Category Archives: Movie reviews

Bigfoot the Movie: The Sequel (2024)

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As this was made in my hometown of Ellwood City, just like the first one, Bigfoot the Movie, I feel like I have to watch it and/or apologize for it.

Chuck (Curt Wooton, who is Pittsburgh Dad around here, a social media character that people love), Dale (Nate Magill) and Burl (director Jared Show) are back after their last encounter with Bigfoot and have been called to a ski lodge where another creature is on the loose.

According to one of my hometown newspapers, the Beaver County Times, this has appearances by “Former Patterson Township resident Joanie Sprague (an America’s Next Top Model runner-up) makes a cameo, along with WDVE-FM morning man Bill Crawford, former WDVE star Jim Krenn, Pittsburgh standup comics Aaron Klieber and Terry Jones and former WPXI-TV news anchor Darieth Chisolm.” Those names mean a lot here. Also: I lived next to Big Beaver, which is closer than Beaver Falls.

As for that ski lodge, it’s Bill’s Valhalla- the same parking lot in Children of the Living Dead– just moments away from DJs Island, a private club for adventurous adults and Sims Lanes. As someone who started drinking when he was 12, I can also tell you that there are scenes shot at the Chewton Polish Club.

Also, Jared Show and Nathan McGill went to my school rival, Riverside, and Chuck is wearing a headband from that school. So, I have been indoctrinated since I was a child to hate that part of town with everyone in me and celebrate when it floods at least once a year and people who live there just by the name. They are the Shelbyville to Ellwood City’s Springfield, except Homer doesn’t hate Shelbyville like I was taught to absolutely despise Riverside, often by teachers, town leaders and parents.

You may watch this and think, “I thought Southwestern PA was in the north and not the south of the U.S.” As someone who grew up in Ellwood City and still comes home for the BVM — sorry, Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, Holy Redeemer Church — pepperoni puffs, I want to love this and more people than five — five people, come on, Letterboxd — to see this. But man, it’s rough unless you find Yinzer accents and Iron City references funny. Bonus points for getting nebby into the dialogue.

But yeah. If you ever wanted to see where I originated, this would be the movie to watch. And if you like Yetis, well, so much the better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Hijacked: Flight 285 (1986)

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Directed by Charles Correll (who directed a ton of TV and was a cinematographer on movies like Star Trek III, Joy of Sex, Movie Madness, Nice Dreams, Animal House and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home) and written by David E. Peckinpah (who wrote The Paperboy and Hotline), this is the kind of made-for-TV movie that I love: one that has character actors and TV personalities playing out of character characters.

Peter Cronin (Anthony Michael Hall) is a criminal being transported by commercial jet who breaks out thanks to his girlfriend Shayna (Hudson Leick) and henchmen, using a plastic gun and a bomb to take over the whole plane. Now, only FBI agent Deni Patton (Ally Sheedy) — yes, this movie has the Brat Pack go to war with each other — can save everyone. By everyone, I mean pilot Veronica Mitchell (Barbara Stock), her ex-boyfriend and co-pilot Ron Showman (James Brolin), Vietnam crippled vet Ben Horner (Michael Gross), air hostess Barbara (Kim Miyori), an alcoholic — literally, his name is Alcoholic in the credits — played by David “Tackleberry” Graf and the Paulsen family — who many divorce before this ends.

For a TV movie, this looks way better than you’d think, thanks to cinematographer Stephen L. Posey, who also shot Hellhole, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, Savage Streets and Bloody Birthday and was on camera for Surf II and The Howling.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Anguish (1987)

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John Pressman (Michael Lerner) is a barely controlled diabetic who works for an eye doctor but is also going blind. And his mother, Alice (Zelda Rubinstein), is controlling him, making him kill people for their eyes. One night, he decides to escape from his mother and hide in a theater that’s showing The Lost World, killing people one by one until the cops arrive with his mother as a hostage negotiation tactic. Except she gets shot and he gets arrested. Cue the credits.

Maybe not.

Because The Mother is the movie playing at The Rex, it’s disturbing everyone who views it. There’s even one man who keeps coming back and has decided to kill people in perfect union with the movie. Even as the police arrive in The Mother, they are showing up in Anguish, but the movie never ends. Even with the death of the killing machine, John Pressman shows up in one of the survivor’s minds and he wants her eyes.

Maybe not.

Because this is another movie in a movie.

Bigas Luna seems like he’s directing a slasher, pulling every rug out from under you, and dropping the floor and the earth under you. Originally, Bette Davis was asked to be The Mother in this and wow, except that Rubinstein is beyond exceptional. Also, it starts with this disclaimer: “During the film you are about to see, you will be subject to subliminal messages and mild hypnosis. This will cause you no physical harm or lasting effect, but if for any reason you lose control or feel that your mind is leaving your body — leave the auditorium immediately.””

The purest movie drugs.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Angels from Hell (1968)

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Bruce Kessler had a wild life. A race car driver, the last person to speak to James Dean, a survivor of a racing crash that put him into a coma, a world-class skeet and trap shooter, and the director of tons of TV shows and movies (Cruise Into Terror, Deathmoon) and movies (Simon King of the Witches, Killers Three, The Gay Deceivers), he led what we call a life.

Mike (Tom Stern) comes back from ‘Nam and back to leading his gang, the Madcaps. Unlike many of these biker movies, the main cop — Bingham (Jack Starrett) — is actually sympathetic to the motorcyclists.

But as great as the title is and as cool as biker movies can be—often hiring real gang members and having them do stunts—this just can’t decide whether the bikers should be heroic or scumbags, and it can’t have it both ways.

At least it has Arlene Martel in the cast. She was also Spock’s would-be wife, T’Pring, in the “Amok Time” episode. She also played a character named Adultress 58 in Battlestar Galactica, and if that’s not a great band name, I have no idea what is. She also shows up in Dracula’s Dog, Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera and Chatterbox! And if you were a ’90s hipster, you should know Von Dutch did the opening titles and murals.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Alvin Purple (1973)

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Alvin Purple (Graeme Blundell) is a door-to-door waterbed salesman — if we’ve learned anything from cinema, it’s that “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed, at the same time.” — who is irresistible to women.

Somehow, this was made by director Tim Burstall, who was part of the new wave La Mama Theatre in Melbourne, established by his wife Betty Burstall. His first movie,  2000 Weeks, was well-reviewed outside of Australia, but failed at home. Did he get cynical and just make movies that would make him money? Sure seems like it. When adjusted for inflation, this is the seventh biggest movie made in Australia and had two sequels, Alvin Rides Again and Melvin, Son of Alvin.

It was released over here as The Sex Therapist. 

Alvin somehow goes from sleeping around to seeing a therapist to a quack doctor who uses him to start a whorehouse and then make porn movies and then the one girl that he really loves becomes a nun, so he becomes a gardener.

You’re not watching it for the plot.

You can watch this on the Cave of Forgotten Films. 

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: All the Young Wives (1973)

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Directed by William Diehl (who also directed The Secretary and wrote the novel that Sharky’s Machine is based on) and written by Raymond Marlowe Jr., All the Young Wives is also known as Naked Rider and You All Come.

Big Jim (Gerald Richards, billed as Jerry) runs the town and all the women, too. But his much younger wife Melody (Linda Cook, the voice of Leech Woman in Puppet Master) starts sleeping with Sam (Edmund Genest), one of his workers — and perhaps stealing his money — and he has to re-evaluate his life, which is mostly spent chucking his friends.

The posters and titles make this sound sleazy, but it isn’t. It’s a Southern Gothic take on bad marriages and women trying to come into their own when you expect wall-to-wall balling. You may not recognize a single actor in this, but you’ll be surprised by just how good everyone is.

You can get this from Dark Forces.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: All the Way Down (1968)

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Joe (Joe Weldon) is the man who gets the girls for a Sunset Strip go-go club. He also gets those girls for his own pleasure, as he starts the movie by taking Colette (Mary Bauer, who may have been in Lady Godiva Rides, The Divorcee and Street of a Thousand Pleasures but was also a production assistant on Sesame Street) back home for some clumsy sixties exploitation movie aardvarking.

There’s also Sandra and Billie, two ladies who do a BDSM routine that had to be volcanic back in 1968, but when voiced over today with “wow, look how out there these chicks” are VO and some amazing fuzz guitar, it’s kind of quaint. Then the ladies go home and get a vibrator that is so unsexual that in no way can you be turned on by. It looks like…man, I don’t even know. It looks like something you’d buy at Home Depot.

The girls decide to skip work the next day, which means that Joe has to bring in a new lady: Cindy (Pat Barrington), who tends the bar. If you didn’t guess by the fact that Pat Barrington is playing Cindy, well, in little time she’s the most popular dancer there is. Barrington is the queen of movies like this, as well as a life that Ashley West of The Rialto Report said was “a wild tale of sexploitation films, a serial killer, go-go dancing, sexual assault, Hollywood, nude modeling, Sam Fuller, Lenny Bruce, Robert Mitchum, and much more.” Barrinton was also the gold girl in Orgy of the Dead and shows up in The Satanist, Mantis In Lace and Sisters In Leather.

Anyways, the rest of the girls get upset and try to forcibly make her a daughter of Sappho, which leads to the police arriving and the end of the gravy train for Joe.

Director Zoltan G. Spencer also made seven other movies: The Hand of Pleasure, Danish & Blue, The Screentest Girls, Sisters In Leather, Tropic of Scorpio, The Satanist and Terror At Orgy Castle. He’s the voice of Joe in this and sounds world-weary. Joseph A. Ziemba from AGFA said that he was “a mysterious sex-horror sorcerer who created happy un-worlds that writhed with sexual chaos, shabby sets, and baffling tangents.” I want to thank him for being part of my favorite genre: the sex movie that doesn’t have any intention of turning you on.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

The Zombie Wedding (2023)

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This has the Weekly World News logo on it and coming from the home of Bat Boy, I expected so much more. In fact, I expected more of everyone involved.

Directed by Micah Khan and written by Greg D’Alessandro, this certainly has a good cast. Cheri Oteri, who plays the mother of the groom and — spoiler — gets zombified, is always game for working hard. She’s wasted. Vincent Pastore? Just a name on the poster — or streaming info these days — to get you watching this. Micky Dolenz? A wedding DJ.

Based on an interactive play—I guess Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding isn’t enough when it comes to that genre—this has Weekly World News editor Brick Rivers (Ajay Naidu) sending Elsa (Christine Spang) and Frank (Mu-Shaka Benson) to cover the first human/zombie wedding between Ashley (Deepti Menon) and Zack (David Cheng). They thought being from different races was tough on their parents. Now they’re totally different species.

The zombies retain who they were before, but they just want to eat brains. The movie is mostly played for laughs, and forty minutes of it feels like ten hours. Somehow, this was the movie that broke me and made me give up after years of what I feel are some of the toughest microbudget cinema. Maybe I just want more from my former favorite tabloid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Sunset Strip (1985)

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This is not Sunset Strip, the 1992 Flashdance ripoff.

Nor is it 1993’s Girls of the Sunset Strip, which has Monique Parent in it.

It is also not Richard Pryor: Live On the Sunset Strip, Glitter Goddess of the Sunset Strip, Riot On Sunset Strup, Mayor of the Sunset Strip or Shakedown On the Sunset Strip.

No, this is the 1985 Sunset Strip, directed and written by William Webb (Party Line, The Banker). His movies make Los Angeles feel like a neon soaked nightmare, a place that when I finally got to the Sunset Strip and saw it from high above, I thought, “Right now, there’s a serial killer or a gang dance fighting and I am missing it to be in this lame club.”

Photographer Mark Jefferson (Tom Eplin) decides to help his friend Roger (John Mayall, yes, the Bluesbreakers John Mayall, I’m as surprised as you) protect his bar from organized crime quite unlike but also totally like Road House. Or more like Club Life, but both of those movies came after this even if retroactively this feels like a ripoff.

By the mysteries of movie fate, Mark’s ex Carol (Cheri Cameron Newell) is singing at the club and they fall back in bed within minutes. Then the mob starts running guns through the club and people start getting killed left and right, including the horny landlady who lets Jeff pay via sex years before Kingpin. This also has electrocution torture a few years before Lethal Weapon and I doubt anyone saw this and stole these scenes, but it is prescient, so you have to give it some credit.

Moran (Danny Williams) and his gang kill Roger, frame Mark and then the cops are LA cops, so this goes about as well as you’d expect. Except it looks so much better than it has any reason to. Beyond the endless telephone scenes and chases, this has a neon look that is intoxicating and remembers it’s a 1985 direct-to-video store effort and loads things up with violence and rampant nudity. Also: Shabba Doo cameo!

You can watch this on Tubi.

EUREKA BOX SET: Mabuse Lives! Dr. Mabuse At CCC: 1960-1964: The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964)

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A co-production between France, Italy and West Germany, this is also known as The Secret of Dr. Mabuse. Maj. Bob Anders (Peter van Eyck, who despite his character’s name keeps coming back to fight Dr. Mabuse; here he’s renamed so they don’t have to pay Bryan Edgar Wallace again) is investigating a death ray created by Prof. Larsen (O.E. Hasse), but he’s not the only one interested. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss has his name in the credits, but he isn’t in this) remains alive, somehow.

Directed by Argentine director Hugo Fregone — who also made Los Monstruos del Terror — and Victor De Santis, and written by Ladislas Fodor, this gets ahead of Bond by having a spy boss named Admiral Quency (Leo Genn) — kind of Q, I guess, right? — who has a burned face, an eyepatch, a wooden arm, and a team of scuba troopers way before Thunderball. Four years after the new Dr. Mabuse started, worried about the paranoia of the post-war era, we’re suddenly in Eurospy territory. There are also three gorgeous women — Gilda Larsen (Yvonne Fourneaux), Judy (Rika Dialina) and Mercedes (Yoko Tani) — to flirt, fight and/or be saved by the hero, who everyone knows is a spy and he’s clueless to figure out why.

The Italian version, I raggi mortali del Dr. Mabuse, is 17 minutes longer yet seemingly moves faster. It also has an alternate edit. Choose that version when you watch this.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! includes this movie, an introduction by genre film expert and Video Watchdog founder Tim Lucas, a new 1080p presentation from a 2K restoration of the original film elements undertaken by CCC, a commentary track by film historian and author David Kalat, and an alternate ending. You can get it from MVD.