THE BASEMENT (1989) Four people are summoned to a dank basement by the Sentinel, a hooded ghoul who warns them of crimes they will commit in the future. Told in omnibus format, the first story is about an unfaithful housewife who uses the tentacled creature in her swimming pool to dispose of her husband. A Halloween-hating curmudgeon is terrorized by the spirits of All Hallows’ Eve in the second segment, which plays like a bizarre version of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The third story is a spin on Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) where the living dead crash the dysfunctional set of a zombie movie. The last part features a young writer who moves into a house that harbors a demonic entity that possesses people into committing murder. The final chapter is the goriest, but it’s too poorly lit to tell what’s happening, a fact that may have attributed to the The Basement never getting a release until Camp Motion Pictures grabbed it in 2010. If anything, The Basement is a bargain-basement Tales from the Crypt recommended solely for fans of cheap shot-on-super-8 movies.
THE IMMORTALIZER (1989) The flamboyant Dr. Divine (Ron Ray) has devised a way to extend life by transplanting the brains of the elderly into the bodies of the young. Since the number of willing volunteers is slim, Dr. Divine must send his small army of homemade mutants out into the world to abduct teens back to his clinic for experimentation. One of the young subjects (Chris Crone) escapes, but his brother is turned into a mutant and locked away in the basement along with the doc’s other overzealous goons. Tired of being fed scraps—body parts and old brains—and endlessly tortured, the mutants break out of their confines and tear the place apart. Mediocre Re-Animator clone that lacks that film’s intelligent satire and, most importantly, gross-out gags.
A RETURN TO SALEM’S LOT (1987) Exploitation mogul Larry Cohen—the man responsible for such cult classics as It’s Alive (1974), God Told Me To (1976), and The Stuff (1985)—co-wrote and directed this unnecessary sequel to Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1979 adaptation of Stephen King’s vampire epic, Salem’s Lot. But, instead of picking up where Hooper’s film left off, A Return to Salem’s Lot introduces new characters and a different storyline, making this whole affair seem like an offbeat revamp. Cohen regular Michael Moriarty stars as an anthropologist who, after moving to the hamlet of Jerusalem’s Lot with his estranged son (Ricky Addison Reed), discovers the place crawling with vampires. Instead of making dinner out of him and Reed, the vampires use Moriarty as a tool to document their existence and to help secure the future of their species. Doubting Moriarty is manipulated by the town’s “judge” (Andrew Duggan) into giving his son a better life, and seduced into having lots of sex with the local sexpot. Reed’s eventual desire to be turned into a cunning killer of the night lights a fire under Moriarty’s ass to join forces with a Nazi hunter (Samuel Fuller) to destroy the place and its inhuman inhabitants. The screenplay’s sardonic sense of humor occasionally lifts the material out from the doldrums of a middling story, which is highlighted by flashes of interesting ideas that are never played out to their strengths. While not good, this is still better than the horrible Salem’s Lot remake from 2024.
