Two years ago, we watched Mandao of the Dead, a film that was a lot of fun. Now the sequel — which was almost called Mandao of the Damned — is here and the good news is that it picks up right where the first one ended.
This time around, Jay Mandao has astral projected back in time to save the life of a B-movie star. Assuredly, that seems like a noble endeavor. But the more Jay and his pals mess around with time, the deeper they go into conspiracy, death and a Hollywood cult. Oh yeah — it’s also Christmas.
Writer/director Scott Dunn returns as Jay Mandao, the titular character of this story, along with cousin Andy (Sean Lang, their driver Fez (Gian Gomez Dunn) and nephew Jackson O’Hare (Sean McBride).
This time around, Jay is feeling lost until he’s hired by Ted Williams (Jim O’Doherty), an agent to determine how an actress named Aura Garcia (Jenny Lorenzo) in his employ died. While Jay has only been able to communicate with his dead father before, now he learns way too much. He learns information that puts all of his friends in danger.
I get how Mandao feels. He just wants to escape into a world of cereal and slacking, but people keep pulling him into their schemes. I had a blast with this one, just like the original Mandao movie. The filmmakers know a wise fact that even big budget movies neglect: keep people wanting more. This clocks in at 70 minutes, which is the perfect running time for a movie.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime. I’m excited that it’s going to be a series soon!
USMC Lieutenant Colonel Jack Lewis did more than write this movie. He lived a life. After enlisting in the Marines in time for World War II, he left to become a screenwriter of westerns. However, he’d return for tours in Korea and Vietnam, where he earned his second and third Air Medals. Lewis didn’t retire from the Marines until the day before his sixtieth birthday.
In between active duty, he also found time to write 12 books and an estimated 6,000 magazine articles and short stories. He was also the co-founder and editor of Gun World, a publication which led to several controversial moments, as he decried America’s reliance on the M-16 and his no-BS take on weapons and love of showing off exotic arms made several major firearms manufacturers choose to not advertise in the pages of his magazine.
Lewis’ screenplays include the Lash LaRue film King of the Bullwhip, as well as the original Naked Gun, Black Eagle of Santa Fe and quite possibly Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. Perhaps most strange of all, he was the music editor for Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?
This is a story that calls to mind the days that Hedda Hopper and Confidential! could destroy the career of a celebrity. Maxwell Carter (Robert Clark, The Hideous Sun Demon) is an ex-detective whose job it is to dig up the stories the stars don’t want to see in the rags near the checkout.
This is the first movie for Francine York (The Doll Squad). She has a great character name in this — Nan Torr. If you’re a fan of Night Train to Terror, you know that she played Marilyn Monroe in Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (also known as Scream Your Head Off), which is one of the stories within that movie.
After this movie, Crown International Pictures took nine years off. I will tell you that that is not because this is a good movie and they felt they’d done all they could do. Quite the opposite.
However, in my endless quest to watch every single film they ever released, as well as my slavish addiction to Mill Creek box sets, I find myself here, struggle watching this supposed satire on Hollywood.
This is all about a producer of exploitation and sex videos who uddenly is accused of killing one of his star’s boyfriends and his mistress. It’s a wacky sendup of what I can only assume it was like make movies in 1994.
I mean, this is a movie that pokes fun at the erotic thriller genre, with the character Abdu clearly an analogue of Ashok Amritraj, Menaham Golan and Yorum Globus and Greg Rhodes from Ghosthouse and Deadly Manoras the filmmaker who is pretty much making post-adult Gregory Dark movies, except this makes me wistful for Gregory Dark movies.
In a meta move, India Allen, who was Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1988, as well as in movies like Silk Degrees and Wild Cactus, plays herself.
Michael Weaver, who wrote and directed this, also shot Dark Eyes and The Sender as well as directing two segments in the movie Night Terror before heading off to do TV work, working as the DP on Pushing Daisies and directing episodes of Californication and Good Girls.
I’ll do anything for Crown International and Mill Creek, I guess. Even this.
Editor’s Note: The first time we unpacked this film, on November 12, 2019, it was for its inclusion on Mill Creek’s Pure Terror set, in a review written by Melody Vena.
We first read Melody Vena’s writing in last year’s Horror and Sons Halloween Horrors 2018 event and learned that she won the 2017 and 2018 Monster Movie Maniac “Monster Movie Marathon” contest by watching the most movies in one month. She also wrote about Man In the Attic for us last year. And when you learn that director Michael Fischa, he of the epic Death Spa, made his film debut with a werewolf comedy, well, Sam reviewed it a second time. And Mill Creek, never letting a cool obscurity be forgotten, have reissued it again, as part of their B-Movie Blast 50-Film set that we’re reviewing this month.
Enjoy this repost of Melody’s take on the film!
My moms a werewolf hit the screen in May of 1989, a comedy/horror film much like Teen Wolf. With a cast starring John Saxon, John Schuck,Susan Blakely and Ruth Buzzi, and being directed by Michael Fischa the film has that classic 1980s cheesy vibe that we all know and somewhat love.
The movie focuses on an average kind of ditzy housewife (Susan Blakely) who is fed up with her boring doing the same thing every day kind of life, and the situation gets worse by the fact that she is being continually ignored by her husband, Howard (John Schuck). She often finds herself watching TV with the family dog instead of being included in things with the family. Meanwhile her daughter, Jennifer is being dragged to a horror convention by her horror obsessed friend, Stacey. Jennifer finds the whole convention boring. Very disinterested and skeptical by the whole scene, she agrees to have her fortune told by a palm reader at the convention. The fortune teller seems pretty phony at first, but then tells Jennifer that she sees the sign of the pentagram on her face, and warns her that she will “struggle with an unholy evil over the next few days.” Jennifer jokes that she must mean the Halloween party she’s been planning.
Meanwhile, Leslie leaves the house in a huff to go shopping, after being ignored by her husband once again. She goes to a local pet store to buy a flea-collar for her dog but is surprised by the mysterious owner, Harry Thropen (John Saxon), who offers to give her the collar for free. Taken back by the generous offer, she leaves the store and the camera focuses on Thropen as he sneakily eats one of the white mice he has for sale. As the she enters the street a thief grabs her bag, flipping her off before running away. Thropen, sees what happens and is able to catch the purse snatcher by appearing suddenly in front of him and throwing him onto a pickup truck full of eggs. Leslie is befuddled at how he was able to do this but offers to buy Thropen lunch in for his troubles. Worried about her parents’ marriage (all of a sudden), Jennifer goes with Stacey to the restaurant her mother frequents with a bunch of flowers, she has made a plan to tell her mother that the flowers are from her father.
Unfortunately she sees Leslie eating with a strange man and assumes that she is having an affair (I mean she is ignored A LOT). Although Leslie asserts to Thropen that she is a married woman, he goes right ahead and kisses her anyway.
The kiss ends abruptly when dessert arrives en flambe, and the flames scare him away. Leslie chases him back to his shop ( all of a sudden full of courage) with Jennifer and Stacey following close behind. While in the shop Leslie continues to avoid his advances until Thropen removes the sunglasses he has been wearing, revealing disturbing orange irises which hold the ability to hypnotize her. Meanwhile outside Jennifer and Stacey are shooed away from the pet shop door by a policeman who catches them snooping outside, then he proceeds to look in the cracks himself.
After a few cocktails (some with goldfish swimming in them) Leslie and Thropen start fooling around on a bed covered in animal skins. Leslie seems to be enjoying herself with the strange pet shop owner until he bites her big toe, which causes her to jump up and leave hurry (not the fact that she was about to go full blown affair with a stranger) Thropen allows her to go, saying that she would be back because he would “be in her thoughts.” (cause that’s not weird)
When she arrives back home the family dog, and her only friend, growls at Leslie. Then Jennifer attempts to confront her about the affair, a matter of which Leslie is genuinely ignorant, thanks to the glowing eyes of hypnotism. Howard also notices a change in Leslie, both in the way she cooks meat for dinner despite being vegetarian and more importantly the way she acts in the bedroom (because now all of a sudden he wants to have sex with the wife he has constantly been ignoring…must have been the meat). The next morning Leslie is horrified to learn her teeth have become fangs. She attempts to hide her deformity from her daughter who assumes she is nervous because of the presumed affair. Leslie goes to see the suggestively named dentist, Dr. Rod (and yes, the name fits the persona and behavior of doctor and nurses), to have her fangs filed down, which only results in a broken file and some lewd sounds of frustration from Dr. Rod. (think a lot of moaning and groaning)
Driven by cravings for meat, she stops at a butchery and gets a snack, Leslie drives back home eating raw meat, milk bones, and singing loudly to rock music (apparent werewolf behavior). When an elderly couple pull up next to her at a stoplight and the old man remarks: “Look Edna, a singing werewolf. We don’t see many of those nowadays, do we?”
My Mom’s A Werewolf is such a good time to watch, with its underlying sexual tones, and quick one liners, it’s surprising that it does not have much of a cult following. I will not give away any spoilers, I enjoy leaving you all wanting more, so I highly suggest giving this one a good watch. I mean is a horror comedy with a moral at heart – Men, don’t ignore your ladies because you never know where a furry beast may be waiting to pounce.
We’ve been jammin’ on this movie at B&S About Movies for quite some time, as we included it on August 19, 2019, as part of our “Deadly Game Shows Week” of film reviews. Leave it to the fine film folks at Mill Creek to finally give it a slot on a Mill Creek box set. And it’s a part of their B-Movie Blast 50-film box set. And guess what? As is par for the Mill Creek course, it’s coming at us again on Mill Creek’s Excellent Eighties 50-film set — which guest writer Sean Mittus covered for us (on February 28, 2021).
Yes. The poster is better than the movie.
Well, Sam, even though he knows I hate Troma movies more so than him, he asked me to give this another take, so as to keep the site fresh and repeat free. Whatever, boss.
Lord help me. I guess I’ll be sharing some of Sam pissy hate-mails love for not liking Troma movies. But I pride myself on my “delusional hipster” and “edgy commentary” skill sets. Look, I just don’t like movies that are bad on purpose. Well, scratch that. Writer and director Eric Eichelberger, of the comedic horror Ghoul Scout Zombie Massacre, purposely made his movie “bad.” But it’s not bad from incompetence or campy due to lack of skill (as is the case, here), for it is a well-produced and shot film and acted film (by skilled actors that understand their material) that is in homage to the ’80s SOV films before it.
That same can’t be said for this . . . celluloid thing. It’s exists. That’s the nicest thing I can say. It’s not a real movie, like Ghoul Scout Zombie Massacre. I know, I know. It’s “over my head” and this . . . thing . . . and Redneck Zombies has fans. I am not one of them. Maybe The Toxic Adventure and Surf Nazis Must Die — and that’s only because of the nostalgic USA Network Friday-Saturday weekend connection. Yeah, yeah. I know this isn’t a Troma movie. But it dumps #2s — among other things — like one.
There, now that’s two rips on Troma. Deal with it, dear reader-cum-troll.
Yeah, this movie is more “deadly” that you realize. Where’s Ralphie’s Red Rider?
So, in an f’d up Los Angeles communications outlet of the KLST variety of the Zoo Radio variety (only that’s radio; this is TV) and just down the dial from “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Channel 62 in UHF, is the bottom-of-the-barrel KSIK — with the top-rated show hosted by John McCafferty: Live or Die. And McCafferty (played by Chuck Toedan) ain’t no Damon Killan. Now, do you remember when Chuck Barris went meta with The Gong Show Movie? That’s how you do a game show parody: Deathrow Gameshow is a “how to” on how not do to them.
Now, before you start with the “hypocrite” love: Yes, I liked Mark Pirro’s My Mom’s a Werewolf. But he only wrote that and didn’t direct it: the great Michael Fischa, did. And Fischa had John Saxon and Susan Blakely to carry the film. And McCafferty and his co-star, Robin Blythe ain’t no Saxon or Blakely.
So, if you haven’t figured it out: Condemned death row prisoners are given one last chance to entertain the masses before they get executed, as well as the chance to win prizes for their families. What you don’t know, in the “plot” of it all: It all goes off the rails when the Spumoni family’s boss is executed playing the game — by electro-shocked wires on his penis as a stripper dances before him. Comedy. You gotta love it.
Now the family send Luigi Pappalardo to kill the host. And this is where I am allowed by B&S About Movies’ hipster and edgy editorial policy to use the word “ensues” because to say more is a lesson in QWERTY futility. Okay, I’ll say this:
This is a film that thinks naming the love interest damsel-in-distress Gloria Sternvirgin, a member of Woman Against Anything Men Are For organization, is funny. It’s not. This is a film that can’t pull of its too-ambitious over talent and budget mock-parody TV commercials and promos for other shows at the station. Again, “Weird Al” does it so much better in UHF. This is a cheap, talentless crap bag that’s an insult to crap bags the world over that also served as a waste of my hand muscles. Do not do this to me again, Sam, or I’ll scrape up my couch coins and Auntie and Gram’s X-Mas and Birthday money and send a hitman to kill you — which is greater than the budget wasted on this “existing” crap bag that stinks to Troma high heaven.
I can’t recommend this. You’ll have to find your own freebie streams and online shopping links for DVDs.
R.D out. See you in the comments box.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
This documentary offers a look back at the films that we love to cover most on this site, the grindhouse and drive-in horrors of the 70s and 80s. It has plenty of the stars lined up and doesn’t do anything to get in the way of them telling their stories, along with clips of the films for which they’re known best.
You’ll get to hear from everyone from Brinke Stevens (Slumber Party Massacre), Lynn Lowry (The Crazies, I Drink Your Blood, Shivers), Kevin Van Hentenryck (Basket Case), John Dugan (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Mel Novak (Game of Death), John Russo (the writer of Night of the Living Dead, Midnight and The Majorettes), Carl Crew (Blood Diner), Jonathan Peacy (I Spit on Your Grave: Deja Vu), Marneen Fields (Hellhole), Camilla Carr (Don’t Look in the Basement), Craig Muckler (the producer of Microwave Massacre), John Naulin (special effects for Re-Animator), Frank M. Farel (writer and producer of Spookies) and Craig Reed (who played the one-armed zombie in Re-Animator).
The only downside I can think to this movie is that it has such a short running time. I would have loved to hear more stories from everyone involved. If you’re a fan of any of these movies, this is something you’ll enjoy watching.
Necropath, the feature film debut of writer and director Joshua Reale, has had a long, strange trip . . . on a path that begins in 2014 as a short that found a wider audience as part of its inclusion in the 2016 indie-anthology Empire State of the Dead. Now, that short has been combined with two other award-winning short films to create the feature-length version of Necropath.
Warning: If you enjoy zombie movies, you’re not going to like this movie. Now that doesn’t mean it’s not a good movie, because it is a good movie. A great one, in fact. But this ain’t your pop’s traditional George Romero or Lucio Fulci zombie movie. And it’s not one of the many indie-streaming pieces of zombie slop clogging up Amazon Prime. Necropath is a zombie movie run through an unconventional, Bigas Luna surrealistic filter with a smidgen of Alejandro Jodoroswky’s impressionism and José Mojica Marins phantasmagoria. So, if their off-beat brand of psychedelic ambiguity open to interpretation (as with our recent reviews of 2021’s Blood Freaks and Welcome to the Circle) with their respective films Anguish, Santa Sangre, or the fubar’d supernatural exploits of ol’ Coffin Joe isn’t your cup ‘o joe, well, then you’re already dead. So stand tall in the mortuary corridor and let one of the Tall Man’s flying cuisinart balls take you the red planet . . . if Scag doesn’t slice off one of your ears, first.
We, well moi (Did your read our reviews of?), have been down this less-dialog-is-more narrative (that isn’t everyone’s cup of Coffin Joe) before with Jason Lester’s High Resolution and Vahagn Karapetyan’s Greek horror Wicca Book. As with those films, Reale’s debut feature is a film of sight, color, and sound that pushes the visual medium envelope of film; an art form that, at its core, is a craft based in “showing” and not “telling.” In the case of Necropath, Reale tears the ubiquitous 90% visual and 10% dialog film rulebook (stage is the reverse) in half, tosses it into Scag’s needle-strewn drug den, and goes for broke and allows his actors — through their use of props and body language — to bring on the hopeless fear and dread.
Well, what exactly do we mean by an “unconventional” serial killer-cum-zombie movie?
Well, this ain’t no A-List Brad Pitt-starrer or AMC-palpable living dead romp. Necropath is a film of darkness and nihilism (and FYI: the third act goes uber-brutal). It’s a film rife with odd-ball light sources, queasy-inducing framing, and a soundtrack that forgoes the trite and trope route of Blumhoused screeching-crescendo shock scare soundscapes for, well, a bunch of disconnected noises. And Necropath also forgoes with the prattling exposition on how we got here, in fact, the characters rarely speak at all. (And when they do speak, it’s none of that lazy, wild lines “Quick, run!,” “Look out!,” “He’s right behind you!” dialog daggit dung.) Ultimately, Necropath answers the felicitous question: What if Micheal Myers and Hannibal Lecter — or any criminally insane individual — were allowed to wander unchecked amid the chaos of a global pandemic. And what if he’s also infected with the zombie plague?
When that mysterious zombie plague rips across the globe, the virus’ spread is exacerbated by corruptions within an opportunistic pharmaceuticals industry. Amid the imminent demise of society occurring around him, a serial killer known as Scag (a stellar Moe Isaac) — a needle-pushing drug addict that’s also zom-infected — continues his murderous rampage with impunity . . . until he meets his match from the most unlikely person: a little girl who survived the slaughter of her family. And she’ll do whatever it takes to save her baby sister from Scag and his girlfriend/hoe, Crack Hag (Natalie Colvin, in another stellar turn), whose own zom-morphin’ kicked in her motherly instincts: she wants the baby. And, regardless of her age, our young “final girl” has to stand up, as the police officer on Scag’s trail, obviously, can’t kill him. And her dad? A useless puss-bag who, even with his briefcase and tie, is as morally corrupt as Scag: even in the face of a zero-game plague where compassion is key, ol’ pop is still a profanity-abusive husband and father threatening to divorce his wife.
An unlikely heroine: actress Lillian Colvin
While her name isn’t marquee-positioned on the theatrical one-sheet, the most recognizable name here is Cassandra Hayes, whose work we’ve enjoy in the B&S About Movies cubicle farm with the low-budget indies Amityville Death House, Mark Polonia’s Revolt of the Empire of the Apes, and Amityville Island. In fact, it was Cassandra’s presence that advanced Necropath to the top of the digital review stack. Courtesy of my Law & Order: SVU fandom, it was also nice to see her co-star, New York-based actor Nathan Faudree (great here as the dickhead dad), who appeared in “Hell’s Kitchen,” (which just had an off-network rerun this week that I re-watched; so that’s a sign right there) a 2018 episode of that long-running NBC-TV series.
And we’re glad it we advanced the film to the top, as we discovered Joshua Reale has a unique narrative vision and a great cinematic eye. Now, that — it seems — Necropath has reached the end of its path, we look forward to what Reale has in store with his next feature film.
While Necropath is comprised of three shorts — each dealing (realistically) with the opening throes of a zombie outbreak — Reale’s feature film debut isn’t an anthology film. And since I’ve never had the pleasure to watch those three shorts as standalone films, I have no way of knowing where one ends and one begins (since the film runs an hour and a half, we’re assuming each short is at least 30 minutes, with minimal, addition-connective frames shot). And if Reale never disclosed the fact that Necropath — the feature film version — was comprised of three shorts, you’d never know it.
As of late, a lot of short films trickle across the streaming-verse and those filmmakers, looking to increase their opportunities to have their works seen by a wider audience, have worked together to thread their films into a feature film narrative. Of course, most of these “feature films” culled from shorts, tend to have editing issues, inconsistent cinematography, and plots stymied by weak linking devices. Our beloved Amicus omnibuses of the ’70s, with linking crypt and shop keeps, and evil elevators and train passengers, are one thing: those films were scripted that way. It’s another thing to take a grouping of unrelated pieces-parts to make a feature film. And it doesn’t always work. (Editor’s Note: We have not seen the short-anthology Empire of State of the Dead and we are not taking that work to critical task in the context of the opinions expressed in this review.) One of the few times it works (beautifully) is when you have skilled artisans at the center, such as Argentinean Giallo-purveying brothers Nicolas and Luciano Onetti with their 2019 offering, A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio. And Reale’s film works at that level, even more so, because, as the Onettis required a ne’er-do-well disc jockey to thread a narrative, Necropath has no linking-character for consistency. Reale’s skills in the editing suite is the “consistency” that keeps the viewer engaged in the narrative. No linking required.
And it’s a narrative that is nauseating. I haven’t felt this unsettled by a film since Gaspar Noé’s arthouse-homage upending of the ’70s rape-revenge cycle with 2002’s Irréversible, courtesy of its brutal mix of sound, music, and images. Reale’s utilization of odd-ball lighting, gore, and a crazed sound pallet of perpetual, atmospheric hums, screeches, buzzes, and distorted, disembodied voices (we assume, from the head of Scag), and wailing emergency alert clarions, you’re left feeling as hopeless as the innocents victimized by a serial killer in the midst of a global zombie pandemic. The hopeless darkness of Alexandre Aja’s 2003 New French Extreme hit High Tension, also comes to mind in the frames of Necropath, even a touch of Ryûhei Kitamura‘s brutal (Am I the only one who liked it?) serial-killer trope-upending, No One Lives (2012). (You may see hints of Rob Zombie’s retro-homage oeuvres, as well, and as some who’ve watched Necropath have said. But it’s best not to mention that point and get Sam, the boss, started on Rob Zombie tear. Please, do not get him started on a Rob Zombie tear, for life is too short. Wink: Mum’s the word.)
Necropath is a fucking arthouse war zone that leaves you praying to God that a zombie plague never comes to fruition. Necropath is a film that raises the bar on indie-horror streaming norms — then takes the bar and plunges it through the arduous, rotten corpse of all other poorly-shot and edited and acted indie streaming horrors in its path and forces those filmmakers to step it up to an A-Game or just spare us the pain and go sling faux-Tex Mex food at a Chili’s. (And our irritable bowels kick in and we wipe our asses with their bogus film school degrees.) Necropath lets you know it ain’t gonna be a cool-verse with Jeffrey Dean Morgan swingin’ “Lucille” around and Norman Reedus being all sexy-smoldering, grungy-hot for the ladies in the audience. Necropath is a Private First Class Hudson “Game over, man!” world where you’re fucked. You die. Everyone fucking dies by virus, by drug addiction, by zom, and bye-bye. There’s no Operation Warp Speed to save you. End of story.
Necropath becomes available on all digital platforms on February 9th from Gravitas Ventures and Kamikaze Dogfight. You also can learn more about the film at Cayo Industrial Horror Realm’s official Facebook page and website. You can also visit the film’s official Facebook and Instagram pages for more photo stills. Another Kamikaze Dogfight release we’ve recently reviewed is Don’t Look Back.
Disclaimer: We received a screener from the distributor’s P.R. firm. That has no bearing on our review. We would have loved this movie even without the freebie. And that’s no feldercarb.
Editors Note: Necropath has since made its July 2021 free-with-ads-streaming debut on Tubi. And don’t forget to read our interview with the writer and director, Joshua Reale, for more about the film.
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 short stories and music reviews on Medium.
Oh, you better watch out With Mill Creek sets And those fan-lists Of said Mill Creek sets Because those multiple film titles And plurals Are coming to town
Yeah, when you’re making a Mill Creek list, you’ve always got to check those lists twice to find out which film is the naughty B-Movie or the nice A-List movie.
Mill Creek fans have listed Sly Stallone’s The Specialist from 1994 directed by Luis Llosa (of Crime Zone and Anaconda fame) on their lists for Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film pack. Others noted on their lists — uh, oh, there’s that friggin’ plural “S” again, the same “S” that bit me in the arse during out big, British-produced Satan’s Slave (1976) vs. the Indonesian-produced Satan’s Slaves (1982) snafu with our Mill Creek Pure Terror Month review back in November 2019 — that the film included on the B-Movie Blast set is Sergio Corbucci’s The Specialists (1969; starring French rock singer Johnny Hallyday (French rock singer; later of 1987s Terminus) — a film that we didn’t get around to during our “Spaghetti Western Week”* of reviews.
So, plural “S,” damn you, for ye almost deprived us of an Adam West . . . yes, THE ADAM WEST . . . spy thriller directed by Howard Avedis, he who gave us the epics of Connie Stevens as a rogue cop in Scorchyand ex-Waltons frolicking through the supernatural in Mortuary. Yeah, you know us all too well: we feel a “Howard Avedis Week” coming on, too. I mean, with film titles like The Stepmother and The Teacher (sexploitation time!!!!), and movies starring the B-Movie elite of Sybil Danning, Karen Black, Bo Hopkins, Patrick Wayne, Edy Williams (Dr. Minx!!!), and Angel Hopkins (!) with Jay “Dennis the Menace” North — how can we NOT have a “Howard Avedis Week” of reviews?
But. let’s get back to Adam’s West’s B-Movie milieu (Omega Cop, One Dark Night) in the Avedis schlock oeuvre.
As you can see from the theatrical one-sheet, this is all about Budapest, Hungary-imported bombshell Ahna Carpi, who blazed through 70-plus U.S. TV credits (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is my fondest Carpi-ory) before retiring from the business. But you know her film work in . . . YES . . The Brotherhood of Satan and Piranha (oops, the 1972 one that Joe Dante didn’t direct — damn you, multiple titles) and . . . YES . . . as Tania in Enter the Dragon. And, would you believe she was a child actor in two episodes of the now Antenna oft-run ’60s series Leave It to Beaver (I just got done watching “Beaver’s Sweater” a few days ago!), but, back then, she was “Anna Capri” and not the more porny-reading Ahna, which is the proper, Euro-ethnic spelling of her first name. Oh, and to continue that Brotherhood of Satan degree of separation: Alvy “Hank Kimbel” Moore is in The Specialist (as blackmailing court bailiff) as well, and Avedis’s Mortuary (and a few others) . . . and Cotton Candy (but no Avedis or Capri on that one).
So, there’s your movie trivia for today: What two movies starred a Hungarian child actor and a Green Acres cast member?
See? Reposting that old Sly Stallone review, in error, would have robbed us of all this fun! But, alas . . . I know, I know . . . get to the friggin’ movie, already, R.D. Hey, I’ve haven’t seen this one either, so, let’s go, Adam West fans! Hit the play button!
Now, based on this still from the film (or promo pack from the film) posted by the Digital Content Management Team at the IMDb, you’d think you’re getting a spy thriller with Adam West as a B-Movie James Bond or as an ex-war vet now a kick ass private eye. Oh, ye Mill Creek grazer of the digital divide, how wrong are ye. For this is a Crown International Pictures — serious — court room drama. I know. I never thought I’d type that sentence in a review either. This from a studio that gives us a steady stream of boobs, vans, cheerleaders, female basketball coaches who have sex with male students, and any -sploitation variant you can imagine.
But this ain’t your granddad’s or great grandad’s Perry Mason, Owen Marshall: Attorney at Law, or Matlock (especially not with Nancy Stafford in the cast). This court room caper, again, looking at the rendering of Ahna in that dress, is an R-rated potboiler. But a Joe Eszterhas Jagged Edge neo-noir legal thriller this is not, Motion Picture Association Ratings to protect us youngins, be damned.
West is “The Specialist,” aka defense attorney Jerry Bounds, who’s in a court battle against fellow attorney Pike Smith (western actor John Anderson), an attorney who wants his job back on the board of a (corrupt) water company. So, to assure he wins the case, Pike recruits a sleazy P.I. (is there any other kind), Alec Sharkey (aka Howard Avedis aka’in as actor Russell Schmidt), who, in turn, recruits Londa Weyth (Ahna Carpi), his blonde-n’-hot operative serving as a juror-ringer on the trial, to seduce Bounds and get a mistrial declared.
So, in case you haven’t figure it out: The “Specialist” isn’t West as a cool-as-steel spy or ex-Special Forces-now-an-Attorney (or P.I.) bad-ass; the well-endowed Londa is the special forces sex kitten in these proceedings. Another sultry kitten in our midst is Playboy and Max Factor model Christiane Schmidtmer, you remember her as the hot stewardess from Boeing Boeing (1965) that got Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis all hot-n-bothered.
I am sure West, looking to be taken seriously as an actor (and deserved to me), was hoping this adaptation of the best-selling novel Come Now the Lawyers, would become a box office hit and thrust him into a legit theatrical career with the bigger studios. As did author Ralph Bushnell Potts, himself a Seattle-based Attorney-at-Law (learn more about Potts’s interesting life with his 1991 obituary in the Seattle Times). But, alas . . . Potts’s serious book about Washington State’s early courts system was turned into a Crown International exploitation fest that is not the least bit titillating and fails on the salacious scale that Crown in known for via these Mill Creek box sets. In the annals of Crown International public domaindom, The Specialist is a truly odd duck in the Crown celluloid pond.
There’s no freebie rips online to share, but you can check out the trailer and a scene clip on You Tube. Of course, you can enjoy The Specialist as part of Mill Creek’s B-Movie Blast 50-Film Pack.
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.
Here’s some trivia you can use on your friends. Santee was one of the first motion pictures to be shot electronically on videotape, using Norelco PCP-70 portable plumbicon NTSC cameras and portable Ampex VR-3000 2″ VTRs.
Director Gary Nelson mainly worked in TV before this, but he has some interesting films to his credit, like the original Freaky Friday, The Black Hole and the Mike Hammer TV movies.
Jody has finally reconnected with his father, just in time to learn that he’s an outlaw on the run from a bounty hunter named Santee (Glenn Ford). There’s not any time for a reunion as the entire gang gets gunned down and Jody decides that he’ll kill Santee himself. However, they end up becoming father and son, as Jody may have lost his father, but the old gunslinger lost his son.
This has a fun cast, with Dana Wynter (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Jay Silverheels (Tonto himself, who for some reason has been showing up in nearly every movie I’ve watched lately), Robert Donner (who also is in Nelson’s Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold), Dark Brothers repertory actor Jack Baker, X Brands (the oddly named actor who may have been of German descent and from Kansas City, but always played Native Americans), Chuck Courtney (who played Daniel Reid Jr. on The Lone Ranger, the character who would grow up to be the father of The Green Hornet) and Lindsay Crosby (Bigfoot).
This was produced by Edward Platt, The Chief on Get Smart, who raised the money to buy the videocameras. One can only assume that he got Nelson the job of directing the TV movie Get Smart, Again.
Animal collector Ron Shanin, the writer/director/cinematographer/producer of this movie, wanders the world to show the world what it’s like to search for the world’s biggest and most dangerous animals.
Filmed in 1962, but unreleased until 1969 or so, it is narrated by Michael Rye, who is just pretending to be Shanin. He was also the voice of the narrator for the video game Dragon’s Lair, Green Lantern on the Super Friends and Super Powers cartoons and Magneto for several of the 1980’s Marvel cartoons.
Of course, no mondo would be complete without interacting with the natives and it coming off as very cringe worthy. This is by no means a Goodbye Uncle Tom moment, but just be warned if this is your first time into these type of movies (it’s actually a fine start, but go slow and don’t jump right into the Italian side of mondo right after this unless you want to be truly shocked and awed, OK?).
Why this is on a Mill Creek collection is beyond me, other than Crown International Pictures was like, if you buy one of our movies, you get all of these other ones. It had a pretty cool title and you’d be forgiven if you thought that it was a peblum movie.
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