Directed, written and produced by David Schwartz, Las Vegas Bloodbath follows the storyline of so many SOV films, which seem to be indebted to Herschell Gordon Lewis movies that came out two decades before: man gets screwed over, man goes insane, man brutally murders women as the camera focuses on the gore.
Sam Butler returns to Las Vegas after a business deal and finds his wife Ruth in the arms of a cop whose gun he takes and kills both of them. He cuts off his wife’s head and goes off, stabbing sex workers in the face, pulling their legs off with a car, shooting a bartender, using a shovel on a gardener and then attacking the Beautiful Lady Oil Wrestlers at a bridal shower that starts with him tearing a baby out of the soon-to-be mother Barbara, then wiping out everyone else, bathing in their blood and then killing another police officer.
Oh yeah, he also cuts a Jehovah’s Witness guy’s head off.
Imagine Maniac without any of the talent. Or more cocaine, if possible. But instead of the grimy world of New York at the end of the world, this is in Vegas, sunbaked city of sin transformed into a family destination but still a place where oil wrestling women have baby showers where women call one another bitch and whore and then have fashion shows for one another while drinking beer and eating donuts. You know, that sounds like a great day other than, you know, seeing a baby get tossed into the next room.
Do you want oil wrestling with your misogyny, this film stupidly asks, and certainly there are enough people who rented or bought this. Also: daytime whores, a line from the film, is the perfect band name.
Doug (Mark Williams) is a wedding videographer — did he teach the Bergeron Brothers: Wedding Videographers? — who keeps dreaming of making a horror movie. When he meets Rails (Al Darago, who co-directed and co-wrote this with Doug Ulrich, who one assumes is the inspiration for the character in this movie), the lead singer of a shock rock metal band, he finds a kindred spirit who can help him make the movie he’s been fantasizing about. Unfortunately, Rails is also a killer and using the movie to create grisly murder scenes that begin to fascinate Doug and make him complicit in the crimes.
People get dynamite in their mouths, bodies are hung up and chainsawed in half and heads roll. If you like erotic knife torture, I think this was made for you. Once you watch a few of these scenes, you’ll figure out why this movie was also named Snuff Kill. There are plenty of stabbings in this with a variety of implements and despite its low budget SOV origins, it all looks pretty good. In fact, the grainy and grimy nature of this format adds to the overall feel.
Ulrich and Durango also made Scary Tales, Darkest Soul and 7 Sins of the Vampire together and all of those are pretty fun, too. I kind of love that Rails’ band looks all grim and kvlt, then sounds like more of a 60s psychedelic band than the SUNN O))) you expect them to be playing what with all those robes. There’s also a band on the soundtrack called Thee Enigma Jar. The other band is called Surefire and yes, that’s Doug and Al’s band.
SRS put this out on DVD a few years ago and I just love that this has been upgraded for today.
Chuck (Andy Nichols, one of the doctors in Nightdreams and Max Melodramatic from Cafe Flesh) and Buck (Louie Bonanno, who was in Chuck Vincent’s Slammer Girls and also appeared along with Nichols in Dark’s In Search of… the Perfect 10) leave their women behind and go to a new wave whorehouse — in case you’re wondering about that term, stick around — called Madame Mondo’s Zombie Palace, where they try and find the perfect zombie women and just end up tied to the wall in tutus.
The zombie women include adult star Blondi (who also worked as Blondi Bee; she shows up in the KISS eXposed video as their personal envelope licker), Teri Lynn Peake (Penthouse Pet of the Month for October 1987), Ashley Elstad, Violet Lickness and Lisa Devine.
If this feels like a late 80s adult feature, well, that’s no accident. Director and producer Jon Valentine is actually Gregory Dark! Writer Veronica Cinq-Mars was really Anthony R. Lovett, who was also Antonio Passolini, the director of some late 80s sequels to classic adult films like — you guessed it — Cafe Flesh, The Devil In Miss Jones and even Dark’s New Wave Hookers. He also used the name Johnny Jump-Up to write Dark’s White Bunbusters, Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout Black Chicks, Deep Inside Vanesse del Rio, The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning and The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage. He was also the head of production for VCA Pictures, which pretty much ruled adult in the 80s. He’s also the Anthony “Tex” Lovett that wrote Faces of Death rip-off Inhumanities II: Modern Atrocities and Gesichter des Todes V, which was sold in Germany as the fifth Faces of Death and has scenes taken directly from the former film as well as Death Faces IV. There was a Gorgon Video-released Faces of Death 5 in the U.S., but it’s just clips from the other four movies. The German one, though, lists Countess Victoria Bloodhart as a director (who is also credited with a fourth installment of Mondo Cane which is just more recycled clips and stolen footage from Nick Bougas’ Death Scenes and, yes, Inhumanities II: Modern Atrocities which was directed by Wesley P. Emerson, the director of nearly every Deep Inside 80s adult compilation). Ah,man — Lovett also wrote most of Michael Ninn’s stuff too.
Most amazingly, Gesichter des Todes V also has footage taken from Stelvio Masi, who as Max Steel was the director of Hell’s Heroes, Taxi Killer, Arabella: Black Angel and probably the movie those Germans ripped off to make their fake sequel, Savage World Today. Of course, he also made tons of awesome Italian crime movies like Convoy Busters, Magnum Cop and Highway Racer.
That was a tangent, huh?
Anyways! Gregory Dark! The man who reinvented porn in the 80s and brought a sense of punk energy to what had become a very staid video formula made this and it’s a lot like all of his movies of the era minus the sexual gymnastics. He’d go on to pretty much also own the adult thriller section of your video store, as well as Showtime and Cinemax after midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. And oh yeah, directed a few hundred music videos before reinventing himself again and making mainstream movies.
There you go. Greg Dark stealing a Romero title and trying to make a mainstream softcore movie with the same sensibilities as his porn work. Thanks for listening.
Leslie and Joan Stanton are sisters played by real life sisters Leslie and Joan Simon and they like to post video personal ads, marry financially stable men and murder them, all with the someday dream of owning their own mortuary business just like their father once had.
Then Aunt Ingrid shows up and screws everything up.
She’s played by director and writer Nick Millard’s wife Irmgard and she’s something else. She’s got a bag packed with lingerie and wants to be part of the singles scenes — and swap lovers maybe — with these two ladies. Except, you know, there are a lot of bodies.
This being a Nick Millard movie, you can be sure that it’s about an hour, that it’s padded with whole scenes from Criminally Insane and Satan’s Black Wedding, that it’s deranged and that it seems like hairbrushing scenes go on forever and then happen again. You can also be certain that this was made in his house and that it feels weird, the kind of weird that isn’t easily explainable and isn’t “fever dream” or “slow burn” but just plain strange and not to show off. The weird that feels earned.
Where are the Nick Millards of today, the people filming their wives as insane horny aunts and finding people to sit around their house being murderers who clean up crime scenes with so many rolls of paper towels?
Unlike many of the shot on videos featured on the site the last few days, The Killing Edge was directed by someone who had made several films, Lindsay Shonteff. One of his first films was 1964’s Devil Doll, but he may be best-known for a series of James Bond remix remake ripoff movies that started with Licensed to Killand continued to include Spy Story, No. 1 of the Secret Service, Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun. He also made The Million Eyes of Sumuru, Permissive, Night After Night After Nightand as budgets lowered in the mid 80s, he started shooting on video. Beyond this movie, he also made the video giallo Lipstick and Blood.
Working from a script by Robert Bauer (who also wrote Shonteff’s Vietnam movie How Sleep the Brave), this is the story of a man — Bill French (Steve Johnson) — wandering the post-apocalyptic wastelands with only a stuffed teddy bear as he searches for his family, who he finds just in time for them to be killed by robotic Terminators, which is why this was released in West Germany as Killing Edge – Super Gau Terminator.
They are not robots. This is not exciting. In fact, it seems like it was made up while it was being made, just like many shot on video projects. The difference is, again, Shonteff who at one point was someone who made actual films.
Two different aliens — the humanoid Mirusian and the pig-appearing Ghastorian — have been battling over a Death Sphere that accidentally dropped off on Earth by goofball Mirusian janitor Nagillig — and because it looks just like a beach ball, it is fated to land on a beach and have some nerd scientists and surfer dudes try to figure out what’s happening. Oh yeah, they also become friends with Nagillig.
There’s a lot of weed smoking — one probably correctly believes that it was this way behind the camera as well — and death by surfboard, which doesn’t happen all that often. The death comes from Ghastorian commander Lord Odem and his henchman, who lie in wait at an old house, where Dr. Bateman has been studying UFOs. Also: sunscreen can defeat aliens, so someone alert Baz Luhrmann.
Director and writer Andy Gizzarelli never made another film, but has worked on a producer on the HBO remake of Perry Mason, Bridgerton, And Just Like That…, True Detective, Big Little Lies and Feast. The amount that you will enjoy this movie is based on how much you can stand helium voices or people who sound like they’re trying too hard to be Jeff Spicoli.
That said, it’s a beach party science fiction slasher and there aren’t many movies that can say that.
Bugsy Malone is one of the strangest movies you’ll find, Sir Alan Parker’s gangster musical that stars Scott Baio, Jodie Foster and an all-child cast. Hawk Jones does that and goes beyond, with an all-child cast from Moline, Illinois shot on video and instead imitating the days of Dillinger and Capone, they’re making a direct to video cop movie complete with doomed women and machine gun aided revenge.
Director Richard Lowry kept on making movies after this, like President Evil, Alien Overlords and Rapture. He was inspired by seeing a Jello Pudding Pop commercial where all the kids were acting like adults. It was written by his brother Tor Reyel.
Hawk Jones (Valiant Duhart) is a cop who all the other cops make fun of for being such a maniac. He’ll also flip out if you make fun of his mother. His partner is in love with him, but he’s dating Lola, the gangster’s moll who is fated for a bad ending, and he’s been battling a crime boss named Antonio Coppola for years, a man — well, a child — who has hired a punk rock larger kid named The Destroyer to take out Hawk.
Kids in bars. Kids singing in Vegas-style numbers. Kids battling with guns in scenes that feel like a sub-Cannon 80s action movie except, again, with children and sound effects written on the screen like Batman. And best of all, a sword fight ending that’s better than almost any movie you’ll see this year.
Johnny LaRue couldn’t get his crane shot but somehow, this movie could.
Directed and written by Mark Burchett and Michael D. Fox (Vamps, Blood Sisters: Vamps 2), this movie is also known as Evil Ambitions and really is 1996 in its most pure and distilled flavor.
The Satanic Yuppies in the title are politician Gideon Jessup (David Levy) and model agency owner Brittany Drake (Amber Newman, Horrorvision, Hell-O-Ween) and they have marked Julie Swanson (Lucy Frashure), a virginal fresh off the bus and new in the big city girl for Satan’s bride. And by the big city, I mean Cincinnati, because dead bodies keep showing up in the Ohio River.
Reporter Peter McGavin (Paul Morris) is on the case, despite being warned by his boss Miles Bishop (S. William Hinzman, the Flesheater not in zombie mode) to just forget all about it. You know who does get him off the trail? Brittany, who owns him from the minute they speak. At the same time, another girl he runs into gets kidnapped by the cult’s long-haired killing machine Lester (Rob Calvert).
Despite the sexual dynamo throwing herself his way, McGavin finds his way back to his story and gets help from phone sex operator/literal ghostwriter of Mae West’s autobiography Madame Natalie Goldfarb (Debbie Rochon), who informs him that the first four murders were to create the bridesmaids of the devil and the fifth murder will be his bride, at which point, kind of like a godfather at an Italian wedding, Satan must give a favor to whoever put the nuptials together.
After killing Detective Leslie Kellogg (Renee Raos), the police officer who was trying to help McGavin, with a blue blur while she’s in the bathtub, a succubus is sent to take our protagonist and make him a member of the cult. But when Satan (Randy Rupp) shows up, it turns out he’s not all that pleased with the rich and powerful who are following him.
While the protagonist is lame and you’ll probably be more of a fan of Newman’s evil mistress of the dark arts — and modeling — this is by no means a bad film. It looks a lot like a 1990s adult film from VCA, with that plastic bright video quality, yet just hints at the sex instead of giving it to you. That said, if suddenly people started having sex for real, I would in no way be surprised.
Between Hinsman and Rochon being involved, how did John Russo not get into this movie?
Thirty years ago, the BBC seemed to be doing another one of their “Watch” shows, as four presenters — Michael Parkinson (host of the talk show Parkinson for twenty five years), presenter Sarah Greene (who had worked on several of the “Watch” shows like Airportwatch), her real-life husband Mike Smith (a co-host of the BBC’s Breakfast Time and was a presenter on Top of the Pops) and Craig Charles (who worked as a presenter before playing Dave Lister on Red Dwarf, hosting Robot Wars and narrating Takeshi’s Castle) — and a camera crew descended on the most haunted house in Britain on Halloween night.
Pamela Early (Brid Brennan) and her daughters Suzanne (Michelle Wesson) and Kim (Cherise Wesson) have been dealing with Mr. Pipes, a poltergeist who possesses and harms Suzanne and lives in the basement of their home. Dr. Lin Pascoe (Gillian Bevan), a psychologist studying the phenomena, supports Pamela and the children as Sarah reports from inside the home with her husband Mike interviews the man on the street and Craig makes with the jokes.
As the program (programme!) unravels, it turns out that maybe this isn’t all a hoax. Several calls from listeners help construct the true story, as the story of the murderous Mother Seddons is retold, as is the case of Raymond Tunstall, who hung himself in the basement of the Early home and was eaten by cats. By the end, the beast known as Mr. Pipes has transformed the live broadcast into a seance circle and attempts to use the show to possess all of England.
For American viewers, it’s all rather well made but one wonders how people could have been so upset by this show. Well, for those in Britain, this movie seemed like anything but.
The crew making it took great pains to make it seem real, even if it was part of the BBC anthology series Screen One. It was shot in Studio D of BBC Elstree Studios, a place where many news shows had been aired from. The 081 811 8181 is an actual BBC call-in number, adding to the realism. In fact, the show was nearly canceled because the network didn’t want a War of the Worlds panic to happen. They demanded opening credits be added including the writer’s name, in addition to a Screen One title sequence.
No one noticed that.
The documentary style of Ghostwatch led to 30,000 phone calls from frightened viewers, including Parkinson’s elderly mother! In the days to follow, tabloids went to town criticizing the BBC — who never reaired Ghostwatch — which only increased when eighteen-year-old factory worker Martin Denham became obsessed by the show and upon hearing noises in his parent’s home much like the show would take his own life. The Broadcast Standards Commission rebuked the BBC, saying “The BBC had a duty to do more than simply hint at the deception it was practicing on the audience. In Ghostwatch there was a deliberate attempt to cultivate a sense of menace. The presence in the program of presenters familiar from children’s programs took some parents off-guard in deciding whether their children could continue to view.”
Considering that children and elderly people reported PTSD after watching this, you can see why Greene appeared on the following Monday’s Children’s BBC to reassure younger viewers that the show was not real.
Except that it kind of is.
The story is based on the Enfield poltergeist, a story that had been debated in the tabloids as well, which adds even more of a layer of truth to this story. Peggy Hodgson reported poltergeist activities in her home and voices that would emerge from her daughter Janet. The BBC had reported several times on this story, so Ghostwatch probably felt like a Halloween ratings sweeps stunt.
Writer Stephen Volk (Gothic, The Guardian) had seen this as a mini-series but producers thought that the final live segment, inspired by Nigel Keale’s The Stone Tape, would have more impact.
While this show destroyed minds and reaped souls in England, over here it’s been an influence on so many found footage films like Host and The Blair Witch Project, as well as the near-perfect UHF TV era U.S. remix WNUF Halloween Special.
I love that this is shot on video, not for the need to save money, but for the need to appear real. SOV continues to be a format that offers so many hallways to explore.
Volk wrote a sequel in the short story 31/10, in which he vists the sealed-off BBC studio space where the original show was made along with a group of people whose lives were somehow impacted by Ghostwatch. You can read it here.
In Britain, there are national seances every year to watch this and even a great website called Behind the Curtains that tells so many of the stories of this movie.
If you want to see it for yourself, the 101 Films blu ray release of Ghostwatch is perfect. In addition to the movie, you also get a 30th anniversary feature-length documentary, two sets of commentary — one with film historians Dr. Shellie McMurdo and Dr. Stella Gaynor and the other with Volk, producer Ruth Baumgarten and director Lesley Manning — as well as a Shooting Reality feature with Manning, a 32-page book and a first edition slipcase. You can get it from MVD.
Droid is a science fiction movie created by British director Peter Williams, who is really adult film director Philip O’Toole, because this movie is really a re-edited version of the 1987 film Cabaret Sin, a movie in which sex is outlawed except inside the Pleasure Dome, where it is performed live for those who can afford to attend. In other words, it’s Cafe Flesh.
Yet the film that has emerged from the VHS porn wasteland and become a Blade Runner post-apocalyptic movie that you didn’t have to walk through those adult saloon doors to rent. It takes place in Los Angeles, in 2020, and yes, the future is not now.
The world is policed by cops known as Eliminators who are battling the fascist Droid Warriors and their leader Azteca (Lorrie Lovett). Once, those Droids were simply servants and now, more and more, they are breaking free from their programming. The protagonist of this remix is Taylor (Greg Derek), who has a Droid of his own named Rochester (Kevin James, not the comedian) who sounds like a certain protocol droid and looks like a robot from Sleeper or a visitor from V. All Taylor cares about is his ex-wife Nicola (Krista Lane, billed here as Rebecca Lynn), who has been brought into the war and is being charged with stealing a digital decoder to help the Eliminators.
Yet all Taylor seems to do is sit at that club and watch people couple up, like Herschel Savage, Bunny Bleu (if you’re amazed that I knew who she was instantly, well, you didn’t grow up in the late 80s and early 90s), Candie Evans, Kristara Barrington, Keisha and Tom Byron, who is listed as dancer #3.
This is a movie that has a geisha having on-stage sex with a samurai warrior while a man has a ventriloquist doll on his shoulder like some demented bird as a Reformer android with glowing red eyes looks all menacing and fog is everywhere and neon and cigarette smoke and this is what I thought strip clubs would look like and have been forever let down that robots and synth didn’t dominate things, just women trying to make some money off as sad men drink and aggressive bros toss crumpled up dollar bills in furtive gestures of not understanding that they are not truly in control.
THX-1169 is such a better name for this movie.
There are the cheapest Blade Runner cars in this and I love them so much. I’m a fan of movies that in no way need to have science fiction in them, like Obsession: A Taste for Fear, and that makes me want more needless tech and so much fog in everything. When you think of 1988 in the adult world, everyone wanted to be the Dark Brothers or Stephen Sayadian and that wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
At the center of the end of the world movies, Naziploitation, smut without smut, Phillip K. Dick and when pornographers saw art within their industry and thought, “Anyone can make Night Dreams or New Wave Hookers” and totally made strange inferior junk like Party Doll-A-Go-Go (am I outing myself or what? I mean, at least that movie has Tianna, Raven and Madison Stone in it), not to mention Star Wars xerox cinema, off the rack futuristic costumes and fog, glorious rolling fog, you will find Droid.
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