Category Archives: Movie reviews

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.

EUREKA BOX SET: Mabuse Lives! Dr. Mabuse At CCC: 1960-1964: Scotland Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse (1963)

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Directed by Paul May and written by Ladislas Fodor from a story idea by Bryan Edgar Wallace, this time Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) has returned as a ghost and Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla) and takes back his criminal empire. He then orders the death of a professor who has invented a mind control device, which puts the man’s daughter Nancy (Sabine Bethmann) into harm’s way, ready to be saved by hero Bill Tern (Peter van Eyck).

The thing I don’t like about this movie? Tern’s elderly mother (Agnes Windeck) has to save the day again and again. She should be the protagonist in this, not her son, who is dumb enough to jump into a river at one point and nearly die. What I did like was seeing Klaus Kinski show up as a cop who gets hypnotized and placed on the side of evil.

These movies have always hinted at a supernatural side of Dr. Mabuse and now, this one pays that off and somehow is one of the slowest of the series.

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.

EUREKA BOX SET: Mabuse Lives! Dr. Mabuse At CCC: 1960-1964: The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1963)

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A remake of the 1933 Fritz Lang film, this finds Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss) in Hannibal Lecter mode — I get it, Lecter was in Mabuse mode because this comes first, but let me get back to writing this — and trapped in an asylum where Inspector Lohmann (Gert Frobe) keeps visiting, wanting to know how he’s communicating with criminals despite being locked away.

There’s also a boxer named Jonny Briggs (Helmut Schmid) who becomes part of Mabuse’s gang of henchpeople. Maybe he should just not live this life of crime and spend more time with his girl, Nelly. That’s because she’s played by Senta Berger (The Ambushers, When Women Had Tails), and that’s way cooler than being a hood for a mysterious mastermind, but what do I know?

I like how these films are gradually becoming more Eurospy. Here, the last film—The Invisible Dr. Mabuse—leads directly into this one. As no one in the U.S. knew who Dr. Mabuse was—or so they say, despite nearly all of the CCC movies coming out here—this was released as The Terror of the Mad Doctor. This time around, Werner Klingler directs.

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.

EUREKA BOX SET: Mabuse Lives! Dr. Mabuse At CCC: 1960-1964: The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)

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Dr. Mabuse has a new base under a theater, a place that is putting on a play about the French Revolution but really, it’s just a place for dancer Liane Martin (Karin Dor, You Only Live Twice, Assignment Terror) to take a steamy bath. Something for daddy, as they say.

Anyhow, Mabuse wants an invisibility machine and he’ll kill for it. Or at least his new henchmen will, who include Walter Bluhm as a murder clown. Only FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) — Perry’s brother? — can save the day. There’s also a mutated scientist, if you have a Letterboxd list of those.

Released in the U.S. as The Invisible Horror, this was directed by Harald Reinl, who also made Chariots of the Gods, Mysteries of the Gods, The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism and The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle.

The Eureka box set Mabuse Lives! has this movie, along with 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.