The reissued art for this movie could totally be an Aircel comic.
James R. Buick, who directed Bikers Versus the Undead and co-wrote it with Diane Chapman, was a one and done filmmaker, gifting us with only this lone shot on video effort.
Somewhere outside of Phoenix, a man named Speed (Jerry Anderson) — who even gets his own theme song over the credits — has created a formula called Agent Live that turns everyone — including a dog! — into zombies. Well, the goal was something that killed bikers and didn’t harm normal people — maybe using the formula of the American Motorcycle Association, “99% of the motorcycling public are law-abiding; there are 1% who are not.” — but it backfires and turns everyone into zombies and does nothing to said bikers, who we assume have rates of alcohol and hard drugs in their system — this is not a knock, but a bit of praise — and they aren’t impacted. Or as Lemmy once said, “I never said speed was a good idea for you. I said that I liked it.”
What’s really surprising in this is that the fight scenes are so big, like a cast of thousands all battling out there in the desert and if you enjoyed the biker scenes in Dawn of the Dead, logic says that you will enjoy a full-length film with the same idea. I’m also impressed that someone was convinced to do a full body burn stunt in this movie, but then again, in 1985 video stores were dying for product and this helps the movie stand out. Sure, a lot of it is too dark to see and the quality of nearly every shot is bad and the soundtrack is distorted, but if you’ve come this far in your shot on video journey, you know, why not go all the way? And who decided that organized crime and conservative politics were the real enemy, not the zombies? The latter just makes me sad because all the bikers I knew who used to pound it out with my aunt and her friends used to despise authority and hate cops so much that they would climb up and tear down gigantic flags and what do you do with a huge hundred foot Stars and Bars? But anyways, those same guys that were public nuisances and named speed 7 and 14 after the truck stop in Ohio where I used to get great burgers and strawberry shortcake in a dirty coffee mug from the meanest waitress ever are now all in on yelling about Brandon and maybe they should go back and watch this and concentrate on getting ready for the real troubles and by that, I mean the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
Also: Major points to the biker who earns his blue wings by making sweet love to a zombified girl down by the fire.
Made with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, video artist Cecelia Condit’s nightmarish short has had many lives: as an art project to help her heal from her past, as a scare tactic shown on the 700 Club and as a viral video that got shared without context and was rumored to be a cursed film.
Starting with her film Beneath the Skin, Condit uses her video work to attempt to deal with the cycles of violence that she felt were all around her and so close to her. That’s because, for a year, she dated Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, who was also one reason we had Earth Day. The entire time that they dated, the rotting body of his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, was in a trunk. A trunk that Condit constantly walked past, one assumes.
It made it onto religious television because, beyond being about the self-destructive behaviors of men toward women, it also looks at female friendships and love. Its lead characters, Sharon and Janice, may be a couple. Or they may just be supportive women. Or both. Who are we to put any bounds on their relationship?
It’s become a viral sensation several times, as teens try to copy its strange musical numbers and send it to one another as a curse straight out of The Ring.
Our ladies are just trying to shop for perfume — this was shot at Beachwood Place in Beachwood, Ohio, where Condit sat outside the building manager’s office until she was allowed to shoot there; she was given twenty-minute blocks of time, which was a challenge — when Arthur begins to stalk them, a man whose face changes with a series of latex masks.
Arthur is the kind of Prince Charming who shows his love to women by hacking them to pieces; his always-changing face is a way of showing the roles that abusive men have taken in their relationships. We also discover that Sharon is attracted to violent men but also likes making them think that violence is their idea. Regardless, love should never cost an arm and a leg.
The songs, written and performed by Karen Skladany (who also plays Janice), are insidious in the way that they worm their way into your brain. This is the kind of weirdness that is completely authentic in a way that today’s manufactured social media creepypasta weirdness cannot even hope to be a faint echo of.
As frightening as this can be, it’s also a film about absorbing — eating a cannibal is one way, right? — and getting past the worst moments of life without being destroyed by them. This also lives up to so much of what I love about SOV in that while we’ve been taught that the 80s looked neon and sounded like a Carpenter movie, the truth is that the entire decade was beige and sounded like the demo on a Casio keyboard. This doesn’t nail an aesthetic as much as document the actual 1983 that I lived within, minus the shape-changing cannibal and singsong happy tale of a dog in the microwave.
Consider this absolutely essential and one of the most critical SOV movies ever.
Jeff Hathcock also made Victims!, Night Ripper! and Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell. This time around, he takes us to the worst parts of Los Angeles where sex workers are being murders and the cops keep fumbling around in the dark. Bernie Navarre (Simon de Soto) and Grant Jordan (Lawrence Scott) get help from undercover officer Kelly Anderson (Susanne Smith) who acts as one of the ladies of the night to draw out the killers, who end up being Artie Benson (Larry Thomas, no soup for you) and Lenny Miller (Guy Ecker). Their gimmick is to pretend to be making a movie and then film each kill.
Then Bernie’s former partner, Frank Phillips (Tommy Kirk, a former Mousketeer) comes in the picture and decides that he needs back on the force. As Kirk said to Filmfax, “The film had some problems…. I played a cop who has been kicked off the force because he was a drunk and had accidentally killed somebody. But he wanted to be back on the force, to be a cop again, so he goes off on his own and tries to solve this string of serial killings in the Los Angeles suburbs… That picture was a good example of a case of good intentions.”
This is a movie packed with grime that really gets into the darkness of its killers and then mixes in dialogue like a hooker saying, “Why don’t we discuss this over a cock tail? Your cock, my tail.” Mix that in with a death by power drill and you have a movie that attempts to be an erotic thriller on a budget, shot on video yet feeling very procedural all the same. This would pair nicely with L.A. AIDS Jabber if you want to really delve into the City of Angels shot on video tracking filled darkness.
Twenty years after Violent Shit, Karl Berger Jr. (director and writer Andreas Schnass) continues the killing that began with his father. He was raised by a woman (Anke Prothmann) who gives him a machete fo his birthday. Years ago, she buried his father and raised him to avenge that man’s death and, well, indiscriminately kill people for her pleasure. She even drinks their blood and occasionally allows her adoptive son to pleasure her because hey, it may be low budget shot on video but it’s still Italian exploitation.
Violent Shit II dispenses with any of seriousness and just delves into goofy humor mixed with gore and, as always, genital destruction. There’s also a near-Taxi Driver shootout in a porn theater and an ending that sets up that Karl Sr. has returned.
That said, this movie has some of the funnier credits I’ve seen in an SOV movie, as they’re rainbow colored and bouncing and seem to come from a totally different film than what we’ve just watched. Actually, if you can make it through this without flinching, I think you can make it through anything.
Throughout Violent Shit, Violent Shit II: Mother Hold My Hand, Violent Shit III: Infantry of Doom,Nikos the Impaler, which was released in some countries as Violent Shit 4, and Karl vs. Axe, Andreas Schnaas has grown from making movies on the weekend with his friends and a camcorder to become known force in extreme horror.
Yet it all started here for so many. Twenty years before this film, Karl (Karl Inger) used a meatcleaver to end his mother’s abuse. Then, after years of prison life, he escapes into th woods and begins killing and eating his victims before realizing that all along he has been taught how to kill by demons. At this point, reality kind of stops and Karl crawls into the body of Jesus and then his skin begins to fall off, so he finally just rips himself to pieces, revealing a child covered in blood.
Will you like it? Are you prepared for a murderdrone dive ino absolutely nonsensical gory murder, punctuated by more murder, then followed by a demonic being that will definitely be hiding in my brain from now on and then, like I said, the killer disembowling a religious figure and then horrifyingly being born again. I always wonder if I should recommend things and what people will think of them when I do. So…you’re in this one alone.
Director and writer Joe Zaso was on a tear in the mid 80s and early 90s, making Screambook, this movie and It’s Only a Movie, all three filled with moments of the typical SOV moments that keep normal people from enjoying these, such as long stretches where nothing happens, lighting that can charitably be referred to as murky and no regard at all for keeping the audience entertained at times unless they know when to entertain themselves. Unlike so many other SOV films, Zaso also has talent and there are stretches of his films that feel so close to being great.
Unlike the first movie, this is not all made with teenagers with the lead and it kind of gets away from slavishly wanting to be Creepshow. Then again, Zaso was just 15 when he made this.
The copy on YouTube starts with glorious tracking static and that blue screen that always showed up when you dubbed something, along with the kind of blocky type that was all that was possible for when you made a movie yourself. It follows that up by showing King Video, an old mom and pop with a magical blue color scheme and white swinging adult room doors.
Follow that with a young couple deciding to rent Ants for the evening and you have a place that I would like to live inside. When they get to the front counter, they discover that they’re about to be waited on by either a clown, a mime or a demon. I’d say juggalo but this was 1985 and Shaggy was 11 and Violent J was 13 at the time. And you know, guys.
She also scream laugh talks everything she says like Margaret Hamilton mainlining helium and offers them a copy of Screamtape 2. I imagine that this was how Zaso got people to watch his movie, just hiding in a video store like a cackling demon.
“Till Death Do Us Part” starts with an entire family all smoking and drinking as they learn that one of their number has a secret past, not that you’ll be able to hear much of the dialogue through the recorded through the camera mic and sounds of cars rolling through the streets all around them. Yet in the midst off this is a very video era Andy Milligan feel, as this story is about a family that absolutely hates one another and isn’t shy about letting everyone know about it. Unlike Milligan, some of that screaming is because you need to be heard over the truck mufflers blasting away mere feet away and the way too loud library score. There’s also a Sweeney Todd-reference apron-wearing woman dealing with a husband whose voice is more distorted than a doom band who she cuts and then appears outside a play whose stage door is totally the one to the living room. Yes, Elizabeth Welcher is killing all over the place and yeah, the camera is shaky, but what 15-year-old has a movie with “It Had to Be You” on the soundtrack? An awesome one, that’s who.
Also: wood paneling everywhere, monologues all over the place and a zombie ending that you’ll see from the first few minutes, not that Screambook didn’t also have a straight-up cover of “Father’s Day” from Creepshow. This one does too, but instead of a cake, the old lady’s head on a plate with an apple in it, kind of like the poster for Tales That Witness Madness.
“Silversweets” starts at a funeral for Amanda, who died from lung cancer, so all of these old ladies all talk about women who “smoked and smoked their brains out.” I may have heard the exact same speech from my wife about how much she loves to smoke and how no one will change her.
Anyways, this lady has a husband named Brewster who is a monster — but pronounced mahn-stah — and he runs her life like an army sergeant. It feels like Zaso branched out here from Romero and watched either Terry-Thomas in Vault of Horror or the antismoking moments in Cat’s Eye. He tosses her cigarettes and forces her to stay home to watch sub-Rockette footage on TV while strange music plays on the soundtrack. She goes to the basement to sneak a smoke and a furry arm attacks her to a music cue from The Time Machine plays and Fluffy pretty much emerges from his wooden carton except its so dark you can barely see him and instead you get closeups of plates on the wall like a good Italian house should have.
I totally love how this one ends with a nice old man cooking a nice meal for a monster and the camera fixating on a light fixture.
“Birthday Wishes” is very similar to “It’s a Good Life” from Twilight Zone: The Movie in that a young kid named Michael who gets powers that his entire family is powerless to stop. The kid in this gets his from Shana, a holy man, when he asks for the power of revenge over his family and friends. He gets chanted over and he is given the gift, the power of revenge and is only asked that he never gets angry and must be cautious.
Then Michael goes off at his birthday party, canceling all the guests, setting his sister on fire, making his father throw up blood, forcing another relative to shoot himself and becoming zombified. I mean, if someone made a cake for me that looked that flat, I would go off as well and I don’t have reality-destroying abilities. I really love the bald old man that pulls a gun at this birthday party. Who comes packing to a pre-teen party?
By the end, the entire house has turned against Michael’s mother as we get some effective stills of each room and her bathed in green light. Oh yeah — there’s also a zombie arm chasing her. Dig that lattice in the dining room.
For everyone who keeps making movies they say feel like the 80s, I want you to watch this segment. See how beige and dingy everything looks? That’s what the 1985 really looked like.
“A Grave Matter” is about a series of murders and oh man, this old guy in this one has a Frank Rizzo voice which makes me beyond happy. A reporter keeps going back to a funeral home to learn if he’s the killer while the waitress that he fired goes back to find her glasses and she gets killed and then we come back to the newspaper the reporter works for and man, the exposition before she tries to go behind a curtain.
Everyone in this has such rich New York accents by the way.
Finally, back to the video store and our mime — well, she does talk plenty — before recommending another movie that’ll really make someone scream.
Also: That guy who snuck into the adult section? John Zaso, Joe’s dad, who also did the effects.
Screambook 2 is, well, it’s fun. It’s not great but there are enough moments and talkent shining through that you make it through.
You can watch this on YouTube where Zaso has posted several of his films.
Suburban Sasquatch came from West Chester, PA but the Skunk Ape is from Detroit and he’s the creation of Mike C. Hartman, who went on to direct Chubbies, Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake and Detroit Blood City. His enemy is Stinky Thumbs Arbuckle, a redneck who dreams of one day getting to kill him and there you go. You get forty minutes of that.
You know how Stanley Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon by candlelight, forcing one candle manufacturer to cancel all of their orders for a year so they could exclusively supply him with the only candles good enough for him, as well as how the candles were so hot, used so much oxygen and gave off so much choking smoke that the crew was in danger so they used of reflectors to amplify them so they wouldn’t be in danger any longer? Yeah, this was shot on a camcorder in front of a campfire and looks nothing like the magic that Kubrick and director of photography John Alcott got in that movie. You just get blurry images of a man with a goofy fake accent battling another man in a monkey suit that has a zipper showing.
The real skunk ape mostly shows up in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, not Detroit, and nearly had a law passed in 1977 that was to keep Florida hunters from abducting or killing this creature. Forty-eight out of sixty-seven counties in Florida have had sightings since 2010 and you know, that’s not really a surprise, is it?
The skunk ape also, as you can expect from the name, stinks as bad as this movie.
There’s a place down by the Pittsburgh Zoo where the USS Potemkin (a Star Trek fan club) used to volunteer to clean the road in costume, where firefighters burn a fake building for practice, the Shuman Center used to hold the worst yinzer teenagers and the Society for Creative Anachronism would do fake swordfights. For some time, if you looked this place up on Google maps street view, you’d see this microcosm all coming together as one.
It’s this kind of magic that led Abraxas Productions to make this movie all over Kansas — mostly in Lawrence — and it’s a sword and sorcery film without even the budget of a Joe D’Amato production. I’ve tried looking up director J. Stanley Haehl and there’s nothing on IMDB. There’s no entry on Letterboxd. This is literally undiscovered territory and even crazier, it feels like Goron a less than paperback budget.
Imagine, if you will, LARPers — Live Action Role Playing — but on a much larger scale, filmed by video camera, fuzzy drained video colors coalescing to give us wanderers with walking sticks in the woods, primitive video effects in the place of computer generation magic and best of all, everyone is so serious about it. Like, serious enough to get out amongst the jagger bushes — my Pittsburgh is showing, you know, those trees that catch on to you in the woods — and mosquitos in a loin cloth of all things.
You ever pore over that old Monster Manual and have a Hook Horror LJN figure? Then you’re going to get this. Maybe you’d like to see ladies in Renaissance Faire garb sword fight one another in the hometown of William Burroughs, possibly behind a mall? Do you like dialogue like, “Do mine eyes deceive me or is it Shan-Ra?” And people bowing and saying, “My lady, I beseech you for protection?”
This movie makes me feel like everyone in this is really into symphonic metal, BDSM, polyamory or painting miniatures. Maybe and instead of or. And look, I could make some jokes about Charisma rolls and doing 3d6 damage and knowing that TSR stood for Tactical Studies Rules but the last time I started talking like this, well, my wife still hasn’t slept with me. So yeah, in another time and place, I would have totally been part of a movie like this. I’ve worn a ST:TNG costume in public. I mean, I have no shame any longer. So I really can’t make fun of this. I mean, you totally will.
I’m also totally thinking part of this was shot at the Coronado Heights Castle, a place where Francisco Vásquez de Coronado gave up his search for the seven cities of gold and went back to Mexico. In 1936, to celebrate this, the Works Progress Administration built a stone shelter that looks like a castle. But no, it was shot in Kanopolis State Park and Douglas County.
Man, by the end, the video effects get wild and some dude has a rune on his forehead and the synth and howling woods kick in as the dialogue gets thick and the good guy looks like he could be in a hair band that no one knows like Shark Island or the Sea Hags. Or Banshee from Kansas City, but those guys were on Metal Blade and more power metal.
There’s also totally a big fight scene with a dude who looks like he could alternatively be in The Scorpions or a VCA movie fighting dudes with lit torches while a shirtless Shan-Ra poses above a castle.
If you drink every time someone says thou or thee, well, you’re going to die. I love the character names as well, like Grimwald Graelie (Ry Brown, who also wrote and produced this), Kalydia (Maria Anothont, who wrote and produced too) and Death itself! Oh yeah — Ry and Maria also designed the costumes and fabricated them, so my SCA theory holds up.
Also: Merlin shows up!
Also also: Dudes totally look like Manowar.
There’s also an accommodations consultant in the credits, so I assume that’s the guy who knew where the hotel was.
Please drink every time Ry and Maria’s names are in the credits.
I want to know. everything there is to know about this movie, so if you were in it or have a story about it, get in touch now. Please. I’m dying to know more. I know I’ve made fun of it for around seven hundred fifty words now, but Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that I need to know facts about The Song of the Sword. That’s what’s important! Trivia pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me knowledge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!
You can watch this thanks to Demolition Kitchen Video on the Internet Archive.
Jan Reiff went on to be a director of photography on movies like Iron Doors and Slave, but before that he made this shot on video tale of Ludwig Herrmann, who killed his wife Elizabeth — and her lover — when he caught them in bed together. Then he killed a witness who was completely innocent. And oh yeah, then they came back as zombies.
Translated as Requiem for the Devil, this feels like a German Fulci superfan made his own movie because, well, that’s exactly what it is. Those zombies put him through hell — razor blades in the spaghetti anyone? — but Ludwig isn’t going down easy.
That said, he also kills his wife in a way that will get him on one one my many Letterboxd lists: he throws a hairdryer into the bathtub while she’s in it. Then he shoots her lover and runs him over to be totally sure, then because that witness saw everything, he remembers Italy and jabs out one of his eyeballs.
I mean, this has a lot going for it, beyond the gore, like an eighty minute running time and an ending that has, well alright it’s mostly the gore because the wife gets her face ripped clean off before quite literally facefucking our protagonist with a drill and then finger banging the hole left behind because, you know, why not? I’ll bet Ludwig wished he just kept playing his Gameboy and never looked around to see if he was being cucked. I mean, there are some questions you don’t want the answers to.
You can watch this on YouTube thanks to altohippiegabber.
Satan’s Storybook prefigures the streaming horror anthology films that litter our watch services today yet it’s miles above those, not just within its two tales, but with a connecting story that makes you want even more.
Directed and co-written by Michael Rider, who was also a zombie in the shot on video Hororama, this movie starts with the bride of Satan (Leslie Deutsch) — who by the way looks amazing and just like a late 80s heavy metal album cover come to life — being abducted by ninjas, one of whom is her sister, who is played Ginger Lynn, so of course I was beyond in love with this segment. This upsets Satan so much that he demands that his jester tell him some stories to keep his mood light. This segment hints at a third story as well as more of the story which is never delivered and honestly, that’s the only thing about this movie I dislike, because it leaves you wanting so much more.
“Demon of Death” is all about Zeek Heller (co-writer Steven K. Arthur), a serial killer who abducts metal and horror fan — she has a Scared Stiff poster on the all black walls of her room — Jezebell Jones ((Leesa Rowland) and even wipes out her family before being sent to rot in jail. He’s just like so many metal dudes I knew in 1989 except, you know, he randomly looks up girls from the telephone book — placing this firmly in 1989 — and killing them. Then he gets arrested by the law, wo say things like “The only thing that stands between you and Old Sparkey is us, and we don’t give a lizard’s dick if you do fry, you buttplug!” The trial goes on and on and right before they throw the switch, Jezebell does some black magic that doesn’t really work out like she planned. It’s grimy and grainy and you can see people reading their lines off scripts, which some reviews proclaim as the sign of a bad movie, as if they’d never watched SOV before.
The second segment, “Death Among Clowns,” has a clown named Charlie (Grady Bradner, the writer of The Howling and Cameron’s Closet in his only movie as an actor) hanging himself in his dressing room and then engaging in lengthy dialogue with another clown named Mickey La Mort, who is played by this film’s director and writer Rider. This is the segment that usually causes people to hate this movie as it seems to go on forever yet I love it. Mickey the clown keeps getting more demonic as the segment moves on and basically this is two writers putting together endless dialogue in one location — with a Howling IV: The Original Nightmareposter no less — and no twist ending. Exactly what you think is going to happen — a clown dragging another clown to Hell — happens. It’s. kind of fascinating, like near murderdrone with no murder.
This movie has so much fog throughout that one wonders if this was considered as a pack-in with fog machines so that people could learn of their power.
Satan’s Storybook has the feel of Night Train to Terror and I mean that in the best of mind-melting ways. There are so many moments in this that make little to no sense at all and that’s what I demand from my films. If anything, this is a movie where Ginger Lynn magically transforms from a ninja to a barbarian princess and if you can’t find some wonder in that, I think you should give up watching films and reading this site. Bring on the synth and distorted voices. Bring on the rubber masked demons. Bring on the fog, the glorious fog.
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