r/80sHorrorMovies

Finally watched this killer movie last weekend and the plot genuinely held up. I have the attention span of a goldfish, so the fact that it kept me completely glued to the screen says a lot. To top it off, Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne make appearances, and the soundtrack is pure gold. It’s been on repeat during my drive to work all week.

From Jon Mcbride the man who gave us cannibal campout & blades

I’ve been watching horror since I was 8, but as I got older, I definitely went deeper down the rabbit hole. I remember hearing stories about Faces of Death and Cannibal Holocaust—and the first time I finally watched Cannibal Holocaust, that music alone absolutely unhinged me.
After 26+ years of collecting physical media, I somehow never owned it…until the 88 Films 4K. I finally opened it today, just in time for Grindhouse Releasing’s pre-order announcement. Naturally, I immediately pre-ordered theirs too!
This 4K looks phenomenal. Now I can’t wait to see what Grindhouse did with their release!

Got in the mood for a few Summer Horror Films, and Sleepaway Camp will be the first one. Nothing like a little summer camp horror to set the mood. Time to revisit this classic!

They Live (1988)

Rating: 10/10 (PERSONAL FAVORITE)

Watched: August 12, 2026

Like most every teen in North America in the 80s, I was AN ENORMOUS fan of WWF (now WWE). Rowdy Roddy Piper was an instant favorite of mine because of his boisterous, give no shits, say WTF-ever attitude and just the sheer amount of fun that he seemed to be having all the damn time.

Well, I fell out of love with wrestling when Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat miraculously healed from a crushed throat. No joke. I remember being legitimately worried about Ricky, and when he was fine the next week, I was done with wrestling, but my love of Roddy Piper never, ever waned.

At the time, They Live was your standard(ish) John Carpenter thinkpiece about government and corporate overreach, control of the masses, and all the ways they kept us, the people, down. Tossing Roddy and Keith David into the mix was sheer brilliance.

They both worked so well together and they equally managed to give off the vibe that these two very different men had been struggling in the damaged world they inhabited. As ya gotta, I absolutely loved the fight between Nada and Frank, with Nada trying to slap them sunglasses on Frank at every turn.

How could you not? It's one of the most realistic fights out there. There's no fancy moves. There's no tricks. Just two guys whalin' away on each other non-stop, one because he wants the other to wear a pair of sunglasses and the other doesn't want shit to do with shinola.

I won't bore you with the big, overarching picture because if you've seen it, you know what's going on. If you haven't, you have to trust me:

They Live's message is stronger now than ever before. Corporations control the world and it's all bread and circuses out there, man. If you want to see a movie that shows you the straight truth, this one's it.

Now on to something cool that I ONLY noticed because I'm watching a LOT of John Carpenter's movies this month.

In the very beginning of the movie, an old man in the homeless camp says the following line: "Shooting people, robbing banks. A whole lot of people going crazy over some nutty dream they just had. The truth is, this kind of shit happens at the end of every century. It's just people afraid to face the future."

If you catch the reference, awesome. If not, let me fill you in.

That's in reference to Carpenter's movie the year before, Prince of Darkness.

Yes. That's right. They Live exists in the same universe as Prince of Darkness, so even though things shake out the way they do in They Live, everyone on that planet is living on borrowed time ANYWAYS.

Here's to you, JC, for making another badass movie, and leaving Easter Eggs for me to find nearly 40 years later.

Obviously, not to be confused with the 1999 post-SCREAM slasher (starring a pre-fame Anna Farris), the announcement for LOVER’S LANE first appeared in Box Office Magazine in October 1980 as an upcoming production from Cannon Films. This was a busy time for the Golan-Globus trash powerhouse, which had grown confident in the burgeoning success of its exploitation and horror library and took out six full pages to advertise upcoming titles and boast of current successes. Featured titles included X-RAY (aka HOSPITAL MASSACRE), listed as starring Jill St. John (who was eventually replaced by Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton). Also NEW YEAR’S EVIL (advertised here as for U.S. national release on December 19, 1980—just in time for, yes, New Year’s). Another page boasted of the box office success of Cannon’s then newly released SCHIZOID, which was listed as grossing over $4 million in its first month of release (over $12 million in today’s money). The bottom half of that page announced a title called LOVER’S LANE, featuring a silhouetted image of a man holding a knife looming over a car with a necking couple inside. Given its company, it seems this was going to be another slasher schlockbuster title for Cannon.

But what about the time when LOVER’S LANE was in pre-production? A common misconception about the slasher boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s was that it was just that—a sustained boom. Christian Williams, writing in The Washington Post, exclaimed: “This Autumn of 1980 will be remembered in Hollywood as the season when horror movies, those unspeakable celluloid things, cracked out of their pods en masse to gorge anew on the wallets of American filmgoers.” It was a veritable slasher gold rush, fertile ground for fledgling slasher projects, but as with any boom, it’s tricky to know when it will bust.

As early as the release of TERROR TRAIN in October of that year, major studios—who measured the success of a picture against the combined box-office juggernauts of HALLOWEEN (1978) and FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)—expressed disappointment with their returns. Even genre barometer Roger Corman canceled a horror film and said the market would be oversaturated by spring the following year. Williams exclaimed with a small amount of glee: “So it's a hello-goodbye to the biggest glut of nightmare movies in film history.”

However, it wasn’t time to write off the subgenre just yet. Filmways said that a third of the 150 scripts they received each month were still horror scripts. Avco-Embassy said the number of similar proposals was “uncountable.”

In November 1980, while The Washington Post declared the horror movie’s fortunes in decline, it admitted that LOVER’S LANE (among others) would soon join the likes of FRIDAY THE 13TH and PROM NIGHT (also 1980) in “throbbing like abscessed teeth in the gaping maws of the nation's multiplex theaters.” Curiously, perhaps hinting at production troubles, even as late as March 1981, LOVER’S LANE was still being announced (around the time it was originally due for release). The, ahem, ever-reliable World Weekly News stated: “Las Vegas heartthrob Wayne Newton wants to be a movie superstar. The entertainer has signed on to play a nutty murderer in ‘Lover’s Lane’” (although the same issue detailed how Faye Dunaway was supposedly being haunted by the vengeful ghost of Joan Crawford on the set of MOMMIE DEAREST. Perhaps she had seen the rushes!).

While the LOVER’S LANE ads in both Variety and Box Office Magazine tantalize with the possibility of a bona fide lost slasher, it is worth considering their nature and purpose. They were trade ads, not intended for the public, and mixed bragging, bravado, and investor shopping. Indeed, stars and directors often changed from those listed in these ads—and, in many cases, the films never made it in front of the camera at all for lack of backing, a shift in a genre’s popularity, or some other reason.

Or, if they did, as in the case of THE SPACE VAMPIRES (slated here for a Christmas 1981 release), it was eventually made by Cannon as LIFEFORCE by Tobe Hooper and released in 1985. The advertising feature lists at least one other potential horror film that wasn’t made, called HARVEST OF FEAR. However, for months Box Office Magazine repeatedly listed LOVER’S LANE as coming soon for a spring 1981 release. Then a double-page ad in Variety announced its world premiere at Cannes that May. Given Cannon was boasting of the financial success of SCHIZOID, why would LOVER’S LANE not end up being produced?

Despite murmurs that the teen slasher boom was almost over shortly after it started, independent producers still scrambled to make them in the hope that some of that blood-splattered gold would rub off. After all, they were relatively cheap to make, and profit was still likely even without major studio pickups. However, that led to another problem: a glut of independent productions and limited space in theaters. This meant many slashers sat on the shelf, some for years. But could LOVER’S LANE have been made but never released? Was LOVER’S LANE a real lost slasher?

The truth is that reels of Cannon’s LOVER’S LANE celluloid are not lying in some long-forgotten, dusty corner, waiting to be discovered. Sadly, the cameras never rolled. The film fell through after NBC ran a 1980 story linking Newton to organized crime, spooking investors. This came to light when Newton sued the network in 1986 for defamation. The article confirmed that Newton had hoped to portray a psychotic killer in the film.

Billy Fine—a Hollywood film distributor who released films such as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978) and PENITENTIARY II (1982) and served as executive producer on NEW YEAR’S EVIL—testified in the case that he couldn’t take the chance after the NBC broadcast, saying: “We had a very conservative group of investors, and image-wise we didn't want any problems or hassles; they wanted a clean deal.” Presumably, the idea of Wayne Newton donning a fedora and carving up teens met with their approval, while the whiff of alleged criminal activity frightened them off. Newton won the case and was awarded $19.2 million in damages (though that figure was later overturned on appeal).

In 1986, Fine said he now had his own money and would love to make the film with Newton. But by then, the slasher bandwagon had long since left town, and LOVER’S LANE was safe from knife-wielding maniacs for a few years, yet ...

More Lost Slashers at Hysteria Lives!: https://www.hysteria-lives.co.uk