The summer of 2020 was a brutal time for Australia, as bushfires devastated massive areas of the country and record-breaking heat took a toll on its citizens. Thirty-four people across the country died, including several volunteer firefighters who were underfunded and not equipped for what they were facing.
In a world where we still argue whether or not climate change exists, these bushfires should be a wake-up call for what is coming for every single one of us, not just Australia. My eyes sting every time I go outside now thanks to the high air quality index numbers and the moon looks red at night. I never remember this ever happening before and I know it’s not going to get better.
Director and writer Eddie Martin was on the ground for much of this and shows the Black Summer fires in a way that makes you feel as if you were there. There’s a harrowing moment when a woman literally tears her shirt off to rescue a koala on fire and pours bottled water all over it before taking it to a shelter. For all the trauma in this, that hit me the hardest.
At the end of Twisted House Sitter, this sequel starts with Alicia (Crystal-Lee Naomi) surviving prison until she fakes a stomach virus that seemingly kills her. I mean, she’s already gotten over being stabbed by a corkscrew at the end of the first movie.
Prison doctor Tyler (David Vaughn) has set up a drug that just makes it look like she was dead. He promised her Florida and gives her Nebraska, so she gives him the slip.
Now, our twisted house sitter is looking for a new target.
First, she tracks down her sister Loren (Tesh Wright). Sorry, adopted sister. Turns out that Alicia grew up in an orphanage and Loren wants nothing to do with her, keeping her distance since she went to college. Alicia, however, has been stalking her through social media and wants her help in getting a job. Instead, she shoves her sister down the steps, gets a makeover and becomes Loren.
Loren had a good job lined up as the assistant to Pamela (Vivica A. Fox) and Marcus (Jermaine Rivers). The co-owners of a skin care line, they are exactly who Alicia/Loren want to be, so she systematically takes over their lives while in the midst of a nerve-wracking stock IPO. She goes from spiking wine spritzers to serving laced tea to even setting Pamela up to run over her prison boyfriend.
By the end, she has exactly what she wants and Pamela is in the same jail cell that Loren once was confined within. But she soon learns that her new cellmate was also Loren’s (there are so many levels of coincidence here that I can’t even comprehend them) and she has a plan to get back what’s hers.
Director Courtney Miller made the first film, while writer Dana Werde also wrote another Tubi original, Safe Word. Here’s hoping that beyond the third film that we get a crossover between Alicia, Zooey from The Stepmother and David from Surprise and there’s an actual Tubi Streaming Universe.
Originally called “Collector’s Items” — a title that spoils the surprise — this episode of Night Gallery feels like it almost belongs on The Twilight Zone.
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Rod Serling, “Rare Objects” is the story of August Kolodney (Mickey Rooney), an organized crime figure who is barely surviving all of the attempts on his life. A doctor (Regis Cordic) removes the slug that someone put in him and tells him that his blood pressure is so off the charts that even his body could betray him at any minute.
Is there a way out? Well, the doctor knows a guy, but the price is steep.
Dr. Glendon (Raymond Massey) has the criminal to his home, shows him his many collections and invites him to stay, as Kolodney himself is a very rare item. He’ll have a long life free of worry, but he just has to give over anything and everything. But by the time he tries to leave, it’s too late. The drugs in his drink have kicked in and soon he may just live forever, surrounded by Princess Anastasia, Amelia Earhart and Adolph Hitler. Now, he’s a bird in a cage for just one person, no longer a person but instead an object.
Szwarc’s direction is solid and this is tension-filled the whole time. Ah — it’s so good when Night Gallery is great.
Travis (John Travolta) and Wendell (Arye Gross) are clubgoers who get hired and taken to Indian Springs, Nebraska to teach the town the modern ways of life before their first nightclub opens. They make big changes, because everything is stuck in the 50s, and soon are even dating two locals, Bonnie (Kelly Preston) and Jill (Deborah Foreman).
The only problem is that they aren’t in the U.S.
They’re in Russia, taken by KGB agent Cameron Smith (Charles Martin Smith) and used to teach Russian agents how to pass for Americans.
The Experts is silly fun and I was surprised to learn that it was directed by SCTV genius Dave Thomas. There’s also a great cast, including Brian-Doyle Murray, James Keach and Rick Ducommun. It was written by Steven Greene, Eric Alter (Hardbodies, Hardbodies 2) and Nick Thiel.
The Kino Lorber blu ray release of The Experts has a brand new HD master from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative by Paramount Pictures, a new interview with director Dave Thomas and a trailer newly mastered in 2K, You can get it from Kino Lorber.
June 30: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Sequels! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
There’s no reason why sixth Universal Soldier movie is so good.
There’s also no reason why it goes so hard, because this is an NC-17 movie that starts with the hero, John (Scott Adkins), watching his wife and young daughter get shot in the head in a POV shot by Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who until now has been the hero of the UniSols.
And I mean, who could have guessed that director John Hyams would bring Apocalypse Now, The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to — again — the sixth movie in the series that started with a blockbuster.
John wakes up from a coma, only to learn that Luc is on the run and a sleeper agent named Magnus (Andrei Arlovski, the most winning fighter in UFC history) is on the loose, wiping out an entire brothel before a clone of Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) wipes his memory clear and frees him.
So yes, in the midst of this brave new world, Deveraux and Scott are gathering UniSols and radicalizing them against the U.S. government. I am all for this wildness.
John also learns that he was once a truck driver, that he was in love with Sarah (Mariah Bonner) and that he can regrow body parts because he’s an unstoppable killing machine. There’s also that original John, who has been co-opted by the government and the idea that everything that the new John believes is just weeks, not years, old.
Spoilers on, because the act of removing John’s memories drives him insane and he starts killing every UniSol, but that’s all part of Deveraux’s plan, to find a successor and sacrifice himself to him so that the dream of a new world order of UniSols can finally come true.
Written by Hyams, Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenlagh, this is a movie that starts with a doomed little girl saying “There are monsters in this house” and ends with Van Damme and Adkins having a strobe-lit, face-painted death match with machetes.
“From this moment on, you are no longer a slave to the government. From this moment on, your mind is your own. From this moment on, you will seek vengeance from your oppressors. Freedom is yours.”
Show me any action movie — hell, movie! — that tries for such loftier ideals and does it with three action stars and an MMA fighter in its cast. The fact that it took me so long to absorb this movie is a bit of stupidity I am going to pay back by being an evangelist for this film.
H. P. Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs!) tells his cabby (Brian Yuzna) to wait outside the monastery — he’s got a Necronomicon to find. As he races to find a copy before the monks stop him, he’s locked inside a room where he gets to discover the future through the book.
The first story, “The Drowned,” is loosely based on “The Rats in the Walls.” It tells the story of Jethro De Lapoer (Richard Lynch!), whose wife and child died in an accident, causing him to set a Bible ablaze at the funeral. He brings them back to life with the Necronomicon, but the green glowing eyes of his family as they rise upset him so much that he leaps to his death. His nephew has no such compunctions and brings back his wife Clara (Maria Ford), who comes back in the same way, nearly causing his death. Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak was also inspired by this same story. This story and the framing story come from Yuzna.
“The Cold” is based on the short story “Cool Air” and has Dr. Madden (David Warner!) injecting spinal fluid and staying inside a chilled room to stay alive forever, at least until the power goes out. Dennis Christopher, Gary Graham and Millie Perkins are also in this story, which you may have seen in Alberty Pyun’s H. P. Lovecraft’s Cool Air or the Jeannot Szwarc-directed, Rod Serling-written Night Galleryepisode. This was directed by Christopher Gans, the director of Brotherhood of the Wolf and Silent Hill.
At the end, Lovecraft avoids the monks and runs into the night. This film may not be completely successful at making an anthology of his stories, but it’s pretty entertaining. It was well-received in the U.S., but a much bigger success in Europe and Asia, where it played theaters.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
Seriously, who knew that the director of Cybernator and Run Like Hell— as well as scarecrow #1 in Dark Harvest, ninja guard #1 in Big Sister 2000 and Bo Stompkins in Raw Energy — and writers Randall Frakes (Rollerblade, Hell Comes to Frogtown) and Tanya York (Frogtown II) would be able to create such a piece of outright lunacy? I always discuss movies seemingly made by aliens that have no idea what humanity is like and beam us their ideas and as such they’re so strange that nothing seems like anything a human being would do.
This is the movie we send back to them.
The Vampire of Los Angeles (Don Stroud) is the kind of killer that only direct-to-video can give us. He randomly picks up women and does all manner of odd things to them, like keeping their skulls for cereal bowls and injecting their blood into his veins. Oh yeah — one of the skulls talks to him and has gotten inside his head and not in the way that skulls should be in your head. Stroud is absolutely going for it in this movie and seeing as how the last four movies he did before this were Donald Jackson roller blade-related movies, I get the feeling he had the chance to really stretch his wings as an actor. And by stretching his wings, I mean screaming at the top of his lungs and taking Polaroids of himself in the mirror.
In the very same neighborhood is a house of priests: the Monsignor (Erik Estrada, whose first name is misspelled in the credits), Father Thomas (Jan-Michael Vincent) and Father Daniel (Michael M. Foley, Tracer from WMAC Masters). Most of the time, the priests are all sitting at a table eating dinner, reading their lines off of the newspapers in front of them and interacting with their maid Merna. Yes, the priests have Judy Landers as their maid.
Have you started to figure out why I love this movie yet?
As we get into the stories of the Vampire draining women of their blood and Father Michael kicking ass for the Lord as a vigilante priest complete with a cross-decorated gun and throwing stars, we also get nearly an entire song by a lovely young lady named Hiroko. She’s also in Miracle Beach, a beach blanket movie that unites Ami Dolenz, Pat Morita, Alexis Arquette, Allen Garfield, Martin Mull and Vincent Schiavelli.
I have no idea how a Japanese pop idol got to America much less why she’s in this sleazy movie and even less why she got to sing almost all of her song “My Love’s Waiting.”
Otis the vampire has a new target, a girl named Kim (Carrie Chambers, Karate Cop), who is a psychic just like him. Yes, that’s right. He’s not just a vigilante cop who has a gun with a cross on it, he’s also a psychic vigilante cop who has a gun with a cross on it. Kim brings the two stories together, even if I can’t remember how Robert Z’Dar, Jim Brown and Scott Shaw (more Donald Jackson crossover) are part of this.
This is the kind of movie where you watch Don Stroud eat corn flakes out of a human skull and make smoothies with blood and beer, all while the psychic cop also has a crucifix knife ready to hear that killer’s deathbed confession.
Thanks to my weird movie pals across the pond The Schlock Pit, I learned that Stroud was paid $1,000 a day for this movie. He should have made way, way more than that, because he’s giving this movie everything he has left.
This is the kind of movie that people get mad at and I get happy about. It’s just so oddly made, so poorly paced and has the cast equivalent of a horror movie convention, but you know I’d buy every 8×10 Judy Landers has on her table.
Director Louis Crisitello has created this documentary all about Pensacola musician Phil Thomas Katt, whose show The Uncharted Zone has built and encouraged a scene all its own. I didn’t know anything about this music, these videos or the man himself, but this film was plenty of fun and made me want to know more.
Known as the “Dick Clark of the Gulf Coast music scene,” Katt believes that anyone can make good music. It’s great that even as the world becomes more commercialized and homogenized, there are people out there willing to put their time and energy into championing music that no one else would hear or see.
He’s still out there, still making The Uncharted Zone and the idea that music of all kinds is encouraged brings a smile to my face.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
Germán Alonso is trying to finish his first movie, Mexman, but he’s battling with the documentary crew following him, trying to get taken seriously as a filmmaker and dealing with fickle love.
Directed and written by Josh Polon, I got the idea that yes, Germán is a genius and makes incredible shorts and puppets. When producer Moctasuma Esparza (the producer of Selena, The Milagro Beanfield War and The Telephone) is interested in making his film, Germán and the writers he’s working with — Tyler and Ben Soper — start to have conflicts because its show business, you know. Business. And geniuses don’t always do well at business.
It takes more than just the ability to animate and dream to direct, because you are the one in charge. You need to be on schedule, you need to be organized and you need to have people respect you. The problems start when Tyler and Ben take the writing credit and give Germán the credit of just story. This sends him over the edge and things never improve from there.
I feel bad for Germán, but when you have an opportunity, you need to focus. The idea of falling for a woman who may not be all that into you and spending forever talking about ideas instead of doing them is infuriating. For all his talent, it feels sadly wasted.
The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook,Twitterand Instagram.
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