If you’re looking for someone to direct a made for TV movie, always go with John Llewellyn Moxey. He was behind great films like Where Have All the People Gone, Home for the Holidays, The Night Stalker and A Taste of Evil amongst others.
Here, he’s making a Mary Higgins Clark film all about attorney Kathy DeMaio (Lauren Hutton, Once Bitten), a widow who keeps passing out at the worst moments. As a child, she watched her father die in a hospital and now she’s phobic about even being there. It gets worse when she has to stay in a hospital, has a nightmare and wakes to spy a doctor (James Farentino, Dead and Buried) stuffing a body into the trunk of his car.
Look for a young William H. Macy — billed as WH Macy.
The weirdest thing is that Ben Murphy, who plays Hutton’s love interest, did a three-episode cameo on the soap opera Guiding Light — thanks Made for TV Mayhem — and characters from that show crossed over into this TV movie!
This was remade in 2004 with Angie Everhart in the lead role.
Over this month, we’ve talked about the controversy over Thunderball, with Ian Fleming not crediting Kevin McClory, which led to a copyright case and Ron Productions settling on a deal to use the novel as well as the Blofeld and SPECTRE intellectual property.
By the mid 1970’s, McClory wanted to remake the movie as Warhead and had Connery interested in coming back as Bond. This led to another lawsuit, as Eon thought that the results of the lawsuit allowed for the usage of elements of the story, but not Bond himself.
Another version of the movie was in development as James Bond of the Secret Service, with Jack Schwartzman coming on board as a producer and adding writer Lorenzo Semple, Jr. Connery asked Diamonds Are Forever writer Tom Mankiewicz to join the project, but he felt that wouldn’t be right due to his respect for Albert R. Broccoli.
After Connery had finished Diamonds Are Forever, he pledged that he would “never” play Bond again. His wife Micheline suggested the title and by the end of another lawsuit in 1983, this movie was finally about to get made.
Many of the Eon-produced Bond trademarks couldn’t be in this movie, such as the gun barrel sequence, the theme and even a pre-credit sequence.
In the post-Star Wars world that Moonraker attempted to navigate for Bond, this film embraces the Lucas team, with director Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back) and much of the Raiders of the Lost Ark crew, including first assistant director David Tomblin, director of photography Douglas Slocombe, second unit director Mickey Moore and production designers Philip Harrison and Stephen Grimes, coming on board.
Bond fails a routine training mission and is sent by M to get in better shape. While at a health spa, he watches as Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera, Condorman) beats a patient into oblivion and battles an assassin.
That beaten man — Bond is dealing with BDSM here — is Captain Jack Petachi, an Air Force pilot whose eye has been altered so that it is the same as the President of the United States. He’s played by Gavan O’Herlihy of Death Wish 3. He and Fatima are working for SPECTRE and its main boss, Blofeld, played here by Max Von Sydow.
Soon, he’s battling SPECTRE agent Maximillian Largo, seducing his mistress Domino (Kim Basinger) and, as always, saving the world all over again.
Former pro wrestler Pat Roach is in this as a henchman. Most people will recognize him from his roles as the giant bald Nazi mechanic Indiana Jones battles outside a Flying Wing in Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the Man-Ape in Conan the Destroyer and General Kael in Willow.
Bernie Casey is a welcome sight as Felix Leiter and Rowan Atkinson makes his screen debut as one of Bond’s assistants. Plus, a pre-fame Steven Seagal was the movie’s martial arts instructor. He broke Sean Connery’s wrist during training, a fact that the actor didn’t learn until nearly a decade later.
The end, where Bond winks at the camera, is fun. However, Connery and Roger Moore had an idea for an ending where they would bump into one another in the street and Moore would say, “Never say never again!”
Years after this, McClory announced plans to make another remake starring Timothy Dalton called Warhead 2000 AD, but it never was made. Sony acquired his rights and announced that since they held the rights to his material and Casino Royale that they would make their own Bond movies. As you can imagine, this led to another lawsuit.
After McClory’s death, MGM acquired the rights to his intellectual property, as well as both this movie and Casino Royale, meaning that finally Blodfeld could come back to the Bond storyline, as he did in Spectre.
When Octopussy came out, I was 11 years old and in full James Bond fever. I’d been watching all the old ones on ABC and HBO whenever they were on and playing the Victory Games James Bond 007 role playing game. I was probably more excited for this movie than anything else that year.
That same year, Bond would also be back — as would Sean Connery — in Never Say Never Again. This is the 007 movie I saw in the theater. I saw that one on HBO.
British agent 009 is killed, but abe to reach the British Ambassador, where his body shows up dressed as a circus clown and carrying a fake Faberge egg. This draws 007 into the orbit of Afghan prince Kamal Khan (Dr. Arcane from Swamp Thing), who has been smuggling Russian treasures to the West with the help of a circus owned by Octopussy (Maud Adams, who was also in The Man with the Golden Gun).
The title comes from the Ian Fleming short stories compendium Octopussy and The Living Daylights. Hardly any of the plot of the short story Octopussy was used, with the auction scene taken from The Property of a Lady and other parts from Moonraker.
Much like Connery, Moore began to tire of playing 007. His original contract had only been for three films, which ended with the The Spy Who Loved Me. The producers even started looking for a new Bond, with Timothy Dalton as a suggestion and tests being filmed with between Maud Adams and both Michael Billington and James Brolin. Yet once Never Say Never Again was announced, Moore was brought back.
Octopussy herself was supposedly going to be played by Sybil Danning, Faye Dunaway, Barbara Carrera, Persis Khambatta and Susie Coelho. Seeing as how Maud Adams was already doing those screentests, she was brought in and darkened her hair to play the Indian-born Octopussy, depsite being Swedish.
This movie is also the first time I ever saw my father swear. We took one of our neighbors to see it, who may have never even seen a film in the theater before by the way he behaved. He kept asking my dad if James Bond was going to die, until completely infuriated, my father blew up. It still makes me laugh to this day.
The tenth adventure of Count Waldemar Daninsky — played as always by Paul Naschy — this Spanish/ Japanese co-production was never theatrically shown in any country other than its native Spain. It was never dubbed in English, never released on VHS or even DVD. Now, Mondo Macabro comes to the rescue with a gorgeous blu ray release of a movie that defies any logic and makes me fall in love with werewolf movies all over again.
What do you need to know? Well, Waldemar Daninsky goes to Japan in the hopes of being cured of his lycanthropy. You may wonder, “Why is this movie in the past instead of modern times like most of the other Paul Naschy werewolf movies?”
Stop asking questions and buckle up.
For the first time, you will learn how the Daninsky curse began, way back in the 10th century. Yes, a witch busts in and screams, “All the seventh-born sons will be transformed into beasts! The Daninskys will be a race of murderers! Hated and persecuted FOREVER!” before taking a wolf skull and biting the baby Daninsky through his pregnant mother’s stomach. Centuries later, that baby has grown up and searched the world looking for a cure before coming to Japan.
There, in the studios of Toshiro Mifune, he will battle a samurai played by Japanese actor Shigeru Amachi, as well as a tiger, a witch, ninja and ghost samurai.
How could something this magical happen? Well, Naschy was paid by some Japanese investors to make a series of documentaries on the history of Spain. They also paid for two films — Human Beasts and this movie.
I wish they had given him enough yen to make twenty of these movies.
You can get this directly from Mondo Macabro. Do so now. ASAP.
This first-ever U.S. release is awesome, with a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative, an archival intro by Naschy, a documentary about his werewolf films, new audio commentary by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of The Naschycast and a New interview with Gavin Baddeley, author of the book The Frightfest Guide to Werewolf Movies.
If the mail fails at any point, you can also download this from the Internet Archive.
Jim McCullough Sr. produced Where the Red Fern Grows and Creature from Black Lake before he started directing his own movies like Charge of the Model T’s, The Aurora Encounter and Video Massacre. He also acted in The Love Bug and Teenage Monster years before all of that.
Initially a regional movie that plated Louisiana and Mississippi under the titles Mountaintop Motel and Horrors at Mountaintop Motel, it was picked up by New World three years later and retitled before playing in New York City and coming out on home video.
Evelyn has been recently released from a psychiatric institution and loses her mind all over again when she catches her daughter Lorie doing a witchcraft ritual. So she does what any of us would do and kills her daughter. She gets away with it. And then she runs a motel called, you guessed it, the Mountaintop Motel.
That’s when the victims show up, like wanna-be record producer Al, two girls he’s trying to do the horizontal lambada with, some newlyweds and a preacher named Reverend Bill McWiley (Bill Thurman, ‘Gator Bait). Much like Shakespeare, just about everyone dies.
The folks at Vinegar Syndrome have sought fit to rescue this movie from the moldy fate of hiding around on the shelves of the few remaining mom and pop video stores in the country by doing a 2K scan from the original 35mm film and putting this out on blu ray. They really are doing the Lord’s work.
Released by Vestron Video in 1987, this forgotten folk horror—also known as Cry Blue Sky—is very similar to The Witch, minus any arthouse aspirations. Instead of a man whose pride casts his family out of their village, this movie is about a reverend accused of adultery and polygamy.
Reverend Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb, Under Siege) and his followers leave their town behind to live in a valley haunted by an ancient evil. A rugged woodsman, Marion Dalton (Guy Boyd, Body Double), is along for the ride because he has his eye on Smythe’s lusty wife, Eloise. Hijinks, as they say, ensue. And by hijinks, I mean whatever is in the woods begins to haunt and kill everyone.
Rob Paulsen, who plays Jewell Buchanan, would become a voice actor. Perhaps you’ve heard him as Raphael and Donatello, two of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Pinky from Pinky and the Brain. He’s also in the movies Stewardess School, Warlock and Body Double. He’s also the voice that says, “Cheers was filmed in front of a live audience.” In all, he’s been in 1,000+ commercials and been the voice of 250+ cartoon characters.
Director Avery Crounse started his career as a photographer and only made two other films: The Invisible Kid and Sister Island, which starred Karen Black.
A beyond low budget film made by a drama school and directed by the former owner of the Brixton Academy, Alan Briggs, this movie is strange beyond strange. Basically shot on VHS yet proclaiming that it’s based on true events, it comes off as both amateur hour and endearingly earnest. It’s a combination that more than pays off.
Elizabeth shows up at a children’s school with a note that says she’d be better off being there. That’s because she’s possessed — not to skate, but by Satan. Soon, zombies are rising from the dead and the other children are under her control.
This sounds like so many movies that I love, like Cathy’s Curse, but this movie makes it even better by having blaring heavy metal play every time Satan’s powers are used and VHS static between each and every transition.
It’s the last fifteen minutes of the movie that make it great, with the evil kids decimating the adults until Jesus Christ himself shows up to take care of business, complete with video game drones, boops and beeps.
No, I didn’t believe it either.
You have to love a movie that has its child actors writing about it on IMDB.
You can get this — of course — from Intervision and Severin.
According to Severin, “Suffer, Little Children is a reconstruction of the events, which took place at 45 Kingston Road, New Malden, Surrey, England in August 1984. None of these events were reported in the press and now the house is scheduled for demolition in the immediate future.”
You basically want this in your life right now.
Sam’s right: you need this 3/4″ spool of trashy incompetence in your life that isn’t in the least biographical and everything about pinching from Stephen King’s The Shining, as well as The Exorcist and The Omen — and probably even Amando de Ossorio 1975 rip of The Exorcist with Demon Witch Child, but with none of that film’s de Ossorioness.
All of these bad actors are from a drama school? The owner of the Brixton Academy — where The Smiths played their last gig in 1986 — made this? Stick to concert promotions and venue management. Even at 74 minutes, this is too long. And there’s the dodgy sound, the poor framing . . . and poor everything else. But hey, they tired, they made a movie . . . about Jesus showing up and killing all the devil worshiping kids. Come to think of it: didn’t Jesus show up in Giulio Paradisi’s The Visitor?
Yeah, this is SOV gold at the end of the crinkly, celluloid rainbow. Marshmallow stars, included.
If you think you’ve seen the spaceships and special effects and heard the James Horner music before, it’s all taken from two other Corman films:Battle Beyond the Stars and Humanoids from the Deep.
Captain C.F. “Hawk” Hawkens (Vince Edwards, TV’s Ben Casey) is a space pirate who was once in the Space Service, hired to steal a freighter from The Company. A ten-year-old boy named Peter (David Mendenhall, Over the Top) — annoying us in a Battlestar Galactica Boxey sort of way — stows away with the pirates and goes on adventures with them.
Luca Bercovici, the director of Rockula and Ghoulies, appears in this film as Ace. Dick Miller shows up and that’s always a welcome thing. And hey that’s William Boyett — Sergeant William MacDonald from Adam-12.
Not content to rip off only Star Wars, the end of this movie 100% comes from Shane. So there’s that. I’ve never understood why people loved putting annoying kids into science fiction films (“Boxey Syndrome”) in the hopes that kids would find someone to identify with, when all we wanted was to be the adults. Oh well. But at least we got the chance to speak Howard R. Cohen’s and Sylvester Stallone’s names in the same sentence.
There was a time where Disney did not care at all whether or not they gave nightmares to kids. Or so it seemed. They were concentrating on films with more mature themes in an attempt to break free from their stereotype as an animation and family film studio.
Yet when this film was being made, it was really two movies. On one hand were writer Ray Bradbury and director Jack Clayton, who were trying to stay faithful to the novel. And on the other was Disney, who wanted a more accessible and family-friendly film.
Bradbury wrote the screenplay in 1958 as a directorial vehicle for Gene Kelly before rewriting it as a novel. In 1977, he and Clayton produced a completed script before the project went into six years of stops and starts.
That’s why it’s so sad that Bradbury and Clayton lost their friendship after Bradbury discovered that Clayton had hired writer John Mortimer to do an uncredited rewrite at the studio’s urging. And after disastrous test screenings, Disney fired Clayton and the film’s editor before throwing out the original score. They spent $5 million and even more time basically remaking the film.
Disney added a new director, Leo Dyer, and a new spoken beginning that was narrated by Arthur Hill. There was also a long CGI sequence — one of the first-ever filmed — of Mr. Dark’s circus train pulling in to Green Town. The sequence was incredibly complex — the smoke from the locomotive would form ropes and tents, tree limbs would make a Ferris wheel and a spider web would become a wheel of fortune. There was also a scene where Mr. Dark would send a hand into the house to attack the two main characters, but this scene was seen as fake by Disney execs who replaced it with a scene that had hundreds of real tarantulas.
Everything that was right about the project pretty much went away, from the original themes of Bradbury’s novel to the darkness of the original cut and the very human relationships that director Clayton loved. In its place was that new narration and a new ending.
What remains is still stranger and better than nearly any kids movie — and hey, let’s throw in just about any movie — that you will see this year.
So what’s it all about? Well, it’s about autumn. It’s about a small town called Green Town. And it’s about two kids, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who find themselves at odds with Mr. Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival.
Mr. Dark’s (Jonathan Pryce) goal is to give the people of the town exactly what they’ve always wanted and take their souls in the process. The scene where he takes years off of the life of Will’s father (Jason Robards, great as always) has more resonance every year that I watch this movie.
Plus, you get great acting from Diane Lane and Royal Dano, and an appearance from noted little person actor Angelo Rossitto, who has been in more movies that I’ve watched than nearly any other actor.
They’re planning on remaking this movie, but you know how that goes. Luckily, you have this dark reminder of what could have been, way back when Disney was trying to be something more than a kid-friendly movie house.
Hikmet (or Howard) Avedis studied at the University of Southern California and won the George Cukor Award, which totally prepared him for a lifetime of working in exploitation fare. With titles like The Stepmother, The Teacher (consider it the grindhouse version of The Graduate), The Specialist (where Adam West fights against the water company), the Connie Stevens’ classic Scorchy and the utterly baffling sex comedy/giallo They’re Playing With Fire, Avedis may not have made Oscar-worthy pictures, but he certainly knew how to entertain. He also wrote this movie along with his wife Marlene Schmidt, who also acted in this movie (as she did in nearly every movie he made).
Known internationally as Embalmed and Hall of Death, this film has shown up on a few of the top ten slasher lists that we’re putting together for later this month. It’s a great example of what happens when a slasher strays from the form somewhat and you get the idea that this movie is kind of like a carny haunted house, ready to scare you at every turn.
Wealthy psychiatrist Dr. Parson has died and only his daughter Christie (Mary Elizabeth McDonough, Erin Walton from The Waltons and one of the stars of the abysmal Funland) believes that there was foul play. The official word is that he drowned and that’s good enough for her mother Eve (Lynda Day George!), who doesn’t believe the dream her daughter had where dad was bludgeoned with a baseball bat. Oh yeah — she also sleepwalks all the time.
But let’s forget about all that. Let’s get to the mortuary, where Christie’s boyfriend Greg Stevens (David Wallace, who was also in Humongous) is stealing tires with his friend Josh. After all, if Hank Andrews (Christopher George, never far from his wife, in one of his last roles) isn’t going to pay Josh fairly, they may as well take what they want.
While they’re in the midst of this larceny, an occult ritual just happens to happen, with Hank leading a bevy of gorgeous women in what is called a seance. Josh is unfazed, as he claims that this kind of thing happens all the time. He goes off to get the tires and gets stabbed for his efforts. Greg can only watch as someone drives off in his van.
Greg and Christie search everywhere for Josh, including the local roller skating rink because it’s 1983. There’s some insanely great roller skating footage here, if you like that kind of thing. You know that I do.
As Christie drives to her family’s mansion the next day, a car starts to follow her. Soon after her arrival, a hooded figure begins to follow her around the pool where her father died. Her mother claims its all a dream.
The next day, Greg tells Christie that her mother was one of the women in the ritual he watched. That makes sense to her, because now Eve and Hank are shacking up and her dad’s corpse is barely cold. If things couldn’t get weirder for our heroes, Paul (Bill Paxton, who shows up in so many great films of this era), the son of Hank, begins getting hot and bothered for his soon-to-be stepsister. He’s even weirder than his dad, but that’s probably because his mom killed herself.
Greg and Christie try to hook up, but her entire house goes wild, with lights flashing on and off, music playing by itself and even the film seeming to stop and start. It’s a great sequence and really sets up the gaslighting — or supernatural attacks — that Christie is forced to endure.
Greg and Christie decide to follow her mother, who heads right to the mortuary. Stranger and stranger? It gets even more so, as a cloaked figure who looks like Paul attacks Christie that night and in a shot that looks similar to Suspiria, almost pulls her out of a glass window.
While Eve again says it was all a dream, she does have one oddball theory: Paul used to be a patient of her dead husband and he was obsessed with Christie, talking about her the entire time. This is soon followed by Paul, clad in a latex mask, appearing and stabbing Eve in her bed. He attacks Christie and brings her to the mortuary, claiming that he intends to embalm her alive.
Hank arrives to stop him and we get the villain moment where he explains his actions: he had to punish everyone, like Eve for telling Christie he was insane and Dr. Parson for putting him in jail. He then goes one step beyond by stabbing his father just in time for Greg to try to save her. A battle leads to Greg getting locked in the embalming chamber while Paul arranges all the bodies of his victims for a wedding ceremony.
You know how weddings go — you spend much of the the time conducting a symphony. Paul does exactly that while we see all of his victims, including his mother who was in a coma and not dead. What follows is a battle between Paul and his scalpel and Greg with an axe, ending with Christie sleepwalking her way into killing the villain with one hack of the axe into his back. Our heroes embrace, just in time for Paul’s mom to awaken from her coma and attack them with a knife, probably because she saw the end of Carrie and knew this needed one more jump scare.
We’ve talked about Gary Graver and his work for Orson Welles, in the adult film industry and within films like Texas Lightning, Sorceress and Trick or Treats, amongst other films. His cinematography makes this movie a cut above ordinary slasher fare.
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