As a storm tears through Manhattan, four convicts narrowly escape the crash of their prison transport. Bomber Christie (Robert Carradine), sex criminal Eddy (Terry Haig), murderer Marcus (Victor B. Tyler) and arsonist Chico (Don Granbery) are free to take over a building, steal some money, find a getaway car and oh yeah, assault Annie (Belinda Montgomery) and destroy the Picasso of Richard (Ray Milland). What they didn’t count on was police officer Dan Evans (Jim Mitchum) finding them.
There are also roles for June Allyson, Jean-Pierre Aumont, John Wildman, Vlasta Vrana and Peter MacNeill. If you watched your share of Canadian exploitation movies, you’d recognize Wildman from Skullduggery and Humongous.
It’s a mean movie made by the director of one of my favorite films. Yes, Eddy Matalon made Cathy’s Curse before this and he hasn’t lost his edge, putting man, woman, child and dogs in harm’s way. It was written by John C.W. Saxton, who wrote Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS under the name Jonah Royston as well as Happy Birthday to Me and Class of 1984. The story was inspired by an idea from John Dunning, who has just as wild of a resume, as he wrote all three Snake Eater movies and produced Daughters of Darkness, The Possession of Virginia, Shivers, Rabid, The House by the Lake, Meatballs, The Surrogate, The Vindicator and wow, Buffalo ’66. He was also responsible for one of Canada’s first erotic movies, Valérie.
Psychiatrist C.J. Arnold (Richard Crenna) has bought an abandoned Civil War mansion that was built over hot sulfur pits, which seems like it may instantly be an issue beyond the fact that, you know, the house is totally haunted. But sure, why not turn it into a place where drug addicts can cold turkey sweat out all the stuff in their systems.
His wife Dr. Caroline Arnold (Joanna Pettet, who had lunch with Sharon Tate the afternoon of her death) is able to sense that there’s something wrong, so she heads to the basement and unleashes it because, well, we wouldn’t have a movie otherwise.
And what a movie we have, with people spontaneously combusting, dogs suicidally knocking Cassie Yates (Rolling Thunder, Sarah Curtis on Dynasty) off a balcony, people sawing off their own hands, Mandy Pepperidge being abducted by some kind of ghostly entity, bodies coming back from the dead, said entities ripping clothes off of women, Andrew Prine drowning in quicksand and Victor Buono as the devil.
This episode brings back more Lovecraft and a Basil Copper story as well in an episode that stays mainly on the side of horror and less of the poor attempts at humor that often ruin this show.
After having Jack Laird bring a Lovecraft story to a previous episode*, host Rod Serling wrote “Cool Air,” which is directed by Jeannot Szwarc. It’s about the strange love story between Agatha Howard (Barbara Rush) and Dr. Juan Munoz (Henry Darrow), a man who must live in a constantly cold apartment. Her father was a professor that wrote often to Munoz and they both refused to believe in the power of death. Szwarc has commented that Lovecraft, as written, was unfilmable. Serling solves that by making this horror actually about romance and loss, even if it leaves Agatha alone in a graveyard, saying “I wonder if I’m mourning something that was or something that might have been.”
I know I go on and on about how this show gets damaged by the attempts at humor, but this story is an example of just how perfect this series can be when it works. It’s not a slavish version of the Lovecraft story, but takes the main ideas and becomes something more suited for the small screen.
“Camera Obscura” is directed by John Badham and written by Serling. It’s about a money lender named Mr. Sharsted (Rene Auberjonois) collecting from a man whose 13% interest has come due, Mr. Gingold (Ross Martin). Gingold has a camera obscura — a darkened room with a small hole through which an image can be projected onto a wall or table — that can see nearly all of London and he uses it to point out the greed that has marked Sharsted’s career. And he has another camera just like it, yet it can send a man back in time to a world of even greedier men whose sins have transformed them into monsters.
“Quoth the Raven” is directed by Jeff Corey and written by Laird. Edgar Allan Poe (Marty Allen) is trying to write and the raven (Mel Blanc) is annoying him. Do I even need to write how this made me feel?
That said, this episode is so strong, one can escape those last few pointless moments.
There’s a fine line between a dominant person and someone who takes advantage of their submissives. I mean, yes, there’s always the element of taking advantage of someone within BDSM, but the idea of consent remains paramount so that the headspace to roleplay can be successfully explored. But when someone takes advantage of that trust, they prove themselves to be the absolute worst in humanity.
Unfortunately, when Hollywood allows this hidden side of human sexuality into their films, it’s often for. the exploitation value and always leads toward antagonists who use their power in the worst of ways. For the unitiated, it seems that the world of domination and submission is a mind destroying world of sinister sneering men and meek brutalized women.
Safe Word would be another of those films, but at no point did I expect it to give me life lessons or properly translate the multiflavored world of kink for a mainstream audience. I just expected to be entertained.
Colette (Moriah Brown) has just met Ethan (Gavin Houston) and she’s already smitten. He’s good looking, seemingly successful and able to push her libido into forbidden places. For some reason, one of those forbidden places is to reenact the meet cute in Notting Hill, which doesn’t seem like something a young African American couple would get turned on by, but who am I to yuck anyone’s yum?
Within just a few weeks, Colette is neglecting her job — the tension between she and a co-worker feels like the kind of storyline that would last for weeks on a streaming show but here is over in minutes — as well as her friend Lainey (Kajuana S. Marie) and even her mother. Then, she and Ethan run off to elope and her dream relationship quickly grows brutal and dark, with arguments erupting over everything, including multiple arguments over the quality of pudding. Look, if you’ve been in a bad relationship, you get that fights can emerge over the smallest of things. I may have never fought over the quality of my homemade desserts, but I can see it happening.
Ethan also breaks down Colette’s sexual hangups and brings toys and restraints into their bedroom. She reminds him that she has some behavioral health issues that cause her to panic whenever she’s confined and he explains to her how a safe word works. Yet within days, he’s telling her things would be hotter without the safe word that stops him from going further. This should be her — and anyone’s — first clue that this guy is the wrong person to give power to, as the very idea of a safe word allows the play of saying no and stop while the dominant keeps going. The safe word keeps that illusion while also giving the submissive a level of security that yes, things can actually stop.
He also brings her to a sex club where she has her first threesome, an event she brags about to Lainey, who seems way interested in her friend’s romantic life, a fact that upsets Ethan and makes him consider ending their marriage. There’s also the matter of a woman that Colette meets, Stephanie (Shaquita Smith), an ex-lover of Ethan who seems deranged as a result of what he made her endure. Is she just a jealous woman from the past or is she justified in wanting revenge?
Spoiler: She’s totally right, as Ethan comes from an entire secret society of sexual beings who own the police, the courts and, well, pretty much everything. I kind of love that this weird side of the movie only comes out once or twice. And I adore that Stephanie is an absolute maniac when she attacks people, brutalizing them beyond the point of normalcy.
Directed by Sara Seligman and written by Dana Verde, Safe Word could be considered a Lifetime version of 50 Shades of Grey with a more evil edge. As most Tubi movies have been having sequels, I can definitely see how this can have another chapter and you know, I’d definitely watch this. Yes, I disagree with the way that it presents the world of kink, but you know, that’s a lost battle. It does achieve it’s main goal, which is being ridiculous fun.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site on September 10, 2019 but has new info added from my interview with Allan Arkush.
Deathsport unites everything I love about late 1970’s junk film all in one place. It’s set after a nuclear war. It has David Carradine in it. Claudia Jennings, too. Throw in Richard Lynch, motorcycles, lucite swords and strange religion and you’ve discovered the most perfect of all movies for 5:44 AM on a Thursday.
This was supposed to be a sequel to Death Race 2000 with motorcycles instead of cars. Seems simple, right? After all, Corman had a five-picture commitment with David Carradine and already had Charles B. Griffith writing the script.
Corman was unhappy with the script and Nicholas Niciphor, a recent graduate of USC, got the job of writing and directing the film. He had two weeks to write and pre-produce it. And to top it off, Carradine had no real interest in being in the movie and would only give three weeks of his time to the production.
It didn’t get any easier once production began. Niciphor would later say, “The script was too ambitious, the shooting schedule too tight and…the crew and the cast were largely sodden with drugs.” He was including both Carradine and Jennings in that statement. Indeed — this was one of her last films before she died in a car crash at the age of 29.
Years later, Carradine would tell Psychotronic Video that Niciphor was “a very talented and crazy guy. As a director, he was erratic and unknowing…The picture, which was brilliantly written, was unable to overcome the madness of the shoot.” He elaborated that his “direction seemed to me to mainly consist of hysteria and episodic tantrums,” including an incident where Niciphor physically attacked Jennings and got his ass kicked by Carradine in response.
For his part, Niciphor did admit to physically removing Jennings from a motorcycle because of how high she was and that Carradine routinely roughed him up on set, including breaking his nose. He had to hurry back from the hospital and finish the actor’s scenes before he left to film Circle of Iron.
After all that madness, Corman ordered reshoots. That’s kind of amazing given his stingy nature. But then the director wouldn’t work with Carradine, so Allan Arkush stepped in. He told Trailers from Hell about this experience, remembering: “Mostly we just blew up motorcycles. Lots of them. We also set some mutants on fire. And the stunning Claudia Jennings got naked. David Carradine…smoked a lot of high-grade weed and helped us to blow stuff up…Sad to say, I couldn’t save the picture.”
One of those scenes added in was a nude scene where Jennings was tortured. Why? Well, Corman felt like this movie needed more nudity. Despite plans for a third film, Deathworld, the movie didn’t perform and Carradine claimed that his career never recovered.
So what’s it all about?
A thousand years from tomorrow, after the Neutron Wars, the world is made up of city states — ala Judge Dredd — surrounded by wastelands populated by cannibal mutants and policed by the Range Guides.
Two cities — Helix and Tritan — are about to go to war with one another with their Death Machines, which are laser-equipped motorcycles. Yes, that’s the absolute furthest technology has taken us.
Meanwhile, the death penalty has been replaced by Deathsport, where criminals battle each other to the death for their freedom. Lord Zirpola (David McLean, one of the two Marlboro men to suffer from cancer) yearns to use his Death Machines on the Range Guides, but the two best, Kaz Oshay (Carradine) and Deneer (Jennings) escape.
As they search for Deneer’s missing child, Oshay must battle the man who turned on the code of the Range Guides and killed his mother, Ankar Moor (Lynch). Of course, they’re destined to battle one another in combat using their Whistler swords. If you’ve always wanted to see Richard Lynch get decapitated, well, this is the movie for you.
Someday, mark my words, I’m going to do a Letterboxd list of Hardboiled Haggarty’s many roles. The ex-pro wrestler is in this as a jailer.
Brenda Venus also appears as Adriann and her life could totally be a Roger Corman movie. When she was in college, Venus purchased a book at an auction that contained an envelope with the address of famed writer Henry Miller. She wrote to the ailing author and soon, the two became romantic pen pals with over 1,500 letters exchanged between the two of them. This relationship led to Miller becoming her mentor and Venus his muse.
Ed Millis wrote, “Venus was a source of inspiration to the aging and ailing Miller. Brenda was all of 24 years of age, Henry was 84. She was a beautiful Southern belle, “The Botticelli of Mississippi” — he called her. Henry, the renegade intellectual, the writer, had taken millions of us to the sexy Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn. Now he was sick and slowly recuperating. He needed a lift in spirits… Brenda the Muse breathed life into her mortal charge and gave him reason to live.”
After appearing in the June 1997 issue of Playboy, Venus wrote a column for the magazine called “Centerfolds on Sex.” She also wrote the books Secrets of Seduction and Secrets of Seduction for Women, which have been translated into 37 languages.
In 2002, prime minister Vladimir Putin requested that Venus visit Moscow as his guest to attend the opening performance of Venus, a play about her life. I can only imagine how bonkers that play was.
Even stranger, the music in this movie comes from the film was scored by Andy Stein (A Prairie Home Companion’s Guys All-Star Shoe Band and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) and Jerry Garcia.
My favorite part of this movie would be the strange speeches that the Range Guides give to one another. They also heal one another through sex, which is very 1970s. Carradine wrote in his memoirs that when the time came to shoot those scenes, Niciphor told him he hadn’t slept with a woman in six months, so he couldn’t trust himself to be naked in the same room as Jennings. Carradine directed those scenes instead. He also probably punched Niciphor in the face afterward.
In true Roger Corman fashion, some of the footage from this film was sold to the TV show The Fall Guy, where it appears in the episode “Baker’s Dozen.”
You can get this on a double disc with Battletruck from Shout! Factory. It’s also free on Tubi.
I asked Allan Arkush several questions about this movie.
B&S: Another IMDB trivia note that maybe you can dispel: Is that the Deathsportbike in the hallways scene near the end of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School?
ALLAN: No. Those were bigger road bikes and that was the problem. Shooting them for that film, they weren’t really the right bikes for going across a rough landscape. But Roger got a deal on those bikes and we used them…
B&S: What happened with Nicholas Niciphor directing that movie?
ALLAN: Well, Nick had gone to UCLA and he was really good, but he was brought up in Europe and he had never seen a Roger Corman movie. And he hadn’t seen the kinds of movies that we were making, he’d seen art films.
Everyone working with Corman had turned down Deathsport. It had a bad, bad script. We were desperate to do our first picture and we still all turned it down!
One of the problems Nick had was that we’d all been working for Corman for three or four years and had built this network of people. Nick was an outsider. And he’s working for Corman, who was so cheap that he didn’t want to rent out a screening room to show him Death Race 2000 and he’s making the sequel to that movie!
He didn’t know anyone like we did, the people you could turn to to get these done. Making a Corman movie took a certain amount of camaraderie and he was walking into it blind. And his experience wasn’t enough. I don’t want to say anything about him as a person. He was a stranger in a strange land.
It wasn’t going to work, so nothing was working right. If you look at the Trailers from Hell, I summed up all of the things that were wrong about the movie. I worked on it for another six weeks afterward trying to save it. Nothing changed. It still was awful.
Roger was like, put aside Disco High — which was what he wanted Rock ‘n Roll High Schoolto be — and come blow up motorcycles and then I’ll let you make your musical.
The story was so vague and strange. I had to spend a lot of time correcting screen direction and so forth. And I was editing and writing and shooting it was a disaster. The preview was so bad that just before the sword fight, the projectionist closed the curtain.
B&S: Well, the poster sells the movie. And Claudia Jennings. You can’t look away from her.
ALLAN: Ali Larter, who was on Heroes, is the same way. There’s no time of the day or night where she doesn’t look perfect.
In 2010, Blue Water Comics released a four issue miniseries with more stories from the universe of this movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I watched this at Another Hole In the Head film festival and now it’s available on digital platforms.
Director and writer A.T. Sharma has created a film in which a young therapist (Tim Torre) tries everything he can to save his patient (Adam Johnson, who is really great in this) including hypnotism. The problem is that that backfires and soon the issues that his patient is undergoing begins to slowly go even more unhinged than a man who is struggling to keep his business solvent and his family together.
Starting with “The following is based on actual case studies” and ending with a long quote about the Catholic Church trying to keep exorcism relevant — “There continue to be cases of demonic possession that goes mis-diagnosed as mental illness today. The Catholic Diocese states that there has been a recent increase in exorcisms in the United States and around the world. As faith is in decline, more people are opening themselves up to the reality of evil. Father Vincent Lampert (Diocese appointed exorcist)” — this film has some disquieting moments, including a grisly suicide scene that shocked me.
By the way, Lampert is the designated exorcist of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and part of the Pope Leo XIII Institute in Milwaukee, a training school for American clergy to learn how to perform an exorcism.
This is a little all over the place, but it’s got an interesting take on possession and how modern medicine attempts to stop it. I sometimes ponder how much of possession is just mental illness and how much of mental illness is possession.
David Gamble (Will Coleman) has it all. A gorgeous wife named Jenna (NuNu Thurman). A successful business with his college best friend Greg (Lemastor Spratling, who in addition to being a director, actor, model, producer writer, he’s also the CEO of Fair Game Credit Repair). It’d all be great if he didn’t wonder why his wife seems to be working late hours and Greg’s number keeps coming up on her phone. Then he hires a private detective to find out what’s going on. Here’s some advice: if you don’t want to know the answer to a question, don’t ask it.
Obviously, spoilers from here on out.
The funny thing is, you can see through what’s happening here as soon as the drama starts. It’s literally the kind of plot that happens on sitcoms. Except that, well, most sitcoms don’t have angry husbands meeting hitmen in parking lots — I love how the hitman says, “Meet me in the shopping center” as if there’s only one place in shop in the entire town where this takes place — and paying to have their best friend dealt with.
Even funnier is how David reacts to all of this, as Gamble portrays it like a mild inconvenience when he realizes he was wrong and doesn’t even really freak out all that much when calling Greg or trying to warn the guy who has been his friend forever that he’s about to die. Then his heart starts beating really hard and he passes out to end the movie. It doesn’t come off as dramatic. It comes off as absolutely hilarious.
That said, director and writer Janaya Black knows the kind of movie that she’s making. She keeps things moving and entertaining. Sure, it really does seem like Jenna is hiking the Appalachian trail with Greg but man, David should have listened to that detective — every white guy in this is either a seedy detective or a killer and all of them tell you that if you ever talk to them again, they’ll kill you — and had a conversation before he decided to make that big step.
Based on three Henry James stories — “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle” and “The Way It Came” — this was Francois Truffaut’s seventeenth film and the third in which he’d also act. He plays Julien Davenne, a newspaper editor who specializes at obituaries and who keeps a special room in his house to pay tribute to his decade-gone wife Julie.
A thunderstorm destroys the room and Julien finds an abandoned chapel that he transforms into a celebration of all the people he has lost in his life — the room is actually filled with photos of people from Truffaut’s life — yet refuses to include a photo for his friend Cécilia Mandel (Nathalie Baye), who wants to include her lover Paul Massigny’s image. At one point, Paul and Julien were best friends, but something happened.
When the relationship between Julien and Cécilia ends, he locks himself in his home and refuses to eat. She writes him and urges him to forgive Paul. He does and they visit the chapel one more time, at which point he dies and she leaves behind a picture and candle for him.
Truffaut had watched his movie Shoot the Piano Player and suddenly saw that half the cast was dead and it was only seventeen years old. He wondered why we could not have the same affection for the dead as those that were alive when he made this. This ended up being one of his best reviewed films but one of his biggest financial failures.
The last theatrical film of Ralph Nelson (Charly, Lillies of the Field), the screenplay for this film came from the author of the book that it’s based on, Alice Childress. It’s all about teenager Benjie (Larry B. Scott), who goes from marijuana to heroin and nearly dropping not just out of school, but life itself. Can his family — mother Sweets (Cicely Tyson), grandmother Mrs. Bell (Helen Martin) and replacement father figure Butler (Paul Winfield) — save him?
This is a movie that tries so much, presenting a story about drug use, a story about black men losing their fathers, about how black men and the education system don’t mix well, about a young black couple trying to make things work and build a family, all within one story that really wants to do well but keeps trying, as I said, too much in too little time.
That said, the cast is beyond likable and if this were a series, this could have adjusted and been all of those things. It’s preachy, sure, but it has the right message from a heart that is in the proper place.
Poliziotto senza pauraalso known as Fearless, Fatal Charm, Fearless Fuzz and A Matter of Honour is directed by Stelvio Massi (Convoy Busters, Highway Racer), who wrote the screenplay with Gino Capone from a story by Fulvio Gicca Palli.
In the lead role of Walter Spada is poliziotteschi star Maurizio Merli, who was encouraged by Massi to act like Phillip Marlow and only shoot his fun once in the entire film, to which the actor replied, “Come on, he must be shooting like mad, or else nobody’s going to watch this movie!”*
Wally and his partner Benny (Massimo Vanni) are off the police force and now private detectives who make their own kind of law for criminals. This takes them to Austria, where a child prostitution ring has already taken one of his friend’s daughters. Unlike other Merli films, Wally is more of a fan of action movies than one himself, as he smiles and laughs more in this movie than in all of his others put together, even if this gets really grim.
Once Walter saves Annalize von Straben (Annarita Grapputo, Don’t Look In the Attic, Like Rabid Dogs) twice — criminals take her back from his apartment at one point — he gets on the case of a dead girl and her still-living friend Renata (Jasmine Maimone, Nancy from Demons) and gets seduced by the mystifying Brigitte (Joan Collins). And yes, if you love Joan Collins, well, this is the movie for you, as she’s not only an evil seductress, she actually does an exotic dance, the kind that never showed up in I Don’t Want to Be Born even though her character is a stripper.
This has Merli wearing overalls, which is certainly odd, in the beginning action scenes. After an entire movie waiting for him to go nuts, man, he sure does, busting through windows and fist fighting his way through an entire film’s worth of bums. Even after — again — all this darkness, it still has a wacky sitcom ending too.
I loved this movie so much that I yelled out loud at one point and my wife thought I was having some kind of medical emergency.
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