Don’t Look Down

Clearly inspired by the classic 1960 plastic surgery French horror film Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), eccentric exploitation master director Jesús Franco (Bahía Blanca), who often goes by Jess, crafted the horror movie Faceless (1988) – his highest budgeted film in twenty years. Sometimes things go bad right off the bat, and that is the case here – as a disgruntled former patient of famed plastic surgeon Dr. Flamand (Helmut Berger) tries to throw acid on him as payment for the botched job... unfortunately, it hits his gorgeous sister Ingrid (Christiane Jean) in the face, disfiguring her model-like visage.

The fantastic thing about a horror short film is that it strips away all of that bulky flesh – the slick story that’s trying to trick or impress, the characterization of the spooked individuals or haunted location, the exorbitant settings and special effects that might distract as much as impress; a short instead simply returning to the very primordial aspects of what scares us as human beings – a most basic idea that creakily lurks in the shadowy recesses of our minds. This 2025 four minute and three second feature, Dark Water, written and directed by Ethan Hunt (no, not Tom Cruise’s super spy), does just that. Starting with a most basic premise: a young woman (Amelie Melsness) helps a friend with a seemingly simple and rather menial task – open a jar of murky water no later than 10 P.M., make sure there are no witnesses... and wait until the water goes crystal clear. That’s it! One thing’s for sure, the girl named Alyssa who asks for this by way of text has a great friend.

A British slasher film parading as your prototypical American one, 1986's Slaughter High (which was originally going to be more accurately titled April Fool’s Day, but changed after a conflict arose with a Paramount movie coming out with the same name), written and directed by triumvirate George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, and Peter Mackenzie Litten, is a by the books horror movie with some above average kills... and, as we all know in this sub-genre, that is usually what truly stands out. Following a group of high school hot shot jerks led by pretty girl Carol Manning (Caroline Munro – Bond girl Naomi from The Spy Who Loved Me; as well as the Hammer horror film Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter), cruel prankster Skip Pollack (Carmine Iannaccone), feigners Ted Harrison (Michael Safran) and Carl Putney (John Segal), slutty Stella (Donna Yeager), and other entourage members, their sole goal is to sabotage the life of science nerd Marty (Simon Scuddamore). As these things do, they take the jester prank way too far... leaving the teen in a horribly disfigured state.

Opening with infinite possibilities, today’s feature could have been a prison set boxing movie, a searing drama about the conditions in an Alaskan jail, or simply a prison break narrative, but instead, it becomes... Runaway Train (1985). A movie that has become a bit forgotten over time (after its initial disappointment at the box office), director Andrei Konchalovsky’s action thriller follows a rough around the edges bank robber, Manny (Jon Voight) – who has attempted to break out of Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison in Alaska several times. A sort of hero figure amongst the rowdy inmates, the obsessive Warden, Ranken (John P. Ryan), has locked him away in solitary confinement for a most punishing three years.

A late era entry in the last decade of Sean Connery’s impressive catalogue, Rising Sun (1993), co-written and directed by Philip Kaufman, was brought to the page by Michael Crichton – yes, the mind behind Westworld and Jurassic Park, who helped adapt it from his own novel of the same name, building a woven web of corrupt mysteries and thrills in this edgy crime movie. For James Bond fans, it may bring to mind a direct connection to You Only Live Twice (1967), as in that 007 adventure, Connery plays a character deeply immersed within the Japanese culture

You always know you’re in for something rather interesting when a mysterious drifter walks into some small town in a movie... which is just the case in Red Rock West (1993), a neo-noir infused modern western crime thriller co-written and directed by John Dahl (his brother Rick, the other writer and associate producer). The drifter is Michael (Nicolas Cage – in a more reserved performance), an injured former Marine and rather quiet Texan who is simply looking for some oil field work in Wyoming... but is having no luck. Down to his final five bucks, he drives to the next closest town, Red Rock, and pops into a bar for a drink.