Three Ben Lyk’s have been murdered in London, so Scotland Yard puts all of the people with that name together until it can figure out why. Yes, a masked killer with a strange mask is wiping them all out. And that would be a bad thing for anyone but one of the Ben Lyks (Eugene Simon, Lancel Lannister from Game of Thrones), a YouTuber looking for a chance at the celebrity that he’s always dreamt of.
This is the first feature from director Erwan Marinopoulos, who has an assured style and opens the film with quite a bang. Literally.
I really like how Scroobius Pip shows up in this movie. I’ve meditated on his lyrics for the song “Thou Shall Always Kill” for years, so it was fun to see him in this.
So what happens when every Ben Lyk is in the same spot — including a former Falklands hero and a female Ben? Well, all Hell breaks loose and hijinks ensue. Plus, the design of the villain is just plain awesome.
This film will be released sometime in 2020. You can learn more at the official Facebook page.
DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.
Legendary Detroit Red Wings goalie Terry Sawchuk played in the days where protective masks were considered unmanly. At the time of his death, he was the all-time leader among NHL goalies with 447 wins and with 103 shutouts. These records have only been surpassed by five players and his shutouts by only one person, but he will forever be the best goalie of the Original Six NHL era.
However, every save Terry makes adds one more gash to his face and means that he needs one more drink to numb the pain. Even with a wife and seven children at home, he can’t escape the depression he’s suffered since his childhood.
Kevin Pollak plays Red Wings coach Jack Adams, adding some star power to this film. Sadly, it was made with no NHL endorsement, so there are no actual jerseys or arenas in the film.
Much like Tough Guy: The Bob Probert Story, this movie proves the difference between being a hard man and one that must deal with the scars of the past by any means necessary. It’s a sobering watch. And I liked the documentary style that was used to film it.
Goalie is out in theaters now and will be released on demand and DVD February 25 from Dark Star Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.
Sextette is exactly the type of movie that this site was created to talk about.
For years, I’d read about it in the Medveds’ Turkey Awards books and since then, I’ve pretty much decided that the Medved brothers have no idea what fun is all about. Surely, Sextette can’t be as bad as people say it is, right?
Well, it’s…I have no idea what it is. It’s the kind of movie that felt like it took me six years to watch, yet I finished it in a morning.
In a time when women were seen and rarely heard, Mae West was an outspoken sex icon, a brazen beauty who hid her sexual openness within comedy. Indeed, she was the woman who said, “I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.”
In 1926, West had her first starring role on Broadway in a play called Sex. It was also a play that she wrote, produced and directed. This would be rare today. Imagine how much rarer it was nearly a hundred years ago.
West became a movie star, but was always followed by controversy. However, her films contain no nudity, swearing or violence. But in a world where women were always in second place, she was a frightening aberration: a confident woman unafraid to use her sex appeal to get what she wanted.
Imagine this. When speaking to the ventriloquist dummy Charlie McCarthy, she referred to him as “all wood and a yard long.” She was nearly banned from radio so thoroughly that even her name was not allowed to be spoken.
West went to Vegas, where she could be herself. Her show at the Sands was famous for its muscle men who carried her around. One of them was Mickey Hargitay, who married another dangerous blonde, Jayne Mansfield. She also had a recording career, which is absolutely astounding, as she recorded songs about Criswell and performed covers like The Doors’ “Light My Fire.”
The counterculture discovered her in the 70’s, perhaps because of her appearance in Myra Breckinridge, her early crusades against censorship and her books, like her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It and Sex, Health, and ESP.
West, while not a traditional women’s liberation believer, was an early believer in women’s rights. And she dated across the color line before that was even remotely accepted. One boyfriend, boxing champion William “Gorilla” Jones, was barred from her apartment complex because he was black. She bought the building and erased that ban.
West was also smart about her money, producing her own work and investing her money in Van Nuys before Los Angeles grew into the sprawl that it is today.
In 1978, she started working on this film, her final one, and despite hearing and vision loss, her spirit carried it through. She was also dealing with production woes and near-daily changes to the script, necessitating that director Ken Hughes (Night School) read her lines via an ear piece.
My devotion to Ms. West does not mean that this is a great movie. It is, however, an interesting one.
Screen legend Marlo Manners (West) is in England, where she’s just married the much younger Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton!), but before they can consummate their marriage, all manner of hijinks ensue, mostly because of her manager (Dom DeLuise).
To complicate matters, the leaders of the free world have gathered in the very same hotel to discuss the fate of the world. And soon, all of Marlo’s ex-husbands — diplomat Alexei Andreyev Karansky (Tony Curtis!), director Laslo Karolny (Ringo Starr!?!), gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton, who I will opine has never been in a good movie, yet I love him), and the U.S. Olympic team — all show up to bed her again.
This movie is the 70’s all over — celebrities are the kings and queens of the world, even minor ones like Rona Barrett, Gil Stratton and Regis Philbin years before he’d work with Kathie Lee. And holy cow, George Raft shows up as himself and yes, he’s totally a gangster.
This movie is packed with people who should not be in a movie with Mae West, yet totally are. These folks include Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Van McCoy (who wrote “The Hustle”), Juen Fairchilde (the jumper from The Monkees’ Head), Ric Drasin (who created the Gold’s Gym logo), weightlifter Denny Gable, Roger Callard (Conan the LIbrarian from UHF) and Walter Pidgeon.
For what it’s worth, Alice said that West propositioned him numerous times a day.
The soundtrack to this film has never been released, however, the song “Happy Birthday Twenty One,” which is in astonishingly bad taste today, was on West’s 1972 album “Great Balls of Fire.”
Go figure — the film’s producers couldn’t find a major studio to distribute the film. They did hold two sneak previews, including one on the Paramount Pictures lot and a second at the Fox Bruin Theater, where West received a standing ovation. Young folks flocked to its premiere at the Cinerama Dome, but the film was sadly a major flop, grossing just $50,000 on an $8 million dollar budget.
Critics were unkind, too. Rex Reed, who has his own sins to pay for his participation in Myra Breckenridge, said that the film was “a monument of ghoulish camp” and that West “looks like something they found in the basement of a pyramid.”
Whatever. Sextette is my dream film — a movie that by no means should ever have been made, yet there it is, living on streaming services, waiting for you to watch it, to be astounded by it, to be assaulted by it and finally, to proclaim that you survived it.
Heaven’s Burning was Russell Crowe’s last Australian film until 2014’s The Water Diviner. He plays a getaway driver who goes on a deadly road trip with a runaway Japanese bride (Youki Kudoh, Rush Hour 3) pursued by both hired killers, her jilted husband and the police.
Robert Mammone, who played Blanka in Street Fighterand opposed “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in The Condemned, is in this. So is Colin Hay, who was the lead singer of Men at Work, whose 1980’s songs were a major Australian export and convinced many an American kid — like me — to try vegemite.
A 1990’s road movie with a downer ending that I’ve never heard about? Ah, movies are filled with so much magic. Throw in a Japanese star and someone who went on to much bigger things and you have a genuine item of interest.
Heaven’s Burning is now available digitally for the first time and has been re-released on DVD by High Octane Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR company.
If you ever wondered: Is there a film with an almost $20 million dollar price tag that the acting and technical unions had to shut down because none of the actors or crew were paid? Is there a film that still hasn’t been released—thirteen years after it completed production? More importantly: Is there a film where Lee Majors goes “Six Million Dollar Man” on Dan Conner’s ass? Is there a film where Lee Majors makes prank phone calls looking for “Phil McCracken” with Johnny Brennan of The Jerky Boys?
And that movie is this reported “remake” of director Sean S. Cunningham’s second post-Friday the 13th project, the 1983 teen comedy, Spring Break (here’s that film’s theme song by Cheap Trick). The story is a familiar one: a group of four friends who were bullied in high school decide to seek revenge against those now college freshman bullies during a Florida Spring Break in 1983. Shot in outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the film was produced by Big Sky Motion Pictures, the production company of the film’s writer and director, Mars Callahan, who’s best known for the acclaimed Poohall Junkies starring Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Walken (and the little seen What Love Is starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.).
While the title makes you think this is a direct-to-DVD knockoff of a Judd Apatow sex-joke fest, you’d be wrong. Spring Break ’83, co-directed by Sam Raimi associate Scott Spiegel (Intruder, co-writer of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn), carries an $18 million dollar price tag and was intended as a theatrical release.
And look at that cast. The talent we love here at B&S About Movies is everywhere you look! It’s a B-Movie fan’s dream wet dream with Robert Davi (Maniac Cop II), Erik Estrada (Do or Die, the Hallmark Channel’s Dead Over Diamonds), Morgan Fairchild (American Horror House), John Goodman (C.H.U.D), Lee Majors (The Norseman), Joe Pantoliano (The Final Terror) Joe Piscopo (Dead Heat), Richard Portnow (Howard Stern’s dad in Private Parts), and Adrian Zmed (The Final Terror, William Shatner ‘80s TV series TJ Hooker). Fans of cable television’s Hannah Montana, iZombie, and Henry Danger (and its spin-off, Danger Force) will notice Andrew Caldwell in one of his earliest theatrical roles as “Mouth”; he’s also appeared in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Drillbit Taylor, and the latest Matrix installment, Revolutions (2021).
It’s been reported the film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. However, it actually didn’t screen at the festival: the film was shown at an (unnamed) venue in Park City, Utah, at the same time Sundance was taking place. Piggybacking the film onto the festival did nothing to help the film find a distributor. The film’s once official website now leads to a 404 error and the legal disputes over who owns the film’s negative still continues. . . .
Be sure to enjoy all of our reviews for “Box Office Failures Week,” as there might be some you know . . . and some you don’t.
About the Author: You can read the music and film criticisms of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He’s also a staff writer at B&S About Movies.
In case you thought So Sweet, So Dead wasn’t an amazing title, this movie also has the alternate titles Rivelazioni di un Maniaco Sessuale al Capo Della Squadra Mobile (Revelations of a Sex Maniac to the Leader of the Mobile Team), The Slasher is a Sex Maniac and Penetration, which was used for a U.S. re-edit that also has x-rated scenes courtesy of Deep Throat’s Harry Reems and Tina Russell.
Director Roberto Bianchi Montero bounced around from genre to genre, like the spaghetti westerns Seven Pistols for a Gringo and The Last Tomahawk to peblum (Tharus Son of Attila) and horror (The Island Monster, which starred Boris Karloff).
This movie has a great pedigree in spite of all that sleaze, as star Farley Granger appeared in two movies by Alfred Hitchcock: Rope and Strangers on a Train.
Someone is killing the rich and adulterous wives of Rome. First, he or she takes photos of them as they do some crab fishing in the Dead Sea — so to speak — and then he kills them. The images of their trysts are laid next to their bodies with the faces of the men scratched out. And Siskel and Ebert thought slashers were anti-woman! They would have lost their minds in 1972 Italy!
The rich society wives don’t stop sleeping around — neither do their husbands but the killer wants nothing to do with punishing them –and even discuss the crimes while getting their nails done in the nude. Such is the world of So Sweet, So Dead. It’s also a place filled with opulent homes, awesome fashions, squeaky horns, dance parties and a killer named the Avenger that completely was influenced by the look of the murderer in Blood and Black Lace.
Update November 2020: Kino Lorber has reissued this Roberto Bianchi Montero giallo classic as an HD Scan With Extensive Color Correction Blu-ray.
A Jack the Ripper-type serial killer is loose and it looks like the most obvious suspect is a transvestite judge. Yes, it’s 1969 in London and there’s all manner of kinky goings-on, as this proto-slasher and Argento-predating giallo gleefully shows.
It’s directed by Lindsay Shotneff, who also brought you Devil Doll, Curse of the Voodoo and several James Bond-esque films like Licensed to Kill, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Loveand Kill and Number One Gun.
I’m fairly obsessed by late 60’s and 70’s London, with all its tawdry excesses and scandals. This movie fits right in, a scummy, darkly shot film that earns its U.S. video release title, Night Slasher.
Linda Marlowe, who would later appear in Shotneff’s films The Big Zapper and The Swordsman as Harriet Zapper, is in this. So is Jack May, who would be the voice of Igor on TV’s Count Duckula. And Jack May, who was in a series called Adam Adamant Lives!, which aired on the BBC in 1966 that I have to track down. It’s all about adventurer Adam Adamant, who was frozen alive in a block of ice by his arch-nemesis the Face. In 1966, he’s revived into the swinging world of 1960’s London, much like a reverse Austin Powers, getting right back to a life of adventure. Ridley Scott made his directing debut on this show.
So yeah. London. Sex. Murder. Tough cops. Hippies. Tough talk. Thick accents. It moves faster than most British crime films at the time and you won’t feel like you wasted your time, governor.
Stendhal syndrome was first diagnosed in Florence, Italy in 1982. However, a young Dario Argento experienced it in Athens as a child, as he climbed the steps of the Parthenon and was overcome in a trance. That’s what it does — the mind is so overcome by artwork that it just kind of goes away for a while.
Bridget Fonda was originally set to star, but dropped out before the start of filming. While Jennifer Jason Leigh was considered — bestill my heart to have either of them in a giallo! — Dario eventually cast Asia, his daughter, as the lead.
Detective Anna Manni (Argento) travels to Florencehunting serial killer Alfredo Grossi (Thomas Kretschmann, Baron Strucker in the Marvel movies). While visiting the famed Uffizi Gallery — Argento is the only director ever granted permission to shoot there — she is overcome by the vision of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Alfredo learns of Anna’s weakness, so he kidnaps her and assaults her. She escapes but is traumatized by the episode. He tries to take her back, but she knocks him into a river and he is believed dead. Yet even when she attempts to move on, he keeps calling her from beyond the grave.
When Marie, Anna’s new lover, is found murdered, her psychologist begins to worry, a fear that is intensified when Alfredo’s body is found. It turns out that Arnold is inside her, ordering her to murder people and she must be caught by the police.
Somehow, Argento was going to make a sequel to this film, with Anna becoming a detective again. Asia wasn’t available, so Stefania Rocca ended up playing a similar role in Argento’s The Card Player.
Look for Veronica Lazar (Mater Tenebrarum in Inferno, as well as Martha in The Beyond) and Cinzia Monreale (Emily from The Beyond, as well as roles in Silver Saddle, Warriors of the Year 2072 and Beyond the Darkness.
This is also the first Italian film to use CGI and features a score by Ennio Morricone that can be played the same forward or backward!
It’s a late period Argento film, but it’s also probably the best of that era. There’s an awe-inspiring moment where Anna wanders into Rembrandt’s Night Watch that makes this a must-watch.
You can watch this for free on Vudu. However, Blue Underground has a tremendous blu ray version that is packed with extras.
Il Dolce Corpo di Deborah, or The Sweet Body of Deborah, is a gorgeous film that embodies the fashionable side of the giallo. It’s directed by Romolo Guerrieri (Johnny Yuma) from a script by Ernesto Gastaldi (Hands of Steel, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The Case of the Bloody Iris, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh — obviously this man knew what he was doing with a resume like that) and producer Luciano Martino (who, in addition to helping write The Whip and the Body and Delirium, was engaged to Edwige Fenech at one point).
Adding to this pedigree — the cast. Carroll Baker is a giallo queen if there ever was one, thanks to appearances in So Sweet…So Peverse, Orgasmo, A Quiet Place to Kill and Baba Yaga (a comic book adaption with George Eastman in it, so it’s amazing that I’ve never written about it here). And Jean Sorel, who was in the proto-giallo Perversion Story for Fulci, appears here as well. Finally, to make every fan of the black-gloved psychosexual realm pleased, George Hilton (who once played Sartana, as well as appearing in Luciano’s brother Sergio’s films, such as All the Colors of the Dark and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail) is here as a voyeur.
Oh yes. We have a winner, dear reader.
Deborah (Baker) and Marcel (Sorel) have returned home from their honeymoon, just in time for them to learn that Marcel’s past lover, Susan, has killed herself. The mood transforms from frolic and fun to fright, as a man from the past named Phillip (Luigi Pistilli, Iguana With the Tongue of Fire, A Bay of Blood).
Marcel — and Deborah — both start to receive threats related to Susan’s death. But is she really dead? And who is Robert (Hilton) and why is he perving all over our girl?
While this isn’t the best giallo you’ve ever seen, you get to see Baker in — and out — of some insane fashions. There’s a bonkers outdoor twister scene set to some cool jazz and a nightclub with pop art all over the walls, including Batman and several sculptures of Cybermen from Dr. Who. The whole mood and tone are totally perfect.
Ah man. If only all films were this sumptuous. And sounded this great, thanks to a score by Nora Orlandi. You may know her from the song “Dies Irae”, which was in The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2.
There’s also an amazing knife fight scene in the dark and a great ending. What else do you want?
Ian Parker is a former army lieutenant who learns of the death of his mother, who he’s cut out of her life. Her past is filled with strange behavior and as a result, he’s lived a life cut off from humanity, crashing through bad relationships and struggling through life. Now, he’s returned home to learn the secrets of his mother and why she died.
The pact that Ian’s mother made with demons not only makes him in their debt, but his young son as well. He must battle six demonic bounty hunters if he has any hope to lead a normal life.
If you like gruff dudes being snarky and demons swearing as they spit black blood, then this is the film for you. It’s the only demonic possession movie I’ve ever seen that has a dramatic monologue about a cat after the lead characters kill one of the fallen angels, so it has that going for it.
Covenant is available on demand and on DVD from High Octane Pictures.
DISCLAIMER: This was sent to us by the movie’s PR company.
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