Tag Archives: 1982

MILL CREEK NIGHTMARE WORLDS: Panic (1982)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 13, 2018.

Also known as Bakterion, Nightmare Killing and even Zombie 4 in Greece, this film was directed by Tonino Ricci, Fulci’s assistant director on White Fang and Challenge to White Fang.

It all starts with lab rats going nuts and killing one another, which was not what I was planning on watching while I ate my breakfast while watching this. What was I thinking?

Professor Adams has gone missing — maybe it was a fishing trip — but we all know that he’s behind all of the random killings. The government literally sends Captain Kirk (David Warbeck from The Beyond) to figure out what’s going on. He starts working with Jane (Janet Agren, Eaten Alive!, Hands of Steel) to figure out how to stop the infection and save not just the town, but soon the entire world. Yep, there’s plenty of talk about how this mutant virus could end life as we know it, yet all we see is one rotting meatloaf looking doctor.

Will the military nuke the town? Can Captain Kirk stop the worst special effect you’ve ever seen this side of Curse of Bigfoot? Will Jane feel bad for the professor, whose face looks like the inside of a stuffed pepper? Did I laugh out loud at this end credit copy?

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 30: Curse of the Screaming Dead (1982)

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30. A Horror Film Covered in the ShockMarathons Books.

In his book, All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, Troma president Lloyd Kaufman lists this among the five worst films in Troma’s library. Yet another reason for me to say it: Fuck Lloyd Kaufman.

Director Tony Malanowski and star Steve Sandkuhler had already made this movie a year before as Night of Horror. Yet the idea that a bunch of zombie Confederate soldiers could rise up and destroy some hippies in a Winnebego seemed to be too good of an idea to pass up. So they went back and made it again, this time putting six twenty-something teens — Wyatt (Sandkuhler), Mel (Christopher Gummer), Sarah (Rebecca Bach), Bill (Jim Ball), Blind Kiyomi (Mimi Ishikawa) and Lin (Judy Dixon) — up against the South as it rises once again.

Yes, who knew that deer hunting would lead to this? This movie is a lesson for us all. If you stay in an area that has a Confederate graveyard, don’t steal their stuff and don’t read the book they left behind. Nobody — not even the cops — can survive once those zombies come back and want back their stuff. That’s why the other title for this film, Curse of the Cannibal Confederates — is so truthful.

Look, I get that this movie is shot in complete darkness, no one knows how to act and the story has been done before. If that stopped me, I wouldn’t watch anything. There’s a hiss and echo on the bass heavy soundtrack to this movie that makes me convinced that somehow this movie exists on the same collective unconsciousness place as the second wave of black metal. Everything is as dark as it can be, day for night but night for day, and in the same way that some people laugh off corpsepaint and bad production on those albums, they are also filled with moments of drone drug floating out of our reality abilities that this finds and seizes on. I mean, the zombie attacks are legitimately unsettling, the sounds of zombies masticating their prey beyond disgusting. And that church set! In Norway, they would have burned it down. Here, we turn it into the setting for a zombie film.

If this came out today, it would have the tagline “We are going to eat y’all.”

Malanowski went on to edit Dr. Alien and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it.  and Nightmare Sisters. He’s still at it. I’d love if he made this one more time.

2022 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 21: House of Traps (1982)

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21. TRAPS: To lay or be laid, that is the question.

Based on Shi Yukun’s The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants, this Shaw Brothers movie has the Venom Mob and a house of, well, traps. Not a trap house. That’s different.

Directed by Chang Cheh, this is the last Venom Mob movie. Lo Meng is already gone. Only Kuo Choi and Lu Feng get to fight. It seems odd. But then again, there is the house full of traps, which seems to be the main selling point.

Butterfly Chua (Lu Feng) has taken a priceless jade statue and hidden it inside his — do I have to say the title of this movie again? — which has spikes everywhere, steps that rip off feet, steel nets and archers ready to kill anyone who makes it close to the treasure.

Inspector Yuan (Lung Tien-Hsiang) is the person who will challenge the house, because that jade statue — and the other art treasures hidden within — have some great importance to the government. Both Yuan and Butterfly Chua end up employing entire armies of martial artists ready to kick, punch and brutalize one another.

The good guys are called the Rat Gang, which wouldn’t happen in America. There’s also a killer umbrella and some wild costumes. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it doesn’t have to. That’s why I love these movies, I can just put them on and they fill my eyes with so many images, my brain was so many visions and my heart with so much joy.

SLASHER MONTH: Death Valley (1982)

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Wilfred Brimley was two years young than me when he made this movie and that’s kind of screwing me up right now.

Paul Stanton (Edward Herrman) has sent his son Billy (Peter Billingsly) into going to California to meet up with his mother Sally (Catherine Hicks) and her boyfriend Mike (Paul Le Mat) who are on the way to Arizona. As things usually occur, Billy accidentally walks across the crime scene of a serial killer, takes a turtle necklace and unleashes unwitting hell.

Directed by Dick Richards and written by Richard Rothstein, this movie puts a young child into the claws of a serial killer, which is scary now but had to be even worse in 1982 when we hadn’t really come to understand the evil around us.

A year later, Peter Billingsly would be in A Christmas Story in which he’d also dress like a cowboy and bring up Black Bart. What are the odds, I ask you?

Also: Wilfred Brimley was a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.

Also also: This is part of that most wonderful of horror genres, the RV movie.

If I saw this as a kid, I would have made sure that my parents never took us on vacation.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE 19: The Last Horror Film (1982)

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16. A Horror Film Featuring Caroline Munro.

The Last Horror Movie reunites those wacky lovebirds Joe Spinell and Caroline Munro from Starcrash and Maniac and makes another appearance for Joe on the video nasty section 3 list.

Director David Winters was one of the few stage actors and dancers in West Side Story to be in the film version. He then became a choreographer and was the first to choreograph the Watusi as well as the originator of the Freddie and helped Elvis and Ann-Margaret dance in Viva Las Vegas. His first directorial effort was the Alice Cooper film Welcome to My Nightmare and he produced everything from Linda Lovelace for President to Young Lady Chatterley, Killer Workout and owned Action International Pictures. He also dated Lovelace after she divorced Chuck Traynor. She credited him for introducing her to culture. The guy did so much! He directed Racquet, did the choreography for Roller Boogie, made Mission Kill with Robert Ginty and oh yeah, also directed Thrashin’!

Anyways, both Spinell and Munro are two people who make me love life the moment I see them. The blonde highlights in her hair in this movie got me through the rest of a very hard week. This film is very 1982 and therefore, it is very good.

Spinell is Vinny, a cab driver who lives with his mother (Filomena Spagnuolo, Spinell’s real mother, who ends the movie by asking if she can take a hit off his joint; that’s also Spinell’s real apartment) but dreams of making a horror movie with scream queen Jana Bates (Munro), who is going to be at Cannes to promote her latest film Scream along with her manager and ex-husband Bret Bates (Glenn Jacobson) and producer and current boyfriend Alan Cunningham (Judd Hamilton). She gets a note that says, “You’ve made your last horror film. Goodbye.” and finds Bret murdered, but the body disappears when the police come to investigate. This turns into more of a whodunnit than a slasher, but I mean, Spinell still gets to chainsaw someone to death.

Just like the movie within this movie, this was shot with no permits at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. If you think it’s not realistic for an actress in a horror movie to win an award, that very year Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress award for Possession. 

PS: In no way am I as obsession with Munro as Vinny was with Jana.

2022 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 14: The House Where Evil Dwells (1982)

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14. THE RUBY ANNI-VHS-ARY: Watch something that came out in 1982. #onlyonVHS!

Based on the novel by James Hardiman and directed by Kevin Connor (From Beyond the Grave), this movie starts with a samurai committing murder-suicide when he catches his wife with another man. The house, as you can pick up from the title, is haunted and that’s the nightmare world that the Fletchers — Ted (Edward Albert), Laura (Susan George) and Amy (Amy Barrett) — end up living at.

The spirits of the house possess Laura and she ends up having an affair with Ted’s friend Alex (Doug McClure), which seems like the kind of excuse guys use to get away with getting caught. Seriously, a samurai and the dead spirits of his wife and her secret lover made me do it. They also turned into spider crabs and pushed our little girl out of a tree! Why don’t you believe me?

Connor related a story about one of the lovemaking scenes in this movie: “The interesting story about this is that the producers wanted a more graphic sex scene, which wasn’t in the script. So Edward Albert and Susan George agreed to do it on their terms which was that Susan would wear her panties because of an experience she had had on Straw Dogs where somebody at the lab (allegedly) had copied some of the revealing out-takes from her nude scenes – so she certainly wasn’t going to let that happen again. You can imagine how difficult it was to shoot a nude scene with both your leads wearing underwear, but it worked out very well.”

Between ninjas and ghost samurai, Susan George’s early 80s really were something.

Xin xi you ji (1982)

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New Pilgrims to the West is based on the Chinese 16th century book Journey to the West, which is about the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. In spite of great danger, he traveled to the Central Asia to discover the Buddhist sacred texts. A combination of Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology, Confucianism, Taoist and Buddhist theology, the lessons in this book are still being meditated on today.

The main characters are Sun Wukong the Monkey King, Tang Sanzang, Zhu “Pigsy” Bajie and Sha Wujing. Perhaps you’ve seen The Forbidden Kingdom, in which Jet Li plays Sun Wukong, Stephen Chow playing the role in A Chinese Odyssey or the 1960s series of Shaw Brothers movies that include Monkey Goes West, Princess Iron Fan, Cave of the Silken Web and The Land of Many Perfumes.

It’s low budget, yes, but director Chun-Liang Chen also made the incredible Child of Peach and the unofficial movie Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, so there’s still some magic to be found in this story of Sun Wukong and Pigsy as they journey to the west.

I am of the belief that props don’t have to be expensive, sets don’t have to be perfect and even the quality of the print that I see decades later doesn’t have to be 4K quality. Magic can be found anywhere.

You can watch this on YouTube.

 

Jin fen you long (1982)

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Released under so many names — Matching Escort, Fury of the Silver Fox, Wolf-Devil Woman 2, Wolfen Ninja, Venus the Cavalier, Venus the Ninja and Venus: Wolf Ninja — some of those are due to director, producer and star Pearl Chang, who was also the auteur who made Wolf Devil Woman even if this was made a year before. Chang is amazing because she was making her own kung fu movies in Taiwan and as a woman in the early 80s and that’d be a big feat even now. To add to the odd charms of this movie, it was written by the man who would unleash a hundred or more ninja clones, Godfrey Ho.

Wronged by the warlord who killed her family — and seventy-four other leaders — Chang is a princess who trains in an underground cave filled with neon-hued colors and homemade skeletons prepping for the final battle with that very same final boss, a man who has a Nintendo Power Glove seven years before the rest of the world and knows how to use it to break swords and shoot out on a long metal coil. He also has on a sparkling costume that looks like Frank Brunner drew it.

Pearl Chang’s movies probably won’t be getting a high end blu ray release anytime soon — the fact that I missed out on the Gold Ninja Video microrelease kills me — so the ultrabright colors and hyperkinetic wirework is lost in multiple transfers as this movie moved from the East to the West.

Here’s just one reason why this movie is so great: as a child, the princess had to wear concrete boots. That way, when she grew up, she’d be used to be weighed down and as an adult, she can run so fast that she can walk on water.

The final battle is filled with spraying blood every few seconds before the good guys take out the eyes of the evil warlord. It’s super graphic and very fake at the same time, which is actually perfect when you think about it. Sometimes, people get stabbed so well that blood sprays ten feet directly upward.

Movies have never been more magical.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Sun Wu Kong dai zhan fei ren kuo (1982)

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Monkey Wars is a sequel or at least connected to New Pilgrims to the West and has Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy coming up against some Taoists and their ally a spider-woman who has created a base within the caves.

Director Chun-Liang Chen also made Child of Peach, Spell of Magic and Magic Warriors, so you know the kind of lunacy that this will soon deliver to you. What you may not be prepared for is the final part of this movie which has the taoists joining up with bat people, some of whom use hang glider wings and others that are humanoid bats and there’s a battle in the sky. Truly, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Seriously: this movie has a human monkey fighting flying bat people when he isn’t growing so large that he can walk to Heaven and urinate all over his enemies. Can you imagine a movie that while being made, the filmmakers said, “Human spider people just aren’t enough. What else can we do?”

This movie cost less than what some Hollywood movies spend on plastic sporks at craft services. Yet somehow it has a wealth of ideas that you won’t get to experience anywhere else in the universe.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ngû yaks (1982)

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Golden Buddha Against the Snake Phantom AKA King Kong vs. the Snake Phantom is a Thai movie with just this description to go by: “A tribe of snake-men are out to wreak havoc on a Miao minority group. Old Chang is not only the witch-doctor of the Miao people, but he and his two sons also help defend them against the intruders.”

A woman gets impregnated by a snake at one point and Buddha himself strikes her down. There are also fire-breathing snakes that destroy a village. Monks can teleport, bad guys can turn into snakes, Buddha grows gigantic and has a battle with an equally huge snake man.

Director Chih Chen was in Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss and also was an assistant director on that film. I wouldn’t look for anything from that movie to influence this one. What you will notice is a lot of distorted voices and a fuzzed out soundtrack that got me into the movie drugs space that I love so much.

There is no King Kong.

The filmmakers also needed gold snakes so they either have a rubber one painted that color or, as I suspect, they straight up painted some real snakes gold. Also some chickens get killed by snakes, so I should probably warn you about that.

Watch this on YouTube and see if you can understand as much as I did.