Blood Beach alone doesn't perk up your ears, perhaps a little context. In 1975, a very young Steven Spielberg screwed Hollywood forever by inventing the summer blockbuster with Jaws. During the next several years, there were about 16,984 ripoffs of that film, most of which were in no way subtle. By 1980, audiences had been subjected to so many iterations on the same theme that filmmakers were starting to run out of ways to get people into the mouths of sharks. That's when one desperate screenwriter had a brilliant idea: what if the beach itself was eating people?

That is the supremely insane premise of Blood Beach, which begins with a woman out walking her dog getting sucked under the sand by some unseen beast. Because this is an '80s horror movie, several more sand-suckings must happen before anyone notices, no one is smart enough to simply stay away from the beach, and the film ends with a ridiculous-looking monster getting blown to bits (and an obligatory sequel setup). In short, it's brilliant. Sadly, the potential sequel (Bloodier Beach? Son of the Beach?) never materialized, and the film never received a DVD or Blu-Ray release because its distributor went broke. If you happen to secure a copy on eBay, be prepared for a jolt when it arrives — as any '80s kid will tell you, the VHS cover art is freaking terrifying.

Okay, first off: Jeff Goldblum as the Devil. That's an iron-clad elevator pitch for eight different awesome movies. But the only one that ever got made was 1990's Mr. Frost, an excellent slow-burn psychological thriller that, it should be reiterated, features Jeff Goldblum as the Devil.

As the film opens, the mysteriously rich Mr. Frost is arrested for having tons of dead bodies buried all around the grounds of his huge mansion, which authorities tend to frown upon. Unable to establish his real name, they throw him into an asylum, where he starts messing with the head of a young doctor (Kathy Baker, Picket Fences), insisting that he's the actual Devil and seemingly proving it by doing weird, devil-y tricks. The film builds to a bizarre and inevitable conclusion, wherein it becomes pretty obvious that Mr. Frost is telling the truth. As the great Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film, there's a time-honored tradition of big-name actors playing Old Scratch onscreen, but he called Goldblum's performance "easily the least likable — which is praise, I guess."

First things first: There are no monkeys, blue or otherwise, in this film. A little boy makes a comment about a scary dream he had about a blue monkey, and that somehow became the movie's title. The film is about a giant bug monster, and the filmmakers did consider other titles both super on-the-nose (Insect) and crazily over-the-top (Invasion of the Body Suckers) before settling on nonsensical, so at least they considered all their options. But titling issues aside, Blue Monkey is pretty much a mashup of Aliens and The Thing, and is almost as awesome as that sounds.

A man is pricked by a weird, exotic plant and falls ill. He's taken to the hospital, where he promptly vomits up a giant white larva that starts growing way faster than the normal, small white larva that people vomit up all the time. The hospital is quickly quarantined, making those trapped inside easy pickings for the slimy, gross, car-sized bug-creature that the larva grows into before anyone has time to say "Xenomorph." It's an extravaganza of low-budget '80s creature effects, and the fact that it borrows liberally from some much better movies is really part of its charm. That no character ever says, "There's a really bad bug going around this hospital" is the only disappointment here.

Wayne Coe was an illustrator for Universal in the '80s, and he made "obscene amounts of money" for coming up with the posters for little films like Out of Africa and Back to the Future. All the while, he was dreaming of his passion project, which he hoped would one day be his debut as a Hollywood director: a horror-Western anthology film, for some reason.

Originally intending to shoot one segment every year for five years using his own money, he was eventually able to secure a producer, a small budget, and — in a pretty major coup — the services of James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif to star in the wraparound segment, which featured a couple of Old West travelers trading ghost stories over the campfire. Shot through with a strong streak of social conscience (Coe says Dourif told him they were making a "feminist Western" because racist and sexist men keep getting their asses handed to them throughout the film), Grim Prairie Tales turned out to be quirky, creepy, and effective — which apparently nobody was ready for in 1990. Practically no one saw the film, and Coe retreated into music video and sketch comedy work before becoming a painter. But he got to make a pretty sweet horror flick with James Earl Jones, and he almost certainly has the VHS tape that proves it on hand at all times.

Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, despite going through multiple titles to arrive at one that we can print, is one of the celebrated mystery author's most beloved works. It tells the story of ten guests summoned to a mysterious island who are picked off one by one by an unknown killer, leaving the reader guessing whodunit — until everyone is dead, leading to an explanation of what the hell happened (in the form of a letter penned by one of the guests) that had mystery fans stuffing their brains back into their ears. The 1982 exploitation horror flick Island of Blood pretty much tells the exact same story, but with a lot more gore and a killer who inexplicably chooses a jaunty, uptempo punk song called "Face to Face" for a calling card. 

With lyrics like "spear me, spear me," and "boil me, boil me," the tune seems to be there just to make sure the killer doesn't run out of ideas. There are some pretty excellent death scenes, and the kind of gloriously goofy acting you'd expect from a low-budget film of this vintage, with the whole thing building to a twist that keeps the spirit of Christie's original one while being a damn sight more demented. It's the kind of gonzo, weirdass flick that begs to be discovered in the VHS bin at a garage sale or flea market — or you can buy beat-up copies online from $50 to $100. Just don't start up your own murder spree when you get that stupid song stuck in your head.

Joseph Zito is a man who, under the banner of the notorious Cannon Films, gave the world not one but two Chuck Norris kick vehicles (Missing in Action and Invasion U.S.A.) and also the best film of a venerable horror series (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter). He also directed a micro-budget movie called Bloodrage under the name Joseph Bigwood, which probably tells you all you need to know about the guy. But his 1981 slasher effort The Prowler is criminally underrated, for one simple reason — Tom Savini. The groundbreaking gore effects artist (whose work on the previous year's Friday the 13th scarred fans of Kevin Bacon forever) contributed some of his best setpieces to Zito's film, and some fans consider it to be his best work.

Not to say that the film itself is fantastic or very original. A jilted lover who murdered his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend in 1945 returns 35 years later to the scene of the crime, prowlin' and slashin' his way through a bevy of young people before being revealed as an authority figure and tragically dying of a blown-off head. However, Savini's gore effects are ruthlessly brutal, lingering lovingly on slashings, impalings, and the agonized expressions of the killer's victims. The film's status as Savini's masterpiece is only challenged by another movie from 1981, a year in which the gore maestro was definitely not screwing around.

Visiting Hours was not the first slasher to be set mainly in a hospital — Halloween II comes to mind — but it is the only one to feature William Shatner, who does what he does best, chewing scenery as if he were taking part in a million-dollar overacting contest. Only this time, he had stiff competition in the form of the great Michael Ironside (Scanners, Watchers) who took his psychotic Big Bad act far enough over the top that Shatner was waiting there, sipping a beer and asking what took him so long.

Crusading feminist reporter Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) draws the ire of an MRA prototype by the hilariously badass name of Colt Hawker (Ironside, as if his real name wasn't badass enough), and she is injured when he attacks her at home. Taken to the hospital, she somehow manages to survive attack after attack by Hawker, who in frustration eventually gives up and just starts killing, you know, whoever. Slasher fans will find no surprises here, but Ironside — who really gave his all with every bug-eyed, deliriously insane performance — is typically unnerving to watch as a single-mindedly murderous psycho, and if he and Shatner trying to one-up each other in the histrionics department in a film that also made the famous Video Nasty list doesn't pique your interest, then you're reading the wrong list.

Xtro may have been remembered as just another attempt to cash in on the success of Alien, if indeed it had been content to just stay put in one genre. In its completely gonzo back half, it touches on everything from slasher flicks to zombie movies to Carrie — but it precedes this with a fairly standard alien invasion narrative, punctuated by a jaw-dropping scene that seems to have been conceived with the objective of making Alien's chestburster sequence look like a Disney movie.

Years after a man is kidnapped by aliens, one of the slimy things returns to pay a visit to his wife, impregnating her in a truly disgusting fashion that we can't rightly go into detail about here. But then she gives birth to her husband, a full-grown man, in a manner every bit as graphic and horrifying as you're imagining. Things then get really weird as the man imbues his son with psychic powers, which he uses to bring his toys to life and murder his classmates. The son then inexplicably develops a thirst for blood, and by this point audiences are wondering just how many beats from other films this story can accommodate. Critical reviews were scathing — Roger Ebert called it "an exercise in sadness" — but fans appreciated writer/director Harry Bromley Davenport's willingness to dump every single freaky idea in his head into one supremely bizarre movie, and that birthing scene ... well, go watch the movie if you really want to.

Director Larry Cohen showed his stripes early on with his fourth feature It's Alive, based on the novel of the same name. Having mainly trafficked in blaxploitation flicks up to that point, his work took a hard left turn with this tale of a woman who gives birth to a somewhat ... unusual child. That is to say, it's a mutated monster with fangs and claws, which kills the doctor who birthed it as its warm-up act. Escaping the hospital, it's hunted by police, its father, and a representative of a pharmaceutical drug company whose contraceptive medication almost certainly cause the mutation. It doesn't end well for any of them.

Whether this film represents the most insane possible take on birth control and abortion the '70s had to offer is up for debate, but its seriously disturbing premise and creature effects have made it a cult classic — to say nothing of its marketing campaign, which probably gives children of the '70s nightmares to this day. Its bloody climax, in which Murder Baby is finally dispatched by the police, let audiences relax just long enough to deliver one of the best gut-punch final lines of dialogue in horror: "Another one's been born in Seattle."

1981's Hospital Massacre may be the least essential '80s horror movie set in a medical facility (after Halloween II, Visiting Hours, and probably Blue Monkey), but it at least lets the audience know what they're in for right from the title card, and it delivers on that promise. There's a hospital, and a massacre takes place; really, the film is a paragon of truth in advertising. It could only have been more accurate if it had been called Hospital Massacre, and Barbi Benton Gets Bare.

That's right, none of those other hospital-themed horror flicks could boast the presence of Playboy model (and longtime Hugh Hefner girlfriend) Barbi Benton, who spends much of the film running in jiggly terror from a masked killer who may or may not be a spurned childhood admirer. (Spoiler alert: He totally is.) The mystery isn't mysterious, the deaths are run-of-the-mill, and the ending is telegraphed from a mile away — but here's Benton in the middle of it all, looking ethereally gorgeous and treating the whole cheesy, ridiculous enterprise with deadpan seriousness. It's certainly no Halloween II, but there's no shame in falling short of the bar set by that timeless classic.