31. “I’LL BE BACK”: We hope you had a good time with our little Challenge. Conclude your journey by watching one with a catchphrase you find yourself repeating in the real world.

I say some dumb lines from movies all the time, movies that no one remembers, like when I go in a store I say, “I’ll be in and out like a duck mating,” which comes from Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, a movie that no one cares about but me.

Unlike “I’ll be back” or “I’m getting too old for this shit,” the catchphrase that I always say is from this movie, as Julie tries to get janitor Melvin Ferd Junko III  into the hot tub, she purrs, “It’s time to do it.” Melvin replies, “Do what?” And she stares at him and says, “Do it, Melvin. Do it!” It made me laugh so hard when I was a kid — much like the other line I often say from this, “I’ve never done me no blind bitch before!” — but when do you use these catchphrases in polite conversation?

I love The Toxic Avenger in the same way that I hate Troma, because I championed this film and rented it so many times and told so many people about it and Troma never did anything this good ever again. Not even close. The sequel is fine and yeah, I bought the toys and watched the cartoon, but I’m still angry and let down almost forty years later by how bad everything was after this and what an annoying person that Lloyd Kaufman has become.

Side note: A lot of people call him Uncle Lloyd and I am here to tell you that I hate anyone who gets a fake uncle name because generally they are horrible people. To wit:

Uncle Stan Lee: A man who made his fortune on the backs of hard working men like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby, who never got royalties or a job for life or got to be in Marvel movies, having to have their families — in Kirby’s case — fight for credit or be like Ditko and just do advertising work and hide in the middle of New York City. Kaufman is a similar loud braggart who had one major success and we’ve had him hanging around like the turd that won’t flush ever since.

Uncle Forry Forest J, Ackerman: I grew up late to the monster kid world, but there are people who worship this man and sorry to tell you, he’s been accused of sexual harassment and outright abuse by so many women that you have to believe it. And even if you don’t, explain An Illustrated History of Heidi Saha, a Warren special that has photos of a prepubescent girl dressed as a jungle girl and Vampirella, as well as the poster Warren sold, that had notorious sexual predator Isaac Asimov say, “An absolute delight! I love her!” This girl does not look like a woman at all. In this book, Forrest said of this at the time 13-year-old girl, “In the so-called real world, among the beasts of science fiction and Comicdom…there now walks a great beauty.  The young Goddess known as Heidi: supple, blonde reed of womanhood, bending in the wind of the sighs of her would-be wooers, her stricken swains.  Heidi the delightful, the full-of-life dweller on the pink cloud of fantasy and wonder.  Heidi — unbelievably refreshing, soft and shy, wildly exciting — Heidi — a poetic blend of fantasy and wondrous reality.”

I refuse to call Jess Franco Uncle Jess, but he never took that name himself as far as I know.

But regardless, people that want to be called Uncle are all creeps. It’s even worse that they preyed on geek culture fans, which all generally people like Melvin in this movie, lost and looking for acceptance. Instead, they get treated as objects.

As for Lloyd Kaufman, he has written in his book Make Your Own Damn Movie! not to audition women alone or else you’ll get accused of sexual harassment, then also talks about making women disrobe during auditions.

Man, did I digress.

Anyways, this movie is great, has ridiculous gore and great dialogue, all while not being all that different from a comic book origin of a man going from geek to superhero. It moves quick, makes you giggle and seems like it’s the first of many big ideas but the well was sadly dry. And yet people are convinced that Troma films are amazing.

This goes for it, like having a dog get shot, a kid getting his head crushed and lines like, “No tickee, no washy,” which seems edgy, but after years of Troma movies aren’t shocking for the sake of shock but instead feel like casual racism. There’s no message behind it all, just more outrage. Which is fine, I guess, but then I read about Troma being iconic.

That said, I will defend Filmirage and much more reprehensible studios. I guess I’m a jerk.

I wish I could be fourteen year old me again, obsessed over this film and showing it to anyone who would watch it. I wish I wasn’t so cynical. But the world will sometimes open your eyes, you know?

Anyway.

Do it. Do it Melvin.

You can watch this on Tubi.

30. EXHUMATION POINT: Digging up the past one coffin at a tomb time.

Korean shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her assistant Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) have been hired by a wealthy Korean American family to determine why their infant son is sick. It turns out to be something called the Grave’s Call, as an ancestor wants something from them. They take the family’s eldest member, Park Ji-Yong (Kim Jae-cheol) to the grave of his grandfather, along with a Feng Shui expert named Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), a funeral home owner, to see what they can do to stop the curse.

Kim Sang-deok is wary and doesn’t trust the entitled family and their plans to excavate the grave without cremating what is left. Hwa-rim and Bong-gil perform their ritual and a human headed snake appears. As you can figure out, this is a bad omen. Then, a custodian opens the coffin, hoping to find treasure. This unleashes the angry spirit of the grandfather, who worked with the Japanese during War World II and was never given a proper burial. He kills Park Ji-Yong and several members of his family before Sang-deok cremates the grave and saves the child.

Months later, Yeong-geun and Sang-deok meet with the gravedigger who killed the snake, who has been upset since. The grandfather’s grave site was sold to him by a man named Gisune, who ends up being a Japanese shaman named Murayama Junji, who has been killing local priests and animals. Hwa-rim and Bong-gi are attacked by this samurai ghost, which becomes a ball of flame before possessing Bong-gil.

Then we learn the major plan of the Japanese, which was to leave iron spikes throughout Korean, enabling them to destroy the magic energy of the country and claim it. Gisune has been protecting his spike, which is a headless samurai, inside the grave of the grandfather. The four gather to remove this magic from their homeland and end the reign of the Japanese ghost.

Korean shamanism is something I haven’t seen much of in movies and director and writer Jang Jae-hyun has created something really wild here. It’s a bit long for those without much attention, but it’s also nearly two movies worth of story as you can consider the reveal of the Japanese magic to almost be a sequel.

The director may be a Christian deacon, but he had his actors study real rituals from shamans in order to accurately portray them. There was even a shaman on set.

Yet this is about more than magic. The four heroes are named for the martyrs of South Korea who fought against Japanese colonial rule. There are some big ideas in this and it’s worth taking the time to absorb it.

28. COUNTDOWN TO OBLIVION: Watch a race-against-timer. Oh, the tension…

Before WandaVision and Agatha All Along, Jac Schaeffer directed, wrote and produced Timer, a film about a wrist implant that counts down to the day when the wearer will meet their soulmate.

Oona (Emma Caulfield) has a blank Timer, which means that her soulmate is not wearing one. Her stepsister and roommate Steph (Michelle Borth) has been told by hers that she won’t meet the right person for 15 years, so she works at an old folks home by day and a bar at night, actively being rude to everyone she meets so she doesn’t start dating the wrong person. As for their sixteen year old brother Jessie, his works immediately and he’s told that he’s to be with the daughter of their family’s housekeeper.

Oona meets Mikey (John Patrick Amedori), a much younger man who works in a grocery store and plays in a band. She decides to just have fun with him until either or their timers goes live, while Steph meets Dan (Desmond Harrington), whose wife died three years ago. She’s sure he’s perfect for Oona, but she doesn’t know that she’s falling for him herself.

I really liked the romance between Oona and Mikey, even though its somewhat doomed.  Oona and Steph share a birthday and decide to remove their Timers, but Oona’s goes off, telling her that she will find her soulmate tomorrow. It ends up being Dan, which causes the sisters to argue. Oona finds Mikey and tries to tell him that the results don’t matter, but he says that they do. The next day, she sees Dan running on the same track that she does and they promise to see each other.

I really enjoyed this. JoBeth Williams is wonderful as the mother of the women, while the idea that Oona and her mother both are attracted to musicians bonds them. I didn’t, however, like the ending, which seems to subvert everything that the characters have learned throughout the movie. Everyone is so likeable that I was rooting for something different; maybe that’s a mark of how good these characters are written.

You can watch this on Tubi.

26. DANZA MACABRA: Boogie down with some soundtrack heavy Giallo.

Ronald Marvelling (Curd Jürgens) has married a new wife, a much younger one, by the name of Alexa DuBois (Rosalba Neri) but within weeks, she’s making love in the sand with Pietro (Juan Luis Galiardo) and he’s downing J&B and clutching a pistol. This is no happy marriage. His daughter Catherine (Emma Cohen) is worried about all of this but more because she wants her inheritance and not out of any concern for her father.

The film then flashes back to how Alexa went from being Catherine’s friend to marrying her father without giving up the chance to make love to much younger men. Yet to keep up appearances, Marvelling allows her to make love to anyone she pleases, even if he doesn’t understand why. As we make our way through the nightclubs, mansions and love nests that make up the rich lives of the three protagonists, we’re left realizing that even all the money in the world doesn’t mean that problems can’t fester and eat at you.

Marvelling kills himself and locks down his home, as steel covers the windows and doors, trapping them inside. A recorded version of his voice tells them that they will be blamed for his murder and will die with him. There’s no escape.

This was directed by Juan Logar, who also was one of the writers of the script. It’s an interesting movie due to its structure and how claustrophobic it becomes. The Spanish version was obviously made in a time of censorship, so none of the nudity made it into the film that they saw.

Two Males for Alexa is scored by Piero Piccioni, who created a Hammond organ heavy jam that drives the action. He also did the soundtrack for more than two hundred other movies, including Camille 2000, Marta, The 10th Victim and Crazy Desires of a Murderer. Speaking of murder, Piccioni was one of the suspects of in the politically motivated murder of Wilma Montesi. Luckily, he was acquitted when it was discovered that he never Montesi and was on vacation with his lover Alida Valli at the time of the killing. This case inspired La Dolce Vita and the scandal ruined the political career of Piccioni’s father Attilio, who had to step down as the secretary of his party and as foreign minister.

This is just barely a giallo yet it’s enjoyable nonetheless. I mean, Rosalba Neri may be one of the most perfect women to ever walk this planet, so if all she does is eat bread for 90 minutes, I’ll still watch that. She does more than that here.

You can watch this on YouTube.

24. SHLOCK & AWE: Can you believe how “good” this is?

The Incredibly Strange Film Show aired on Discovery in the 1990s and it was such a part of my early psychotronic obsession. In just two seasons, I learned who Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted V. Mikels and Doris Wishman were and got so much more info on the movies of El Santo, Russ Meyer, John Waters, Ed Wood, Herschell Gordon Lewis and more.

Ray Dennis Steckler was a filmmaker who I’m fascinated by. Who else could make The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies and have László Kovács and Vilmos Zsigmond operating the cameras? Who else could be Cash Flagg, Harry Nixon, Sven Christian, Henri-Pierre Duval, Pierre Duvall, Michael J. Rogers, Michel J. Rogers, Wolfgang Schmidt, Sven Hellstrom, Ricardo Malatoté, Cindy Lou Steckler and Cindy Lou Sutters? And who could direct films like Wild Guitar and Sinthia: The Devil’s Doll, not to mention the music video for “White Rabbit?”

This starts as a very real and horrifying story of The Chain Gang killing people and abducting Cee Bee Beaumont (Carolyn Brandt), the girlfriend of rock star Lonnie Lord (Ron Haydock using the name Vin Saxon) after terrorizing her with phone calls. That’s because this was originally a crime drama called Depraved that was inspired by real-life crank calls Brandt kept getting.

And 40 minutes in, Lord walks into a closet and walks out as Rat Pfink as his friend Titus Twimbly (Titus Moede) becomes Boo Boo. They chase The Chain Gang on their Ratcycle as suddenly, this has become a Batman parody. This is followed by a big bad monkey named Kogar (Bob Burns, always the man who has the costume) knocking out our hero and taking Cee Bee, but he’s soon coming back to her rescue.

You may ask, at this point, why is the title so off? The legend: Rat Pfink and Boo Boo was the intended title, but when they made the titles, and became a and Steckler couldn’t afford $50 to fix it. The truth: Steckler said, “The real story is that my little girl, when we were shooting this one fight scene, kept chanting, “Rat pfink a boo boo, rat pfink a boo boo…” And that sounded great! But when I tell people the real story, they don’t wanna hear it, so you better print the legend.”

You have to love a man who crashes a Christmas parade for his rapey crime movie that somehow becomes a superhero movie by the end, complete with songs. Any time you need a song, get Lonnie Lord, because “He always carries his guitar with him in case he is called on to sing!”

The thing is, I can show some strange movies to guests, but how do you even start showing Steckler’s films? There’s so much backstory and I really don’t want folks coming over saying, “This is stupid,” because I’m very defensive of the art. I mean, the fact that this movie even exists makes me hopeful for the human race.

You can watch this on Tubi.

23. FOR PEAT’S SAKE: Log one that takes place in a swamp or a bog.

Danny (John White, who would become the direct to video Stifler in the American Pie sequels), Phil (Dan Warry-Smith) and Angel (Charlotte Sullivan) live in a swamp where every kid talks about Gator Face. After a summer of having to behave, they decide to make a costume, dress up as the monster and prank the entire neighborhood. Then the National Guard gets called in. That’s when the friends learn that Gator Face is real and a part of the swamp.

Directed by Vic Sarin and written by David Covell, Alan Mruvka and Sahara Riley, this aired on Showtime and if I was the right age for it, I would have been obsessed by this movie. At the end, when Gator Face gives his life up to save Danny? I would have cried my eyes out. When the swamp saves Gator Face? I don’t know if I had that many years as a child.

This may be the most innocent swamp horror film that I’ve ever watched. I mean, I’m used to humanoids rising up during salmon festivals and violently assaulted women who later give birth to their clammy children.

You can watch this on Tubi.