Editor’s Desk: This review originally ran on October 1, 2020, as part of our October 2020 annual “Slasher Month” and we’ve brought it back for “John Doe Week.“

As I write this, Boston’s iconic, trendsetting alternative rock station, WFNX 101.7 FM, is no more.

When the station went on the air in 1947 as WLYN, it broadcast a programming palate of simulcasting its sister AM station with the same callsign on AM 1360, then originated its own programming at night after the AM went off the air at sundown (an AM-FM combo broadcast standard until the mid-70s). Upon the convergence-birth of Los Angeles’ alternative rock station KROQ (the home of Rodney Bingenheimer; his career chronicled in The Mayor of the Sunset Strip) and MTV in the early ’80s, the station came to drop its variety-ethnic programming in 1981 and began experimenting with new wave music in the evenings.

By 1982, WLYN became known as “Y-102,” one of the first full-time new-wave rock stations in the country; a station sale in 1983 resulted in the format remaining, but birthing a new set of call letters — WFNX — until another station sale in 2012 to Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) resulted in an automated format flip to an “Adult Hits” and a new set of call letters: WBWL (a common practice — live to automation — in these digital times).

The first song WFNX played under its new, full-time alt-rock format was the Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed.” In August of 1991, with buzz on the group in full effect, DJ Kurt St. Thomas gave the then commercially unknown Nirvana their world broadcast premiere of their new album, Nevermind, from start to finish — and we all know how that album turned out.

At that point, WFNX became a trendsetter of the alt-rock community, giving the first national airplay to the top-selling bands The Darkness, Franz Ferdinand, Florence and the Machine, Hawthorne Heights, and Jet, just to name a few. When the station when off the air in 2012, they went off with the song that started it all: the Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed.” Nirvana’s first major, mainstream concert appearance beyond the college-rock club scene was for WFNX’s annual anniversary party in August 28, 1991.

To call St. Thomas — as do Beatles historians with New York DJ Murray the K as “The Fifth Beatle” — the “fourth Nirvana member” (or fifth, if you count the late addition of Pat Smear of the Germs as a second guitarist during the In Utero years), is no understatement.

By 1996 Kurt St. Thomas transitioned into filmmaking. Along with fellow WFNX DJ Mike Gioscia, they made the 1999 black and white film noir Captive Audience. The film dealt with the odd, symbiotic relationship between an overnight DJ and a gun-toting intruder at the station. Winning several international and domestic film awards, St. Thomas and Gioscia were encouraged to shoot a more adventurous feature production.

Recruiting John Doe of X (Border Radio) as their star, The Red Right Hand is a horror film that begins in 1963 as it follows five high school friends forced to relive a terrifying secret at their 15^th high school reunion in 1978. Also released to video under the titles Above and Below and Jon’s Good Wife, the original title was taken from a Nick Cave song. 

As with most of the Troma Entertainment catalog, don’t let the logos from The Asylum deter you from spinning the DVD, as the studio only distributed the film; they were not involved in its production.

Is it “The Creepiest movie since Rosemary Baby!” as the DVD box claims? No. And The Asylum marketing department has a lot of balls making us thing we’re getting a film that matches the majesty of Roman Polanski. However, St. Thomas and Mike Gioscia have crafted a solid mystery drama rife with blackmail, murder, private demons, and rattling bones: all the plot points you expect in a noir.

St. Thomas would later work at the KROQ, the L.A. rock station responsible for birthing WFNX; while there, he came to produce the long-running specialty show “Jonesy Jukebox” for Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols (The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle). He and John Doe are currently in post-production stages on their latest effort — and St. Thomas third feature film overall — D.O.A: The Movie, with co-star Lucinda Jenney, who we last saw in Rob Zombie’s 3 from Hell. A noir homage, it concerns Frank Bigelow (John Doe), a Florida private detective hired to follow the ne’er-do-well husband of a St. Augustine socialite. The spiraling double-crosses ensue.

Even though The Asylum made the VHS and DVD widely available in the marketplace — I’ve seen it numerous times on rental and retail shelves, cut-out bins and second hand stores — they’ve opted not to offer it as an online stream. There’s not even an online trailer or clips to share. But if you Google it, you’ll readily find VHS and DVD copies in the online marketplace.

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

Editor’s Desk: This review originally ran on May 25, 2018, as part of our “Stephen King Week” of reviews and we’ve brought it back for John Doe Week.

Originally titled The Curse, this film, based on the real-life Spur Posse case (read up at Wikipedia; you’ve seen the case as plot fodder for Law & Order), sat in development hell for two years. One can only wish that it had remained there. How did we as a people allow this movie to happen? If only social media had been around to shame this film into nothingness back then!

The original story was so close to Carrie that the producers decided to go for it and the film finally went into production in 1998 under the title Carrie 2: Say You’re Sorry. However, just a few weeks into production, director Robert Mandel (School Ties, F/X) quit over creative difference and Katt Shea (Stripped to Kill, Poison Ivy, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase) stepped in with less than a week to prepare and two weeks’ worth of unusable footage.

Did you like Hackers? Well, if you did, good news. The writer of that movie, Rafael Moreu, also wrote this. Chances are, however, that you disliked that movie. Most people do.

Man, where to start? Well, how about in the past, where Barbara Lang paints a red paint barrier throughout her house to protect her daughter Rachel from Satan? There’s a nice transition here where we go from the young girl holding her puppy to the teen version holding an older version of Walter the dog.

Rachel hates her foster parents (the dad is John Doe from X! and A Matter of Degrees) and only has one friend, Lisa (a pre-American Pie and American Beauty, if only by a few months, Mena Suvari). On the bus, Lisa shares that she just gave up her virginity to Eric (Zachery Ty Bryan of TV’s Home Improvement), a football player.

The truth? It’s all an elaborate game where players get points for sleeping with different girls. Eric rejects her and Lisa dives off the roof of the school, igniting Rachel’s telekinetic powers.

That’s when we meet Sue Snell (Amy Irving, who asked Brian De Palma for his blessing), the only person who came back from the original. She’s now a school counselor and she and Sheriff Kelton are trying to figure out why so many girls have come to her in tears. Never mind that one of them just did a perfect dive off the garden club’s roof.

Meanwhile, Walter the dog gets hit by a car and Jesse, the nice football player takes her to the animal hospital. Becca assures me that Jason London and his twin brother, Jesse, were once a big deal. All I know is that he was in Dazed and Confused.

The football players learn that Rachel figured out the game and alerted the police, so they try and intimidate her. Her powers nearly kill them before her foster parents arrive.

Sue Snell drops the bomb on Rachel soon after. Her father, Ralph White, also was the father of Carrie White, who burned down the school that Sue attended and killed 70 people thanks to her powers. Rachel refuses to believe that they are half-sisters, even after a visit to the burned down school. This is probably where the planned Sissy Spacek cameo would have gone, but she did not want to be in the film. She did allow her old footage to be used, however. There was even a version shot of this scene where Rachel kicked the metal bucket that dropped onto Carrie’s head, but thankfully smarter heads won out.

So Jesse falls in love with Rachel, despite popular girl Tracy being all butthurt about it. Oh yeah — I forgot that American Pie alumnus Eddie Kaye Thomas shows up, too.

The players get out of jail free thanks to the status of their parents. But they want revenge, so they decide to humiliate Rachel. They secretly tape Rachel and Jesse making love and play it at a big party that they’ve invited Rachel to. The players also reveal their sex game and make her believe that Jesse never really loved her.

As they all scream and yell at her (one of them even yells, “They’re all going to laugh at you,” which one imagines they would only know from an Adam Sandler routine), she finally unleashes her power and kills nearly everyone. This is the one great scene in the film, as her shitty tattoo (which looks like the fakest tattoo in the history of the fake tattoo game) becomes vines that descend down her arm.

Sue has somehow stolen Barbara from the mental institution to try and save Rachel, but it causes her death (shades of Miss Collins in the original). Even spear guns and a flare gun can’t stop her. Finally, her mother tells her that she is possessed by Satan and wants nothing to do with her and Rachel begs to die.

Tracy comes into the house and Rachel kills her with absolutely no mercy. As the videotape of Jesse and Rachel plays, she makes him explain. He screams that he loves her but she doesn’t believe it until she hears the same tone on the video. The ceiling collapses on her and he stays by her side to kiss, but she pushes him away as she dies.

A year later, while in his college dorm with her dog (he must have one of those great football player deals that allow you to have a pet on campus and yes, I get the silliness of me being bothered by this when I’ve just watched an entire movie about psychic powers), Rachel appears to him in a dream before she shatters. And yes, that’s the dumbest ending I’ve seen in some time.

This movie is a complete piece of 1990’s shit. It’s all shot with that crushed black/blue filter, everything on the soundtrack sounds like Fear Factory and it makes you realize a time and place where horrible sequels like this and An American Werewolf in Paris were considered good ideas. This would have been better if it were a movie that stood on its own so that I could have ended this article with something like, well, it’s no Carrie. Instead, it shoves that fact into your face from the very first frame.

If you’d like to suffer through this for yourself, Amazon Prime and Hulu have you covered. Man. I hope Stephen King got more than his traditional $1 advance for this.

Although Man Maid was made in the backwash of the 2005 critical and box office comedy hit The 40 Year Old Virgin (Jane Lynch from that film cameos here as a dominatrix) — and lost somewhere in the Judd Apatow comedic raunch-o-verse — this quirky tale about a male housekeeper at a dying hotel in the Pacific Northwest feels like one of those off-beat, innocuous ‘80s comedies John Cusack used to make — on his way up to the likes of Con-Air — such as Better Off Dead and The Sure Thing. But since Man Maid was released in the early 2000s and filled with eccentric characters, a more accurate reference would the out-of-the-ordinary, ’90s indie comedy hits Bottle Rocket, Little Miss Sunshine, and Napoleon Dynamite. And if this was made in the ’80 with major studio backing, John Cusack would have been our male maid; in the ‘90s, Jon Heder would have been cleaning rooms; a pre-Office Steve Carell would have been tailor made for the role of our off-the-grid geek hero — complete with motor scooter — who gets the girl and saves the day. In fact, if DreamWorks-Paramount had backed Man Maid, Jay Baruchel from their 2010 joint venture, She’s Out of My League, would have his face inside the washing machine.

Shot in 22 days on a shoestring in Oregon back in 2006 and hitting the festival circuit in 2008, Man Maid feels as if it comes from a place of erudition. Self-financed and mini-major indie comedies usually come from aspiring filmmakers and burgeoning actors with the burning desire to make something and, to that end, they’ll keep the story simple and write it around locations that they know (and know they can secure for shoots to avoid costly set builds) and write characters that they know. And considering this is a tale about a male maid, one wonders if writer-director Chris Lusvardi and lead actor Phillip Vaden worked as maids — or at least as hotel concierges or managers — to work their way through college.

Vaden — who’s very good here and brings a definite Cusack-Carell vibe to the proceedings — is Vincent Van Metcalf: a slightly more ambitious Pacific Northwest slacker — and second generation male maid — who finances his camping-tent lifestyle as a member of the housekeeping staff of a historic, dying hotel. During his off-days, he feverishly builds a piecemeal structure — as an act of love (reminding of the tale of eccentric South Floridian Edward Leedskalnin and his Coral Castle mystery) — that’s to serve as an outdoor concert stage for the way-out-of-his league Chloe Flaminghawk (nary a strand of Elizabeth Warren’s Native American DNA in her body), a free-spirited, aspiring singer who can’t sing, write, or play a harmonious chord on her accordion. (Played by a wonderfully ditsy-cute Amanda Walsh from SyFy’s Lost Girl, she’s bumped-off-the-marquee for Jane Lynch; that’s Walsh, poster right. And yes . . . the Bryce Johnson on the marquee is Detective Darren Wilden from ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars.)

Proving that even off-beat dorks can get girls . . . and couldn’t be more clueless: Vincent is oblivious to his more realistic romantic goal of Tory (Sara Rue, TV’s The Big Bang Theory), the hotel’s “plain and boring” manager. Love blossoms when it’s learned the in-debt-to-the-IRS hotel is about to face foreclosure at the hands of a heartless developer (is there any other kind), played by omnipresent comedic television actor Stephen Hytner (who — sorry, Sam — will always be the ovaltine-obsessed Kenny Bania from Seinfeld). So the makeshift, outdoor stage, once to serve as a musical home for the dreamy-eyed Chloe Flaminghawk, will now host a benefit concert to save the hotel. And Chloe’s godfather — Americana-Country star Sissy Taylor (John Doe), known for his protest anthems — will headline the show.

Aggravating Sam — one Seinfeld reference at a time.

Ah, but beware, ye streaming John Doe fan. While John gets top-billing on the theatrical one-sheets, he only appears in the film’s last 15-minutes — to stand up to the cops and sing a tune — but it’s worth the wait to see Doe mixing it up with Stephen Hytner. (Oh, and while Rue and Doe worked together in Gypsy ’83 — also reviewed this week — they have no scenes together here.) All in all, Man Maid is an enjoyable, competently shot and acted film that rises above the usual indie norms — and is actually on par with the other comedies named checked in this review.

Sadly, unlike indie writer-directors Wes Anderson, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and Jared Hess, each who found critical and box office acclaim with their respective indie-darlings, along with major studio and A-List actor acceptance with their sophomore films, the equally quirky Man Maid — which served as their film debuts — would be the only feature film from the writer-director and acting team of Chris Lusvardi and Phillip Vaden.

You can enjoy this “John Doe Week” entry — with its hard-to-find DVDs currently out-of-print — as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTV and decide to give it a go after you watch the trailer.

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