Directed by Ralph Nelson (Charly) and written by Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas — who had stopped screenwriting for more than a decade to become a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and write a series of books on troubled youth — Embryo finds Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) living a life of solitude after losing his wife in a car accident, a fact that his sister-in-law/assistant Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd) reminds him of near daily.
One night, he runs over a dog — maybe he should stop driving — and ends up taking that dog’s unborn child and bringing it to healthy — if murderous — life in his lab. If he can play God like that, well, why not bring the unborn child of a suicide victim to life and have her become just about instantly 22 years old and named Victoria (Barbara Carrera)?
Despite how smart Victoria is, she’s also quickly dying as her body is addicted to the immune suppressant drug methotrexate and has no issue killing Martha to keep her origins a secret. And oh yeah — making sweet love to the much older doctor.
The end of this movie is ridiculous and I love it. I mean, rapidly aging clones drinking dead fetus fluids, the doctor watching her kill his son and chasing after her only to learn that she’s having his baby? 70s science fiction carny BS at its finest.
It goes without saying: Barbara Carrera really must have been grown in a lab. I don’t know if that kind of perfection can come from the coupling of a man and woman. It must have some kind of science added to it.
This also has a party scene with Roddy McDowell and Joyce Brothers during which chess is the main source of fun, not drinking. Sure.
Somehow, due to Cine Artists Pictures going out of business this movie is in the public domain.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on October 5, 2021.
Adapted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, The Lost World is most famous for its stop motion special effects, which were created by Willis O’Brien and predate his work on the original King Kong.
In some prints of this film, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself appeared in the opening, introducing what audiences were about to see. Just a few years earlier, he had shown a test reel of O’Brien’s effects to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, including Harry Houdini. The audience was certain they had seen true footage of dinosaurs and Coyle refused to say where he had acquired the footage. It even made the front page of the New York Times, which said that Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.”
The first feature-length film made in the United States — and probably the world — to feature model animation as the primary special effect, this was also the first movie to be played on an airplane.
Professor Challenger (Wallace Berry) has been ridiculed for announcing that dinosaurs are real, yet he accepts an offer to field a team to rescue the scientist Maple White, along with that learned man’s daughter Paula, sportsman Sir John Roxton, news reporter Edward Malone, Professor Summerlee, Zambo and Challenger’s butler Austin. I mean, if you live in style, I always say take your servant to meet some kaiju.
Well, their trip is filled with peril, plenty of dinosaurs and an apeman who nearly kills them multiple times before they bring a brontosaurus back to London. Unlike Kong, beauty does not kills the beast and the gigantic quadruped sauropod swims on down the Thames to freedom.
I’m so excited for everything that Cauldron Films is putting out. Every release has been so good but their pre-Thanksgiving announcement is packed with three incredible releases, as well as Kill Butterfly Kill, the first release from new label Neon Eagle.
There are also great deals on everything else they’ve released so far!
Here’s what I’m so excited about, the three new releases. Click on any title to purchase.
Convoy Busters: Maurizio Merli (Violent Naples and The Cynic, The Rat, and The Fist) is busted down from Homicide to Emergency Squad. Despite his demotion, he is not content with letting Rome’s criminal element run rampant and his violent nature soon finds him the target of both the press and the local mob. After a bloody attempt on his life, he is transferred to a quiet coastal town to run a local department but, never one to leave things alone, he quickly finds a dangerous smuggling ring is using the cover of the sea and darkness to run their operations in his sleepy district.
Shanghai Joe: According to the Spaghetti Western Database, lead actor Chen Lee may have been a Japanese karate instructor, but according to director Mario Caiano (Eye In the Labyrinth), he worked in a laundry, not in a dojo, and was picked because he looked like a young Dustin Hoffman. Some think his real name was Mioshini Hayakawa, which is Japanese, not Chinese. That said, if that being racist — not knowing the difference between two countries nearly 1,900 miles away from one another — then this movie is not for you.
Seriously, nearly every race gets denigrated in this movie audibly and physically. Luckily, Shanghai Joe ends up killing every single offender.
Shanghai — or Chin Hao — has come to this country and instead of finding whatever it is he’s looking for — he has tattoos much like Kwai Chang Caine — he’s found that aforementioned racism and a love interest in Cristina (Carla Romanelli, Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen, The Lonely Lady).
Our hero’s skills as a fighting man make their way to cattle rancher Stanley Spencer (Piero Lulli, Kill, Baby…Kill!), who is really enslaving Mexicans to do his work. That means that the bad guys decide to kill him, but none of them can get it done.
Spencer ends up hiring four different killers, much like video game bosses, to do his work for him. There’s Tricky the Gambler (Giacomo Rossi Stuart, The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), Pedro the Cannibal (Robert Hundar, Sabata), Buryin’ Sam (Gordon Mitchell, who improvised and sang the song “Chin-Chin Chinaman” while carrying a shovel to try to kill Shanghai) and Scalper Jack (an astonishing Klaus Kinski, who is obsessed with hair and you genuinely fear for the life of Romanelli in their scene).
Finally, Mikuja, the only person who has the same martial arts technique and tattoo as our hero, is hired to kill him. Their battle may not be a fight on the order of a Shaw Brothers technical battle, but it’s still fun.
This movie is incredibly strange, because every time I thought it was going to be normal, it would go from slapstick to our hero plucking out a bad guy’s eye and blood spraying all over the place. It’s closer to a horror film set in the West with martial arts than a straight-up Italian Western, but it’s better for that difference.
Frankenstein ’80: Dr. Otto Frankenstein works in his lab all day and to the normal daytime world, he seems like an ordinary doctor. But at night, he works on perfecting his own form of life, Mosiac, putting together this inhuman human from several dead bodies. Then, once completed, Mosiac repays him by killing him and we still have an hour left.
Directed by Mario Mancini (who was the cinematographer for Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks and The Girl in Room 2A), this is a film featuring real surgical footage, nonsensical dialogue and a total lack of plot. Suffice to say I loved it.
Mosiac spends the rest of the movie replacing his constantly failing organs, which means that he must murder and murder and murder some more. Have you ever wondered, “What if someone used a giant leg bone to kill someone?” this would be the movie that answers your inquest.
Also, in whatever nameless city in some unknown country that this is supposed to be set in, possibly Germany, the women in the night have no issues with a gigantic monster in a leather Nazi-esque outfit picking them up with merely a few grunts. No money discussion — he kills them way before they tell him how much a half and half costs.
This movie was inspired by Italian horror, sex and gore comics, like Oltretomba. If you’re offended by the blood and guts and books of this film, consider this a stern warning: avoid these comics at all costs. They take it even further. And then further. And then some.
There’s a new blu ray of this that’s been released — the film is in public domain — that finally fixes the rough prints that are out there right now. It’s nearly impossible to find, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop looking. For all the foibles of this film, it has a certain something.
As a bonus, here’s some artwork that I did of the film.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on January 31, 2022.
I’m so excited that Cauldron has released this. Their blu ray release has a director’s commentary and behind the scenes footage. You can get it from MVD.
Jordan Graham took seven years to make this movie, thanks to the limits of its budget, but he also built the cabin that it takes place in, did nearly every job of making the film and cast his grandmother, June Peterson, who has been haunted by the demon Sator since 1968 in real life, automatically writing a lot of the words that are shown in the film. She spent time in a mental hospital, which makes you wonder if this movie was just exploiting her mental illness or could potentially be the story of a real demon that might, you know if you’re a Christian fundamentalist, be using this movie as a way to get into your mind.
Director, writer, editor, producer, cinematographer and editor Graham told Flickering Myth “In 1968, she brought home an ouija board and conjured up Sator. She then spent the next three months talking with him through something called automatic writings. She sat in a chair with a pen and let Sator speak through her. She wrote thousands and thousands of pages across the course of three months. And then, at the end of those three months, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital.”
Deciding to use her home as a location and having her act in a scene where she’d discuss Sator, she began sharing things she’d never told him. Over the shooting of the film, Peterson’s dementia got worse and she was taken to a care home, where Graham would visit and interview her, as well as study thousands of pages of her automatic writings and a diary where she explained how Sator guided her, using those interviews to write and then rewrite the movie based on what she told him.
In the film, her grandson has disappeared into the woods, obsessed with Sator. Perhaps his grandfather sacrificed himself to the demon, but definitely, there are other followers in the woods, wearing skulls and eventually, the protagonist becomes lost in the timeless world of the woods and the call of a demon.
It’s a slow build, but if there’s a movie that proves that folk horror doesn’t exist simply in the past. The truly frightening thing is that Sator itself is so powerful that even as the ravages of age made Graham’s grandmother forget her family, she didn’t forget the demonic spirit that dominated her life. It makes me wonder if mental illness is real or is demonology or both?
This isn’t a perfect film, but it’s a singular work by an auteur and there are times that it works perfectly and other times that it feels like it’s going nowhere slow and then it rewards your patience. I can see some loving it as equally as I can understand people hating it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on February 21, 2020.
Cauldron Films has released it on blu ray along with several featurettes, such as Remembering Sergio Pastore – Interview with Sara Pastore and Sergio Pastore – Un Ammirevole Indipendente. There are two commentary tracks — one by Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson and the other by the Fragments of Fear podcast — as well as a trailer and image gallery. You can get it from MVD.
Italy and Denmark unite for a film made in the wake of Dario Argento’s landmark The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Just look — there are crimes right in the title and some vaguely associated animal name! Actually, a black cat does kill some people in this, so the name makes sense.
Originally titled Sette Scialli di Seta Gialla (Seven Shawls of Yellow Silk), this movie was written and directed by Sergio Pastore.
Several fashion models are killed by a murderer — think Blood and Black Lace — by a black cat that has been alerted to them by gifted shawls laced with chemicals. Such a strange way to kill someone, but hey — we’re in the psychosexual world of the giallo, so why worry?
Paola, the first victim, had been dating Peter Oliver (Anthony Steffen, who was Django in Django the Bastard and also shows up in Play Moteland The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave), a blind composer who believes that he’s heard the killer. He and his butler (Umberto Raho, Enter the Devil) are on the case, tracking the cat down to its owner, who is killed before she can reveal who has been taking care of her cat.
Much like the aforementioned — and superior — Bava film, Francoise (Sylva Koscina, Steve Reeves’ love interest in Hercules and Hercules Unchained; she’s also in So Sweet, So Dead and Bava’s Lisa and the Devil) was killing the models to cover up another killing. That’s because Paola was sleeping with her husband and certainly had to pay.
So yeah. The movie is a Bava remix with a lead character taken from another giallo, Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails. And the killer’s method comes from Bela Lugosi and The Devil Bat. Don’t let all that copy and pasting get in the way of your enjoyment of this movie. It’s still fun — the fashions are inordinately loud, the zooms are wild and the music is out of control. There’s a vicious shower kill than leaves nothing to the imagination. And it’s still better than anything out there today.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cauldron release of this film comes with a CD soundtrack with music by Luciano Onetti, behind the scenes footage and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.
Thirty years after his father The Great Dante was killed during a magic trick gone wrong, Lorenzo is now being accused of a series of murders that all have magical themes as he struggles to present the biggest show of his career.
This is the third film in the Onetti Brothers’ Giallo Trilogy, following Francesca and Sonno Profundo. For all the reviewers that bring up their Argento style, the true maniacs, the ones who put on their gloves while watching a giallo, the people like, well, me and you — we realize that their influences go beyond the touchstones every critic uses. For all of those that love Martino as much as Argento, good news. This feels like one of his films that was lost in time.
I caught the YouTube premiere of the film, which is missing most of the gore and nudity, which would be the selling point for many a fan of these films. But for the other parts of the form, such as the soundtrack, the plot that goes everywhere and nowhere at the same time, even the look of the color and film, this is a true piece of giallo in a time when I wondered if all the gold has truly been mined.
That said, you can look forward to people decrying its dubbing, acting and plot. Those people have never seen anything beyond Suspiriaand have declared themselves experts. Screw it. I hope these Argentinian madmen keep making movies. I’ll pour them a whole bottle of J&B if I ever get the chance to meet them.
PS: I realize that the example I picked isn’t even a giallo. Those of you that have read copy and pasted reviews of movies that reference this genre will, I hope, get the joke.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on April 10, 2021.
Cauldron Films has released this on blu ray with a 4K restoration from the original negative and commentary by film historan Kat Ellinger, plus an image gallery with soundtrack. You can get it from MVD.
Written and directed by Tomás Aznar, this Spanish biker/slasher/occult freakout thrilled me with every single frame. It starts with one of a group of robbers posing as a prostitute before she brutally knifes a man, then she joins three others to rob a bar.
Taking a middle-class couple hostage and holding out in the home of an old woman and her grandson, they act just like you’d expect a home invasion biker gang to behave, killing everyone in their path when they’re not screwing in churches.
Before they kill her, the grandmother prays to Satan to destroy the bikers and from there on, they see ghastly visions of her dead grandson, you know, when they’re not having sex and killing more people or being chased by Ossorio-like Templars through a desiccated chapel. Oh yeah — there’s also supposedly a fortune guarded by those very same Blind Dead-ish mummies in thecatacombs beneath the ruins.
It’s packed with menace, gore, sex and meanness — exactly the kind of Eurohorror that always played well over here. It has that glorious shot on film soft darkness that I love so much, as well as drugs, shootouts and a final twenty minutes that are a delirious thrill ride.
Más allá Del Terror was never released ever in the United States until now and I have no idea why.
PS – Fans of Warren Comics will spot the art that was lifted for the German VHS release. It’s the Frank Frazetta cover of Vampirella #11.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of my favorite movies of all time by one of my favorite directors. This review was originally on the site on April 8, 2018.
Cauldron is to be celebrated for releasing it. Their release has a 2K restoration from the original camera negative, on-camera interviews with director Sergio Martino and production designer Massimo Antonello Geleng, then and now location footage, The Projection Booth Podcast episode that discusses the movie, commentary with Samm Deighan and Kat Ellinger, and an image gallery. You can get it from MVD.
A rickshaw driver in Miami is protected by an Asian witch when he comes up against a conspiracy involving him being videotaped having sex with a mysterious redhead and it causing the death of the son of a faith-healing televangelist played by Donald Pleasance — all directed by Sergio Martino (Torso, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and so much more)!
This seems like the perfect union of everything I love in movies. It’s pure junk and perfect for 3 AM weekend viewing! Scott (U.S. Olympic Gold Medalist Mitch Gaylord, American Anthem) just wants to get ahead in class and help his roommate with his rickshaw business. But after that aforementioned redhead hooks up with him, all hell breaks loose. Reverend Mortom’s (Pleasance) son Jason was taping the action and Scott flips out, beating the guy’s ass. But soon, Jason ends up getting killed when the boat the action happened on is set ablaze. Soon after, a hitman (Daniel Green, in a role made for George Eastman) comes after Scott, killing his roomie with another inferno.
There’s also an ancient Chinese woman, Madame Luna, who Scott helped with his rickshaw who uses a cobra, a cat and magic to rescue our hero throughout the movie. She also wrote him a letter that he never seems to get to finish. Even after it’s been eaten by rats, her voice still plays in his head when he is near the paper.
The cops are also after Scott, thinking that he’s killed the reverend’s son and his roommate. So our hero goes to the Pink Pussycat and kidnaps the redhead — who we soon learn is Joana Simpson, the girlfriend of the dead man. I should also mention that Scott is pretty much the most moronic asshole to ever be seen as a hero in a film and that’s covering so much territory. Yet even after kidnapping Joana at gunpoint she still likes him and ends up helping him.
Throughout, Martino uses tons of crazy zooms, weird cuts that defy editing logic and everyone is constantly running and grimacing. It’s like a Rob Liefeld comic come to life. And it’s awesome. And by awesome I mean that anyone normal — like Becca — will tell you that this is a shitty movie.
However, let me make my argument. Any movie where Donald Pleasence is an evil televangelist with a warthog statue that is locked in eternal combat with a sorceress directed by my favorite giallo director is going to obsess me. There’s also a shower sex scene where our hero keeps his jeans on, confounding me even further. There’s also a magical key that unlocks the secret of the statue that burns through the killer’s hand. There is also a magical cat. Holy fuck, this movie. I have no idea how anyone would even come up with these concepts.
It turns out that Scott and the reverend’s son were both born on the highest day of the Chinese calendar — 6/6/66 — which means that when Scott says that he wears a tiger t-shirt because he was born in the year of the tiger, he is full of shit. He was born in the year of the horse and American Horse is a much shittier title than American Tiger or American Rickshaw. It’s also the title of a song by the band The Cult, but I think I’m probably the only person who knows or cares about that.
Donald Pleasence comes to attack the Chinese woman, but the cobra and cat attack him before he chokes her. Have you ever heard Pleasence do a Southern accent at the same time that he can’t shake his British voice? You will. I’d say this role was beneath him, but I can also point to so many other films that he was in that are worse.
The killer finally catches up with Scott, who runs across railroad ties and trips — he was an Olympic gymnast — before a semi takes out the killer, who suddenly has a snake come out of his eyeball! Again — this fucking movie!
Scott takes the statue back to Madame Luna, who is young again. The cops listen to Joana, who tells them that Scott is innocent. And the Reverend goes on TV and transforms into a warthog while Luna outs him to the world. Yes, you just read that correctly. Then, his wife screams that he is the devil and shoots him as everyone watches the warthog under his skin emerge. “He was the devil!” she screams as the cops matter of factly lead her away. A man just turned into a giant bloody pig. This should be a much bigger deal than the way the cops behave.
Just watch this trailer and wonder, “How could a movie like this be created and no one is constantly talking about it?” When I hear people complain that they’re bored and hate the world, it’s movies like this that I point them to.
The Found Footage Festival, the life mission of Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, is to find, archive and share VHS tapes, capturing pop culture history before it disappears. They’re both huge influences on my sense of humor and my need to write for this site, trying to discover new things and share them with others.
I have no words to explain what a big deal it was to get to speak with Joe — at length, I kept him on the phone way past our scheduled time — and this interview truly makes all the work of creating this site worthwhile.
Joe and Nick as Chop and Steele
B&S About Movies: How strange is it to go from making documentaries to being in one, Chop and Steele?
Joe Pickett: Very, very strange. Especially to see it up on a big screen. But here’s the thing. I really liked the movie. Yeah. I got a draft last January. And I was afraid to watch it. I sent it to my brother first and I was like, “Can you watch this and just make sure I’m not a total jackass?” Because they spent four years with us shooting a lot of footage. And so I kind of forgot all of it.
I remember what we did, but I was like, “What is this gonna look like?”
I was scared shitless and then my brother said, “Go ahead, watch. It’s pretty good.”
I love watching it with audiences especially. I mean, it’s definitely weird, but I think I think it’s done so well. It’s edited and shot so well that I’m proud of it. And I think it’s a good lasting record of what we have and what we’ve done so far.
B&S: I can’t imagine watching it not knowing the history (editor’s note: Joe and his partner in crime Nick Prueher also created characters named Chop and Steele that appeared on morning news shows as real guests and got sued over it, which forms much of the story of the film). So I tried to put myself in the space of someone who had no idea what you did and went in open-minded versus as a fan and I loved it.
Joe: We have a very small niche loyal group of fans. But it’s definitely not a mainstream thing at all. Not everybody knows about it. So that’s good to hear that. I think it’s accessible to people who don’t even know us.
B&S: I’m sick of origin stories in movies, so you really got across how you got here, why you do what you do and then get to the court case really efficiently.
Joe: Well, that’s efficient editing. That’s because we had three editors on it. And then the last editor who came in, he’s just, oh man. It’s like A Beautiful Mind. Like, he can just see things. Originally we were thinking that the America’s Got Talent appearance was going to be last. This is our last hurrah. We thought it was going to be the end of the movie.
This editor steps in and he’s like, no, no, no, that’s the middle of the movie. He said, “I know what the ending of the movie is going to be already.”
So that’s just a genius editor and efficient editing and storytelling.
B&S: The movie gets across how harrowing that day was but it had to be worse than that to live it.
Joe: It’s still the most stressful day of my lifetime. It was just surreal. Like Tyra Banks, heavy with Tyra Banks, all while prepping for our big stunt and then actually doing it and you’re flying all the way there and we have to pull this off and it’s just nerve-wracking.
Throughout the day, I don’t think we talked about this in the doc, but you know, they would say “Alright, you guys are going on at noon.” And we’ve been there since like 9 AM and now we’re ready to go on at noon. Then they’re like, “Oh, wait, no, you’re not gonna go on at noon.” Then they would come in and say, “We need you guys now.” It was all day long. It was just the most fucked up day. (laughs)
B&S: What I loved about that scene is that in the past, you had all the power and were putting those morning shows at your mercy. And now, you’re thrust into the real belly of the multimedia machine and the rules have changed. There is no show I can think of that’s bigger than America’s Got Talent.
Joe: It’s the biggest one. They wanted us to be scripted and tell us what they wanted us to do. And we’re like, “No, we’re not going to go on there. We’re not going to be scripted.” Yeah, it’s just so stupid. Like why would we go on there and do what they wanted us to do? That’s the antithesis of what we would do!
B&S: It’s not reality but reality TV.
Joe: I’ve worked on reality TV. They call it scripted reality now. So you’re actually writing the dialogue. We had to do the dialogue for wildlife hunters, you know, like, we don’t know this world. We don’t know how they talk. Two guys in New York are writing the dialogue for these guys. So stilted and weird. And, you know, we’re trying to write comedy lines for non-comedy performers.
B&S: I think we’re sadly past the era of being surprised by what’s on TV.
Joe: Definitely. I think that I think there’s like a naivete that we don’t have anymore. You know, we’re so self-aware. That’s because we all have phones and we’re always on camera. You know, like probably I’m on camera almost daily whether it’s a zoom call or whatever.
If you look back on some of the old videos of sports, the camera guy in the crowd just has shots of everybody yelling “Hi mom” and trying to get on TV. Now, people don’t really give a shit. Everybody’s been on TV at least once. Probably. (laughs)
B&S: The Andy Kauffman moments on Late Night with David Letterman and Fridays wouldn’t mean as much to today’s audience but back then they did.
Joe: Yeah, that was the best. It was just more of an event and you had to see it live at the time too. It was hard to find the tapes and it wasn’t until the internet came around that you could experience it again.
B&S: I always think about the Mr. Show “Tape Trading Underground” sketch. Before the Internet, someone had to be like, “Hey guys, I got this. Do you want to see it?”
Joe: It was a different time. The heyday for tape trading was probably around 1999. I got a job at a video duplication house and I was working as a production assistant. You’d be on the shoots and everybody would talk about tapes they had. One of the guys on a shoot had the Jack Rebney tape and talked it up and kept saying, “I’ll bring it for you.” It took some time for me to get it but it was ten times better than I thought it was going to be.
Today the same excitement is lost. But I’m trying things on our show VCR Party. I love when people buy old digital cameras and send me IMG files. The thrill of the hunt is what I love. That’s lost with VHS now because they’re hardly even at thrift stores anymore. I was in Indianapolis at a Salvation Army and normally those would be fantastic. They would pick up so many tapes and now they have nothing. They have a copy of Titanic if you’re lucky.
Now that hunt is really gone. We do get a lot of people sending us tapes, so that’s cool. But I do miss that, especially the rarity. Just feeling like I have one of a few videos that nobody else has seen and I can’t wait to show people. You know, like Nick and I roomed together in college and he had that McDonald’s training video. We would have people over to watch it with us. We’d have a running commentary and that’s really how we got started. It was just us showing it to friends in our dorm. And then we lived together for a little while after college and we’d have a friend come over and be like, “Oh, you haven’t seen the John and Johnny tape?”
We come from that era where you got tapes and you couldn’t wait to show people. We hope that with our show that it’s kind of like that for people. We want to introduce them to something they’ve never seen, not even on the internet.
B&S: I have a language made up of so many of these videos.
Joe: It’s almost like a language that we speak that only a handful of people speak. For me, it’s always like John and Johnny references and Jack Rebney.
B&S: I’ve always been obsessed with training videos, too. I have to tell you, in no way have they improved since the McC video that you guys stole.
Joe: They haven’t. I think the production quality has because the cameras are better and the audio stuff is better, but the content still sucks.
Did you see that we got a whole box of Victoria’s Secret training videos from a mall in Salt Lake City?
I am confirming what you just said: they suck.
They do the reenactments. They’re cheesy, everybody’s excited. Everybody’s happy to clean the bathrooms. It’s just like not living in reality. At all. But I’m happy for them. I’m glad that those training videos haven’t changed much.
I have a fascination with unimportant things. I would rather talk about a video from the Home Shopping Network than Citizen Kane. The stuff we share says more about our culture and human beings and anthropology and what drives us more than say, you know, something considered essential. (laughs)
Sometimes I struggle with the idea of there’s so much stuff out there that’s just ending up in landfills right now. And we’re never gonna see it. There’s so much gold out there. I feel like we’ve maybe touched like 2% of the videos that came out in the golden age of VHS.
We probably just scratched the surface of what was shot.
B&S: How many more exercise videos were there?
Joe: How many celebrities started one and didn’t finish that cash grab? (laughs)
B&S: I’m amazed that something like Linda Blair in How To Get…Revenge exists.
Joe: It’s so bad and she’s so mean spirited! It’s really dark. It’s so dark.
Even DMX and the Ruff Ryderz made an exercise video. That’s because anything could get made because they went from film being so expensive to shoot and you need a crew and it’s so much work. Suddenly, video exists and all you need to do is press the red button and shoot.
Any half-baked idea could become real. Rent-A-Friend could happen. Someone said, “I’m going to act like I’m talking to someone for 45 minutes” and sell that!
B&S: It’s even easier to make video now and it feels like less weirdness exists.
Joe: It’s like everyone is in on the joke. Once Tommy Wiseau got in on the joke, anything else he made wasn’t as special. That’s why I love American Movie so much, because it’s just limited resources with a lot of ambition. And that’s just my favorite combination in the world.
B&S: There are so many characters in the Found Footage Festival universe. Who’s your favorite?
Joe: It’s a tough question. The first one that pops into my head is Frank Pacholski.
We tracked him down and it was really mysterious. He was really weird about it.
He told us to meet him in Santa Monica and so we flew out there like the next week. We spent way too much money on this. (laughs) At first he’s like, come to my house. Then he switches it on our way over and tells us to meet him at the second lifeguard stand to the right of the Santa Monica Pier. He’s there in an outfit waiting for us and refuses to answer questions. How did he get all those old people? Why would he dance for them? And he told us nothing. It was a bit for him to not tell us! (laughs)
Before we leave, he tells us to go meet my manager at a coffee shop but no cameras. We get there and it’s him in a suit and tie and he’s a different character and refuses to break. He told us the whole story, but we had to role play and ask Frank as his manager character questions about Frank.
There’s a documentary called Committed about the guy whose real name is Vic Cohen. Howie Mandel produced it and it’s barely seen the light of day. I think it was on Amazon or you can probably buy it somewhere for like, five bucks. But it tells a whole story and just what a weirdo this guy is.
B&S: Have you noticed any of the Found Footage stuff taken into pop culture and appear in places you didn’t expect it? Like you’re kind of flowing back into pop culture?
Joe: Well, I think with Jack Rebney, that really made a splash in pop culture and was featured in video games and in movies. But like, John and Johnny, the Avett Brothers…have you seen that music video that they did? They replicate the set of John and Johnny. They do an impression of John and Johnny. Andy Daly plays both John and Johnny and the Avett Brothers are in it playing on Home Shopping. So that was a really cool one because that was a tape that we found in a closet in a box in a warehouse in northwestern Wisconsin. We introduced that to the world and then to see a huge band and Andy Daly doing the characters that we fell in love with?
We don’t see it all the time. But every so often, you see a pop up.
B&S: Finally, as someone that’s traveled the roads of America with so much touring, how awesome is the super slab?
Joe: (laughs) Super slab super rapper coming at you know it’s all about that super slab.
Are you into trucker music?
B&S: I grew up in a town where everyone had a CB radio, a scanner and listened to trucker music. I loved the “Rappin’ Trucker” episode of Bastard Tapes so much.
Joe: I toured with Neil Hamburger and we’d go into thrift stores and buy CDs of artists that no one had ever heard of. We’d just analyze them and deconstruct them and it was so much fun. Nick and I do that with trucker music.
You should check out Dirty Country, the movie we made about Larry Pierce. We followed him for four and a half years at a small town in Indiana and he writes these dirty songs on his lunch breaks. He’s a factory worker and would perform them on the weekends for his friends and never really played on the stage before and at the end of the movie he plays a stage for his fans. So yeah, look it up. I think that especially because you appreciate truckstop music, you’ll definitely appreciate this movie.
Please visit the Found Footage Festival web site, order lots of videos, see the guys on tour and watch all of their many streaming shows. I beyond appreciate the time and energy that Joe put into this interview.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
This is Not a Test shares much in common Panic in Year Zero directed by Ray Milland. Both were low-budget productions released in 1962 and both deal with a group of strangers who come together in the California desert outside Los Angeles before/during a nuclear attack. Equally, both seem quaint in 2022. This is Not a Test, in particular presents a highly unlikely scenario for audiences who grew up on Mad Max or zombie apocalypse films. A lone Deputy Sheriff played by Seamon Glass sets up a roadblock on a lonely mountain pass to catch Clint (Ron Starr), a hitchhiking killer on the run. A truck carrying the fugitive along with a few other vehicles are stopped, giving Clint just enough time to flee into the darkness while all the other characters are introduced. We have a couple of gamblers, a married couple on the outs with their dog Timmy, a wise old man and his granddaughter Juney and – joining them later – a nice guy on a scooter. When news of a pending missile attack comes across the police radio, not only does the cop stay at his post, but all eight of the people stopped at the roadblock comply with his every command for the majority of the film. If this film were made today, Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter would either raid the delivery truck and flee the scene, or have his gun stolen and become Deputy Sheriff pork shoulder. In 1962, he’s the law and so “We have to do what he says.”
That’s not to say that things don’t go sideways. Colter is truly an idiot, making all the wrong decisions, including destroying a whole case of booze, which could not only be used to start fires in the post-apocalyptic world, but also to disinfect wounds. Not to mention act as a sedative against the coming horrors.
Things unravel quickest for the dissatisfied married couple once the wife realizes her likelihood of survival is small. Looking for one last moment of happiness, she almost immediately falls into the arms of the truck driver, leaving her cuckolded husband to shoot himself with Colter’s gun in the very next scene while everyone else prepares the back of the truck as a shelter. While a few people choose to stay outside, the majority of the remaining group empty out the back of the truck and cover the air vents with mud. Although they initially plan to hunker down for at least 14 days, once inside, it takes all of 10 minutes for them to become exceptionally sweaty and claustrophobic. Colter kills Timmy the little dog for taking up too much air, a fight ensues and the group bursts forth from the back of the truck only to be greeted by a gang of looters in fresh from the hellscape that is now Los Angeles.
Before any Negan-style nastiness ensues, the final countdown comes over the radio. Some of the people finally knock Colter unconscious, and take his car while the looters barricade themselves inside the back of the truck. Colter wakes up to find Clint running past, who, having been hiding in the woods for the pat 75 minutes, has no idea what’s going on. The film ends with Colter begging to be let inside the back of the truck. The screen turns white, we hear an explosion. The End.
Despite its outdated social platitudes, It’s not a bad little movie. The location is used to good effect and the acting is pretty good. Although nowhere near as gruesome as the later films about nuclear war made in the 80s like The Day After, or the incredibly dark British outing Threads, which gave me nightmares for weeks, This is Not a Test is sufficiently bleak to satisfy fans of this well-worn subgenre. Best of all, it’s available for free on YouTube.
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