Mannequin Two: On the Move is very much the same movie as Mannequin but it is also quite similar to Tammy and the T-Rex. How could that be? Well, as always, you’re going to have to listen to this episode.
You can listen to the show on Spotify.
The show is also available on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, Amazon Podcasts, Podchaser and Google Podcasts.
Directed and written by Larry Wilson (Beetlejuice, The Little Vampire), this episode has Charlie (Travis Tritt) and Richard (Hank Azaria) working the night shift as security guards who get mixed up with the body stealing Dr. Orloff (Austin Pendleton). The lesson in this episode is to never murder a friend for a mad scientist.
“Yeah, kids these days with their long hair. You can’t even tell the boils from the ghouls. And when they do want a cut, they go to one of those fancy salons like Jose Slay-ber or Videad Sassoon. It’s enough to make you terror your hair out. Hmm. I guess that towel was a little too hot. Still, I think it’s a good look for you. Once it’s groan out, I’m sure you’ll love it. Which brings to mind the young men in tonight’s terror tale. They’re about to try a new scare style as well, in a delightful little die-job I call “Doctor of Horror.””
Ben Stein shows up as the bad boss and while this doesn’t have much of a story, it does have some gore. Sometimes, that’s enough.
This was based on “Doctor of Horror” from Vault of Horror #13. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Graham Engels. It’s a different story, as Professor LeMonet digging up corpses to get more students into his class. By the end, though, he’s gotten greedy and starts paying criminals to murder people instead of waiting for bodies to expire.
Why do I do this to myself?
Once called The Mouse Experiment, this even has a dumb logline: “The film follows a group of friends stuck at a fairground amusement park hunted down by a mutated rat – Steamboat Willie.”
Yes, Steamboat Willie is in the public domain, so we will get stuff like this instead of making Amityville movies. And Screamboat. And The Mouse Trap. And Mouseboat Massacre. And The Mouse Trap: Welcome to The Mickeyverse.
I swear I will not watch all of these movies, like Amityville and Ouija, and keep posting them.
I’m lying and hate myself because I’ve already watched two of these.
Directed by Brendan Petrizzo and written by Harry Boxley (Popeye’s Revenge) and Marc Gottlieb (Snow White and the Seven Samurai), this has Dr. Rupert (Chris Lines) creating killers like the well-named The Killer (Lewis Santer), who looks like a Spirit Store version of Mickey by way of Hot Topic. There’s also The Bear (Stephen Staley), wearing the same mask as the killer from Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and the two have to compete to see who can get the most body parts.
Is Pooh in the same universe as Mickey now? How many Mickey universes will there be? For all the people watching it, how many other than me picked it because Michelle Bauer and Geretta Geretta have voice cameos? Why is this set in a video game place (Knightly’s Fun Park Towyn, North Wales’ premier holiday entertainment complex)- other than it’s trying to be Five Nights at Freddy’s too while it’s stealing so much- when it has nothing to do with the plot? And murderous jellyfish? And somewhat good gore? Why did Mickey act like Art the Clown? Why would Dr. Rupert be using women’s bodies to make a bride for each of his murderers?
The ending makes no sense, and the sound quality is as good as a second wave of black metal record. I’m being kind to the sound design as that makes it seem lood. But hey- a killer mouse who is public domain. When do we get Amityville Mickey? Am I going to have to film it?
You can watch this on Tubi.
Aisha Osagie (Letitia Wright, Black Panther) is a Nigerian girl seeking asylum in Ireland. As you can imagine, she’s not treated well by anyone and is seen as less than nothing. Luckily, she has a good lawyer in Peter Flood (Loran Cranitch) and starts a friendship with Conor Healy (Josh O’Connor, Challengers).
Aisha may have a sad existence, but it’s better than the violence that she’s left behind, as her father and brother were both killed, and her mom has gone into hiding. She, much like so many of the asylum seekers that she befriends, can be taken away at any time, which means their lives start to feel almost meaningless.
Director and writer Frank Berry has put together a good movie that has flown under the radar and ended up on Tubi. It has so much to say about the world- the country, if you’re in the U.S.- that we’re living in today. It ends in a totally anticlimactic way, but even that makes so much sense, and it seems like it has to be that way.
You can watch this on Tubi.
This Saturday at 8 PM EST on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube channels, Re-Gor from Fright Lounge will join Bill and me to show two awesome movies!
Up first, it’s 1980’s Incubo sulla città contaminate AKA City of the Walking Dead AKA Nightmare City AKA Invasion by the Atomic Zombies! It’s a movie where Umberto Lenzi, Mel Ferrer and Hugo Stiglitz ask, “How bad do you want to see the infected fuck up a jazzercise class?” You can watch it on YouTube.
Every show, we watch movies, discuss them, look at the ad campaigns and have a cocktail to go with each movie. Here’s this show’s first drink:
Infected
Our second movie has many titles as well. Virus – L’inferno dei morti viventi AKA Hell of the Living Dead AKA Night of the Zombies! You can watch it on Pluto.
Here’s the second drink.
Hope Center
See you Saturday!
Doesn’t Lionsgate feel above making cash in Amityville movies?
No?
Let’s look at the logline: “When Heather West, a paranormal investigator, receives a call from a terrified woman who claims her house is inhabited by a ghost, she discovers the building has a horrifying history. After a presence from beyond our world reaches out to her, Heather begins to feel a pull to the other side of the spirit plane. Can this hunter of specters deliver an innocent soul to a place of peace and discover an eternal truth in time to save her own life?”
Notice that Amityville is nowhere to be named. At least the Echo is the student news site of Amityville Memorial High School.
This was made as The Girl from the Other Side, and like all Amityville movies, it has nothing to do with the house or the place. It’s about paranormal investigator Heather West (Saran McDonald) and her need to learn what happened to Maryanne and her killer, Ronny Bushik (director and writer Carlos Araya). The owner of the house where it happened allows her to come in and explore, but as you can imagine, things get bad once the Tarot cards get dealt.
However, much of the movie is about Heather watching a TV show called Hauntings of the South and House On Haunted Hill. There’s a lot of voiceover, supers on the screen, and unconnected dialogue, making me think this was a foreign movie re-edited for American streaming. This movie wasn’t well-made, or there was something in between. That said, even as bad as it is, it’s still heads, shoulders, and bloody walls above most Amityville movies, but that bar is so low that you can’t limbo under it.
I have no idea why this was divided into chapters, why some scenes looked all gauzy, or why there were so many slow-motion moments. It’s trying to be arty, stumbling and then getting up and running full-speed into being arty all over again, but it never gets steady, so it runs right into a wall and kind of pauses a bit before it falls down.
How did this end up on Peacock? I could see Tubi, but people are actually paying to watch this!
It’s year four of the April Movie Thon, your chance to write for B&S About Movies.
All April long, there will be thirty themes as writing prompts. If you’d like to be part of April Movie Thon 3, you can just send us an article for that day to bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com or post it on your site and share it out with the hashtag #BSAprilMovieThon
This year, I plan on doing one long review for each day and really exploring each movie. Will this be the year that other writers take part?
Here are the themes:
April 1: Drop A Bomb — Please share your favorite critical and financial flop with us!
April 2: Get Me Another — A sequel or a movie way too similar to another film.
April 3: National Film Score Day — Write about a movie that has a great score.
April 4: World Rat Day — Celebrate this holiday by writing about a movie with a rat in it.
April 5: Visual Vengeance Day — Write about a movie released by Visual Vengeance. Here’s a list to help you find a movie.
April 6: Independent-International: Write about a movie from Sam Sherman. Here’s a list.
April 7: Jackie Day — Celebrate Jackie Chan’s birthday!
April 8: Zoo Lover’s Day — You know what that means. Animal attack films!
April 9: Do You Like Tubi Originals? — I do. You should find one and write about it. Here’s a list to help.
April 10: Seagal vs. Von Sydow — One is a laughable martial artist. The other is a beloved acting legend. You choose whose movie you watch, it’s both of their birthdays.
April 11: Until You Call on the Dark — Pick a movie from the approved movies list of the Church of Satan. Here’s the list.
April 12: 412 Day — A movie about Pittsburgh (if you’re not from here that’s our area code). Or maybe one made here. Heck, just write about Striking Distance if you want.
April 13: (Evil) Plant Appreciation Day — It ain’t easy being green. Pay tribute to all the plants with a movie starring one of them.
April 14: Viva Italian Horror — Pick an Italian horror movie and dig into the pasta sauce and gore.
April 15: TV to Movies — Let’s decry the lack of originality in Hollywood. But first, let’s write about a movie that started as a TV show.
April 16: Filmirage — Give in to the sleaze and write about a Joe D’Amato produced movie. There’s a list here.
April 17: Bat Appreciation Day —Watch a movie with a fake bat in it.
April 18: Heavy Metal Movies: Pick a movie from Mike McPadden’s great book. RIP. List here.
April 19: Record Store Day — Write about a movie starring a musician.
April 20: King Yourself! — Pick a movie released by Crown International Pictures. Here’s a list!
April 21: Gone Legitimate — A movie featuring an adult film actor in a mainstream role.
April 22: Earth Day Ends Here — Instead of celebrating a holiday created by a murderer, share an end of the world disaster movie with us. You can also take care of the planet while you’re writing.
April 23: Regional Horror — A regional horror movie. Here’s a list if you need an idea.
April 24: Polonia Bros — Whether alone or with his brother John, Mark Polonia has made so many movies. Pick one off this list.
April 25: Bava Forever — Bava died on this day 43 years ago. Let’s watch his movies.
April 26: Oh Giorgio! — Pick a movie with a Giorgio Moroder score. Here’s a list to get you started.
April 27: Kayfabe Cinema — A movie with a pro wrestler in it.
April 28: Nightmare USA — Celebrate Stephen Thrower’s book by picking a movie from it. Here’s all of them in a list.
April 29: Screw the Medveds — Here’s a list of the movies that the Medveds had in their Golden Turkey Awards books. What do they know? Defend one of the movies they needlessly bashed.
April 30: Weird Wednesday — Write about a movie that played on a Weird Wednesday, as collected in the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive. Here’s a list.
Watching The Projectionist last week and then this, I felt like I was seeing the open and close of director and writer Harry Hurwitz. Now I have to go back and watch his Harry Tampa movies and Safari 3000.
Hosted by Tony Randall, this is a fake doc about the life and films of Max Roeebling (James Coco). It’s very ZAZ in that it keeps throwing jokes at you and unless you’re as obsessed by the history of bad movies as I am, you just might hate this.
But for those of you who want to take the ride…
Adequate Studios has been around since the 1930s and just copies what everyone else is doing. Hollywood epics (but dirty). Shakespeare (in animal costumes). A more violent Three Stooges. And somehow, Bruce Willis, Robert Downey Jr., Stiller and Meara, Sinbad and Robert Townsend show up and we get to see the career of Baby Elroy and Young Hitler (which stars Robert Vaughn!,) which is just Hitler in George Washington’s story.
Not Necessarily the News fans will be happy to see Anne Bloom and Stuart Pankin, Brother Theodore and Professor Irwin Corey appear and Susan Dey sings a folk song and then goes down on someone.
Not all the jokes land. Most people who will review this on Letterboxd will hate it, because they didn’t grow up in a time when all movies weren’t instantly available and you could find this weird late 80’s movie in a video store and wonder, “How can all of these people be in the same movie?” I don’t care how many of the jokes work, I laughed at the We Are the World comedian part and Bob Elroy Meets Frankenstein. If a movie can make you giggle a few times, I say it’s a success.
I mean, Joe Franklin is all over this. That’s worth at least three stars alone.
You can watch this on YouTube.
With that VHS art, I wanted to love this. I thought it was going to be an under the city horror movie, but no, it’s action. John Willis (Doc Dougherty) is a cop that has lost his public standing thanks to an article by reporter Kim Knowles (B.J. Geordan AKA Forbes Riley; Splatter University). Then, they have to find a way to work together to stop attacks on New Yorkers led by the recently escaped mental patient Boris (Lennie Loftin).
Also released as Underground and Juez, Jurado y Ejecutor, this was directed by James McCalmont, whose only other director credit is for Escape from Safehaven. He did shoot American Tickler, The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue, The Rejuvenator and Voodoo Dawn, while also working as a gaffer on Let My Puppets Come, Gums, My Demon Lover and director of photography on Evolver, Fist of the North Star and The Silence of the Hams. That’s what I call a career.
The writer, Brian O’Hara, also wrote Rock ‘n’ Roll Frankenstein.
I wish I could tell you that this was some big find or worth the time to track it down. But it isn’t. If only I could report otherwise.
Jessica and the police are baffled when a car with no driver runs down a visitor to Cabot Cove who had fired local inventor Dan O’Brien.
Season 1, Episode 6: Hit, Run and Homicide (November 25, 1984)
Tonight on Murder, She Wrote…
We go back to Cabot Cove just in time for a murder.
Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury, and were they in any exploitation movies?
Claude Atkins is back as Captain Ethan Cragg. I wish he’d stuck around more than one season. He’s joined by Tom Bosley as Cabot Cove’s other lawman, Sheriff Amos Tupper.
Edward Albert, the son of Eddie Albert and Mexican dancer Margo, plays Tony Holiday. He has appeared in Sorceress, Ellie, The House Where Evil Dwells, Butterfly, Galaxy of Terror and The Fool Killer.
Kate Simmons is June Allyson, the wife of Dick Powell, who was Jo in 1949’s Little Women.
Leslie Ander is played by Patti D’Arbanville, who, in addition to being the subject of the song “Lady D’Arbanville” by Cat Stevens on his album Mona Bone Jakon, was once Don Johnson’s lover.
Daniel O’Brien is Van Johnson, the inventor in the middle of this mystery. He made three appearances on Murder, She Wrote. Still, he’s in movies like Delta Force Commando II: Priority Red One, Killer Crocodile, Taxi Killer, Concorde Affaire ’79 and 23 Paces to Baker Street.
Charles Woodley is Stuart Whitman, who some folks could tell you was in some big movies. Still, for me, he’s in some of my favorites: The Monster Club, Demonoid, Guyanna: Cult of the Damned, Ruby, The White Buffalo, Shadows In an Empty Room, Eaten Alive and Emanuelle – A Woman from a Hot Country AKA Fury. This is the first of four Murder, She Wrote rolls for Whitman.
Dean Merrill is played by Bruce Gray, the bride’s father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Eliza Bates is Lois Foraker, Nurse Merrin in Exorcist III and Sgt. Frazer in Child’s Play 3.
Lois Hoey? That’s Paddi Edwards, who, outside of voiceover work, is a secretary on Halloween 3.
In minor roles, Cora McIntyre is played by Dee Croxton, a gas attendant is played by Doug Stevenson (who shows up in The Prowler and Iced), Harry Stevens is in one of three small parts on the show, GR Smith plays a deputy, Roger Price was a local, Ed Morgan shows up (he was the first assistant director on The First Nudie Muscial), Juen Allyson’s wife David Ashrow has a minor part, Betty Jeanne Glennie was a passerby (one of her many crowd roles), Crystal Jenious is there, as is Paul LeClair (who shot second unit on Blood Diner and Night Patrol), Michael Rodgers and Steven Ameche.
What happens?
Charles Woodley came from Boston to Cabot Cove hoping to meet inventor Daniel O’Brian, who used to work for him. He’s nearly killed by a car with no driver—The Car? — and he’s not the last to get run over. There’s also Katie, who is trying to hire Daniel for a job and a couple named Tony and Leslie, who are in the middle of a new relationship.
Dean Merrill, Woodley’s partner, gets to town just in time to be the next victim of the car. Daniel is the main suspect, as he designed a car just like that in the past. So of course Jessica goes looking for the car while she jogs every morning and finds it almost immediately. Then she does a total Jessica move: she gets in the car and is nearly killed.
There’s also a moment when Ethan plays Spy Hunter and tries to get Jessica to leave him alone. Video games being in small neighborhood grocery stores is such a memory of when life was better. Jessica takes over his game and figures out the case, all while we get a POV shot from inside the machine, which is pretty good for an 80s network TV show.
Who did it?
Woodley, along with Leslie and Tony, because Daniel has designs which could keep the company in business. Woodley gets all the money without his partner, which he will share with his conspirators.
Who made it?
British director Alan Cooke worked a lot on TV in his homeland and America.
Writer Gerald K. Siegel wrote nine episodes of this show and episodes of Darkroom and Salvage 1.
Cinematographer Dennis Dalzell shot this (and 33 other episodes). He also worked on V, Vampire, and Bustin’ Loose and was the cameraman on Ginger In the Morning and Necromancy. His father, Archie R. Dalzell, also shot an episode of this show, as well as Cruise Into Terror, The Boy In the Plastic Bubble and The Trip.
Some facts…
Captain Joshua Wayne, the founder of Cabot Cove, was a pirate who fought for the British during the Revolutionary War.
At least when this episode happens, there are 3,560 people in Cabot Cove. Many of them will be murdered.
Lois Hoey is also in the pilot.
Jessica doesn’t have a driver’s license.
Does Jessica get some?
No, but the way she and Ethan argue, I can only imagine they have really rough sex. I mean, as rough as older people sex would be, which in my experience is going into it without taking aspirin before and using Mineral Ice after. I would go further and explain which position I think they’ll enjoy but I think we need to leave some of Jessica’s secrets secret.
Does Jessica dress up and act stupid?
No. She is dumb enough to get into a murder auto.
Was it any good?
This is a fun episode, but it’s strange that Elliot Silverstein, the director of The Car, did episodes of Murder, She Wrote but not this one with a killer car.
Give me a reasonable quote:
Captain Ethan Cragg: I’m sorry to eat and run, Jess, but they’re having a tournament on that arcade game, and since I am the current record holder, I feel obliged to defend my title.
Jessica Fletcher: Well, dishes can wait. Would you mind if I competed?
Captain Ethan Cragg: You? It really would be kind of a waste of a good quarter.
What’s next?
Jessica goes to the theme park. Someone dies. You knew that, right?
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