April 10: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

Also known as Slipping Into Darkness and Bloodshed and shot as The Paranoiac, this movie is like a young and scrappy cover band playing Psycho in a small club and you’re like, well, they’re derivative, but that’s a totally different bass part and that singer has some charm, you know? It’s ramshackle and cheap in the best of ways, set in a boardinghouse, as so many of the best horror movies are — particularly regional and low budget examples — where aspiring journalist Karen (Beverly Ross) gets a cheap from Mrs. Brewer (Belle Mitchell). Yet, as always, everything comes at a price, as her new neighbor Grahame (Laszlo Papas) is beyond obsessed with her.

Grahame spies on her through the ventilation system and we soon learn that he was molested not once, but twice in his formative years, leading to him being quite off today. The kind of off where — spoiler, except that by me saying this is so very close to Psycho you should know what’s coming but this goes further — when Karen drowns in the tub, he keeps her body in his room and tries to preserve what little he has of her, all while her ex-boyfriend and a classmate she’s grown biblically close to try to find out where she’s gone.

There’s a detail early on where it’s revealed that Karen is diabetic and suffers from seizures and by the time she’s in her death throes in a bathtub, you realize that this isn’t a movie that just throws out small details. It’s a movie that forces you to empathize with its killer — again, third mention, Psycho — while having its main female character neither be the final girl nor the heroine.

Either you’re going to feel that this is way too long and drawn out or you’ll be fascinated by it, feeling like you’re just like Grahame, watching lives that are not our own, seeing damaged people attempt to escape their dismal fates. In a different story, the way that life has turned both of the leads into shells of people — Grahame haunted by multiple moments of childhood trauma and a lack of being able to connect to anything resembling intimacy and Karen unable to even face her ex-boyfriend as she leaves him and continually being inappropriately approached by nearly every man in this movie — who in a different story may have met cute and worked together to solve their issues.

Instead, the one moment when Grahame’s voyeurism could have been used for good and saved Karen, he’s called away by Mrs. Brewer and misses out on his would-be love’s lonely demise. For a movie that seems to present itself as a slasher, that’s a big idea.

Director and writer Richard Cassidy sadly didn’t do much after this, directing and writing — before being removed and replaced by editor Adrian Carr — the 1983 Danielle Steele adaption Now and Forever, as well as writing The Edge of Power and directing The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Mysteries of the Bible Unravelled, which his based on Dr. Barbara Thiering’s book, The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church, which introduces the theory that the unnamed figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls are John the Baptist and Jesus.

An even bigger shame is that this hasn’t been released on blu ray, as there are plenty less deserving movies that have been given plenty more attention.

April 10: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

Most folks know Jack Starrett from playing his Gabby Hayes-like character in Blazing Saddles. Or maybe they know him from all the biker movies like The Born Losers and Hells Angels on Wheels. Or maybe some of the other movies he directed, like Run, Angel, Run!, Nam’s Angels, Slaughter, Race with the Devil, Cleopatra Jones and Hollywood Man.

That said — I’ve never heard of this movie and it kind of blew my mind.

Virgil (Ken Howard, The White Shadow) is a traveling salesman who thinks, at first, that he’s going to have some easy sex with a girl he meets on the road, Rosalie (Bonnie Bedelia). But she’s too young, he’s too nice of a guy and, well, things feel too strange. They’re only going to get stranger.

Based on The Chicken by Miles Tripp, this was written by SAS soldier and sculptor Anthony Greville-Bell, who also wrote the script for Theater of Blood, another movie produced by his co-writer, John Kohn. Rosalie is a character who can only come out of fiction, a feral wild child who is also hopelessly gorgeous, yet starts the film burying someone and spends most of this movie decimating Virgil, leading him to break his leg and live out Misery years before the book was even written.

She claims that she had a dream that her grandfather had this house, a place where she has made Virgil into a near-invalid and where only one other person encounters them, Fry (Anthony Zerbe), a total scumbag who just wants the gold buried somewhere near the house. And by house, I mean falling apart shack somewhere in the dusty and abandoned American Southwest.

Also known as Someone to Watch Over Me, this movie somehow finds you cheering for Rosalie, as Virgil is the white upper class man who is brought low by sex appeal and, well, the ability for her to at once appear helpless and capable. For a movie with only one extended location and two characters taking up most of the running time, it works and Bedelia is incredible. Is it any wonder why she ended up in Needful Things and Salem’s Lot? Maybe King was karmically paying her back for outright stealing so much of her character in this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 10: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

The origins of this movie are wonderful.

Producer William Szlinsky told director Michael Stanley that he had a great idea for a scene: a man’s face getting devoured by acid. But what if there was a movie around that scene? And what if there was an island filled with not just one of the Zuni dolls from Trilogy of Terror but hundreds of them?

And what if that deserted island was in Stamford, Connecticut?

John (Robert Nolfi), Cathy (Julia Rust), Case (Robert Lengyel), Phillip (Frank Murgalo), Diane (Lisa Pak), Mr. Morgan (John Vichiol), Mrs. Gordon (Kay Bailey), Pat (Frans Kal) and Mr, Bruin (Robert T. Firgelewski) survive the sinking of a ship only to end up on a mysterious island and then, well, succumb one by one to puppets. If you loved Bela struggling with in octopus in Bride of the Monster, get ready for an entire movie filled with moments just like that.

This is the kind of movie where a man dips his face in water to take a drink and learns — too late — that it’s acid, fulfilling the dreams of Szlinsky. It also has the kind of synth score that those who get woozy about synth scores will positively faint over when they watch this.

Also known as Hell Island, this is the type of film that separates the lovers of off the wall regional cinema from small minded folks who say things like, “This looks like it cost a hundred dollars,” “No one in this can act” or “Those are obviously puppets.” The world is too small and too sad for you to have thoughts like that. Instead, just watch this and allow it to wash over you, like calming murderdrone synth waves on the bloodiest of beaches.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

April 10: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

Lord Arnold Dwellyn (Norman Stuart) has just married Karen (Stella Stevens), which would not be all that strange except that, well, he’s dead. He’s not buried, as per his will, if Karen wants to inherit all that he owns, she must never leave his mansion and leave him in state. That doesn’t mean that she’s taking it easy, as she’s been having an affair with Arnold’s brother Robert (Roddy McDowall). And umm, how did Arnold get married when he has a widow, Lady Jocelyn (Shani Wallis)? I guess it really is until death do you part, right?

There’s money hidden in the walls, though, but whenever anyone gets close to it, Arnold has already planned for it, knowing how each person will react and coming up with a death trap created just for them, like some kind of Dr. Phibes without the years of medical school. Only Arnold’s sister Hester (Elsa Lanchester, once a Bride) seems to benefit from all of this, but her luck can’t last.

Shot at the same time as Terror in the Wax Museum with most of the same cast — Lanchester, Wallis, Steven Marlo, Patric Knowles, Shani Ben Wright and Leslie Thompson — this didn’t hit right with me at first. It felt like a long black out sketch from Night Gallery. Yet the more I think about it, well, I keep thinking about this movie. I mean, what other movie finds roles for Victor Buono, Bernard Fox, Farley Granger and Jamie Farr? How many fog machines did it take to make this? And wow, it was produced by Bing Crosby Productions?

Directed by Georg Fenady, who other than this and the aforementioned Terror in the Wax Museum mainly worked in TV and written by Jameson Brewer (who did write The Incredible Mr. Limpet) and John Fenton Murray (whose credits include Sid and Marty Krofft shows and Partridge Family 2200 AD), this feels like something made in between episodes of other shows. Yet it has some weird charm that keeps bringing me back to it. Maybe it’s the Shani Walls theme at the end?

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

No, not Hangman’s Joke, Hangman’s Curse.

The Veritas Project is a privately funded team commissioned by the President — the President, yes! —  that is in charge of supernatural occurrences, mysteries and crimes and looks into them from a Judeo-Christian perspective. They exist in two books, the one that inspired this movie and Nightmare Academy.

Directed by Rafal Zielinski and written by Kathy Mackel and Stan Foster, this takes place at John R. Rogers High School in Spokane, Washington. Ten years ago, Abel Frye got sick of being bullied and hung himself. Now, it seems that his ghost has come back to put the football playing jerks of today into comas thanks to spider-assisted poisoning, a plot straight out of Black Belly of the Tarantula.

We need Christian giallo, right?

The Veritas Project — Nate (David Keith, who is also in Christian Mingle, the movie about the holy hook up company) and Sarah Springfield (Mel Harris, Raising Cane) and their kids Elisha (Leighton Meester, Gossip Girl) and Elijah (Douglas Smith, Big Love) plus Max, a dog that can smell drugs — are here to look into the various arachnid-related comas and the goths that worship Frye and love that he’s finally taking out the students who make their lives so rough every single day.

Back to the giallo, get this plan: every bully has a male spider inside a straw inside their locker and the student targeting them gives them money tainted with female spider pheromones, which causes the spider to emerge from the straw, bite them and give them hallucinations which make them think that the ghost of Frye is killing them.

Elisha figures out all of this and is attacked by the killer and nearly dies from spider bites, as thousands of female spiders have taken over the school. She’s saved by Dr. Algernon Wheeling, who just so happens to be Frank Peretti, who wrote the book.

There are religious mentions here, but it’s not as over the top as many other faith-based movies. Well, praying does save Elisha from the spiders, so that does happen. I’m just amused that they didn’t look too deep into the other films Zielinski made before this, including Recruits, all three Screwballs movies,  Spellcaster and State Park. I mean, Cyrus was a broken vessel too and he ended up being the man who set the Jews free from the Babylonians and helped build the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus did hang out with the sex workers and tax collectors, so maybe He would also enjoy Canadian tax shelter sex movie directors helping to spread the Gospel.

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

This is loosely based on John Bunyan’s Journey to Hell. Well, I learned about his Pilgrim’s Progress from Glenn Danzig, who started the original version of the video for “Mother” with the line “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell, even from the gates of Heaven.”

“Welcome to my book collection,” says Glenn, shirtless.

Shane Badman (John Terrell) isn’t a bad person. Why did he end up in Hell after he drowned? This surfer went to megachurches and wrote them big checks, so why is he next to Hitler (Ron Gilbert), Chairman Mao (Val Victa), Judas (Anatolii Reeves), the Zodiac Killer (Mikael Mattsson), Eric Harris (Jens Sweaney), Dylan Klebold (Nicholas Adams), the internet scam Nigerian Prince (Jako Crawford), Adolph Eichmann (Frank Mitzi), Pontius Pilate (Zachary Chicos) and the Vegas shooter (Steven T. Bartlett)? Was it because he gambled and may have cheated on his wife (Emilie Soghomonian), whose only character is that she’s pretty and always harping on Shane for not going to study the Bible? Because he was mean to a homeless man (Darrell P. Miller)?

Inside this green screen 50,000 years of Hell, Shane whines to the demons (Arron Groben and Harry Goodins) who look like Abbath and Demonaz from Immortal and I really appreciate that these demons are true kvlt. And I like that Hell isn’t filled with LGBTQ folks and democrats but plenty of those who ran megachurches and were fake Christians. And man, the dialogue, as Shane calls the Columbine shooters that they are “less than dog poop.” In Hell. After thousands of years of burning. And then the Zodiac Killer threatens to kill him all over again. And Hitler saying, “I’ve been in Hell since 1945, don’t tell me what to do!”

Directed by Timothy A. Chey (who also directed Slamma Jamma, Fakin’ Da Funk, Suing the Devil — in which the devil (Malcolm McDowell) gets sued by a law student — and a movie I need to track down, Interview with the Antichrist, which is a live interview during Armageddon), who wrote this with Victor G. Chey and W. Thomas, I really ended up loving this movie. It’s so earnest, the acting is all the worst choices and the sheer wildness of it all just has to be seen to be believed. Most importantly, it succeeded in its mission. I have thought about the way that I act and how it impacts my soul. I mean, did I still watch some insanely upsetting movies afterward? Certainly. But it also made me think of ways that I can make the world better.

Also: Mao Zedong threatens a man with kung fu in Hell.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

In the spring of 2010, there was a lock-in at the First Baptist Church. Two days later, Justin would confess to his parents that he had experienced evil and had it all on video. Yes, the boys brought a pornographic magazine to the lock-in and after upsetting everyone with it, a demon arose from its pages and made their lives literal hell.

Yet this is not the only Christian found footage horror movie in which porn unleashes a demon. Harmless is about a box of old dirty magazines that unleash a poltergeist that attacks a father and son.

You know who directed that movie?

Rich Praytor.

You know who directed The Lock-In?

Rich Praytor.

What are the odds that someone would make two movies about wank material unleashing demons?

Anyways, Pastor Chris tries to burn the magazine and it shows up again unsinged, which did not happen when my college girlfriend discovered the stack of magazines under my bed and forced me to burn them in front of her and then I singed my hands trying to pull the January 1993 Hustler out of the inferno, but I mean, come on, it had Madison on the cover.

There’s some incredibly bad improv in this movie, mostly from the mother of one of the kids and it makes for a tone that is wildly uneven but come on. You expected that. What you may not expect is the scene where a sound guy shows up in a reflection and he’s not even holding a boom mic but the smallest microphone ever. It actually made me sad for the sound guy.

I didn’t get the barn door speech and had to look it up. It comes up a few times and maybe I was born a Catholic so I’m not supposed to get it. Pastor Chris even says, “Didn’t your parents teach you about the barn door?” Is it Matthew 13:30 that explains that Jesus will gather one group into his barn and the other will be burned in God’s harvest of judgment. This is your chance to teach me.

Why is the demon a child?

Why does this have a twist ending?

Why haven’t I been able to stop thinking about this?

Because this is a movie that has the dialogue “There is a correlation between pornography and demon activity.”

I went to a lock-in once and all I remember is going to Eat ‘n Park afterward, which if you live in Pittsburgh, is a lot like dealing with demons.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

Time Changer is a movie that will fool you.

It doesn’t seem like it’s going to be an ultra religious movie. After all, it has a time travel concept, which seems against the Bible. It has a pretty recognizable cast, such as Hal Linden, Gavin MacLeod, Paul Rodriguez, Richard Riehle and Jennifer O’Neill.

Yes, Jennifer O’Neill from Fulci’s The Psychic.

I’ll get to her soon enough.

Bible professor Russell Carlisle (D. David Morin) shares his new book, The Changing Times, with the leaders of the Grace Bible Seminary. The big idea is that you can have good morals without Jesus Christ. Everyone — and by everyone, I mean Barney Miller and Richard Riehle — agree this is a good thing. The only person who doesn’t is Dr. Norris Anderson (Gavin MacLeod), who has a time machine that he plans on using to show Carlisle the error of his ways.

A hundred years in the future, Carlisle is frightened by everything: cars, telephones, laundromats, Paul Rodriguez, baseball, children watching unmarried men and women kiss, tipping people who carry your luggage — even though tipping was invented in the middle ages in Europe, when servants would receive extra pay for good service from their masters and wealthy Americans learned of it when they started traveling to Europe in the mid 1800s — so, you know, pretty much everything. Taking the Lord’s name in vain in a movie — he’s not afraid of the actual movie, like how people ran away from the theater in France when L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciota played there in urban legend — is enough to stun him into gibberish speech.

Up until now, Carlisle is played as a comedy character, happily befuddled by the strangeness of our modern times. Yet things start to get to him, like divorce and women’s clothes on a mannequin, which causes him to complain to an employee, who thinks that our bearish religious learned man wants to wear those clothes himself.

Again, this is all played for laughs.

Except for when he goes to the school of someone he meets in church and lectures the class on how science works and drops this on them: “Remember, students, if any scientific record contradicts the Scriptures, it is the scientific finding that is in error. The Scriptures are never wrong.”*

This scene is so strange because up until now, we’ve been shown that Carlisle is a well-meaning moron. One of those so smart they’re kind of idiotic movie people who invent Flubber but can’t make it to any appointment on time. But now, are we to empathize with him when his religion is kept out of school? Or are we to take dialogue like “God’s Holy Word is so trustworthy, it is amazing how it is recorded scientific fact hundred of years before scientists ever discovered them, and has proven accurate one hundred percent of the time.”

So…is he a goofball?

Not anymore, as he goes to meet Mrs. Bain, the librarian Dr. Anderson told him to check in with. And yes, that’s Jennifer O’Neill. And before you can hear seven notes in black, she brings this movie to sheer right wing persecution mania just when you thought you were watching a different movie, telling him that “our nation is no longer built on the biblical principles set forth by our forefathers,” even though in the Treaty of Tripoli, written in 1797 and sent to the Senate by John Adams, states “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” Yet more importantly, while many of the morals of the U.S. are indeed based on Christian principles, there is no demand to practice Christianity or any other religion. The First Amendment to the Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” People are free to believe whatever they wish; that’s far from being expressly established on biblical principles.

She goes on to say that “We’ve lost prayer in school since the Supreme Court decision in 1962.” This is a myth. Yes, official, state-sponsored and mandated prayers led by school officials aren’t allowed, but moments of silence and private prayers are always allowed. Trust me. Whenever there’s a test someone didn’t study for, there are prayers.

But man, when it gets to “secular entertainment is one of the biggest tools Satan uses to mislead people” and that Hollywood started in the 1930s — wrong, In Old California was the first movie shot in Hollywood in 1910 — and movies started with a code of ethics — wrong: “The Hays Code was this self-imposed industry set of guidelines for all the motion pictures that were released between 1934 and 1968,” according to Australian Centre for the Moving Image curator Chelsey O’Brien — and now, all of the failings of morals can be attributed to movies.

How did we switch so suddenly?

Get this: the movie goes back to wacky hijinks right after that.

Well, first our hero goes to the Church and tells everyone they are in the End Times, then he gives a Bible to Paul Rodriguez, who yes, was actually in this movie and remember when AKA Pablo was going to be this huge hit after all that hype and lasted six episodes? Man, I watched too much Entertainment Tonight as a child. Then, the two guys at the church who have always been weirded out by him chase him into an alley and he goes back to his own time, which they think is The Rapture.

At the end of it all, Carlisle decides to change his book and even shows a young boy who he yelled at in the beginning the error of his ways, gifting him some marbles and a lesson about Jesus.

But it’s not over.

No, Captain Stuebing decides to send a Bible through his time machine to find out when the world ends. Well, it could very well be 2050, the way this makes you see things.

Director and writer Rich Christiano is still making movies. And you know, I like a lot of this film. I just feel like it goes so all over the place in its narrative and then outright has moments where you know the truth against the words on screen that you start to doubt everything and man, faith is hard. Can you be moral and good without belief? I’m not sure, I’m no theologian. This movie says there’s no way.

It would be easy to just shoot fish in a barrel and make fun of this film — I mean, I did fire off plenty of ammo — but I still enjoyed the time I spent watching it, even though the Hollywood scene made me scream at my television. Then again, I own an uncut version of Emanuelle In America, so I am in no way to be listened to.

*Credit to Heathen Critique for writing down much of this movie’s dialogue.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 9: Easter Sunday – You don’t have to believe to watch and share a religious movie.

I’ve been obsessed with Jack Chick since a copy of The Beast brutalized me when I was a kid. It’s hard to explain my love of Chick’s work, because he made near-hateful attacks on other religions and on nearly every group on people on Earth to prove his point, but the work that he created along with an army of artists is beyond outsider art. It’s much the same way why I love Ron Ormond’s films. I want to believe like they do and find myself unable to, yet I utterly respect and admire that they were able to put together their creativity and stringent beliefs into works that last long beyond themselves.

The Sissy is one of Chick’s least incendiary works. As the description goes, Duke thought Jesus was a sissy and laughed at anyone who believed in him until one trucker talked to him and showed the horrible price that the Son of God paid to forgive our sins.

You can check out the original tract here and it has some of the best art of the Chick cartoonists. Fred Carter is always the guy that does the ultra realism in these and that’s what calls this out to me. That said, the movie made from it is early computer animation.

I’ve seen a lot of reviews that make fun of the animation in this and that’s a given. It’s really poor and way too unrealistic, compared to the art of the original. But just making fun of it because it’s Christian andd simplistic is easy. As mentioned above, this has a really heartfelt message, that sometimes loving people and turning the other cheek is hard but if you believe in making the world better, that’s what you do. You don’t have to believe to see the power of that message. It’s shooting fish in a barrel trying to feel and show you are superior to this. Instead, explain your point of view. There’s a lot to make fun of in Christian media, but basic insults aren’t enough. Share how your way is better other than just scoffing.

That said — I can’t defend any of Chick’s more outrageous works. After all, the guy kept me awake for weeks as a kid,

April 8: Film Ventures International — Share a movie that was released by Edward Montoro’s company. Here’s a list!

Members of an Army unit that served in Vietnam are turning up dead in Los Angeles and Niagara Falls. Ex-Colonel Kip Moore (Perry King, man, I’m way behind in saying that King was in some awesome stuff, but come on — Mandingo, Bad, The Possession of Joel Delaney, Lipstick, Class of 1984, The Clairvoyant — let’s all recognize him for his genre stuff!) is trying to figure out who it is after his friend Buddy Grant (Don Stroud) is shot and left paralyzed.

The cops, however, think that Moore is the killer. The real killer turns out to be a man with one black glove and missing fingers, so…is this a giallo? Well, Kip has to investigate the killings himself. And seeing how vets came back from Vietnam feeling like strangers in a strange land, not to mention Tisa Farrow is in the cast which lends a bit of Italian feel to this, I’d say it’s really close but it’s more action than psychosexual murder movie.

As for the cops, George Kennedy leads them, but come on. We all know that Kip is going to be the one to solve the case.

Director William Fruet worked with Stroud on Death Weekend and went on to make Spasms, Funeral Home, Baker County, U.S.A., Killer Party, Bedroom Eyes and Blue Monkey.

If you wanted to go to Niagra Falls in 1979 and never did, just watch this movie. You’ll get to see all the tourist spots. Also: I will watch anything with Tisa in it.