The Gemini, a deranged serial killer, has been torturing and killing people in the basement of his San Fernando Valley home. But once he meets famous musician Craig Owen and his girlfriend Kelly, he may have met his match.
The Gemini (Jackson Davis) has already claimed seven victims, maiming them and decapitating them with a blowtorch. He’s a master of psychological mayhem, but it turns out that Craig (Cayleb Long) may be even better. They play a back and forth game of identity for the entire film, with neither ever holding the upper hand for long.
Craig is abducted while buying champagne for his wife and awakens in Bill’s basement, who turns Craig into the killer and himself as a number of personas that are interrogating him. Jackson Davis is great in this as the killer, bringing a variety of voices, mannerisms and pure insanity to each new role. Seeing as how this is a film where two actors have to carry most of the weight, both Davis and Long really hold their own.
There’s also a subplot where that wife — Kelly (Mischa Barton, making her second recent appearance on this site) — deals with an affair Craig is having. This made me feel like I was watching two different movies.
Directors Brian Conley and Nathan Ives may not have done many movies that you’ve heard of, but this movie proves that they’re two talents to watch. The film looks really great, with special attention being obviously paid to lighting and shadow. I think they both have a great film in them and this is a good start.
The torture scenes here gradually increase in how rough and gory they are, starting with smashed teeth and only getting worse. There’s also a plot twist or two here, but you’ll be able to spot them coming from a few hundred feet out. It also owes a lot to Split, but is a more down to Earth tale.
That said — the climax does NOT skimp on the gruesome, offering a real surprise. That part I enjoyed. I could have done without the one month later denouement, but some people like having things explaining. At least after an entire film of Micha Barton feeling estranged from the plot, it ties it all together.
The Basement is opening today in these cities:
LA: Laemmle Music Hall
Cleveland: Tower City Cinemas
Atlanta: AMC Southlake Pavilion
Chicago: AMC South Barrington
Houston: AMC Gulf Pointe
Minneapolis: AMC Apple Valley
Phoenix: AMC Arizona Center
San Francisco: AMC Deer Valley
Dallas: AMC Grapevine Mills
You can also find it digitally starting today. Learn more at the official site.
Disclaimer: I was sent this film by its PR team and in no way did that impact my review.
It’s time for our favorite Native American warrior, Thunder, to return. This time, he takes on a racist militia in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They’ve refused to pay the very specific amount of $53,000 for attacking and abusing him (yes, Thunder gets beat up again) after destroying his village.
If the promise of Mark Gregory wearing buckskin and teaching children how to shoot arrows seems like a good idea, then you’re ready for this one. Actually, this feels incredibly prescient, as a bunch of good old boys get all trashed on beer and male bonding before entering his village en masse and starting some shit.
Yes, director Fabrizio De Angelis is back for a third Thunder film, along with Mark Gregory and the man who seemingly wrote every Italian movie in the 1980s and 1990s, Dardano Sacchetti. Coming along for the ride as Sherriff Jeff? Diabolik himself, John Phillip Law!
The bad guys are beyond bad here, as they whip our hero and drag him behind a truck before blowing up his village. Of course, Thunder has been dragged behind a truck before. He just wants paid in cash this time, trying to be peaceful.
That said — we all know why we’re watching a Thunder movie. We want the slowly simmering, bad acting of Mark Gregory to explode into violence, baseball batting, gathering an army of Native American warriors and jumping dirt bikes. It’s more of the same, but watching this film in the pst-Trump era makes me feel like it could really happen. You get frame after frame of heavy set MAGA types shooting up a reservation while their leader watches from a helicopter. Actually, it feels way too real.
So how does Mark Gregory react to these red staters blowing up his home and making him run behind their trucks while tied to the bumper? By getting all pouty. Such are the acting chops of Gregory!
How did three Thunder movies get made? Was there such a demand for them? Were video stores really that awesome that they potentially could have an entire Thunder section? Dare I dream of a video store with a Dardano Sacchetti section, where I could choose to rent favorites such as Manhattan Baby and Warriors of the Year 2072?
Keep in mind, this movie may give you a seizure like you’re in a Cronenberg film. I mean, just to set up the scene where Thunder decimates a classic car with a baseball bat, we get a long, loving look at an old redneck in short shorts lovingly washing said car. Then Mark Gregory tears that car apart like only he can. And by that, I mean he stares off into space while absentmindedly hitting it with a bat before heading off to a hardware store filled with people and going buck futter in the aisles until the shop owner pulls a gun — in front of paying customers, no less! You’ve never seen a store so shitty or one that sells stuff that is near unnecessary that isn’t called the Red White and Blue Thrift Store in your life! And then to top this all off, Thunder fills the aisles with gasoline — that he pulled off the shelf, because that’s how it’s stored — and sets the store on fire! And it’s a drugstore, not a hardware store, a store that has full cans of gas right next to TV sets. The world of Thunder is not our own. It is a parallel universe of goofball lunacy, one where one lone man who walks as if he has a tomahawk up his ass can wear tight jeans, a fringed shirt and turquoise whilst leading the local fuzz on one hell of a manhunt.
How many times must they burn down Thunder’s home, tie up his woman and beat him? Well, once he brings an entire army of Native Americans on horseback to beat up three rednecks, that seems like it should be the last time, right? If Thunder had this whole posse on his side the whole time, where were they when he was being dragged behind a car? It’s best not to ask these kinds of questions and just sit back and watch them chase those guys down and give out some justice, I guess.
This movie also makes some major leaps of tone, such as how we go from this chase to a wacky truck stuck in the desert scene, complete with goofball synth. Then, Thunder lays down the law to the cops. It’s time for his brand of law with the white man. And right after that, an entire lineup of big fat white dudes shoot up the shack where Thunder is hiding as he makes big goofy eyes and runs away. Man, Thunder. You can’t catch a break.
Our hero replies by busting up a political rally by blowing stuff up real good as he rides in on a dirt bike, face painted up and ready for a fight. He ends up trying to bury one of the fat politicians alive rather than take a payoff, but gets held up by the sheriff. He gets the money and uses it to rebuild the village before heading off into the sunset with his woman.
One supposes that because we never got Thunder 4 that this was the last time he got in trouble with the law. Me, I’m still holding out hope. I mean, after a week of Mark Gregory movies, I realize that I have watched every single second that he ever committed to film. And now, I have both a sense of completeness and sadness. Do I have to use Go Fund Me to make the Italian action film of my dreams, a movie where Thunder meets Trash in the future and they walk in way too tight denim down an alley before somersaulting through fire?
You can grab this at Revok. Or use the internet to find double dubbed versions of it like me.
You know what gets me to watch a movie every single time? Based on a true story. Nothing makes me want to watch something more. That’s what drew me to Blood Child, which is based on the Malay myth of the Toyol, which are ghost children raised by black magic.
After a devastating miscarriage in Singapore, Ashley turned to a witch doctor to start the process of raising a ghost child that would help her discover the spirit of her lost baby. This tragedy brings her and husband Bill back to the United States where his friends are amazed that he stayed faithful to her in a foreign country filled with beautiful women.
Soon, the couple finds themselves pregnant again, but their joy doesn’t last long. That ghost child — or the spirit of their lost baby — will not come in second place to a living child. And what about Siti, their housekeeper, who has come back with them, creeping out all of their friends?
What really struck me about the film is the incredibly casual misogyny of Bill’s friends toward his marriage and wife’s mental state. “You just need to get laid” seems to be their solution to a spouse in major need to support. And everyone in the film has no issue at all being racist toward Siti, who is one of the few sympathetic characters in the film.
I also enjoyed the fact that the spirit in this film chooses technology to make its presence known. In moments of physical interaction, some of the characters turn to stare into their screens, such as when a girl attempts to seduce Bill in a bar. Instead of enjoying that moment — when he shouldn’t be — he starts to film it and instead of watching her giving him a sexual favor in digital POV, he’s greeted with the face of evil.
The film marks the directorial debut of Jennifer Phillips, who is also the film’s writer and producer. The film looks way better than most current VOD features and while some performances aren’t as good as others, it’s a decent first effort — minus the surprise ending, which feels a little tacked on.
As is typical in horror films, people don’t always behave like you or I would in these situations. When a voice tells me to get out, I get out! I also know better than to try and raise a ghost child, but then again, as far as I know, I am not a character in a horror movie.
Blood Child is now available on all major platforms, including iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, inDemand, Dish and more. Plus, you can get the DVD from all major online retailers.
Disclaimer: I was sent this movie by its PR team, but as you know, that has no bearing on my review.
Before Dr. Strange was in big time movies, he was in TV movies. There, he was played by Peter Hooten. Why am I telling you this? Because Pete is here to star with our man Mark Gregory today in Just a Damn Soldier.
The story here is that Hooten’s character gets together his mercenary pals to steal some gold from a bad guy and sell it to the Afghan rebels that would one day become the Taliban because his girlfriend was killed by the Russians. That Taliban part is me editorializing. It’s also totally true.
Ferdinando Baldi is back in the chair for this one, as he must have had a deal to create every Mark Gregory commando style movie. Also: Mark gets shot in the knee, limps and is fine by the very next scene.
You should do what I do. Shoot roman candles at the TV while drunk, screaming Mark Gregory’s name over and over while savoring every second of this film. You can watch it for free at Amazon Video!
The second film in John Carpenter’s “apocalypse trilogy” (The Thing and In the Mouth of Madnessare the other two), this was the first movie in his deal with Alive Pictures, which guaranteed him complete creative control if he made each film at a budget of $3 million dollars.
This is probably the only horror movie that you’ll see that is all about theoretical physics and atomic theory, as well as secret religious orders and the Antichrist. There’s also plenty of Nigel Kneale (Quatermass and the Pit) influence here, which Carpenter tips his hat to by using the alias Martin Quatermass for the screenplay. From messages from the future to ancient evil finally being unleashed on the modern world, it could be a Kneale film, but the British writer was displeased with being associated with the film (he had previously worked with Carpenter to script Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, although his name was removed when he objected to producer Dino De Laurentiis adding more gore to the film).
A priest (literally, that’s his name, but he’s played by long-time Carpenter associate Donald Pleasence, although I’ve also heard him referred to as Father Loomis) discovers that a member of the Brotherhood of Sleep has died just before an important meeting with the Pope. It turns out that an abandoned church in inner city Los Angeles contains a container of green liquid that is the secret to the inverse side of God, literally an Anti-God. Whatever is inside that container is alive and able to transmit long streams of complex data that needs to be analyzed by Prof. Howard Birack (Victor Wong, Big Trouble in Little China) and his students.
One by one, those students are taken over by the Anti-God or killed by the homeless people and insects that surround the building, led by Alice Cooper. Also, every single person who hasn’t been killed or taken over starts to have the same dream, one where a shadowy figure emerges from the church. Each time they have this dream, a warning sent from the year one-nine-nine-nine, they see more detail. This part of the film, shot on video, played on a television and then reshot with Carpenter’s voice intoning the warning message, are some of the strangest and most surreal sequences ever included in a mainstream film.
Soon, one of the researchers has been transformed into a vessel for Satan and the evil forces are attempting to pull the Anti-God out of a mirror. Much like Ghosts of Mars and Assault on Precinct 13, this is another Carpenter riff on Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, with a group of survivors stuck inside a building, trying to survive an evening worth of attacks.
I can’t say enough about how much I love this movie. It has great little character bits, moments of true horror and even some great compressed storytelling. I love that instead of a long explanation of how a physics professor and a Catholic priest would be close friends, one student just off-handedly mentions that they both were part of a BBC exploration of God’s existence. That’s all we really need to know and it lets us answer that and move on to more important matters.
You just need to watch this movie. Luckily, Shout! Factory has released a great version of it. I mean, how can you not love a film that theorizes that Jesus was an alien and the Catholic Church has known that all along and kept the secret that another alien, an evil one, was on its way…or has a scene where someone just keeps typing “I live!” over and over again, then this message: You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED.”
Terrorists are making genetic experiments on kidnapped girls. And Professor Larson has a dream. That dream is probably your nightmare, as he wants to create a master race to rule the world. Luckily, some scientific organizations in Asia and Europe have hired a group of mercenaries to kill everyone. Yay!
But wait! This movie is a North Korean/Italian co-promotion! Kim Il-Sung actually allowed this movie to be made in his country and, well, it’s a total piece of shit.
That said — Mark Gregory is the bad guy, the leader of the terrorists. And who is being paid $65,000 by FSR (Final Solution Research) to stop him? Frank Zagarino — Stryker himself! Plus, Sabrina Siani (Conquest, The Throne of Fire) came along too. Did you know her mother used to come to nearly every set she was on and get in the way? Well, she also encouraged Jess Franco to film her daughter naked, so there’s that.
There is also a veritable army of North Korean extras ready to do whatever it takes to make this entertaining. They failed!
There is one goofball scene where Lou, a commando, talks about how he spent the last year with the Bolshoi Ballet and how he had to kill a ballet dancer who was ready to stop disarmament talks between Russia and the U.S. Not only does this sound like the kind of script conversation that Quentin Tarantino used to get paid to write (like that discussion about the Silver Surfer that comes out of nowhere in Crimson Tide) and a way better movie than what I suffered through.
But Mark Gregory is in it! That has to count for something.
An interesting trivia note: the evil Professor Larson was played by Charles Robert Jenkins, a United States Army soldier who lived in North Korea from 1965 to 2004 after deserting his unit and crossing the Korean Demilitarized Zone. He immediately regretted this decision and was treated poorly for years. In 1982, Jenkins appeared as Dr. Kelton, painted to be the mastermind behind the Korean War, in the film Unsung Heroes. This was the first evidence to the Western world that he was alive, but the U.S. government did not acknowledge this fact until 1996. He was given a Japanese wife, who was allowed to go back to Japan and he eventually was able to go there, where he spent the rest of his life.
The country of Japan asked for the U.S. to pardon him for treason, but they refused. Jenkins put his conscience to rest by reporting to Camp Zama on Patriot Day, September 11, 2004. He showed up in full uniform with all of his medals and saluted the military police.
On November 3, he pleaded guilty to charges of desertion and aiding the enemy, but denied making disloyal or seditious statements. Those charges were dropped and he was sentenced to 30 days in the brig. He was released early for good behavior and received a dishonorable discharge.
He published a biography in Japan called To Tell the Truth, which was re-published nearly a decade later in the U.S. as The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea. He died in Japan on December 11, 2017.
His story would make a much better movie than Tan Zan: Ultimate Mission. But you can still watch this movie for free on Amazon Prime.
Melissa is new in town and already meeting men at the bar, even though she’s just 15 — forget the title of the film — and taking one of them to make out in a Native American burial ground. If it sounds like things are about to go bad, well, of course they are.
Melissa Morgan and her family are in town for just a few months, as her father is on a dig and her mom is from the area. As she talks with Johnny, the dude she hooked up with, her father (Patrick Macnee!) finds them and sends him away. He soon gets stabbed and killed, turning the slasher conventions around.
Sheriff Dan (Bo Hopkins, Uncle Sam) gets a call from Johnny’s brother Billy and they search for him, finding no signs of foul play. Then, the sheriff’s daughter Marci (Dana Kimmell, Friday the 13th Part III) finds the body. Sheriff Dan starts his investigation in earnest, looking into Melissa, as she was the last person to see Johnny alive.
Everyone who gets close to her dies — like Tommy, a dude who just wants to hang out behind the bar with her. Melissa blames Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon, Bishop Pickering from Caddyshack), an older Native American, who is soon found lynched in his home.
The investigation continues, as Dr. Morgan blames Jason, another local who has stolen five knives from the dig. Jason is played by Don Shanks, who you may know better as Michael Myers in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. There’s also a really fancy barbecue party that Melissa’s mom (Susan Strasberg, daughter of famous acting teacher Lee) throws her.
There’s some skinny dipping, Jason breaking out of jail, arguing about who killed Greyfeather and a whole bunch of mistaken and transferred identity and at this point, I was checking out of the film. Nothing ever really picks up and gets going here. Which kinda sucks — I was ready for this to be something great. There’s no real tension or worry about any of the characters here. Yet I still watched it and will probably do so again. I’m weird like that.
You can watch it and see for yourself at Amazon Prime. It will also be playing October 11, 2018 as part of Bloody Disgusting and Fandango’s Retro Nightmares.
In the first forty minutes of Thunder 2, the movie recaps the first film, is a rookie cop drama, tells us about corrupt cops and then becomes an Italian exploitation version of Cool Hand Luke. If you’re not in, you’ll never be in. This is why I watch movies.
Remember the last time we saw Luis Martinez — Thunder to you and me? He was blowing up an entire town and fucking up cops. Well, now he is a cop! How did this happen? How could this not happen?
Even crazier — he gets assigned to the town that he fucked up and has to work with the same cops who ruined his life. That said, Thunder proves to be a pretty good cop, even winning the trust of his old archnemesis, Sheriff Roger (Bo Svenson). He even busts a transgender person who nearly knocks him out!
Of course, the cops are still corrupt. Deputy Rusty Weissner still has it out for Thunder and sets him up, making it look like he’s a drug dealer. Thunder has to go to prison and try to survive the box. If only he didn’t have the worst drunken attorney ever!
Thunder breaks out, taking a cop car with him. He tries to get a fair trial, but Rusty attacks him and flips over the jeep carrying Thunder, his pregnant wife and the drunken lout. Thunder’s wife loses the baby and he goes on the run again. When he meets her at the hospital, she tells him to get revenge.
Oh he does. There’s an army on Native Americans, exploding crossbow weaponry, tomahwaks and Mark Gregory stiffly walking around wearing warpaint. Holy shit, this movie! It’s everything fabulous about Italian exploitation without zombies or sex crazed killers.
Fabrizio De Angelis returned to direct the sequel and he brought along the most prolific writer in Italian sleze with him, Dardano Sacchetti. Magic ensued.
In the end, the sheriff just lets Thunder go as he’s innocent. He tells him not to ever come back and his drunk lawyer laughs and take a shot. In front of a cop. They pull away and the sheriff takes out a rifle, watches them in the scope and shoots. The end.
Were they trying to make a Billy Jack ending?
Take my word for it. This movie is perfect. I mean, Mark Gregory hanging off a helicopter? Slouch walking around dressed as a cop? Native Americans having their own special doctors? This movie says it all.
You can find this at Revok or if you look around on YouTube hard enough.
Also known as The Devil Within Her, The Monster and Sharon’s Baby, this mid-70’s film plays it so straight that it can’t be anything but a parody of The Exorcist. Yet here it is — screaming in your face, full of bad accents and horrible sex scenes, so earnest that it makes you want to believe that you can’t help but hold it tight and tell it that yes, everything will be OK.
Directed by Peter Sasdy, who also brought us Taste the Blood of Dracula, the Ingrid Pitt starring Countess Dracula, Hands of the Ripper, Welcome to Blood City and, of course, The Lonely Lady, this is probably the only film you’ll ever witness where Joan Collins and a little person engage in occult warfare.
Lucy (the lovely Ms. Collins) is a dancer and not the kind that does modern or ballet. Her stage act includes a routine with Hercules, played by George Claydon from Berserk!, a dwarf strongman. She invites him for a drink one evening but he declines, instead feeling like giving her a rubdown in the dressing room. Our heroine feels uncomfortable just as he goes for her breasts, making her scream and bringing in Tommy (John Steiner, Shock and, of course, The Overlord from Yor, Hunter from the Future), the stage manager, who kicks his ass out and then makes sweet, sweet love to Lucy. As she leaves the club that night, the dwarf curses her: “You will have a baby…a monster! An evil monster conceived inside your womb! As big as I am small and possessed by the devil himself!”
If you didn’t say, “Holy shit, I am all in,” after the above paragraph, you have no soul and no sense of what makes a horrible movie worth watching.
Months pass and Lucy has given up the exotic dancing lifestyle, settling down with wealthy Gino (Ralph Bates, The Horror of Frankenstein and Lust for a Vampire), who has set her up in a fancy townhouse. She has a long, arduous and painful delivery of her baby, who weighs in at 12 pounds (.86 stone for the British fans out there). Said baby is also fond of ripping at her with his nails, but Dr. Finch (Donald Pleasence, who never turned down a role ever) assures her that it will all be alright. Tell that to housekeeper Mrs. Hyde (Hilary Mason, Don’t Look Now and Dolls) when the baby almost bites off her finger!
The baby just won’t get along with anyone, a fact that Lucy relates to her galpal Mandy (Caroline Munro, livening up the proceedings) and Gino’s sister Albana (Eileen Atkins, a British stage star who deserves way better), a nun. Despite a series of tests — both religious and medical — the baby will not be stopped, even smashing and drowning his nurse (Janet Key from The Vampire Lovers).
Lucy even tries to talk to Tommy, saying that he may be her son. The baby reacts by punching the gangster in the nose, which makes Lucy happy until her son gets the face of Hercules.
Her husband tries to take her mind off everything with a night of, as they said in the 1970’s, sweet whoopie. After the most unsexual sex scene ever filmed, the baby lures him outside where he’s lynched and stuffed down a storm drain. Oh no, Gino! It gets worse! The infant also beheads Pleasence and stabs Lucy in the heart! Don’t let kids play with scissors, parents!
Albana finally realizes what she must do — rip off the ending of The Exorcist. As she goes through with the rite, Hercules is dancing on stage, but the moment she touches the baby’s head with a crucifix, he dies in front of the audience.
This one is a real crowd pleaser. Seriously, it may be talky and boring in parts, but you have to admire its drive to do anything to shock and surprise you. It keeps trotting out attractive British genre stars only to off them in ludicrous ways, all while Joan Collins screams her head off. Writing about this movie only makes me want to watch it again.
Native American warrior Thunder has returned home, only to discover that the white man is destroying his ancestral burial ground. He tries to stop them, but the law only protects whites. He’s beaten and banished and left for dead. But now, he’s going to get his revenge.
Yes, it’s a takeoff of Rambo Italian style, but it also stars Mark Gregory! Yes, he looks sad for the entire movie. Yes, his long longs are intact. Yes, his lip quivers. And yes, he walks like he has several sticks up his ass.
Directed by Fabrizio De Angelis, who also produced Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, The New York Ripperand more, this movie was shot in Monument Valley, Utah, so it really has an authentic background if not weaponry. Yes, Thunder uses a bazooka as if one would use a rifle. Oh, Thunder. We still love you.
Sheela, Thunder’s lady, is played by Valeria Cavalli from Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 1972 and Lamberto Bava’s A Blade in the Dark. Bo Svenson plays the evil sheriff. You may recognize him from taking over as Buford Pusser in Walking Tall part 2, as well as Inglorious Bastards (and the remake), The Delta Force, Speed 2: Cruise Control and Kill Bill: Volume 2. Plus, you get Antonio Sabàto, Sr.!
Of course, Dardano Sacchetti wrote this, as he wrote nearly every important Italian genre film of the 1980’s. Seriously, all the way back to A Bay of Blood to Shock, Manhattan Baby, Blastfighter, Devilfish and so many more. Alright, some of those are a bit more essential than the others.
If you want to watch Mark Gregory repeatedly get punched in the face and then getting his slow-motion revenge, awkwardly slapping at people and shooting massive weapons, then this is the movie for you. I’m pleased to report that there are two sequels. I am also pleased to report that we will end up covering them, too.
You can watch Thunder for free on Amazon Prime. Man, those guys really have the junk 1980’s video scene covered, huh?
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