Dreadful, justly obscure ghost story. Mary Page Keller and Andrew Stevens play a couple who move into a haunted house. Then Stevens is possessed by a ghost and begins to kill people...or something like that. To be honest I had trouble staying awake so the story is kind of vague.

Dumb, by the numbers "horror" film loaded with false scares and stupid sequences. Like a workman, working outside the house, is killed and hung...and supposedly hangs there for days on end with no one noticing. Or Keller has a pointless dream sequence where a co worker slashes her throat...and leads to nothing. It's only in there to throw some cheap gore into our face.

Keller (who can be good) is lousy and Stevens (who has never been good) is even worse. Dull and pointless. Avoid.

If watched in the context of 1980's horror films this is a great little forgotten horror, fits in with films of the era such as 'House' & 'The Gate' movies, has the real film of USA middle budget horror films, it's a little surprise gem of that era .... enjoyable horror flick.

The fact that Scared Stiff has been given all of the care of a Criterion release is a testament to why Arrow Video is one of the best labels out there in the rapidly dying world of physical media and the fact that there are still movies out there waiting to be discovered.

Kate Christopher (Mary Page Kellar, Pretty Little Liars) is a pop singer who had a nervous breakdown but is now getting it back together thanks to David (Andrew Stevens), her psychologist boyfriend. Together with her son Jason, they move into an old colonial mansion that comes packed with secrets, like a horror-filled diary and a trunk filled with the mummified bodies of a woman and her son.

Scared Stiff started as a Mark Frost script (the second Frost written movie we've covered this week, along with The Believers), but grew into complete lunacy, packed with every single shock tactic possible, from exposed brains to body horror style transformations and pre-CGI digital effects. It was directed by Richard Friedman, who went on to direct Doom Asylum, Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge and the recent Acts of Desperation.

I love that this movie also features MTV-style videos, a ridiculous Native American lamp that grows gigantic, the goopiest of gore, a lynched handyman that doesn't show up again until the perfect time in the film, a hallway filled with fog that sends people back and forth through time, a villain who sells slaves when he isn't choking out little kids and turning into a literal monster, dead babysitters in a fountain and a shock finale that made me laugh out loud in the best of ways. I've said it so many times here, but how do basically forgotten movies from 1987 end up being better than anything released today?

Want to see it for yourself? If you grab a copy from Diabolik DVD, you get an exclusive slipcase! This gets a big recommendation, as it comes complete with Arrow's usual high standards, including a thirty-minute documentary that covers every aspect of the creation of Scared Stiff.