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 read numerous warnings about this movie being a totally worthless and inept piece of garbage, so I watched the crummy VHS (yes, I still watch movies on VHS in 2015…) with an absolute minimum of expectations. Great was my astonishment when "Curse of the Blue Lights" suddenly began with a terrific and powerfully atmospheric scene involving a scarecrow that comes to life and viciously pursues a petrified farmer! Good horror movies with scarecrows are, well, scarce and thus I even had a little bit of hope for a brief moment. Could it be that this isn't a dud at all, but a misunderstood and wrongfully ridiculed late '80s gem? No, of course not, the powerful scarecrow opening is just a fluke and the rest of the film is unendurable nonsense. "Curse of the Blue Lights" fits into a series of late '80s horror films that are child friendly – on the verge of childish, in fact – and feature wannabe comical screenplays, dim- witted lead characters, brainless dialogs and utterly cheesy make-up effects. Other, similar films like this one include "Spookies", "Cameron's Closet" and "The Monster Squad". I can't really say I liked any of these very much, but "Curse of the Blue Lights" is by far the worst. It's only been 2 days since I watched and already I can't remember much about it apart from the scarecrow intro and a handful of brief flashes involving fat, green-faced and inarticulate ghouls. I'll admit that – once again – the cool title and intriguing artwork on the cover lured me into watching something that should have been forgotten longtime.

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.

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

I had actually never heard about this 1988 horror movie titled "Curse of the Blue Lights", but of course I opted to watch it, as I happened to stumble upon it by random chance. And having grown up with horror movies in the 1980s, of course there was a certain appeal to finding a movie such as this.

However, writers John Henry Johnson and Bryan Sisson didn't exactly deliver anything grand or wholesome in terms of script and storyline for the movie. It was actually a rather boring, monotonous and sort of uninteresting storyline, and the movie failed to capture my interest, much less provide much of any entertainment or enjoyment for me. So it was quite an ordeal to suffer through 93 minutes of watching "Curse of the Blue Lights".

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in "Curse of the Blue Lights", nor can I say that I was really impressed with anything that transpired on the screen. But then again, and fair should be fair, the actors and actresses didn't really have much to work with , now did they?

Visually then "Curse of the Blue Lights" was low key. It wasn't good or memorable special effects, prostethics, and such. And the movie was suffering from that aspect.

This movie came and went without leaving a lasting impression on me, and it turned out that I hadn't been missing out on a great 1980s horror gem here from director John Henry Johnson.

My rating of "Curse of the Blue Lights" lands on a two out of ten stars.