I’ve had some bad luck of late with picking out movies to watch with my in-laws. The first, Officer Downe, started with male on female oral pleasure and that got a hard pass from the room. This was going to be the follow-up and they might have felt even stronger about how this one made them feel.*
As for me, I have mixed feelings about the film.
It looks gorgeous, unlike anything else I’ve seen out of horror this year. And I honestly feel like it’s pacing and tone owe more to strange 70’s American drive-in folkish stuff like Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and Dark August. It’s a simple tale — a mother comes to terms with the loss of her daughter while meeting the man who caused her death — but it’s told in an incredibly interesting way.
But there are great stretches where it lost me. And yet, it always got me back.
Written, directed by and starring filmmaking family the Adams Family (Tobey Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams), this is all about a tarot card reader named Ivy, whose teenage daughter Echo is accidentally killed bt a new neighbor. However, Echo refuses to pass away quietly and starts to become part of the man’s every waking moment, slowly taking over him and reaching out to her mother from the other side.
There are moments of shocking violence in this film, as well as scenes of the other side that are the parts that lost me. I’d like the clown makeup scene explained to me. It all feels more silly than earnest and took me completely of the film, but the end of the story won me over. It’s wildly uneven, but so filled with promise that I think that it’s totally worth you taking the time to watch it. It’s certainly better than the next direct to streaming or meant for the multiplex film you’ll suffer through.
The Arrow Video release of this film also comes with The Hatred, another of the Adams Family’s films, as well as an exclusive, in-depth interview with the filmmakers, music videos, trailers and more. I’m used to Arrow putting out releases of past favorites, so it’s nice to see them tackle a recent release.
You can also watch this on Shudder. I’m interested in seeing what others think of this movie. Also — thanks to Arrow for sending this our way.
*The B of B&S About Movies, Becca, wanted me to provide her review of this movie, which is short and to the point: “It was stupid.”
I don’t share a political affiliation or views with Bo Copley, but I left his documentary feeling that he’s someone who I could see trusting and listening to.
At a town hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton spoke of replacing fossil-fuel energy with renewable sources, saying that she wanted to create “economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country.” Yet in a major mistake, she seemingly finished by saying, “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Of course, that’s where the quote stopped in the media, but she did continue to state, “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”
Copley was invited to join a roundtable discussion with Clinton, who was campaigning in West Virginia before the state’s presidential primary. He showed Hillary a photo of his three children and with raw emotion, he broke through the political spin cycles and reached the hearts of many across the country.
Now, two years later, he’s struggling to win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in his home state. Sure, he has peoples’ best interests at heart and so much emotion, but he lacks experience, a traditional campaign and most importantly, money. That’s because Bo has been unemployed for two years and is facing the taxes mounting from cashing in his 401K.
Again, Bo, I can relate to you.
A lifelong resident of Mingo County, WV — I’ve wrestled there — Copley worked in the coal industry for 11 years before the industry got rough. But even tougher was the campaign trail, where he was attacked for everything in his life, despite being the type of outsider that other candidates can only dream of being.
The trouble is, the state of West Virginia desperately wants coal to come back in a world where natural gas and other cleaner energy resources are more efficient and inexpensive. The past truly can’t return, but who can help those that depended on it? There are no easy answers — and while I like Bo, I don’t think he had any other than a great media appearance and the belief that God told him to run.
World Channel will screen this movie on October 19 at 4 PM PT and 9 PM PT and October 20 at 5 AM PT. It will also screen in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, Houston, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, Detroit, San Diego and many more markets. You can learn more on the official site.
DAY 17. VIDEO STORE DAY: (10th anniversary!!) This is the big one. Watch something physically rented or bought from an actual video store. If you don’t have access to one of these sacred archival treasures then watch a movie with a video store scene in at least. #vivaphysicalmedia
The last Family Video in our area closed this year. Both of the spaces have been filled with new stores, as if someone you love had been replaced by someone you never want to meet.
I try not to dwell on it, but honestly, life hasn’t gotten better once we lost video stores.
That’s why the Scarecrow Challenge is so important to me. It’s a chance to celebrate physical media, as well as genre films, in all their wonder and glory. 2020’s Scare Package may have been a movie that I caught on the Shudder streaming service, but it feels like it was made by people who know more than a little about the feeling of having a stack of rented movies on top of your VCR and a cold beer in your hand.
Written and directed by Aaron B. Koontz, Courtney Andujar, Hillary Andujar, Anthony Cousins, Emily Hagins, Chris McInroy, Noah Segan and Baron Vaughn, it revolves around Rad Chad’s Horror Emporium, a store stacked with horror tropes that we expect and that subvert those expectations. This framing sequence allows the employees and the video tapes of the store to tell several stories, along with bringing Chad into the orbit of the Devil’s Lake Impaler (Dustin Rhodes!) and even Joe Bob Briggs.
Here are some of the other stories.
“Cold Open” tells the story of a man named Mike Myers, who yearns to be the main character in the many movies he walks into. Instead, he is the one that moves the characters through their stories. Pay attention to Mike, as he makes another appearance.
“One Time in the Woods” takes the slasher trope and body horror and goes wild, with more gore than in twenty modern films.
“M.I.S.T.E.R. (Men In Serious Turmoil Establishing Rights)” is about werewolves and the occult and men’s help groups, while “Girls Night Out Of Body” concerns sugar skull lollipops and “The Night He Came Back Again! Part IV: The Final Kill” is concerned with the multiple ways that slashers are dispatched and yet come back, again and again, ruining lives.
Finally, “So Much to Do” features plenty to do all amidst the worries of having one’s favorite show get spoiled.
While not every segment hits perfectly, many of them do, making one remember the feeling of getting to the third or fourth video in a stack of weekend movies, knowing that you still have a few more hours left in a Saturday night, an entire Sunday to sleep in and plenty time to watch teh rest before they’re due back at the store.
You can watch this on Shudder with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs. You can also get this on blu ray from Diabolik DVD, which lives up to the demands of video store day. And hey — if you live near a video store, take advantage of it! You never know when the things you love will go away.
What if Charles Bronson made a film to compete in the John Carpenter Slasher ’80s — and no one came?
So goes this J. Lee Thompson effort for Menahem Golan’s Cannon Films.
Watch the Shout Factory! reissue trailer and the epic, “final scene” clip.
It all looked pretty good on paper: Bronson was a still popular, aging action star; Thompson’s resume included The Guns of Navarone (1961), Cape Fear (1962), and Mackenna’s Gold (1969). And let’s forget J. Lee’s two POTA flicks: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), and one of the slasher era’s most unconventional slashers, Happy Birthday to Me (1981). Behind the Brother typewriter was William Roberts, who gave us The MagnificentSeven (1960) and a really great war movie with The Bridge at Remagen (1969). He also gave us (soon to be reviewed for “Fast and Furious Week II”) The Last American Hero (1973), and a pretty fine TV movie with SST: Death Flight (1977).
So where did this self-described “crime-horror-thriller” go wrong?
When I went to see this during its initial theatrical run, I enjoyed it; the general consensus, however, was that it just an unnecessarily bloodier and more violent knock-off of Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” series of films embodied in Charles Bronson’s rough-hewn,”shoot first, ask questions later,” LAPD Detective Leo Kessler. (His aprehensive, wet-behind-the ears partner is Andrew Stevens of Massacre at Central High.)
Mainstream critics, such as Roger Ebert, pounced on the film’s “gratuitous” violence and nudity and its overabundance of vulgar language, profanity, and sexual situations. (Those moments of nudity and sexual scenes were cut out and re-edited with alternate, clean-clothed scene (underwear instead of full nudity) for television.)
It seems Cannon Pictures was shooting for a Italian Poliziotteschi (which were much violent and bloodier than any U.S. “Dirty Harry” flick) and Giallo (which were even more graphic than any U.S. John Carpenter-knockoff) hybrid-homage of the two genres that would have likely played well to Euro-audiences. And it did. In the U.S. it barely cleared its almost $5 million budget. So, while not exactly a flop, thanks to its international box office, it wasn’t exactly a hit, either.
It certainly seems that Bronson and Thompson’s efforts had an effect on Sly Stallone, as it’s easy to see a creative through line of 10 to Midnight‘s “detective vs. serial killer” plot to Sly’s Cobra (1986) to — even more so — D-Tox (2002). And it definitely had an effect on the production of the “mainstream” porn-slasher hybrid of Spine, a film that did its best — against its budget — to emulate John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980).
That comparison to Spine comes as result of that film’s Lawrence Aston and 10 to Midnight’s Warren Stacy both with an affinity for nurses — a trait shared by real-life serial killer Richard Speck and his July 1966 Chicago murders of eight student nurses. However, while Speck’s exploits served as the inspiration behind William Roberts’s script, John Howard and Justin Simonds have stated that the similarity to Speck’s crimes was mere coincidence and it was, in fact, Brian De Palma and John Carpenter who influenced their development of Spine.
The roots of 10 to Midnight began with Cannon’s (initial) failed attempt to adapt R. Lance Hill’s novel The Evil That Men Do (1978), an action tale about an ex-assassin that comes out of retirement to avenge the death of a friend. During a “brainstorming session” at that year’s Cannes Film Festival, with Cannon still wanting to do a film with Bronson, came up with new project — 10 to Midnight. To sell the film, Golan did what he did best: the ol’ Hollywood shuffle, selling a film filled with “action, danger, and revenge” — but no script. And the buyers bought it. Now, they need a script.
The script they found — based on the exploits of Richard Speck — was a William Roberts spec script, Bloody Sunday. And, as for the Evil that Men Do: that became one of the final film’s produced by ITC Entertainment, which went bankrupt after the dual failures of Raise the Titanic and Saturn 3.
In all, Bronson and Thompson made five films: St. Ives (1976), The White Buffalo (1977), Caboblanco (1980), 10 to Midnight (1983), and The Evil That Men Do (1984). And while it failed at the box office and with critics — Bronson’s lone foray into the horror-slasher genre is the lone Thompson-Bronson project everyone remembers and revers as a “classic” film in the Bronson canons.
You can purchase DVDs and Blus from Shout! Factory and stream it via Cinemax-Amazon Prime. There’s also a great, hour-long documentary about Bronson’s career, Charles Bronson: Hollywood’s Lone Wolf, on TubiTv.
Other films we reviewed — for this month’s “All Horror, All Slasher Month” for October — that are based on real life serial killers, include Black Circle Boys, River’s Edge, and Naked Fear (both on the way this month, search for ’em!). And we discussed the Cropsey urban legend that resulted in the more traditional slashers The Burning(1981) and Madman (1982).
Cut and Run was originally going to be directed by Wes Craven with the working title Marimba, with Tim McIntire, Dirk Benedict and Christopher Mitchum as the cast. However, when money never showed up, they turned to Ruggero Deodato, who got a script from Cesare Frugoni and Dardano Sacchetti and ended up making Inferno in diretta.
There was a softer R-rated American version and then another one for places that were used to the madness that is Deodato in the jungle.
This one is simple, but the best exploitation movies always are. Reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount, Prince of Darkness) is investigating a war in the jungles of South America between drug cartels and the army of Colonel Brian Horne (Richard Lynch). Yes, that’s right. Richard Lynch in the jungle commanding a cult of maniacs, including Michael Berryman.
Does that sell you? What if I told you that Willie Aames is in it? And he wears a Mickey Mouse shirt throughout?
Man, this movie has an Italian star for every Italian. Eriq La Salle from ER? I’ll give you Laura Gemser’s husband, Gabriele Tinti. Karen Black? I’ll raise you Barbara Magnolfi. Plus, you also get Italian Western actor Leonard Mann, John Steiner, Valentina Forte (from Blastfighter!) and Richard Bright.
Seeing as how this is a Deodato movie, there’s all manner of lunacy, like people being ripped in half and crucified. Instead of making another Cannibal Holocaust, he decided to make his own Apocalpyse Now, but with the kind of cast I’d choose to be in my version of that movie, with a chaser of Flavor Aid from Jonestown.
Claudio Simonetti did the score, which is really all you need to know. This movie is complete junk food, but the best kind of junk food that melts in your hands, your mouth, all over your face and ruins your new shirt, too. It’s filled with massive amounts of sleaze and gore and strangely enough, was filmed with actual English instead of the typical Tower of Babylon shooting style that Italian films usually use.
City In Panic has a poster that looks like a giallo — well, it’s not as gorgeously designed as a traditional Italian poster, but the killer sure looks like he stepped off the set of a movie made in 1973 with an animal-based title — and makes the AIDS crisis a major part of its story, which is pretty woke for 1986. That said, it’s filled with so many homophobic moments and slurs that this will be the last time that I say that this movie has anything to do with being culturally sensitive*.
There aren’t many direct to video Canadian slashers that are willing to rip off — sorry, pay homage — to Fritz Lang while looking cheaper than any made for TV movie you’ve seen. That’s this movie, which was originally titled The AIDS Murders. The Lang steal is because the murderer, much like Peter Lorre, leaves an “M” behind on their victims (notice that I was PC in my pronoun usage, but really, I was trying to not spoil who the killer was).
Unlike every slasher ever, gay men are the targets here, with the first man being killed in the shower of Toronto’s Oak Leaf Steam Bath. Yes, this is a film either brave or foolish enough to start things off by shamelessly aping Hitchcock.
It’s also one of the only slashers I can think of where a slasher is opposed by a final boy, a shock jock who constantly argues on the air with right wingers.
Beyond being somewhere between slasher and giallo — that ending in a mannequin factory almost made me label it the latter — this is also a “based on a true story” movie, as it was inspired by the real-life murders of 14 gay men that all frequented the St. Charles Tavern on Yonge Street in Toronto.
*That said, several of the victims aren’t stereotypically gay, which is refreshing.
Dennis Devine has been making movies since this film, turning out stuff like Dead Girls (Kay Schaber, Angela Eads, and Brian Chin from that film, star here), Fat Planet, Vampires of Sorority Row, and, most recently, Camp Blood 8: Revelations. For this one, a serial killer kills himself, but not before he seals his soul into a camera. And what if, by pure happenstance, that camera sends up being sold to a young girl and all of her friends start dying? Why, we’d have a slasher, would we not?
This movie has a character that wears her pajamas under her clothes all day long because it saves time at night. It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic, which you would not expect to arrive within an SOV slasher made 31 years ago. Yet here we are.
A hair metal band plays in a field, everyone has on comfy sweaters and someone’s arm gets ripped off. There are worse things you could be doing with your time, to be perfectly honest. Devil worshipper photographers bonded forever to their cameras, emerging to murder everyone they see? It’s basically a feel-good picture. What helps this along is the effects that come courtesy of the iconic Gabe Bartalos, who worked on Dead Girls, as well as Frankenhooker, Spookies, Brain Damage, and the Fright Night, Basket Case, Leprechaun, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre and, Gremlins.
You can watch Fatal Images on YouTube. And be sure to join us for our “Drive-In Friday” tribute to the works of Dennis Devine.
Yes seems metatextual right from the beginning, as it explores how Jeremiah Rosenhaft (Nolan Gould of TV’s Modern Family) and Patrick Nolan (Tim Realbuto, who wrote and presented this as an off-Broadway play) have each come to escape from their lives with acting. Jeremiah moves past their sessions to become a major star who started in sitcoms, which seems how Gould’s career is going. And sadly, Nolan has been destroyed by failure, scandal and an almost made it past.
Directed by Rob Margolies, who also brought us Immortal, this is a look at just what it takes to escape from the world and become an actor, told through the intriguing visual trick of having everything else fall away once the acting begins.
While this isn’t the typical film we feature on our site, we can definitely recognize the value of this film. The two characters really are lost souls, but only one of them will emerge from their relationship with the tools that will allow them to survive, yet be forever haunted by the time they spent together.
Yes is available on demand. We were sent a copy for review but that does not impact our opinion.
DAY 16. MASKS ARE REQUIRED: You guessed it, at least one character has to wear a mask for the entire movie.
Chris Sievey was a comedian and musician who started his music career by hitchhiking with his brother and heading to the headquarters of Apple Records, where they did a sit-in and demanded to meet one of The Beatles. Instead, they got to play a song for the head of A&R Tony King.
His band The Freshies had their biggest hit with “I’m in Love with the Girl on the Manchester Virgin Megastore Checkout Desk,” but were mostly known only in Manchester. Then, a character that Sievey created, Frank Sidebottom, took over.
Frank was originally a superfan of The Freshies but the popularity of the character led Sievey to focus his output on strictly making records as Frank. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Frank appeared on the British version of Remote Control, as well as live performances and even a comic strip. He disappeared until 2005, when his Frank Sidebottom’s Proper Telly Show in B/W appeared on television and then he never went away again until Sievey’s death. His song “Christmas is Really Fantastic” was a big hit and there was even a social media campaign to get his song “Guess Who’s Been on Match of the Day” on the charts.
Jon Ronson was the keyboard player for Frank several times, touring with him while beginning his writing career, which has brought him into the orbit of David Icke and Alex Jones before anyone in this country really knew who they were, unlike now when conspiracy theories are everywhere. His book The Men Who Stare at Goats became a movie, then he mined his past to create the script — based on his newspaper article and co-written with Peter Straughan — for the mask-filled movie we’re about to discuss.
Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) dreams of being a rock star, but has no idea how to get there. One day, by whim or fate or accident, he watches a man try to drown himself. That man was the keyboardist for the Soronprfbs, an experimental group that he is invited to play with that very night. Walking in off the street, he sees the lead singer, Frank (Michael Fassbender), a man with a very large masked head that he plugs a microphone into. Before he can get his bearings, the band begins to play and the performance just starts to come together when Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) flips out and destroys her KORG keyboard.
The band moves on. Jon cannot.
Soon, Frank calls him and invites him to join the band. Unknowingly, that means going to Ireland for an extended period to record an album. Jon struggles to be accepted by the rest of the band, which includes Baraque and Nana (Carla Azar, from Autolux, which is fantastic). As he secretly records the band, they begin to get noticed, which is the very thing that Frank both wants and fears most.
Stephen Rennicks from The Prunes wrote much of the music in this and it feels so real. The scenes where the songs come together are magical. And the scene in the diner, where fans are asking Jon about the band and wondering how crazy everyone is and not understanding that they are real people, underscores the issues of mental illness versus art that Roky Erickson, Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnston all really lived.
I’ve only seen one other Larry Abrahamson film before, 2015’s Room, but I really need to take the time and track down everything else he’s made. This movie really took me on a journey and I found myself filled with emotion at the end, as Frank is revealed.
We start right where the last film ended, with Mark and Sarah escaping the burning wax museum. However, while writer/director Anthony Hickox and Zach Galligan returned for this movie, Deborah Foreman and Hickox had had a bad breakup, so she was replaced* by 6’1″ supermodel Monika Schnarre, who was also in Hickox’s Warlock: The Armageddon.
Much like House II, this movie takes the ideas of the first movie and spins them deliriously out of control into another film that feels barely connected to the original while still being totally great. I also realize that this isn’t a slasher as much as the first film, but I still wanted to cover this sequel during our month of the genre.
The zombie hand that survived the last film has killed Sarah’s abusive stepfather (George “Buck” Flower!) with a sledgehammer and she’s charged with the crime. Going back to Sir Wilfred’s home — he’s been reborn as a raven — they learn that they must join the army of light angels and use the various nic nacs that have been assembled throughout time to get the evidence needed to clear her name.
They enter God’s video game, which makes me hope that there is a Divine Creator, becuase that means that our heroes get to play in the worlds of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Alien, Godzilla, Frankenstein, The Haunting, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack the Ripper, Nosferatu and a film the original Waxwork already teased, Dawn of the Dead.
This film also has a great cast, with everyone from Spandau Ballet bassist Martin Kemp as Baron Von Frankenstein to Bruce Campbell, Michael Des Barres (the singer of the bands Detective and the Power Station, as well as MacGyver nemesis Nicholas Helman), Sophie Ward (Young Sherlock Holmes), a pre-Deanna Troi Marina Sirtis, John Ireland, Die Hard bad guy Alexander Godunov, Maxwell Caulfield, David Carradine, Juliet Mills (!) and even Drew Barrymore in an uncredited role as the victim of a vampire.
They could have made fifty of these movies and I would have watched every single one. This one is even more out there than the original and expands on the concepts to be more adventure, which I was totally on board for.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.