EDITOR’S NOTE: This was on the site back on November 1, 2020 but now Arrow has released a UHD version. The beauty of the Arrow re-release — beyond the gorgeous 4K rescan of the 35mm negative — are all the extras. Not just one, but three commentary tracks are on this (star Lance Guest and his son Jackson Guest; Mike White of The Projection Booth podcast; director Nick Castle and production designer Ron Cobb), along with interviews with Catherine Mary Stewart, composer Craig Safan, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel, special effects supervisor Kevin Pike, a breakdown on the landmark effects and even a featurette with game collector Estil Vance, who has actually made the game from the movie.

I have to say, the Castle and Cobb commentary is packed with info, from who is playing the aliens to how the effects came together to even plenty of fun asides about how they tried to tie the video game world and real movie world together. It’s like listening to two friends talk about a really great time in their life. Castle is super honest about the lack of time they had to film and things he feels could be better today. It’s exactly the kind of thing that film lovers get into the most and, as always, Arrow delivers the goods.

I also love the reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Ferguson and the collector’s booklet featuring writing by Amanda Reyes and sci-fi author Greg Bear’s Omni magazine article on Digital Productions, the company responsible for the CGI in The Last Starfighter.

You can order the 4K UHD or blu ray from MVD.

As much as we decry practical effects over CGI — in the same way we demand physical media over streaming — there are times when it doesn’t have to be all that bad. I decided that instead of finding a poor example of computer generated animation, I’d share something that I love.

While the first CGI in mainstream film was probably 1976’s Futureworld (several modern techniques were innovated in this film, from an animated CGI  hand that was taken from Edwin Catmull’s 1972 experimental short subject A Computer Animated Hand and an animated face from Fred Parke’s 1974 experimental short subject Faces & Body Parts to an early example of digital compositing to place live actors over a previously filmed background), the two movies that I can really remember to use extensive computer-generated imagery were Tron and The Last Starfighter.

In place of physical spaceships, 3D rendered models were used to depict this film’s Gunstar and spacecraft. Their designs came from artist Ron Cobb, who also worked on Dark Star, Alien, Star Wars, Conan the Barbarian and wrote the initial script for Dark Skies, which Steven Spielberg rewrote into the mich friendlier E.T. He’s also listed in the credits for Back to the Future as DeLorean Time Travel Consultant.

There are over 27 minutes of effects in this film, which was a tremendous amount of computer animation for its time. However, this animation required half the time of the traditional miniature special effects, allowed the film to be made for just $14 million dollars.

That said — there are still plenty of practical effects, like the creature and Beta Unit special makeup, as well as the Centauri’s Starcar, which was a real vehicle created by Gene Winfield, who also created the spinners for Blade Runner and the 6000 SUX for RoboCop. His car design for The Reactor was used in a variety of TV shows, including Catwoman’s Catmobile on the Batman TV show, the Jupiter 6 car in the “Bread and Circuses” episode of Star Trek, Bewitched and Mission: Impossible, where it was part of a scheme to make a bank robber believe that they’d been asleep for 14 years.

The idea that video games were recruiting players for some high end military service started as an urban legend that games like Missile Command were saving information on its players so that they’d be ready to defend America from the inevitable Russian ICBM strike that was coming in the 1980’s. There was also the There’s also the weird tale of Polybius, a video game that never existed — or did it? — that was an MK Ultra style experiment unleashed on Portland, Oregon arcades that led to addiction, hallucinations and visits by the Men in Black. Obviously, those legends led to this film or this is all an elaborate piece of disinformation to hide the truth in plain site. I leave your version of reality up to you, dear reader.

Alex Rogan (Lance Guest, Halloween 2) is going nowhere, stuck in a trailer park taking care of everyone else. His scholarship has been rejected and he has to keep fixing things and watching his little brother instead of getting to spend time with Maggie (Catherine Marie Stewart, The Apple).

The only fun he has is playing the Starfighter arcade game in the trailer park, which allows him to pretend that he’s defending the Frontier from Xur and his Ko-Dan Armada.

After Alex becomes the game’s highest-scoring player, the game’s inventor Centauri visits, offering him a ride in his fancy car as a prize. He’s played by Robert Preston, who is really just reprising his role as Harold Hill from The Music Man, which is an ingenious gambit.

The car is really a spaceship and Alex is taken to meet the Rylan Star League while a Beta Unit is used to replace him on Earth. That’s when he learns that the game is actually a training unit meant to find starfighters ready to battle very real Ko-Dan Empire.

Alex is expected to be the gunner for the Gunstar along with the reptilian navigator Grig (Dan O’Herlihy, who pretty much owned the 1980’s between this movie, playing Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and the Old Man in RoboCop). However, all our hero wants to do is go home.

It takes alien assassins attacking the trailer park and the death of all of the other starfighters and Centauri — who takes a laser blast meant for our hero — for Alex to join the cause. While he fights the Armada in space, Beta and Maggie battle the Zando-Zan killers back down on good old Mother Earth.

Of course, Alex has the gift that all great starfighters need and saves the day. He lands his ship on the trailer park and takes Maggie into space with him, while his brother starts playing the game in the hopes of joining his brother.

This is a film with real heart, beyond its aspirations of being a blockbuster. It’s directed by Nick Castle, who you probably already know played Michael Myers in the original Halloween. What you may not know is that he wrote the movie Skatetown U.S.A. or directed Tag: The Assassination Game, The Boy Who Could Fly and Dennis the Menace. Plus, he, John Carpenter and Tommy Lee Wallace all formed The Coup De Villes and played much of the music for Big Trouble In Little China.

Despite the film being based on the idea of an arcade game, there never really was one despite the promise in the closing credits of an Atari-created edition. The game was actually started and would have been Atari’s first 3D polygonal arcade game to use a Motorola 68000 as the CPU. It would have used the Star Wars arcade controls and been much like the game Lance Guest plays in the film, but it was canceled once Atari representatives saw the film in post-production and decided it was not going to be a financial success. That said there were Atari home versions in development and they were eventually released as Star Raiders II and Solaris.

There is an NES game — it’s a reskin of the computer game Uridium — and Rogue Synapse created a freeware PC game in 2007 that’s very close to the game in the film.

The themes of The Last Starfighter have been repeated in plenty of other stories, like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ernest Cline’s Armada, which is pretty much a note for note reboot of the same story. Of course, Cline wrote Ready: Player One and works in a reference to the original film, but he wears his influences on his sleeve. Interestingly enough, Wil Wheaton read the audio version of this book — which will be a movie soon enough that’ll cost a hundred times what The Last Starfighter did and have a sliver of the soul — and he appears in this film.

Galoob planned to create a toyline for this movie that sadly never came to be. You can see images of it and learn more about it at Plaid Stallions.

If you’re looking for a great slice of 1984, you can’t go wrong with this movie. I love that it has a lizard best friend, fun spaceship designs, the Music Man conning people for money in the midst of a galactic war and even the promise of a sequel which never came. It’s the kind of movie that would always be a rental that everyone could agree on or the perfect film to veg out whenever HBO showed it for the two hundredth time.

Claire Brennan plays Jade Cochran, a diner waitress who hates freaks and sadly for her, she’s pretty much in a remake of Tod Browning’s Freaks but, you know, 35 years later and somehow with a lower budget. Within minutes — and just one ferris wheel ride — she’s the wife of circus owner Steve St. John (Bill McKinney) and moments after that, rough trade Blackie Fleming (Lee Raymond) is treating her how she likes being treated behind her new old man’s back and then, even sooner than that, Steve’s dead at the hands and switchblade of Blackie and Jade owns it all.

Again, if you saw Freaks, you know how this all ends, the comeuppance of it all, right? The effects are rudimentary but effective and I mean, you can’t call a movie She Freak and not have a she freak.

Directed by Byron Mabe (The Acid Eaters, Space Thing, Nude Django) with inserts from Donn Davison. Donn was the manager of Florida’s Dragon Art Theatre and one of the guys who would work four-walled theaters and talk marks into buying gimmicks. He also narrated the trailer for The Crawling Thing and Creature Of Evil.

This was written by Michael B. Druxman (who also wrote Cannon movie Keaton’s Cop) and producer David F. Friedman, who produced this and also plays the carnival barker. He learned how to make movies in the army and when he was discharged, he sold army-surplus searchlights. His first customer? Kroger Babb, perhaps the most carny of all carnies. And this, Friedman entered the world of film, working with Herschell Gordon Lewis, making more money in softcore and retiring when hardcore took over.

Filmed during the Kern County Fair and the Ventura County Fair, She Freak takes advantage of the rides and attractions of West Coast Shows, which was such a major company that they could do five carnivals in different locations at the same time. Most of their crew are in this.

Even though Jade and Shorty (Felix Silla) are at odds in this movie, the truth is there’s a thin line between love and hate. This movie started a nine year affair between the two that was kept a secret, even when Brennan gave birth to Silla’s son.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Shot on video in real Chicago locations over several years for a reported total of $10,000, Black Devil Doll from Hell is one of the most famous SOV movies ever made, preceding the more successful Chicago-based Child’s Play by four years. 

The story concerns a religious woman named Helen Black (Shirley L. Jones) in a constant struggle to remain abstinent in a society filled with temptation. It turns out, as with most religious zealots, she’s really just as horny as the rest of us. A fact revealed when she buys a puppet resembling Rick James in is “cocaine is a helluva drug” phase in a local thrift store. The sales woman warns Helen that the puppet is said to grant its owner their one greatest wish before returning to the shop on its own. Turns out Helen’s greatest wish is to get tied up and assaulted by a Rick James puppet while a stuffed bunny with a whistle in its mouth watches. <Insert Superfreak joke here>

The next day, the puppet returns himself to the shop as predicted. Helen throws away all her bibles and seduces several locals including a thief (Rickey Roach) who, upon hearing her story exclaims, “You were raped by a puppet? I’ve heard better stories than this before!” Really?? That’s a movie I’d like to see! 

Of course, no human can satisfy Helen like the puppet and she returns to the shop to buy it again. When the puppet refuses to make love to her, she threatens it. The puppet gets angry, the rabbit comes to life and Helen dies of a seizure. The film ends with yet another customer bringing the puppet home.  

Puppet porn and cheesy dialogue aside, this movie is a gem of a time capsule, filled with décor, locations and technology of the dawn of the SOV age. The opening titles and end credits, which add up to a total running time of over 7 minutes, appear to have been made on an Amiga Video Toaster. The footage is dark, blurry and grainy. The score, written and performed by director Chester Novell Turner, is a concerted effort to replicate any or all of John Carpenter’s themes with what sounds like a Casio keyboard recorded directly onto the boom box we see at 6:51 using the built-in mic. Ahhh, memories. 

The wall-mounted phone on the breakfast nook wall…the big-ass alarm clock with the annoying buzzer…it all brought back memories of a time when struggling indie filmmakers, even those armed with cutting edge 1984 tech, had to overcome many obstacles just to get their humble puppet porn finished.  

The tracking lines at the top of the frame made me long for the days of a 2-mile walk down to my local video store (housed in a barn) to rent a movie I was too young to watch, and buy a bag of Tato Skins and a Mandarin Orange Slice for later using the money I earned from babysitting and mowing lawns.  

My favorite thing (besides the foul-mouthed devil doll himself) is Helen’s lovely sofa she keeps covered in a thick sheet of plastic. If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s in a working-class environment, you either knew or had in your own family an aunt or grandma who had a plastic-covered couch to “keep you kids from messing it up.” 

It’s not often modern audiences get to see a horror film like this one. There’s no CGI, and no pretentious storyline about familial trauma like the ones we get in so-called elevated horror films. It’s an evil puppet with beaded braids, a naked lady, a camcorder and a Casio keyboard. That’s pretty much it. Hey, they did the best they could, okay? It’s a miracle Chester Turner finished this film let alone sold it. Further kudos to the Turner for reportedly paying everyone involved. That’s generally not something you see in the SOV world. Especially in movies with devil dolls from hell with mad love-making skills. 

If you’re curious, you can seek out the Massacre DVD release from 2013 or watch the extended cut here:  

https://archive.org/details/black.-devil.-doll.-from.-hell.-extended.-1984.-dvdrip.-bagger-inc

George Pan Andreas — according to his IMDB bio — opened the West Coast Academy of Dramatic Arts (formerly the Pan Andreas Theatre) with Oscar winners Jack Lemmon, Richard Dreyfuss and Ginger Rogers (his godmother). He returned to film work in the early 2000s, forming his own production company, GPA Films International, which has produced films in which he starred: Crime Killer and The Matadors.

Pan Andreas was the director, writer, the editor, did stunts and was also the lead, Zeus, in this movie. Some of you may read that and wonder, “Can someone do all of those jobs and still make a good movie?” And others are salivating knowing that this is the kind of vanity project that delivers some majestic entertainment. You can become a real-estate developer and property owner with some money, but if you have dreams in Los Angeles, you can still make movies.

The film starts with a shootout where Zeus’ partner dies and tells him, “Don’t get soft.” No worries there. Isn’t Zeus the Crime Killer? Well, yes, he is, because he kills both of the perps and then the two crooked cops who come to try and clean things up.

The incident causes the LAPD to take our Greek hero’s badge and gun. Seeing as how horrible the LAPD was in 1987, we have to wonder if Zeus wasn’t stopping and frisking and beating enough black people into oblivion to stay on the force.

The CIA then drafts him and sends him on a mission to destroy drugs. He decides that he needs a bunch of other would-be crimefighters, so he calls in all of his old Vietnam buddies to study under a drill instructor whose sole note for the film were “be homophonic.” At the end, as he whips them into shape, they finally win his respect and he refuses to speak to them, only salute.

To add to the wild racism — or out of touch nature of the film — Zeus goes undercover as a Mexican gardener and, well, he can barely speak English much less do any Mexican accent that is not outright hilarity.

Let me sum up the rest. Drug dealers kill the President’s ex-wife! Every woman negs Zeus! Our hero and the President of the United States play with a watch that explodes! Back to that drill instructor sequence, it plays along with flashbacks of eating pig feces back in Vietnam! Every single cut is a jump cut! People talk over one another! Random sounds just bust into the movie! It all reads even more deranged than this every sentence ends with an exclamation mark paragraph!

This movie feels like it’s a send up of action movies yet it isn’t aware enough to be that and that’s what makes it so good. It has a blacksploitation theme song for a Greek hero, out of nowhere brutal death and presents a world where the leader of the free world just randomly hangs out with Greek supercops.

In now way could this movie be better than it is.

You can watch this on YouTube.

I love Michael Winner because, well, the dude was a lunatic and sometimes, he appears like the smartest director ever. And other times, you wonder if he’s ever seen a movie before. Working from a Tom Holland script, Scream for Help is pure psychodrama, a blast of absolute insanity filtered through teenage hysteria and told by a British pervert who once tried to eat nothing but steak tartare and nearly died.

Also: Winner somehow got both Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones to score his films.

New Rochelle, New York mast as well be Twin Peaks. It’s a town filled with lunatics, like Paul Fox (David Allen Brooks), the stepfather to Christie (Rachael Kelly) who seemingly is trying to kill her and her mother — and his new wife — Karen (Marie Masters).

I say seemingly and you should read that as “he’s totally trying to kill her.”

Paul is also sleeping with another insane person, Brena (Lolita Lorre), who has an even more unhinged sibling named Lacey (Rocco Sisto). All of them have this wild plan of taking Christie and her mom for all their money, then killing them, but their plan is at best nonsense and based around a set time that doesn’t matter, but who cares? This movie goes hard, stays harder and has pregnant teens getting plowed over, their boyfriends getting over it super quick, a near giallo-plot and oh yeah, a bloody deflowering that does not get glossed over in the least.

All of this set to John Paul Jones working on his first post-Zeppelin album with Jimmy Page, Madeline Bell, Jon Anderson from Yes and guitarist John Renbourn.

I have no idea how or why Antonio Cantafora shows up for a second as a man at the no tell motel. He was also in Baron Blood, And God Said to Cain, The Bitch, Demons 2 and so many other films. I need to know how he got into this film. Was he on vacation in the U.S.?

This movie is an Afterschool Special with boobs.

You did it again, Michael Winner.

In preparation for this movie, Winter spent time in New Rochelle meeting and speaking with teenage girls to audition for the lead role. Unfortunately, some of the local townsfolk suspected him of being a child molester. Winner knew the local chief of police, who talked them out of that, but if anyone was dangerous to be around nubile teens, it was Michael Winner.

Also: This was to be the third movie that Richard Franklin would direct from a Holland script after Psycho 2 and Cloak and Dagger. Franklin ultimately decided he didn’t want to do another low budget movie, so IMDB says, but those other two were not low budget. The movie that Franklin would have made would have been technically better, but it would not have been as memorable.

Here’s a drink.

Stepdaddy

• 2 oz. J&B (or whiskey if you’re afraid of the taste)
• 1 oz. amaretto
• 5 oz. root beer

1. Pile up a glass half full of ice.
2. Pour scotch, then amaretto, then root beer.