A few weeks ago, Nathan Rabin, a big influence on me if you couldn’t tell, shared an article entitled “Remember Mena Suvari? What? You Don’t? Never Mind” on his site Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. You know how when you speak the devil’s name, you hear his wings? Yeah, as soon as I started thinking, “Whatever happened to Ms. Suvari?” I got one of her movies to review.
I’m not one for spoilers, but consider this warning: a small dog gets run over in this movie. I know that I can watch people get burned, stabbed, shot, chainsawed, impaled and eaten and I can’t even think about a dog getting hurt.
Anyways…
Knox Bannett (Todd Grinnell, Schneider from the new version of One Day at a Time) and his wife Tracey (Suvari) have moved to Malibu in the hopes of flipping a beach house when they learn that a homeless woman named Bree (Kristin Bauer van Straten) is living under the house.
Suvari was also in The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, one of the oddest movies I’ve seen and one I encourage everyone to try and make it through. She’s also going to be playing Jane Wyman in Reagan the Movie opposite Dennis Quaid as the Great Communicator, Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy, Jon Voight as Viktor Novikov (no, not the Hitman character, but a Russian man who was reunited with his American wife during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit)Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, Robert Davi* as Breznev and Scott Stapp as Frank Sinatra.
Perhaps of major interest to those of you who visit our site regularly is that Krista Allen, Emmanuelle from the 90’s TV movies, is in this.
I’m glad I watched this after we moved into our new house, because if I had to think about someone living here and me not knowing it, I would have just stayed put. The couple in this movie are not as lucky.
*If it took you this long to figure out this is a Republican-heavy film…
Editor’s Note: This review ran back on March 12, 2020, as part of our Explosive Cinema 12-Film Pack blowout. Now, we are having a B-Movie Blast as part of that Mill Creek 50-Film Pack of reviews (Amazon).
I came here to see Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers do the “Tobacco Worm” and the “Stratosphere Boogie” . . . and eat popcorn . . . and drink coffee. Lots of coffee. (They’re sort of a redneck, twaggy bluegrass version of Booker T. and the M.G’s; please telll me that you know the iconic instrumental “Green Onions” and get that reference. Don’t make me feel like the old dude that I am.)
“Yeah, I call B.S on the pseudo-intellectual B&S About Movies writer,” you say. “You never heard of them or the movie, R.D, until Sam bought the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” 12-pack.”
Sorry, ye mighty Internet Warrior. You’d be wrong.
Because of my longstanding love of rock ‘n’ roll and movies; slumming, collecting, and working in the vintage vinyl marketplace, doing road work, and working on the radio, I thrive, THRIVE on rock ‘n’ roll movie oddities and obscurities. If a flick has even the slightest cameo by a rock band in it, I’ve tracked down that movie and seen it. Even more so with today’s public domain catchall disc sets. Back before the digital realm, I taped ’em off UHF-TV and have shelves of 6-hour mode recorded VHS tapes packed with these flicks.
The Skydivers is the second of three films written and directed by Coleman Francis, primarily a TV and Drive-In flick bit actor who appeared on episodes of Dragnet who turned up in Russ Meyers’s Motorpsycho! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and had a somewhat larger part in the juvenile deliquent rock ‘n’ roll flick, 1959’s T-Bird Gang, which is just one of the many made in the backwash of 1955’s Rebel Withouta Cause and Blackboard Jungle. (Now I am really missing the old AMC Network’s “American Pop” film series. Tears.) While I have never seen the riffed version, MST3K took The Skydivers to task in the ’80s; perhaps you’ve seen that version.
Skydivers is not, however, a rock ‘n’ roll or juvenile deliquent flick: it’s a bargain basement film noir of the Double Indemity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) variety. It does not, however, qualify as “explosive cinema” and it is as out-of-place alongside Tony Tulleners’s Scorpion (1986) on the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set as it is seeing me sitting in front of a plate of sushi or inside a Starbucks. So don’t be fooled by the movie’s tagline: “The first feature length motion picture showing the daredevils of the sky who free fall from heights of 20,000 feet with only a ripcord between life and death!” (Insert yawn, here.) “Thrill jumping guys, thrill seeking girls, and daring death with every leap,” indeed.
Anyway, Anthony Cardoza . . . wait, where do I know that name from . . . holy B&S About Movies, BatSam! Tony starred in Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls and directed Alvy Moore (The Witchmaker) from TV’s Green Acres in Smokey and the Hotwire Gang. He’s produced, as Sam has called out, “interesting films” (aka, turkeys), such as The Beast of Yucca Flats (directed by Coleman Francis) and Bigfoot. (Coleman’s other directing efffort was 1966’s Night Train to Mundo Five, produced by, you guessed it. . . .)
Anyway, Tony-boy is the producer behind this vanity project as part of a unhappily married couple who owns a decrepit airfield-skydiving school in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Of course, Harry is the loser-dickhead who dragged his wife Beth (don’t be confused; actress Kevin Casey, in her only role, is a “she”) out into the desert—and he’s the one who’s restless and cheats on her. And the woman, Suzy, he’s cheating with is a femme fatale (Marcia Knight, Mako: The Jaws of Death) who’s had enough, so she seduces another guy to kill him. But wait, the wife is restless as well and she’s having an affair with her husband’s army buddy.
And they plot against each other. And they jump out of planes. And they sit in coffee houses and listen to a couple tunes from Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers—who are the only reason to check out this mess.
And they’re the only reason I know this movie exists. And now: you know it exists. Email your disdain to the fine folks at Eide’s Entertainment in Pittsburgh for carrying that cursed copy of the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set and selling it to Sam (we love you, guys!).
You can watch TV-taped VHS rips on You Tube without the riffing, but I think you’ll need the MST3K riffed version to make it thought.
That, and a nice, strong pot of coffee. Stratosphere Boogie, babydoll!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Mill Creek will make you love this movie. Resistance is futile. This post originally ran in November 2019 as part of our Pure Terror month. And it came back as part of the Explosive Cinema set. So here’s Terror In the Jungle, a movie that we love, as part of the B-Movie Blast 50-film pack.
I kind of wish that I was alive in 1968 just so I could have been part of this movie. Seriously, I’ve never seen a film that so quicky changes its tone and central theme so quickly, abandoning characters that its taken time to set up for an entirely new situation. And then we get the airplane, with swinging bands playing on it and people going bonkers before it crashes? I want to live in this insane world.
After we meet all these folks — bound for Rio — we better not get too used to them. Except for little Henry Clayton Jr., who is taking his stuffed lion to live with his mother after his parents split up. There’s also Mrs. Sherman, who may or may not have killed her husband, but has a suitcase full of money and is given to insane crying jags. And there’s an exotic dancer on board as well! And some nuns, traveling with one of their dead sisters in a coffin! And then there’s a band! And a rich dude that talks about cannibals!
Everybody is having so much fun that the band plays their big hit and Marian, the exotic dancer, shows off and even the nuns enjoy it. However, the movie soon turns into sheer insanity, as the plane begins to crash. Money spills all over the plane, a nun gets pulled out of an open door and half the cast abruptly dies. Seriously, somehow this went from “Soft Lips” to dudes getting their foreheads split in half and a gory death with a birdcage. I have no idea what brought on this narrative shift.
Then, to top all this off, every single other person we met is eaten by alligators.
You read that right.
The entire cast is dead.
Everyone except Henry, who is now floating down a reptile filled river in the coffin of a dead nun.
What the actual hell is going on here?
The natives — yes, the cannibals that were discussed on the plane that call themselves the Jivaros — find Henry and thanks to his blonde hair and the magic of 1968’s worst special effects, he has a halo. The leader of the tribe declares that he is a god, except that one of them thinks he has to die. So he chases Henry into the jungle and the kid’s stuffed lion transforms into a real lion and eats the dude.
So wait — is Henry really a god?
This is a movie that starts with the declaration that “This picturd was filmed on location in the Jivaros Regions of the Amazon Jungle. Without the assistance and encouragement of the Government of Peru it would not have been possible.”
It’s also the kind of movie that randomly has Fawn Silver be Marian, the exotic dancer. If you don’t know who she is, she’s Criswell’s assistant in Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead.
It also has three directors — Tom De’Simone directed the plane sequence, Andrew Janzack the jungle parts and the temple close was directed by Alex Graton. That may explain the strange narrative leaps that this makes.
Let’s break down each director.
Tom De’Simone went on to become adult film director Lancer Brooks, as well as creating some of my favorite films, like Hell Night, Reform School Girls and Chatterbox. Andrew Janzack never directed another movie, but was the cinematographer for The Undertaker and His Pals.
Alex Graton would finally direct another movie eleven years later, a romantic comedy entitled Only Once In a Lifetime that has Claudio Brook — yes, the same Claudio Brook who was in Luis Buneul’s The Exterminating Angel — in it.
I love IMDB because it has comments directly from De’Simone in the review. I’ll share it below for your enjoyment:
“OK, now it’s my turn to weigh in on this disaster. I’m the director who’s credited with this fiasco but in my defense I have to explain that there were three directors on this film and we all suffered under a producer with no experience, no taste, no sense and worst of all, NO MONEY.
I was fresh out of film school working as an editor when I was introduced to him when he was looking for a director. I convinced him I could handle a feature having already won two awards at film festivals for two shorts I had done. This was the biggest mistake in my life. Once on, for a mere $50 a day, I realized what I had gotten into. He hired a bunch of non-SAG actors who actually PAID HIM to be in his movie. None had any experience in front of a camera and all the characters were his creation. I was stuck in that plane mock-up for two weeks with these desperate souls trying to create something from nothing. The script was only half written when we started and he said he would finish it when we got to the jungle. When we completed the plane interiors, including the now famous “crash” scene, the rough cut was 83 minutes long and we hadn’t even reached the jungle part of the story.
I told him we had to make some serious trims, both for time and for performances. He refused to cut anything. He was so in love with the crap we had he actually once said he believed that the actress playing the stewardess would win an Oscar for her scream scene in the fire. I knew I was doomed. We argued over and over about what I felt should be dropped, trimmed and eliminated until I had it. I walked from the production and that wonderful salary. Undaunted, he went to Peru and used the cameraman as the replacement director. Down there they wrote the second half of the script and shot it as he wrote it.
Back in LA they now had a bigger disaster, naturally. The film was way too long, badly shot, badly acted and unwatchable. He and this second director fought, as did I, and he then walked away as well. Now the producer was over a barrel. He had sunk what little money he borrowed and still believed he had a hit on his hands if he could just get it finished. He hired a third guy to come in and fix the problem. This genius hired a bunch of extras, put bad wigs on them and went to Griffith Park in LA and shot more crap that was even more laughable than what they got in Peru. After that the producer shopped around for stock footage of native ceremonies and came up with some god-awful crap from a 40’s schlock film and cut it in . . . the final disaster is what’s on screen. I’ve lived in shame my entire career because for some reason I always get the credit for making this turkey. I was one of three victims! The entire debacle was the brain child of the producer and none of us had a chance in hell to make it any better than it was doomed to be from the start.
And that’s the truth.”
In case you haven’t realized it yet, I love this movie. Like, beyond love. I’m going to bother everyone I know to tell them just how great it is and then laugh when they look at me and wonder why I enjoy this blast of craziness so much. Beware!
Editor’s Note: We reviewed this early Harry Dean Stanton flick on March 13, 2020, as part of its inclusion on Mill Creek’s Explosive Cinema 12-pack. It’s back as part of its inclusion on Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-film pack.
Lots of Henry Farrell’s stories got turned into movies. Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Such A Gorgeous Kid Like Me, How Awful About Allan, The House That Would Not Die, What’s the Matter with Helen?, The Eyes of Charles Sand and, most famously, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
His first book, The Hostage, was turned in to this low budget Crown International film, which was directed by Russell S. Doughten Jr., who would go on to executive produced the entire A Thief In the Night series of Christian pre-millenial madness. God bless you, Mr. Doughten, for all you have given to me.
A kid named Davey Cleaves sneaks on to a moving truck driven by the bonkers man named Bull (Don Kelly, a TV star who died young as this is his final movie) and his partner Eddie (a very young Harry Dean Stanton).
John Carradine shows up, as he does at least seventeen times a week in movies that I watch, as does Ann Doran, whose career started in the silent era.
This was the first movie ever shot in Iowa. What a joy for the state when a drunken John Carradine was arrested in Des Moines, as he was disturbing the peace by loudly acting out various Shakespeare plays.
You can watch this on Tubi. Or You Tube. Or turn to the Mill Creek Explosive Cinema set that we’ve been covering all week.
Editor’s Note: We originally enjoyed this movie back on March 22, 2020, as part of our review of Mill Creek’s Explosive Cinema 12-pack. Now it’s back as part of their B-Movie Blast 50-film pack.
Mill Creek Explosive Cinema set, you are one strange duck. You assault us with Crown International Pictures releases that have been seen by tens of people and then, in the middle of it all, give us a black and white war movie from the mid 60’s about women in combat. How do you do what you do?
North Korea: A bunch of citizen soldiers have to take out a mortar position and make it back to the safety of Uncle Sam, but that’s not as easy as it seems.
Jim Davis, Jock Ewing himself, leads the men. Don “Red” Barry, who played Red Ryder, shows up, as does Tristram Coffin (Rocket Man from King of the Rocket Men) and L.Q Jones, who we all know would someday make The Brotherhood of Satan and A Boy and His Dog, films that just blow my mind for how astounding they are.
Director Ken Kennedy would go on to be the set decorator for Return to Boggy Creek. He also directed the women in danger movie The Velvet Trap and the 1990 version of The Legend of Grizzly Adams, which starred Gene Edwards as Grizzly. Who? He was one of the stuntmen from the TV series. L.Q. Jones is in that, too.
This would be Margo Woode’s last film, as she played heroine Nurse Lt. Laura Fleming.
A gung ho movie about Americans winning the war in Korea. So there’s that. You can download this from the Internet Archive if you want to see a war movie that just about no one else will watch in 2020.
Also known as The Legend of Blood Castle, The Female Butcher, The Bloody Countess and Ceremonia Sangrienta, this Jorge Grau-directed (The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue) Eurohorror film is a real classic that’s finally getting a great release thanks to Mondo Macabro.
The people of 19th century Europe aren’t ready to let go of their fear of vampires just yet, so they head out into the night and conduct trials over the graves over those who have recently died and are rumored to the undead.
As for Countess Erzebeth Bathory (Lucia Bosè, Fellini’s Satyricon), all she cares about is her quickly fading beauty and her husband’s lack of attention. But there are methods to bring her looks back and him back to bed which involve the dark practices of the ancestor she shares a name with. Blood is the secret and shockingly, her husband is only too willing to get it for her.
Where you’d expect a film awash in blood and gore, this is a movie more about how women deal with aging and men that only see beauty in youth. And yes, there’s still plenty of bloodbathing along the way.
Ewa Aulin (Candy, Death Laid an Egg) is also in this. Sadly, Aulin didn’t enjoy acting and was done by the age of 23.
So many versions of this film were released in the U.S. in PG form. The Mondo Macabro release has the fully uncut International and alternate Spanish cuts of the film, along with interviews with the director and two commentary tracks (Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson; Robert Monell and Rod Barnett).
This is yet another must-have for your horror collection. I wish Grau had made more films in the genre, if only because his movies end up having so many alternate titles.
The new episode of New Castle After Dark is more than one of my favorite movies. It also features Bill Van Ryn from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum! I love these guys and love Bill, so this is perfect.
EDITOR’S NOTE: R. D Francis first covered this for our site on June 26, 2019. I think it may have actually been the first thing he contributed. I’m excited to watch the new Mondo Macabro release of this, which is a great reason to cover this film for the site.
In case you didn’t guess from all the films of his we’ve covered, we kind of love Paul Naschy around here.
Sort of a sequel and a remake of 1973’s Horror Rises from the Tomb, this Naschy effort was written and directed under his real name, Jacinto Molina. Naschy also brings back the same role he played in that movie, Alaric de Marnac.
Within moments of the film starting, Alaric is already chasing women down while in horseback and caving in their skulls with a mace. Fast-forward a few hundred years and we meet Paul Marnac (also Naschy), who brings his infirm wife Geneviève (Night of the Werewolf, The People Who Own the Dark) to his family’s ancestral home. Of course, you know that this home was built above the ruins of Alaric’s castle and that Marnac’s ancestor comes back every hundred years or so to ruin his relatives’ lives, starting with scaring Marnac’s wife literally to death.
Or was it all a ruse? Did Paul really just want to get with his younger lover Mireille all along? Is Paul also sleeping with the maid’s niece Julie? Is Alaric real and coming for everyone? Yes, yes, yes and oh yes, just wait until the absolutely gore-drenched last ten minutes,
Somehow, this movie goes from a twist and turn tale of lovers getting people out of the way to a Fulci-level splatterfest by the end of the film. Bravo!
Also, if you love the body of Naschy — and I know who you are and I think you do — he’s nude in a bathtub for your viewing enjoyment.
Naschy also played Marnac in The Devil’s Possessed. Most people would worry about typecasting. Not Naschy — he also played the werewolf by night Count Waldemar Daninsky twelve times in his career.
Mondo Macabro’s blu ray release has a new 4k transfer from a film negative, making this movie sparkle. I’m used to seeing Naschy in the grainiest of quality. This is really something else. It also includes two interviews with Paul Naschy and audio commentary from The Naschycast (Troy Guinn & Rod Barnett).
You better believe that this movie has my absolute recommendation. If I came to your house and it wasn’t in your collection, I would silently judge you.
Editor’s Note: We reviewed this back on March 10, 2020, as part of our Explosive Cinema 12-Pack of reviews. We’re bringing it back as part of our B-Movie Blast 50-Film Pack (Amazon) flurry of reviews.
Just look at that VHS-’90s resume of David A. Prior: The spa ‘n blades romp Killer Workout, the David Carradine post-apoc flicks Future Force and Future Zone. The Filipino actioners Firehead and The Final Sanction. And while he didn’t direct them, through his Action International Pictures, aka West Side Studios (aka in homage to AIP – American International Pictures), founded alongside David Winters and Peter Yuval, Prior was involved in the production of the holiday horror Elves, the Battlestar Galactica rip-off Space Mutiny, the apoc-slop Phoenix the Warrior, and the exploitation zombie mess directed by our beloved game-for-anything John Saxon, Zombie Death House.
And as we’ve said many times before when referring to the direct-to-video oeuvre of David A. Prior: Here’s another one from the bottom of Action International’s very tasty barrel. Another piece of B&S wisdom: What David A. Prior movie doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Makoto (Sonny Chiba!, Kill Bill: Vol 1), a cold-blooded assassin, escapes from prison to extract his revenge on the mean streets of New Orleans against an elite squad of “Special Crimes” agents headed by Eddie Cook and Vinnie Rizzo (Robert Davi of Maniac Cop II and Steven Bauer from DePalma’s Scarface!). As Makoto and his sexy-vicious partner Sybil (Red Sonja? Brigitte Neilsen? *) execute the squad members one-by-one, it’s up to Tango & Cash, Rizzoli and Isles, Starsky and Hutch, Cook and Rizzo to find the deadly duo and stop the carnage.
“Hey, dude. What about me?”
Oh, yeah. Hey, Jan-Michael Vincent. I didn’t forget you’re Detective Reinhart. That sucks that Sonny Chiba tossed you off the building so early in the movie. We dig your work here at B&S.
“Yeah, well. You didn’t do me any favors by reminding everyone I did Alienator, buddy.”
Well, you were trying to build a theatrical resume and break out of television. It’s all good, Cindy. Besides your were uber hot and ass-kicking in this as Special Agent Janet Hood. That catfight with Brigitte saved the movie. And, I must say: You were the best of the Seinfeld babes of all time.
“Even hotter than Susan Walters?”
You mean Mulva-Doloris from ‘The Junior Mint’ and ‘The Foundation’? Oh, hell yes, Cindy!
“Hey, thanks for being a gentleman and not making any jokes if ‘they’ were real and spectacular.”
You bet, Cindy.
As you can see: what we have here is an exploitation cast wetdream . . . in a very bad movie. And that’s the way we like it here at B&S About Movies: mindless and fun, and oh, so “Prior” plotted.
Well . . . I challenge you to come up with a better review . . . and find a freebie VHS rip online. God bless those public domain DVDs collecting mold in the bins at The Salavation Army.
* Brigitte Neilson recently made the news for giving birth to a new baby at the age of 54 (story link) and that she would allow herself to be purposefully infected with the Chinese Cornavirus for a planned vaccine clinical trial to be done in London (story link). And get this: Robert Davi has 15 . . . yes, 15, films in various states of pre-and–post production, with a resume now at 161 credits.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.