Mini Reviews - What I Have Been Watching

Christmas Evil (1980) - Marketed as a Christmas slasher, this is more of a blackly comic art film, no deaths until 50 minutes in. Sadly, it lags a lot, and only the end involving a flying van is memorable in a WTf way.
A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012) - Simon Pegg gets haunted by delusions of serial killers as a kids' author trying to parlay his success into adult crime novels. A surreal but boring and slightly self-obsessed film directed by ex-Kula Shaker Crispian "son of Hayley Mills and Roy Boulting" Mills (Boulting, and has none of the father's directing style). Nice cameos from Clare Higgins off Hellraiser and Paul Freeman, Belloq off Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Amityville 3-D (1983) - After the insane but watchable Damiano Damiani-directed Amityville II - The Possession, Dino De Laurentiis' 2nd attempt at an Amityville movie, having taken the rights from AIP was this unusual film, definitely chasing Poltergeist with its Kneale-esque plot of scientists researching ghosts, in this case Robert Joy and a load of university parapsychology kids, and Woody Allen regular Tony Roberts as a Walter Matthau-esque dad. Candy Clark is wasted, and should have been in the wife role played by the anodyne Tess Harper. Directed ably by the great Richard Fleischer, who had directed many films including 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage, Dr. Dolittle, Mandingo AND Ashanti (two epic slavesploitation epics that border on horror, especially Mandingo, with James Mason's Yorkshire inflection making his Cajun accent sound Aussie and the late boxer Ken Norton bumming Susan George -resulting in the monstrosity (in Mason's eyes) of a mixed-race baby, while Ashanti is its own kind o Euro-pud, Caine vs. Ustinov AND Sharif as spectacularly unvillainous slave traders and with a plot point involving abandoning kids in the desert to reach Caine's lover quicker). But never mind, this has a young pre-insane Meg Ryan, and some great 3-D effects, a great kind of fish-like demon that resides in a well to a strangely Nordic, Icy Hell (this is New England, though). Though Lori Laughlin as Roberts and Harper's daughter's death is unseen, instead with her drenched ghost prematurely appearing in the kitchen to Harper, unaware her daughter is dead. The last good Amityville film.
The Possession of Joel Delaney (1971) - Early ITC feature, a vehicle for Shirley MacLaine to avoid playing hookers (even in Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), where the titular nun is a prostitute in disguise), but cost her the role of Chris MacNeill (based on MacLaine) in The Exorcist, as WB execs thought it was too similar. This film is indeed similar. It involves MacLaine's kid brother Joel (Perry King, later in Mandingo and as Han Solo in the radio Star Wars), who rejects her wealthy socialite ways and gets involved with the Puerto Rican community and the psuedo-Catholic voodoo-orientated religion of Santeria, rarely covered in films bar this and the later Martin Sheen vehicle The Believers (1987, which also features the lead character searching for his or her young relative only to find connections with Santeria). It is filmed entirely on location by ex-Doctor Who director Waris Hussein (just off Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx, also about a misfit, this time in Ireland, played by Gene Wilder, the same film that caused a rift between Hussein and my grandfather, the latter being a bit racist and a tad homophobic), who unusually manages to cast entirely actual Pueto Ricans (perhaps due to Hussein being ethnic himself, British-Asian, and trying to get the 'right' ethnicity for once rather than any Hispanic actor), and bar the two leads very few recognisable stars appear, except a cameo from Michael Hordern (in the "Maurice Evans in Rosemary's Baby" role of random British character actor who turns up to advise heroine, but unlike Evans, is here possibly to justify the British financing, and is partly-dubbed) and Miriam Colon, best known as Al Pacino's only slightly older mother in Scarface.