I have let all of you down by not having a Pollonia Brothers holiday movie on the site until now, so here we go. Alan (Mark Polonia) has a horrible job that gives him big hours and small pay and he might not be able to get gifts for his kids, but maybe if he helps Santa defeat the Feeders, which are literally hand puppet monsters, perhaps everything will work out.

Directed by John, written by him and Mark and just around an hour, this also has a cat in it that is really made of construction paper and I don’t know, there’s something about things being lo fi and shot on video that makes me incredibly forgiving. The real gift? There are two more Feeders movies and have the same aliens that look like they were made by children and have glowing red eyes which I love. I mean, they also haunt me, but I love them.

You can watch this on Tubi.

In the opening of this film, Edgar and Alan Frog (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) stopping a vampire Senator from killing a Congressman. That said, Alan is forced to drink vampire blood, which makes him a half-vampire. Then, we move forward five years and learn that Edgar is down on his luck and trying to sell all his comics to the store where Zoe (Casey B. Dolan) works.

He’s been turning down vampire fighting, even the stack of money that Gwen Lieber (Tanit Phoenix) offers to find her missing brother Peter and learn about the drug called The Thirst that a vampire known as DJ X is using to make thralls. Allan’s life might be worse, as he drinks animals and then turns them into taxidermy. And as for Sam? Well, he did become a vampire and Edgar had to kill him.

Why do some sequels just make things so bad for heroes that you love?

I do like that Congressman Blake (Matthew Dylan Roberts), who the brothers saved, has gone nuts and stolen all sorts of weapons from Area 51 to battle vampires. It’s that kind of madness — as well as rave vampires — that I want from direct to video sequels, as well as the hint at the end that vampires exist in this world.

Directed by Dario Piana, who made Too Beautiful to Die WAIT WHAT? No one told me this was directed by an 80s giallo dude! Oh man, now I love this even more. This was written by Evan Charnov and Hans Rodionoff, who also made Deep Blue Sea 2 and The Skulls II.

There had been plans to make a sequel to The Lost Boys since that movie opened and original director Joel Schumacher had wanted to do a sequel called The Lost Girls before the announcement of this film, one he had nothing to do with and thought was a bad call.

Hans Rodionoff originally wrote a script about surfing werewolves called The Tribe which was turned down by studios — including Warner Bros. —  because it was pretty much The Lost Boys. Then there was an idea…what if it was the sequel and they made werewolves into vampires.

Corey Feldma, who came back to play Edgar Frog, told MTV “Warner Bros. has further developed the script — they brought on a great writer, Hans Rodionoff, who came up with a great story line. In the script, as it is today, I am one of the leads. My involvement is very close to what my involvement was in the first one. So I’m pretty much scattered throughout. Edgar was always an outcast, but here his close-knit family have drifted apart. They’ve had a major problem, and because of that problem, Edgar today is working alone. The film is about him trying to still carry the torch as it were, without the aid and assistance of his partners. That leaves him in an even lonelier and even more delicate place than he was in the first film being the outsider that he already was.”

I really want to see the movie that he was talking about.

After watching some surfing vampires kill old man vampire Tom Savini, we meet former pro surfger Chris Emerson (Tad Hilgenbrink, who would be in another direct to video sequel, American Pie Presents: Band Camp) and his sister Nicole (Autumn Reeser) have movied to Luna Bay to live in the home of their aunt Jillian (Gabrielle Rose). Chris wants to surf again, so he reaches out to a surfboard shaper — Edgar Frog — and then meets Shane Powers (Angus Sutherland, who is, you know, Keifer’s half brother) and gets all wrapped up in the world of Billabong bloodsuckers.

Nicole gets turned, Edgar helps out and many vampires die horribly. The end, however, give you what you want, as you learn that Sam Emerson (Corey Haim) is now a powerful vampire. Or maybe in the other version, you see Sam warn Edgar that his vampire brother Alan (Jamison Newlander) is coming to kill him.

Shockingly, the credits for this movie use The Hold Steady’s “Knuckles,” which kind of freaked me out, because my love for that song is in direct inverse to this movie.

Director P.J. Pesce also was behind another direct to video sequel, Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball.

Look, the pun is there, but between 1989 and 1990 there really was something in the water, as studios churned out The Abyss, Leviathan, The Evil Below, Lords of the Deep and DeepStar Six all in the span of several months and exploitation directors took notice, particularly Juan Piquer Simón, the man who gifted us with Pieces, Slugs, Supersonic Man and Cthulhu Mansion.

Released in the U.S. by Trimark and silently executive produced by Dino De Laurentiis — who shh, also produced Leviathan — this may have been the best budget that Simón would ever enjoy. That’s how he got a cast like Jack Scalia, R. Lee Ermey and Ray Wise. I mean, let’s think on that a bit. R,. Lee Ermey went from Francis Ford Coppola in Apcalpyse Now and Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket to the guy who made Pieces. Man, I love movies.

Written by Simón, Mark Coleman (who never did anything else), David Coleman (who directed Southern Shockers and wrote Cthulhu Mansion) and an uncredited British writer Colin Wilson, who wrote the novel Space Vampires that Lifeforce is based on, The Rift is all about Wick Hayes (Scalia), the engineer of the Siren I, a ship that is lost deep in the ocean and must be retrieved by a team that includes Captain Phillips (Ermey), navigation officer Robbins (Wise), a bunch of people doomed to die and, you guessed it, Wick’s ex-girlfriend Nina (Deborah Adair). Also, if you’re wondering, yes Edmund Purdom is in this.

Like The Abyss, there are aliens on the bottom of the ocean. Unlike that movie, this is made the old fashioned way with miniatures and stop motion and you know, I love that. There’s no fancy getting in a gigantic tank and CGI here. Colin Arthur, who did the special makeup effects, has a crazy resume, working on everything from 2001 to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Toomorrow, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Horror Hospital, Zardoz, Keep It Up Jack, Vampyres, Barry Lyndon, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, The Apple, Christiane F., Conan the Barbarian, The Fan and Edge of the Axe. That’s seriously the most all over the place career and I love it.

Other effects are by Basilio Cortijo, who worked with Simón on all of his big films, plus Carlo De Marchis who did effects on Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, Alien, Monster Dog, Hundra, Deep Red and A Lizard In a Woman’s Skin. María Luisa Pino, an effects assistant, was the wife of Arthur at the time and beyond working on several films in the effects field, she also was an editor on The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, The House By the Edge of the Lake, Jaguar Lives!, The Apple, Solarbabies,  Edge of the Axe and Rest In Pieces.

Did the Spanish exploitation film industry get work or what?

Also: If you can’t get Jerry Goldsmith, who did the score for Leviathan, get his son Joel, who did the scores for Laserblast, Olivia and Hollywood Hot Tubs.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This for kids but not recommended for children movie was originally on the site on December 23, 2019.

I love my wife, but man, when she gets control of the remote, we end up watching movies like Prancer when all I want to watch is Cannibal Holocaust again. I’m joking — I know it’s Christmas, but c’mon.

Here’s the demented thing about this movie: it has the same director as Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, John D. Hancock. I swear to Santa.

This movie is all about nine-year-old Jessica Riggs (Rebecca Harrell Tickell, who left acting to become a clean Earth activist), who is being raised by her widower father John (Sam Elliot). He can handle raising her brother Steve, but feels that she’d be better of being raised by his sister-in-law Sarah (Rutanya Alda from Mommie Dearest and Amityville II: The Possession).

Eventually, her obsession with Santa’s reindeer Prancer pays off and she gets to nurse him back to health. But man, is this a dark movie. The eighties are packed with dead moms in movies and this is yet another holiday film where everything is beyond somber.

Michael Constantine from the Greek Wedding movies is a Santa in this, plus you get Cloris Leachman, Abe Vigoda, a young Johnny Galecki and Ariana Richards from Jurassic Park.

You know how dark this one is?

Director John D. Hancock insists that Prancer’s fate — either he rejoins Santa or leaps off the cliff to his death — should be left open to interpretation.

Let that sink in: LEFT TO INTERPRETATION IN A MOVIE MADE FOR KIDS.

I’m not always a fan of studio notes, but I get why they wanted a more definitive answer. Originally, Hancock decided on an elaborate special-effects sequence showing Prancer’s journey to Santa’s sleigh, but they couldn’t afford that.

When asked, Hancock claims that the shot of Prancer rejoining Santa is all in Jessica’s mind.

So the reindeer is dead.

Merry Christmas from John D. Hancock.

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

The sound of Victorian era church bells fill the air as I complete this review from my office in south London. Much like this great city, Scrooge (1935) is a film both old and new. A tale told dozens of times on stage and screen, yet one I had not seen before. The earliest sound adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, Scrooge (1935) was the inaugural production and release of Twickenham Film Distributors, Ltd. At just over an hour long, it’s an altogether more unpleasant, blunt, realistic version of the story, closer in-line with the novel source material which so clearly painted a picture of the horrors of poverty in Victorian England. While other later versions only hint at the horrible inequalities, here we are treated to a scene where the Mayor of London’s Chef who, while preparing a banquet in service to the Queen, literally throws out scraps to the masses from the window of the Mayor’s opulent mansion kitchen. A shocking image when compared to the stylized feel-good versions that likely would have had the populist author rolling in his grave. 

The performances are darker as well. When compared to the performance of Alistair Sim, who played Ebenezer Scrooge with an over-the-top humorous insanity who became bitter and twisted only following the death of his sister, star Seymour Hicks, who appeared as Scrooge over 2,000 times on stage, plays the title role as a right bastard, not likeable on any level. This is the version of A Christmas Carol we need in the winter of 2022 – known in the UK as “the winter of discontent.” A colder than average winter where just about everyone is on strike with nurses standing on line at the food banks and many working families unable to heat their homes while the wealthy worry about what Prince Harry said in his new Netflix documentary. 

This is the version, more than any other, where I felt a satisfaction in watching this greedy prick frightened into paying his underpaid, overworked employee Bob Cratchit a living wage. And with such a truncated script, it doesn’t take nearly as long for old Ebenezer to become repentant. Ghosts and spirits tend to have that effect on people. Especially when they’re voiced by Claude Rains (uncredited), as the invisible Jacob Marley is here. 

Speaking of ghosts, the spirits here rely more on a German expressionist visual style than later versions, with the ghosts of the past and future rendered completely using a combination of light and shadows rather than utilizing actors. Along with great lighting, the sets are wonderful and, while many shots are locked down in the style of a filmed stage play, there is a fair amount of camera movement including one long dolly shot during the Mayor’s banquet which must have been quite complicated for the time and visually crystallizes eloquently the difference between the classes in Victorian (and increasingly modern) England. I was not expecting such an old version of this well-worn tale to connect so relevantly to modern concerns. Colorized and black and white versions of the film are available online for free. Watch it. 

https://www.pbs.org/video/scrooge-1935-y64qdm/

With seven million dollars ready to spend, Earthquake took what worked in Airport and worked hard to get to theaters before its competition, The Towering Inferno. Not only would it throw a huge cast of stars at a disaster, it would bring Sensurround to theaters. This William Castle style gimmick was basically gigantic speakers that could play sub-audible infra bass 120 decibel sound waves that made it feel like audiences were really quaking. How well did it work? It cracked plaster Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the head of Chicago’s building and safety department made a rule that the system be turned down to stop structural damage to buildings. That same system would also be used for Midway, Rollercoaster and Battlestar Galactica.

This has big names even before we get to the cast. An early script by Mario Puzo! A score by John Williams! Direction by the man who made Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls — and edited Cat People — Mark Robson! Also, if you’ve never seen his movie The Seventh Victim rush out and stop reading this.

The movie begins with former football star Stewart Graff (Charlton Heston) fighting with his wife Remy (Ava Gardner) and then visiting an actress named Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), who is the widow of one of his old friends. He’s dropped off an autographed football for her son Corry (Tiger Williams), but come on. We all know what he wants.

California Seismological Institute’s Walter Russell (Kip Niven) learns that Los Angeles will suffer a major earthquake soon but everyone decides to keep it a secret to stop panic. This is the first of many bad ideas in this movie. I kind of love how these movies jump around to reveal their characters, like poor good girl Rosa Amici (Victoria Principle), male bodybuilder fan and National Guardsman Jody Joad (Marjoe Gortner) and Stewart’s father-in-law Sam Royce (Lorne Greene), who offers him a big job if he leaves Denise, who he’s just made sweet love to, the kind of premarital congress that shakes the ground so to speak.

Boom! The entire town of Los Angeles goes to hell as a 9.9 earthquake ruins everything and places the following stars in harm’s way: Richard Roundtree! Barry Sullivan! George Kennedy (as Lou Slade, a totally great name, and also an Airport vet of every one of those films)! Lloyd Bolan! Walter Matthay as a drunk! Even Hard Boiled Haggerty!

There’s a total old Hollywood moment where Heston has to choose between Ava Gardner and Geneviève Bujold and he just dives into the sewer to — shock! — die. What! Oh man, 1974 Hollywood was full of brutal endings.

This movie also has George Kennedy using a jackhammer to rescue people and blowing Marjoe Gortner’s brains out. That’s the kind of cinema I love.