In 1987, action star Arnold Schwarzenegger teamed up with director Paul Michael Glaser to adapt the Stephen King/Richard Bachman novel The Running Man for the big screen.  But that wasn’t the only convict reality show movie to see release that year.  Decades before The Asylum was even a thing, an unwitting rip-off called Deathrow Gameshow explored the same concept as The Running Man, only with far more hilarious results.

A handful of horror movies are just bona-fide classics.  Some are from the silent era, and others are products of the Universal Monsters period of the thirties, but the classics that are remembered most fondly today are the popular fright flicks from the seventies and eighties, movies like Halloween, Friday the 13^th, Alien, and even The Amityville Horror.  Also falling into this timeless category is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 Stephen King adaptation The Shining.

Those who grew up in the seventies may remember a children’s show nestled in between “Sesame Street” and “The Electric Company” on PBS called “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  It wasn’t as flashy as its bookends, but it was every bit as charming, and probably even more historically important.  The show and its creator, Fred Rogers, are the subject of the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Over the years, Cinema Fearité has handled both alien invasions (Xtro, Without Warning, Prey) and outer space horror (Event Horizon, Galaxy of Terror, The Green Slime).  But what about that middle ground, the alien abduction movie?  We’re checking that off the list this week with the 1993 sci-fi thriller Fire in the Sky.

This past weekend, B-movie goddess Linnea Quigley celebrated her 60^th birthday.  Quigley is about as famous on the horror circuit as an actress can be without actually being a household name, thanks to movies with titles like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Nightmare Sisters, and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.  Arguably, her most high-profile role came in 1985 when she played the sexy punk rocker Trash in the cult hit The Return of the Living Dead.

Some movies are timeless.  Classics like The Exorcist, Halloween, or even Jaws are as fresh today as they were on the day they were made.  Other movies, like 976-EVIL, Evilspeak, and Nightmares are products of their time, snapshots of the era in which they were conceived.  Made in 1988, Waxwork is another one of these time capsule movies.

While the great Stanley Kubrick had a fairly modest output over his long career (13 movies in 46 years), there’s little doubt that he’s considered to be one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.  Filmworker takes a close look at the second half of his career through the eyes of someone who was involved intimately in it, his trusted colleague and friend Leon Vitali.

This past weekend, Canadian-born actress Margot Kidder passed away at the age of 69.  Although Kidder was known primarily as Lois Lane from the classic Superman series of movies, horror fans remember her as both Barb in Black Christmas and Kathy Lutz in The Amityville Horror.  However, her first fright flick, made two short years before Black Christmas in 1972, was Sisters.

In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the Papacy and took the name Pope Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi.  Almost immediately, he became a controversial figure because of his progressive views.  A few years later, documentary filmmaker Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, The Salt of the Earth) was given unprecedented access to the Pope in order to make a movie.  That movie is simply called Pope Francis: A Man of His Word.

In 1987, cult director David DeCoteau (Dreamaniac, Creepozoids) got together with scream queens Linnea Quigley (Graduation Day, Silent Night, Deadly Night), Brinke Stevens (The Slumber Party Massacre), and Michelle Bauer (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) and made the camp classic Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama.  But that’s not the only movie that particular quartet made in 1987.  It’s not even the campiest.  That title goes to Nightmare Sisters.

In her long and storied career, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has gone from lawyer to judge to Supreme Court justice.  But perhaps her most interesting accomplishment has been becoming an internet meme, an inspirational figure for both modern women and liberal activists all over America.  Her fascinating story is the subject of a new documentary, appropriately entitled RBG.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein could possibly be the most adapted novel in horror history.  Starting with a silent version in 1910, the tale has been told countless times on the screen.  Some are classics, like the iconic 1931 Universal adaptation that made Boris Karloff a star.  Others are looser retellings, such as the more recent Victor Frankenstein.  Still others are speculative reboots, like I, Frankenstein.  There has even been Gothic, which explored the circumstances around the novel’s very creation.  And then, there are the parodies, the more comedic movies that take the general concept of Frankenstein and run with it, like Frankenweenie and Young Frankenstein.  The 1990 shocker Frankenhooker falls firmly into that last category.

Alien intruder movies come in all shapes and sizes.  Sometimes, the aliens are friendly, like in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Arrival.  Sometimes, they’re horrifying, as in Xtro or The Dark.  And sometimes, not even the audience can tell the difference.  That’s the case with the 1977 schlocker Prey.

Over the years, Cinema Fearité has covered plenty of movies that tell their audience what NOT to do, movies such as Don’t Look Now, Don’t Answer the Phone, Don’t Look in the Basement, and Don’t Open Till Christmas.  And that’s not even counting movies like Don’t Breathe and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark that are non-Cinema Fearité, regular section reviews here at FilmFracture.  Well, there’s no shortage of negative commanding horror movies, and this week, we’re going to add another one to the pile – the 1982 television movie Don’t Go to Sleep.

Several years ago, Cinema Fearité covered The Astral Factor, aka Invisible Strangler, which is a 1976 movie about a killer who has mastered the psychic art of astral projection, allowing him to commit his crimes without being detected.  However, a year before The Astral Factor was made, in 1975, another movie beat it to the conceptual punch.  That movie is Psychic Killer.