The most frequent plot-to-title film requests

Titles and plots

films with 17 documented requests

1. The Hugga Bunch (1985) (TV)
   Live action with puppets, not animated. In a typical two-story suburban house lives a family with two children and a grandmother, sometimes visited by a nurse, who is a relative. Of the children the little girl Bridget is 7 years old and has short brown hair, and the boy Andrew is 11 years old. The grandmother is referred to simply as Grams. The girl narrates parts of the movie. The grandmother seems to only be in the way in the house, and the parents talk about putting the grandmother in a retirement home. The parents buy the kids presents (Bridget gets a stuffed penguin) in preparation for the bad news about sending the grandmother away. Andrew tells Bridget bluntly that the grandmother is getting too old so they're putting grandmother "out to pasture." While this is going on, Bridget keeps hearing sounds that come from the closet door mirror in her bedroom every time she hugs one of her stuffed animals, but nobody believes her. At one point is a scene of the brother and sister eating breakfast, and Bridget constructs a pancake sandwich filled with eggs, bacon, syrup, and other foods, as Andrew looks on with disbelief and disgust. Later, when alone in her room, a girl doll emerges from Bridget's mirror, and makes friends with Bridget. This girl doll named Huggins has curly hair. The rest of her family is too busy to listen to the girl telling them about the live doll. At one point the mother accidentally throws the doll into the washing machine (not clothes dryer) and the girl has to rescue it and dry it out. When the girl tells the doll about the problems with her grandmother, and that she wants to keep her grandmother from getting old so they won't send Grams away, Huggins suggests they ask the bookworm in Huggaland, since the bookworm knows everything. So together they travel/step through the mirror into another world / other land / strange land. One of Bridget's tennis shoes becomes lodged in the mirror as she steps through, so she has to take her shoes off in the new land. In the magical land there are little weird creatures. The good characters look roughly like cabbage patch kids, and were done with ugly puppets. Huggaland is colorful and filled with rounded objects like mushrooms and a bridge with ball-like railings. The first new doll Bridget meets is a boy doll named Hugsy. Everybody hugs each other as a greeting in Huggaland. The puppet creatures sit around on a bridge with mushrooms around, and sing a song. Bridget and one doll travel to find the bookworm, who tells the girl that the secret of youth is love and hugs. But when the girl presses him further for a medicinal cure for aging, he says she'll have to visit the queen of Shrugland, who has a "youngberry" tree with magic berries that keep the queen young and restore youth, which can also be used by Bridget's grandmother. However, he warns her that the berries disintegrate immediately if they touch the ground, and the only way to get to the queen's castle is to jump down a certain deep hole that looks like a well. The girl and doll bravely jump down the hole. Once in Shrugland, they have more adventures with a sidewalk with sideways gravity, and an elephant standing guard that looks like a mastodon that has flames coming out of its several tusks. When the doll hugs the leg of the ferocious-looking mastodon, the mastodon becomes a friendly elephant with a patch quilt body. They all ride on the elephant to the castle, and enter. Inside the castle there are quartz crystals all around, both clear ones and black ones. They soon find the youngberry tree. The tree is housed inside a transparent cylinder with a domed top that might be described as a glass dome / jar / cage. The tree isn't large, but it stands taller than an adult's head. The tree and its dome stand atop a round platform raised several inches, with surrounding steps. (The tree does not sit on top of a table.) The tree has the general appearance of an apple tree / peach tree / fruit tree / cherry tree / berry tree / rose tree. The berries glow orange. The transparent covering is mechanically lifted off when the queen's transparent key unlocks the control mechanism. It rises and descends slowly, held by three chains. Although the bookworm describes the woman as the queen, she has the general appearance and mannerisms of an evil witch. She wears all black with a Dracula-type protruding collar. The queen catches Bridget and doll taking the berries, and imprisons them in a dungeon, then the queen carelessly leaves the key next to the lock to the tree's dome mechanism. Ordinarily she wears the key on her wrist/neck. The elephant uses its strength and trunk to break out of the dungeon, they return to the youngberry tree, use the key to open the dome, grab many berries, which they place in a glass cup, and then return to the real world. The queen catches them the second time, but her arm becomes trapped under the edge of the cylindrical covering when she lowers it back into place. As Bridget steps back through the mirror into her bedroom she trips/stumbles/tumbles into her bedroom and spills the berries and the berries immediately vanish upon striking the floor. Everyone says tearful goodbyes to the grandmother, who is ready to leave, suitcases packed, then the father has a change of heart and asks her to stay, which she does. Though this Bridget learns the wisdom of what the bookworm tried to teach her, about the value of love and hugs.
   Children's / family movie. The front cover of the video is misleading because the illustration suggests the film is animated, but it is not. This movie was based on the Hugga Bunch children's/kid's TV show from the 1980s.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "H.R. Pufnstuf" (1969) (TV), "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), "Magic in the Mirror" (1996), and all "Alice in Wonderland" / "Through the Looking Glass" movies.
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape
   FTF: #81, #127, #330, #493, #587, #1167, #1691, #2192
   MW: Dec 12, 2004 1:07 am, Jan 25, 2005 9:25 pm, Jul 13, 2005 7:06 pm, Aug 12, 2005 11:23 am
   IMDb: Jun 13 2006 05:31:14, Jun 21 2006 02:32:17, Jul 6 2006 11:16:10, Jul 9 2006 03:21:58, Jul 12 2006 09:55:30
   

   films with 16 documented requests

   films with 15 documented requests

   films with 14 documented requests

   films with 13 documented requests

2. Burnt Offerings (1976)
   A family acting as caretakers moves into an old house for the summer. The family consists of a couple, their son, and their aunt. The house/mansion is a gothic, brick house in the country in upstate New York. They rent the house at a suspiciously low rate. One of the stipulations is that the family must leave food trays outside of the door of an old lady who lives upstairs. The wife regularly prepares a tray and leaves it outside of the old lady's door, occasionally trying to initiate conversation but no one ever answers. The horrid old woman/lady who lives there in the room sits and stares/looks out the window. A freaky/creepy chauffeur with a broad, frightening smile and a ghostly white face who is dressed in a black outfit, black cap, and mirrored sunglasses drives a black car. It turns out the house is alive. Every so often the house renews itself / rejuvenates itself by peeling off all its shingles and siding. This rejuvenation is done each time a person dies there, and even human injuries there are rewarded with gifts mysteriously appearing and things working better. The incidents start happening when the boy falls off the gazebo on their first day there, scraping his knee, and a seemingly dead flower in a flower pot has an unexpected bloom on it. After a few days there, the father starts to have nightmares and starts to become possessed, the aunt falls ill, and the mother disappears into the old lady's quarters for hours on end. At one point the possessed father is on the verge of drowning his son while the two of them are together in the swimming pool. There are large, wild waves in the pool when this happens. The aunt ages strangely quickly while there, then the aunt dies from a coffin that the chauffeur pushed at her. At one point one of the children falls out of a tree for no reason, and something happens with a gas heater in the kid's room, but the parents find it just in time and open the windows to let fresh air in. the father goes back upstairs before leaving the house, sees the deceased aunt alive again, sitting in a rocking chair with her face disfigured from decay, and in panic he throws himself through the upper story window, and lands face down on top of the family's station wagon. At some point the wife realizes that whatever was upstairs is evil, and she tries to flee, but a storm-like event happens, with trees tipping over as she tries to drive away. The family tries to escape but the mother goes back in and goes back to that room while part of the house crumbles below. Near the end the family sees the mother sitting in the room looking out of the window, evidentally having replaced the other old lady who used to sit there, and they realize the house has taken her, too. At the end, in the empty house the camera pans across old photographs sitting on a table, the same scene at the beginning of the film, only this time the most recent family's photos are among those on the table. Horror.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "The Shining" (1980), "The Amityville Horror" (1979), "The Haunting" (1963), "The Other" (1972), "Let's Scare Jessica To Death" (1971), "The Sentinel" (1976), "The Shuttered Room" (1967), "Ghost Story" (1981).
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: DVD
   FTF: #272, #577, #749, #982, #1225, #1473, #1708, #2187, #2201, #2227
   IMDb: Apr 24 2006 07:23:47, Jun 18 2006 18:27:01, Jul 10 2006 20:31:06

   films with 12 documented requests

3. Frog Dreaming (1986) = The Quest = The Go-Kids
   Set in Australia (not New Zealand). Mysterious bubbles periodically rise in a lake/pond/quarry/waterhole, followed by something that looks like the head of a monster breaking the surface. A fisherman alone at the lake sees the monster emerging, has a heart attack, and dies. Sometimes the silhouette of the monster is shown, which looks like the head and neck of a T. Rex. A boy is then shown getting on his bike-train invention that rides on railroad tracks to see how fast he can get to school, but his bicycle brakes fail so he has to ditch / jump off early. The boy Cody is about 15 years old, and is an American living in Australia with only his guardian (not his father). He is very intelligent, and his hobby is inventing things. Cody goes on an a bike excursion one day with some other kids/girls to a national park and they find the dead body of the fisherman there on shore. This leads Cody and other kids to believe there is a monster in the lake, or that the lake is haunted. Cody researches "donkajin" folklore by talking with a local black man to find out about local legends about such a monster, Despite a warning from his guardian, Cody goes exploring the lake on his own with the two girls. The lake is fairly remote, surrounded by ferns, frogs, and much wildlife, and the water is very murky. On one such trip he jumps off a cliff to swim out to pull the girls' raft back to shore after the bubbles begin. On another such trip he uses a diving helmet of his own invention, but doesn't tell the girls his theory of what he thinks the monster is. However, when the bubbles appear again while he's submerged, he doesn't return, the girls assume he drowned or died somehow, and they hurry back to town to tell what happened. The townspeople realize there is no hope of him still being alive by the time they return, but they go back to the lake anyway and start draining it with pumps overnight. Back in town, one of the two girls snoops around Cody's workshop and discovers that Cody had rigged a toy steam shovel inside an aquarium to model a scientific explanation of the "monster," then realizes what Cody's theory was, and that he might still be alive if he's trapped underwater in a pocket of air in the scoop part of the crane. She excitedly tells some adults, and a crowd of people hurry back to the lake, and a helicopter drops two scuba divers into the lake. While they are there, the machinery rises out of the water, looking very much like a dinosaur head, and Cody shouts to them from the shovel/mouth part that his foot is caught. The monster is just some old mining machinery / mining equipment / construction equipment like a bulldozer / crane / steam shovel / back-hoe / donkey engine (=> "donkajin") that occasionally floats to the surface when enough of the bubbles accumulate underneath the bucket/scoop part. Cody is rescued by the divers. At the end, a black man atop a cliff surveying the lake below appears to be a ghost, and vanishes.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Magic in the Water" (1995)
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape.
   FTF: #1061, #1120, #1360, #1899
   MW: Mar 15, 2005 1:44 am, Jun 04, 2005 8:20 pm, Jul 30, 2005 5:08 am
   IMDb: Jun 2 2006 02:18:44, Jun 5 2006 06:45:59, Jul 8 2006 10:20:34, Jul 9 2006 19:07:59, Jul 10 2006 14:04:37
   

   films with 11 documented requests

4. Don't Go to Sleep (1982) (TV)
   A family moves into a new house after one of their girls died. The boy Kevin is about 11 years old, the surviving girl Mary is about 12 years old and has brown hair in braided bun style, and the deceased girl/sister was about 15 years old and has blond hair. The dead girl's ghost starts to haunt the family in their new house. The surviving girl and the ghost girl are friends, but nobody else can see the ghost girl except her sister. The surviving girl has nightmares resulting from the accident, and the parents send her to a psychologist. At one point the girl is outside in the daylight with a ring/garland/stefanos of flowers/daisies on her head, talking with the ghost girl. The ghost girl deftly plays upon the surviving girl's fears, and thereby encourages the surviving girl to kill off her entire family one by one. For example, she tells the surviving girl that her family would send her to a nut house if the surviving girl tells anyone about seeing a ghost. She does this in such a way that each death appears accidental. At one point the girl then causes her live in grandmother to have a heart attack by putting her brother's pet iguana in her bed at night. At one point the boy and girl are playing frisbee, and the girl "accidentally" throws the frisbee on the roof/rooftop. The boy climbs up the side of their new 2-story house to get it, but the boy falls to his death when the window next to him pops open and scares him. The mother is in the kitchen and drops a watermelon when she hears him scream, and the watermelon smashes/splatters on the floor. The father has a hard time figuring out what to feed the boy's iguana after the boy dies, then by accident discovers iguana food in the boy's closet, which works. At another point the father is electrocuted in the bathtub by his radio. The mother becomes frightened of the girl and believes she might be responsible. At another point the girl is cutting pizza downstairs, then slowly walks up the stairs while while rolling the pizza cutter blade along the full length of the banister and wall, then attacks her mother with the pizza cutter. The mother tries to call for help, but the girl cut the phone line with the pizza cutter. Near the end the girl is in a straightjacket in a padded room in a mental institute, which ironically is the same situation the ghost girl warned her about earlier that could happen. The girl tells the lady nurse what happened: the other girl died in a car accident as a result of her sister's shoelaces tied together as a prank by her younger sister while riding in the car, sleeping, then when their car was in an accident, the sister couldn't get out before the car exploded. At the very end of movie, the mother is lying in bed and hears knocking, which she thinks is her maid, but then she sees the ghost girl rising up at the end of her bed. The film ends with the mother screaming.
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape
   FTF: #103, #114, #223, #376, #953, #961, #1098, #2097, #2102, #2117
   IMDb: Jun 17 2006 12:51:44
5. Sole Survivor (1970) (TV)
   A plane crash occurs in the desert. The plane is a B-24 "Liberator" bomber from World War II, with an emblem on the tail. The desert is the Sahara Desert in Libya. The plane crashed due to lack of fuel after going off course while returning from a bombing mission over the Mediterranean. A storm had come up, and heavy winds forced it to crash land. There are 5-7 American military men on board. The crew tried to escape, one managed to escape before the crash by bailing out over water, but the others were unable to escape in time. The man who escaped before the crash, Russell Hamner, was the plane's navigator and is now an Air Force general, 25 years later. However, it appears the other men also survived the crash. The bulk of the survivors wait around until they are rescued. Throughout the movie people discuss their lives, what they did before the war, how to escape, and so on. Most of the film is dialog, with not much happening until near the end. One of the crew was an up-and-coming baseball player before the war, and plans to be a professional player after the war. He happened to have his glove, ball, and mitt on the plane, so they play baseball to pass the time. One guy is always complaining about trying to find his dog tags, which he knows are located under the broken tail section of the crashed plane. They run low on water. Eventually a search group finds the wreckage/wreck, and an Air Force investigation team is called in to examine it. The team quickly discovers that the wreck has not been touched since crashing a quarter century earlier. Towards the end of the movie one of the guys is talking and suddenly says there are people around and people are coming with flags. Each time one of the survivors' dog tags is found by one of the investigators, that survivor disappears. This continues until only one soldier is left, because his dog tag cannot be found. The surviving men try to talk to the investigators but it is as if the survivors cannot be seen, and when the survivors run towards the rescuers, they run right through them. At that point the survivors realize that they are dead / in limbo, and that the people with the flags were the rescue party to collect the bodies. Hamner's story about the crash is in conflict with where the wreckage was found, and it was his lies that delayed the finding and rescue of the crew. The ghosts plot to expose Hamner as a coward who deserted his post and left his crew-mates to die. The reason the guy who was looking for the dog tags is left is his dog tags were under the tail section but so was his body, so his body was not found by the rescue crew and so his spirit was left. At the very end the sole survivor is the guy looking for his dog tags. At the end the sole remaining ghost is shown clutching his baseball and bat, then he picks up the ball and playing baseball by himself, with no companions, realizing his fate. Color. Inspired by the discovery of an almost intact B-24 in Libya in 1954 by an oil exploration team who discovered both it and the remains of the crew with the plane.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "The Flight of the Phoenix" (1965), "Flight Of The Phoenix" (2004), "Carnival Of Souls" (1962), "The Sixth Sense" (1999).
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: only unofficial DVD copies; see ACTWON [7-9-06]
   FTF: #210, #475, #679, #867, #1437, #1509
   MW: Oct 28, 2004 3:07 am
   IMDb: Jun 11 2006 09:38:01, Jul 2 2006 21:46:03, Jul 4 2006 06:15:35, Jul 7 2006 09:21:32, Jul 8 2006 23:52:28
6. When A Stranger Calls Back (1993) (TV)
   A ventriloquist who wasn't successful as a comedian begins stalking a lady in her home. The ventriloquist can "throw his voice," even when right in front of the listener. The story takes place in the city. The movie starts out with a young woman babysitter who is babysitting a boy and a girl. The babysitter Julia is about 30 years old. While she is babysitting she gets some calls from a man/guy, who keeps telling her things she doesn't like. The man keeps calling her, so she decides to tell call 911 to have them track the number. They call her back and tell her that she needs to get out of the house because the calls are coming from inside the house. The police/cops come and find that the man had kidnapped the kids. The killer turns the boy into a puppet. Then he starts killing other people. The babysitter has a phobia about things being moved in her home. Years later and she finds a child's shirt in her closet and is sure the killer has been in her house. The man comes into her home when she is gone and takes pictures/photos/photographs of her walls so that he can paint himself to camouflage himself against a wall. When she comes home he can imitate the phone ringing. As she answers the phone you can see him open his eyes while he is camouflaged against her brick wall, in the room with her. A cop eventually helps the babysitter. In the end the police catch him back in the lady's house/apartment, his body painted to match the brick wall so he blends in like a chameleon.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Scream" (1996).
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: DVD, but hard to find
   FTF: #67, #211, #458, #704, #1275, #1328, #1830, #1965
   MW: Mar 26, 2005 3:23 am, Dec 13, 2005 8:15 am, Jan 27, 2006 3:58 pm

   films with 10 documented requests

7. Child Of Glass (1978) (TV)
   Set on a Southern plantation. The ghost of a little girl asks a young boy to help her find her China doll, which was used to smuggle a necklace of diamonds, which is still in it. The boy Alexander is about 13 years old, and the Creole ghost girl Inez is about 13 years old and has a French accent. The ghost girl has a ghost dog. Inez asks Alexander to help her by reciting a riddle. He has only a day or two to solve the riddle, or be haunted for the rest of his life. The doll with diamonds glows in the dark in the barn. The little girl sings "Frère Jacques." At one point Inez dances with Alexander. The girl's body is found in a well, and the boy finds the doll in the well, too, though at a different level. She fell into the well because she was looking for her doll, which was hidden in a stone inside the well.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "The Watcher in the Woods" (1980).
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape, but hard to find
   FTF: #56, #97, #181, #331, #975, #1018, #1654, #1706, #1973, #2176
8. Fortress (1986) (TV)
   Set in a small country town in Australia / Australian Outback. One female teacher and nine students are kidnapped from a classrooom in school. The bus driver is also kidnapped. The school is very small so this group of students constitutes the entire school. The students are both male and female, and range in age from kindergarten to about 14-15. The kidnappers/thugs consist of a gang of about four people. The kidnappers wear masks. One kidnapper has a duck mask, another a rabbit mask, and another a Santa Claus mask. The kids/children call the kidnapper with the Santa Claus mask "Father Christmas." The kidnappers take the people to the hills and put them in a hole in the ground to be held hostage, but before each one enters the hold the kidnappers make them take off an item of clothing. The bus driver ends up just in boxer shorts. But the hole has tunnels, and the victims find a tunnel into some caves. The escapees have to swim underwater in a cave at one point, which requires them to strip down to their underclothes before doing do. Some of the students are uneasy about removing their clothes in front of the others, but they do so anyway. They escape the cave only to be caught again, the second time on a farm where an old husband and wife are forced to cook for the kidnappers. The victims quickly become survivalists, and make their own weapons to fight back, including spears and arrows. At the end the victims fight back savagely and roar, like tribal warriors. They kill off the kidnappers one by one. They stab Father Christmas, and he dies, staring blankly into space. Later the class is rescued by a helicopter. After returning back to the classroom a curious detective comes to visit with questions. The children are quite protective of their teacher at that point, and start to move towards her when the detective moves towards her. The detective wants answers to unexplained questions about how the kidnappers were killed. He looked on the window sill and realized there was a body part being preserved in a jar but, the kids came up a cunning answer to what it was. One of the video covers for this film had a photo of the teacher with her face painted and holding a spear. Based on a true story.
   HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Lord of the Flies" (1990), "Walkabout" (1971), "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975).
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape
   FTF: #119, #213, #296, #1158, #2126
   MW: Sep 30, 2005 9:38 pm, Apr 08, 2006 3:08 am, Apr 18, 2006 11:45 am
   IMDb: Jun 23 2006 14:59:19, Jul 3 2006 20:28:09
   

   films with 9 documented requests

   films with 8 documented requests

9. The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)
   A large number of orphans or young children/kids live in a home/orphanage/factory/sweatshop. The factory is run as a child labor factory. The man in charge is a painter and has one particular boy staying in the home. This boy Michael is 11 years old. Michael looses all of his hair when he is badly frightened after going into a strange house, and he becomes permanently bald. Other kids make made fun of him so mostly he stays in his house and doesn't go play with the other kids. One time he tries to glue a hairpiece on, but it is ripped off during a soccer game. Two "friendly" ghosts create a special potion for him. This potion is a magical hair-growth potion/solution/concoction/recipe. The ghosts give him the recipe, which has ingredients of peanut butter, flies, and other gross things. The ghosts warn him not to use too much. Michael smears the solution all over his head, and he gets has magical growing hair, which grows at about a tenfold rate. At one point he goes to sleep on the top of a bunkbed and in the night his hair grows rapidly, so fast that it can be seen growing. At one point Michael's friend finds the concoction and puts it on his crotch and the resulting pubic hair is so long that it grows out his pants. This boy Connie is about 11 years old. Connie's pubic hair hangs out from his pant leg like a horse's mane as he skips along the crosswalk. Michael is then kidnapped/used by a creepy old painter to make magic paintbrushes. With these paintbrushes the painter paints pictures that traps children in them. The children move around in the picture and plead to be set free. Eventually the boy/authorities tries to cut his hair but it continues to grow. At one point Michael gives an inspirational speech in school, and says something like "I want to be educated. Not just hairy." Michel's room is similar to Elliott's room in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" (1982). The film is weird in general, and contains other random, dream-like imagery like a sugar trail, moon, children in cages, trespassing on condemned property, and so on. Live action.
   OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape
   FTF: #202, #330, #769, #845, #1236
   MW: Jul 25, 2005 10:19 pm
   IMDb: Jun 23 2006 15:12:38, Jul 11 2006 08:40:03
   

   films with 7 documented requests

10. Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (1973) (TV)
    A neurotic woman/housewife named Sally and her business executive husband move into Sally's family house. Sally is alone in her large house most of the time. The house is a spooky, two-story Victorian mansion. When Sally starts the redecorating along with her pompous decorator she comes across a locked room in the house/basement. The room has been locked for 25 years. After arguing with the handyman who insists she should leave the room locked, she finally gets the key. But once she opens her father's old study and has the bricks from the fireplace / ash bin removed, strange things begin to happen. Every time the lights go out, little people / troll-like creatures come out of doors inside the house and try to harm her. The creatures have dark bodies, conical heads that are bald, their faces shriveled and ghoulish like raisins, their eyes are dark, and they had small hands with claws. Altogether they are a lot like humanoid mice. At one point Sally is taking a shower, the lights go out, the little creatures come out of a closet and try to get her. The creatures are heard whispering to one another inside the heating vent, but it isn't always possible to hear exactly what they are saying. After Sally opens the wall, they are heard saying, "We're free! We're free! She set us free!", and later they say things like "Join us." and "Let's get Sally." Sally keeps hearing their tiny voices. At one point her decorator trips at the top of the stairs and falls to his death. Sally sees a rope lying across the place where he tripped, but when she picks it up to take it, a horrifying little creature pulls it from her grasp. Her husband doesn't seem to be affected by all these occurrences; the trolls seem to be after only Sally. Her husband dismisses her as neurotic and her friend thinks Sally may be loosing her mind. In the end of the movie the creatures hit/bonk her over the head and the creatures begin to drag her to the basement. One the way to the basement Sally is able to grab a camera and snaps a flash picture of the little creatures. The light from the flash temporarily saves her since the creatures seem to hate/fear bright light. But the creatures are still able to drag her to the basement/vents, and after they have her in the vents, her husband comes in the house yelling for her and Sally's voice changes to a voice like that of the trolls.
    HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Trilogy of Terror" (1975), "Cat's Eye" (1985), "The Exorcist" (1973).
    FTF: #11, #188, #582, #586, #589, #645
    MW: Apr 19, 2006 5:26 pm
    
11. The Gate (1987)
    Set in suburbia. Glen is 13 years old and is obsessed with toy rockets, his sister Al/Alexandra is busy discovering boys and having slumber parties, and his nerdy pal Terry obviously has issues. After an old tree collapses in Glen's backyard, he and his friend Terry find a geode in the hole underneath. A large and mysterious hole in the backyard is left behind. They bring the geode inside the house to break it open, and find beautiful crystals inside the rock. Planks are put over this hole to cover it up. Glen and his sister are left to look after themselves for three days when their parents go away on vacation. The older daughter throws a wild party. Terry has a heavy metal album by Sacrifyx ("my dad picked it up in Europe") and inside is a sleeve book with pictures and spells that they later use to figure out what is going on. After his friend Terry plays his heavy metal album backwards and they coincidently bury the family dog in the hole in the backyard, the hole becomes a portal to hell, and they awaken demonic spirits that destroy the home and try to kill them. 1-foot high creatures/demons emerge from the hole, get into his house, and turn people into zombies. These small demons have mean faces and sharp teeth. There is a very long, winding staircase at one point. At one point Glen finds an eyeball in the palm of his hand that looks back at him, and he attempts to cut the eye out. At one point the handyman tumbles over, then transforms into tiny demons that scatter about. The three occupants are attacked by reanimated dead, droves of tiny demons, and a head demon the size of a bus. The goal of these creatures is to create hell on earth. All they need is two human sacrifices which will enable the gateway to their world to be blown wide open. The demons take Terry and Al as sacrifices. At one point the demons melt together into one big monster. One girl finds the big monster in a closet, and she picks up a Barbie doll and stabs him in the eye with the doll's legs. The parents finally return home late at night. The kids are relieved at first, but then the mother's head falls off. The father tells Glen, "You've been baaaaaad!" and tries to strangle him while slime drips out of his father's face. The first set of demons are eliminated through readings of random passages from the Bible. The second (large) demon is killed with a small rocket. At the destruction of the large demon, fireworks go off over their destroyed house, and Terry and Al come back to life.
    HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "The Gate II: Trespassers" (1992), "Poltergeist" (1982), "Gremlins" (1984).
    FTF: #251, #915, #994, #1528, #1832, #1944
    IMDb: Jul 8 2006 19:15:28
12. The Phantom Tollbooth (1970) = The Adventures of Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth
    A boy/kid comes home from school. This boy Milo is about 17 years old and lives a somewhat isolated life with his mother in an apartment in the big city. Milo is sitting on the living room couch, he's alone at home, watching TV. His friend calls him on the phone, and Milo complains on the phone to his friend that he is bored stiff. This friend is never given a name but is a male about 11 years old. Milo talks to his friend on the phone for about a minute, but then there is a loud noise from another room. He tells his friend he'll be right back, he goes to see investigate, and walks away from the phone. Inside the bedroom is a huge box, wrapped like a gift/present, wrapped in red and white paper. There is a tag on the box, stating who it is for and who it is from. The boy pulls the tag. Inside the box is a tollbooth that landed in his bedroom / living room. He opens the box, the box opens outwards, and there is a nice little red car inside. He starts to walk into the booth, but as he steps in, he goes into a spinning portal, the film changes to animation/cartoon, and he is transported/warped into an animated world. The bulk of the movie is about his extensive adventures in this animated world of different lands/worlds/planets. He drives a car on a rainbow road. He meets many characters and has many adventures. He lands in a swamp of bad feelings. He drives his car in the swamp, there's someone else with him, and a dog. The dog jumps out of the car and the boy goes to search for him. The dog gets him out of the swamp. At some point he finds an old man playing an organ-like instrument that controls the sun and the weather. The boy waits for the man to leave and starts playing with it, wreaking total havoc with the weather and the sun is going nuts not knowing whether to set or rise. At one point they meet a king, and they have dinner and since the kid couldn't make up his mind about what he wanted to eat, he ate his own words, and then they go on on their journey and they meet a grasshopper who makes them do tasks that would take forever, like moving a pile of sand from one place to another with a pair of tweezers. There are scenes with melting clocks, and an alphabet world. At one point he meets a wise man who adds and subtract numbers, and calculates everything. The ending scene is full of monster-type creatures. A big event happens that causes Milo to learn his lesson. Milo ends up back in person in his house, in the real world. (The film changes back to live action.) The big box folds up and goes out the window. The phone is still sitting there, he picks up the phone, his friend is still waiting for him, but almost in a panic as to where he's been. His friend asks Milo something like, "Where have you been? You've been gone for the past five minutes.", despite Milo's adventure lasting for maybe days. Milo apologizes to his friend for being away for so long, but that he was away only for a few minutes. Suddenly his friend on the other end of the phone says he has to go, since something has just landed in his bedroom, he describes it as some sort of giant tollbooth, and he goes to check it out. At the end a similar tollbooth has now landed in his friend's bedroom. Musical.
    OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape and imported DVD copies
    FTF: #351, #579, #1024, #1663
    MW: Nov 30, 2005 4:45 pm
    IMDb: Jun 29 2006 12:32:41, Jul 7 2006 08:47:48
    
13. Trilogy of Terror (1975) (TV) = Tales of Terror = Terror of the Doll
    A woman leaves her mother to live by herself, and her mother, living all by herself, becomes more and more fearful that she lost her daughter forever. This woman Amelia is about 37 years old, is ordinary but slightly neurotic and has to decide whether to spend Friday night with her boyfriend or her mother. Amelia comes back from Africa (not India or Australia) with a weird little black wooden statue of a person holding a spear (not a sword or knife). It is a Zuni hunting fetish doll / tribunal doll / statue / figurine (not a voodoo doll), standing 1-2 feet tall, and with an ugly face. It is a gift for her latest boyfriend Arthur, who is an anthropology professor. The small wooden doll comes with a scroll that informs her that it contains the spirit of a genuine hunter named "He Who Kills," and that if the golden chain around its waist ever comes off, the doll will come to life. She accidently knocks the statue over, the necklace comes off when she's not looking, and the statue comes alive. At first she keeps finding it in odd places like under the couch. Then the statue attacks her in her apartment. The statue makes a sound like "chacca... chacca... chacca... chacca..." while waving its spear up and down, it moves very fast, and its attack is ferocious. At one point the ferocious doll steals a kitchen knife / steak knife and really goes after her. At another point the doll saws its way out of a closed suitcase. At another point the doll climbs out of Amelia's bathtub with the knife clenched between its teeth. She screams and frantically runs around her apartment. At one point she laments, "I can't believe this is happening, I can't believe this is happening," and at another point she's fearfully crouching in the shadows of her apartment. After fighting with the statue for a while she finally tricks it into the oven and she cooks/burns it. With the danger over of being killed by the Zuni warrior Amelia calmly goes to the phone and calls her mother to come over for the night at her place so she won't be alone. Amelia is planning to cook dinner for her mom and is also planing to make a sharp and deep impression on her mom with her newfound culinary skills. The full film is a trilogy of the stories 1. "Julie," 2. "Millicent and Therese," and 3. "Amelia" (also known as "Prey"). All feature the same actress Karen Black, in different roles, but it is this third story "Amelia" with the fetish doll that everybody remembers so well.
    HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Child's Play" (1988), "Trilogy of Terror II" (1996) (TV).
    OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape and DVD
    FTF: #320, #1310, #1496, #1638, #2127, #2213
    IMDb: Jul 2 2006 08:10:36

    films with 6 documented requests

14. All Summer In A Day (1982) (TV)
    On the planet Venus, it rains all the time, almost constantly. The children/kids, after having to stand in UV-ray baths every day to get their artificial "sunlight," all go outside to play/frolic in the fields. The school children wear gray, futuristic clothing. A school / classroom full of young children are excited to hear that the rain will stop briefly today, for just fifteen minutes. This is a rare event happens only once every year or so. But they are also resentful of a new classmate from Earth, who remembers what it's like to see the sun. This student/kid is a girl (not a boy). They lock the girl in a detention cell / room / closet, which is half underground. just before the sun comes out, then forget about the girl when the sun comes out. Sunbeams streak through the small window high up on the wall in the detention cell, and the sad little girl reaches up to try to touch them. It starts raining again eventually and they all come in and they remember the kid in the closet and they let her out. Then they all feel bad that they forgot her, and one girl gives her a flower. From a Ray Bradbury short story, science fiction. This film was often shown in elementary school / grade school in the 1980s, often in conjunction with the book / short story.
    OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: apparently nothing
    FTF: #152, #817
    MW: Dec 27, 2004 3:32 pm
    IMDb: Jun 24 2006 15:56:48, Jun 28 2006 09:16:50, Jun 29 2006 05:07:14
    
15. Bad Ronald (1974) (TV)
    A high school youth/teenager/boy is interested in a girl who doesn't like him. This teenager Ronald is about 18 years old, nerdy, has dark curly hair, and wears glasses. He will graduate from high school soon. He lives alone with his mother after his mother's divorce, in a 2-story house, and never sees his father. His mother advises Ronald to stay away from the girl he likes, but he goes to see her anyway while she and her high school friends are swimming in a pool. She tells him she can't go out with him, and the other kids laugh at him. When leaving her house, he runs down a slope and collides with the girl's younger sister, who was riding by on a bike. The younger sister doesn't like Ronald, either, and tells him that he's weird, and that his mother is weird, too. Ronald becomes angry at this, he pushes her, she falls backwards and her head strikes a concrete block (not a rock). Ronald thinks she's joking at first, then upon closer inspection sees that she's dead. The girl is accidentally killed. He drags her off. Ronald comes home late that night, clothes dirty, his mother pressures him to tell him what happened, and Ronald admits that he accidentally killed the girl, buried her in a shallow grave (not a haystack). His mother is upset at his hiding the body because now it will look like he's guilty. She fears the police will not believe that it was an accident, and that if he flees somewhere he will inevitably be caught. So without calling the police, the mother moves/hides her son into a bathroom that he turns into a secret hiding place / secret room. The room looks like a pantry on the outside. Ronald can see out into the house through small peepholes that he drills in the walls. The mother has been having gall bladder problems and finally goes to a hospital, but she never returns. The mother dies and the boy keeps living there. A new family moves into the house. In the mean time, Ronald is interested in drawing, and begins drawing people in a fantasy world he read about. He becomes lost in this fantasy world created in his own head from being hidden away for so long. He stays there for some time, undetected by the new family, and he spies on them through the peek holes. Ronald obviously becomes insane, evidenced by his increasingly stranger drawings and his reactions to them. he draws one of a devil with wild hair and horns, and he draws a jagged line across the face of one painting, X-es out another, and stabs another with his paintbrush. The family that moves in has three girls. He falls in love with one of the girls, the youngest one, Babs, who has long blond hair. He sometimes emerges from his secret room when the family is away, to eat their food, but one day their nosy, elderly neighbor is peeking in the window when Ronald is in the kitchen, she is so astonished upon seeing him that she falls down the steps and dies. (Ronald didn't directly kill her.) He buries her under the house. Towards the end, Ronald comes out to meet the blond girl while she is home alone, she sees he is crazy and flees, but is locked in the basement of another house. Soon after that Ronald overpowers one of her sister's boyfriends, and ties the boyfriend up in Ronald's secret room. The boyfriend makes noises and struggles with Ronald. In their struggle the covering over one of Ron's peepholes becomes uncovered, casting light out of it, the family hears the noise and comes downstairs to investigate, look into the lighted peephole, Ronald bursts through the wall, the police handcuff him and take him away, and at the end the family examines Ronald's secret room in awed horror.
    FTF: #62, #77, #479, #508, #693
    IMDb: Jun 24 2006 12:45:16
16. The Bermuda Depths (1978) (TV) = Bamyuda no nazo = It Came Up from the Depths = La Légende des Profondeurs
    A very sad and haunting/eerie movie about a giant turtle / giant sea turtle. The plot revolves around an old legend of a woman in the 1700s who was crossing the Bermuda Triangle / Devil's Triangle when a typical storm crept up. She prayed to Satan / the devil to take the souls of her entire crew, but to let her live because she was too young and beautiful to die. She got her wish: she would be young and beautiful for all eternity, but she would have to live in the ocean with a giant turtle and take the souls of young men. After making her pact with the devil, she throws herself off the clipper ship into the ocean, thus sealing her pact. She sinks into the depths, her skirts billowing around her. A young boy and girl are on a beach. They look on while a sea turtle hatches out on the beach. They find a huge sea turtle. They carve their names onto the giant turtle's shell/carapace. The girl sits on top of the turtle, and the turtle swims out to sea with her riding on it. When this boy Magnus Dens gets older, after being traumatized and orphaned, and after having dropped out of college, he returns to the town Bermuda where he lived as a kid, to find the cause of his father's mysterious death years before, when Magnus was a boy. The Dens house on the cliff is stark and silent from years of neglect, and near the end is a scene of a cemetery that has no bodies. There is a scene in the cemetery of Jennie's tomb with theme music playing. At the Bermuda Biological Station, Magnus finds Eric and Dr. Paulis, friends and colleagues of his late father, and joins them on a quest for gigantic sea creatures. He discovers that his father had been conducting strange experiments. He is reunited with his childhood friend Jennie Haniver, who is now a mysterious young woman. Jennie is a beautiful brunette with green eyes, and is the same girl who rode on the turtle as a girl. Local legend has it that Jennie is really the spirit of a young woman lost at sea centuries ago. Magnus joins his friend Eric who is in the pursuit of a giant sea turtle. Paulis' housekeeper, an island local, warns Magnus that Jennie is dangerous, but nobody heeds the folklore and the researchers trap the giant sea turtle, setting the stage for a deadly confrontation with both minions of the Devil. At one point giant turtles attack the lighthouse. At one point Jennie takes Magnus to an underwater entrance of a cave, then they resurface in the cave at a hidden place where is no water so they can talk. This undersea cavern is where Magnus' father died. One day he shoots an arrow at a large sea turtle and hits it in the fin, and Jennie later turns up with a wound on her leg, suggesting she was the turtle he shot in the water. At one point Magnus observes how cold she felt to his touch, and she, in turn, asks him to warm her. At one point Jennie is a traveler on a ship/boat, and during the course of the voyage she transforms into a giant sea turtle. In one scene Jennie's eyes glow when she shows up on the boat. At the end of the film a man is riding on one a party boat (the type you can eat dinner on) out on the ocean. Eric (a black man on the boat) harpoons the giant sea turtle, but is dragged to the depths to his death by the giant turtle, via the rope attached to the turtle via harpoon. Eric's last air bubbles trail from his mouth. The turtle's eyes glow just before claiming Eric's life. Towards the end, Magnus is on the boat, he has the necklace that Jennie made in his hand, and suddenly he throws the necklace into the water/sea. As the necklace sinks down a giant sea turtle swims up and swallows it. The huge turtle swims under the boat, the sun shines through the water, and Magnus' and Jennie's names are seen to still be carved on the turtle's shell. Contains a lot of classical music, especially Vivaldi's "Largo" movement from the Concerto for Lute, 2 Violins and Basso Continuo in D Major, and the guitar-based theme "Jennie."
    HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "Splash" (1984), "The Blue Lagoon" (1980), "Whale Rider" (2002), "Titanic" (1997)
    OFFICIALLY AVAILABLE ON: videotape, but original copies are hard to find
    FTF: #87, #521, #802, #2005, #2190
    IMDb: Jul 4 2006 19:13:02
17. La Cabina (1972) (TV) = The Phone Box
    Short film (35 minutes), Spanish (not Italian or French) with English subtitles, in color. A man/gentleman enters a public phone booth to make a call. The phone booth is a rusty old English red telephone box. When he tries to leave he finds the door locks / is jammed, so he is stuck/trapped inside. He ends up calling the fire department, who came out to rescue him. They are about to smash the booth open when a van with people from the phone company arrives / turns up. The phone booth is loaded onto the back of the truck/van, with the man still inside, and driven off. The long journey takes hours, and it takes him out to the wilderness/country. On his way down one road he is passed by an identical van which has a phone booth on the back of it, and there is a man trapped in that one, too. Eventually the van drives into a huge cavern / warehouse / large building / telephone booth morgue. Inside the warehouse are thousands of the phone boxes, suspended from the warehouse ceiling, each with a trapped/locked person inside. Most of the other people are dead, some having strangled themselves using the phone cord. Many of the bodies are nothing more than decomposed skeletons. The newly trapped man/guy in his phone box was set down in the cavern and abandoned there to face his doom. He screams wildly, realizing his fate. The camera zooms out to show more of them, then the camera rises to show a dump completely filled with loads of them. The phone booths stretch to the horizon. This might be considered a black comedy.
    HAS SIMILARITIES WITH: "The Phantom Tollbooth" (1970), "The President's Analyst" (1967).
    FTF: #406, #457, #1361, #2048
    IMDb: May 23 2006 11:47:55, Jul 8 2006 12:29:04

Explanations

List derivation, organization, and maintenance

• Find That Film! / Found That Film!
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How to link to a specific title

The Hugga Bunch =>
the_hugga_bunch =>
http://www.simnia.com/film/common_requests.htm#the_hugga_bunch

Created: June 17, 2006
Updated: April 19, 2007
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