April 18: In Like a Lion — A weather gone wild movie.

They’re making Twisters this year and you know, I don’t care.

I never saw this movie when it came out but my wife did.

I only knew it from the pinball machine.

Last year, she made me watch this movie and you know, I came away wondering how anyone could leave all that food behind at Aunt Meg’s house and then she put it all in bags for everyone because she’s used to all these storm chasers in her life.

Yes, storm chasers. My aunt used to follow tornados with my grandmother but they just had a little Cutlass Ciera. They didn’t have Dorothy and a cool truck, much less a woman who would make gravy for them.

Twister is a strange film because it has great talent — Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman — in the service of a Jan de Bont summer blockbuster. That means that there are moments that are total popcorn as trucks raise twisters and then moments of longing and romance that feel honest, thanks to Paxton and Helen Hunt.

Maybe it makes sense, I figure, that there was no script pitch for this movie, but instead a proof of concept clip of the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic. When you need a movie to go with all those computer animation, you used to get Michael Crichton (who co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin).

So here’s how it happens: Bill Harding (Paxton) is now a weatherman but once, he was a storm chased along with his soon-to-be ex-wife Jo (Hunt) and he has to track her down to get the divorce papers signed so that he can marry Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) who gets a raw deal in this movie to be honest but you know, when you chase tornadoes your whole life with a girl who lost her family to one, you have to imagine the sex is like getting tossed around the bed by an F5.

But yeah, while everyone is getting Dorothy IV to send out probes and watching Cary Elwes get pulped by a twister, poor Dr. Melissa is stuck in a truck with Dusty (Hoffman) hearing about how cool weather is. And she’s a therapist!

At least it’s based on some facts, as The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma trained the crew on weather safety and brought the actors along on a tornado chase. There was a moment in the script where one tornado lasted for 36 hours and they shot that down. Speaking of Oklahoma, the production shut down so the cast and crew could pitch in and help after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Also in case you want to talk about stormy weather, the crew wanted to kill Jan de Bont. The camera crew l– ed by Don Burgess — said De Bont “didn’t know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he’d want to shoot in the other direction right away and we’d have to move everything and he’d get angry that we took too long … and it was always everybody else’s fault, never his.” Five weeks into filming, the director knocked over a camera assistant who missed a cue and Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They agreed to stay Jack N. Green and his crew took over. Sadly, Green was injured when a house rigged to collapse did so with him inside it before filming started. He injured his head and back, which led to de Bont being director of photography for the last two days of the movie.

This movie was filled with injuries, as Hunt had a door hit her in the head and she and Paxton both had their retinas burned because of how intense the lights were during the inside the truck scenes.

Both the soundtrack and the orchestral score featured Respect the Wind,” an instrumental composed and performed for the film by Alex and Eddie Van Halen. Again, speaking of storms, another song — “Humans Being” — was a big mess for the band Van Halen. Lead singer Sammy Hagar didn’t want to be working as his wife Kari was pregnant and they wanted to naturally deliver the child in Hawaii. He also believed that the band should rest up after touring as Eddie had avascular necrosis, which had him on a cane and painkillers, and Alex was in a neck brace.  Their manager Ray Danniels told them they’d get rich off the song, as if they needed more money.

As they wrote the song, Alex called de Bont and asked him how closely he wanted the lyrics to be to the movie. de Bont said, “Oh, please don’t write about tornadoes. I don’t want this to be a narrative for the movie.” Hagar asked for some footage and the lyrics he wrote were “Sky turning black/knuckles turning white/headed for the suck zone.” Yes, he started the song not supposed to be about tornadoes by writing about tornadoes.

As Eddie told Guitar World, “And so what does Sammy come back with? “Sky is turning black, knuckles turning white, headed for the hot zone.” It was total tornado stuff! Not only did Alex tell him not to do that, but the director of the fucking movie told him, “Do not write about tornadoes.’””

Hagar claimed de Bont loved a demo he recorded in Hawaii and provided “300 pages of technical weather terms that tornado chasers use” that had the word “suck zone” in it. He also explained to Livewire, “The new manager that came in wanted us to do a greatest-hits record with both Dave’s era and my era with two new songs from me and, not to my knowledge at the time, two more songs from Dave. We ended up using one of them for Twister, and that was the end of the band. I wanted to do a whole record. I didn’t want to do a greatest hit record. I didn’t think Van Halen was there yet.”

Six weeks after the premiere of the movie, Hagar was out of Van Halen, replaced by David Lee Roth, who was soon replaced by Gary Cherone.

I love that this movie was so loud and had a bass-heavy sound that destroyed the speakers in theaters everywhere. A tornado hit a drive-in theater in Thorold, Ontario, on May 20, 1996, damaging a screen that was due to play this movie.

We don’t get many tornadoes in Pittsburgh but one of the few took out my childhood drive-in, the Spotlight 88, and I have hated tornadoes forever because of that.

April 17: Did You Get It? — A bug movie.

The Drifting Classroom is based on a horror manga series written and illustrated by Kazuo Umezu, who also had his work turned into the movies The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch and Tamami: The Baby’s Curse and the TV series Umezu Kazuo: Kyôfu gekijô. The series was originally serialized in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from 1972 to 1974 and is about a school building that has been mysteriously transported through time to a post-apocalyptic future.

Directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (who not only directed House, he was also the man who made the Charles Bronson Mandom commericial) with a cast of untrained actors who were actual students at the Kobe International School, this film takes the sprawling story of the manga and tries to turn it into a condensed film. It avoids one of the major points of the original story as the adults almost all go mad and literally go to war with the young children who have to fight back.

I also have no idea why they shot this in English with Japanese subtitles instead of just making it in the native language. It isn’t like there was a huge crowd in the U.S. dying to see an adaption of a manga made two decades before outside of some hardcores. Maybe they thought that Troy Donahue was still a big deal?

As if it were bad enough that Sho and the other students have traveled through a time slip, this end of the world situation also has monstrous cockroaches that go wild and attack the school, killing many of the children. Yes, a movie that holds back nothing while also having song and dance numbers every few moments. As you can imagine, I’m fascinated by this film.

There’s also a friendly little alien that feels badly that the children have no water to wash their faces, so he urinates in their faces. Where else are you going to see that? Or a child ride a tricycle into the next reality? I’m not saying this is great, but it’s weird and sometimes that’s better than great.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

April 16: Get Me Another — A sequel.

I love Dario Argento. Love his movies. Have his book. A coffee mug from his shop Profundo Russo is in my office. I’ve watched all of his films so many times I can act them out without a script.

But man, Mother of Tears.

Also known as La Terza (The Third Mother); Mater Lachrymarum, The Third Mother and Mother of Tears: The Third Mother, this is the third movie in the cycle of The Three Mothers. The Three Mothers come from “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow”, a section of Thomas de Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. Just as there are three Fates and Graces, there are also three Sorrows: Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs) and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness).

Starting with Suspiria and continuing with Inferno, these are the stories of the three ancient witches who are close to ruling our world. At the beginning of the 11th century, they started of witchcraft as they rose from the Black Sea, making their way across countries, making money and gaining power as they kill everyone around them.

In the late 19th century, the Three Mothers had E. Varelli, an Italian architect based in London, design and construct three buildings for them to conduct their magic. The architect learned too late that they were evil and the places he made have become so corrupted by their evil that the very land around them is cursed.

The first of the mothers is Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, the Black Queen Helena Markos of Suspiria. After writing a series of books on the dark occult arts, Markos started the Tanz Akademie outside the Black Forest. As her power and wealth increased, the locals began to suspect her, so she faked her own death in a fire and passed control to the dance school to her greatest student, who was also Helena Markos.

The second mother is Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, is the youngest and cruelest of the Three Mothers and the main antagonist in Inferno. Her home is in New York City where she keeps E. Varelli as her slave.

This brings us to The Mother of Tears, as the other two Mothers have died as their homes burned. Before Suspiria, Elisa Mandy (Daria Nicolodi) battles Markos, who killed her and her husband. This left Mater Suspiriorum “a shell of her former self.” This movie is about Elisa’s daughter Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) and her battles with Mater Lachrymarum in Rome.

Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, Palazzo Varelli.is the most beautiful and powerful of the Three Mothers. We first saw her in Inferno as she attempted to use her magic on Mark Elliot as he studied music in Rome.

Directed and written by Dario Argento (along with Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch), this begins with the Catholic Church finding a magical runic that increases the powers of Mater Lachrymarum. It is sent to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, where Sarah (Asia Argento) and her boyfriend Michael Pierce (Adam James) work. Sarah discovers the tunic, along with Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) when they are attacked by the followers of the Third Mother. Sarah only survives thanks to a voice in her head.

Mass suicides, murder and insanity take over Rome, as Michael is killed, his son is eaten by witches and the coven plans on doing the same to Sarah. After being followed by Detective Enzo Marchi (Cristian Solimeno), Sarah learns that she has power and the guidance of her mother, which helps her to bring the entire plan and building down on the final of the Three Mothers.

Why did this movie take so long to be made? In 1984, Nicolodi claimed that she are Argento had written a script. That script was not used and neither was a 2004 script that Dario wrote. When the movie was finally made, its distributor, Medusa Film, asked for the film’s sex and violence to be edited.

Critics were not kind — they never are to Argento — and he said, “…the critics don’t understand very well. But critics are not important – absolutely not important. Because now audiences don’t believe anymore in critics. Many years ago critics wrote long articles about films. Now in seven lines they are finished: ‘The story is this. The actor is this. The color is good.””

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this movie. Sure, it goes for it and goes even further. But nearly everything Argento has made since, well, forever feels like it doesn’t have his heart in it. It doesn’t mean that I always hate what I watch but it makes me sad. The inventive camera work, the shock of what will happen next, the look and feel are gone, replaced by something else. As to whether or not that’s good, well…it’s different. It’s something I think about all the time.

To be honest, I kind of prefer Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat, which is an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno about a director making his own sequel to those movies and being cursed by the actual witches. It’s also a total mess but it feels like Cozzi is in love with making it which is what I look for when I need to see something go off the rails.

You can watch this on Tubi.

April 15: Slasher — A slasher without any sequels.

Directed, co-written (with Inserts director and writer and Mahogany writer John Byrum and Marsha Sheiness) and produced by Michael Walters — his only movie — Have a Nice Weekend is an early slasher that attempts to be ripped from the headlines as it starts with Chris coming home from Vietnam, burning his uniform and inviting his entire family to meet at their summer home.

Father Paul (Michael Miller), mother Laura (Nikki Counselman), sister Muffy (Patricia Joyce), her friend Ellen (Colette Bablon) and football coach and handyman Frank head off to the island, which seemingly has only two other people living there, Donald and Joan Crab (Peter Dompe and Valerie Shepherd). They have a strange meal where Paul looks at a butcher knife to carve the roast like it’s a sexual object and Chris flips out and smashes a radio that dares to speak of the war.

Is it a surprise that Paul is dead the next day, found in the rose bushes his wife was enraged about and stabbed by the same butcher knife he almost came over? Found by Donald and Ellen, now everyone becomes a suspect.  And the killing isn’t done yet, as there’s a garden hoe and a hook to be used.

That said, this feels like a TV movie that no one wants to watch and nobody wants to act in. I do love a sleepy movie, however, and I also adore one that has an ending where it seems like no one knows who did the murders and then someone is like, “We need an epilogue” and it still makes less than any reasonable sense.

Also: Chris gets killed, mom is banging it out with the gardener football coach and Muffy once sunk her fingernails into another girl’s face. It could be anybody. Or it could be someone no one knows who just so happened to head to this island to kill. Also also: Everyone hates everybody. Even the boat captain who takes them to their vacation home yells at everyone, the phones have all been cut off for the season (how is that a thing?) and nobody wants to be around anyone. In no way is this like what Barry Manilow sang, “Time in New England took me away to long rocky beaches you by the bay.”

This weekend in New England will be the death of these people.

If you’ve watched every slasher there is, well, you can watch this one too. I may be talking to myself.

That said, it has one great line: “Making a sandwich is a one man job!”

You can watch this on YouTube.

April 14: Don’t Go Back to Amityville — An Amityville movie official or otherwise. Here’s a list.

Director, writer and star Michael Stone has had enough of Amityville movies.

He said, “Now because Amityville is the name of a town and it really doesn’t exist beyond this house and those iconic windows, it really can’t be a protected franchise like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. So what this ultimately shakes out to is I could fart on camera for an hour and a half and legally release it as Amityville: Gas Chamber. And nobody would have any rights to sue me. If I wanted to actually make something about the Lutz or Defeo family not so much, but if you just want to make a movie on the cheap and attach a famous name to it, Amityville is a good one to do.”

This movie is the result of a joke that spiraled out of control. Amityville: Gas Chamber started as a concept for a 5-10 minute long video on my channel. However, every step of the way was met with “Why not?” Make it a full-length run-time? “Why not?” Give it proper artwork? “Why not?” Seek distribution methods? “Why not?” Now, here we are.”

It also has the best IMDB fact: “No dialogue is spoken in this film. Which means every time you aren’t talking, you’re quoting Amityville Gas Chamber.”

This is a movie where a man sits and reads The Amityville Horror while occasionally farting.

It also has occasional subtitles that start with “This is it. This is the movie. I’ll be periodically putting some trivia about Amityville here. But this is the movie.”

It also claims that this movie is better than Amityville Mt. Misery Road. 

I agree.

It’s a one note joke and that note is a brown one.

Actually, as someone who has made it through more than fifty Amityville movies, this is not the worst I’ve seen. That may speak to some of the horrors that I have endured as I struggle through the curse that I have to watch every single movie that has that name in the title and then some.

You can watch this on YouTube.