Bugsy Malone is one of the strangest movies you’ll find, Sir Alan Parker’s gangster musical that stars Scott Baio, Jodie Foster and an all-child cast. Hawk Jones does that and goes beyond, with an all-child cast from Moline, Illinois shot on video and instead imitating the days of Dillinger and Capone, they’re making a direct to video cop movie complete with doomed women and machine gun aided revenge.
Director Richard Lowry kept on making movies after this, like President Evil, Alien Overlords and Rapture. He was inspired by seeing a Jello Pudding Pop commercial where all the kids were acting like adults. It was written by his brother Tor Reyel.
Hawk Jones (Valiant Duhart) is a cop who all the other cops make fun of for being such a maniac. He’ll also flip out if you make fun of his mother. His partner is in love with him, but he’s dating Lola, the gangster’s moll who is fated for a bad ending, and he’s been battling a crime boss named Antonio Coppola for years, a man — well, a child — who has hired a punk rock larger kid named The Destroyer to take out Hawk.
Kids in bars. Kids singing in Vegas-style numbers. Kids battling with guns in scenes that feel like a sub-Cannon 80s action movie except, again, with children and sound effects written on the screen like Batman. And best of all, a sword fight ending that’s better than almost any movie you’ll see this year.
Johnny LaRue couldn’t get his crane shot but somehow, this movie could.
Tina Krause has appeared in more than a hundred sub-budget horror films, appearing in near-fetish gore movies for W.A.V.E. Productions and Seduction Cinema, starring in movies with titles such as Psycho Sisters, International NecktieStrangler, The Vegas Showgirl Strangler and Sorority Slaughter.
Sadly, Limbo is the only full-length movie that she directed and wrote.
Shot in an abandoned warehouse that Krause was living in, this is a non-linear journey to Hell that starts with its female lead killing a date and then breaking every wall there is as Krause escapes movies where she showed up to take showers and disrobe and instead gets down and gets weird. She’s able to push people back with just a thought while constantly speaking to an disembodied voice that keeps asking if people will forgive her for all she’s done. From there, we’re constantly moving, down dark hallways, past faceless faces, speeding on a highway to oblivion, blood, masks, glow in the dark paint, strobing lights, images covering images, so much screaming and always the darkness.
I’ve seen this movie compared to Lynch, but I truly believe that it’s the rare film that can somehow co-exist within the same legitamately unsettling cinematic world that The Last House On Dead End Streetoccupies.
It took Krause two years to make this and she went through losing two leads as she worked to make it real. It’s beyond intense and speaks to why I love SOV so much, because the consumer nature of the equipment made movies democratic, in that finally anyone, any gender, any place in the world could take what was in their head and make it a piece of content that you could hold, watch and disappear into.
You can watch this on Tubi or get the blu ray from AGFA.
Directed and written by Mark Burchett and Michael D. Fox (Vamps, Blood Sisters: Vamps 2), this movie is also known as Evil Ambitions and really is 1996 in its most pure and distilled flavor.
The Satanic Yuppies in the title are politician Gideon Jessup (David Levy) and model agency owner Brittany Drake (Amber Newman, Horrorvision, Hell-O-Ween) and they have marked Julie Swanson (Lucy Frashure), a virginal fresh off the bus and new in the big city girl for Satan’s bride. And by the big city, I mean Cincinnati, because dead bodies keep showing up in the Ohio River.
Reporter Peter McGavin (Paul Morris) is on the case, despite being warned by his boss Miles Bishop (S. William Hinzman, the Flesheater not in zombie mode) to just forget all about it. You know who does get him off the trail? Brittany, who owns him from the minute they speak. At the same time, another girl he runs into gets kidnapped by the cult’s long-haired killing machine Lester (Rob Calvert).
Despite the sexual dynamo throwing herself his way, McGavin finds his way back to his story and gets help from phone sex operator/literal ghostwriter of Mae West’s autobiography Madame Natalie Goldfarb (Debbie Rochon), who informs him that the first four murders were to create the bridesmaids of the devil and the fifth murder will be his bride, at which point, kind of like a godfather at an Italian wedding, Satan must give a favor to whoever put the nuptials together.
After killing Detective Leslie Kellogg (Renee Raos), the police officer who was trying to help McGavin, with a blue blur while she’s in the bathtub, a succubus is sent to take our protagonist and make him a member of the cult. But when Satan (Randy Rupp) shows up, it turns out he’s not all that pleased with the rich and powerful who are following him.
While the protagonist is lame and you’ll probably be more of a fan of Newman’s evil mistress of the dark arts — and modeling — this is by no means a bad film. It looks a lot like a 1990s adult film from VCA, with that plastic bright video quality, yet just hints at the sex instead of giving it to you. That said, if suddenly people started having sex for real, I would in no way be surprised.
Between Hinsman and Rochon being involved, how did John Russo not get into this movie?
I don’t put my wife through my Amityville obsession, but she was home for my watch of Amityville Hex and it stopped when she told me that she was going to divorce me if I didn’t shut it off.
Tony Newton, who also made The Amityville Exorcist, is to blame for this. It’s less a movie than a series of people speaking directly to the camera and repeating the Amityville Hex. Then, we see what happened to them. Those people include Shawn C. Phillips (who co-wrote this and has a rambling swear word-filled rant while fondling a hammer; he also takes off his hat at one point and somehow adds decades to how old I thought he was), Pool Party Massacre director Drew Marvick, the excoriable Lloyd Kaufman, Mike Ferguson (who was also in Amityville Uprising), Marciah Vales, Luna Meow, Mercedes, Ken May, Kyle “Moviebuff1” Rappaport, Erik Anthony Russo, Tony Newton, Rheanon Nicole, Veronica Ricci, John R. Walker, Jaclyn Passaro and Danny “Cinestalker” Filaccio.
George Stover is also in this and really deserves so much better. He steals the show but that’s kind of sad.
My biggest problem — other than the project as a whole, the unbalanced audio, the scenes of people talking that are at the level of indy wrestling promos and that this dared to use an audio clip of Lon Chaney Jr. singing the theme from Spider Baby — is that there’s a scene where a woman goes through a Paranormal Activity evening as her cute and chubby chihuahua sleeps nearby. As the owner of a cute and chubby chihuahua, this scene is unrealistic in a movie about a viral curse. Cubby, our dog, flips out at the slightest provocation. The wind may pick up speed, someone a few blocks away may open a door, a car may drive two miles from our house and he has an apoplexy. This dog just sleeps through an entire evening of the paranormal.
I’ve watched a lot of Amityville movies, but man, I don’t know when I’ve seen a worse one. The box art is pretty great and you’d think I’d learn my lesson, but the real Amityville curse is that I can’t stop watching these movies.
Thirty years ago, the BBC seemed to be doing another one of their “Watch” shows, as four presenters — Michael Parkinson (host of the talk show Parkinson for twenty five years), presenter Sarah Greene (who had worked on several of the “Watch” shows like Airportwatch), her real-life husband Mike Smith (a co-host of the BBC’s Breakfast Time and was a presenter on Top of the Pops) and Craig Charles (who worked as a presenter before playing Dave Lister on Red Dwarf, hosting Robot Wars and narrating Takeshi’s Castle) — and a camera crew descended on the most haunted house in Britain on Halloween night.
Pamela Early (Brid Brennan) and her daughters Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson) have been dealing with Mr. Pipes, a poltergeist who possesses and harms Suzanne and lives in the basement of their home. Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), a psychologist studying the phenomena, supports Pamela and the children as Sarah reports from inside the home with her husband Mike interviews the man on the street and Craig makes with the jokes.
As the program (programme!) unravels, it turns out that maybe this isn’t all a hoax. Several calls from listeners help construct the true story, as the story of the murderous Mother Seddons is retold, as is the case of Raymond Tunstall, who hung himself in the basement of the Early home and was eaten by cats. By the end, the beast known as Mr. Pipes has transformed the live broadcast into a seance circle and attempts to use the show to possess all of England.
For American viewers, it’s all rather well made but one wonders how people could have been so upset by this show. Well, for those in Britain, this movie seemed like anything but.
The crew making it took great pains to make it seem real, even if it was part of the BBC anthology series Screen One. It was shot in Studio D of BBC Elstree Studios, a place where many news shows had been aired from. The 081 811 8181 is an actual BBC call-in number, adding to the realism. In fact, the show was nearly canceled because the network didn’t want a War of the Worlds panic to happen. They demanded opening credits be added including the writer’s name, in addition to a Screen One title sequence.
No one noticed that.
The documentary style of Ghostwatch led to 30,000 phone calls from frightened viewers, including Parkinson’s elderly mother! In the days to follow, tabloids went to town criticizing the BBC — who never reaired Ghostwatch — which only increased when eighteen-year-old factory worker Martin Denham became obsessed by the show and upon hearing noises in his parent’s home much like the show would take his own life. The Broadcast Standards Commission rebuked the BBC, saying “The BBC had a duty to do more than simply hint at the deception it was practicing on the audience. In Ghostwatch there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace. The presence in the program of presenters familiar from children’s programs took some parents off-guard in deciding whether their children could continue to view.”
Considering that children and elderly people reported PTSD after watching this, you can see why Greene appeared on the following Monday’s Children’s BBC to reassure younger viewers that the show was not real.
Except that it kind of is.
The story is based on the Enfield poltergeist, a story that had been debated in the tabloids as well, which adds even more of a layer of truth to this story. Peggy Hodgson reported poltergeist activities in her home and voices that would emerge from her daughter Janet. The BBC had reported several times on this story, so Ghostwatch probably felt like a Halloween ratings sweeps stunt.
Writer Stephen Volk (Gothic, The Guardian) had seen this as a mini-series but producers thought that the final live segment, inspired by Nigel Keale’s The Stone Tape, would have more impact.
While this show destroyed minds and reaped souls in England, over here it’s been an influence on so many found footage films like Host and The Blair Witch Project, as well as the near-perfect UHF TV era U.S. remix WNUF Halloween Special.
I love that this is shot on video, not for the need to save money, but for the need to appear real. SOV continues to be a format that offers so many hallways to explore.
Volk wrote a sequel in the short story 31/10, in which he vists the sealed-off BBC studio space where the original show was made along with a group of people whose lives were somehow impacted by Ghostwatch. You can read it here.
In Britain, there are national seances every year to watch this and even a great website called Behind the Curtains that tells so many of the stories of this movie.
If you want to see it for yourself, the 101 Films blu ray release of Ghostwatch is perfect. In addition to the movie, you also get a 30th anniversary feature-length documentary, two sets of commentary — one with film historians Dr. Shellie McMurdo and Dr. Stella Gaynor and the other with Volk, producer Ruth Baumgarten and director Lesley Manning — as well as a Shooting Reality feature with Manning, a 32-page book and a first edition slipcase. You can get it from MVD.
Droid is a science fiction movie created by British director Peter Williams, who is really adult film director Philip O’Toole, because this movie is really a re-edited version of the 1987 film Cabaret Sin, a movie in which sex is outlawed except inside the Pleasure Dome, where it is performed live for those who can afford to attend. In other words, it’s Cafe Flesh.
Yet the film that has emerged from the VHS porn wasteland and become a Blade Runner post-apocalyptic movie that you didn’t have to walk through those adult saloon doors to rent. It takes place in Los Angeles, in 2020, and yes, the future is not now.
The world is policed by cops known as Eliminators who are battling the fascist Droid Warriors and their leader Azteca (Lorrie Lovett). Once, those Droids were simply servants and now, more and more, they are breaking free from their programming. The protagonist of this remix is Taylor (Greg Derek), who has a Droid of his own named Rochester (Kevin James, not the comedian) who sounds like a certain protocol droid and looks like a robot from Sleeper or a visitor from V. All Taylor cares about is his ex-wife Nicola (Krista Lane, billed here as Rebecca Lynn), who has been brought into the war and is being charged with stealing a digital decoder to help the Eliminators.
Yet all Taylor seems to do is sit at that club and watch people couple up, like Herschel Savage, Bunny Bleu (if you’re amazed that I knew who she was instantly, well, you didn’t grow up in the late 80s and early 90s), Candie Evans, Kristara Barrington, Keisha and Tom Byron, who is listed as dancer #3.
This is a movie that has a geisha having on-stage sex with a samurai warrior while a man has a ventriloquist doll on his shoulder like some demented bird as a Reformer android with glowing red eyes looks all menacing and fog is everywhere and neon and cigarette smoke and this is what I thought strip clubs would look like and have been forever let down that robots and synth didn’t dominate things, just women trying to make some money off as sad men drink and aggressive bros toss crumpled up dollar bills in furtive gestures of not understanding that they are not truly in control.
THX-1169 is such a better name for this movie.
There are the cheapest Blade Runner cars in this and I love them so much. I’m a fan of movies that in no way need to have science fiction in them, like Obsession: A Taste for Fear, and that makes me want more needless tech and so much fog in everything. When you think of 1988 in the adult world, everyone wanted to be the Dark Brothers or Stephen Sayadian and that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
At the center of the end of the world movies, Naziploitation, smut without smut, Phillip K. Dick and when pornographers saw art within their industry and thought, “Anyone can make Night Dreams or New Wave Hookers” and totally made strange inferior junk like Party Doll-A-Go-Go (am I outing myself or what? I mean, at least that movie has Tianna, Raven and Madison Stone in it), not to mention Star Wars xerox cinema, off the rack futuristic costumes and fog, glorious rolling fog, you will find Droid.
The Coma-Brutal Duel is one of two movies made by Heiko Fipper, along with Ostermontag or I Spit On Your Fucking Grave Bitch! If you think that you’ve seen everything there is to see when it comes to German ultragore shot on video movies, get ready.
Less a film than a series of shorts created between 1984 and 1999, this starts with Stephan Bandera losing his father to a drunk driver named John Eisentempler and enlisting an organized crime family to help him get revenge. It seems that the drunk driver won’t get any prison time, so Stephen pledges himself to the family and what follows is a calvalcade of carnage and human body destruction.
Only Heiko, the son of John, survives and just barely. He ends up in a coma that lasts ten years and walks into the sunset, only to be met by a still-alive Stephan and another bloody battle that takes out both of them.
He awakens, crucified, as the mob has their way with him while they bring Stephan back to life just as a zombie attacks. By the close, zombies are in nearly every scene as the leads continually battle over and over again until there can be only one alive.
Everyone was obviously having fun making this, no matter how tense some of the torture scenes get. How else can you explain characters scooping up their own brains, putting them back in their heads and getting back out to fight again? It’s like playing army in your old neighborhood where every wound magically heals except these ones send brown sprays of blood everywhere. It also has a mob made up of eight identical members, so at least it realizes how ridiculous it is, but those of a more delicate stomach may want to skip a movie that has a baby ripped out of a womb and stomped into oblivion.
In the year 2210, the world as we know it has been wiped out by a virus sent here by aliens — aliens that look like ninjas with pillowcases over their heads. Now, their leader Lord Gideon (Conrad Brooks, yes, from Ed Wood’s movies) has sent these alien ninjas to destroy the last two people alive, Jake (director and writer Jose Prendes) and Katherine Great (Denice Duff, Michelle Morgan from Bloodstone: Subspecies IIand Bloodlust: Subspecies III and the director of Song of the Vampire; if you’re going to be alone with just one woman, you really are doing find if it’s Denice Duff).
Beyond Prendes being decent at kicking and punching, he was smart enough to go to a convention and pay Tom Savini and Linnea Quigley to do a scene, which is probably some of the reasons why some people watched this.
Prendes is still making movies, writing stuff like Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark and directing 2022’s Headless Horseman. He thanks marshmallows in the credits, which seems like the right thing to do after watching this.
Who would think of making Omega Man on the budget of what Will Smith drank in soda on each day of I Am Legend? Joe Prendes. That’s who.
The one and done directorial work of Felix Girard, Night of Terror was written by Renee Harmon, who went from being in an acting group in Texas with fellow Army officer’s wives to roles in Al Adamson’s Cinderella 2000 as well as Frozen Scream, Lady Streetfigher, Van Nuys Blvd., Jungle Trap and Hell Riders. She also stars Chris Nilsen, who is being kept in a mental hospital against her will by her philandering husband Alex (Henry Lewis) and Dr. Seymour Harper (Frank Neuhaus), who just wants to experiment on his patients in a very Hellhole scenario.
Her lawyer finally gets her released and she moves into the former home of Harper — bad idea — and becomes friends with Harper’s wife Ellen (Lynn Whitmire) — bad idea again — and stays there even after learning that Harper’s mistress Inez (Susette Andres) was killed there in the worst of all these ideas. If that doesn’t just beat all, there’s also a hooded would-be giallo killer in the form of Harper’s patient Paul Peterson (Steven Neuhardt) who is haunting the house as well.
Somehow, in the midst of all of this, we get to see Chris’ stepdaughter Becky (Lauren Brent) go to a pool party where a new wave band plays and by plays, I mean we hear the entire song and not just a clip of them.
As all of this is happening, Chris also meets Paul’s psychic mother Celeste (Arline Specht) who uses an Ouija board — oh man, Ouija and SOV in the same movie, alert my Letterboxd lists — to introduce our protagonist to her spirit guide Julian.
Obviously this was also produced by Harmon, so no one told her not to speak in an impenetrable accent — to be fair, she was born in Mannheim, Germany but had lived in the U.S. for some time and there’s usually always a second take but come on, there wasn’t we all know that — or play scenes from Frozen Screamas happening at the same time as this tale, despite that movie being made ten years or more before that.
That said, I kind of love this whole enterprise. From Paul wearing a full set of fancy pajamas while supposedly in a mental hospital — topped by the bald female patient who looks to be wearing an outfit from a combination fast food restaurant and Nickelodeon game show — this is a movie full of choices, so few of those choices being ones that make the slightest sense. It also has a Night Killer-level scene of its lead character having a long conversation with herself in a mirror and you know how much I love that.
This is also a film that ends with potential forced surgery and a ghost melting her face in front of everyone, as well as Paul being absolved of all the murders he’s committed and yet stalking our heroine in a twist sting that made me laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.
Keep in mind as you watch this that Renee Harmon was an acting teacher in East Texas and yes, of course she was. She should have been. More people should make movies like Night of Terror, which is also called Escape from the Insane Asylum. There are Dutch angles, sure, but there’s also a scene where Harmon screams at herself and puts lipstick all over her face and man, that’s cinema.
Directed by Giovanni Arduino and Andrea Lioy, this Italian SOV* movie has a great title that there’s no way that it can live up to.
Bernie has been burnt up from being hit by a drunk driver so he remains high as much as possible and hides his injuries under a white Klan hood because the car was black. His receptionist sister Jenny, who everyone thinks is ugly but in no way looks that way, abuses him by repeatedly kicking him in the ballbag before injecting him with her urine, which gives her mental power over him. I think you have to pay for that kind of treatment.
There’s also a garage band called The Sick Rose that plays throughout the movie as Bernie kills everyone who has been tormenting his sister. I’m still trying to figure out the punk rock cop whose dad was a banana peel falling for cowboy.
It does have someone getting their face jammed into a meat slicer and several people cutting off their own dicks and then eating them. In case you wondered why I’m not the kind of reviewer who gets to be on Criterion blu rays and a talking head on Shudder shows, it’s because there’s no call for someone to discuss the best self-castration scenes in SOV movies.
I mean, regular Italian exploitation horror has scenes of eyeballs being destroyed, drill presses through people’s heads and people literally puking their guts out. Actually all of those things happen in City of the Living Dead. Just imagine how much more disgusting Italian filmmakers who aren’t really filmmakers are. That said, just imagine how many long stretches there are of this film there are where absolutely nothing happens.
*I get this was shot on Super 8 but you know what I mean when it comes to the quality. I know that I’ll get at least one letter if I don’t have this disclaimer.
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