DAY 30. BRING IT ON HOME: Something filmed in Seattle.
As we near the close of the Scarecrow Video Psychotronic Challenge, finding a movie shot in Seattle was a real, well, challenge. I didn’t want to do something easy, like Practical Magic, which isn’t really a psychotronic film either. And I’d already posted about Fear, The Changeling, Class of 1999, Ghost DadandThe Night Strangler, so I really wanted to find something left of center.
Enter Shredder Orpheus.
Made more than thirty years ago about a future that has never happened, this is a group of skaters and musicians that created something that has never been created before or since, a skate-rock opera.
Skateboarder/guitarist/revolutionary Orpheus and his gang of skaters must go from the Gray Zone into, well, Hell itself to save the world and his girl from the threat of television. Beyond showing a snapshot of Seattle’s counterculture — which would be its culture, right? — of the past, this movie also features a soundtrack created by Roland Barker (Ministry, Revolting Cocks), Bill Rieflin (Ministry, King Crimson), poet/performance artist Steven Jesse Bernstein, guitarist Dennis Rea and multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio. Robert McGinley was the auteur behind this movie, writing, producing, directing and starring in it. He’s still making cyberpunk films, as he put out Danger Diva in 2017.
How many post-apocalyptic skater industrial takes on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice are you going to find? Probably, well, exactly one. I’m sure that if you live in Seattle and don’t have a copy that Scarecrow probably has more than one available for rent.
To learn more and see it for yourself, check out the official site.
DAY 30: BRING IT ON HOME: Something filmed in Seattle.
“She’s killed a man, been shot at, and made love twice already this evening…and the evening isn’t over yet!”
I mean, how am I not going to watch this movie after all that?
Man, American-International kept putting out awesome movies late into the 1970’s, with this Howard Avedis written, produced and directed caper (made back when he was still Hikmet Avedis). If you’re looking for more Avedis goodness (Goovedis?), I’d recommend The Teacher, Dr. Minx, The Fifth Floor, They’re Playing With Fire and the awesome Mortuary.
Jackie Parker (Connie Stevens!) is a cop by day and a drug smuggler by night, when she isn’t hooking up with Greg Evigan. She’s after drug dealer Philip Bianco (Ceaser Danova) and has to deal with the awesome William Smith as Carl, one of the henchmen, who leads her on a chase through the streets of Seattle that involves a dune buggy, a vehicle which seems quite out of place in the City of Flowers.
At some point in the 1980’s when this was released on VHS, the original Igor Kantor-supervised soundtrack was replaced with a Miami Vice inspired score, which is completely out of this world great.
Stevens had a clean image before this movie, so it must have been shocking to see her bed guys and suggest that her elder boss get some fellatio to improve his mood. It’s like this movie has the dialogue of an adult film without any of the actual penetration!
Actually, the only penetration is when Carl attacks Scorchy while she’s scoring with a guy, entering her Lake City home to shoot the guy in the ass cheek with a harpoon as if this was an Emerald City version of A Bay of Blood.
Man, I live in Pittsburgh and the movies that the world knows my hometown for all involve zombies, which is certainly an awesome thing, but if I were from Seattle, I would be quite honestly inordinately proud of having Scorchy made there. It’s a near-perfect drive-in movie and ends James Bond style with a barrage of cops descending on the drug dealer’s house and people being shotgun blasted left and right.
Day 30: Bring It on Home: Something filmed in Seattle. (AKA we’re cheating with the Pacific Northwest.)
Okay, so why are we reviewing this dark, teen-crime drama in the middle of an all slasher ‘n horror month at B&S About Movies for October — outside of the fact that Slayer, Hallows Eve, and Fates Warning tear up the soundtrack? What more could possibly be said about a such a well-known, respected and positive-reviewed movie by the likes of us old sods and codgers of B&S About Movies?
Well, this review is all about the context.
During this month of October reviews, we took a look at the metal-influenced horrors of Dead Girls (1989), Snuff Kill(1997), Black Circle Boys (1998), and — by the way of the uber-graphic Deadbeat at Dawn (1988) — we poked a stick at Jim Van Bebber’s unforgettable short film, My Sweet Satan (1994). (We’ve also since reviewed Ricky 6.)
But let’s take it back a bit earlier: to the coming-of-age-crime drama Over the Edge (1979), which River’s Edge director Tim Hunter wrote. He based that Jonathan Kaplan-directed (White Line Fever) film on a 1973 San Francisco Examiner article entitled “Mousepacks: Kids on a Crime Spree” about the rampant teen crime and vandalism in an upscale, planned community outside of San Francisco (the film relocated the events to fictitious New Granada, Colorado).
I burnt the cassette back into Scotch Tape and cinnamon roll’d the album — and I taped Iron Maiden’s “Wrathchild” over that Burning Spear crapola. I dug the Wipers and Agent Orange, however; they remained to rock me.
As result of that Tim Hunter association — in conjunction with the film’s similar titles — in many ways, the later River’s Edge serves as a loose sequel/sidequel to the events in the earlier Over the Edge (Van Halen’s film soundtrack debut). True, those Colorado kids of the late ’70s were rocking out to the then burgeoning sounds of Van Halen, Cheap Trick, and the Ramones, while those mid-’80s Pacific Northwest teens were sporting tee-shirts by Motley Crue and Iron Maiden and thrashin’ to the sounds of Slayer, Fates Warning, and Hallows Eve; however, in a weird, metal rip in the space-time continuum and through the phantasmal crystal ball, we can see that while Carl Willat was leading the charge against the establishment at “New Granola,” Sampson Tollet was strangling the life out of his girlfriend Jamie and giving guided tours of the body.
All of those aforementioned, metal-influenced horrors, as well as River’s Edge, are each loosely based on the horrifyingly true story about the 1981 California murder of Marcy Renee Conrad at the hands of Anthony Jacques Broussard outside of San Jose, California, and the 1984 New York murder of Gary Lauwers at the hands of Ricky Kasso. Occurring later and not directly contributing to the development of River’s Edge, but to all of the other metal-influenced films in this review, was the 1994 West Memphis 3 case in which Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley, Jr., and Jason Balwin, three non-conformist boys, were wrongfully convicted as murderous “Satanists”; their guilt: a shared interest in rock music, horror films, and unconventional art and books. And while there’s no denying the guilt in the 1999 Columbine massacre — the maligning of the music of — and the career damage of Marilyn Manson and the industrial/goth bands KMFDM and Rammstein — as an “underlying cause” of the tragedy — was unconscionable.
Giving metal a bad name.
The legal atrocities of the West Memphis 3 case were, of course, foretold by the 1986 “subliminal message” trial in which British metal band Judas Priest was held responsible for the shotgun suicides of Nevada teens James Vance and Raymond Belknap. Then there’s the parents who sued the “Prince of Darkness” between 1985 and 1990, claiming the song “Suicide Solution” from Ozzy Osbourne’s 1980 debut album, Blizzard of Oz, encouraged their young sons to commit suicide; the best known of those was California teenager John McCollum who perished in 1984. Then there was Canadian, Nova Scotian teen James Jollimore — who killed a woman and her two sons on the “direction” of Osbourne’s then hit song, “Bark at the Moon.”
WM 3 Railroaded: The legal system needs an enema.
Sometimes, the reality of our world, when put to film, is more frightening than anything Stephen King, Wes Craven, or James Wan can dream and we stream in this post-A24 and Blumhouse world.
And there’s a reason why numerous mainstream critics classify River’s Edge a contemporary-day horror film. It’s real and it’s bone chilling. And you can stream it on Amazon Prime, while scene clips abound on You Tube . . . and here’s the trailer.
Jay Wexler, You Rocketh: For ye re-creating the River’s Edge Soundtrack on You Tube. We bow before ye as we rocketh through the the ramble-babbling actor sidebars that is our jam at B&S About Movies.
The Six Degrees of John Carpenter, aka Speaking of Sequels and Sidequels, Sidebar: Three of the cast members from River’s Edge appeared in the Halloween film franchise: The great Leo Rossi (Maniac Cop II), who played the boyfriend of Keanu Reeves’s mom, was Budd the paramedic in Halloween II (1981); Joshua Miller, who played Reeves’s little brother Tim, was one of Tom Atkins’s kids in Halloween III: Season of the Witch; and we’ll-watch-him-in-anything Daniel Roebuck appeared as Lou Martini, the owner of the Rabbitt In Red Lounge in Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009).
The Rob Zombie Connection, aka, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace My Inner Hellbilly, Sidebar: And, to keep with the all-horror theme for this month, Roebuck also appeared in Rob Zombie’s 31 (Pastor Victor), The Lords of Salem (2012), and 3 From Hell (Morris Green) — as well as Don Coscarelli’s John Dies at the End (2012) and Phantasm: Ravager (2016).
The Crispin Is an Acting God, aka How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace that Fact that Crispin Is an Acting God, Sidebar: How can we forget Crispin Glover — incredible here as the loyal, but troubled Layne — starting his career as Jimmy Mortimer in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984). We nostalgically wax over Crispin’s films Bartleby, Ed and Rubin, and Twister in our review of Steve Buscemi’s Ed and his Dead Mother. (Yes, Steve, ye are an acting god as well, so proclaimed; we even reviewed the majesty that is Trees Lounge.)
We get into Eddie Van Halen’s musical contribution to the River’s Edge spiritual cousin, Over the Edge, with our “Exploring: Eddie Van Halen” featurette. Remember how The Wild Life wasn’t a sequel, but a cousin-film to Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Well, Eddie worked on that Cameron Crowe film, as well. Check it out!
The new 2021 documentary on Ricky Kasso.
The real, well, sort of, Ricky Kasso.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes on Medium.
As Robert Freese pointed out in his “Exploring: 80s Comedies” featurette for B&S About Movies, Bob Clark’s Porky’s opened up a cottage industry of teen sex comedies. And boy, did producers scrape the grease pits . . . where’s Pee Wee, Kim Cattral, and Kaki Hunter when you need ’em? Robert Hays! Leslie Nielsen! Where are you, bros?
You a-lookin’ for a-finger lickin’ good burger joint (that’s not) down the road from Faber College . . . one that’s staffed by Melanie Griffith’s half-sister Tracy Griffith (Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland) going up against evil burgermeister Jim Varney (yes, Ernest P. Worrell of the “Goes To” movies), along with Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers . . . and Michael J. Pollard (Memorial Valley Massacre) . . . and Traci Lords (Shock ‘Em Dead) as an industrial spy?
No?
How about a movie with lame jokes about “date rape drugs” in the special sauce and labs where men suffer from non-stop erections?
No wonder this ended up being the last film by ex-’80s TV teen idol Clark Brandon (My Tutor, TV’s The Fitzpatricks, Out of the Blue, Mr. Merlin, The Facts of Life). And why am I the only one who remembers watching 1977’s The Chicken Chronicles on HBO in the ’80s with Clark mixing it up with Steve Guttenberg and Phil Silvers?
Yeah, it’s as bad as American Drive-In and Hard Rock Zombies, which were both shot back-to-back by Krishna Shah. So thanks for the heads up, Blue Laser Studios. And thank you, You Tubers for uploading it HERE and HERE to enjoy. Eat ’em and smile!
You a-lookin’ for a ripoff of Airplane! starring Donnie “Ralph Malph” Most in a comedy that plays an airline crash in downtown Los Angeles for comedy? How about a ripoff of Police Academy set in a stewardess school?
Well, if Donnie, aka “Don,” Most as a washed-out pilot slummin’ as a steward doesn’t get ya . . . maybe Mary Cadorette — who played Vicky, the girl who finally got Jack Tripper to settle down and go from Three’s Company to Three’s a Crowd — as the hot air hostess, will get ya’. How about Wendie Jo Sperber as a frumpy, overweight air hostess?
No. Didn’t think so. Again, where’s Robert Hays and Leslie Neilsen when you need ’em?
Intermission! You need a Chilli Dilly!And a hotdog!
Of the glut of teen sex comedies, it’s this Cameron Crowe-penned comedy — along with Bob Clark’s Porky’s and, to a lesser extent, Boaz Davidson’s much-adored The Last American Virgin — that major and indie studios desperately tried to imitate but never duplicated.
This one has it all: Phoebe Cates changed our young lives rising out of a pool. The Sherman Oaks Mall is practically a character in itself. Jennifer Jason Leigh is so hot, she breaks up a friendship. We all wanted to be as cool as ticket scalper Damone and wore caps and vests. We wanted to hang out with Jeff Spicoli like his stoner buds Nicholas Cage, Eric Stoltz, and Anthony Edwards. And we begged our parents for a pair of checked vans. And we all wanted jobs at the mall slingin’ fast food and selling movie tickets (and working in the record store). And it came with a pretty cool Sammy Hagar theme song.
An all-out classic. Watch it.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Along with Edge of the Axe and Deadly Manor, Spanish horror director José Ramón Larraz made this movie explicitly for the burgeoning American video rental market. It has all the cheap thrills you want, but it feels like a Michelin star chef just made you a mac and cheese pizza.
Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vail, The Patriot) and her husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker, Open House) have just moved into the country villa of her recently deceased Aunt Catherine. Everyone there is pretty much beyond rude and more in your face hostile to them both, which is only the start of the weirdness they endure. I mean, I would have given up when the corpse of Catherine sat straight up when Helen kissed her.
Actually, even before they get there, Helen learns that her father was Catherine’s ex-husband and that he died soon after she was born. Her aunt has held a grudge out against the family, but still gives her everything she owns before she commits suicide during the video will by drinking poison milk. Yes, you read that correctly.
Jack Taylor — who was in more horror movies than even I have watched, but I’ll list out the Nostradamus films, The Ghost Galleon and Female Vampire to start — plays a blind musician who plays a concert while everyone in the town conspires against the two newcomers. Euro horror queen Patty Shepherd also shows up as a character named, get this, Gertrude Stein.
It’s not great, but the idea of a great movie is in here. But you know me. This is exactly the kind of goofball horror that I love.
This Saturday at 11 PM, we’re celebrating Halloween on the Groovy Doom Facebook page with one of our favorite movies of all time, Tales from the Crypt!
Pre-drink prep: Bring 1/2 cup of honey and 1/2 cup of water to simmer and stir. Remove from heat and add a teabag of hibiscus herbal tea. Let cool, then remove tea bag and store in fridge.
In a cocktail shaker, muddle the lime, cucumber and mint.
Add the syrup and vodka with plenty of ice, and shake until well-chilled.
Strain over ice into a glass and top with soda water (after using it to wash your husband’s blood out of the thick white shag carpet). Garnish with a cucumber wheel, if you feel particularly cool.
The original version of The Craft is a movie that has never gone away. Written and directed by Andrew Fleming, who also made one of my favorite (and most derivative) slashers, Bad Dreams, and screenwritten by Peter Filardi (Flatliners) with direction from producer Douglas Wick, who wanted to mix the high school experience with witchcraft, the stories that it tells have continued to engage audiences since it came out in 1996.
This Blumhouse reimagining/sequel had the opportunity to be interesting. Would it take a whole new pass at the story? Would it refer to anything from the past? Or would it be a muddled mess that tries to have a little of both?
This new version has the same problem with so many reimagining: instead of either giving you a new look at an old story or moving past the origin to tell the real story that people want to see (doing so here will necessitate a big spoiler, so I’ll explain more at the end of this after plenty of spoiler space), this just tells a new origin and sets up characters without creating a single memorable moment or character that you come back to and want to know more about.
The original four girls — Sarah, Bonnie, Nancy and Rochelle — each had their own reasons for turning to witchcraft. They all had their own issues, personalities and even styles. And almost 25 years later, I can still tell you about them and how their individual stories all come together.
I just watched this movie last night and I can not tell you a single identifiable thing about the three supporting characters that make up the witches other than two (Frankie and Lourdes) are interchangeable brunettes and Tabby is a black girl who jokes that she doesn’t like Beyonce. We learn nothing of their home lives, their challenges and who they want to be in this world, only that they feel ostracized and they feel the need to turn to the left hand path.
Lily Schechner is the girl who will be their fourth, completing their coven. She’s new in town, as her mom has moved to a new town to live with Adam Harrison (David Duchovny) and his three sons. Maybe I’ve grown too old, but every boy in this movie felt so interchangeable that I had difficulty figuring out which one was their friend Timmy and which were the three brothers.
In fact, why did there even have to be three brothers? None of them are truly essential to the story at all, with the oldest being a cipher at best and a living jump scare at worst. They are interchangeable stock characters that you could remove from this movie and still end up in the same place. Even the villain — spoiler, it’s Duchovny) never really seems to gain any steam or even appear to be much of a threat.
Zoe Lister-Jones, who wrote and directed this, never really sets up any tension. Again, I must refer to the first movie, where it seemed like without magic, the girls’ lives would be meaningless. Nancy, for example, has a life so depressing that you wonder why it took her so long to go completely off the deep end. Her reveal as a sociopath and the girls must working together to stop her tragic unraveling speaks volumes. The moment where the girls realize that getting everything they wanted still leaves them wanting more is as well. Not a single moment happens in this movie that comes within a newt’s eye of that.
That said, Lister-Jones based much of the film and its characters in her own adolescent experiences as a misgendered youth. She also moved with her mother into a home of all men, so she had to adapt. This is the only part of this film that seems true to me.
Now, after adequate spoiler space, I’ll tell you the problem.
Have you ever seen the Jem and the Holograms movie? It spent so much time telling you the origin story — which took 22 minutes in the original cartoon — that the moment you want to see, Pizzazz and the Misfits vs. Jem and the Holograms, is relegated to a post-credit scene of a perfectly cast Kesha threatening to ruin the happy ending.
Here, Lily learns with about ten minutes left in the film that she’s adopted. As we get to the end credits, we follow her to a hospital where she gets to meet her birth mother…Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk). The story of what happened, why Nancy is still in an asylum and how she could have had a daughter, as well as what happens next, is way more interesting than what we just watched.
The frustrating thing of Blumhouse — the studio who made a Black Christmas that seemed more like The Skullsand a Halloween that spent inordinate time discussing sandwiches and peanut butter on private parts than having The Shape murder people — is that they will eventually remake every horror movie worth anything. Sure, we’ll always have what came before, but for some young folks, their first exposure to something great will be a watered-down modern reimagining that’s missing the word imagination.
This is a movie that somehow combines rambling dialogues, Xeroxed zines, the kind of music that you’d hear on a pay to play night at Gazzarri’s in 1990, BDSM pornography, slasher movies and the scuzzy black and white detective magazines that would get ink all over your hands, shoots it all on video and lets it get moldy inside the plastic VHS so that it barely plays on your TV, a warped, distorted and fuzzy time capsule of the past that somehow has survived into our digital time.
It pits a man named Chase (Rik Billock, who is from Vandergrift, PA, the same place we regularly attend the Drive-In Monster-Rama; he was also in Knightriders, The Dark Half and is even a zombie in Dawn of the Dead) against a call girl named Tara (adult film actress Gabriela) who promises “the ultimate climax” to the men and women that pay her all of their money to, well, kill them with knives and weedwhips.
Director Hugh Gallagher also made two more movies related to this called Gorotica and Gore Whore. He also shows up in Mail Order Murder: The Story Of W.A.V.E. Productions, a movie that tells the story of the pre-internet company that created damsel in distress and exploitation movies on demand for those that wanted to see attractive women get tied up, menaced and murdered on videotape. Gallagher also published Draculina Magazine and has written Playgore, a book all about the making of this movie.
If you didn’t grow up in the shot on video era, you may be put off by the dingy feelings of this movie, which mostly takes place in the backrooms of video stores. It feels like the days of self-stapling zines, trading cassettes and the ads in the back of Hustler. It’s completely socially and artistically irredeemable, but even in the lowest levels of culture, sometimes there are moments that can become enjoyable. Or maybe this movie would have run on Videodrome and caused your brain to swell up. Either way, you’ll be somewhat entertained, if you can make it through the cue card reading, bad acting and oh yeah, pretty much a lack of gore in a movie called Gorgasm. Obviously, the title Lots of Breasts and a Bit of Blood and a Weedwhip didn’t fit on the clamshell case.
Lester Bacon misses the old days of slaughtering food, when you got to do it with your hands. Now everything is automated and the local cops and government want to buy him out for $50,000. He’s pretty much forced to take the deal and has thirty days to get out.
But then again, there is his son Buddy, who is really, really good at slicing up anything in his way.
Of course, the slaughterhouse would be exactly where the sheriff’s daughter would go along with her friends to make a horror movie. Because that’s what teenagers did in 1987, go make shot on video films. They get scared off, but one of the boys bets them $20 — which seems like a small amount of money even 33 years ago — to survive a night back at the Bacon Slaughterhouse.
Whoops.
That said, this is a movie with a killer who grunts throughout the film* and an unexpected ending, so it has that going for it. It also has way more new wave on the soundtrack than you’d expect, seeing as how it has a very rural setting.
This being a late 1980’s rental slasher, you know there’s only one place to get it, right? Vinegar Syndrome. I should really just sign over part of my pay to them every year pre-tax, like I do for healthcare.
*Joe B. Barton, who played Buddy, did a radio tour where he stayed in character the whole time.
DAY 29. ONE NIGHT IN APE CANYON: Watch a Bigfoot story.
There are tons of Bigfoot films to watch. Trust us, we know. We have an entire Letterboxd list packed with the ones we’ve made it through. And we know that Scarecrow has an even larger section in the store that’s all Yeti, skunkape and sasquatch based.
We decided to go back to the classics and rewatch this 1974 Michael Findlay film, in which Professor Ernst Prell takes four of his graduate students — Keith Henshaw, Karen Hunter, Tom Nash and Lynn Kelly — into the woods to discover if the Yeti really does exist.
Despite a mysterious dinner the night before — their dish of gin sung is broken up by a drunken former student and his wife who loudly proclaim that the last trip to see a Bigfoot got everyone killed — everyone decides that going into the brush to find the beast is a dandy idea.
As if that isn’t enough, that lout keeps drinking and decides to cut his wife’s throat with an electric turkey knife before she responds in kind by dumping a toaster into the bloody bathwater as he tries to clean himself up.
When the students get to Boot Island, they have more gin sung, meet a mute Native American named Laughing Crow and listen to Tom strum a little tune he wrote about the Yeti, who liked that song so much that he rips Tom apart, leaving only his leg as evidence.
The professor isn’t someone I’d like to have as a teacher, as he’s willing to use that leg and the body of another of the students, Lynn, as bait to catch his white whale. Or white Yeti, you get the allusion.
That said, the reveal of this all — spoiler warning for a 46-year-old movie — is that there’s no Bigfoot at all, but a big society of cannibals looking for either victims to be fresh meat or those willing to help them consumer the flesh of their fellow man.
If you’re a big film geek like me — seeing as how you’re reading about a Sasquatch film from the last century when you could be doing something much more productive, I get the feeling that you are — you’ll wonder, did the print Sam saw have Hot Butter’s “Popcorn” in the soundtrack? Yes. It did. It sure did.
In 1982, if you were lucky enough to still have a drive-in around ou, chances are you could have seen this movie as part of an event named 5 Deranged Features. Don’t be fooled by some of these titles, as you may have seen them all before! They’re Coming to Get You is not All the Colors of the Dark, but instead Al Adamson’s Frankenstein vs. Dracula. House of Torture is The Wizard of Gore. Night of the Howling Beast is The Corpse Grinders. And Creature from Black Lake wasn’t so lucky as to get a name change.
You can watch this for yourself on Tubi if you don’t already own it. Trust me, across Mill Creek comps, bootlegs and official releases, I think I have at least four copies.
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