Nathan H. Juran directed plenty of films, but we probably know him best for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Becca and I had seen the trailer for years, but this was one of those films that you could only find on the grey market until Shout! Factory released it this year.
Robert Bridgestone (who starred in Juran’s aforementioned Sinbad film) is a divorced dad who tries to bond with his son, Richie, by taking him on a camping trip. On a midnight hike, the men are attacked by a werewolf, but Robert is able to toss it into a ravine where it’s revealed to be a human, impaled on a wooden fence. The sheriff and Robert are happy with the conclusion that the man was simply a drifter, but Richie isn’t so sure. And since his father was bitten in the attack, he’s worried about what will happen next.
Sandy, Robert’s ex-wife, insists that father and son go to counseling together, because Richie has become obsessed with lycanthropes. The psychiatrist (George Gaynes, Commandant Eric Lassard from the Police Academy series) believes that Richie has invented the werewolf story as he can’t deal with the knowledge that his father has killed another man. He suggests they go back to the camp, an act he believes will stop Richie’s fixation with werewolves.
As they return to the cabin, Robert finds himself in great pain and transforms into a werewolf that chases Richie — who has no idea that the beast is his father — across a highway. The werewolf attacks and massacres a driver while Richie hides with two newlyweds who are camping. Finding his father missing, Richie stays with the couple, but when Robert comes to get him in the morning, he’s ill-tempered and not about to listen to his son’s werewolf shenanigans.
The next night, Robert changes into a beast again, but Richie has already found a hiding space. No worries — the werewolf will kill the newlyweds instead, shoving their camper down a hill, then mutilating their bodies and decapitating them. Richie emerges just in time to see his father go from wolf back to man. As they drive back home, Richie grills his father, who doesn’t take kindly to it. When they get back to his mother’s house, he runs, telling her he doesn’t want to be alone with a monster.
After another visit to the psychiatrist, its determined that between the divorce and murders, Richie sees his father as a beast. The film would be much more interesting here were there any doubt as to whether Robert was the werewolf. But no — instead the entire family is put into harm’s way. Too bad they didn’t see the headline of today’s paper: Local Psychiatrist Murdered.
As the estranged family heads out to camp, they run across a hippie commune. Sandy enters their circle of power that wards away evil spirits, but when Robert tries to join her, he is stopped dead in his tracks.
Back at the cabin, that whole 1970’s liberated women need men and were all wrong for divorcing their spouses paradigm rears its ugly head. Sandy confesses how much she missed Robert, who starts transforming into a wolf.
Robert finds Richie in the shed and begs his son to lock him in. Sandy barges in, only to nearly be killed. They escape to the sheriff’s office, but no one will believe Richie. Even now. I mean, he may be the most annoying kid ever, but his logic is starting to add up.
Even after he attacks the hippies, they pray for his soul and watch him transform. That night, he rises again and a search party — read that as mob of angry townsfolk — give chase. The wolf grabs Richie and bites him on the arm before he’s shot and stumbles onto a stake in the ground, which pierces his heart.
Everyone is shocked as the werewolf reveals his true form: Robert. But Sandy is more concerned that her son is now a werewolf, thanks to his father’s bite.
The Boy Who Cried Werewolf can’t live up to the manic trailer that sold it to me. But it’s still an enjoyable yarn, mixing end of the 20th century problems — divorce and hippies, man — with the traditional werewolf mythos.
Today’s Scarecrow Psychotronic challenge is 27. MODUM ONERARIIS: A movie about transportation methods. A car, rollerblades, a broom, flying saucer…whatever gets you there. I’ve been wanting to talk about The Wraith for some time, so this is the perfect opportunity.
In another version of our reality, The Wraith was the Top Gun of 1986. People are still wearing t-shirts of it, dressing up in costumes at cons and I have an amazing Jake Kesey action figure on my shelf.
As bright lights descend from the heavens — shades of The Visitor — an all black Dodge Turbo Interceptor comes to life, along with a black-garbed driver.
Welcome to Brooks, Arizona. This is where Packard Walsh (Nick Cassavetes, son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, exuding pure sexual menace) leads a gang of car thieves that race people for pink slips. Everyone and everything is his property, mainly Keri Johnson (Twin Peak‘s Sherilyn Fenn), who doesn’t remember Packard killing her boyfriend Jamie Hankins (Christopher Bradley).
That’s when Jake Kesey arrives on a dirt bike. He instantly befriends Keri and Jamie’s brother Billy, who both work at Big Kay’s, a local drive-in hamburger joint. One day, while they swim at a local river, they both notice huge knife scars on Jake’s back.
The Turbo Interceptor starts to take over Packard’s races, its driver’s face never seen, his body covered in armor and metal braces for reasons unexplained. Everyone who races the Wraith, as he comes to be called, is killed, including gang members Oggie Fisher (Griffin O’Neal, April Fool’s Day) and Minty. Me, I like Skank and Gutterboy. How can you not love gang members who drink gasoline for an entire movie? I love that they’re so high that they refuse to believe in the Wraith. Soon, they get blown up real good.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Loomis (a pre-freakout Randy Quaid) is in hot pursuit but never seems to get close. Rughead, the only gang member who didn’t help kill Jamie, goes to the police to try and save his skin. He’s played by Clint Howard and his amazing hair, a B&S favorite since Evilspeak.
Packard still has an iron grip on Keri, despite the fact that she won’t give him what he wants: sex. Isn’t that what all guys want? Well, once he sees Keri kiss Jake, he kidnaps her and says they’re heading for California. She stands up to him and says that she never loved him. The Wraith shows up and Packard finally pays for his crimes. As the police prepare to give chase, Loomis calls it off, as they could never catch him.
Keri gets back home and the Wraith pulls up, then transforms into Jake. He tells her that he is her dead boyfriend, but doesn’t look like him because “This is as close as I could come to who I once was.” In truth, Sheen was tied up making Platoon, so they filmed the early scenes without him.
But Jake has one last act before he can leave — he gives the Turbo Interceptor to his brother, revealing who he really is. He tells Keri to pack light for where they are going. Where, Jake? Heaven? Outer space? The planet or dimension that sent Tony’s dad in Xtro?
The Wraith is the very definition of bonkers. It’s like Ghost Rider meets The Car meets Rebel Without a Cause by the way of a punk gang from The Road Warrior. It’s so many movies in one, with something for everyone to love. It was written and directed by Mike Martin, who also brought us Hamburger: The Motion Picture and directed four movies under the pen name Jake Kesey. Yep. You guessed it. The Wraith himself.
You can check it out on Shudder, which you should do immediately.
A girl named Alice Woods and her sister Zoe have come to the town of Garrett in the hopes of escaping the madness that destroyed their mother. However, there are staircases to nowhere and the Peach family to contend with, even if the rest of the world believes they’ve been gone since the 1950’s. Welcome back to Channel Zero. Things are about to get weird all over again.
From the beginning of the first episode and the strains of “Crucified Woman” by Riz Ortolani (from the film Cannibal Holocaust), you know that this season, you’re in for it. Throw in Rutger Hauer as the leader of the Peach Family and you have a recipe for what is fast becoming the perfect horror show.
Ever since the death of the Peaches’ youngest daughters, they have left our world behind and become part of a side world called Slaughterland, which lies behind the many doorways and staircases to nowhere that show up randomly in Medallion Park. There, they are immortal thanks to the Pestilent God, who randomly asks that children be sacrificed to him.
Alice is the exact opposite — a social worker trying to save people. But soon, a little girl named Izzy and her mom disappear from her care in broad daylight. Her sister Zoe begins to continually hallucinates the face of the Pestilence King, seeing him no matter where she goes. The Peach Family calls to her to join them, demanding that she help sacrifice Izzy as part of their covenant.
Meanwhile, the girl’s landlady is writing a book all about the horrors of the area now known as Butcher’s Block. Of course, she knows way more than she lets on. And then there are the children of the Peach clan, one of whom is arrested and promptly eats his cellmate before being released by the police with no charges.
Think things are crazy? Get ready — the elder Peach cures Zoe of her schizophrenia by drilling directly into her brain, then invites Louise and Alice to a feast that ends up being Izzy’s mom. Two episodes in and this season has eclipsed all of the Channel Zero terrors that have come before!
The Peaches want Zoe to consume human flesh and become one of them, but she refuses, instead subsisting by eating her own flesh. And Alice? By now, she’s seeing visions of herself as various creatures that look like giant puppet-headed Alices.
What I loved about this season is that the heroines’ roles are reversed by the last few episodes, begging the question of who will save who. And you can understand the motivation of the Peach family, as they went away to avoid the rapidly changing horrors of the world but ended up being changed into something even worse.
There are also goblin children, a meat servant, two generations of policemen forced to face the sins and compromises of the past, 1950’s housewives, a crazy scissors lady and so much more, you’ll wonder how six episodes is enough to contain it all. Unlike the bloated seasons of American Horror Story that rely on stunt casting and deus ex machina endings season after season to increasingly worse effect, Channel Zero has only improved with every successive tale.
I don’t want to spoil anything else for you. I insist that you simply watch the entire season now on Shudder.
Michele Soavi directed four horror films from 1987 to 1994, starting with Stagefright and ending with Cemetary Manthat continued the rich tradition of Italian horror. With training from Joe D’Amato and Dario Argento, as well as second unit work on two Terry Gilliam films, he emerged as a unique presence with an eye that combines those aforementioned traditions with a gaze toward the art film and the new.
Some considered this movie a sequel to the Demons series of films, with each movie all based around one cursed place. Demons was all about a movie theater (including Soavi as the Man in the Mask that lures people to their doom) and Demons 2 concerns an apartment building. There are also a million other movies that are and are not connected to that series that only Joe Bob Briggs can properly explain.
The film opens with the history of the church. Upon finding stigmata on the foot of a village girl, Teutonic Knights wipe out a village — man, woman, child and animal — burying them in a mass grave. It seems the devil had infiltrated the entire town and this was the only way to deal with it. One villager (Asia Argento) tries to escape and is impaled and tossed into the grave. The knights cover the grave with crosses and build a church upon it.
In modern times, we meet Lotte (Argento, again), the daughter of the church’s sacristan, Hermann; Evan, the new librarian who starts a relationship with Lisa (Barbara Cupisti, Stagefright, Cemetary Man), an artist restoring the artwork in the church; the bishop; the reverend (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, The Omen, City of the Living Dead, House on the Edge of the Park) and Father Gus (Hugh Quarshie, Nightbreed, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace).
The cathedral is filled with secret pathways that Lotte uses to go out clubbing, before coming back and getting slapped by her father for smelling like cigarettes and booze. There’s also a rumbling, bubbling undercurrent of pure evil presided over by black-robed monks.
Evan and Lisa may be sneaking off and making love, but he is only really in love with learning more of the church. As she finds his way to the stone with the seven eyes, he kneels before the status and tears his own heart out, holding it above his head as it beats its last, while we’re treated to fast-moving visuals of the pulsating city above the church set to the music of Philip Glass (The Church also features music by Keith Emerson and Goblin).
As the possession of Evan increases — yes, ripping out his own heart was just the start — we’re treated to a litany of insane images. Lisa is taken by a demonic goat. An elderly couple bickers and then the wife is found using her husband’s head to ring a church bell. A man kills himself with a jackhammer. A bridal party photo shoot ends with the bride model impaled. A woman is absolutely destroyed by a subway train. A giant flesh tower of dead bodies rises as the mechanics of the church kick in, trapping everyone there with death the only escape. Oh yeah — there’s also a flashback to the original builder of the church being impaled on his mechanical security system.
The Church is less about a narrative flow and more about a collection of images and moments that add up to one impressive smorgasbord. Soavi saw the other Demons films as “pizza schlock” and ended his artistic relationship with Argento with this film. Yet he was contending with a script that had a ton of other writers, including Argento, Soavi, Franco Ferrini, Lamberto Bava, Dardano Sacchetti (who wrote nearly every major Fulci movie, as well as A Bay of Blood and Shock), Fabrizio Bava and Nick Alexander. What emerges is a wild exercise in style, featuring a multitude of references to artwork both religious and modern, including the painting “Vampire’s Kiss” by Boris Vallejo.
If you’re expecting a movie that’s easy to follow, I suggest you find another one to watch. But if you’re searching for arresting visuals and a technically proficient director who has a ton of visual tricks he wants to blow your mind with, then by all means, get ready to experience The Church.
Day 31 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is 26. MILITARY INVOLVEMENT. When the men in green take on the little green men. I’ve decided to go with a movie that gets unfairly maligned — Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, which may be the most anti-government, anti-imperialism movie ever made. Trust me — I have plenty to say about this one.
Originally an unrelated script called Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine, this movie licensed the name Starship Troopers from the Robert A. Heinlein novel. That novel is as militaristic and fascistic as it gets. This movie? Well, upon its release, many critics saw it as a celebration of fascism. How anyone came to that conclusion is an absolute moron. This is a movie that rails against it from its very first frame, building on the mega mobile awareness that Verhoeven only hinted at in RoboCop.
There’s no way to not reveal my politics as I write about this. I usually keep that out of these articles, but a constant source of worry for me is that our universe has done more than slide to the right; we’ve seen Nazi and fascist ideologies written off as “some good people.” So when Verhoeven alludes to wartime newsreels and Triumph of the Will (the Mobile Infantry ad at the beginning is taken shot-for-shot from this film), he’s doing more than just some satire. I have no idea how anyone can watch a movie where Doogie Howser is wearing full SS regalia and see it as an endorsement of militaristic ideology.
In the DVD commentary, the director states that he “evoked Nazi Germany’s fashion, iconography, and propaganda because he saw it as a natural evolution of the United States after World War II, and especially after the Korean War.” Obviously, if we believe conspiracy theory, the Nazi powers that be became part of our CIA, NASA and military/industrial complex. We won the war and became the enemy. Verhoeven motto for the film? “Let’s all go to war and let’s all die.”
As manifest destiny takes mankind into the stars, they discover arachnids, called “bugs.” While it’s never outright stated, it seems like the bugs are several steps down the evolutionary ladder from humans and would have never attacked us if we’d just left them alone.
On Earth, citizenship in the one world government is a privilege that only comes from military service. That’s one of the reasons to sign up. You also get to be a pilot. Or impress the girl you’re in love with. That’s how Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) joins up, trying to win the heart of pilot Carmen (Denise Richards). Then there’s Dizzy (Dina Meyer), who is the way better choice, but as she’s more masculine, Johnny never sees anything in her until it’s too late. They also have a friend named Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) whose psychic ability means he will be one of the ruling class.
The film unfolds in episodic form where we progress from basic training to initial battles with the bugs to the first meeting with one of the more intelligent members of their species, a “brain bug.” Throughout, commercials and military propaganda fill the screen, always ending with “Do you want to know more?” That’s ironic — real, uncontrolled information does not exist and executions air live on TV at 6 PM. This is the government-controlled media empire that we are constantly spiraling closer and closer to.
Every time Starship Troopers hints at the fact that humanity is doomed and that we’re in over our head — like the disastrous battle on Klendathu — these messages nearly erase those feelings. And one only has to look at the climax of the film, where an army of masculine warriors gathers around a very female creature and celebrate the emotion of fear as people celebrate in a moment that should be the emotional feel-good close of the film. But it’s hollow. And it’s wrong. And the emotions that it makes you feel are false, put in there to teach you a lesson.
“Come on you apes! Do you wanna live forever?”
“They’ll keep fighting and they’ll win!”
“These are the rules. Everybody fights, nobody quits. If you don’t do your job I’ll kill you myself.”
Yet every single authority figure in this movie has been scarred by the very Federation they serve, particularly Rasczak (Michael Ironside, absolutely amazing in every film and beyond that here), who goes without an arm until signing back up for service, his stump now replaced by quite literally an iron fist.
I still can’t believe that they sold kids toys of this movie.
We’ve covered plenty of monsters in wrestling, but it’s been awhile. Just in time for Halloween, we’re back to talk about the living dead in the squared circle.
Plenty of pro wrestling promotions have done zombie wrestling shows — I’m on one this Saturday night in Pittsburgh, cheap Foley plug — but right now, we’re talking about individual wrestlers that have become zombies and some zombie vs. wrestler themed films.
Probably the most famous zombie wrestler is The Undertaker. You could argue that he probably has the best gimmick — or the longest lasting — of the modern era of wrestling. He’s been an undead minion of Paul Bearer, the leader of a quasi-Satanic church, an unliving biker, an MMA fighting member of the walking dead, a semi-retired once a year fighter and now, inevitably, he’s back for “one more match.”
The Undertaker has been around since he made his official on-camera debut at the 1990 Survivor Series as Kane the Undertaker (he had done a previous TV taping three days earlier), making one of the best pushed first-night appearances ever, eliminating Koko B. Ware with his tombstone piledriver and Dusty Rhodes by double elimination. Soon, he’d be in the title mix and off to a career to has seen him be a face, a heel, somewhere in the middle and finally the kind of legend that no one wants to boo. Throw in his incredibly confusing connection with his brother Kane, that moment when Mabel crushed his face and he had to wear a mask, getting buried by all the heels and coming back to battle his twin brother after Leslie Nielsen (!) searched for him, that time he had the American flag inside his trenchcoat because undead dudes are jingoistic babyfaces, his association with managers Brother Love and Paul Bearer, his Ministry of Darkness, the Corporate Ministry and his epic 21-0 Wrestlemania streak and you have the kind of first ballot Hall of Fame career that few wrestlers will ever match.
Undertaker doesn’t do many full on zombie spots, instead of relying on a Michael Myers-like instant recovery and the power to a funeral urn that can heal him. He also used to use a body bag on his foes after he beat them, but we can only assume that parents got angry when little brothers got shoved into sleeping bags and put a stop to that.
ECW had one zombie. And only one. On June 13, 2006, the premiere of the SciFi version of ECW featured the late Tim Arson as The Zombie, who lasted all of a few moments before The Sandman mercifully Singapore caned him in the brain.
Finally, there’s Onryu, the Japanese wrestler Ryo Matsuri, who is just as much a ghost as he is a zombie. He won a cursed championship, died and must now forever walk the Earth. He has magic powers, such as being able to appear and disappear to his opponents, as well as disconnecting his hand so that he can make impossible rope breaks.
When I wrestled for Pittsburgh’s International Wrestling Cartel promotion, we were lucky to get to use Onryu for the Super Indy 3 tournament, which was won by Chris Sabin. In the first round, Onryu defeated fellow WMF wrestler Soldier before losing to Alex Shelley in the second round.
I first met Onryu in Tokyo after wrestling a six-person intergender match for the bonkers DDT promotion. Someone told me that Onryu wanted to meet with me before he came to America and I was honestly pretty excited, as I was a big fan of his work. I was kind of worried though — how does one talk to a zombie? The reply came: Onryu is a rock star. I’m not putting myself over — I’ve met plenty of pro wrestlers, big, small, famous and unknown. Only Onryu was legit a rock star, appearing before me like a miniature Japanese David Bowie in full zombie paint, wearing a long shirt and bell bottom pants with a dragon pattern all over them.
This is not my most insane Onryu tale. He stayed in my home for several days on his tour and we made sure to take him to plenty of places in the USA so that he got to see what our country is all about. His favorite? Target, where he stocked up on dishwands, those sponges that you fill up with liquid soap. He’d never seen one before and wanted to bring them back for all of his friends in Japan. Keep in mind, he was still dressed like a rock star in a small town Target, standing out as no one has ever stood out before.
Beyond wrestlers who have shuffled off this mortal coil, there have been plenty of wrestling vs. zombie movies, dating way back to Plan 9 From Outer Space. In this Ed Wood opus, or Johnson, formerly known as the wrestling Super Swedish Angel, rose from the grave to aid an alien invasion alongside Vampira. His part was played by pro wrestle George “The Animal” Steele in the Tim Burton biographical film.
Even better, there was a movie called Pro Wrestlers vs Zombies, where pro wrestlers like Roddy Piper, Kurt Angle, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, Matt Hardy and Shane Douglas.
I had the chance to speak with Ashton Amherst, who is more than just a pro wrestler who has torn it up all over the country. He also played Angus in Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies!
B&S: So how did you get involved in Zombies vs. Pro Wrestlers? ASHTON: Originally, I was asked to be cast as a pro wrestler extra in the film. But, with real work and real life, I couldn’t commit to the 2+ weeks of filming in WV for that amount of money. So, in a twist, Sylvester Turkay, who was originally going to be the lead villain, backed out. I auditioned for the role and they liked me and kind of tailored it more to me than a big monster like Sylvester. Funny side note, he did come for one day of filming and is the monster that rips Kurt Angle off of me in the one scene. B&S: Had you had any acting experience before? ASHTON: Other than the acting that is pro wrestling, I had no real movie set experience.
B&S: What was it like working with some of the bigger names? ASHTON: It was awesome. I remember the first morning, we had gone late the night before. It’s 6 AM and I’m at the hotel Starbucks and it’s just me, Shane Douglas, Roddy Piper and Hacksaw Duggan in line. I’m like, “Oh shit, this is pretty damn cool.” Over the two weeks, I got to hang with them a lot and really got to know Shane, who was my idol as a teenage wrestling fan. Roddy really took a liking to Ryan Reign, who I had brought in as an extra a few days into filming and Roddy ended up helping Ryan a lot and taking him to Raw and some WWE stuff with him. So, it was very cool to meet those guys and get to hang with them.
B&S: Any stores (that you can legally share)? ASHTON: Oh man. So many (laughs). Day two, we were filming and they needed some extras to work with Matt Hardy in a fight scene. I was done filming that day and offered to get into some zombie gear and work kind of under a hood, so no one would know that it was me. We did a scene where he knocked me off a prison cell and when I fell the crash pads moved and I separated my shoulder badly!
They had to put me under at the hospital to pop it back in and when I woke up it was just Shane sitting next to my hospital bed. Very surreal (laughs).
But yeah, so after that I was in a sling the next week or so and I took it off to film scenes. The scene I mentioned early with Kurt, I reminded him probably five times that my shoulder was recently separated. He either forgot or didn’t care, because he jacked me up against the wall for about nineteen takes straight (laughs).
But we were put up in a nice 5-star hotel and the room service guys always remembered my hurt shoulder and would deliver me ice packs every morning or night after filming. Since Parkersburg is such a small place, the filming of the movie was a much bigger deal than it would have been other places. It was also probably 10 degrees or less most nights of filming. And the second week, the filming shifted to 6 PM to 6 AM. So we had some nice warm trailers to chill in, but the other like 1,000 extras that were just Parkersburg residents wanting to be in the movie stood in freezing temps just to be part of it, which was awesome. But yeah, all the fight scenes on the hill at the end? It was freeeezing. Then after those filmings, most of us would go to this local pancake house place. So you’d have a bunch of pro wrestlers, a male porn star guy, a Penthouse Pet of the Year, and all the other oddities in our troop just posting up eating pancakes at 6 AM in zombie makeup and ripped up clothing. SAM: Are you a horror movie fan? ASHTON: Absolutely! My poor wife has to live thru watching all the Halloweens roughly 100 times each October!
Thanks, Ashton!
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that WWE has made several series of zombie action figures and characters for their Supercard and WWE2K19 games, including a skull-faced “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, an even paler than normal Paige and even a brains craving Shinsuke Nakamura. Yeaoh! Brains!
I didn’t even get to the luchador named Zombie Clown! Man! But are there any pro wrestling zombies that I missed? Feel free to let me know in the comments. Do you have a wrestling monster that you’d like to tell you more about?
In case you’re wondering, past Mat Monsters have included:
Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum always jokes about movies where nothing happens as being his favorite movies. If that’s true, he must absolutely adore this movie.
Christopher Lee, the main selling point of this movie, said, “Some of the films I’ve been in I regret making. I got conned into making these pictures in almost every case by people who lied to me. Some years ago, I got a call from my producers saying that they were sending me a script and that five very distinguished American actors were also going to be in the film. Actors like José Ferrer, Dean Jagger, and John Carradine. So I thought “Well, that’s all right by me”. But it turned out it was a complete lie. Appropriately the film was called End Of The World.”
The film opens with a shaken Lee as a Catholic priest trying to get to a phone call. All hell breaks loose and a diner is destroyed, with the owner blinded by coffee before being killed and the pay phone being blown up. Turns out that Father Pergado is due to be replaced by the alien Zindar. Good start. And it was the trailer, filled with science fiction machines and evil nuns that got me interested in this picture!
Professor Andrew Boran discovers radio signals that predict natural disasters. He and his wife investigate, discovering that they come from a convent where aliens have taken over. The aliens want him to join them, as the Earth is too diseased to exist.
The leads are wooden and only seem to want to have sex with one another, yet there are no love scenes. They’re utter failures at being heroic and simply move the plot along to its conclusion, where we learn that the Earth is filled with glitter. It blows up real good!
There are some ridiculous moments, such as Lee’s true form and seeing nuns operate supercomputers. Seriously, if I just read the description of this movie, it’d sound like everything I love. But seeing the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Today’s Scarecrow Psychotronic challenge is 25. INSTITUTIONALIZED. An antagonist from the funny farm. I’ve answered with Nightmare, which probably best known for being a video nasty, one of the 72 films that violated the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959. In fact, its distributor was sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to edit the film. It also brags that Tom Savini created the film’s effects, a credit denied by the FX artist.
After mutilating and murdering a family, George Tatum has been jailed for years. Now, he has been given the opportunity to be reprogrammed and returned to society. That said — he still has nightmares of his childhood and a trip to a Times Square peep show unlock flashbacks that make him a killer all over again.
En route to Florida — where his ex-wife, daughters and son live, George follows a woman home and kills her. Meanwhile, his doctors have no clue that he’s left the city.
Imagine his wife’s surprise when she starts getting all manner of threats over the phone. All she wants to do is carry on with her new boyfriend, Bob. She has enough to deal with, as her son C.J. is the worst of all horror movie kids. He often plays pranks that go way past the line of good taste, like covering himself in ketchup and pretending to be dead. So when the kid says that a man is following him, everyone thinks he’s just up to his normal young serial killer in training mischief.
After killing some of C.J.’s fellow students, George breaks into their house and kills the babysitter while mom is at a party. But C.J. calmly and cooly deals with it — he shoots his father with a revolver while dad has a flashback of catching his dad engaging in BDSM games with his mistress before he decided to kill them both with an axe.
The movie closes with C.J. sitting in a police car, mugging for the camera, while his mother returns to see her ex-husband’s body being removed from the house. How does C.J. know the camera is there? Has he learned how to break the fourth wall? Will he soon be able to hear his own theme song, much like Michael Myers? And when I’m asking questions, isn’t the full title, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, way better than just Nightmare?
Director Romano Scavolini started his career in porn, which might explain the incredibly casual nudity in the film and its devotion to giving the viewer exactly what they want from a slasher. It knows exactly why you’re here and gives you what you need. He stated about the film that he wanted to tell a story that has roots in reality and not just fantasy. A story of no hope, because mankind is at the mercy of its own demons. And, perhaps most importantly, a story where a young boy is unable to deal with the fact that his parents might just happen to be down with BDSM.
According to Matthew Edwards’ Twisted Visions: Interviews with Cult Horror Filmmakers, Scavolini claimed that prior to receiving distribution through 21st Century Film Corporation, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures had both wanted to buy the film, but only if the gore was cut down. Scavonli refused, feeling that “the strongest scenes had to remain uncut because the film should be a scandalous event.” Yeah, I’m gonna call bullshit.
This is a scummy, down and dirty affair. C.J. is an annoying kid, but who can blame him, He has the worst parents possible — one’s a serial killer and the other would rather party on down with Bob than deal with the wretched fruits of her ex-husband’s loins. It’s everything that 20/20 exposes on how horrible slashers movies are should be.
If you want to see this for yourself, it’s streaming for free with an Amazon Prime membership.
I wasn’t ready for Mirror, Mirror. I had no idea it’d grab me, thinking it was just another clone of The Craft. But nope. It’s something else entirely.
Megan Gordon (Rainbow Harvest) is the new girl in school, a shy and withdrawn goth who is taunted and treated like shit by everyone other than Nikki and Ron, a popular girl and her jock boyfriend. Now here’s where this movie stands out. Megan isn’t one of those fake Hollywood versions of what they think goth is. She honestly looks insane in so many of her outfits, wearing tiny hats and headdresses that Vulnavia would be proud to put on. Her hair is shaved in weird places and even when she has to wear her tennis uniform, she looks incredibly out of place and uncomfortable. In short, if I was 15 years old, I would be making her the perfect mix tape.
Megan’s dad has recently died, which is why she and her mother Susan (Karen Black!) have moved. In their new home, she finds an antique mirror in her room which keeps returning even when it is taken away. Oh yeah — her dog dies too, for some reason on top of the kitchen counter, and Willaim Sanderson (The Rocketeer, TV’s Newhart, Fight for Your Life) shows up as a weird pet undertaker who starts dating Susan.
Megan learns that the mirror gives her magic powers, which she uses to get revenge. But despite the warnings of the antique dealer who was in charge of the house’s furnishings (Yvonne De Carlo!) that the mirror grants its powers at the cost of the user’s life, Megan grows more and more addicted to having the power.
Soon, Megan starts to get everything she wants. And when she doesn’t, she kills everyone in her way. Along the way, she inverts the sexual predator role, going after the men in the movie with so much passion that they often beg her to slow down or to leave them alone.
I’m not saying this is a perfect movie. There’s an extra long sandwich-making scene that feels way off script. But Megan killing Ron is quite intense, as is the way she murders her rival in the shower. And not since 1988’s remake of The Blob has a sink been so murderous.
By the end of the movie, Megan has lost control of the mirror and it starts killing people she didn’t want it to go after. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the scene where the mirror is coated with blood, leading to Megan making out with her own reflection.
The end takes the sisterhood between the two main characters to a frightening conclusion when seen through the mirror’s reflection.
For a straight to video 80’s horror movie that was followed by three sequels, this is much better than you’d expect. You can find Mirror, Mirror on Shudder and Amazon Prime!
Day 24 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is 24. PUPPETS OR DOLLS: Sometimes they play back. When I first started dating my wife, this was a movie that she picked for us to watch. While I scoffed at the time, it’s been in our DVD player more times than I may like to admit. It’s an early film from James Wan, after the first Saw but before The Conjuring and Insidious.
You need to know a few things about this film.
First, it takes place in a fairy tale reality that has nothing to do with our world as you know it.
Second, no one acts like a normal human being.
Third, everything — and I mean everything — is shot in blue filter and overly processed, appearing washed out.
Finally, every single bit of the frame is overly art directed. Everything it too complicated. Everything is too dirty. Everything is too macabre. Nothing ends up being frightening because everything is too much, too much and way too much.
But I have a soft spot in my hard heart for this wacky little movie. It’s never really sure who it wants to be — is it about the dolls doing the killing? Is it the legend of Mary Shaw? Is it a police procedural? And why does the evil woman have such a frightening tongue?
Mary Shaw has an undefined moveset, as it were. Should we be worried about her ability to silence areas and kill people when they scream? Or should we be worried about someone else? or should we be worried about all the killer dolls? There is so much to worry about!
Big shout out to Donnie Wahlberg here, who must have just finished an acting class that said, “You gotta have some kind of object for your character so you can do object and hand work.” He was like, “What if I continually shave my face with an electric razor in every scene?” And everyone on set was real harried that day and said, “Sure, I guess that sounds good.” So basically all I can tell you about his character, Detective Jim Lipton, is that he shaves in every scene. It’s also hilarious to me that the above class I mention, which doesn’t probably exist outside of my brain, was an Actor’s Studio class and he wanted to credit James Lipton with the name of the character as a way of paying back his mentor.
So what can I say good about this movie? The theater set — I refuse to believe a small town that was the happiest town ever would name their theater after France’s Grand Guignol but go with this movie for a bit — is awe inspiring. I love how it looks, as nature has had its way with it, with a giant display case of hundreds upon hundreds of evil dolls. Seriously, if you have an issue with dummies, don’t watch this. It’s like Magic times one hundred and one, minus the talent and story.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. The studio got super involved with this one, to the point that Leigh Whannell (who also wrote most of the Saw and Insidious films, as well as writing and directing the superior Upgrade) was so displeased with the final film that he only writes scripts on spec now, instead of pitching to studios and being paid to write the screenplay.
I say all these things knowing that I’ll end up watching this movie once a year, laughing at some of its worst moments, puzzling over some of its poor FX and trying to decipher why the characters would act the way they do. I’ll also wonder how such a quaint little town has such a sleazy motel in it. And then I’ll watch it all over again.
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