Trees was Jaws, substituting Sheriff Cody for Brody], botanist Max Cooper for oceanographer Matt Hooper and lumberjack named Squint for, you already yelled it out, Quint. But hey — there’s certainly a sequel in here, as Ranger Cody goes to live in a resort town that is soon battling an army of government-created genetically enhanced trees that eat humans and get loose over the holidays.
Yes, that is Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter. And this is definitely in the Troma school of a movie that’s aware of how dumb it is and going deep to be even dumber.
I’m all for the idea of killer tree movies. There’s already Day of the Triffids, The Happening, The Guardian, The Crawlersand as bad as some of those are, they sustain interest and entertain much better than this movie.
Imagine hearing a bad joke and laughing at how well it’s told. Now just imagine if someone tells the same joke with no delivery and timing.
Gabe Snow writes for a tabloid with a very limited audience — The X-mas Times — which is all about holiday conspiracies. The latest is Flight 1225, which was brought down one foggy Christmas Eve by a flying creature with a glowing nose.
To keep this a secret, Clausferantu — a demonic vampire anti-Santa Claus — has unleashed zombie elves, demonic snowmen and an army of ninjas known as the Silent Nights.
It makes sense that this was directed written by one of the people who worked on the WNUF Halloween Special, Jamie Nash, who created this along with David Thomas Sckrabulis.
There are animated sections, Gremlinsflashback stories to horrible holiday secrets, a karate fight with Santa coming back to battle his evil twin, an evil bunny, a horrifying story about pulling out teeth to get money and an SOV aesthetic that I absloutely loved.
This movie has jumped up on my list of favorite weird holiday horror and feels like a spiritual sequel to Elves, which is the highest praise I can give.
Yes, you may notice that the fourth Curse move was made two years after the third. We can blame that on the fact that it was the last officially completed film by Empire Pictures before the company was seized for failure to pay on loans.
This delayed the movie by five years and TriStar Home Video released it direct-to-video as Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice with no connection to The Curse, The Curse II: The Bite or The Curse III: Blood Sacrifice.
It’s directed and written by David Schmoeller, whose Tourist Trap and Puppet Master are both great movies.
Teacher Elizabeth Magrino arrives at the Abbey of San Pietro en Valle to see the abbey’s first Prior had his vision healed within the catacombs thanks to the Miracle of the Celestial Light. There’s also the issue of a demon that had been trapped in the monastery that has now possessed an albino leper, which is really a sentence that you should go back and read again.
Making this movie work is a solid Italian crew, including cinematography by Sergio Salvati (The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery), a score by Pino Donaggio and production design by Giovanni Natalucci (Once Upon a Time in America, The Stendhal Syndrome). There’s one scene worth watching this movie for, as a possessed statue of Jesus remembers how amazing The Eerie Midnight Horror Show was and gets down off the cross and kills a monk.
Shot as Panga by director Sean Barton (who only directed this one movie, but has edited many more) on location in South Africa in 1989, this film was added to the Curse series of films. None of these movies are connected and you know, that’s kind of how we like it. You can call it Witchcraft, Blood Sacrifice or Curse III: Panga, if you’d like.
Geoff Armstrong (Andre Jacobs) and his wife Elizabeth (Jenilee Harrison, Cindy Snow from Three’s Company and Jamie Ewing Barnes on Dallas) are running a large sugar plantation in East Africa. Things go wrong when the sacrifice of a goat by the locals get interrupted and a witch doctor calls a demon from the sea that kills everyone in the Armstrong family except Elizabeth.
Elizabeth gets help from Dr. Pearson (Christopher Lee) and to break the curse she must lure the witch doctor into the sugar cane fields and set him on fire. Seems like a good plan, I guess.
The fish man is designed by The Fly special FX artist Chris Walas, so this has that going for it. It’s not really all that exciting, nor is at as devoted to being entertaining weirdness like the first two films in the Curse non-series.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This sequel article originally ran during our Junesploitation coverage on June 15, 2021.
The only thing better than a sequel is one that’s in name only. That’s exactly what The Curse II: The Bite is all about. It’s really a movie called The Bite, which was directed by Fred Goodwin, who is really Frederico Prosperi, whose only other credit is producing the nature on the loose movie The Wild Beasts.
The film came to be after the success of The Curse. Producer Ovidio G. Assonitis and his company TriHoof Investments started making this film and another called The Train, which also became an in-name-only sequel as well called Beyond the Door III (AKA Amok Train).
Our heroes are young lovers Clark (J. Eddie Peck, the star of Lambada) and Lisa (Jill Schoelen, who is one of my favorite unheralded scream queens with roles in The Stepfather, Cutting Class, The Phantom of the Opera, Popcorn, When a Stranger Calls Back and Chiller) whose cross-country trip has taken them right past an abandoned nuclear test site crawling with mutant snakes. Clark gets bit and starts to slowly mutate into a snake himself.
Luckily, Lisa has some help from a sheriff (Bo Svenson) and Harry Morton (Jamie Farr) a traveling salesman who is also a doctor of sorts. He tries to treat the snakebite and uses the wrong medication, which pushes the mutation further as he furtively seeks the couple out to save them as much as he’s trying to save himself from a malpractice lawsuit. Why is a traveling salesman also a doctor? That’s just how the world of this movie works.
Also, if you ever wanted to see a movie where Jamie Farr has conjugal relations with trucker women, come on down to Curse II: The Bite!
There are some great Screaming Mad George effects in this, as well as an astounding scene where Clark tries to use his hand in a Biblical manner on Lisa. His mutated snake hand. Man, I was screaming at the television! Stick with this movie because while it starts off slow, but it gets ooey, gooey and great by the end. And by great, the kind of great when Italian filmmakers are let loose in America. You know what I’m talking about.
This worked out so well that a movie called Panga became Curse III: Blood Sacrifice and Catacombs was retitled Curse IV: The Ultimate Sacrifice.
Casper Van Dien plays a meteorologist haunted by…oh man, just let me say it. I will honestly watch anything obviously. I mean a Christmas movie about a tornado with the star — such as it is — of Starship Troopers? I did it. I did it for you, like Rudolph in the foggy night trying to save Santa and the reindeer who had previously ignored him to the point that he decided to go die on an ice floe in a world of toys missing eyeballs and appendages. I did it like Frosty, trying to keep kids happy despite knowing that soon the Earth would suffer global warming and things like floods through New York City would soon become commonplace but fighting back icy tears and gamely putting on that stupid scarf and magic hat that’s tainted by the blood of a long-dead magician. I did it like a man ready to jump off a bridge because I lost all your money and wanted you to forget I ever lived because at their heart Christmas movies are dark and horrifying affairs as we scream into the sun and try to cling to a planet where gravity is the only thing keeping us from being launched out into the vast cold void of space.
So yeah, a tornado brings a family together and no one wants to believe that the Earth is changing and that things like tornadoes out of season can be a thing, so the one-time husband of Catherine Oxenberg, who is a legitimate princess — 3,936th in succession to be Queen of England no less — and a woman was once married to Robert Evans for nine days, can not only save people but save his family…at Christmas.
This was also called F6 Twister which is a horrible name and I’d never watch it because I’m a strange man and I like the idea of an act of God happening during the season of His Son’s Divine Birth and for some reason, Casper has fought tornadoes before in 500 MPG Storm and Fire Twister and why do I know this?
Did you know the F in F6 stands for the Fujita Scale? Now you do. Happy holidays.
Also — Creighton Duke shows up if you’re the kind of person who cares about those things and you know that I am.
You have to love a movie that has a rubber dinosaur effect and also the budget to get Diane Ladd in its cast, much less one based on a book.
Dr. Jane Tiptree’s (Ladd) plan to exterminate the human race with a lethal virus and replace them with her own genetically created dinosaurs, which seems like something I can get behind. She’s been creating special chickens — Death Laid an Egg? — that hatch lizards and give people the flu and you know, that’s a very specialized plan for taking over the world.
Doc Smith (Raphael Sbarge) and Ann Thrush (Jennifer Runyon) are our protagonists and man, they’re ineffective throughout this movie and pay the price for it. I mean, for a movie with an obvious rubber dinosaur this is a movie that will shock you with scenes of families getting gunned down like they wandered onto the set of The Crazies.
Within a secret bunker, the new world order plans to repopulate the human face through artificial wombs and strict fertilization rules; Diane Ladd gets herself sick off her own disease and dies but not before she gives birth to a baby dinosaur and Smith crashes a backhoe into another big lizard. But — and man, I feel like saying spoiler warning but I doubt anyone cares about Carnosaur as much as me — he gets the cure to Ann just in time for government troops to shoot them and burn their bodies.
The really funny part is that Roger Corman rushed this out before Jurassic Park and had Laura Dern’s mom — Ladd — in his movie, which is some kind of casting miracle.
“The last thing we need is a biotech panic about chickens!”
Gary Sherman made Death Line, Dead & Buried, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Vice Squad and Lisa, so the guy knows how to make down and dirty horror and action, right? Despite this being the third film in the series, it’s a big budget movie for Sherman, but only Heather O’Rourke and Zelda Rubinstein from the original film and sequel came back.
Now, Carol Anne Freeling (O’Rourke) is in a Chicago high rise and being watched over by Bruce and Pat Gardener (the dream team of Tom Skerritt and Nancy Allen). Bruce thinks they just want to get rid of their problem daughter while she’s told that she’ll be attending a school for gifted kids.
One of the doctors in that school thinks that Carol Anne is insane and not touched by evil, so he keeps making her bring up the events of the last film and despite her parents efforts of sending her far away to confuse the horrifying Rev. Henry Kane (no longer Julian Beck, but now Nathan David with Corey Burton doing the voice), all that talking about him brings him right back to her. Not even psychic Tangina Barrons (Rubinstein) can save her, as he uses dopplegangers of Carol Anne to murder her and Bruce’s daughter Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) to kill the doctor.
Of course, everyone must battle in the land beyond death and Pat has to prove that she can be Carol Anne’s mother. Sure, the end sets up a fourth movie, but it never happened.
That may be because real life found a way in.
At the time this movie started production, O’Rourke had been ill with flu-like symptoms and subsequently underwent medical treatment as the movie was filming. The theory was that she contracted giardiasis from well water at her family’s home and given the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease. She was prescribed cortisone injections to treat the disease and those injections resulted in facial swelling of the cheeks, which you can see in some scenes.
After O’Rourke completed filming, she returned home to California with her illness in remission. A few months later, she became sick again, her condition rapidly deteriorated and she died a month later as the movie was in post-production.
O’Rourke’s cause of death was ruled congenital stenosis of the intestine complicated by septic shock. It was a shocking tragedy that left an unfinished film that no one was sure how to release.
Meanwhile, Sherman still wanted to reshoot the end of the film and his complicated effects were all done in camera.
The movie was released with little to no marketing, as MGM didn’t want to exploit the death of the young actress. Skerritt and Allen were discouraged from giving interviews about the film to avoid questions.
It’s not great, but the effects are worth watching. The end — where Kane is obviously not defeated — is pretty cool. Too bad no one has done anything with him. Maybe he should go to Amityville.
Rena Riffel, I really want to get to know you better. Like seriously, I want to buy you a nice lunch and discuss your life and learn more about it. I want to know how this movie came to be, what got it made and what you’re doing now. Because man, this movie…I’m not frequently surprised by movies, but you’ve punched me repeatedly in the head and my brain hit my skull and everything is swimming.
A movie concussion.
You’ve given me a movie concussion.
Showgirls is either a movie that you absolutely hate or completely love. You’ll not be surprised to know that I fall in the later camp. So when I learned that Rena, who plays Penny in that movie, had made her own movie, I just had to devour it.
But how did it come to be?
I got the chance to ask Mike Justice, who played Bob — Beer Drinker 1 and the assistant editor on this movie, to shed some light on it.
B&S About Movies: So how does a movie like this happen?
Mike Justice: Because Carolco was bankrupt and the rights reverted back to Paul Verhoeven and she asked him and he just sort of chuckled and said, “Go for it.”
B&S: And why?
Mike: Rena just had TONS of fringe Hollywood friends; like sub-sub Dr. Drew Rehab/Surreal Life types. Horror hosts and strippers and ex-junkies and shit like that. She’d made a DIY musical called Trasharella that was a minor hit, so she thought her best course of action to get one of her adorkable home movies starring all her weird friends noticed was to make a “sequel” to Showgirls. And I guess she was right.
B&S: But how did she get the cash — beyond a Kickstarter — or the money to think that she could do this?
Mike: She was managing an apartment building in Hollywood and didn’t have to pay rent. She also didn’t really like fixing things or managing the apartments, so she had tons of free time to make DIY WTF “movies.”
Rena was sort of like a nicer, less aggressive, non-drug-addicted Anna Nicole Smith; everyone around her was to varying degrees obsessed with her/in love with her/willing to do anything for her. And she was pretty smart.
B&S: So what was it like being part of it?
Mike: I remember when some extras showed up responding to an ad looking for people for the sequel to Showgirls. They walk into this cheap Mexican restaurant and are met by Rena and a guy in a paper mache devil mask. They almost ran away.
I was on that set for a few weeks doing data management. It was surreal.
What I love is when the artist becomes the auteur, so not only did Rena direct, write, produce and edit this movie, but she stars in it as Penny Slot, a girl with a dream. Isn’t that always the way?
And what if — in a sequel to Showgirls — the movie stars with Penny being ripped off by the same drifter (Dewey Weber) who robbed Nomi Malone? Everything seems normal but then she’s nearly killed by the MILF Murderer and barely makes it to Hollywood, where she’s either going to get on Stardancer, star in Showgirls 2 or die trying. After all, she has a Hollywood producer interested in her who has Hollywood producer right there on his business card.
Somehow, violinist Godhardt Brandt wins her attention — for some time — before she learns that he’s an occult devotee of theosophist Helena Blavatsky who makes snuff movies and is given to pimping her out and then dragging her over the fact that she’s selling herself for money when he himself set it up. Ah, negging, the classic move of every antagonist.
Also, at some point Penny becomes Helga, she gets a maid who works for free, there’s a plot to kill her, a double boiled hot dog eating scene, she gets trained to dance by Godhart’s ballerina fiancee Katya, a cocaine tooth brushing scene, a makeup meltdown, she tries out for the TV show but has to get naked and she finally decides to go to Broadway before running into the drifter again, just like Nomi, tomatoes for dinner, a moebius strip of remake and remix that lasts two and a half hours or more while having the canny ability to repeat the pool sex scene but with two ladies of a certain age all set to the music from Birdemic.
This either feels like a mid-90s Rinse Dream movie without penetration or the unsexiest sex movie ever or if Bruno Mattei had replaced Paul Verhoeven or if we’d sent Showgirls on the Voyager Probe as an example of our finest art and years later, Kirk and crew touched down on a world that treated a Joe Eszterhas script as a holy tract and based their entire culture around it and Spock was like, “How fascinating, Captain. It would appear that they are doing a ritual where they shove the oldest woman down the steps and initiating another to take her place. Most logical.”
It’s also:
A Dark Brothers movie where no one is slapped in the face with a fish.
A David Lynch movie on a $30,000 budget without David Lynch or a trip to Bob’s Big Boy.
A movie about a fallen angel, as Penny’s From Heaven suggests a divine origin for our heroine, which given what happens here with all the talk of Seven Sisters and rituals, I can completely believe.
An episode of Real Housewives of Tarzana gone wrong, so wrong, but so right.
What happens in the customer lounge of a Pottery Barn after three mimosas.
Also known as Scanners: The Showdown, this brings back LAPD scanner cop Sam Staziak (Daniel Quinn) and places him on the case of renegade scanner Karl Volkin. He’s already put the man in jail once before and killed his brother, but now Volkin has been killing other scanners and adding their power to his own.
Volkin gets his revenge by causing Staziak’s mother to kill herself — well, she sacrifices herself instead of letting him scan her — and that leads to a brutal final battle in a warehouse.
Khrystyne Haje is in this, following being in Head of the Class. She’s also in Cyborg 3: The Recycler and Demolition University, but don’t feel bad for her. In 2001, it was reported that she was the quarter owner of a Silicon Valley company worth $500 million.
Director Steve Barnett also made Mindwarp and Hollywood Boulevard II, a movie that I never knew existed until now. Writer Mark Sevi seems to be a sequel master, scripting films like Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, Ghoulies IV, Dream a Little Dream 2, Excessive Force II: Force on Force, Dead on: Relentless II and Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes.
Plus Robert Forester automatically adds several stars to any movies he shows up in.
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