ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. You can listen to her podcast at https://thecinemajunction.com. Her latest book is Japanese Cult Cinema: Best of the Second Golden Age. She writes for Horror & Sons and Drive-in Asylum. She has also appeared on the podcasts Japan on Film, Making Tarantino, Making Scorsese, The Rad Revivalhouse and contributes to Cinemaforce. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or follow her on Instagram @jennxlondon. 

April 28: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

The Nail Gun Massacre had three things going for it that allowed it to secure distribution back in the ‘80s. 

1. A great title. 
2. It’s a slasher – those were just a wee bit popular in 1982.  
3. Video stores needed horror stock. 

Had it not met all three criteria, this regional horror movie made in Texas for 50 grand would likely be forgotten. Aside from the decent special effects, there’s nothing memorable about it. To quote another famous southerner – Mr. Leghorn – the plot of this film is “…smaller than the little end of nothin’ sharpened.” 

There are no character introductions. The movie just jumps right in at frame one to a woman being gang-raped by a bunch of rednecks. Then, a diminutive person in a motorcycle helmet and army fatigues hunts down all the perps and takes them all out with a cool-looking nail gun. In the end, it’s revealed that it’s not the victim doing all the killing, as we’re led to believe. Surprise, surprise! It’s the victim’s brother, Bubba! Reason 3,741 to never visit Texas. 

Rewatching this for the first time in many years, I was struck with the same question I was when I first watched it on VHS in the ‘80s. “How many nails would a killer go through to take out one person?” It’s not an effective distance weapon. A nail to the shoulder is hardly fatal. Hell, even several to the face might not kill a person unless it’s square into the temple. A rapey chubby guy with extra padding? You’d have to press right against the jugular. Even then, his protective flesh scarf could skew the entry, potentially postponing his well-deserved death for days or weeks. I mean, a guy got nailed to a chair through his scrotum in The Serpent and the Rainbow and basically walked away. 

Perhaps I was spoiled having seen Serpent first, and The Toolbox Murders before this movie. I had seen Dawn of the Dead’s screwdriver zombie kill probably a dozen times by the time Nail Gun Massacre threaded up into my trusty GE VCR. So, this movie never had a chance to win me over. 

I felt then, as I do now, that although the masked killer’s weapon of choice looks great, it’s not really all that efficient at killing sexual predators. It’s more suitable for long torture sessions. 

But this movie does have a lot going for it. A nail right in the dick? Yeah, this movie’s got that. Which is nice. It also has lots of dark humor. After every murder, the killer rattles off a funny Bond-esque one-liner in a Darth Vader voice. It also has the grossest dinner scene ever. Spaghetti-O’s, collard greens and cream corn. You can smell the combination of odors through the screen. 

I’d classify this movie as a Texas giallo. It’s worth watching to see what was possible in the 1980s with such a small budget.

Remember this review the next time you’re out shopping. Whether you’re in your local Home Depot tool aisle or the canned food aisle at Costco….choose wisely. Personally, I’d go for the chainsaw and Beefaroni combo.  

Trailer: 

April 28: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.

I’ve been super into John Hayes’ films lately. Jailbait Babysitter, The Hang-Up, Rue McClanahan’s debut film Hollywood After Dark, End of the World, Garden of the Dead, Grave of the Vampire, the Tales from the Dark Side episode “The Madness Room,” Dream No Evil…speaking of that last film, in which a woman grows up in an orphanage dreaming of the day her father will return, forever living outside the other children around her, only leaving to be a faith healer in a circus…well, it’s incredible. Sure, there’s no budget, but it has such a strange vision, powered by Hayes’ issues with his own childhood.

Six years later, he made this movie, one of the few times — if only — that the same director made an R-rated film and then remade it as an adult movie, using the name Howard Perkins.

Rosemary (Sharon Thrope, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days) is a teacher trapped in a cycle of sexual repression and father-fixation that would make Freud scribble notebooks full of findings. She never knew her father, grew up in an orphanage and barely cares about her boyfriend John (John Leslie, born in East Liverpool, Ohio and one of the Golden Age of porn’s most recognizable stars). They emerge from a theater showing Let’s Do It Again and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and while he has sex on his mind, as all men do, she couldn’t care less.

She’s leaving for three years to be a teacher and tells him blandly, “I’ve got to say goodbye to my father tonight.” Their lovemaking is barely that. It’s perfunctory. He soon departs and turns to a sex worker named Unis (Leslie Bovee) to fulfill his needs. This must be a regular thing, because he’s given her many of Rosemary’s outfits so that he can do what he really wants to do to his virginal girlfriend and can’t bring himself to unleash. He worships her from behind while calling Rosemary’s name. Once he finishes, he throws his money at her, leaving her unfulfilled and complaining about her back.

She tries to find her father in the flophouse where he lives. Instead, she runs into Mick (Ken Scudder, Thundercrack!) and Kate (Monique Cardin), who assault her at knifepoint. She runs away, only to return three years later, as her father has died and she wants to reconnect with Mick.

Rosemary goes to the funeral home along with John, who is now a police officer, to identify the body, bringing along her students Tracy (Candida Royalle, who pretty much created feminist adult) and Marsh (Melba Bruce, Alex de Renzy’s Femmes de Sade).

She muses, “It was such a nightmare to be a child. Now I’m the adult. Sex is always so degrading, so unclean. I’ll teach my girls all the good things. To be pure in mind and body.”

These girls are part of a cult that worships sex and soon end up making it with the funeral director (John Seeman), who has a small apartment filled with horror movie posters (Dracula, Frankenstein, King Kong, The Black Cat). As Rosemary and John watch — and they chant about eternal wombs — she finally finds an erotic stirring, and she allows him to dry hump her before going back to Mick, whose rough ways finally get her off. He gets a job, stops drinking and treats her right. Guess what? She hates it. He responds by nearly strangling her to death before John tries to save her life. He gets knocked out, and Mick leaves, promising that the next time he sees her, he’s going to kill her. No wonder she takes sapphic solace in the dual arms of her students.

Rosemary stares at herself for long stretches in the mirror and hears the voice of her father, begging her to not bury him because he’s still alive. During the funeral, fog appears everywhere, a demon emerges, the music gets discordant, and everyone in her life — John is now in a relationship with the woman who sexually replaced her, Unis — makes love to her as Rosemary screams, “Daddy! Take me away from this place!” The end is just pure sadness, as she’ll never escape, as the smoke and strange voices engulf her utterly.

This is not an adult Rosemary’s Baby, despite the title and horrible poster. It’s even weirder and better than that. In Nightmare U.S.A., Stephen Thrower wrote that this is “…a brutal sex drama that stands as one of his (Hayes) most disturbing films, with strong echoes of the family trauma theme that incessantly colored his career.” A lot of that is because Hayes was raised by an alcoholic uncle and an ancient grandmother, while his sister Dolores was sent to a convent, emerging only to have multiple children and descend into fanatic religious behavior. 

If Dream No Evil was a melancholic, circus-tent meditation on a missing father, then this film is the pitch-black, grimy realization that some things are better left buried.

You can watch this on CultPix.

April 27: Kayfabe Cinema — A movie with a pro wrestler in it.

This hits a bit close to home, as I did indies for more than twenty years, so when I saw Matt Cross, formely M-Dogg, “Super Cop” Dick Justice and “The Handicap Hero” Gregory Iron show up in the first few minutes of a movie, it kind of felt like how I spent most of my weekends over the last few decades: sitting in a high school locker room, waiting for my match. 

Matt’s wife Amy (Roni Jonah) used to wrestle, but left once she got pregnant with their son Cash (Cash K. Allen), who is being babysat by her ex-tag partner Kelsi (Britt Baker, whose boyfriend at the time, Adam Cole, shows up for a few seconds), who lost the ability to wrestle after an accident. A lot of this movie is about the pain of not being in the ring anymore and wishing you had it back, which I connected with very strongly. It doesn’t explore it anywhere near where it should, and really, things just happen in this, rather than feeling like we have any stirrings toward a point of view or a plot.

Paul (Wes Allen), a superfan or smart mark, kidnaps Matt and chains him up in his basement, explaining that he wants to give him his killer instinct back. Powerbomb never gets around to explaining that, instead focusing on Paul taking care of his sick mother or beating up a puppet. It wants to be the indy wrestling version of Misery, yet never quite gets there. 

B.J. Colangelo and R. Zachary Shildwachter have something here, even if they never find it. Instead of going all in on its premise, we have promoter Solomon (Aaron Sechrist) getting beaten up by Adam Cole’s thugs, trying to get Amy to wrestle again, while Paul tases Matt Cross and makes him eat pizza. Then we get a monologue where Kelsi cuts a promo in a mirror, then realizes the extent of her knee pain, turning to the bottle. We never see her again.

If you like indy wrestling, you at least get to see Derek Dillinger and Rickey Shane Page show up. Otherwise, this feels like they had a bunch of footage and no idea how to edit it into a collective whole. An IMDbs trivia says, “Film was funded by wrestling fans and made by wrestling fans (Hence its lack of creativity or professionalism), has several real wrestlers in it.” Man, people will say anything online.

I really wanted to like this movie, but it never gets to where it needs to go, as if it stayed in chain wrestling when it was time for the double down.

Ignore the poster, as that never happens. If this movie were a match on a show, it would really have them going, as Lord Zoltan once said. Going to the bathroom, the concession stand, to their cars to leave…

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.

Mario Bava — or John Old — was the man who could make a studio backlot look like the gates of Gehenna. And while Lisa and the Devil was his heart and soul, it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. But then The Exorcist happened, and suddenly every producer in Italy wanted their own pea-soup-spewing cash cow.

Producer Alfredo Leone had a masterpiece on his hands that nobody wanted to see, so he did the most exploitation producer thing imaginable: He asked Bava to chop it up, add some possession flavor and then he retitled it House of Exorcism. Now it was less of an art film and more, well, Exorcisty.

This flick is a Frankenstein’s monster of cinema. You’ve got the ethereal, dreamlike footage of Bava’s original cut smashed together with new scenes directed by Leone (and a helping hand from Lamberto Bava, aka John Old Jr.). To slap a name on this identity crisis, they credited Mickey Lion as the director.

Mario said, “Even though it bears my signature. It is the same situation, too long to explain, of a cuckolded father who finds himself with a child that is not his own, and with his name, and cannot do anything about it.”

So what is new? A lot. Enough to make you think that this is two movies joined together, which it totally is.

There’s a new framing device in which Father Michael (Robert Alda, father of Alan) is an exorcist trying to exorcise a demon from Lisa (Elke Sommer). She’s swearing more than Regan MacNeil, showing way more skin and also throwing up frogs. She’s also Elena, and all of Bava’s superior cut becomes a series of flashbacks to how she lost her mind, her life and her soul, eventually possessing Lisa.

Elena was stuck in an incestuous four-way relationship between her husband Max (Alessio Orano), a guy so impotent and tied to his mother’s (Alida Valli) apron strings it’s no wonder Elena looked elsewhere and found love — and some deep dicking — from her husband’s stepfather (Espartaco Santoni). It all ends in blood and with every in hell.

Somewhere in all of this, we have the priest get tempted by the ghost of his dead wife — she burned up in a car wreck — Anna (Carmen Silva), who is one of those Eurohorror women who seems like an android with a perfect body and fake eyelashes. Magic in its purest form. “Darling, don’t be embarrassed. You’re still a man. Take me.” You know, the devil works hard to convert those who have faith, but have you seen Carmen Silva? I get it. Man, I sure get it.

This feels like a weird U.S.-made exploitation rip-off of Lisa with bloodier deaths and a near-inserts level edit of Sylvia Koscina and Gabriele Tinti (and body doubles) getting it on. You know, I’m sure Gabriele Tinti was a good guy, but between this and him being married to Laura Gemser, I kind of despise the dude.

Spare a thought for poor Elke Sommer, who had to come back two years later just to contort on a hospital bed and projectile vomit neon green slime. It’s a far cry from the gothic beauty of the original, but there’s a greasy charm to it that you just can’t find in modern horror. I can’t help but kind of love the balls on this concoction of a movie.

Also: In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woodie Allen) walks past a marquee playing Lisa and the Devil and Messiah of Evil, and he kind of scoffs. For this and so many more reasons, I hope Tisa kicked him right in the dick at Passover, and it was no accident.

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 24: Puke! — Pick a movie that had a barf bag given away during its theatrical run! Here’s a list.

Gerardo de Leon made The Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Brides of Blood, so we should watch any movie he ever chose to direct. This time, he tells us about Eduardo (Eddie Garcia) and his sister Leonore (Amalia Fuentes), a twosome who have made the worst of all horror-movie mistakes. They’ve come back home to see their father on his deathbed.

The old man has one simple request: “Burn this house to the ground the second I’m gone.” Does Eduardo listen? Of course not. Instead, he decides to poke around the basement.

Eduardo discovers his mother chained up in the dark. She’s a vampire, she’s hungry and she gives him a hickey that turns him into a cape-wearing, blood-chugging menace. While Eduardo is busy transforming into a monster, Leonore is pining for her lover, Daniel (Romeo Vasquez), hoping for a deathbed blessing that—spoiler alert—is not coming.

What follows is a chaotic descent into madness. Eduardo ruins a wedding with the kind of social grace only a vampire can muster (by biting the bride), murders his father in a fit of vampiric rage, and develops a deeply uncomfortable lust for his own sister. He tops it all off by getting into a sword fight with a ghost.

The film was picked up for U.S. distribution by Hemisphere Pictures, the same outfit that brought the Blood Island films to American drive-ins, often as part of legendary double features.