B.D. Sweetman (James Brolin), July (Richard Roundtree) and John T. Coleman (John Clark Gable, yes, the son of Clark, born four months after his death) buy Billy the Kid’s horse and decide to become outlaws themselves. The men only need ten grand to get their dream of opening a farm, but after their first job, they end up killing two members of the posse after them.

While Ty Hardin appears as a wagon master, Rory Calhoun as a ranch hand and Harry Carey Jr. is here as well — their last westerns — this movie is an absolute mess, from wanted posters that look like they were made with modern desktop publishing software and pencil drawings to a long montage scene set to the song “Renegade” by Jeff Scott Soto — the lead singer on Yngwie Malmsteen’s first two albums as well as a member of Journey from 2006 to 2007 and also a member of holiday metal band Trans-Siberian Orchestra — that is a mix of outtakes, still action photos and posed model shots of the cast.

I wonder if Gable asked Brolin about the time the future Mr. Streisand played his father in Gable and Lombard.

This was directed and written by Clyde Ware, who also wrote All the Kind Strangers and 12 episodes of Gunsmoke.

Anyways, it ends badly, as most westerns do, with the three stuck in a gunfight trap in a small town. And there you have it, a movie possibly made to cash in on Young Guns and Silverado but getting there a few years too late.

But man, that montage!

Director John H. Parr also directed The Pin-Up Girl, Nightslave and Pursuit while writer Paul S. Rowlston did much of his career in TV. In this movie, four big game hunters end up getting bored with animals, so they start paintball hunting journalist Simon Rush (Todd Jensen) but come on, there’s no way that that’s going to be good enough either.

If four rich dudes offer you some money to be hunted while they carry paintball guns, I’m telling you right now to say no. Rush ends up beating them pretty easily and that’s when the richest guy, Bob Jenkins (Andre Jacobs) tells everyone that they’re switching to real guns. The others in the group, Alex (David Butler), Eric (Alan Granville) and Jason (Evan J. Klisser) have to just agree because they’re all rich white guys and that’s how they do murder business.

Or course, Rush is too busy romancing the girl who got him into all of this, Yvonne Pearl (Michelle Bestbier), all while the other members of the elite start getting killed off and he gets blamed for it. Oh man, The Most Dangerous Game, you know? Have you played it?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Matt Butler (Deon Stewardson) has joined soldiers battling Communist rebels and — yeah, this movie was made in South Africa during Apartheid when people were like, “Hey, don’t make movies there” and 21st Century and Menahem Golan were like, “I’m sorry, I’m going into a tunnel.” — the white mercenaries get the black tribesmen to fight their battles for them by murdering their families and obviously, hell is South Africa.

This was directed and written by Ronnie Isaacs, who was behind a lot of low budget action movies like Cobra Force and Rhino as well as The Pin-Up Girl and a sequel to that one.

There’s a decent amount of gore in this and lots of stuff gets blown up real good and isn’t that why we rented these movies? Ah, maybe it was the synth soundtracks, too.

You can watch this on Tubi.

By all rights, a remake to Night of the Living Dead should be a movie that I absolutely hate. But you know, when you get George Romero rewriting the original script and Tom Savini directing, it already had a great shot of having me be happy. Yet Savini told Film Monthly that there was an even better movie that he didn’t get to make: “It was the worst nightmare of my life. No, I still have nightmares of being on the set directing that movie. It all started before the movie. It was a plethora of why and how dare you?! I’m getting the same slack now because I’m in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. Listen the thing that kept me going on the Night of the Living Dead set was that George asked me to do the FX on the original film back in 1968. But I was in Vietnam when he shot that. You know I had enlisted in the army and they called me in. So what kept me going on the set was that I realized that I didn’t get to do the first movie and now here I am directing the remake. My problem with the remake and the reason I call it a nightmare is because you know I had lots of ideas. I had some eight hundred-story boards and the whole movie was actually shot on paper. See George Romero wasn’t there. George was off in Florida writing the Dark Half. I got stuck with these two idiot producers that didn’t know anything and their careers prove it and you know I didn’t want to make their bad movie for them. You know my hands were just slapped all over the place I couldn’t do a lot of stuff. The movie is about forty percent of what I intended. It would be a much better movie if I had got to put in all the stuff I really wanted to do. Then the MPAA hit us hard. You know with my name on it and George Romero they were waiting for us. And they made us cut some more stuff so it’s kind of a sterile film.”

Those producers would be Ami Artzi, who also produced several movies for 21st Century starting with The Forbidden Dance, and Declan Baldwin, who went on to produce American Splendor, Manchester by the Sea and Captain Fantastic, so he seemed to do pretty well.

Regardless, the whole reason for the remake was that thanks to the court battle over the rights to the film — as well as the mistake that caused the copyright notice not to be included — Romero never saw any money from his original film. Even when he won the case, the distributor went out of business before he got any money.

Romero contacted Menahem Golan when he heard that 21st Century Film Corporation wanted to make a remake. This remake would bring together Romero, John Russo and Russ Streiner for the first time in 20 years. Savini was supposed to only do the special effects but Romero talked him into directing the film.

Sure, we know the story — starting with Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and Johnny (Bill Moseley) getting attacked in a cemetery — and if the players are the same (Ben is the hero and played by Tony Todd, Harry is still a horrible person and played by Tom Towles), the fact that this movie gives Barbara more agency and doesn’t have her grow catatonic worked with me. How great is it that this one ends with Streiner — as a cop — saving Barbara instead of menacing her in Evans City Cemetery?

Despite the fact that filming was on time and on budget, Menahem Golan and his producers insisted on cutting out scenes to keep costs down. Savini could do little to stop them. He also blamed the multiple MPAA cuts as the reason why so few horror fans were excited about this movie.

I know that I was in a theater the first and only weekend this played in Western Pennsylvania and when Bill Cardille showed up and read the cities where the zombies were showing up, there was sheer joy and outright yelling in the theater. I hoped that this movie would be a bigger deal and yet even three decades later, no one seems to think about it.

No, not the Roger Corman-produced and Larry Brand-directed The Masque of the Red Death, which also came out in 1989.

Much like Corman, Menahem Golan probably realized the public domain status of Poe’s works (well, Corman did that twice with the first being a classic, 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death). This was produced by Avi Lerner and Harry Alan Towers for Golan’s nascent 21st Century Film Corporation.

It’s directed by Alan Birkinshaw, who made Ten Little Indians and Ordeal by Innocence for Cannon, as well as Don’t Open ’Til Christmas and another Poe-inspired film that was released the same year, Edgar Allan Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher. The script came from Michael J. Murray, whose career went from making those two Poe movies that Birkinshaw directed — on the same sets in South Africa no less — to TV movies about Madonna and Michael Jordan to, as always with genre filmmakers, holiday movies.

Rebecca (Michelle McBride, Subspecies) has snuck into a very exclusive costume party — dressed in a Cupid costume that sadly does her no favors nor does it look like Cuipid — being put on by Ludwig (Herbert Lom, in a role originally written for Jack Palance) that will celebrate Poe’s Masque of the Red Death with one goal: get an interview with soap opera star Elaina Hart (Brenda Vaccaro!?!). Meanwhile, as everyone engages in an Easter egg hunt — you know how much Poe’s horrific gothic fiction was based on Easter eggs right? — a red cloaked and masked figure starts slashing everyone into oblivion.

About fifteen minutes into this movie, Becca asked me how it was and I was just about to say dreadful but then — you guessed it — Frank Stallone showed up as a duke named Duke and a keyboard-driven rock band with a lead singer with star sunglasses takes the stage to play the schmaltziest of music and I said, “How the fuck have Vinegar Syndrome not released this?”

In fact, no one has. This hasn’t even come out on DVD yet.

Ludwig’s girlfriend Colette is played by Christine Lunde who was the girl in Heaven 17’s video for “Trouble,” plus she’s also in Mankillers, Patty Hearst and Young Rebels. Her accent is, at best, impenetrable and I love every single line she says in this, a mixture of babygirl cooing and an approximation of English that shortcircuited YouTube’s predictive closed captioning.

This movie is bafflingly wonderful as it can be both good and bad in equal measure. Sure, most normal people would hate it, but someone said to me the other night that they’re very impressed by my defense of movies that other people look down upon. This has a game of human chess, slashings inspired by Poe stories, Herbert Lom being Herbert Lom, the worst French accents ever, neo-punk dancers, choreographer Neil McKay and the Razzle Jazzle Dance Company (who also show up in Brutal Glory and Outlaw of Gor), Ludwig turning to a secret female doctor who injects him with age-defying medicine in a sub-plot that is forgotten, the songs “Twilight Zone,””I Can Rely On You,”, “Magical Mystery” and “Where Do We Go From Here,” a black cat that drops in out of nowhere just to give this a jump scare, a concluding catfight and a murder by loom.

“So much misery. So much madness,” says Ludwig at one point. Not for me. This is the kind of movie you’d rent in the early 90s or happen upon on cable in the middle of the night and then keep thinking of it for years.

I loved this movie. Loved. My devotion to movies like this is why I’ll never get to be an approved Rotten Tomatoes reviewer but man, screw that site and how its logo ruins DVD cover art.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This 21st Century Film Corporation release was originally on the site on October 31, 2021.

Could have been a Cannon!

Yes, this slasher take on the Gaston Leroux classic was going to be directed by Twins of Evil director John Hough and man, what a movie that would have been. That version was set in 1881, but the new movie — which was transferred to the 21st Century Film Corporation, which let’s be honest was just Menahem Golan’s severance package — was moved to the present day and seen as an opportunity to have a slasher franchise with a follow-up already planned The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan.

That never made sequel is why this movie has an opening and close in modern day New York City. Supposedly, most of the ideas of that sequel show up in Dance Macabre.

The smart part of this film — which ended up being directed by Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers maker Dwight H. Little — is casting Jill Schoelen as our heroine, Christine.

In the beginning, she’s an opera singer seeking a unique audition song and her agent (Molly Shannon!) introduces her to Erik Destler’s “Don Juan Triumphant.” Never mind that Destler was a killer who may have also been responsible for the disappearance of another young opera singer. When she does use the song, a sandbank knocks her out, shatters a mirror and sends her back to 1885 and into the world of Destler.

Making things even stranger is the knowledge that Destler sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for people losing his music. Of course, Satan gives him what he wants, but disfigures his face so that his music will be the only thing that people love him for; they will never see or hear him performing it.

Seeing as how this ended up in our slasher month, it earns its way there by having a Phantom that skins people alive and uses their skin to cover his own. He can also only be killed when his music is destroyed. And even when Christine comes back to our time, he will find a way to follow her.

I’ve always avoided this movie and after watching it, I can see the error of my ways. It’s not great — it’s a late 80s horror movie looking for a place to belong. But the makeup is great, Englund is having fun and Schoelen is always an engaging and perfect horror actress.

I was in the middle of watching Mack the Knife and wondered, “Why is this movie so absolutely deranged?” and then I realized, “Oh yeah, this is Menahem Golan directing and writing his own version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera.”

I’m telling you all, if you loved The Apple, well, just imagine what Menahem could do with two hours, $9 million dollars and the talents of Raul Julia, Richard Harris, Julia Migenes, Roger Daltry, Julie Walters, Bill Nighy and Clive Revill.

Mr. Peachum (Harris) is the boss of the downtrodden, giving them the permits they need to beg on the rundown streets of London, while Macheath or Mack the Knife (Julia) is a killer constantly surrounded by willing women yet he only wants Peachum’s daughter Polly (Rachel Robertson), which starts a war on the cobblestone streets of London.

I was sitting here wondering, “Why is this not on DVD or blu ray?” And then I realized that I may be the only person in the world who wants to see more than one Menahem Golan musical film, much less one that he wrote all by himself and included a catfight between Robertson and Erin Donovan, playing Lucy Brown. Somehow, he got a lot of well-regarded stage actors and actresses to stare directly at the camera and play each part so broadly and loudly that they could be heard in the last row, which makes them emoting directly in our faces to be as bombastic as it gets.

Yes, Menahem Golan made a movie of a socialist critique of the capitalist world. That’s something right there, huh?

Raul Julia is really great in this, but the guy was also great in Street Fighter and he was dying from cancer at the same time, so he was some kind of superhero.

Movies like this are why I’ll never own a boutique blu ray label. I would completely put out a release of this with tons of bonus features and two people would buy it. One of them would be me.

Speaking of Mack the Knife, yes, it was a song.

“The Ballad of Mack the Knife” was a huge hit for Bobby Darrin. Dick Clark told him that a song from an opera wouldn’t be a hit. It was the second best-selling song of 1959. It had been previously recorded as an instrumental by Dick Hyman and sung in another release by Louie Armstrong.

McDonald’s used the song — and the image of Darrin — to create Mac Tonight in the 80s, the first mascot the restaurant had for adults. Created by ad agency Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto, it combined Darrin’s stage moves with a Max Headroom look and a moon atop the skinny body — that was Doug Jones! — to sell burgers to grown-ups. It worked! It worked so well that Darrin’s estate sued as the commercials infringed upon the singer’s trademark. They asked for the commercials to be removed from the airwaves and that was the end of Mac Tonight.

Sadly, Mac Tonight was turned into a racist meme called Moon Man and the character is now listed on the Anti-Defamation League’s database of hate symbols.

In case you wondered, here’s how his lyrics compare to “Mack the Knife”:

Original

McDonald’s

“When the clock strikes
Half past 6, babe
Time to head for
Golden lights

It’s a good time
for that great taste
DINNER! At McDonald’s
It’s Mac Tonight!
Come on, make it Mac Tonight!”

Mac Tonight went nationwide in 1987 and was gone by 1989, the same year this movie came out.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This 21st Century Film Corporation release was originally on the site on October 31, 2021.

Oh man, where do I even begin in trying to make sense of this movie?

It’s not a sequel to Demons, no matter what its alternate title Demons 6 De Profundis promises to you.

It was called Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat in America, when it most assuredly has nothing to do with that film.

And somehow, it was nearly called De Profundis (From The Deep) and is also sometimes referred to as Demons 6: Armageddon, which makes sense because it’s filled with scenes of space and planets randomly throughout the movie.

It’s also — sit down for this one — an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno, made back when Argento hadn’t yet decided to close off that cycle of movies with Mother of Tears. Yes, the script to this movie was adapted from Daria Nicolodi’s (Argento’s ex-wife and creator of The Three Mothers trilogy) script for what was going to be an official Argento Three Mothers film that never saw the light of day. And who better than Luigi Cozzi — who in addition to making Starcrash and the Ferrigno Hercules films, runs Argento’s store Profondo Rosso store — to direct this?

Are you confused yet? I am and I haven’t even started watching the movie yet!

This one is all about Marc (Urbano Barberini, who was actually in Demons), a horror film director, is making a movie called Suspiria De Profundis that is a sequel to Suspiria and based on Thomas De Quincey’s story Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow. There’s even a sequence where the characters discuss just how good of a director Argento is as they reveal what the Mother of Madness looks like, dripping with worms and gore.

Marc casts his actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin, Too Beautiful to Die) in the lead, along with Nora (Caroline Munro, who I should not have to tell you anything about other than the fact that her being in this movie makes me overjoyed). Things seem to go pretty well for all involved until Levana, who it turns out is a real person, objects to how she’s portrayed in the movie and goes wild, blowing up food in refrigerators and people’s chests.

Levana — the Mother of Tears — may be the lead villain, but there’s also an evil film producer in a wheelchair named Leonard Levin (Brett Halsey, Demonia, The Devil’s Honey) who hints at wanting to take Marc’s soul. And Nora has designs on Marc, so there’s that. Also — a refrigerator that sprays food everywhere and Michele Soavi in a cameo as a director.

This movie is also packed with mid-80s hair metal, featuring Bang Tango and White Lion all over the soundtrack.

Charitably, this movie is a mess, but I completely loved every single minute of it. There’s enough bile and blood and breasts and beasts to satisfy just about any horror movie lover. I’m in for Demons 7 if these guys want to make it.

If you want the details on all the different versions of Demons, we have you covered right here.

UPDATE: Get this from Severin.