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

These movies were first on the site on April 12, 2022 and December 8, 2022.

Santa Claws (1996):John Russo lives in Glassport, which I can see from my house, and he wrote the idea that became Night of the Living Dead, which would probably be enough, but he also helped make Return of the Living Dead happen. And he also made Midnight and The Majorettes, two movies that fall into that strange genre that can only come from Pittsburgh, the yinzer giallo. He also was the publisher and managing editor of Scream Queens Illustrated, which figures into this movie.

Raven Quinn (Debbie Rochon) used to be a scream queen but ever since she had two children with a scream queen magazine publisher who would rather take nude photos of models than work on his marriage. Luckily, she has Wayne (Grant Cramer), a neighbor who once watched his mommy do more than kiss Santa Claus, lost his mind and killed them both. So perhaps she is not quite so fortunate.

Beyond getting to see Night stars like Marilyn Eastman, who played Helen Cooper, Karl Hardman, who played her husband Harry, and first zombie — and the director of The Majorettes and FleshEater — S. William Hinzman, you can pretty much see this as an American Night Killer. They’re both set at Christmas, they both deal with broken marriages and they’re both absolutely berserk movies seemingly made by maniacs.

Waste not, want not, as Russo edited this into Scream Queens Naked Christmas.

Yinzer bonus: Numerous scenes of characters wandering Market Square before anyone went there, back when George Aiken was still making the best-fried chicken ever, when National Record Mart still had that huge store and G.W. Murphy’s was still open. I mean, the killer runs into the Oyster House for a second and I was awash with 90s dahntahn memories, like Honus Wagner, the smell of Hare Krishna’s t-shirts, Candyrama and so much more.

In short, a killer that uses a garden cultivator as a weapon, like a total South Hills Blood and Black Lace, all with softcore dancing that makes me wistful for dollar pizza at Anthony’s and the old sign that was painted on the wall at the Cricket and hey, John Russo wrote two songs for this, “Christmas by Myself” and “Brand New Christmas.”

If you remember that old store Novelties in Market Square that never seemed to sell anything and was put out of business for a Dunkin’ Donuts, well, I want you to know that this movie has the killer buy his Santa Claus suit in that very store.

Welcome to the yinzer giallo list, Santa Claws. Meet us under the Kaufmann’s clock for your framed certificate.

Scream Queens Naked Christmas (1996): Available as an extra on the new Terror Vision blu ray of Santa Claws, Scream Queens’ Naked Christmas is such an oddity in our overly saturated by pornography world of 2022. It’s dirty, kind of, but not really in any way as much as it’s women taking their clothes off which seems perfectly chaste today. It ends up here, a combination movie for this week of Pittsburgh movies and holiday classics — classics may be stretching things but it is the season of giving — directed by John Russo, who was also the publisher and managing editor of Scream Queens Illustrated, a magazine that chronicled horror movie actresses — and showed their boobs, let’s be frank — in a time when getting on the internet often involved needing to be at a university or the slowest dial up ever.

As a kid, I often fantasized about what it would be like going to the Edison Hotel and what was waiting for me inside. I should have been shown this film because the dancing in it is about as sexy as any so-called Pittsburgh adult club I’ve ever been in. At least the Tennyson Lounge used to let you get up on stage and sing, The Cricket was cheap to drink at and you could get dollar slices at Anthony’s when that was still a place. In fact, I’ve always liked the aura of sin in clubs of ill repute more than experiencing the sin because it’s just a transaction and the sooner you realize you’re just a mark, the quicker you can just hang back and soak it all up. The robotic dancing in this, the faraway eyes — just imagine it darker, smelling like more perfume and if you dumb glitter all over yourself and burn your money, you too can have an authentic experience.

With Wayne (Grant Kramer) from Santa Claws hosting, basically this video is John Russo and Bill Hinzman videotaping women and getting them naked for the yule season. Sue Ellen White only did this movie, but Lisa Delien (using the stage name Lisa Duvaul) was also in Eyes Are Upon You and Amanda Madison (using the name Christine Cavalier) appeared in other movies like Psycho Dance, Psycho Vampire, Slaughter Secretaries…yes, all Wave Productions. She’s also in Donald Farmer’s Red Lips.

The main star is, of course, Debbie Rochon, whose career took her everywhere from getting a scar on the streets of Vancouver at the age of 14 and being an extra in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains to buiding her legacy as a scream queen in movies like Lurkers, Tromeo and Juliet and so many more, being picked as Draculina magazine’s Scream Queen of the Decade (1990–1999). She’s still making movies today, shrugging off setbacks like nearly losing four fingers of her right hand to a prop machete. She’s also one of those people who appear so perfect that you wonder if they’re some kind of android. I hope she never stops making movies ever.

This movie is ridiculous but I’m also strangely happy that it exists. If you saw Santa Claws, you’ve seen it already, but I respect that Russo is out to make money off you more than once for the same exact product.

You can get these movies together on the Terror Vision blu ray of Santa Claws.

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

This was originally on the site on October 7, 2021.

I grew up directly between Youngstown, OH and Pittsburgh, PA, which meant that growing up, I got to see UHF channels from Cleveland, Wheeling, Stuebenville and everywhere in between. There are still local jingles that I know by heart — Youngstown’s Remnant Room — and when I see the staticky look of this ancient television, it warms my heart beyond belief. Beyond Superhost and Chilly Billy, I can remember characters like Barnaby and the local news teams that had no hope of ever working for the networks.

The WNUF Halloween Special could have been horrible, but I get the feeling that its creator Chris LaMartina grew up watching plenty of Baltimore TV* (he probably knew Captain Pitt as Captain Chesapeake on WBUF (but we both may have not known that he was also Ghost Host), because this is so authentic that I thought that I went back in time.

A home recording of WNUF’s Halloween special that aired on October 31, 1987, this tells the story of Frank Stewart’s investigation of the Webber House, the site of the Spirit Board Murders. He’s brought along a priest and Louis and Claire Berger, psychic investigators who use a cat named Shadow to speak to the dead.

By the end of the night, the evil inside the house will show itself. And no one is safe.

The story may have been told before, but it’s the entire package that is perfect. There are references to Dust Devil, R.O.T.O.R. and so many more movies, plus it captures that strange moment of the pre 90s when UHF stations would air just about anything, when major bloopers happened almost every day and something like a series of occult murders could happen live while you watched.

If you want to own something amazing, you need to own the Terror Vision blu ray.

*Producer Jimmy George confirmed that WNUF TV28 was inspired by Baltimore’s WNUV TV54, a similar TV station that was independently owned until the mid-90s.

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

Video Violence (1987): Writer and director Gary Cohen was working in a video store and noticed that no one was renting any of the classic films that he loved. They were all renting slashers.

One day, a mother asked him if I Dismember Mama had any sex in it. He told her that it didn’t, but it had plenty of graphic violence. She told him that if it didn’t have sex, it was find for her kids. This scene is in the movie, except they are discussing the movie Blood Cult.

Steve and Rachel have just moved to a new town, setting up a mom and pop rental shop that seems to exclusively rent out slashers. One of their customers — probably Howard and Eli, whose sports store seems to be a front for mayhem — accidentally returns a video tape of one of their murders, which soon reveals that everyone in this sleepy little SOV town is a killer.

If you look closely on this box, it has J.R. Bob Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius on it, claiming that he has approved this movie. Your tolerance for SOV horror will determine how much you like this yourself.

Video Violence 2 (1988): At some point after the events of the first movie, Eli and Howard have decided to start broadcasting a public access show from their basement, one that has viewers from home sending in their own kills as if this was America’s Bloodiest Home Videos.

It has an electric chair, a gang of woman seducing a pizza guy until deciding to repeatedly stab him, a commerical for some killing implements and a live guest becoming, well, a dead one. And where the first film starts to make you wonder if you’re just as bad as the killers for loving their work, this one decides to go full Herschell Gordon Lewis and make the whole thing a ridiculous, if not blood spraying, laugh fest.

Either that’s going to work for you — I love it — or you’re going to feel like this whole thing is a poorly acted waste of time, which is a sad state for you to be in. You have to love a film that has The Shape, Freddy and Norman Bates all show up and bother the same girl in the same shower.

Hurry up and get the set of both of these movies from Terror Vision. Last time I looked, there were only 2 left.

April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.

Marco Ferreri is probably best known for his film La Grande Bouffe. Here, he sets a film in an end-of-the-world-feeling New York City, a place of only the strange and the rats, a place where Gerard Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu) lives in the basement of Andreas Flaxman’s (James Coco) wax museum, which is all about the Roman Empire.

He also volunteers at an all-female theater group, which has Mimsy Farmer, Francesca De Sapio (The Godfather Part II) and Stefania Casini (Sara from Suspiria) as members. Their latest play is about how women could easily overpower men and rape them. To prove their theory, Gerard is knocked out with a bottle of Coke and Angelica (adult actress Abigail Clayton, billed as Gail Lawrence; she was in 7 Into Snowy, Sexworld and Alex de Renzy’s Femmes de Sade. After going into legitimate movies, she played Rita in Maniac) volunteers to be the one to take him.

Meanwhile, in Battery Park, Gerard finds a baby monkey in the arms of a King Kong sculpture — or is it Kong, fallen from the Twin Towers? — and a group of eccentrics led by Luigi (Marcello Mastroianni). He takes his new simian child home but Andreas tells him that the baby will destroy his dreams. Angelica moves in as she’s pregnant, possibly with their child of rape, but when he doesn’t care about their child being born, she leaves and while the baby ape is alone, the rats eat him.

Gerard responds by breaking into the wax museum and causing a fire that kills both he and Andreas, while Angelica sits on the shore with her new child.

Ferreri wrote this with Gerard Brach (Wonderwall, Frantic, Repulsion, The Tenant) and Rafael Azcona. It has some interesting imagery — Kong washed up on the beach — but ultimately goes nowhere. Still, just the idea it was made is somewhat intriguing. Also, the baby is named for Cornelius from Beneath the Planet of the Apes.

April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.

Producer Braxton Pope, writer Bret Easton Ellis and director Paul Schrader had the movie Bait get canceled due to money and then decided to make another one that was crowd funded. Paul Schrader. Making a crowd funded movie. They raised $159,015 which got the budget up to $250,00 and had American Apparel doing the clothing, Kanye West re-editing the trailer and creating music and Lindsay Lohan in the lead just as she was getting out of her sixth rehab and starring on a reality show on OWN.

While Lohan and James Deen were cast by the creators, the rest of the cast was handled through a website, Let It Cast. Shrader said, “We’re making art out of the remains of our empire. The junk that’s left over. And this idea of a film that was crowdfunded, cast online, with one actor from celebrity culture, one actor from adult-film culture, a writer and director who have gotten beat up in the past—felt like a post-Empire thing. And then everything I was afraid of with Lindsay and James started to become positive. I was afraid we wouldn’t be taken seriously and people would think it was a joke. My son and daughter didn’t want me to do it. That just shows you how conservative young kids are.”

Of course, everyone argued at the end, as the final cut wasn’t what Ellis had in mind, although he’s come around to enjoy the movie, saying everyone got what they wanted artistically and financially from the movie. He found Lohan to be good in it and the rest of the world judged it just because she was in the movie. It was that kind of time.

Christian (Deen) is a trust fund kid who makes low budget horror movies. We meet him at a dinner with his lover Tara (Lohan), his personal assistant Gina (Amanda Brooks) and her boyfriend — who will bin Christian’s next movie — Ryan (Nolan Funk). Christian loves to push people and keeps revealing how he and Tara use dating apps to have anonymous sex with other people. Also, while he may be sleeping with someone else in secret — Cynthia (Tenille Houston) — he controls Tara, who once dated Ryan and left him for the stability of dating wealthier men.

We soon learn that Christian is forced into therapy to keep the money coming in — Gus Van Sant is the therapist — and he needs the behavioral help, because he sends people after Ryan and attacks Tara. Yet they stay within the orbit of one another, even when she talks him into letting another man — an anonymous hookup — go down on him. This makes him feel controlled and that’s the one thing he can’t handle. By the end of the movie, there’s murder, a movie nearly ruined and Tara trying to escape with her sanity and life.

While Deen’s life ended up mirroring his character — he’s an adult star who has been accused of going too far in his scenes and in his personal life by several partners — he’s not bad in this. South by Southwest may have turned this movie down — they said it had technical issues, as well as “There’s a cold deadness to it.” — but I have no idea why. It’s fascinating, as a major Hollywood name is now making movies with sourced money, cast by a website and featuring people who at one point were so far away from each other fame wise that Lohan and Deen wouldn’t even be in the same reality and here she is, topless and engaging in simulated sex with the guy who put a lemon in Joanna Angel’s ass.

Also: Shrader got nude during this scene to make Lohan comfortable. His idea.

Also also: adult actor Danny Wilde appears and his scenes were edited because unlike everyone else, he was not simulating his masturbation.

This is the best IMDB gossip about the movie: “At one point, the stress of the hectic shoot was wearing on everyone and the crew was upset because they hadn’t been paid in a week. Producer Braxton Pope, hoping to buck up morale, suggested raffling off two Samsung tablets used in the film. Director Paul Schrader said no because he didn’t have a tablet at home and wanted one of them for himself.”

The auteur!

Also (third also): Lily LeBeau is in this, adding even more adult stars to the cast.

You know, maybe I cut Lohan a break, but I really liked this. It just feels so unlike every other movie out there, nearly feeling like the most high budget adult movie while also coming off like a cheap direct to streaming movie with some level of star power. It’s also the kind of movie that may have been more interesting if they just filmed the making of it, as Lohan has an understudy constantly ready to step in, she would stop partying — or so they say — at 5:30 AM for a 6 AM call time and Deen didn’t stop booking porn shoots while making this movie.

Again, let me say: Paul; Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Then again, he screwed the adult industry over once with Hardcore, so all bets are kind of even. He did make Cat People, though.

You can watch this on Tubi.