Harvey (Dave Coyne) has led a cautious and conscientious life — he knows more strange laws than Tom Waits — until he gets fired and finds out he has one month to live. Throwing caution to the wind, he meets Luke (Nick DePinto) at a bar and confesses he’s never broken any rules. Luke responds “Do you want to?,” and their journey begins.
Along the way, they accidentally kidnap Shuri (Nadia Mohebban) who joins them on their adventure, which has the goal of a theme park in Miami. However, the ways things are going, the group may never get there.
Director and co-writer Jonathan Zuck — and his collaborators Joe Leone and Jenna St. John — have some good ideas here. It’s an odd idea for a comedy, but well-executed and kept me guessing throughout.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.
As I descended a horror-inspired digital rabbit hole, I was shocked to hear (a little late, obviously) that former child actor Luke Halpin, best known as Sandy Ricks on TV’s Flipper from 1964 to 1968, was suffering from Stage IV head and neck cancer (reported in 2015). Then, in June 2016, Halpin beat the cancer, but then discovered, as the cancer went into remission, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.* (I’ve dealt with both of these damned illnesses in my family of late, and trust me, it’s a rough ride for everyone concerned.)
So, it’s time for us to take a moment to lift up Luke Halpin and praise his work in one of our cherished, classic ’70s horror films (yes, I said “classic,” you scoffing gore-dog): the definitive (underwater) “Nazi Zombie” flick: Shock Waves.
We aren’t from Italy.
Now, considering that we are all ’80s Euro-horror video fringers here (and you are, admit it): when you say “Nazi Zombies,” the synapses of our blood-goo sloshed minds loads a copy of Jean Rollin’s Zombie Lake (1981) and Jess Franco’s counter-programming Oasis of the Zombies (1981) into our analog-cerebal VCR-cortex. But, oh, how we soon forget the three-time Academy Award-nominated The Boys from Brazil (1978) (okay, so it’s more sci-fi than horror) and the Canadian potboiler, Death Ship (1980). (Okay, so neither of these films had actual Ken Weiderhorn-inspired zoms, but still, they’re cool flicks.)
Water! We need water!
For the serious, deep video fringer: there’s the porn connected-produced (shot in the home and on the property of noted ’70s porn purveyor, Shaun Costello; come on, now: don’t lie and say you didn’t sneak home a copy of 1976’s infamous Girl Scout Cookies?)Gamma 693 (1979). Then, when the Euro-zom craze hit, it floated around the VHS shelves in 1983 under its better known title: Night of the Zombies. (I saw the retitled version at the ‘ol Twin in 1981 as Hell of the Living Dead, which has nothing to do with the Bruno Mattei-directed film of the same name.)
Then there are the rotted roots behind director Ken Weiderhorn’s Nazi-Zom vision: the first of the bunch: 1941’s King of the Zombies and its 1943 sequel, Revenge of the Zombies. Then there’s the British-made The Frozen Dead (1966) and the American TV hoke that is They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1968).
In the end the “Big Three” of the Nazi Zombie sub-genre of the ’80s zombie craze initiated by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are Shock Waves, and the aforementioned-linked, lesser-quality Zombie Lake and Oasis of the Zombies. (Oh, guess who did the incredible makeups on Shock Waves: Alan Ormsby of Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged, and Popcorn. What’s that? Fred Olen Ray from 1992’s Evil Toons was on set as the film’s still photographer? It’s a video-finge wet dream!)
For a guy who’s been cracking the celluloid since his 1973 award-winning short, Manhattan Melody, Ken Wiederhorn’s directing resume is a short one. But, oh, the film’s he has made: After the critical and box office achievement of his feature film debut with Shock Waves, he worked with Tom Savini (The Ripper) in giving Jennifer Jason Lee (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) her film debut in another one of our video fringe favorites: Eyes of a Stranger (1981). In between, it was the Animal House-inspired curio, King Frat(1979). (Yes, we reviewed that one! How could we not! And damn you, Sam, for robbing me of that review!)
Yep. I know. I’ve gone off the chain and I’m careening down the rails, again.
“Enough with the Charmin-squeezin’ over Ken Wiederhorn and your unhealthy obsession with Nazi Euro-Zombies, already,” you say. “Let’s back to Luke Halpin.”
Luke brilliantly, yet sadly, summed up his career with this slice of wisdom: “That’s part of the problem with being a kid actor. When your show’s over, nobody informs you that your career’s over, too.”
While Halpin picked up a few post-Flipper starring roles, his career was pretty much over by the mid-’70s. Then Ken Weiderhorn smartly cast the tan and ripped, water-experienced actor (Halpin’s worked as an stunt man and marine coordinator on a slew of ’80s films: if it was shot on or in the water, Halpin was there: Island Claws, Porky’s Revenge . . . even the Sandra Bullock-starring Speed 2: Cruise Control) as his lead in Shock Waves. And he holds his own — admirably — against his marquee co-stars Peter Cushing and John Carradine.
To say that Shock Waves‘ tale of a Gilligan’s Island episode gone Twilight Zone — with a tourist yacht stranded on an uncharted Caribbean island — was a rough shoot is an understatement. South Florida’s Key Biscayne Island in Miami, and the then abandoned Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, doubled for the Nazi island hideaway. Wiederhorn also smartly repurposed the real life shipwreck of the American-commissioned S.S Sapona as his “nazi ship wreck,” which is a still popular Florida tourist attraction, for the film. (The Sapona, and the island of Dry Tortugas, are a sight to behold, indeed.)
Granted, the headlining stars of the acting royalty that is John Carradine and Peter Cushing only worked five days each (they don’t share any scenes) — but what a five days they worked! Halpin and Brooke Adams (be still my heart!) are champs, slopping around, diving and swimming in the salt water and the swampy quagmires, but the perpetually-cadaverous Carradine . . . and “Grand Moff Tarkin” Cushing chasing zombies through the water are a sight to see. (God bless ’em both. What champs!)
The film starts with Brooke Adams (she made her acting debut in the 1975 TV Movie Song of the Succubus, best known for Stephen King’s The Dead Zone) as Rose, adrift in small, ratty row boat being rescued by two fishermen. Then, following the plotting of — and keeping things in a horror/sci-fi perspective — 1959’s Angry Red Planet, Rose flashback-recounts her terrifying experiences at the hands of a self-exiled SS Commander who created the “Death Corps” (the film’s original title), a breed of aquatic undead soldiers for extended submarine missions. While Cushing’s old ship is a wreck . . . it also seems to cruise the waters around the island as a ghost ship that purposely strikes and strands boaters (e.g. the aforementioned-linked, later Richard Crenna and George Kennedy-starring Death Ship).
Before you know it, the Ceasar-cut uniformed hoards of welding-goggled, albino zoms are popping up out of the water at every turn — even from the island-rundown hotel’s mucked-slimed swimming pool. Then, taking a page out of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead playbook, first-mate Keith (Luke Haplin) leads the survivors to barricading themselves in an so-apropos refrigerator unit in the hotel.
The flashback then comes full circle, with Rose’s repetitive, babbling voiceover as she scribbles non-sense in a journal from a hospital bed: she’s gone insane. And no one has any clue as to the horrors that await in the waters . . . somewhere in the Caribbean.
While we all ran to the local duplex to see this in 1977 (I begged my dad to take me, and he liked it, which was shocking: Dad liking a goofy horror or sci-fi movie I liked. The only other time that happened was with 1979’s Alien.), many’s first experience with Ken Wiederhorn’s genuinely creepy (hey, for a kid in the ’70s, it was) debut was via Prism Entertainment‘s popular ’80s VHS rental. According to Blue Underground’s 2003 DVD reissue, they had to source the release from Wiederhorn’s own personal collection, as the studio lost the film’s original negative. To promote their 2014 Blu-ray, Blue Underground gave the film a limited theatrical release that November.
Sadly, it seems the majesty of Weiderhorn’s deliberately slow pace to create mystery and suspense, and his exquisite, subtle use of atmosphere — without darkness or you-can’t-see-shit shadows — over cheap (now clichéd) shock-scares punctuated by gore is lost of today’s gore hounds weaned in the post-Eli Roth and James Wan “modern horror” universe. To see blog and message board commenters referring to Weiderhorn’s masterpiece of horror as “boring” and “stupid” and deriding those “old farts” (I guess they mean moi) who regard this as “horror classic, ” is a dark, cinematic day indeed.
Must everything be guts and gore and “shock scares” to satisfy our horror needs? Can’t we all just enjoy atmosphere and suspense, for once? Then again, the friends I’ve exposed to Ugestuand Kwaidanscoffed. . . .
So, raise your glass to Ken Wiederhorn — and say a prayer for Luke Halpin and his wife, Deborah. For when it comes to Nazi zombies, this underrated effort is the best of the genre — and they’d both be da man in this horror dog’s dish.
Luckily, there’s an upload of the full movie on You Tube to enjoy.
*If you’re interested: Luke Halpin’s friends and family have created a GoFundMe page to help with Luke’s mounting medical bills.
About the Author:You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and B&S Movies, and learn more about his work on Facebook.
Paul Wendkos may have directed most of the Gidget movies, but he has quite the horror pedigree. There’s the TV movie Good Against Evil, Haunts of the Very Rich, the 1985 remake of The Bad Seed and the legendary 1975 TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden.
Because this is a Quinn Martin Production and CBS aired it extensively on TV, many people believe that it was a made-for-TV movie. However, it was actually released in theaters—the only movie that Twentieth Century Fox released for the entire calendar year of 1970, due to several of 1969’s movies failing at the box office.
Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) once wanted to be a pianist but is now a music journalist. He gets to interview the world’s greatest piano player, Duncan Ely (Curd Jurgens, The Vault of Horror). It doesn’t start well, but then Ely discovers that Myles has hands perfect for the piano.
At that point, Duncan and his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Perkins) become friends with Myles and his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset), who doesn’t trust either of them. She was right to suspect them, as they’re Satanists who have transferred Duncan’s mind to Myles’ body. However, as Myles becomes a major star, she starts to like the man she’s married to more and more. She becomes seduced by the power, even if Duncan comes to her in dreams and tells her that their daughter must die.
After that dream, the daughter dies, which pushes Paula to investigate the Ely family. She then finds herself falling into the arms of Roxanne’s ex-husband, Bill (Bradford Dillman).
This is the 1970s, so of course, incest figures in. It turns out that Duncan and Roxanne have bartered with Satan to enable them to pursue their incestuous relationship by placing Duncan’s consciousness into Myles’ body. When Bill is killed with the same blue forehead murder style as Paula’s daughter, she starts to worry for her life. But simultaneously, she decides that no matter who is in her husband’s body, that’s the man she wants to be with.
So she does what any of us would do. She turns to Satan and kills herself, moving her mind into Paula’s body. Then, she returns to her husband, Paula’s father, in her husband’s body. Whatever issues there were with the marriage have been solved, thanks to the left-hand path and outright murder.
A group of friends makes a bet to survive on an island. Unbeknownst to them, a mysterious old creature starts to hunt them and what was once an innocent bet is now a fight for survival. As the night goes on, none of them may make it out alive.
The PR for this promises “a pulse-racing profusion of Stranger Things and Predator.” No pressure, right?
This is the first full-length film from director Paul Anthony Rogers.
Honestly, it’s pretty basic. There’s a weird creature that ends up looking like Gollum on steroids and he kills just about everyone. I’ve had an entire holiday of arguments that I’m still getting over, so I really didn’t feel like listening to an hour plus of idiots in the woods fighting and then yelling one another’s names as they are chased and murdered. Your mileage may vary.
It certainly looks nice and the non-CGI practical monster is a definite plus.
Crypsis is available on demand and on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR company.
Originally airing on SyFy back when it was still Sci-Fi, way back on October 27, 2007, Headless Horseman is all about the famous Washington Irving story, which was true and was much less scary than what actually happened.
It’s directed by Anthony C. Ferrante, who would go on to create Sharknado.
On their way to a party, seven teens stumble upon the town of Wormwood Ridge, whose townsfolk are celebrating a ceremony honoring the Headless Horseman. Turns out that the town wants their skulls, to quote the Misfits.
Nearly everyone loses their head in this one, quite literally. You know, if I’ve learned anything, if you end up in a small town and it feels weird, just leave before you die.
So yeah. Don’t go in expecting Sleepy Hollow and just aim to have some fun and you’ll be just fine.
Mill Creek Entertainment’s Savage Nature set has this movie and three other films all about the evil side of Mother Nature. You also get a code for all four films on their MovieSPREE service. Want to see it for yourself? Then grab a copy right here.
Produced and directed by Roger Corman, this movie was originally a double feature with Beast from Haunted Cave. When it was released to TV two years later, a new prologue was added by director Jack Hill to add to its running time.
The musical score from this film may seem familiar, because it’s the same music from Corman’s A Bucket of Blood. It was written by Fred Katz, who sold Corman the same score was used for a total of seven films, including The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea.
Janice Starlin is the founder and owner of a large cosmetics company, (Susan Cabot). She starts losing money when the public begins to see that she is aging, so her scientists reverse the aging process by using the royal jelly of the queen wasp. It doesn’t work fast enough, so she breaks into her own company’s lab and injects herself multiple times.
So she gets twenty years younger over the weekend, but occasionally transforms into a wasp woman who kills people. At the end, when acid is thrown in her face, that scene was more real than it should have been. Someone had filled the breakaway bottle with water and it was so heavy that when hit her, she thought that her teeth had been knocked out. To make matters worse, the fake smoke used to simulate the acid also choked her. So after she fell through the window, she found herself unable to breathe. To save herself, she tore off her makeup as well as a good chunk of skin around her neck.
Things didn’t get much better in life for Susan Cabot. This was her last film and at the end of her life, she suffered from depression and suicidal thoughts. The psychologist that she was seeing felt that she was so troubled that he could no longer see her and her home was filled with trash and rotting food.
After her mental health continued to worsen, Cabot’s 25-year-old son, Timothy Scott Roman, beat her to death with a weightlifting bar. While he would initially claim that a man in a ninja mask was the killer — thinking that no one would believe her struggles with mental illness — the truth was that she woke him screaming and attacked him with both a scalpel and the barbell. His defense attorneys claimed his aggressive reaction to his mother’s attack was due to the drugs he took to counteract his dwarfism and pituitary gland problems.
Prosecutors changed the charge to voluntary manslaughter at the end of the trial, as no evidence had been presented to support the premeditation required for a murder conviction. Roman, who had already spent two-and-a-half years in jail, was sentenced to three years’ probation.
Corman remade this with director Jim Wynorski for his Roger Corman Presents series on Showtime.
You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime. You can also watch it with the Cinematic Titanic crew riffing on it on Tubi.
This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.
Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.
It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.
The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.
The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.
Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.
She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.
This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.
Here’s a drink recipe.
Invasion of the Bee’s Knees
2 oz. gin
.75 oz. lemon juice
.75 oz. honey syrup
1 oz. egg white
Dash of honey
Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
Frank Marshall is more known as a producer than a director. After all, he was in that role for movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Color Purple, Back to the Future and so many more films, but he didn’t direct until 1990’s Arachnophobia. He also helmed Alive and Eight Below, as well as this film. Again — he’s much better known as a producer, as he’s since executive produced the Jason Bourne and Jurassic Park films.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, a Michael Crichton novel also inspired this film, which had a long history before it finally played cinemas.
After the success of The First Great Train Robbery, Crichton wanted to write a movie for Sean Connery, as the character of Charles Munro, who he saw as an analog to Allan Quatermain. Ironically, that’s the character that Connery would play in his final screen role in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Crichton pitched the idea to producer Frank Yablans — the same guy who brought us The Fury, Mommie Dearest and Kidco — who liked the idea so much that he — without Crichton’s authorization thank you very much — sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, a year before the book was published.
Once Crichton learned that he could not use a real gorilla to portray the character of Amy, he left the project. The film was offered to Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter before years later, Marshall came on board. That all came to pass because, during the making of Jurassic Park, Crichton was impressed with Stan Winston’s work. Producer Kathleen Kennedy suggested that Winston could make the apes for Congo, talked to her husband — yep, Frank Marshall — about the project and Yablans came back on board again.
However, the final film is only loosely based on the Crichton script, with John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck) taking over the writing duties.
While testing a communications laser in the Congo, TraviCom employees Charles Travis (Bruce Campbell!) and Jeffrey Weems discover the ruins of a lost city. However, it looks like everyone dies as the company watches the exploration via satellite by Karen Ross (Laura Linney), a former CIA operative and also the former fiancee of Travis, whose dad R.B. (Joe Don Baker!) owns the company. Man, talk about run-on sentences.
There’s also primatologist Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), who has a mountain gorilla named Amy, who can speak via a special glove that translates sign language to audio. She’s been drawing jungles and intricate gems, which means that Peter thinks she should go back home to Africa. He funds that trip via Karen and TraviCom, as well as Romanian philanthropist Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).
They’re led by the greatest hunter of all time, Captain Monroe Kelly. You know what they always say: if you can’t get Sean Connery, get Ernie Hudson. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje — Killer Kroc from Suicide Squad — shows up as Munro’s second-in-command Kahega. And hey — there’s Joe Pantoliano as another merc! And John Hawkes (Eastbound & Down) is also here, as well as Delroy Lindo and Kevin Grevioux from the Underworld movies.
Between native tribes, gorillas being used to guard diamond mines and Tim Curry getting killed by a pack of those gorillas — not to mention a subplot that has Dr. Elliot upset when Amy ends up getting rawdogged (rawaped?) by a silverback and leaving humanity for the jungle, this movie literally looks like studio notes on film. There’s everything for somebody, I guess. Curry and Hudson are having a blast, however. Hudson is almost in a totally different movie than anyone else and has called out Congo as the best time he ever had making a movie. It shows.
1990’s kids had Kenner on hand to help them recreate the story of the Lost City of Zinj with Congo action figures. You could grab Peter, Karen, Kahega, Peter and Amy for the good guys — well, I guess protagonists, maybe, but who wants to tell kids that they are protagonists versus good guys? And then for the apes, you have Blastface, Mangler, Zinj Apes and the deluxe Bonecrusher. There were also two vehicles, the Net Trap and Trail Hacker. They fit into the Kenner aesthetic, just like their RoboCop and Jurassic Park figures. Seriously, Kenner made figures for every movie it seemed like — they made Waterworld figures, after all!
Speaking of Jurassic Park, my feeling on this movie has been that everyone wanted to will another series of films much like Crichton’s novel into existence. This whole thing was vaporware, based on a story that the author never really finished made by people who didn’t have any real concern with the source material, which never really existed in the first place. Millions were dumped into it and it actually did pretty well — $152 million worldwide on a $50 million budget — but no one really remembers it.
All they do remember is that there was a scene where one of the Zinj gorillas uses a laser. That scene doesn’t exist in the movie, but that hasn’t stopped people from remembering it in a Mandela Effect moment.
Russell Bayne (Jeremy London, T.S. Quint from Mallrats), is bitten by a werewolf and finds himself in the middle of a supernatural war between vampires, werewolves and the human hunters who want to stop them. So, you know, Underworld. There are some magic amulets that are needed to stop a vampire named Lilith from rising to power and lots and lots of exposition.
Wolvesbayne premiered on October 18, 2009 as part of SyFy’s 31 Nights of Halloween.
This comes directly from ex-members of The Asylum under their new name Bullet Films. If you’ve seen an Asylum movie, you know exactly what to expect.
Christy Carlson Romano appears as Alex Layton. She was on Even Stevens and was the voice of Kim Possible. Mark Dacascos, the American Iron Chef chairman and one of the many reasons why Brotherhood of the Wolf is so good appears as Von Griem. Then there’s Yancy Butler, who was on the Witchblade TV series, who shows up as Lilith, plus scream queen Stephanie Honore (The Final Destination and the never released Spring Break ’83).
This is another film — the Savage Nature and Hosues of Hell Mill Creek sets are fill of them — involving Griff Furst and Leigh Scott. Good for them getting sold to SyFy and then keeping them relevant on digital platforms and re-released on DVD.
Mill Creek Entertainment’s Savage Nature set has this movie and three other films all about the evil side of Mother Nature. You also get a code for all four films on their MovieSPREE service. Want to see it for yourself? Then grab a copy right here.
Roger Corman wasn’t happy with the end results of this film, which was shot in the Philippines, but man, he has no idea. This is my kind of insane movie, where a movie leaves his woman for, well, a cobra woman who keeps him alive by pimping out his native lover who draws venom from the men that she kills.
Andrew Meyer only wrote and directed one other film, The Sky Pirate, which is a shame because this movie is pretty much insane. It has snake murders, an air of filth and women ruining lives. Is there anything else you can put in a movie?
How about Joy Bang? You know and love her from Messiah of Evil and she’s here, looking gorgeous. She’s the former girlfriend of Stan Duff (Roger Garrett, who got a poultry infection while making this movie!), who has now found love in the arms of Lena (Marlene Clark from Ganja & Hess, Beware the Blob and Switchblade Sisters), the cobra woman herself.
Vic Diaz, who was Satan in Beast of the Yellow Night, also shows up. Quentin Tarantino would refer to Vic as the Peter Lorre of the Philippines, a title he earned in appearances in movies like Beyond Atlantis, Black Mama White Mama, Superbeast, Daughters of Satan and Raw Force.
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