They might say that this was directed by Roy Garrett, but that’s really the Americanized name for Mario Gariazzo, who directed Enter the Devil, AKA The Sexorcist, AKA The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, which is perhaps the scummiest of all Italian sexualized ripoffs of The Exorcist (and also the most awesome). He also made Play Motel, which is a giallo complete with hardcore inserts.
If you’re reading this and suddenly got a little flush, you’re my kind of people. I feel the same way about as I am about to watch Gariazzo make the first of two Close Encounters of the Third Kind cash-in films that he’d direct in 1978 (the other is Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, in which three nerds dress up like bondage-loving aliens to get their astronomy teacher into bed.
Peter Collins (Franco Garofalo, The Return of the Exorcist) is a photographer who cuts a session short with model Karin Hale (Sherry Buchanan, who was Emanuelle in Emanuelle and Joanna and is also in The Last House on the Beach, Dr. Butcher M.D. and played Belle Starr in Escape from Galaxy 3) after they both start to feel like they were being watched. When he develops the photos, he discovers evidence of alien creatures, which puts them both into a nascent X-Files conspiracy plot.
This being an Italian film, you need some more star power, so Monica Stiles is played by Nathalie Delon (A Whisper In the Dark, Bluebeard; she was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world at one point and dated Richard Burton and Eddie Fisher after both divorced Elizabeth Taylor, which is pretty odd when you think about it), Robert Hoffman (Naked Girl Killed in the Park, Death Carries a Cane) is in this as Tony Harris and Martin Balsam appears as Inspector Jim Grant. And The Silencers, a government organization, soon are on his trail, led by Sergio Rossi, who was the narrator of Africa Blood and Guts, who has Mario Novelli (the engineer from Beyond the Door III/Amok Train and Tango from Fulci’s Warriors of the Year 2072) and George Ardisson (Theseus from Hercules In the Haunted World) under his command.
The poster and giallo sounding title of this movie have always placed it on my watchlist and that’s why I love Mill Creek month. It’s an opportunity to finally get to watch movies that I keep saying, “I need to get to that” and then for some reason always overlook.
It has aliens that wear full-body suits with mylar faces and the cleanest space ship you’ve ever seen and the ability to blind dogs, as well as Hoffman and Stiles pretty much playing Mulder and Scully* 15 years before the show even existed while also ripping off Gerry Anderson’s UFO, a soundtrack of drones and buzzes, plenty of alien point of view shots and a movie that switches protagonists midway through, which is ironic when you consider that Martin Balsam is in this.**
This movie has more twists and turns than any giallo and isn’t afraid to change gears quickly, going from alien movie to conspiracy tale to bringing in psychic and then remembering that it was made in the 1970’s and the rule that all seventies science fiction must have a downer ending.
Plenty of the reviews that I’ve read for this movie hate it. Perhaps they haven’t watched hundreds of Italian genre cinema and want everything to be paced normally and make sense. For those of you who have given up on movies that are sane and are thrilled by warming up leftovers from another era that don’t always taste as good as they once did, you’re going to really love this one.
Everybody smokes. Everybody punches one another in the face. The aliens are barely in it. The soundtrack is atonal and annoying. These are things that would chase off the hardiest of film watchers. To me, it’s the bread and butter that I dip into the sauce after devouring the cinematic pasta.
To make things that much better, it ends with a “this really happened” title card. I didn’t know I could be so happy.
*Ardisson is pretty much playing the Cigarette Smoking Man, when you come to think of it.
**Sometimes when you explain the joke it is no longer funny. However, for the non-watchers of ten movies a day, this is the exact same thing that happens in the movie that Balsam is best known for, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Dustin Fallon from Horror and Sons has returned to write this entry. He’s always been a big promoter of our site and has been instrumental when it comes to getting writers for this project. I’ve always had fun writing for his Halloween projects — I wrote about CHiPs this year — and love any time he comes to write for our site.
The Day Time Ended is a 1980 science fiction film released by Compass International Pictures. As I’m sure you know, Compass were also the distributor for John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978, and producer Charles Band’s Tourist Trap in 1979. As I’m sure you also know, both of those films are much better remembered than this film, and for a multitude of good reasons.
Band would also serve as the producer of The Day Time Ended, with former stuntman John “Bud” Cardos (The Dark, Kingdom of the Spiders) taking directing duties. Fans of Band’s Empire Pictures and Full Moon Features presentations will undoubtedly notice quite a few regulars among the crew, such as David Schmoeller (director of Tourist Trap and Puppet Master) and Ted Nicolaou (Terrorvision, Subspecies series), as well as Oscar-winning make-up artist Ve Neill!
The Day Time Ended was seemingly produced to cash-in on the still lingering success of Star Wars in 1976, a wave of science fiction hysteria that allowed filmmakers and distributors of the time to drop any genre-related turd upon a presumably unsuspecting, yet still eager audience. If you were a young male during this era, chances are that the presence of spaceships, aliens, laser guns, and other intergalactic trappings was generally all it took to get your butt in the seat.
In The Day Time Ended, a young couple (played by Robert Mitchum’s son, Chris and Marcy Lafferty, who had previously appeared in Kingdom of the Spiders) and their daughter move to the middle of the desert in order to take up residence with the husband’s parents (or, at least I think they are his parents) and younger brother in their solar-powered home that looks far too small for all these people. The elder couple, played by Western star Jim Davis and Peyton Place‘s Dorothy Malone, have seemingly “dropped off the grid”, retreating from the modern world.
As we learn from a radio broadcast playing as the film opens, this move coincides with the occurrence of a triple-supernova. Almost immediately upon arriving at the desert home, the young child, Jenny, finds a strange, glowing structure while tending to a new pony that her grandfather has purchased. She runs off to tell her family, who find themselves distracted by the fact that the house appears to have been ransacked. The structure, about the same size as the horse, disappears before anyone else can see it. Once her family has left her side, believing the young child to be lost in childish fantasy, Jenny again finds the glowing structure, now no bigger than a large sugar cube or game die.
Other strange events begin to occur around little Jenny, but of course, no one takes any notice for an extended period of time. The grandparents soon witness two UFOs that fly over their heads as they walk the property, but think little of the incident other than being a little creeped out. Later that evening, when the family is in their beds, Jenny is visited by a tiny extraterrestrial creature. The mute creature jumps and spins around the room, but soon flees when another alien craft, also quite small, appears in Jenny’s bedroom. The grandmother also has an encounter with one of the small alien creatures.
In time, more alien craft of varying size and shape converge upon the home. The family is unable to flee due to the car acting erratically, and any attempts to call in or out on the phone line are either cut short or garbled with static, thanks to “atmospheric interference”, an “electrical storm”, or whatever you choose to call the electromagnetic disturbance caused by all this alien activity.
The Day Time Ended continues along with all sorts of extraterrestrial shenanigans occurring both within, as well as outside of, the home. Eventually, large monstrous creatures appear outside the house, further preventing any attempts at escape as they fight and maul each other to death. While these early examples of David Allen’s stop-motion work do show the early-stages of his abilities, they undeniably feel dated by today’s standards, and are far from “ideal” demonstrations of the talent that has made him a considerable legend by many and that earned him an Oscar nomination in later years for his work on 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes. Overall, it’s still a fairly neat sight to behold by those of us still fascinated with cinematic monsters and aliens.
The film’s multiple effects are clearly on showcase here and are the obvious “star” of the film, covering up for (and at times, highlighting) the film’s thread thin and wildly incoherent plot. Sure, there’s some late-night, braindead entertainment to be found here if you aren’t looking for anything too deep or thought-consuming, but even the film’s veteran actors occasionally look bewildered and lost at times.
The Day Time Ended finally reaches its conclusion, only to become even more confusing. Drowning in visual nonsense, the finale presents endless questions with no clear answers given, other than what we interpret them to mean. Honestly, the whole thing just feels tacked on and more than a little rushed.
While I personally enjoy the stop-motion effects on display in The Day Time Ended, they are unfortunately an aspect of the film that many critics trashed upon its release, as well as in the years following. To further exemplify that just maybe I have no clue what I’m talking about, I personally felt that Lafferty wildly over-acted her way through her entire performance as “Beth”, the young mother. However, others clearly must have disagreed with my assessment as she was nominated for “Best Supporting Actress” at 1980’s 7th Annual Saturn Awards, losing to Alien‘s Veronica Cartwright. I can’t imagine there were many other viable competitors.
The Day Time Ended received a blu-ray release from Full Moon Features in early 2019. While the film, as well as Allen’s stop-motion effects, do benefit from a visual upgrade (well, the effects are debatable) thanks to the HD transfer, there’s really little to recommend here if you aren’t already an avid fan of Allen’s work or aren’t into watching painfully dull vintage sci-fi just for the sake of it.
I dig what Dustin Ferguson is doing with his movies. They’re not big budget affairs, but they have heart, quick a little over an hour bursts of blood, boobs and beasts, which as we know is pretty much all you need to make a good little movie.
Much like a Trigon movie from the past, this film concerns a small town that protects itself from the outside world by sacrificing a victim once every ten years to the titular Blood Beast. It’s also a lot like 1972’s (well, it wasn’t released until 1976) Track of the Moon Beast, the Richard Ashe film that was co-written by Batman co-creator (some would say main creator) Bill Finger. To hammer that point home, a character named Bernadette (Dawna Lee Heising, who will be in the remake of Ghosthouse!) watches a scene from that very same movie within this movie.
This movie has AVN Hall of Famer (and guest vocalist on a Lords of Acid album) Alana Evans as an early victim, as well as Julie Anne Prescott (Kill Dolly Kill), Vida Ghaffari (Eternal Code), Mike Ferguson, Alan Maxson, Ken May, Chelsea Newman, Eric Reingrover, D.T. Carney, Rob Mulligan, Valerie Mulligan, Dustin Wonch and Raymond Vinsik Williams.
This has some fun monster costumes and gore to go with all the POV shots. It’s a quick watch and probably better than the film that inspired it, to be perfectly honest.
I love that Ferguson debuts these movies on WGUD, an actual TV station, with this one airing on the After Hours show on June 7, 2019.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally reviewed this movie on October 9, 2019. However, the new release from Arrow Video made us sit back and watch it one more time, especially the great extra features that they always include.
The Last Starfighter is all about Alex Rogan (Lance Guest, Halloween 2), whose life is going nowhere but the trailer park where he takes care of everyone else and dreams of finding a better life with his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Marie Stewart, The Apple). His only escape is a video game called Starfighter, a video game that takes him to the Frontier, where he battles Xur and the devilish Ko-Dan Armada.
Of course, the game is just there to recruit him for a galactic battle and they send the Music Man — err, Centauri — who tries to talk him into joining up with the war effort. Either way, I’m still so amazed by the fact that Robert Preston is in this movie.
Another great character is reptilian navigator Grig, who is played by one of my favorite character actors, Dan O’Herlihy. Between this movie, Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and the Old Man in RoboCop, every time I see O’Herlihy in a film, I can’t help but smile. Here, he does it all while completely covered in reptilian makeup.
It’s a very simple, but effective, space opera that fits well into the science fiction of 1984. Credit the great direction by Nick Castle, who you probably already know played Michael Myers in the original Halloween, before making this his second film after Tag: The Assassination Game.
The beauty of the Arrow re-release — beyond the gorgeous 4K rescan of the 35mm negative — are all the extras. Not just one, but three commentary tracks are on this (star Lance Guest and his son Jackson Guest; Mike White of The Projection Booth podcast; director Nick Castle and production designer Ron Cobb), along with interviews with Catherine Mary Stewart, composer Craig Safan, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel, special effects supervisor Kevin Pike, a breakdown on the landmark effects and even a featurette with game collector Estil Vance, who has actually made the game from the movie.
I have to say, the Castle and Cobb commentary is packed with info, from who is playing the aliens to how the effects came together to even plenty of fun asides about how they tried to tie the video game world and real movie world together. It’s like listening to two friends talk about a really great time in their life. Castle is super honest about the lack of time they had to film and things he feels could be better today. It’s exactly the kind of thing that film lovers get into the most and, as always, Arrow delivers the goods.
You can get this blu ray from Arrow, who were kind enough to send us a copy.
“The body is gone…but The Head lives on!” That’s what brought them out in theaters in 1960 to see this on a double bill with The City of the Dead, I guess. What they got was a German film — originally known as Die Nackte und der Satan (The Naked and the Satan) — redubbed and made ready for American viewing.
A scientist named Professor Dr. Abel (Michel Simon) — and if you need two titles like that then yes, you are a genius — has invented a serum that keeps a dog’s head alive even after the body has died. So when he dies, his assistant (Horst Frank, The Dead Are Alive) cuts off his head and keeps it alive so that he can give the hunchbacked nurse a new body. Hijinks ensue.
Someone should have made a movie of the life of Simon. The son of a Catholic sausage maker and a Protestant housewife, he left home at an early age, living on the streets and giving boxing lessons for money before becoming a clown, an acrobat and a Swiss soldier before applying his bizarre looks to a life as an actor. He was also the man who tried out the new call girls for France’s most elite brothel owner, Madame Claude, as well as being the owner of one of the world’s foremost collections of erotica, housed within a weed-covered home that was interconnected by tunnels and patrolled by an army of pet monkeys.
At the time of making this, Simon had had the left side of his face and most of his body paralyzed after a bad reaction to some stage makeup. He needed money and wanted to work, but didn’t want many to know just how bad he was. The producers of this film assured him it would only play in Germany, yet it ended up playing all over the world. Luckily, he’d recover and end up being in plenty of plays and movies afterward.
Now what can we do about fixing up Professor Dr. Abel with Jan Compton?
You can watch this Trans-Lux Release public domain ditty on Tubi and YouTube.
Jerry Sangiuliano was born and died in Scranton, PA. He left behind four short films and one full-length movie, which will be the one we discuss today. It’s a movie that says, “WARNING! An experiment in mind control is out of control … and the body count is building!”
Laurie Stevens (Farrah Forke, Hitman’s Run) is one of several college students who have signed up to improve the world of video games and end up becoming killers when flashes of light begin to reprogram their brains.
Yes, it’s Polybius all over again, with the games that kids love being the cause of everything evil in the world, just like they always warned us they would be. They probably shouldn’t have sat so close to the TV while they were at it.
Sangiuliano re-released this movie in 2013 as Fractals, which is an amazing piece of carny hucksterism, because as far as I know, video game graphics do not improve over the course of 22 years.
I’ve never understood movies where evil video game companies try to kill off their main target audience. It’s the same reason why I never understood why Judas Priest and Ozzy wanted me to kill myself. Who else was going to buy their records?
You can watch this Crown International release on so many Mill Creek sets, including the one we’re featuring this month (Sci-Fi Invasion), the Gore House Greats 12-movie set, Drive-In Cult Classics Volume 4 and the Drive-In Cult Cinema 200 Classics box and the B Movie Blasts set. I am certain that it just might be a bonus feature on everything Mill Creek has ever and will ever release. It’s also on YouTube.
February 10, 1978: a day that changed hard rock music forever with the release Van Halen’s self-titled debut album.
Fueled by the FM radio hits of “Eruption,” “You Really Got Me,” “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love,” “Running with the Devil,” and “Jamie’s Cryin'” the album eventually broke the U.S Billboard Album Top 20 to peak at #19 and sell more than a Diamond-certification of 10 million copies in the U.S. Not bad for an album that had its start as a three-track demo in 1976 financed by Gene Simmons of Kiss. The album was eventually recorded by ex-Harpers Bizarre guitarist and Doobie Brothers producer Ted Templeman in three weeks in October of 1977 at a cost of $40,000. And we’re grateful that Gene was unable to shanghai Eddie into Kiss (to replace Ace Frehley). And that Eddie convinced Ted that replacing Dave with Sammy Hagar and grafting Eddie into a Montrose reboot wasn’t going to happen.
The Pasadena rock scene where Van Halen developed their sound was hungry and competitive. Not every band that got a major-label deal “made it” to the top of the charts: most ended up in the cut out bins.
One of the bands sharing stages with the various incarnations of Van Halen — as Wolfgang and Mammoth, and then, Van Halen — was fellow Pasadena rockers Rockits. Led by guitarist and vocalist Brian Naughton, he was knockin’ around the L.A. rock scene since his first deal on MGM Records in 1970 with his Montrose-Van Halen precursor Rock Candy, along with tenures in the line-ups of hippie-rockers the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and Top 40 darlings the Grass Roots.
Sadly, unlike Van Halen’s deal with Warner Bros., the later known Rockicks’* deal with Robert Stigwood’s RSO Records (yes, home of the Bee Gees) failed to send their album, 1977’s Outside, up the charts. Also on that same local L.A. rock scene was a band that — unlike Van Halen and Rockicks — couldn’t get a deal (and when they did, it was in Japan). It was a band that featured a young ax slinger by the name of Randy Rhodes; a band that shared management and rehearsal space with Rockicks: Quiet Riot. And how can we forget Sorcery, who ended up in the films — as actors and soundtrack contributors — Stunt Rock and Rocktober Blood.
Image Left: Van Halen gig from December 1976, courtesy of The Roth Army Facebook/Image Right: Quiet Riot and Rockicks feature articles in a 1977 issue of L.A. rag Raw Power, courtesy of Scott Stephens.com.
And it wasn’t long after that little ol’ band from Pasadena starting out at the Whisky a Go Go and the Starwood was opening shows for Journey, Montrose (discovered and produced by Templeman, the band once featured Van Halen’s next lead singer), and Black Sabbath. Of course, the uppity critics at Rolling Stone and Village Voice hated Van Halen. But the fans loved them. And soon, the TV and film studios came-a-callin’. Between TV series and films — with lots of song repeats (“Jump,” “Panama,” and “Hot for Teacher” mostly) — Eddie amassed 100-plus credits.
Here’s the Top 10 highlights.
WKRP in Cincinnati “Hold Up” (1978) “Atomic Punk”
Before MTV went on the air to break bands, record companies went to MTM Productions to have their bands spun on the faux-airwaves of a little ‘ol AM rocker in Cincinnati.
It’s hard to believe a network TV series could break bands, but this CBS-TV series did. Songs were, in fact, not just incidental, atmospheric pieces, but often tied into the plot of the episode with the DJs announcing the tunes. The Boyzz, which had their debut release out on CBS-affiliated Cleveland Int’l Records, were spun by Dr. Johnny Fever. Capitol’s Durocks had their poster/album featured on the show. Detective (signed to Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label) led by Michael Des Barres, had three songs featured on the show. And the show’s use of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” is credited with breaking the band in the U.S. In a show of appreciation, the band’s label, Chrysalis, presented the show’s producers with a gold album that was used as a set piece in the sales bullpen during the second, third, and forth seasons.
Another band “broke” — in the fifth episode of the first season, “Hold Up” (the inept Herb Tarlek makes a mess of a Dr. Johnny Fever remote at Del’s Stereo Shop) — was Van Halen with “Atomic Punk” from their debut album.
Sadly, our opportunity to revisit “Atomic Punk” — as well as most other songs featured on the show — is forever lost due to music licensing issues. MTM Productions’ song licenses expired in the mid-1990s and it proved too expensive to renew, so today’s syndicated and DVD home video versions now have those songs replaced with stock music. Your only hope is to find grey market VHS (now DVDs) box sets of the series taped-from-TV during the series’ initial network and pre-’90s syndication runs to watch-hear the series in its original state. (The Shout Factory DVD box set was able to reproduce most of Season One with 80 percent of the original music intact.)
Series producer Hugh Wilson explains the music licensing issues on You Tube, while superfan Mike Hernandez created an episode-by-episode Google Spreadsheet of every band and song featured on the series. He also created Google Graphs showing a song’s chart performance before and after its appearance on the series. (Be sure to check out our review proper of the movie FM with more about the relationship between that film and the series.)
Van Halen “live off the board” at their last show at the Pasadena Civic Center with “Atomic Punk” before the release of their debutalbum.
Over the Edge (1979) “You Really Got Me”
The digital content managers at the IMDb fell asleep at the data entry terminal by not including this film in Eddie’s soundtrack credits; for this second film from Orion Pictures (their first was the Diane Lane-starring A Little Romance) served as Van Halen’s big screen debut. You’ll remember Van Halen’s cover of the Kinks’ classic playing in the background of the house party scene where Carl only has eyes for Corey — who’s making out on the couch with Mark.
Sadly, the film’s eight-city test run was scuttled by negative publicity surrounding youth gang films such as The Warriors, Boulevard Nights, and Defiance — where actual violence broke out in the theaters between the gang rivals in the audience. The film, of course, found a cult audience on HBO and introduced the “new” sounds of not only Van Halen, but the Cars, the Ramones, and Cheap Trick to us youngins. And, since the film was scuttled, so was the soundtrack: us wee lads n’ lassies picked it up in the $1.00 cut out bins — and rocked.
And Kurt Cobain was one of us back then.
We go a deeper into the backstory of Over the Edge in our review of its sister film, River’s Edge.
The Wild Life (1984) and Back to the Future (1985) “Donut City” and “Out the Window”
No one remembers Cameron Crowe’s follow up to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which served as Eddie’s first film score. (Yes, he’s done others!) Recorded around the time of Van Halen’s sixth album, 1984, it features all new, instrumental tunes. A true solo effort, Eddie scored the entire film playing guitar along with an electronic drum machine.
Sadly, while many pieces of his music are in the film, only “Donut City” appears on the official motion picture soundtrack (Discogs). And thanks to those pesky licensing issues, the soundtrack has never been released on CD. You can, however, enjoy Eddie’s work from the soundtrack courtesy of a playlist on the official Van Halen Vault You Tube page.
Astute Van Halenites will recognize three musical vignettes from The Wild Life became the basis for three, later Van Halen songs: “Good Enough” from 1986’s 5150, “Right Now” from 1991’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, and “Blood and Fire” from their final album, 2012’s A Different Kind Of Truth. The fourth, “Out the Window,” was later recycled in Back to Future. You’ll remember when Marty McFly — in a yellow hazmat suit as “Darth Vadar from Vulcan” — played the song to a headphoned George McFly.
Be sure to check out our full review of The Wild Life, coming soon, as result of its upcoming Kino restoration reissue.
Ugh. Again. We give up with the trailer embeds. You’re on your own.
The Seduction of Gina (1984) Soundtrack Composer
Closing out her sitcom career with One Day at Time in 1984, and while the “Big Three” networks were still making TV movies, Valerie Bertinelli produced this CBS telefilm that deals with a newly-married and bored housewife who develops a gambling addiction. And Val brought on her husband to compose the soundtrack.
At the time of producing this film, Bertinelli was also in the running for Lori Singer’s role in 1984’s Footloose. Imagine Kevin Bacon boppin’ around to a score by Eddie Van Halen — Eddie Rabbit be damned. Or was that Kenny Loggins? I always get the two confused.
Eddie would go onto compose the theme music to Valerie’s next CBS-TV series, 1990’s short-lived Sydney. The show used “Finished What You Started” from OU812 and it’s said that Eddie also composed uncredited instrumentals throughout the series’ thirteen episodes.
Sigh . . . there was a You Tube clip — the only clip — of the film’s opening titles featuring Eddie’s music. It was posted for a few years . . . and right before we went press, the film’s copyright holder scrubbed the clip from You Tube. So we found this Nicki Swift report on Eddie and Val’s divorce to watch.
Better Off Dead (1985) “Everybody Wants Some”
Then Eddie became a hamburger . . . in this mostly autobiographical film by Savage Steve Holland. According to Holland, he really was suicidal when his high school girlfriend left him for the captain of the ski team. Also, he really did have a paperboy who’d harass him for two dollars. And, when the film came out, his ex-girlfriend contacted him to apologize.
And the biographical continues . . . as the film’s infamous claymation hamburger scene was inspired by Holland’s first job working at McDonald’s. And while John Cusack went on record as hating this movie and chewed out Holland for it, Eddie VH’s “big scene” was the highest testing scene when the film was screened by audiences. The burger, of course, plays “Everybody Wants Some” from Van Halen’s third album, 1980’s Women and Children First. The burger also plays a guitar resembling Eddie’s Frankenstrat.
Regardless of “Claymation Eddie” being the only part of the movie we remember, “Everybody Wants Some” does not appear on the soundtrack (Discogs). The soundtrack does, however, feature two tunes from co-star E.G Daily (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) and one from Terri Nunn of Berlin. And we wished Eddie wrote the entire soundtrack instead of Fixx producer Rubert Hine. And we thank Richard Linklater for using the song in his 2000 film named after the song.
Why did they use the super annoying cover from the super annoying, didn’t-even-deserve-their-one hit wonder 4-Non Blondes instead of the Van Halen original? What gives Ian the Shark? KMPX is an Active Rock station, right? Wouldn’t Van Halen be on the station’s “Gold” rotation? Why not add the friggin’ Spin Doctors and Crash Test Dummies to the playlist while you’re at it? And we love Anthrax . . . but not when they’re covering the Smiths. Or friggin’ Joe Jackson. Where’s “Metal Trashin’ Mad” when you need it to spin?
Well . . . at least we got a get very cool dig at Sammy Hagar, which exposed Harold Ramis as a cop-cum-bogus record executive.
Be sure to check out our review proper of Airheads.
Twister (1996) “Humans Being” and “Respect the Wind”
Could you imagine the above scene from Airheads ripping Patty Smyth of Scandal or Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates? Well, before Sammy Hagar joined, Eddie approached both singers — who turned down the offer. Yikes, talk about “thinking outside of the box,” right?
And could you imagine a world where Micheal Crichton became a “Yoko Ono” and broke up Van Hagar — and gifted us with Van Cherone? Well, it happened.
After completing their support slot on Bon Jovi’s European Summer stadium tour — which served to promote 1995’s Balance, VH’s then tenth album overall and fourth studio album with Sammy Hagar — Van Halen was contractually obligated to record two original songs for the Twister soundtrack. Hagar, who was against the Warner Bros. project to start with, wanted time off with his family, as he was expecting the birth of a child. And Eddie read him the riot act about what it means to be in a group. And Hagar ranted that being in a group sucks and he’d rather be a solo artist (no wonder the mighty Montrose — the Hagar version we cared about — fell apart after two albums). (Montrose bassist-keyboardist Alan Fitzgerald, who ended up in Night Ranger, served as VH’s off-stage/touring keyboardist from the early ’90s until the early 2000s.)
But Hagar, reluctantly, wrote and recorded “Humans Being.” And Eddie, unhappy with Sammy’s lyrics and halfhearted attempt, re-wrote the melody and re-titled the song, originally known as “Shine On.” And Eddie turned the song into, what is practically, an instrumental. And it sounds exactly like the shitty Van Halen B-Side not-suitable-for-a-studio-album outtake that it is.
Hagar was pissed.
And when it came time to record the second song, Hagar split for Hawaii. So the Van Halen brothers, with Alex on keyboards, alone recorded the instrumental “Respect the Wind,” which got dumped onto the film’s end credits. Is it the best end credits song ever? Yes. But surely Warner Bros. Pictures was expecting something more from Van Halen.
Update, November 2022: Sammy Hagar, in speaking with Consequence. net, tells of another song recorded for the soundtrack, “Between Us Two,” that didn’t make final cut. Long questioned by Van Halen fans as to its existence, Hagar claims the “mid-tempo ballad that’s almost country, kind of like “Can’t Stop Loving You” from 1995,” was not only recorded, but it was completely finished. Hagar thinks the song may resurface, as Eddie’s estate is currently going through the archives to remaster the Hagar-era material for re-release.
Mission to Mars (2000) “Dance the Night Away”
What can you say about a movie that features astronauts spouting cheesy lines such as, “Okay, we’re ready to light this candle,” playing with M&M’s in zero gravity, product-placing astro-bags of Coca-Cola to seal hull breeches, and eventually gets turned into a Walt Disney theme park attraction?
Only that it gets worse: Gary Sinise wears eye liner throughout the film. The alien is CGI-hokey. And the crew dances in the ship’s zero gravity hub to a tune from Van Halen II. Where’s that copy of Hammer Films’ Moon Zero Two from 1969 when you need it?
Man, you just want to puke. And that’s not the zero-gravity sickness talking. Sorry, we can’t embed the video, but you can watch the “Dance the Night Away” scene on You Tube.
After three lead singers and almost thirty years across eleven studio albums — the last being 1998’s critical and chart-flopping Van Halen III featuring ex-Extreme singer Gary Cherone — Eddie moved into the world of adult films.
If you go into this “Gothic ghost tale” expecting “Eruption” from Van Halen I or “Saturday Afternoon in the Park,” which served as the dark, instrumental opening to “One Foot Out the Door,” the closing track from Van Halen’s fourth album, Fair Warning, you’ll be disappointed. Don’t expect the heavy darkness of “Intruder,” the instrumental opening to “Pretty Woman” from Van Halen’s fifth album, 1982’s Diver Down; expect the lighter “Cathedral” from that same album. These two tracks, written for Eddie’s longtime friend, Micheal Ninn, are closer to “Baluchitherium” from Balance and “Respect the Wind” from the Twister soundtrack.
According to Eddie, in speaking to industry website AVN, his working on a porn film was no big deal. He was simply working with and helping a friend with his film, whose work he respected. In addition to the songs, Eddie, who also served as the film’s executive producer, provides a series of atmospheric piano interludes throughout the film.
Eddie the Actor Frazier, Cafe Americain, and Two and a Half Men
Eddie was one of the many celebrity callers — as was the schtick of the series — as Hank on “Call Me Irresponsible,” a 1993 season one episode of Frazier. Of course, that voice-guest part was result of Eddie being on the Warners Bros. lot for the shooting of his wife Valerie Bertinelli’s failed, one-season series Cafe Americain, where he played a “Street Musician” in the series’ seventh episode, “Home Alone.” For his only on-camera speaking role, he performed “Two Burritos and a Root Beer Float” on “818-jklpuzo,” the first episode of the seventh season from CBS-TV’s Two and a Half Men.
Edward Lodewijk Van Halen January 26, 1955 – October 6, 2020 We’ll never look at or hear the guitar the same way again. You were our Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.
“What time is it?”
“7:14”
“Quaalude, Quaalude.”
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.
* You can learn more about the career of Brian Naughton and L.A.’s Rockicks with a history on the band, as well as an interview with Rockicks’ guitarist Jerry Zubal, in the pages of the Euro-online publication, It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine.
Every year, October becomes the month that I try and watch as many slashers as I can. This year, my goal was to watch a hundred. And guess what? I hit my goals. Here are the ones that I watched this year, along with links so you can read about them.
You can always track the entire list of our slasher watching with our Letterboxd list.
Want to see these for yourself? Plenty of them came from Vinegar Syndrome, which has been releasing some of the best lost VHS era slashers on blu ray. There are others that came out from Arrow Video, as well. Within each article, you’ll always find a place to watch the movie in streaming form or where you can order a copy.
Thanks for reading! Now, I have to prepare to beat this record for next year.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.