VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 30, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

My wife wants to go away on a fancy vacation. While horror films have forever enriched my life, they’ve also damaged her chances of going anywhere. The tropics? Have you seen Zombi? A resort like Sandals? I assume that Laura Gemser will show up and I’ll be boiled in a pot. And now, thanks to this movie, we can also cross Mexico off the list.

As much as horror may have curtailed my partner’s opportunity to globetrot, it’s also imparted several important lessons to me. To wit: if your mine is over a Satanic temple where left hands were severed to honor demons and every single worker refuses to go any deeper, perhaps it’s time to find a new mine. And if by chance you discover a miniature coffin with a hand inside it, just leave it where you found it. Don’t take it back to your hotel room. This is why I’ve made it forty-six years on this Earth without being possessed or dealing with a face-melting cult in the desert.

My true joy in the movie Demonoid comes from reading the review that it received when it was released in 1981 and laughing in their prose faces. How can anyone dislike a movie where a possessed man decides that old school Las Vegas is the best place to hide out? Who can dismiss a film where Samantha Eggar obviously dressed herself in some of the most astounding fashions that the early 80s could unleash? The woman wears an ascot and oversized orange counter to explore a mine (let’s be fair, every outfit she wears in this movie are a paradox, somehow both gorgeous and ridiculous at the same time). And damn anyone who speaks ill of Stuart Whitman! This former boxer and soldier had already played Jim Jones — I’m sorry, James Johnson — in Guyana: Crime of the Century, released less than a year after that tragedy? Here, he plays a battling Catholic priest who we just know could win over Ms. Eggar if he didn’t have that pesky collar and angel on his shoulder to worry about.

Maybe they weren’t watching the Mexican cut (Macabra!), which has more dialogue, more death and a different ending? Look, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. And most of those critics, they never got pleased all that much anyways. Demonoid is worth the whole lot of them. Would they dare to feature an ending so downbeat after 98 minutes of rooting for our British heroine? I dare say no. They’d be afraid to insert so many flashing shots of a demon raising his fist, they’d be too concerned about a soundtrack that practically screams in your face and they’d sooner hide behind their film theory books than make a movie in 1981 that feels like it came from 1974.

Demonoid is why I watch movies. Samantha Eggar screaming at the top of her lungs while a mine explodes all around her? There. An appearance by Haji, she of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Bigfoot, Supervixens and the wonderfully titled Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman(whose real name Barbarella Catton wasn’t sexy enough for a stage name)? You got me. Overacting in nearly every scene? I’m riveted. A poster that promised nubile ladies reclining for a fallen angel carrying a gigantic sword? I might have piddled a little.

Keep your Oscar picks and guilty pleasures. I have no such taste or qualms. Give me Demonoid or give me a severed left hand!

This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum #13, which you can get right here!

You can watch this movie on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 30, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Based on the novel The Damned Innocents by Richard Neely, this film was directed and written by Claude Chabrol, a member of the French New Wave (nouvelle vague) group of filmmakers. Chabrol claimed that he was “seized by the demon of cinema,” which led to him writing about film and championing directors like Alfred Hitchcock, who this film owes a debt to.

Chabrol was a massive fan of Hitchcock, even writing a book on the director with Eric Rohmer. On the set of To Catch a Thief, Chabrol and François Truffaut were so starstruck that they walked right into a water tank. Hitchcock would laugh at that for years, even saying years later that the dup were “ice cubes in a glass of whiskey.”

Chabrol’s first movie was the Hitchcock-influenced Le Beau Serge and throughout his career, he would return to the styles of the director and stories of the rich and powerful dealing with murder and scandal.

Louis Wormser (Rod Steiger) has a young wife — Julie (Romy Schneider) — a drinking problem, a bad heart and a case of impotence. He doesn’t even sleep in bed with his wife anymore, so it’s no wonder that she’s started having sex with a writer named Jeff Marle (Paolo Giusti). And even less of a narrative jump that they decide to kill Louis. She hits him with a heavy object, Jeff rolls him into the water and she decides to lay low. But then Jeff disappears with all the money, leaving Julie without a man, without cash and under the watchful gaze of the police.

So just imagine how she feels when Louis reappears, claiming to be cleaned up and in great health. Even stranger, he says that he got a confession out of Jeff and killed him. Now, he wants to be a good husband and they make love just in time for Jeff to come back for her.

Man, can one woman find worse men? Yes, when it’s in a Hitchcockian film like this. I almost claimed it’s a giallo, but the line between Hitchcock, krimi and giallo is so thin, right? Maybe neo noir is the right category? Do we need labels?

This was released in the U.S by New Line, which caused Vincent Canby of The New York Times to say, “I have no idea how much the English dubbing and editing have damaged the original, but the Dirty Hands that opened yesterday at the Forum and other theaters is a junk movie.”

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 23, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Director Billy Hazelrod (Joe Warfield) wants to make a biker movie in a small town where all of the interactions are real. He wants people to live and breathe their roles, but seeing as how the town already distrusts not just bikers but these Hollywood types, he’s basically setting up a horrible tragedy. Or maybe that’s what he intended all along. Why else would he set a sexual assault scene in a church, surrounded by real worshippers? And why is anyone surprised when they stop kneeling and start attacking the bikers — who they think are real — as the cameras keep rolling?

Sue Bernard (Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) is the lead actress who starts taking her role too seriously. Andrea Cagan (The Hot Box) is the local girl who gets seduced by the dream factory that has taken over her small town. And John Holmes plays a cop!

The idea of this movie is way more interesting than the film itself. If I write and tell you that an accidental killing in this film becomes part of the movie that is being made within the movie and it’s about art and life intersecting, it comes off that this film is able to turn that storyline into something meaningful. It gets close through it’s very fly on the wall way of being shot. Yet it’s so talky that it feels like it will take a long time to get there. If made by a better filmmaker, it may have.

Speaking of those filmmakers, this was directed and co-written (with Earl Jay) by Gerald Sindell, who also made H.O.T.S., a movie that was on cable seemingly non-stop in the middle of the masturbatory night in my teenage years.

You can watch this on YouTube.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 30, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Beyond Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there’s one movie my mother has already brought up that she hated. And that would be this one.

The book that these stories come from has eighteen of them, but Howard B. Kreitsek and Jack Smight picked these three for the film without ever speaking to Ray Bradbury, the author of the book. The tattooed man who appears in the book’s prologue and epilogue would become this film’s main story and be played by Rod Steiger.

The funny thing is that when Steiger takes off his glove to reveal his hand, it’s tattooed and played off as a horrific moment. A half-century after this movie was made, nearly all my friends have this many tattoos.

Carl, the tattooed man, meets Willie and uses his skin illustrations to tell tales throughout time. The ink came from a mysterious woman named Felicia. At the end of the film, Willie sees his death at Carl’s hands in the only bare patch of skin on the Illustrated Man.

The stories that are told include “The Veldt,” which takes place in the future and involves children who study within a virtual version of the African veldt. Soon, the lions will solve this issue of their parents. “The Long Rain” has solar rains* that drive an entire crew to madness in space. And “The Last Night of the World” predates The Mist, with parents who must decide if their children should survive the end of the world.

The final story—and its bleak ending—is exactly why my mom hates this movie. The fact that she may have told me all about it when I was a kid may have given me nightmares.

This movie did poorly critically and financially. Rod Serling, an expert on adapting short stories to film, called it the worst movie ever made.

*Their spaceship is recycled from Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 16, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

One of the things that I love about the 80s mom and pop video store explosion was that there was such a need for content — unmatched until the era of streaming — that everything, it seems, came out on video. Like this Italian tragicomedy, directed by Nanni Loy and written by Loy, Elvio Porta and Nino Manfredi.

Manfredi, who stars in this as Michele Abbagnano, was one of the most prominent Italian actors in the commedia all’italiana genre. He was an incredibly popular actor — described as one of the few truly complete actors in Italian cinema — and is still remembered decades after his death.

Michele makes a living on the night trains between Naples and Vallo della Lucania — I wonder if he ever ran into Macha Méril — selling coffee and cappuccino from the thermos and stolen sugar packets he keeps hidden from the railroad workers. He provides a service that the trains do not — becoming whoever each passenger wants him to be, whether that’s a concert piano player or soldier missing an arm from war or a freezing winter — such as waking them before their stops or keeping their secrets.

Why does he work so hard, keeping so many pleased, long into the night, every night? It’s all to keep his son Cazzillo (Giovanni Piscopo) alive. He suffers from a heart defect and he must remain in the hospital while Michele makes money for his surgery.

On this night, Michele is chased by three conductors — Giuseppe (Silvio Spaccesi), Nicola (Gerardo Scala) and Vigorito(Luigi Basagaluppi) — as he conducts his illegal business, but none more powerful than chief inspector Ramacci-Pisanelli (Adolfo Celi, still playing the villain, even if this isn’t a Eurospy or giallo). If they catch him, he’ll be arrested and he’ll lose the one chance to save his son, who unknown to him has left the hospital and is wandering the night trains himself.

Loy was inspired to do this movie after he worked on a hidden camera show, Viaggio in Seconda Classe, on the night trains. The movie uses that half awake setting to present a series of characters and stories that exist in their own midnight world.

I love that everyone — I admit, I discovered it in the same way — that found this movie on the Video Archives podcast is complaining about the video quality of the version of this movie on Amazon Prime. Perhaps these people — listening to a podcast about a video store’s library of films — never rented from an actual video store, where tracking issues would show up and you got whatever prints some smaller labels would get. Yes, we live in a world of pristine 4K UHD releases — yes, I have more than my share — but for someone who grew up in an era where we took what we could get, sometimes you need to appreciate the actual film more than the media that delivers it to you.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 16, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The Relic is the only movie that I ever watched in a theater in Hollywood.

More to the point, I watched it at Mann’s Chinese Theater.

And I hated it.

Based on the novel Relic by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, this Peter Hyams (Outland, Sudden Death, Timecop) film has Margo Green (Penelope Ann Miller) and Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) going up against Kothoga, a Stan Winston-designed monster.

And for some reason, man, I thought this was the dumbest movie I’d ever seen. Maybe I was on a date. Maybe I was trying to impress someone with my wit. But I loudly made fun of it for most of its running time.

I mean, spoiler warning for a movie made in 1997, but the Kothoga is really a museum anthropologist who drank mushroom soup in South America. I don’t know about you, but the entire idea of that is ridiculous and I have no idea to this day how both Siskel and Ebert liked this.

I feel kind of bad still feeling this way. After all, Hyams made the second most important movie ever made in Pittsburgh, one where Van Damme is a French Canadian firefighter who lives in the Southside Slopes and has a rich ex-wife who lives on Mt. Washington and the Penguins owner’s wife thought it would launch her to Hollywood. So young Sam, cracking wise in a legendary theater, is kind of embarrassing. But old Sam would still find a lot of those jokes hilarious and agree that the end of this movie is a mess and it’s an entire film of Sizemore not stepping on a crack so he doesn’t break his mother’s back while a xenomorph-looking mushroom man rips off people’s heads.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 16, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Based on the novel by F. Paul Wilson* — which was the first of a seven book series called The Adversary Cycle — The Keep is the movie you find on Wikipedia when you look up troubled production. Starting with a rough thirteen week shoot that went all the way to twenty two weeks with reshoots and a supernatural creature that kept changing because director Michael Mann couldn’t decide how he wanted it to look, the fact that this movie was ever released is pretty amazing.

Making things even more challenging was the sad fact that visual effects supervisor Wally Veevers died while the film was still being made and nobody knew how he planned to finish the visual effects scenes in the movie. Mann had to finish 260 shots of special effects himself after Veever’s death.

This is a movie with so many different endings that it’s hard to keep track. The original end was close to the effects Veevers did for 2001: A Space Odyssey with a dimensional wormhole tearing through The Keep and time and space itself. Paramount refused to pay for the filming of the additional footage needed for this finale, so Mann had to compromise.

Mann’s original cut was 210 minute long and we may never see that version of this movie. It was taken out of his hands and cut down to 96 minutes and the result was utter hackwork. Huge chunks of the story are missing, continuity is all over the place and there are obvious mistakes in the sound design, soundtrack and editing. And that’s what played in theaters!

There was a Laurie Anderson score for this — it ended up becoming her album United States Live — but this film wouldn’t be as successful as it is without the Tangerine Dream score that plays throughout.

Somehow, it took until 2020 for this to come out on DVD and that was only in Australia. It looks like this will never get a big release, but hey — we’ve been surprised before. When asked if it would ever be released in 2016, Mann said, “No. we were never able to figure out how we were to combine all these components that were shot (pre blue and green screen). That one’s going to stay in its…” before he just stopped talking.

A German unit of soldiers have occupied an uninhabited citadel n Romania in an attempt to control the Dinu Mountain Pass. Two soldiers attempt to steal a religious icon before releasing Radu Molasar, a monster that kills several soldiers as it becomes more physically real. And as the soldiers struggle to keep their ownership of The Keep, even more sadistic troops come to town, killing the local villagers.

There’s also a Jewish historian named Prof. Theodore Cuza (Ian McKellen) who the Molasar is using to escape the confines of this building, another mysterious named Glaeken Trismegestus (Scott Glenn) and yeah — just listen to the cool music and watch the pretty lights and let this movie wash over you. I mean, German soldiers and Jewish people joining together to stop a golem? Is that a good explanation? Who knows!

There’s a great cast game for whatever happens, like Gabriel Byrne, Robert Prosky, Jürgen Prochnow and Alberta Watson. As for Mann, he left the movies behind for a while. But he did just fine, creating Miami Vice and making films like the fascinating Manhunter, Heat and The Insider.

Somehow, Mayfair Games was able to take the movie and make a board game and a Dungeons & Dragons module in its RoleAids line.

No matter how disjointed or poorly editing this movie is, I keep watching it. Maybe someday, the film I get to see will be the one that Mann actually wanted audiences to see.

*Wilso disliked this movie so much that he wrote a short story called “Cuts” in which a writer puts a voodoo curse on a director who has ruined one of his books.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the September 13, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Interpol agent Ramon Ortega (Franco Guerrero) and his new blonde American children’s book author wife Ann (Jody Kay, Death Screams) are back in the Philippines after a honeymoon in San Francisco. Within minutes, the drug dealer that our hero is after — Edwards (Christopher Mitchum) — has sent his men to kill Ann and chopped off his arm. And in case you’re wondering if the drug dealer is evil, he has an evil Axis symbol on the side of his boat.

He spirals into depression and drinking, just trying to live out the rest of his life in pain when a new master named Wo Chen appears and teaches him how to fight with one hand and how to do gun fu, if you will, in which they have a gigantic training device with numbers. The master calls out the targets and Ortega gets better with each shot.

You feel for Ortega, as he found the right kind of woman, the one who sleeps with baby dolls and has sex in the shower with her shower cap on, the height of eroticism. But seriously, he really does hit rock bottom but this film pulls him up and gives him the chance to get revenge. This movie is an absolute blast from the beginning until the end, delivering the kind of weirdness and magical action that could only come from the Philippines and a master director like Bobby A. Suarez, who also directed American Commandos, The Bionic Boy, Cleopatra Wong and Warriors of the Apocalypse.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 2, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

EDITOR’S NOTE: To see the review that Severin quoted on the back cover of this release, click here.

Delirium is kind of about Vietnam vet Charlie Gunther (Nick Panouzis).

It’s also kind of about a secret society of vets bringing together other vets — kind of like my VFW, but with less drinking and amazing barbecue on Fridays and Saturdays, shout out to Terry and his amazing chops — to murder those that they think deserve it. Led by Eric Stern (Barron Winchester), they’re remaking St. Louis in the image of cleanliness and order, one gory murder at a time.

Those two stories come together as Stern hires Charlie, trying to bond with him. They’re both Vietnam vets, right? Well, where Stern gets rid of his trauma through doing what the cops can’t, Charlie gets rid of his PTSD by killing women.

Sterns’s group feels a lot like the people that hired The Punisher in his first mini-series. Or The Star Chamber. Both of those came long after this.

You know what didn’t? Magnum Force.

While Charlie is murdering young ladies and Stern and his men kill anyone who could turn them in, cops Paul Dollinger (Turk Cekovsky) and Larry Mead (Terry TenBroek) are on the case, wondering who could have killed so many people on the streets of St. Louis.

This movie was stitched together, starting with an “an unfinished urban conspiracy thriller” and then adding on slasher story beats, because, well, John Carpenter happened to make a movie in 1978 that a lot of people seemed to enjoy.

What emerges is a movie that honestly makes no sense and every time you’re about to point out a lapse in logic, the movie responds to you by showing bare breasts or having someone get violently chopped up with a meatcleaver or shot, stabbed or impaled in the most messy way possible. That’s how you make movies: throw everything at the wall and what doesn’t stick, well, cover it with squibs and spray everyone with red food coloring and Karo syrup.

Director Peter Maris also made Alien Species and Land of Doom, two movies that did not end up as memorable as this. Nor did they end up on the Section 2 Video Nasty list. This movie has an alternate title that makes no sense — which makes it great. That title? Psycho Puppet.

It also has a conspiracy group of Vietnam vets who kidnap criminals who got away with it, kill them and then stage suicide scenes. That’s planning. You have to respect that level of thought.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the August 9, 2022 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Could James Bond be relevant in a post-Star Wars world? If Moonraker had anything to say about it, yes. Up until GoldenEye, it was the highest-grossing of the series, making $230 million worldwide.

But wait — didn’t the end credits of the last film promise James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only? Sure they did. However, the producers chose the novel Moonraker because of the aforementioned Jedi-starring George Lucas film.

One could also argue that Hugo Drax’s plan is exactly the same plan as Karl Stromberg’s in The Spy Who Loved Me: blow up the world and go away to build your own civilization. This time, it’s in space versus underwater.

Here’s the weird thing: for such an iconic British character, this movie’s shooting was moved from the tax heavy UK to France. This is also why Michael Lonsdale was cast as Drax instead of James Mason and Corinne Clery was cast instead of Corinne Dufour. Ah, the 1965–79 film treaty in action. Well, I have no complaints about Clery, who is also in Yor Hunter from the Future and Fulci’s The Devil’s Honey.

Lois Chiles (Creepshow 2) had originally been offered the role of Anya Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me, but was in temporary retirement. In actuality, bad reviews had sent her back to acting school and she ended up getting the role of Holly Goodhead when she was seated next to director Lewis Gilbert on a flight. Jaclyn Smith had almost signed for the part but had to turn it down due to scheduling conflicts with Charlie’s Angels.

This is perhaps the silliest of the Moore movies — well, there’s also him bedding Grace Jones in A View to a Kill — and it’s nearly overflowing with effects and gadgets. But hey — Jaws turns good, gets a girlfriend and opens a bottle of champagne by biting into it. So there’s that.

There remains an urban legend that Orson Welles was making his own version of this movie, as Fleming intended it to be filmed as early as 1955. The rumor is that 40 minutes of raw footage exists with Dirk Bogarde as Bond, Welles as Drax and Peter Lorre as Drax’s henchman.