Yearly Archives: 2018

2018 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 8: Eyeball (1975)

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The Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge for today is THE EYES HAVE IT. This pick must have an eye specific scene. I’ve already covered the granddaddy of all eye torture, Fulci’s Zombi, as well as his other paean to ocular decimation,The New York Ripper. There’s also Demonia, where nuns eat a dead baby’s eyeballs. And Cat in the Brain, with a whole plate of eyeballs. Oh, Fulci. You do love seeing the eyes get killed, as they have seen so much.

I already hit Dead and Buried, which has an eyeball impalement that upsets many. And Lamberto Bava’s Demonia, where a woman looks like a giant eyeball. So that leaves Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball, where a killer in a red raincoat kills tourists in Barcelona.

It’s time for the creator of Ghosthouse, Nightmare City and Cannibal Ferox to show us how he does giallo (to be fair, he also created Spasmo, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, Orgasmo,  and So Sweet… So Perverse).

Any of the main characters could be the killer, one with this amazing motive: “I was like you… before this friend of mine ripped out my eye playing doctor with me… leaving an empty socket!” That means with each kill, the killer keeps an eyeball.

Unlike most giallo, the killer is all in red, with red gloves, which is a rarity unless we’re considering The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. Like most giallo, it has the worst cops ever on the case. And for 1975. it’s pretty woke, considering one of the couples is an interracial lesbian duo.

Seeing as how this is a movie with an Italian director and a Spanish crew, you just know that the dubbing is going to be great. Witness this exchange:

“Spanish or Italian, it makes no difference to me. He made a terrible mistake. You don’t think America’s worth all that trouble do you?”

“Oh my God! You’re not a communist, are you?”

That said, I came off really enjoying this. There’s a lot of red highlights hidden in every scene, which for a Lenzi movie is as close as he’s going to get to art. Then again, I tend to love all of his films way more than most people.

DOCUMENTARY WEEK: Vampira and Me (2012)

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Maila Nurmi was the first goth. She was Elvira before that was even a name. She was used up, spit out and stomped all over by Hollywood. But she still continues to inspire.

Vampira was an icon.  Starting on May 1, 1954, The Vampira Show (the show actually premiered the night before, but it was not called that names and it was considered a preview) opened each night with the pale goddess walking as if in a trance down a foggy hallway, screaming, then reclining on a couch where she would make fun of the movies she was about to show.

She became a star, appearing in LIFE Magazine, running for Night Mayor of Hollywood, being used as the model for Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and being nominated for a Los Angeles area Emmy Award as Most Outstanding Female Personality in 1954. She lost to Lucille Ball. And as soon as fame came to her, it went away.

She appeared in films like Too Much, Too Soon, The Magic Sword, I Passed for White, Sex Kittens Go to College, The Big Operator and The Beat Generation in a role that was as close to the real Maila Nurmi as any she would play. She started to refer to Vampira as another person. And her role as Vampira in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space has lived on and on.

What hasn’t lived on are video versions of her in the role. Many TV stations constantly retaped over expensive videotapes, so until her later years, Maila never saw herself in the role.

That’s why R.H. Greene’s documentary is so good. He took his 2010 radio documentary (first broadcast by NPR channel KPCC and available here on their site) to the next level, including an extended interview with his subject from a 1997 interview.

The story is not happy. By 1962, Nurmi was making a living installing linoleum flooring and running an antique store called Vampira’s Attic. Years later, in 1981, she was asked by KHJ-TV to revive her Vampira character. Working closely with the producers of the new show, she was due to be the executive producer but left the project over creative differences.

The station chose Cassandra Peterson to play the part, but was now unable to use the name Vampira. Renaming her Elvira, she shot to fame overnight.

Nurmi sued, by lost when a court ruled that “likeness means actual representation of another person’s appearance and not simply close resemblance.” Peterson stated that Elvira was nothing like Vampira. After all, the only similarity was that she wore a black dress and had black hair. Right? Wrong. Nurmi claimed that the entire Elvira persona, which included her pun-filled patter, was based on her. And she lost. It’s still amazing to me.

After that, Nurmi nearly disappeared, other than playing with the band Satan’s Cheerleaders and appearing with Tomata du Plenty of The Screamers  in Rene Daalder’s punk rock musical Population: 1 (in the interview on the film, the director said, “There was a wild lady living out in back in a shed. Tomata befriended her and found out she had played Vampira.).

In the early days of the internet — 2001 — she started running her own site, selling autographs from her small North Hollywood apartment.

The film doesn’t shy from the saddest parts of her life, such as her rumored love affair with James Dean or the stalker who attacked her in 1955, years before the media even knew what a stalker was.

This is more than a documentary. It feels like a labor of love. I learned so much about the person behind the icon, which is what a true documentary should be all about.

You can watch it on Amazon Prime or Vudu. Please do.

2018 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 7: Jubilee (1978)

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Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd. 

The Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge for today is 7. HELL ON EARTH. Watch a post-apocalypse movie. Bonus if it has punks (see the Destroy All Movies definition of punk) in it. We’ve watched so many post-apocalyptic movies that it was hard to find one that we hadn’t had on the site. And punks made it an even bigger challenge. That said, we’re all about trying to find movies no one else is talking about. And that leads us to 1977’s Jubilee.

Queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, Son of Dracula, The Witches) asks her occultist John Dee (Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror fame) — an advocate of British imperialism that spent the last thirty years of his life learning the secret language of angels — and Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (David Brandon, Delirium, Stagefright) to show her the future.

That future? The no future of the punk rock era, a place where Queen Elizabeth II was killed in a mugging and a gang of punk rock survivors, including Amyl Nitrate (Jordan, the model who was of the creators of W10 London punk look), Bod (Runacre in a second role), Chaos (French singer, writer and tightrope walker Hermine Demoriane), Mad (singer Toyah Willcox) and Crabs (Little Nell from Rocky Horror, who even gets in the line “Don’t dream it, be it.”). When they’re not talking about boys or music, they’re talking about how history can be manipulated. And then Amyl Nitrite says that her heroine has always been Myra Hindley (Hindley and Ian Brady were responsible for the Moors Murders, which occurred in and around Manchester between mid-1963 and late-1965, claiming five child victims and inspiring the song “Suffer Little Children” by The Smiths).

Things making too much sense? There’s also Borgia Ginz, who shares a house with Hitler, runs the world and has transformed Buckingham Palace into a recording studio and Westminster Cathedral into a disco where Jesus performs.

Beyond the nihilism and lack of hope in this film, there’s also plenty of punk rock stars, like Adam Ant and Wayne County along for the ride and gamely performing songs, as well as blink and you miss it moments for Siouxie and the Banshees and the Slits. And hey — the music is by Ol’ Sourpuss himself, Brian Eno.

Director Derek Jarman may have based this movie in punk rock, but he was against the scene’s fascism fetish, as well as its love of stupidity and violence. Many punks weren’t pleased with the film, such as fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who created an open letter T-shirt that denounced the film because of how she felt it misrepresented punk.

Jubilee is definitely a time capsule of Thatcher-era England. It’s loud, obnoxious and strange, which are all wonderful things to be. I’m glad that I didn’t watch something easy like Cy-Warrior and chose this movie.

GRANDSON OF MADE FOR TV MOVIE WEEK: Sins of the Past (1984)

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A group of call girls all decide to quit the business when one of them is killed. They change their names, leave town and make lives for themselves over the next 13 years. Then, one of them is killed and the rest soon learn that her killer is looking for the rest of them.

Originally airing on April 2, 1984, this TV movie is pretty much a giallo without black gloved hands or tremendous amounts of gore and nudity. But stylistically, it’s very close in tone.

Terry (Barbara Carrera, Never Say Never Again) was once the leader of the girls, but now she’s fighting for custody of her son. The other girls have all grown into different lives, like Paula (Kim Cattrall), who is a doctor that is being considered to run a hospital, Patrice (Kirstie Alley), an actress and Clarissa (Debbie Boone), who sings gospel music as part of a televangelist’s ministry. None of them can afford to lose their station in life by the — SINS OF THE PAST — coming back.

Anthony Geary from General Hospital is also on hand as a detective that somehow worms his way in Barbara Carrera’s pants. This is one of those films where cops can be total pricks and still lead with the heroine because it was the 1980’s and that’s how writers thought women acted.

Director Peter H. Hunt also directed adaptations of Danielle Steele’s Secrets. This is a very similar type of story, with plenty of red herrings, like the father who killed his daughter that caused all of the girls to go into hiding. This is difficult to find, but there’s always YouTube if you want to check it out.

 

Kill or Be Killed (1980)

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Martial arts movies make little to no sense most of the time. Then, there’s this movie.

Steve Chase is a martial artist who goes to the desert for what he thinks is an Olympic style meet. Nope. An ex-Nazi general was defeated at the 1936 Olympics by a Japanese martial artist named Miyagi, so he’s out for revenge.  Luckily, Steve and his girl Olga escape.

To fix up his team, von Rudloff’s miniature henchman Chico goes around the world to recruit a new team. And Steve ends up meeting Miyagi and joining his team, which leads to the madcap fight between he and his girl when she is kidnapped and forced to join his team.

Finally, Steve must fight and defeat Luke, the ultimate fighter, leading the Nazi to killing himself rather than face defeat.

I’ve given you a straight reading of the film. To see it is to know how different it is, as it’s either filmed by someone who wants to be an artist or someone who has been in the sun too long. This is often the same thing.

This movie was a success for four years in its native South Africa, where many Japanese martial arts forms were done to perfection. Yes, that makes no sense to me either. Neither does the sequel, but trust me, I’ll be covering that one soon enough, too!

You can watch this for free on Amazon Video.

GRANDSON OF MADE FOR TV MOVIE WEEK: The Midnight Hour (1985)

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With so much of television now just fodder for streaming services, we may never have the days of Halloween specials and strange movies like this ever again. The world is a worse place for this.

Originally airing on ABC on Friday, November 1, 1985, The Midnight Hour is all about five teenagers causing hijinks in Pitchford Cove. Those kids, Phil (Lee Montgomery, Davey from Burnt Offerings all grown up!), Mary (Dedee Pfeiffer, Vamp), Mitch (Peter DeLuise, son of Dom), Vinnie (Levar Burton!) and Melissa (Shari Belafonte, Time Walker) steal all manner of costumes and artifacts from the town’s historical museum. But then they go too far and read a spell in the cemetery, which causes the dead to rise, led by Melissa’s great-great-great-great grandmother Lucinda Cavender.

While everyone else is having fun at a Halloween party, Phil hooks up with a mystery girl named Sandy who ends up being an undead cheerleader. Lucinda is also turning everyone into vampires to the sounds of “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths, which is pretty amazing music for a 1986 TV movie (yes, I am that Charmed used this song too, but this is only one year after it was released and long before the mainstream found it).

The only way our heroes can stop the curse is to find a spirit ring that is in the grave of witchhunter Nathan Grenville, who is, of course, Phil’s great-great-great-great grandfather and perhaps more troubling, the former slave owner of our main villain. If Phil and Sandy don’t stop the spell by midnight, the town will be cursed until the end of time.

I can best describe this movie as a combination of recognizable talent like Cindy Morgan (Lacey Underall from Caddyshack), Kurtwood Smith (sure, he was on That 70’s Show, but we remember him best as Clarence Boddicker from RoboCop), Dick Van Patten, Wolfman Jack and Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Kevin McCarthy with musical numbers and comedic scenes while also containing some truly horrific and frightening scenes. It’s a mishmash. A monster mash?

It’s interesting to say the least. It’s the kind of movie that wouldn’t get made today, a movie that crosses genres and emotions while trying its heart out to entertain you. Director Jack Bender has gone on to direct episodes of Lost, The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.

This was released on DVD in 2000, but has become really hard to find, with prices as high as $400 on ebay!

Here’s a drink for the movie.

Sandy’s Jacket

  • 1 oz. pineapple vodka
  • 1 oz. rum
  • 2 oz. orange juice
  • 2 oz. pineapple juice
  • 1 tbsp. passion fruit simple syrup
  • 1 tbsp. cream of coconut
  • Club soda
  • Maraschino cherry
  1. Pour all ingredients in an ice-filled glass.
  2. Stir and top with a cherry. This one is easy and still casts a spell.

2018 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 6: Legacy of Satan (1974)

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Day 6 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is here. The theme? 666. El Dia De La Bestia: The more Satanic, the better. Well, this one is a Satanic movie made by a pornographer, so why not pile all of our sins in at once?

That pornographer is writer and director Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat). This film was originally intended to be a hardcore movie, but he saw it as a mainstream opportunity and decided to turn the film into a straight-up horror film. That said, that opportunity may have been suggested by producer Lou Parish, better known as Louis “Butchie” Peraino, a member of the Colombo crime family.

Shot on a tight budget and starring unknown actors, the film briefly ran in theaters before becoming part of a grindhouse double bill with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blood (one assumes that Bryanston Distributing Company, which had rumored mob ties, had something to do with that).

Other than Sarah Peabody from Last House on the Left, who plays a cult member, there’s nobody recognizable in this tale of Maya, a young woman who a Satanic cult has picked to be their new leader. Fantasies overtake her daily existence, synthesizers play at the right time and everyone wears some wonderful 70’s clothes.

There are dream sequences, photos are burned between a woman’s thighs, a glowing sword appears, we witness a black mass, there are portentous (and pretentious) speeches and lots of gorgeous colors. But it’s all a mess. While filmed in 1972, it wasn’t released until much later. And Damiano would bring another better and more Satanic film — The Devil in Ms. Jones — to raincoaters soon.

Despite the budget, this movie looks way better than it should. There are a lot of gorgeous people on display but they really don’t do much for the hour plus running time.

If you want to watch it for yourself, it’s free with your Amazon Prime membership. You can find it right here.

GRANDSON OF MADE FOR TV MOVIE WEEK: Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989)

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On a rainy night, six priests battle the infamous Amityville House until a demon finds its way into a lamp. That lamp is later sold in a yard sale for $100 to Helen Royce (Peggy McCay, TV’s Days of Our Lives) and her friend Rhona. That very same lamp gives Helen deadly tetanus, killing her nearly instantly. If you’re still with me after that incredibly stupid beginning, well, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t get much better. But hey — that doesn’t mean this movie can’t be fun.

Originally airing on May 12, 1989 on NBC, this continuation of the Amityville Horror series doesn’t even need the house, not when it has that evil lamp, which is now in the home of Helen’s sister, Alice Leacock (first wife of Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyatt). Alice’s main character quality is that she is a bitter bitch who instantly judges nearly every single person in this film.

Her daughter Nancy (Patty Duke, who once lost control to a hot dog) and her three kids Amanda, Bria and Jessica have all moved in with Alice. The lamp causes some arguments in the family, but Jessica is drawn to it. Soon, it’s doing all sorts of incredible things, like putting birds into toaster ovens, cutting off boyfriend’s hands with the garbage disposal, drowning plumbers in tar and making their cars drive away, and vandalizing people’s bedrooms.

The police and the church get involved as they all battle the lamp. Let me remind you of that one more time — they all fight a lamp. This is also a movie where a small child nearly wipes out his family with a chainsaw. Of course, the lamp is destroyed, but it finds its way into the family cat. Such are the depths that the Amityville franchise has sunk to. Writer/director Sandor Stern might get some of the blame, as he also wrote the original. But let’s cut that dude a break. After all, he was behind one of the oddest films ever, Pin!

This one is hard to find. I got mine for $1 at an Exchange store, so you might get lucky, too. Or unlucky. It depends on your POV on bad sequels and made for TV films.

UPDATE: You can watch this on Amazon Prime or Tubi. Or, if you want the ultimate non-cannon Amityville experience, you can grab this movie as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s astounding Amityville: The Cursed Collection set, along with Amityville: A New Generation, Amityville: It’s About Time and Amityville: Dollhouse.

Starhops (1978)

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Stephanie Rothman was studying at UC Berkeley when The Seventh Seal made her want to become a filmmaker. She was the first woman to be awarded the Directors Guild of America fellowship, which was one of the reasons why Roger Corman hired her as his assistant (selecting her over another applicant, the woman who became his wife Julie).

She directed It’s a Bikini World, which was not the kind of movie she wanted to do and was semi-retired until working on the film Gas-s-s-s. She then directed The Student Nurses, an exploitation film that she was not aware was an exploitation film, as she had carte blanche to explore political and social issues in the film that interested her.

She said, “I went and did some research to find out exactly what exploitation films were, their history and so forth, and then I knew that’s what I was doing, because I was making low-budget films that were transgressive in that they showed more extreme things than what would be shown in a studio film, and whose success depended on their advertising, because they had no stars in them. It was dismaying to me, but at the same time I decided to make the best exploitation films I could. If that was going to be my lot, then that’s what I was going to try and do with it.”

She wasn’t interested in making a sequel to The Student Nurses or making The Big Doll House, but her next movie was The Velvet Vampire. Moving to Dimension Pictures, she directed Terminal Island, The Working Girls and Group Marriage.

However, attempts to go mainstream were stigmatized by the films that she had made. Before ending her movie-making career, the rumor was that she reshot some scenes in Ruby and definitely wrote Starhops before taking her name off it, as it was not the film she wanted it to be.

It is, however, directed by Barbara Peeters, the only other female director from New World Pictures. She famously warred with Corman over the additions to Humanoids from the Deep and directed favorites like Bury Me an Angel and the TV series The Powers of Matthew Star.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x57xckp

But what about the movie itself? Well, it’s a trifle, about three waitresses, Danielle, Cupcake and Angel, who all work together to stop their fast food restaurant from going broke. Of course, Dick Miller shows up, as this is a Roger Corman-associated film.

What’s interesting about Angel is that she’s played by Jillian Kesner-Graver, who was not only Fonzie’s girlfriend Lorraine on Happy Days, but worked with her husband Gary to preserve the films and legacy of Orson Welles.

Starhops isn’t really funny. Or sexy. It’s just kind of there. But sometimes, you watch a bad movie and learn about some interesting people.

GRANDSON OF MADE FOR TV MOVIE WEEK: Summer of Fear (1978)

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Also known as Stranger in Our House, Summer of Fear is based on Lois Duncan’s 1976 young adult novel. Duncan also wrote the books that the movies I Know What You Did Last Summer and Killing Mr. Griffin were based on.

Originally airing on October 31, 1978 on NBC, this Wes Craven-directed film is all about Julia (Lee Purcell, Necromancy), who has lost her parents and housekeeper to a car crash. Her aunt Leslie (Carol Lawrence, ex-wife of Robert Goulet), uncle Tom (Jeremy Slate, The Dead Pit) and their kids Peter (Jeff East, the teenage Superman in the 1977 film), Bobby and Rachel (Linda Blair!). Rachel and Julie quickly become friends, which helps Julie escape her shyness and even get a makeover.

You know who doesn’t like Julia? Rachel’s horse Sundance. But everyone else seems to love her. However, stuff just doesn’t add up. Like why does she have human teeth in her room? Why did she steal a photo of Rachel, who suddenly gets hives (poor Linda, always having to be in makeup)? Why doesn’t she have a reflection? And oh yeah, why does she get away with stealing Rachel’s boyfriend Mike (Jeff McCracken, who wrote his own Wikipedia page obviously)?

To say that Rachel’s life turns into shit is putting it mildly. She loses her boyfriend. She loses her best friend (a young Fran Drescher). She loses her horse, which flips out in competition and needs to be put to sleep. And she even nearly loses her one confidant, Professor Jarvis (the man once known as the King of the B’s, Macdonald Carey), who believes her when she says that Rachel is into black magic. Oh, it gets worse. Julia is planning on getting with her father and killing her mother!

Of course, everything works out well and it’s revealed that Julia was really Sarah, the housekeeper. But perhaps more frightening is the fact that she survives another accident and becomes a nanny in a new household. Her evil isn’t finished yet.

This is a slow burner, but once the occult madness kicks in, it gets pretty fun. Then again, I’m a sucker for Linda Blair. Made a year after The Hills Have Eyes, it fits well into the 1970’s TV movie milieu.

After playing on NBC and CBS, this film was sold theatrically to Europe, where it got the title Summer of Fear. It was re-released in 2017 by Doppelganger Releasing.

You can also watch the entire movie hosted by the guys from New Castle After Dark right here.