Mid-way through watching Prime Evil, Becca asked me, “Why do you like this piece of shit so much?”
I answered, “This is like an Italian movie that makes no sense, yet made somewhere in the United States and it just keeps getting more and more ludicrous. Of course I love it. I might love it more with each passing second.”
She asked me to put back on her true crime show.
The real answer why I loved this so much is that it’s a late model Roberta Findlay movie and as we all know, Roberta knows how to make a scuzzy movie. She knows her audience and in this one, we want Satanic shenanigans, occult meanderings that make little to no sense and way too many characters to keep track of.
This is the kind of movie where a church lent their building for the shoot, even allowing the crew to sleep there and stay warm, and they still went and shot a Black Mass there. That takes the kind of balls that makes complete junk, the kind of cinematic smack that I inject directly into my eyeballs.
Father Thomas Seaton is a centuries old priest who has an entire cult of robed maniacs just waiting to get together and chant stuff, but he’s also a multi-tasker, because he has a handyman who is pushing a new kind of street drug on prostitutes and then there’s this dude named George who is keeping his granddaughter a virgin so he can sacrifice her to his sweet Satan but her boyfriend Bill keeps trying to get up in her ladybusiness, even when she tells him on a romantic ride through Central Park that she’s been abused, which is not a good look.
There’s also a nun named Sister Angela who pretends that she hates God and infiltrates the cult. In between all of this wrestling between Heaven, Hell and a puppet Satan, there is plenty of aerobics.
Obviously, I loved this, but my love of crap is probably in a plane much lower than yours. To anyone else, approach with caution. To those who see the Crown International Pictures logo and get a little wistful, you’re my kind of people.
You can watch this on YouTube. Also, this movie was made for Vinegar Syndrome, who released it on a double disc with Lurkers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a ghostwriter of personal memoirs for Story Terrace London and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
I knew very little about this film when I chose to write about it. I knew even less about director Norman J. Warren. Terror, was produced and released independently in the United Kingdom. It starts out as a standard witch’s revenge film, with an opening sequence set 300 years in the past.
In the present, the witch returns in spirit to take revenge on the ancestors of her executioners. Not a new premise at all. Until the stalk-and-slash sequences begin. “Okay,” I thought, “So, it’s a witch movie that’s also a slasher movie.” Then I began to notice small clues both within the story and visually as to the creative intentions of Mr. Warren. The red herring eccentric characters (both male and female) that might or might not be the killer. The soft purple and green gel lights that draw the eye away from the primary action. The close-ups of mascara-clad eyeballs and gory murders where the victims bleed a hue of red patented by the Crayola corporation. The electronic musical score. A torrential downpour with drenched characters bathed in blue and white light. POV shots of the killer’s knife moving relentless towards its prey. A finale that comes out of nowhere and leaves no closure for the audience. Sound familiar?
Released in 1978 at the beginning of the American slasher craze ushered in by the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, Terror owes more to the Italian Giallo thrillers than any stalk-and-slash offering. A quick search on internet confirmed my suspicions. Warren was a big fan of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, released one year prior to Terror.
While not a complete rip-off by any means, Warren manages to inject his own style into what is ultimately a wildly entertaining film. It’s much more grounded in terms of acting and story than anything Argento or Bava ever made, making it much more “British” in tone. While the Italians are much more given to fits of artistic abandon, with very little attention paid to story, most British directors – even the most creative ones like Ken Russell or Michael Reeves – never stray too far outside the bleak reality of Great Britain as a backdrop and generally adhere to a three-act structure. The acting is solid and the story engaging. Terror gets the point quite quickly in terms of action. There’s never a dull moment. Eagle-eyed genre-fans will likely feel the same warm fuzzies I got when I noticed posters for both Warren’s own Satan’s Slave (1976) and Bo Arne Vibenius’s Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973) in the background of one scene. A scene very clearly shot in the film’s actual production office.
By combining elements of classic British period horror and Italian Giallo, Warren has done what no British director had done before or possibly since. Terror could be considered the first and only true British Giallo. The fact that it was all shot in real locations (including a BDSM strip club) on a shoestring budget makes it all the more impressive. I look forward to exploring more of Mr. Warren’s work. Anyone who apes the Italian masters while still managing to make a movie that feels fresh deserves further scrutiny.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to Mill Creek Month! As you know, we love those Mill Creek sets, so we’re doing an entire month of these films. The first set we’re getting into is B-Movie Blast, which has — as is par for the course with these bricks of films — a real mashup of movie mayhem. We originally reviewed this movie on November 23, 2020 as part of our William Gréfe week.
Tim Ochopee (Chris Robinson, who would write, direct and star in 1975’s The Intruder) is a war damaged Seminole just back from Vietnam that wants to live out the rest of his life in the Everglades with his snake Stanley. He didn’t count on Richard Thomkins (Alex Rocco), a maker of leather goods with mob ties, killing his father. Now, all the snakes that Tim has lived with will be the death of everyone who has done him wrong.
Only Grefe could take a ripoff of Willard and somehow make it more disturbing than you’d expect. Yes, this is a movie packed with snakes doing all manner of damage to people and people doing just as horrible things to them, including an exotic dancer playing a geek and biting the head off one on stage as she dances seductively with blood all over her bare chest.
Of course, Tim has to kill everyone in the way and kidnap Thomkin’s daughter Susie (Susan Caroll), but any hope of true love kind of goes the way that you’d expect in a Florida regional horror film that doesn’t stop with just stealing from one film and moves into being a reptile-obsessed Billy Jack.
That said — for a movie so much about protecting snakes, the actual snakes in this movie were defanged and some had their mouths sewn shut. There’s enough human on snake violence in this that you’d expect that it was made in Italy. Grefe still owns the wallet that they made out of the skin of the main snake that played Stanley, which is pretty weird when you dwell on it as much as I have.
Gary Crutcher wanted to do a sequel called Stanley in Miami, but it didn’t happen. He wrote this on two days under the influence of amphetamines, which is the most Florida thing you can say about a movie that is the most Sunshine State movie I’ve seen.
Every November we tackle a Mill Creek box of fifty movies. We started with the Chilling Classics set in 2018 and also did the Pure Terror one last year. You can grab the Sci-Fi Invasion set for $11 on Amazon, which is a great price for a ton of strange films.
As a matter of fact, whenever a “theme week” gobsmacks us and we need a gaggle of films to review — such as our recent “Fast and Furious Week” — a Mill Creek 12-pack never lets us down, as is the case with the Savage Cinema set. And, back in March, we were so giddy with glee that we finally got our own copy of 9 Deaths of the Ninja courtesy of the Explosive Cinema 12-pack, we paid it forward to Mill Creek and reviewed all of the films in the pack.
Here’s the list of 50 films we reviewed on the set. Many thanks to Eric Wrazen, Sean Mitus, Dustin Fallon of Horror and Sons, Robert Freese of Videoscope Magazine, JH Rood, Paul Andolina of Wrestling with Film, Jennifer Upton of Womany.com (she also writes for Horror and Sons), Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum, Phil Bailey, Cat Waller, Herbert P. Caine, and Andy Turner helping out with the reviews.
Yeah, you know the drill . . . it’s all about those Mill Creek box sets and this Savage Cinema 12 Movie Collection pack served as the perfect fodder in supplying us with a nifty batch of obscure and off-beat, rubber-burning drive-in epics for our “Fast and Furious” tribute week to Universal Studios’ Fast and Furious franchise created Gary Scott Thompson.
So, with Universal’s March announcement that the ninth Fast & Furious movie in the “Fast Saga,” officially titled F9, would be pushed back from its May 22, 2020, North American premiere to April 2, 2021, which pushes Fast & Furious X beyond its planned April 2021 premiere, you can get fast and furious with these films. Well, just a little. Maybe.
Burnin’ rubber, hot asphalt, and smokin’ babes!
Here’s the links to the reviews on the Savage Cinema set:
Anytime we roll out a review of a Mill Creek box set, we think, “Eh, no one cares.” We couldn’t be more wrong! Our readers love learning about the box sets — and we gain new readers as we see an increase in our site traffic, along with a lot of social media likes and reposts on Twitter and Facebook. So thanks to all of our readers for spreading the word.
Ah, you “heart” B&S About Movies!
Of course, our past March 2020 exploration (Sunday, March 8, to Saturday, March 14) of the Explosive Cinema pack was no exception.
We’ve been clamoring for a copy of 9 Deaths of the Ninja for our personal collection — since forever. And there it was! Once again: Mill Creek with the VHS-to-Digital assist. Sold! And for that, we say: Oh, god bless ye, ye overlords of the public domain netherworlds of analog delights of thee obscure and thee crappy. For we analog peasants lost in the digital barrens need these movies to assure our survival in the never ending quest to relive our Drive-In, UHF-TV, and VHS entertainment youth.
Also be sure to check our past reviews for Mill Creek’s Pure Terror and Chilling Classics sets . . . and, keeping with our yearly, November tradition of blowing out a Mill Creek box set, we’ll be checking out the 50 films included on their Sci-Fi Invasion set. Would you like to write a review (or reviews) for the films on the set? You can get all of the deets, here.
Oy! We almost forgot: As part of our “Fast and Furious” tribute week, we’re reviewing Mill Creek’s rubber-burnin’ and asphalt-tearin’ Savage Cinema set all this week — from Sunday, August 2, to Saturday, August 8.
Happy watching! And be careful . . . it’s explosive! Tony Tulleners will kick your ass into next week.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post originally ran way back in November 2019 as part of our Pure Terror month. If there’s one thing Mill Creek Entertainment knows, it’s being green and recycling. If you’re a fan of their sets like I am, you soon realize that you often have the same movie multiple times on multiple sets. After I got the Explosive Cinema set at Eide’s Entertainment, I knew that my OCD would demand that I review this entire set, too. So here’s Terror In the Jungle, a movie that I love.
I kind of wish that I was alive in 1968 just so I could have been part of this movie. Seriously, I’ve never seen a film that so quicky changes its tone and central theme so quickly, abandoning characters that its taken time to set up for an entirely new situation. And then we get the airplane, with swinging bands playing on it and people going bonkers before it crashes? I want to live in this insane world.
After we meet all these folks — bound for Rio — we better not get too used to them. Except for little Henry Clayton Jr., who is taking his stuffed lion to live with his mother after his parents split up. There’s also Mrs. Sherman, who may or may not have killed her husband, but has a suitcase full of money and is given to insane crying jags. And there’s an exotic dancer on board as well! And some nuns, traveling with one of their dead sisters in a coffin! And then there’s a band! And a rich dude that talks about cannibals!
Everybody is having so much fun that the band plays their big hit and Marian, the exotic dancer, shows off and even the nuns enjoy it. However, the movie soon turns into sheer insanity, as the plane begins to crash. Money spills all over the plane, a nun gets pulled out of an open door and half the cast abruptly dies. Seriously, somehow this went from “Soft Lips” to dudes getting their foreheads split in half and a gory death with a birdcage. I have no idea what brought on this narrative shift.
Then, to top all this off, every single other person we met is eaten by alligators.
You read that right.
The entire cast is dead.
Everyone except Henry, who is now floating down a reptile filled river in the coffin of a dead nun.
What the actual hell is going on here?
The natives — yes, the cannibals that were discussed on the plane that call themselves the Jivaros — find Henry and thanks to his blonde hair and the magic of 1968’s worst special effects, he has a halo. The leader of the tribe declares that he is a god, except that one of them thinks he has to die. So he chases Henry into the jungle and the kid’s stuffed lion transforms into a real lion and eats the dude.
So wait — is Henry really a god?
This is a movie that starts with the declaration that “This picturd was filmed on location in the Jivaros Regions of the Amazon Jungle. Without the assistance and encouragement of the Government of Peru it would not have been possible.”
It’s also the kind of movie that randomly has Fawn Silver be Marian, the exotic dancer. If you don’t know who she is, she’s Criswell’s assistant in Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead.
It also has three directors — Tom De’Simone directed the plane sequence, Andrew Janzack the jungle parts and the temple close was directed by Alex Graton. That may explain the strange narrative leaps that this makes.
Let’s break down each director.
Tom De’Simone went on to become adult film director Lancer Brooks, as well as creating some of my favorite films, like Hell Night, Reform School Girls and Chatterbox. Andrew Janzack never directed another movie, but was the cinematographer for The Undertaker and His Pals.
Alex Graton would finally direct another movie eleven years later, a romantic comedy entitled Only Once In a Lifetime that has Claudio Brook — yes, the same Claudio Brook who was in Luis Buneul’s The Exterminating Angel — in it.
I love IMDB because it has comments directly from De’Simone in the review. I’ll share it below for your enjoyment:
“OK, now it’s my turn to weigh in on this disaster. I’m the director who’s credited with this fiasco but in my defense I have to explain that there were three directors on this film and we all suffered under a producer with no experience, no taste, no sense and worst of all, NO MONEY.
I was fresh out of film school working as an editor when I was introduced to him when he was looking for a director. I convinced him I could handle a feature having already won two awards at film festivals for two shorts I had done. This was the biggest mistake in my life. Once on, for a mere $50 a day, I realized what I had gotten into. He hired a bunch of non-SAG actors who actually PAID HIM to be in his movie. None had any experience in front of a camera and all the characters were his creation. I was stuck in that plane mock-up for two weeks with these desperate souls trying to create something from nothing. The script was only half written when we started and he said he would finish it when we got to the jungle. When we completed the plane interiors, including the now famous “crash” scene, the rough cut was 83 minutes long and we hadn’t even reached the jungle part of the story.
I told him we had to make some serious trims, both for time and for performances. He refused to cut anything. He was so in love with the crap we had he actually once said he believed that the actress playing the stewardess would win an Oscar for her scream scene in the fire. I knew I was doomed. We argued over and over about what I felt should be dropped, trimmed and eliminated until I had it. I walked from the production and that wonderful salary. Undaunted, he went to Peru and used the cameraman as the replacement director. Down there they wrote the second half of the script and shot it as he wrote it.
Back in LA they now had a bigger disaster, naturally. The film was way too long, badly shot, badly acted and unwatchable. He and this second director fought, as did I, and he then walked away as well. Now the producer was over a barrel. He had sunk what little money he borrowed and still believed he had a hit on his hands if he could just get it finished. He hired a third guy to come in and fix the problem. This genius hired a bunch of extras, put bad wigs on them and went to Griffith Park in LA and shot more crap that was even more laughable than what they got in Peru. After that the producer shopped around for stock footage of native ceremonies and came up with some god-awful crap from a 40’s schlock film and cut it in . . . the final disaster is what’s on screen. I’ve lived in shame my entire career because for some reason I always get the credit for making this turkey. I was one of three victims! The entire debacle was the brain child of the producer and none of us had a chance in hell to make it any better than it was doomed to be from the start.
And that’s the truth.”
In case you haven’t realized it yet, I love this movie. Like, beyond love. I’m going to bother everyone I know to tell them just how great it is and then laugh when they look at me and wonder why I enjoy this blast of craziness so much. Beware!
Thanks to everyone who took the time to write or read the PURE TERROR MONTH.
Like all Mill Creek box sets, this one is packed with all manner of crazy films, from 1930’s black and white pre-Code detective movies to foreign insanity.
First off, thanks to all of the amazing writers who brought an entirely different point of view to the site this month. R. D Francis went nuts on all of these films, covering so many before some people even selected their first movie. Bill Van Ryn was amazing, bringing his great info and opinions to many films, saving my ass when a few people missed their deadlines. Dustin Fallon kicked ass on his site Horror and Sons in October and then did so much to help publicize our month of PURE TERROR. I also want to thank Craig Edwards, Jennifer Upton, Robert Freese, John S. Berry, Robert Constant, Paul Andolina, Roger Braden and Melody Vena for their great writing.
Here are the films we covered. If you missed any, go back and check them out. We’ve also created a list of all of these movies on Letterboxd.
If you want to be part of this next time, keep checking the site. We’ll be picking another Mill Creek set to tackle soon. If you’d ever like to write anything else, just ask!
Want your own PURE TERROR set? You can get it on Amazon. Plus, Mill Creek Entertainment has plenty of other great movies on their site and streaming service, Movie Spree!
Whew — we made it through CHILLING CLASSICS MONTH! I thought nobody would care at all, but we actually gained readers and site traffic. Thank you to everyone that contributed, read, liked and shared our articles.
I’m debating doing the PURE TERROR box next. Hopefully, we can get all of these writers and more to come back!
In August of 2023, Letterboxd user Matthew Hale called to our attention that there are several versions of this Mill Creek set. Here are the movies that were missing:
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.