The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Venomous starring Treat Williams and some genetically engineered snakes was just what you would expect from director Fred Olen Ray and co-producer Jim Wynorski working under pseudonyms.

  Brian Yuzna’s Spanish-made Faust: Love of the Damned featured Andrew Divoff and Jeffrey Combs and was based on yet another comic book series.

  Donald F. Glut’s low-budget softcore comedy The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula was simply embarrassing. The unlikely-named Brick Randall played a singer bitten by Count Dracula (a sick-looking William Smith), who lived in Hollywood with her faithful servant Renfield (Del Howison). From the same producers, Glut’s half-hour short The Vampire Hunters Club resembled a home movie. John Agar, William Smith, Bob Burns, Dave Donham and Forrest J. Ackerman played members of the eponymous group, still searching for a young girl kidnapped in 1958 by Dracula (Daniel Roebuck). This included special guest appearances by Belinda Balaski, Conrad Brooks, Del Howison, Irwin Keyes, Carla Laemmle, Brinke Stevens, Mink Stole, Carel Struycken, Mary Woronov and others.

  Erotic Witch Project 2: Book of Seduction was another of Seduction Cinema’s softcore lesbian romps from the production team of producer Michael Beckerman and director John Bacchus, who were also responsible for The Erotic Ghost. Terry M. West’s The Sexy Sixth Sense was more of the same, also from Seduction.

  From Video Outlaw, Cremains was a shot-on-video anthology movie from writer/director Steve Sessions that featured Lilith Stabs and Debbie Rochon. In David A. Goldberg’s Demon Lust, Brinke Stevens was a sexy demon confronted by Tom Savini’s hit man for the mob, while Jeff Burton’s The Night Divides the Day was about a psychopathic killer stalking a group of students camping in the woods.

  Blood: The Last Vampire was an animé about a sword-wielding girl battling shapeshifters on an American military base during the Vietnam war.

  All Day Entertainment’s The Horror of Hammer and Tales of Frankenstein contained numerous trailers of varying quality, while the latter also included the 1958 Hammer TV pilot Tales of Frankenstein as a bonus.

  Some of the scariest bogeymen to appear on film, including Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, Chucky, Leatherface and Pinhead, were profiled in Bogeymen: The Killer Compilation, a three-hour documentary featuring an audio commentary by Robert Englund.

  Jay Holben’s Paranoid was an eight-minute short adapted from the 100-line poem ‘Paranoid: A Chant’ by Stephen King.

  Hallmark Entertainment’s The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells was an enjoyable three-part mini-series, based upon the author’s short stories. Tom Ward portrayed Wells, interviewed by a secret government agency about the mysterious adventures he and his future wife (Katy Carmichael) were involved with.

  Co-produced with The Jim Henson Company, Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story was an inventive two-part TV movie in which a millionaire industrialist (Matthew Modine) discovered that the fairy tale lied. Daryl Hannah and Richard Attenborough turned up as giant gods.

  Allan Arkush’s Prince Charming was just as good, as two humans (Sean Maguire and Martin Short), transformed into frogs 500 years earlier, found themselves in contemporary New York. Hallmark’s Snow White was yet another version of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, with the princess (Kristin Kreuk) menaced by Miranda Richardson’s wicked queen. Clancy Brown played a creepy Granter of Wishes, and Warwick Davis and Vincent Schiavelli were amongst the dwarves named after the days of the week.

  The Disney cable TV movie Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge reunited the cast of the 1998 original, including veteran Debbie Reynolds, for an inferior sequel where everyone living in Halloweentown was placed under a warlock’s spell.

  Christopher Lloyd played the zombie who helped a town overcome its Halloween curse in the Fox Family movie When Good Ghouls Go Bad, based on a story by R.L. Stine.

  In The Evil Beneath Loch Ness, Patrick Bergin and Lysette Anthony discovered that a giant prehistoric creature had been released from an underwater abyss. Infinitely better was the two-part BBC-TV movie of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, in which Bob Hoskins’s gruff Professor Challenger led an expedition to discover superb-looking CGI dinosaurs.

  Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes was a series of four superior BBC films created by David Pirie. Charles Edwards portrayed Arthur Conan Doyle, who teamed up with his old friend Dr Joseph Bell (the superb Ian Richardson) to investigate various murders. The Kingdom of Bones (scripted by Stephen Gallagher) included a number of allusions to Doyle’s The Lost World while, in The White Knight Stratagem, comedian Rik Mayall gave a stand-out performance as the likely inspiration for Professor Moriarty.

  A totally miscast Matt Frewer played Doyle’s great detective in Hallmark’s Canadian version of The Sign of Four, the second in a series of ‘public domain’ adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

  John Fawcett’s impressive Canadian cable TV movie Ginger Snaps linked lycanthropy and menstruation when the weird Brigitte (Emily Perkins) realized that her rebellious older sister (Katharine Isabelle) was turning into a sexy werewolf.

  Wolf Girl was a USA Cable Entertainment movie for Halloween in which the eponymous hirsute heroine was trapped in a freak show run by an over-the-top Tim Curry.

  The Cinemax/HBO series Creature Features comprised loose ‘remakes’ of five old AIP movies – She Creature, The Day the World Ended, How to Make a Monster, Earth vs. The Spider and Teenage Caveman – executive-produced by the late Samuel Z. Arkoff and with special effects credited to Stan Winston on all but the last title. Despite the presence of such stars as Rufus Sewell, Nastassja Kinski, Randy Quaid, Colleen Camp, Julie Strain, Dan Aykroyd and Theresa Russell, the results were definitely mixed.

  Lost Voyage, starring Judd Nelson and Lance Henriksen, was a fun, low-budget horror thriller set on a cruise ship that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle and returned from Hell possessed by evil. Almost exactly the same story was told in Lewis Teague’s inferior The Triangle, a TBS movie starring Luke Perry and Dan Cortese amongst a group of vacationers killed off by evil spirits on a lost liner.

  Judd Nelson also reprised his role as psychotic screenwriter Stanley Caldwell in the USA Cable Entertainment sequel Return to Cabin by the Lake.

  Bo Derek was the professor with a killer curriculum in the Sci Fi original movie Horror 101, while Fox’s The Rats apparently had nothing to do with James Herbert as the verminous creatures ran riot through a Manhattan department store where Mädchen Amick was trying to shop.

  UPN’s Curse of the Talisman featured killer gargoyles, and in Robin Cook’s Acceptable Risk, from TBS, Chad Lowe discovered that a drug made out of a strange fungus had horrifying side effects.

  Showtime’s On the Edge anthology featured a trio of actresses making their directorial debuts with three half-hour shorts: Helen Mirren’s ‘Happy Birthday’ was based on a Keith Laumer story and featured John Goodman, Beverly D’Angelo and Christopher Lloyd; Anthony LaPaglia starred as a terminally ill scientist in Mary Stuart Masterson’s ‘The Other Side’, based on a story by Bruce Holland Rogers, and the multi-talented Anne Heche both scripted and directed ‘Reaching Normal’ from Walter M. Miller’s short story, starring Andie MacDowell and Joel Grey.

  In 2001, Buffy the Vampire Slayer lost its sense of humour, while spin-off series Angel finally found one, at least for a while. Vampire Spike (James Masters) fell in love with Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Buffy’s mother (Kristine Sutherland) died, and the evil god Glory (Clare Kramer) discovered that the hidden ‘Key’ she was searching for was actually Buffy’s younger sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg). The fifth season of Buffy ended with the 100th episode as the eponymous Slayer sacrificed her own life to save Dawn.

  After very public arguments over the price paid per episode, the sixth season of Buffy moved from The WB to UPN in October with a two-hour premiere featuring Gellar as the android Buffy-bot. Once resurrected by Willow’s (Alyson Hannigan) dark magic, Buffy had hot sex with Spike, battled a trio of super-nerd villains and went to work in a fast-food ou
tlet. Meanwhile, Willow allowed her use of magic to get out of control. The best episode was done entirely as a musical.

  There were also rumours that Buffy creator Joss Whedon was developing a spin-off series for British character Giles (Anthony Stewart Head, who left the series after the first few episodes of the new season) which would be made in collaboration with the BBC. Buffy also finally went into syndication five nights a week on FX.

  Meanwhile, over on Angel, the eponymous vampire’s (David Boreanaz) obsession with Wolfram & Hart broke up the team, which eventually reunited only to travel to The Host’s (Andy Hallett) alternate demon dimension. For the new season, Angel and his companions were joined by Amy Acker’s physicist Winifred ‘Fred’ Burke. Darla (Julie Benz) announced she was pregnant with Angel’s child, and Angel was pursued by an old enemy, vampire hunter Holtz (Keith Szarabajka), seeking revenge for the deaths of his family.

  With David Duchovny’s Agent Mulder apparently gone for good, and Gillian Anderson’s Scully now a mother, the ninth season of Fox’s The X Files added Annabeth Gish’s FBI agent Monica Reyes as a full-time lead alongside Robert Patrick’s John Doggett. Cary Elwes joined the cast as an FBI assistant director, and former Xena actress Lucy Lawless also turned up for a couple of episodes.

  Unfortunately, the quirky spin-off series The Lone Gunmen failed because it ignored the core genre audience that had made The X Files so successful.

  The reworked pilot for CBS-TV’s Wolf Lake was delayed after the terrorist attacks in September. Twin Peaks met The Howling as a Seattle detective (Lou Diamond Phillips) traced his missing girlfriend to the eponymous Pacific Northwest town where most of the humans turned into wolves. The hour-long series, created by John Leekley, lasted just eight episodes in America.

  Yancy Butler starred as Sara Pezzini, a New York cop who used a mystical gauntlet to battle evil in the TNT series Witchblade, based on the Top Cow comic book.

  After the series was renewed by The WB for three more seasons, actress Shannen Doherty quit Charmed as one of the witchy Halliwell sisters. In her final episode (which she also directed), Doherty’s character Prue was killed by a demon assassin. At the start of the new series, the remaining two sisters discovered that they had a long-lost half-sister who had magic of her own. After such actresses as Tiffani Thiessen and Jennifer Love Hewitt were reportedly considered, Rose McGowan joined the cast as Paige in a two-hour season premiere.

  Dawson’s Creek met The X Files in the hit WB series Smallville, about the contemporary adventures of Clark Kent/Superboy (Tom Welling) and his friends Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) and Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). Each episode usually involved green meteor fragments giving other people strange powers. John Glover had a recurring role as Lex’s industrialist father, Lionel Luthor.

  In UPN’s All Souls, a young doctor (Grayson McCouch) began inquiring into a series of mysterious deaths in a hospital, while Rae Dawn Chong and Adrian Pasdar were back investigating mysteries and miracles in a second series of Mysterious Ways on PAX and NBC-TV.

  The Sci Fi Channel’s The Chronicle was about a tabloid newspaper that researched bizarre but true stories, and The WB’s Dead Last was about the members of a rock band who obtained the power to see ghosts from a mysterious amulet.

  In UPN’s Special Unit 2, a covert branch of the Chicago Police Department investigated ‘the monsters of every child’s nightmare’. These apparently included gargoyles, virgin-craving mermen, werewolf stockbrokers and a ninja mummy, all created by Patrick Tatopoulos.

  Following the movie pilot featuring Eric Roberts and Judd Nelson, Strange Frequency was an anthology series on VH1 hosted by Roger Daltrey, who appeared as a satanic talent agent in the first episode. Meanwhile, Aidan Quinn, Lou Diamond Phillips and Samantha Mathis were among the stars of the Fox anthology series Night Visions, which also failed to identify its audience.

  The second series of Shockers comprised three offbeat hour-long dramas written by Stephen Volk, Joe Ahearne and Chris Bucknall.

  In the Halloween episode of Relic Hunter, Sydney (Tia Carrere) teamed up with charismatic vampire novelist Lucas Blackmer (Adrian Paul) to find Vlad Tepes’s mystical chalice.

  Season four of the Sci Fi series Lexx included a two-part episode, co-written by Tom De Ville, in which Stanley (Brian Downey), Xev (Xenia Seeberg) and Kai (Michael McManus) travelled to the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracul (John Standing) and encountered the power of the revived Vlad (Minna Aaltonen). Veteran Lionel Jeffries turned up briefly as a priest.

  Vampire High was a Canadian teen series in which five young vampires were entrusted to the Mansbridge Academy, where they would learn to tame their instincts and live among mortals.

  More Land of the Lost than Conan Doyle, the Australian syndicated series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World featured episodes in which members of the stranded expedition discovered a mysterious valley full of werewolves and received psychic visions from the knife belonging to Jack the Ripper. Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens were creative consultants, and a slightly more risqué version apparently aired on DirecTV in America.

  Filmed in New Zealand, the Dungeons and Dragons-inspired fantasy series Dark Knight, created by co-producer Terry Marcel, included episodes in which Ivanhoe (Ben Pullen) and his companions came to the aid of a village menaced by an ancient werewolf cult and battled an Egyptian mummy raised from the dead by a band of Templar Knights.

  In the second season of the syndicated BeastMaster, Dar (Daniel Goddard) and Tao (Jackson Raine) encountered the shapechanging demon Lara (Sam Healy and Danielle Spencer) and the original film series’ star, Marc Singer, joined the cast as spirit guide Dartanus.

  TV’s Tarzan, Ron Ely, turned up as a villain in Sheena, starring Gena Lee Nolin as the shapechanging heroine, while TV Batman Adam West was among those battling Black Scorpion.

  During the fifth season of Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (how long can they keep using that title?), Sabrina finally moved out and lived with roommates on campus.

  Creator R.L. Stine described his anthology series The Nightmare Room on Kids’ WB as ‘a Twilight Zone for kids’. Tippi Hedren (Hitchcock’s The Birds) was one of the guest stars.

  Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible was a not very funny BBC series created by and starring comedian Steve Coogan. Spoofing everything from Hammer Films to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and the Amicus anthology movies of the 1970s, the shows did feature such interesting’ guest stars as Oliver Tobias, Sheila Keith, Warwick Davis, Angela Pleasence, Tom Bell and Graham Crowden.

  In the crazy world of American daytime soap operas, NBC-TV’s Passions featured homages to five classic horror films before 300-year-old witch Tabitha (Juliet Mills!) lost her head and had it sewn back on by little Timmy (Josh Ryan Evans). Meanwhile, Timmy’s magic left Charity with some odd side effects.

  Over at ABC-TV’s even wackier Port Charles, after a twelve-week ‘telenovella’ involving time-travel, the town’s inhabitants found themselves succumbing to schizophrenic vampire Caleb (Michael Easton). The characters also saw the year out with an apocalyptic plot involving angels and devils.

  Not to be outdone, on ABC-TV’s All My Children Gillian (Esta TerBlanche) was shot in the head by an assassin and then visited by the ghostly spirits of previous characters from the show, who helped her find her way towards the bright light.

  Reworking themes and characters from The Mummy Returns, the Universal cartoon series The Mummy featured the ancient Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep searching for the ancient Scrolls of Thebes. In one episode, Rick O’Connell (voiced by John Schneider) was bitten by a wolf in Ireland and transformed into a werewolf.

  Shown on the digital TV channel BBC Choice, The Fear was a series of fifteen-minute readings (with dramatized inserts) by such actors as Marianne Jean Baptiste, Jason Flemyng, Anna Friel, Sadie Frost, Kelly Macdonald, Neve McIntosh, Nick Moran, Sean Pertwee and Ray Winstone. Authors whose work was adapted included Honore de Balzac, M.E. Braddon, F. Marion Crawfor
d, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Berwick Harwood and Edgar Allan Poe.

  American Movie Classics’ hour-long Halloween tribute to American International Pictures, It Conquered Hollywood, featured interviews with Beverly Garland, Roger Corman, Bruce Dern, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Susan Hart and others.

  Produced for Channel Four Television by Pete Tombs and Andy Starke, Mondo Macabro was a wonderful half-hour documentary series looking at exploitation and genre film-making in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, South Asia and Turkey. Among those interviewed were Eddie Romero and José Mojica Marins (aka Coffin Joe/Zé do Caixâo).

  SF:UK was a jingoistic documentary series written and hosted by the irritating Mathew De Abaitua for Channel Four and The Sci-Fi Channel. Topics included Frankenstein and War of the Worlds, and Mark Gatiss and Kim Newman were among the regular contributors.

  Gatiss and Newman also turned up in Inventing Monsters, an impressive half-hour documentary for digital channel BBC Knowledge hosted by Professor Christopher Frayling, who looked at the attraction of monsters in popular culture. Other contributors included David J. Skal, Marina Warner, Anne Billson and Ingrid Pitt, plus archive interviews with Jimmy Sangster and Yutte Stensgaard.

  Mario Bava, Maestro of the Macabre was an hour-long documentary about the cult Italian director with commentary from film-makers Tim Burton, Joe Dante, John Carpenter, John Saxon, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Lamberto Bava, John Philip Law, Alfred Leone and Daria Nicoldi and from critics Allan Bryce, Tim Lucas and the ubiquitous Kim Newman.

  Michelle Trachtenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer hosted the half-hour Discovery Kids series Truth or Scare, in which she looked at such subjects as Dracula, The Curse of Tutankhamun, werewolves and Irish ghosts with the help of Dr Leonard Wolf, David J. Skal, James V. Hart and Professor Nina Auerbach.

  In September, Canada’s Corus Entertainment launched the country’s first twenty-four-hour digital-access horror channel, entitled Scream. Horror author Edo van Belkom hosted the midnight-movie programme Post Mortem, supplying commentary during breaks in the films.