Monthly Archives: July 2020

Mnemophrenia (2019)

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I always say that you should learn something new every day. Here’s what I learned today: the title of this film was invented just for the movie. According to its IMDB page, “It’s a portmanteau of the words ‘mneme’ and ‘schizophrenia’. In the film Mnemophrenia the word is defined as: “A condition or a state characterized by the coexistence of real and artificial memories, which affects the subject’s sense of identity.”

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This is the debut feature of Eirini Kostantinidou, who said of making it, “For the past several years it has been my ambition to make a feature film around the subject of artificial memories. A humanistic, generation-spanning story asking questions about human identity, virtual reality and the future of cinema. A film that would delve into who we are and where we are going and imagine our species on the brink of its next evolutionary step.”

The way that this movie was made is incredibly intriguing. There was plenty of improvisation and each of the three parts was made separately, with the cast getting to watch each part before getting to take on the next chapter of the story. According to the film’s IMDB page, “This technique allows for an organic development of the characters and dialogue, which is a result of the creative collaboration between the actors and herself.”

As our world grows both larger in scope and smaller in the ways that we will get there, the issues that this film raises will become more important. This movie isn’t for everyone, but it is something you can watch and discuss long after it’s over.

You can learn more at the official site.

Want to watch it? It’s on Amazon Prime and Tubi courtesy of Indie Rights Movies.

Disclaimer: We were sent a screener by the film’s P.R firm. That has no affect on our review.

Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948)

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Kino Lorber Studio Classics has steadily been releasing a number of classic film noir titles under its Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema series. This one, starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster, fits right into those box sets.

Former POW Bill Saunders (Lancaster) barely survived the war and is a man on the edge. This blows up when he kills a man in a bar fight and hides in the home of nurse Jane Wharton (Fontaine), telling her its all an accident. They fall in love and after some jail time for attacking a cop, he gets a straight job. That gets ruined when a gangster who saw the bar fight starts blackmailing him.

Fontaine and Lancaster would recreate their roles for the Lux Radio Theatre broadcast on February 21, 1949 under the title The Unafraid, which was much less offensive of a title. Indeed, there was a fight where this movie was almost called Blood On My Hands and Blood On the Moon. Lancaster was a producer, so he really struggled to keep the original title, seeing as how it was based on a book by Gerald Butler.

Norman Foster mostly directed Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto films, so this is one of his few chances to strike out and make something unique, which he does. Also, the scene where Lancaster is whipped with a cat o’nine tails 18 times was voted #43 in the book Lash! The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped in the Movies.

You can grab this blu ray from Kino Lorber, who sent us a review copy. It has a new 2K transfer and commentary by film historian Jeremy Arnold.

The Body (2020)

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We previously reviewed Adam Weber’s movie The First Date and said that it was “a fun effort” with “decent FX.” Now he’s sent us his latest work, which is a quick little tale of two men and a dead — well, maybe — body.

Yes, these two characters have been asked to bury the body in the countryside, but things are never that simple when you have a corpse in the trunk.

Much like his last film, Adam knows how to use his production budget to make things look way better than they cost. I’m looking forward to the time when he moves past these short takes and attempts a longer narrative, as I want to see if he can sustain the same tension and humor across a longer story.

You can learn more at the official Facebook page. Thanks for sending us your films, Adam!

The Evil Inside Her (2019)

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If you’re a regular reader at our humble, little corner of the web, you know how much we admire journeyman-actor Eric Roberts around this neck of the wilds of Allegheny County. Yes, we will sit through a Lifetime damsel-in-distress movie—their Stalked by My Doctor franchise, now up to part 3—for our Eric Roberts fix. We’ll even watch Hallmark holiday movies (A Husband for Christmas and The Great Halloween Puppy Adventure) for our Eric Roberts blow with a shot of David DeCoteau.

Yes, that love goes even deeper into the celluloid thickets when Eric teams with our favorite directors, such as David DeCoteau (Bigfoot vs. D.B. Cooper, A Talking Cat), along with Mark Polonia (Amityville Death House) and Mark L. Lester (Hitman’s Run, Groupie, and Public Enemies). We even streamed Fred Olen Ray’s Boggy Creek: The Series on series on Amazon Prime just to listen to Eric’s voiceover narration. And Eric worked with Kent Wakeford (Power 98), the cinematographer on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and the Blaxploitation classic Black Belt Jones.

But how is it that across Eric’s 523 credits — with 60 more films in various stages of filming and pre-and-post production — Fred Olen Ray hasn’t done a live-action film with Eric? Eric’s not only done a Christmas movie with David DeCoteau (again, A Husband For Christmas), he’s made 14 movies with David DeCoteau*. How is it that Eric hasn’t appeared in at least one of Fred’s 11 X-Mas flicks?

Eric Roberts in a Fred Olen Ray movie . . . that would be the best X-Mas for Sam and I — ever. Even that Christmas when I got the Aurora Xcelerator race track. Even that Christmas when Becca gave Sam a Mayhem t-shirt.

However, until that dream Olen Ray-Roberts project comes to fruition, there’s more than enough Eric Roberts flicks to enjoy. These days, Eric’s a journeyman actor who truly enjoys traveling around the country helping helping both established filmmakers (but a bit down-and-out these days) and budding storytellers market their films. Some of the films from those undiscovered filmmakers that we’ve reviewed include The Arrangement, Angels Fallen, Clinton Road, and Lone Star Deception.

I know. I know. Off-the-rails with Eric Roberts love. Get back to the movie.


And to that end: Eric ended up in Asheville, North Carolina, to lend a thespian hand to screenwriter James Blankenfeld and director James Suttles. Blankenfeld is an established production assistant and cameraman (The Apprentice, Project Runway) making his feature film debut as a screenwriter with The Evil Inside Her. James Blankenfeld brings a more established career to the set as a cinematographer with his twenty-credits deep resume on a variety of indie shorts and features, as well as a half-dozen directing credits — with The Evil Inside Her as his third feature film.

Hopefully, based on that production pedigree, ye streamers of the digital divide will be inspired to watch, knowing that you’re getting production values above the usual norms for low-budget streaming movies and Roberts “starring” flicks, in general.

As with most of the films in his mindboggling oeuvre, we go into The Evil Inside Her with the knowledge that Eric’s role will be a small one (and sometimes, a pivotal one; it is, here), while the “lead actors” are unknown, mostly amateurs from the local theatre community who, while they give it their all, offer up the occasional awkward, strained moments.

As you can tell from the theatrical one-sheet, this is another in a long line of “cabin in the woods” thrillers about a group of 20-somethings’ vacation stay gone wrong, ala Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. And James Blankenfeld knows we’ve been in these foreboding woods before, with its wide array of home invasion sieges-by sexual deviants (Dead by Dawn and Cry for the Bad Man), flat-out demon possession (Reawakened), disturbed J or K-Horror onryōs, shiryō, or yūreis (0.0 Mhz), or their Euroized, yulyeong (hair ghost) counterparts (Evil River). Blankenfeld intelligently bypasses the “from the beyond” hocus pocus or supernatural deus ex machina tomfoolery. There’s no Paul Naschy out-of-left field zombie seige (Horror Rises from the Tomb). There’s no centuries-dead malevolent witch connected to trinkets. No basement-hidden reel-to-reel tape players. No bogus necronomicons. And, most importantly, there’s no “lone survivor” doped up in a hospital bed flashing us back with tortured dreams.

What Blankenfeld gives us, in a refreshing twist-of-the-keyboard, is an ominous, dapper chap that calls himself Clayton: but I like to refer to him as “The Chemist.” Yep, you guessed it: Eric Roberts, in a role that, for me, plays as a sequel, prequel, or sidequel to his ambiguous role as the foreboding “The Pitchman” in The Arrangement (released this month to streaming platforms).

When The Evil Inside Her opens, “it” has already been released: we see a daughter slaughter her elderly father over breakfast, which leads us to the opening titles montage of news clippings about a rash of unexplained domestic violence murders: suddenly for no reason, people snap and murder their friends and family.

The “reason” is The Chemist . . . and he’s using society as his personal lab. His newest lab rat is Vikki (Melissa Kunnap; good here in a spiraling, slow burn), doped-up at the local coffee shop on the way to the cabin: she begins a campaign of self-mutilation that progresses to murder in quick succession. As with The Pitchman in The Arrangement: The Chemist is Hell’s Geppetto, a bizarro Alfred Lord Tennyson pushing a little wonder drug that “helps” man see in the world what he carries in his heart: repressed immorality, anger and rage toward his fellow man. The Chemist removes one’s inhibitions to be their true selves: cold blooded killers.

Why?

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

On a release rollout since the spring of 2019 on DVD, VOD, and PPV in the worldwide marketplace, The Evil Inside Her is now available as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTv. You can learn more about the film with this interview from director James Suttles at Scared Stiff Reviews. You can also visit the film’s official website and SuttleFilm.

* For the Roberts-DeCoteau-Roberts completists, the rest of their resume (by the time you read this: it’s ever-expanding):

Bonnie & Clyde: Justified
Doc Holliday’s Revenge
Evil Exhumed
Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft
Snow White: A Deadly Summer
Sorority Slaughterhouse
Wolves of Wall Street
The Wrong Mommy
The Wrong Roommate
The Wrong Teacher

Disclaimer: We weren’t provided an advanced screener or a review request by the film’s PR company, distributor, or director. We discovered this film all on our own as we went down an Eric Roberts-IMDb rabbit hole looking for online streams of his films. We genuinely enjoyed the movie.

About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.

Just Go with It (2011)

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Somehow over quarantine, this movie has played in our house more than three times. Yes, I know. Being stuck inside does weird things to you.

Oddly enough, this movie is based on the 1969 film Cactus Flower, which an adaptation of the 1965 Broadway stage play, which was based on the French play Fleur de Cactus.

It was directed by Dennis Dugan who, beyond Problem Child, has mostly directed star Adam Sandler in movies like Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, Jack and Jill and two Grown Ups films. Another of Dugan’s non-Sandler films is Love, Weddings & Other Disasters. As an actor, Dugan appeared in everything, from The Girl Most Likely To… (1973) to The Howling (1980).  He even had his own, short-lived TV series, Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, which spun off the more popular, long-running The Rockford Files starring James Gardner.

The Golden Raspberry people must have been licking their lips, ready to bestow this movie with awards. And so they did, giving this both Worst Actor and Worst Director.

Long story short: Sandler is a lifelong bachelor who really should be with his assistant, played by Jennifer Aniston. However, he’s in love with Brooklyn Decker, who thinks he’s married. As always, rather than the truth, hijinks rule the day. Otherwise, we’d have no movie.

I’m always amazed at the stars that will show up for a Sandler film, as Nicole Kidman is in this. I always think of her as an A-list star well above these matters, but here you go, as she’s interacting with Nick Swardson.

That said, Sandler films play on our screen often enough. And while they’re hated by critics, they’re innocuous enough and I always end up rooting for him every time he enters the third stage of the hero’s journey.

Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990)

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When I think of Leona Helmsley, who I remember from WOR commercials, I think of Suzanne Pleshette as her. This film is from that near-exploration sub-genre of made-for-TV films: the ripped from the headlines takedown of the fallen.

Somehow, they talked Lloyd Bridges into being in this movie. Don’t ask me how, but man, when he’s all out of it and can barely shave? Magic.

Director Richard Michaels did 55 episodes of Bewitched, which seems to me like the perfect start for a career of making TV movies just like this. It’s filled with so much sleaze

Somehow, no one on Letterboxd has reviewed this except me. This either makes me happy or makes me realize that I will watch anything and everything, then try and tell an uncaring world how the movies make me feel.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Oblivion (1994)

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Full Moon, you so crazy. You filmed this Peter David written story and somehow put aliens in space and got Andrew Divorff to play the villainous Red Eye in a movie that feels a lot like an adult version of BraveStarr. They also grabbed Meg Foster, Isaac Hayes, George Takei, Julie Newmar and Carel Struycken, the giant from Twin Peaks to help tell the story of how the outer space west was won.

If a Western can contain empaths, aliens that can foresee death and cyborgs, then let this be that Western.

They filmed Backlash: Oblivion 2 at the same time, so if you liked this, good news. There’s more waiting for you.

Written by Charles Band, this was directed by Sam Irvin, who also made Elvira’s Haunted Hills.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Exploring: John Saxon

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Born Carmine Orrico on August 5, 1936 and sadly departing this Earth just a few days ago, John Saxon is my favorite actor of all time. This isn’t hyperbole. This is fact, as Saxon unites nearly every one of my favorite film genres. You can always count on him to deliver the goods, no matter how small the movie gets.

The son of a Brooklyn dock worker, Saxon studied under Stella Adler and was originally set to be a matinee idol. How did that happen? Agent Henry Willson saw Saxon’s picture on the cover of a detective magazine and at the age of 17, he had a new name and was making $150 a week from Universal Studios.

After eighteen months of waiting, Saxon played alongside Mamie Van Doren in Running Wild (he appeared in uncredited roles in It Could Happen to You and the 1954 version of A Star Is Born). After The Unguarded Moment, where he is set up as the supposed stalker of Esther Willaims, he got a raise to $225 a year.

After Rock, Pretty Baby and its sequel, Summer Love, he lived up to the promise of being a star for the teenage girls. He starred opposite Sandra Dee in This Happy Feeling and The Reluctant Deubtante before finding his heart in character roles, starting in John Huston’s 1960 film The Unforgiven.

In 1962, Saxon made his first movie in Italy, a country he would return to throughout his career. A year later, he would appear in Mario Bava’s nascent giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much, then globetrot back and forth, making The Cardinal for Otto Preminger (the movie that destroyed The Other author Tom Tryon) in Hollywood, The Ravagers in the Philippines, Night Caller from Outer Space in England and then went back to La La Land to make Queen of Blood. Heck, he even went to Bollywood before anyone knew what that was to make 1978’s Shalimar with Rex Harrison and Sylvia Miles (The Sentinel, The Funhouse).

You can say that Saxon’s movies got smaller here, but for me, his roles from the late 60’s on define so many of the movies of my life. There’s Saxon as Mr. Roper, the gaijin ass-kicker alongside Bruce Lee in the movie that broke him in America, Enter the Dragon. Here he is in Italian Westerns like One Dollar Too Many. Giallo? He’s in Strange Shadows In An Empty Room and Tenebre, two of the best there are (well, Shadows is a weird mix of all kinds of movies in one). Slashers? He’s in one of the very first, Black Christmas.

Saxon is a dependable cop or crook in movies like Special Cop in Action, Violent Naples, hell even Mitchell.

I grew up on John Saxon. He was all over my television, whether he was beating up The Six-Million Dollar Man (he even got a toy made of his character Day of the Robot character, which was called Maskatron instead of Major Frederick Sloan; he also played Nedlick, the alien who got Steve Austin to battle Bigfoot), as a vampire fighting Starsky & Hutch, getting on The A-Team twice, being on both Falcon Crest and Dynasty and even being part of a whole series of Gene Roddenberry TV movies.

The first time I realized that Saxon was the same actor I loved in so many movies was when he played Sandor in Battle Beyond the Stars, a movie that dominated the daydreams of my pre-teen years.

Then came the role most people of my generation know him for, Lt. Donald Thompson in the A Nightmare on Elm Street films (he’s in the first, the third and appears as himself in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

Here are a few more of my favorite Saxon roles. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

Moonshine County Express: Gus Trikonis — who directed The Sidehackers — case Saxon as a karate fighting, moonshine running race card driver battling William Conrad alongside Susan Howard, Maurine “Marcia Brady” McCormick and the absolutely perfect Claudia Jennings.

The Bees: Yes, the same maniac that made Demonoid, Alfredo Zacarías, cast Saxon alongside John Carradine, Angel “The Teacher” Tompkins and Claudio Brook — yes, Simon of the Desert — in a war against killer bees.

Fast Company: Sure, you’re ready for William Smith, Claudia Jennings and Saxon in a racing film. But are you ready for one directed by David Cronenberg?

The Glove: Ross Hagen — Rommel from the aforementioned The Sidehackers — directed this sheer slice of bizarre, as Saxon plays a detective trying to stop Roosevelt Grierfrom killing his old prison guards with a giant spiked glove. Bonus points for casting Keenan Wynn, Joanna Cassidy, Old Hollywood star Joan Blondell, Aldo Ray and Michael Pataki, making this an all-star cast in the way that I mean all-star. That is, only character actors that I obsess over.

Cannibal Apocalypse: Saxon plays Norman Hopper, a man bitten in Vietnam that brings home his cannibal curse, starting with a teenager that tries to seduce him. Antonio Margheriti brings the gore in this one.

Blood Beach: Jeffrey Bloom made Flowers In the Attic and several Columbo TV movies before this backward riff on Jaws. “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…you can’t get to it!” yelled the posters and Saxon. Burt Young and the always wonderful Marianna Hill answered the call of, well, whatever was under the shifting sands of an LA beach.

The Scorpion with Two Tails: Nearly ten years after he had the best four year run of giallo in the history of the genre, Sergio Martino made a new film for the form, featuring Saxon as an archeologist studying Etruscan graves. Originally made for Italian TV, it was instead shown in theaters.

Desire: Eddie Romero, the man who put the green into Blood Island, worked with Saxon in 1982 to make this movie where a young Filipino girl falls for a man who might be her father. Of course, maybe daddy is Mr. Saxon.

Prisoners of the Lost Universe: Everyone knows Terry Marcel from Hawk the Slayer, but he also made this film with Richard Hatch, Kay Lenz, some cavemen and the man who tries with all his might to make it watchable: John Saxon.

Hands of Steel: Working with Martino yet again, this movie would have been the death of Saxon had it not been for him being a stickler for Screen Actors Guild rules. He would only appear in scenes shot in Italy, as the U.S. part of the film was a non-union shoot. Otherwise, he would have died along with Claudio Cassinelli in the tragic helicopter crash that marred this film. That said — I still love this strange little movie, an oddball potluck mix-up of Over the Top, Rambo: First Blood Part II and The Terminator. Also: the main character’s name is Paco Queruak.

Zombie Death House: Directed by the man himself, starring his Tenebre co-star Anthony Franciosa and combining the zombie, prison and mobster genres all into one film, this movie would be so much better had it a decent budget and more than nine days of shooting. I would have loved to have seen what else Saxon could have done.

My Mom’s a Werewolf: A rare comedy turn for Saxon finds him playing Harry Thropen, a mysterious pet store owner who turns Susan Blakely into a suburban lycanthropicMILF. I really think that my insanity cast this film, which has John Schuck, Diana Barrows, Marilyn McCoo and Ruth Buzzi all chewing up the scenery as if they’re doing dinner theater at the Slaughtered Lamb.

Nightmare Beach: Umberto Lenzi may have disavowed this film, seeing it as an inferior remake of his Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, but I absolutely love every single moment of this film, which has Saxon cast against type as a bad cop battling a biker back from the grave who has a chopper with an electric chair on the back of it.

Blood Salvage: Saxon plays a dad who should have just stayed home instead of taking his family on a backwoods vacation.

From Dusk Till Dawn: When you get rich and famous like Tarantino and Rodriguez, you can either cast your films with A-list talent, use your favorite grindhouse performers or just do all of the above. Here, Harvey Keitel, Salma Hayek, Juliette Lewis and George Clooney share screen time with Michael Parks, Tom Savini, Fred Williamson, Marc Lawrence and Saxon.

Saxon also appeared in everything from major Hollywood movies like Beverly Hills Cop III to VHS era-stuff like The Arrival, Hellmaster and a late model 1993 Italian Western  I’ve become obsessed with finding: called Jonathan of the Bears. Directed by Enzo G. Castellari, it co-starred Bobby Rhodes, Franco Nero, David Hess and Andy Sidaris’ best villain, Rodrigo Obregón.

Television was also another home for the star, seeing him appear five times on Gunsmoke, six times on Fantasy Island, three times on Murder, She Wrote and in the TV movies Winchester ’73, Istanbul Express, The Intruders and many more, including the Dario Argento-directed episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror.

Perhaps the strangest Saxon story is that he wanted to write an Elm Street sequel called How the Nightmare Began which was all about how therapist Frederick Krueger was wrongly blamed for a series of murders that were really committed by the Manson Family. The script sold on eBay a while back and I wish that it was really a movie.

A lifelong liberal Democrat, a Black Belt, a former Coney Island archery game carnie and a man who was still acting until the last few years of his life, including appearing as the villain of a Tarantino-directed episode of CSI.

Saxon has so many roles that I’ve neglected at least a few of them. But that’s the beauty of a career this rich. There’s always something new to discover.

I found out Saxon died as I sat at the drive-in and it brought a tear to my eye. Do me a favor and pay tribute to the man by watching one of his films as soon as possible.

Invasion Earth (2016)

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Eight young addicts attend an experimental group therapy run by self-help guru Doctor Carson. This will keep them out of prison, which a TV reporter sees as a scam. She tries to expose the group but just as this UK movie sets itself up as a thriller, it shifts into science fiction as an alien invasion throws the entire plot into pure chaos. I mean, they do warn us at the beginning that those alien ships are showing up in three months!

You know how you wait for the entire running time of The Alpha Incident for something otherworldly to happen? This is close to that, but not as well made. That said, it has a great poster going for it.

Director Steven M. Smith has tons of direct to streaming videos in production, so good for him for hustling. This isn’t bad and there’s some promise, so here’s hoping I like his next effort even more.

This movie will be released on demand and on DVD August 4 from Midnight Releasing, who were nice enough to send us a review copy.

Straight Shooting (1917)

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A landmark in the history of the Western, this was John Ford’s — here using the name Jack — first feature and the comeback for Harry Carey, who began playing the character of Cheyenne Harry a year before in A Knight of the Range and would portray the character until 1936’s Aces Wild.

Cheyenne Harry may be an outlaw, but he has a good heart. In this movie, he’s hired by a rancher named Thunder Flint to kick the Sims family off his farmland. It all ends up as most of these stories do, with the rich ranchers against the poor farmers.

Hoot Gibson, who was second to only Tom Mix as a star between the World Wars, also appears.

Straight Shooting is available on blu ray and DVD from Kino Lorber and is packed with special features including audio commentary by film historian and Ford biographer Joseph McBride (author of Searching for John Ford), a video essay by film critic Tag Gallagher and the lone surviving fragment of Ford’s 1920 film Hitchin’ Posts, preserved by the Library of Congress, and a music score by Michael Gatt. The Blu-ray edition also includes a booklet essay by Tag Gallagher.

The foremost reason to purchase this is the gorgeous transfer, which takes a piece of history and makes it feel raw, vibrant and new.

Thanks to Kino Lorber for sending this to us.