Brianna (Hannah Cohen-Lawlor) is sick of dealing with mean girls and conjures up a cult who takes care of everyone she ever had an issue with, stabbing them right in the throat and even devouring their tongues. Yes, if you’ve ever been bullied, you may feel some level of catharsis through this one.
This was written and directed by Daniel Emery Taylor, who also made The Hospital, The Hospital 2, Camper Massacre, Paranormalice and Repulse, which is in pre-production.
Once our heroine brings Sister Amelia and Brother Marco (Leah Hudspeth and Alex Zuko) into her world, no one that treated her badly is safe. They are joined by Brother Thaddeus (a cameo by Taylor), Sister Daphne, Skullgirl and the Pigmen, while following the orders of Mother Murder (Cassandra Bryson). This strange family of killers are all pretty interesting and I wish they had another film to expand on each of them further.
This makes great use of its $50,000 budget and lean 70-minute running time. There’s plenty of bloody mayhem — indeed, I’ve never seen two killers aardvark on the dead bodies of the teenagers they just murdered — to go around for even the most jaded of horror fans.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Van Ryn is the man behindGroovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum. As soon as I saw the list of films on this set, I knew that this would be the movie he’d choose.
Norman J. Warren’s unique brand of low budget bat shittery is all over the damn place. While not always totally satisfying (I’m looking at you, Inseminoid), when he’s hot, he’s hot. 1977’s alien freakout Prey is one of the hot ones. Its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach blends elements of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a dash of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for the hell of it, and this is no accident – the script was being written while filming was progressing, with Warren taking on the project based on the premise alone.
And oh, what a premise. Prey gives us the story of an alien creature who arrives on Earth in a spaceship (unseen by us, other than a colored light show that could have just been a groovy light from Spencer gifts) and immediately encounters two Earth people who are having a romantic tryst in a parked car. He murders both of them, assuming the identity of the man, whose name is Anderson. This being capable of interstellar travel uses a futuristic walkie talkie to communicate with some home base (apparently off-world, which…wow! That’s some wi-fi!), and appears to be on a mission to observe us in our natural habitat. He also likes to eat meat, and that’s it. Total carnivore, this alien.
He moves on and discovers a large secluded estate nearby, where lovers Jessica and Josephine are living an isolated life together. They encounter some mutilated rabbits, which Jo attributes to the work of a fox. They also find our space-hopping buddy “Anderson” (wink wink), seemingly injured, and even though Jo reacts with immediate total hostility, Jessica is excited to finally get someone to talk to other than Jo, who is suspiciously dedicated to making sure Jessica never, ever goes anywhere on her own. They take him back to the house and allow him to stay, which turns out to be a really bad idea on so many levels.
I adore the fact that this movie is so low budget that it doesn’t even attempt to present any convincing alien technology, but it does have some built-in style that expensive effects could never buy. The manor where most of the action takes place is a fantastic location, with wooded areas bathed in muted green and overcast skies – this is England, after all – and amid all these earth tones are a few scenes with shockingly bright red gore. And for sheer “What the hell am I watching?” kicks, just wait until you see the weird slo-mo scene where Anders and the women roll around screaming in a shallow pond. There’s something almost S.F. Brownrigg about Warren’s work, despite their visual style being different. They both have the ability to create a memorable atmosphere in their films, despite having no visible budgetary advantages.
Anderson mostly stumbles around in a daze, acting like he has no idea what parrots are, or plants, or why people bring them into their homes for decoration. He doesn’t know any locations, either, claiming to be from London after he hears one of the women suggest it. When they press him for his first name, he says “Anders”. His hostesses serve him a vegetarian dinner – Jo goes total OG meatless preachy on him – but he responds by vomiting and rushing out of the house to find some more animals to mutilate for dinner. He also doesn’t know anything about sex, and he spies curiously on Jessica and Josephine having screaming sex together. Jo develops a theory that Anders is an escapee from a local mental institution, and later on we come to realize she may have been doing some projecting when she came up with this idea.
That’s one of the interesting things about this weird movie, there is actually an intriguing relationship between these two women, and the script ends up surprising us about one of them, but it exists uncomfortably alongside the fact that one of the characters is a flesh-eating alien, which sort of steals the spotlight. For this reason, I suggest multiple viewings of Prey. In fact, it should be a tradition.
Somehow, this movie came from the same man who made Get Carter, Flash Gordon and Black Rainbow, Mike Hodges. Man, what an all over the place resume of films!
Originally called Illegal Aliens, it later became entitled Morons from Outer Space, which led to Mel Brooks changing the name of his movie Planet Moron to Spaceballs*.
This was written by Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, who created Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones. They were never on the same page as Hodges, which is probably why this movie feels so uneven.
Three aliens named Sandra, Desmond and Julian strand another named Bernard (Smith) and head to Earth, where they become instant celebrities with an agent (Jones) getting them all over the media. They offer nothing special yet everyone wants to meet them, while when Bernard comes to Earth, he’s seen as a crazy man.
Somehow, this was the only film that Smith and Jones would ever make. So there’s that.
You have to love that this Mill Creek set has a British science fiction comedy, a Japanese super hero movie, an American TV movie, a German horror movie, Italian ripoff cinema and so many more genres all packed into one inexpensive box.
*Strangely enough, the aliens play a game called Spaceball in this film.
I love that they put this out, as this is one of the stranger movies I’ve seen in a while and imagine what that entails. The winner of the Audience Award for Best International Feature at the 2019 Fantasia Film Festival, this movie feels like a mix of art film, cartoons, monster movies and old serials, all in black and white with occasional color.
Captain Seafield (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who also wriote and directed) is hunting down the titular beast who killed his father. So he assembles a crew to take it down, including weapons expert Sean Shaughnessy (Erick West, who also ran camera, did makeup and produced), sonar whiz Nedge Pepsi (Beulah Peters, also on camera and producing) and former N.A.V.Y. (Nautical Athletes and Adventure Yunit) officer Dick Flynn (Daniel Long).
Along the way, the Captain screws up at every opportunity, losing his crew and even having to assemble a new one made up of ghosts before meeting the beast that just might be his sister. But you know, if you’re Ahab and you finally found your white whale, would you stop? And why do Milwaukee liquor stores close at 9 PM anyway?
You have to love a movie that brags that it’s been “banned in four lakes” and ends with the kind of eye damage that would make Fulci weep.
The new Arrow Video release — this is also playing on their on demand channel — comes with a sober and drink cast and crew audio commentary, as well as another option to hear critics talk about the film while you watch it. There are also interviews, behind the scenes on the effects and even the first season and pilot episode of L.I.P.S., Tews and Mike Cheslik’s sci-fi comedy web series.
You can get this from Arrow and I totally recommend it. It just works perfectly.
I don’t know what was in the water, because the frenzy of 1979’s Mad Max inspired imitators all over the world, from the Italian westerns with cars to the Filipino tricycle driving blasts of strangeness and, yes, this Japanese punk rock epic. This is one of the most frenetic and just plain loud movies I’ve ever seen, which made me fall in love with it right from the very first frame.
Whether its characters are rocking the stage, partying, fighting, getting wasted, hunting down a killer or battling any authority figure they can find, this is a film of noise, fury and high energy. It unites bikers, workers and punk as one to fight the Yakuza, which leads to the Battle Police shutting everything down.
Burst City has a soundtrack from all three of the major punk cities in Japan. The Stalin was from Tokyo, Machizo Machida was from Kansai, and The Roosters and the Rockers were from Kyushu. The cast and crew bonded by living on the post-apocalyptic set when they weren’t shooting, like some end of the world squatters.
Shot on filthy 16 mm film, this movie stops and starts, changes speeds and amplifies the strangeness throughout. Director Gakuryū Ishii is often cited as being a major influence on Japan’s cyberpunk culture with movies like Gojoe: Spirit War Chronicle and Electric Dragon 80.000 V, as well as music videos for The Roosters and Einstürzende Neubauten.
If you look closely, you can spot Japanese pro wrestling heel king Umanosuke Ueda, a bleach blonde heel who also shows up on Takeshi’s Castle. He’s one of the yakuza henchmen. If you’re a fan of New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Evil, you are watching the modern version of his character, which also inspired Mr. Gannosuke, Tatsutoshi Goto and Toru Yano.
This is 115 minutes of punk bands screaming*, motorcycles, fistfights, cops getting shotgun blasted and astounding fashion choices. It’s non-stop imagery and sound. In my dreams of punk rock 1982 Tokyo, I imagine that everyone dressed and acted exactly like this film, racing dekotora trucks and chugging sake right out of the microwavable containers when they aren’t plugging holes in their amps so they get even more distortion out of them.
The Arrow Video re-release of this has a 1080p hi-def presentation, which is kind of awesome because this is one of the grainiest movies I’ve ever seen. It also has new audio commentary by Japanese film expert Tom Mes, a 56-minute interview with the director and a 27-minute discussion of the film with filmmaker Yoshiharu Tezuka on jishu eiga (self-made movies).
This is one weird trip that you should totally take. You can get this from Arrow Video. Grab a helmet or something to restrain yourself, because this movie feels like it could give you whiplash.
*Becca: “Is this movie just an hour of Japanese people screaming?”
Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin) watched a strange film in her childhood called “Footprints on the Moon,” where astronauts were stranded on the moon’s surface. Now, as an adult, the only sleep she gets is from tranquilizers and she starts missing days of her life. Get ready for a giallo that skips the fashion and outlandish murders while going straight for pure weirdness.
After losing her job as a translator, Alice find a torn postcard for a resort area called Garma. That’s where she meets a little girl named Paula (Nicoletta Elmi, Demons, A Bay of Blood) who claims that Alice looks exactly like another woman she met named Nicole, who is also at the resort. Slowly but surely, our heroine starts to believe that a huge conspiracy is against her.
This is the last theatrical film of Luigi Bazzoni (he has directed some documentaries and wrote a few films since), who also directed The Fifth Cord. There are only two murders, but don’t let that hold you back. There are also abrupt shifts in color and a slow doomy mood to the entire proceedings. It’s unlike any other giallo I’ve seen and I mean that as a compliment.
Klaus Kinski also shows up as Blackman, the doctor who was behind the experiment that Alice saw as a child. He’s only in the film for a minute or so, but he makes the most of his time, chewing up the scenery as only he can. And cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, beyond working on The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, also was the DP on films like Apocalypse Now, Reds, Last Tango in Paris and Dick Tracy (1990)Dick Tracy.
Shameless Films, who are the folks to order this from, referred to it as “the loneliest, most haunting and beautiful giallo you will ever see.” I have to agree — especially with its shocking ending. This isn’t like any of the films that came in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumageand it’s a shame that its director didn’t make more films in the genre.
To the Moon
.25 oz. Kaluha
.25 oz. Bailey’s Irish Cream
.25 oz. amaretto
.25 oz. high proof rum
Stir with ice and strain into a chilled shot glass.
Footprints On the Amber Moon
3 oz. whiskey
Raw egg
Dash of Tobasco
Pour whiskey into a glass, then crack a raw egg and drop into the glass. Don’t break the yoke or the ghost of Klaus Kinski will haunt you.
Add some Tobasco, do a count down and ignite the engines.
I’m taking a hardline on this review: this movie sucks the stars out of the deepest black hole in the deepest regions of the universe and deserves to be forever public domain-buried on DVD box sets. I know, shocking. I am not usually that rough on a film — new or classic — and I’ll always find the positive in a film.
Sorry, but I get cranky when the celluloid snake oil salesmen and analog hucksters take scissors (yes, and I mean Roger Corman and then film-school student Francis Ford Coppola) to my beloved Russian sci-fi forefathers to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Hiding behind this Roger Corman hack job is a beautiful film known as 1959’s Nebo Zovyot, aka The Sky Calls, by Valery Fokin and Mikhail Karzhukov. Also translated as The Heavens Beacon, the story concerns the galactic competition between the United States and Russia to execute the first mission to Mars. When an American spaceship requests repairs from a Russian crew, they come to discover their Russian saviors are on their way to Mars; the Americans set sail to beat the Russians, veer off-course, become lost in space, and the Russians scrub their mission to save the American crew.
So great are the Yuri Shvets production designs on Nebo Zovyot, Stanley Kubrick hired Shvets to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey during its pre-production stages. Sadly, Shevts’s greatness is lost, courtesy of Corman’s Americanization (read: bastardization) as Battle Beyond the Sun — which also features unrelated special effects inserts from Mikhail Karzhukov’s next film, Mechte Navstrechu, aka A Dream Come True (1963).
You’ve also seen special effects shots from Nebo Zovyot repurposed in the John Saxon*-starring space vampire romp Queen of Blood (1966), which is actually the Americanized version of Mechte Navstrechu.
And since we’re on the subject — and although Queen of Blood is not on this particular Mill Creek box set: In the plot of Mechte Navstrechu, the inhabitants of a distant planet receive a radio transmission of an Earth-based love song; they send a ship to investigate. When the alien mission crash lands on Phobos, a Mars moon, the Earth receives a distress call to rescue the survivors; technical problems and the harsh landscape threaten the mission. See? There’s no space vampires.
And the pillaging of frames from Nebo Zovyot gets worse.
Instead of leaving Pavel Klushantsev’s 1962 masterpiece Planeta Bur, aka Planet of Storms, intact, Corman snake oil-it into 1965’s Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. Then he revamped it a second time, with with inserts from Nebo Zovyot — and added a few bear skinned-clad bikini cavewomen (courtesy of Peter Bogdanovich, aka Derek Thomas) — as Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (also known on American UHF television as Gill Women of Venus).
You can watch Nebo Zovyot with English subtitles on You Tube and an even better, pristine non-subtitled copy on You Tube — so you can sample the film’s superior quality, in lieu of the washed-out, dubbed-from-VHS prints of Battle Beyond the Sun that appear on public domain DVDs. Sorry, I can’t in good conscious provide a link to a rip of Battle Beyond the Sun. You’ll have do it yourself.
We get into Nebo Zovot, Planeta Bur and other Russian sci-fi films dating from 1924 to the early ’80s with our “Exploring: The Russian Antecedents of 2001: A Space Odyssey” featurette during our month-long Star Wars tribute last December. However, until we get a Russian Sci-Fi box set of all those great films uncut, you can have your own copy of Battle Beyond the Sun on the uber-cool Mill Creek Sci-Fi Box Set.
Back in 1957, evil aliens from the mind of Ed Wood initiated a plan to conquer the Earth with a fighting force created from the reanimated dead.
In 1970, Toho Studios brought us Yog – Monster from Space (aka Space Amoeba), a tale about Jupiter-based amoeba-like extraterrestrials who transform an octopus (well, its little cousin, a cuttlefish) into a giant kaiju to conquer the Earth.
In 1977, Ed Hunt — in conjunction with Hal Roach Studios — gave us bonkers underwater aliens sporting some nifty Gumby-space pajamas with Starship Invasions.
And in 2020, Mark Polonia — with a special effects assist from Brett Piper — brings us aliens who devise a plan to conquer the Earth with . . . sentient, telepathic sharks.
Yes, you heard me right. Jaws In Space. (All due respect to The Asylum and Syfy unleashing their “sharks in space” romp with 2015’s Sharknado 3: Oh, Hell No!, of course.) But please, don’t sue Polonia Studios, Mr. Spielberg. Mark is just trying to make a living doing what he loves: providing us with ’50s-cum-’60s retro-monster and sci-fi romps.*
Images from the one-sheets may not appear in the actual film.
As with any Polonia production — or Brett Piper, for that matter — the familiar cast of friends is here, with Titus and Natalie Himmelberger, Jennie Russo, Jeff Kirkendall, and Steve Diasparra starring in a $30,000 tale about hostile aliens crash landing in the ocean, using their telepathic abilities to control sharks and protect an ancient alien bounty down below.
Leading the charge against the aquatic-bound invasion is Kay Radtke (Jennie Russo), who just so happens to return to town to take over her late father’s alien abduction support group. Helping Kay are Sloan (Jeff Kirkendall from The Ghost of Camp Blood) and director Mark Polonia as two fisherman-turned-treasure hunters (the aka “Quint and “Hooper”), and Alan Cason (Titus Himmelberger, Outpost Earth) as the “Sheriff Brody” of the proceedings.
It’s all bought to you from the twisted pen of John Oak Dalton, who also brought you Mark Polonia’s Jurassic Prey, Amityville Death House, and Amityville Island** — and if you’ve seen Amityville Island, then you’ll recognize the CGI sharks from that film, here. (Waste not, want not!) My only complaint: Why didn’t you guys pull a “Yog” and bring in Pee Wee from Queen Crab to help the sharks take over the Earth?
But it’s not too late! Since the defeated aliens left us with intelligent sharks — that now warn “they hate us” and “they rule the oceans” — we wait for the Polonia-Piper rip of Planet of the Apes, only with sharks. And, considering they made two Apes rip offs — Empire of the Apes and Revolt of the Empire of the Apes . . . we wait with chum-bated breath . . . and hope Pee Wee shows up to turn us humans into a surf n’ turf platter-to-go.
You can find Mark Polonia’s 56th directing effort on all of the usual streaming platforms via Wild Eye Releasing. You can keep up to date with the latest from Wild Eye on You Tube and Facebook. And don’t forget to find Wild Eye’s library of films as free-with-ads streams on Tubi TV.
* You need more retro-romps? Then be sure to check out our “Drive-In Friday” homage to Brett Piper.
** Check out our full list of ALL of the Amityville films — including official sequels and sidequels, remakes and ripoffs — with our “Exploring: Amityville” featurette. If a film has a word after “Amityville” in the title, we’ve seen it.
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.
While piloting his family to his father’s funeral in rural Appalachia, Marquis (Omari Hardwick, Sorry to Bother You) flies through an electrical storm and crashes, waking up alone and injured, a captive in the attic of Ms. Eloise (Loretta Devine, who was one of the original actresses in the stage presentation of Dreamgirls). She claims that for him to be whole again, she must use the Boogity, a Hoodoo figure created from human blood and skin.
Trapped in an attic with no idea where his family is, Marquis must escape his past and his future at the very same time.
Spell was written by Kurt Wimmer, who wrote and directed one of my favorite odd 2000’s action films, Equilibirum, as well as its kind of, sort of follow-up Ultraviolet. He also wrote Salt, Sphere and the remakes of The Thomas Crown Affair, Total Recall and Point Break. He also directed a new Children of the Corn, which came out on October 23 of this year.
It was directed by Mark Tonderai, who made House at the End of the Street and has worked on plenty of streaming shows like Castle Rock, Locke and Key and Gotham.
This film looks nice, with well-thought-out dream sequences and colorful hues. I just wish it had something new to say. It feels like a backwoods — yet black-acted — version of the post-Deliverance films that brought the supernatural to the table like Ritualswhile the allusions to Misery simply can’t be glossed over.
That said, between this and Antebellum, you can really tell that modern black horror suffers without someone like Jordan Peele at the helm. It’s an alright film, but like I stated above, I wish it had something more to say.
However, Devine is great in her role and really brings it. She’s the best thing in this.
Spell is playing in some theaters — check COVID-10 restrictions — as well as being available on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, DirecTV, VUDU, Xfinity, FandangoNOW and more.
The best Science Fiction holds a mirror up to the society from which it sprang. Brother From Another Planet (1984) does this in several innovative ways. Written and directed by John Sayles, it tells the story of a three-toed empathic runaway alien slave (T2’s Joe Morton) stranded on earth. Despite the fact he cannot speak and is never named, he is one of the most sympathetic aliens ever committed to film. He hears and feels the past through surfaces. Upon landing on Ellis Island, he becomes overwhelmed by the voices of the past – a full 36 years before Klaus in The Umbrella Academy.
As much as Morton is the star of the film, Harlem – where “the brother” finds sanctuary – is his co-star. All the locations are real and at times it looks as if the people in the background were passers-by rather than paid extras. On life as person of color in the city, one character offers the opinion, “I’d rather be a cockroach on a baseboard up here, than the Emperor of Mississippi.” The brother likely feels the same way, albeit about his home planet.
At times, the narrative feels more like a series of short films, than a feature film, with each scene introducing a new character as the brother navigates his way through new earthly experiences. When he’s not working at fixing old arcade games with his special powers, he hangs out in a local bar.The regulars speculate as to his predicament, although they never guess he’s not “one of them.”
The brother’s silence leaves ample room for one-sided conversations. Funniest of all is when a couple of tourists from the mid-west spend hours drinking with him believing themselves to be interacting with a genuine big city “local.” All the people the alien encounters offer him a chance to learn about humanity. Conversely, they all see a bit of themselves in him, completely oblivious to his true identity. It’s a powerful testament to the phenomena of psychological projection while also tackling the nature of xenophobia. Essentially, what the film is saying is that it’s what we believe about others that leads to understanding and fellowship, regardless of whether those beliefs are rooted in truth.
The residents of Harlem all treat brother kindly, giving him shelter and a job. He even falls in love, although it’s never clear if he’ll see her again. Like many of the vignettes in the plot, this one is left open-ended.
The only unsympathetic characters in the entire film are the two white “men in black” pursuing “brother” from their home planet (played by Sayles himself and a young David Strathairn.) The film concludes with others of the brother’s kind who have also assimilated into earth society coming to his assistance. Seeing they’re outnumbered, the pursuers humorously flee proving there’s power in numbers if only we’d realize it.
Overall, it’s a great movie and very different for 1984. Back then, everyone was in love with cute little aliens with glowing fingers. Brother From Another Planet isn’t sci-fi for kids and thankfully, has none of the ‘80s trappings. There are precious few special effects (although the brother’s removable eyeball that records the past was very realistic), it has only one cute kid who is not the least bit precocious, and the visitor from space never goes home. What does it have that those other films don’t? A great deal more intelligence. It’s filled with enough American history analogies and yes – heart – to keep even the staunchest sci-fi fan happy. Given the current state of racial and immigration affairs in the United States and across the globe, the film’s message of acceptance has definitely withstood the test of time. In short, I liked it. A lot. Fans of great writing, documentary-style filmmaking and terrific acting will, too.
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