April 3: National Film Score Day — Write about a movie that has a great score.

L’assassino dei poliziotti is also known as Copkiller, Corrupt, Bad Cop Chronicles #2: Corrupt, Corrupt Lieutenant and The Order of Death. After making movies about the Italian Communist Party, director Roberto Faenza was considered so politically incorrect that he had to go outside Italy to find funding for movies like this one.

Filmed in New York City and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, this film stars Harvey Keitel as corrupt cop Lt. Fred O’Connor and former Sex Pistol John Lydon as the criminal that obsesses him.

O’Connor has been making money off drugs with Sgt. Bob Carvo (Leonard Mann, Vengeance Is a Dish Best Served Cold), which they invest in a Park Avenue apartment. However, Carvo wants out, as his wife—and O’Connor’s ex-girlfriend—Lenore (Nicole Garcia)—suspects rightly that he’s on the take.

Then, O’Connor meets Fred Mason (Lydon), who is really Leo Smith. He keeps claiming that he’s the Copkiller, a man who has been murdering police officers. When O’Connor catches him in his apartment, he ties him up. He keeps him captive, even going to interview his wealthy grandmother, Margaret (Sylvia Sidney), who tells him that after the death of his parents, he swore off their wealth and compulsively confesses to crimes that he didn’t commit.

This film plays with who the guilty person is—either the seemingly mentally ill Smith or the manipulative O’Connor—before flipping the script right before the dark ending.

So much of who Lydon is in this movie is, well, post-Sex Pistols Lydon, given to rants. The song “The Order of Death” from the Public Image Ltd. album This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get refers to the film, with the line “This is what you want… This is what you get” coming from the Hugh Fleetwood novel Order of Death that this movie is based on. As for Keitel, he’s essaying an early version of his character from Bad Lieutenant.

Backing it all up is a solid score by Ennio Morricone, whose career of more than four hundred films goes from classy fare like Days of Heaven and Cinema Paradiso to scumtastic stuff such as Hitch-Hike, Last Stop on the Night Train and What Have You Done With Solange?

You could also view this — instead of as a cop movie — as a film where two male closer than friends break up because of a woman, only for the jilted one to keep a young man captive and engaging in a BDSM relationship with him. That said, Keitel is, as always, great, and I wish Lydon was in more than just this one movie (and not just because the other film he had planned to act in was to be directed by Russ Meyer). He’s excellent in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 3: National Film Score Day- Write about a movie that has a great score.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

Dragonslayer (1981) and Trancers (1984): Two Great Film Scores but Only One in Service of Its Film

The mating of visuals to music can be transcendent. Think of how many movies, even stone-cold masterpieces, wouldn’t be as effective without their iconic scores by musical geniuses such as Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Miklos Rozsa, Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, Vangelis, Danny Elfman, and, of course, the greatest film composer of all time, Ennio Morricone.* And we can’t forget groups who did scores, like Goblin, Tangerine Dream, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Who, Nine Inch Nails, and Queen. Music has always been a part of movies even in the silent era. 

A great score can elevate a movie or hurt it. My fundamental maxim for judging the effectiveness of a score is whether I’m paying more attention to the score than the film itself. During my prime theater-going days, I went to see Dragonslayer, a now-forgotten film from 1981, a year packed with classics like Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman II, Altered States, Flash Gordon,** The Evil Dead, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling, Ms. 45, and Possession. I’d read in reviews before buying my ticket that the score by legendary composer Alex North was exceptional. My expectations were high.

So there I sat on opening day in a Philadelphia grindhouse—not one of the scarier ones—enjoying Dragonslayer, a decent enough film. And the reviewers were right: Alex North’s score was fantastic. (It was later nominated for an Academy Award.***) The score was so good that it took me right out of the film’s universe. The music had transformed this urban shithole, with urine-stained floor, broken seats, and tattered velvet curtain, into Carnegie Hall. (If only it could have literally done that—and changed the wino snoring next to me into a tuxedoed high-society type offering me a single malt Scotch.)

It was then that I realized that this was not a good thing. All the effort that had gone into creating that awesome-looking dragon had been lost on me. I’d closed my eyes and was zoning out to the music. While it was a classic symphonic score, it wasn’t the usual rousing John Williams stuff. Instead, it was more brooding. North had incorporated complex lines with counterpoint and some atonality. It’s not that the score was inappropriate to the action. It’s just that it was so much better than the film itself that it became a distraction and put a damper on my viewing experience. Dragonslayer’s score, though outstanding, does no service to the film it supports.

But sometimes—more accurately, rarely—a film with a few good elements that would otherwise be forgotten is improved so much by an unexpectedly great score that both the film and its score live on, each beloved. Case in point: Trancers (1984) a film I first watched on home video. 

On paper, Trancers doesn’t look like much: a low-budget mash-up of Blade Runner and The Terminator that Charles Band and his Empire International Pictures dumped into Chicago and LA theaters to make a few bucks before the VHS cassettes hit the shelves at Blockbuster. But Empire made exploitation films that were a cut above the rest, so it looked good, courtesy ace cinematographer Mac Ahlberg. And it had some other good things going for it: stand-up comedian Tim Thomerson, perfectly cast as Jack Deth, the futuristic gumshoe; future Best Actress winner Helen Hunt as his juvenile love interest; and a funny, clever screenplay from Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo. That duo went on to write even more great stuff, including Zone Troopers (1985), Eliminators (1986), and The Wrong Guys (1988) for Empire; The Flash (1990) for television; The Rocketeer (1991) for Disney; and Da 5 Bloods (2020) for Spike Lee, which was released after De Meo’s death. These things make Trancers memorable, to be sure, but you’ll be blown away by the score by Phil Davies and Mark Ryder.

Like the score in many 80s films, the Trancers score used the premier electronic instrument of the day, the Fairlight synthesizer. The main theme, which serves as the musical motif throughout the film, is simplicity itself: an initial burst of synthesizer whine, followed by a slow, haunting melodic line in a minor key supported by swelling harmonies. It’s mournful mood music that stands in contrast to the film’s action scenes. The film may be part science fiction, part noir, but the music emphasizes the noir. Like the Dragonslayer score, it calls attention to itself, but does so in a way that doesn’t violate my rule. Instead of distracting, it engages.**** George Bernard Shaw once said, “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. To this day, I can’t listen to the Trancers soundtrack without being moved.

Trancers was so successful on home media that it became a franchise with seven installments.***** Charles Band’s brother Richard, Empire’s house composer, reworked Davies and Ryder’s compositions through Trancers III before the uneven series turned to other composers and music with lesser effect. Recently, there’s even been talk of a Trancers TV series. Jack Deth may live on, abetted, I hope, by the original Trancers score.

But, you ask, “Isn’t the Trancers soundtrack just a knock-off of Vangelis’s opening theme from Blade Runner?” It’s true that Trancers and Blade Runner are both science-fiction films with synthesizer scores. The difference is that the Trancers score, even if it was inspired by Blade Runner, is better. If you weren’t scorched by my hot take there, here’s a molten-lava take: The Trancers score is among the best movie scores of all time. If you don’t believe me, some kind soul has put together a 10-hour loop of the theme, which you can listen to on YouTube.

There you have it: two genre films, Dragonslayer, a big-budget studio film with high ambitions, and Trancers, a low-budget exploitation film with modest ambitions, both with excellent scores. But only one score does what it’s supposed to do, and it does so beautifully. I want the Trancers theme played at my funeral as I head down the line to the next life.

* For my money, the scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with Eli Wallach as Tuco running through the cemetery to “Ecstasy of Gold” by Maestro Morricone is the greatest music cue in any movie ever. If perfection can exist in this world, this is it. 

** If you read any discussion of movie soundtracks mentioning the rock group Queen, you’ll always sing aloud “Flash! A-ah… Savior of the universe!” See? You did just now. It’s an immutable law of the universe.

*** North received 15 Academy Award nominations, including one for the American standard “Unchained Melody,” which he wrote early in his career for the film Unchained. If that was the only thing he’d ever written, I’d say he had an amazing life.

****  Just last month, Band released to YouTube a black-and-white remastering of Trancers. The noirish score complements the monochrome images even more brilliantly.

*****Six features and one 20-minute short. The short, originally intended as a segment of the Empire portmanteau film Pulse Pounders, was shot in 1988 but was unreleased until 2013. It fits between Trancers and Trancers II on the series’ timeline and is lovingly called “Trancers 1.5” by fans.

April 2: Get Me Another- A sequel or a movie way too similar to another film.

Anne Goursaud may be known for editing Francis Ford Coppola’s films Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Outsiders and One from the Heart, but she also had a run of directing in the 90s, working with Alyssa Milano to make this and another erotic film, Embrace of the Vampire, before also directing Love In Paris, which was released in the U.S. as Another 9 and 1/2 Weeks and brought back Mickey Rourke as John Gray and giving him a new love interest played by Angie Everhart. As you can imagine, it did not do well.

She also made this a sequel to Poison Ivy by name only. Milano is Lily Leonetti, a girl from Kalamazoo who has come to California to learn to be an artist. She moves in with Tanya (Kathryne Dora Brown), Bridgette (Victoria Haas) and Robert (Walter Kim), three fellow students who each have their own unique artistic skills. She soon finds a diary and nude photos of a girl named Ivy, who she becomes obsessed over, wishing that she could be as fearless as her.

Those photos: Jaime Pressly confirmed in 2008 that they are her, saying “Drew plays Ivy in the first Poison Ivy film, and in Poison Ivy II, Alyssa Milano plays the art student who moves into Ivy’s old room in a house with other students. She finds a diary and pictures of Drew’s character in a closet. The pictures are supposed to be of Drew, but they’re of me, though you never see my face.”

Pressly is the lead in the next movie, another unconnected effort, Poison Ivy: The New Seduction.

As she takes classes from Donald Falk (Xander Berkeley, Christopher in Mommie Dearest), he tries to seduce her, all while she’s babysitting his daughter Daphna (Camilla Belle), becoming friends with his wife Angela (Belinda Bauer) and falling in love with fellow student, the complicated sculptor Gredin (Johnathon Schaech). By the end of the movie, she’s changed so much that he’s fallen out of love with her, the teacher tries to assault her during Thanksgiving dinner, and his daughter runs into traffic.

This may be the most 90s movie to ever exist, feeling like Delia’s catalogue becoming a sentient being through Hot Topic. There’s one song that sounds so much like Portishead that I was convinced it was a remix I had never heard before. Monks chant over nearly every song, and I’m shocked that nobody shops at Wet Seal in this. This movie goes to the mall, right?

Anyway, the married art teacher gets so enraged over Alyssa Milano that he tries to shove her out the window. Her boyfriend—who came back to her—saves her at the last minute. She stays in California, but how can they return to art school?

This would be Milano’s last movie with nudity, but perhaps two was enough for most teenage 90s boys. Maybe the internet got in more homes and they learned that. they didn’t need to go to the video store to see nude women. Alyssa Milano had bigger and better things to do. As for the series — well, the title — there would be two more that I will get to.

April 1: Drop A Bomb- Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!

I’m obsessed not just by flops but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Hollywood wanted to figure out how to get the kids into theaters. Easy Rider was a hit, so they financed movies like The Last Movie, Head,  Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Skidoo, Zabriskie Point and so many more.

This felt like a can’t miss: the novel Candy by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg using the name Maxwell Kenton. They got paid $500 by Olympia Press, the same people who printed the first edition of Lolita. They wrote it chapter by chapter, trading things back and forth. They were amazed that it became a big deal, as Hoffenberg said, “Do you remember what kind of shit people were saying? One guy wrote a review about how Candy was a satire on Candide. So, right away, I went back and reread Voltaire to see if he was right. That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.”

Candy Christian is a Midwestern girl who just wants to make people happy. Of course, being an eighteen-year-old and gorgeous blonde, most of them want to have sex with her, then own her. She wants to make love to the gardener, but that leads to her father nearly dying from a concussion and adventures that will take her around the world.

Originally, Frank Perry—who directed The Swimmer—was going to make this, and Hayley Mills would play Candy. Her father wouldn’t let her play the role, so Christian Macquand got the rights. He’d just helped Marlon Brando buy his island—Brando’s son was named for him—and that got the great actor on board, as well as other big-time box office names.

In Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 60s, Southern said that the director “disappointed me by casting a Swedish for the lead role, which was uniquely American and midwestern. He thought this would make Candy’s appeal more universal. That’s when I withdrew from the film.”

That Swedish girl is Ewa Aulin, who is naturally attractive and had already been in the Tinto Brass giallo Col cuore in gola and Giulio Questi’s Death Laid an Egg. Aulin would only be in one other movie that U.S. audiences may see, Start the Revolution Without Me, before appearing in her husband John Shadow’s Microscopic Liquid Subway to Oblivion and Italian films including The Double, When Love Is Lust, Legend of Blood Castle, Death Smiles on a Murderer and Una vita lunga un giorno. By 23, she had tired of acting, divorced Shadow, and met real-estate developer Cesare Paladino. She had two daughters and became a schoolteacher.

Buck Henry took over the script, and the movie got made.

The film starts with Candy daydreaming in her father’s (John Astin) class; she soon falls for the charms of the poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton), who is too drunk to make love to her. The gardener, Emmanuelle (Ringo Starr), attacks her, and she gives in; when his family finds out — he was about to be a priest — they are attacked by his sisters Lolita (Florinda Bolkan in her first movie), Conchitya (Marilù Tolo!) and Marquita (Nicoletta Machiavelli!). Her father gets a brain injury and she goes off with his brother (also Astin) and his wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli), but not before she’s nearly impregnanted by Brigadier General Smight (Walter Matthau) and lusted after by the man who saves her father’s life, Dr. Abraham Krankheit (James Coburn), and filmed by Jonathan J. John (Enrico Maria Salerno). Oh yeah- the doctor’s nurse is Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg.

She meets many men — a hunchback (Charles Aznavour), a guru (Brando, who its said tried to have sex with her for real on camera) and another guru who enlightens her before its revealed that it’s her father and yes, they have just had sex — and by the end, wanders through a field of hippies and flies into space.

Southern said, “The film version of Candy is proof positive of everything rotten you ever heard about major studio production. They are absolutely compelled to botch everything original to the extent that it is no longer even vaguely recognizable.”

Brando said that this was the worst movie he ever made. But man, this excerpt from Marlon: A Portrait Of The Rebel As An Artist by Bob Thomas is just insane: “Brando, of course, wanted his portion of the script rewritten. The screenwriter was Buck Henry, a gifted young comedy stylist who had written The Graduate for the screen. Brandovisitedt Henry at the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris accompanied by the French moneyman for Candy, Peter Zoref, a conspiratorial-looking man who wore dark glasses indoors and out. The two visitors found Henry suffering from food poisoning. Henry tried to defer the conference, but Brando insisted on continuing, even while the writer went to the bathroom. While Henry retched, Brando shouted comments about how the comedy elements of his sequence could be heightened. There was a brief silence from within, and Brando opened the bathroom door to find Henry nearly unconscious, hunched over the toilet. Brando lifted the slender writer into his arms, carried him into the bedroom, and laid him out on the bed. Brando sat beside him and continued reading from the script and making suggestions to increase the hilarity. Zoref remained stolid behind his dark glasses, occasionally puffing on a cigar. A knock came on the door, and a waiter entered to remove the dinner tray. He stopped and surveyed the scene with open mouth: an (alleged) American gangster sitting in a chair like a stuffed figure, a thin corpse stretched out on the bed, a famous movie star sitting on the bed and guffawing over pages he was reading. The waiter slowly turned and walked out the door, closing it quietly behind him.”

This is the kind of movie that today gets one-star hate reviews by hip kids on Letterboxd who can’t be bothered to write much more than a sentence. It didn’t fare that well when it was released, either. But man, it’s a mess, a glorious mess, but one that has Coburn being incredible, famous people acting like morons and Aulin being some kind of android angel who has floated into this movie and bewitched everyone. She married Shadow while making this, a rock star who would one day write the 3D Matt Cimber martial arts movie Tiger Man.

So yeah, it’s a mess, but I love it for that. This is from a time when people were not afraid to fail and would throw money at projects that made no sense. Hollywood emerged from years of musicals and Westerns to try and become cinema, only to fall into blockbusters. But this emerged, a movie shot in France and Italy that looks luscious and yet is dumb throughout, a perfect blend of overindulgence and underwatched.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 30: Teen Movie Hell — Mike McPadden’s other book. List here.

Airing on NBC on February 10, 1985, between when Michael J. Fox was a star on Family Ties and then a huge star after Back to the Future, Poison Ivy was directed by Larry Elikann (who did eighteen ABC Afterschool Specials) and written by Bennett Tramer, who wrote Without Warning and would go on after this to create Saved By the Bell.

If you enjoyed High School U.S.A., well, this will be something else you will probably get into, as Fox and his love interest, Nancy McKeon, were in both and were also NBC stars. Fox is Dennis Baxter, the Bill Murray of this and McKeon is Rhonda Malone, who is studying to be a psychologist. There’s also a Color War — yes, this movie is Meatballs — and it has Robert Klein as the owner of the camp, Cary Guffey from Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a kid that wants to escape camp, Adam Baldwin as one of the bad guys, Joe Wright from Silver Bullet as a camper who runs scams and flams,  Thomas Nowell (who was in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) as a young writer with a crush on Rhonda and Matthew Shugailo as a chubby kid who uses humor to get through the summer’s hijinks.

Oh yeah — Fox and McKeon met on the set of High School U.S.A. and dated for three years.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 29: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.

Released regionally as False Face in 1977 through United International Pictures (a joint venture of Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures that distributes their films outside the United States and Canada; it started as Cinema International Corporation) and was made on a $400,000 budget in Atlanta and Covington, GA. Most of it is shot in Covington’s antebellum Turner mansion, one of the few Southern mansions spared by General William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War.

In 1979, it was re-released by AVCO Embassy, cut to PG and called Scalpel.

Phillip Reynolds (Robert Lansing) is both a plastic surgeon and a sociopath. He’s probably already killed his wife and when he watches his daughter Heather (Judith Chapman) make love to her boyfriend, he becomes so upset that he kills the boy and makes it all look like an accident. Heather runs away, which is inconvenient, as Phillip’s dead wife’s father gives his fortune to her instead of Phillip or Bradley (Arlen Dean Snyder), the old man’s ne’er do well son.

What does one do at this point?

Find an exotic dancer whose face has been beaten into nothingness, train her to be his daughter and collect the estate.

Everyone is convinced of the ruse except Bradley, who is killed while Jane — and Heather, who has returned — watches in horror. Of course, by this point, Phillip is dating his fake daughter, which is another level of strangeness that we expect from regional films. At this point, the women find one another and set upon making things right.

Directed and co-written (with Joseph Weintraub, who usually was an editor) by John Grissmer (who also directed Blood Rage and wrote The Bride, which is so worth watching), this is a slice of Southern Gothic by way of horror but yet made, as all regional greatness is, outside of the traditional system.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 28: Video Nasty: A video nasty! List here.

Arthur Malcolm (Bo Brundin, who was in Meteor, The Day the Clown Cried and Raise the Titanic) can’t pay the rent — he’s a starving artist, you know? — so he tries to sneak into a woman’s bedroom and steals money off her nightstand. He thinks that she’s sleeping, she thinks he’s a rapist and this comical misunderstanding ends with her popping out his eye with a spoon and knocking him out a window.

Arthur pulls himself back up and decides that he’s going to keep being an artist but to do so, he’s going to kill people and use their eyeballs in his art.

It was produced by porn luminary Henri Pachard and distributed by J.E.R. Pictures as a double feature with The Ghastly Ones. The director and writer? Kent Bateman, who was the father of Jason and Justine, and would one day produce Teen Wolf Too.

Back to that porn connection, it has adult actors Larry Hunter (who was also in The Amazing Transplant with another actress from this movie, Mary Lamay) and Linda Southern. Another actress, Ann Wells, was also in Anything Once, Career Bed and The Detention Girls, was married to Bateman but is not the mother of his famous children.

Don’t be confused by the poster. This is not a movie about eyeballs moving on their own. No, it’s a movie about a man with an eyepatch saying “My eye!” and “I’m twisted!” while plucking other eyeballs out of their sockets. Over and over. Sometimes even in focus. Also: set to music stole from the Cecil Leuter and Georges Teperino albums TV Music 101 and TV Music 102.

This is the kind of movie that as soon as it starts, you’re either going to love or despise it.

I loved every minute.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 27: SNL: A movie based on an SNL character.

Julia Sweeney created the character Pat O’Neill Riley for Saturday Night Live but it wasn’t intended to be a mystery as to the character’s gender. Sweeney said, “I’d been an accountant for like five years, and there was one person I worked with in particular who had a lot of mannerisms like Pat. This person sort of drooled and had the kind of body language of Pat. I started trying to do him. I was testing it out on my friends and they were just like, “Yeah, it’s good, but it doesn’t seem like a guy that much.” Like I couldn’t quite pull off being in drag convincingly enough. So then I thought, maybe that’s the joke. I’ll just have one joke in here about how we don’t know if that’s a man or a woman just to sort of cover up for my lack of ability to really play a guy convincingly.”

First appearing on December 1, 1990 and showing up in twelve other episodes, Pat is of another era, a time when non-binary and transgender people were seen mostly as someone to joke about. Let’s be honest, they still are and even worse today. But for a time, Pat was the first character of its type.

Sweeney said about this film — yes, everyone from SNL was getting a movie at this stage — “I wrote It’s Pat with Jim Emerson and Steve Hibbert. We had a great time writing and a lot of fun making the film. The movie didn’t do well at the box office, not by a long shot. In fact, It’s Pat became a popular example of a film so despised that it got a zero percent Rotten Tomatoes rating! I guess in that way, it’s sort of a badge of honor. But I can’t help it, I love this film. It has so many people in it who I love, and loved. Many are dead: Charlie Rocket, who played Kyle, and Julie Hayden who played his wife (who died of cancer a couple of years after the film premiered,) my dad who played the priest who married us, and my brother Mike who had one line at the wedding shower of Pat and Chris. And there are so many good friends in the film too: Kathy Griffin and Dave Foley and Kathy Najimy and Tim Stack and Tim Meadows. And the band Ween! We had so much fun together.”

Yes. Ween is in this. It still makes me laugh that they show up.

Pat (Sweeney) and Chris (Dave Foley, who continually has played women in nearly every show that he’s been part of) have met, found out that they both like to eat and become engaged. Yet Pat can’t get her life together, she has a neighbor (Charles Rocket) obsessed with her and an appearance on America’s Creepiest People turns her into a celebrity, which causes the couple to break off their engagement. The entire free world then becomes obsessed by whether or not Pat is a man or a woman while Pat tries to get Chris back.

Sweeney didn’t want to make the film. She said, “I resisted it completely. I just didn’t know how we could make it last for two hours. But 20th Century Fox was really keen; our producer was really keen. So we thought, OK, we’ll write the script. And after three months, we fell madly in love with the script. Unfortunately, Fox did not.”

This was made by Touchstone Pictures instead of that studio.

It also has an uncredited writer.

Quentin Tarantino.

Playboy: You were hired to do a rewrite of It’s Pat. As one now familar with the perspiring androgyne from Saturday Night Live, is Pat a he or a she?

Tarantino: The androgyny aspect is only a part of Pat’s appeal. What I love about the character is that Pat is so fucking obnoxious. To tell the truth, I don’t know what Pat is. But I know what I want Pat to be: I want Pat to be a girl. There was only one sketch that Julia Sweeney, the actress who plays Pat did on Saturday Night Live that gave a clue to what Pat is. It was the sketch that Pat did with Harvey Keitel. They’re stranded on a deserted island and they have sex — and Harvey still doesn’t know what Pat is. And the thing is, they kissed in it. At one point they were thinking of taking the kiss out of the sketch. But Harvey, being Harvey, demanded they keep it in, that there’d be no integrity without the kiss. So that was the first time we’d seen Pat in an intimate situation — a smooch. There is a certain way that you hold your head, the way you come in for a kiss. And sitting there, watching it, I thought that Pat didn’t kiss like a guy. Pat kissed like a girl.

Sweeney was so upset after this that she never wanted to play the Pat character again. However, she had previously agreed for Pat to be honored as mayor for the day”in West Hollywood on Halloween. She would play Pat one last time on October 31, 1994, but claims that it was “halfhearted and pathetic.”

April 26: Heavy Metal Movies: Pick a movie from Mike McPadden’s great book. RIP. List here.

Also known as The Rejuvenator, this forgotten film was inspired by The Wasp Woman. It was directed and co-written by Brian Thomas Jones, along with Simon Nuchtern (who directed the new sequences for Snuff as well as Savage Dawn and Silent Madness). Steven Mackler, who produced this film, had met Jones after he was impressed with the director’s short movie Overexposed. Mackler had a deal with Sony Video Software to make three movies and sent him the script for a movie called Skin, which was writtem by Nuchtern.

In an interview with Matty Budrewicz, Jones said, “I read the script and, when I finished, I said to myself “I can’t direct this script, but I know how to make this movie. It’s Bride of Frankenstein meets Sunset Boulevard! I pitched the concept to Mackler and he let me rewrite it.”

As for his changes, he stated, I’ve never really been a true fan of blood, guts and gore so when I was writing I tried to weave in all these themes of vanity, addiction, obsession and greed. I really wanted to make it my own movie—something really heartfelt and dramatic.”

Ruth Warren (Jessica Dublin, who was in Trinity Is Still My Name; So Sweet, So Dead; Fragment of Fear; Sex of the Witch; Death Steps In the Dark and much later Troma’s War) is a rich actress who has aged out of leading roles. Dr. Gregory Ashton (John MacKay) has been working for her in an attempt to make her young again. He’s running out of time, as she’s grown frustrated by a lack of results.

His new formula needs testing but she takes it, amazed at the results and becomes a younger woman by the name of Elizabeth Warren (Vivian Lanko). What she didn’t know before she took the formula is that it was based on parts of human brains and she must constantly be given those pieces of mind, so to speak, or she will transform into a monster that is chronically hungry for brains, more brains.

It’s never been released on DVD or blu ray, which is shocking when you think that it’s exactly the kind of movie that Vinegar Syndrome puts out. It’s not just a cheap direct to video film, though. It is filled with heart and characters that you start to care about along with sequences filled with goopy FX that stand up to anything else from the late 80s.

Plus, it has an appearance by the Poison Dollys, an all-female heavy metal band from Long Island. Members Gina Stile, Gail Kenny, Mef Manning and Roulette started as a cover band but added originals as time went on and worked with Kip Winger. One of their songs, “Love Is for Suckers” was recorded by Twisted Sister.

Gina Stile left Poison Dollys to form Envt with her sister Rhonni and was in Vixen from 1997 to 2001. She also played in Ban Animals, a Heart tribute band along with Marco Mendoza, Yngwie Malmsteen drummer John Macaluso and Great White bassist Teddy Cook.

How did I never see Rejuvenatrix until now?

Jones looks back on this movie with some sadness:  “I’ve always been quite disappointed it never got the exposure or recognition I feel it deserved, even though it has developed its fans from those lucky enough to have seen it. The reviews and the fact it did OK on video… I probably should let it go but I’ll always hold a grudge for that SVS guy who didn’t understand the genre or its fandom and realize the potential of what he had.”

You can ready Matty’s interview at his amazing site, The Schlock Pit.

You can watch this on YouTube.