I don’t get to pick movies that we watch. If I did, we would just watch The Car or 1990: The Bronx Warriors every night. Rebecca picks the movies. Tonight, she picked this.

Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra, Cadillac Man) goes to get a routine check-up for her second pregnancy, which ends with her molested by her obstetrician, Dr. Victor Mott (John de Lancie, the Q from Star Trek!), who gets #metooed decades before that becomes a thing. He commits suicide rather than face a trial and his wife (Rebecca De Mornay, Risky Business) goes into early labor and loses her child. Upon seeing a TV story that calls out Claire as the person who started the accusations, she swears revenge.

Soon, she’s become Peyton Flanders, the new nanny to the Bartel family. And she goes nuts as she undermines the family, from breastfeeding Claire’s new son Joey to winning the confidence of her daughter Emma and turning her against her mother. Seriously, the lengths she goes to are amazing, like making it look like Claire’s husband Michael (Matt McCoy, Sgt. Nick Lassard from the last two Police Academy movies) is having an affair with his ex-girlfriend Marlene (Julianne Moore, clearly in a movie well beneath her talents) and having Claire scream “You’re fucking her!” before a horrified house full of surprise party guests. And the way she treats Solomon (Ernie Hudson, Ghostbusters), setting the mentally challenged man as a child abuser, makes her a near supervillain.

Let me stop right here and tell you that this is the kind of movie that has no idea how to be subtle. Every single take is obviously the one that has the most mugging and over the top reaction. Every extra has been hired because they go out of their way to chew the scenery and call attention to themselves, nearly destroying scenes and making them comical. Witness the surprise party guest who randomly brings a flute. Who the fuck brings a flute to a surprise party? And DeMornay is near Mommy Dearest level here, as she decimates a bathroom with a plunger in a fit of pure rage.

There’s also a scene where falling glass wipes out Marlene in a scene that’ll make you realize just how much you wish you were watching Suspiria instead. Every shot in this movie has been chosen to be the absolute most boring way to show action, lulling you into stupidity as you marvel at just how completely insipid this film is.

I’m making it sound like I hated this. I didn’t. I’m just explaining that this is the most unrealistic film ever, one where Rebecca DeMornay in lingerie gets turned down by a guy who looks like the shitty version of Ron Silver. It’s also a movie where windchimes become the clue that fingers a killer, which caused me to remark, “This is just like a giallo, except it totally sucks.”

It gets worse. The address for the house in this movie, 808 Yakima, is the actual address for it in Seattle. And Rebecca wants to go visit it when we’re out there. Look for a photo of that soon, I figure.

If you want to experience this for yourself, HBO has it streaming. Rebecca also chided me that when I saw this in a theater 26 years ago, she was 8 years old. I was 20. The hand that steals the cradle seems like a more appropriate title, huh?

A prank goes wrong on April Fool’s Day and suddenly, the makers of Friday the 13th realize that the title is already taken, so instead, we have Slaughter High. Really. It actually had that title until they discovered it was taken.

Years ago, the cool kids screwed Marty the nerd. However, these pranks go way past Carrie level, the movie the early scenes rip off, with Marty being shocked, stripped and dumped head first in a toilet bowl. Here’s something this movie has that few slashers do — full frontal male nudity (Sleepaway Camp doesn’t count, that’s full frontal transgender nudity and a massive spoiler).

Marty is then given a poisonous joint, which he smokes while doing a chemistry experiment, which says to me that he’s no kind of scientist. One set up by the cool kids later and his experiment has gone up in flames and his face has been doused with acid. I wonder what the yearbook was like that year.

Sometime in the future, those very same social elite of the school are invited back for a reunion. That said — the school is closed and the reunion is only for them.

What follows is exactly what you expect — Marty is back and he kills the rest of the gang in various ways. There’s acid melting someone’s stomach, impaling, acid baths, an electrocuted bed while a couple has sex, death by lawnmower and so much more.

After he kills everyone, Marty sees them come back from the dead in a scene that is absolutely nothing like the end of Maniac. I lied — it’s exactly like that movie, minus Joe Spinell going bonkers.

Marty then wakes up in an insane asylum, where he strangles a nurse and stabs a doctor in the eye with a hypodermic needle as if he just watched Halloween 2 or Dead and Buried.

The cast is nothing to write home about (most of them are British and often slip back into their native accents), save Simon Scudamore who is pure menace in the lead role (and who also committed suicide shortly after filming ended) and Caroline Munro, who is obviously wonderful in everything she does, from Starcrash to Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Also — Munro was 36 years old when this movie was filmed, so it stretches believability to make her a teenager. I’m not saying that she isn’t gorgeous, however.

This movie was written and directed by George Dugdale, Mark Ezra and Peter Mackenzie. Dugdale ended up marrying Munro and having two kids with her, so he probably did the best of anyone involved with this production. I always will remain forever jealous of him.

Slaughter High isn’t the best slasher ever. And it’s not the worst, either. It’s entertaining and a good one to put on at parties, where you don’t have to pay too much attention to it.

The newly revived Vestron Video re-released this on blu-ray last year and you can grab it at Diabolik DVD!

Giallo intrigues me because you often have an unreliable narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised. In a 1981 study, William Riggan analyzed several types of unreliable narrators and in this film, I feel that we’re dealing with one of those types, the madman.

We open on a couple who is getting ready to make love on the beach. However, they meet a man who is parked there and suddenly notice a hanging woman that turns out to only be a mannequin. When they go to ask the man what’s happening, he drives away.

Christian (Robert Hoffman, A Black Veil for Lisa) and his girlfriend have similar romantic notions for the beach. That’s when they also discover a body facedown in the water. This body is still alive and belongs to Barbara (giallo queen Suzy Kendall, who appeared in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Torso and non-giallo Tales That Witness Madness), who can’t explain how she got there.

Christian becomes obsessed with her, following Barbara (along with his girlfriend) to a party where they find her with Alex, her current paramour. Our hero (such as he is) and Barbara both abandon their mates and leave the party, driving through a wooded area that is filled with numerous lingerie-clad mannequins that have been lynched. Christian confesses to her how his father treated him as a child while she tells him that Alex is more provider than partner.

That’s when Barbara makes a strange suggestion: before they have sex, Christian must shave. As he does, he’s attacked by Tatum. They fight and the man is killed with his own gun. Barbara is strangely fine with the whole thing and suggests that they run. He suggests that his brother can help, but she insists that no one can save them.

They then meet Malcolm and Clorinda, two squatters, who taunt Christian with news of a local murder. Thinking they are talking about him, he confesses and they laugh. Clorinda then mentions that she knows him and he rapes her. Or maybe he doesn’t. As I mentioned before, we’re starting to learn that we can’t trust our narrator.

When he wakes up the next morning, Christian can’t find Barbara nor any dead bodies or weapons. Then he sees Tatum and finds Malcolm’s dead body. Reality has stopped working. He becomes desperate and returns to his girlfriend’s apartment where he’s attacked by Tatum.

The man tells him that the plan wasn’t to kill him, but just to drive him insane. However, now things have gone too far. Christian escapes and hits Tatum with his car.

Convinced that he is in the middle of a conspiracy, he switches clothes with the dead man, puts the dead body in his car and shoves it off a cliff.

Barbara then arrives with another man — Luca — to see if Christian is dead. He follows them back to his family’s factory and learns that Tatum was correct. The plan all along was to make him go insane and lose his fortune to his brother. Barbara has fallen in love with him, but they tell her that she must go along with all of it. That’s when I realize who Fritz is…Ivan Rassimov! Man, next to George Eastman, I think we’ve reviewed more of his films here than anyone. If you haven’t seen him in anything, I’d recommend All the Colors of the Dark or Enter the Devil.

For some reason, Christian wanders the highways and acts as a male prostitute before a woman picks him up. Remember this.

Christian finds Barbara and tells her that he knows everything but still loves her. As they begin to make love, he looks at her face and it becomes the face of Clorinda, his girlfriend and the woman who picked him up as a prostitute. He kills her and runs away.

Meanwhile, Fritz has learned that Christian is not dead. As he watches family movies, we learn that Christian has had mental problems passed down from their father. Clorinda was really his nurse and Malcolm his doctor, but he raped and killed her, as well as every other woman he saw that had Barbara’s face.

Christian appears and is shot, but makes his escape, finally bleeding out on the same beach where he first met Barbara.

Fritz makes it back home and his closet is filled with the same lingerie-wearing mannequins that we saw in the trees, except these have been stabbed and disfigured. He begins to attack one of them as we learn that he is just as mentally unbalanced as his brother.

Directed by Umberto Lenzi (Orgasmo, Nightmare City, Ghosthouse/La Casa 3, Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive! and many more), this is an effectively tense film. Lenzi wanted to up the suspense by never showing the actual murders, but American producers felt that audiences would be too confused by this and added about ten minutes of footage with the murders and other elements to clarify the plot. According to Louis Paul’s Italian Horror Film Directors, George Romero may have shot this additional footage. Also — Lucio Fulci was the original choice to direct this film.

Scorpion Releasing put out a blu-ray of this recently that you can find at Diabolik DVD. This movie has my complete and total recommendation. You may figure out its plot and the fact that you can’t trust Christian’s grip on reality, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not enjoyable.

I’m constantly on the hunt for certain movies. Ever since I saw the trailer for this — the only film to ever be shot in Duo-Vision — I’ve been on the hunt. Finally, in an Exchange store on a Sunday afternoon, my patience was rewarded.

The Grandview is one of those gorgeous California hotels that you dream of living the rest of your life in, Telly Savalas style. But there’s one big problem — any blonde female who checks in never leaves. I’d make a Hotel California joke here, but that just seems too easy.

Trivia note: This is really the Hotel del Coronado, where Some Like It Hot was shot.

David Bailey, from TV’s Another World, plays hotel detective Rick Stewart, who is busy with old women who don’t pay their rent and overly amorous beachfront lotharios. Soon, he’s on the trail of the killer, which gets more personal when his ex-wife Lisa James (Tiffany Bolling, The Candy Snatchers) shows up to sing at the Grandview and promptly dyes her brunette hair blonde. Whoops.

This song is the best part of the film. Becca and I have been singing it to one another ever since we watched this.

Writer/director Richard L. Bare — who holds the record for directing the most successive number of television shows (168 episodes of Green Acres) — planned to follow up this film with another Duo-Vision movie called October Incident, which was about trying to kill Castro. The gimmick wasn’t well received so the movie was canceled.

I’d best compare Duo-Vision to the way that Ang Lee shot his version of The Hulk. The other screen often shows what’s in someone’s mind or reveals the truth of what they’re talking about. The story probably wouldn’t be anything I’d seek out if it wasn’t for Duo-Vision, but I’m glad we have this in our collection. It’s one of the rare movies we’ve seen that reveals the killer almost instantly yet remains interesting.

More trivia: Aside from the songs that Bolling sings, the film’s soundtrack is mostly made up of the piano score from 1925’s silent Phantom of the Opera. And thanks to DVD Drive-In’s George Reis, I now know that Charles B. Pierce of The Town That Dreaded Sundown fame was the set decorator!

Thanks to the Warner Archive for restoring this oddball film. I wish I had seen it on the big screen and hope to get the chance one day!

Paolo Cavara and Gualtiero Jacopetti (who took all the credit) directed the first shockumentary, Mondo Cane. Following that, they worked on Women of the World before Jacopetti moved on to make increasingly more insane films with Franco Prosperi. Cavara? He went on to make his own films, including this one, which some place amongst the best giallo ever.

A mysterious killer is killing women who were involved with a blackmail scheme, using a needle to paralyze them before he slices their stomachs open, the same way a tarantula kills a wasp. Even worse — the victims are awake and can feel the pain, but are unable to move or scream.

Cavara uses one of the queens of giallo for his first victim, Barbara Bouchet (The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Amuck!). Soon, it’s up to Inspector Tellini to solve the case before he or his girlfriend is killed. He’s a totally likable character, rare for a giallo, who mainly argues with his wife, who buys too much furniture while worrying if he’s good enough at what he does. He hits a little too close to home.

There is plenty more eye candy in the film, with Claudine Auger (Domino from Thunderball) and Barbara Bach (The Spy Who Loved Me, The Humanoid) showing up. And there’s an excellent Ennio Morricone score.

You can check this one out on Amazon Prime.

Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re looking for you to shock us, to titillate us, to maybe even thrill us a bit. Oh, you’re brought Carroll Baker with you! Please! Show us what tale you’ve crafted!

Kathryn West (Baker) is a glamorous American widow who has come to Italy weeks after the death of her older wealthy husband. She movies into a huge villa but her life is lonely and boring until Peter shows up. His free-spirited ways shake her loose and he soon moves in his sister, Eva. But things aren’t what they seem — they aren’t brother and sister and the relationship becomes a threesome. But when Kathryn tries to quit them, they keep her prisoner, constantly high on drugs and alcohol as they keep playing the same song over and over until she goes insane and wants to kill herself.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a character actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you like twists, if you like more twists, if you like your sex scenes filled with acid drenched visuals, then by all means, it’s time for you to savor this one.

You can get this as part of  The Complete Lenzi/Baker Giallo Collection set from Severin, which also has So Sweet…So Peverse, A Quiet Place to Kill and Knife of Ice.

I’ve recently been reading the book Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 1980’s and reminded of my own misspent youth. In sixth grade, a teacher knew that I was religious and thought I could warn my fellow classmates about the dangers of evil music and movies. He gave me a mimeographed sheet of heavy metal (and non-metal) bands to study and by the time I got to Black Sabbath, my soul was sold to rock and roll.

By eleventh grade, I was squarely in the devil’s camp in the eyes of my teachers. My love for bands like King Diamond and Danzig, along with my predilection for drawing Leatherface in class, marked me as a subject of interest. Obviously, I was doing drugs and black mass rituals — I could easily discuss Dungeons & Dragons, too. I was to be more feared the dead-eyed athletes who would soon realize their lives were peaking at 17 while mine hadn’t even started yet.

It’s to those times in my youth, when I wanted to escape my hometown and sat in my room blaring Samhain’s “November Coming Fire” and reading Fangoria, that this movie perfectly fits in. It is disgusting. It is unrepentant. It has no moral or social value. It is filled with the kind of gore than makes churches throw VHS tapes into a blazing bonfire. In short, it is everything amazing and wonderful and metal about horror movies.

The movie starts with two Germans exploring a beautiful Greek beach. Someone emerges from the ocean and murders them. Meanwhile, five travelers are joined by Julie (Tisa Farrow, who some may know as the sister of Mia, but we all know her as Anne from Zombi 2), who asks for a ride to the island. However, Carol (Zora Kerova, Cannibal Ferox, The New York Ripper) uses her tarot cards to learn that something bad will happen. No one listens to her.

The pregnant Maggie (Serena Grandi from Delirium) stays behind on the boat and is abducted by the killer, who quickly beheads a sailor.

The island is in ruins and completely abandoned, except for a woman in black, who writes go away in the dust. Upon finding a rotting corpse that has been eaten, everyone runs back to the boat, which is floating unmanned, then goes to the house of Julie’s friends. There, only the family’s blind daughter Henriette has survived.

The young girl panics and attacks Daniel, but when she is calmed, she tells everyone of the maniac that is stalking the island. Daniel is wounded and needs medicine, so Andy and Arnold head to town. Meanwhile, Daniel flirts with Julie, which causes Carol to run into town and Julie to follow her. While all this drama is going on, the killer rips out Danel’s throat.

Everyone travels to a mansion that belonged to Klaus Wortman, who died along with his wife and child in a shipwreck. This caused his sister, the woman in black, to lose her mind. And to hammer that point home, we soon see her hang herself.

Everything seems like its going to get better when a boat rifts to shore. On board, Julie finds Klaus’ journal. It turns out that he is alive…and the killer! Soon, Maggie is confronted by him and we learn that it’s George Eastman, who is in so many awesome Italian movies, such as Baba Yaga, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The New Barbarians, Blastfighter, Rabid Dogs, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, oh man! So many amazing films! This is his star-making role though and he really goes for it. He has a flashback where we learn how he accidentally stabbed his wife while trying to convince her that they should eat their dead son to survive. After eating his family, he went insane. Soon, Klaus breaks out of his flashback reverie, stabs Arnold and rips out and eats the unborn baby inside Maggie’s belly. Holy fucking shit, this movie!

I wish that those teachers who thought I was a Satanic terror in 1988 could see me now, jumping up and down with glee at 2:44 AM on a school night screaming “GEORGE EASTMAN!” while drinking a beer and holding a small dog.

What follows can’t really top that, but fuck it if Eastman isn’t going to try, including eating his own intestines after Andy hits him the stomach with a pickaxe! That’s commitment to your role!

The American version of this film, The Grim Reaper, has 35 cuts in an attempt to get an R rating. That’s correct – nine minutes are missing, including the baby being devoured and the killer eating himself. It just ends when he is stabbed in the stomach. It also replaces the electronic Italian score with the music from Kingdom of the Spiders.

Director Joe D’amato and George Eastman would return in a spiritual sequel called Absurd. You better believe we’ll be getting to that one soon. This is a rough film, but isn’t that why you’re this far down in the review, reading this? You know it. And you can check it out in sadly edited form on Amazon Video. If you want the real deal, you probably know how to find movies on iOffer, right?

EDIT: You can forget the end of the paragraph above and just grab the insanely awesome Severin Video rerelease and stop bothering with edited crappy looking versions of this movie.

René Cardona Jr. gave us Tintorera, a Susan George star vehicle about the Mexican version of Jaws and Guyana: Crime of the Century, which somehow included Stuart Whitman as Reverend James Johnson leading Johnstown, along with Gene Barry and Joseph Cotten. If these things warm your heart, you’re reading the right website.

Based on Charles Berlitz’s best-selling book, this one has it all. Atlantis. A possessed doll. Black characters dubbed to sound like they’re coming straight out of Amos ‘n Andy. John Huston.

The Black Whale III has set sail for the Bermuda Triangle with the Marvin family leading the way. Sure, they’re looking for Atlantis, but mostly they just argue with one another. Finding a doll in the water, the family’s young daughter Diana becomes possessed, telling people how they’ll die and locking the cook in the freezer.

Oh yeah — there’s also a scuba diving expedition that leads to the oldest daughter getting her legs crushed and her father just can’t decide whether or not to cut her legs off. Such is the drama of this film.

People start getting killed off until the desperate captain tries to call other ships for help. They end up hearing multiple distress calls, including their own being played back to them. When they finally reach someone, they learn that everyone on board died ten years ago. All that’s left is the doll floating in the water.

Claudine Auger (Black Belly of the Tarantula) shows up here, livening things up somewhat. This film is strange, as it wants to be about so many things while struggling to be about anything. And as mentioned before, the near minstrel show dubbing of the black cook is quite troubling at worst or hilariously inappropriate at best.

Let me reiterate: Hollywood legend John Huston is somehow in this piece of shit. Oh the 1970’s, when once big time talent would show up in the strangest of films!

I found this for free on Amazon Prime, so I recommend you do the same. The doll parts are at least somewhat cool, as is the atonal soundtrack and poor dubbing.

What happens when you mix a teen sex comedy with a gore film? It’s kind of like chocolate and peanut butter, one would think, but the results don’t always taste as good. Witness 1985’s Evils of the Night.

Three vampire aliens, Dr. Zarma (Julie Numar, who of course is the Catwoman, but is also a writer, real estate mogul and lingerie inventor), Cora (Tina Louise, who is of course Ginger from TV’s Gilligan’s Island) and Dr. Kozmar (John Carradine, who is of course skinny Dracula), have come to a college town to get the blood of young co-eds, which keeps them young.

There’s also Neville Brand (Al Capone from TV’s The Untouchables) and Aldo Ray (whose career trajectory goes from the highest of heights to the lowest of lows) as two old mechanics that are helping the aliens. As for the teens, we’ve got Tony O’Dell (Ferdy in Chopping Mall), Karrie Emerson (who was also in Chopping Mall), 80’s adult movie queen Amber Lynn and “Raw Talent” Jerry Butler, who was also a well-known adult film star.

Director Mardi Rustam (who wrote and produced Psychic Killer and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive) is the person to blame for all of this. If you’re used to sex in the woods looking fake and feeling gratuitous, then this film will decimate your sensibilities. It feels like porn sex could literally break out at any minute, but the only penetration is when one of the girls gets drilled. With a drill. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Along the way, there are lesbian aliens, spaceships, axe murders, the Millenium Falcon on the poster for the movie, rings that shoot lasers, John Carradine in a space suit and more.

You can also blame Aquarius Releasing for this one, the fine (well, maybe not fine) folks who brought Dr. Butcher, M.D., Zaat, Deep Throat, Make Them Die Slowly (Cannibal Ferox) and Silent Night, Deadly Night to 42nd Street. They also released The Beyond as Seven Doors of Death, cutting out plenty of gore along the way to get an R rating.

Look, this movie is terrible. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining. The pathos at the end when one of the mechanics laments his dead friend are poignant. You could find a worse movie at 4 AM to watch. You can check it out for yourself by ordering the DVD/blu-ray combo from Vinegar Syndrome or watching it on Amazon Video.

It takes a lot for me to say that a movie is horrible. I am here today to tell you that Wacko is a horrible, horrible movie. Imagine — with all I have seen — what that entails.

13 years ago, Mary Graves’ (Stephanie from TV’s Newhart) older sister was killed on Halloween by a lawn mowing killer. Now she sees mowers everywhere, but tonight, she just wants to go to her prom. Can she avoid the pumpkin masked killer? Can Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker, Mitchell, The Pack) save her?

This is a film packed with actors you may or may not love filmed, lit and treated poorly. The film is so dark that daylight scenes appear shot night for day. It redefines the term shoddy. Where Airplane! works because it allows actors like Robert Stack and Peter Graves to be themselves while chaos explodes around them, everyone in this film acts as if Lloyd Kaufmann were dosing them with laughing gas.

George Kennedy deserves better, despite his appearances in Airplane 1979: The Concorde and The Uninvited. Stella Stevens deserves better. Fuck, even  Andrew Clay, before he became Dice (a character he first played in the film Making the Grade), deserves better. So do E.G. Daily (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure), Anthony James (The Chauffer from Burnt Offerings!), Jeff Altman (who also appeared in the utter piece of shit TV series The Pink Lady and Jeff) and anybody who somehow ended up connected in this mess.

I place the blame at the feet of Jensen Farley Pictures, who also rewarded us with pieces of dreck like Madman, Joysticks (yes, I see you in that movie too, Joe Don Baker) and Homework (yet I still love you, Joan Collins). PS – my thrift store has had a DVD of that and Private Lessons for a few weeks that I know I’ll end up buying). They did bring us Curtains, but at what cost?

Greydon Clark also bears the brunt of the blame. I mean, did he hate George Kennedy or something? He directed him here and also in the aforementioned The Uninvited, a movie about a mutant military weapon housecat. And oh yeah, Joysticks also comes from him. As does Final Justice, proving he hates Joe Don Baker as much — if not so much more — than George Kennedy. He also was behind Without Warning, the 1980 movie that features an alien hunter played by Kevin Peter Hall who is looking for human trophies. You may say, “Hey, that’s Predator.” You’d be right. And this movie came out seven years before that one.

Notice how I’ve done anything but talk about Wacko? That’s because this movie is a piece of absolute fecund drivel that makes movies like King Frat and Movie 43 look like Citizen Kane. I stopped it at 28:00 in, thinking the film had to be over 19 hours long and was shocked at how much pain it had put me through. Please don’t watch it on Amazon Video. No matter how much you want to.