June 12: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie — is sword and sorcery.

Yes, now I can say that I have seen all four Deathstalker movies.

Rick Hill, who played Deathstalker in the first film is back (John Terlesky had the role in Deathstalker II and John Allen Nelson (Killer Klowns from Outer Space) was the protagonist in Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell) and he’s in a tournament where the queen wants to commit assault with a friendly weapon on all of the male combatants. He’s also looking for his sword, which means sleeping with plenty of barbarian women, but such is being a sword and sorcery hero.

Also, for some reason, lots of footage from the original film gets re-used.

Maria Ford (Burial of the Rats) is a major plus in this, but you know, after four Deathstalker movies, I kind of feel like just looking at the poster art and imagining a much better film. Brett Baxter Clark — Nick the dick from Bachelor Party, Bruiser from Teen Witch and Shane from Malibu Express — plays Vaniat, one of the fighters, so there’s that.

Writer/director Howard R. Cohen has some pretty decent credits, though. He wrote Unholy Rollers, Stryker, Barbarian Queen and episodes of Rainbow Brite and Care Bears, as well as directing Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Space Case, Time Trackers and Saturday the 14th Strikes Back.

I was hoping that the last Deathstalker was going to blow my mind, like how the Ator series suddenly becomes an insane MTV musical with Iron Warrior. That said, even the worst sword and sorcery movie fills me with happiness, so I didn’t hate the time I spent watching this.

The rest of the movies in this series:

• Deathstalker
• Deathstalker II
• Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell

You can also check out our Sword and Sorcery list on Letterboxd.

Krishna Shah made Hard Rock Zombies, which was supposed to be the movie within this movie, which is a movie all about a drive-in, in case you couldn’t figure that out from the title. The film moves from car to car, with each one telling a different story that all adds up to a very low end version of American Graffiti.

That may not prepare you for the fact that the movie is also about a country girl who continually gets near-assaulted by some greasers and her boyfriend gets put in the hospital but the tonal shifts in this movie are all over the place, so humor intertwines with a female revenge movie and none of it really adds up.

Also, Hard Rock Zombies basically plays in real-time, so since I already saw it, this felt like being forced to watch that movie all over again.

I’m not mad that I bought this movie nor that I’ve endured it. Emily Longstreth, who plays the country girl named Bobbie Ann, was also in Star Crystal, Hardbodies, Gimme an F, Pretty In Pink, Private Resort and Wired to Kill, which is a B&S About Movies all-star list if I’ve ever written one. Speaking of great resumes, another actress who was in this, Mike, is also in Candyman, Hard Hunted, Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Sword of Heaven.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally shared this Paul Naschy movie on August 24, 2020. Now that Mondo Macabro has released it on blu ray for the first time in the entire world, we felt that we should cover it and get more people watching it.

Despite being 54 years old and already surviving one heart attack, Paul Naschy took on the heavy burden of playing multiple monsters in this film, as he appears as Frankenstein’s Monster, Mr. Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, The Devil and the human Hector and Alex Doriani. Oh yes — and Waldemar Daninsky, El Hombre Lobo!

For a long time, this movie was never officially released. Before the death of one of its producers, it was to have a lavish budget. It’s better than Naschy usually got, which gives him ample time to get into makeup and play multiple roles. It also got better talent, including Howard Vernon (Dr. Orloff!) and Caroline Munro (Starcrash).

Mostly, Naschy plays Hector, a horror actor devoted to living a carnal life that he compares to de Sade, Gilles de Rais, Vlad Tepes and Jack the Ripper. Each night, Vernon brings him a new prostitute and he dresses up in complicated horror makeup. As you do.

Meanwhile, he’s raising his brother’s son Alex (or Adrian, depending on the translation, played by Naschy’s son Sergio Molina) ever since his sibling killed himself. He may have been helped by the fact that his wife was cheating on him with his own brother. And since he overdosed on heroin, Alex is with Hector, yet lost in his own world of monsters, which is where we get to see Daninsky.

Oh and meanwhile again, there’s a priest in love with a servant girl (Munro) who left him in the past. He pays a homeless man to spy on her and bring him back under penalty of her death. And while all that’s going on, a giallo-style killer is offing people on the grounds of Hector’s estate. And beyond all that — so much is happening! — Alex is trying to bring his father back from the dead.

Imagine Godzilla’s Revenge about Universal Monsters but with the budget and insanity of a Naschy movie and you’ll see why I loved this so much.

The end of this movie — I don’t want to give anything away — somehow has an actor known for Jess Franco movies getting treated like a Lucio Fulci character in a conclusion that somehow makes this an Omen ripoff by way of The Beyond‘s running to nowhere conclusion. It is truly the Dagwood sandwich of sleazy horror scum and I — pun intended — wolfed down every bite.

You can now get this Mondo Macabro release from Diabolik DVD. It comes complete with a new 4K restoration, commentary by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of the Naschycast, a previously unreleased making of documentary and a new interview with Naschy’s son Sergio.

Lovelines has a central conceit that I love so much. High schools are connected and informed by a telephone service run by J.D. Prescott (Michael Winslow!) that helps teens to fall in love while also sponsoring a battle of the bands, which seems like the kind of business model that I’d love to see someone explain to a loan officer.

Those two kids destined to fall in love are Piper (Mary Beth Evans, Kayla from Days of Our Lives) and Rick (Greg Bradford, who was in Zapped!, Let’s Do It! and some other movies without exclamations in the title like Skatetown U.S.A.). They go to rival schools at war with one another, Malibu High School and Coldwater Canyon High, and they are the lead singers of their bands, The Firecats and Racer. Now, as teen movie fate would have it, they’re about to face off against one another in the finals and no one wants them to stay a couple.

Don Michael Paul, the guy who would direct sequels to movies you didn’t know had sequels, like Kindergarten Cop, Jarhead, The Scorpion King, the last three Tremors movies, Sniper, Lake Placid and non-sequel fare like Half Past Dead and Who’s Your Caddy?, shows up in this. So does Tammy Taylor, who was Bondi in Don’t Go Near the Park. And Godzilla, Piper’s maniac old brother, is Frank Zagarino, who was in everything from Where the Boys Are to Ten Zan Ultimate Mission, Striker and Shadowchaser.

Lovelines was directed by Rod Amateau, who made some baffling films along the way like The Statue, one of the few movies Roger Ebert ever walked out on, as well as High School U.S.A., the movie that convinced Joel Robinson to leave Hollywood, plus Son of Hitler, a Peter Cushing movie that never played outside of Germany and The Garbage Pail Kids Movie. That track record should explain exactly what kind of movie Lovelines is.

Really, you should watch this movie to see Miguel Ferrer show up for a split second and play the drums. That’s my review right there. If this comes out on blu ray someday, that’s the quote I want on the cover art.

Straight up, this movie is insane.

Just look at that poster. You may be led to believe that this is a cute little teen sex comedy.

You will not expect a single thing that happens in this movie.

If you want to be surprised, seriously, stop reading now, because the world needs more surprises.

Still with me?

Kim Bentley is played by Jill Lansing, who only made this one movie. That’s a shame because she’s completely the most incredible part of this movie, a girl who is so sick of life by her teen years that she just sits on her bed naked, smoking, staring at the mirror and angry at even being alive. When she smokes her way through breakfast, her mother starts to yell at her and she point blank tells her that if only mom had sexed it up a bit more, her husband wouldn’t have killed himself.

At school, she gets dumped before class even starts, as Kevin leaves her for a rich girl (Tammy Taylor, Nancy from Meatballs II). Then she finds out that she’s failing every class and has no money. So she does what any of us would — she starts sleeping with every teacher in school and improves her marks. Then she blackmails them and when the one female teacher and the principal figure it out, she strips in the old man’s office and kills him with a heart attack.

Kim somehow makes the move from hooker to fancy call girl to a killer in self-defense and finally a hitwoman for the mob. I have no idea how a movie named Malibu Beach that seems like it’s going to be a fun beach movie or a sex comedy ends up being so dark. But I love it. I seriously love every single minute of this film.

This movie has the oddest soundtrack ever to make it even weirder, with off synth pieces coming out of nowhere, including the music that starts off SCTV’s broadcast day. It also has the theme from The People’s Court, “The Big One” by Alan Tew, used throughout the movie. Perhaps the more prurient of us also recognize that it was used in Barbara Broadcast before that.

Director Irvin Berwick also made The Monster of Piedras Blancas, The 7th Commandment, Strange Compulsion, Ready for Anything!, The Street Is My Beat, Suddenly the Light and the incredibly scuzzy Hitchhike to Hell.

Perhaps the greatest thing about this movie — which originally had the title Lovely but Deadly before those maniacs at Crown International Pictures gave it the name that hides its menace and mayhem — is that Lansing was asked to pose for the poster. She demanded to be paid an outrageous sum of money, so Mary-Margaret Humes got the job.

Jill Lansing should have made a thousand movies.

Gerald Ayers had a vision: What would happen if you dropped Louisa May Alcott into the San Fernando Valley today? She would have a different story to tell.” I doubt the author of Little Women would write about the glam band Angel, who figues prominently in this movie.

Nonetheless, Foxes is really the story of four girls:

Deirdre (Kandice Stroh, who didn’t act against for 21 years after this movie) is discovering her sexuality and the issues that brings with boys. Madge (Marilyn Kagan), on the other hand, is a virgin and hates her body as well as her younger sister Anne (Cherie Currie in her acting debut), who uses drink and drugs to escape their abusive home life. And the motherly friend who takes care of all of them is Jeanie (Jodie Foster), who is also raising her mother (Sally Kellerman) while yearning for a closer bond with her father, the tour manager for Angel.

Alright, let’s talk Angel.

Formed in mid-1970s Washington, DC by Punky Meadows and Mickie Jones (who rumor has it were asked to join the New York Dolls), Angel was signed to Casablanca Records by Gene Simmons and presented at the anti-KISS, as they wore all white to the all black Knights In Satan’s Service. Their classic line-up — Meadows, Jones, Frank DiMino, Gregg Giuffria and Barry Brandt — recorded the albums Helluva Band and On Earth as It Is in Heaven before Jones left and was replaced by Felix Robinson.

By 1981, DiMino and Meadows left and now the band had Fergie Frederiksen (Toto) and Ricky Phillips (The Babys, Bad English, Styx) before they broke up for good.

Over the next few years, Frank DiMino joined UFO guitarist Paul Raymond in the Paul Raymond Project; Felix Robinson played with White Lion; and Gregg Giuffria started the band Giuffria and recorded with House of Lords.

Like most rock and roll bands, Angel got back together. The 90s saw a new Angel made up of DiMino, Barry Brandt, Randy Gregg, Steve Blaze from Lillian Axe and Gordon G.G. Gebert, who was replaced by Michael T. Ross. Punky played on their album In the Beginning and there was a greatest hits release Angel: The Collection.

Mickie Jones died in 2009. Meadows and Dimino toured together as Punky Meadows and Frank Dimino of Angel, performing a set of classic Angel songs and solo cuts before just deciding to call themselves Angel.

Now, back to the movie.

By the end of the film, the girl’s life — which was once drinking, drugs and disco, has changed. Annie is dead and buried. Madge marries the guy who takes her virginity (Randy Quaid). Deidre is over boys. Jeanie is leaving for college. It’s a sobering realitization that the four friends may not see one another or be as close as they once were.

Foxes was the first film that Adrian Lynn would direct. The dude pretty much ran the 80s and 90s with movies like  Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Jacob’s Ladder and Indecent Proposal.

Speaking of the 80s, the soundtrack to this movie is pretty great. Other than two songs by Angel, it was entirely produced and composed by Moroder and recorded by the same musicians — Keith Forsey and Harold Faltermeyer — that he worked with on songs by Donna Summer, the Three Degrees and Sparks. “On the Radio” by Summer is probably the bets-known song on from Foxes. It was the second movie Moroder scored in 1980 after American Gigolo.

Supposedly, Foster and co-star Scott Baio dated during the this time. That may or may not be true, as Foster came out right around this time. Maybe this is where Baio got his right wing rage from. Whatever the story is, this is my second favorite movie that they’re in together.

You know, the Warrens were not Catholic superheroes. Despite warning us that the world was in a constant battle with demons, the Hollywood Reporter divulged that “in the early 1960s, Ed Warren initiated a relationship with an underage girl with Lorraine’s knowledge. Now in her 70s, Judith Penney has said in a sworn declaration that she lived in the Warrens’ house as Ed’s lover for four decades.”

They were pretty much hucksters who knew how to keep themselves in the eye of the media and could always fall back on religion to literally say they were doing God’s work. I guess that I don’t mind the carny world all that much until it starts impacting people’s lives more than the money they willingly give away.

This movie is a case in point of my issues with them.

It’s based on the trial Arne Cheyenne Johnson, also known as the “Devil Made Me Do It” case. This case was the first known court case in the U.S. in which the defendant claimed that Satan took over their body and actually committed the crime.

It all started when 11-year-old David Glatzel got possessed. The family brought in the Warrens to work with the Catholic Church to exorcise their son, at which point the demon left the child and went into Arne. Months later, Arne would kill his landlord and his defense lawyer that he was possessed.

As soon as a day after the murder, Lorraine Warren told local police that Johnson was possessed when the crime was committed. A media blitzkrieg followed, because the warrens were planning lectures, a book and even a movie — which was canceled — would soon be forthcoming. There was a TV movie, The Demon Murder Case, but the whole furor died down when Judge Robert Callahan rejected the defense, saying that possession could never be proved and that it would be “irrelative and unscientific” to allow related testimony.

On November 24, 1981, Arne was convicted of first-degree manslaughter, serving five years of a ten to twenty-year sentence. The book that followed, Gerald Brittle’s The Devil in Connecticut, was published in 1983. When the book was republished in 2006, David Glatzel — the kid who got possessed in the first place — and his brother Carl sued for violating their right to privacy, libel and “intentional affliction of emotional distress.”

Carl claimed that the criminal and abusive acts against his family and others, as recounted by the book, were lies created by the Warrens to exploit his brother’s mental illness. As he didn’t believe anything the Warrens told him, he was painted as the bad guy. Even worse, he also stated that the Warrens explained to him that the story would make the family millionaires and get Johnson out of jail.

Lorraine defended the story, bringing up the fact that six priests were involved in the incident. And as for Johnson, he continues to support the Johnsons and has stated that the lawsuit is so that the Glatzels can get rich.

All of the real-life things you just read are way more interesting than this movie.

There’s a new bad guy — The Occultist — and a priest named Kastner who had a child and left the church, but not before battling the Disciples of the Ram cult. Also, Earl has a new kryptonite to deal with as exorcizing young David leads to him having a heart attack.

The opening exorcism is pretty well-done and I was hoping for a return to form, as the original film in the series has some great art direction. Yet here we’re dragging back into the universe of this film, with fanservice toward showing Annabelle and Valak, reminding us that perhaps this series best days are long behind it and if this were the 90s, this movie would have gone direct to video.

That said, I love the team of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as the Warrens. However, I really disliked the directing style of Michael Chaves, whose The Curse of La Llorona was only halfway decent. There are plenty of opportunities for jump scares — the scene with a haunted waterbed has such promise that fizzles out, showing that no one studies Val Lewton any longer — and the rest of the movie is a strobing and confusing mess. They also must have not remembered the movie that this pays homage to — A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master — because that sequence is remembered to this day. This one will be gone in a week.

This movie also seems obsessed with The Exorcist. In the opening, Father Gordon’s arrival echoes the poster of that film and later, when Earl is in the hospital, we hear the name Dr. Merrin get called. These little asides to that classic did not make me think this was in the same pantheon of that film. It made me want to shut it off and watch that movie instead.

I’m kind of sad that this movie was so bad. The past two films in the series have had great scares and I’ve kind of written the side stories off, thinking that at least the mainline films have been pretty good. Sadly, that downward slide of creativity has now extended toward this film, which was an utter waste of time and energy. At least people are vaccinated now and can’t put their lives on the line to go and see it.

Growing up in the 80s, this movie seemed like it was going to be a hot property. Susanna Hoffs was the it girl of the time, the lead singer of The Bangles, and seeing as how The Allnighter seemed like a teen sex comedy — it’s a bit more of a coming of age film, but that wasn’t how it was sold — everyone was beyond excited at the potential of seeing, well, a bit more of Ms. Hoffs. Look, we were in the throes of puberty and that type of behavior was still seen as healthy.

What we did not know was that her mother, Tamar Simon Hoffs, was directing the movie, which meant that there was no way we were getting a movie like Mischief.

Our heroines — Molly (Hoffs), Val (Deedee Pfeiffer) and Gina (Joan Cusack) are graduating college and starting their real lives, but for one last night, they explore where they are before they get where they are going. Molly wants true love. Val has it, but isn’t sure if she wants it. Gina just wants to video tape everything.

Actually, if you think about it, Hoffs’ character — trapped between an older man who is wrong for her and a young man who is wrong but a bit more right — is a lot like Lelaina Pierce in Reality Bites, while Cusack’s non-stop filming and commenting on the lives of everyone else takes a bit of that character and Vickie Miner as well.

C.J., one of the boys in this movie, is of course John Terlesky from Chopping Mall, Deathstalker II and Appointment with Death. Michael Ontkean — Sherriff Harry S. Truman — is also on hand, as are Pam Grier and Meshach Taylor in quick cameos. And Edge of the Axe fans — well, that’d be me — Christina Marie Lane is in this in an extra role.

Oh yeah — Killer’s date at the party, listed as Debi Lester — is adult film queen Debi Diamond. I don’t know what it says about me that I instantly recognized her.