News

Before he came face to face with Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Peter Barton faced a different kind of cinematic killer alongside Linda Blair in Hell Night. With the 1981 horror film coming out soon on a Collector's Edition Blu-ray / DVD with a new 4K scan from Scream Factory, we've been provided with an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip to share as a special treat for Daily Dead readers.

In the behind-the-scenes clip below, Barton reflects on a humorous time when it was difficult for him to maintain a straight face during filming, and he also talks about the high level of energy that goes into a performance when actors are playing characters who are fighting for (or fear for) their lives.

Scream Factory's Hell Night Collector's Edition Blu-ray / DVD will be released on January 2nd, 2018, and we have a look at the full list of special features...

One of my absolute favorite 80s flicks, Hell Night, is coming to Blu-ray in grand fashion via Scream Factory; and we couldn’t be more excited it you locked us into a well known haunted house and then sent a deranged killer after us! The film, directed by Tom DeSimone (Reform School Girls) and produced by […]

The post Hell Night Hazes Blu-ray in January appeared first on Dread Central.

After facing off against the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist, Linda Blair faced off against a vicious murderer that made some horror fans "pray for day" in the 1981 slasher film Hell Night (read our own Scott Drebit's Drive-In Dust Offs on the film here), coming out this January on a Collector's Edition Blu-ray / DVD combo pack from Scream Factory that's brimming with almost four hours of bonus features:

Press Release: One dark night 12 years ago, madman Raymond Garth butchered his wife and children in their mansion before killing himself. Legend has it that one child survived the slaughter and remains hidden in the house as a deformed monster. Years later on pledge night, a group of new fraternity and sorority pledges must spend an evening in this creepy mansion on the anniversary of the killings. But what starts off as a night of innocent pranks and rowdiness soon turns deadly…...

By Todd Garbarini

When I was a teenager, the Boy Scout troop that I was a member of consisted of nearly 25 scouts. We had a few older scouts whom the rest of the younger scouts looked up to, and during our weekend camping trips the seniors made every effort to scare the beejezus out of us youngsters with ludicrous tales of ghosts or killers hiding out in the woods. These stories were often woven around a campfire in the late hours of the evening when we were all seemingly vulnerable. During the summer of 1980, Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th was doing well at the box office, so I was already aware of these “murderers in the woods”-themed films. This didn’t make it any easier for us to go on camping trips! The success of Friday the 13th gave birth to countless carbon copies of young adults-being-stalked-in-the-woods films.

By Murray Weiss and Ben Fractenberg

Queens — The FBI began digging for a body Monday in the former Queens home of notorious mob power James “Jimmy The Gent” Burke, who was famously portrayed by Robert De Niro in the movie "Goodfellas," sources told DNAinfo New York.

FBI Evidence Collection specialists and agents from the Organized Crime Division descended into the basement of Burke’s family home at 81-48 102 Rd. in South Ozone Park around 8 a.m. armed with jackhammers and sledge hammers.

Sources said the feds recently obtained information from a new cooperating informant linked to the Gambino and Bonanno crime families who told them he believed a hood who disappeared decades ago was buried in Burke’s basement or backyard.

The sources say the dig is not related the fabled 1978 Lufthansa Heist, where Burke, portrayed as Jimmy Conway by De Niro in "Goodfellas," and his fellow wiseguys pulled off an $8 million robbery at JFK,...

It’s a taxing, life-threatening task to evolve from a mobster into an FBI informant, take it from me. Henry Hill Jr., who died yesterday from an undisclosed illness, underwent this evolution, resulting in one of the finest mafia films of all time. Initially, crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi wrote about Hill’s life in his non-ficiton work Wiseguy. This would become the source material for Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas, in which Ray Liotta played Hill.

Before Hill made the transition from Mafioso to FBI informant, he was responsible for some remarkably executed heists due to his association with the Lucchese crime family. This tight-knit familial clan is still active as one of the “Five Families” that oversee organized crime in New York. One of the coolest things that Hill was able to accomplish during his stellar criminal career was the Air France robbery of 1967. The airline company was carrying...

It’s a taxing, life-threatening task to evolve from a mobster into an FBI informant, take it from me. Henry Hill Jr., who died yesterday from an undisclosed illness, underwent this evolution, resulting in one of the finest mafia films of all time. Initially, crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi wrote about Hill’s life in his non-ficiton work Wiseguy. This would become the source material for Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas, in which Ray Liotta played Hill.

Before Hill made the transition from Mafioso to FBI informant, he was responsible for some remarkably executed heists due to his association with the Lucchese crime family. This tight-knit familial clan is still active as one of the “Five Families” that oversee organized crime in New York. One of the coolest things that Hill was able to accomplish during his stellar criminal career was the Air France robbery of 1967. The airline company was carrying...

More Netflix Instant Drive-In reviews.

Night of the Comet; 1984, 95 min.; dir. Thom Eberhardt; available on Netflix until 5/1/2013

Okay, so Night of the Comet isn’t a low-budget splatter fest with buckets of syrupy fake blood, or dripping organ meat gore, but it is quintessentially b-grade fare. And for me, that’s enough. Starring Catherine Mary Stewart (Days of our Lives, Weekend at Bernie’s) as our heroine, Reggie. She’s tough, yet girly, loves arcade games, works at a movie theater, and can wield a submachine gun like a boss. Every geek’s fantasy, basically. Reggie is working the night that Earth is supposed to pass through the tail of a comet (and provide a totally bitchin’ celestial event for the planet), however, her skeezy boyfriend Larry (the projectionist) is trading some film reels on the black market, and asks her to stay the night in the booth with him,...

What are you all doing out front of my house on a cold night like tonight? You want to hear about another movie from back in the day? Don’t you have school or something? Ok, I guess I can spare a few minutes to share another forgotten gem with you, but then it’s straight to bed…for me, anyway.

I think it’s safe to say that Linda Blair and I have pretty much grown up together, albeit on different sides of the camera. While I was toiling in the multi-media club in high school making movies for the classes she was in Hollywood making movies for the masses, but we were on the same ship. From the Exorcist movies, Born Innocent, Sarah T.–Portrait of an Alcoholic, Roller Boogie, Ruckus, Savage Streets, Night Patrol, all the way up to All is Normal…I’ve pretty much seen it all.

.Not available on DVD. column since it began nine months ago and I realize that 19 of the previous 24 films I.ve written about are from the decade of the 1970.s. It.s not that there aren.t worthy forgotten films of the 50.s, 60.s or 80.s that have yet to see life in digital format, it.s just that, being born in 1961, it was the .70.s when I came of age and I.ve always had a fixation with the many films I saw at the drive-in in the last half of that decade. Besides, only from the politically incorrect .70.s could have come a disco musical comedy about a woman with a talking vagina.

Chatterbox, made in 1977, is no porn film (though bare breasts abound), but a silly R-Rated comedy based on a ridiculous but titillating situation that today doesn.t seem at all sleazy or dirty but really funny and kind of innocent.

In the spirit of Halloween '09, we're breaking out reviews (some new, some old) of some Fall Frights you may want to work into your monthly viewing.

Going To Pieces - Fangoria Archives: Originally Published 10/2006

When a documentary tackles a subject as specific, and with such specific appeal, as slasher films, the challenge lies in conveying that attraction to the unconverted while not simply feeding the fans a buffet they’ve already fully sampled. The Starz original Going To Pieces: The Rise And Fall Of The Slasher Film is more successful in offering devotees a gorenucopia of clips and talking heads (still attached to bodies) recounting the subgenre’s history than it likely will be in convincing non-fans that this grisly strain of cinema is a worthy one.

The hour-and-a-half show is based on Adam Rockoff’s book of the same title, which stands as the single best study of stalker cinema ever published.

This week Gorked-out Andrew and Wendy O. Williams share the spotlight in an interview so exploitative that some will get tough...some will go insane...some will die! Tom DeSimone joins the Deadpit crew this week, and he'll be sharing the inside scoop on some classic 80's films including "Hell Night" and "Reform School Girls". You'll pray for day when we dim the lights and take a look at two new DVDs including the 20th Anniversary Edition of Tom Holland's killer doll opus "Child's Play" and the shocking Ellen Page/Catherine Keener melodrama "An American Crime". All this bombascity plus a new contest for Scarefest tickets, new written reviews, exciting news on upcoming interviews, and an epic call-in portion for the ages...only on Deadpit.com!

It was revealed in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly that Sony Screen Gems plans on remaking Tom DeSimone's 1981 horror-slasher Hell Night, which follows four college pledges who are forced to spend the night in a deserted old mansion where they get killed off one by one by the monstrous surviving members of a family massacre years earlier for trespassing on their living grounds. But here's the sad news, "If you are going to make a movie for a bunch of kids, you have to make it Pg-13, says Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper. You try not to make a movie for an audience that is older than your protagonist. More Pg-13 coming your way in the near future. Yay....