Curse of the Blue Lights

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source: Curse of the Blue Lights

Moviecut—Curse of the Blue Lights

My review was written in April 1990 after watching the movie on Magnum video cassette. Nice special effects highlight this regional horror pic, a one-man effort made in Colorado by John Henry Johnson three years ago and currently in video stores. Title refers to a remote weekend hangout, reportedly haunted, on the outskirts of the small town of Dudley, where teens congregate. Unfortunately for Patrick Keller and his chums, three ghouls in a crypt led by Brent Ritter are conjuring up the dreaded Muldoon Man, a missing link of sorts, to take over Earth. THe kids go to witch Bettina Julius for help. They ultimately defeat the baddies, including the Muldoon Man, who blows up real good at the cemetery climax. Naive pic is fun to watch and could have been a sleeper success if Johnson had built his story around something less cliched than the old "teens on an outing" standby. The Acting is weak, but makeup effects are interesting. Johnson has done his homework, even coming up with a nice Jean Cocteau-invented mirror-to-another-dimension gimmick.

I hoped for something like Return of the Living Dead but got instead some muppets-like "horror" show. Well, show is maybe a too favorable word to describe Curse of the Blue Lights - the movie somewhat does not know if it wants to be a serious horror movie or a horror comedy, in the end the director and writer achieved to conjure up a bad mix that provides not much really funny jokes nor some serious gore and feel for horror. Anyway, this one is not a total waste or failure, and in the case you are one of those rare lone wolfs still hunting for some unknown 80s horror cheese, this one may fill your belly. Verdict: meanders on the thin line of really bad and cheesy.

source: Curse of the Blue Lights

In a sleepy little U.S. community, a cemetery is haunted by a family of ghouls intent on resurrecting an ancient demon. This evil deed cannot be accomplished until a certain artifact is retrieved from a group of local teenagers. This juvenile regional chiller never found much of an audience upon its initial home-video release, and it remains relatively obscure to date. It's a bit more ambitious that the usual backyard monster movie, with some surprisingly inventive entry-level horror makeup being the highlight of the production. Beyond that, CURSE OF THE BLUE LIGHTS is precisely the amateur horror hayride you'd probably expect it would be, with cheesy Gothic sets that look like an annual Halloween spook-house attraction. Performances are uniformly substandard, and the whole film ultimately comes off feeling like a feature-length episode of the TV show "MONSTERS". These criticisms aren't made to sway you from seeing it, mind you...it's actually pretty fun stuff, so long as your expectations remain squarely fixed at ground-level. Despite the perplexing(and quite possibly self-imposed) R rating, I would recommend this primarily to younger horror fans. 4.5/10

As the world has grown smaller thanks to all of us being connected 24/7/365, the weird pockets of regional filmmaking may not exist. After all, you can download the latest Polonia movie or watch it on Tubi, right? But in 1988, odd little movies could still just show up at your video store with nothing telling you what they were all about or where they came from. Dudley is a nothing happening town that only has a few things for teens to do and all of them get you in trouble. The Blue Lights of the title are both a place for them to have furtive backseat car sex and also see the strange glow that could either be aliens or the ghosts of a train wreck from long before any of these kids were born. Four kids back from college for the summer - Ken (Patrick Keller), Alice (Becky Golladay), Paul (Clayton A. McCaw) and Sandy (Deborah McVencenty) - and three guys who are probably never getting out of Dudley - Bob (Kent E. Fritzell), Max (Tom Massmann) and Sam (James Asbury) - decide on one of those boring long hot summer nights to go see the lights for themselves. Oh yeah - that train fire also had a petrified monster within its wreckage known as The Muldoon Man and that's what they find. Now, if I discovered a ten-foot-tall monster in my drunken teens, I would totally not touch it or even be anywhere around it, no matter how much Pucker, Yuengling or Fireball I had to drink. No, instead they decide to haul it off in a truck - what no one wanted to go mudding instead? - and try and make money off it. If you guess that the creature gets away - or someone steals it - you've seen enough horror movies. So instead of doing the sensible thing like drinking on someone's porch, the teens all head to Sunny Hill Cemetery, more specifically the tunnels under the graves. That's where they learn the truth: the Blue Lights are to signal the return fo Loath (Brent Ritter), a gigantic undead leader of a cult of zombies who want to return the dreaded Muldoon Man to life by devouring the living. Somehow, they get away, with Paul stealing the disc they need to complete their ritual, and the zombies follow. How do you stop them? Maybe the witch (Bettina Julius) can help. If you're reading this and think, "That's way too much for one movie," you're right and also wrong, because gloriously regional movies existed outside the purview of La La Land and studio notes so deliriously madcap things could happen. Like, well, this movie. Also, perhaps most amazingly, this movie looks like a million bucks thanks to the sets and special effects by Michael Spatola (Return of the Living Dead, Predator 2) and Mark Sisson (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Subspecies). Sure, there are way too many primary characters and yes, perhaps too many monsters to keep track of, but isn't it nice sometimes to totally lose track of something and have it still be fun? Even better, Curse of the Blue Lights is based on several suburban - rural? - legends of Pueblo, Colorado, which is where it was made. The Blue Lights really is a parking spot for teens where they would see mysterious blue lights in the nearby river bottom. The Muldoon Man was real, too. This supposedly prehistoric petrified human body was discovered in 1877 - seven years after his infamous Cardiff Giant hoax - by a con man named William Conant at a spot now known as Muldoon Hill, near Beulah, Colorado. The figure had a brief tour of the United States before it was revealed to be a hoax. Named after pro wrestler William Muldoon, it was made of clay, plaster, mortar, rock dust, bones, blood and meat. Director and writer John Henry Johnson also made two documentaries, Zebulon Pike and the Blue Mountain and Damon Runyon's Pueblo. Turns out that the Consumer Infomation Catalogue isn't the only great thing to come out of that town.

The young me would probably have loved Curse of the Blue Lights. The seven to twelve year old me, free of expectations, free of growing into gore or serious horror cinema. Curse of the Blue Lights is a pretty juvenile affair really, and looking at it through the cold light of adulthood it isn't all that good, but on a Friday night peering back into the mists and yearnings of youth it does the trick. A low budget regional affair, it sees a group of teens out for the night in the Blue Lights area, an ill defined and ill lit place that seems to have a river nearby but most importantly a slope wherein is buried an ancient beast, the Muldoon Man. One teen slips and falls, revealing a petrified hand protruding from the dust, they also find a medallion which they take before heading home for a pick up truck, get apprehended for speeding, return and find the body gone. Following tracks they find nefarious ghouls beneath a cemetery and realise there are some bad shenanigans afoot, which they set about putting to rights with the help of a local witch. Its a fast paced film bounding with enthusiasm, the cast are generally as young looking as the ages they seek to portray and there's a pleasant feel of youthful endeavour to the film, friends getting together to make a movie and test their skills. Though the writing is poor and the acting often flat there's a drive and purpose to everything that makes it a pretty easy watch. Special effects are the highlight, much better than would be expected for a film of this budget. Quality ghoul make up and some neat melting effects, even an amusing old school shonky monster at the end, if nothing else the sum of the effects makes the film a decent cheesy time. Special effects man Michael Spatola went on to credits in Stargate and Terminator 2: Judgement Day as well as other more minor projects and there's loving craft here that seems to foretell such a career. Some of the performances are fun as well, mostly from folk who only did this one film. Cheers go out to Brent Ritter hamming as fiercely as he can beneath a lot of make-up as main ghoul Loath, Kent E. Fritzell and Willard Hall as his equally enthusiastic but inept assistants Bor and Forn and Bettina Julius as the aforementioned witch, who really isn't terribly comprehensible but is quite watchable in a weird sort of way. This stuff and the energy of the leads makes for a cheerful camp that buoys the film through its slower patches and gives a bit of an extra pop when things do hot up. The film is a bit too long at over an hour and a half and the lack of general gore (a spot of blood and melting effects mostly) puts a slight dampener on things, preventing it from ever reaching a full head of delirious steam, but its a fun watch nonetheless. Best recommended to younger viewers, those seeking films suitable for younger viewers and those seeking to revisit their earlier years, this one gets a fair 6/10 I think.

source: Curse of the Blue Lights