I kind of love when Tubi doesn’t even hide that they’re owned by Fox so you stop watching them and puts on shows like this that totally would have once aired on a Saturday afternoon on FX or Fox or one of their many, many channels.

This is so new that despite it airing on the channel starting today, there are no credits on IMDB. Obviously, with Netflix asking for your password so your mom, sister and girlfriend don’t have it and MAX being the mess you knew it would be, things are looking pretty good for Tubi.

You know, as long as my morality doesn’t get in the way and I sit back and realize that the fun streamer that has an Italian Giallo and Horror category has created the death cult of brain dead people stomping on Pride shippers at Target, because that’s the real problem and not the fact that a kid got shot in front of a school today and the shooter kept punching him after or that we enable oligarchs and tech-spending manchildren and man, if we take this show literally, the Scariest Places In America is just cities in Florida for 90 minutes. Orlando? Terrifying. Tallahassee? Bone chilling. Ocala? I just pissed myself.

Anyways. Off the soap box and time to talk about ghost chasing.

Written by Savannah Lucas (who was also behind Love You to Death: The Jodi Arias Story and Suburban Nightmare: JonBenét Ramsey) and narrated by Jake Hart, this is the kind of down and dirty doc that lists where its music and stock footage came from in the credits but not any of the people who are the talking heads in this, which makes them much like the people in four hour horror movies about movies that say things like, “Really, it’s the best of the sequels.”

Here are the thirteen places with some comments by me.

13. The Lizzie Borden home in Fall River, MA: Lizzie was fine, but I really prefer the 1975 TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden. As I sit here, I can think of so many better haunted places, but I guess they don’t have the lurid charges of an axe murderess who may have been a lesbian and ghost hunter Omar Escobar claims that he really got scared there, so who am I to doubt him when I sit in a basement all day watching dubbed ninja movies and he’s engaging in the pants filling terror of ghostbusting? To top that off, paranormal investigator — and TALKING BOARD COLLECTOR, this woman collects Ouija boards — Beckie Ann-Galetin smiles and guides us through this while looking way too much like the kind of girl young me would pine over and send Craigs List missed connections to…only to discover that she has a house full of spirit boards. They were correct about this show being scary.

12. Lake Lanier in Georgia: I feel for whoever had to write the Lake Lanier website and work on the FAQ, because this question had to feel like they were leading people to drown. Is Lake Lanier safe to swim in? “In addition to the Corps swim areas, there’s also a beautiful white-sand beach and designated swim area (with a stunning view) at Don Carter State Park. All swim areas are “swim at your own risk”, and there are no lifeguards on duty.” Actually, they put their photos on the site and their names are Robert and Bradley and nowhere on this cute little site do they mention that, oh I don’t know, that its the “largest lake in Georgia, is one of the deadliest in the U.S. Since its formation, 500 people have died there, nearly 200 since 1994,” according to an article in Oxford America. Nor that it’s a haunted lake. A haunted lake. Come on. I don’t even want to take a bath and you expect me to get into a haunted lake. Come on, Robert and Bradley.

11. The Sallie House in Atchinson, Kansas: The Visit Archinson website isn’t as friendly as our enemies in Georgia. Nope, right on the site they invite you to stay overnight at the Sallie House if you dare. They’re questioning my manhood, right in front of the cyberworld. No thank you. I will not challenge the spirit world, I will keep right on sitting here sipping on this Pineapple Bubbly and remain alive. And who is Sallie? Well, she was the little girl patient of Dr. Charles Finney who died on the operating table in the basement of this house and she’s now known as “The Man-Hating Ghost.” Nope. I’ll end up running out of that house sounding like Jim Varney, you know what I mean?

10. The Farnsworth House in Gettysburg, PA: Well, my wife’s best friend lives in Gettysburg and told me that all the children have white teeth there because the water is infused by the calcium from the bones of the Civil War dead. I’ve never wanted cavities so much in my life. Here’s some free advice. Never ever stay in a bed and breakfast that also has ghost tours, much less “Civil War era magician Professor Kerrigan who will delight you with Magic spanning from Card Tricks—using Civil War Era Playing Cards— to Illusions from his Parlor Presentation.” The professor has no idea how to capitalize properly and it’s giving me a bigger headache than sleight of hand usually does.

9, Sleepy Hollow in New York: Yes, all the movies get mentioned, even the one where Tim Burton reveals that he watched Black Sabbath. Not only is Washington Irving buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, but Kykuit, the Rockefeller family’s opulent hilltop estate, is located here and nothing but nothing makes me more upset — and yes, scared — than rich people. So yes, Sleepy Hollow belongs right where it is.

8. Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO: You know this already, right? This is where Stephen King came up with The Shining because it freaked him out so much and he was too poor at the time to buy coke like he was mainlining into his eyes while directing Maximum Overdrive, so I will go and say that yes, this place is super scary. I did stay at the Timberline Lodge in Mt. Hood, OR where they shot the exteriors and it was very peaceful and quite breathtaking, but also very very scary because my mother-in-law went along and when I was looking at the “red rum” written on my bathroom mirror, she popped up and screamed, “What does that mean?” and then asked me who wrote it. I told her it was a ghost child and she didn’t sleep for days.

7. St. Augustine Lighthouse in St. Augustine, FL: The oldest surviving structure in this Florida town, this is perhaps the most frightening place on the list because if you peaced out of my rant earlier, you also have to go to Florida to see it, a state where Deicide seems like the most well-adjusted people now. I mean, have you see Ron DeSantis laugh? He laughs like someone who can’t wait to touch the nuclear button. He’s already laughing the laugh he’ll laugh when that happens. Also, I refuse to call him an android or automaton because as we learned in Anton LaVey’s Five Point Plan, android companions are the way of our safer future.

6. The Clown Motel in Tenopah, NV: This 31-room motel was opened in 1985 by Lenroy and Leona David in honor of their late father Clarence, whose collection of over 150 clown statues was used to decorate the property. There are now 2,000 clowns that exist on the property and a cemetery nearby. None of these things are frightening, per se, they are just odd to people. Clowns aren’t as terrifying as the fact that the LAPD’s “34 helicopters and four small aircrafts also release 11,100 metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions annually”which is way more than all the celebrity private planes people complain about according to Curbed. They also “are lowest and loudest in census blocks that are more than 40 percent Black, subjecting those residents to unwarranted stress, trauma, and sleep deprivation — in addition to blanketing those neighborhoods with toxic airborne pollutants.” Sometimes under 1,000 feet, putting civilians in danger. But go ahead, be freaked by clowns.

5. The Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA: You can stay overnight in the Queen Mary but like the back of an old Slayer shirt once asked, “Do you want to die?” Suite B-340 is supposedly haunted and you know, reality is like a videotape and when you record horrible moments over and over in the same spot of the tape — like the maniacs in my hometown including me that would pause Kelly Preston’s nude scene in Mischief on the only rental copy at Prime Time Video — things just get left behind. Things that want to eat your soul. Ask yourself: could I sleep on the same ship where The Poseidon Adventure and episodes of Baywatch were made?

4. The Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles: When your Wikipedia page says, “the hotel has a checkered history, with many suicides and deaths occurring there” in the third sentence, well…you should stay away. Now an affordable housing complex — I guess Candyman has a new address after he moved out of Cabrini–Green — this has been on enough true crime shows that even I, someone who writes about Godfrey Ho movies and tries to ignore Keith Morrison’s gleeful descriptions of human depravity and sadness knows what this place is. I mean, a girl drowned in the water tower and people drank aqua infused by her decaying body. If you want to stay in a place where Richard Ramirez could walk around unencumbered in his bloody boxers, I won’t stop you.

3. Alcatraz in San Francisco, CA: In 1969, the Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz for 19 months in the name of freedom and Native American civil rights. That makes up for the fact that this was the final stop for so many career criminals, I guess. Like how this was the longtime — and often final — home for Al Capone, Robert Franklin “Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud, Mickey Cohen and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. What’s really weird is that the families of the jail guards lived on the island. It’s now a national park.

2. The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, WV: I live minutes from here and I will never go. Why? Have you seen how many horror movies I watch? Do you realize that that’s research for staying alive? When a ghost tells you to “stay away,” you do not run headfirst into spectral slaughter. They have flea markets and Father’s Day car shows here. As Jake “The Snake” Roberts once said while contemplating the chocolate all over his jacket, “Ain’t no way.” Also: There are 12 things to do in Weston. This ranks #1. Two of the other things on the list are places to buy glass and #13 is Appalachian Oddities, which sells a trepanning set if you want to drill a hole in your head and also has a wall of pickled punks. I went to the Müttter Museum once and there was a whole wall of backlit fetuses in jars and I thought, “I can handle this,” and then, just then, the drugs kicked in. Imagine.

1. The Lemp Mansion in St. Louis, MO: William J. Lemp Brewing Co. dominated the St. Louis beer market before Prohibition with its Falstaff beer brand. So many members of the Lemp family — William J. Lemp Sr., Frederick, Billy, Charles and Elsa Lemp Wright — killed themselves in this house. Elsa may have been murdered. When the last surviving Lemp, Edwin, died in 1970 at the age of 90, his final wish was that his art collection and all of the family’s heirlooms were to be destroyed. Totally normal.

You know what’s the worst part of all of this? Self-professed “spiritual teacher, psychic medium and paranormal investigator” informs us at the end that the scariest places in America are right where we lived. “Maybe someone died in your house,” she helpfully coos. You know what? The dude whose wife left him and used to live here hung himself and I live feet away from the second largest Native American burial mound in the U.S. and when they built my plan, they left the bodies and only moved the headstones. I don’t need this stress.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the March 14, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here. You can read another take here.

Harry Garmes (George C. Scott) has left the world behind. His wife has left him after the death of their son. And after a life in organized crime, he’s content to be a nobody in a little fishing village somewhere in Portugal.

Then Harry gets a job.

It’s been nine years, but he still gets a job. Bring escaped killer Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) and his girlfriend Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere) to France. Rickard is to kill French President DeGaulle under orders of the OAS.

Harry knows this will end bad.

He takes the job anyway.

Even the prostitute he sleeps with and gives all his money to, Monique (Colleen Dewhurst) turns on him.

Because Harry’s been dead a long time.

He just doesn’t know it.

Directed by Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Fantastic Voyage, See No Evil, Mr. Majestyk, Mandingo, Conan the Destroyer and like, ten or more other movies I could mention) and written by Alan Sharp (The Osterman Weekend, Ulzana’s Raid, Damnation Alley), this was originally directed by John Huston, who went to war with a drunken Scott on set. Then again, Huston and his son Tony were rewriting the script over and over — Sharp also rewrote it six times — but after all that messing with the script, it wasn’t a movie anyone wanted to make. Huston left, Tina Aumont went with him and Fleischer was called in. He hated the script. That’s because it wasn’t the movie Sharp and Scott wanted to make.

The Last Run finished with a cost of a little over $2 million, only one week and $30,000 over the original schedule. Flesicher said, with no small pride, “I think it’s a miracle it got made. I’m the miracle.”

As for Scott, once his wife Dewhurst flew out with his kids, he fell in love with Van Devere, who he would later marry. So yeah. Scott is in this movie with two of his wives from three of his marriages (he was married to Dewhurst twice). In all, he was married five times, but he was with Van Devere from 1972 until his death in 1999.

Scott had just finished Patton, so he had some power on this film, and wanted to make a movie that reminded him of the ones he loved when he was young. I always liked that it seemed like he made every film personal.

I worry about AI a lot, because you know, I work as a writer in my non-constantly watching movies and writing about them time. I’ve been in this field for twenty-five years or more — this gets relevant for this movie as well, I promise — and I feel like I’ve been fighting Skynet since 1984 and now I’m being asked to embrace it.

This is all being confided in you, dear reader, because I feel like Amityville Emanuelle has been concocted by that very same AI that I’ve been asked to use for my work and not director Louis DeStefano (who also plays Detective James and is directing his first movie) and Geno McGahee (producer of Call Me Emanuelle, The Awakening of Emanuelle and the writer and producer of Amityville Cop and the writer, director and producer of Amityville: The Final Chapter, which was originally known as Sickle).

How else can we explain a movie that has Amityville, a spirit board and namechecks the character invented by Emmanuelle Arsan that has become a brand in itself, remixed remade and ripped off into so many different characters, whether black, white or in space?

How long did it take before someone realized that Emanuelle and Amityville are both available to put together and lure me into watching 65 minutes of the results?

That’s why I blame AI.

If you have watched any of the post-relevant Amityville movies by now — you can stop after the Canadian ones, if you’re like most people, or after the In the Hood ones if you’re like me — you should never look at the poster and decide to watch these movies. I promise you that hardly anything on this art happens in the movie or even gets close to it and looking at it will only spoil you for visuals that its creators and budget are unable to deliver.

As you know — you must know — on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family at 112 Ocean Avenue in the suburban neighborhood in Amityville, located somewhere on the south shore of Long Island, New York.

This movie accepts that and even starts with a quick cut version of it to set up what we see next.

Twenty-some years later, Laura Lutz (Dawn Church) is working in marketing, of which she says, “I market things. I get people to buy things. It’s like advertising” as I screamed at the screen while I actually did marketing inches away from this prompt-created attempt to finally destroy my Amityville obsessed black soul. She’s also trying to date and hasn’t gotten any for a year because of, yes, marketing and good Lord, this movie is trying my soul because it’s hitting so close to home my dog is trembling as the house shakes this way and that.

She ends up going on a double date with her friend Allie (Linda S. Wong) and hooking up with a nebbish teacher named Evan (Chris Spinelli) who seems to be acting for the back rows of a theater that no longer exists. Oh — I nearly forgot. Some lady brought over a box of objects from her father — George Lutz, who was played by James Brolin and Ryan Reynolds once long before Amityville movies were made on a daily basis and I had to search Tubi every morning at 3:15 AM to see which ones had possessed my smart TV, forcing me to watch them eyes sleepily open, simply through just a touch of Lucifer’s burning hand.

One of the objects in the box of occult stuff her dad kept all these years looks like a cocktail shaker but the filmmakers assure us that it’s an urn. Well, that urn has the ashes of Ronald DeFeo Jr. in it, the father of this movie’s other lead, Gordon (Shane Ryan-Reid), who has been seeing visions of his murderous father more and more since he died in jail. And when his girlfriend Gena (Allie Perez) gets a Ouija board as a housewarming gift from Scott (Johnny Avila)and May (Joycelyne Lew)…I mean, who does this kind of thing? What kind of gift is that? Don’t you know what happens?

Well, they’re lucky because Gena’s cousin Janet (Saint Heart) is a medium. They need her pretty bad right now — she’s sure she’s going to die so she makes Gena promise to take care of her cat Roman — because Laura gets possessed by the spirit and it makes her hook up with two dudes at a bar and shows up inside her bed while she’s jilling off. Worse of all, Evan has gone murderous, killing everyone that comes close to her.

I fear that in all these words, I’ve somehow made Amityville Emanuelle more exciting than it is. It’s an Amityville movie with no real Amityville, not even a shot of the house, just connected to real people whose real lives were destroyed by the case. And I can handle exploitation — I wallow in it, let’s be honest — but when you go nowhere deeper than saying, “These are the kids of Amityville” and then just have them sit in a living room, this underwhelms even when I barely expected it to whelm. But adding to that ennui is the fact that they’ve somehow made an Emanuelle movie with no nudity and some of the most boring lovemaking scenes you’ll see outside of an afternoon soap opera. In fact, in one, the guy pulls a blanket over Laura’s shoulders while she’s on top of him. This is an Emanuelle movie, with one m, and that means that Joe D’Amato is practically spinning so fast in his grave now that he’s about to burst forth from the Earth at the utter gaul of making even a softcore sex movie the unsexiest sex you’ve seen since you found your parent’s hardback of Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. Children of the seventies, remember when the only nudity you could find was the Sears catalog bra pages? That was volcanic compared to this flaccid nonsense.

Nearly everyone that acted in this either produced or also worked behind the camera, no one is blameless. You do it to yourself, you do and that’s what really hurts, as they say. Or sing.

You know, if Joe D’Amato was alive, he’d be making movies with titles a lot like this, but they’d also have half the cast torn to shreds and sitting bloody and congealing in an acid bathtub while a schoolmarmish maid gave her adopted child of a master a furtive handjob, because that’s how you really make a scummy movie. Please learn from the masters.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the February 28, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Based on the 1928 novel by Alexander Beliaev, Amphibian Man seems timeless even as its tech seems ancient. It feels like it comes from no set point of origin, as if it could be made today or fifty years ago.

At a seaside port in Argentina, the pearl fishermen all have told the story of an amphibian man who can live in the water. Ichthyander (Vladimir Korenev, voiced by Yuri Rodionov) was adopted by Professor Salvator (Nikolay Simonov), who had to save his life by replacing his lungs with the gills of a shark.

The dramatic thrust of this story occurs when Ichthyander falls in love with Guttiere (Anastasiya Vertinskaya, voiced by Nina Gulyaeva), the daughter of a fisherman and the wife of Pedro (Mikhail Kozakov), who uses the love between his wife and the undersea human to exploit him into getting him more pearls.

As a child, I was always told that Russia was a sad, cold place that had no access to art. How did this beautiful movie come to be? Had I been lied to? Perhaps.

In the January 2018 issue of Indie Cinema, the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water is taken to task, not just for allegedly taking its plot and visuals from the Dutch student film The Space Between Us, but for how close Guillermo del Toro’s film is to Amphibian Man. It’s set in the same year that the Russian film was made and, yes, much of the movie concerns the Russian element in America.

Directed by Vladimir Chebotaryov and Gennadiy Kazanskiy and written by Akiba Golburt, Aleksei Kapler and Aleksandr Ksenofontov, this is at once a retro future movie — whooshing doors are everywhere and the costume that Ichthyander looks like Alex Raymond or Rick Yager drew it — while it also has musical numbers, which makes it so charming that it nearly breaks my heart.

I mean, read this dialogue:

Gutiere: This must be love at first sight!

Ichtyandr: Is there any other kind of love?

Of course it has to end with its lovers separated by the waves and unrequited love.

Is there any other kind of love?

You can watch this on Tubi.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the February 21, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

I have to tell you, the hunt for this movie felt like the old days of trying to find a movie and for the return of that feeling, something that’s hard to come by in the days of streaming and instant gratification.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the January 31, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The fourth of the five movie New World Pictures nurse cycle — preceded by The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses and Night Call Nurses and followed by Candy Stripe Nurses — this was directed by Clint Kimbrough, who played Dr. Bramlett in Night Call Nurses, and written by Howard R. Cohen, whose awesome output includes Unholy Rollers, Cover Girl Models, Vampire Hookers, Fighting Mad, Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Stryker, Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen, Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell, Barbarian Queen 2, Deathstalker IV and Lords of the Deep. He also directed Saturday the 14th, Space Raiders, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, Time Trackers, Deathstalker IV and Space Case.

As usual, there are three nurses: Kitty (Jeane Manson, Terror Circus, 10 to Midnight), Joanne (Ashley Porter, who other than an uncredited role in The Student Nurses was never in another movie) and Michelle (Angela Elayne Gibbs, Cleopatra Jones, Party Line).

They all have their own storylines. Kitty falls in love with a boat racer named Donahue (Zach Taylor), even though there’s never a moment where he seems charming or even likable. Plus, his father who pushes him to be a sailing man seems like too much to deal with. Joanne is sick of the doctors failing at their jobs and hurting patients, so she starts to do their work for them. And Michelle discovers that patients are overdosing on bad drugs and investigates for herself.

Beyond these dramatic moments, this film is filled with cameos, with Sally Kirkland, Dick Miller, Mantan Moreland and Samuel Fuller all showing up.

My favorite part of this entire movie is when Joanne is dealing with probably losing her job as a nurse by tearing her clothes off on a beach and diving into the ocean. It’s just so out of nowhere and an excuse to get a gorgeous young actress nude, which you know, is kind of everything Roger Corman was about.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 15, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here. There’s another take on this movie here.

I seem to really enjoy the movies of Steve Carver, which are all over the place when it comes to genre, like the peplum The Arena, the gangster films Big Bad Mama and Capone, his two Chuck Norris movies An Eye for an Eye and Lone Wolf McQuade and most definitely this movie. He knows how to make a movie that entertains.

Steel starts off by introducing us to Lew “Big Lew” Cassidy (Goerge Kennedy), a real man’s man, the kind of business owner that goes up on the skyscraper when it’s being built just like his men. What’s shocking is that he’s dead five minutes into the movie, falling when things go wrong thanks to substandard equipment. The rest of the film is literally an attempt to live up to the standards that he set.

Sadly, on September 21, 1978, stuntman A.J. Bakunas died in this scene. Not only does it set up the danger of these heights in the movie, it also set them for the creation of Steel. The saddest thing about that is that the scene had already been shot safely. Then Dar Robinson beat the record for highest fall that Bakunas set on the movie Hooper, so the stuntman asked to reshoot the fall. He fell perfectly on to the airbag. The airbag split and that cost him his life. That’s why the credits say “This film is dedicated to A. J. Bakunis, a man whose zest for life was admired by all who knew him.”

That fall is the one in the movie. A.J.’s dad, who was with him on set, told them to use it.

His daughter Cass (Jennifer O’Neill, the best dressed woman in genre cinema) decides she’s going to do thingsher fatther’s way, no matter what her uncle Eddie (Harris Yulin) has to say about it. But to live up to the deal her father made, she’s going to need the kind of leader that can get men to do impossible things. That would be Mike Catton (Lee Majors), a guy who lost his nerve on his last job and has taken to being a trucker. She meets him on the road and convinces him that he needs to get back up in the sky.

It’s impossible to explain just what a big deal Lee Majors was in the mid 70s. Sadly, by 1978, the show that made him a success — to be fair, he was already a star from The Big Valley — The Six Million Dollar Man was cancelled. In the three years between that show and finding another hit in 1981 with The Fall Guy, Majors made a few movies like The Norseman, Agency and Killer Fish. And yes, this movie, which puts him in the lead of the Dirty Dozen of steel. His crew is made up of Pignose Morgan (Art Carney), Valentino (Terry Kiser, not yet dead), Lionel (Roger E. Mosley, not yet TC ), Surfer (Hunter von Leer, not yet a Haddonfield cop), Tank (Albert Salmi, not yet a cop investigating ghosts), The Kid (Ben Marley, not yet battling Jaws), Cherokee (Robert Tessier, not chasing Charles Bronson in this movie) and Dancer (Richard Lynch, not a villain in this, amazingly). Oh yeah — this also has great parts for R.G. Armstrong and Redmond Gleeson.

This might be the most manly movie that I’ve ever had on this site, a film that starts with Kennedy saying,   “The sight of a tall building still gives me a hard-on” and ends up with an American flag being lifted high above the streets below. You’ll want to celebrate with the rest of the crew, feeling like you’re part of them. This movie is a success for me and it’s just as much the guys on screen as it is the script by Leigh Chapman (Truck Turner, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) from a story by Peter S. Davis, Rob Ewing and William N. Panzer.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 15, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

The Video Archives podcast really hit a lot of Roger Aldrich movies this season. The director told Film Comment, “From the time we started to the time we finished the picture, I’d say fifty, sixty percent of it was changed. Alan Sharp, the writer, was very amenable and terribly helpful. And terribly prolific. He can write twenty-five pages a day. He couldn’t agree more with my political viewpoint—so that was no problem. And fortunately, Lancaster and I felt pretty much the same about the picture. It was good that I had support from Sharp and Lancaster, because I don’t have the highest regard for Carter DeHaven, the producer.”

The first time Aldrich and Burt Lancaster worked together since Vera Cruz, this was a Western released after Italy had its way with the genre, which gave birth to the American revisionist Western.

It’s a definite Tarantino favorite, who said in a New Beverly blog article said that it was “hands down Aldrich’s best film of the seventies, as well as being one of the greatest westerns of the seventies. One of the things that makes the movie so remarkable is it isn’t just a western; it combines the two genres that Aldrich was most known for, westerns and war films.”

That’s because it’s just as much a movie about Vietnam as it is the West.

Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez) has taken a Chiricahua war party and escaped captivity. This puts the fear of, well, Native American vengeance into most of the army that faces them, as one even kills himself and the woman he is escorting than face them. The unlucky man to try and stop him is McIntosh (Burt Lancaster). Near the end of his service, he only has a few dozen men to win this skirmish, including Apache scout — and Ulzana’s brother-in-law Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke) and a way too young soldier named Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davidson).

Where this becomes Vietnam, obviously, is because the Native Americans have known this land for hundreds of years and the better armed Americans aren’t better trained. They just have nicer guns. DeBuin isn’t ready for the way that war will change him and McIntosh is just ready to die by the end of the film. Even Ke-Ni-Tay lays down his weapons, knowing he’s done, but he’s changed each and every person who has faced him.

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

The first time I saw The Apple, I was in the throes of losing my job and starting a new company and feeling lost. This is the movie that not only made me feel like I could go on, but inspired me to start writing more about films and why they mattered to me.

You know how everyone thinks Cannon put out some completely crazy movies? If you haven’t seen The Apple (also known as Star Rock), you haven’t seen their full power. Directed by Menahem Golan, this slice of sheer madness is a movie I use to test the resolve of anyone brave enough to watch movies with me.

The genesis of this film begins in 1975. Israeli rock producer Coby Recht was signed to Barclay Records and began to feel distrustful of show business. He worked it into a story with his wife Iris Yotvat and brought it to the attention of his longtime friend Menahem. After hearing the demos for the songs, the producer/director instructed Recht to go to Los Angeles immediately. They were making the movie.

Yotvat said, “That was marvelous. That was just fantastic to think that it was going to be a movie all of the sudden. It was just amazing.”

It wasn’t going to stay that way.

Recht and Yotvat lived in a villa that Menahem provided, writing six screenplay drafts in three weeks. As those drafts progressed, the story became more comical and less Orwellian. Soon, things were getting corny, out of touch and out of date. If you’ve seen any of the movies that Golan was involved in, you can see how that might be true.

After auditioning thousands of hopefuls, Recht settled on Catherine Marie Stewart for the lead role of Bibi. Who is a singer. Not a dancer, like Stewart. He figured she could learn, but the producers decided to have her voice dubbed.

Tensions only got worse once filming began, as what started as a $4 million dollar movie turned into $10 million and then more. Editor Alain Jakubowicz claimed that Golan shot around a million feet of footage, with six cameras of coverage for every dance number, ending up with a four-hour rough cut.

The movie got way bigger than its scriptwriters intended. Shooting in West Berlin lasted forever, with a five-day shoot for the opening number, the song “Speed” being filmed at the Metropol nightclub (which held the world record for biggest indoor laser show) and some scenes were actually shot inside a gas chamber that had killed people during World War II.

Nigel Lythgoe, who later was a big part of American Idol, choreographed the film, saying that some days were “really, really depressing” and others “very, very stressful.” The cast and crew hated the script, but here they were, making the film.

Menahem and Recht’s battles soon got worse. The writer felt he should be in London mixing the songs (the sessions had more than 200 artists involved), but Menahem demanded that he show up at the shoot. The first day he was there, he witnessed the uncut version “Paradise Day” which featured fifteen dinosaurs and a tiger that broke free and escaped. This scene also contained elephants getting their trunks stuck in the set, actors collapsing while wearing a too hot brontosaurus costume and a set that made it near impossible for people to dance on and cameras to move around. Removing this scene makes the Biblical end of the movie come out of nowhere. That’s right. None of this is in the film.

Catherine Marie Stewart has stated that none of this rattled Menahem. In fact, he was convinced that The Apple was going to be embraced: “Menahem was very passionate about what he was doing. He had very lofty ideas about the project. He thought this was going to break him into the American film industry. It had, you know, all the elements that he thought were necessary at that time. It was the early eighties and there were a lot of musicals. And Menahem thought that was his ticket into the American film industry.”

So what happened?

The plot is basically Adam and Eve meets Faust. Bibi (Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour) are contestants in the 1994 Worldvision Song Festival. They’re talented but easily defeated by the machinations of Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal, Kronsteen in From Russian With Love) and BIM (Boogalow International Music).

The evil leader soon signs the duo but they soon fall victim to the darkness of show business. Bibi is caught up in the drugs and sex and glamour, while Alphie is beaten by cops and nearly dies to save her. He also lives with a woman who is either his mother or lover or landlady and no one ever explains it to us.

Eventually, they escape and live as hippies, having a child. Mr. Boogalow finds them and claims that Bibi owes him $10 million dollars, but soon God, known here as Mr. Topps (Joss Ackland, The House That Dripped Blood, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) takes them away in his Rolls Royce and the Rapture occurs.

There are numerous scenes where people put stickers, called BIM Marks, all over their faces. Everyone has camel toe. And the movie is nearly 100% disco.

The movie premiered at the 1980 Montreal World Film Festival. To say it did not go well is an understatement.

Attendees hated the film so much that they launched giveaway records of the soundtrack at the screen. Menahem was so devastated that he almost jumped off his hotel balcony before being saved by his business partner, Yoram Globus. A similar scene happened at its second premiere at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood.

The director said, “It’s impossible that I’m so wrong about it. I cannot be that wrong about the movie. They just don’t understand what I was trying to do.”

I get it, Menahem. You were just trying to get people to understand the power of love and music and being hippies a full decade after any of that mattered. You didn’t care if anyone else got it. You had a vision. And we’re not talking about any of those critics today. No, we’re talking about you. We’re talking about The Apple.

This is a movie that wears its heart messily all over its spandex crotch. The songs are ridiculous. The dancing is, at times, poor. The story makes no sense at all. You’re lucky to sit and witness it. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve watched it!

BONUS! You can hear Becca and me talk all about The Apple on our podcast.