April 11: Upsetting — What movie upsets you? Write about it and share it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

There’s a moment in Spasms where Oliver Reed twitches and spits like a snake in a yellow cardigan sweater. It’s a quick cut at 1:07:50 and it’s why I love this movie. That and the design of the creature – an ancient, one-of-a-kind blue snake referred to by locals as “the serpent.” It’s pretty damn cool. 

Spasms was produced in Canada. It’s based on a book with two main heroes. The first, millionaire Jason Kincaid (Reed) whose brother was killed by said snake on a past hunting trip to Micronesia. The snake bit Jason as well, but instead of dying, he lived and, it appears, formed a telepathic connection with the animal as a result of the venom’s mutation of the brain cells responsible for extrasensory awareness. 

Kincaid pays a low-rent-Indiana-Jones-style poacher to capture the snake and bring it to his estate because he is plagued by images of the serpent continuing to kill people. Kincaid lives with his hot niece, Suzanne played by Kerrie Keane from The Incubus (1982.) I never thought I’d see Oliver Reed play a creepy uncle, but it’s the second reason I love this film. It’s pretty obvious he’s in love with her.

Kincaid seeks out the film’s second hero – ESP researcher and psychiatrist Tom Brasilian (Peter Fonda) in the hopes that he can assist him in permanently cutting off the unwanted psychic contact. Kincaid offers to finance all of Brasilian’s ongoing research in exchange. 

Suzanne falls for Tom. Who wouldn’t with lines like, “You shouldn’t say ‘crap.” It’s not lady-like.” Poor Kincaid is left alone with nothing but blue snake on his mind. Meanwhile, a snake-worshipping cult sends a heavy out to capture and bring them their god. Turns out he’s not so heavy compared to the snake. 

Of course, the snake gets out of its crate and starts killing people. Its venom is so strong that everyone bitten blows up like a balloon and then decomposes very quickly following death. 

 The shots of the snake are fast, few and far between, but the point-of-view sequences are pretty good, especially the shower kill and the greenhouse chase. 

It’s not a bad movie at all, although probably not exactly what people thought they were going to get when they first saw the trailer back in 1983. It’s a must-see for Canuck horror fans, Oliver Reed fans or snake film enthusiasts. I kind of felt bad for the creatures. There he was just chilling out in the jungle, the last of his kind, and all of sudden he’s in America in unfamiliar surroundings. I’d be pissed off, too! TSST!!!! 

You can watch the entire film here on YouTube.

April 8: Film Ventures International — Share a movie that was released by Edward Montoro’s company. Here’s a list!

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s another take on this movie.

Juan Piquer Simón made Pieces and Slugs, so we can forgive him for Supersonic Man, The Rift and Cthulhu Mansion (which I like for some reason). With this movie, he’s challenging us a bit.

Los nuevos extraterrestres was meant to be a frightening movie about an alien on a murderous Earth rampage, but then E.T. came out and who better than the man who made Pieces to create a clone of Spielberg’s family classic?

It starts with poachers trying to get to the alien eggs that they find in the woods and being killed in the process, as well as a rock band getting involved. Then Tommy (Óscar Martín), our child protagonist, brings one of the eggs home and ends up helping it hatch, at which point he gets a new telekinetic friend he calls Trumpy.

Maybe that name hasn’t aged well.

Meanwhile, the band — Rick (Ian Sera, Kendall from Pieces and obviously his genitals have healed well as he has a roving eye), his girlfriend Lara (Susana Bequer, who shows up in Hostel: Part II), Kathy (Sara Palmer) and Tracy (Maria Albert), along with a hitchhiker named Sharon (Nina Ferrer) they found on the way — show up at Tommy’s house and Lara soon dies with a Big Dipper symbol on her forehead, which happens after she’s attacked by Trumpy’s mother and falls off a cliff.

This movie alternates between sweet moments between alien and child versus angry alien mother killing people left and right before being shot tons of times by Rick after she kills Tommy’s angry Uncle Bill (Manuel Pereiro). The boy and alien say their goodbyes and you’re like, well, didn’t we just watch Bambi’s murderous mother get killed? Has anyone learned anything in this? Is Trumpy going to grow up and murder us all?

Film Ventures International released this as Pod People and the credits appear on top of blurred footage from a whole different movie, Don Dohler’s The Galaxy Invader. And hey, if Tommy’s room feels familiar, it’s the same room where Timmy was working on his dirty puzzle in Pieces. 

I have no idea who this movie is for, but I have to respect the lengths it takes to make us think that it was shot in America, as Tommy’s bedroom has tons of Boston sports pennants to the point that you question why there are so many of them and start to realize that no, this didn’t come from the colonies and no, in no way is this a sequel or in the same world as E.T., no matter what they want to tell you.

The chocolate of alien murder in the woods and peanut butter of human and alien childhood friendship does not taste that great when smashed together, but it sure is fascinating and man, Trumpy looks legitimately like an alien to the point where if you told me that he was an escapee from Groom Lake, I’d believe you.

This is being released on blu ray from Severin. It has a 4K scan from the 35mm negative, plus extras such as The Simon’s Jigsaw — A Journey Into the Universe of Juan Piquer Simon, interviews with Emilio Linder and composer Librado Pastor, a private concert with Pastor, the Pod People credits and a CD soundtrack single. You can get it from Severin.

April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).

Also known as Savior of the Earth or its Western remix Space Thunder Kids — which also has parts of The Cosmos Conqueror (which takes from Giant Robo), Raiders of Galaxy, Protectors of Universe,  Savior of the Earth, Solar Adventure, Space Transformer, Cheolin samchongsa and Defenders of Space  — this movie may claim that it’s about Dr. Kim, Sheila and Keith saving the world from Dr. Butler, but a casual watch will tell you that this is Tron.

The English dub of this is incredible, because it feels like it was made by two guys in a tunnel, as it’s somehow too loud and too quiet all at the same time.

Keith is kind of the hero, despite being very annoying, and spends much of the movie playing a version of Galaxian before being blasted into the video game grid and being beat on by Joe, who is probably the most characterized black man that’s been in a cartoon since the 1930s. Joe whips everyone around him and forces them to play Go, Asteroids, Pac-Man and other video games but just like the world of Bridges and Boxleitner, these games are real.

Keith — or Ki, I mean, who knows with this dub — escapes into the desert as he battles Joe in a racing game, which ends up with them drinking in an oasis together, captured by the tiny and annoying Bbik Soo-ni or Princess Sandy who falls for our protagonist and wants to keep him all for himself, but then he explains that he has to save the world, so she introduces him to her eyepatch-wearing pirate sister Odin who for some reason has a submarine that would not look out of place on Space Battleship Yamato and at the very same time, it looks like Nintendo’s Radar Scope, a game that failed in the U.S. and was replaced with the reason we probably still know Nintendo thanks to its success, Donkey Kong.

Maybe they’ve also ripped off Captain Harlock‘s Arcadia. Who knows. Because Odin, beyond being the sister of the miniature princess, could also be the twin sister of Space Adventure Cobra‘s Sandra. The movie does get the Japanese influence right, because characters either look realistic or absolutely cartoony beyond belief and the two animation styles, when mixed, are very jarring. Oh yeah — the Saviors costumes also look like they come from Lensman.

At the end, as Keith leaves, he’s given a computer disk or frisbee — or come on, it’s an identity disk — by Bbik Soo-ni and that’s what destroys Sark — or you know, Dr. Butler — and that’s how we get through this 70 minutes of Korean animation.

Director Su-yong Jeong also worked on Transformers The Movie and the TV series. He also directed a Bible-based TV series, Jesus: A Kingdom Without Frontiers and the movie Yesu, which one imagines comes from that show. IMDB lists Roy Thomas as the other director and that’s linked to the comic book writer and I call IMDB kayfabe on that.

This is definitely something, I’ll tell you that much.

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive.

I learned about this movie from Ed Glaser, author of How the World Remade Hollywood, which you can buy from McFarland Books. Here’s a fun video he made about it.

April 3: Rock and role — A film that stars a rock star.

I always wondered why the 1991 John Leslie adult movie Curse of the Catwoman had such a cinematic opening — yes, it’s true, even in the video era of dirty movies, they could often look like real movies and had plots and were actually worth watching — and then, when I saw the beginning of The Hunger, it all came together. It’s totally taking shots from this and the plot kind of from Cat People.

But I digress and hadn’t even started.

Miriam Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve) has been alive since, well, the beginning of time it seems, always taking in human lovers and making them eternal like her. Like John (David Bowie). He’s been with her for at least two hundred years and now, they pose as a rich New York City couple who teach classical music.

But the curse of eternal life is not eternal youth. He’s aging years in days and seeks out Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), who along with her boyfriend Tom (Cliff De Young) and Charlie (Rufus Collins) are studying how to reverse the impact of the years on the human body. But even feeding on Alice Cavender, the girl who Miriam was planning to be her next lover, won’t keep him alive. He begs her to kill him but there’s no way to do that. Instead, like all her past inamorato and inamorata, he lies moaning for eternity in a coffin in the attic, stuck between the land of the living and the dead.

As Sarah comes to the apartment to find John, she instead encounters Miriam and the two become obsessed with one another, changing how Sarah relates to the world as Miriam pursues her, with her blood overtaking the humanity that runs through Sarah’s body.

Any movie that starts with Bauhaus playing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” before Bowie and Deneuve consume John Stephen Hill and Ann Magnuson isn’t just going to be forgotten. It’s going to be the kind of film that inspires entire subcultures.

On the commentary for The Hunger, Sarandon shares that she hates the ending: “The thing that made the film interesting to me was this question of, “Would you want to live forever if you were an addict?” But as the film progressed, the powers that be rewrote the ending and decided that I wouldn’t die, so what was the point? All the rules that we’d spent the entire film delineating, that Miriam lived forever and was indestructible, and all the people that she transformed died, and that I killed myself rather than be an addict. Suddenly I was kind of living, she was kind of half dying… Nobody knew what was going on, and I thought that was a shame.”

Tony Scott knows how to shoot a movie. I just think it’s funny that the lesbian sex in this movie scandalized people when Eurohorror directors had been making sapphic bloodsucker movies for years, like Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos (and about five or more other Jess vampire films), the many vampires of Jean Rollin, Jose Larraz’s Vampyres) and Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness. Or, even closer to home, The Velvet Vampire.

When this failed at the box office, Scott quit directing and went back to commercials. He would come back to make Top Gun and after that, he kept making films.