2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 21: Dance ’till Dawn (1988)

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21. VIDEO STORE DAY: This is the big one. Watch something physically rented or bought from an actual video store. If you live in a place that is unfortunate enough not to have one of these archival treasures then watch a movie with a video store scene in it at least. #vivaphysicalmedia

Herbert Hoover High School is the setting for the biggest night of the year, the prom, which is being run by Patrice Johnson (Christina Applegate). The couple who should be queen and king, Shelley Sheridan (Alyssa Milano) and Kevin McCrea (Brian Bloom), have just broken up and are looking for new dates.

Shelley skips the prom and goes to watch a horror movie — this movie is not a documentary — and meets the geekiest guy around, Dan Lefcourt (Chris Young), who hates trying to live up to the lovemaking ways of his dad Jack (Alan Thicke). Kevin decides to go after Angela Strull (Tracey Gold), who he heard was easy, and who is being protected by her friend Margaret (Tempestt Bledsoe) as well as her father Ed (Kelsey Grammer).

Angela and Kevin end up winning, Shelley and Dan are going steady and the night is ruined for Patrice and Roger (Matthew Perry).

Oh yeah! Edie McClurg is great in this, as is Mary Frann.

I have a big weakness for TV movies that feature stars of other shows all in the same story. And hey, there’s a scene with Tracy Gold with big glasses picking movies out in a video store, which is pretty much heaven for teenage era Sam.

You can watch this on YouTube:

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Deadly Game (1991)

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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: Made for TV

In this USA Network movie, seven people — Lucy the dancer (Jenny Seagrove), Peterson the teacher who has Vietnam PTSD (Michael Beck), Jake the quarterback with a secret drunk driving accident on his consciousness (Marc Singer), Chang the yakuza member (Steven Vincent Leigh), Dr. Aaron (Roddy McDowell), Admiral Mark Nately (Mitchell Ryan) and Charley the businessman (John Pleshette) — have been brought to the island of Osirus, a masked maniac who wants revenge on each of them for reasons only he — and they — know. If they can reach the other side, they can each make a million dollars. Osirus also doesn’t plan on letting that happen, as they have a heavily armed gang ready to murder the defenseless protagonists.

This movie is so much fun. You get flashbacks to how each character met Osirus — I’m not revealing who they are — and the best is how Lucy had a love affair with this movie’s villain complete with a love scene where Osirus never removes its disguise. There are also plenty of kills, lots of jungle action and clues that trigger those memories. And oh yeah, Marc Singer playing his character in high school despite being 43-years-old when this was made.

Thomas J. Wright also directed the Hulk Hogan movie No Holds Barred and painted all of the artwork for Night Gallery. The fact that both of these things are true should make you happy to live in the reality that you occupy. Writer Westbrook Claridge did the scripts for all the TekWar stuff on USA and shows up as a security guard in The Incredible Melting Man.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Curse of the Stone Hand (1965)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Curse of the Stone Hand was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 4, 1968 at 11:20 p.m. 

Alright, I know this isn’t a Mexican movie, it’s American, but it was a remix and reedit by Jerry Warren, who brought so many South of the Border movies to America. He shot new footage with John Carradine — who else? — and Katherine Victor to freshen up two twenty-year-old Chilean films, La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) and La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death).

Seeing as how it’s two films, Warren decided to turn this into an anthology, if two stories can really be an anthology. The same house is supposed to be the setting for both stories, one in which a gambler finds a set of stone hands in the cursed house and uses them to play curses before joining a suicide club. This is La Dama de la Muerte (The Lady of Death), as that movie was an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club. The second story has another owner’s son finding the hands — this is La Casa está Vacía (The House is Empty) — and using them to hypnotize his brother’s fiancee.

This is the closest that Warren would stay to his source material and therefore lacks the utter drug-induced insanity of his Mexican remake remixes. The dubbing is horrible, yet we can directly trace Godfrey Ho and the wildness that he dropped on us several decades later to the way that Warren could take any movie and chop it to pieces.

Warren once said, ” “I’d shoot one day on this stuff and throw it together. I was in the business to make money. I never ever tried in any way to compete or to make something worthwhile. I only did enough to get by, so they would buy it, so it would play, and so I’d get a few dollars. It’s not very fair to the public, I guess, but that was my attitude. You didn’t have to go all out and make a really good picture.”

Know what you’re getting into before you watch this!

Warren’s American Distributors Productions, Inc. teamed this up with another of his mixtape wonders, Face of the Screaming Werewolf, which is Mexican and is also two movies in one — La Casa del Terror and La Momia Azteca.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Attack of the Robots (1966)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the Robots was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, June 15, 1968 at 1 a.m. It was also on the show on December 18, 1971 and August 19, 1972.

You know, there are times when you get the Jess Franco who is obsessed with sex and times when you get the jazz-loving, Old Hollywood fan Jess Franco and this would be the latter.

This Eurospy affair stars Eddie Constantine as Al Pereira*, who is hunting down a series of bronze-skinned and horned-rim glasses-wearing killer robots commanded by Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion, probably the only person to be in movies like Le Divorce and Otto Preminger’s Rosebud, as well as a Franco film) who is using computers to destroy Europe.

So yeah, Jess shows up playing jazz piano, but don’t worry. Plenty of BDSM and mind control lurk right around the corner, instead of appearing full frontal and center. Perhaps the strangest thing about this movie is that it was shot in color and released in black and white. And that it’s nothing like the Franco movies that people dislike his movies harp on.

*Franco would return to the character in the films Les Ebranlées, Downtown; Botas Negras,Látigo de Cuero; Camino Solitario; Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies and Revenge of the Alligator Ladies.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Man from Planet X (1951)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Man from Planet X was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, November 2, 1963 at 3:00 p.m. It also aired on Saturday, November 7, 1964.

After landing in the foggy Scottish moors, an alien follows Professor Elliot (Raymond Bond) and American reporter John Lawrence (Robert Clarke). They can’t communicate and wonder what he wants. Dr. Mears (William Schallert) tries to use music and when that doesn’t work, he attempts to murder the space brother by shutting off his breathing machine.

It turns out that the alien was actually leading Planet X here to take over our planet, so maybe the bad guy had the right idea. How odd.

This was directed by poverty row icon Edgar G. Ulmer, who also directed The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, The Amazing Transparent Man and Girls In Chains. In Peter Bogdonvich’s book Who the Devil Made It, he said, “I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money’s sake.”

Speaking of cash, this was shot on the sets of Joan of Arc and pumped in fog so you didn’t notice.

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 20: Most Likely to Die (2015)

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October 20: A Horror Film About A Class Reunion Gone Wrong!

Director Anthony DiBlasi also made Last Shift and was into this as he always wanted to work on a slasher. The killer in this movie is known as The Graduate and they have come to a class reunion with revenge on their mind.

Ashley (Skyler Vallo) comes to the house of her boyfriend, former hockey player Ray (Jason Tobias). She finds threats all over the place and is soon kidnapped and taken to a shed, just as his high school friends — Gaby (Heather Morris), Freddie (Perez Hilton), Jade (Tess Christiansen), DJ (Chad Addison), Lamont (Johnny Ramey) and Simone (Marci Miller) — arrive. There’s also the weird butler, Tarkin (Jake Busey), but he’s soon murdered by the cap and gown-clad killer.

Much like all class reunion movies, all of these people share a secret: they wrote Most Likely to Die under the photo of a classmate, John Dougherty, and now The Graduate is killing them based on what their yearbook superlatives were, such as Ashley was Most Likely to Have Her Name Up In Lights and she’s found dead under lights that spell it out. This theme plays itself out as you learn exactly who is killing all of their old friends.

It’s no Slaughter High or The Redeemer, which was also known as Class Reunion Massacre.

2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 20: Fortress (1992)

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20. THE GREAT UNSTREAMBLE: Search all night with all your might, it still ain’t found on any site. Bonus for desert/drought content.

John Henry Brennick (Christopher Lambert), and his wife Karen B. Brennick (Loryn Locklin) have been punished for having a second child. He thinks that she escapes, but he’s been sent to  the Fortress, a private 30-level maximum security prison run by the Men-Tel Corporation (it’s the Australian theme park Warner Bros. Movie World).

Every prisoner has an intestinators inside them which allows the guards to put them in pain or even kill them. Director Poe (Kurtwood Smith) uses a computer called Zed-10 (voiced by Carolyn Purdy-Gordon) to keep everything running and the prisoners working for the good of the company.

John is inside a crowded cell with Abraham (Lincoln Kilpatrick), who is nearly Poe’s slave; D-Day (Jeffrey Combs), a computer expert who knows how to blow things up; Nino Gomez (Clifton Collins Jr.), a teen captive; Stiggs (Tom Towles), a prison bully and his friend Maddox (Vernon Wells). After Stiggs and Maddox try to intimidate him, John gets into a fistfight and Maddox is killed by a security guard. As punishment, John is mindwiped, forgetting that his wife is also a prisoner and that Men-Tel will own his child when it is born. He gives D-Day Maddox’s intestinator before he is captured.

Poe takes Karen as his wife as long as he promises to not punish John after this. She sneaks into a room and reprograms John’s mind while D-Day figures out how to shut down the intestinators. During a riot, the Strike Clones are sent in, but the prisoners soon kill one and take its flamethrower. Soon, he learns that Men-Tel doesn’t negotiate and the full brunt of their security teams come down on the prison, just as his wife starts to give birth. And if that happens, the company will give her a fatal cesarian.

Stuart Gordon was such a dependable genre director, even if he switched from Lovecraft horror to giant robots and even men in ice cream suits. According to Gordon, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a big fan of Re-Animator and was almost in this: “It was Arnold Schwarzenegger that got me the job and it was because of Re-Animator. We used Arnold’s body double in Re-Animator. The first reanimated corpse is a guy named Peter Kent, Arnold’s double. He’s got those big muscles. He got Arnold to see Re-Animator and Arnold liked it so much that he had a screening of it in his home, inviting all of these people, including producer John Davis. John had the rights to Fortress and Arnold was going to do it. For some reason, I’m not sure why, Arnold finally decided that he wasn’t going to do the movie and dropped out. They had a big budget, probably like 60 million, 70 million dollars, which was a huge budget in those days. Now it sounds small. Anyway, he dropped out and the budget went down. They cut the budget to about 15 million dollars.”

Fortress takes the prison film and adds in near-future cyberpunk. I don’t have to tell you how correct the script by Troy Neighbors and Steven Feinberg is today. The U.S. has more people in jail — 565 citizens per every 100,000 — than any other country in the world. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, those in jail only earn 12 cents to 40 cents per hour for jobs serving the prison and 23 cents to $1.15 per hour in Federal Prison Industries factories, which include food processing, shrinkwrapping and packaging product and even have worked in call centers for politicians.

None of them wear intestinators. Stay tuned on that, though.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Vampire In Venice (1988)

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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: 1980s

August Caminito planned a sequel to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. Step one: Get Kalus Kinski. That wasn’t so hard, as Kinski had already spoken to the writer of the film, Carlo Alberto Alfieri. Kinski signed a two movie deal with Caminito, finally getting to make his passion project Paganini.

Step two: Get a director. Not as simple. Originally, Maurizio Lucidi (The Designated Victim) was going to direct and even shot some scenes that are in the movie but Caminito thought that this should have a higher budget and a more well-considered director. He hired Pasquale Squitieri (Vengeance Is a Dish Best Served Cold) but Squitieri changed the script so much that he was let go. Mario Caiano (Nightmare Castle) was next, but he couldn’t get along with Kinski.

That’s because Kinski refused to wear fangs or shave his head. He argued with Caiano and would not listen to the director saying cut before locking himself into his trailer, as he thought that he was directing the film. In response, Caiano ran into Kinski’s trailer and shouted, “Now you’re directing the movie!”

It was decided that Caminito would direct the film. He’d only directed two other movies, Maschi e femmine and Grandi cacciatori, which also had Kinski.  He had help from Luigi Cozzi, who shot second unit. But Kinski remained, well, Klaus Kinski. He kept changing where he would act from, causing lighting set-ups to be redone and he would never do a second take. It got so bad that the entire crew quit and would not come back until Kinski apologized.

If that’s not bad enough, Kinski fired Amanda Sandrelli and replaced her with actor Yorgo Voyagis’ girlfriend Anne Knecht, who was visiting the set.

After six weeks of shooting, Caminito gave up and tried to edit it together.

A seance awakens Nosferantu (Kisnki) from two hundred years sleep and throws Princess Catalano (Maria Cumani Quasimodo) out a window before stalking her daughter Henrietta (Barbara De Rossi), seducing her while her sister Maria (Knecht) watches.

The monster then easily defeats Professor Paris Catalano (Christopher Plummer), Father Alvise (Donald Pleasence) and Dr. Barneval (Voyagis) before taking Henrietta. Catalano then shouts that only a pure woman willing to give Nosferatu her true love can destroy him before he kills himself by jumping into a canal.

Maria tries to save her sister and catches the vampire’s eye when she climbs to a tower and jumps to her death. He catches her and informs her that he wants to die, but he needs a virgin to love him. They become a couple and wipe out most of the rest of the cast before Dr. Barneval shoots Maria. As she dies, she begs for the undead beast to turn her. He tells her that that is a punishment that he can never give. They wander into the fog without a resolution.

I think I made this sound a little more cohesive than it really ends up.

Characters show up and we have no idea who they are and then disappear. Some of that is because Kinski was a lunatic. He sexually assaulted actresses Elvire Audray and Barbara De Rossi. With Audray, he physically beat her, tore off her clothes and bit her between the thighs, while he was brutally rough in his lovemaking scene with De Rossi.

Every time I write about Kinski, it’s more about how insane he was than how great he is in movies.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: Dante’s Hotel (2023)

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Directed by Anthony C. Ferrante (Blind Waters, Sharknado), who wrote it with William C. Martell, Dante’s Hotel is the Dontene Hotel and their annual New Year’s Eve party. This year, Goldie Stanton (AnnaLynne McCord, Titanic 666) has been hired to run the event. As she gets her life together and continues her sobriety, she wonders if she can handle working this demanding event for the exacting Mr. Emitt (Ted Raimi). Meanwhile, Detective Stone (Moon Bloodgod, Terminator Salvation) is obsessed with the hotel and a man named Daniel Brayer (Judd Nelson), who has been in the hotel for two massacres, one when he was 12 and his parents were killed and another when he was 24. However, no bodies have ever been found. And Stone’s superior Captain Pasado (Emilio Rivera) warns her to not make the same mistakes his father did and throw his life away investigating this case.

Dante’s Hotel has some really interesting ideas that go beyond the typical horror film. Now, it’s Halloween but this is a fresh New Year’s Eve movie to add later in the year. I loved the idea that the hotel is just one of many cursed buildings where Father Time (Kevin Porter) kills his 12 victims every year, as well as Bryaer being the only resident of the cursed 12th floor in room 1224. Father Time also has a unique look and the building itself conspires to kill people, even pulling them into walls and ripping them to pieces.

What helps this movie and places it above the everyday Tubi original is the talent in the film, the fact that it’s not afraid to get super weird — an elevator that takes you to a portal to Hell is a strange place to make small talk — and it has production values that feel way higher than most Asylum films. There’s also a bit of Eurohorror to the villain and the endless clocks and gears that appear everywhere.

By the way, this has nothing to do with the video game of the same name.

You can watch this on Tubi.

SCREAMFEST LA: Faceless After Dark (2023)

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Screamfest Horror Film Festival stands as a cornerstone of the horror genre, boasting the largest and longest-running festival of its kind in the United States. You can learn more about this year’s festival by checking out the official site. Faceless After Dark plays on Wednesday, October 11. 

After starring in a killer clown horror flick, Bowie (Jenna Kanell, Tara from another killer clown movie, Terrifier and Terrifier 2) is held hostage by an unhinged fan posing as the slasher that she survived in her movie, which has now become her life.

Directed by Raymond Wood and written by Todd Jacobs and Jenna Kanell, Faceless After Dark starts with Bowie stuck working conventions and doing Cameos, barely holding on to any fame that she may have had. Meanwhile, her girlfriend Jessica (Danielle Lyn) is really enjoying getting to star in a superhero movie. It gets so bad that fans ask Bowie to take photos of themselves with Jessica, which really gets at her.

The man in the clown mask (Max Calder) has, however, found the wrong final girl for the movie in his head. Bowie has had it with her place in the world and is way more dangerous than the character she played on screen. After killing off one fan, she feels something she hasn’t felt in some time. Some level of control. Some level of being alive. And that clown won’t be the last. Bowie begins to invite all of the worst comments on her social media to Jessica’s house and then kills them, one by one, all while neon colors play on the screen and blood sprays.

Is it a home invasion movie if you invite them into the house?

You’re either going to see this as a cathartic blast of getting back at horrible people or an entitled woman who just can’t get it together. I’m on the former side of the argument, but I can see some loving this and some just hating every minute.

That said, Kanell is great and the movie looks absolutely gorgeous.