Sebastian has become possessed and now has the power to make his thoughts come true. Somehow, all that allows him to do is relive his past lives again and again.

Director José Ramón Larraz also worked in comic books, as well as helming the films Symptoms and Vampyres.

The film starts with Sebastian learning that his father has died and his mother feeling free and ready to start her life all over again.

It turns out that Sebastian was born with a veil of skin covering his face, which is a symbol of psychic power. That may be how he knew that his father was dead before anyone told him.

Also, Sebastian has issues with women. He puts off anyone who wants to be with him and gets upset when his mother kisses another man. Learning that his father was with a whore when he died, he declares that all women are whores. His mother answers by slapping him.

Sebastian and a girl who is interested in him, Marta, end up kissing but he forces himself on her until his lip begins to bleed. At confession later, a priest tells him that wishing evil is the same as doing it. What does this have to do with Marta being dead now?

An old woman named Olga remembers Sebastian from the past as he has a vision of hanging himself. Olga awakens her granddaughter Angie, sure that something bad is about to happen to Sebastian. There seems to be a romantic triangle between him, Angie and his brother Joe.

Sebastian ends up recording his mother having sex with her new lover. This upsets him so much that his shower is filled with blood and his vision of a ghost woman makes his lip bleed again.

That love triangle I mentioned above ends up with Angie and Joe having sex. Yet Olga thinks that Sebastian and Angie have an attraction too. She’s worried about the danger that he brings. While on a ferry with Angie, Sebastian sees the ghost woman again. He confesses to Angie that when he thinks of someone he hates, he makes them die and his lip bleed — that’s his stigmata. He also can see himself from the outside of his own body and he probably killed his father.

Joe confronts Sebastian about the issues that he’s having in school, so Sebastian thinks of him dying in a car crash. Angie believes that he is evil, but he says that he has no control. Once he realizes that someone is going to die, it’s too late.

Here’s where things get really bonkers: Sebastian keeps seeing the ghost woman, so he talks with Olga. She hypnotizes him and he remembers where he killed Marta. He then goes into his past lives, where he sees his sister, who looks exactly like Angie. They have sex and he awakens in a panic as his father had become angry with him.

While he doesn’t want to see Olga again, Sebastian uses tapes of her seance to calm himself. Soon, he is visiting the setting for his dreams in real life and has more visions of his past inside them. Angie comes searching for him and he shows her where people died in the building as he starts to bleed from his lip.

That’s when we go back into the past again, where he has sex with his sister again and his father criticizes him. When his sister is engaged to be married, he becomes depressed. She doesn’t even think of him any longer and he can’t forget her or stop disappointing his father.

That’s when he uses an axe to kill his parents, then starts making love to the maid. He decides to strangle her instead, then remembers many other girls that he is killed. A mirror breaks and he begins to bleed from the lip as we return to the present and he listens to the seance tapes.

I honestly had to read several sites to make sense of what happens in this movie. It’s long on style, short on substance and yet it has a unique doom feel. I was pretty forgiving of its narrative issues, but your mileage may vary. I was interested to see what would happen next and it had enough verve to keep me watching.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or order it from Diabolik DVD.

Martial arts movies make little to no sense most of the time. Then, there’s this movie.

Steve Chase is a martial artist who goes to the desert for what he thinks is an Olympic style meet. Nope. An ex-Nazi general was defeated at the 1936 Olympics by a Japanese martial artist named Miyagi, so he’s out for revenge.  Luckily, Steve and his girl Olga escape.

To fix up his team, von Rudloff’s miniature henchman Chico goes around the world to recruit a new team. And Steve ends up meeting Miyagi and joining his team, which leads to the madcap fight between he and his girl when she is kidnapped and forced to join his team.

Finally, Steve must fight and defeat Luke, the ultimate fighter, leading the Nazi to killing himself rather than face defeat.

I’ve given you a straight reading of the film. To see it is to know how different it is, as it’s either filmed by someone who wants to be an artist or someone who has been in the sun too long. This is often the same thing.

This movie was a success for four years in its native South Africa, where many Japanese martial arts forms were done to perfection. Yes, that makes no sense to me either. Neither does the sequel, but trust me, I’ll be covering that one soon enough, too!

You can watch this for free on Amazon Video.

“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.