Lenny (Mark Hennessy) and Bruce (Scott King) are taking photos of bikini girls on Venice Beach when they accidentally film a murder. The only clue? A woman with a rose tattoo on her butt. Now, Mr. Karrothers (John Vernon) is sending his hitmen after them.
Featuring a score by a very young in his career Hans Zimmer, this Nico Mastorakis directed and written movie moves fast and soon has Lenny and Bruce — along with Lenny’s bully brother Skip (Steve Donmyer) — catch up with that tattooed behind. It belongs to Christie (Hope Marie Carlton, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Picasso Trigger) who, of course, once dated Skip. The law thinks she’s a killer but Lenny thinks otherwise.
You may or may not know, but I’ve been trying to watch every Tara Buckman movie, so I am pleased that she shows up here as the wife of Vernon’s character. Ted Lange also plays a man who is at once unhoused on the beach but perhaps the smartest character in the film.
This is a mix of high and lowbrow, as most of Mastorakis’ movies are. It has allusions to Blow Up while also naming a character Mario Argento. It’s also ridiculous at times, but never boring. I don’t believe Mastorakis can make a boring movie.
This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.
Man, Nico Mastorakis made some crazy movies. Like this one, in which a bunch of teens on a Greek vacation discover an entirely new kind of drugs: audio cassettes that deliver orgasms via hallucination filmed music videos. No, really. What is this, The Digital Underground’s Sex Packets: The Movie?
It also has a soundtrack filled with songs by Chris de Burgh, the guy who wrote “Lady In Red,” so it has that going for it. Also, Seiko paid big money to get their Data 2000 watch into this movie, as if the people who watch Nico Mastorakis movies are looking to upgrade their digital watches.
This is a movie about an old man inside the cassettes trying to get the three heroes to find the second tape, which will weaponize the music video orgy inside. So basically Porky’s meets Videodrome but Debbie Harry never puts out a cigarette on her breast.
Yes, it’s exactly as odd as it sounds.
This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.
Andrea (Adrienne Barbeau) is a widow whose husband was an astronaut. She’s come to Greece to raise her son Tim (Jeremy Licht). One day, walking the beach after a storm, they come across a man (Keir Dullea) in the surf. He doesn’t even remember who he is, so Andrea calls him Glenn. She begins to fall in love with him, while Tim sees him as a father figure. The island’s people seem to be weirded out by him, other than Dr. Barnaby (Peter Hobbs), who learns that he has two hearts. In time, Glenn tells him that if he ever had something like a father, he wished that it would be him.
Glenn ends up being Jesus — or the brother of Jesus — who has come here from the future. He has powers that we don’t and is able to see Tim get accidentally shoved off a cliff by a very cute dog in a scene that made my jaw drop. Glenn is able to bring him back to life, but when he’s unable to do the same for other kids, the village turns against him. Also: Why would Andrea give weed to a man she thinks is a murderer at worst and an amnesiac at best?
Dullea is really great in this, as he plays the confusion perfectly. It’s wild to see director and writer Nico Mastorakis tackle such a serious subject, nearly making both a Jesus Christ and superhero movie at the same time. If Jesus came back in time to Earth, I imagine that it would be only right if he got to sleep with Adrienne Barbeau.
This is part of Arrow Video’s The Nico Mastorakis Collection and has an interview with Dan Hirsch looking back on his role in the film and a trailer as extra features.
Based on the stage play The Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller, Doctor X shouldn’t be disregarded by today’s horror fan just because it was made in 1932. It’s packed with murder, cannibalism, sex workers, strange relationships, frightening special effects and so much more. Because it was made in the two-color Technicolor process, it looks nothing like you’d think either, nearly a painting come to life. Large cities got to see this version while other countries and smaller towns only had black and white, which is how audiences saw this movie when it made its way to television in the 1950s.
It was feared that the color print was gone until the death of Jack Warner, who had one. The true color vision of Doctor X was donated to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who did a digital restoration in 2020.
Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is writing about The Moon Killer, a serial murderer who has been killing during every full moon. Each body has pieces missing, as if they were eaten, which has driven the police insane as they search for suspects.
Doctor Xavier (Lionel Atwill) is the police’s expert on the case, yet they believe that he may be the suspect as well. After all, the brains are removed with surgical skill with a scalpel similar to the one he uses. If not him, it could be the other experts at the Academy of Surgical Research: Dr. Wells (Preston Foster), an amputee who has written several studies of cannibalism; Dr. Haines (John Wray), a voyeur; Dr. Duke (Harry Beresford), who is paralyzed and Dr. Rowitz (Arthur Edmund Carewe), who is studying the mental impact of the moon.
The police are morons, as they trust Dr. X enough to let him investigate this case, bringing together all the suspects. Each of them is connected to an electrical system that tracks their heartbeat in the hopes that reenacting a murder will tell Dr. X who The Moon Killer is. Only Wells is not in this experiment, as the murderer has two hands while he has just one.
As Dr. Xavier’s butler Otto (George Rosener) and maid Mamie (Leila Bennett) act out the horrible slaughter, Taylor starts to fall for Dr. X’s daughter, Joanna (Fay Wray), despite the fact that she outright hates him for writing that her father was probably the suspect that everyone should watch for.
The lights go out and when they come back on, Rowitz is dead, a scalpel in his head. That night, when his body is set out, it gets cannibalized. Mamie runs and Joanne must take her place as the experiment continues, but that’s when the killer — SPOILER! — is revealed as Welles, who has been creating inhuman flesh and he wants to kill Dr. X’s daughter next.
She’s saved by Taylor and because this is a pre-Code horror movie, he sets Welles on fire and tosses him out a window.
The success of this movie led to Atwill and Wray appearing in Mystery of the Wax Museum. Before that release could be filmed — which also has effects by Max Factor — they were also in The Vampire Bat. While The Return of Dr. X is not a sequel, Night Monster, which also stars Atwill, is a remake.
The Moon Killer is based on Albert Fish, who was called the Moon Maniac. He was still murdering while this was being made, as he was arrested shortly after this was in theaters.
Doctor X is from some other world, a place filled with weird jokes, strange killers and a doctor’s home that seems like it’s more dungeon than domicile. I can’t wait to go back there again.
Manga creator Junji Ito grew up in a house where he was afraid to go to the bathroom, as it was at the end of a long underground tunnel filled with water crickets. While working as a dental technician, he was drawing at night and submitted a story to a magazine called Monthly Halloween that would become Tomie. The story was inspired by the death of a classmate, which Ito felt was odd that the boy just disappeared from the world. So he came up with the idea of a girl who died but just came back as if nothing has happened.
Director Ataru Oikawa didn’t want to make the movie version to be filled with gore, but more of a horrific youth drama. He still sought out Ito’s approval, taking parts from the original “Photograph” and “Kiss” stories and even had the creator’s approval for the casting of Miho Kanno as Tomie.
The police are looking into the murder of Tomie, a high school girl, which was followed over the next three years by the suicide or insanity of nine other students and a teacher. Soon, the detective assigned to the case learns that Tomie has been murdered and reborn in Gifu since the 1960’s, just as Japan joined the industrial era.
A classmate of Tomie, Tsukiko Izumisawa, can’t remember the three months around her friend’s murder. And oh yeah — her neighbor is nursing a strange baby that soon grows into another Tomie, which seduces Tsukiko’s boyfriend before attacking her at her therapist’s office by shoving cockroaches down her mouth. So our protagonist’s boyfriend does what any of us would do — he cuts the head off Tomie and takes Tsukiko to bury the body in the woods, which of course backfires. Tomie reappears and kisses Tsukiko full on the lips, who responds by setting her on fire.
That said, a few months later, Tsukiko begins to realize that she is becoming Tomie herself.
While not a horror movie, this certainly is a strange movie. For some reason, in the glut of Japanese horror that was badly remade in the U.S., this series never showed up. I would assume that’s because there’s no easy hook to grab on to.
The Arrow Video release of Tomie has audio commentary by critic and Japanese cinema expert Amber T.; interviews with director Ataru Oikawa, actress Mami Nakamura and producer Mikihiko Hirata; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by Zack Davisson and Eugene Thacker and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sara Deck.
After Easy Money, Saturday Night Live veteran James Signorelli directed one more film. This one — starring Cassandra Peterson as her Elvira character.
In 1981, six years after Sinister Seymour was off the air, the producers of LA’s Fright Night decided to do another show and asked Vampira — Maila Nurmi — to help them with the project. There were creative differences — supposedly Nurmi wanted Lola Falana to play Vampira — and soon the station just did the show themselves (for her side of the story, please watch Vampira and Me).
Peterson had already lived a crazy life before she auditioned and won the role of the new horror host. She was a Vegas showgirl at 17, briefly dated Elvis, played a showgirl in Diamonds Are Forever, posed for men’s magazines like High Society, tried out to be Ginger in a new Gilligan’s Island, was on the cover of Tom Waits’ album (she claims that she doesn’t remember but it totally could be her), played in rock bands in Italy, ended up in Fellini’s Roma, joined the improv group The Groundlings and then ended up as a DQ on KROQ.
Is this Elvira?
Anyways, back to Elvira. The station allowing her to create the image of her character. Originally, she wanted to look like Sharon Tate in The Fearless Vampire Killers, but ended up with the punky and busty look we’ve all come to know and love.
Before the first episode even aired, Normi sued, claiming that Elvira was too close to her character. I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, but they are quite similar. However, her Valley Girl delivery and sarcastic tone was a real difference and Elvira went from local star to pop icon, which led to this, her first movie.
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark quits her job in LA after the station’s new owner has a #metoo moment with her. She wants to start an act in Vegas, but needs $50,000. Luckily, her great aunt Morgana has just died and she has to travel to Fallwell, Massachusetts to claim the inheritance.
So what does she get? A mansion, a recipe book and Morgana’s pet poodle, Algonquin. But once she’s in town, she learns that no one is allowed to have fun and she sets out to change everyone’s grey demeanor. Oh yeah — and her uncle Vincent just wants the cookbook — which is a book of spells — and he also wants to sacrifice her so that he can take over the world. Thus, magic battles ensue, Algonquin becomes a rat at one point and the town’s morality club gets hit with a sex spell that gets them all arrested for indecent exposure.
Fellow Groundling Edie McClurg shows up as one of the villains, as does former Grease and Taxi heartthrob Jeff Conaway. Other Groundlings in the film are Lynne Marie Stewart, Deryl Carroll, Joseph Arias, Tress MacNeille and John Paragon.
Scripted by Sam Egan and Paragon, who is better known as Jambi and Pterri from his Pee-Wee’s Playhouse days, along with Peterson, this movie’s entertainment level will depend on how much you love puns and Elvira. I adore her, so this movie is totally fun for me.
The Arrow Video release of this film features a brand new restoration of the film from a 4K scan of original film elements. Plus, you get an introduction to the film by director James Signorelli and commentary by him. There’s also commentary by Elvira’s webmaster Patterson Lundquist and a third commentary track with Cassandra Peterson, Edie McClurg and writer John Paragon. You also get a making of feature, Too Macabre – The Making of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, and another on the making of the Pot Monster. This also includes trailers, storyboards, image galleries, reversible art and a collector’s booklet featuring writing by Sam Irving, Kat Ellinger and Patterson Lundquist.
Warner Brothers hired David Kajganich to write they wanted to be a straight-forward remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Kajganich changed the script to reflect contemporary times. I believe that each generation gets the body snatchers that it deserves, from the Cold War McCarthy menace of the 1950s, the end of the world gloom of the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the gory yet doomed 1990s Body Snatchers.
The explanation for the aliens in this version is very scientific. A space Shuttle crash lets loose a fungus that is scattered across the country. It infects people and when they go to sleep, it reprograms them. CDC director Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) is the first to be changed and his ex-wife Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) notices that he has become someone else. One of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright), says the very same thing.
This film is way ahead of the conspiracy theories of today, as Kaufman uses a flu vaccine to further spread the alien contagion throughout the world. I’m shocked more Twitter — sorry, X, I forgot — users haven’t been screaming about how this movie was the government telling us what they were going to do.
Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) attend a dinner party where they witness the transformation of a human into an alien. By now, they’ve been doing research with Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) that shows that anyone who has had acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is immune from the aliens. Thanks to movie logic, this includes Carol’s son Oliver (Jackson Bond).
Carol is eventually infected but this also brings in a bit of Elm Street as you must stay awake or you will be an alien. Luckily, she remains alert and her son is the key to fixing things, even if the society that the human race returns to is violent and emotional, unlike the perfectly ordered world that the aliens promise.
Originally directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel as a nearly effects free invasion movie, the studio was unhappy and asked for The Wachowskis to rewrite and reshoot some of the movie. After a year of the movie not progressing any further, James McTeigue was hired to shoot action scenes. During these, Kidman was injured and broke her ribs. That said, she made $17 million off this.
Remember when I said that each generation gets the bodysnatchers it deserves? This one is very 2007. I can’t remember much of that time and it seemed that everything was being remade as a faster and less soulless version of what came before. It’s a great looking film, it has pleasant leads and it tries to be about the forces that rule the world. Yet it comes after three versions of Jack Finney’s story The Body Snatchers that each had a point of view about the world and how it needed to change. This one ends with no horrifying conclusion, just the pod people waking up as if they were in a dream. Compare that to the horrific closes of the 1970s and 1990s takes.
The Arrow Video release of The Invasion has so many extras, including audio commentary by film critics Andrea Subisati and Alexandra West, co-hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast; visual essays by film scholars Alexandra Heller Nicholas and Josh Nelson; archival features from the 2007 release; a trailer; an image gallery; an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film critics William Bibbiani and Sally Christie; a reversible sleeve with original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket and a double-sided fold out poster featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Tommy Pocket.
You can order this movie on UHD or blu ray from MVD.
Sam Raimi was, at one time, mostly known for horror. Of the novels of Scott B. Smith you would think he’d make a movie of, maybe The Ruins would make more sense. That said, A Simple Plan reminds you that he once lived in the same house as the Coen Brothers when all were new to Hollywood. That said, he makes this movie all his own.
Wright County, Minnesota mostly has a feed mill and lots of snow. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and his wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) are two of the few college-educated people there. Hank’s brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and his friend Lou Chambers (Brent Briscoe) are closer than the two actual brothers are. This is tested when the men find a crashed plane and $4.4 million dollars. Hank wants to turn it in. Jacob and Lou change his mind, saying he should keep it until the snow melts and if no one brings up the money when the plane is found, they can keep it.
They all agree to not discuss the money with anyone except that Hank tells Sarah. She thinks they should take some money back to the plane. On the way, Hank and Jacob are surprised by a farmer on a snow vehicle. In the heat of the moment, they kill him and send his body and vehicle into the icy river.
Sarah believes that the money was a ransom for a kidnapped heiress from Michigan, who was abducted by two brothers by the names of Stephen and Vernon Bokovsky. She tells him that there’s no victim in the crime now, as one of the brothers had to be the dead body in the plane. The plan falls to pieces though when Lou demands his money. He’s been spending too much and might lose his truck. He threatens to go to the cops. Sarah says that they should kill him, a shocking moment as she’s just given birth to their first child.
Sarah says that they should frame Lou for the farmer’s murder by getting him drunk, making him confess and recording it. Jacob is upset that he has to betray his friend and it almost all goes wrong when Lou pulls his gun. It ends up with Lou and his wife Nancy dead and Hank having to spin the story to the police of what exactly happened. The next problem is that Jacob mentioned the plane, so Sheriff Carl Jenkins (Chelcie Ross) makes Hank show him where it is, bringing along FBI agent Neil Baxter (Gary Cole).
This is probably where you should stop reading if you want to watch this movie.
Baxter is, of course, Vernon Bokovsky. Somehow, Hank is able to kill him but now Sheriff Jenkins is also killed. That means that another story has to be told. And that’s when Jacob tells him that he’s tired. He’s either going to kill himself or force his brother to kill him, creating an alibi so that Hank can live free. It turns out that when he tells the story to the real government agents, they tell him all of the money was marked. He burns it in his fireplace, realizing that he will always be haunted by what he has done.
Paxton and Thornton had been scheduled to be in this movie for years. John Boorman was the original director and the film got cancelled. Neither believed they would ever be in the film but luckily, it all came together. This was one of the first movies where Raimi worried more about the performances of his actors instead of the action of the shots.
I miss Bill Paxton. I realize I never knew him outside of the roles he played but I feel like some part of me — I know it’s strange — knew he was a good man. In this, Hank is an ordinary person who somehow becomes a level of evil that he had no idea that he was capable of. Thornton also plays a role that any other actor would treat as a message part. His diminished intelligence is just who he is; he has other smarts that somehow make up for his lack of intelligence.
The Arrow Video release of A Simple Plan has a new 4K remaster from the original negative by Arrow Films, approved by director Sam Raimi. There’s also two new commentaries, one by critics Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme and the other from production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein with filmmaker Justin Beahm. There are also interviews with cinematographer Alar Kivilo, actors Becky Ann Baker and Chelcie Ross, and on-set interviews with Paxton, Thornton, Fonda, Raimi and producer Jim Jacks. Plus, this set has behind-the-scenes footage, a trailer, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Matt Griffin and an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Bilge Ebiri and an excerpt from the book The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi by John Kenneth Muir.
You can order the 4K and blu ray releases from MVD.
Princess (Season Hubley, who was Nikki in Hardcore) is walking the streets to make money for her daughter Lisa losing her job. Sunset Boulevard is dangerous, as you know if you’ve watched the same movies that I have, but never more dangerous when pimp Ramrod (Wings Hauser) is running things.
LAPD vice squad sergeant Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) brings Princess down to the morgue to look at the body of her dead friend Ginger (Nina Blackwood, former MTV VJ) and tell her that she’ll be busted for cocaine and lose her daughter if she doesn’t help. Yeah, every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.
Even when she helps the cops catch Ramrod, he easily escapes, starting a reign of terror on the Sunset Strip looking for Princess, promising that she will be killed. He even castrates her former pimp, Sugar Pimp Dorsey (Fred “Rerun” Berry losing his dick? No!), and beating men and women alike into the great beyond all as he gets closer and closer. At the same time, Princess is turning tricks in fancy mansions, getting into coffins with old men who like to pretend that they are dead. That’s because she knows that the vice squad will never be able to change what happens on the streets.
I would not deserve this site and you reading it if I didn’t mention that one of the working girls is Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith.
Gary Sherman should get more credit than he does. I’ve never seen a boring movie from him. Wings Hauser is also an absolute maniac beyond all other lunatics in this and even sang “Neon Slime,” the song that plays at the end.
Supposedly, Martin Scorsese got in a fight with Dawn Steele over this movie, saying that it deserved to be the best movie of the year.
The opening says, “The motion picture you are about to see has been produced with the cooperation of law enforcement authorities. Though a work of fiction, it is a composite of events that have actually taken place on the streets of Hollywood.” That’s true. Producers Brian Frankish and James Robert Dyer approached Sandy Howard about making a realit documentary about prostitution with interviews from pimps, sex workers and the LAPD Vice Squad. The project eventually became a movie with Howard, Kenneth Peter and Robert Vincent O’Neil working on the story.
Also known as Barn of the Naked Dead and Nightmare Circus, this is one of those movies where no one is even sure who made it. Sure, Alan Rudolph is listed as the director, but stuntman Gerald Cormier — also the leader of the film’s distributor CMC Pictures — is credited. Some say that he’s Rudolph. Star Andrew Prine says that two other directors made this before Rudolph and Cormier was one of them. Writer Ralph Harolde could also be Rudolph.
Andre (Prine) has built a circus in the desert, located right on top of a former atomic test site, and keeps kidnapping showgirls like Simone (Manuela Thiess), Sheri (Sherry Alberoni) and Corinne (Gyl Roland) and even female scientists, training all of them to perform for him. He also has a cougar that he lets loose on them and there’s something inside the barn that loves to kill women.
Simone is worshipped as the lost mother Andre can’t have, as he tells her of his past. That’s better than Sheri, who has been picked to be the new Reptile Girl as Andre flings snakes at her. Then, the girls free Andre’s father (Gerald Cormier) from the barn. Nuclear fallout has made him into a crazed psychopath and he kills everyone in his path with only two girls escaping. That’s the scene that the agent of the Vegas girls, Derek Moore (Chuck Niles), and the cops discover when they get there.
Andrew Prine said, “This is the only movie I ever regretted making.”
He should embrace it. I love the circus tent in the middle of the desert and the sheer lunacy of this movie. It’s just so out there and it shouldn’t work yet it does just long enough to rush to its bloody end.
Here’s a drink.
Barn Door of the Naked Dead
1.5 oz. vodka
5 oz. pineapple juice
.5 oz. cranberry juice
Pour the vodka into a glass filled with crushed ice.
Top with pineapple juice and float cranberry juice to complete.
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