EDITOR’S NOTE: The Wiz was on the CBS Late Movie on October 5, 1984.

As discussed in the article on this site about Return of Oz, nearly every Oz movie has been a failure until Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful. While we traditionally believe that the 1939 version was a success, it wasn’t a financial success until it was re-released in 1949 and then became beloved when it was on TV.

The Wiz lost $10 million nearly forty years after.

The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” premiered in Baltimore in 1974 and won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. Ted Ross and Mabel King would reprise their roles as The Lion and Evillene, but when Motown made this movie, Stephanie Mills was out as Dorothy and Diana Ross was in. First, she was turned down by Barry Gordy and then she got Rob Cohen of Universal Pictures to finance The Wiz if she were to play the lead role. Other roles would include Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man, Lena Horne as Glinda, Thelma Carpenter as Miss One (instead of Addapearle as in the stage play, but writer Joel Schumacher didn’t use any of the original book by William F. Brown) and Richard Pryor as the Wizard.

Saturday Night Fever director John Badham was to direct, but he couldn’t see Ross as Dorothy, so he left and Sidney Lumet (known for movies like Dog Day Afternoon and Network) was hired. He’d never made a musical and little if any comedy.

Back to that script. Schumacher was influenced super into Werner Erhard and the Erhard Seminars Training movement, as was Diana Ross. While some say that EST is used to “transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself,” others charge that it was mind control or an attempt at creating a “totalitarian army.”

Cohen said, “Before I knew it, the movie was becoming an est-ian fable full of est buzzwords about knowing who you are and sharing and all that. I hated the script a lot. But it was hard to argue with Ross because she was recognizing in this script all of this stuff that she had worked out in est seminars.” A lot of what Glinda says at the end of the movie is L. Frank Baum filtered through EST — “Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.” — as is the song “Believe In Yourself” — “If you believe / Within your heart, you’ll know / That no one can change / The path that you must go. Believe what you feel / And know you’re right, because / The time will come around / When you’ll say it’s yours.”

If there’s anything positive from this film, it’s the fact that both Michael and LaToya Jackson were able to move into a Manhattan apartment, all on their own for the first time in their life. Michael got to go to Studio 54; he impressed Quincy Jones with his work ethic so much that Jones agreed to produce Off the Wall. He would also produced Thriller and Bad. Jones compared Jackson to Sammy Davis Jr.

However, the film was a commercial failure and may have even hurt all black films for some years to come, as Hollywood kept pointing to how this movie bombed. It cost $24 million, made $13.6 in theaters and CBS paid $10 million to air it, but it still was seen as a loss. Michael came out as a star, but this was the end of Diana Ross as a movie star.

I’ll never understand why Dorothy was 24 years old in this instead of a child, but that’s what Ross wanted and that’s what she got. Yet there are things that really work in this for me, like the urban scapes that make up Oz — critics hated that and well, they were wrong — and the four crows are fun villains.

The CBS version cuts a lot of footage so that it fit into a three hour running time. I can’t even imagine how long the commercials were for this when it was on the CBS Late Movie.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Avalanche was on the CBS Late Movie on June 28 and September 4, 1985.

Corey Alan directed a ton of TV, 1971’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio and this Rock Hudson-starring disasterpiece in which the much beloved actor plays ski resort owner David Shelby, a man who owns a ski lodge so we can all totoally identify with him. He also invites his ex-wife Caroline Brace (Mia Farrow!) to visit in the hopes that he can convince her that he’s a changed man.

His opposite is Nick Thorne (Robert Forster), an environmental photographer who knows that that David has built his resort where he shouldn’t. One look at the title of the movie should tell you what’s coming next. When Caroline battles Nick over being a control obsessed freak all over again, well, she ends up in Nick’s arms just in time for David’s business partner’s plane to crash into the mountain and send the snow into everyone’s lives.

The end of this movie — after so much destruction and loss of life — is really all about Mia Farrow choosing between Rock Hudson and Robert Forster. I mean, what else should this be about?

Originally budgeted at $6.5 million, producer Roger Corman cut that amount –will the shocks ever end? —  before shooting began in Colorado. There’s plenty of styrofoam for snow, which is kind of obvious. It was still the most expensive movie that New World ever made.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I’ve discussed the video store of my youth often, but no movie in Prime Time Video inspired such dread as Faces of Death, its gigantic clamshell package covered with a note scrawled in sharpie: YOU MUST BE 18 TO RENT.

This feels like a movie made from VHS, as where were people going to see this in 1978?

Written and directed by John Alan Schwartz (using the name Alan Black for the screenplay and Conan LeCilaire for directing, as well as Johnny Getyerkokov for second unit and appearing with no screen name for his role as the leader of the cannibal cult), this film made $35 million at the box office, despite being outlawed in the UK and made a video nasty. It was not banned in forty countries, no matter what the box art may scream at you, and it really doesn’t contain all that much real death either.

Try telling that to the kids in my hometown in the mid-80s.

They believed that pathologist Francis B. Gröss — actually portrayed by Michael Carr — was a real doctor who was using video to explore the phenomena of death itself. They spoke breathlessly of the moments in this movie and it was another torture test film, one people bragged about surviving.

As this was a non-union film, there weren’t many credits, so it could have seemed real. But today, so many people have come forward discussing how they were involved in the movie. Estimates are that 40% of the film is fake, but the death scene of the female cyclist is real and the alligator scene also shows up in Naked and Cruel.

In today’s world, we have the internet, which has non-stop access to the kind of footage that Faces of Death could only dream of having access to getting. As such, we are numb to the kind of panic and worry that one would have with this movie staring back at them from the shelves of a mom and pop video store.

Is it any wonder that Legendary is rebooting this film series but making it friendlier? Here’s the logline for the film: “A female moderator of a YouTube-like website whose job is to weed out offensive and violent content and who herself is recovering from a serious trauma, who stumbles across a group that is re-creating the murders from the original film. But in the story primed for the digital age of online misinformation, the question is: Are the murders real or fake?”

Nobody is going to have nightmares about that movie.

Known as Dragon Zombies Return, this movie is the kind of movie I just let wash over me.

Polly Shang Kuan Ling-Feng plays East Sea Dragon, a woman who has spent a year in a cave to study her fighting style and now is searching for the other, well, zodiac fighters like Rooster, Rat, Ox, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Dog, Pig, Tiger and Rabbit. Everyone has a costume that ties into their sign and martial arts to match.

Their enemy? Tiger Shark, played by Lo Lieh, who has an army of crab men, a boat that launches rubber sharks and the Five Elements, Fire, Wood, Water, Air and Gold. You thought there were only four elements? You aren’t ready for this.

From http://tarstarkas.net/2012/11/the-zodiac-fighters/

This is the story of a professional mourner who finds a magic cave and unites all of the animal forms of combat to battle rubber sharks. I have no other way to explain it. It’s one of the oddest movies I’ve seen — and just think about that and all that I have watched — and it’s so blobby and grainy and a bad transfer and you know, I kind of want it that way.

Want me to convince you?

Morricone’s theme from Exorcist II is in this.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Growing up, the Saint Francis Hospital would always send people with mental issues to the fifth floor. I’ve had certain family members who would have semi-regular vacations to the fifth floor. It got to the point that whenever someone would discuss whether or not someone was acting strangely, they’d say, “Well, they’re on the fifth floor.”

This was going to be part of slasher month, except that it’s in no way a slasher. Of course, the poster work and other marketing makes it seem that way. It’s not. It’s much stranger.

Kelly McIntyre (Dianne Hull, cryonics enthusiast and an actress in Christmas Evil) is a disco dancer who gets dosed, probably by her boyfriend. This brings her to the fifth floor fo Cedar Springs Hospital, where her boyfriend refuses to help her, accusing her of being suicidal.

Kelly’s attractive, which means that she soon becomes the target of Carl the orderly. He’s played by Bo Hopkins, who I have had the fortune of watching several films with him in them of late. Here he’s out of control, a non-stop erection determined to ruin everyone’s life.

This movie is packed with faces you’ll remember, like Don Johnson’s ex-girlfriend and Warhol movie star Patti D’Arbanville, Cathey Paine (Helter Skelter), horror icons Michael Berryman and Robert Englund, Sharon Farrell (It’s Alive), Anthony James (the chauffeur from Burnt Offerings), Julie Adams Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and The Creature From the Black Lagoon), Mel Ferrer, John David Carson (Creature from Black Lake), Earl Boen (the only actor other than Arnold Schwarzenegger to appear in the first three Terminator films), Alice Nunn (Large Marge!), rock and roll photographer Chuck Boyd (who is also in the sexploitation film Dr. Minx and The Specialist, both from the same director of this movie), Machine Gun Kelly (who was the announcer in UHF), disco singer Patti Brooks (whose song “After Dark” was on the soundtrack of Thank God It’s Friday! and recorded two duets with Dan Aykroyd for Dr. Detroit), Milt Kogan (Barney Miller), 1961 Miss Universe Marlene Schmidt (who is in nearly every movie this director did) and Tracey Walter. Yes, Bob the Goon from Batman.

This star-studded journey into mental illness comes straight out of the mind of Howard Avedis, who brought us all manner of literally insane movies like Mortuary and They’re Playing with Fire, two movies that I recommend highly. He knows how to take a salacious topic and make it even smuttier, which I always adore. Well done, Howard (or Hikmet).

It might seem like a TV movie for a bit, then there’s full frontal nudity and you’ll feel safe, like a warm straitjacket has been put on you, allowing you to just lie back and enjoy the magical exploitation within.

You can watch this on Tubi.

“It’s super human, super music, super magic and super amazing! You’ll be compelled over the edge of sight and sound and under the spell of mind-boggling action and music! Pushed to the danger zone! It’s a death wish at 120 decibels! Stunt Rock! The ultimate rush!”

If there was ever a movie that can’t live up to its trailer, it’s Stunt Rock. Upon witnessing it on the Alamo Drafthouse’s Trailer War compilation, I fell in love with whatever this movie could be. I even ordered the official DVD of the film but never unwrapped it. Why? Because nothing could be as great as this trailer.

I’m so happy to have been proven wrong.

Stunt Rock — directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In, Night of the Demons 2, Turkey Shoot and so many more) — is exactly the type of movie I love: Take a basic concept and let hijinks ensue.

As Trenchard-Smith sais himself, the concept was “Famous stuntman meets famous rock group. Much stunt, much rock. The kids will go bananas.” He’s also referred to it as “a largely plotless, pseudo-documentary, rocumentary and basically a 90-minute trailer for Grant Page.”

Grant Page is an Australian stuntman who pretty much defied death on a daily basis throughout the 70’s and 80’s, transforming his weekend hobby into a career that would give him international exposure thanks to films like The Man From Hong Kong, Mad Max, Death Cheaters, Mad Dog Morgan, Death Ship and so many more, as well as starring in Road Games and having his own TV series, Danger Freaks.

Basically, Grant comes to America, talks about stunts, does stunts, gets the girl — Trenchard-Smith’s future wife Margaret Gerard — and hangs out with a band that combines rock and roll and magic. Monique van den Ven (Amsterdamned, the 1982 version of Breathless, Paul Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight) also shows up.

There’s also the subplot of a movie being filmed and the ways directors and agents treat their talent. The agent in this film is played by Richard Blackburn, whose career is the kind that draws the laser focus of this website. Would it just be enough if he played Dr. Zaius on the Return to the Planet of the Apes cartoon series? Let me add that he also co-wrote Eating Raoul and appears in that film as James from the Valley. But perhaps what he’s most celebrated for — at least around these parts — are for writing, directing and appearing as the Reverend in the absolutely transcendent 1973 film Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural.

This is less of a film and more of a movie that you can shut off your brain and just savor the stuntwork while hearing Page discuss how and why he did it, interlayed with Sorcery in concert.

While Trenchard-Smith wanted Foreigner for the film, they were on tour and wouldn’t be back in time. That’s fortunate — no band other than Sorcery could have been in this movie.

A theatrical metal band formed in Los Angeles in 1976, Sorcery’s gimmick was that two master magicians would dress as Merlin (Paul Haynes) and Satan (Curtis James Hyde), join them on stage and battle one another in what their press bio referred to as “The King of the Wizards against the Prince of Darkness.”

The band was made up of Richard “Smokey” Taylor on guitar, Richie King on bass, Greg MaGie on vocals, Perry Morris on drums and the masked Doug Loch on keys. They’d later play Dick Clark’s 1982 A Rockin Halloween and 1983 A Magical Musical Halloween.

But if you really love metal, you probably know them best for a completely different film.

In 1984, Morris, Taylor and King became Headmistress, the band for the seminal metal/horror film Rocktober Blood, a film in which Billy “Eye” Harper wipes out most of his band before they reform a year after his killing spree has been halted.

That’s pretty much the movie. It doesn’t demand that you invest much more of your brain into it, instead relying on a magical blend of 1978 L.A., behind the scenes movie-making and wizards launching fire across a stage while a masked dude plays keyboards and dudes wail and shred. If this doesn’t sound like the most amazing film ever committed to celluloid to you, you’re invited to leave this site now and never come back.

The frequent use of split-screen seen in this movie was a necessary editing tool. That’s because many of the stunts from Australian films like The Dragon Files, Mad Dog Morgan and Death Cheaters was filmed on 16 mm and needed to be fixed to fit the wide frame. That said, I love how each frame has a different angle. It’s MTV three years before that little moon man ever launched.

I’m not the only lover of this film. Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof owes the way it presents stunts — much less a New Zealand stunt icon in Zoe Bell in a starring role — to this film. And Eli Roth wore a shirt of the film while filing Hostel 2 and has featured the Sorcery songs “Talking to the Devil” in Knock Knock and “Sacrifice” in his remake of Death Wish.

Perhaps Stunt Rock has even greater cultural significance. After all, it’s Phil Hartman’s first movie. And editor Robert Leighton — who was billed as Robery Money as this was a non-union film — would go on to be the supervising editor of This Is Spinal Tap. Hmm — now it’s all making sense.

While Trenchard-Smith would at one point state that this was the worst movie he ever made, he’s softened on the film in later years. What do you expect from a movie that went from an idea in the shower to in theaters in under 5 months?

Sadly, three months prior to Allied Artists distributing the film, they went bankrupt. The film was sold to Film Ventures International. And then…the movie disappeared for decades until it was rediscovered.

You can order this movie — and lots of other amazing stuff — from the band Kino Lorber. Do so right now. This is a movie begging to be experienced.

BONUS: The amazing Trailers from Hell has posted Trenchard-Smith discussing the film over the trailer and it’s everything you want it to be.

The Weekly World News was launched in 1979 by The National Enquirer publisher Generoso Pope, Jr. as a means to keep using the black-and-white press that when that higher profile tabloid went to full color. Unlike any of the other rags you’d get at the supermarket, The Weekly World News was unafraid to wildly speculate on aliens, monsters and Elvis. It also introduced Batboy to the world and has been sadly lamented since it ceased publication in 2007 (although you can still read it online).

The Force Beyond is like watching an issue of that long lost tabloid without the smell of the pulp or getting black ink all over your fingers.

Producer Donn Davison did it all. He was a yo-yo master and a professional magician, while also a producer for Film Ventures International. He was a huckster who voiced the pitch to buy how-to sex manuals in roadshows and he ran the Dragon Art Theater in California, all before he did the voiceovers for The Crawling Thing and Creature Of Evil. Now, he’s our host, presenting the words of his wife, Barbara Morris Davison, who also was behind the movie Honey Britches. Whew!

Guess who else brought this movie your way? William Sachs, who also directed The Incredible Melting Man. Strap in. This movie is a non-stop deluge of info, where things are just thrown at you with no set order or reason. Grown men trying to make their own UFOs? Yeah, but did I tell you about the barn in Bangor that just suddenly disappeared?

Meanwhile, the soundtrack is a combination of Moog and chopped and screwed interpretations of Christian music made years before anyone knew who DJ Screw was.

My favorite part of this movie is that it’s voiced by Emperor Rosko, the son of Hollywood mogul Joe Pasternak. He started his career in 1964 on Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship off the coast of Britain. He was joined on the air by his pet bird Alfie and would nearly rap his American-style music intros. He was also the inspiration for the character that Philip Seymour Hoffman played in Pirate Radio. He sounds like a verifiable maniac in this movie.

Honestly: this movie is one of the most ridiculous films I’ve ever witnessed, a whiplash tour through everything from Cayce to Bigfoot, Atlantis and MUFON. It’s the visual version of open calls back when Art Bell was still alive and people would call from Area 51 or the Antichrist would call in. Say it with me: “West of the Rockies, you’re now on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell!”

You should read the above paragraph as me jumping up and down telling you that you should call off work, cancel any plans and watch this as soon as possible.

You can get The Force Beyond on Tubi.