April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

I’m so obsessed and delighted by the movies of Earl Owensby, who produced 18 movies with his own studio, including the Elvis death cash-in starring his last girlfriend Ginger Alden Living Legend: The King of Rock and Roll, Christian slasher — yes, really — Day of Judgement, the anthology with a doubled up title Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D and religious retribution movie Dark Sunday. Man, he even made Lady Gray, a movie with David Allen Coe as the star. He even loaned out his studio to other films, like The Order of the Black Eagle and The Abyss. He also had that Cannon idea down before they did: his E.O. Studios’ success was due to never spending more than a million dollars on a movie and never signing a distribution deal that made him less than eight million in profit.

Owensby made movies in Shelby, North Carolina and they played drive-ins in towns just like it. He knew his audience and what they wanted. And for this, well, they wanted 3-D dogs.

Also known as Rottweiler 3-D, this was the first of six movies from E.O. Studios that required special glasses to watch. The others — in case you’re like me and want to watch all of them — are Hot Heir, Chain Gang, Hyperspace, Hit the Road Running and Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D.

Director Worth Keeter also made several movies for Owensby — how many times can I say Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D in this — and went on to direct episodes of Power Rangers and Silk Stalkings. And the aforementioned The Order of the Black Eagle plus Sybil Danning in L.A. Bounty. Writer Thom McIntyre directed, well, you guessed it, Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D, and wrote several of Owensby’s other movies under names like Lynelle Grey and Grey Lynellee.

Up at Fort Bragg, the military is trying to replace soldiers with dogs. As you can imagine, things get out of control. This is a welcome event, as the town of Lake Lure isn’t the most exciting place to be. Owensby plays the sheriff; the town has a vibrant mud wrestling scene; somehow fashion models show up there and get torn to pieces in the woods in 3-D by the dogs.

Released months after Cujo — that’s how you do it! — this has a dog’s head blow up real good, an effect created by Fred Olen Ray. I mean, the dogs are driven insane by the military-industrial complex, but I do hate to see dogs be the victims in movies.

I have no idea why Earl Owensby’s movies aren’t more available. Let’s make that happen, boutique labels.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Back before he and his wife Linda made Designing Women and were a major part of the Clinton political machine, Harry Thomason was just a high school science teacher and football coach who started making movies.

His first movie that got noticed was Encounter with the Unknown, an uneven — and I like the movie, so keep that in mind — anthology film that combines horror with urban legend before people really discussed what urban legend was. He also made The Great Lester Boggs, Revenge of Bigfoot and The Day It Cane to Earth. And oh yeah — this movie.

It starts with Frederick (Dean Jagger, whose career started in 1929 with The Woman from Hell and ended in 1987 with Evil Town) picking up his niece Gloria (Lori Saunders, Bobbie Jo Bradley from Petticoat Junction; she also made Frasier, the Sensuous Lion the same year) from a sanitarium. She’s been there since watching her father die. Now, she’s ready to assume his estate and become a pampered rich girl just in time to quickly meet, marry and move into a mansion with Chris (Robert Ginnaven, White Lightning), a writer who doesn’t seem to care that this place once housed a series of axe murders nor that his young wife has tripped out reveries where she is haunted by something. You know, the rich.

Written by Marshall Riggen (who was also the writer of the bizarre Six Hundred and Sixty-Six and Cry for Poor Wally) from a story by Thomson, producer Joe Glass and Mike Varner, this was shot at the same time as Encounter with the Unknown with much of the same crew and was originally called Visions of Evil and Visions of Doom. It was this vibe that fits into a lot of early 70s exploitation cinema, movies in which young women come of sexual age while also experiencing trauma or believing they that they are a murderer. Like, well, Axe, a film this feels so much like, but that has to be an accident, because Axe is one of many pieces and parts edited into a film, a miracle that barely happened. And, well, this. came out a year before and that was made in California and this in the Ozark Mountain region of Arkansas, so the collective unconsciousness connected two disparate film productions in the wilds of regional exploitation.

This was sold with the tagline of “The romance of Love Story — the terror of Psycho!” and you know how much I simply am obsessed with movies referencing other movies in their ads. When it played around Little Rock, it had a local phone number you could call on the ads and when the phone picked up, all you heard was Gloria screaming and then the line went dead. Again, I am all for that.

A killer in a Tor Johnson mask, strange repressed memories and not just one but two twist endings — along with long stretches of nothing happening and extended cute dating montages (oh yeah, that Love Story reference) — make this a movie that may test those that don’t partake of the deep well of regional filmmaking. But for those that get high off this supply, drink deep.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Also known as Any Body…Any Way, this movie was exactly what I wanted it to be: fucking weird.

When Terry Wilson (Joyce Danner) and Ann Henderson (Eve Reeves) go to the middle of nowhere for a barn party, Ann is nearly raped but saved by the middle-aged, British and oh-so-strange Mr. Bradley (Daniel Garth). They ditch the party and Ann’s man, but then run out of gas because otherwise we wouldn’t have a movie.

In the middle of nowhere, they walk up to a house — on the suggestion of a drifter (Ivan Agar, Laughing Crow from Shriek of the Mutilated) who is more than he seems — that just so happens to belong to Mr. Bradley and his sister Ida (Irene Lawrence). They have no phone and their car isn’t working either, so they stay for dinner and a bed for the evening. Ida needs the company. She’s been there for two years, ever since her mortician brother retired.

So why are there bars on the windows? Why did their door lock behind them? Why are the closest filled with women’s clothing of all sizes? Why would Terry pick this exact and terrifying time to finally get sapphic with her office buddy?

The Bradleys wake them up and let them know that they’re in control and must play their demented games with them or end up like all the embalmed bodies in the basement. Mr. Bradley just wants to discover the perfect way to make love, so if he has to tie up women and then kill them, that’s how his laboratory of libido operates.

I mean, this is a movie that starts with fifteen minutes of go go dancing in a barn — I played in a band that practiced in a barn and it’s hard to sing when all you can smell is shit, so I can’t even imagine go go dancing while smelling cow feces — and ends with that same barn and Ann going off with the guy who tried to rape her and Terry finding another young lady to enjoy a game of flats with. Yes, I used a 17th century term — lesbian sex was thought to look like two playing cards rubbing together — in this article. I bring you quality euphemisms, my friend.

Did you not see the signature of Harry Novak hanging above this? Behind Locked Doors came from director and co-writer Charles Romine, who would go on to make Mysteries of the Gods, while producer and uncredited co-writer Stanley H. Brassloff made one of the most upsetting of all softcore movies, Toys Are Not for Children.

This movie looks way better than it should with great lighting and bright colors and a room full of gorgeous and very dead women — or are they? — posed seductively, along with an off the rails room destroying catfight and an ending that blew my mind, as deceased denizens of the strange mansion come back for one last dance with brother and sister into the inferno. This is the kind of movie that makes you stay for all that barn dancing and you wonder, “When does it get weird, Sam promised me it would get there” and when it does, you’ll text me and say, “I can’t believe that this is a real movie.” Well, it is, pal. It sure is.

April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Director, writer and editor Jon Killough made this cheap — and I mean that with kindness — film about a family led by Crawdaddy (Mary Jackson, yes, Evelyn from Terror House) that makes leather goods from the skins of the people they murder. Her kids, Violet (Susan Rothacker) and Phink (Scott Spiegel) are just as crazy as she is. And man, Spiegel is swinging for the upper decks with his scene chewing. But that and the goofy humor made this fun for me.

This was produced by J.R. Bookwalter, whose Tempe Video released many a small town film years ago. I’ve read so many reviews online that outright disliked this movie to the point I wondered if it did something to their mother. I mean, you’ve seen worse. But you have also seen better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 22: Terror Vision — Write about a movie released by Terror Vision. Here’s the list.

This was originally on the site on October 29, 2022.

In case you ever wonder what life is for and why you’re here and get depressed or anxious, worry not. You live in the reality that produced Linnea Quigley and whatever made this all should be thanked. I’m not really religious but if I were to ever start a church, it would probably be one where we all watched this video and just stared at the tracking lines growing around this VHS wonder, a workout tape punctuated by jokes, zombies and synth. I mean, if you want to believe in God, just stare into the eyes of Linnea Quigley, listen to her bubbly voice and watch her kick here legs over her head while working out in a studded bra.

Ken Hall, who directed and wrote this, also made Evil Spawn and The Halfway House. He also made creatures for Critters, Ghoulies, the Bio-Monster in Biohazard, Carnosaur, the creatures in Willy’s Wonderland and wrote Dr. Alien and Nightmare Sisters. He’s not in the Criterion Collection but belongs somewhere more important, in the video store shelves of our wildest and fondest dreams.

Nobody watches this to work out. I mean, what other exercise video has its host murder every single other woman in it and then threaten you for jerking off to her films? I mean, this starts with a shower scene and ends with Linnea cooking human parts while dressed in lingerie that Frederick’s of Hollywood would say is too ridiculous.

Linnea shot this in her parent’s house and man, if you don’t love her after that, what is wrong with you? Get this NOW from Terror Vision.

You can also get the soundtrack on LP or cassette.