June 4: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I’m obsessed by the true fact movies that Sunn Classics and Schick Sunn Classics released in the 1970s. There’s Peter Graves telling the world about The Mysterious Monsters, Rod Serling narrating The Outer Space Connection, a movie about 70s hot topic The Bermuda Triangle, the religious strangeness of In Search of Noah’s Ark and In Search of Historic Jesus,  The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, near-death experiences in Beyond and Back and Beyond Death’s Door, the snuff disasters of Encounter With Disaster and two that I had never been able to find. One is pretty much lost, The President Must Die, and the other is today’s movie, The Lincoln Conspiracy.

“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone sitting in this audience has been exposed to the traditional story of the assassination of President Lincoln. For over a century history books have taught us that the murder was committed by a crazed actor named John Wilkes Booth. The history books go on to say a few southern rebels helped him and no one else. The motion picture you are about to see will shock you. Because the true story of President Lincoln’s assassination can not be found in any history book. It is a story of corruption, treachery and cover-up. It is a story every American has a right to know.”

With that opening, we’re off and running with this movie, which was based on the book of the same name by David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr. If that last name sounds familiar, he’s the man behind so many of these movies. He has a wild life story, starting as a Cajun Catholic, converting to Mormonism and then to evangelical Christianity. He also wrote The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and founded Sunn with Rayland Jenson and Patrick Frawley. They were the kings of market research and four-walling, a process in which they bought space at a theater and did all the ads, then collected all the ticket money. They realized that there was a Christian audience that wanted G rated movies on one hand and paranormal ones on the other. Sunn was ahead of its time when it comes to what is on basic cable today.

It made the movie look better to be based on a book. Schick Sunn Classic Books started to put this out, which is a genius movie that exploitation masters since Kroger Babb have used to make money. The main idea of the book and the movie is that historians and have been part of a big cover-up. This all started when President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Union spy Lafayette C. Baker, Senator Benjamin F. Wade, Senator John Conness, other congressional Radical Republicansm and a cabal of Northern bankers and speculators all wanted to capture the President and keep him hidden until they cold impeach him. The reason? Lincoln wanted to unite the country after the Civil War and they were upset that they would lose money.

Baker found out that actor John Wilkes Booth wanted to kidnap Lincoln and was brought into the plan. After he failed several times, he was told to stop and instead, he decided on his own to kill Lincoln on April 14. He had a diary that incriminated several of the men who paid for him to do the plot and they were panicked. A Confederate double agent James William Boyd was killed and the trial that followed and the autopsy were altered to make it appear as if Booth was killed, while sympathetic people got him to England.

Maybe. You know how speculative history is.

The book and film’s theories and perhaps not all that well researched use of source material* made historians lose their minds. But weren’t they covering it up?

The movie casts Robert Middleton (Even Angels Eat Beans, amongst many other movies) as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, John Dehner (who was an animator on Fantasia and was a radio actor before a long acting career in movies and TV) as Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, Bradford Dillman (Bug, Piranha, The Swarm) as John Wilkes Booth, Ted Henning as Robert Campbell, Whit Bissell (a scientist in Creature from the Black Lagoon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf), Ken Kercheval (Dallas), as John Surratt, James Green (One Hour to Live) as Capt. James William Boyd, Len Wayland as Ward H. Lamon, Edmund Lupinski as Edwin Henson, Greg Oliver (the killer in Scalpel) as Rep. George Julian, Frank Schuller as Lt. Everton Conger, Patrick Wright (Track of the Moon Beast) as Major Thomas Eckert), Sonny Shroyer (Enos from The Dukes of Hazzard) as Lewis Paine, Wallace Wilkinson (who was in Cannibals Apocalypse, Invasion U.S.A. and The Visitor) as Dr. Samuel Mudd, Mimi Honce (who was also in Scalpel and Asylum of Satan) as Mary Surratt, Ben Jones (yes, this movie has both Cooter and Enos in it) as Samuel Arnold, John Anderson (the car salesman in Psycho) as Lincoln and Sunn’s narrator in nearly every movie, Brad Crandall, who also was the voice of movies and shows like the “The Curse of Dracula” parts of Cliffhangers!, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the Wizard on the early 80s Spider-Man cartoon.

Basically, it’s a Southern all-star low budget cast.

Director James L. Conway went from Sunn movies like their Classics Illustrated TV movies such as Last of the Mohicans to Beyond and Back, Hangar 18, The Boogens and episodes of shows from Hardcastle and McCormick, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Charmed to The Orville and The Magicians. He also produced Charmed and created the series Burke’s Law and University Hospital.

As always with Sunn, I loved every minute of this, no matter how fake the beards looked.

Want to watch it? It was just released by Kino Lorber.

*The movie ends with this: “The story you have just seen is true. It has been authenticated with the following documents: Lafayette Baker Papers; James William Boyd Papers; Chaffey Shipping Company Papers; Andrew Potter Papers; National Detective Papers; Rep. George Julian’s Diary; James V. Barnes Papers; Ray A. Nef Papers; Paine-Powell Papers; Michael O’Laughlin Testimony; Edwin M. Stanton Letters; John Wilkes Booth Letters; Richard D. Mudd Papers; Dr. Samuel Mudd Papers; Col. Julian Raymond Papers; Larry Mooney Papers; John Wilkes Booth Purported Missing Diary Papers; “Web of Conspiracy” by Theodore Roscoe; “Mask of Treason” by Vaughn Shelton; “Why Was Lincoln Murdered?” by Otto Eisenschiml; “In the Shadow of Lincoln’s Death” by Otto Eisenschiml.”

June 3: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Revenge! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Inspired by a 1950s series of Malaysian movies*, this film is about Sheng Yun (Danny Lee, The Killer, Thunder of Gigantic Serpent/King of Snakes, Infra-Man), a man who has risen past the handicap that polio dealt him to become a lawyer. He tries to helps a man, Lin Yang Ba (Ku Feng), who has killed a criminal to protect his daughter Yue (Chen Ping) and his coconut oil business. Before he is hung, Lin Yang gives Sheng Yu a black magic spell that transforms him into an oily maniac.

The real problem is that Yue is really in love with Chen Fu Sin (Wa Lun) and wants nothing to do with him. That means he goes on a rampage, wiping out all manner of criminals, like a plastic surgeon, a woman who accuses men of rape and a blackmailer. Look, if someone asks you to look at the magic spell on their back, lie in a hole in your yard and cover yourself with oil, I guess you do it.

Some people think all the Shaw Brothers did was martial arts movies. Oh man. I hope you know that they made movies like The Boxer’s Omen, Human Lanterns and Corpse Mania. Somehow, director Meng-Hua Ho (The Cave of the Silken Web, Black Magic) and writer Lam Chua made a movie that feels like The Heap, Man-Thing and Swamp Thing with a bit of Toxic Avenger except, you know, in 1976.

You would also think that because this is a superhero movie that it would be for children. Well, no. Not with the near-constant nudity and threat of sexual violence in every scene. It’s so strange how the goofy costume of the creature is juxtaposed against the sheer depravity on display in this movie, including scenes where a woman reveals her burned breast and the Oily Maniac attacks an abortionist mid-baby killing.

*According to IMDB, this is based on the Malaysian legend of the orang minyak (oily man), a creature that comes to life out of crude oil and is fueled by the hope for revenge by those who have been done wrong. There are also three Malaysian films — Curse of the Oily Man, Orang Minyak and Serangan Orang Minyak — as well as two modern movies, Orang minyak and Pontianak vs. Orang Minyak, which has the oily man battle a vengeful ghost woman.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 2: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Zombies! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

What do you watch when you’ve seen nearly every major zombie movie?

You hunt.

Directed by Alex Visani, who wrote the script with Tom Larini and Dan Sabatta — who also appear in the movie — Zombi New Millenium is all about Daniel (Sabatta), a black magic user who has created a new zombie virus that can be spread by mobile phones and television screens (Demons 2, you know?) and the zombies all look a lot like, well, Demons.

Daniel’s plan was to become rich and immortal, using his theory that there are three dimensions: Earth, Hell and the internet. He believes that demons gain their power through humans, so by using a computer programmer, he’s made a subliminal virus that will allow him to have power over the demons, but of course they take over the programming and spread their virus everywhere, creating demons and zombies that spread their infection and destroy humanity.

Visani has moved on to make movies like Born Dead, Blades In the Darkness, Stomach and Mind Creep. This is obviously an early effort, but even here there are some interesting moments, like the idea of phone calls causing transformations and people tearing their faces off. I mean, if I made a movie when I was young, I would have ripped off the intestines eating from Antropophagus and been indebted to Luigi Cozzi and Lucio Fulci too. I mean, I still would if I made a movie now.

Don’t expect much more than a grainy videotaped film that is indebted at once to Italian splatter and Japanese ideas. But hey — greater things were in the future. Everyone starts somewhere.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Roger Corman Tribute! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

1957 was a big year for Roger Corman. He directed Naked Paradise, Attack of the Crab Monsters, Not of This Earth, The Undead, Rock All Night, Teenage Doll, Carnival Rock and The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Playing with Edward L. Cahn’s Motorcycle Gang — a remake of Cahn’s earlier film Drag Strip Girl — this was distributed by those masters of teen drive-in films, American-International Pictures.

Susan Cabot was a contract actress for Universal that appreciated getting to play roles she’d never get to play otherwise thanks to Roger Corman. She’s also in The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, Carnival Rock, War of the Satellites, Machine-Gun Kelly and The Wasp Woman. She had a rough life, as she was raised in eight different foster homes — and abused in several of them — which led to late life PTSD. Her mother was also institutionalized and she may have inherited some of her mental illness. She married her first husband before she was 18, just to escape, and eventually came to Hollywood where she would act in many a Western and date King Hussein of Jordan. Later in life, as she fell in mental illness and hoarding, even her psychologist would say their sessions were emotionally draining. One night, she woke her son — who had dwarfism and suffered pituitary gland problems — and attacked him with a scalpel and a weight lifting bar. Confused, he took the bar from her and beat her to death. He originally told police she was attacked by a man in a ninja mask as no one understood mental problems in 1986. Eventually, he was put on probation after being in jail for two and a half years.

Back to happier things.

Written by Leo Lieberman and Ed Waters for AIP — Corman didn’t like the script — it has Cabot as Sabra Tanner, a rich girl who feels like her mother doesn’t care about her. She can’t help herself as she hurts everyone around her, like trying to steal her friend Rita’s (Barboura Morris’) boyfriend Mort (Dick Miller) and forcing a heavier pledge named Ellie (Barbara Cowan) to do situps in order to be thin. When Tina doesn’t listen, she paddles her and yeah, this is exploitation so not only does Sabra love it, Tina just may as well. And when Mort won’t give in, she finds a pregnant waitress named Tine (June Kenney) to blackmail him.

None of it ends well, as must happen in so many teen movies. Sabra is a psychopath — as if the opening credits didn’t spoil this — and at the end, all she can do is walk into the ocean and drown. Today, she’d probably get over all this and be a CEO or something.

There’s nothing I love more than a woman destroying people. I’ve had it done to me more than a few times. Now, I just watch it in movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

June 1: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Roger Corman Tribute! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

At 67 minutes, this movie was made to be shown with Attack of the Crab Monsters. Its stars Paul Birch as Mr. Johnson, a man quite literally not of this Earth because he’s an alien from Davanna with blank eyes that can burn right into your brain. If you start to like him, remember that he starts the movie by removing the blood of a teenage girl with some tubes that he keeps in his attache case.

Davanna is dying from the end of a nuclear war which has turned everyone’s blood to dust. Now, as he waits in Los Angeles, Mr. Johnson is attempting to solve the issues with his peoples’ blood. He has a houseboy named Jeremy (Jonathan Haze) and hires away nurse Nadine Storey (Beverly Garland) from a man he has hypnotized, Dr. F.W. Rochelle (William Roerick).

The police are wondering who the vampire killer is, but Mr. Johnson is just trying to stay alive. And look out anyone — like Dick Miller as a vacuum salesman — who comes to his home. Soon, another alien (Anna Lee Carroll) shows up but her blood becomes laced with rabies. She’s not the last as even though Johnson perishes in a car crash — a police siren is too much for his alien hearing — another alien that looks just like him shows up at his grave.

Director Roger Corman and Charles B. Griffith (who wrote the screenplay with Mark Hanna) worked together quite a lot. Griffith said of the story, “It started all this X-ray eye business. Most of Roger’s themes got established right in the beginning. Whatever worked, he’d come and take again, and a lot of things got used over and over. During the production of Not of This Earth, I was married to a nurse, and she helped me do a lot of medical research. I remember how we cured cancer in that script. Somehow the film was a mess when it was finished.”

Birch had no fun making this, as he had to wear the painful contacts all day as Corman wanted to shoot whenever with no prep. The actor was so upset he left before filming was done, so in some shots, that’s not him. Luckily, he has on a hat and sunglasses often, so he was easy to fake Shemp in this by Lyle Latell. Before he left the set, he said, “”I am an actor, and I don’t need this stuff… To hell with it all! Goodbye!”

This has been remade twice, once by Jim Wynorski with Traci Lords as Nadine in 1988 — Wynorski made Roger Corman a bet that he could remake the 1957 film with the same budget and schedule thirty years later — and in 1995, directed by Terence H. Winkless and part of the Roger Corman Presents series.

If you watched this on TV in the 1960s (or any time), there are three more minutes that were added by Herbert L. Strock right after the credits. A voice intones “You are about to adventure into the dimension of The Impossible! To enter this realm you must set your mind free from earthly fetters that bind it! If the events you are about to witness are unbelievable, it is only because your imagination is chained! Sit back, relax and believe.. so that you may cross the brink of time and space.. into that land you sometimes visit in your dreams!” If you’re wondering if a scene or two are repeated, they are so that the movie fit into TV schedules. There were also three scenes that were extended in some theatrical prints: the scene in which Johnson speaks with the courier, him chasing Nadine and when Harry chases him.

You can watch this on YouTube.

June 30: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Sequels! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

There’s no reason why sixth Universal Soldier movie is so good.

There’s also no reason why it goes so hard, because this is an NC-17 movie that starts with the hero, John (Scott Adkins), watching his wife and young daughter get shot in the head in a POV shot by Luc Deveraux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who until now has been the hero of the UniSols.

And I mean, who could have guessed that director John Hyams would bring Apocalypse Now, The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to — again — the sixth movie in the series that started with a blockbuster.

John wakes up from a coma, only to learn that Luc is on the run and a sleeper agent named Magnus (Andrei Arlovski, the most winning fighter in UFC history) is on the loose, wiping out an entire brothel before a clone of Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren) wipes his memory clear and frees him.

So yes, in the midst of this brave new world, Deveraux and Scott are gathering UniSols and radicalizing them against the U.S. government. I am all for this wildness.

John also learns that he was once a truck driver, that he was in love with Sarah (Mariah Bonner) and that he can regrow body parts because he’s an unstoppable killing machine. There’s also that original John, who has been co-opted by the government and the idea that everything that the new John believes is just weeks, not years, old.

Spoilers on, because the act of removing John’s memories drives him insane and he starts killing every UniSol, but that’s all part of Deveraux’s plan, to find a successor and sacrifice himself to him so that the dream of a new world order of UniSols can finally come true.

Written by Hyams, Doug Magnuson and Jon Greenlagh, this is a movie that starts with a doomed little girl saying “There are monsters in this house” and ends with Van Damme and Adkins having a strobe-lit, face-painted death match with machetes.

“From this moment on, you are no longer a slave to the government. From this moment on, your mind is your own. From this moment on, you will seek vengeance from your oppressors. Freedom is yours.”

Show me any action movie — hell, movie! — that tries for such loftier ideals and does it with three action stars and an MMA fighter in its cast. The fact that it took me so long to absorb this movie is a bit of stupidity I am going to pay back by being an evangelist for this film.

June 29: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

No matter what you or I think or believe, Glenn Danzig is making exactly the kind of movies that he wants to make.

Following Verotika, he decided that the next film he’d make would not just be a Western, but a Spaghetti vampire Western and the minute I read that, I realized that Danzig is making the movies that I want to see as well.

Despite saying that he’s watched a lot of Bava and Fulci, it feels like Danzig has made the kind of movie an Italian director that not many people discuss in the U.S. would have made. The closest comparison I can think of is the work of Alvaro Passeri, who is somehow at once sub-Bruno Mattei level in directorial skill but has ideas and a lack of anyone telling him no, which leads to absolutely aberrant cinema like The Mummy Theme Park and Plankton.

More likely, I think that Danzig wanted to hang out with his friends and a bunch of adult stars while cosplaying as both vampires and characters straight out of a Giulio Questi or Tonino Valerii while someone filmed the lost weekend. After spending a few million, his account called and said, “Glenn, I know you want my skull, but seriously, we need to recoup some investment. Can you call Cleopatra Records? I mean, yes, they used to release weird cover tribute CDs that had Electric Hellfire Club played KISS songs, but now they’re releasing movies.” And then Glenn howled and said, “Yea.”

The Death Rider (Devon Sawa) has just arrived at the Vampire Sanctuary (there is no irony in the cinematic universe of Danzig, things are named what they are) and has the admission fee: one naked virgin (Tasha Reign). He asks for sanctuary — yes, from the Vampire Sanctuary, I get it — from its owner, Count Holiday (Julian Sands, R.I.P.).

The Vampire Sanctuary (I swear, I am not getting paid every time I use those two words) is more like a saloon from an old cowboy movie, filled with working girls like Carmilla Joe (Pittsburgh native Kim Director, who was on The Deuce and in Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows) and her assistant Mina Belle (Ashley Wisdom, Verotika) and gunslingers like Kid Vlad (Victor DiMattia, Timmy Timmons from The Sandlot), Drac Cassidy (Eli Roth, yes, that Eli Roth), and Bad Bathory (Danzig himself and when his name flashed up on scream I cheered even if I was home alone).

So yes, Danzig wears a cowboy hat in this, but he really wears all the hats: director, writer, producer, composer, cinematographer and editor. The choices are, well, big choices. The kind of choices that only could have been made by Glenn Danzig.

If takes as long to get to the Vampire Sanctuary (cha-ching!) and past the opening credits as it does for Jan-Mikl Thor to drive a van to a suburban house in Rock ‘n Roll Nightmare, that was the vision of Glenn Allen Anzalone.

If Danny Trejo is going to show up as Bela Latigo, well, that’s 100% from the brains and balls of Lodi’s favorite son.

And if there’s no real plot other than random gunfights, naken women, vampires biting naked women and gunfights around naked women with vampires shooting silver bullets at one another, then you guessed it. This is all the vision of the man who wrote, “devil on the left / angel on the right / there’s no mistake / who’ll I be with tonight.”

But how many movies are going to just throw Lee Ving at you as a bartender service Sean Waltman a drink while the Soska sisters look on and the camera zooms more often than three Italian movies and two jess Franco films all added up?

Actually, I think that Danzig has had the same Saturday late nights as me, watching three Franco movies in a row until all the endless scenes of dialogue just pound your brain into a druggy haze. He delivers this same drone goodness as we spend what seems like days watching Death Rider do what he’s been named for: ride. Ride that horse over that Danzig-sung theme song! Ride into the night! Ride past the villains that survive!

Ride into our hearts.

I hate that anyone would call this so bad it’s good or even watch it in any way other than with sheer joy. These are kinds of movies that get inside my heart and make me so protective.

Please, Glenn. Make more movies.

You can learn more at the official site.

June 28: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s comedy! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

Any movie that has Harvey Korman as a space archaeologist is pretty much one I’m going to watch. I don’t know why it took me so long. I used to stare at this box in the video store and was just amazed that it had a little monster drinking a beer, smoking a cigar and looking up someone’s dress.

That lil’ guy’s name is Arnold and he came from a cave in Peru. Simon’s son Paul (Charles Stratton) and his girlfriend Cindy (Nadine Van Der Velde, who was also in Critters) lose him to Simon’s evil twin, snack food magnate Cecil. The problems kick in when Cecil decides to draw and quarter Arnold after he tries to attack the snack king’s son. Instead of dying, he splits into four more creatures.

How do you stop a Munchie? You electrocute it and that turns it into stone. I would not have guessed that, nor would I figure out that Machu Pichu was the toxic waste dump of the gods.

Director Tina Hirsch was assistant editor on Woodstock and Hi, Mom! before heading out West and working for Roger Corman, editing Death Race 2000, Big Bad Mama and Eat My Dust. She also edited a lot of Joe Dante’s films, like Gremlins and Explorers. She’d always wanted to direct, Corman always wanted to make a Gremlins rip-off and hey, they made this in 12 days of human shooting and 3 days of puppet pick-ups.

Seeing as how the Munchies drive an AMC Gremlim with an OHGIZMO license plate, I think that Hirsch, Corman and Dante were all on the same page.

I am also legally obligated to mention that Paul Bartel is in this.