Around the World in 80s Movies

Janet Leigh starts off the film as Marion Crane, a clerk in a real estate office engaged in a romantic fling with Sam Loomis (John Gavin), the manager of a hardware store in Phoenix, Arizona.  When she’s given the task of depositing $40,000 in cash into the bank, Marion impulsively decides to keep it, and drives off to California, perhaps to Sam’s hometown, Fairvale, with the freedom t...

Motel Hell  follows the exploits of Farmer Vincent Smith (Rory Calhoun), who has three basic jobs: farmer, motel owner, and purveyor of the best straight-from-the-farm smoked meat products sold in the country. He and his sister Ida (Nancy Parsons) set up road accidents to abduct injured passers-by along the two-lane highway near their motel (it’s called “Motel Hello” but the last...

A dysfunctional family is hired as the caretakers for an empty, isolated Rocky Mountain hotel, the Overlook, during the snowy season. Young Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) is gifted with ESP, his father Jack (Jack Nicholson) is a tempestuous alcoholic, and his mother Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is racked with guilt. Jack hopes writing a successful play will rectify his dreary life. The hotel has a history...

The Changeling concerns an esteemed New York pianist/composer named John Russell (George C. Scott) who accepts a lectureship position in Seattle for solitude and restoration following the deaths of his wife and daughter in a roadside accident. Claire Norman (Trish  Van Devere), a volunteer at the local Historical Preservation Society, moves him into a massive old Victorian-Gothic mansion located o...

House II opens in the early 1950s, where we find Charles and Judith McLaughlin handing away their baby Jesse to adoption. This is to protect their child from retribution by a powerful ghost named Slim Razor, who has appeared in the couple’s mansion demanding they hand over a crystal skull. After the couple confronts Slim to reveal that they don’t have it or know where it is, Slim kills...

An elderly artist named Elizabeth Hopper (Susan French) is found having hanged herself in the three-story Victorian house in Marin County, California, that she claimed is haunted. Hopper’s nephew, a famous horror novelist named Roger Cobb (William Katt), inherits the house and decides to move in so that he can have the solitude necessary to write his next book, a memoir of his harrowing time...

After viciously murdering over 110 people, the serial killer known as ‘Meat Cleaver Max’ Jenke (Brion James) gets the death penalty, sentenced to fry in the electric chair. Max doesn’t go easily, staying alive for nearly ten minutes as they zap him with everything they have before expiring. However, something happens in the process of electrocution that allows Jenke to live on as...

A college football star named Jonathan (Peter Berg) experiences horrifically vivid hallucinations following a concussive collision with a goal post. His first vision depicts the murder of his foster mother and siblings. When he awakes, he finds that his dream actually happened. He’s an eyewitness, but wasn’t physically there, leaving the cops skeptical. Jonathan realizes his visions ar...

Electricity lines between the houses in a suburban Los Angeles neighborhood allow an unseen but powerful malevolent force to enter homes, where it begins twisting the house’s wiring and everything that is plugged into it to its liking. Eventually, it begins using the home’s appliances to torture the inhabitants within. In one home on a cul-de-sac, the father went crazy and began destro...

In this made-for-network-TV entry, a crack team of Catholic priests comes in to exorcise the demonic presence within the possessed Amityville home. Cornered, the demon finds refuge by traveling through the power cable into a hideous-looking floor lamp. Sensing the evil is gone from the home, the contents of the home are put up at a yard sale, where a frolicsome older woman spies the lamp for a hun...

John Baxter is a recently divorced journalist working for an investigative magazine called Reveal. Baxter’s latest assignment exposes a seance scam operating within the abandoned Amityville home on Long Island, New York. Afterward, Baxter finds that the house is immensely affordable due to its sordid history of terrible things happening to those who’ve been inside. Baxter, apparently n...

In this prequel of a sort to The Amityville Horror (1979), the dysfunctional Montelli family moves into their new home and finds many curious things right away, including every window being nailed shut and a secret room in the basement of the house that is full of flies, muck and smells to high heaven (or down to low Hell). The longer they stay, the more they begin to witness strange events, and b...

The Amityville Horror is based on a popular novel by Jay Anson with a little longer title, “The Amityville Horror – A True Story”. The true story is, at this point, well known to be fictitious, but it did give the public quite a rise for a while. In the story, a young man ends up shooting his parents and sibling while they slept in the middle of the night for reasons even he coul...

Heather O’Rourke and Zelda Rubinstein are the only players from the first two films to cross over into the light of  Poltergeist III .  Here, O’Rourke’s character, Carol Anne, seemingly dumped by her parents for reasons unknown, is taken care of by her Aunt Patricia (Nancy Allen), Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt), and teenage step-cousin, Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle), living in a high-rise...

Poltergeist II: The Other Side  seeks to give more back story to the events of the first film, why the youngest child in the Freeling family had been wanted by the spirits, and the nature of the cult from which the spirits culminated, headed by Reverend Henry Kane (Julian Beck).  Kane manifests himself in human form in this sequel, tenacious in his pursuit of young Carol Anne (Heather O’Rour...

In the film, a family of five known as the Freelings lives in idyllic suburbia – or so they think.  Strange things begin to occur in the house shortly after their cherubic 5-year-old daughter (Heather O’Rourke) begins receiving communication from someone she refers to as the “TV people” through the static on their television set.  Their pet bird dies, furniture begins to move on its own, and...

Adam (Alec Baldwin)   and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis)   love the little home in the country they’ve built for themselves, but after they are killed in a freak accident and come back as ghosts, they are appalled to find that their house has been sold to a tasteless and unpleasant family, who plan one tearing down all they’ve built to redo the house in the tackiest way possible. Now t...

Five years after the events of  Ghostbusters ,  the heroes are zeroes again, bankrupt after getting sued by the city for the destructive aftermath of clearing out the city of spooks. There’s also a Federal restraining order prohibiting them from continued ghostbusting. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) is now the host of a cheesy local cable talk show called, “World of the Psychic.”  Occult bookstore ow...

Ghostbusters centers on three university researchers (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis) of paranormal activity who go into business of their own once they get into trouble for their uncouth antics, and their grant money runs out.  They emerge on the scene as the “Ghostbusters”, a trio of exterminators (of sorts), willing to investigate phenomena from anyone in New York City w...

The diary of a reclusive priest named Father Carlton reveals a centuries-old secret sect in the Church called the Brotherhood of Sleep.  Carlton was on the verge of revealing their existence to the Archbishop that Brotherhood is guarding an ancient cylinder filled green fluid hidden in the basement of an abandoned 16th Century-built chapel in Los Angeles. The dormant entity inside the cylinder has...

Larry Cohen concocts this comedic horror-thriller involving an ex-FBI agent turned industrial spy hired by a desperate ice cream industry, trying to steal the secret formula from a corporation pushing a newly marketed yogurt-like food substance called The Stuff. He discovers the substance, which is found bubbling up from seemingly unlimited deposits underground, is deadly and humanity hangs in the...

The Blob suddenly appears after crashlanding in a rural area outside of the fictional ski resort town of Arborville, CA. It attaches itself to the hand of a vagrant, Star high school wide receiver Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch) and his cheerleader crush Meg Penny (Shawnee Smith) are out on their first date when they come across the man, taking him to the hospital, along with the town’s juvenil...

The story starts out in Antarctica, where a group of scientists is bunkered until one day they are disturbed by the sounds of gunshots coming from a Norwegian helicopter, apparently trying to kill a runaway dog.  They miss their quarry, and the Norwegians end up getting offed, with no explanation as to what their problem is.  Fearing more violence, the American crew travels to the Norwegian camp,...

Michael Nouri stars as LAPD detective Tom Beck, who takes down a bank robber gone berserk in one of the bloodiest shootouts in department history.  What Beck doesn’t know is that the culprit is actually being controlled by a parasite within his body that loves danger, money, speeding, and good ol’ rock-n-roll, and it can’t be killed by normal means, and moves from host to host wh...

Jason Lively and Steve Marshall are the primary stars as Chris and J.C., a couple of nerdy college freshmen fraternity pledges who must steal a corpse as part of their initiation. They accidentally end up releasing a small army of leeches, jettisoned from an alien spacecraft, dormant in the cryogenic cadaver they find in the university’s research facility. These leeches jump into the mouths...