UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2024: The Ghosting (1992)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Ghosts

This film’s director and writer, Walt Hefner, got out of the Air Force and went right into working at Spokane, Washington’s State Theater. He worked hard and eventually owned his own theaters and in 1972, opened the Starlite Drive-In. According to this article from the Inlander, Hefner showed some pretty great triple features, such as  I Spit on Your Grave, I Dismember Mama and Snuff all in one night in 1976.

In 1991, Hefner sold his drive-in to a theater chain and used the money to make this movie, produced and filmed in Spokane with an all-local crew. Where did this debut? The Newport Cinemas, built over the drive-in that Hefner once owned, four years after it was filmed.

Ralph (Charlie Shores), Amy (Pamela Kingsley), Jeanie (Jennifer Salmi) and Steve Jessup (Jason Jackson) are stuck. He can’t find a job and is angry that he has to live with his father and have his wife make the money. Then Amy learns that their church needs a caretaker, which gives Ralph something to do other than have flashbacks to Vietnam.

Then he hits Dan Marcum (Bill Hutton) with his van.

Marcum just escaped a mental hospital after years of care. He’d killed his family in that same church where the Jessups now live and his spirit won’t leave Dan alone.

So yes, this sounds like it’s inspired by every 80s haunted house movie — The Shining with the axe and caretaker parts — but what Hefner made is so strange that it begs to be seen. Ralph and Amy seem ready to murder one another at any moment, while Jeanie hurt her legs in an accident that her mother forces her to get past and when she finally gets over it and prepares to go on a date, the ghost of Marcum chains her legs and forcibly spreads them apart. This is a clothed scene but feels like such a violation and her trauma is not ignored. It all happens while one of those strange monkey with cymbal toys goes nuts. It’s terrifying.

Steve seems codependent on his dad. At times, they seem like the only two people who care about each other and then Ralph is abusing him. This all ends with Steve trapped in his room as a low budget version of Gozer mauls him and Ralph can’t figure out how to break the glass window into his son’s room. Who has a glass door for their bedroom? And who lit this scene, because the fog and pink light inside that haunted place is great!

Speaking of family issues, three years after this was made, Jennifer Salmi’s father Albert — the actor who appeared in Caddyshack, Superstition and Empire of the Ants — was served with divorce and restraining order from his wife Roberta. Suffering from clinical depression, he went to her house anyway and shot her before killing himself.

This also has the baptism pool being confused for a pool, explorations of the haunted church, burning baby dolls and a date scene at a movie theater that has no dialogue and seems to go on forever while farting synth plays. As I watched this scene, I was amazed that the movie theater workers had no gloves on and were just about bare handing the popcorn. No one cared in 1987, when this was made, about germs.

Amy does. Ralph gets in bed covered with maggots and acts like it’s not a big deal. Rightly, she goes insane screaming at him and he follows that up by having his son get hit by a car, which is bad guy karma. There’s also a scene where someone gets into a tub filled with snakes and so many poems.

Hefner couldn’t get anyone to pick this movie up. He would have in the early 1980s, as no one would care that it seems like the film stock changes and it sometimes appears shot on video. But in 1987? No, sadly. He kept all the VHS copies in the church he bought to film this in, along with his camera equipment and it all went up in flames in 2017.

Before that, he shot a few other movies. Shooting Grunts is his autobiographical story of how was a combat cinematographer in Vietnam and was seriously wounded at the battle of Khe Sanh.

Then, there’s 2008’s Bad Ghost. I can’t find a copy but it seems like a re-edit of The Ghosting, starring most of the same cast: Salmi is Jeanie, Keith Lee Morris is her boyfriend, Hutton is Dan (called Crazy Dan in this) and Edna Caldwell plays Edna, his wife, a character not in the original movie. The one photo on IMDB of Salmi looks a bit older than she was in The Ghosting. I need this movie.

I’m not saying that this is a good movie but if you know the kind of things that obsess me, you know that I loved it and will recommend it to you.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Thanks to The Schlock Pit for so much info that I used in this review.

I HOPE YOU SUFFER OCTOBER FILM CHALLENGE: Amityville Scarecrow (2021)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Is Amityville Cornfield a better title? I don’t know. Nor can I comprehend how one family can have so many unmatching accents, but if I have learned anything, it’s don’t watch sixty Joe D’Amato movies in a week followed by three Amityville movies because you start to see the world as a very weird place. Don’t follow my path.

Tina and Mary are sisters who can’t agree on what to do with the land their mother gave them when she died, land that could never grow corn and was probably haunted and will surely end everyone’s lives. Then again, Tina did steal Mary’s husband, so you can understand why they are fighting.

There’s a scarecrow that gets possessed by the spirit of a child-touching handyman so…you know, I guess there’s an Elm Street in Amityville. That said, the scarecrow looks pretty scary in a few scenes, which is more than you can usually expect from these films.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: My World Dies Screaming (1958)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: My World Dies Screaming was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 9, 1964 at 1:00 a.m., Saturday, July 16, 1966 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 2, 1969 at 1:00 a.m. under the title Terror In the Haunted House. That was its TV title, which was used as part of the 22 film Allied Artists Sci-Fi for the 60s package.

Sheila Wayne (Cathy O’Donnell) has just married Phillip Justin (Gerald Mohr). She’s spent the last 17 years in Switzerland, a place where she had nightmares of a Florida mansion where the mad Tierney family once lived. It’s been abandoned for — you knew it — 17 years. At least that’s what the caretaker, Jonah Snell (John Qualen), says when Phillip drives Sheila to the door, telling her it will be their new home. She freaks out, but just as you’d figure, the car breaks down before they can leave.

Sheila has been dreaming of this place for years and remembers that a tree says SW+PT. When she looks at the actual tree, that is carved into it. When Mark Snell (William Ching) visits, he calls her Ms. Tierney and that’s when she starts to put it all together. Phillip is PT, Phillip Tierney. He tells her that the two years she spent in a hospital as a child were to forget what happened in this house, but if she goes into the attic, she will be cured. She refuses.

Jonah tells her that Matthew Tierney – Philip’s grandfather – killed his sons Lawrence and Samuel in the attic with an axe. This makes Phillip, Samuel’s son, the last of the Tierneys. Or maybe not, as Mark accuses them of gaslighting her. That’s when she finally goes to the attic and remembers that Jonah is Mark’s father and that he killed everyone out of jealousy, then paid for Sheila and her family to go to Switzerland for treatment. Mark ends up killing him before he can tell her, but after he battles Phillip, he gets stabbed on his own axe.

This was originally filmed with the Precon Process — called Psychorama — which used subliminal messages and exaggerated supraliminal symbols. Only one other movie, A Date With Death, uses Psychorama. However, most of the subliminals are edited out of the versions that are available today. In Kevin Heffernan’s Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business 1953–1968, the messages are described as “…single frame, hidden images such as skulls, knives, and spelled words like death designed to trigger the audience’s emotional responses. These subliminal imprints remain below the level of consciousness of the viewer, supposedly causing a palpable but unexplainable dread and horror.” He also claims that other messages include “a devil face, a bug-eyed face, a skull (in red), a cobra head and the message “scream bloody murder.””

You can watch this on YouTube.

 

Tales from the Crypt S5 E2: As Ye Sow (1993)

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Leo Burns (Hector Elizondo) thinks that his wife Bridget (Patsy Kensit) is having an affair. So he hires G. G. Devoe (Sam Waterston) to learn the truth.

“No need to worry. For one thing, vegetarians are probably much better for him. I like to stalk one myself from time to time. My advice is to let him fiend himself. The little nipper will never learn to maggot on his own if you’re too busy protecting him. Our next caller Leo thinks his wife is cheating on him. Let‘s hope for her sake he doesn’t catch her in the hacked. I call this sickening psycho drama “As Ye Sow.””

Devoe believes that Bridget is having an affair with Father John Sejac (John Shea). Plus, you get Miguel Ferrer as a hitman and Adam West as another private dick. As you can figure, this being an episode of Tales from the Crypt, there’s a big twist that ends up costing the protagonist everything.

This episode was directed by Kyle MacLachlan — yes, Agent Cooper — and written by Ron Finley, who wrote five episodes of this series.

This story is based on “As Ye Sow” from Shock SuspenStories #14. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by George Evans.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Hands of a Stranger (1962)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Hands of a Stranger was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, July 10, 1965 at 1:00 a.m. and Saturday, October 25, 1969 at 1:00 a.m.

Concert musician Vernon Paris’ hard work has finally paid off. He’s become the biggest star there is. That’s when his hands are ruined in an auto accident and Dr. Gil Harding amputates them — with no authority — and replaces them with the hands of a murderer, all in the hopes that Paris can play piano again. Sure, the transplant is a success, but Paris becomes unhinged and increasingly violent toward those he blames for him needing his killer new mitts.

Sure, this is based on the 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac by French writer Maurice Renard, but the real draw is the absolutely over the top slasher like violence — well, as good as it gets in 1962 — throughout the film. First, Paris argues with his former girlfriend Eileen, who can’t love him as a normal man and craves the limelight that dating him gave her. Her dress catches on fire as they fight and she burns alive. Later, Skeet, the son of the taxi driver who caused the accident, enrages Victor by being able to play the piano when he cannot. He crushes the child’s hands, then smashes his head open.

Keep your eyes peeled for a very young Sally Kellerman and Irish McCalla, who was TV’s Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. This isn’t a great movie, per se, but it’s over the top and filled with brimming menace. It’s also anything but boring!

2024 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 10: Frankenhooker (1990)

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10. NEW YORK NEW YORK: A slice and dice set in the city so nice they named it New York.

Has there ever been a better video box?

Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a bioelectrical scientist who works at a power plant. His life in New Jersey was going so well until his fiancee Elizabeth’s (Patty Mullen) father (J.J. Clark) gives him a lawnmower as a wedding present. It goes wild — yes, really — and mows down Elizabeth.

Anyone else would move on or kill themselves. Not Jeffrey. He gets into self-trepanation, drilling holes into his own skull to take the edge off, as well as eating dinner surrounded by all of Elizabeth’s body parts that he could find. But hey, he knows circuits. So maybe he should leave New Jersey and go to New York City and kill sex workers to build his wife the perfect body, because that’s worked out so well in so many movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Jeffrey rents all of Zorro’s (Joseph Gonzalez) girls for one night but gets second thoughts about giving them the super crack he’s invented. They find it, they smoke it, they blow up real good. And now Jeffrey has to assemble a puzzle of bloody body parts to create the perfect new body for his fiancee. She’s impressed but angry at where the parts came from and that she’s slept with — and blown to pieces — several clients before she got her memory back.

This ends with a monster made of sex worker parts dragging an evil pimp to a dungeon and Jeffrey’s head on another woman so that he and his bride can be in love forever. That’s creative.

Another trip into the hellish New York City of Frank Henenlotter, this was a movie that screamed at you in the horror department of your mom and pop video rental place. Literally. The box could talk. The movie that was inside more than lives up to the marketing.

This has an awesome cast. Beverly Bonner shows up as Casey, the same character she played in Brain Damage, Basket Case and Basket Case 2. Elizabeth’s mother is Louise Lasser, the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Horror host Zacherly is the weatherman. The girls of Zorro are played by Kimberly Taylor (Bedroom Eyes II), Charlotte J. Helmkamp (Playboy December 1982 Playmate of the Month), Jennifer Delora, Lia Chang, Susan Napoli (Penthouse Pet of the Month February 1986, AKA Stephanie Ryan in mainstream movies and Carrie McKayan in adult films), adult legend Heather Hunter, Gittan Goding, Vicki Darnell, Sandy Colosimo, Kathleen Gati and Sonya Hensley.

As for Spike the bartender, that’s the awesome Shirley Stoler from The Honeymoon Killers.

You can watch this on Tubi.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2024: Black Ice (1992)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Michael Ironside

It’s still early fall as I write this and the last thing I want to think about is snow or icy roads and here I am, watching a movie shot in Winnipeg where huge snow piles are all over the place.

Called A Passion for Murder in the UK, this stars Russian actress Joanna Pacula as Vanessa, a government agent who is sleeping with a married politician named Eric Weaver (Arne Olsen).  After they have a fight, he’s killed when she shoves him out a window and she has to go on the run, as she’s left out in the cold by her black ops bosses. The only person that can help her is Ben Shorr (Michael Nouri), a cab driver.

Directed by Neill Fearnley, whose career was mostly in TV, and written by Olsen and John Alan Schwartz — the Conan le Cilaire who wrote as well as the Alan Black who wrote Faces of Death — the main reason I watched this was Michael Ironside, who plays Quinn, Vanessa’s boss who tells her that she’s a loose end that needs to be killed.

Ben, an author who can’t get a break, has to drive her from Detroit to Seattle, all on back roads. Those roads are all in Canada and man, they’re cold. And kind of boring. There is a sex scene in a rest stop, where Nouri bends Pacula over a sink and someone accidentally walks in.

The real star here is Michael Nouri’s fake long hair. It looks like they threw yarn at him and just gave up. You can’t stop looking at it.

I just wanted Ironside to kill everyone.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I HOPE YOU SUFFER OCTOBER FILM CHALLENGE: Amityville Cop (2021)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

You know, I find myself cursed by Amityville more than anyone because I have the kind of OCD that demands that every single time a new Amityville-related film comes out — however tenuous and damn, they can get tenuous — I have to watch it and document it for you, dear reader. Just like Ronald Joseph DeFeo Jr. felt compelled to murder his family, I feel the horrific pull. And no one dies, except for time which is the resource we never get back.

Imagine my surprise when Amityville Cop, a movie that has nothing at all to do with Amityville, was actually pretty good!

Sure, it’s a ripoff of Maniac Cop, but is that such a bad thing?

Directed by Gregory Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance) and written by Geno McGahee (Satanic Meat Cleaver Massacre), this has the requisite cop-killing homeless people, but if he’s powered by a Satanic ritual gone wrong led by Laurene Landon — from Maniac Cop and Maniac Cop 2 — I think all can be forgiven.

Someone yells, “He looked like a cop but he was the devil,” which is a thing I have thought many times. And sure, the humor is forced, the effects are bad, the stock footage is overused and a rocket launcher is represented by fireworks — and oh yeah, no one even says the words Amityville — but I was entertained.

For anyone writing reviews saying, “This is the worst Amityville movie I’ve ever seen,” at least this is only 68 minutes and I have a murderer’s row of Amityville films that are worse.

You can watch this on Tubi.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Lady Vengeance (1957)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Lady of Vengeance was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 9, 1964 at 4:00 p.m. and Saturday, August 28, 1965 at 11:20 p.m.

Melissa Collins (Eileen Elton) has killed herself, which drives her guardian, newspaper publisher William T. Marshall (Dennis O’Keefe), insane with the need for revenge. She blames her death on a musician named Larry Shaw (Vernon Greeves), who ruined her life with all his cheating. So what does he do? He hires master criminal — and stamp collector — Karnak (Anton Diffring) to help him plan the perfect murder.

Luckily, Marshall has a loyal — and one in love, one assumes — secretary named Katie Whiteside (Ann Sears) who goes to the police to stop the madness.

Director Burt Balaban also made Murder, Inc., Mad Dog Coll and Stranger from Venus. He worked on several movies with writer Irve Tunick.

Made in England, this even has on location shooting at the H. R. Harmer Philatelic Organisation, which has been leading stamp auctioneer in London since 1940. There’s one great twist — spoiler warning — and that’s the fact that Karnak actually killed Melissa, not Shaw. It’s a fine noir, though, and can make a late night or Saturday afternoon move quickly.

You can watch this on YouTube.