Stephanie Fondue, who stars in this as Jeannie, had an even more incredible real name. Enid Finnbogason. She was in Hollywood from Winnipeg, got hit up at lunch to try out for this movie and got it. She’d never been a cheerleader. She was twenty. Also: A nude model, so disrobing during the audition was no big whoop.
In the film, Amarosa High School is a high-stakes place where lives depend on football games. Along with Jeannie, Bonnie (Jovita Bush), Debbie (Brandy Woods) and head cheerleader Claudia (Denise Dillaway, who eventually did the makeup for 2000s reality specials Exposed! Pro Wrestling’s Greatest Secrets and Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets, as well as the VHS release of Party Games for Adults Only, the girls try to help the men win. Except that Claudia is catty and is trying to get Jeannie deflowered by the end of the season. It’s a backward teen sex comedy bet.
But hey, everyone goes to see I Drink Your Blood at one point. So there’s that.
Director and co-writer Paul Glicker also directed Running Scared (starring Ken Wahl) and adult films Parlor Games and Hot Circuit. Other writers included Richard Lerner, Tad Richards, and Ace Baandige, a pseudonym for someone who claimed to have been a Presidential scriptwriter named David. David Gergen seems too clean for this, David Shipley is too young and David Frum was 11 when this came out. I am looking at Presidential writers and comparing them to someone who made a sex film.
Speaking of sex films, Suzie is played by Sandy Evans, but that’s Clair Dia, who was in Lucifer’s Women and 3 A.M. — the only porn with an Orson Welles-edited scene — and directed Screwples and The Health Spa. Patty, played by Kim Stanton, who is also known as Kimberly Hyde, appeared in The Young Nurses and Candy Stripe Nurses. There were a lot of nurse movies. There are even sequels to this one: The Swinging Cheerleaders, Revenge of the Cheerleaders and Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend.
Sometimes I wonder how far a movie can go down the toilet. Good news — Chained Heat left me with little room to ponder. It’s written and directed by Paul Nicholas, who brought us another slice of insanity, Julie Darling.
This is yet another descent into madness for poor Linda Blair, who has endured some of cinema’s worst tortures. Here, she’s naive teenager Carol Henderson, sentenced to serve 18 months in the slammer for accidentally killing a man. As the new fish, can she survive?
This is one horrifying prison. Warden Backman (John Vernon) has a hot tub where he films pornography with the inmates. Captain Taylor (Stella Stevens) is a madame who uses the inmates to make money when she’s not making whoopee with Lester (Henry Silva). Meanwhile, Lester is making time with the prison’s leader of the white girls, Ericka (Sybil Danning!), who is battling the leader of the black girls, Dutchess (Tamara Dobson, Cleopatra Jones) and strangely TV’s Jason of Star Command) for dominance.
Edy Williams, the former wife of Russ Meyer, shows up, as does Nita Talbot (Marya from Hogan’s Heroes) and Louisa Moritz from The Last American Virgin and New Year’s Evil.
Because this was made in the 1980s, the ladies want to riot in the hopes of getting a better warden. Instead, perhaps they should seek the means of power for themselves. Then again, you can’t expect a 1983 women in prison movie to be woke. You have two men in prison, and you need to know what and when it was made for.
In my perfect world, Sybil and Linda would have teamed up for Thelma and Louise and spent most of the movie’s running time killing men with chainsaws. This is probably why I don’t get to make the movies, only write about them.
Also known as Cruisin’ High, this stars two actors from another 1976 teens in trouble movie, Derrel Maury and Steve Bond, who were in Massacre at Central High AKA Sexy Jeans. As for the titular Eddie “Cat” Murkil, actor David Kyle is now a missionary and religious speaker after being an actor and male prostitute.
Eddie and the Silks are white kids playing around at being a gang, which means stealing cars, robbing businesses, fighting with other gangs and because this is a 70s drive-in movie, sleeping around. Eddie’s brother Joey (Bond) has already been through all of this and tries to warn his sibling to go straight. He kills Punch, the leader of the gang, takes over and pretty much gets them all killed when he rumbles with a Latino gang. He’s also trying to make time with his brother’s wife, except she’s already cheating on his brother, so he ties up her new man and shoots her in the lady parts. This is a scene at odds with some of the hijinks here, just like the shower stabbing scene earlier.
Either you look like a kid or a twenty-year-old teenager in this.
But hey, vans are cruising, which is what I watch movies for.
In case you recognize Eddie, well, he’s Judith Myers’ boyfriend.
This was re-released as its alternate title in 1979, Cruisin’ High, with a different ad campaign, then again under that name on VHS in 1985 with a totally different look, trying to be tougher than it is. That’s funny because it cut all of the gun violence and the shower stabbing.
In Germany, it was released as CATS – Die Klasse von 1976, in Spain as Eddie el gato and had two incredible working titles: L.A. Gangs Rising and Street Kids of America.
Also, as I always note this, Doodles Weaver is in this!
Based on Catherine and Co. by Edouard de Segonzac, this is about Catherine (Jane Birkin) — are you shocked? — who becomes a sex worker and starts her own business. She also sells stock and repurchases her business.
Directed by Michel Boisrond, this was written by Catherine Breillat, whose first novel at 17, l’Homme facile (A Man for the Asking), was banned for French readers under 18. She would go on to make Romance and Anatomy of Hell, both of which feature adult actor Rocco Siffredi. She also acted in Last Tango in Paris.
She isn’t without controversy, as actress Caroline Ducey accused her of allowing actors to go too far with her sexually during Romance (not Siffredi). She has also been outspoken about actress Asia Argento, who had starred in her film The Last Mistress. She didn’t believe that Weinstein was guilty and referred to Argento as being involved in “semi-prostitution.” Argento responded by calling Breillat “the most sadistic and downright evil director she’d ever worked with.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cartier Affair was on the CBS Late Movie on May 5, 1988.
Curt Taylor (David Hasselhoff) is released from California State Prison, and to settle a debt to Phillip Drexler (Telly Savalas), he pretends that he’s gay and becomes the secretary for soap opera star Cartier Rand (Joan Collins). The goal? Steal her jewelry. But then he falls in love.
Rod Holcomb only made two theatrical films: Stitches, for which he used the pseudonym Alan Smithee instead of his name, and Chains of Gold, the only thing that John Travolta ever wrote. The rest of his career was spent in TV. The writer crew included Scarecrow & King creators Eugenie Ross-Leming and Brad Buckner, who wrote the script from a story by Michael Devereaux.
What a guest cast! Ed Lauter, Randi Brooks as the Hoff’s girlfriend, Rita Taggart as the maid who wants to basically sodomize Hasselhoff, Charles Napier and Harry Reems as a cop! As for the film, well, it’s as good as a 1984 TV movie with Hasselhoff and Joan Collins should be. There’s one great scene where the Hoff is trying to run from mob henchman David (John Bloom, The Reaper from The Hills Have Eyes Part II, The Dark from The Dark, Frankenstein’s Monster in Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein). He keeps trying to talk his way out of it, while the hitman keeps telling him that he has to shoot him. Bloom was more than seven feet tall but had some great comic timing.
Man, Christopher Lee may rival Donald Pleasence for not being able to say no — I say this with full knowledge that the former turned down Halloween while the latter said yes to that series more than he should have — and here he played Sax Rohmer’s “yellow peril” character of Fu Manchu, who is joined by his just as sadistic daughter Lin Tang. She’s played by Tsai Chin, who was a Bond girl twice in You Only Live Twice and Casino Royale, topped the music charts with “The Ding Dong Song,” and played Auntie Lindo in The Joy Luck Club.
Rosalba Neri is also in this, and you know, as bad as this movie might be, Rosalba Neri is in it. You should be so lucky as to get to spend 92 minutes with her.
This is the fifth and final time that Sir Lee played Fu Manchu, if you can believe that. Also starring in this movie is a substantial amount of pilfered footage, including the entire opening effects sequence from A Night to Remember and the dam bursting sequence taken from Campbell’s Kingdom.
There’s lots of fog, which I appreciate, and a plot about freezing the oceans, which I am also totally down with. Man, is Fu Manchu the good guy?
July 28 – Aug 3 Screwball Comedy: Just imagine, the Great Depression is raging and you’re getting less than a fin a week at the rubber boiling factory, but it only costs two bits to go to the movies all day, so let’s watch some quick-talking dames match wits with some dopey joes!
The sequel to Topper finds Marion Kerby (Constance Bennett) still on Earth with George already in Heaven and Cary Grant only appearing in reused footage. To get her own place in the hereafter, Mation must reunite Cosmo (Roland Young) and Clara Topper (Billie Burke). That said, Clara left him over a supposed affair between her husband and Marion.
The most famous actor in this might be Skippy the dog, who had been in more than a dozen movies before this and is best known as Asta in the five Thin Man movies. He was also in Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth. Check out the press he got: “His owner is Mrs. Gale Henry East, once a prominent movie comedienne…When Skippy has to drink water in a scene, the first time he does it he really drinks. If there are retakes and he’s had all the water he can drink, he’ll go through the scene just as enthusiastically as though his throat were parched, but he’ll fake it. If you watch closely you’ll see he’s just going through the motions of lapping and isn’t really picking up water at all. And, because he has a sense of humor, he loves it when you laugh and tell him you’ve caught him faking but that it’s all right with you.”
It was directed by Norman Z. McLeod, who also filmed the first film, and written by Jack Jevne, Eddie Moran and Corey Ford.
EDITOR’S NOTE: All the Kind Strangers was on the CBS Late Movie on October 9, 1979 and November 25, 1980.
Let’s not judge Burt Kennedy for directing the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando. Let’s remember him for something much better — All the Kind Strangers.
Written by Clyde Ware — a writer/director/producer who worked on shows like Airwolf and Gunsmoke, as well as TV movies like The Hatfields and the McCoys and The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd— this film reeks of backwoods menace. No wonder — Ware was born in West Virginia and his second novel, The Eden Tree, was a semi-biographical read which scandalized his hometown.
Jimmy Wheeler (Stacy Keach, Butterfly, Mountain of the Cannibal God) is a photojournalist traveling by car to Los Angeles. He runs through a small Southern town where he sees Gilbert, an adorable child, walking on the side of the road. Seeing that the kid is hefting some heavy groceries, Jimmy offers him a ride. As the road goes deeper into the woods, the rain increases. Soon, he realizes he’s trapped in a house of seven children.
The oldest, Peter (John Savage, Hair, The Deer Hunter), has hidden the fate of his mother and father from the town, using various resources to keep their power on and training vicious dogs to protect the children. Their father was a bootlegger and their mother a schoolteacher (what a match!); when she died, he drank until he fell from the roof.
The rest of the children — John (Robby Benson, who sings two songs on the soundtrack), Martha, Rita, James and Baby (named because their mother died before they could name him) — need guidance, so Peter sends the younger ones out to lure people to their home. Then, they evaluate whether or not they’ll be good parents. If they’re fit, they stay. If not, they’re free to go. Or that’s what the kids think. Evidence points to another, more grisly fate.
There’s a new mother already in the house. Carol Ann (Samantha Eggar, The Brood, Demonoid, Curtains) has been taking care of the children for some time. She has seen plenty of other father figures, and while she asks for help, she also knows that everything seems pointless.
Jimmy has to convince the kids that he’d make a good dad while trying to find a way to escape. But between the multitude of kids and dogs, as well as his car being sunk in the swamp, he starts losing hope as well.
I have two issues with this film. Things get wrapped up with way too neat of a bow. Jimmy gives a speech to the kids, which saves his life, and Peter asks him to walk him into town so that they can get some help. Jimmy doesn’t even talk about the police, and when you know that these kids have murdered numerous “kind strangers,” you have to wonder if he traded his freedom in for some complicity in the crimes. Second, as a photojournalist, Jimmy’s only camera is a Polaroid, which would not be good enough to be printed in the 1970s. I know that it makes good theater to have him show Gilbert the photo as it develops, but it’s a stretch.
All the Kind Strangers is a small-screen Deliverance, yet it has some fine acting from Keach and Eggar. It’s restrained, but there is more not seen than seen that makes this movie slightly scary.
July 28 – Aug 3 Screwball Comedy: Just imagine, the Great Depression is raging and you’re getting less than a fin a week at the rubber boiling factory, but it only costs two bits to go to the movies all day, so let’s watch some quick-talking dames match wits with some dopey joes!
The third and final installment in the initial series of supernatural comedy films inspired by the novels of Thorne Smith, this follows Topper and Topper Takes a Trip. The strange thing is that it may have Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and his wife (Billie Burke), but it has a totally different set of ghosts.
Wealthy young heiress Ann Carrington (Carole Landis, One Million B.C.) and her best friend Gail Richards (Joan Blondell) are nearly killed by a masked and black gloved Giallo-style maniac when he shoots out their tire. They have a comical time catching a ride — Blondell’s thigh causes a man to crash a car — before Cosmo and his driver Eddie (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) pick them up and drive them to their destination, the Carrington mansion.
Everything about this place is creepy, so strange that you wonder if Ann and Gail are about to put on diaphonus white gowns and clutch candleabras. There are evil servants, like Lillian (Rafaela Ottiano) and Rama (Trevor Bardette). And the sinister Dr. Jeris (George Zucco), who warns Ann that the father she has never met, Henry Carrington (H. B. Warner), is in poor health. She was raised far away, as her mother had asked in her will, after she and her father’s business partner died in a company mine. Now, her father tells her that tomorrow, on her birthday, she will assume complete control of the family fortune.
Gail makes a fuss about her room being small and takes Ann’s, but who could sleep after a chandelier almost kills them? Somehow, they do go to bed, just in time for that murderer in black to knife Gail, thinking that she’s Ann. But don’t be sad — this is a Topper movie and Gail comes back as a ghost, one who threatens Topper with a scandal if he doesn’t help solve her murder. As for his driver, he claims that he’s going back to working for Jack Benny, because ghosts never showed up there.
Seriously — Gail’s body shows up and then disappears, and I wonder, is this an Edgar Wallace-written Topper? There’s mistaken identity, leather gloved knife-carrying lunatics, family drama, a will — this has it all and by all, I mean it’s totally a Giallo. At least this ends happily, except for the ghosts again scaring Rochester.
Director Roy Del Ruth (The Alligator People) and writers Jonathan Latimer (30+ Perry Mason episodes), Gordon Douglas (who would later direct Them! and In Like Flint) and Paul Gerard Smith put together a fun farce that may not have all the characters of the films, but has the right ones. Blondell fondly recalled the film thirty years later, saying, “It was a hit but has grown on TV viewings because it is public domain. I laugh when I see it. I laugh at Eddie Anderson, Patsy Kelly, Billie Burke, and Rollie Young. It’s a send-up of all those dark house plots.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Toughest Man In the World was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and September 14, 1988.
Mr. T’s first starring made-for-TV movie role has him playing, well, himself. Or Bruise Brubaker, a tough and scowling secret softy nightclub bouncer who is in charge of a neighborhood center. He’s a Vietnam vet, he has a mohawk to honor his roots, and he’s illiterate. And he’s gonna help kids, fool!
As he’s helping kids, he’s also trying to keep Billy (John P. Navin Jr.) from being part of the crime that rules the streets. He gets Tanker Weams (Tom Milanovich) to show up at the center but also screws up and promises everyone will be a winner in a fake charity giveaway, so he has no idea how to keep working people, kind of like Mr. T’s buddy Hulk Hogan and no, I won’t let death stop me from sharing stories of the Hulkster’s lies when they’re as funny as him being in Metallica or not getting the Foreman Grill deal because he missed one phone call.
Mr. T is a little like the Hulkster. Born Laurence Tureaud, he grew up in a family with twelve kids in Chicago, calling himself Mr. T so no one would call him boy. A city wrestling champion, he went to Prairie View A&M University on a scholarship but was kicked out in the first year. Then, he was in the army and tried out for the Green Bay Packers before inventing himself as he bounced at Dingbats Discotheque. He claimed that he was in more than 200 fights and that his chains were from the people he beat in fistfights. This turned into being a bodyguard for Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, LeVar Burton, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks — to Wiki name just a few — as well as whispered assassination and runaway tracking deals.
Then, ABC aired two of the World’s Toughest Bouncer contests, with Mr. T bloodying huge Tongan fighter Tutefano Tufi and defeating someone in the second in under a minute after saying, “I just feel sorry for the guy who I have to box. I just feel real sorry for him.” Sylvester Stallone saw this, cast him as Clubber Lang, and the rest was history.
After a role in Penitentiary 2, he was on The A-Team, had a cartoon, a cereal, was in D.C. Cab and even had a motivational video, Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! Also: an action figure that told you to always respect your mother and a rap album, Mr. T’s Commandments. Also, he became a wrestler, backing up the Hulkster, and this is where it gets funny. Despite being in all those toughman fights, T was freaked out about the idea that his image would be destroyed by a wrestler going off script. Maybe the rumor that Bruiser Brody was getting paid big money to hurt him — this would have never happened, Brody knew that at some point in his career, he would work for McMahon — got to him. He kept no-showing almost until the day of the event.
An aside. A few weeks before Mania, Mr. T and Hogan were on the USA Network show Hot Properties. According to Remind Magazine, “After some encouragement from Mr. T, Hogan agreed to demonstrate a chokehold on host Richard Beltzer, but ended up applying too much pressure and rendering him temporarily unconscious. Belzer recovered quickly enough to send the show to a commercial break, but he officially filed a $5 million lawsuit against both guests in 1987. The case was settled quietly in 1990.”
They also hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the show, a last-moment replacement for Steve Landesberg.
Roddy Piper, Bob Orton and Paul Orndorff, Mr. T’s opponents at Mania, may not have liked this outsider and made him nervous, but they knew where their money was coming from. That’s why the stories — Hogan wrote that “security at Madison Square Garden resisted letting Mr. T’s entourage into the building the day of the show. He was distraught by the confrontation and declared that he would just leave. The Hulkster, however, took credit for finding the actor and talking him down, getting him to see through the planned main event attraction. Paul Roma claimed that he even no-showed a few years later, as Mr. T was to manage the Young Stallions — started.
OK, another aside. Wrestlers are notoriously full of shit. There’s no way a big payday guy like Mr T was going to be with enhancement talent like the Young Stallions. And Hogan’s book isn’t non-fiction.
Then again, comedian Chris Burns once said, “I can – again, inside baseball – tell you Piper was not a fan of Hulk Hogan, moreso, Mr. T. I mean, rest in peace, Roddy, I don’t think he’d have a problem with me telling this story. He legitimately was going to kill Mr. T. I’m not kidding around. He said, he thought, “You know what? If I just back suplex him and arch it a certain way, he lands on his neck, they can’t tell me that I did it on purpose.” Piper had that thought several times, and then was like, “I’m not gonna mess up WrestleMania like that.”
Roddy Piper, also a wrestler, was probably full of shit a lot of times.
Anyways, back to Mr. T in a TV movie.
He falls for Leslie (Lynne Moody), beats gangsters and ends up knocking everyone out, including running through a wall like he’s on Takeshi’s Castle. It’s as stupid as you want it to be, and I wanted it to be really stupid.
This was directed by Dick Lowry. Yes, the same man who made Smokey and the Bandit 3. It was written by Vincent Bono, Dick Guttman and, of all people, Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster. How did that happen?
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