Author Archives: bandsaboutmovies

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Embryo (1976)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Embryo was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and December 2, 1983 and March 17 and December 8, 1976.

Directed by Ralph Nelson (Charly) and written by Anita Doohan and Jack W. Thomas — who had stopped screenwriting for more than a decade to become a Los Angeles County deputy probation officer and write a series of books on troubled youth — Embryo finds Dr. Paul Holliston (Rock Hudson) living a life of solitude after losing his wife in a car accident, a fact that his sister-in-law/assistant Martha Douglas (Diane Ladd) reminds him of near daily.

One night, he runs over a dog — maybe he should stop driving — and ends up taking that dog’s unborn child and bringing it to healthy — if murderous — life in his lab. If he can play God like that, well, why not bring the unborn child of a suicide victim to life and have her become just about instantly 22 years old and named Victoria (Barbara Carrera)?

Despite how smart Victoria is, she’s also quickly dying as her body is addicted to the immune suppressant drug methotrexate and has no issue killing Martha to keep her origins a secret. And oh yeah — making sweet love to the much older doctor.

The end of this movie is ridiculous and I love it. I mean, rapidly aging clones drinking dead fetus fluids, the doctor watching her kill his son and chasing after her only to learn that she’s having his baby? 70s science fiction carny BS at its finest.

It goes without saying: Barbara Carrera really must have been grown in a lab. I don’t know if that kind of perfection can come from the coupling of a man and woman. It must have some kind of science added to it.

This also has a party scene with Roddy McDowell and Joyce Brothers during which chess is the main source of fun, not drinking. Sure.

Somehow, due to Cine Artists Pictures going out of business this movie is in the public domain.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: The Amazing Transplant (1970)

Posted on by

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

I’ve seen some strange movies, but Doris Wishman’s films often feel like they belong to my favorite genre: movies made by beings not from our reality, beamed to us in the hopes that we won’t notice that there isn’t a single moment of normal human behavior in what they have created.

Arthur Barlen (João Fernandes) starts the movie by visiting his ex-girlfriend Mary (Sandy Eden) to propose to her. As she happily celebrates, he catches a vision of her earrings, loses his mind and chokes the life out of her in a way that only appears in roughies. The police are chasing him for the murder, while his mother Ann (Linda Southern, The Headless Eyes, A Night to Dismember) asks her police detective brother-in-law Bill (Larry Hunter) to find her son.

Let me see if I can explain why this happens, if I can do the narrative of this movie justice. Dr. Cyril Meade (Bernard Marcel) treated Arthur because the young man was upset about being a virgin. Dr. Cyril also had an assistant, Felix (Sam Stewart). He loved Felix to the point that he glows when he talks about him. He also introduced Arthur to Felix, who tried to set him up on a double date and ended up having sex with both women (Linda Boyce, The Curse of Her Flesh, and Uta Erickson, The Ultimate Degenerate) at the same time while Arthur helplessly watched. Yet Arthur also loved Felix and once he realized that his friend was dying, he was surprised that Felix wanted to live on, giving Arthur his gigantic penis to replace his micro cock. However, once the surgery — which trust me, if it was a real surgery it would happen every day — is complete, the sight of golden earrings makes Arthur insane with lust and anger.

If that isn’t strange enough, keep in mind that every environment has just a touch of strangeness happen. When we first see Mary, she’s naked and playing a zither, a stringed instrument that looks kind of like a miniature harp. Some of the apartments have paintings that look cursed, another has a moose head, yet another has a gigantic saddle, which causes Bill to ask the owner of the place, “Do you ride horses?” and she nonchalantly says, “It came with the apartment.” An entire wall of riding equipment, like how Ponderosa used to have that crap up on the wall, and she didn’t take it down or redecorate?

Speaking of Bill, he’s just as creepy as his nephew, often eyeing women as they cross and uncross their thighs while telling him of the horrifying assault they have endured at the hands and transplanted wang of his brother’s son.

You know, Wishman also made Let Me Die A Woman and you’d expect this movie to have a gory trouser snake transplant moment, but no. It’s like a lone moment of self-restraint in a movie that starts with black and white images of its protagonist attacking women and has a scene where he attacks a lesbian, causing her to throw up all over the place.

Speaking of that young lady with the saddle on her wall, that’s Ms. Evans. She’s played by Kim Pope, who appeared in many of the Golden Age of adult films like The Passions of Carol, White Slavery In New York and Deep Sleep, which was the first movie of Alfred Sole. Janet Banzet plays another victim, one who comes on to Arthur in the stairwell before he notices those earrings. Always those earrings. She was also in The Party at Kitty and Stud’s, the movie that started the urban legend of Stallone being in a hardcore movie. Suzzan Landau (Keyholes Are for Peeping) also shows up.

Is this kind of a giallo? Is it a remake of The Hands of Orlac that could only be named The Cock of Orlac? Why is there happy jazz playing over the sexual assaults? How bad can the dubbing get? Why is every home in this movie festooned with bric a brac? Why are there ransom shots of shoes and carpet? Why does a child choir sing along when one of the victims turns Arthur’s attack into lovemaking? How did raincoaters feel when they thought they were getting something to jack off to and were confronted by this blast of dada?

Stranger still, star João Fernandes started his career shooting second unit and acting in adult films — he was given the name Harry Flex by director Gerard Damiano during as he used an Arriflex camera — before being the cinematographer or director of photography of Legacy of Satan, Darktown Strutters, The Kirlian Witness, Human Experiments, The Prowler, The Nesting, Children of the Corn, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Hollywood Vice Squad and Red Scorpion, In the 1990s, he shot eight episodes and directed three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. That may be because after working on Joe Zito’s Norris movies Missing In Action and Invasion U.S.A., he also shot Chuck’s movies Braddock: Missing in Action III, Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection, The Hitman, Sidekicks, Hellbound, Top Dog and Forest Warrior.

I have seen so many weird movies. This has moved way to the top of the list of the oddest.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Ghosts, Italian Style (1967)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ghosts, Italian Style was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28, 1977.

Pasquale Lojacono (Vittorio Gassman) and his wife Maria (Sophia Loren) have no money, nowhere to live and no future until they are allowed to live rent-free in a cursed apartment haunted by an old Spanish nobleman’s ghost.

Questi Fantasmi played U.S. theaters under this title so that people would remember Loren in Marriage Italian Style. In fact, her co-star from that movie, Marcello Mastroianni, shows up in as a headless ghost at the end. This film was produced by Sophia’s husband, Carlo Ponti. You know, the man who brought us both Dr. Zhivago and Torso.

Maria’s past love, Alfredo (Mario Adorf) shows up to try and win her back from her recently fired opera singer husband, who thinks that he’s not a living person, but the ghost.

Directed by the writer of Marriage, Italian Style, Renato Castellani, this has a huge list of writers who worked on the script, including Castellani, Adriano Baracco, Piero De Bernardi and Tonino Guerra, based on a play by Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo.

This is a goofy farce that didn’t do well at the box office in Italy or America. But hey, here it is on the CBS Late Movie!

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris (1980)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Seizure: The Story of Kathy Morris was on the CBS Late Movie on October 7, 1986.

Kathy Morris died at the age of 29 three years after this TV movie was made. She suffered from seizures for seven years of her life, starting when she was a student at the Manhattan School of Music. According to the New York Times, during an operation in 1976 “her brain unexpectedly swelled, and the surgeon, convinced that Miss Morris would not survive the day, did not complete the operation. After six weeks in a coma, she suddenly responded to a doctor’s instruction to squeeze his hand. She later underwent five brain operations and countless hours of therapy to restore her ability to read and write.”

Two years later, she performed her operatic recital in five languages.

Penelope Milford plays Kathy in this movie, in which she learns how to put her life back together while her neurologist, Dr. Richard Connought (Leonard Nimoy), learns about relationships from her.

Brought to you by products of the Procter & Gamble Co., this was one of those uplifting TV movies that we don’t have any more. Nimoy is really great in it and seems to be enjoying the chance to play a human being.

Director Gerald I. Isenberg usually worked as a producer. This is his only directing credit. Based on the book Seizure by Charles L. Mee Jr., this was written by Robert Lewin and the husband and wife duo of Jack and Mary Pleshette Willis.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Beverly Hills Cowgirl Blues (1985)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Beverly Hills Cowgirl Blues was on the CBS Late Movie on April 28, 1988.

Amanda Ryder (Lisa Hartman) is in Los Angeles to bring learn who killed one of her friends. She teams with fashionable LAPD detective Harry Wilde (James Brolin) and if you don’t think these two are going to have sex, you’ve never seen a movie before.

What surprised me is that David Hemmings shows up as Ian Blaize, the villain of this, and a man who employs a man dressed as a woman who is good at kickboxing as his henchperson. That’s big thinking today,  much less 1985.

Imagine if Lisa Hartman was Eddie Murphy, because that’s what this movie is. It’s kind of, sort of Beverly Hills Cop and if you don’t believe me, the synth heavy soundtrack by Mark Snow — not yet the man who would make the theme for The X-Files — will remind you over and over again.

Director Corey Allen also made Cry Rape, while writer Rick Husky created S.W.A.T.

I thought that the villain was going to end up being Brolin, so I was happy that at the end, it seemed like these two cop lovers are going to try and make a go of it in Los Angeles. That said, their series never happened, so who knows what happened next.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Deadly Encounter (1982)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Deadly Encounter was on the CBS Late Movie on November 26, 1986 and January 4, 1988.

William A. Graham (The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer) directed this Larry Hagman-starring movie, which was written by David J. Kinghorn (The Golden Gate Murders) and Robert Boris (Dr. Detroit). Hagman is Sam, a helicopter pilot pulled into a scheme by Chris Butler (Susan Anspach), an ex-girlfriend whose husband has just been killed by some criminals. He has a black book that can put all of them away, as long as she can get it before they do.

Graham and Boris also made another helicopter TV movie, Birds of Prey, which starred David Janssen. Unfortunately, three people died making this film. The Hughes Model​ 500 (369HS) that Hagman flies in the movie crashed when it collided with a cable. Owner Glen Miller (who plays Pocotello Pete in this movie), Diane Doherty and costumer Frank Novak all were lost in the tragedy.

This is the end of when real planes and helicopters were used for stunts. As a result, aviation lovers are super into this movie, as the IMDB review section will prove. It also has a great synth soundtrack, written by Michael Hoenig (Galaxy of Terror, Koyaanisqatsi) and Fred Carlin (Bad Ronald) and played by J. Peter Robinson, who scored The Wraith. Robinson also appears in the video for Phil Collins’ “Don’t Lose My Number,” playing the gyro pilot as Phil becomes Mad Max.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: Satan Was a Lady (1975)

Posted on by

Doris Wishman week (July 21 – 27) Doris made the loopiest of movies. A self-proclaimed prude who made nudist camp movies, her filmography is filled with contradictions. When she tried to be mean spirited with something like Bad Girls Go To Hell there was always an undercurrent of silliness and fun, but when she tried to be silly and fun in things like Keyholes Are For Peeping there was an underlying seediness and grime that couldn’t be wiped off. It’s hard not to love her!  

After years of softcore, Doris Wishman directed two hardcore pornographic features. We already covered Come With Me, My Love and Wishman directed another movie — this one — with that film’s star, Annie Sprinkle. Wishman made more films than any other female director of the sound era and she didn’t really enjoy making hardcore; she denied these movies for years.

Claudia (Bree Anthony, also known as Gloria Hadott, Lauri Suesan, Bree Anthony Fredericks, B. Anthony Fredericks and Sue Richards, the name she used as the editor of High Society) and Victor (Tony Richards, the Tweedledee to Anthony’s Tweedledum in Bud Townsend’s Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy) are engaged, but that won’t stop her sister Terry (Sprinkle) from sleeping with her sister’s fiancee. He’s not exactly innocent, as he’s also sleeping with C.J. Laing — and who would blame him? — while Terry’s mother and Claudia’s stepmother Ada (Sandy Foxx, who also used the alter egos Diana Ames, L’il Annie, Sandy Morelli and Sandy Sludge; she was married to director Lawrence T. Cole) is ready to cheat everyone out of their inheritance.

The inner voices of the sisters comes from Wishman; this also has an ending — spoilers! — where Terry gets Victor a poisoned glass of water, putting Claudia into shock for the rest of her life. Who in the raincoats on 42nd Street realized they were watching Wishman cover Diabolique?

Also: none of the bodies in this movie look like women in adult today and Annie Sprinkle to this day remains as wild and incredible as she was then.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Deadly Deception (1987)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Deadly Deception was on the CBS Late Movie on December 22, 1989.

The VHS art for this movie makes it feel like you’re about to watch a Mexican straight to video horror movie. Instead, you get a well-made TV movie that was directed by the king of the form, John Llewellyn Moxey, and written by Gordon Cotler (The Facts of Life Down Under).

Laurie Shoat (Meg Gibson) is struggling with post-partum depression when she ends up dead and her child missing. The police just think it was a murder suicide while her husband Jack (Matt Salinger, Cannon’s Captain America) thinks that his son is still alive and that his wife was murdered. With the help of a reporter named Anne (Lisa Elibacher, 10 to Midnight), he learns that a woman named Sarah (Mildred Natwick) may be the secret to why his wife was found hung in a motel.

The New York Times said that it was, “melodrama, occasionally unpleasant, vaguely depressing, only fitfully interesting.” They’re wrong, but how often did reviewers like TV movies?

You can watch this on YouTube.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: High Ballin’ (1978)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: High Ballin’ was on the CBS Late Movie on May 15, 1981.

“Iron Duke” Boykin (Jerry Reed) is an independent trucker dealing with “King” Carroll (Chris Wiggins) and his gang, led by Harvey (David Ferry), who are trying to get every big rig driver to be part of his company. He’s joined by Rane (Peter Fonda) and Pickup (Helen Shaver) in an attempt to bring whiskey to a labor camp, thereby making enough money to be free of the monopoly.

But when Boykin is shot and Pickup is captured, Rane has to fight the gang with a posse — this movie is pretty much a Western with trucks instead of horses — and go one-on-one with Harvey.

Set in the U.S. but shot in Toronto, this also was released on video as Death Toll, which is a way more serious title.

Director Peter Carter also made Rituals and The Intruder Within, so he’s good in my eyes. It’s written by Paul F. Edwards, Richard Robinson (Kingdom of the Spiders) and Stephen Schneck (Welcome to Blood City). This has an amazing action scene with Rane launching cars off a truck onto the gang chasing Duke, as well as a tire iron fight outside a truck stop. Best of all, this was called Convoy II in some countries.Plus Clint Howard and Michael Ironside! How can you go wrong with all of these elements, as well as Jerry Reed singing the theme song, the same house at the beginning of Smokey and the Bandit in this opening and the stars of Smokey and Easy Rider teaming up?

You can watch this on Tubi.

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn (1977)

Posted on by

EDITOR’S NOTE: Alexander: The Other Side of Dawn was on the CBS Late Movie on December 11, 1970 and June 30, 1980.

I said in the article on Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway that Alexander was a loser. Well, I should have seen his movie first, because it’s way better than the more famous first movie and he comes off way better.

This pulls a Halloween 2 and starts right where the first movie ended, as Alexander Duncan (Leigh McCloskey) is being operated on. He then has flashbacks of how he came from Oklahoma to Hollywood with dreams of being an actor. What else was he supposed to do? His father Eddie (Lonny Chapman) threw him out because he had so many kids to feed and Alexander was drawing more than doing chores. His mother (Diana Douglas, Michaels mom!) begs dad to reconsider, but his mind is made up.

He’s too young to get a real gig, so a hustler named Buddy (Asher Brauner) introduces him to sex work. He makes $50 off his first john. He then wakes up and we see the ending of the first movie, as Alexander convinces Dawn (Eve Plum) to go back home. While her story may be happy now, his isn’t. He loses his job and goes back to walking the streets, getting arrested on his first night.

Ray Church (Earl Holliman) overhears Alexander asking for his old probation officer, Donald Umber. But for some reason, he’s left town. And I totally lied about Dawn being happy, because she misses Alexander and stuff isn’t going well for her either. I bet she’d be unhappy to know that Buddy is taking his former friend on double dates where older women pay for their company. She also probably wouldn’t like that he becomes the plaything of football player Charles Selby (Alan Feinstein), using him for his cash.

Dawn gets recognized at home by someone who knows she was a sex worker. She runs away and goes back to Hollywood, where she luckily meets Alex just in time. He’s fresh off a drug bust and just wants to leave town. Together, they head out into a future that we hope is happy.

Director John Erman also made the Scarlett TV miniseries, as well as Roots: The Next Generations, Stella and When the Time Comes. This was written by Walter Dallenbach (Las Vegas Lady) and Dalene Young, who is credited with the characters and story.

Alexander is obviously gay and his father’s hatred of his art hints at this. One wonders how solid his relationship with Dawn really will be. However, I was moved by how this movie, despite being made in 1977, didn’t have the normal homosexual stereotypes. It doesn’t place any judgement on Alexander for potentially liking men, even if we’re told her loves Dawn. My opinion? They’re both in horrible lives and only have one another, at least for now.

You can watch this on YouTube.