“The Clowns are a rock group on their way up the ladder of success. In their macabre makeup, it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. Their incredible stage performance center around sadistic, mutilating theatrics and eventually, real murders begin. The police are called in and consider the band members prime suspects until they realize the killings are occurring during their performances. The search for the murderer begins … and ends with the audience chanting, Kill, Kill, Kill!”

The Clowns are an Alice Cooper-like group that sings about killing their fans. So when their fans start showing up dead at their shows, of course, they’re the main suspects.

Directed by Don Edmunds (Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS) and with James W. Robertson, the director of Superstition as the director of cinematography, this is a sleaze, sex and murder filled movie. Which is probably just as you like it, just as the crowds that come to see The Clowns like it and the kind of life the boys in the band are struggling to get away from.

Larry Thomas — the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld — is even in this, as it’s his first film. He hates the movie so much that he wrote an apology on the film’s IMDB page. No apologies for Night Ripper! from Larry, however.

This is a dark, murky film — not just because of the transfer I saw — that has plenty of drugs and sex. It honestly feels like a porn movie without the payoff of sex. The music isn’t bad, with one track that sounds a lot like Motörhead.

I never understand why bands hate the spotlight they find themselves thrust into. And I don’t get it here, either. Also: the story is a total mess. You should probably get fucked up yourself while watching it and yell at the screen a lot. That makes every movie better.

The Clowns are actually a Champaign, Illinois, hard pop-new wave band, The Names, which features Chip Greenman on drums. Chip was the drummer in the Cheap Trick precursor, Fuse, alongside Rick Neilson and Tom Petersson. When Rick and Tom morphed into Cheap Trick, they asked Chip to come back, he turned them down and stayed with his then band, a German prog-rock outfit, Frantic Dwarf. The Names did a couple ’80a D.I.Y singles, and never got signed. And you know what happened to Cheap Trick.

You can watch Terror on Tour courtesy of Burial Ground 5 You Tube, which features lots of lost VHS and SOV films from the ’80s. Check ’em out!

Oh, by the way: There’s more faux-bands to be had with our “Ten Bands Made Up for Movies (and More)” featurette.

As I worked on Bigfoot Week, I turned to Phil Hall’s The Weirdest Movie Ever Made for guidance. All it said about this movie was “the 1980s started with another vicious Bigfoot attacking humans in Night of the Demon (1980),” so I didn’t expect much. I have to tell you, my mind still hasn’t fully comprehended what I just watched.

The film starts with a giallo-style framing device, where several policemen are interviewing Professor Bill Nugent, an anthropology teacher who was found in the woods with his face mutilated, surrounded by the bodies of his dead students.

This is a film of unconnected narratives, where one character after another appears to tell a story about Bigfoot, then that story is reenacted. It starts with Carla Thomas, whose family was murdered by a Bigfoot. That’s when Nugent initiates a flashback of his class discovering proof of the creature after it attacked a family on a picnic.

The authorities determine that all of the murders in the area that Bigfoot was involved in had to be a hoax. Carla goes one further by saying that the police tampered with the evidence in her father’s case. She also tells another flashback story where we watch a couple in the throes of passion inside a van. The man is soon dragged from the vehicle and dies in bloody pain on the windshield while the woman watches.

It’s at this point that I realized that this isn’t really a Bigfoot movie per se. It’s a slasher. A slasher that ended up on the video nasties list due to its shocking levels of gore and mayhem.

The university won’t sanction Nugent’s class trip to continue searching for Bigfoot, but they head out anyway. Nugent and his group plan on staying at Carlson’s Landing, owned by Lou Carlson, who refuses to help the professor and students. Well, he does until they get him drunk and he reveals that a woman in the woods named Wanda has a connection with the beast.

Meanwhile, Bigfoot shoves a man into a sleeper bag, swings him around and around, then throws him into a tree where he’s impaled on a tree branch.

Nugent and the kids make it to town and learn that Wanda went mute and insane after having a deformed stillbirth. Her father was a preacher named Emmet McGinty whose followers live in total isolation, inbreeding and practicing cannibalism and human sacrifices. And oh yeah — the sheriff is spying on them now.

As they reach their campsite, Nugent regales the kids about a biker who castrated and died nearby. Casual, fun conversation? Sure. You’ll enjoy watching it in lurid detail, too. A few hours after they all go to sleep, they are awakened by McGinty’s Satanic cult — which includes the sheriff — as they chant and perform a sex ritual with a girl who we soon learn is Wanda. Nugent panics and fires his gun, leading to complete chaos and the Bigfoot statues catching on fire.

At this point, any sane person would leave the woods. But Nugent and crew press on, despite Bigfoot following them and stealing their boat. They find Wanda’s cabin and bribe her with candy. Once they show her a track of Bigfoot’s prints, she goes crazy and locks herself in a room.

How would you pass the time? Oh, more stories. Nugent speaks about an outdoorsman who was cut up with his own axe and then regales us all with a little anecdote about two Girl Scouts who are walking through the woods holding knives. Why? Who knows. But Bigfoot soon shows up and girls them with their own weapons. Finally, one of the students plays top this and tells about Bigfoot slamming a man’s head into a tree repeatedly until the man shoots himself. In the midst of all this, two of the kids decide to have sex, which draws out Bigfoot, who tears up the boy’s back.

Somehow, Nugent’s teaching abilities extend to hypnosis. He uses those on Wanda, who helps us flashback to her abusive childhood, her father interrupted her first lovemaking experience and then her rape by Bigfoot. Yep. You read that right. Convinced the father of the child was a demon, McGinty killed the beast’s offspring and Wanda got her revenge by setting him on fire.

Again, at this point, anyone sane would get out of the woods. Nope. They decide to dig up the body of Wanda’s child, which brings out Bigfoot who steals back his child’s bones.

Everyone decides to become a cover version of Night of the Living Dead and see much of the footage in Bigfoot vision. Bigfoot breaks in while Wanda calmly watches. The monster strangles folks, rips out intestines, slices throats, shoves people’s faces through glass windows like his name is Dario Argento and then shoves Nugent’s face onto a hot stove. You’ll cheer, trust me. This is why you watch movies.

Nugent wakes up back in the giallo framing device, where the doctors sedate him as he pleads for everyone to find Wanda and Bigfoot. The police discuss his story, declare him criminally insane and move on. Are they part of the conspiracy?

After doing some research on this, I learned that the original ending of the movie had a helicopter rescue the remaining students and the sheriff telling Wanda that Bigfoot was safe. The film’s distributor felt the movie would sell better commercial if all of the students were killed.

I love this movie. Pure perfect love. From the words “those horror stories that you heard about the forest…they’re all true!” to the bloody ending where nearly every single character is wiped out in graphic detail, this is a movie that shocks you at every turn. Brutal violence. Odd moments of humor. Loud blasts of synthesizer beeps, boops and squeals. Nonsensical plotting and a movie that has no idea what it truly wants to be, so it becomes all of them.

I want more people to discover this film. It’s scummy filmmaking at its bloody best.

Originally released by porn label VCX (under their VCII label) in the 1980’s, this was re-released by Code Red a few years back. Luckily, you can find it on Amazon Prime.

While other men hunt, an intergalactic hunter has come down from the stars to track the most dangerous game, invisibly hiding until it can kill them with its throwing star weaponry. The creature is played by Kevin Peter Hall. But this isn’t Predator! This came out seven years earlier! This is Without Warning!

The film opens with a father and his reluctant son hunting. In moments, they are killed by flying creatures that have tentacles that pierce their skin.

Meanwhile, four teens ignore the warnings of Joe Taylor (Jack Palance!) and decide to camp here. Is this a dangerous area? You bet. Not even F-Troop‘s Larry Storch can survive, as he is killed and his Cub Scout troops run into the woods.

Two of the teens die pretty much instantly and their bodies are found in a shack. As the survivors run, one of the creatures tries to attack them through the windshield. They go back to the truck stop and no one believes them except for PTSD veteran Fred “Sarge” Dobbs (Martin Landau, Ed Wood, Space: 1999).

Landau is great in this, as he descends into paranoia, sure that everyone is an alien. He’s a villain who is acting like the heroes of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or They Live.

It turns out that the shack is where the creature is keeping his trophy kills. Only Sandy survives, as Sarge goes nuttier than ever and Taylor sacrifices himself to stop the gigantic alien.

Greydon Clark directed this. You may know him from acting in films like Satan’s Sadists. Or perhaps you’ve seen one of his films, like Satan’s Cheerleaders.

Cameron Mitchell, Neville Brand and Ralph Meeker all show up to add some Old Hollywood to the proceedings. And then there’s a young David Caruso as one of the teens. Don’t blink or you’ll miss Cinemax late night icon Darby Hinton (Malibu Express)!

The majority of the film’s budget went to having Landau and Palance on board, as well as having Rick Baker design the creature’s head. And hey! Dean Cundey (Halloween) makes this movie look way better than it’s $150,000 budget would lead you to believe!

Scream Factory put this out on blu ray and it’s seriously way better of a production than this film probably deserves. But that’s why those guys are awesome and why so much of my paycheck goes to them.

By 1980, slashers ruled the movie theaters. Yet every once in awhile, a traditional horror film would emerge. A film like The Hearse. A movie that’s more about an evil house and a ghost boyfriend and an evil woman and the occult just as much as it’s about a car that drives around and haunts people.

Jane Hardy (Trish Van Devere, the widow of George C. Scott who also appears with him in The Changeling) just got divorced and just left San Francisco. While she gets her head together, she’s decided to live in the old country home in Blackford that her aunt willed to her.

From the minute she arrives in Blackford, everyone is hostile to her. That’s because her aunt was a witch. Meanwhile, a large black hearse begins driving past her house, stalking her when the evening grows dark. But also, her aunt’s home is haunted and by her spirit. There may also be a coven stalking around, too.

Goerge Bowers didn’t direct many films (he also did My Tutor), but was better known as the editor of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, A League of Their Own, The Good Son, From Hell and many more films. Here, he creates a film that harkens back to classic horror versus modern slashers.

Joseph Cotten (The Abominable Dr. Phibes) is also on-hand, as are several people who were important to the music and art worlds. Like Med Flory, whose Supersax band won a Grammy for their translations of Charlie Parker’s music. He’s also in The Boogens! Then there’s Al Hansen of the Fluxus artist collective, who would give birth to Warhol protege Bibbe Hansen and is also the grandfather of rock star Beck.

Luke, the teen who has a crush on Jane, is played by Donald Petrie, who would grow up to direct How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Miss Congeniality, Mystic Pizza and Grumpy Old Men. He’s in a subplot here that goes nowhere, other than to show Trish Van Devere in a tight 70’s jogging outfit. And the sheriff is played by character actor Chuck Mitchell, who played Porky Wallace in the Porky’s series of films (he also shows up in Don’t Answer the Phone! and Frightmare.

For more pop culture reference, The Hearse also has Christopher McDonald (Shooter McGavin from Happy Gilmore!), David Gautreaux (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and Allison Balson (Nancy Oleson from Little House on the Prarie).

I have a beat up cheap DVD copy of this that I paid $1 for. But you should totally spring for the new re-issue from Vinegar Syndrome, complete with new artwork, TV and theatrical trailers and an interview with David Gautreaux. It’s newly scanned in 2K from the 35mm negative. I can promise you my bottom of the barrel copy is not.

It’s hard for me to explain the cultural behemoth that The Gong Show was when it debuted. Originally airing on NBC from June 14, 1976 to July 21, 1978 (and in first-run syndication from 1976 to 1980), the show was basically a talent contest with celebrity judges that graded the talent and could gong — meaning they’d have to stop their act — those who had no talent to speak of.

Sure, there were clunkers, but the show also featured real talent, such as Andrea McArdle (Broadway’s Annie), Cheryl Lynn (disco hit “To Be Real”), Paul Reubens and John Paragon (who would go on to become Pee Wee Herman and Jambi the Genie), Police Academy’s Michael Winslow, Boxcar Willie, Oingo Boingo (which had future composer Danny Elfman in the band), actress Mare Winningham and more.

But more famously, there were reoccurring characters like the Unknown Comic (he wore a bag on his head) and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine, as well as risque acts like the Popsicle Twins, who basically performed oral sex on, well, popsicles. They are considered the main reason why the show was moved from NBC to syndication (and one of the times when creator Chuck Barris said he began to reconsider his career). Of note, the other reason NBC canceled the show, judge Jaye P. Morgan flashing her breasts, appears in this film uncensored.

Barris is an interesting character study himself. He wrote the song “Palisades Park,” as well as creating The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. He never intended to host the show, but did so to save it. Watching his appearances today, you’re reminded that while there weren’t as many entertainment options in the 70’s, there was plenty of coke. Where life gets really wild is that in his book Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, he confessed that states that he worked as a CIA assassin, killing 33 people while acting as a chaperone on The Dating Game‘s big vacation dates (although the CIA denies this and Barris even later stated that the novel was his fictionalized account of how his life would have been different had he become an agent).

Which brings us to 1980’s The Gong Show Movie.

Written by Barris and Robert Downey Sr., the film is all about a week in the life of the show (including a nervous breakdown which Barris may have really had at one point, of which he said, “I had a small nervous breakdown out there, doing strange things. When I see films of the last shows, I was walking around, busting up [studio] flats on the air. That was the behavior of a host who was bored to death.”).

Indeed, Barris starts the film exhausted and miserable, in direct juxtaposition to his manic on-air character. The first song, “Sometimes It Just Don’t Pay to Get Up,” (which was, like all the movie’s songs, written by Baris) sets up the defeatist tone. Barris is overwhelmed by the attention the show brings him as well as the work it takes to get the show on the air.

We see a quick glimpse of the show — hey, there’s the Unknown Comic, there’s Hard Boiled Haggerty, there’s Tony Randall — just so we remember why we’re here. Yet even in the moments where the film tries to be fun, a man named Melvin and his chicken dance leads to a heart attack after Barris makes the man do encore after encore. Even when Barris tries to atone by visiting the man in the hospital, he is faced with a constant barrage of people wanting to try out for the show — including the sick man!

What was it about the 70’s that led to the need to see our heroes get shat upon? Think of the trials that Rocky endured in his sequel or Altman’s Popeye whose miserable life includes the fact that he hates spinach?

The film then descends into auteur — or maybe vanity — territory as Barris attends a country music recording session which turns into a montage. He watches a man abuse his wife and intervenes, only to have them both attack him (a bit taken from Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality). And then, a discussion with his girlfriend ends up with him being attacked by two men whose mother he had gonged (character actor par excellence Vincent Schiavelli is one of them).

Another montage of clips follows, including Danny Devito singing, a group of girls in Alice Cooper makeup, a priest swearing, old women with falsetto voices, eggs being smashed and poured onto people, a crucified man singing “Please Release Me,” the infamous Popsicle Twins performance and Jaye P. Morgan’s baring her breasts uncensored.

Barris is harassed about the content of the show by his boss as he leaves. He sneaks into a restaurant where the maître d’ Raoul (Rip Taylor!) gives him a table inside the kitchen and the cook forces him to listen to a song. Meanwhile, another man is cooking naked in the background. The new boss finds him at dinner and follows him the whole way into the bathroom, where an excited fan pisses on Barris.

The boss even follows him to his house, where he interrupts breakfast in bed. This is followed by a montage of people waking up, with the Unknown Comic waking to his bag headed wife and Jaye P. Morgan in bed with numerous men.

Barris then meets with Morgan to discuss her behavior and that she acts too dirty on the air. Then it’s time for another montage of people getting ready for the show shot cinéma vérité style. Then Della Barris, Chuck’s real-life daughter, shows up and announces her plans to marry NBA star Bill Bridges. It’s at this point that I discovered that Barris’ love interest in the film, Robin Altman, was really his girlfriend at the time. In a 1980 People article, Barris said, “Robin used to work in our accounting department, but she was going with someone else, so I had to play it just hugs and kisses and copping a little feel. Then I threw my back out, and she came over with these heating pads because she had the same problem. We’ve been living together ever since.” The 70’s and 80’s, everyone!

Then it’s time for another montage, which ends with a pause on Barris’ face that stays on screen for way too long to hammer home the host’s nervous breakdown. Barris meets a doctor who he tells just how much he hates The Gong Show and how he needs to do something meaningful. She tells him that he needs to get away.

Somehow, Barris telling a joke leads to an argument which leads to him breaking up with his girlfriend. Which, of course, leads to another montage. Actually, it’s just one scene of him alone in the park with sad music. No, I take that back. It’s time for another montage, set to another listening of “Sometimes It Just Don’t Pay to Get Up.”

But Barris can’t escape The Gong Show. Even heading to a small diner in the middle of nowhere leads to the waitresses auditioning. So he heads to the airport and tries to fly out of town. A guy walks right up to him in line (Phil Hartman!) with a gun, because pre-9/11 these things just happened.

Barris takes a one-way ticket to Morocco and walks into the middle of the desert. If you think you’re not going to get a montage, you haven’t been watching this movie. We get view after view of Chuckie Baby crossing the desert to the tune of a sad piano.  Finally, a helicopter lands and his boss gets out. Everyone wants him back and the USC Trojan marching band appears, marching over the dunes (seriously, after playing on a coked up Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk,” this is not the strangest thing this school band has ever been involved in). Everyone in Barris’ life comes out to sing a big musical number, including Gene Gene the Dancing Machine. Everyone thanks him as they sing “Don’t Get Up for Me.”

How does it all end? Another montage of show clips that ends with a man farting out a candle, which causes the new boss to faint. Did you expect anything different?

This is a film packed with cameos and character parts, like Mabel King (Mama from What’s Happening!), Harvey Lembeck, Ed Marinaro, baseball star Steve Garvey, Jamie Farr, Rosey Grier, Kitten Natividad and Taylor Negron, who must show up for a cameo in every movie made in the 1980’s.

You can watch this as a time capsule. You can watch it as a fascinating study in determining the difference between an auteur film or a vanity project. Or you can just be happy to see uncensored clips from the show. If you were born after The Gong Show graced the airwaves or have no interest in celebrity-obsessed 70’s pop culture, none of this will make sense.

The Gong Show Movie was in and out of theaters in less time than it took you to read this article. It did play on HBO, but wasn’t released on VHS. It finally came out on blu ray from Shout! Factory in 2016.

As a large ship drifts into New York City, you may wonder, “Am I watching Zombi?” No, you’re watching Contamination or Alien Contamination, but the similarities may be international. Both films shared the same production offices and director Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Hercules) was so impressed that he wanted to hire the same cast, but only ended up with Ian McCulloch.

The ship is packed with large containers of coffee, which really hide green eggs that pulsate and make droning sounds. The crew of the ship is more than just dead. They’re in pieces and the rescue team soon discovers why. The eggs tend to explode, spraying acid all over the place that’s toxic to anything human. As soon as it touches them, they explode in glorious slow motion bursts of red food color and Karo syrup.

The military soon links the green eggs with a recent mission to Mars that caused one astronaut to disappear and the other, Commander Hubbard (there’s Ian McCulloch!) to become a drunk. He joins Colonel Stella Holmes and New York cop Tony Aris (Marino Masé, The Red Queen Kills Seven Times) on the case, which takes them all the way to a Columbian coffee plantation (well, the movie was funded by Columbia cocaine dealers) and Hubbard’s old partner, who is now in the thrall of a gigantic alien cyclops (!).

Originally intended as a straight sequel to Alien, this movie enters James Bond territory at times and is not afraid — at all — to wipe out characters left and right. It also has a scene where a green egg menaces a girl in the shower, which should be frightening yet comes off as hilarious. That said, this has a loud Goblin soundtrack that makes this seem like a much better movie than it is.

But hey — who can hate a movie with dialogue like this?

NYPD Lt. Tony Aris: Jesus Christ, the whole world is going to be wiped out and all this broad’s worried about is getting changed!

Colonel Stella Holmes: Listen, Aris, if I have to die with the rest of the world then I want to have a proper dress on and clean underwear.

That’s better than the first few minutes of the film, where almost the entire dialogue is muffled. But hey — you can either choose great dialogue or awesome gore. Guess which one you get here?

Want to see it for yourself? Shudder and Amazon Prime both have this streaming and you can get the Arrow blu ray at Diabolik DVD.

UPDATE: You can also watch this with commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder.

I’ve recently been reading the book Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 1980’s and reminded of my own misspent youth. In sixth grade, a teacher knew that I was religious and thought I could warn my fellow classmates about the dangers of evil music and movies. He gave me a mimeographed sheet of heavy metal (and non-metal) bands to study and by the time I got to Black Sabbath, my soul was sold to rock and roll.

By eleventh grade, I was squarely in the devil’s camp in the eyes of my teachers. My love for bands like King Diamond and Danzig, along with my predilection for drawing Leatherface in class, marked me as a subject of interest. Obviously, I was doing drugs and black mass rituals — I could easily discuss Dungeons & Dragons, too. I was to be more feared the dead-eyed athletes who would soon realize their lives were peaking at 17 while mine hadn’t even started yet.

It’s to those times in my youth, when I wanted to escape my hometown and sat in my room blaring Samhain’s “November Coming Fire” and reading Fangoria, that this movie perfectly fits in. It is disgusting. It is unrepentant. It has no moral or social value. It is filled with the kind of gore than makes churches throw VHS tapes into a blazing bonfire. In short, it is everything amazing and wonderful and metal about horror movies.

The movie starts with two Germans exploring a beautiful Greek beach. Someone emerges from the ocean and murders them. Meanwhile, five travelers are joined by Julie (Tisa Farrow, who some may know as the sister of Mia, but we all know her as Anne from Zombi 2), who asks for a ride to the island. However, Carol (Zora Kerova, Cannibal Ferox, The New York Ripper) uses her tarot cards to learn that something bad will happen. No one listens to her.

The pregnant Maggie (Serena Grandi from Delirium) stays behind on the boat and is abducted by the killer, who quickly beheads a sailor.

The island is in ruins and completely abandoned, except for a woman in black, who writes go away in the dust. Upon finding a rotting corpse that has been eaten, everyone runs back to the boat, which is floating unmanned, then goes to the house of Julie’s friends. There, only the family’s blind daughter Henriette has survived.

The young girl panics and attacks Daniel, but when she is calmed, she tells everyone of the maniac that is stalking the island. Daniel is wounded and needs medicine, so Andy and Arnold head to town. Meanwhile, Daniel flirts with Julie, which causes Carol to run into town and Julie to follow her. While all this drama is going on, the killer rips out Danel’s throat.

Everyone travels to a mansion that belonged to Klaus Wortman, who died along with his wife and child in a shipwreck. This caused his sister, the woman in black, to lose her mind. And to hammer that point home, we soon see her hang herself.

Everything seems like its going to get better when a boat rifts to shore. On board, Julie finds Klaus’ journal. It turns out that he is alive…and the killer! Soon, Maggie is confronted by him and we learn that it’s George Eastman, who is in so many awesome Italian movies, such as Baba Yaga, 2019: After the Fall of New York, The New Barbarians, Blastfighter, Rabid Dogs, Hands of Steel, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, oh man! So many amazing films! This is his star-making role though and he really goes for it. He has a flashback where we learn how he accidentally stabbed his wife while trying to convince her that they should eat their dead son to survive. After eating his family, he went insane. Soon, Klaus breaks out of his flashback reverie, stabs Arnold and rips out and eats the unborn baby inside Maggie’s belly. Holy fucking shit, this movie!

I wish that those teachers who thought I was a Satanic terror in 1988 could see me now, jumping up and down with glee at 2:44 AM on a school night screaming “GEORGE EASTMAN!” while drinking a beer and holding a small dog.

What follows can’t really top that, but fuck it if Eastman isn’t going to try, including eating his own intestines after Andy hits him the stomach with a pickaxe! That’s commitment to your role!

The American version of this film, The Grim Reaper, has 35 cuts in an attempt to get an R rating. That’s correct – nine minutes are missing, including the baby being devoured and the killer eating himself. It just ends when he is stabbed in the stomach. It also replaces the electronic Italian score with the music from Kingdom of the Spiders.

Director Joe D’amato and George Eastman would return in a spiritual sequel called Absurd. You better believe we’ll be getting to that one soon. This is a rough film, but isn’t that why you’re this far down in the review, reading this? You know it. And you can check it out in sadly edited form on Amazon Video. If you want the real deal, you probably know how to find movies on iOffer, right?

EDIT: You can forget the end of the paragraph above and just grab the insanely awesome Severin Video rerelease and stop bothering with edited crappy looking versions of this movie.

Danny Steinmann started his directing career with the adult movie High Rise and worked on the films Savage Streets and Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning along the way. After that film, he was injured in a bicycle accident and was unable to return to directing. He also produced the Gene Roddenberry made-for-TV movie Spectre. Today, though, we’re here to discuss his 1980 effort The Unseen.

Keep in mind — Steinmann had his name removed from the movie as he was upset with the final cut. He’s credited as Peter Foleg.

Jennifer (Barbara Bach Lady Starkey, the wife of Ringo Starr who also was in The Spy Who Loved Me, Black Belly of the Tarantula and Short Night of Glass Dolls) and Karen (Karen Lamm, the wife of Beach Boy Dennis Wilson), along with their friend Vicki, are in Solvag, CA to cover a folk rock show and town festival. A mix-up over their reservations leads the girls to stay with Ernest Keller (Sydney Lassick, Skate Town U.S.A., Lady in White), the owner of a museum.

Jennifer is in town to report on the town’s parade and festival, but has to deal with her soon to be ex-boyfriend Tony (Douglas Barr, TV’s The Fall Guy‘s Howie, as well as Deadly Blessing), who wants to talk about their relationship. Ugh.

Meanwhile, Vicki just wants to get naked while creepy old men stare at her through vents. Sadly for her, The Unseen pulls her through one of those vents and slams it down on her beck, killing her. Soon after, Karen is also killed. Their bodies are discovered by Ernest’s wife Virginia (Lelia Goldoni, who was in Cassavetes’ Shadows and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

That’s when we learn the secret: Virginia and Ernest are husband and wife, as well as brother and sister. He killed their father two decades ago and they’ve lived here ever since, along with Junior (Stephen Furst, the guy from Animal House in the role one wonders if he was born to play), their inbred son. Ernest is keeping up the cycle of abuse that his father started, beating his son and keeping wife/sister in submission. Now, Jennifer must die to keep the secret.

Ernest lures her into the basement where she finds her friends’ bodies. She panics and runs into Junior, who she discovers probably didn’t mean to kill anyone. Ernest tries to kill her, but Virginia tries to save her. This leads to a family fight and Ernest kills his son with a board with a nail through it.

Just as Ernest is ready to off Jennifer with a hatchet, her stupid ex saves her. Well, he tries to, but an old leg injury flares up, Oh, you inept moron! It’s up to Virginia to save the day by shooting her husband/brother and going back in the house to hold her dead son.

The Unseen was originally written by Kim Henkel and Michael Viner. While Henkel is best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Viner was a producer and audiobook pioneer who also assembled the Incredible Bongo Band, whose song “Apache” is one of the most sampled songs ever. Their screenplay was adapted into the book Deadly Encounter by Richard Woodley.

Bluntly put, this movie is all over the place. The reveal of The Unseen stays on the monster so long that you wonder why this movie is called The Unseen. It starts with so much promise, but by the end, you may find yourself staring at the time left, hoping that it ends quickly.

Sunn Classic Entertainment may have made Grizzly Adams, but they were really known for four-walling theaters, renting them and making all of the money. The films they showed tend toward conspiracy theories, starting all the way back in 1975 with The Outer Space Connection and continuing with In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Lincoln Conspiracy, In Search of Historic Jesus, The Bermuda Triangle and so many more. They expanded to producing films with Tim Conway, The Boogens, Cujo and this one, based on the late 1970’s fascination with our government’s alien cover-ups (this was a big part of the end of every episode of Battlestar Galactica – “U.S. Air Force’s 1969 Project Blue Book findings that UFOs are not proven to exist and are not a threat to national security.”).

Suffice to say that I was constantly scared shitless of U.F.O.’s throughout 1979, 1980 and into 1981. A big part of that fear was this TV commercial:

There was even UFO Candy that listed out different sighted UFO’s on the inside. Yes, this fat kid got sugared up and then read all about alien abductions and then tried to go to bed. No dice.

Hangar 18 is all about the government covering up an incident where an astronaut is killed on the Space Shuttle, which is witnessed by two other astronauts: Steve Bancroft (Gary Collins, whose show The Sixth Sense was syndicated alongside the superior — and best show perhaps of all time — Night Gallery. Plus, he hosted beauty pageants and talk shows for years) and Lew Price (James Hampton, The Longest Yard).

As the government works to keep things under wraps, the men make their way to Arizona. Price is killed, but Bancroft finally makes it to the Air Force base that has the damaged UFO. On board were two pilots and a woman in suspended animation. Plus, the ships have ancient languages on them and a record of all of the surveillance the craft has done on our planet. Even scarier — this may have been a shuttle and a larger ship is out there.

Darren McGavin shows up, as does Robert Vaughn as Gordon Cain, a government agent who is out to erase all of the evidence. He does so with a remote controlled jet, but Bancroft and a few scientists survive, as they were inside the UFO. This is conveyed via voiceover, which is the least dramatic way to end a movie (there’s also an alternate version called Invasion Force with a different ending).

Interestingly enough, Hangar 18 was one of the very few American films to be theatrically shown in the Soviet Union. As one of the only science fiction and action films shown at that time, it was incredibly popular amongst Russian youth. If they only knew what they were watching was basically a TV movie with little to no excitement!

As for me, knowing that the real Hangar 18 was at Wright-Patterson (originally Wright Field) AFB in Dayton, Ohio — close to my Pittsburgh home — gave me even more sleepless nights and dreams of being taken away to my true home planet.

How much do we love this movie? We revisited it again as part of our December 2019 Star Wars tribute week.

If you are in a 1980’s slasher movie and have kids, never let them see you have sex. Chances are, you are either going to die or they are going to grow up to be complete maniacs. Possibly both!

Cathy (Jenny Neumann, Hell Night) is one of those kids. When she was little, she caught her mom having sex in a really weird position that didn’t look plausible. And then, her mom’s boyfriend was making out with her while they drove in the car. She tried to get them to stop. However, she caused her mother’s death in a car crash, with a piece of glass ending up in her throat.

Sixten years later and Cathy has become Helen. She’s an actress in a play called Comedy of Blood, but everyone keeps getting killed with shards of glass. There’s no real guesswork here — you can pretty much figure out the killer from the first few moments of the movie.

All I have to recommend this movie on is that Brian May did the soundtrack and that it is also called Stagefright, but you’d be much better off watching the Soavi film of the same name. It’s so much better that at the end of this movie, I kept wondering, “Why am I not watching the real Stagefright?”

That said — it’s on Shudder.