“It’s a brain. Not an animal.” — Dr. Anthony Blake

Warning! This Canuxploitation shocker carries the Shapiro-Glickenhaus Entertainment seal of approval. Yes, the studio that brought us everything from Basket Case to Maniac Cop, from Black Roses to Frankenhooker. Then there’s C.H.U.D., Death Spa and Zombie Nightmare. If you haunted the video store shelves of the ‘80s, you’ve loaded a Shapiro-Glickenhaus VHS into a VCR.

And you know what that means: The acting will be questionable (and, in the case of The Brain, you’ll end up rooting for “The Brain” and not the dick-whiny high school hero and his screechy girlfriend). The story will be weak (and, in the case of The Brain, the ending is just stupidly lame). But you will get yourself a slice of low-budget entertainment of the first order. The fact that Ed Hunt directs is icing on the B-Movie schlock cake.

Oh, and yes: you will get some questionable production values; it is an SGE flick, after all. However, in the case of The Brain, you do not want to miss director Ed Hunt’s opening hallucination set piece of inward-pressing walls, live teddy bears bleeding from the eyes, demon hands tearing through walls, and monster tentacles punching out of TV sets. Considering the budget, it’s very well done.

Hey, why am I telling you? See for yourself!

Yeah we love Canadian director Ed Hunt here at B&S Movies. Why? Hunt’s an “all in” type of filmmaker and you do not get run-of-the-mill storytelling. When he does a Star Wars rip, you get Starship Invasions, a tale about UFOs and an underwater pyramid filled with telepathic aliens and Sir Christopher Lee in a black Gumby outfit. When he does a slasher flick, you get Blood Birthday, a story about telepathic kids born under a solar eclipse infected with a taste for blood. And with The Brain you do not get a straight, graphic horror film: you get a campy, sociological statement on Scientology brainwashing, the psychological effects of television, and a lesson that, in order to succeed, you have to submit to some level of conformity. But again, this is an Ed Hunt flick, so you’ll have to wade through the blood of a wife “divorcing” her husband via an electric carving knife.

The Brain reunites Bloody Birthday screenwriter Barry Pearson (Firebird 2015 AD) with Ed Hunt (they also worked together on 1986’s Alien Warrior) for more of that same “what the hell, why not” approach in a film that critical guides opine is a cross between the ‘50s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the dumber John Agar camp fest that is The Brain from Planet Arous. Now, while that’s an accurate pitch, I’d have to add that this mind control romp also tosses in a hallucinatory dash of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. More astute fans of the video-obscure may name check the New Zealand-Australian shot Strange Behavior (aka Dead Kids), which dealt with teens mind-controlled into murder.

As with the aforementioned-linked Blood Birthday, we’re back for more horrors in the small “Southern California” town of Meadowvale (actually a real Canadian town). Dr. Anthony Blake (played by British-Canadian actor David Gale, who pleasantly reminds us of his superb work as Dr. Carl Hill in Re-Animator) is a local psychiatrist and self-help guru of wayward teens. The fact that his teen patients have suffered hallucinations that led them to commit murders and suicides doesn’t seem to alarm anyone. In fact, the ratings of his Dr. Phil-inspired “Independent Thinkers” cable TV show has climbed so high in the local ratings that it’s ready to go national. And what’s the reason no one is alarmed: the show has everyone in town brainwashed. But don’t expect the “brainwash” to be some man-made, electromechanical device of the Cronenberg variety. There’s no From Beyond “Sonic Resonator” making anyone “see” things. This is an Ed Hunt what-the-hell-why-not mind control movie, after all.

The newest inductee to Blake’s clinic (that, with its curved architecture and round windows, looks like a UFO) for wayward teens is Jim, a high school delinquent who’s “so smart” that he’s intellectually bored to the point of blowing up the school’s toilets and has reached the point of expulsion. Jim’s “intellect” helps him in rejecting Blake’s mind-control methods masquerading as therapy—and he stumbles into Blake’s secret: a giant, disembodied alien brain, which is able to spread open its two hemisphere and swallow a person whole, is wired into Blake’s TV show’s transmissions. And what is up with the brain? Is it an alien creature? Is it something Blake cooked up in his lab? Is Blake, like The Tall Man in Phantasm, himself an alien? Or is he a human with once noble intentions now under the control of his own experiment?

Well, keep wondering. We never find out. Argh!

And remember the lame ending? Gale’s Dr. Blake gets punched in the face—one punch, mind you—and his head falls off (a funny homage to his career-making role) and spurts green zombie-goo. Then Jim, the prank-pulling jackass “hero” once on the verge of suspension, rides off into the sunset and gets into Princeton? Where’s the Phantasm twist-ending where we get the ol’ “it’s just a dream/no, it’s not” and Jim the Dick gets what he deserves: an alien brain tentacle choke n’ chomp as he’s yanked into the hallucinatory abyss. We loved Mike—and we were sad when The Tall Man sucked him through the broken mirror. Jim deserves a Dr. Blake from beyond comeuppance.

Eh, who cares! How can you turn down a movie with David Gale hamming it up and losing his head, again (!), nudity, a damsel chained up in cold storage, and a giant, man-eating brain that grows a face and slimes around the catacombs of a psychiatric hospital on its spinal cord? The Brain is one of those movies, like Phantasm or Black Roses, Shock ‘em Dead or Shock Waves, that I’ve revisited many, many times over the years from the warmth of my VCR. Is this as crazy as Fangoria’s Severed Ties. Oh, hell yes, and a bag ‘o chips!

Thanks to those fine folks at Shout Factory, you won’t need to scour the web for a muddy VHS print for your collection, as they released The Brain on Blu-ray in April 2019. If you’d rather a DVD copy, then you will have to scour the web to find the now out-of-print 2011 DVD issued by Britain’s Boulevard Entertainment.

If you can’t wait that long, you can take a dive into the green, brain tank waters of You Tube with these VHS rips of the full movie here and here. We also featured The Brain — with a second look — as part of our weekly “Drive-In Friday” featurettes with a tribute to the old USA Network’s “Night Flight” programming block from the ’80s.

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.

Oh, yes. I love this movie! I bow at the altar of Coleman Francis. I bow.

For I came here to see Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers do the “Tobacco Worm” and the “Stratosphere Boogie” . . . and eat popcorn . . . and drink coffee. Lots of coffee, even more so than in a Bill Rebane flick (Invasion from Inner Earth), but smoke even more, just like in, well, a Coleman Francis movie. (Oh, since you asked: Jimmy and the boys are sort of a redneck, twaggy bluegrass version of Booker T. and the M.G’s; please tell me you know of the iconic instrumental “Green Onions” and get that reference. Don’t make me feel like an old bastard.)

“Yeah, I call B.S on the pseudo-intellectual B&S About Movies writer,” you say. “You never heard of them or the movie, R.D, until Sam bought the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” 12-pack.”

Sorry, ye mighty Internet Warrior. You’d be wrong.

Because of my longstanding love of rock ‘n’ roll and movies; slumming, collecting, and working in the vintage vinyl marketplace, doing road work, and working on the radio, I thrive, THRIVE on rock ‘n’ roll movie oddities and obscurities. If a flick has even the slightest cameo by a rock band in it, I’ve tracked down that movie and seen it. Even more so with today’s public domain catchall disc sets. Back before the digital realm, I taped ’em off UHF-TV and have shelves of 6-hour mode recorded VHS tapes packed with these flicks.

The Skydivers is the second of three films written and directed by Coleman Francis (1961’s The Beast of Yucca Flats seated his Ed Woodian fate, along with 1966’s Night Train to Mundo Fine), primarily a TV and Drive-In flick bit actor who appeared on episodes of Dragnet and turned up in Russ Meyers’s Motorpsycho! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and had a somewhat larger part in the juvenile deliquent rock ‘n’ roll flick, 1959’s T-Bird Gang, which is just one of the many made in the backwash of 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle. (Now I am really missing the old AMC Network’s “American Pop” film series. Tears.) While I have never seen the riffed version, MST3K took The Skydivers to task in the ’80s; perhaps you’ve seen that version.

The Skydivers is not, however, a rock ‘n’ roll or juvenile delinquent flick: it’s a bargain basement film noir of the Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) variety. It does not, however, qualify as “explosive cinema” and it is as out-of-place alongside Tony Tulleners’s Scorpion (1986) on the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set as it is seeing me sitting in front of a plate of sushi or inside a Starbucks. So don’t be fooled by the movie’s tagline: “The first feature length motion picture showing the daredevils of the sky who free fall from heights of 20,000 feet with only a ripcord between life and death!” (Insert yawn, here.) “Thrill jumping guys, thrill seeking girls, and daring death with every leap,” indeed. Not in a Coleman Francis joint.

Anyway, Anthony Cardoza . . . wait, where do I know that name from . . . holy B&S About Movies, BatSam! Tony starred in . . . speaking of . . . Ed Wood’s Night of the Ghouls and directed Alvy Moore (The Witchmaker) from TV’s Green Acres in Smokey and the Hotwire Gang. Yep, and Coleman Francis helped ‘ol Tony in the production of another humdinger, Bigfoot.

Anyway, Tony-boy is the producer behind this vanity project as part of a unhappily married couple who owns a decrepit airfield-skydiving school in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. Of course, Harry is the loser-dickhead who dragged his wife Beth (don’t be confused; actress Kevin Casey, in her only role, is a “she”) out into the desert—and he’s the one who’s restless and cheats on her. And the woman, Suzy, he’s cheating with is a femme fatale (Marcia Knight, Mako: The Jaws of Death) who’s had enough, so she seduces another guy to kill him. But wait, the wife is restless as well and she’s having an affair with her husband’s army buddy.

And they plot against each other. And they jump out of planes. And they sit in coffee houses and listen to a couple tunes from Jimmy Bryant and the Night Jumpers—who are the only reason to check out this mess.

And they’re the only reason I know this movie exists. And now: you know it exists. Email your disdain to the fine folks at Eide’s Entertainment in Pittsburgh for carrying that cursed copy of the Mill Creek “Explosive Cinema” set and selling it to Sam (we love you, guys!).

You can watch TV-taped VHS rips on You Tube without the riffing, but I think you’ll need the MST3K riffed version to make it thought.

That, and a nice, strong pot of coffee. Stratosphere Boogie, babydoll!

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.

Hayden Christensen (Outcast with Nicolas Cage . . . and do I really have to mention Star Wars?) is a disconnected, self-centered Wall Street broker who’s estranged from his wife and bullied son. In an attempt to reconnect, and toughen up his son, he decides the best course of action is to take his family on a hunting vacation to the very same cabin where his own father took him—and in the very same woods where bank robbers have just murdered their double-crossing, corrupt police office accomplice.

That’s where First Kill kicks into Hunter’s Blood mode, with Christensen’s fish-out-of-water stockbroker and his weakling son forced to tough up or die as Christensen races against the clock while evading Bruce Willis’s police chief—who believes he was involved in the heist—to recover the stolen money as “ransom” for his kidnapped son.

While watching this third collaborative effort from Bruce Willis and direct-to-video auteur Steven C. Miller (they previous worked on 2015’s Extraction and 2016’s Marauders), and taking into consideration that Willis worked with Sylvester Stallone in the Expendables franchise, I couldn’t help but think of Cop Land (1997). That’s the film where Sly made a valiant attempt to expand his resume beyond the one-dimensional action films of his past (e.g., Cobra) with a film that offered more character-driven content.

Such is the case with Bruce Willis’s Howell who, like Stallone’s Freddy Helflin, is a sheriff who rather not be bothered, but is thrust into “urban western” (well, in this case, “rural western”) circumstances and rises to the challenge. However, don’t go into this expecting John McClane . . . or all Bruce Willis all the time. This is a Hayden Christensen set piece (and the second of a two picture deal with Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films; the other was the 2015 Christian-based family film 90 Minutes in Heaven). And we all know how polarizing Christensen was as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels (he’s really not that bad of an actor).

As with our previous review for Steven C. Miller’s Aaron Eckhart-starring Line of Duty, we’re not going to sugar coat: the reviews on First Kill aren’t good. And Christensen, like Kristen Stewart (Underwater), takes a social media beating for his acting. And Miller’s direct-to-video action thrillers—such as Nicolas Cage’s Arsenal (2017) and Sylvester Stallone’s Escape Plan 2: Hades—are universally derided.

The err of film critics and movie goers (these days, renters) that tend to bash Miller’s work is that they fail to put on their retro-beanies and appreciate that Miller creates ‘90s action movie throwbacks. Think back to the major studio theatrical romps of Die Hard and Cobra, and of Speed and Lethal Weapon. They’re big, they’re dumb, they’re stupid, and they’re improbable. And we love those friggin’ movies.

For me, Miller’s films are like my grandma’s three-meat overloaded spaghetti replete with garlic and bay leaves: I’m not going back for seconds or thirds and ruining my heart and stomach lining, but that single serving is satisfying filling none-the-less. And I always go back for another artery-clogging dinner at grandma’s at a later time.

You can stream First Kill on Amazon Prime, Google Play, Vudu, and You Tube Movies. If you’d rather hard media, you can pick it up at your local Redbox or pick them up at Best Buy and Walmart.

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes for B&S Movies.

Arsenal is one of those movies that, if we still had video stores, based on the marquee names of Nicolas Cage (Mandy, Color Out of Space) and John Cusack (Better Off Dead), you would have plucked it off the shelf. Those were the days when, for the 5 Videos-5 Days-5 Bucks offers many indie-stores had, you’d take a gamble on anything.

Sadly, in these digital days when you have to pay $5.99 to $7.99 for a digital rental, we don’t gamble that much on movies. (And I ask you: Was Arsenal even on cable VOD? Was it even available on Redbox? Did Walmart carry it in their cutout barrels in the electronics section? Honestly, I’ve never heard of Arsenal.)

It’s that retarding digital distribution environment that causes a film like Arsenal—an admittedly slow, but decent film noir action-thriller overflowing with ultra-violence and complex-beyond-cardboard characters—the type of characters we don’t get in the big studio set pieces that cut-out emotional layers and concentrate on the bullets—to being ignored at the digital box office. (Arsenal was a theatrical release in Europe.)

And this is how a hangover from last night’s holiday frolicking on the last Friday night of the year leads to your Saturday morning of couch surfing and channel grazing with your bowl of Coco Puffs (Fruity Pebbles, if you got ‘em) as you discover a well-written and well-directed film on a tight budget ($10 million is a “low budget” in these comic book franchise days): when it plays on the SyFy Channel.

Yep. Hollywood is a cruel, filmmaking mistress. Oscar be a bitch in gold clothing.

When we first meet the Lindel brothers, the younger, middle-school J.P always looks up to his older, high-school brother Mikey, who’s a face-slapping dickhead one minute, then a giving, caring brother the next. When their ill-drunk grandmother decides it’s time to leave the Terra by shotgun suicide, Mikey supports them both by working for Cage’s small-time mobster, Eddie King, making coke deliveries and committing petty crimes-for-profit.

Now grown up, blue collar brothers, J.P (now Adrian Grenier, HBO’s Entourage) is a responsible owner of a construction company; Mikey (now Johnathon Schaech, That Thing You Do!) is a black sheep that causes chaos, not only in his own family, but J.P’s. When J.P floats a 10 G loan to help his older brother pay off some family responsibilities, Mikey decides to buy coke from Eddie King and “flip it” to 20 Gs. Then the coke is stolen. And Eddie thinks Mikey ripped him off. So he kidnaps and ransoms Mikey for 300 percent more than the coke is worth. “You little brats owe me! I raised you!” screams Eddie King as he punches a chair-tied Mikey in the face.

So J.P—doing something his brother would never do for him—sets out with their childhood friend Sal (a perpetually black-clad and baseball-capped John Cusack), now a rogue undercover cop, to rescue Mikey. And they open up the “Arsenal.”

Arsenal is the type of movie Nicolas Cage—he openly admits—makes to pay down his highly publicized tax problems. It’s also the type of movie that gives top-billing to Nicolas Cage and John Cusack—who everyone came to see—then pulls the ol’ bait n’ switch with Johnathon Schaech and Adrian Grenier—that no one came to see (but they’re both very good here). It’s also the type of film where Nicolas Cage lets loose his unhinged, biblical self as we listen to the traditional religious tunes of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Oh Freedom” as his Eddie King character gives CGI-blood-flowing-out-of-the-mouth, slow-motion beat downs by baseball bat and fist.

Now, in case you haven’t figured it out, Arsenal wants to be “Quentin Tarantino”—but you end up with another “Boondock Saints.” But we all loved Boondock Saints . . . remember?

Anyway, Cage, as is the case in his lean, direct-to-video-in-the-U.S-and-theatrical-release-overseas years, portrays another one of his patented, over-the-top cartoonish characters. Cage is known for his extreme form of method acting—where he rips teeth out of his head without anesthesia, spends five weeks with his head wrapped in bandages, walks around in corpse paint, eats an all-raw meat diet, and has hot yogurt poured over his feet to prepare for a scene. So, when we see Cage’s name, we wonder: What crazy-ass play from his “Noveau Shamanic” playbook is he going to run with this time?

This time: he’s running the “Tony Clifton.”

I don’t know how else to describe it. From the first moment of his very limited screen time (about 20 minutes combined, tops; same for John Cusack), the VCR centers of my brain loaded a VHS of Andy Kaufman’s old Tony Clifton routines. Cage’s Eddie King is (maybe not) a parody of Kaufman’s boorish lounge singer—complete with a fake nose and oversized sunglasses, a droopy walrus mustache and the kind of fake wig an insecure bald man would wear and think he’s “sexy.”

Oh, yes. The Cage never disappoints. And the Cage never treads middle ground. He’s either a master of his craft . . . or he’s past-his-prime awful in the eyes of the viewer. Either way, you’re leaving entertained.

Oh, and there’s an additional twist to Cage’s Eddie King: It’s the second time he’s portrayed the character. It turns out Arsenal serves as a sequel to the film Deadfall (1993)—despite the fact that Cage’s character dies in Deadfall. So, in actuality, Arsenal is an Eddie King prequel. (I’ve never heard of or seen Deadfall, either. Help us out, SyFy!) Oh, and the character of Buddy, Eddie King’s older brother in Arsenal, is played by Christopher Coppola, the real-life older brother of Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Coppola), who directed Nick in Deadfall.

And there are a few, additional twists to writer-director Steven C. Miller’s Arsenal.

While it isn’t a prequel-sequel, Arsenal is Adrien Grenier and Johnathon Schaech’s second paring: they also starred in Marauders (2016), another film written and directed Miller. Arsenal also unites the two lead actors from the 8MM franchise: Nicolas Cage starred in 8MM (1999) and Johnathon Schaech was in 8MM 2 (2005). And Arsenal is the fourth collaboration of Nicolas Cage and John Cusack: they worked together Con Air (1997) and Adaptation (2002), and the no-one-saw-it, The Frozen Ground (2013). (Caveat emptor: they’re not in any scenes together in Arsenal.)

Say what you will about Arsenal (IMDb users were not kind), but Steven C. Miller knows how to bring on the action with morally-screwed characters. His other films include First Kill (2017, starring Bruce Willis), 2018’s Escape Plan 2: Hades, and Line of Duty (2019, starring Aaron Eckhart). Miller’s also directed a remake of Silent Night, Deadly NIght and almost brought a new version of Motel Hell to the big screen. Arsenal’s first time screenwriter, Jason Mosberg, created the 2018 limited original series One Dollar for the CBS All Access digital platform.

So do yourself a favor. The next time you see Steven C. Miller’s or Jason Mosberg’s name on something, give it spin. You’ll be entertained.

And what in the hell is this about? “Nic Cage Bitch” is our Nicolas Cage blowout written by Paul Andolina of Wrestling with Film. It’s a must read for all fans of the Cage, so check it out and learn about some Cage films you may have missed, such as A Score to Settle, Between Worlds, Kill Chain, Outcast, Rage, and Seeking Justice.

About the Author: You can read the music and film criticisms of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.