Director Ed Hunt brought us The Brain and Starship Invasions. But as the slasher boom continued, he combined The Bad Seed with the multiple murders that audiences were demanding. Jose Ferrer is along for the ride as a doctor and to add some Old Hollywood star power to the proceedings.

June 9, 1970. Southern California’s Meadowvale General Hospital sees two boys and a girl born during a solar eclipse. Certainly, this can’t be good.

Ten years later, a series of murders has been happening in town. Sheriff Brody comes to his daughter Debbie’s class and asks if any kids have seen a shovel or jump rope, but no one speaks up. Then we meet Debbie’s friends Curtis and Steven, who invite their teacher Ms. Davis (Susan Strasberg, the daughter of famous acting coach Lee and the originator of the main role in The Diary of Anne Frank; she’s also in Sweet Sixteen) to their birthday party.

The kids waste no time killing the lawman, trying to get him to trip on a skateboard before beating him with a baseball bat. Then, as they notice that a kid name Timmy is watching, they lure him to a junkyard and try to trap him in a fridge.

While he escapes, the kids go bonkers from here on out. Curtis shoots their teacher with the dead cop’s handgun. Then they graduate to using cars and vans as weapons.

How would you explain all of this to your kids? Timmy’s mom Joyce (Lori Lethin, The Prey, Return to Horror High) explains to him that Saturn was blocked when the three kids were born, which is the normal planet that controls how people treat one another.

Figuring that she’s figured out their scheme, the kids make Joyce look insane. And even worse, they kill Debbie’s older sister once she catches wise, too. This is where I should mention that Julie Brown — yes, the Earth Girls Are Easy Julie Brown — plays Beverly and she dances nude in a scene that was always in Celebrity Skin back before we had a thing called the internet.

I kind of love that Debbie is very much the Rhoda Penmark of this movie, always getting the boys to do her bidding and continually blaming them for everything. Even when these kids are caught, you get the feeling that they’re never going to learn how to behave. They’re going to become even worse murderers or go into politics.

Joe Penny from Riptide is also in this, as is Billy Jayne — who in addition to being in The Beastmaster, Superstition and Cujo is the half-brother of Scott “Bad Ronald” Jacoby — and Cyril O’Reilly, Tim from the Porky’s movies.

You can watch this for free from Tubi. Or grab the Arrow Video blu ray release.

Scott Spiegel is the great uniter of the 90’s film scene. When he first moved to Los Angeles, he shared a house with film directors Sam Raimi, the Coen Brothers and actresses Holly Hunter, Kathy Bates and Frances McDormand. Not content with that star-packed household, he later shared a house with Bob Murawski, the Grindhouse Releasing co-founder. This may be part of the explanation for how Sam Raimi came to use a shot from The Beyond, a film that Murawski helped bring to the US, in his first Spider-Man movie.

To top all of that off, in the early 90’s, Spiegel introduced Lawrence Bender to Quentin Tarantino. Together, they got Reservoir Dogs off the ground.

But before all that, Spiegel worked at the local grocery market across from Walnut Lake Elementary School back in Birmingham, Michigan. His teenage best friends? Oh, only Raimi and Bruce Campbell.

Drawing on that grocery experience — and based on an old Super-8 film he created called Night Crew — Spiegel and Bender would make this film. Paramount Home Video hyped up that Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi and Ted Raimi were the major stars, along with Renee Estevez. They’re all barely in it and Renee is the first — SPOILER WARNING — to die. Hell, the DVD art gives away the killer!

As a supermarket closes, the crew begins restocking the shelves. Craig and Jennifer are broken up, but they get in a fight. This upsets Linda (Estevez, who yes, is Charlie’s sister and was in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers), who hits the panic button. Craig is chased away, the cops are called and then the bomb gets dropped — the store is getting sold and they need to do an inventory before the store changes hands.

As the night goes on, person after person is killed. Is it Craig? Or can it really all be that simple?

This movie is packed with gore, courtesy of KNB. In fact, five minutes of it was cut for its eventual VHS release. And look out — the police officers are Alvy Moore and Tom Lester, who played Hank Kimball and Eb Dawson on Green Acres. Intruder then raises the bar even higher on cameos that only I would care about by having Emil Sitka, the fourth Stooge and the only man other than Harold Brauer to work with all six Stooges. He even says his famous line, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.” That same phrase appears on his tombstone.

Spiegel wanted the final shot go all the way down Jennifer’s throat and inside her body to her heart, where the film would stop on a freeze-frame of her heart as it stopped beating. I would have loved that!

The director has gone on to create films like Hostel: Part III, The Temple, From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, My Name Is Modesty and the completed yet never released Spring Break ’83.

You can watch this for free on Tubi. Or grab the uncut version from Synapse!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Andolina from Wrestling with Film is here to review a new found footage movie, as no one I know loves this genre more than him.

Scooter is a 2019 thriller about three Youtubers, Paul, Will, and Juan who run the channel The Three Amigoes. These three young men are known for having fun with the different challenges they take on in their videos. There newest challenge is that they are going to travel the 866 miles to New Orleans on motorized scooters. The scooters, however, can be no bigger than 50cc, about 5 horsepower. On their journey they see something they were not supposed to see and this challenge will end up being their last one.

I really enjoy films shot in the found footage and/or mockumentary style. Scooter combines the mockumentary and found footage to come up with a solid but flawed entry. The antics between the three young guys is a blast to watch even if Will can be super annoying. In fact I often wonder how they even made it to their 23rd episode with him being so obnoxious. Paul has a thing for mermaids and this is played up by taking a detour to a mermaid show where Will proceeds to have sex with the mermaid performer. This makes Paul angry for a period of time and Will and Juan keep jabbering on about Paul and Will being mermaid brothers.

When things finally go south while the three stop for a much needed rest at a campground, they witness a rape that turns to murder so fair warning, if you have issues with that type of thing. It is brief but it comes as a stark contrast to the light-heartedness seen within the first part of the film. Things get progressively worse for our protagonists from there.

My biggest gripe with the film it is that cameras are seemingly left in areas or already in areas that make no sense. If you are going to make your movie appear to be found footage or a mockumentary you need to have reasons for shots and a lot of them I felt were too unnatural to be included in the film.

They have a drone that follows them throughout the film but Juan does not know how to get it out of follow-me mode, this wouldn’t be an issue if the drone hadn’t have to been in follow-me mode to begin with to get their overhead shots in the early parts of their scooter trip. I spent most of my time worrying how the drone was even being piloted to begin with because I was unaware you could get a drone to follow you. I felt like a real dummy when I found out drones can be programmed to follow you by GPS.

I had fun with this movie but it also left me scratching my head at times, wondering how the film was compiled. I would have loved for this to have no credits to play up the fact that it was found footage but I know how hard that can be to pull off these days when you need to properly credit those working on your film. 

If you are interested in road-trips gone awry then this is the one for you. It’s a very brief film at about 72 minutes so it’s not much of a time commitment. I’d say give this one a watch when it sees its release.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.

Alvin Rakoff is a Canadian television, stage, and film director who has spent most of his career working in England. This is the lone horror film on a resume that includes more than a hundred television works. It’s certainly not the only horror film on the IMDB list for co-writer Jack Hill, who wrote and directed Spider Baby, as well as Switchblade Sisters, Foxy Brown, Sorceress and so many more.

Imagine if you will — a combination of a slasher and The Shining on a boat. That’s probably how this got sold, with a logline just like that.

Captain Ashland (George Kennedy, who as we all know will never turn down a role. Sadly, this is not his worse cruise ship film, as he’d save that honor for Uninvited, a film in which he battles a genetically altered housecat on a drug dealer’s boat) is on his final voyage around the Caribbean, a fact that makes him angry about life in general. His replacement, Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna) tries to connect with him, but it isn’t happening. Also: Marshall never got that old salty sailor memo about wives being bad luck on ships.

Before the movie even gets out of port, a black freighter appears and sinks the ship, leaving a small band of survivors in a rescue boat. Don’t get to know many of them all that well — they’re fodder for the slasher gods.

Beyond Marshall and the captain, there’s Marshall’s wife Margaret (Sally Ann Howes, who played Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Seriously, was Ian Fleming the most ridiculous, the most sexist or the most ridiculously sexist namer of female characters ever? I can almost see him sipping on tea and saying, “I’m going to name her Scrumptious. Truly Scrumptious.”) and kids, Robin and Ben. As the movie moves from scare to scare, Ben is truly the little engine that moves this death ship onward, all because he can’t stop peeing. Seriously — 90% of this movie is this kid looking for a place to piss and then getting lost and leading others to their doom.

There’s also a young officer named Nick (Nick Mancuso, following “The Danza” trope here; he’d go on to be in TV’s Stingray and play the improbably named Antichrist Franco Macalousso in an extension of the Left Behind franchise) and his girl Lori, as well as an older passenger named Mrs. Morgan and the ship’s comedian, Jackie (Saul Rubinek, who was in True Romance and SyFy’ Warehouse 13).

They all managed to find their way on to the black freighter — no, not the one from Watchmen — and instantly Jackie the funnyman is grabbed by a cable, held aloft and repeatedly dunked into the ocean until he’s swept away. Jackie didn’t seem like all that popular of a crewmember, because the attempts to rescue him are laughable in their half-heartedness.

In the midst of all these shenanigans, the captain meets the Nazi ghosts that run the ship and — shades of the aforementioned Kubrick film which came out the very same year — he becomes the new captain of the ship, doing fun things like menacing children and strangling old women. He even manages to find an old Kriegsmarine officer’s uniform, a fact that no one really finds as troublesome as it should be.

This being a slasher, we’re going to need some nudity and plenty of blood. A scene where Lori takes a shower — I love this character choice, made in the midst of a once-trusted captain going full on bonkers and Nazi ghosts singing in the hallways — that turns into a bloody deluge before she’s casually tossed into the drink. She’s soon followed by her lover, Nick.

Of course, the family gets away and we’re treated to the image of George Kennedy getting ground up in the gears of the ship. Speaking of ship parts — if you play the drinking game that involves having a drink every time b-roll footage of the ship’s engine room is shown, you’ll die faster than any character in this movie. Some of that footage — including the actual flooding of the ship — comes from 1960’s The Last Voyage. There’s also some footage cribbed from the 1970’s remake of King Kong!

The actual death ship used for this movie broke down in the first hour of filming, so any of the shots of it cruising through the ocean are all trick photography. That’s probably the best thing I can say about this movie, other than after watching a scene where George Kennedy is blasted full in the face with sewage for an extended period of time, I really felt for him. He had kids — and grandkids and ex-wives — to feed, so he gamely just stood there and took it right in the kisser. God bless you, George. PS — he also played Captains in three other films: Police Captain Ed Hocken in the Police Squad series, a captain in the movie Mean Dog Blues and mechanic Joe Patroni, who eventually became a captain for the truly baffling The Concorde … Airport ’79). Before you say that’s typecasting, please know that Kennedy was a captain in the U.S. Army, serving for 16 years before retiring due to a back injury. He actually broke in to Hollywood as a technical advisor on The Phil Silvers Show.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or get the blu ray from RoninFlix.

You know how slashers go: you need to get the horny teens to wind up in a secluded place with some promise of sex and drug hijinks. An abandoned mental hospital? That’s not frightening — it’s a good place to screw!

Of course, inside the walls of this old asylum, there’s more than just a place to party hearty. There’s also a deformed maniac who just so happens to be the attorney that split final girl Kiki’s parents up and caused her mother to die a decade before. Again, in slashers, there are no coincidences. Everything has been ordained, as if by freakish fate.

Now, the former Attorney Mitch Hansen has become The Coroner, a serial killer who uses surgical tools to wipe out anyone in his way.

The dual roles of Kiki and her mother Judy are played by Patty Mullen, Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1986 and 1988’s Pet of the Year. You may also remember her from playing the title role in Frankenhooker and being married to Joey Image, one of the drummers for The Misfits.

However, Jane — one of the many friends of Kiki set up to die, as is the wont of the slasher — would grow up to be Kristen Davis. Yes, from Sex and the City. So if you ever wanted to see her get her face sawed off…

There’s also a punk band played inside the asylum named Tina and the Tots. Tina  is played by Ruth Collins, who was also in Witch Academy and was paid $100 extra to show her breasts. Because you know, you can’t have a slasher without them (actually you totally can).

This was all written by Rick Marx, who also was behind the movies Taboo American Style 1: The Ruthless Beginning, Wanda Whips Wall Street, Blonde Justice #3 and Christy In the Wild. In case you didn’t guess, those are all adult films. He also wrote Snapped for Chuck Vincent, Warrior Queen, a biography on WOR late-night fixture Joe Franklin and the two Gor movies.

Behind the camera? None other than Richard Friedman (Scared Stiff, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge). This movie is all over the place in tone and presentation, but if you rented it back in the late 1980’s — it’s pretty much a perfectly goofball slasher that would go well with a six-pack and pizza — you probably have much fonder memories than I do. After all, if you went and watched Bloodsucking Freaks without seeing it through the lens of being 15 years old and landlocked in a small town, you probably wouldn’t understand why people liked it either.

You can get this on blu ray from the fine folks at Arrow Video or watch it for free on Tubi!