Anthony Barnao Movies

Actor and former casting director Anthony Barnao directed this initially intriguing but ultimately risible thriller about small-town sin. Lisa (Yancy Butler) is an aspiring writer from Pennsylvania who comes to the small Southern town of Edsville on her way across the country. She meets handsome diner-owner Luke (screenwriter Keith Coulouris) and is quickly attracted to him, developing a close friendship with his younger, simple-minded sister Annie (Charlotte Chatton) as well. But all is not right in Edsville, as Lisa soon learns. Luke is overprotective of Annie, having killed their father in a rage when he struck her 10 years previously. He and Annie are also having sex, and the woman who runs the local boarding house (Twin Peaks' Grace Zabriskie) reads all of Lisa's private journals aloud to both siblings. Things only get worse when local boy Jeff (Morgan Margolis) hits on Annie. Luke beats the teen to a bloody pulp, then kills his father (Ralph Lillig) and hangs his corpse in the library to use as a punching-bag. Lisa finally stumbles on to the horrible secret of Edsville, which turns this Cement Garden knockoff into a bizarre variation on The Wicker Man. By that point, however, most viewers will have given up, as the film's fascinating first hour gives way to undisciplined silliness in its concluding scenes. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

This made-for-TV film was based on a real-life, nail-biting hostage situation. The incident began when a deranged gunman, disgruntled for a variety of reasons, burst into the maternity ward at the Alta View Hospital in Sandy, Utah. Holding mothers, babies and nurses captive, the gunman clearly intended to kill as many people as possible before he himself was subdued by the police. Harry Hamlin, light-years away from LA Law, plays the psychotic intruder, while Terri Garr co-stars as the maternity nurse who struggles to act as the voice of reason. Filmed on location in Salt Lake City, Deliver Them From Evil premiered April 28, 1992. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Whoopi Goldberg stars in this TV movie as a single mother who begins paying the bills by hustling pool at a local billiards hall. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide

In this sci-fi adventure, an intergalactic pilot tries to stop the spread of a deadly virus before it destroys all life in the universe. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Though bereft of budget, the 1988 sci-fier Arena has its heart in the right place. The scene is a distant planet, where extraterrestrial gladiators square off in an arena. Earthling Steve Armstrong would like to prove his fighting skills, but the evil planetary ruler Marc Alaimo won't let him. After an intensive series of training sessions with martial-arts expert Claudia Christian, whose father used to run the arena, Armstrong is at last permitted to display his prowess in public. He also gets a chance to topple Alaimo's despotic regime, and, hopefully, to win himself a trip back to Mother Earth. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This interesting fusion of the horror and Western genres involves a modern-day sheriff (Franc Luz) whose search for a missing heiress leads him into the title locale, a frontier-age Arizona township whose residents are cursed with immortality. He eventually discovers that the abductee (Catherine Hickland) has been spirited off to the lair of an evil black-clad gunslinger (Jimmie F. Skaggs), who sees her as the reincarnation of the dance-hall girl he murdered a hundred years before. Excellent photography by Mac Ahlberg and a gritty Sergio Leone-inspired ambience lend a great deal of quality to this otherwise mundane production from Charles Band's outfit, which is saddled with a weak script that fails to put its unique concept to adequate use. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

A quaint, stagebound little horror film from Charles Band's Empire Pictures, Cellar Dweller stars Jeffrey Combs (fresh off his glorious turn as Herbert West in the Empire-produced Re-Animator) as a '50s horror-comic artist who falls prey to one of his own creations -- a ferocious demon he based on a drawing from an arcane book of spells and curses. The story picks up again in the 1980's, where the late artist's palatial home has been converted into a combination boarding house and art academy led by Yvonne De Carlo. One of the students pursues her obsession with reviving the "Cellar Dweller" comic series herself, delving into Combs' old studio for inspiration, and eventually discovers the same occult manuscript secreted in the basement. History repeats itself (naturally) and the creature emerges to stalk and maul anew. This admittedly cool concept and the rather effective monster are dampened a bit by a flippant, tongue-in-cheek attitude (a more ominous, Lovecraftian tone would have been more effective), but makeup-man-turned-director John Buechler shows a definite flair for imbuing his beast with a suitably sinister personality. Observant fans of Charles Band's body of work (yes, they do exist) should spot the numerous visual references to other Band films. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

In this violent crime drama, the residents of a New York City housing project live in fear of The Vampires, the brutal gang that continually terrorizes them. Things change after an insurance agent and a telephone repairman end up trapped there. Perhaps things would not be so desperate had the fellow not accidentally offended one of the gang members. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

The production team responsible for the twisted cult classic Re-Animator -- including director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna -- returned the following year with this equally depraved (perhaps more so) follow-up, based once again (and very loosely) on the pulp-horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Also returning to the fray is Jeffrey Combs, here playing the mild-mannered Crawford Tillinghast, apprentice to the dangerously obsessed Dr. Pretorious (Ted Sorel) and co-inventor of an enigmatic and ominous-looking device known as "The Resonator" -- a machine designed to stimulate the vestigial sensory apparatus contained within the human pineal gland. Such stimulation allows participants to "see" the slimy creatures which occupy a dimension parallel to our own, but with some chilling side effects -- the first of which being that the interdimensional vision works both ways. When a powerful sentient force devours Pretorious and assumes his consciousness, Tillinghast panics and destroys the Resonator -- soon to find himself in a padded cell, accused of his mentor's murder. Called to the case are Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton, another Re-Animator alum) and amiable cop Bubba Brownlee (Dawn of the Dead's Ken Foree), who escort Tillinghast back to the shattered laboratory in an attempt to corroborate his deranged account by re-creating the experiment. Their attempts are all too successful, and the Pretorious-thing emerges to take control of the reactivated Resonator and draw the others into its hideous realm. Also called forth are the participants' darkest sexual desires -- another interesting by-product of pineal stimulation -- and, in Tillinghast's case, an uncontrollable urge to devour human brains. Just when it seems it can't get any weirder...it does. Gordon explores this demented scenario with relish, allowing nearly every scene to go completely over the top into surreal mayhem while retaining the dark brooding sense of menace characteristic of Lovecraft's work. (It's not likely, however, that the author's dignified upbringing would have explored the psychosexual dimensions of the premise -- at least not in the kind of detail seen here.) All manners of perversities abound, accompanied by the wizardry of four dueling special-effects studios and the rich, creepy score by Richard H. Band, bringing the film to a literally explosive climax and a chillingly poetic final shot. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide