


Night of the Living Dead (1968 / B&W): When unexpected radiation raises the dead, a microcosm of average America has to battle flesh-eating combies in Geroge A. Romero's landmark cheapie horror film. Siblings Johnny (Russel Steiner) and Barbara (Judith O'Dea) whine and pout their way through a visit to their father's grave in a small Pennsylvania town, but it takes a turn for the worse when a zombie kills Johnny. Barbara flees to an isolated farmhouse where a family, a teen couple, and a lone man named Ben (Duane Jones) are already holed up. Bickering and panic ensue as the group tries to figure out how to escape, while hoards of undead converge on the house; news reports reveal that fire wards them off, while a local sheriff-led posse discovers that if you "kill the brain, you kill the ghoul." After a night of immolation and parricide, one survivor is left in the house... Carnival of Souls (1962 / B&W): Actress Candice Hilgoss has earned cult status solely on the basis of this one-of-a-kind film. Hilgoss plays a young woman who is involved in an automobile accident, wherein her car plunges into a river. Sometime later Candace emerges from the water, apparently completely unhurt. She wanders into a church where she's appointed the new organist. She rents a room and is propositioned by a strange neighbor. She ambles to a spectral carnival, populated by the town's dead. Then her car is fished out from the river; inside there are three bodies. Carnival Of Souls was filmed in Lawrence, Kansas; the film's low budget and unfamiliarity of its surroundings add to the eerie, unsettling quality that has compelled the film's disciples to experience the picture over and over again. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973 / Color): In London in the 1970s, Scotland Yard police investigators think they have uncovered a case of vampirism. They call in an expert vampire researcher named Van Helsing (an ancestor of the great vampire hunter himself, no less) to help them put a stop to these hideous crimes. It becomes apparent that the culprit is Count Dracula himself, disguised as a reclusive property developer, but secretly plotting to unleash a fatal virus upon the world.
Rifftrax: Night of the Living Dead - from the stars of Mystery Science Theater 3000!
(DVD)
6/16/2009