VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 11, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

Buster Lane (Jan-Michael Vincent) has it all. He’s handsome, popular and engaged to his ravishing high-school sweetheart Margie Hooks (Pamela Sue Martin). He has everything he needs. Except, well, sex. For that he turns to Billie-Jo Truluck (Joan Goodfellow) just like all the other boys in town.

Thing is, Buster falls in love with her. And Billie-Jo falls in love with him. She opens up for the first time and experiences a life she never thought she would ever live. And then Buster’s friends, upset that they can’t have sex with her, rape and kill her. Billie hunts them down, killing two and putting two more in the hospital. He gets out of jail just in time for her funeral, which only his parents attend, and he tears every gorgeous garden in town to shreds to give her the flowers she deserves.

Directed by Daniel Petrie (The Betsy), this was based on real-life events that occurred in writer Ron Turbeville’s South Carolina place of birth. He wrote the story with Ron Batron and the script himself. It’s also the first film of Robert Englund.

Hoyt Axton did the theme song, Sydney Shelton may have directed some of it and oh yeah, this is the first mainstream American movie to have its male star appear completely nude.

After being compromised during a mission gone wrong, an international assassin named Walker (Daniel Stisen ) is sent to Reassignment Center 42. There, he’ll get a new identity and be able to erase any trace of his last job and even his past.

However, a ruthless team of operatives led by Keates (Samantha Schnitzler) storms the secure compound forcing Walker to team up with an elite hitwoman named Elda (Lauren Okadigbo) and her mysterious charge Juliet (Yennis Cheung).

Who will survive The Siege?

Directed by Brad Watson and written by Nicole Bartlett, this is a movie mostly cast with stunt performers, which means that it’s all action from literally the first few minutes. You’re not coming to a movie like this for emotional resonance. You want to see people fire guns, do ill-advised stunts and beat the stuffing out of one another. I’m happy to report that this movie delivers more of that than you’ll find in probably ten other movies.

If video stores still existed on the scale of the past, this is the kind of movie that people would rent and be really surprised how much they liked it. They’d say, “I watched this movie with this super muscular dude getting in all these fights, two women had a brutal brawl and man, some dude used pliers to take the teeth from all the people he killed. It was pretty awesome.”

It is pretty awesome.

You can get The Siege on blu ray from Well Go USA.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the March 28, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here. There’s another take on this movie here.

Directed, produced and co-written — with William Goldman — by George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Slaughterhouse-Five, Slap Shot, The World According to Garp, Funny Farm — what a career!), The Great Waldo Pepper stars Robert Redford as Waldo Pepper, a pilot who spent World War I teaching other pilots instead of being in combat. He feels a sense of loss as he settles back into American life, a malaise that he takes out on his rival Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson) before they become friends. A stunt goes wrong, sending Waldo back home to his girlfriend Maude (Margot Kidder), who hates when he returns, because it’s always when he’s hurt. Her brother Ezra (Edward Herrmann), however, is excited because he thinks that his monoplane plans can make Waldo famous.

Until then, Waldo and Axel start working in Doc Dillhoefer’s (Phillip Bruns) air circus, which has an act where Mary Beth (Susan Sarandon) will wear a barely there dress, climb out on the wing and have the wind tear her clothes off. Well, that’s the idea. She ends up falling to her death, grounding everyone and bringing an investigation from Newt Potts (Geoffrey Lewis).

Ezra joins the circus and brings his monoplane, hoping to be the first person to an outside loop — an aerobatic maneuver where a vertical circle is entered from a straight and erect level flight with the canopy pointing out of the loop — before he crashes on his third attempt. As he lies in the wreckage, a member of the audience flicks a cigarette into the gasoline-soaked crash scene, burning Ezra alive. As he screams in abject pain, with no one helping him, Waldo kills him to stop his agony. He jumps in a plane, despite being grounded, and buzzes the crowd before crashing himself.

Waldo and Axel go to Hollywood, where they get a job shooting recreations of the air battles of the War to End All Wars alongside German air ace Ernst Kessler (Bo Brundin). During shooting, the two men — both bitter at the world — find something of their past in the sky and begin a dogfight without weapons, instead crashing into one another. Waldo wins their fight and the two men salute one another as Waldo learns that his plane has no landing gear, which means one more crash.

This was made without models. Those are real planes.

Hill flew as a U.S. Marine Corps cargo pilot in World War II and was a lifelong pilot, so this was a passion project for him. He had Svenson and Redford do each sequence with no parachutes or safety harnesses so they would experience the real feeling of flight. It’s amazing that this happened, that no one was hurt and that they agreed to it. In no way would that ever happen today. Well, unless we’re discussing Tom Cruise.

After a quick and passionate few weeks of dating, Rafer (John Clarence Stewart) and Suzie (Marija Juliette Abney, Dora Milaje from the Black Panther movies) get married. At first, they like the freedom that they give one another, he for guy night and she for therapy. However, that’s not the truth. Both of them have a secret that will either destroy them both or bring them together forever.

Rafer tells his wife that he works at Red Light Insurance with Travis (Christian Campbell), but the truth is that he’s a killer for money, being given targets by a mysterious agency that sees all. He’s worried that Suzie is cheating on him, which he seemingly confirms when he catches her making out with a man in the back alley of a bar. The truth? She’s a serial killer, killing men who date rape women and cutting off the lobe of their left ear as a trophy.

Meanwhile, Detective Jane Flough (Summer Crockett Moore) and Detective Bob Reyes (Manny Perez) find that their cases are matching up as they find several bodies of men missing their lower left ear. As they get closer to Suzie — whose revelation has bonded her closer to Rafer — Detective Flough learns that her marriage is suffering as she keeps so much of her work from her partner.

Directed and written by Tony Glazer, A Killer Romance is one of the better Tubi originals that I’ve seen. There are people with actual problems in this, real feeling people in an unreal story of murder and contract killing. When Rafer keeps his life from his wife, he starts to destroy the trust that she had given him. You know, you may not be a killer and your wife might not murder men, but there are some relationship lessons that you can learn from this movie.

I also really dug Tao (Suo Liu), the philosophical agent who explains to our heroes that they have something that very few people will ever find and yet, he still must slice them to pieces. Yet because they have awakened a love for killing that has broken through the sadness and ennui he’s been experiencing, he feels that he must thank them. Between that and the random serial killer artwork that pops up in the background, A Killer Romance — originally called To Have and To Hold — has the right quirks, as well as solid cinematography from Tiffany Armour-Tejada and even giallo-style lighting in the bar scenes, that make it break out from the pack of been there, done that movies.

VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the February 13, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.

I know they made a remake of Straw Dogs in 2011, but there’s no way I can imagine people not being beyond upset with this movie. The violence probably wouldn’t upset all that many people, but the two graphic assaults of Susan George — much less the quick flash that she may not have been all that upset by the first — would be greeted by a procession of anger the likes of which no movie made today would be able to create. I mean, would director Sam Peckinpah have been able to make movies in today’s world? One could argue that he struggled to do it in the 70s.

Based on The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon M. Williams and written by David Zelag Goodman and Peckinpah, the story begins with David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) moving his wife Amy (George) back to her hometown of Wakely. Her ex, Charlie Venner (Del Henney), has a gang of horrible townsfolk like Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), Chris Cawsey (Jim Norton) and Phil Riddawa (Donald Webster) and each of them resents the meek academic American making love to one of their own.

David and Amy have moved into her father’s house, Trenchers Farm, and hired the four men to fix it up. As the house improves, their marriage falls apart, as she claims he left America because he was a coward afraid of conflict and that he treats her in a condescending manner. He withdraws into his study of stellar structures while she teases the workmen with her body.

Despite the men killing their cat, David still goes hunting with them. They pull the snipe hunting trick and abandon him, heading back to his home so that Venner can attack his wife. That coupling seems a bit too much like lovemaking by the end and as she holds her ex-lover, Scutt comes in with a gun and forces Venner to hold her down. By the time David returns, Amy says nothing.

The next day, David fires the men and Amy has a breakdown in church when she sees them. Things get worse — a local boy named Henry Niles (David Warner) ends up being seduced by a relative of Venner named Janice Hedden (Sally Thomsett). When the men chase them down, he accidentally kills her and goes on the run. After David accidentally hits him with his car, he takes the boy home, which brings the foursome back to begin invading the home.

Then David says, “I will not allow violence against this house.”

What follows is a Hoffman descending into the kind of barbaric behavior one expects in a Stanley Peckinpah movie.

Straw Dogs is older than I am and still packs such infernal power. We see ourselves cheering for David to finally rise up, but is too much well, too much? I guess not from the same man who made The Wild Bunch. I’ve been thinking this film over and over in my head and trying to figure out how I feel about it. It’s not ambivalence. I’m just seeking an answer.

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.