Tom DeSimone started his directing career in gay porn as Lancer Brooks, creating the first homosexual film with dialogue and a plot with 1970’s The Conversation before going mainstream and making Chatterbox. After this film, he’d be behind such greats as Reform School Girls and Angel III: The Final Chapter, as well as uncredited direction on another fabulous Linda Blair movie, Savage Streets.

Oh Linda Blair. By 1981, Linda was eight years past The Exorcist and a few years past a major drug bust. While some people may say they lived their lives, I get the feeling that Ms. Blair really lived her life, starting to date Rick Springfield at fifteen after seeing him play the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, as well as relationships with Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes and Styx frontman Tommy Shaw. And a year after Hell Night, a nude pictorial in Oui magazine would lead to her dating Rick James, who spoke of her in glowing terms in his autobiography: “Linda was incredible. A free spirit. A beautiful mind. A mind-blowing body. She liked getting high and getting down as much as I did.”

But hey — we’re here to talk about Hell Night and lots of teenagers are basically begging to get killed. Let’s get to it!

Spoiler before we go any further: I was basically two minutes into this movie before declaring my pure love for it.

During a college costume party, Peter (Kevin Brophy, who played the main character in the TV show Lucan) is all fired up about initiating the new pledges of Alpha Sigma Rho: rich kid Jeff (Peter Barton of TV’s The Powers of Matthew Star), Marti, a smart girl from a poor family (Blair); party girl Denise (Suki Goodwin in her only movie role) and stoner Seth (Vincent Van Patten, son of Dick, former pro tennis player, star of the failed pilot The Bionic Kid and current World Poker Tour commentator). They’re forced to spend the night at Garth Manor, the abandoned mansion when Ramon Garth murdered his wife and three deformed children before hanging himself. Then, the fourth child Andrew somehow survived and still roams the grounds.

The moment they get there, Marti and Jeff have sex, just before a ghost shows up to frighten her. Unbeknownst to them, beyond that ghost, Peter and two other students have been setting up traps and scares all over the house. As soon as they finish, the denizens of the house attack, decapitating one of them and then stringing another up on the roof. Peter tries to prank Denise, only to be chased into a hedge maze and killed with a scythe.

Seth and Denise respond to all of these murders and pranks by getting high and having sex, which really seems to be the best possible solution. When Seth leaves Denise to go to the bathroom, he returns to find a severed head in their bed.

Of course, it all goes very slasher and the kids each gets killed off in various ways after discovering the remains of the Garth family in the tunnels under the house. The police have no interest in helping them, so they try and survive the night themselves. Marti is the final girl, hot-wiring cars and slamming strange killers into spiked gates to make it through the night.

I love the end of the movie, where she wakes up as the sun rises and just gets out of the car, which has a dead killer on the hood and walks away.

There are some weird things about Hell Night beyond the actual movie, like the two actors who played the Garth killers being unlisted in the credits because they were unknown German nationals that spoke little English. The bearded one died soon after the film wrapped and the other is gone to history.

Even stranger is that when a man in Illinois named Ray Fulk died, he asked for his estate to be split between Hell Night stars Kevin Brophy and Peter Barton, despite never meeting the actors. That’s right, they split a million dollars just for him being a fan of their work.

It’s also the last movie that Irwin Yablans’. Compass International Pictures would release. They had some hits — Halloween, Tourist Trap, Fade to Black and Blood Beach, as well as some smaller films like Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula, The Day Time Ended and Roller Boogie. They’d soon reform as part of Universal Studios and be called Trancas International Films, where they’d produce all of the Halloween films.

Hell Night also had Kevin Costner working as a grip and was one of the first films Frank Darabont worked on. It’s another example of the fact that a movie that wasn’t thought of all that fondly in 1981 appears to be an utter classic once you watch it in 2019.

You can watch this for free on Tubi or get the blu ray from Shout! Factory.

Also known as Anyab, this is a movie that can start with red lips in blackness ala The Rocky Horror Picture Show and then remind you of that film with one of its leads putting on a shirt of that seminal film while he sings. But this Egyptian film is no mere cover version — it has a lot of its own strangeness to share with you.

The lead couple — the Brad and Janet if you will — battle an evil vampire (played by singer Ahmed Adaweya) who becomes an evil doctor, butcher, plumber, a tutor, cab driver, and realtor. At the end of each scene, he smiles, looks at the camera and bares his fangs. He also battles the film’s narrator and loves to host parties.

Director Mohammed Shebl may have died at the young age of 47, but he left behind a life of many careers — diplomat, film critic, Egypt’s foremost expert on The Beatles, screenwriter, talk-show host, radio DJ and director. This is but his first, a movie that liberally borrows music, themes and scenes from any number of Western films.

Yes, the music from movies and shows like The Munsters, The Pink Panther and James Bond are literally stolen and mixed into a soundtrack that combines traditional Egyptian melodies with new sounds like funk and synth. It’s staggering actually, like a swirl of influence and remixing on a scale unrealized until much later in the Western world.

Who knew that an Egyptian musical about vampires would instead be a think piece on consumerism? I’ve also never seen a movie where a dance sequence ends with a real chicken being killed and bleeding all over the floor.

Like nearly every other movie this week, this film was a massive bomb. Shebl lost most of his family’s fortune making it, but did direct three more movies: The Talisman (which features The Bangles “Walk Like An Egyptian” on its soundtrack), Nightmare and Love and Revenge…With a Meat Cleaver.

You can watch this on the Internet Archive.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show may have failed when it was first released, but somehow, midnight showings have kept it in limited release four decades after its premiere, making it the longest-running theatrical release in history.

In 1979, writer/cast member Richard O’Brien wrote a sequel called Rocky Horror Shows His Heels. I remember reading about this in an issue of the teen magazine Bananas. If you remember this magazine, you are officially old. Anyway, this script would have featured the return of all of the characters from the original film, even the ones who died. However, director Jim Sharman didn’t want to revisit the film and Tim Curry had no interest in coming back.

Two years later, Sharman and O’Brien reunited for this movie, which had the tagline “It’s not a sequel… it’s not a prequel… it’s an equal.” This infuriated fans, as they wanted Curry, Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick instead of new cast members. And where Rocky is strange, Shock Treatment is near lunatic in its depiction of the town of Denton.

Complicating matters was that the Screen Actor’s Guild strike led to the entire being shot on a sound stage in the UK, which I feel adds to the proceedings. Your mileage may vary, but there’s plenty to like here if you keep an open mind.

Brad and Janet Majors have gotten married and settled into the town of Denton, USA. Brad is now played by Cliff De Young (The Hunger) and Janet is Jessica Harper (seriously, do you think she was tired of playing in films that only maniacs like me enjoy, like this one, Suspiria and Phantom of the Paradise?).

Denton is really owned by fast food magnate Farley Flavors, also played by De Young, and is now totally encased within a TV studio to create a strange reality where town residents are always on TV, either as stars, cast, crew, regulars or audience members.

Our heroes are selected for one of the TV shows that make up the life of Denton called Marriage Maze, which is hosted by the supposedly blind game show host Bert Schnick (Barry Humphries, who you may know better as Dame Edna). For winning, Brad gets placed on the soap opera Dentonvale, where brother and sister doctors Cosmo and Nation McKinley (O’Brien and Patricia Quinn, pretty much playing similar roles from Rocky Horror) conspire against him, while Farley molds Janet into a singing superstar.

Meanwhile, Betty Hapschatt (Ruby Wax, the script editor for Absolutely Fabulous) and Judge Oliver Wright (Rocky Horror narrator Charles Gray) learn that everyone is just a character actor and that Farley is Brad’s evil twin, out to take Janet for himself.

The cast of Shock Treatment is pretty amazing and absolutely filled with talent:

Little Nell comes back as Nurse Ansalong, Young Ones star Rik Mayall is around as “Rest Home” Ricky, while Officer Vance Parker is played by Chris Malcolm, the first Brad from the Rocky Horror stage show. Betsy Brantley, who played Neely Pritt, was the body model for Jessica Rabbit as well as playing Dolph Lundgren’s girlfriend in I Come In Peace. And you can catch Rocky Horror fan club president Sal Piro in a brief cameo.

Barry Dennen, who plays auto dealer Irwin Lapsey had an interesting career. He helped Barbara Streisand develop her act and lived with her romantically for a year before learning that he was gay. He’s in a ton of movies, appearing as Mendel in The Fiddler on the Roof and Pontious Pilate in Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as Claude LeMont in the “High Adventure” segment of The Kentucky Fried Movie. He’s also in The Shining, Dark Crystal, Madhouse, The Shadow and Trading Places, as well as voicing tons of video games and cartoons. Sadly, he never recovered from a fall in July of 2017 and died a few months later.

Ironically, Brad from this movie and Janet from Rocky Horror — DeYoung and Sarandon — are a couple in The Hunger.

Shock Treatment never achieved the levels of fandom that Rocky Horror did. But man, it has some great songs, Jessica Harper in gothy makeup and a “Little Black Dress,” and predates the world’s fascination with reality TV by several decades. It’s worth tracking down — it’s really something else.

Ralph Bakshi made The Lord of the Rings years before Peter Jackson, but his animated version has often been forgotten. After that film, he decided to create something more personal, which would feature an extensive soundtrack that would all have more meaning when seen with the film.

American Pop was the result, again taking advantage of the technique of rotoscoping, which uses an already filmed movie as the basis to animate over to capture more lifelike movement. Beyond Bakshi, the film’s other artists contributed their own individual art styles and experiences to the finished product.

Starting in Imperial Russia during the late 1890s, this movie follows the journey of the Belinksy family from escaping to New York City all the way through the turmoil of the next century. When Zalmie’s mother dies in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — which went a long way toward ending sweatshops in this country — he begins to work in vaudeville, even after his throat is injured during World War I. Now with no singing voice of his own, Zalmie pushes the career of his wife Bella no matter what it takes, even working with mob boss Nicky Palumbo. She’s killed by a bomb and a gang war begins in earnest (Bakshi freely samples from other films here, basing the artwork on scenes from The Public Enemy).

Zalmie and Bella’s son Benny becomes a jazz pianist but is forced to marry the daughter of Palumbo. Seeking some sort of redemption for his mobbed out family, he enlists in World War II but is killed by a Nazi soldier.

His son Tony must watch as the mob bosses curse his grandfather for testifying against them. He grows up to drive across the nation, meet up with a band and become their writer before descending into drug addiction along with their lead singer, Frankie Heart.

At a tumultuous show in Kansas, Frankie overdoses backstage while Tony meets Little Pete, who he recognizes as his son from a one night stand with a waitress. He takes the boy to New York City as he goes deeper into drug dealing and addiction. Pete then becomes a dealer himself, selling to bands until he demands that they listen to his music before he sells them any more cocaine. The story ends with Pete playing Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” while we see images of all the members of the Belinksy family that have come before him.

The real actors in this movie include Ron Thompson as Tony and Pete; Lisa Jane Persky as Bella; Mews Small, who originated the role of Frenchy in Grease on Broadway as Frankie; Roz Kelly, better known as Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days, as Eva; Richard Moll, who must be in every 1980’s movie plays The Poet; Joey Camen, the voice of McGruff the crime dog, is Freddie; Lynda Wiesmeier, the July 1982 Playboy Playmate of the Month, as The Blonde who Frankie meets in Kansas and Lee Ving and Fear as the punk rockers.

American Pop is packed with bands and performers like Bob Dylan, George Gershwin, The Mamas & the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Lou Reed and more, but tying up the music rights meant that this film wasn’t released to home video until 1998.

This film played repeatedly late nights on VH1 throughout the 2000’s. While heavy-handed in parts, it’s still worth a watch to see how music and violence equally shaped America over the last hundred years.

The last time I saw this movie, I was 7 years old and watching it under the stars at the Spotlight 88 drive-in theater in Beaver Falls, PA. Sadly, that theater was destroyed by a freak tornado that tore through the Pittsburgh/Southwestern PA area on May 31, 1985. This was a seminal location for my childhood, a place where I saw tons of double features and built memories that would provide the foundation for the movie love that I still hold dear today.

Woodrow “Woody” Wilkins (future Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom Michael Crawford) is a comic book artist whose devotion to realism extends to creating his own Condorman suit and attempting to fly off the Eiffel Tower. Instead of arresting him, his friend Harry (James Hampton, Uncle Harry the werewolf from the Teen Wolf movies), a CIA file clerk, asks him to exchange papers with someone in Istanbul.

Woody finds KGB spy Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera, Wicked Stepmother), who he tells that he is really Condorman. Impressed by how he protects her and how poorly she’s treated by her KGB boss Krokov (Oliver Reed!), she defects to the U.S., but only if Condorman helps her.

Woody’s already in love — he’s added Natalia to his comic as Laser Lady. When he’s asked to help her defect, he only agrees if the CIA designs him gear like his comic. Amazingly, they agree and the adventure is on.

Imagine James Bond crossed over with the Adam West-era Batman and you have an idea of how Condorman plays. For a Disney movie, Carrera is really sultry, which probably had an effect on my nine-year-old mind.

Before the days of licensing, Condorman had two cool tie-ins. A daily strip by Russ Heath and an ice cream flavor at Baskin-Robbins!

Mining town Valentine Bluffs hasn’t had a Valentine’s Day dance for over twenty years — ever since the accident. Two supervisors messed up and left several miners trapped below just so they could go to that dance. They didn’t even check the methane levels, which led to the explosion that trapped the men. Only Harry Warden survived, living off the bodies of his co-workers, until he could escape and kill the supervisors. He was committed for two decades and finally forgotten. Now, the dance is back on. Someone, somehow, is going to pay.

My Bloody Valentine right when slashers were king, complete with so much gristle that nine minutes of offensive violence was removed. Just imagine — the film starts with a nude woman impaled on pickaxe, so it still got worse than that.

Even after officials decide to close down the dance, a bunch of young miners have their own party at a bar. Why would you do that when Harry Warden wants to kill everyone? This movie is packed with death, from nailguns to the face and beheadings to people being impaled on shower heads.

It’s also a giallo-esque story, with the murders in the past warping one of the characters so badly that he or she commits the murders in the present. The mystery of who this character would end up being was kept hidden even from the actors until the final scene was filmed.

Interestingly, once the producers decided to shoot in the Sydney Mines in Nova Scotia, the town cleaned the sets up so they would be more presentable. This led to a set that looked like Disneyland, according to reports. The filmmakers had to go back and make the sets look darker to fit the script. That said, because the movie was filmed in legitimate mines 900 feet underground, special lighting devices were required because of the danger of methane explosions.

My friend Patrick Murphy suggested this one, which was the first film to spoof slashers like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Prom Night. My favorite part of this silly movie is that every single time someone is killed, a helpful body count graphic appears on screen to inform you just how many people have been killed.

Director Mickey Rose collaborated with Woody Allen on the films What’s Up, Tiger Lily?; Take the Money and Run and Bananas. He also wrote the movie I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now? He had uncredited directing help from Michael Ritchie, who also directed The Island, Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Semi-Tough, The Bad News Bears, both Fletch films, The Golden Child and more.

A serial killer called The Breather (voiced by Richard Belzer!)  is watching and murdering the female students at Lamab High School. He loves to call people on the phone — the makers of Scream had to have watched this film — when he’s not getting upset and killing them after sex. The women are all killed with a ridiculous arsenal of weaponry, like bookends and paperclips, while the men are placed in trash bags.

I kind of love that this movie references the giallo tradition of a black covered killer, except here, The Breather wears dishwashing gloves. The film ends with reveal after reveal, with The Breather’s identity coming out, it all being a dream — like The Wizard of Oz — and the real killer being revealed, but then the ending of Carrie gets parodied.

I’m also a big fan of how this is shot. It looks like an honest to goodness horror film, no matter how silly things get. The music, the camera angles, the feel of the movie — it’s all legit. The story itself is what’s silly.

While Student Bodies contains no gore or violence, it does contain one moment of profanity in a really clever way. A man interrupts the film to explain that in order to get an R rating, movies “must contain full frontal nudity, graphic violence, or an explicit reference to the sex act.” For this movie to be a success, it needs that R rating, so the man says that “the producers have asked me to take this opportunity to say, ‘Fuck you’.” Then, the MPAA rating card appears. This scene is legit — it’s what really got the movie the rating it demanded.

My only downer here is that an eggplant was used to kill the black victim in this movie. In case you didn’t know, the term mulignan is a Sicilian word taken from the derived from the Italian melanzane, or eggplant, as a slur against the skin color of African-Americans. One hopes this was a coincidence, but I think not. I get that culture was different in 1981 and I hope that we all continue to grow, but it’s pretty jarring in 2019.

You can get Student Bodies from Olive Films.

The final movie directed by Roy Ward Baker (Asylum, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) and produced by Milton Subotsky (who was behind Amicus along with Max Rosenberg), this portmanteau film is based on the stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes. While it all feels like an Amicus film, it is not. But don’t hold that against it.

R. Chetwynd-Hayes (John Carradine!) meets the famished vampire Eramus (Vincent Price!), who bites him and then takes him to the Monster Club, where nightclub acts perform and three stories are shared.

In The Shadmock, Angela (Barbara Kellerman, Satan’s Slave) takes a job at a secluded mansion owned by a Shadmock named Raven. The strange creature falls in love with her and her controlling boyfriend (Simon Ward, Zor-El in Supergirl) forces her to marry him so they can steal all of the beast’s money. The night of their engagement party, Raven discovers Angela stealing his gold and she screams that she could never love him. In anguish, he responds with his demonic scream, destroying her face and putting her boyfriend in a mental home.

Next is The Vampires, where a young vampire is bullied at school and ignored by his father, who is played by Richard Johnson (Dr Menard from Zombi 2!). Meanwhile, some totally business-like bureaucratic vampires — led by Donald Pleasence! — kill the father, or so we think. Family bliss is soon returned when dad fakes his demise and mom — Britt Ekland! — bites good old Donald.

In the third story, The Ghouls, a movie director (Stuart Whitman, Guyana: Crime of the Century, Demonoid) discovers a new location for his film, a place where ghouls eat the living. There, he meets the hum-ghoul Luna and her ghoul father (Patrick Magee, Tales from the Crypt). He tries to escape but learns that this will be the final location he ever sees.

Finally, Eramus and the club members decide that humans are the worst monsters of all. Except for Chetwynd-Hayes, who is made an honorary monster and club member.

Both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing turned down this film! I like it — the music in between is really weird, with a girl stripping her clothes and then her flesh off. It’s…well, this is a strange one! It’s also the only movie where Vincent Price played a vampire.

Beyond John Bolton painting the picture of the Shadmock, there was a limited edition comic book made of this movie to promote it at Cannes. 2000AD creators like Dez Skinn and David Lloyd also worked on the comic! Here’s a great YouTube video of it.

Also: this part about the genealogy of monsters is the best part of the film! You can get a copy of it at Amok Time.

You can also listen to our podcast about this movie!

Can we all admit that Ovidio Assonitis is a bona fide maniac? I’ve tried to explain The Visitor to people and always fail to capture the sheer lunacy and notion that it’s a film at the very same time about everything and nothing at the very same time. Nor can I divine why Franco Nero lives on the moon with bald dancing children determined to stop Satan from helping Atlanta to win a basketball championship.

You may wonder — what if Assonitis made a slasher? Good news. He did. And it’s also as deranged as you’d have hoped.

Julia teaches deaf children when she’s not having flashbacks to her horrific childhood, including her mistreatment at the hands of her twin sister Mary. Her uncle James, a priest, urges her to visit her sister and deal with her past.

Mary is suffering from a degenerative skin disease and their reunion does not go well to say the very least. The evil twin promises to make her sister suffer as she has suffered and begins using her evil dog to kill nearly all of Julia’s friends and neighbors.

At some point, Assonitis decides to just throw reality to the wind and we’re given a scene where the priest asks a lady to help him move some packages into Julia’s basement. One of them is a dead body and when she panics, he chases down the neighbor and murders her. The next day, the now insane priest arranges a surprise party for our heroine, complete with the dead bodies of everyone he has taken out. Mary confronts her sister, but is also murdered by the Catholic maniac priest.

Julia’s boyfriend comes back just in time, killing the evil dog with a power drill and rescuing his woman, who gets her revenge by repeatedly striking Father James with a hatchet before sitting down next to the dead body of her sister.

This is a theme in his catalog, but Assonitis had to fire and take over for the original director ten days into the production. There are touches of high art here amidst the slasher gore and the setup of the evil sister is quite well done, only to be thrown away at the end.

Also known as There Was a Little Girl and And When She Was Bad, this movie was re-released by Arrow a few years back. You can grab a copy from Diabolik DVD or watch it with on Amazon Prime.