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

Shot on video in real Chicago locations over several years for a reported total of $10,000, Black Devil Doll from Hell is one of the most famous SOV movies ever made, preceding the more successful Chicago-based Child’s Play by four years. 

The story concerns a religious woman named Helen Black (Shirley L. Jones) in a constant struggle to remain abstinent in a society filled with temptation. It turns out, as with most religious zealots, she’s really just as horny as the rest of us. A fact revealed when she buys a puppet resembling Rick James in is “cocaine is a helluva drug” phase in a local thrift store. The sales woman warns Helen that the puppet is said to grant its owner their one greatest wish before returning to the shop on its own. Turns out Helen’s greatest wish is to get tied up and assaulted by a Rick James puppet while a stuffed bunny with a whistle in its mouth watches. <Insert Superfreak joke here>

The next day, the puppet returns himself to the shop as predicted. Helen throws away all her bibles and seduces several locals including a thief (Rickey Roach) who, upon hearing her story exclaims, “You were raped by a puppet? I’ve heard better stories than this before!” Really?? That’s a movie I’d like to see! 

Of course, no human can satisfy Helen like the puppet and she returns to the shop to buy it again. When the puppet refuses to make love to her, she threatens it. The puppet gets angry, the rabbit comes to life and Helen dies of a seizure. The film ends with yet another customer bringing the puppet home.  

Puppet porn and cheesy dialogue aside, this movie is a gem of a time capsule, filled with décor, locations and technology of the dawn of the SOV age. The opening titles and end credits, which add up to a total running time of over 7 minutes, appear to have been made on an Amiga Video Toaster. The footage is dark, blurry and grainy. The score, written and performed by director Chester Novell Turner, is a concerted effort to replicate any or all of John Carpenter’s themes with what sounds like a Casio keyboard recorded directly onto the boom box we see at 6:51 using the built-in mic. Ahhh, memories. 

The wall-mounted phone on the breakfast nook wall…the big-ass alarm clock with the annoying buzzer…it all brought back memories of a time when struggling indie filmmakers, even those armed with cutting edge 1984 tech, had to overcome many obstacles just to get their humble puppet porn finished.  

The tracking lines at the top of the frame made me long for the days of a 2-mile walk down to my local video store (housed in a barn) to rent a movie I was too young to watch, and buy a bag of Tato Skins and a Mandarin Orange Slice for later using the money I earned from babysitting and mowing lawns.  

My favorite thing (besides the foul-mouthed devil doll himself) is Helen’s lovely sofa she keeps covered in a thick sheet of plastic. If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s in a working-class environment, you either knew or had in your own family an aunt or grandma who had a plastic-covered couch to “keep you kids from messing it up.” 

It’s not often modern audiences get to see a horror film like this one. There’s no CGI, and no pretentious storyline about familial trauma like the ones we get in so-called elevated horror films. It’s an evil puppet with beaded braids, a naked lady, a camcorder and a Casio keyboard. That’s pretty much it. Hey, they did the best they could, okay? It’s a miracle Chester Turner finished this film let alone sold it. Further kudos to the Turner for reportedly paying everyone involved. That’s generally not something you see in the SOV world. Especially in movies with devil dolls from hell with mad love-making skills. 

If you’re curious, you can seek out the Massacre DVD release from 2013 or watch the extended cut here:  

https://archive.org/details/black.-devil.-doll.-from.-hell.-extended.-1984.-dvdrip.-bagger-inc

George Pan Andreas — according to his IMDB bio — opened the West Coast Academy of Dramatic Arts (formerly the Pan Andreas Theatre) with Oscar winners Jack Lemmon, Richard Dreyfuss and Ginger Rogers (his godmother). He returned to film work in the early 2000s, forming his own production company, GPA Films International, which has produced films in which he starred: Crime Killer and The Matadors.

Pan Andreas was the director, writer, the editor, did stunts and was also the lead, Zeus, in this movie. Some of you may read that and wonder, “Can someone do all of those jobs and still make a good movie?” And others are salivating knowing that this is the kind of vanity project that delivers some majestic entertainment. You can become a real-estate developer and property owner with some money, but if you have dreams in Los Angeles, you can still make movies.

The film starts with a shootout where Zeus’ partner dies and tells him, “Don’t get soft.” No worries there. Isn’t Zeus the Crime Killer? Well, yes, he is, because he kills both of the perps and then the two crooked cops who come to try and clean things up.

The incident causes the LAPD to take our Greek hero’s badge and gun. Seeing as how horrible the LAPD was in 1987, we have to wonder if Zeus wasn’t stopping and frisking and beating enough black people into oblivion to stay on the force.

The CIA then drafts him and sends him on a mission to destroy drugs. He decides that he needs a bunch of other would-be crimefighters, so he calls in all of his old Vietnam buddies to study under a drill instructor whose sole note for the film were “be homophonic.” At the end, as he whips them into shape, they finally win his respect and he refuses to speak to them, only salute.

To add to the wild racism — or out of touch nature of the film — Zeus goes undercover as a Mexican gardener and, well, he can barely speak English much less do any Mexican accent that is not outright hilarity.

Let me sum up the rest. Drug dealers kill the President’s ex-wife! Every woman negs Zeus! Our hero and the President of the United States play with a watch that explodes! Back to that drill instructor sequence, it plays along with flashbacks of eating pig feces back in Vietnam! Every single cut is a jump cut! People talk over one another! Random sounds just bust into the movie! It all reads even more deranged than this every sentence ends with an exclamation mark paragraph!

This movie feels like it’s a send up of action movies yet it isn’t aware enough to be that and that’s what makes it so good. It has a blacksploitation theme song for a Greek hero, out of nowhere brutal death and presents a world where the leader of the free world just randomly hangs out with Greek supercops.

In now way could this movie be better than it is.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I love Michael Winner because, well, the dude was a lunatic and sometimes, he appears like the smartest director ever. And other times, you wonder if he’s ever seen a movie before. Working from a Tom Holland script, Scream for Help is pure psychodrama, a blast of absolute insanity filtered through teenage hysteria and told by a British pervert who once tried to eat nothing but steak tartare and nearly died.

Also: Winner somehow got both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones to score his films.

New Rochelle, New York mast as well be Twin Peaks. It’s a town filled with lunatics, like Paul Fox (David Allen Brooks), the stepfather to Christie (Rachael Kelly) who seemingly is trying to kill her and her mother — and his new wife — Karen (Marie Masters).

I say seemingly and you should read that as “he’s totally trying to kill her.”

Paul is also sleeping with another insane person, Brena (Lolita Lorre), who has an even more unhinged sibling named Lacey (Rocco Sisto). All of them have this wild plan of taking Christie and her mom for all their money, then killing them, but their plan is at best nonsense and based around a set time that doesn’t matter, but who cares? This movie goes hard, stays harder and has pregnant teens getting plowed over, their boyfriends getting over it super quick, a near giallo-plot and oh yeah, a bloody deflowering that does not get glossed over in the least.

All of this set to John Paul Jones working on his first post-Zeppelin album with Jimmy Page, Madeline Bell, Jon Anderson from Yes and guitarist John Renbourn.

I have no idea how or why Antonio Cantafora shows up for a second as a man at the no tell motel. He was also in Baron Blood, And God Said to Cain, The Bitch, Demons 2 and so many other films. I need to know how he got into this film. Was he on vacation in the U.S.?

This movie is an Afterschool Special with boobs.

You did it again, Michael Winner.

In preparation for this movie, Winter spent time in New Rochelle meeting and speaking with teenage girls to audition for the lead role. Unfortunately, some of the local townsfolk suspected him of being a child molester. Winner knew the local chief of police, who talked them out of that, but if anyone was dangerous to be around nubile teens, it was Michael Winner.

Also: This was to be the third movie that Richard Franklin would direct from a Holland script after Psycho 2 and Cloak and Dagger. Franklin ultimately decided he didn’t want to do another low budget movie, so IMDB says, but those other two were not low budget. The movie that Franklin would have made would have been technically better, but it would not have been as memorable.

Here’s a drink.

Stepdaddy

• 2 oz. J&B (or whiskey if you’re afraid of the taste)
• 1 oz. amaretto
• 5 oz. root beer

1. Pile up a glass half full of ice.
2. Pour scotch, then amaretto, then root beer.

Tubi is opening the world to you with this film, which comes from New Zealand director Tearepa Kahi. It’s based on the 2007 New Zealand police raids, a series of armed police raids in response to alleged paramilitary training camps in the Urewera mountain range. More than three hundred police officers went on these raids, which led to them seizing four guns and 230 rounds of ammunition and arresting eighteen people. At a cost of $8 million dollars in New Zealand money, only four of those people to trial and hundreds of people protested the waste and police militarization that led to this two-day raid. Years later, politicians admitted that innocent people “were unnecessarily frightened and intimidated” and seven years later, the police commissioner formally apologized to the Ruatoki community for police actions during the raid.

In this film, the Maori community and the armed forces come into conflict when the Maori are believed to be domestic terrorists. One of the police in the region, Taffy (Cliff Curtis), has just come back home hoping for a quieter life. He’s caught between the law and what’s right.

As the raids start to happen, activists like Tame Iti (beyond being an actor, he was a member of the protest group Ngā Tamatoa in 1970s Auckland and is a key figure of the Māori protest movement) have been training their people to use weapons and fight. Who can blame them, seeing how they’ve been treated historically? Iti was actually one of the men jailed in the 2007 raids and spent nine months in prison before being released.

This is a tense thriller and shows that no matter you go in the world, you will find universal issues with those in authority overstepping and hurting marginalized people. I’m excited that in addition to Lifetime and BET style films that Tubi’s originals are seeking out movies like this and Riding With Sugar.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Joe Zaso is a NewYork-based actor, filmmaker, model and cookbook author, Joe Zaso is a performer on the stage and screen. He’s also the director of some awesome shot on video movies from his teenage years, such as Screambook
and It’s Only a Movie. 

Bryan Norton has an M.F.A. degree in Film Production from New York University’s Tisch School of The Arts Graduate Film Program, and a B.A. in Cinema Studies from Sarah Lawrence College. As a professor and lecturer of film, Bryan has taught film directing and screenwriting throughout the United States since 2001 and served as the chairperson of The New York Film Academy. He also has consulted on several documentaries, books and articles relating to the history and analysis of the horror genre, including Going To Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel and Fangoria Magazine. 

I’m so excited that they offered this article to the site. Enjoy!

Is it any surprise that two of 1980’s highest grossers spawned their own hybrid-subgenre that fizzled out before it even started?  They were the disaster spoof Airplane! (ranking at #4) and the slasher classic Friday the 13th (ranking at #17*) which were both from Paramount coincidently.  A perfectly capital idea to take these two genres and blend them together had studios racing against the clock to get their horror spoofs into theaters.  The result?  A bizarre wave of mostly independent (some admittedly under-produced) releases rushed into production all hoping for a piece of the profitable parody pie.  The 1981-82 roster included Student Bodies, Saturday the 14th, Wacko and National Lampoon’s Class Reunion. MGM was the studio behind this coup known as Pandemonium and what might have seemed ideal in every way didn’t exactly have the desired end result. In fact, what would have had a wide theatrical release (promotional materials, posters, lobby cards and all were all printed and ready to go) ended up relegated to a tiny limited theatrical release on April 2, 1982. Most of us discovered this peculiar seemingly unheard of gem when it hightailed it to HBO and home video.

Originally titled, Thursday the 12th, Pandemonium is a rather ambitious production considering its silly nature.  Produced by the team of Doug Chapin and Barry Krost who unnerved the world with When a Stranger Calls (1979), this wacko extravaganza was directed by the late great Alfred Sole (Alice, Sweet, Alice and Tanya’s Island) who passed away not long before this article was written.  Not since The Sentinel (1976) has such a bizarre studio movie had such an impressive cast of classic stars, has-beens, currently hot and soon-to-be-famous stars which include Carol Kane, Tommy Smothers, Candice Azzara, Judge Reinhold, Debralee Scott, Eve Arden, Donald O’Connor, Kaye Ballard, Marc McClure, Phil Hartman, an uncredited Eileen Brenann, David L. Lander, Paul (Pee Wee Herman) Ruebens, Sidney Lassick, Miles Chapin, Tab Hunter, Edie McClurg, Warhol vet Pat Ast, and dozens of other familiar character actors.

Like Friday the 13th and several other holiday-themed slashers, Pandemonium begins many years before at the scene of the hideous massacre of a cheerleader team which is impaled with a javelin and transformed into a virtual shish-ke-bob.    Who’s the guilty party?  Perhaps the jilted Brooklyn-accented wannabe cheerleader, Bambi (Candy Azzara) or someone with a twisted agenda all his/her own.   The massacre causes the famed school to shut down for 20 years (seems to be the favoured time lapse for all slasher movies) with Bambi now returning to re-open the school as her own cheerleading camp. Despite the many warnings of the locals, Bambi perseveres and soon a hapless fresh-faced gang of perky and horny cheerleaders move in for the summer.  However, a stranger with open-fingered gloves seemed determined to terminate the camp through any homicidal method necessary including a killer electric toothbrush, megaphone impalings, pom-pom suffocation, exploding trampolines that sends one character into a jumbo jet full of camera-snapping Asians, and most diabolical of all – a drowning in a tub of cookies and milk.

We were able to catch up with three of the film’s stars who all seem genuinely amazed and touched that the world still fondly remembers this oddball gem after 40 years.

Starring as Candy the Carrie White-inspired good girl, Carol Kane gives a beaming and delicious performance.  Now residing in NYC’s Upper West Side, Carol reminisced…

CAROL KANE: I think I was told about the movie by my friend Bud Cort, and I knew producer Doug Chapin. We did When a Stranger Calls together a couple of years before.  I grew up loving the Smothers Brothers.  So funny and talented.  I was thrilled to work with Tommy. I had no idea that Pandemonium had a cult following and people still enjoy it today. Isn’t that wonderful! That’s the best thing for an actor to hear. When one of my movies is mentioned, when I look back and remember, it’s more of the experience that I attach to it.  I’ll always cherish that movie because that’s where I met Pee Wee Herman.  He’s one of my favorite people. We’ve been friends ever since. After talking to you about Pandemonium, now I want to see it again!

Another up-and-coming familiar face, Miles Chapin played Andy, one of the sex-starved cheerleaders who was smitten with Candy.

MILES CHAPIN: It was great because honestly our director Alfred Sole didn’t have a great sense of humor on his own.  He wasn’t a comedy director.  He was a horror director.  So basically he said, “If any of you guys have any ideas, please throw them up. Let’s hear them.”  He was surrounded by people who knew and loved comedy, so that was why we were able to get away with everything.  He had the producers on his side, but he was out of his element because it was a comedy.  He had a great visual sense.

Last, but not least, the divine Candy Azzara gives a charming performance as Bambi, the hard-working, but ill-fated camp owner who clearly believed if you can’t cheer, teach.  To this day, her Esther Williams-inspired death scene is an absolute guilty pleasure that still ignites chuckles galore to this day.

CANDY AZZARA: The milk bath (laughs)!!  That was the hardest thing in the world!  Because I had to eat those chocolate cookies and I saw bits of dirt and hair in the bathtub! (laughs)  It took about a day to shoot that scene.  And then the milk went up nose!  They used real milk and they just left it there I said, “Am I desperate or what!” (laughs) I always thought of my father.  I did my father [inspiration for her cookie-eating style].  The yum sounds.  He always used to go like that.  I loved the production. I just get such a kick out of acting.  I love acting.  Any part I do is like the most important part in the world.  I don’t care how big or what.  Pandemonium wasn’t a hit like Airplane!, but now it’s becoming a cult thing.

It’s clear that Alfred Sole’s strong production design sense is felt throughout the movie as every corner of the screen is laden with details galore.  This forte along with his seeming displeasure with directing led to him spending the remainder of his career as a production designer of many features and TV shows including the new McGyver, Castle, Moonlight and Melrose Place.

Pandemonium is still a favorite amongst those who remember it well and while it may not resonate with today’s audiences, it certainly can’t be faulted for being unabashedly just-let-go-mind-go-blank. Or perhaps it’s simply the ideal party movie for those who just can resist groaning and eyeball-rolling.