Posts tagged 80s horror

By Dan Kinem



This is one of those reviews where I am writing solely to warn those unsuspecting fools out there who might want to see this movie like I did. Had I not been doing a review for this sorry excuse for a movie I would have shut it off after the first five minutes. Why you ask? THIS IS NOT A FUCKING MOVIE. Sure, it’s advertised as one, but what you get is nothing more than a poorly read audio book.



This VHS had been on my wishlist for a while, mostly because it was a shot-on-video horror movie released by Vestron. Vestron really fucked me with this one, but I’ll talk shit on them later. Ghost Stories: Graveyard Thriller is just what the title says, it is stories told in a poorly constructed graveyard courtesy of your local Halloween store. The camera creeps in on a man telling a story about a crazy doctor who does experiments on people. After the first cut I figured it was going to cut away to visualize the story he was telling, similar to nearly all the most popular anthology films, but no, this terrible local theater actor just kept rambling. How much imagination did they really think their audience possessed? My eyes immediately began drifting to other things in the room and I could barely focus on these stories.

The first story is basically an “Island of Doctor Moreau” clone, in which some mad scientist does experiments on people and animals. The only slight twist is he somehow has a woman and a rat have sex which creates a half-rat/half-human named Billy and, after a fight, he and his mother end up dying and are buried in the cemetery together.



The second story is around the time I realized literally this whole thing would consist of people telling stories. Nothing else would happen. The camera would hold on an actor as they talked… A woman tells the story about how she fell in love with some guy named Mr. Fox and he turned out to be a crazed killer who hung girls from meathooks. There is a host who occasionally chimes in with terrible jokes, and after this story he said, “That Mr. Fox had more girls’ clothes than your downtown Macy’s. She had quite a yard sale.”



The next story is told by one of the ugliest hags ever to grace the screen. It was all about how she caught a fever that made her look dead, so they buried her, and she had to dig her way out. This is probably where I lost all my patience. They could have at least got voice actors to do these parts, but instead they got some of the worst the local theater had to offer and forced them to do 1800s-style southern accents. Every person does an accent straight out of the Civil War, yet it clearly takes place in the modern day. You see tombstones that have modern dates, they reference someone playing music in a band on the radio, etc.


^The only truly terrifying thing in the whole movie.

Next story the host takes the reins and tells the dumbest one of them all. It’s all about how he had to team up with Frankenstein (yes, he calls Frankenstein’s Monster simply Frankenstein) to fight a sphinx monster, Dracula, Godzilla (??), Jack the Ripper, Jeykll and Hyde. I guess they win (he doesn’t really talk about how they won, other than that they ripped the heart out of Godzilla…), but Frankenstein gets hurt, because he has to give him a hanky and pick up his bolts. A second later a werewolf comes and kills both him and Frankenstein. I’m not lying to you, that was seriously a story in this “movie.”

Finally, there is the story of a woman who accidentally killed her husband. She summoned some witch who grants her three wishes and the second one caused his death, so for the third wish, she wants to bring him back from the dead. She succeeds but he is a zombie. The end. After a whopping 56 minutes this pile of shit ended.



I cannot reiterate this enough: this was not even a movie. The back of the box says it was too scary for TV, which I assume means this was going to be some public access TV special but was denied, but that still doesn’t explain why in the fuck Vestron would pick this up for video release! Vestron is one of the most highly regarded companies in terms of quality releases that it seriously baffles me how this 50 minute, shot-on-video, too-terrible-for-TV movie was worthy of release. The hilariously shitty cover doesn’t even look like anything Vestron would do. It’s not an easy tape to find, but since it is so terrible, if you do find it it’ll likely be for cheap. Please do not seek this movie out. I’m not overreacting here, this was one of the all-time worst and most boring movies ever. This was so fucking bad that I wanted to smash it with my bare hands. I struggled trying to break the tape to no avail, but luckily, the tagline on the back gave me the inspiration I needed in order to snap this in half, “Keeping telling yourself…It’s only a video…It’s only a video…It’s only a video…”

(Source: vhshitfest.com)