Also known as American Commando Ninja, IFD claims that this is made by Joe Law. Really, who can tell you the truth? Who even knows how many titles this has, how much music it stole or what it’s about? Hocus pocus, as the sensei says at the beginning. It doesn’t have to make sense. Seeing as how this was produced by Joseph Lai and Betty Chan, all bets are off.
Jow Law is also Law Chi AKA Chi Lo, the director of The Crippled Masters, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu (using the name Lo Ke), Girl with Cat’s Eyes and Magic Swords.
This poster has nothing to do with the movie you’re about to watch. Who cares? You’re here, one assumes, for ninjas. Or commandoes. Or Commando the Ninja.
IFD also lets us know what this should be about: “David, an up-coming young master of Ninjitsu, is recruited by his master to steal the formula for a bacteriological weapon and to free the Japanese scientist who is responsible for developing it. He is pitted against two wily opponents: Mark, a KGB operative, and Martin, who are bent on using the formula in a bid for world domination. The fate of humanity is in the hands of David and a group of four surprisingly acrobatic young fighters.”
Edgar Allan Lovecraft (Steve Westerheit) is the brainy outcast of the hard-partying Delta Epsilon Delta Fraternity and now, he’s invented — you guessed it — a reanimator formula.
In the video store era, the box art and title were all you needed. So if you combine long rental favorites Police Academy and Re-Animator, you get this.
The Delta Epsilon Delta (DED) frat is all about partying. Except for the aforementioned Edgar Allan Lovecraft, who is busy bringing a severed head named Fred back to life, which brings in a local gangster, Mugsy, who wants Edgar to do the same for his girl, Hotlips (executive producer Connier Speer, who was also in Nail Gun Massacre). Things don’t go to plan as the reanimated gangster’s moll starts killing the student body. Can Edgar, Mugsy, his henchman Bruno, and Fred the severed head stop her?
Directed and written by Judith Priest — a one-and-done talent who may or may not be someone else — this was set up by Fred Olen Ray with David DeCoteau (using the name Ellen Cabot, which comes from an episode of Batman) producing. The instructions? “Give a good title and make it 70 minutes and horror.”
Shot on 8mm consumer format with a two-month turnaround from script to final product, it was shot over a weekend. And there was a Super VHS on hand to edit the dailies. It was co-written by Benton Jennings, who was also Bruno. He’s also in tons of movies and TV shows: Highway to Hell, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Profiler, Dexter, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, American Carol, the soap opera Passions, Our Flag Means Death and I Think You Should Leave. He also played Alex Trebek’s dead body on Jimmy Kimmel in addition to Hitler on that show, a role he’d play again in Poolboy: Drowning In Fury. He was also the historical consultant on Frontier: The Decisive Battles and Last of the Mohicans.
This movie has so many talented people making it, including Greg Synodis, who composed the music for this and Highway to Hell, while also making the music videos for “Ice Ice Baby” and “Play That Funky Music” for Vanilla Ice. There’s also JP Black, who shot and starred in Redneck County Fever; as well as assistant director Richard Perrin, who was in Bret McCormick’s Blood On the Badge and Fred Williamson’s Steele’s Law. Plus, you get Fred the Head, who has a list of credits a forehead long. He was in Head, A Bullet to the Head, Sergeant Deadhead, A Hole In the Head, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte. Virginia Leith is his mom, or so he says.
Released to video on February 28, 1992, this was filmed in Fort Worth, Texas — a clue to who the person who made this is, and shows up in the Tomb of Terrors box set along with such other incredible movies as Demon Sex, Granny, Gorno: An American Tragedy, Kill the Scream Queen, The Night Owl, Purvos, Redneck County Fever, Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death and Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires.
Is this made by movie lovers? All I can say is that in the frat house scene, you can see posters for Zachariah, Terror Circus (Barn of the Naked Dead), School Spirit and America 3000.
Tibor Takács made some wild movies, but before that, he was part of the Toronto-area punk and metal scene as the manager and producer for The Viletones and The Cardboard Brains, some of whom end up in this 1978 rock opera. Sure, he makes streaming Christmas movies now, but he once made The Gate and the insane I, Madman.
Written by Stephen Zoller, this feels like The Man Who Fell to Earth meeting The Rocky Horror Picture Show as well as Phantom of the Paradise and The Foreigner, but that’s just me trying to put some handle on this.
Max the Promoter (John-Paul Young, lead singer of The Cardboard Brains) has hired private detective Philip Chandler (Richard Ward Allen) to find The Messiah (David Jensen of the band Kickback), who is preaching to the teens of Anywhere City that rock and roll is filled with sin. Max either wants him to be a star or dead or both, while Violet (Liane Hogan) and the Children of Truth want him hooked on drugs.
The music in this feels early 70s glam rock but that just helps this seem even weirder, as does the Third Reich crowd noises in the final concert, as the Metal Messiah — spoiler warning — because a religious rock star and gets crucified to the cheers of the assembled crowd.
This was a stage play and that makes sense. What doesn’t is how much this movie seems to hate rock and roll while being a rock opera. The evils of music would stay with Takács, as the album The Dark Book would open quite literally The Gate once he learned how to hone his filmmaking.
Chuck McCann (Chuck McCann, The Girl Most Likely to… and the co-creator of Far Out Space Nuts with Bob Denver) is a projectionist at the Midtown Theater, which is run by the always angry Renaldi (this is Rodney Dangerfield’s first movie). Stuck in the booth with no one else for hours at a time, McCann watches movies all day and dreams of being a superhero, Captain Flash, with Renaldi as The Bat.
McCann was a gifted voice actor, so he does tons of impressions in this, including Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Butterfly McQueen and Laurel and Hardy. He was a big fan of the comedy duo, hosting the New York City kid show Laurel and Hardy and Chuck. He often played Oliver Hardy in commercials with Jim MacGeorge as Stan Laurel. He was one of the five founding members of The Sons of the Desert, a Laurel and Hardy appreciation group, along with their official biographer Jim McCabe, Orson Bean, cartoonist Al Kilgore and John Municino. And then he dreams of The Girl (Ina Balin) and rescuing her from The Bat.
Director and writer Harry Hurwitz also made the adult Fairy Tales, Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula and Auditions as Harry Tampa, as well as Safari 3000, That’s Adequate, Buster Krabb’s last movie The Comback Trail, Safari 3000 and he wrote Under the Rainbow.
You can spot several interesting people in this: David Holliday (the voice of Virgil Tracy on Thunderbirds), cinematographer João Fernandes (who shot Deep Throat, The Devil In Ms. Jones, Bloodrage, Invasion U.S.A., The Prowler, Children of the Corn, Human Experiments, The Nesting, The Kirlian Witness, Let Me Die a Woman, The Taking of Christina, Legacy of Blood, Deadly Weapons and directed three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, as he worked with Chuck Norris many times), Lucky Kargo (who is also in Cauliflower Cupids and Barry Mahon’s Sex Club International as Lucky Bang Bang), Sam Stewart (Bad Girls Go to Hell, The Girl from S.I.N.), Alex Stevens (a werewolf from 23 episodes of Dark Shadows), bellydancer Morocco, Robert Staats (Night Call Nurses, Mr. Billion), Robert King (who is in tons of late period Jess Franco movies such as Lust for Frankenstein, Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell and Blind Target), Rita Bennett (who played a strippeer in Raging Bull, All That Jazz and Danny Steinmann’s High Rise using the stage name Elizabeth Sunburst) and it’s all shot by Victor Petrashevic, who also was the cinematographer on Behind Locked Doors, Massage Parlot Murders!, The Minx, Gathering of Evil and the director of Love Me…Please!
I have no idea how this was able to just take scenes from Casablanca, Gunga Din, Sergeant York, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Fort Apache, The Birth of a Nation, The Maltese Falcon and Barbarella, but there you go. There are even some fake trailers, but the best part of all of this is getting to see the theaters of Times Square all the way back in 1970.
Pierce Jackson Dawn (Randal Malone) was one of the greatest make-up artists of the early 20th century. However, his death is quite strange. It came after he wanted to work with horror stars Pratt Borokov (Tim Sullivan) and Janos Blasko (director and writer Ron Ford) for producer Leonard Schein (Wes Deitrick), even if Blasko has overdosed and Borokov must be convinced through death and reanimation to make the movie. Yet instead of acting, they start to kill.
Featuring interview segments with David DeCoteau, Conrad Brooks, silent star Anita Page and former Hollywood starlet Margaret O’Brien, this is basically Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff coming back from the dead to destroy unsuspecting people. For that alone, as well as how it’s shot kind of like a documentary, you have to enjoy it. It’s a low, low, low budget affair, yet when has that stopped a movie from being worthwhile?
If you love old movies and didn’t have any worries about watching movies no matter what format they were shot in, you’re going to love this. If you demand things have an actual budget and not spend time throwing deep cut horror jokes at you, well…
The Mask of Satan was also released as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil in the U.S. and Japan. If you want me to explain all that, you can click here.
This is part of the Sabbath TV series which also includes Pedro Olea’s La leyenda del cura de Bargota, Imanol Uribe’s La Luna Negra, António de Macedo’s The Curse of Marialva, Daniel Wronecki’s María la Loba and Gertrud Pinkus’ Anna Goldin, la última bruja.
A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michele Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from movies in the Demonsseries. Soon, they find a metal mask — this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they find an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments for her revenge.
Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it. That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, who often read it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he decided Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.
Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancé Klaus Kinski here; she’s in the Kinski-directed Paganini and the Tinto Brass movie Iaprika) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?
There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun of, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. You just may get what you wish for. Speaking of the cast, Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman, as the demonic form of Anibas. What a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old teats and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws. At the same time, she spits white fluid all over. She also has the facial scars Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s version. Plus, Stanko Molnar is in the cast as a weird priest. He showed up often in Bava’s early movies like Macabreand A Blade In the Dark. He’s also in the Antonio Margheriti TV mini-series Treasure Island In Space, which has an insane cast: Anthony Quinn, Philippe Leroy, David Warbeck, Ernest Borgnine, Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Bobby Rhodes.
This is a hard movie to review, as you must compare it to one of the greatest movies ever. Even Lamberto, I think, would admit that his father remains the best director. But his son tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sundayis the kind of film that will live forever. Lamberto was able to create some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Maskand did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sectand Cemetery Man.
It has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.
It’s entertaining, as all Italian late in the game horror is to me. And that’s enough to recommend it to you.
Severin has released the North American Blu-ray premiere of this film, which has interviews with Bava, Mary Sellers and Deborah Caprioglio. It looks great and I love that I can get rid of my bootleg, which looked like it was multiple generations of VHS dubbed to DVD. Please, Severin — more Lamberto late 80s releases please.
Aloysius “Quackser” Fortune (Gene Wilder) takes road apples and sells them to people with gardens. His family keeps telling him that horses will be banned for cars soon, but he loves his work. And he’s in love with an American, Zazel Pierce (Margot Kidder) who is studying abroad. I mean, this movie has to be science fiction. 1970 Margot Kidder is in love with a guy who scoops manure.
Director Waris Hussein would eventually make TV movies like The Henderson Monster and Copacabana. This film strains my credibility meter as there’s no reason for these characters to be in love, and at the end, where Fortune inherits a fortune from that cousin in the Bronx and becomes a tour bus driver—spoiler—it seems too easy.
Nonetheless, 21st Century re-released this as Fun Loving after Wilder’s successful films with Richard Pryor as a new movie, not one with years of dust on it.
I love seeing Gene Wilder and Margot Kidder in movies, even if what emerges isn’t necessarily their best work. I’m also excited that this is out on Blu-ray, as it will allow me to go back and watch it again in the hopes that it will find me in a better frame of mind.
This Blu-ray has a commentary track by Robert Kelly, artist, reviewer and film buff extraordinaire. It also has a photo gallery and trailer. You can get it from MVD.
Every time Beth (Lyndsey Craine) dies — at her own hand — she wakes up in another horror movie. This time, it’s a cannibal romantic comedy. And that idea, that Beth wants to die but might learn something from each new film, is a great one. It doesn’t come back into this film at all, which is the first of the misfires that this movie commits.
My enthusiasm for this diminished somewhat when a Troma logo came across the screen. As for the story, well, Beth is the only student at Henenlotter High School — get it? — sees how horrible everything is and tries to do something about. The film seems to nudge you, wink wink you throughout; the same school is also the setting of director Liam Regan’s My Bloody Banjo. Those students not in the know can win the “All You Can Eat Massacre” contest and get a handgun of their own with which they can either shoot their fellow students or kill themselves.
Yet there may be hope. Beth has a crush on English teacher Miss Campbell (Lala Barlow) which seems to play out as a need to consume human flesh. This is the exact opposite of her vegan ethos yet eating one’s enemies is such sweet revenge.
The rest of the film uses teen movie stereotypes from Heathers, Tragedy Girls and Mean Girls to tell its tale of girl cliques and male sexual predators. Of all the imagery and ideas this movie uses, I liked that one of the female bullies favors Road Warrior Hawk makeup.
The movie — well, the evil teacher Nancy Applegate (Annabella Rich) — refers to Beth as “the millennial product of the American high school trope” and that would be an intriguing meta comment were it not so on the nose. Sure, her mother is dead, she has a horrible stepfather and school sucks, but why does she want to end her existence beyond a “woe is me” attitude? Far be it from me to expect good taste in film, much like exploitation, but I demand a character who has a reason, that a character with it is dying.
If she wants to live in a movie life that isn’t nostalgic horror, why does she play into the same cliches throughout? That motivation is never truly explored. Instead, there are endless references to other movies — if this were a Marvel comic, there’d be an editor note in every panel, cluttering this up with reference upon reference — and can you top this gross-out humor. Trust me, I love humor like that. Lloyd Kaufmann saying “Alex Baldwin” and blowing out his brains is anything but wit.
To be satire, one must have some position from which to state why something is worthy of ridicule, lest it becomes precisely what it is deriding. If you want to make fun of direct-to-video horror, that’s not that hard. If you want to make a satire about hot button issues like date rape and teen suicide, go for it. But you better bring your best material. And if this is it, I am not interested in seeing what comes next.
If you do like Troma, you can get this from MVD. It comes with an audio commentary, a making-of, deleted scenes, outtakes, a gore reel, a raw b-roll, cast interviews, a VFX reel, trailers and an introduction from Lloyd Kaufman.
This movie is so important to me. I feel like I’ve talked about it so much, but now that there’s finally a great version of it available, I can’t retire the $1 DVD I have of it that has BUTCH written across it in sharpie.
The director of A Dolphin’s Tale and A Dolphin’s Tale 2, Skippy from Family Ties and one of the stars of A Chorus Line made the most metal film ever. Let that sink in.
I grew up a fat, bespeckled child in a small town with crushing self esteem issues, a love for gore movies and a sarcastic mind that loved the way people treated me when I started dressing all in black. Every single situation that Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price, the previously mentioned Skippy) endures in this film…I lived it. If a monster Glenn Danzig (Verotika) could take over shop class and kill my tormentors, I would have gladly welcomed such mayhem and menace.
Eddie is a big fan of Sammi Curr, a superstar who went to the same high school Eddie is in, was tormented and bullied the same way Eddie is, became a big star and then died in a mysterious fire. Radio DJ Nuke (Gene “inventor of the devil horns*” Simmons, who played a great transgendered bad guy in Never Too Young to Die while wearing his girlfriend Cher’s clothes) gives Eddie the only vinyl copy of Sammi’s satanic masterwork “Songs in the Key of Death.”
Eddie does precisely what I’d do: he listens to the record and falls asleep. He has a crazy dream about the fire that killed Curr and awakens to the album playing backwards, telling him how to gain revenge on the bullies that torment him.
Eddie chickens out though — he doesn’t want to kill the jocks who have made his life so rough. Sammi takes matters into his own hands, creating an electric surge that allows him to escape the record and return to our reality. Eddie responds by smashing his stereo. Sammi’s response is as fucking perfect as it gets: “No false metal.”
Sammi’s friend Roger gets involved and unwittingly plays a cassette — fucking metal — at the school dance, causing Sammi to leap out of a guitar amp and take the stage. The crowd goes wild before Sammi starts killing audience members, shooting lightning at them and revealing his burned face. Holy shit — I saw this scene at the drive-in this year and the exuberance of hearing Fastaway blasting from car stereos in the fog at 5 AM is an experience I recommend to every single person reading this.
Can Eddie stop Sammi from being played on the radio and attacking everyone that hears it? Of course. It’s an ’80s horror movie. But man — I’m all from more Sammi Curr (sadly, Tony Fields died of AIDS in 1995).
Oh I forgot – Ozzy is a preacher in this that Sammi attacks. It’s a small cameo, just like Gene Simmons’ role, but that doesn’t stop my DVD cover from claiming they starred in this.
If you’re an 80s metal fan (and if not, man, thanks for reading this far), there are so many band logos and posters to spot in this, from the expected like Anthrax and KISS to the out of left field like Raven, Exciter and Savatage. You’ll also be much more likely to not dismiss this film as a piece of shit.
Me? I quote from this film almost every day. “The bait is you. Let the big fish hook themselves. You’re the bait. The bait is you.”
I really hope that people rediscover this movie or discover it in the first place. It’s probably the most perfect of all heavy metal horror movies, which wasn’t hard to do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredible.
*Dio has always claimed that he got the gesture from his Italian grandmother, who claimed it warded off the evil eye.
This movie’s Synapse 4K UHD has a 1080p Blu-ray of a 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative approved by Director of Photography Robert Elswit, along with audio commentary with director Charles Martin Smith, moderated by filmmaker Mark Savage. There are also interviews with writer/producer Michael S. Murphey and writer Rhet Topham, moderated by film historian Michael Felsher; an audio conversation with Paul Corupe and Allison Lang, authors of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s; a making-of featurette; a tribute to Tony Fields; Horror’s Hallowed Grounds: The Filming Locations of Trick or Treat with Sean Clark; the Fastaway video for “After Midnight;” trailers, TV commercials and radio ads; a still gallery with an interview with photographer Phillip V. Caruso; a vintage electronic press kit; a limited edition slipcover and reversible cover art. You can get this from MVD.
He said of this movie, “That’s why Surviving Edged Weapons is so fascinating. It’s like a police department gave some kid like fresh out of film school $30,000 and this kid was like, “I’m gonna make a masterpiece.” I swear to God, so it opens with two cavemen in an argument, and one of the cavemen takes a sharp rock and stabs the other and then the narrator comes in and says, “Since the dawn of time, men have been using edged weapons to kill each other.” It’s so weird. It’s so profoundly weird. I can’t get over it.”
No matter how much he prepared me for it, I wasn’t ready.
According to Calibre Press’ website, director Dennis Anderson and author Charles Remsberg published Street Survival: Tactics for Armed Encounters in 1980. They claim that “this book changed the law enforcement landscape by introducing new tactics, personal stories, and real scenarios. Within a year of its publication, the Street Survival Seminar was born and quickly grew to become the most popular and respected resource for officer tactical training in the country.”
While they no longer sell this video on their site, they do have a course entitled “Advanced Leadership in a Police Reform Era” that uses children’s building blocks to spell the word “defund.” There’s another called “Surviving Hidden Weapons” that uses a lipstick tube with a blade. I obviously need to see that.
But first, let me explain Surviving Edged Weapons.
I’ve heard that this was made in Canada and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, even though Calibre is based in Glen Ellyn, IL. They also sell a koozie that says, “One drink away from telling everyone exactly what I think.” Keep in mind that everything else on this site is about police response.
Narrated by Ronald Rolland, this has the production quality of Unsolved Mysteries and I mean that as a compliment. And yes, this begins with a Cain and Abel murder that explains that edged weapons have been with us forever. Then, your jaw will drop as this alternates between police officers showing off their scars and discussing how they’ve been stabbed — including an astounding ending where a cop is brought to tears by the memory and cries the thickest, deepest, saddest tears I have ever seen in my entire existence — and being an action movie, to the point that stuntman Dan Inosanto (who shows up in Game of Death, Sharky’s Machineand Out for Justice) is in it.
So yes, Officer James Phillips may say, “In my mind, I’m never gonna die in no ghetto. Absolutely never. A man turns around and punches me in the head, the fight’s on. If he cuts me, the fight’s on. If I’m shot, the fight is on. I’m not losing no fight to no scumbag out there in no ghetto, period. That’s it. No son of a bitch out there is gonna get me. The only way he gets me is cut my head off, and I mean that. I’ll fight you til I got a breath left in me. I don’t think any of those animals in that street can beat me. I’ve been going that way for eighteen years of street service, street duty, and that’s the way I’m gonna keep on going. You don’t lose the fight.” But you also get a Black Mass being interrupted by the police, a domestic disturbance turning into a meatcleaver going directly into someone’s head and a series of wounds closing with a full-on uncut dead cock on camera.
You will learn how criminals place knives in their jeans so they cut up cops hands, discover how the streets are non-stop terror and hear a man say, “Fuck me? Fuck you!” in a way that Bob Odenkirk had to have heard it. The VHS cover of Halloween is shown as part of our country’s knife culture and the narration says it “glorifies the blade.” A man in a Corvette with the license plate KILME stabbing himself. This is at once so much better than it needed to be and more reactionary than you’d expect a cop training video to be, even one made nearly forty years ago.
I’m saying this with no hyperbole. This is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve ever seen and if you come to my house and want to watch movies with me, there’s a really good chance I’m going to suggest we watch it. It’s like the unmade Death Wish 6 but on a smaller scale, shown to real people to prepare them for the thankless job of protecting the lambs from the wolves. It makes me reflect on how liberal real life me is and how jingoistic and needing for carnage movie watching me is, a juxtaposition that sometimes throws me into panic, but there you go. This movie will make you confront things, like how you might not like the fact that we live in a police state, but you certainly don’t want to do that job, and you even step away with some level of respect. Or worry. I can’t figure it out, but I’ll get back to you when I watch this four or five more times.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.