This is a movie that starts off in a way that got me quick. A prostitute named Isabelle (pre-Baywatch Alexandra Paul) is naked in bed, smoking a joint and trying to get a man in the bathroom to come out and make love to her. He keeps washing his hands obsessively while she apologizes for some videos she appeared in. The man comes out, gets out top of her and slices her throat open. In the world of exploitation movies, this is what we call a good start.
American Nightmare isn’t from this country. It’s from our pals in Canada, where we for some reason aren’t building a wall.
Isabelle’s brother Eric is a famous musician who is coming to find his sister after she writes him — no cell phones yet — to let him know that she’s in trouble. This sends him on a journey through strip clubs, adult theaters and dens of prostitution, all to find his sister — who was killed at the beginning of the movie.
This movie is pretty scummy — when Eric confronts his father about he and his sister leaving the family, the old man kicks him out and then fondles a photo of his daughter. Is this how the Great White North sees us?
The killer starts murdering all of Isabelle’s friends, except for Louise, who Eric saves. They end up becoming lovers, because that’s how the world works in movies.
Of course, the video in question is one of Eric’s dad having sex with his sister. The reveal causes the old man to blow his brains out. This is the kind of movie my wife walks into the room and just stares and walks out angry. Then I yell, “But Michael Ironside is in it!”
In 1979, Austrian film director Walter Bannert was simply enjoying a meal at a Vienna cafe when he was beaten by a gang of neo-Nazis. That’s when he determined that he would research these groups by convincing their leaders that he was making an objective documentary. He ended up spending three years with these groups in West Germany and Austria.
The Inheritors is what emerged, a film based on real people, events and conversations that Bannert actually experienced. Obviously, the film was controversial, with theatres screening it threatened by neo-Nazi sympathizers. Sadly, while it’s over thirty years old, the rebirth of right-wing extremism means that it may even be more relevant today.
On his way home from school, Thomas helps Charly escape from the police. They couldn’t be more different, as Thomas comes from a rich home, where his self-made father and music-loving brother are both dominated by his mother. Charly is poor and doesn’t have much of a future.
Soon, the two are dreaming of a revitalized fatherland based on happy families, free from corporate control and dedicated to the environment, one that will be free from the influence of the West. They discover that they find a better family and friends within the party, as the rest of the world throws them away as they become more and more dedicated to the Nazi cause.
This is not an easy watch. But it’s certainly one that will make you think.
Nobody sees this movie as a classic. But I do. It’s from a moment of great joy, when I was 11 years old and sitting beside my father and uncle at the Majestic Theater in Ellwood City, PA, as they proceeded to laugh so loudly during this film until you could no longer hear what was being said. My memories of this movie make it mean more to me than anything in the Criterion Collection.
Montgomery “Monty” Capuletti is the role that Rodney Dangerfield felt was closest to who he really was. He lives hard, he drinks too much, he gambles and he lives to smoke pot. He’s the only Italian member of an Irish family of rich folks who own a department store, Monahan’s. He also ruins nearly everything he touches, from his job as a photographer to his daughter’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh!) wedding cake and marriage to Julio (Taylor Negron!).And his best friends — Nickey Cerone (Joe Pesci!) and Paddy (Tom Noonan!) — are just as sloppy and messed up as he is.
That’s when the film’s challenge happens. His wife’s mother dies and Monty stands to inherit all $10 million of her will if he can give up drinking, drugs and gambling, plus lose weight. Much like all great 80’s movies, I have given you the plot and simply follow with this statement: hijinks ensue.
You get so much in this film. You get real life pedo and full-time movie asshole, Jeffrey Jones, doing what he does best, be an asshole. You get Taylor Negron saying the lines that Anthrax would use in their song “I’m the Man.” You get a store that’s only open 23 hours a day. And you get the real guy look, the fashion line that Monty inspires.
Director James Signorelli only has one other movie to his credit, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. But he has been involved in the making of Saturday Night Live off and on as a producer, plus he also worked on the crews of Black Caesar, Phantom of the Paradise and Superfly. This movie is a quick trifle, but it makes me laugh every single time. It’s running time is a blur and it always rewards multiple viewings with just as many laughs.
If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can watch it for free.
Thanks to Dustin Fallon from Horror and Sons for this entry. He’s been instrumental in helping us get writers for this project and is one hell of a nice guy. Also, his site is great!
As the population of a small, quiet town prepares to celebrate the bicentennial anniversary of its founding, the literal ghosts of its past return to seek retribution for the actions of their forefathers long, long before. If you think that this plot synopsis sounds like it’s for John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog, you are right! It sounds a whole Hell of a lot like The Fog.
In this case, the film in question is Bill Rebane’s 1983 release, The Demons of Ludlow. However, in Demons, it is the town’s founder himself that has returned with a supernatural bloodlust. And while Blake and his men may have sailed into Antonio Bay in spooky style in The Fog, Demons of Ludlow‘s Ephram Ludlow comes to town by way of a haunted piano. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem as “grand” an entrance.
The most significant difference between both films is undoubtedly in the quality of the production. Simply put, The Fog had a budget, while Demons clearly does not. By no means is that to say that Demons of Ludlow is not worth watching. In fact, it’s these same budgetary limitations that gives all of Rebane’s films whatever appeal they may have.
Being a major studio release, Carpenter was able to enlist the acting talents of heavyweights such as Hal Holbrook, Janet Leigh, and John Houseman to help lend his film some “credibility” (as well as some highly entertaining performances). However, the cast of Demons is comprised almost entirely of actors native to Rebane’s home of Wisconsin, most of whom had no previous or future film credits to their name.
Expectedly, performances here aren’t as “polished” as those in Carpenter’s film, but the majority of Demons‘ cast give respectable performances. A few scenes do feel like community theater performances, and this feeling is further enforced by a couple of the sets looking like just a backdrop on a stage. Overall, the film has a very “made for early 80’s syndication” look to it, which may provide some additional appeal for audiences alive during that era.
While The Fog undoubtedly provided more than a few chills and shocking deaths, Demons of Ludlow is much more gleefully sadistic with its underworldly carnage. Demons unabashedly presents scenes featuring a beheading, severed hands, an old woman pelted in the face with stones, and (most notably) a pack of ghouls possibly sexually assaulting a mentally handicapped woman while ripping her to pieces and eating her. Interestingly enough, the forthcoming scene featuring the Mayor’s complete lack of empathy about the girl’s death (with her mother present) is the film’s biggest comedic moment.
Gore is quite light in Rebane’s film, presumably due to budget. However, what is implied is just as effective as a pile of blood and guts on the screen, if not more so. There is one quick moment of nudity during the attack on the handicapped woman, and one character spends the majority of her screen time in sexy lingerie despite being the minister’s wife, so the film may not be appropriate for audiences of all ages. As there’s little to no outdoor lighting used in this film, it probably fits best as a late night viewing.
Much like Rebane’s most successful film, The Giant Spider Invasion, Demons of Ludlow is far from polished, but shines as an example of local filmmaking. What makes this film work is that all parties involved are trying their best to make it work. Special effects really aren’t all that “special”, but are wisely kept secondary to the story itself. The story is fairly ambitious, but the film never tries to be bigger than it is.
Demons of Ludlow is definitely not the best film on Mill Creek’s 50 Chilling Films collection, but it’s also far from being the worst. (I feel sympathy for the poor bastard stuck reviewing either War of the Robots or The Witch’s Mountain.) I’ve owned this set for quite a few years now and highly recommend it to any fan, new or old, that may want to freshen up a bit on their older horror films.
Pottsville, Idaho has some problems. A massage parlor is coming to town and the local conservatives are going insane battling it. And oh yeah — children are disappearing and people are being horribly murdered. Oh boy, 1983 was a magical time to be alive, because this movie may have seemed stupid to critics when it came out way back when, but I loved every single minute of this.
Much like Jaws, the authorities — including Mayor Lane (José Ferrer, The Sentinel) are covering everything up so that they don’t damage the town’s potato crop. That said, he hired chemical safety engineer Garcon Jones (what an amazing sentence that was to write), who is played by the always dependable Martin Landau. Detective Lutz is also on the case, played by Rexx Coltrane, who is in fact exploitation producer Bill Osco. Osco produced this film, as well as plenty of more adult titles like Flesh Gordon and Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy. He also worked with Jackie Kong, who directed The Being, to bring Night Patrol to the screen.
Toss in Kenny Rogers’ wife (at the time) as a love interest and a mutant who is totally influenced by Alien and we’ve got ourselves a movie. This also curiously takes place during Easter, which has nothing to do with anything at all, other than inspiring its original title, Easter Sunday.
It turns out that the mutant has been exposed to radioactive materials in one of the town’s dumps. And luckily, the mutant is light sensitive, so it only attacks at night. Will Martin Landau and the film’s producer be able to stop it in time? Also, don’t you want to see this even more when I tell you that Ruth Buzzi is in it? Or that in addition to Ferrer, this film has another Oscar winner in the cast, Dorothy Malone? What if I told you that Murray Langston, the Unknown Comic himself, was in it? Or that at the end of the movie, we get to learn what happened to every character after the film with title cards and then get to see every major character with a super of who played them (and anyone who has died, we get to see them die all over again)? For these reasons and so many more — like a creature that has one eye and hundreds of teeth, this movie is a must see.
You can watch it yourself on Amazon Prime Video. It’s free with your membership. You can now thrill to my favorite scene in the film, where a cat scares the hero so much that Martin Landau has a laughing fit.
Once upon a time, when network TV actually mattered, they’d gather all of their stars once a summer and put them in a TV movie. Or they’d grab the cast of Facts of Life and send them to France. It was a big deal to me when I was a kid. And there are kids growing up today that will have no idea how exciting it was knowing a 2 hour TV movie with all of your favorites was about to air. Even better — when stars of the past crossed over with the hottest stars of the present, I was always hooked.
Originally airing on October 16, 1983 on NBC, this film is all about Excelsior Union High School, where Beau Middleton (Anthony Edwards) rules over everyone as class president and quarterback. His father is even offering a $10,000 prize for best teacher, so every single one of them is trying to outdo one another.
J.J. Mathers (Michael J. Fox), however, is one of the few students to stand up to the preps. He’s never cared about anything before. That is, until he met Beau’s girlfriend, Beth Franklin (one of my first crushes, Nancy McKeon).
This one is packed with so many great stars. There’s a super young Crispin Glover two years before Back to the Future, playing a geek. Tony “Wally Cleaver” Dow, Frank “Lumpy Rutherford” Bank and Ken “Eddie Haskell” Osmond from Leave It to Beaver are in this, as are Elinor Donahue from Father Knows Best, Dwayne Hickman, Steve Franken and Bob Denver from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato from Diff’rent Strokes, Crystal Bernard (years before she’d be on Wings and in Slumber Party Massacre 2), Angela Cartwright from Lost in Space and The Danny Thomas Show, Jon Gries (who wasn’t just King Vidiot in Joysticks, but also Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite, Lazlo in Real Genius, O.D. in TerrorVisionand the Werewolf in Monster Squad), Lauri Hendler from Gimme a Break, Barry “Ernie” Livingston from My Three Sons, the last surviving Munchkin (until May 24, 2018) Jerry Maren, David Nelson from Ozzie and Harriet, Cathy Silvers of Happy Days, Tom Villard (you know how much I love to get a Popcornreference in) and Dawn Wells from Gilligan’s Island (but also from The Town that Dreaded Sundown). If you like spotting actors and wondering where you know them from, this is the movie for you.
It was directed by Rod Amateau, who has plenty of TV directing and production credits for shows like Dukes of Hazzard, Supertrain, the Dukes’ spin-off Enos, My Mother the Car, a failed TV series pilot for the Kenny Rogers vehicle Six Pack that didn’t star Kenny Rogers and The Garbage Pail Kids movie. Mr. Amateau even did stunts in Rebel Without a Cause and Mighty Joe Young.
This was so successful that a one-hour pilot for a regular series was made and aired on May 26, 1984. According to Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson, he was going to be one of the stars of the series but turned down the offer as the material wasn’t very good. The network thought he was just playing hardball and upped their offer. This is when he realized how shallow Hollywood is and left town.
It’s kind of funny to see Anthony Edwards be the rich villain when he’s so well known for being on the other side in Revenge of the Nerds. It’s not the greatest movie you’ve ever seen, but if you’re looking for something to make you happy at 2 AM on a drunken Saturday night, it’s there on Amazon Prime just waiting to be watched.
On March 7, 1983, ABC presented this slasher movie of sorts that’s packed with plenty of great talent and enough twists to get you from commercial break to commercial break.
Stephanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin, Better Off Dead, Amityville II: The Possession) is spending the summer at Starkweather Hall, a rich girl’s boarding school. She’s a simple young lady, so she doesn’t fit in at first, but soon makes friends with Marita (Ally Sheedy), Calli and Shama, her Saudi princess roommate.
Everything seems to be going well until the murders start. Detective Russ Kemper comes to investigate and you know he’s a cop, because Larry Wilcox (Jon from CHiPs) plays him. Instead of waiting to learn who the killer is, Stephanie decides to play investigator with the help of stable boy Eddie Fox (Bill Paxton).
This movie is packed with red herrings, like the school janitor who thinks that Marita’s mother was his daughter. But the truth? It’s the cop! His mother, headmistress Miss Wade (Donna Reed!) abandoned him as a child. Therefore, he’s going to take away the lives of these girls that she loves and ruin her school.
Written by Jennifer Miller (who brought The Dark Secret of Harvest Home to TV) and directed by TV movie master William Wiard (This House Possessed, Fantasies), this is a fine way to pass some time and play spot the future star.
It’s not available on DVD, so visit YouTube or your favorite gray market source.
The first challenge on the list: 1. THE LADY AUTEUR: Pioneering women directors in psychotronic cinema. Now see who’s wearing the pants in Hellywood.
I’ve gone with Doris Wishman, who produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958, with her feature debut being 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.
She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.
That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.
Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.
As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.
That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.
From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.
There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.
Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.
Back to Wishmasn. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”
Originally airing on March 6, 1983 on NBC, The Demon Murder Case was based on the trial or Arne Cheyenne Johnson, better known as the Devil Made Me Do It Case. It was the first court case in the United State in which the defense sought to prove innocence based on the defendant’s claim of demonic possession.
The story starts on November 24, 1981 in Brookfield, Connecticut when Johnson was convicted for the first-degree manslaughter of his landlord. The Glatzel family claimed that their 11-year-old son David was possessed and after the aid of Ed and Lorraine Warren (you knew they’d get involved here), as well as some Catholic priests, the demon was cast from their child’s body. Unbeknownst to them, it went into the body of their daughter’s boyfriend — Johnson — before caused him to kill said landlord after an argument.
The day after, Lorraine Warren informed the Brookfield Police that Johnson was indeed possessed when the crime was committed. Soon, the media got involved — fueled by the Warrens — who began working on a book, lectures and movie deals.
The major motion picture never happened, but Gerald Brittle, with the assistance of Lorraine Warren, published The Devil in Connecticut. While Lorraine Warren stated that profits from the book were shared with the family, it’s claimed that they only got $2,000 for the book.
Members of the family claim that the possession story was a hoax concocted by the Warrens to exploit a mental illness. The famous demonologists also claimed that the story would make the family millionaires and would help get Johnson out of jail.
For what it’s worth, Johnson and Debbie got married and still support the Warrens’ account of demonic possession and have stated that her family is just out for money.
I told you all that so that I can tell you about this.
You have to love a movie where a demon is described as looking like a cloven-footed man burnt from head to toes, wearing ripped jeans and a flannel. You also have to love this cast! Eddie Albert as an exorcist delivering priest? Cloris Leachman? Ken Kercheval? Kevin Bacon as the killer? Andy Griffith and Beverlee McKinsey as Warren stand-ins Guy and Charlotte Harris? And who is that doing the voice of the demon? Harvey Fierstein in his first screen role, just using his normal indoor voice!
For being a TV movie, this one has some pretty great VHS box art.
This also has good direction from William Hale, who was behind several Night Gallery episodes and the two Lace mini-series.
It’s not going to be the best demonic possession movie you’ve ever seen, but for a TV movie, it’s pretty fun. No one spits nails or anything. But it has some fun scares. I found it on YouTube, seeing as how it’s never been released on DVD or streaming. Come on — why are these great TV movies being withheld?
After the end of the world, water is in short supply. One woman has the key to the last fresh water on Earth, which is guarded by Amazons. She gets taken and tortured by an army of road warriors and only one man can save her. Stryker!
Cirio H. Santiago! Hello, old friend! We’ve watched so many of your movies, like Demon of Paradise, Wheels of Fire and The Big Bird Cage. Here, you’ll take us to Armageddon and beyond!
Our heroine, Delha, is on the run from Kardis and his gang. Luckily, Stryker (Steve Sandor, the voice of Darkwolf from Fire and Ice and Orion on the 1990’s Superman cartoon) and Bandit (William Ostrander, Christine) are here to help.
Delha has been trying to contact Trun, Stryker’s estranged brother, to help defend her colony. But Bazil, one of his Trun’s second-in-command guys, betrays them. Stryker is captured and tortured, but luckily he gave some dwarves water. So they come and rescue him just in time for the rest of Trun’s soldiers to defeat Kardis and give everyone the water they need.
There is also an entire army of Amazons wearing football shoulder pads, because that’s what you do in the future. Stryker goes more for the western look and he makes it work.
You can grab the blu ray of the Kino Classics reissue of this film from Diabolik DVD.
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