I thought I knew what a necromancer looked like. I kind of thought it would look like Orson Welles in robes for some reason, but now I know that it looks like an 80’s girl in a unitard and a red headband and I feel much safer with that knowledge. Said necromancer is practicing her magic in a garage, slicing up women with axes and making the bikes of nerds go bye bye.
Her skills will come in handy when our heroine, Julie (Elizabeth Kaitan, who slasher fans will tell you was in Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 and Friday the 13th Part VII, but some people will blush and whisper, “She was also Candy in Vice Academy 3 through 6.”) is assaulted by a trio of horrible folks in a movie theater while the security guard is sailing a solo voyage down the seas of mayonnaise in the rest room. She refuses to go to the cops, but when she and her friend Freda see an ad that catches their eye: “Sometimes revenge is the only justice. I, and not others of this world can help. Contact the power. Call (213) Revenge.”
Lisa the Necromancer only charges $20 for her services, which will come in handy when our heroine has to go to a party at the home of one of the men who assaulted her, Paul. Why she’d go to this, much less put up with the sexual harassment of her professor Charles DeLonge (Russ Tamblyn!) is beyond me. Let’s blame 1988 direct to video movies and the fact that they were made to get young boys to rent them more than being concerned with changing the language and actions that we use to interface with one another. Actually, this one does more than most to advance the conversation — while still featuring plenty of nude male ass and female breasts.
From a scene with a band playing music, as all great 80’s movies must have, to blood coming out of faucets, castrations and spray painted pentagrams, nearly every frame of this movie seems calculated to please me.
What put this in front of my eyes instead of another film was that it’s basically a demonic I Spit On Your Grave and the fact that it was directed by Dusty Nelson, who made Effects, and written by William T. Naud, who directed Island of Blood/Whodunit. Much like that movie, you can also get this from Vinegar Syndrome.
Fifteen years in the making with archive material going back forty years, Rom Boys looks at one of the world’s most unique skateparks, which is one of the only ones in the world to have official historic protection. This films does more than introduce you to the people who used the park, but shows you the rich influence that Rom had on their lives.
With more than 30 interviews with architects, historians, entrepreneurs, street and graffiti artists, professional skaters and BMX riders as well as the old school locals who have been visiting the park since it opened, this is a first-time look at a very influential space.
However, when the park suffers a major tragedy during the middle of filming, this film shifts from how these skaters and riders all come together to try and save the park from closure.
There are some astounding shots of the park as well as rich footage of the past. If you have any interest in BMX, skating, graffiti or the influence of these activities on our culture, this is a must watch.
For more information, you can visit the official site and Facebook page. You can watch it on demand from 1091 Films, who were kind enough to send us a review copy.
Six students are about to fail right before graduation, but their teachers Ms. Blook (Felissa Rose, who also co-wrote this movie) and Mr. Warner offer them a weekend camping trip with no technology as the chance to get the credit they need to escape high school. Of course, that means also going to Camp Twilight, a place that has inspired so many urban legends.
Look — it’s 2020 and kids are still going to have sex in the woods. Then, they’re going to pay.
Originally known as Monster Lake, this Brandon Amelotte-directed movie is filled with plenty of names that will make genre fans happy. Beyond Rose, there’s also Dave Sheridan (Scary Movie, The Devil’s Rejects), Vernon Wells (Bennett from Commando!), Camille Keaton (I Spit On Your Grave, What Have You Done to Solange?) and Linnea Quigley (take your pick of 80’s and 90’s direct to VHS movies) on hand to be in this film along with a cast of young actors who didn’t learn any of the slasher rules.
In case you wonder why I never went to summer camp, it’s because movies like this taught me I was much safer at home. It’s a fun film — Rose is clearly having a blast in her role — and while not the best slasher you’ve seen, it moves quickly and has a decent ending.
Camp Twilight is available on digital platforms on November 1st. We were sent a preview copy and that has no impact on our review.
DAY 23. A REST IN THE PIECE IS ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING DRAMATIC PAUSE: Morricone soundtracks only.
The beauty of Morricone is that for every big budget or quality film that he did music for — The Hateful Eight, Days of Heaven, Once Upon a Time In America — you can find scores he did for movies that aren’t as well thought of, from giallo like What Have You Done to Solange? and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin to outright ridiculous films like Butterfly and, well, this movie.
And I love it.
I love every single minute of it.
Ippolita (Carla Gravina rocking a Mia Farrow haircut) is a paralyzed young woman with major issues, all because her mother has died. So her shrink does what any psychologist would do in 1974: he sends her brains back in time to remember when she was a witch getting killed during the Inquisition. That ancestor takes over and before you know it, our heroine is screwing and destroying men. It’s time for this movie to stop ripping off Rosemary’s Baby and start being The Exorcist!
Also released as The Tempter, this was directed by Alberto De Martino, who also made the amazing poliziotteschi/giallo hybrid Strange Shadows In an Empty Roomand the downright weird superhero film The Pumaman, not to mention Miami Golem.
There’s way more nudity and sexuality than the majority of American The Exorcist clones, but this is Italy and Aristide Massaccessi is the director of photography. That’s Joe D’Amato, in case you didn’t know, so when Ippolita says cock numerous times and there’s a lengthy Satanic orgy, one of the few I can think of set to tunes by Morricone (that said, he did so many films* that I’m sure there’s at least one more key party for the First of the Fallen set to his music), you can just say, “Hell yeah, the Italians might be all repressed Catholics, but they sure know how to make a Satan movie.”
The scene in the ruins at the end? That’s the kind of stuff my dreams are made of. More movies should be this unabashedly out of control, you know? Another great example of this level of craziness is another De Martino ripoff that somehow has great Hollywood actors in it, 1977’s Omen Xerox film, The Chosen, also known as Holocaust 2000.
Joe Spinell’s last film, this movie was never released to theatres or to video and the only known copy belonged to the actor best known for his role in Maniac. This was a bootleg for years until Code Red put out a version in 2010 that was padded with public domain footage to increase its length. Vinegar Syndrome re-released it in 2016 without that footage.
Uncle Roscoe (Spinell) attends community college during the day and kills women at night, saving their body parts in his basement, Spinell is, of course, the best part of this movie, acting completely unhinged and making what should be a typical film into anything but just by the ability of his performance.
His nephew Nicky joins Pam, who is one of his professors and her roommate Mandy to figure out what Roscoe is up to. But soon, the hunters become the hunted and pay the price.
Even Spinell at the end of his life, struggling through making this movie, is better than anything most actors will do on their best day. Seeing him cry and try to talk to a corpse is at once heartbreaking and hilarious.
Director Frank Avianca is actually a pseudonym for the following four people: Screenwriter William James Kennedy, cinematographer Richard E. Brooks (the cinematographer for DarkAugust, Teenage Mother and Creating Rem Lazar) and producers Steve Bono and Frank Avianca (writer and producer of Blood Song) all of whom had a hand in directing this film.
When will the kids learn? When an old man in a town warns you of great evil, perhaps he knows what he’s talking about. When your college professor does the same thing, perhaps you should listen to him as well. But no, these kids just meander along and unleash the spirit of Black Claw and then all die one after the other.
Well, I guess we wouldn’t have a month of slashers if these kids knew what they were doing.
This Fred Olen Ray written and directed film isn’t bad. It’s a different location for a slasher, the Native American mythos are intriguing and hey — that’s Superman as the professor! No, really, that’s Kirk Alyn, the original movie serial Kal-El, as Professor Machen*, who works alongside Forest J. Ackerman, who plays Professor Trentwood. And oh yes — Dr. Sharon Reynolds is Carroll Borland, whose look as Luna, the daughter of Bela Lugosi’s Mark of the Vampire inspired plenty of undead femme fatales.
I don’t know of too many other movies that have a lion-headed ghost, much less a moment where the image of an old man inside a bowl of soup causes someone to slice their own throat, but there you go. Scalps is there for you, answering the call of a movie you never knew you wanted but now you will always feel like you need.
*Aldo Ray and Robert Quarry were also up for this role. I mean, those are great picks too.
As Robert Freese pointed out in his “Exploring: 80s Comedies” featurette for B&S About Movies, the late ’70s one-two punch of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) andMeatballs (1979) opened up a cottage industry of comedies featuring snobs vs. slobs, lovable losers, and harmless, misguided man-children behaving badly — with Caddyshack solidifying the genre to carry us through the rest of ’80s . . . and beyond with the likes of American Pie and all of its subsequent knockoffs.
Sadly, for every Easy Money and Revenge of the Nerds . . . well, as Freese points out, there’s was a LOT more swings and misses than hits in the ’80s . . . and we’re scrapin’ the grease pits and threadin’ the reels with four of ’em.
Oh, man. Movie tough guy Joe Don Baker as a curmudgeonly businessman who wants to shut down the local video arcade? Greydon Clark, who directed The Uninvited, Without Warning, and Wacko, and acted in Satan’s Sadists is behind the beeps n’ boops? Nicholas Josef von Sternberg, the guy who lensed Petey Wheatstraw and Mistress of the Apes, sat behind the camera?
I’m all in.
This movie was such a big deal that Midway allowed the image of Pac-Man to be used, as well as their new game Satan’s Hollow, and the as-yet-unreleased Super Pac-Man during the big showdown at the movie’s end.
What the . . . did I just program both a Greydon Clark and a Nicholas Josef von Sternberg Drive-In Friday tribute nights?
Sigh . . . Deborah Foreman, as Sam pointed out in his review, is our favorite 1980s comedy girl that caused our hearts to weep in the frames of Real Genius, Valley Girl, and April Fools Day. And she was always reliable and dependable on screen. How she never broke though to the A-List in major Hollywood films as the next “Meg Ryan” with her plucky Carole Lombard crossed with early Shirley MacLaine vibe is anyone’s guess.
Well, movies like this certainly didn’t help.
The “golf course” in this one is replaced by the Brentwood Limousine Service run by Howard “Dr. Johnny Fever” Hesseman and owned by E.G Marshall from Creepshow. And, of course, love blooms between Foreman’s commoner driver and E.G’s son played by Sam “Flash Gordon” Jones — on his way to the late ’80s post-apoc slop that is Driving Force and the early ’90s Basic Instinct wannabe that is Night Rhythms.
What the . . . did I just program a Sam Jones Drive-In Friday night?
Not to be confused with Hot Dog: The Movie starring David Naughton (yep, the Dr. Pepper “Making It” from Meatballs American Werewolf guy). And not to be confused for being an actual movie. And no, you’re not confused: writer and director Mike Marvin — yes, the guy who concocted one of the most F’up car flicks ever, The Wraith — is behind both fast food oddities.
So, if you think that any movie that needs to suffix itself with a colon and remind you that it’s a “motion picture” and a “movie” has to be good . . . think again. But, as Sam pointed out in his more complete review: when you’re in a small town with one duplex theater and one quad drive-in back in the ol’ pre-cable TV days with no Internet streaming, you ended up seeing suffix n’ colon’d movies for lack of anything else to do during the summer.
So, if you ever wanted to see a movie where — I am safe enough in my masculinity to admit — the very hot Leigh McCloskey from Dario Argento’s Inferno can’t seem to stop being a hornburger horndog and hooking up with ALL of the girls on campus, this is your movie. And Leigh keeps getting kicked out of schools as result. And his reputation is so bad, Faber College won’t even have him. So he ends up at Buster Burger University run by Dick Butkus in the John Vernon role.
We dug up this way-late-to-the-course direct-to-video oddity during our “Police Academy Week” tribute because, well, you think you’re getting a Caddyshack redux, but your really getting a Police Academy rip sans cops and lots of golfballs boobs.
No, it’s not “alright,” when you blatantly steal a whole lot from Caddyshack (right down to a camouflaged Bill Murray clone) and add lots of gratuitous boobs from the likes of Playboy and Howard Stern’s perpetual radio guest Amy Lynn Baxter and adult film star Jennifer Steele. And there’s jokes about blue (golf) balls and bent “wood,” a farting Chihuahua, cussing grannies, and more golf double entendres about “sticks” and “balls,” vaudevillian spit-takes, shower scenes, and public urination.
Maybe if they added a colon and reminded us this was a “motion picture” it would have helped? Nah.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Zipperface is one of the scummiest movies I’ve ever watched that wasn’t made in Italy, so imagine what that entails. Written, produced and directed by Mansour Pourmand, whose IMDB reveals is a person that emerges every 18 years to make a movie, like some crazed maniac that would be battled by Carl Kolchak, this is all about new cop Lisa Ryder (Dona Adams, whose mother Marilyn is also in this, which had to be uncomfortable) tracking down a serial killer on her very first case.
Zipperface is killing actresses who are also BDSM prostitutes at night, which for some reason has upset Mayor Angela Harris. The investigation by Ryder and her partner Harry goes through more red herrings than a 1974 giallo, as they look into a misogynist cop, a crossdressing aide to the mayor, a priest and a photographer.
Making things harder — I should have said difficult but this movie is obsessed with sex and it…rubbed off on me — is the fact that our heroine is dating Michael the photographer, the exact same man who everyone thinks could be the Zipperface. Zipperface! I love yelling that name out for no reason at all.
Much like any number of my favorite giallo, this ends with the killer being someone you would never think was the killer. If only this was made with less Cinemax After Dark feel and more giallo zeal. That said, I foresee this coming out via Vinegar Syndrome any day now.
Monir has just arrived to Sweden from a war-torn middle eastern country together with his older cousin Farid. Living within the Swedish migrations board cabins deep in the woods with another refugee family. The forest is mystical and quiet, offering Monir a place to explore. But anger and violence is never far.
That’s because the local racism rears its ugly head when our hero falls for a local girl. The solace and open world of the forest may not keep Monir safe once his new lover Moa’s family realizes that she is in love with someone of a different color.
Speaking of the term color, this movie is filled with lush green hues and wide spaces, contrasting with the place that its protagonist has escaped from.
Written, produced, directed and edited by Markus Johnson Castro, this is a visually striking work that the more artful minded readers of our site should enjoy.
Ghabe is playing Film Noir Cinema in Brooklyn from October 16 and is available on demand on October 20.
Not only does this movie excite me because it’s a slasher and a Cameron Mitchell movie, but it’s also a “based on a true story” riff, which is always fascinating.
Los Angeles producer Tony Didio wanted to make a low-budget horror film after seeing how well The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He knew the film’s distributors — uh-oh — and contacted them to see why they were re-releasing the movie again. While he should have realized it never really stopped playing theaters until the advent of home video — and even afterward for some time — he was smart enough to stay clear of working with the, and making and releasing his own slasher.
Supposedly based on a series of killings in either Michigan or Minnesota that were ritualistic and sex-based, this has famously been cited as one of Stephen King’s favorite movies.
If Pieces can say that “it’s exactly what you think it is,” The Toolbox Murders takes things even further into what I refer to as the pornography of violence, treating each kill as another scene in a gradually escalating orgy of evisceration. That said, the film then goes from slasher to character study in the final act, totally changing everything up on the viewer.
As for Mitchell, he’s completely off the rails in this and I loved every minute of his performance. And this being 1977, of course there’s an incest angle, because the 70’s were just greasy and sweaty and gross.
Vance Kingsley, Mitchell’s role in this, tries to rise above all the sin by using every tool in his, well, toolbox to perforate, slash and decimate every sinner he meets before being killed for love, which then uses scissors to escape into the night. There’s even a square up card at the end for a “this really happened*” shocker.
Wesly Eure loved being in this, relishing the opportunity to do something subversive after being the goody Will Marshall on Land of the Lost. I wonder how Pamela Ferdin felt, as she is better known for being the voice of Lucy on Peanuts (though she is also in the original The Beguiled).
Director Dennis Donnelly would go on to direct plenty of TV, including one of The Amazing Spider-Man episodes in the 70’s, along with Supertrain, Hart to Hart and The A-Team. That makes sense, as this really does look like a TV movie, unless you take into account all the nudity, sex and gore. And speaking of carnal knowledge, that’s adult actress Kelly Nichols playing Dee Dee, the woman who gets nail gunned in the tub (she was still working in the field doing makeup as Marianne Walters, the name she used for this film, as late as 2015).
Despite a 1986 sequel never happening, in a strange twist Tobe Hooper would direct the remake to this in 2004, which was followed by an official sequel in 2015 and an unoffical one, Coffin Baby, in 2013 that used footage from a scrapped sequel. That movie was tied up in legal wrangling, but has since been released. They all have a more supernatural element than the down-to-earth feel of the original.
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