Consider Light Blast (Colpi di Luce in Italy, which means Strokes of Light) Erik Estrada’s Rick Dalton moment. Made two years after the show that made him famous — CHiPs — was canceled and six years after People named him one of The 10 Sexiest Bachelors in the World, this finds Estrada in Italy working for Enzo G. Castellari, the same man who directed The Inglorious Bastards, 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Sinbad of the Seven Seas. Estrada even married his leading lady, Peggy Lynn Rowe, while in Rome making this movie.
He plays San Francisco cop Ronn Warren who must stop Dr. Yuri Svoboda (Ennio Girolami, who is in many a Castellari movie; he was the President in Escape from the Bronxand Viking in Sinbad), who has a laser ray that can melt human flesh — this being an Italian movie, we get to watch a young couple make love and then get burned down into goo and skeletons — unless he’s paid $10 million dollars.
How much of a tough guy is Warren? We meet him when he defuses a hostage situation by walking in just in the tiniest of a banana hammock carrying a turkey that has a pistol inside it. He shoots a criminal right in the face and then takes everyone else out while pretty much naked. Why? Who cares. It’s San Francisco, which has a Chinatown, baby!
This being an 80s movie, the final boss has decided to menace the Oakland Stunt Show, which means we get to see people race dune buggies. In fact, if you love car chases, I would dare say that this is the movie for you. And face melting. Seriously, Castellari and co-writer Tito Carpi (Tentacles, Alien from the Deep, Atlantis Interceptors) must have watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and decided to go all in on human features being turned into wet hot bloody goo.
Speaking of Atlantis Interceptors, if you liked the Maurizio and Guido De Angelis music from that movie, you’re in luck. It’s in this movie too. So is some of the Oliver Onions score from Yor, Hunter from the Future.
Also: This also uses footage from Fireball 500 for that stunt show. I am proud of my Italian people for believing in recycling before anyone else.
If you rented movies with me in the 80s and 90s, I would have totally picked this. And you might have wondered why and then when it started with gratuitous nudity and body melt, you’d look over and see me laughing and say, “Well, yeah. That’s why it picked this.”
June 11: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Horror! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
I feel like I haven’t really given Lambverto Bava a fair chance. Then again, whenever I say that, people always remark that I’m always mentioning that I like his movies. Demons is a near-perfect movie but I’ve always qualified that by saying that he had Argento, Franco Ferrin and Dardano Sacchetti on board along with Michele Soavi as assistant director. And then I think, well, you know, I kind of really like Macabre and it has some really grimy stuff in it. A Blade In the Dark, Blastfighter, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance, The Ogre, Demons 2 and Midnight Ripper all have charms. I’ve even come around to liking Delirium e foto di Gioia, Maybe not Monster Shark. But the more I think about it, I really do like Lamberto Bava.
This is the movie that put me over the edge into perhaps even love.
In July of 1986, Lamberto was hired to create five TV movies under the title Brivido Giallo (Yellow Thrill). Of course, none of these were giallo and only four got made: The Ogre, Dinner with a Vampire, Graveyard Disturbance and Until Death.
There were some hurt feelings about this movie when it was made. It was based on an older script by Dardano Sacchetti, but Lucio Fulci went on record saying that he was planning on making an adaption of The Postman Always Rings Twice with the title Evil Comes Back. Fulci said that Sacchetti wrote it up and sent it to several producers and later found out that when Luciano Martino bought it, his name wasn’t on it. Fulci said, “…because of our friendship I decided not to sue Sacchetti, but I did break off all relations with him.” Sacchetti responded, “The producer of Evil Comes Back didn’t have the budget required, and he gave up to do the film. That’s it. Years later, as the screenplay was mine, I sold it to another producer who used it for a b-movie with Lamberto Bava.”
Gioia Scola really could have been a remembered giallo queen if she’d come along 15 years early. As it is, she was in some of my favorite late 80s films in the genre, including Obsession: A Taste for Fear, Too Beautiful to Die, Suggestionata and Evil Senses.
In this film, she plays Linda, a woman whose husband Luca (Roberto Pedicini) left her eight years ago. All the men of the small village wondered why he’d leave behind such a stunning woman. In fact, this movie could have been called Ogni uomo vuole scopare Linda. She gave birth to Luca’s son and unknown to the town, has since become the wife of the man who helped kill her husband, Carlo (David Brandon).
Together, they run a small hotel near the lake. During one rainy night, Marco (Urbano Barberini) arrives to stay. And it seems like he knows way too much about what’s going on. Her son Alex (Marco Vivio) may as well, as he wakes up every night screaming, dreaming of his father clawing his way out of a muddy grave. She hires Marco as the handyman, but Carlo thinks they’re sleeping together. In no way can this turn out well.
How does Marco know where all the old clothes are kept? How does he already know the family recipes? And why is he so close so quickly with Alex?
What’s intriguing is how close this is in story and tone, yet goes off on its own path, to Bava’s father’s film Shock. The difference is where the father would use camera tricks and tone to create a mood of dread, his son will put you directly into the middle of the muck and grue with comic book lighting and great looking effects from Angelo Mattei. And keeping the family tradition going, Lamberto’s son Fabrizio was the assistant director. How wild that Mario’s grandson was AD on movies like Zoolander 2 and Argento’s Giallo and The Card Player, using the name Roy Bava for those last two movies.
My favorite fact about this movie is that it was released on VHS as The Changeling 2: The Revenge. Trust me, it has nothing to do with The Changeling.
You can watch a gorgeous version of this thanks to Dr. Sapirstein on YouTube.
FP 4EVZ tells the story of JTRO (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his legendary family of rhythm game warriors, which includes Chia-T (Tally Wickham) and their daughter Chia-TRO (Lib Campbell). To save humanity from a sober future, they must use the time travel device known as the Remix Machine.
Also, if you’ve never watched one of these movies, they demand that you believe that Dance Dance Revolution is how people battle in the world after the end. In this world, it’s called BEAT, which means Balance/Expeditiousness/Aggression/Tempo.
Crowd funded at the same time as the third FP movie, this has Space Ducks coming back to our Earth to rule it once again and only Chia-TRO can be the chosen one who can dance against them.
If you can wrap your head around that sentence, this movie is for you. I asked Jason Trost about this series and how it’s grown and he said, “I’m making a movie that me and the close people around me want to make. A lot of people aren’t going to like them, but I don’t really care. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, we’re appealing to the people who like FP movies. They’re going to love these and I’m making these movies for them.
I’m not trying to make FP for everyone. I feel like there are so many movies now where they try to expand their audience and they lose the magic of what they were when they start targeting everyone. Is everyone going to like RoboCop? Probably not. But do some people love it?”
Trost also discussed how each film in the series has become a different style of film: “I feel like with each movie, well, they’re all parodies, so to speak. They’re all satirical, parodying new genres and new movies every single time. So the joke just continues to evolve. At this point, the same characters are almost in completely different worlds every time.”
So what movie is FP 4EVZ? “Obviously, a lot of Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Then there was definitely the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies, Romancing the Stone, things like that. I definitely want this to be a high adventure, going after an artifact movie. I mean, the two main characters are a man and a woman who bicker with each other about their relationship.”
I loved every minute, but I’ve been into these films since day one. I live by the motto “Dance with your mind, not with your feet.”
Carrie Gemmell — who also appeared in director and writer Chris Alexander’s Queen of Blood and Blood for Irina — is She. During the day, she’s merely an office drone. Yet at night, She dreams of another woman (Cheryl Singleton) that she works with, as well as blood, sex and death. And when she wakes up, it isn’t where she went to sleep. And her fangs are growing.
I thought maybe it was all in her head, but then after luring the woman back home, She opens her mouth and reenacts The Company of Wolves with a head emerging from her lips. Or is this her finally coming out? Ah, maybe I just need to remember the words of Georges Bataille. “Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.”
If you haven’t seen one of Alexander’s films, they remain deceptively simple. There’s a moment here where She is looking in the mirror when she wakes up and the white wall creates an effective split screen, juxtaposing her inspecting herself with absolute nothingness. It’s all in camera, not something created in the edit, and so much of this is just art emerging for long takes or color taking control of the screen.
There’s also another woman — Shauna Henry — who was Irina in Blood for Irina, Blood Dynasty and Queen of Blood. Is she playing the same role, lending her vampiric power to this tale of another creature that walks the night — “To walk the night / To feel no love / To know the touch of another kiss / Never more.” — and wakes to wonder if these transformations and desires could be true?
Instead of Samhain, maybe I should have considered The Electric Prunes as a theme for this film. “Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room / I touched your golden hair and tasted your perfume / Your eyes were filled with love the way they used to be / Your gentle hand reached out to comfort me / Then came the dawn / And you were gone / You were gone, gone, gone.”
Made in 2014, How to Save Us prefigures the last few years of our reality by being about Brian Everett (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and his younger brother Sam (Coy Jandreau) during the middle of a mysterious quarantine. When Sam goes missing in Tasmania, Brian has to travel there to save his brother.
In the world of this movie, Tasmania is filled with the spirits of its many dead souls, so Brian must cover himself in the ashes of the dead to move amongst them. After his sister Molly (Tallay Wickham) asks him to search for their missing sibling, she givcs him Sam’s notebook, which has the title of this movie scrawled on the cover.
There are some big ideas here, with the entities being heard on the radio, Brian dealing with the loss of both of his parents and the fact that electricity can stop the dead, which means that a Nintendo Power Glove can become a weapon. Despite the addition of that nostalgic game gear, this movie has a darker edge than Trost’s The FPseries.
When I got the chance to speak with Jason Trost, we discussed the end of the world that we’ve been living through. When discussing the actual pandemic, he said “You sit there and watch it outside and it’s like the laziest zombie apocalypse ever. (laughs) None of these movies really prepare you for it, because it was very tame in comparison to what we’ve watched. I think we’ve all been built up towards something and what we got wasn’t Mad Max.”
I really enjoyed the dark world that this movie shares and how it’s characters only speak through voiceover. It’s a way different film for Jason Trost and I enjoyed its challenges to the viewer.
Sobriety and time travel aspect threaten JTRO (director, writer and star Jason Trost) and the FP in the third installment of The FP. What can twenty grand and some green screen get you? A movie with a vision.
L Dubba E (Lee Valmassy) has returned, thanks to the aforementioned chronal messing about, as well as JTRO’s daughter with Chai-T, Chai-TRO (Lib Campbell). Where the first two movies are filled with tons of action — and this has some — this builds the universe and makes it dense, kind of like how by the late 90s you needed several guides and needed to know someone to be able to understand a single issue of X-Men. The mythology has gotten so rich that you need to wade into it slowly.
When I got the opportunity to interview Jason Trost, he said that “I feel like with each movie, well, they’re all parodies, so to speak. They’re all satirical, parodying new genres and new movies every single time. So the joke just continues to evolve. At this point, the same characters are almost in completely different worlds every time.”
Are the movies still exciting for him? It sure seems that way, as he added “…every time there’s no rules. I can really just kind of do what I want with it. The only rule per se of this franchise is that each one has to be more ridiculous and the stakes have to be higher every time. If I can do that I can pretty much do whatever I want. I think that’s kind of what I’ve built and set up with this franchise. If you’re still here at this point, you kind of know that’s the deal. Every time it gets to be fresh because they get to go on an entirely new adventure.”
While this ETs Among Us film is only twenty minutes, Linda Moulton Howe and narrator/director Cybela Clare analyze parallel binary code warnings from UFOs 35 years apart.
In 1980, a military officer in Bentwaters Air Force base (Britain) witnessed a landed spacecraft and was later mentally bombarded with binary code. This is better known as the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident and is considered by some to be “Britain’s Roswell.”
On December 26, 1980, U.S. military personnel spotted strange lights above Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. Air Force officer John Burroughs was one of the men who investigated the event — which Nick Pope has claimed was an actual landing — and said “The woods lit up and you could hear the farm animals making a lot of noises. You could see the lights down by a farmer’s house. We climbed over the fence and started walking toward the red and blue lights and they just disappeared.”
Fellow office Jim Penniston said, “I estimated it to be about three meters tall and about three meters wide at the base. No landing gear was apparent, but it seemed like she was on fixed legs. I moved a little closer… I walked around the craft, and finally, I walked right up to the craft. I noticed the fabric of the shell was more like a smooth, opaque, black glass.”
Both men have PTSD from the incident and Penniston even claims that he was “bombarded with binary code.” Others say it was just a meteor or the SAS pulling a prank on the U.S. Air Force.
According to this movie, binary code was transmitted to another military man in 2015 in the USA. What do you think? Have you ever been bombarded by binary code?
June 10: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Kung Fu! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.
It’s real easy to make Gymkata a punchline. But how many movies have ninjas on horseback and Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas as a secret agent?
Based on The Terrible Game by Dan Tyler Moore, this was directed by Robert Clouse, who seemed to have a talent for making movies that I love, including The Ultimate Warrior, Force: Five, The Pack, China O’Brien and its sequel, Game of Death, Battle Creek Brawl, Enter the Dragon and The Pack. Its writer, Charles Robert Carner, also made the amazing Blind Fury.
Jonathan Cabot (Thomas) is tasked by the Special Intelligence Agency (SIA) to play The Game, the athletic spectacle that the country of Parimsitan makes foreigners play. It’s like American Gladiators but to the death with the winner getting any wish they want. The SIA wants that wish to be allowing the United States to place a Star Wars early warning satellite system in the country. Cabot is told that he can save the country and also learn about his missing father, who they claim was an SIA agent. He’s trained in the fighting arts by Hao (Conan Lee) and soon falls for Princess Rubali (Tetchie Agbayan) who he saves from the enemy by using his combination of karate and gymnastics or, as the movie says in the title, Gymkata.
Can Cabot defeat Commander Zamir (Richard Norton)? Will he find his father who supposedly died in The Game? Does he win The Game which no outsider has succeeded in winning in 900 years? Certainly you know the answers to all of these, right? How about this one: Is it strange that we’re cheering on American imperialism?
There’s also a “Town of Crazies” that luckily has a pommel horse in the middle of downtown so that Cabot can thrill us all with his abilities. And the leader is called The Khan and he’s played by Buck Kartalian who was Julius in Planet of the Apes and Peter Fudd in Please Don’t Eat My Mother. Isn’t his real name better than his name in this?
Kurt Thomas was a great enough gymnast that he has several moves named for him: the Thomas flair, the Thomas salto, the Thomas on High Bar and the Thomas flair on pommel horse. I never knew that in gymnastics, new moves are named in the gymnastics rule book after whoever first performs them in an international competition. So Scott Steiner would not get to call the rana the Frankensteiner, because Huracán Ramírez did the huracán rana first.
For all the worst movies this film is on, it’s never boring and always ready to delight you with people screaming, fist fights and yes, gymnastic chop sockery. There are way worse movies, trust me.
At night, a woman (Ali Chappell) puts on her red overcoat and black gloves, reaches for a straight razor and heads out into the blackness to kill, baby, kill. And when she returns, she seemingly communicates with death herself (Thea Munster) who drives her to commit more acts of death and self-harm.
As each night ends, the viewer learns more about the life of this killer, a woman divorced from an abusive man, unable to see the daughter that she loves.
Directed, written, shot and even set decorated — with Chappell — by Chris Alexander, this is a film that is at once giallo and then an art piece, fitting somewhere between the two worlds way better than a much higher budgeted film like Amer can dream of doing. Yet unlike so many of the films within this genre, the emphasis is less on the murders and more on the pre and post states of the murderer.
I can see where some would see this as pretentious arty nonsense, but I love it. This is the movie that puts us into the mindset of the giallo killer while knowing nothing of the victims. They are just there to be grist for the mill, flesh for the flash of the blade, mannequins to do violence upon so that we can return to that room, the place where it seems that time stops and also stops making sense.
Elizabeth Carter (Erica Mena, who played the role in The Stepmother and The Stepmother 2) is still looking for her perfect family and repeating the cycle of trying to make it work, losing her mind, killing everyone and then starting over again. She still wants revenge on her true love Eddie (Marques Houston, who played this part in The Stepmother).
Before that, she’s going to try and make college-aged young men her son and be shocked when they get weirded out by it. Then, she kills them and their dads. It’s wild because this movie feels like several movies in the franchise and not just one story.
You can laugh about Tubi originals, but how many movie series today make it to three films? How many streaming shows get premieres? I mean, Erica Mena wore a LaQuan Smith-designed dress and highlighter green Tom Ford pumps on the red carpet!
After seven minutes or so of flashbacks and Elizabeth screaming while she’s covered in blood and wearing a #1 Mom shirt, we learn that while she has used so many names, she’s now Michelle and married to artist Sam Collins (Tremayne Norris) who has a son named Bobby who may be going to college on a basketball scholarship but who refuses to call Michelle his mom.
Bobby doesn’t trust his new stepmother and he’s helped along the way by a nosy Karen named Kelly (Christina Rose) who is sure that she grew up with her in Florida and that she’s Elizabeth, not Michelle. She and her grandmother are so sure that they make a pie and bring it over. You know what you don’t do to murderous stepmothering antiheroines? Bring them dessert and keep bugging them. He gets a photo of Michelle from her past and learns about her real name, determining that she’s the infamous Elizabeth Carter and seconds later, she has Sam all tied up and bloody. And then he’s dead — she beats him with a crowbar — and so is Kelly, who should have just kept her trap shut in the grocery store.
Then it’s time for a shower and a new identity. And a new man.
Michelle becomes Chantel — complete with new contacts, pink wig and a Spanish accent — and sets everything on fire. In a few weeks, she’s picking up Eric Riley from her bar job. Three weeks — and some stock footage — later and they’re married in Vegas.
Yet just like the last marriage, his son Jared doesn’t trust his new stepmother. And when his rebellious daughter Taar comes and says that she needs to stay with him because she hates her mother’s new boyfriend. He and his wife did a Parent Trap with their kids and each took one. He also gave up banging the block — or dealing drugs — which really upsets Chantel as she thinks she got Eric wrong.
Chantel remembers that yes, she likes to kill people. It doesn’t help that Jared barely likes her even if she gives him the latest Air Jordans.
Meanwhile, Harrison Linbrook (Charles Malik Whitfield) comes into a police station and demands justice as his brother Eddie has been missing for 48 hours. Detective Nolan explains that the Phoenix Police Department has been investigating Elizabeth Carter for the last eight months and they believe that she’s responsible for his disappearance.
Wait a second. How much time has passed between these movies?
There’s also Agent Jennifer Conner (Vanessa Deleon) of the Missing Persons Unit. She’s also been looking for Eddie because she thinks it’s a kidnapping. And now they say that six months ago, Elizabeth was spotting stalking his brother. There’s some exposition about the past marriages and we learn that yes, the son Bobby is dead too. So is Gail, the grandmother of the Karen who caused all that drama. And they also mention Kevin and Dustin Smith from The Stepmother 2 and how she killed his friend Dustin.
That’s when Scott (Justin Sweat) shows up from the first movie with his girlfriend. She refers to Elizabeth as “the most dangerous woman on the planet.”
The manhunt — err, womanhunt — is officially on.
Meanwhile, Michelle has become Zooey again and kidnaps Eddie, leaving him shackled up so that she can be the perfect wife for him. Her entire house is filled with the same picture with the words “You are exactly where you are meant to be” on them and she screams, “My Eddie! He’s home!”
Of course, none of the cops are getting along and fighting over who gets the arrest.
Agent Conner interviews Kevin and Dustin Smith who tell her that his ex-wife was obsessed with Eddie. More exposition but man, at least these movies tie together well. I mean, I may be the only person that loves them, so is this fan service just for me?
Somehow, Michelle and Chantel are leading dual lives and are able to talk to each other. Eddie starts using her love for him to try and escape while his family tries to figure out how to save him. They post some videos about Michelle on social media and upload it.
Chantel has a breakdown over Taar and confesses to being abused by her past relationships while having a dramatic cry. She even tells him about having a baby boy Jason with Eddie and that they both died “in a pretty bad accident.” In the middle of this emotionally charged moment between husband and wife, Taar comes in and gives some attitude. I mean, this girl is going to die.
Then w discover that Michelle has a nervous breakdown every time there’s a full moon and it’s a crescent moon! What? She thinks about what Frank did to her and sees him everywhere.
The next morning, Eddie and Michelle or Zooey or whatever have a heart to heart and learn about exactly who Frank is. Frank was the first man to ever hurt her and her son Jason was all that she ever had that was good. And Frank took him from her. “He was a child! He was innocent! He had to watch me be defiled and treated like trash!” Then she explains a crime boss named Michael that she was with, a vicious man, a married man, who took her and Jason in for a decade. And when she got pregnant, she either had to get an abortion or die. His wife was going to kill them both. Frank came with them and eventually, from all the stress, she lost the baby. Frank stayed with her, though, but one day he decided that he was in love with her and then tried to assault her. Here we are with them bonding and we learn that Michelle and Zooey and all these women are different personalities.
Finally, Taar pushes things too far and gets knocked upside the head and gets her dad and brother covered in gasoline. Taar wakes up just in time to save everyone and Chantel runs away.
As the cops narrow down which cabin is Elizabeth’s, Scott has already found out the location and is trying to get revenge all by himself. There’s an amazing fight between Scott’s girlfriend and Elizabeth that brings us to the close of this as the cops finally arrive.
At the end of all of this, when Michelle has finally been caught and is in an insane asylum and looks like Asylum Hannibal Lecter, we notice a man watching her. He’s Michael Esposito (Vincent Rivera), who says that he has finally found her. And that’s where the movie ends which means that The Stepmother 4 is happening.
You know what made this movie for me? This meme by reddit user CreatorLuither69.
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