Category Archives: Movie reviews

Pagan Invasion: Halloween Trick or Treat (1991)

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Did I watch all 13 of these?

You know I did.

Let’s concentrate on perhaps the best of this series, Pagan Invasion: Halloween Trick or Treat.

Let’s go to the sell copy: “Traces the pagan origins and history of Halloween. The Pagan Occult calendar of Druids, Witches, Pagans and Satanists marks Halloween as one of their highest holy days. The occult rituals seen in this video are real and not re-enactments. All the seemingly innocent symbolism of Halloween – black cats, snakes, broomsticks, bonfires, trick or treat…”

This feels dungeon synth, with an early computer-generated castle looming over everyone, which gives me a very warm feeling while also giving me the kind of chill I got from living through the Satanic Panic. This early green-screen technology makes the hosts look like they are broadcasting from a haunted screensaver.

This starts at a video sales convention, and we see some of the most wonderful horror movies of the 80s as the hosts clutch pearls, all before moving to meeting former Satanist Glenn Hobbs, who tells us about how he used to kill infants day and night. Wait, is that Hal Lindsay? It is, and he found a pentagram and a diaper in a shack, so there had to be more baby deaths. Seeing the author of The Late Great Planet Earth poking around a shack with a clean diaper? The peak of investigative journalism.

Like all Christian scare films, this liberally takes from Satanis, because where else are you going to get all that Anton LaVey interview b-roll? 

To understand Pagan Invasion, you have to understand the power couple of the 1980s counter-cult movement: Caryl Matrisciana and Chuck Smith. They weren’t just hosts; they were the architects of a very specific brand of California Charismatic paranoia. Caryl grew up in India, allowing herself to be marketed as someone who had firsthand experience with the darkness of Eastern mysticism. Chuck was a massive figure in American evangelicalism; he founded the Calvary Chapel movement and was a key player in the Jesus People movement of the late 60s. 

You can watch this on YouTube.

Scarlet Warning 666 (1974)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

I have no idea what I just watched. I do not know what this movie is about despite having watched its London premiere with about 20 other people at The Nickel Cinema in Clerkenwell.

Scarlet Warning 666 is the concept of “random” fully realized on celluloid. Specifically, random in the service of ego. The ego of one Palmer Rockey. The man who performed 7 roles on screen and 47 behind the camera. He also composed and sung all the songs on the soundtrack. One song made me laugh so hard I cried.

In preparation for an art history side-by-side slide exam on Edo period paintings, my professor once said, “If you can’t remember the facts about any of the images, just write about what you see.” This is the only way to write about this film.  I will list what I saw and heard. From here on. I will refer to Palmer Rockey as PR.

Here goes nothing:

  • Several parking lots (one shot lasts only a few frames)
  • PR in a parking lot playing finger guns
  • Ladies in bikinis
  • PR running through a cemetery to his own funk song
  • PR running through a corridor to his own disco song
  • PR shadow boxing and pretending to jump rope to his own funk song
  • PR having a long chat with his St. Bernard puppy, Bernie
  • PR making out with a lady in a bikini to his own love song
  • PR making out and tenderly dry humping a different lady in a tight red shirt
  • PR in a yellow shirt with a black stripe down the front
  • PR with a yellow shirt with a black striped collar
  • PR in a red shirt with a white star on the collar and cowboy hat
  • PR shirtless with upsetting shorts (three times)
  • PR dancing to his own disco song
  • PR woofing down green grapes with a copy of his album prominently on display
  • PR dressed as a hooded scarlet guard
  • PR posing for the camera
  • PR rolling around with a fat guy
  • Fake blood on a baby doll
  • A native America shaker thingy
  • A hand with a flashlight waving the light around onto a plastic skull
  • PR with fake blood on naked, fish belly white back
  • More smash cuts than I could count
  • PR in the “supernatural room” doing some sort of ritual while bikini ladies dance in a circle to bad foley and PR’s songs
  • An actor (Not PR) in a purple outfit with a white belt hanging out behind a bush in a park for DAYS
  • A bunch of feathers dyed and clumped together
  • A black and white sequence in a locker room about PR and his buddy in med school
  • A woman whose twin sister has died dancing around a white coffin.
  • 4 shots of the pavement where the camera man dropped the camera
  • A weird narration (sometimes in falsetto) by PR trying to explain to the audience what the movie is about and why he made certain “genius” and “anti-establishment” aesthetic decisions.
  • An actor (Not PR) reading from his script – twice
  • PR dousing his pits with lime juice from a plastic lime
  • More PR running

Basically, the movie is all Palmer Rockey all the time.

The End.

Thank you, Grindhouse Releasing.

See it.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Loose Cannon (2023)

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Brent and Blake Cousins are back. Directed and written by Brett and starring Blake, this takes the guys years forward from Slaughter Day to make a new SOV-inspired film in which a cop uncovers a conspiracy to off the leader of the U.S.A. Well, it was shot in the 90s and finished a few years ago and it goes much deeper than that description, as this liquid can turn normal people into terrorists.

The Cousins have not chilled with age, doing wild stunts and crazy camera angles all over again, while using modern FX, supers and dubbing to make it seem like this all goes together when it totally doesn’t. The Vice President wants the President dead, but like an Andy Sidaris movie, this never leaves Hawaii. Why should it? You have 50 minutes? Then you’re ready for Brent and Blake to take you on another ride.

Because the footage sat in a vault for decades, the movie acts as a bizarre temporal rift. You have the brothers as their younger, stunt-crazy selves, but the post-production feels like it was handled by someone who just discovered every filter in Adobe After Effects. I will always be here for that.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Night of the Flesh Eaters (2008)

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The title of this comes from one of the original Night of the Living Dead titles. That shows where the heart of this film is. It’s the story of a man (James Lemire) who wants to be with the wife (Gia Franzia) of a rich man (David Rosenhaus), who has learned that his beloved spouse has been cheating on him. He hires a killer to wipe them out, but that killer turns out to be our hero, who is also an archaeologist, folklorist, and college professor. It’s a resume that makes Indiana Jones look underachieving. 

What starts as a standard noir betrayal with a jealous husband, a cheating wife, and a hitman with a heart of gold quickly takes a hard left turn into supernatural insanity. Our hero has brought his enemy to a cursed land where Native American dwarf zombies and witch doctors live.

It could happen.

Directed and written by J.R. McGarrity, who also plays one of those evil shamans, this is quick, fun and cheap. But that doesn’t mean it’s without charm. In Germany, this had an even better title, Demon Forest – Sie werden Euch fressen (Demon Forest – They Will Eat You).

There’s also a woman in her bra and panties running around, played by Jessica Alexandra Green. Why is she in the woods almost naked? One would think foreign investors paid for this, but with a budget this low, why are we quibbling? 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Disgusting Spaceworms Eat Everyone (1989)

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A one-and-done SOV by George Keller, this one lives up to the promise of its title: worms from space come to Earth and, well, devour folks. No more, no less.

Or maybe more. This is a noir movie masquerading as SOV, a film where, instead of a black-and-white, rainy, smoky night, we’re seeing downtown LA in VHS-scanline, bright-sun quality, as synth tunes bleat over us. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing cosmic horror occur in a mundane, over-exposed apartment lit only by a sliding glass door. It feels less like a movie and more like a crime scene video captured by a neighbor who happened to have a Panasonic Camcorder. For example, a camcorder saving for posterity mountains of coke getting devoured by space grossness and interstellar maggots that can eat your flesh down to the bone in just moments.

Michael Sonye, who is also Dukey Flyswatter, was in tons of aberrant cinema. The Death Bed: The Bed That Eats remake, Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force, The Phantom Empire…the guy was the Imp’s voice in Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama! He also played Irving Klaw in Bettie Page: Dark Angel and was the Clitmaster in both Tales from the Clit movies. But wait — there’s more. He wrote Frozen Scream, Star Slammer, Commando Squad, Blood Diner, Cold Steel and Out on Bail. And he did the music for The Dead Hate the Living!, Cyclone and Nightmare Sisters and was in the Los Angeles glam-punk scene with his band, Haunted Garage.

There’s an actress named Tequilla Mockingbird. I really don’t know how much more this movie could give us.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Trash Humpers (2009)

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The Trash Humpers are running through the streets of Nashville, causing chaos everywhere they go, which mostly means making people eat pancakes covered in soap, choking out baby dolls with plastic bags and killing a poet. They’re also all mostly old men or men wearing old man masks. They are very dada; nothing means anything. Momma (Rachel Korine), the only female member, kidnaps a child to add some meaning to her life, while the man recording all of this, Hervé (Harmony Korine), at least tries to explain to the viewer the ethos of the group.

One night, as he looked at trash cans in the moonlight, Korine remembered a gang of old men peeping toms who would come out at night, referring to them as “the neighborhood boogeymen who worked at Krispy Kreme and would wrap themselves in shrubbery, cover themselves with dirt, and peep through the windows of other neighbors.” Using video — yes, SOV — made the images softer and less sharp, which he was looking for. It was even edited on two VCRs.

The tracking errors and static make the viewer feel like a voyeur watching something they aren’t supposed to see. A snuff film of human dignity, I guess. This feels like the kind of movies we filmed as kids and then realized we’d get arrested if anyone found them.

I’d like to say that when the Trash Humpers scream “Make it, make it don’t fake it!” or cackle while smashing televisions, they aren’t protesting society; they are simply existing outside of it. They’re celerating the discarded: people, formats (VHS) and things. Did I go too A24 with this? Korine said, “I wanted to make a film that looked like it had been found in a bag of trash on the side of the road, or buried in a basement.” 

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

The Witch’s Sabbath (2005)

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Why yes, I am trying to watch every Jeff Leroy movie.

A coven of witches open a sexy strip club called the Sin and Skin.

That would be enough for some filmmakers.

But no, here Leroy adds the wrinkle that they must kill 666 men by Halloween so that their dark lord can rise and they can maintain their power.

Imagine, if you will, that all these fratboys show up to get laid and just end up dead. I am all for that, especially when you have a cast of actresses that includes Christine Cowden, the sadly deceased Syn DeVil, Gina Valona, adult actress Lisa Sparxxx, April Betts and Annmarie Lynn Gracey. I could do without seeing Ron Jeremy as a Bible salesman, but what can you do?

This could have lost a few minutes of running time, but maybe I was pausing to see some of the actresses more clearly. Yeah, that’s it.

Leroy takes a premise that could have been a 20-minute short and stretches it into a neon-soaked odyssey of digital gore and high-heeled havoc. It’s bloated, but you don’t watch a Leroy film for tight editing; you watch it to see how many CGI explosions he can fit into a scene with a coven of scream queens.

You can watch this on Tubi.

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Eat Your Heart Out (2008)

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New York City is a concrete jungle where the neon lights don’t reach the shadows and the shadows have teeth. Something is stalking the midnight streets, leaving a trail of shredded suits and empty veins behind. The NYPD is baffled, the morgues are overflowing, and the local news is calling it a massacre.

The victims? All are looking for a little company. Want to party?

In this world, we have Jeffrey (Jack Dillon), a nobody in a city of millions. He’s a sad sack with a dead-end job and a heart full of dusty dreams who has gone incel to the point that he spends money on lovemaking instead of dating. But then he falls in love with Pandora (Melissa Bacelar), a sex worker who finally does pay attention to him, at least when she isn’t luring other men to their deaths, seemingly lulling them into unconsciousness while she chomps big bites right out of their skin. 

Also known as Skinned Alive, this was directed by James Adam Tucker and written by Joshua Nelson. This is an interesting take not just on relationships, but on women, as we wonder whether Pandora is a vampire, a cannibal, a zombie, or just a normal person with a taste for earth pig.

Jeffrey represents a specific brand of modern isolation. He isn’t just lonely; he’s hollow. By bypassing the work of dating for the transaction of sex, he’s already treating human connection as a commodity. Pandora is his perfect mirror. She takes people’s consumption literally. While Jeffrey wants to consume her time and body for emotional validation, she wants to consume his literal vitality.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Daughter: I, a Woman Part III (1970)

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Directed by Mac Ahlberg and written by Peer Guldbrandsen, this film promises, “NOW the sexual revolution is complete.”

We start in another dimension, as an upside-down woman writhes, and then we get an erotic snake scene, and part of me was like, “Yes, this is what I was looking for,” all before such an inconvenience as a plot rears its ugly head.

Siv (Gun Falk) is dtf as the kids say, and I don’t mean Danish Talking to Fjords. Her daughter, Birthe (Inger Sundh), is shocked, just absolutely gobsmacked by her mom’s antics, such as the toys she’s been gifted by Dr. Leo Smith (Klaus Pagh), which pushes her between the thighs of erotic dancer Lisa (Ellen Faison) and then Lisa’s brother Stephen (Tom Scott).

Come for the sex, try not to leave for the endless hippies smoking pot and fighting bikers scenes.

Ahlberg is still a cinematographer to this day, working on Full Moon movies, as well as being behind the camera for films like Innocent Blood, Striking Distance, the first three House movies and Re-Animator. He also directed Nana, Fanny Hill, Around the World with Fanny Hill and the other two movies in this series.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Human Tornado (1976)

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After coming off yet another successful comedy tour, Dolemite (Rudy Ray Moore, a cultural force) has a party at his mansion that soon gets gate-crashed by the fuzz. They’re racist, they’re angry, they’re reactionary: they’re cops. They also want to kill Dolemite for sleeping with the sheriff’s wife, so they shoot her just in time for him to kill a deputy. He did not shoot the sheriff, so to speak.

The story changes up to have Dolemite head out to save Queen Bee (Lady Reed) from a pimp named Cavaletti (Herb Graham), all while the sheriff (J.B. Baron) pins the murder of his wife on our hero.

Like many of Moore’s films, this was directed by Cliff Roquemore and written by Jerry Jones, Moore and Jimmy Lynch, who is Mr. Motion in the film. A young Ernie Hudson appears, as does the Bronson Cave, the same place Batman lives. Watch this and know: no permits were necessary. Rudy Ray Moore famously operated on Dolemite Time, which meant filming until the cops showed up or the money ran out.

Like a deranged Tom Jones, scenes of male-on-female oral sex are intercut with fried chicken eating, as well as moments when Dolemite services a woman so effectively that the entire house falls down around the bed. Dolemite breaks the fourth wall, pausing and rewinding the action, and there are evil female torturers with witch makeup. This feels like the product of the stickiest of the icky, and I would have it no other way.

There’s an anachronistic moment where Dolemite screams at an effeminate man, played by Doug Senior, who appeared on our live stream this weekend. Doug may not enjoy this part, as it’s really homophobic, but he had great things to say about Dolemite, who he said was soft spoken and kind when the cameras were off, but barking and wild when he needed to be.

This scene is part of the hyper-masculine, often reactionary tropes found in 1970s street comedy. However, the contrast between Moore’s onscreen persona and his off-screen kindness is a well-documented part of his legacy. He was a savvy businessman who played a character to empower a specific demographic, even if that character carried the prejudices of its time.

Made for $150,000, this made back $4.5 million. Talk about return on investment.