Jay Mandao (Scott Dunn) may not be rich, but he’s living comfortably off of his late father’s cereal royalties. He just wants to be left alone, but has to take care of his adult nephew-in-law, Jackson (Sean McBride). Now with Halloween close, Jay has been suffering from strange dreams and learning that he can project his spirit astrally. And then, the ghost of a not dead yet friend lets Jay know that he has moments to live, as a vampiric ex-girlfriend is ready to murder him.
I really found myself liking this movie. While many have compared it to Shaun of the Dead, I found it to be much closer to John Dies at the End. That’s not a bad thing. There’s a fun repartee between the main characters and I really enjoyed their cab driver, Fer (Gina Gomez).
Written and directed by star Scott Dunn, this movie practically flies by. At times, it feels like you’ve been dropped into a story in the middle of it already happening. And then it feels like you’ve been friends with these characters for a long time.
Another bonus is that despite its budget, unlike so many direct to streaming releases, it doesn’t look cheap.
Mandao of the Dead is available exclusively on Amazon Instant Video and will be released on iTunes in February 2019. A sequel, Mandao of the Damned, is in production.
DISCLAIMER: The production team sent me a copy of this film, but it didn’t impact my review.
The Hammer Sisters are the kind of tough Southern girls that deal with their daddy’s murder by taking over his moonshine business, grabbing some weapons and being way tougher than any of the men they battle. Is that enough to get you to watch this movie?
What if I told you that it was directed by the same man who brought us The Evil, The Side Hackers and the movie based on the song Take This Job and Shove It?
Not yet? How does John Saxon playing a Southern stock car racer and moonshine runner sound? Not yet?
How about Susan Howard, former Dallas actress turned 700 Club host and NRA supporter?
William Conrad? Jeff Corey? Len “Uncle Leo” Lasser? Maurine “Marcia Brady” McCormick? Still not sold?
I get it. John Saxon was enough for me. But then I thought, I bet this movie has Claudia Jennings in it. And I was right. And that’s all it took.
What was it about American pop culture that took hicksploitation from the drive-in to the mainstream? I remember it myself — everyone had a CB radio, we all turned in to The Dukes of Hazzard and watched Smokey and the Bandit on HBO. Heck, I even had a silver NASCAR jacket that made me look like a 5-year-old pit crew member.
From the very first moment that John Saxon appears on screen and does his best version of a Southern accent, I was thoroughly entertained by this silly trifle of a film. It’s a Roger Corman 1970’s drive-in movie, so you’re going to get plenty of cars getting smashed up, scummy bad guys and “100 proof women” like Candice Rialson (Chatterbox, Pets).
Sometimes, a movie will blow your mind in a way that you may never recover. These are ten of our favorites, the ones where we just wonder how they got made, how people reacted to them and how we can convince people to watch them.
1. Son of Dracula: Combine Harry Nilsson performance scenes with a British horror film directed by Freddie Francis and add in some Ringo Starr as Merlin the Magician. This movie didn’t just fade from theaters, it practically disappeared like a vampire at first dawn. The sheer fact that it was made has made me question reality for years.
2. Bizarre: Drink this cocktail in. Start with an Amicus-style portmanteau film. Add Williams Burroughs style cut-up technique. Sprinkle liberally with Page 3 girls. Now, add a mummy as the narrator. This one will melt whatever you have left of your brain, trust me.
3. The Visitor: I’m still trying to unpack this movie and I’ve watched it more than ten times. Let me try again: a gang of bald children from space try to make an evil little girl turn good while her stepfather tries to ensure that she remains evil, all so his basketball team can win the championship. Also, Shelly Winters shows up. And Franco Nero looks like Jesus. There is also a lot of dancing.
4. Pin: Canadians are crazy. Polite, but crazy. Also, when they die, they leave behind anatomy dummies to raise their children. I can’t even do justice to the sheer level of lunacy that this movie contains.
5. Suicide Cult/The Astrologer: This is probably the only film that you’ll ever see that concerns a government agency tracking the biorhythms of the Antichrist and the new Virgin Mary. It is also both immensely exciting and incredibly boring, all at the same time, a rare feat in filmmaking.
6. Harlequin: This is the film that answers the question, “What if someone remade the story of Rasputin in modern day Australia but instead of looking like a hairy bear, Rasputin looked and dressed like David Bowie?”
7. American Tiger: Olympic gold medalist Mitch Gaylord gets mixed up in a battle between a Chinese sorceress and a faith healing televangelist played by Donald Pleasance who is really a warthog, all directed by Sergio Martino. There’s a shower sex scene where the hero doesn’t take off his jeans. If you aren’t racing to find this movie after that last sentence, you can leave this site right now and never come back.
8. If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?: Exploitation director Ron Ormond survived two brushes with the afterlife and then decided to stop selling sin and start saving people from its wages, along with the biggest Commie hater of all time, Estus Pirkle. This movie is not for the weak, as it depicts what WILL happen when Communists overrun our country, machine gunning Baptists in the street and chopping off the heads of children with thick Southern accents. Rating: ten billion stars out of five.
9. Things: You know how in HP Lovecraft stories, strange colours out of shape descend from space and cursed books drive anyone that read them insane? Those little fairy tales were just warm ups to what will happen when you watch this movie, perhaps the most nonsensical barrage of nothing that will ever obsess you. You think The Room is fucked up? Take off your skinny jeans and grow your Hitler youth haircut out, hipster. You’re about to get mindfucked by the best there is.
10. Zardoz: How do you follow up being James Bond, one of the most recognizable roles in the world? How do you follow up directing Deliverance? If you’re Sean Connery and John Boorman, you make a post-apocalyptic movie all about…fuck, I have no idea how to explain it. There are allusions to The Wizard of Oz, two races warring ala the future in The Time Machine, a flying head and Sir Connery wearing a red thong that he later exchanges for a wedding dress.
These are the films that almost made the list:
Exorcist II: The Heretic: John Boorman almost got on here twice with this follow-up, which puts Regan in a clinic for children while teaming her up with Richard Burton as they struggle against African demons. Audiences had to have been incensed as they hoped for more of the original and were greeted with this utterly baffling — and yet somehow awesome — film.
Cathy’s Curse: You come into this movie expecting that it’s going to rip off The Exorcist and The Omen. Once you see a man crash a car to avoid a rabbit in the first thirty seconds, you realize that you’re now in the strangest place of all: Canada, where people behave in ways that seem human but are as alien as a Man in Black trying to eat with his ear.
The Redeemer: Son of Satan:Somehow both a slasher made years before Halloween and an occult freakout complete with possessed thumbs, this film owes more to surrealism than horror.
Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals: I pity anyone that rented this in the 1980’s thinking that they were about to watch a Sylvia Kristel sex romp and were greeted with this Joe D’Amato directed assault on sensibilities and good taste. This movie upset David Cronenberg so badly that it inspired Videodrome. I’ve seen a lot of movies, but this is the only one where the main character has lesbian sex with a cannibal.
Lemora, A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural: If any child ever watched this, they’d be scarred for life. A choirgirl is taken to speak to her dying father before meeting her real mother and an entire town of vampires. Yep. You just read that.
There are so many strange films I’ve sought out that I might just have to make a second list. What are some of the movies that have screwed with your head?
If you want to hate Christmas with all the white hot fury of The Grinch crossed with someone who just got the jelly of the month club from Mr. Shirley, you should really descend into the horrific abyss that is the Christmas horror section on Amazon Prime. This movie is but one of the many bad decisions that you can make.
In the year 3978, global warming has made a desert of the North Pole, leading to Cookie, the last elf, to share his holiday story.
Santa and Mrs. Claus go to war with some angry skeletons who didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas. Then, a bunch of grey and green aliens get involved, headling Santa’s multiple injuries and an abominable snowman decides to eat jolly St. Nick. Every single person wears a mask, so they could just ADR the entire movie and not have to match up dialogue.
I learned from IMDB that the script for this movie never made it to a second draft. In fact, it started filming before the first draft was even finished. You can tell.
Blame falls on Alex Maxson, whose IMDB page tells is packed with a jack of all trades like resume. Supposedly he’s going to be the right head of King Ghidorah in the new Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Good for him — but man, right now I want to beat the Festivus pole and air so many grievances as a result of this movie. Luckily, it was free with my Amazon Prime membership. If I had to pay for this, I may have lost my faith in Christmas.
If you want to deal with this, it’s on Amazon Prime. There are three different Christmas with Cookie movies, including two sequels, The Watching and Locked Away. Even someone like me, that adores Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei, could not bring himself to watch any more than this first film. Perhaps you are braver than me.
Sometimes, you encounter things on Amazon Prime that you feel were made for just you. Take this 1988 forgotten horror movie, which stars Linda Blair and Tab Hunter as family members at war with a gang of street punks while something even more terrifying waits in the wings.
An insane woman tells a deformed man that he has two choices: to kill her or make love to her. He then bites her neck, murdering her as we soon learn that this is all a movie within a movie, the latest from horror special effects master Orville Kruger (Guy Stockwell, younger brother of Dean).
After finishing the movie, Orville plans a family get-together in the San Bernardino Mountains with his wife, daughter Lisa (Blair, the main reason I picked this movie) and her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes, Angel herself!). His brother, Rod (Hunter), will join them later. But before any of hat can happen, Lisa and Kathy run afoul of a gang of punks led by Scratch, who are coming back from Nevada where their last home invasion led to them killing off an entire family.
Lisa asks her mom her Patrick is. Her mother cryptically mentions that he has good and bad days, then later mentions feeding him.
The movie then gives us jump scares galore, as Orville frightens Kathy with a sea creature and a series of his props. He wonders if she’s able to tell the difference between his effects and reality.
Lisa and Kelly go to bed, only to awaken to the punk gang arriving and holding everyone hostage with threats of rape, torture and worse. They’re convinced that Orville is hiding a fortune in the house, but when he tells them he doesn’t have one, they beat him to death. We notice two eyes watching everything.
The girls escape, but Lisa’s mother isn’t so lucky. The gang catches up to Kathy, who is stabbed by a female member of the gang that thinks that she’s in La Venganza de los Punks. Lisa jumps through a window to escape, running through the snow, as the deformed man appears, takes out most of the gang and saves Lisa.
The police soon arrive, as does Uncle Rod. They start looking for suspects and come upon the deformed man attacking Scratch and Shelley, the last two punks. The police shoot first and don’t really ask questions later, killing the mystery man and taking the gang members into custody.
This is where — in a normal film — we’d be close to the conclusion. But not here. Nope. Lisa has a blood clot and a 50/50 chance of survival, but ends up on the bad half and dies. Since she was the only witness, Scratch and Shelley are due to be released. That’s when Uncle Rod explains that the deformed man was named Patrick (is he Australian?) and that he was an abandoned child that the Krugers raised as their own son.
Rod takes the law into his own hand, forcing Scratch and Shelley back to the Kruger home and explaining how he has the same facial deformities as Patrick because (dramatic music) he’s his father! This Tourist Trap twist kind of makes sense, if only for the meta reason that Chuck Connors and Tab Hunter were both cowboy actors who did horror movies at the end of their careers. It turns out that Orville created the special effects that allowed him to live in normal society. But now, even Rod’s horrifying face is beautiful compared to what he’s done to the two villains.
You’d think that this twist is also where the film ends, but nope. Yes, in a movie of pre-meta meta, this has all been another movie. But that’s still not the end. No, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman are in the projectionist booth, arguing over the film. The lycanthrope states his case that the film doesn’t accurately depict monsters by smashing the projector while Dr. Frankenstein’s greatest creation gives this one 8 out of 10. They agree to disagree and attack everyone watching the movie because after all, they’re the best.
I’m not certain that the makers of this movie had any clue what they were doing at any moment in its production, but that’s OK. The end result is so totally strange that you can’t help but adore just how off the rails it goes by the end. There’s no way you can sum this one up in a sentence. It really is a movie that not only jumps mood but also main characters and even genre by the end of the film.
Paul Andolina fromWrestling with Film is back with another seasonally appropriate horror film. I really appreciate him sharing all of these with you!
From this point on it will not feel like the Christmas season without writing at least one review here at B&S About Movies every year. It’s become one of my favorite things to do in December. You may remember my review for Mother Krampus last year, I wasn’t too fond of it and still have not revisited it like I had planned to. I did check out the sequel Mother Krampus 2: Slay Ride this year though!
A sequel only in name, the film is about 4 young women, who almost having completed their community service, visit the house of a lovely old woman. Trouble is she isn’t the nice lady they first thought her to be.
You really have to stick with this movie as the first 15 minutes or so are not the most engrossing moments of the film for me. Those scenes are essential to plot development, though, and do not feel like they need to be cut out. After killing the family occupying the house, a masked intruder takes the place of the owner, Mrs. Smith. The faux Mrs. Smith is charming at first but it is always clear that she is an unsettling person. My favorite character of the film was Athena Slay, a drag queen with one of the sassiest attitudes ever. She is hilarious and really brings a little extra fun to the table.
The film is festive enough for me to get the feeling that this takes place around Christmas and though there is no snow it isn’t an issue in my opinion as not everywhere gets snow in December. This movie was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio possibly sometime in March if I had to guess, as a storefront shown in the movie has a Happy St. Patrick’s Day in the window. That’s just me nitpicking, though.
This movie had my attention in its grasp after the beginning plot set up and the characters made me care about their struggle. I feel that many slashers fail to accomplish this and just give us characters we want to see offed in violent ways. The kills are pretty good and the special effects were quite effective for me. Seeing the gradual decline of the antagonist after she welcomes these 4 ladies into her home ensured that I wanted to see what was going to happen to them.
This movie also has a connection to the world of professional wrestling as a bouncer in the film is played by former wrestler, Benny Benzino.
If you have 96 minutes to spare and want to check out a slasher film, you could do worse than Mother Krampus 2: Slay Ride. Don’t let its title mislead you as this has nothing to do with Mother Krampus which could be a good or bad thing depending on your opinion of that film. Happy holidays!
While on a hike to find a secret lagoon, a group of friends must pass through an evil looking cornfield. Little do they know that the owner of that cornfield turns any trespassers into living scarecrows that rot in his fields.
This film goes from teenagers on vacation to stoner comedy to backwoods slasher pretty quickly in its hour and twenty-five-minute running time. It’s the first film I’ve seen where an insane farmer sews peoples’ mouths shut and hangs them as living scarecrows that get their appendages bitten off by birds. So there’s that.
Directed and co-written by Stu Stone (Ronald Fisher from Donnie Darko), Scarecrows works best when it moves away from comedy and becomes pure horror. It has nothing to do with 1988’s Scarecrows other than its title. However, there are some decent practical FX and some pretty intense lighting and mood during the film’s torture scenes.
Scarecrows premieres on VOD December 11 and will be released on DVD February 1.
Disclaimer: We were sent a screener of this film, which has nothing to do with our review.
Five well-trained paramilitary operatives have stolen $3 million dollars from Camp Pendelton and taken two hostages: a pilot and his daughter. As they force them to fly them out of the country, one of them steals the cash and parachutes out into a dark and foggy field. That sets the stage for Scarecrows.
After landing the plane, the robbers and their hostages head for an abandoned house. Soon, we learn that it has a demonic past, with scarecrows that come to life and slaughter anyone that comes near — adding their dead bodies to their number for all eternity.
Director and writer William Wesley is U.S. Army vet who also worked on episodes of Monsters and the movie Route 666. Here, he’s put together a taunt and quick moving film packed with quick shocks of gore and scarecrow mayhem, along with a totally downbeat ending.
There was plenty of drama behind the scenes, too, as actor Ted Vernon hated the director, feeling that he had wasted the budget that he helped raise (over $300,000 worth!). When the film was halfway finished, Wesley asked for more money and was turned down, eventually getting the rest from the father of his girlfriend, who he was going to reward with an executive producer credit before Vernon choked him.
I kinda love this little film, packed with splatter and unlikeable characters. It’s certainly not boring and really could use more people knowing all about it.
You might think that movie night in the B&S About Movies household means a never-ending barrage of the dead rising from the grave, slasher killers wiping out the teenage populations of small towns and rivers of blood. And for the most part, you’d be right. But then you need to remember that the B in B&S stands for Becca and she runs the TV set during the hours that normal people are awake. That means when it comes time to pick what we watched tonight, Dumplin’ won out. And as she said, “You’re going to bitch every single moment that this starts, but you’ll probably be crying and say that it’s nice and cute when it’s all over.” She’s always right.
Based on the novel by Julie Murphy (you can see her in a cameo near the end of the film and she’s recently written a book called Puddin’ that follows the story of the supporting cast of this story) and directed by Anne Fletcher (who also directed Hot Pursuit, a movie we saw as the second feature at least five times at the drive-in throughout the summer of 2015) from a script by Kristin Hahn (who in her youth lived with star Jennifer Aniston and has a production company with her), Dumplin’ hits home. The story of a teenage girl trying to understand how to fit in with a world she doesn’t fit into who loves Dolly Parton may seem like the exact opposite of something that would reach me, but what you don’t know is that I grew up in a small town with one country station that played nearly all day long playlists of Ms. Parton. And despite my collection of black shirts and a patch ridden jacket, I’ve proudly stood in the front row, singing out loud to every song at Dolly shows.
Willowdean Dickson (Danielle Macdonald) was raised primarily by her Aunt Lucy while her mother Rosie (Aniston) relives her beauty queen past as a semi-celebrity in their small Texas hometown.
After the sudden death of her aunt, Willowdean has to deal with pageant season, a time of the year that she finds ridiculous. She convinces her best friend and fellow Dolly fan Ellen Dryver (Odeya Rush, Goosebumps) to enter the Miss Teen Bluebonnet Pageant as a protest. Willowdean isn’t the same body shape and size as her mother, so she’s fiercely against the beauty contest and willing to defend others, like shy Millie Michalchuk, who ends up coming out of her shell. Joining them in their “protest in heels” is Hannah Perez (Bex Taylor-Klaus, Hell Fest, TV’s The Killing), whose short hair looks and love of metal are in sharp contrast to every other girl.
Miss Teen Bluebonnet will test Willowdean’s friendship with Ellen, as well as strengthen her love of her lost aunt by meeting many of her drag queen friends, including Harold Perrineau from TV’s Lost and Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestant Ginger Minj. Willowdean also learns that even the cutest guy in school, Bo, might be able to see through society’s views on beauty to see who she is inside.
Sure, Dumplin’ is sentimental and at times schmaltzy, but it’s also a well-made and at times, pretty amusing film. It was also nice to see Kathy Najimy in the film (her husband Dan Finnerty is also in the movie as beauty contest host Eugene Reed). And who doesn’t love hearing a soundtrack packed with Dolly tunes, including a new one that she wrote just for the movie?
To answer any questions, yes, I did get a bit teary-eyed by the end of the film. I’m going to have to watch hours and hours of Italian splatter and obscure slasher movies to get my street cred back now, huh?
I always wonder what my limits are. Like, when is a movie so bad that even I will say, “This movie is horrible.” I thought that last year, when I watched Jack Frost, that I had hit the absolute nadir of my movie watching. And then, Jack Frost 2 showed up and I realized how wrong I was.
Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport, returning from the last film) has been struggling with returning to normal life after the last film. His wife, played by the returning Eileen Seeley, suggests a tropical vacation to get as far away from the winter and his constant fear of snowmen. Plus, his deputy and secretary (again returning are Chip Heller and Marsha Clark) are getting married, so they can kill two snowbirds with one stone.
Of course, the FBI screws everything up and brings Jack back from the dead. Now, he shares a psychic link because Sam’s blood is in the antifreeze that killed him back in the first film. Jack’s nose — a carrot — follows them to the tropical island of Colonel Hickering (Ray Cooney, who somehow doesn’t list this film on his Wikipedia page).
What ensues is everyone making fun of Sam for his constant fear of snowmen and a slasher film as Jack begins killing people, even taking their eyeballs out ala Fulci. Meanwhile, Agent Manners (not Stephen Mendel any more, but now played by David Allen Brooks) has survived being maimed by Jack and is here to protect the island.
What follows is pure ridiculousness. The rules of the last film no longer apply, as antifreeze no longer hurts Jack. He also has the power to give birth to baby snowmen that kill even more people. Sam panics and his wife takes over, realizing that Sam and Jack share the same vulnerabilities, including an allergy to bananas, which they use to kill Jack’s new family of baby snowmen.
Sam ends up getting himself together and kills Jack like he’s a giant shark: you guessed it, he blows him up real good. Meanwhile, everyone forgets that two of the main characters were locked in a freezer and they die. Yes, really. And a large carrot killing two sailors in the post-credit sequence hints at the sequel that was never made, where Jack would become Godzilla sized, entitled Jack Frost 3: The Last Coming.
That third movie will never come as Allport was killed by an avalanche. I don’t want to speculate on whether or not Jack Frost was involved.
Trying to decide which Jack Frost movie is better is kind of like trying to decide which family gathering at your ex-wife’s parents was better: the one where a child picked your cat up by the head and threw it down the steps or the one where you hid in the bathroom, alternatively crying and playing an old LCD blackjack game.
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