Originally called Baldy, this movie is all about Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl from The Magicians and Arrow), who has become a poster girl on her campus as she continues to attend classes despite fighting what seems to be a losing battle with cancer. Despite this diagnosis, she remains a popular undergrad with a close-knit group of friends and a fulfillig relationship with her partner Jennifer (Amber Anderson, Emma).
There’s only one problem.
She doesn’t have cancer.
Written and directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas, this is a fearless movie that presents a character that we should, by all right, absolutely hate. Yet by the time we see how Katie has used sympathy and fame to gain everything she wants — while giving up on her family, with a father who remembers how she got away from school in the wake of her mother’s suicide by faking another sickness — at the cost of everyone who has fallen in love with her.
From the description, I didn’t think that this was a movie that would engage me for as long as it did. I’m happy to report that this was better than expected and urge you to seek it out and watch it for yourself.
A bunch of British kids decide to turn their class reunion into a day of fun on the paintball course. However, someone is packing more than paint-based ammunition and is ready to kill them all one-by-one in one of the few slashers I’ve seen that brings in the sport of, well, paintball.
The first full-length film by Darren Berry, who often works as a cinematographer, this film stars Katy Brand, Robert Portal, Cheryl Burniston, Lee Latchford-Evans, Lockhart Oglive and Natasha Killip. There’s even a cameo by Nicholas Vince, who played the Chattering Cenobite in the first two Hellraiser movies.
There’s an attempt at humor here, but it kind of fell flat to me. I did like the scene with a mine going off, as I didn’t expect the film to have the budget to handle that. Otherwise, your enjoyment of this will depend upon your love of slashers — mine is high, obviously — and your enjoyment of getting plugged with paintballs.
You can learn more at the film’s official site. It’s available on DVD and on demand from Uncork’d Entertainment.
While camping deep in the backwoods of Alabama. Dillon and Brenner Baker (Ellen Hollman, Love and Monsters) are hiking when they accidentally uncover an illegal drug and weapon lair. Before they can get away, a cartel captures and tortures them, killing Dillon. Well, you know what they said: they should have killed Brenner too.
That’s because she’s 1st Lieutenant Brenner Baker of the Army’s 75th Ranger Division. And as the title of this movie promises — an Army of One.
If you’re in the mood for a revenge movie, well, this one will certainly scratch that itch. Beyond starring Hollman, who will also be in The Matrix 4, it has Matt Passmore (The Glades), Stephen Dunlevy* (who was in Jigsawand did stunts in Mad Max: Fury Road) and Kendra Carelli (Guardians of the Galaxy).
It’s directed by Stephen Durham, who wrote the script along with Hollman, David Dittlinger and Mary Anne Barnes**.
*Hollman and Dunlevy were also on the TV show Spartacus.
**All of these folks have worked together before on films like The Dark Within — which is pretty great — and Abbey Grace.
Army of One is available on demand and on DVD rom Uncork’d Entertainment.
Man, if you’re looking for a British seance movie — and really who isn’t — there’s not a better film for you than this 1972 bit of craziness. Sir Hugo Cunningham’s (Robert Stephens) idea of fun is to film the last moments of peoples’ lives and seeing if a smudge in the images are the soul of the body trying to escape. Man, Victorian England was daffy.
Things get crazier, because when he uses a camera at the party for his engagement, his new fiancée and son are killed in a boating accident. When he watches the movie he made of the tragedy — because why not, right? — he sees that not only has he captured the blur, but that it is moving towards his son. That’s when he starts to believe that these smudges and blurs are something he calls the asphyx, the grim reaper from Greek myth that individually comes for each of us.
Now here’s where things get even more interesting. Because our hero figures that the asphyx must deal with the rules of the physical world. So he invents a special light that uses phosphorus stones beneath a drip irrigation valve that can briefly capture that smudgy black angel, making anyone who keeps asphyx remained imprisoned into an immortal.
Cunningham tasks his ward — how rich and British and Batman do you have to be to get a ward — Giles (Robert Powell) with capturing his asphyx and burying it deep in a family tomb. Because after all, Cunningham’s contributions to science are just too important for him to ever die. They need to bring in another person, Giles’ stepsister (and fiancee, because this is high society England) Christina for help. If they help him become an immortal, he will consent to them getting married.
Nothing works out well for anyone, save perhaps the guinea pig that can’t die. He’s doomed to wander the Earth with an immortal Cunningham, all the way to modern London as seen at the end of this movie.
The Asphyx is a movie that feels like a hard sell to an American crowd. It’s kind of staid and nuanced, but the effects are pretty wild and the idea is definitely high concept.
This is the only movie directed by Peter Newbrook, who also wrote Gonks Go Beat, produced Corruption (which no woman will dare go home alone after watching) and worked on the second unit on Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge on the River Kwai.
If you watch this in the U.S., know that as of now, you can’t see a high quality version. Every version of this movie — so far — has footage mastered from the 35mm negative mixed with footage mastered from a print of inferior quality, which means that the movie’s quality is constantly shifting. That said, the asphyx itself looks awesome and the story is enough to keep you watching.
Based on the novel The Butterfly Revolution by William Butler, Summer Camp Massacre is not the slasher that you’d be led to believe it is from the title and poster. It is, however, one of the few movies that’s never even come out on DVD.
Donald Poultry is a sensitive young man given to writing a diary in his tape recorder. A summer at camp is supposed to make him come out of his shell, but the arrival of Mr. Warren (Chuck Connors) means that this summer will not be like any he’s ever had before.
That’s where the story seems to be going until the kids go all Lord of the Flies and take the camp over themselves, getting single digit kids drunk and watching satellite TV all night. Honestly, it sounds like a dream summer, but so does smoking a whole pack of cigarettes until you’re actually forced to do it.
Penelope Spheeris was one of the writers of this and it has themes from her film Suburbia throughout. It was directed by Bert L. Dragin, who also wrote and directed Twice Dead.
How do I keep going down the rabbit hole of David DeCoteau films? Well, here we go again, with Ms. Xenobia (Judy Landers, Hellhole, Stewardess School) coming from space to teach biology to a bunch of horndog teenagers, including Bad Ronald’s half-brother Bill Jacoby. He’s Wesley Littlejohn and gets to aardvark with Ms. Landers after a vitamin supplement causes a phallic antenna to emerge from his forehead.
He also has a band called the Sex Mutants, who play along with another band called the Poon Tangs (who are made up of Ginger Lynn Allen, Linnea Quigley and Laura Albert). Sure, he was trained as a classical pianist, but what our alien sex fiend really wants to do is rock and roll.
Karen Russell from Shock ‘Em Dead and Memorial Valley Massacre is also in this, as are Michelle Bauer, Olivia Barash (Repo Man, Tuff Turf), Edy Williams, Troy Donahue and Arlene Golonka from Mayberry RFD.
Originally called I Was a Teenage Sex Mutant, there was almost a sequel called Star Pupil. Writer Kenneth J. Hall also was behind Nightmare Sisters, Evil Spawn and Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout, among other films.
Nothing in this is as good as the poster of Landers with a ridiculous looking alien. But you already know that going in.
Filmed at Six Flags Over Georgia in Austell, Georgia, this is the kind of movie that I can’t really figure out. Who is it for? What is it really all about? Is it a slasher, which it seems like from that poster? Is it a comedy? Is it even funny? It’s a complete mess. But yet, I’ve watched it more than once.
It was written by Bonnie and Terry Turner, who would write for Saturday Night Live for six years before creating 3rd Rock from the Sun and That ’70s Show, as well as the scripts for Coneheads, the two Wayne’s World movies, Tommy Boy and The Brady Bunch Movie. We can forgive them for the Whoopi show, That ’80s Show and this movie, right?
I mean, this is the kind of movie where the line, “I’m a graduate of State University. I also attended the David Lee Roth University where I studied rear projection,” is the highlight. So just know what you’re getting into.
So what is Funland? Well, it’s a theme park owned by Angus Perry (William Windom, Dr. Seth Hazlitt on Murder, She Wrote) that used to be owned by its clown mascot Bruce Burger, who is really former accountant Niel Stickney (David Lander, Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley). And now that the mob has rubbed out Angus and taken over, Niel has gone completely out to lunch, seeing hallucinations of his dead boss and trying to kill the new owners.
There are a lot of comedy names in this, like Bruce Mahler, Robert Sacchi (yes, the Bogart cop from one of the strangest giallo you’ll see, The French Sex Murders), Clark Brandon from Fast Food and Mr. Merlin, Michael McManus (who, like Mahler, did time in a Police Academyfilm), Mary Beth McDonough (one of the Waltons) and a very young Jan Hooks, who had worked with the Turners in Atlanta comedy (and got them on to SNL).
If you’re looking for a movie where a demented clown slashes his way through a theme park, well, this is not it. But it’s…something.
This is the most 1988 movie that I have ever seen, one that is equal parts Cinemax After Dark semi-sleaze mixed with last gasp of celebrity, a late model slasher and even giallo-esque elements all with the gimmick of party lines, which before the interest used to dominate the late night airwaves, promising live sex chat for anyone. Oh man, if you could scrape this movie onto a mirror and do lines of it, I totally would.
Seth (Leif Garrett, who we can pretend is the kid from Devil Times Five grown up because, well, that’s totally the truth and that kid was a transvestite and this character is too, so let’s just pretend, OK?) and Angelina (Greta Blackburn, who played Lorraine, one of the aliens on V) are a brother and sister duo who hide out in their family’s Hollywood Hills mansion and use the party lines to lure people into having threeways with them and then slashing their throats with razor blades. Yes, incest and sex is violence and L.A. scum all in one glorious package.
But what if there was a bad boy cop? Oh, there is and his name is Detective Dan (Richard Hatch, who battled Cylons once upon a time). He’s under investigation for all his bad cop antics, but when his CHiP woman gets killed by Seth, he teams up with a psychologist (Shawn Weatherly, who knows a thing or two about cops, seeing as how she was in Police Academy 3: Back in Training) to take on the case.
This is the kind of movie where Detective Dan handcuffs a cokehead to a toilet before shoving his face into the urinal cake while two siblings sex murder a dude in the alley. Also, because this is a late 1980’s cop movie, the boss cop has to be a gruff older black guy and hey, Richard Roundtree is perfect for that role.
The guy who played Simmons in this, Terry McGovern, has a pretty interesting claim to fame. Sure, he was the voice of Launchpad McDuck. But he was also the guy who invented the word wookie. While making THX-1138 for George Lucas, they were riding in a car together and he shouted, “‘I think I ran over a Wookiee back there,” which made the future Star Wars director laugh so hard that the word — which McGovern invented — stuck in his head.
Director William Webb uses Garrett and Roundtree in a lot of his films, which include Delta Fever (which has Martin Landau and Wendi Jo Sperber in it) and The Banker (along with Teri Weigel and Robert Forester). This is the kind of movie that I’d be watching at 1:37 AM on a Friday when I was 16 years old, so in case you thought that I ever did anything productive with my life, you are sadly wrong. At least now I document my movie watching, I guess.
Oh man, I almost forgot that this teenage girl is coercing her friend into calling the party line too and then she goes to the cops and they make her call the party line while they listen to her basically have phone sex. So this movie riffs on I Saw What You Did, but there’s no Joan Crawford to make it better.
That nightclub also looks like it totally came out of a Rinse Dream movie.
Murdercycle, you have a great poster going for you and the absolutely insipid idea that aliens would come to Earth in the form of black leather wearing motorcycle riders, just like Galactica ’80, a show that only I am cursed to remember.
That’s when the military — along with a female doctor who can read minds — decides to head off to the desert to protect valuable alien intel that the Murdercycle wants back for its home planet.
So yeah. There are some conspiracy theories, some military cosplay and some Area 51 type shenanigans. It’s a very made for video rental kind of movie, so if you miss that era, this is here to reward you. It’s a small reward though, so be warned.
Director Thomas L. Callaway was the cinematographer for Action U.S.A., Slumber Party Massacre II, both Rage of Honor movies and something called Megachurch Murder that I feel like I have to seek out.
Credit for that awesome poster art goes to Charles Band, who was planning on using it from a movie called Battle Bikers. That artwork was never used, so it went to this movie.
Your ears aren’t playing tricks on you when it comes to the character names. They’re all Marvel Comics people, including Ditko, Wood, Adams, Coletta and Sinnott amongst others.
Some people would watch this movie because it’s the debut of Alyssa Milano, but those people have no idea who Rainbow Harvest is. Rainbow was in two made for TV movies, a few TV shows and a handful of movies, including Mirror, Mirror and then she disappeared. She’s wonderful in this, a streetwise teenager who wins over Milano’s rich little girl and teaches her the ways of the world.
Danny Aiello plays her dad and instead of preaching, he beats her up repeatedly.
This won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984 and is probably the only movie ever reviewed on this site that has honor. So it has that going for it.
I promise to make up for this veer into respectability by watching something morally abhorrent next.
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