Author Marie Adams keeps having visions of nuns and werewolves attacking her from a fire. It seems that the same imagination that helps her write is also driving her to madness. Her husband takes her moving all the way to madness, to Drago, where a small cottage will be the place that she plans on resting and relaxing away all the terror that she is going through. That would work if she didn’t keep hearing howling in the woods.
Much like the first film, her man can’t stay faithful. The small town is also rife with werewolves, ghosts and visions of the nun. The whole thing ends in a burning church, and yes, that same werewolf leaps through the flames.
Well, if anything, this is the only werewolf movie I’ve seen that has a theme song by the lead singer of the Moody Blues. So there’s that.
That said, this is a more faithful version of the book than The Howling. Yet it’s not as good a movie. Writer and co-producer of the film, Clive Turner, was originally going to direct, but when the financiers pulled out, he had to get Hough on board.
That’s one story. The other is the one that Hough told Fangoria. The script was written by someone named Freddie Rowe and he would also receive notes and messages from him, as well as additional pages of the script, while making the movie. However, when the director asked for Rowe’s contact information, he was never given it, leading him to suspect Rowe of actually being Clive Turner, who really wanted to be the director of the movie. Seeing as how Rowe only wrote one other movie — Howling V: The Rebirth, which Turner also wrote — that may or may not be true.
Making that story sound even more true is the fact that Turner recut and re-edited the film, adding scenes like the one where the evil werewolf queen Eleanor went bobbing for hot dogs with Marie’s husband.
You can watch this for yourself on Tubi and try and make better sense of it than I did.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling III was on USA Up All Night on January 19, 1991 and March 6, 1998.
This is the last Howling movie to play in U.S. theaters. Gary Brandner, author of the Howling novels, approved director Philippe Mora’s purchase of the rights to his novels. The credits even claim that this is based on his book The Howling III: Echoes. However, in truth, it has a different setting and primarily features werewolves as sympathetic characters.
Professor Harry Beckmeyer is an Australian anthropologist who has found footage of aborigines sacrificing a deer in 19Aboriginal people. Hearing that a wolf-like wolf has killed a man in Siberia, he tries — and fails — to warn the President of the U.S. about the potential of lycan assaults.
Meanwhile, an abused girl who just might so happen to be a werewolf is running away from home. Her name is Jerboa, and after meeting a young American named Donny Martin, she gets a role in the horror film, Shape Shifters Part 8. She gets into horror movies, and after watching a werewolf film with Donny, she reveals that transformations don’t happen that way. He asks her how she knows, she goes full furry beast, and he responds as we all would, by engaging her in some interspecies aardvarking.
As the movie wraps, strobe lights cause Jerboa to transform. She runs into the night and is hit by a car. When the doctors try to save her, they notice that she is with child and has a marsupial-like pouch on her belly. Holy cow, this movie! I can’t believe that I watched that, much less typed it out for you to read.
There’s also a Russian ballerina that happens to be a werewolf, because I guess if you bark at the moon you have a re,allsuppose,derful artistic abilitie,s as a secondary mutation.
Suffice to say that you should stick with this movie, if only to see Dame Edna out of drag as Barry Humphries and a pack of werewolves go wild at the cheapest looking Academy Awards outside of The Lonely Lady.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Howling IIwas on USA Up All Night on April 23, 1994, April 13, 1996 and March 28, 1997.
Even though Gary Brandner, author of The Howling novels, co-wrote the screenplay to this movie, it has nothing to do with his 1979 novel The Howling II, much less the original The Howling. It tries, but this movie is just too weird to fully close the loop.
There’s never been another werewolf movie like this one. Whether that is positive or negative all depends on how much you like werewolves having sex.
Ben White (Reb Brown, who is in a little movie called Yor Hunter from the Future that I could tell you about for many days) is dealing with the death of his sister Karen White, who just so happens to be the heroine of the first of these movies. He joins up with Jenny (Annie McEnroe, who was in Snowbeast and Battletruck) and the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee, who apologized to Joe Dante for making this movie) to battle werewolves.
This brings them on a journey to Transylvania and a battle against Stirba (Sybil Danning!), the queen of the werewolves, who is joined by Mariana (Marsha Hunt, who the song “Brown Sugar” is about) and Erle (Ferdy Mayne, who is in another film I can discuss for days and days, Night Train to Terror).
What follows is complete lunacy: werewolf witchcraft, lycan orgies, Sybil Danning repeatedly ripping off her top (the same shot repeated again and again to no complaint), dwarves, priests being killed and punk rock from the band Babel.
Director Philippe Mora actually made some pretty good films, like Mad Dog Morgan, The Beast Within and The Return of Captain Invincible. I’m insane and love this movie, so I will include it in my list of his good ones.
Finally, let’s talk about another subject I can hold court on: Christopher Lee. Mora didn’t know that Sir Lee was a war hero in Czechoslovakia, where this was filmed. Actually, no one did, because he wasn’t allowed to talk about his intelligence work during World War II. When he showed up for filming, he was greeted with a hero’s welcome, as he had killed a top Nazi official named Reinhard Heydrich. In fact, before he became an actor, Lee remained a Nazi hunter for several years.
I also love that this movie was sent the wrong costumes by 20th Century Fox. Instead of wolf suits, they were sent the monkey suits from Planet of the Apes. Lee tried to help fix this by ad-libbing, “The process of evolution is reversed.”
Want to know more about The Howling movies? Check out this article.
Sept 8-14 Sketchy Comedy Week: “…plotless satires, many of which were only excuses for drug humor or gratuitous nudity sprinkled with the cheapest of gags. The typical form was a channel-changing structure, which would go from one sketch to the next under the premise that this was just another night at home watching the old boob tube. The medium is the message, baby!”
Directed by Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt (This Is Elvis) and written by Dana Olsen (The ‘Burbs, Wacko, Going Berserk), It Came from Hollywood came along at a significant time for me. I’d been watching SNL and SCTV, so seeing so many of my favorite comedy people in one film — Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech and Chong, and Gilda Radner — all in one movie was a huge deal to me. I’d also started reading The Golden Turkey Awards at the library that my uncle was in charge of, and in 1982, it was impossible to know when you could see some of the films in it. This movie, which was on HBO all the time, gave me a chance to see clips of them and discover that they were real.
Directors and executive producers Andrew Solt and Malcolm Leo spent about five months researching and collecting movie clips from about 500 feature films. They then decided to expand their search beyond the 75 titles that the Paramount Pictures studio, the film project’s production house, had licensed for the documentary. However, this meant that it would never be released on home media, as licensing it would be too difficult.
Since I first saw this, I’ve learned that making fun of films isn’t the right way to enjoy them. But for a ten-year-old version of me, I got to see Ed Wood Jr. movies for the first time and couldn’t wait to see even more.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Alien Nationwas on USA Up All Night on July 11, 1997.
Rockne O’Bannon created Farscape, seaQuest DSV, Defiance, Cult and the movie (and later TV series) Alien Nation. It was a spec script sent to Gale Anne Hurd, and she saw a lot of opportunity. What is the difference between other science fiction films? Herd explained, “We wanted the aliens to be more like a different ethnic race than like lizard people, … We didn’t want our audiences thinking, ‘Gee, look how different these aliens are.” Rather, after about five minutes, we wanted the audience to accept them as different from us, but not so different that no one would buy the storyline. We wanted the aliens to be characters–not creatures.”
In 1988, 300,000 enslaved aliens known as Newcomerslandedd in the Mojave Desert. Within three years, they’re settled in Los Angeles and some, like Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), become cops. His partner, Detective Matthew Sykes (James Caan) wants nothing to do with him, as he doesn’t trust the aliens once his partner is shot and killed in a robbery by several of them.
A case involving the wealthy newcomer businessman William Harcourt (Terence Stamp) and his henchman, Rudyard Kipling (Kevyn Major Howard, brings them together. There’s also a drug called Jabroka that can transform Newcomers into an even more dangerous form, and keeping it off the streets could be the difference between the two races existing as one.
This led to a 22-episode TV show, five TV movies, comic books and novels, all of which advanced the story.
Director Graham Baker also directed the last Omen movie.
You know who didn’t like this movie?
James Caan.
He told the AV Club, when asked about this movie:
James Caan: Why the f****…Why would you bring up that?
Will Harris: Many people actually like the film. I do, for one.
Caan: Yeah, well, I don’t know. I don’t have too many…I mean, I loved Mandy Patinkin. Mandy was a riot. But…I don’t know. It was a lot of silly stuff, creatively. And we had this English director whom I wasn’t really that fond of. I mean, nice guy, but…it was just one of those things where, you know, you don’t quit, you get through it. It certainly wasn’t one of…I wouldn’t write it down as one of my favorite movies. But it was pretty popular.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Awakening was on USA Up All Night on June 30, 1990.
Based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars — which was also filmed as an episode of Mystery and Imagination as “The Curse of the Mummy,” Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and the 90s movie Bram Stoker’s The Mummy — this movie places Matthew Corbeck (Charlton Heston), his pregnant wife Anne (Jill Townsend) and his assistant Jane Turner (Susannah York) in Egypt searching for the tomb of Queen Kara. One could argue that the most exploring Matthew is doing is between the thighs of Jane, but there you go.
When you see a sign that says “Do Not Approach the Nameless One Lest Your Soul Be Withered,” you may want to turn back. Nope, Matthew goes in hard — again, much like with his assistant — while his wife goes into labor. She’s dropped off at a hospital so he can get back to digging, and their stillborn child comes back to life once he unearths and opens a sarcophagus.
Eighteen years later and that daughter, Margaret (Stephanie Zimbalist) is looking for her father, who is now married to Jane and still obsessed with the mummy that he found. It’s being destroyed by bacteria, so he gets it sent to England so that he can save it. Of course, the mummy queen wants to be reincarnated inside his daughter, who starts to believe that she really is Queen Kara.
Directed by Mike Newell (who went on to direct Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco) and written by Clive Exton, Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, The Awakening is a big dumb mess. It was recut by Monte Hellman after Newell lost final cut. The best thing I can say is that this was shot in Egypt with actual locations.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Snowballingwas on USA Up All Night on June 7 and 8, 1991 and January 17 and August 8, 1992.
Snowballing may seem like a teen sex comedy — a Lemon Popsicle, if you will — but instead of being like Hot Dog…The Movie or Ski School, this feels closer to an American-International beach comedy than a sex hijinks movie.
It was directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., the same man who made Silent Night, Deadly Night. More importantly, he was best known for creating the American book and television series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and founding Sunn Classic with Rayland Jensen and Patrick Frawley. You might expect that this would mean that this movie would have more ribald elements. Nope.
Filmed in Park City, Utah, this sat on the shelf for four years before the VHS boom demanded a supply to meet the demand for video rentals. This also had a variety of titles, including Smooth Moves, Snow Job and, perhaps most generically, Winter Vacation.
The owner of the ski resort, Tolson (Bob Hastings, the animated voice of Commissioner Gordon), and Sheriff Gilliam (Bill Zuckert) have been scamming young skiers for years, overcharging them for their rooms for the big downhill race.
Andy (P. R. Paul, Neon Maniacs), Dan (Michael Sharrett, Deadly Friend) and Al (Steven Tash, the guy who can’t get the ESP quiz right from Bill Murray in Ghostbusters) are three of those young athletes, trying to pick up the ladies like Karen (Mary Beth McDonough, Mortuary), Cheryl (Jill Carroll, Psycho II), Bonnie (Bonnie Hellman, a hitchhiker in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) and Cheryl (Tara Buckman, the main reason I watched this). Trying to keep them out of trouble is their teacher, Roy Balaban, played by Alan Sues, who you may remember from Laugh-In. He plays a mincing character, but at least there’s one funny part where he puts on an Indiana Jones hat and is chased by a giant snowball.
This had three writers — David O’Malley and Thomas C. Chapman, who also worked on the Sunn-adjacent Hangar 18 and The Boogens, and Norman Hudis, who may have written plenty of cartoons and TV shows, but had the experience of writing Hot Resort, which probably helped here. He also wrote several of the Carry On movies, in case you wonder about the sense of humor in this film.
Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.
Ari Aster made two movies that generated a lot of hype: Hereditary and Midsommar. Like the two films I mentioned above, Beau Is Afraid is very much a movie being made by a creative who has that rare moment of being able to get anything they want and going wild.
Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix) hasn’t had the best of lives. His father died while making love to his mother (Patti LuPone), and he’s waited his whole life for Elaine (Parker Posey), whom he met once on a cruise ship. Now, he’s trapped in a crime-filled city, shoved out of his apartment, hit by a truck and stabbed by a serial killer. He’s saved by Grace (Amy Ryan) and Roger (Nathan Lane), but things fall to pieces, as they do throughout, as their daughter Toni (Kylie Rogers) tries to get him to drink paint, angry that he’s replaced her dead brother. She dies instead, and her mother sends a vet, Jeeves (Denis Ménochet), after him. Roger had promised to take Beau to his mom’s funeral, but now who knows? As it is, he’s lost in the woods, watching a play by The Orphans of the Forest, which he takes on as part of his real life; then Jeeves shows up and kills everyone.
He finally makes it home and gets to make love to Elaine, who dies, and then his mother appears, taking him to an attic filled with his twin brother and his father, a penis monster who kills Jeeves. Yes, I just wrote that. Beau tries to escape, and he finds out that he’s on trial. His mother has records of every visit to his therapist (Richard Cohen), and no matter how much he defends himself, his mother refuses to listen. His boat exploded, and he decided to give in, drowning. The end, as the audience leaves.
What does it mean? Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski said that Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life were all films that influenced this. There’s also a realization that Mona has controlled Beau’s life all along, and everyone, even Emily, was all his employees, paid enough for their family for years to be happy as long as they were in his life. It also feels like a piss take on the audience, who are expecting a great adventure and are given strange journeys through someone’s life that go nowhere.
Is it about anything? Does it have to be about anything in particular? Maybe it’s about ambition and what you can do when you can do just about any movie you want. It speaks to a big vision, so much grander than his past films, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
John Waters said, “A superlong, super-crazy, super-funny movie about one man’s mental breakdown with a cast better than Around the World in 80 Days’: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Parker Posey, Nathan Lane, and Amy Ryan. It’s a laugh-riot from hell you’ll never forget, even if you want to.”
Here’s a double-feature review of two genre-film–adjacent short films screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Ripe (Chín; Canada/Vietnam, 2025)
Official synopsis: A young woman must decide if she will enter into an arranged marriage in order to support her family of durian farmers — all while the land and the spirit realm weave a mysterious influence over her choice.
Writer/director Solara Thanh Bình Đặng blends superstition, economic realities, the possibility of romance, and a touch of the supernatural in her gothic-flavored short Ripe. The film has an aura rooted in both waking life and dreaminess, with a gorgeous retro-feel color palette beautifully captured by Cinematographer Chananun Chotrungroj. Hayley Ngọc Mai does wonderful work leading a solid ensemble cast. Đặng weaves a lyrical spell with Ripe and invests her short film with plenty of food for thought for viewers.
Screenshot
Marriaginalia (Canada, 2025):
Official synopsis: Marriaginalia is a surreal portrait of married life told across a day in three parts. A couple navigates life’s smaller ruptures — the world distorts, the body surprises — but their bond holds, serene and slightly off-kilter.
Described in press materials as a “grotesque comedic short,” you won’t get any argument from me about that description for writer/director Hannah Cheesman’s Marriaginalia. Kayla Lorette and Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll do an amusing job portraying a married couple having a highly unusual day, to say the least. Boasting body horror gags — the initial one will surely have some viewers’ stomachs churning — and some humorous wordplay, the three-and-a-half minute short boggles the mind as it elicits laughs.
Ripe and Marriaginaliascreen as part of Toronto International Film Festival 2025, which takes place from August 5–14.
The new Toxic Avenger remake/reboot isn’t just a good Troma movie within the Troma universe. It’s a good movie in any universe. Fans of films like Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive who have never seen a single Troma movie, let alone the original Toxie, can and will enjoy this film.
While the hype generated from an unrated release after sitting on the shelf for 2 years piqued my interest, it was the casting of Peter Dinklage that intrigued me the most going into this movie. He’s one of those great actors with an expressive face who can evoke an emotional response for an audience using only his eyebrows. A solid character actor in the vein of Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee who improved any project they appeared in. With the addition of Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood and Taylor Paige, we’ve got a solid, reliable troop of actors here who approach the material with a sincerity that brings heart to an otherwise the insanely-whacky-in-a-good-way script.
The plot is updated for modern audiences, removing nerdy Melvin and replacing him with our hero, Winston Gooze. A janitor barely getting by as a single father raising his stepson, Wade. Winston, who recently lost his wife to cancer, works for the evil giant health product company BTH, owned by mob-financed megalomaniac CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon). Winston and Wade live in St. Roma, a real shithole of a working-class town. A town where vets hold little old ladies’ cats hostage for their astronomical fees and BTH employees get the runaround from their insurance company.
Meanwhile, across town, J.J. and her partner steal BTH data with the intention of exposing BTH as the hucksters they are and tank their stock price. Winston and J.J. cross paths when Winston, now desperate for money to pay for his own recently diagnosed cancer treatment, attempts to steal money from the BTH vault.
A chase ensues, Winston is taken out by The Killer Nutz – a monster core band of BTH henchmen – and our new Toxic Avenger is born.
From this point forward in the film, the actor in the suit is Lisa G, who does a fine job with the physical elements of the role, while Dinklage lends his voice for the remainder of the picture’s running time. And what a wonderful time it is! Once Winston is Toxie, we get fights, mutations, rogue police officers firing into the air for no reason, declaring, “Fuck it. It’s a mob!”
We get Toxie interrupting a Killer Nutz performance in a park by singing Motorhead’s “Overkill”(a highlight for anyone who knows of the years-long friendship between Lemmy and Lloyd Kaufman).
The fight choreography is wonderfully over-the-top. Like a Merrie Melodies cartoon on drugs. While the costumes are mostly practical, the gore effects are largely rendered using CGI rather than old-school Karo syrup and silicone. I am at a loss as to how this film was denied an R rating, as AMC’s Walking Dead was more violent and nasty in tone than anything here. Could it be Toxie’s mutant penis? Big deal.
With a budget that likely cost one day of the catering on any Marvel or DC film, the CGI effects in this movie manage to feel more real than the scene in the latest Superman installment (a film I enjoyed) where he spins around and kills 25 bad guys with his heat vision all in one go. That scene felt overblown. When Winston swipes off someone’s head with his trusty toxic mop, the consequences are clear. Don’t fuck with this new Toxie.
This movie is likely to find a larger audience once it becomes available on all streaming platforms. I will be watching it again, not only because Cineverse is using the proceeds to pay off medical debt for people like Winston in the U.S., but because there were so many Troma Easter eggs (New Chem High) and off-screen dialogue gags that utilize the surround sound experience, that I missed a few laughing over them.
Many of the gags are topical, despite the film being completed in 2023. I especially enjoyed the scene where disgruntled thugs take over a burger place – angry over a logo change – the same week half of America lost their collective mind over Cracker Barrel doing the same.
For the big finale, Bob kidnaps Toxie and JJ. His “scientists” harvest Toxie’s blood, with the intention of recouping their profits by selling it as his latest “healthy” drink. When Bob’s mob backers show up to collect on his debt, Bob drinks the new concoction. His body rejects the serum, transforming him into a goat-like, clawed creature, along with his zombie-like personal assistant, Kissy, who gulps down the last few drops to join him.
I hated Bob’s assistant, Kissy, the most of any character in the movie. Because I’ve met her in real life. Multiple times in many places. A sycophant of the highest order just waiting for the CEO to fuck her into relevancy and a mansion. I’ve met Bob, too. We’ve all met him. We see him every day in the news and on TV. He has different names and peddles different products, but we know him. We know Winston and Wade, too. People suffering loss, trying to get by as best they can in a shit world created and run by Bobs and their bitch assistants.
I cared about Winston and Wade and their struggles to just get through each fucking day at work and school, feeling alone with no money. The fact that they go back to their regular lives at the end is bittersweet. Being the Toxic Avenger doesn’t make Winston any richer, although it does cure his brain cancer. The post-credits scene with Toxie showing the audience how to make cheap, tasty grilled-cheese sandwiches using white bread was a highlight. He might be a green mutant, but he’s still a good dad. Winston Gooze is the hero we need now because our world sucks, too. We all live in St. Roma. And “Sometimes, you gotta do something.” Even if that something is simply going to see a movie that makes you forget your problems for 90 minutes and laugh, as this one does.
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