I’ve stayed away from talking about David Cronenberg movies on here because, well, better and smarter people have already done so. After all, there’s an entire zine devoted to discussing his works, House of Skin. And friend of the site Bill Van Ryn has already written an incredibly well-written appreciation of this one. But hey — I made it through the whole Joe Bob Briggs marathon and am trying to share my thoughts with you. So please indulge me. Thank you.

The film starts with Rose and her boyfriend Hart getting into an accident in the remote countryside. With no other option, they are sent to the Keloid Clinic for Plastic Surgery, with Hart suffering only a broken hand, separated shoulder and a concussion. Rose, however, is barely alive, needing several operations and skin grafts from being burned. Dr. Dan Keloid decides to try something new: he uses “morphogenetically neutral grafts” to heal her damaged tissue, hoping that it will heal on its own. A month later, Hart is ready to go home, but she remains in a coma.

Sometime later — time isn’t really of the essence in this nightmare world — Rose awakens screaming. When Lloyd, another patient in the clinic, comes to help her, she somehow cuts him. He doesn’t remember how it happened, but his blood no longer clots and he can no longer feel pain. And Rose? Well, now she has a wound in her armpit that looks sexual — male and female at the same time. Shades of God Told Me To?

Now, Rose can only subsist on human blood, which she discovers after cow’s blood causes her to puke. A farmer watches and tries to rape her, but she is the predator now, soon devouring him and turning him into a zombie-like monster.

All hell soon breaks loose — Lloyd attacks a taxi driver after escaping from the clinic, killing them both. Dr. Keloid attacks everyone within his own clinic. Rose tries to get Hart to save her, but escapes on her own, infecting people all along the way.

Soon, Quebec is a nightmare city, with maniacs using jackhammers to tear people from cars, Santa Claus getting shot and a shoot to kill martial law policy being enacted on anyone showing signs of the virus.

Hart tries to reason with Rose — she is the cause of all of this and needs to be stopped. Of course, things can’t work out well. The world of Soylent Green has become near truth — there are so many dead people, garbage trucks are the only solution.

Cronenberg wanted to cast Sissy Spacek in the lead, but her accent didn’t work for the film’s producers. He heard from Ivan  Reitman, the executive producer, that adult film star Marilyn Chambers was looking for a mainstream role. Her being in the film would help sell it and she put in plenty of work, so Cronenberg was happy with the results. In fact, he had never seen the movie that made her famous, Behind the Green Door.

Chambers was quite literally a pure Ivory Soap girl — appearing on a box of that cleaning product as a young mother with the tag “99 & 44/100% pure.” Her appearing in the Mitchell Brothers’ film — released at the height of post-Deep Throat porn chic, when adult films entered mainsteam consciousness — was a sensation. It didn’t hurt that she was also the first white women in a major adult film to have a scene with a black man, Johnnie Keyes.

Chambers was in the midst of trying a singing career — her song “Benihana” can be heard in this film — and she was married to Chuck Traynor, ex-husband of Linda Lovelace. You could write a novel about the mania of that dude.

That said — for being a sex queen, Chambers comes off as cold in this film. That’s probably Cronenberg’s goal, to subvert notions. Even his heroes are no heroes. No one can stop what is set in motion and everyone is ineffectual. Such is the Cronenberg universe.

One thing I’ve always wondered — why did they spoil the ending of this film in the original poster?

If you want to see Rabid, you can grab the Shout! Factory reissue. Or turn in to Shudder, who has versions with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

There isn’t a better slasher film tagline than “By sword, by pick, by axe, bye bye.” So how does the movie that it’s promoting live up to it?

Young Ed Jr. is cleaning his dad’s guns as a birthday surprise and accidentally shoots his mother. Big Ed never forgives him. So of course, when Ed Jr. and his friends are looking for a fun activity for fall break — is there even such a thing? — they follow him to close up his dad’s beach condo for the winter.

When they get there, they find Big Ed passed out drunk, dreaming of killing his son. So of course, they stick around — as you do. Mike and Linda go skinny dipping, which allows Big Ed to drown the girl and kill the boy with an outboard motor. Then he chops up a cop with an axe. And he’s just getting started!

There’s Ralph, who gives stabbed in the throat with a pitchfork. Sue, who gets stabbed in the crotch with a hook and decapitated. But Ed Jr. and Pam succeed in figuring out the killer and knocking him out — that is, until he attacks them by trying to get through the roof of their car. Pam responds by cutting Big Ed in half with the car, but he’s still strong enough to kill a cop by chopping his leg off before laughing until he dies.

Then, the movie plays a song called “Fall Break,” which is the original title of the film. It’s a happy go lucky song that stands in stark contrast to the exercise in goofy dialogue and bloody gore we’ve just witnessed. Sure, this isn’t a great movie, but it’s entertaining as hell, packed with some really brutal kills. It was directed by one and done director Buddy Cooper and released unrated, as it would have had an X rating for all the gore — so know that going in.

You can grab The Mutilator in its newly released Arrow Video format at Diabolik DVD or watch the film on Amazon Prime.

According to It Came from the 80s!: Interviews with 124 Cult Filmmakers, Tourist Trap was originally going to be directed by John Carpenter. However, co-writer J. Larry Carroll was unhappy with how much he wanted, so he nominated his writing partner David Schmoeller (Puppetmaster and the movie that led to Please Kill Mr. Kinski, Crawlspace) to direct. Along the way, they brought in Charles Band to produce and he demanded that there be telekinesis in the movie. Why? Who knows!

Eileen (Robin Sherwood, Death Wish II), Woody, Becky (Tanya Roberts, The Beastmaster), Jerry and Molly are traveling crosscountry when Woody’s car breaks down. He enters a deserted gas station but is soon killed by a metal pipe thrown by a mannequin that comes to life. This scene is frightening in its shuddery intensity and it’s not the half of the wildness that this film is ready to attack you with.

As the rest of the gang arrive, they decide to go skinny dipping — as you do. That’s when they meet Mr. Salusen (Chuck Connors, TV’s The Rifleman and one of only 12 athletes in the history of American professional sports to have played both Major League Baseball and in the National Basketball Association), who matter of factly chats them up while they’re all nude.

Soon, the tourist trap lives up to its name, with mannequins coming to life, a man with a mask chasing everyone and someone yelling, “We’re having a party! Your world is dark.” Yes, Tourist Trap is a veritably insane film, one that departs nearly instantly from anything approaching reality. There’s talk of twin brothers, the modern world destroying old fashioned businesses and oh yeah — people being turned into wax figures.

The strangest part is that Slausen is able to make the dead alive and the alive dead, sometimes within the same scene. And somehow, this film was given a PG rating. Seriously — this is one of the darkest, most depraved PG films I’ve seen since, well, The Baby. There’s never been a movie like this one, before or since, and that’s a shame. But it’s also a big reason for you to watch this.

You can catch this on Shudder with and without Joe Bob Briggs commentary.

“History is written by winners, baby. So let’s make a little of our own tonight. If you’re thinkin’ my idea of fun is a drag, then you’ve never been to paradise. Do my kisses burn? Do they take your breath? You’ve got a lesson to learn, now. I’m the kiss of death.”

There was a time in the mid-90’s when My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult was showing up in movies all over the place. Hey look — that’s them playing “After the Flesh” in The Crow! Oh wow, they’re on the soundtrack of Showgirls! That’s “Hit & Run Holiday” in The Flintstones! Heck, they’re even on the soundtrack of BASEketball! And they’re all over Cool World, too.

Between “The Devil Does Drugs”, “Holli’s Groove”, “Sex on Wheelz”, “Her Sassy Kiss” and “Sedusa,” TKK makes up a good chunk of this film, which is kinda like the band we’re talking about — a mix of the past, the imagined future, sex, violence, drugs and danger.

Cool World is the first movie Ralph Bakshi made after Fire and Ice. He’d been developing plenty of films, including an adaption of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and an animal version of Sherlock Holmes. He also turned down directing Something Wicked This Way Comes and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which he passed on to Ridley Scott who turned it into Blade Runner. After an attempt to film J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, he actually got the opportunity to speak to the mysterious author, who told him that the novel was unfilmable. This led to Bakshi’s brief retirement (he still ended up working with Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi on the Rolling Stone’s “Harlem Shuffle” video and TV’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures) before getting excited about Cool World.

In its original pitch, a cartoon and human give birth to a hybrid child who visits the real world to find and kill the father who abandoned him. Bakshi had longed to create a film that looked like a living, breathing painting that people could physically walk through. Designer Barry Jackson helped bring these worlds to life, which were created as gigantic paintings and the animation was to look like a mix of Fleischer Studios and Terrytoons.

Yet even as the expensive sets were being built, Paramount producer Frank Mancuso Jr. secretly had a new screenplay written and demanded that Bakshi direct the film, under threat of lawsuit (Bakshi punching him in the face may have had something to do with that). Even casting was changed, with Holli Would’s role switching from Drew Barrymore to Kim Basinger.

It got to the point that even Basinger was rewriting the script, because she wanted to show it to sick kids in hospitals. As for Bakshi, he just told his animators to do whatever they thought was funny.

So what ended up on screen?

Las Vegas, 1945. World War II vet Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) takes his mother on a motorcycle ride that ends in tragedy when a drunk driver hits them. He retreats to an animated alternate dimension called “Cool World” to deal with the loss.

Cut to 1992. Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) might have killed his wife after catching her in bed with her lover, but he’s also created a comic book called Cool World. In truth, he’s really just tapping into the other world. And inside that world, Holli Would (Kim Basinger) has kept trying to visit the real world but is continually denied by Frank, who is now a detective that keeps people from crossing over between dimensions.

Once he gets out of jail, Jack finds his way back to Cool World and meets up with Holli and Frank. Frank warns him that this world has existed way before he was even alive and that for years, noids from the human world have tried to have sex with doodles, or Cool World inhabitants. It’s never really stated, but something horrible will happen if this occurs.

Holli, of course, seduces Jack and becomes a human. This is in direct contrast to Frank, who has a rough relationship with a doodle named Lonette. His partner, Nails, doesn’t tell him about Holli’s crime so that Frank can try and patch up his latest fight with his girl. Unfortunately, Holli murders him and crosses over to our world.

Holli goes wild in the real world, performing onstage with Frank Sinatra Jr. and consuming every vice she can get her hands on. Yet she and Jack are now stuck between worlds unless they find the Spike of Power, a magic object that a doodle in the real world has left behind. She unleashes Cool World on our world, but Jack succeeds in stopping her. Holli kills Frank, but because she was a doodle in our world — who decides on these laws? — he can now be reborn as a doodle in Cool World, to the delight of his girlfriend. Plus, Holli and Jack end up as a toon couple.

Cool World feels like it wants to be an adult Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which was how it was sold. They don’t explain much, but I feel like Cool World is where the imagination of our world ends up living (as symbolized by the sketches that show up out of nowhere). It feels like there is plenty of potential, but knowing what we know today, studio interference took the heart and soul out of the film.

Interestingly, Paramount Pictures created a publicity uproar by placing a huge cut-out of Holli Would on the D of the Hollywood sign. All they had to do was make a donation of $27,000 to the sign’s maintenance fund, another $27,000 to the Rebuild L.A. fund and the salary for two park rangers to guard the sign. Local residents were enraged, however, and demanded that the ad be taken down.

Back to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Even if you don’t enjoy the film, you’ll probably love the soundtrack. It also boasts songs by David Bowie, Thompson Twins, Electronic, The Future Sound of London, Ministry, The Cult, Moby, Brian Eno and others. It’s totally a time capsule of 1992 and worth listening to.

Want to watch Cool World? You can find it on Hulu and Amazon Prime.

There are two movies named Frightmare. Both are enjoyable on their own merits, despite the fact that Prism re-released the 1974 film as a sequel to the 1983 one, which makes no sense. Whether you choose an older British cannibal or a movie star who seems to defy death, both films are quite entertaining. Consider the following the “tale of the tape” to determine which one best matches your filmgoing fancy!

This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum issue 11. Grab your copy here.

Lucy Bellerose has come to the Loire Valley in France on vacation but has ended up inheriting a chateau that’s inspired all manner of local legends and fears. What happens when a girl addicted to social media ends up confronting the unknown?

If we learned anything from Dan Brown ripping off Holy Blood, Holy Grail — or even better, the documentary The Otherworld — France is a crazy place, particularly the areas around Rennes-le-Château. This film concerns one such ancient place that has a past that the townspeople have been whispering about for some time.

Lucy (Sam Valentine, Someone Marry Barry, Followed) is mostly concerned with herself and making videos for her social media audience. I’m an old man, so I don’t get the need to post videos and amass followers, but I tried to keep an open mind about our heroine (that said, she has a great monologue near the end about always cheering for the bad guy, making out with boys in cemeteries and wanting to see dead bodies in funerals).

The castle she’s staying in has guests that she is to never meet or speak to, as well as some crazy ones that she has to deal with, like The Vicar of Borley (writer/director Jude S. Walko), who details the rules of the house and presides over the funeral for her great uncle, and Mary the chambermaid, who nonchalantly cleans up after Lucy, even when her sheets are covered with blood.

In the midst of all of this strides Dean Cain — of all people! — as Abel Baddon, an insurance salesman who knows way more about the castle, the area and Lucy than he is letting on. Just checking out his IMDB page shows that Dean’s a working actor, appearing in a variety of films and genres. And if you’ve learned anything from my reviews, I do so love it when a major actor shows up in a genre film.

Lucy starts to fall in love with Jean-Pierre (Dylan Kellogg), a local boy who helps her explore the grounds and history of the gigantic home that she’s inherited. Of course, that means exploring rooms that she isn’t allowed to enter and following a flower girl covered in blood. And her inheritance is more than just having a great house filled with awesome lighting to take selfies in.

The locations for this film are amazing — the house and surrounding area offer so many vistas for the eerie nature of this film. There are plenty of drone shots, but you have to forgive the urge to feature so many views of the scenery.

I’ll give the team behind this film credit — the movie looks great and the music is stellar. There are some issues with the story — I never felt concerned about the heroine’s fate as I never grew to like her. But I really enjoyed seeing Dean Cain play a demonic character. I mean, the guy had to have sold his soul to get to keep his looks all these years. And when you factor in that he’s the dude who took Brooke Shields’ virginity, he definitely has some pact with some demon somewhere, right? And hey, any film that has the balls to end with such a shoutout to The Shining has to be admired (or admonished, but I’m writing this at 3 AM, so let’s go with admired).

Contrasting the great performances from Valentine, Walko and Cain are some rough ones from people playing townsfolk. It’s almost enough to take you out of the film. And hey — there’s a bat attack and lots of corridors filled with black cloaked monks near the end, which are always buzzwords to get me into a film. I mean, how many movies are you going to get where Dean Cain force feeds communion to a girl? Here’s your answer: exactly one.

The Incantation is available July 31 in iTunes, Amazon Prime, Redbox and pretty much everywhere you stream or watch films.

Disclaimer: I was sent an advance screening of this film by writer/director/actor Jude A. Walko. We appreciate the early look and in no way did getting the film in this way influence our review.

Eddie and his family have just inherited a frightening house that was built over the doorway to Hell. And then Eddie finds out that he has another inheritance: the title of the evil master of the world. What would you do if you finally had all the power you ever craved?

A sequel in name, if not story, to Saturday the 14th, the Baxter family is the focus here. You have the dad, Frank (Avery Schreiber, who was in a ton of Doritos commercials, but he was also Russian coach Markov in The Concorde…Airport ’79, one of my all-time favorite horrible movies), mom Kate (Patty McCormack…do I have to tell you that she was in The Bad Seed?), sister Julie (Julianne McNamara, who before she started acting won the U.S. women’s first individual event gold medal in Olympic history for the uneven bars) and the aforementioned Eddie (Jason Presson, The Lady in White). Oh yeah! I forgot that grandpa lives there and he’s played by Ray Walston.

The Evil One wants Eddie to embrace his power and introduces him to an entire family of monsters, including Michael Berryman as a mummy! Oh yeah, I almost forgot! Grandpa’s pal Leonard is played by Phil Leads, the character actor who played Doctor Shand in Rosemary’s Baby.

The end of the movie is a cavalcade of past Corman productions, including the guitar and part of the body of Joey Ramone. This is a mess, a movie that was cobbled together to cash in on the video store success of the original. Yet I find parts of it charming and perhaps I was in the right mood to enjoy it when I did.

If you want to see it for yourself, you can get the DVD for a decent price on Amazon.

How does a slasher killer achieve his or her fame? What are the steps and rituals that must be adhered to? Why would they want to enter into a life of killing and being killed? And once you’ve been selected as their Final Girl, is there any way to break the cycle? These questions and more are raised and answered by this mockumentary.

Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals, Home Alone) and her two cameramen, Doug and Todd, have been allowed to document Leslie Vernon as he prepares to become a slasher killer. He already has his backstory prepared — he’s based it on an urban legend of a boy who killed his family and was drowned by an angry mob.

Vernon isn’t even his real last name — it’s Mancuso in a nod to Friday the 13th producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. He doesn’t have any powers. But what he does have is a devotion to the methods, preparation and rituals needed to be a perfect killer.

At first, the crew is totally behind Leslie, but as time goes on, the idea of luring teenagers to an abandoned house and killing them one by one seems morally wrong. They try to talk him out of it, but he will not be swayed. Kelly, his Final Girl, will define herself by facing him. However, she is anything but a virgin and has none of the qualities that make up this character archetype. And even more surprisingly, she quickly is killed.

That’s when Taylor realizes that she was the Final Girl all along and is as trapped by the plot as Leslie is. She is the last one alive and must kill him in the exact way he had planned, burning down a shed to stop him. However, throughout the film, we also learned that Leslie had been practicing playing dead and had flame-retardant gel all over his clothes. Is it a surprise when he sits up, very much alive on an autopsy table over the end credits?

There are so many Easter Eggs in the film, from the car Sam Raimi uses in every one of his films to the Rabbit in Red Lounge, a Lament Configuration box, the song “Midnight, The Stars and You” from The Shining and the jump rope girls from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Genre vets Zelda Rubenstein and Kane Hodder turn up, as does Robert Englund as Doc Halloran, who is very much based on Dr. Loomis from Halloween. And Scott Wilson (The Ninth Configuration) plays Eugene, Leslie’s mentor, who is really Billy from Black Christmas.

It took me some time to get into this film. Leslie comes off like such a ridiculous Ryan Reynolds type at first and it seemed too goofy, but I’m glad I stuck with it, as it becomes a pretty enjoyable movie by the end.

There’s been some interest in this film in the ten years or so since its release. DeConte Collectibles put out a collector’s action figure that’s available at Amok Time, IMDB lists a sequel in production entitled B4TM and Scream Factory released it on blu-ray at the end of March 2018. You can also stream it for free on Amazon Prime or catch it on Shudder.

Sunn Classic Entertainment may have made Grizzly Adams, but they were really known for four-walling theaters, renting them and making all of the money. The films they showed tend toward conspiracy theories, starting all the way back in 1975 with The Outer Space Connection and continuing with In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Lincoln Conspiracy, In Search of Historic Jesus, The Bermuda Triangle and so many more. They expanded to producing films with Tim Conway, The Boogens, Cujo and this one, based on the late 1970’s fascination with our government’s alien cover-ups (this was a big part of the end of every episode of Battlestar Galactica – “U.S. Air Force’s 1969 Project Blue Book findings that UFOs are not proven to exist and are not a threat to national security.”).

Suffice to say that I was constantly scared shitless of U.F.O.’s throughout 1979, 1980 and into 1981. A big part of that fear was this TV commercial:

There was even UFO Candy that listed out different sighted UFO’s on the inside. Yes, this fat kid got sugared up and then read all about alien abductions and then tried to go to bed. No dice.

Hangar 18 is all about the government covering up an incident where an astronaut is killed on the Space Shuttle, which is witnessed by two other astronauts: Steve Bancroft (Gary Collins, whose show The Sixth Sense was syndicated alongside the superior — and best show perhaps of all time — Night Gallery. Plus, he hosted beauty pageants and talk shows for years) and Lew Price (James Hampton, The Longest Yard).

As the government works to keep things under wraps, the men make their way to Arizona. Price is killed, but Bancroft finally makes it to the Air Force base that has the damaged UFO. On board were two pilots and a woman in suspended animation. Plus, the ships have ancient languages on them and a record of all of the surveillance the craft has done on our planet. Even scarier — this may have been a shuttle and a larger ship is out there.

Darren McGavin shows up, as does Robert Vaughn as Gordon Cain, a government agent who is out to erase all of the evidence. He does so with a remote controlled jet, but Bancroft and a few scientists survive, as they were inside the UFO. This is conveyed via voiceover, which is the least dramatic way to end a movie (there’s also an alternate version called Invasion Force with a different ending).

Interestingly enough, Hangar 18 was one of the very few American films to be theatrically shown in the Soviet Union. As one of the only science fiction and action films shown at that time, it was incredibly popular amongst Russian youth. If they only knew what they were watching was basically a TV movie with little to no excitement!

As for me, knowing that the real Hangar 18 was at Wright-Patterson (originally Wright Field) AFB in Dayton, Ohio — close to my Pittsburgh home — gave me even more sleepless nights and dreams of being taken away to my true home planet.

How much do we love this movie? We revisited it again as part of our December 2019 Star Wars tribute week.