EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally ran on the site on October 28, 2019 but has been updated thanks to the blu ray release from Synapse. It has a high-definition 1080p remaster scanned, transferred and supervised by director Renee Daalder, as well as audio interviews by Mike White from The Projection Booth Podcast with cast members Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, Derrel Maury and Rex Steven Sikes, as well as an interview with Daalder, conducted by writer/horror historian Michael Gingold. You also get Hell In the Hallways, a new making-of documentary as well as trailers, TV and radio spots and a still gallery. You can get it from MVD or get the limited edition steelbook from Diabolik DVD.

23 years before Columbine, Massacre at Central High would predict not just violent school shootings but the rise of disaffected teenagers. It was directed by Rene Daalder, a Dutch writer and director who would go on to pioneer motion picture technology and virtual reality.

David is the new kid at Central High, but he already knows Mark (Andrew Stevens), a friend he has helped in the past. Mark relates that this place is a country club, but you need the right friends. Friends like Bruce, Craig (Steve Bond, Travis Abilene from Picasso Trigger) and Paul, who rule the school.

After watching these three bully — that’s putting it mildly — the student body, including beating up nerdy Spoony (Robert Carradine), deaf librarian Arthur, the poverty-stricken Rodney and the overweight Oscar as well as assaulting two girls named Mary (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith!) and Jane (Lani O’Grady from Eight Is Enough), David has had enough.

David and the bullies are on a fatal collision course, particularly after our protagonist starts making time with Mark’s girl Theresa (Kimberly Beck, Roller Boogie, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter). One night while he’s working on Rodney’s car, the three kick out a jack and cripple him.

That’s when David goes slasher villain and takes them out, one after the other. Bruce’s hang-glider flies into a power line, Craig is tricked into diving into an empty swimming pool and then Paul’s van gets pushed off a cliff.

Now, the formerly bullied are the bullies and attempt to form alliances with David, but they keep dying off too. Arthur’s hearing aid takes him out. Oscar’s locker explodes and so does Rodney’s car. And Spoony, Mary and Jane are set up to look like they did it all when a rockslide and some dynamite kills them off.

Mark and Theresa know that David is the one who did it all, so they attend the school dance that he plans to destroy, refusing to leave. David then takes the bomb outside, where it explodes, making him a martyr hero and keeping the blame forever on Spoony, Mary and Jane.

Writer-director Rene Daalder was recommended by Russ Meyer, for whom the young man had previously worked for as a cameraman. That may or may not be the reason why this movie was released as Sexy Jeans in Italy, complete with pornographic inserts that are obviously not the same actors. I’ve seen it and have to tell you — it’s disconcerting.

This is a brutal and uncompromising film that would go on to inspire Heathers while sadly presaging the world we live in. Of note, the director intended for gravity to kill nearly everyone and no adults to appear in the movie, like some demented version of Peanuts.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie was first on the site on November 10, 2021.

While it wasn’t released until 1979, the movie that became Savage Weekend — also The Killer Behind the Mask — started as The Upstate Murders. That means that it predates most of the commonly accepted “first” slashers like Halloween and Friday the 13th.

It was acquired by the Cannon Group — one of the few slashers they put out along with Silent Night, Bloody Night*, X-Ray, New Year’s Evil and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, although I can make an argument for Cobra, Hero and the Terror and 10 to Midnight being slashers and I consider Schizoid Americanized giallo — and had a budget of $58,000.

This is a slasher with the most ridiculous of conceits — everyone comes to upstate New York to see a new schooner — but it also has a heroic gay character (Nicky, played by Christopher Allport, who was in both Jack Frost movies and ironically killed in real life by an avalanche) and a woman escaping a bad marriage which seemingly has followed her. Also, since the aspect ratio got screwed up, the boom mic is a frequent co-star.

That said, it has a sewing needle through the head, someone accidentally killed by a bandsaw when the wrong light switch gets turned on, a hanging and an Upstate New York Chainsaw Massacre. It’s not perfect — it’s barely even worthwhile — but at least director/writer got to go on and make the much more interesting Schizoid, which has hot tub therapy sessions, scissor murders, Donna Wilkes being in love with her father Klaus Kinski and a love scene where Kinski has sex with a stripper against a hot water heater.

*I realize that this film is a Dewey-Friedland Cannon release and not Golan-Globus. That said, Golan-Globus distributed Graduation Day, Don’t Go Near the Park and The Hills Have Eyes Part 2, but did not make them.

I always wondered, as a child of the 70s, why everyone cared so much about the 50s. Now, as an old man in the 2020s, I wonder why everyone cares so much about the 80s. Time is a flat circle.

Director William A. Levey made some wild movies. There’s Blackenstein for starters. How about the Harry Novak movie Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman? Or The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington? Not enough? How’s Skatetown U.S.A.? Or another Cannon movie, Lightning, the White Stallion? Hmm? Well, let me ask you, have you seen Monaco Forever, one of the first Van Damme movies? Or Hellgate, a rape revenge occult back from the dead movie with Arnold Horshack as one of the leads?

He also wrote the story for this movie (actor Frank Framer did his only scriptwriter on this), a tell-all about how some 50s girls lost their virginity. That said, this isn’t a Her Secret Garden movie. It’s still a softcore sex romp for guys, as evidenced by the sapphic barnyard scene and underwater camera that gets all the angles, like a pervert at an Irving Klaw camera club. Oh yeah, there’s also a scene where the girls discuss how much they like when their dads spank them.

I don’t want to be high and mighty here. After all, I can appreciate the charms of the leads: a very young Debra Winger, even before she was Wonder Girl in that backdoor Wonder Woman pilot, and in her book Undiscovered, she will only say of this movie “A cigar-smoking agent had signed me while I was waitressing, but that only resulted in a blue movie.”; Noelle North from Carrie and Blood Song; Pamela Wood — Janet from Terror at Red Wolf Inn; Superchick herself Joyce Jillson, Bridget Holloman from Evils of the Night; Mary Appleseth of Planet of the Dinosaurs and most essentially, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith, the sadly lost former Runaway who was in everything from Lemora and Caged Heat to Massacre at Central High, the Michael Pataki-directed softcore Cinderella and Vice Squad.

If you want a movie with Joe E. Ross playing his Car 54, Where Are You role as well as near wall-to-wall nudity — as well as a drive-in scene where the kids go to see Cauldron of Blood which wouldn’t come out for thirteen years after this — well, here it is.

Oh man, this movie.

Lt. Claymore (Clay Tanner) had his face scarred, lost his voice — he has a robot-sounding one now — and his right arm lost thanks to Vietnam, but now that he’s back in the U.S., he’s gathered his old Army friends to either get rich quick or clean up the neighborhood or both — he makes them flush heroin down the crapper and says, We’re not in this to hurt society but to rid society of some of its scum and of course we reap the profit.” — by having them wear masks that make people believe they’re black when they’re white and rob the mob.

Yes, this is the plot of the movie.

To make it even stranger, the masks are really just black actors playing the role and then when the mission ends, they take off the mask and are white actors.

Then, a mob boss named Salvatore (Anthony Caruso) hires Carmine Longo (Mike Lane) from Detroit and teams him with his best assassin Charlie DiSantis (Richard X. Slattery) to take out the Zebra Force, which is as problematic a name — and movie — as you can get.

Writer, director and producer Joe Tornatore did acting and stunts before this movie, choosing it as his debut. He also made a sequel in 1987, Code Name Zebra, and also was behind Grotesque, one of the oddest horror movies I’ve ever seen.

Somehow, RC Cola paid to have their product all over this film. I can only imagine how they felt when they watched it. I’d like to imagine a packed screening room full of soda pop executives and their families just stunned into absolute madness.

Between an uncredited Nick Nolte doing ADR for the lead and Mike Nesmith doing the film’s music for free, Northville Cemetery Massacre near accidentally has a better pedigree than most biker movies. Directed, written and produced by William Dear (who also made Harry and the Hendersons and Angels In the Outfield because life is strange) and Thomas Van Dyke — with Jim Pappas, Phil Nyus, Robert H. Dyke and James King contributing to the script — this was shot as an independent film in Michigan under the original title Freedom R.I.P.

The Spirits, an outlaw motorcycle club played by actual outlaw motorcycle club The Scorpions, are at war with the cops after Deputy Putnam (Craig Collicot) attacks their hippie friend Chris (David Hyry) and assaults his lover Lynn (Jan Sisk), blaming them for the crime and sending her father (Herb Sharples) after them with a sniper (Len Speck) on his payroll.

The Spirits are just a bunch of fun loving motorcycle riders — they even held an elderly husband and wife fix their car — but after a helicopter attacks their three coffin biker funeral, well, there’s going to be some payback.

Shot in 1971 and not released by Cannon until 1976, this whole thing has a bloody close that wipes out just about the entire cast, so don’t get too committed to anyone. It’s got a ramshackle quality that I really liked and if only it had come out when it was made, when biker movies were still in fashion, it may be better known.

Melody (Michelle Daw, a one and done sex symbol) has just got off the bus from Ohio to Manhattan, but she’s no ingenue or doe-eyed innocent. Then again, she refuses to put out after a date and gets assaulted by a man who tells her that she “shouldn’t have eaten the hamburger.”

For those of us who grew up watching Cinemax after 1 AM on a Friday, this film has appearances by Tanya Roberts and Judy Landers.

Director Barry Rosen only made one other movie, but it’s Devil’s Express, and anyone that had the ability to cast Brother Theodore and Warhawk Tanzania knows something. This was written by Philli Levy, his only script, but oddly the man who typed the words to this sex farce would later be in bit parts in Sleepless In Seattle and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. He was joined in writing this by Robert Jahn, who also wrote The Immoral Three and Bloodrage.

What makes this movie magical is this Ginger Lynn Allen intro, which made this one of her few VHS releases that you didn’t have to walk behind the magical adult section doors to rent and watch.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 10, 2021.

Man, ever since I’ve obsessed over Night Train to Terror, I’ve been searching for a movie that has the same absurdist edge and amateurish energy that feels like a million monkeys had been working a million hours in a million room’s worth of typewriters and this is the alien manuscript that they delivered to us.

What makes Blood Bath a movie that instantly went to the top of my list was who made it: Joel M. Reed, who may have made only six movies, but one of them was Bloodsucking Freaks*. This film has the same berserk zeal as that film, a movie I rented so many times as a teenager that I really should have been considered for counseling.

Yet unlike that film — which has pretty much full nudity for most of its running time and some of the most aberrant behavior I’ve ever seen — Blood Bath is, well, nearly bloodless. That doesn’t make it any less strange.

Harve Presnell (Wade Gustafson from Fargo) plays Peter Brown, a man who is at once the most Satanic director of all time and also the husband of an actual demon and a New York City cop. The cast of his latest film wants to convince him that the supernatural is real, so they all gather to tell several stories to him that creates the heart of this portmanteau.

From a killer whose big hit goes wrong to a novelist who escapes the drudgery of marriage into a fantasy that doesn’t live up to his dreams, a businessman locked in a vault with the ghost of a black man that he indirectly killed and a martial artist who steals the most important secret of a secret sect of mystics and sells it as part of his strip mall karate classes, none of the stories are going to set you ablaze (then again, the end of the martial arts story is absolute beyond insane, which is exactly what I want this entire movie to be), the stories all kind of pale to the real weirdness of seeing Raymond’s mom Doris Roberts, Andy Milligan stock player Neil Flanagan, Jerry Lacy — who played Bogart to Woody Allen — and a brunette P.J. Soles tying to get with our director protagonist before his half-demon goat boy son goes off.

The art director of this movie, Ron Sullivan, is probably better known as Henri Pachard, the director of The Devil in Miss Jones Part II and Taboo American Style. One of the actors in this, Sonny Landham, may be better known as both Billy in Predator and a hardcore conservative political career, but he started things off in movies like this (and also doing adult).

This is the kind of movie that has a newspaper headline that shouts “Kung Fu Master Opens Supermarket!” and karate masters — one has no arms and legs — sitting down to eat egg rolls before they battle to the death.

This movie is not well made and that means that to me, it’s beyond perfect. It’s an absolute mess, shot on stages that feel barely put together with doors literally coming off their hinges. It has the kind of heart that today’s endless streaming horror anthologies are missing. I demand more karate in my horror anthologies and films unafraid to be this incredibly odd.

*He also made the Jamie Gillis-starring Night of the Zombies.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Arnold Schwarzenegger won a Golden Globe for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture for this movie, except that if you’ve been following Arnold Week here on the site, you know that this wasn’t his true debut. As Arnold Strong, he played Hercules in Hercules in New York, a henchman in The Long Goodbye and a masseur who Lucille Ball enjoys in Happy Anniversary and Goodbye.

Directed by Bob Rafelson (Five East Pieces, one of the creators of The Monkees and the director of the movie that ended their initial fame Head) who wrote the movie with Charles Gaines (who wrote Pumping Iron and invented paintball), the film is about Craig Blake (Jeff Bridges), a rich and young man who doesn’t really work and finds himself forced to handle the purchase of a small gym to clear the way for a high rise.

Yet when he meets the owner, Thor Erickson (R. G. Armstrong) and his employees Franklin (Robert Englund) and Newton (Roger E. Mosley), he finds himself drawn to the world of bodybuilders who use the gym to become sculptured works of art. He also falls for the receptionist, Mary Tate Farnsworth (Sally Field), and becomes friends with Mr. Universe hopeful Joe Santo (Schwarzenegger).

Craig’s old country club friends — like Ed Begley Jr. — can’t deal with the new people in his life and attempt to destroy his relationship with Mary Tate and embarrass Joe as he plays with a country band. Things come to a boil as the Mr. Universe competition finds Blake’s boss Jabo (Joe Spinell!) giving booze, drugs and hookers to Thor and Newton, who go on an amyl-nitrate assisted rage, assaulting Mary Tate and stealing the prize money, which leads to a chase throughout the streets of bodybuilders and the police.

Beyond the goldmine cast of pop culture standouts — Fanny Farmer, Woodrow Parfrey (Maximus in Planet of the Apes), Scatman Crothers, Helena Kallianiotes (whose appearances in movies like Head, The Passover Plot, Kansas City Bomber and Catchfire point to a career that I can truly appreciate), Joanna Cassidy (always great; Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is a movie she elevates just by being in it), Richard Gilliland (J.D. on Designing Women), Dennis Fimple, F.T.A. and the Committee member Garry Goodrow, Dennis Burkley (Cal from Sanford), there are also plenty of famous bodybuilders in this movie, like Roger Callard, two-time Mr. Universe Ed Corney, “Mr. Lifestyle” Robby Robinson, Ken Waller and Arnold’s best friend, best man and training partner Franco Columbu.

Arnold lost weight so he wouldn’t look bigger than his competitor in the film Ken Waller. After filming ended, Arnold went nuts, working hard to gain weight for the Mr. Olympia contest, which ended up being a lot of the footage that ends up in Pumping Iron. Arnold won, retired and then after getting back into shape for Conan the Barbarian ending up entering and winning the 1980 Mr. Olympia.

This is a goofy movie, but at least you can see a glimmer of who Arnold would become.

You can watch this on Tubi.