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.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This movie first appeared on the site on March 20, 2018. Thanks to the incredible Blue Underground 4K Ultra HD release — which has two sets of commentary (Larry Cohen; Steve Mitchell and Troy Howarth), interviws with Tony Lo Bianco and Steve Neill; two interviews with Cohen (one at the New Beverly; another at the Lincoln Center); trailers an TV sports —  I’ve updated this article and thought a lot more about this film which obsesses me. You can get it from MVD.

According to Larry Cohen, God is one of the most violent characters in literature. Take that insight, toss in some Chariots of the Gods, a little police procedural and a gradually involving drama that ends up taking over the life of the hero and you have God Told Me To.

New York City in the 1970s. It’s a horrible place to be. And now, with a gunman atop a water tower shooting into a crowd below, it’s a deadly place. 15 pedestrians are already dead before Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, The French Connection, TV’s Law & Order) climbs the tower to speak with him. Tony’s skilled at getting crazy people to back down and his technique is to communicate with them. He tells the killer everything — his age, what he’s doing, even the fact that he’s a devout Catholic — in the hopes that he can stop his rampage. Then, the killer looks Tony in the eye and says, “God told me to,” before he leaps to his death.

Attack after attack follows, all seemingly unconnected except for those words: “God told me to.”

There’s a stabbing in a supermarket. A cop (Andy Kaufman!) shooting into the St. Patrick’s Day crowd (there were no permits for this scene, which blows my mind. Also, while Cohen was organizing the crew to set up the shot, Kaufman antagonized the crowd by making faces, leading to people jumping the barricades to fight him, requiring Cohen to get in between the actor/comedian/force of nature and angry New Yorkers). And a man who kills his wife and children because God has always asked people to sacrifice their children since Abraham. This sends Tony over the edge and he attacks the man.

One of the killers says that his orders came from Bernard Phillips. Tony visits the address but is attacked by Phillips’ knife-wielding mother. She falls down the stairs as Tony dodges her attack and before she dies, she tells him that she was a virgin who was taken by aliens and given a pregnancy without taking her virginity, much like the conception of Jesus.

When Tony brings this information to his superiors, they tell him to put a lid on it. There’s no need for more religious panic. He leaks the story to the press anyway with the expected results.

That’s when Tony meets Bernard Phillips’ cult, who he contacts and controls with his psychic powers. He tells them when each murder will happen and now wants Tony to join them. Instead, Tony asks about Phillips’ mother, which causes a follower to drop dead. Another tries to kill him by pushing him in front of a subway train, but Tony defeats him and uses the man to come to Phillips’ underground lair. That follower — upset that he has come so close to his god — decapitates himself.

Upon meeting the glowing, ethereal and hermaphroditic Phillips, Tony realizes that the self-styled god cannot and will not kill him. Therefore, Tony realizes that he is special and has a purpose. Tony’s girlfriend and wife (look, it was the 70’s) come together to try and save him, but numerous revelations come out — Tony’s estranged wife had numerous pregnancies that her husband seemed to will into stillbirth, afraid of what his children would become.

Tony finds his adoption records, finally meeting his birth mother, who gave up her child — another divine birth — after being impregnated by an orb of light at the 1941 Worlds Fair. The footage accompanying this scene is digital manipulated stock footage from Space:1999! This meeting nearly gives both a nervous breakdown and ruins Tony’s sense of self.

Tony decides to meet his brother/sister one more time and learns the truth: they are alien messiahs, children of an entity of light. Tony’s human side is dominant while Phillips is more like the alien that gave them life. Phillips reveals his true sex — a mixture of sex organs on his side and asks his brother to impregnate him so that they can create new life. Tony refuses and attacks his sibling, who retaliates by bringing the building down on both of them.

Only Tony survives and he is arrested for the murder of Phillips. As the police lead him away, a reporter asks him why he committed the crime. He answers simply, “God told me to.”

God Told Me To did not do well upon original release, but time has proven to be quite kind. Watching it forty plus years later, I was amazed by how prescient it is, with killers opening fire for no reason, with the schism between sexes being seen as divine and by a public and leaders who are ill-equipped to deal with a true crisis of faith in their midst. It’s a brutal little film and a real triumph in the way that it starts as a simple police story and unravels not just the plot but the way the main character perceives himself. Even his multiple times a day shows of Catholic worship cannot protect him from the knowledge that he very well could be the Messiah — but not in the way that anyone expected.