Week 1 (June 21 – 27) – Welcome to HELL

The summer’s here, so get ready to broil!

Ate de Jong directed a film you may know: Drop Dead Fred. He followed that up with this Brian Helgeland-written film. Both of these gentlemen have gone on to some amazing things in their careers. Helgeland wrote this long before he won an Oscar for L.A. Confidential and wrote modern classics like Mystic River. It’s a fascinating glimpse at his early work where he was clearly willing to lean into the weird and the wonderful.

Perhaps they don’t recall making a movie about a road to Hades all that fondly. Who knows?

Me, I appreciate any movie that has Satanic cops and appearances from Lita Ford, Gilbert Gottfried as Hitler and nearly the entire Stiller family (Ben, Amy and their parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara). It’s kind of like Mad Max in Hell, with diners aplenty and Chad Lowe.

Charlie Sykes (Lowe) and Rachel Clark (Kristy Swanson) run away to elope in the capital of sin on Earth, Las Vegas. On the way, they ignore the warnings of a gas station attendant named Sam (Richard Farnsworth, Misery, The Straight Story) who tells them that an abandoned backroad is really the road to Hell.

Rachel gets kidnapped by Sgt. Bedlam the Hellcop (C.J. Graham, who played Jason in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives), but Sam gives Charlie a shotgun and a car that will help him in Hell.

Charlie soon battles a motorcycle gang led by Royce (Adam Storke, who was Larry Underwood in The Stand and Julia Roberts’ love interest in Mystic Pizza) and meets a repairman named Beezle (Patrick Bergin, who also has Julia Roberts experience, as he was her antagonist in Sleeping With the Enemy) whose kid Adam sneaks along for the ride along with Charlie’s dog Ben.

What follows are races from Hell to Earth, a revelation as to who Satan really is, Kevin Peter Hall (who played the Predator and Harry from Harry and the Hendersons) as Charon the boatman, Pamela Gidley (Cherry 2000 herself!) showing up, nitro jumps, effects from Randall William Cook (who worked on two of The Gate films and was I, Madman) and Steve Johnson (whose credits include Predator, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, Blade II and being married for some time to Linnea Quigley).

You can watch this on Tubi.

Roger Marsh (Peter Fonda) and Frank Stewart (Warren Oates) are living the dream: two successful motorcycle dealership owners from San Antonio, heading out for a ski trip in Colorado with their wives, Kelly (Lara Parker) and Alice (Loretta Swit), in a luxury RV. But when they decide to boondock in a remote Texas meadow, their vacation hits a hard turn into the occult. They witness a gruesome human sacrifice across the river, and once the cultists realize they’ve been spotted, the vacation turns into a cross-state game of cat-and-mouse.

You couldn’t ask for a better duo to anchor this madness than Peter Fonda and Warren Oates. Fonda brings that rugged, cool-under-pressure vibe, while Oates, a true character actor legend known for his work with Sam Peckinpah, adds a frantic, grounded intensity that makes the stakes feel real. They were real-life friends, and that chemistry shines through even when they’re dodging fire and shotgun shells.

The wives aren’t just passengers, either. Loretta Swit (iconic as Hot Lips Houlihan on M*A*S*H*) and Lara Parker (Dark Shadows) handle the escalating dread perfectly, turning from vacationers into hardened survivors. And let’s not forget the great R.G. Armstrong as the local sheriff. If you’ve seen your fair share of B-movies, you know Armstrong is the king of the is-he-or-is n’t-he trustworthy authority figure.

From here, it turns into an absolute nightmare. The wives find weird occult runes, the local library is a gateway to dark knowledge, and there’s a mysterious red truck tailing them everywhere they go. By the time they hit an RV park, the cult is already inside the house. Well, inside the RV’s cabinets, where they’ve planted rattlesnakes. When the group realizes that the sheriff, the locals and every roadside stranger are seemingly part of a vast, satanic cabal, the ski trip is officially canceled. It’s a high-octane, pedal-to-the-metal chase across the Texas badlands, leading to an ending that will leave you staring at your TV screen in total disbelief.

Note: If you love dogs, as I do, the fate of Ginger is not a happy thing.

Lee Frost was originally at the helm, but after Fox execs caught wind that the actors were basically improvising the whole script, he was swapped out for Jack Starrett. Fonda and Oates almost walked away, but they stuck it out, and the resulting friction actually adds to the film’s manic, desperate pace. As for Starrett, he loved a good headline and famously claimed he hired actual Satanists as extras. Whether that was just classic drive-in marketing hype or the truth, the eerie, blank stares of the cultists in the background of almost every scene sell the paranoia perfectly. Then again, if it were real Church of Satan members, you know that Anton LaVey would have hyped that up as he did with Asylum of Satan and The Devil’s Rain.

The New York Times said, “This is a ridiculous mishmash of a movie for people who never grew up, which is not to say it’s for children. One would think that Mr. Fonda and Mr. Oates had better things to do, but perhaps not. American movie production is in a bad state.”

Whatever, fancy paper. This is RV horror at its finest.

THE NEWEST LOOK. THE OLDEST LAW. An eye for an eye…WARNING!! Due to the constant action/violence depicted in this picture, the producer requests that persons under 17 be accompanied by an adult. Watch out for Judy Lee. She will rip your eyes out !!

Yes, grindhouse posters in the U.S. went nuts for Queen Boxer, also known as The Avenger. The story is classic: don’t mess with the wrong family territory. Our protagonist is a kickboxer who returns home to find her brother has been murdered by a local crime lord. A guy who, naturally, has a penchant for gouging out people’s eyes. She teams up with a fellow fighter who’s tired of shaking down for protection money, and together they wage a one-woman (and one-man) war against a literal army of axe-wielding goons. It’s a relentless, bloody climb through the Shanghai underworld that culminates in one of the most brutal, sustained punch-a-geddon finales in the history of the genre.

Directed by Florence Yu Fung-Chi, a rare female force in the male-dominated 70s HK industry, this was the only real shot she and her production company, Fung Ming, ever got, and they were desperate to make it count.

When the film was released, their marketing tried to sell Judy Lee as Bruce Lee’s actual sister. It was a complete fabrication and one that Lee eventually had to publicly apologize for, but it put butts in seats. But forget the marketing lies; the woman had the goods. With years of intensive Peking Opera training under her belt, Lee’s physicality is undeniable. She wasn’t just posing; she was throwing hands and feet with a ferocity that makes most of her contemporaries look like they’re doing a dance recital.

If that doesn’t make you laugh at the PR stunt for this movie, they also tried to sell it as a sequel to Boxer From Shantung.

It starts with Ma Yu Chen rolling into a restaurant looking to settle a debt with the local crime boss, Lee Ying, and his gang of thugs. He cleans house, but gets ambushed and ends up dead in a particularly nasty fashion. See, this crew belongs to the infamous Axe Gang, the kind of psychos who don’t just kill people. They massacre entire families. They thought they had left no loose ends, but they forgot about Ma Su Chen, his sister.

She hits the streets of Shanghai to the tune of the Shaft theme and hooks up with Fan Kao To (Peter Yang Kwan), a local rice bun shop owner who’s had enough of the Axe Gang’s protection racket. When Kao To stops paying, Su Chen steps in to deliver some instant dentistry to the goons who show up to collect. One thing leads to another, and this dynamic duo turns the city into a war zone to settle the score with the Big Boss. 

This was an 18-day quickie, and it shows. The camera angles are often tilted to the point of inducing vertigo, the editing is frantic, and the gore is surprisingly heavy for the era. The producers clearly didn’t give a damn about copyright, so you’ll hear iconic riffs from Shaft and various James Bond themes ripped straight from the studio masters and slapped onto the soundtrack. But this is arguably one of the few Hong Kong action films from that era directed by a woman, which lends the vengeful woman tearing through patriarchy a bit more bite. 

You can watch this on Tubi.

Back in the early 1980’s, the VHS market allowed my family to enjoy movies that never made it to Ellwood City, about an hour from Pittsburgh. Our hometown video store, Prime Time Video, was packed with films that fascinated me. I wish someone had footage of all the movies on the shelf. I know we definitely rented Ruggero Deodato’s Raiders of Atlantis, and this bizarre piece of cinema about an Aztec god loose in Manhattan. What a time to be alive, when you could walk down the street and wander row after row of horror movie choices!

The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, a feather-winged dragon, has found its new pyramid on the Chrysler Building. The film starts by showing us how it finds and devours the heads of its victims in gory detail. Meanwhile, an Aztec cult is leaving sacrificed victims in its wake as Detective Shepard (David Carradine, Death Race 2000) and Sgt. Powell (Richard Roundtree, Shaft) tries to keep up.

The film cuts to a failed diamond heist that leads Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty, who owns this film with a manic Method performance) to the title monster’s nest. He uses his new knowledge to move away from crime (and jazz piano playing) as he extorts the city for the location of the creature’s egg.

Shephard finds out the location on his own, ruining Quinn’s plans. The cops conduct an attack that takes out a baby Q as the creature returns home, wiping out nearly everyone (don’t take Shaft, Q!) until it’s shot over and over, falling dead to the streets below. The cop also saves Quinn, who is almost sacrificed by a crazed Aztec priest.

That said — the magic of the past in man’s modern world is not gone. The film ends with one last egg hatching.

Q is a great movie even without the monster. In Will Harris’ great oral history of the film, David Carradine said: “I thought if Larry had left the monster out of it, between Michael Moriarty and me, there was a real great story there between the detectives and the sleazebag heroin addict/petty-thief character. That’s where the power in the movie is. That’s where the heart of it is… and not in the chicken that ate New York!“

And this is a movie that rose from tragedy! Cohen had just been fired from I, the Jury and didn’t want to waste the hotel room he had already paid for. He wrote the script, hired actors and was done with pre-production in just six days!

Like all of Cohen’s films—do I sound repetitive yet? — This is a movie that outdoes its small budget and looks like a million bucks. It has heart — and plenty of other organs — and verve and panache and any other hyperbole you’d love to bestow upon it.

Released in Italy as L’uomo senza memoria (The Man Without a Memory), Puzzle was directed by Duccio Tessari, who like many Italy exploitation directors had a career that went from genre to genre: peplum (he wrote several, including Goliath and the Vampires and Mario Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World),  westerns (he wrote and directed A Pistol for Ringo and The Return of Ringo), Eurospy (Kiss Kiss…Bang Bang), blacksploitation (Three Tough Guys) and the giallo with The Bloodstained Butterfly and this film.

Tessari took the amnesia trope and gave it a cold, sharp, European edge. It’s less about a masked killer stalking fashion models and more about a man trapped in a labyrinth of his own making.

Eight months ago, Ted Walden (Luc Merenda) woke up from a brutal car crash with a clean slate and a vacant mind. He’s been trying to piece his life back together, but the universe seems to have other plans. Every time he crosses paths with someone from his former life, one of two things happens: they either pull a gun on him or they end up dead.

His ex-wife (Senta Berger) has moved on, thinking he’s been dead this whole time, which, in a way, he was. But the syndicate hasn’t forgotten him. They know he stole a million dollars before that fateful wreck, and they aren’t looking for an apology. If Ted can’t find the cash, he’s going to lose his life—and he’s going to take his ex-wife down with him.

What makes Puzzle stand out in the crowded Italian thriller landscape of the 70s is the character arc. It’s fascinating to watch Ted slowly realize that the man he used to be was an absolute piece of work. There is a delicious tension in watching a man use the ruthless instincts of his former, evil self to protect the decent man he’s accidentally become. And, because this is an Italian production from the 70s, let’s be honest: the man has taste. For an amnesiac, Ted knows his way around a wardrobe—the suits are sharp, the setting is moody, and the style is top-tier.

While it lacks the hyper-violent, glove-wearing killer obsession of some other Gialli, it leans hard into the “discovery of identity” thriller subgenre. It’s a mystery that feels like it’s constantly folding in on itself, leading to a crowd-pleasing, high-stakes finale that lands with a punch. Interestingly, this movie hit the screens the same year as a certain grisly little film from Texas (you know the one), but Puzzle brings its own distinct brand of Euro-cruelty that demands your attention.

I kind of love that Ted slowly learns what a horrible person he used to be and how he can use it to remain the better person he has become. Also, for an amnesiac, he has not forgotten how to dress well. Less a murder-based giallo and more an exploration of identity — with a crowd-pleasing ending made the very same year as a certain film from Texas — this one surprised me.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Dude, Richard Rush has sure made some disparate movies. There’s Thunder Alley, Hells Angels on Wheels and The Stunt Man, then there’s Air America and Color of Night. But he also made this, which reminds me that if I were alive in 1968, I would have died young.

Jenny (Susan Strasberg) is a deaf girl looking for her brother Steve, who left behind a note that said, “Jess Saes: God is alive and well and living in a sugar cube.” That leads her to Haight-Ashbury and the band Mumblin’ Jim, led by Stoney (Jack Nicholson).

Henry Jaglom, who wrote My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, is an artist who does the band’s posters. When they go to see him, he’s so messed up on 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine that he thinks everyone is the living dead and threatens them with a saw. But that’s where Jenny sees some of her brother’s art and learns that he’s become a traveling preacher known as The Seeker. Dave (Dean Stockwell), who left the band, offers to help them find him, but everyone nearly dies in the junkyard when the gang — led by John “Bud” Cardos — attacks.

The Seeker shows up, and yep, he’s Bruce Dern. He reveals that Jenny was beaten so badly by their mother that she had a stroke and went deaf. He wants to be clean from drugs when they meet. Meanwhile, his sister is caught between Stoney and Dave.

This movie ends as all hippy films must, in death and fire, as Stoney sets his shrine ablaze and Dave saves a tripping Jenny from a car coming right at her by sacrificing himself, remarking that he hopes death will be a good trip as he dies.

Dick Clark produced this, and like a true square, he wanted the drug message to show how wrong it was to get hooked. Ah, I’m being mean.

Let’s be nice — the stunts and special effects are by Gary Kent, whose adventures make up the documentary Danger God. The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Seeds and The Storybook made most of the music in this, and the concert scenes are worth watching the entire film. Plus, Garry Marshall plays an undercover cop!

First things first: this movie has a major identity crisis. It was originally shot way back in 1975 under the title Wheeler by directors Jack Collins and Jim Feazell. But they didn’t just stop in Texas, as the production actually set up camp in El Dorado, Arkansas. Over the years, distributors kept shuffling the deck, re-releasing and re-titling this poor movie as The Mama’s Boy and The Hurting before it finally settled into its most infamous exploitation moniker: Psycho from Texas. They even dragged the movie back to the editing room in 1978 to shoot entirely new insert footage just to crank up the sleaze factor.

The story centers around a complete drifter and hitman named Wheeler (John King III, The House of the Dead). Wheeler is your textbook exploitation psycho, raised in absolute squalor by a violently abusive mother, which left his mind thoroughly scrambled by beating him and — as in all 70s and 80s psycho movies — sleeping around.

After he grows up, Wheeler gets hired by a local businessman to kidnap a wealthy oil baron. To pull off the heist, he teams up with a local backwoods hillbilly named Slick (Tommey Lamey). The oil baron manages to escape almost immediately, turning the entire second half of the movie into a chaotic, endless, slow-motion foot chase through the swamps and muddy backwoods of the South. It’s mostly just Slick screaming wildly into the wind while everyone gets covered in mud. Throw in a stereotyped, bumbling country sheriff (co-director Jack Collins himself) and a screaming maid named Joann Bruno, and you have a recipe for pure drive-in gold.

The absolute main attraction here is an incredibly early, pre-fame appearance by the future Queen of Scream herself, Linnea Quigley. During that 1978 pick-up shoot, they cast a young Linnea for a completely gratuitous, jaw-droppingly sleazy sequence where Wheeler holds her captive and forces her to dance naked while pouring beer all over her. Looking back on one of her very first film gigs, Linnea didn’t exactly have warm, fuzzy memories of the El Dorado shoot, later saying: “They made me take my clothes off and poured beer on me. It was stupid.“

Though this is listed first on Linnea Quigley’s filmography, it is not her first role, as that was Fairy Tales. 

My absolute favorite piece of trivia about this movie has nothing to do with what’s on the screen and everything to do with how they tried to sell it. When the movie premiered in New York City back in 1976, the distributors ran a legendary cowboy-style promotional stunt. They hired a massive truck, plastered it with a giant Psycho from Texas banner, mounted a set of high-powered loudspeakers on the roof, and blasted threatening country-fried warnings at people walking the Deuce.

You can watch this on YouTube.

William Girdler said that Project: Kill was “…the beginning of what I can do if I’m given the opportunity. Here I’m not pinned down by cliches or lousy material. It’s the only picture I’m really proud of.”

John Trevor (Leslie Nielsen) has spent six years as part of an MK-ULTRA experiment that gives American soldiers better killing abilities through training, drugs and hypnosis. It’s kind of like a cult for killers, and now, he wants out. He even tells his second-in-command, Frank Lassiter (Gary Lockwood), that he’s about to escape. It’d all be great if the withdrawal didn’t make John incredibly violent, or if an Asian gang wasn’t looking for him in the hopes of taking the drugs from his system and using them for their own army.

Come for Nielsen dressed like a 70s dad despite being billed as an action star, stay for his romance with Nany Kwan and by all means, come back for his fight with Lockwood on a beach. It even ends a lot like Scorpio, where the older killer tells the younger one, “Now they’re going to come after you.”

On the William Girdler website, Girdler’s insurance man Joe Schulten said, “Project Kill was supposed to be distributed in a lot of countries. Nancy Kwan was an international star at the time, and it was booked up everywhere. But the man who was going to distribute the movie was either killed or committed suicide right before the film was scheduled to come out. So the release was tied up in an estate dispute. I don’t think Project Kill was ever released to movie theaters. I think it only showed up on cable in the eighties.:

Producer David Sheldon had the answer: “Project Kill was released in the theaters, though not a very wide release. It’s been on television quite a bit, and there’s a home video in stores. We pulled the picture from Arnold Kopelson (Inter-Ocean Films), who was supposed to distribute the film overseas, but was taking too long. A company called Sterling Gold tried to take it next, but the owner was found murdered in an organized crime style. Finally, I put it with Picturmedia, which released it theatrically and sold the home video rights. The CEO of Picturmedia is Doro Vlado Hreljanovic. Picturmedia has done a poor job in releasing the picture. It deserves more.”

That said, it does feature Vic Diaz.

Writer Galen Thompson went on to script Superstition, The Evil and several Chuck Norris projects, while David Sheldon was part of Grizzly, Lovely but Deadly and Foxy Brown.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Before Tom DeSimone became the guy who gave us the sleaze-pop masterpiece Hell Night, the iconic Reform School Girls and the Linda Blair-led Savage Streets, he made what the poster called “The First Real Adult Film in 3D!”

Let’s be honest: this is softcore. It’s the kind of movie you could maybe sit through with your dad, but you’d be sweating bullets if your mom walked into the room. 

We kick things off in the prison shower—because, of course, we do. We’ve got Gertie (the legendary Annik Borel, better known as the Werewolf Woman) trying to get intimate with Cindy (the queen of 70s adult cinema, Uschi Digard). But they get cockblocked by the warden, Dr. Reinhardt, who decides to let a group of inmates into the general population for two days as part of a rehab program.

Does this work out? Of course not. The outside world is just as messed up as the slammer. But you didn’t come here for the plot, did you? You came for the 3D experience. And the sleaze. So you want body painting? You got Candy Samples getting turned into a living canvas. You want a cast that reads like an exploitation “Who’s Who“? Feast your eyes on Jacqueline Giroux  Trick or Treats and Drive-In Massacre), Tracy Handfuss (A Clockwork Blue, Psyched by the 4D Witch), Maria Arnold (Fantasm), Liz Wolfe (Fantasm Comes Again), Linda York (A Scream in the Streets), Marsha Jordan (Teen-Age Jail Bait) and Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death).

Critics might argue that The Stewardesses beat it to the 3D adult punch by three years, but who cares about semantics? They could also say that this is less a movie and more a series of softcore lovemaking scenes strung together by the thinnest thread of plot imaginable.

Who listens to them?