Not all slashers are domestic, as we again test the “Is it giallo or is it slasher?” game with the Shaw Brothers-produced 1981 film Corpse Mania. It’s directed by Chih-Hung Kuei, who would go on to create the strange Curse of Evil and the “I don’t have a word good enough to properly convent the level of strange” film The Boxer’s Omen.
Inspector Chang is beginning to figure out that all of the dead bodies in his area all were visitors to the brothel of one Madam Lan and all fingers point to Mr. Li, a man who has already been jailed for defiling corpses, which really doesn’t seem like the kind of crime you get out of jail for due to good behavior.
Sure, you might know who the killer is from the moment the movie starts, but give this points for his bandaged get-up, inventive stalking scenes and not shying away from the gore, including a scene where the killer gets a corpse ready for, well, love and then admires it the more it draws maggots.
From real maggots crawling all over its actresses and astounding blasts of blood to a dummy thrown off a roof that’s so fake that Lucio Fulci would stand up and laugh out loud, this movie has it all. It’s fog and mood suggest a Hong Kong Blood and Black Lace if Bava decided to take a break from all the sexualized violence to deliver a kung fu sequence.
The bloody parrot of this film’s title is a legend of a bird that was born on the devil king’s birthday when all of the lesser demons gave him their blood so that it may grant three wishes to whomever discovers it. Those wishes, however, have a tendency to go poorly. One example is Guo Fan, a government worker who has lost a treasure and begs the bird for their return. The prize does come back at the cost of his son’s life. He then monkey’s paw wishes for the son back, so his wife kills him and commits suicide.
The treasure disappears again and that’s when fighters from around the world learn that if they find the parrot, they will become rich. Swordsman Yeh Ting Feng (Pai Piao) an constable Tieh Han (Tony Liu) start hunting for the truth, which ends up with Tieh killed and Yeh carrying his coffin like some Shaw Brothers Django. There’s also a Parrot Brothel where Pei-yu (Jenny Liang) works. There’s a whole hall of mirrors for her to show off her curves in.
If you liked the gross-out side of Shaw Brothers — Hex, Black Magic, Human Lanterns— then this is what you’re looking for. It also has plenty of sleaze and Wuxia moments to make one strange cocktail. Director Hua Shan has so many cards to deal you, from nudity to martial arts battles, sword fights, maggot eating, autopsies and demonic possession to just name a few. Who are we to deny the man who made Infra-Man?
I mean, this is a movie where a woman sews a man’s face onto a Frisbee and uses it as a weapon.
If that doesn’t make you watch this, is there any hope?
As a warning, this movie makes no sense whatsoever and I’m not advising you to engage in mind altering substances — you may not even need them — but if you can’t get high and watch a movie that combines Bava colors with kung fu and obscene levels of puking, then what are you living for?
Detective Wong King Sun is investigating the horrific and violent death of a little girl at the hands of her father, who claims that he was under the influence of a wizard. This takes the detective all the way to Thailand to learn more and, as happens in films such as this, to be cursed by a powerful magician named Magusu, who was supposedly played by an infamous Malay sorcerer. That’s what the credits say and who are we to deny the words of Shaw Brothers or any exploitation studio when you get right down to it?
Wong King Sun decides to fight black magic, he needs a white magic monk. What follows is an entire movie of one-upmanship battles over whose magic is strongest, including a gut-churning moment when the evil magician grabs that pause that refreshes. Except that we’re not talking about Coca-Cola. This dude likes to sip from a big urn filled with unborn children and blood.
If that last sentence made you wince, turn back now. Bewitched is a ride through absolute chaos. It’s gorgeous, it’s frenetic and it’s also unafraid to try and make you throw up throughout its running time. And if this one seems like it’s going to be too much, its sequel, The Boxer’s Omen, goes even further. Director Chih-Hung also made the equally blood and madness-filled Corpse Mania.
We all know that old Chinese chestnut of advice, right? Don’t take the virginity of village women, ghost them and then just move on or you’ll be covered in body hair, unable to get it up and eventually hammering a spike into your daughter’s head so that she stops being possessed and attempting to kill you.
“The moral of the story is to admonish people against casual sex and to be on guard against witchcraft.” That’s what the end says. As for me, I’m all about movies with neon colors, glittery bats that come to animated life and actual black magic rituals being used to entertain audiences.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dragonslayer was on the CBS Late Movie on February 13, 1987.
After Popeye, this was the second joint production with Paramount of films that were more mature than the expected Disney offerings. That meant that Drahonslayer’s violence, themes and even brief nudity ended up being controversial, despite only being rated PG.
Set the film after the Roman departure from Britain, prior to the arrival of Christianity, the film shows a world of sorcery unlike many others in the genre. Co-writers Hal Barwood (who also wrote The Sugarland Express, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, MacArthur and Corvette Summer, as well as writing and directing Warning Sign and creating video games like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis) and Matthew Robins (who wrote Crimson Peak and wrote and directed Batteries Not Included and I would be remiss not to mention that he also directed The Legend of Billie Jean) were inspired to make something new. Barwood said, “our film has no knights in shining armor, no pennants streaming in the breeze, no delicate ladies with diaphanous veils waving from turreted castles, no courtly love, no holy grail. Instead, we set out to create a very strange world with a lot of weird values and customs, steeped in superstition, where the clothes and manners of the people were rough, their homes and villages primitive and their countryside almost primeval, so that the idea of magic would be a natural part of their existence.”
Vermithrax is also one of the best dragons ever made, even forty years after the film’s release. More than 25% of the movie’s budget went to realizing the dragon. This was the first movie to use go-motion, which had parts of the mechanical dragon be programmed and filmed by computer. The forty-foot tall beast was brought to life by sixteen puppeteers. Its full name — Vermithrax Pejorative — means The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse.
As for the story, it’s all about Galen Bradwarden (Peter MacNicol, who is embarrassed by this movie, perhaps because you can fully see his ween in it) saving Valerian (Caitlin Clarke) from being a virgin sacrifice to the dragon. She’s no damsel in distress, however, as she’d hid her gender identity to help create the sword that can destroy the beast.
But yeah. It’s worth watching for just the dragon.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Excalibur was on the CBS Late Movie on June 6, 1986.
Shot entirely on location in Ireland, employing mostly Irish actors and crew, Excalibur was an important film for the Irish filmmaking industry and helped start the careers of Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, Gabriel Byrne and Ciarán Hinds.
It was also known as the Boorman Family Project, as several members of director Jonathan Boorman’s family appear, with his daughter Katrine Boorman playing Igrayne — Arthur’s mother — as well as his daughter Telsche as the Lady of the Lake and his son Charley acting in the role of Mordred as a boy. It was shot a mile from his home, so he was able to be at home for the entire making of the movie.
Boorman has been wanting to make the movie since 1969, yet the three-hour script was seen as too costly by United Artists and instead, he was offered The Lord of the Rings, which he did not make yet did develop. He ended up using some of the work that went into that adaption here, as well as potentially being inspired by Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
He’d worked with Rospo Pallenberg on that canceled film (as well as Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Emerald Forest; Pallenberg would also direct Cutting Class), so he worked with him here to bring Malory’s Morte d’Arthur to theaters. Boorman said that his film was about “the coming of Christian man and the disappearance of the old religions which are represented by Merlin. The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.”
I love Roger Ebert’s review of this movie, in which he said that the film was both a wondrous vision and a mess, “a record of the comings and goings of arbitrary, inconsistent, shadowy figures who are not heroes but simply giants run amok. Still, it’s wonderful to look at.”
It’s beyond gorgeous, actually, a movie that combines shocking gore with artistic flourishes, like the three ladies in white who attend Arthur to Avalon at the close. Boorman was also smart enough to cast Nicol Williamson as Merlin and Helen Mirren as Morgana Le Fay, two actors who had had a conflict when they acted in Macbeth together. He felt that tension would be seen on screen and it certainly is. That said, Mirren claimed that the two become friends while making Excalibur.
It rained every single day of the shoot, which adds to the foggy look of the film. It had many issues, as the first fight scene had to be filmed three times. It was filmed at night and the exposure meter was broken, leading to two different scenes of underexposed film.
Boorman’s career is pretty great. Sure, there are the big movies like Deliverance, but I love that he shoots for the fences and makes off the wall stuff like Zardoz and Exorcist II: The Heretic. Here’s to less playing it safe for directors, even if the misses end up being spectacular losses. I don’t think that that can happen any longer in entertainment.
My initial exposure to this film came from Mad Magazine. Often as a kid, we wouldn’t see an R-rated movie until it was on HBO, so many of the films I’ve had to find as an adult were first seen through the eyes of Mad’s Usual Gang of Idiots. This time, Don Martin did the movie adaption. I’m happy to share a few panels with you thanks to Jesse Hamm on Twitter.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Intruder Within was on the CBS Late Movie on August 14, 1986 and May 28, 1987.
While Alien is by no means a wholly originally film — just watch Bava’s Planet of the Vampires — its success has begat a spawn (Deadly Spawn, too) of imitators. I’ve made it my insane mission to watch as many of them as possible — I can guarantee that at least one or two of them will be much better than the last outing — the space turd known as Prometheus.
One of the first rip-offs — I say it in a nice way — was 1981’s American TV movie, The Intruder Within.
Back in the day, Starlog was hyping this film as an almost sequel to Alien. With the popularity of the film, folks were ravenous to see more chest bursters in action. That said — this has nothing to do with the original other than stealing just about every single plot point.
Instead of space, this film goes to a more terrain — yet not less remote — location: an oil rig packed with folks like Chad Everett (TV’s Medical Center, Mulholland Drive,Airplane II) as our mustachioed hero, Jennifer Warren (Mutant, Slap Shot) as his love interest and fellow rig worker, Joseph Bottom (The Black Hole) as the villain, Rocke Tarkington (Ice Pirates) and Paul Larsson (The Blaster from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome!). It’s worth noting that every conversation the characters have — pre-alien — is about hooking up. They’re far from the mainland and feeling the urge to just get it on because all the drilling is getting them hot and bothered.
I hesitate to even write the plot to this, as I could just write the plot for Alien: crew finds eggs, someone goofs about and pays the price, the monster starts stalking the ship, hijinks ensue. Again — this film is hypersexualized, as one of the first monster attacks is more rape than attack. And there’s always a KY jelly like substance leaking out of everything. It’s also pretty bleak — the raped crew member dies after she gives birth to a full-sized alien and just about everyone dies pretty horribly — if off-camera, as this was still broadcast TV.
There’s also one well-done section of the film that explains that whatever the creature is, it predates the Biblical Flood and has lived beneath the ice for millions of years — very Lovecraftian themes that are never followed up on, sadly. Plus, being the ’80s, there’s a subplot about the oil company Zortron and how they may want the creature and eggs more than the oil (again, a plot point taken straight from Alien) and some character work about cheating spouses.
The actual creature suit is pretty nice and holds up well to being in the light. It was created by James Cummins, who also contributed to House, DeepStar Six (I’ll be getting to that one), Enemy Mine and The Beast Within. It’s very Giger-influenced to the point that many people incorrectly report that Giger worked on it. That said, it’s pretty strange to see an alien climb a ladder!
For all the exposition, set-up and character development, this movie ends just when it seems like it’s picking up steam. Who knew all it takes is a flare gun to defeat an alien? It certainly surprised me! The Intruder Within got to the party early, but it’s not the best of movies — filled with blocked off TV movie direction, too dark camerawork and a short running time. That said — it still has some charm and you can find worse ways to spend 100 minutes.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bushido Blade was on the CBS Late Movie on April 27, 1984.
Imagine: On a late night in 1984, you could have turned on CBS and found a movie that stars Richard Boone (Have Gun, Will Travel), Mako (Akiro the Wizard!), Sonny Chiba (the meanest man alive!), James Earl Jones (Darth Vader!), Tetsuro Tamba (Tiger Tanaka!), Toshiro Mifune (the greatest Japanese samurai actor ever!) and Laura Gemser (Black Emanuelle!).
This is based on the true story about the Convention of Kanagawa that Commodore Matthew Perry (Boone) signed with the shogun leaders of feudal Japan. Perry was entrusted with a sword meant for President Franklin Pierce by the Emperor of Japan, but it is stolen by Baron Zen (Bin Amatsu), a servant of Lord Yamato (Tamba), who wants to keep Japan isolated.
Yes, Mifune was in a movie about a very similar idea, Red Sun. In this film, he plays Commodore Akira Hayashi, who must find the sword and protect the honor of the Japanese. Soon, Prince Ido (Chiba), Captain Lawrence Hawk (Frank Converse) and Midshipman Robin Gurr (Timothy Murphy) and Cave Johnson (Michael Starr) are all on their own quests to get the sword back.
This is one of four movies that Rankin/Bass produced with Tsuburaya Productions (the others are The Bermuda Depths, The Last Dinosaurand The Ivory Ape). It’s directed by Tsugunobu “Tom” Kotani and written William Overgard, the same team who worked on many of these U.S. and Japanese co-productions.
Obviously this seems like an attempt to cash in on Shogun but it was made two years before that mini-series aired. Also: Laura Gemser is from Indonesia, yet in this she’s a half-Japanese female samurai who can speak English. Who cares? She should be in every movie.
EDITOR’S NOTE: St. Helens was on the CBS Late Movie on January 13, May 31 and July 5, 1988.
Directed by Ernest Pintoff, written by Peter Bellwood and Larry Ferguson and based on a story by Michael Timothy Murphy and Larry Sturholm, St. Helens aired on HBO on May 18, 1981, a little more than a year after the real eruption.
St. Helens begins on March 20, 1980 with an earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale being unleashing by the volcano, the first activity in more than a hundred years. It causes Otis Kaylor (Ron O’Neal) to nearly crash into some loggers as he makes an emergency landing.
United States Geological Survey volcanologist David Jackson (David Huffman) soon shows up to learn more. He’s actually playing someone very close to David Johnston, a scientist who died in the actual volcanic eruption. His parents were angry that not only was her son portrayed as a daredevil but also how much the movie got wrong about the science. Before the movie aired, 36 scientists who knew Johnston signed a letter of protest against the film, saying that “Dave’s life was too meritorious to require fictional embellishments” and that he “was a superbly conscientious and creative scientist.”
He soon becomes friends with a waitress and single mom named Linda Steele (Cassie Yates) and upsets her boss Clyde Whittaker (Albert Salmi) and the locals at Whittaker’s Inn about the danger of the eruption, all while Sheriff Dwayne Temple (Tim Thomerson) tries to keep law and order.
Watching this movie in 2024, it’s amazing how MAGA the people of the town are. It’s no accident that Bill McKinney from Deliverance is one of them. The loudest is the owner of the Mount St. Helens Lodge, Harry R. Truman (Art Carney), who refuses to leave the blast radius and becomes so famous for his stand that he basically can’t leave if he wants to live up to the character that he has created for himself. His sister, Gerri Whiting, served as a historical consultant for the film. According to her, Harry Truman and David Johnston were friends.
At 8:32 a.m. PDT on May 18, 1980, David hikes to find a massive bulge that has been growing on the north face of the mountain while Harry goes fishing in Spirit Lake. As David promised to the locals, they are both annihilated by a force similar to a nuclear bomb going off in their faces.
Sadly, the David who played David — David Huffman — died a sad death as well. He was only 39 years old when he was stabbed twice in the chest while fighting with a would be car thief. He died near instantly.
Why would I watch a movie so surrounded by death and sadness? Because it’s the first Hollywood movie scored by Goblin. Let me tell you, there’s nothing that says the Pacific Northwest more than Italian prog rock.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Phoenix was on the CBS Late Movie on April 3, 1986 and March 2, 1987.
Long ago, in a remote corner of the world, ancient astronauts landed from a distant planet with a gift for mankind…the Phoenix. For a thousand years, he has waited…suspended in time. Now, he’s awakened to complete his mission. He searches for his partner, Mira. For only she knows his ultimate assignment on Earth. Dependent on the sun for his trek for survival, endowed with a superior intelligence, he has fully developed the powers of the human mind. Relentlessly pursued by those who seek to control him, he must stay free. The Phoenix.
In 1981, a young Sam (Becca was just a glimmer at this point) was obsessed was science fiction, ancient aliens and television. This TV movie — and the four episodes that followed — were repeatedly discussed in the Panico household as a show that seemed to have such promise and then suddenly just disappeared.
Judson Scott (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) played Bennu, an ancient astronaut who is awakened from suspended animation within an Incan pyramid. He’s constantly on the run, as the government wants to either control or cut him up (they’re led by Richard Lynch from Bad Dreams).
In the movie, he acquires a love interest who is killed as a result of his escape. The whole movie is pretty dark, actually, setting Bennu up as someone above human emotion and morality who learns how important life on our planet is. His home planet is called Aurica in the movie, but Eidebran for the series.
He has plenty of powers, too. Physical levitation, telepathy, astral projection, precognition, clairvoyance and telekinesis, which are all helped by his Phoenix Amulet and its ability to draw use solar energy.
Beyond Richard Lynch’s Justin Preminger antagonist, Bennu must also contend with another alien named Yago. Just like our hero uses the sun, he uses our moon. It’s hinted that Lucifer and Dracula are both fictionalized versions of this villain, who can deafen with his Bells of Thon and has a musical instrument named the Black Moonball that allows him to teleport or change his appearance. Even more interesting to me, at least, is that his original name in the show was to be Aiwaz, the angel who read The Book of the Law to Crowley!
Bennu isn’t all alone, though. He’s helped by Dr. Ward Frazier (E.G. Marshall, Creepshow) and spends the series searching for his mate, Mira (Sheila Frazier, Super Fly).
The show was created by Anthony Lawrence, who wrote several Elvis movies and created the TV series The Sixth Sense that was often syndicated along with Night Gallery. And get this, a few of the episodes were directed by Douglas Hickox (Theater of Blood)!
There’s never been an actual release of this series, but you can find it on iOffer and other grey market sites.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Just Before Dawn was on the CBS Late Movie on October 10, 1988.
Man, if all Jeff Lieberman did was make Squirmand Blue Sunshine, he’d already be way ahead of the horror game. But no, he also made this contribution to the slasher genre, which owes a major debt to Deliverance (it was called Survivance in France).
Shot in the Silver Falls State Park in Sublimity, Oregon as Mt. St. Helens erupted, this film reminds you of one very important fact: if George Kennedy tells you to stay away from the woods, you better listen.
After that encounter — and seeing the survivor of the movie’s first attack by the mountain family saying that he’s seen demons — a fivesome of teens still head into the woods for what they hope will be a fun time away from the rest of the world. Chris Lemmon — yes, Hulk Hogan’s Thunder In Paradise co-star — is in this, as is Gregg Henry from Body Double.
There’s more than just a killer in the woods — there’s a set of identical twins and an inbred girl and a strange church and crickets that seem to know how to get quiet every time a character shows up.
While the original script’s heavily religious themes were cut out — it was to end with the family forcing the final girl to handle snakes in a ritual — it’s still a pretty great take on a slasher, one more based in something that could happen, with little to none of the supernatural getting in the way of all that murder. And the way that the last bad guy is taken out — wow. Talk about visceral.
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