EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t produce this movie but did release it on video in Germany on the Scotia/Cannon label.

Made by Compton Films, directed by Robert Hartford-Davis and written by Derek and Donald Ford. I watched this because those three men also made one of the wildest British horror movies, Corruption, which we all know is not a woman’s picture.

It feels like British filmmakers trying to make an Italian film, as it starts with Lucy Judd (Edina Ronay) being chased through the woods by a black hooded figure and strangled. We then meet Sir Richard Fordyke (John Turner) and his new bride Elizabeth (Heather Sears) who have come to town so that she may meet her father-in-law Sir Giles Fordyke (Joseph Tomelty). She worries about her first impression, but his father has been weakened by a stroke and can only speak sign language, which can only be understood by his first wife’s sister Diane (Ann Lynn). And oh yeah — Anne killed herself a few years ago when she was told she couldn’t get pregnant. Oh these British upper-crust families and their horrific family trees!

When they finally get there, everyone — from villagers to family — treats them with cold eyes and whispers, because the rumor is that Richard killed Lucy, even if he was far away in London at the time. Witchcraft is in town and the Fordykes are said to be the cause. In fact, there are reports of Richard riding his horse about the village while the dead Anne follows him shouting “Murderer!”

Obviously, someone is trying to destroy Richard. But who? And why?

If you enjoy period dramas with a bit of the supernatural thrown in, well, this is certainly for you. I love that Hartford-Davis would go on to direct a toy tie-in movie, Gonks Go Beat, as well as School for Unclaimed Girls, Incense for the Damned and The Fiend.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Bill Van Ryn wrote this for the site on June 27, 2021 when we did an entire week of Norman J. Warren movies. Cannon didn’t produce this, but did release it on video in Germany as Scotia/Cannon. Check out Bill at Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum.

Norman J. Warren’s unique brand of low budget bat shittery is all over the damn place. While not always totally satisfying (I’m looking at you, Inseminoid), when he’s hot, he’s hot. 1977’s alien freakout Prey is one of the hot ones. Its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach blends elements of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a dash of Night of the Living Dead thrown in for the hell of it, and this is no accident — the script was being written while filming was progressing, with Warren taking on the project based on the premise alone.

And oh, what a premise. Prey gives us the story of an alien creature who arrives on Earth in a spaceship (unseen by us, other than a colored light show that could have just been a groovy light from Spencer Gifts) and immediately encounters two Earth people who are having a romantic tryst in a parked car. He murders both of them, assuming the identity of the man, whose name is Anderson. This being capable of interstellar travel uses a futuristic walkie talkie to communicate with some home base (apparently off-world, which…wow! That’s some wi-fi!), and appears to be on a mission to observe us in our natural habitat. He also likes to eat meat, and that’s it. Total carnivore, this alien.

He moves on and discovers a large secluded estate nearby, where lovers Jessica and Josephine are living an isolated life together. They encounter some mutilated rabbits, which Jo attributes to the work of a fox. They also find our space-hopping buddy “Anderson” (wink wink), seemingly injured, and even though Jo reacts with immediate total hostility, Jessica is excited to finally get someone to talk to other than Jo, who is suspiciously dedicated to making sure Jessica never, ever goes anywhere on her own. They take him back to the house and allow him to stay, which turns out to be a really bad idea on so many levels.

I adore the fact that this movie is so low budget that it doesn’t even attempt to present any convincing alien technology, but it does have some built-in style that expensive effects could never buy. The manor where most of the action takes place is a fantastic location, with wooded areas bathed in muted green and overcast skies — this is England, after all — and amid all these earth tones are a few scenes with shockingly bright red gore. And for sheer “What the hell am I watching?” kicks, just wait until you see the weird slo-mo scene where Anders and the women roll around screaming in a shallow pond. There’s something almost S.F. Brownrigg about Warren’s work, despite their visual style being different. They both have the ability to create a memorable atmosphere in their films, despite having no visible budgetary advantages.

Anderson mostly stumbles around in a daze, acting like he has no idea what parrots are, or plants, or why people bring them into their homes for decoration. He doesn’t know any locations, either, claiming to be from London after he hears one of the women suggest it.  When they press him for his first name, he says “Anders”.  His hostesses serve him a vegetarian dinner — Jo goes total OG meatless preachy on him — but he responds by vomiting and rushing out of the house to find some more animals to mutilate for dinner.  He also doesn’t know anything about sex, and he spies curiously on Jessica and Josephine having screaming sex together. Jo develops a theory that Anders is an escapee from a local mental institution, and later on we come to realize she may have been doing some projecting when she came up with this idea.

That’s one of the interesting things about this weird movie, there is actually an intriguing relationship between these two women, and the script ends up surprising us about one of them, but it exists uncomfortably alongside the fact that one of the characters is a flesh-eating alien, which sort of steals the spotlight.  For this reason, I suggest multiple viewings of Prey. In fact, it should be a tradition.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on February 16, 2021. Cannon didn’t produce this movie but did release it in Germany as Killing House on the Scotia/Cannon label. You can also read Jennifer Upton’s take on this film here.

Norman J. Warren is the kind of director that knows exactly what you want. You aren’t coming to one of his movies to learn some kind of life lesson or to go out to a salon and debate afterward. No, you’re here for all the reasons that you watch horror and exploitation movies. You want to be shocked, scared and stimulated.

What makes this one even better is that the script comes from David McGillivray, who also wrote Satan’s Slave for Warren and Frightmare, House of Whipcord, House of Mortal Sin and Schizo for Pete Walker. He is, to quote British writer Matthew Sweet, “the Truffaut of Smut.”

Also, if you’re watching this and are thinking, “Hey, Warren must have just seen Suspiria when he made this,” then yes, that’s exactly what happened.

The movie starts three hundred years ago, as we watch a witch named Mad Dolly about to be burned at the stake under the orders of Lord Garrick. She then calls on Satan to free her, setting an executioner on fire, a disembodied arm to kill Garrick and for her to rush through the Garrick house with a sword, which she uses to chop the head off his wife before cursing their descendants.

Like I said, Warren knows exactly what you want. That beginning pretty much has everything I watch movies for.

What we’ve just seen is a movie made by director James Garrick — yes, a descendent who lives in the very same house that we’ve seen and for some reason has decided to own the sword of Mad Dolly — and he’s previewing it for his friends and his cousin, Ann. Of course, he also has a mesmerist put her under a spell and she nearly kills him.

This being a Warren movie, of course Ann works at a strip club. And certainly she’s going to be stalked by all manner of ruffians, including Peter Mayhem outside of his Chewbacca costume.

This unleashes a wave of artful violence, including panes of glass chopping off heads, stabbings in the woods, perverts dropped onto spikes, lamps crushing directors and so much more. And the end, well, it’s absolutely bonkers, with levitating cars, more impalings and Mad Dolly’s sword getting used to its fullest power.

As for the Argento inspiration, Warren has claimed that he saw that movie as something freeing, telling Sense of Cinema, “It was just liberating in that you could suddenly get away with doing whatever you liked.”

Since making Bloody New Year, Warren had been promising a sequel to this movie that would be about music and dancers. Sadly, with his death, we won’t see it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie is really Heaven Help Us, which wasn’t produced by Cannon but was released under the name Catholic Boys in Germany by Cannon Screen Entertainment.

Heaven Help Us was originally written in 1978 as a masters thesis by NYU student Charles Purpura who based it on his childhood in Catholic schools. Purpura soon dropped out of NYU and was fired from his job at a lithography shop for organizing a union. To make things worse, he was denied unemployment benefits because his nighttime screenwriting was considered potentially lucrative. He filed for bankruptcy, borrowed some money and left America for India. As for its director, Michael Dinner, he had once been a singer-songwriter and recording artist for Fantasy Records.

The film is an episodic story of the lives of Catholic boys in the at times brutal St. Basil’s. Michael Dunn (Andrew McCarthy) and his sister Boo have been sent to Brooklyn to live with their Irish-Catholic grandparents, who want Michael to fulfill his parent’s dream of him being a priest. He soon becomes friends with the overweight Caesar (Malcolm Danare) and has to deal with that student’s personal nemesis, Ed Rooney (Kevin Dillon).

Complicating that priestly dream is a relationship with Danni (Mary Stuart Masterson) and the misadventures the boys get into once Caesar and Rooney become friends. This brings them into conflict with the discipline of Brother Constance (Jay Patterson) and the somewhat bemused brothers Thaddeus and Timothy (Donald Sutherland and John Heard). And hey — there’s also Wallace Shawn as Father Abruzzi.

McCarthy said that he felt this was probably the best movie he made in the 80s even if only “about twelve people saw it.”

Oh man — I forgot that Larry “Bud” Melman is in this!

“What Margaux wants, she gets. As a group of seniors celebrates their final college days at a smart house, the house’s highly advanced Artificial Intelligence system, called “Margaux”, begins to take on a deadly presence of her own. A carefree weekend of partying turns into a dystopian nightmare as they realize Margaux’s plans to eliminate her tenants one way or another. Time begins to run out as they desperately try to survive and outsmart the smart home.”

I mean, when you read a sell like that, don’t you want to see it? I mean, a house as the slasher? Right?

Director Steven C. Miller hasn’t really made much horror, but is best known for action movies like The Aggression Scale, Submerged, Extraction, Marauders, Arsenal, First Kill, Line of Duty and Escape Plan 2: Hades. Then again, he did the remake of Silent Night. The screenplay was written by Chris Beyrooty, Chris Sivertson (the director of I Know Who Killed Me!) and Nick Waters.

There’s a gorgeous cast — Lochlyn Munro (Hal Cooper from Riverdale and Greg from Scary Movie, which definitely prepped him for this), Richard Harmon (The 100), Madison Pettis (who was in one of the American Pie spin-offs, Girl’s Rules), Vanessa Morgan (who was also on Riverdale as Tina Topaz), Jedidiah Goodacre (Dorian Gray from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) and Phoebe Miu (Jessica on Riverdale) — who find themselves battling Margaux which can possess people as well as activate Doc Ock looking robotic arms and all manner of traps within the home.

Look, I’m going to love any movie that starts with a man’s head violently exploding in the face of his girlfriend, showering her in chunks and blood. Maybe the rest of the film doesn’t live up to that quite literally in your face — in her face? — ending, but if you liked the 90s and 00s trend of slashers that put pretty WB teens against killers, well…this is definitely for you.

Margaux is available on digital from Paramount.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t produce this movie, but released it on video in Germany on the Cannon Screen Entertainment label.

Jackie Collins gave her sister Joan the film rights to both The Stud and The Bitch for free so that they could become movies. Both were co-produced by the sisters’ husbands at the time (Oscar Lerman was married to Jackie and Ron Kass was married to Joan). Both were huge successes and brought Collins’ acting career back; when Aaron Spelling saw these movies, he knew she’d be perfect in the role of Alexis Carrington in Dynasty.

Directed and written by Gerry O’Hara (Fanny Hill, The Mummy Lives) takes place after The Stud — which Collins watches on an airplane in a meta moment — and finds Fontaine Khaled (Collins) divorced but still living that disco diva life. Yet her club Hobo is now struggling. But all that she can think about is Nico Cantafora (Michael Coby), a gambler who owes the mob big money and is using her, first to smuggle a stolen diamond. When she finds out, she’s upset, but soon lets him back in her bed.

This entire film is about her trying to save Nico from his debts and save her club, but at the end, it turns out that crime lord Thrush Feathers (Ian Hendry) now owns Hobo. This was to set up a third book and film that never came.

You know what I liked? John Ratzenberger showing up as a disco swinger.

The soundtrack, put out on Warwick Records, is pretty great. There’s the title track by Olympic Runners is solid, plus there’s Blondie’s “Denis,” The Gibson Brothers  song “Cuba,” Quantum Jump’s “The Lone Ranger” and Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing.”

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t produce this movie, but released it on video in Germany on the Cannon Screen Entertainment label.

Directed by Quentin Masters and written by Dave Humphries and Christopher Stagg from star Joan Collins’ sister Jackie’s book, The Stud was seen as a British take on Saturday Night Fever. It has a great soundtrack that made it to #2 on the British charts and the Bee Gee’s soundtrack for that movie kept them away from #1.

It’s got some great songs in it, like the theme by the Biddu Orchestra, “Love Is the Drug” by Roxy Music, “I’m Not in Love” by 10cc, Sweet’s “Love Is Like Oxygen,” Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights,” Hot Chocolate performing “Every 1’s a Winner,” the K.C. and the Sunshine Band favorite “That’s the Way (I Like It)” and “Blinded by the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, which has the lyric “revved up like a deuce” and not “wrapped up like a douche” as I usually sing it.

Anyways, The Stud.

Fontaine Khaled (Collins) is a disco queen married to an Arabic businessman (Walter Gotell). All she cares about is her nightclub Hobo and her wild life. When she hires Tony (Oliver Tobias) to run the place, she really means that she hires him to keep her satisfied. But he’s more interested in Alexandra (Emma Jacobs), her stepdaughter, who uses him to finally get her stepmother out of her life by showing her father a tape of Tony acting out an Aerosmith song with Fontaine. And no, I don’t mean “Chip Away at the Stone” or “Mama Kin,” but I could either mean “Love In an Elevator,” “Big Ten Inch Record,” “Get a Grip,” “Don’t Stop,” “Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees),” “Get It Up,” “Joanie’s Butterfly,” “Come Together,” “Lick and a Promise,” “Love Me Two Times” or “Bolivian Ragamuffin.”

There’s a scene where a nude Joan swings on a trapeze and a huge orgy scene in a pool in this, which caused the actress to say, “It was those nude shots in the pool that I was most unhappy with. But I was more unhappy because I had gotten so drunk to do them that I did things I normally wouldn’t do.” Poor Joan!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Cannon didn’t produce this movie but did release it on video in Germany as Cannon Screen Entertainment.

Ah, the Cold War.

Well, it never really ended, but let’s look back on when it was really being fought in 1974.

An accident causes two KGB agents to be mistakenly killed during a failed attempt to help a Russian athlete named Sevitsky (Michael Petrovich) defect to the West. That means the U.S. has to have two agents killed to settle the scales of political justice with Bruland (Donald Sutherland) and Griff (Elliot Gould) picked as the patsies. They aren’t friends but must learn to work together if they want to survive.

S*P*Y*S* was directed by Irvin Kershner, who made way better movies than this like The Empire Strikes Back, The Eyes of Laura Mars, Never Say Never Again and RoboCop 2. I kind of love that he played a waiter in Steven Seagal’s only directorial effort, On Deadly Ground.

This was written by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, who wrote Start the Revolution Without Me together, as well as Malcolm Marmorstein, who along with writing Pete’s Dragon was also a writer on Dark Shadows.

Originally called Wet Stuff, this was changed to have those stars in the title to attempt to get back the magic of Gould and Sutherland in M*A*S*H*. Kershner wasn’t happy and said, “I started to make a film that was a little black comedy, and I empathized that it had no relationship to Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*, in which, of course, they’d been teamed so brilliantly. The original title was Wet Stuff meaning blood, and the studio promised that there would be no attempt to compare it to M*A*S*H* in the publicity. Because it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t that kind of freewheeling film. There was no time, nor the budget to do that sort of film anyway. Now, there were many places where they hadn’t seen M*A*S*H*, like parts of South America, Scandinavia, or Germany. In those areas they lovedS*PY*S*. Actually, the film made a lot of money, and it got some great reviews in countries where it wasn’t compared to M*A*S*H*.”

I mean, they even used the same voice over artist in the trailer!

I also love that Variety cut to the chase with what this was all about: “a series of bomb explosions, lavatory homicide, police torture, kinky sex, a car chase, a search through canine feces and a disrupted church wedding ceremony.”

It is, however, the only movie that Joss Ackland and his daughter Melanie appeared in together. And hey — Zouzou is in it, a style icon, a friend of rock stars, a relentless nightclubber and the female Marlon Brando whose career was derailed by heroin.