Milton Moses Ginsberg started his directorial career with Coming Apart, a near-documentary which starred Rip Torn as a mentally disturbed psychologist who has been filming his sexual affairs. Sally Kirkland was also in the film, which was shot within a one-room, 15’x17′ set.

This movie is absolutely nothing like that movie.

Jack Whitter (Dean Stockwell) is the press secretary for the White House. While he’s in Hungary, a Communist werewolf bites him, which is no help at all when he moves back to our nation’s capital and starts making time with the President’s daughter.

Of course, now he’s also killing members of the President’s Cabinet with all of the murders forming the shape of a pentagram. I guess it’s up to the Second Daughter to take him out with a silver bullet, eh?

You must admire a movie that posits Clifton James, Sheriff J.W. Pepper from the 1970’s James Bond films, as our nation’s attorney general.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

Michael Apted directed Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas In the Mist and The World Is Not Enough but before all that, he made this movie that he called an “informed look at the British underworld.” That may be because he enlisted ex-gangster Bob Ramsey to act as a contact between the film unit and the local underworld. This kept harassment down and let them shoot in high crime areas.

Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) has lost his job and his wife Jill (Carol White) and children thanks to his drinking problem. Now a private detective, he’s still drinking and she’s moved on to a new husband, Foreman (Edward Fox) and taking care of his daughter Christine (Alison Portes).

A gang of kidnappers —  Keith (David Hemmings), Vic (Stephen Boyd), Barry (Roy Marsden), Des (Barry Stewart Harwood) and Taff (Alan Ford) — take Jill and Christine to force Foreman to help them with a crime. He’s an important businessman, so he hires Jim to get his wife and child back.

The story itself is simple but the real issues are whether Foreman was part of the crime, the past relationship between Jim and Christine, and how Jim and Keith knew each other when Jim was a cop. There’s a lot of humiliation of Jim — and Christine — which also seems like Foreman’s doing. This may be too British for American audiences — Warner Bros. said it was “too indigenous” — but I found it interesting.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.

This was Bob Shaye’s — and New Line Cinema’s — first full-length production after a decade as a pure distribution company. Director Mark Lester would tell The Pink Smoke, “They were distributing Truck Stop Women to college campuses and they already had a script, so I was hired to direct it. We hired Robert Forster because he had done Medium Cool. Don Stroud was supposed to star in it but he got into a motorcycle accident the night before shooting.”

The film starts with the death of one of Greg Wilson, one of its stuntmen, who was set up. His brother Glen (Forster) arrives on the set, along with B.J. Parswell (Fiona Lewis!), a reporter who wants to write about the danger of the stunt game. The minute Glen gets there he gets hit on by the producer’s wife (Candice Rialson, in one of her last roles; she’s also great in pretty much everything she ever did, like Chatterbox, Hollywood Boulevard and Moonshine County Express).

Glen joins the stunt team of the film, who all promise one another that if anyone gets hurt, they’ll always pull the plug for one another, predating Dr. Kevorkian by several years. Screw the law. We’re stuntmen!

One of the people who have to get the plug pulled on them is Chuck, played by Bruce Glover, always a welcome sight. He’s married to Joanna Cassidy, who is — again, you’re going to get this a lot with this cast — astounding in everything I’ve ever seen her in. In this one, more than aardvarking with Crispin’s dad in a waterbed in the back of a custom van, she’s punching the faces of an entire bar of rednecks.

The death keeps coming, as Paul (Ray Sharkey? This is like a B&S About Movies dream cast and it gets even better) gets trapped in a burning building. That means that our hero has to finish the film, figure out who the killer is and get some revenge.

Former pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty shows up, as does Richard Lynch. And you know how I feel about Mr. Lynch and the fact that he can make any movie better just by walking on set. Suffice to say he does way more than saunter on here.

This is why we’re doing an entire week of Mark Lester’s films. He knows how to get a story told, gather the right people to help tell it and get out of the way. He’s never let me down yet.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Van Ryn is the master of all things Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum. This is a movie that he loves and it’s so awesome to read what he has to say about why he feels the way that he does.

A popular vacation spot, desperate for tourist dollars, is suddenly beset by a beast that kills people. This coincides with the big breadwinning season of the vacation spot, leading the people in charge to hush up the deaths and avoid spooking the tourists into bolting. In the post-Jaws 1970s, there was no limit to the number of movies that came along with this exact same plot. One of the most successful imitators was William Girdler’s 1976 flick Grizzly, which placed the action in a park and substituted a bear for a shark. 1977 TV movie Snowbeast distills this formula even further, making the park a Colorado ski resort and changing the grizzly to a bigfoot monster.

Robert Logan and Sylvia Sidney play a grandson and grandmother who find their winter carnival interrupted by a monster that starts attacking and eating isolated people on the slopes — at one point, Logan says he can identify a victim’s body by looking at her face, and another character says “She doesn’t have it anymore.”  Sidney, of course, doesn’t want to admit that there is a problem at all, and advises Logan to keep it a secret. Bo Svenson is a former Olympic ski champion who has fallen on hard times and picks the wrong time to come to his old friend Logan for a job; I’m pretty sure entering into combat with a murderous bigfoot was not what he signed on for. Svenson’s wife, played by Yvette Mimieux, happens to be a former flame of Logan’s adding a love triangle to the story. Anyone who read the novel Jaws knows there was a love triangle in that story too, although it was not retained for the film version, so maybe nobody realized at the time just how deeply the screenwriter Joseph Stefano plunder the depths of Peter Benchley’s story.

Although the violence is subdued enough for a TV movie, there are some moments of dread to be found here, like when one character is trapped in a wrecked RV and can’t escape the oncoming monster, which just comes right for him and slaughters him immediately. There’s also a very silly moment when the creature shows up to interrupt a rehearsal for a pageant. It smashes a window, causes a little hysterical panic (including a hilarious reaction shot from Sylvia Sidney), and then proceeds back to where it came, stopping along the way to kill a helpless parent who was just waiting to pick up her daughter from the rehearsal.

Ultimately, camp is king in Snowbeast, and there is enough of that on hand to entertain this jaded viewer. Also, I enjoyed the outdoor photography, including some impressive tracking shots of characters skiing.

BONUS: Here’s the drink to go with it!

Snowballbeast

• .25 oz. blue curaçao
• 2 oz. vodka
• 2 oz. vanilla rum
• 2 oz. cream of coconut

1. Shake with ice in your shaker, then pour into a chilled glass. Enjoy!

For an entire article on the space films of Alfonso Brescia, visit this link.

Space is all about computers, at least in Italy in 1977. It’s also very close to when Star Wars was a big deal, so if there could be some cheaply made versions of an already big movie, Italy knew how to do exactly that.

A spaceship’s computer — The Wiz — seemingly saves everyone on-board from a space storm as they are only seeing refractions of the past. Meanwhile, Captain Mike Hamilton (John Richardson, Black Sunday) is being dealt with for slapping around an officer. He’s given the penalty of flying his ship — the MK-31 — to repair a satellite. When he gets there, he sees that they have no idea how to properly fix things and have moved past human sex and now lie on beds and watch light shows instead of messily putting the banana in the ham salad.

He investigates an unstable planet where two flying saucers — disintegrators — are protecting it from being explored. Narrowly avoiding a crash, Hamilton lands on the desert planet and learns that everyone is under the command of a computer. Only one of the people on this sphere survive, coming on board the M-31 while the computer possesses one of the crew who goes on a killing spree. The alien stops them at the cost of his own life and as everyone celebrates, only our hero realizes that the alien machine has now taken over The Wiz.

The cast includes Yanti Somer as Meela. She’s in all of Brescia’s space movies — Star Odyssey, War of the Robots, Battle of the Stars and this movie — as well as Man of the East. There’s also Katia Christine (Spirits of the Dead) as Greta, Maliso Longo (who was also in all of the space movies made by the director) as Halla, Massimo Bonetti as Vassilov, Giuseppe Fortis as Marseille and Italian western actor Vassili Karis as Peter Segura.

Director Alfonso Brescia has all sorts of movies on his list of films, including Naked Girl Killed in the Park, the wonderful Iron Warrior and the demented The Beast In Space. He wrote the story with Aldo Crudo (who made two possession movies in a row, Return of the Exorcist and Beyond the Door) and Maxim Lo Jacano.

In no way is this Star Wars. It’s closer to Planet of the Vampires with a little 2001. That said, I kind of adore it for being that.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.