Tag Archives: 1983

POPCORN FRIGHTS 2023: Jaws 3D (1983)

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If you are a regular visitor to our site, you may realize that we love shark movies. We have a whole Letterboxd list devoted to them. While Sam’s taste may veer toward the ripoff side of the Jaws equation, Becca’s heart is with the sequels, even Jaws: The Revenge.

After a career as a production designer — he built the awesome New York City model in Escape from New York — Joe Alves took his experience on Jaws 2 to make this one. Earning the 1983 Golden Raspberry for Worst Director, he went back to production design for movies like Starman and Freejack.

But this wasn’t even the movie the producers wanted to make.

David Brown and Richard Zanuck, the producers for the first two Jaws films, brought in Matty Simmons, who produced National Lampoon’s Animal House, and Lampoon writers John Hughes and Todd Carroll to write a script called Jaws 3, People 0. With Joe Dante directing, it would have started with author Peter Benchley being devoured in his swimming pool. The studio didn’t want to turn what was fast becoming a joke into a joke and demanded another legitimate film. Brown and Zanuck responded by quitting the studio.

Richard Matheson was brought on to write this script, which was filled with studio demands, including needing to have Brody’s sons in the movie and a part for Mickey Rooney. The studio heads had never checked to see if Rooney was available so that shoehorning was all for naught. As for anyone from the previous films, Roy Schnieder said, “Mephistopheles couldn’t talk me into doing it. They knew better than to even ask.” He specifically took the movie Blue Thunder so that he would be unavailable.

“The third dimension is terror.”

Yes, in 1983, 3D was back, thanks to movies like Comin’ At Ya! Any movie in its third iteration — I’m looking at you Friday the 13th Part 3 and Amityville 3-D — were made ala Dr. Tongue, with things coming directly at your face.

Back in the days before Blackfish, Seaworld was a big name. Somehow, the producers were able to talk the brand — specifically SeaWorld Orlando — into being the location for this movie. I remember as an 11-year-old seeing ads all over the Cleveland park for this movie and wondering, “Why are they advertising something that scares everyone inside a place that is supposed to be making us happy?”

Young Mike Brody has grown up to be Dennis Quaid, who told Watch What Happens Live that this movie had the biggest cocaine budget of any film that he worked on. He told Andy Cohen that he was on cocaine in every frame of the movie. He and Kathryn Morgan (Bess Armstrong) are in charge of the park, which has somehow allowed a great white shark to swim on in and kill people, including some dudes who are there to steal some coral.

Louis Gossett Jr. is also here as Calvin Bouchard, the park manager, who for some reason is best friends with a hunter played by Simon MacCorkindale, which feels counter-intuitive to running a park that is all about the love of animals. Then again, knowing what we know about SeaWorld today, it all makes sense.

There are also two dolphin stars, Cindy and Sandy, who were not on blow but have a bigger role than many of the humans, including Kelly Ann Bukowski (Lea Thompson) and Sean Brody (John Putch). You have to admire the stupidity of someone who wants to ride in bumper boats when the deadliest predator known to man is on the loose.

Somehow, the stupidity continues to the point where a second and much larger shark gets in the park, which seems like the kind of thing that should get everyone fired and the park closed. There’s only one way to deal with this kind of thing: we gotta blow another shark up real good*. Luckily, the 3-D effect is here to show us this in graphic — and below-average even in 1983 — detail. You know how some effects look bad years afterward and you attribute them to the fact that the movie has aged? This looked bad in the time it took from filming to playing in theaters.

Ironically, this movie has a lot in common with Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Both of their original films were big successes in the 70’s that made their directors big names. Those directors didn’t come back for the sequels (well, Carpenter did reshoot plenty) and both were directed by the production designers of the original movies. They also moved the location and tried to do something different. While the Silver Shamrock caper is today much more well-regarded, Jaws 3D is still a joke to many.

By the way, for all the scorn through at Bruno Mattei for outright ripping off shark footage for Cruel Jaws, this movie had to pay a lawsuit to National Geographic for taking scenes from its 1983 documentary film The Sharks without authorization. Strangely, that makes me love this movie even more.

*Some of the entrails that fly out of the screen in 3-D are actually a brown leather ET doll.

Jaws 3D played in 3D at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)

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You know, I waited for years for this movie and, like Lemmy always sang, perhaps the chase is always better than the catch.

Originally filmed in Hungary in 1983, this movie was just a rumor for around four decades. But now it’s here.

Now we can talk about it.

Yellowstone National Park is expecting to have 50,000 people show up for a concert. Chief Ranger Nick Hollister (Steve Inwood) is in charge of making sure that everyone remains safe. That’s not going to be easy, because a poacher has killed the cub of a giant grizzly named Tawanda. Nick tries to warn Eileene Draygon (Louise Fletcher), who is putting on the rock show, but that goes over as well as closing the beach on the Fourth of July.

Samantha Owens (Deborah Raffin) is in charge of the bears and feels that instead of killing Tawanda, a grizzly expert named Bouchard (John Rhys-Davies) can just tranquilize it and place it into captivity. Great plan, but teenagers are already being killed by the bear. That’s right, George Clooney, Laura Dern and Charlie Sheen, early into their careers, are slashed by the titular terror.

By the end of this, the bear gets backstage and kills the so-called bear expert before its lured onstage and knocked off into equipment, causing a huge electrical explosion that the crowd thinks is just part of the show. Screw them. That bear should be rampaging in the mosh put right now.

The big crowd at that show was because the band Nazareth was performing. It was the largest public gathering in Hungary since the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Originally called The Predator, this film was abandoned by its producer Joseph Ford Proctor on the first day of shooting. It was finished by co-producer Suzanne C. Nagy, who held the rights for decades, thanks to a Japanese investor who showed up and paid for the rest of the filming. The Hungarian government took most of the film’s equipment for non-payment of bills, which is why post-production was never finished.

Cannon Group, Inc. bought the film in 1987 and planned to finish its post-production and release it, but then Cannon started to falter and the movie was lost again. This feels very on-brand for Cannon.

This was written by Joan McCall, who played Allison in Grizzly. She also wrote Heart Like a Wheel and episodes of Days of Our Lives, Another World, Search for Tomorrow, Santa Barbara and Divorce Court. She also acted in William Girdler’s Project: Kill and played Julie, the heroine murdered by Leif Garrett with a stick in the throat in Devil Times Five. She was the wife of Grizzly writer David Sheldon, who co-write the script with her.

Sheldon was originally going to direct this movie but one imagines that when Edward L. Montoro of Film Ventures International disappeared, the rights to this got murky. They got probably worse when Proctor bought the movie and chose to make it with a German producer who has only directed one other movie, André Szöts.

Oh — if you’re like me and love to spot people, Deborah Foreman is in this as Nick’s daughter. Plus, the hunters who screw everything up trying to get the bear are Halloween alumnus Charles Cyphers, Marc Alaimo (Arena), Charles Young and Jack Starrett. That’s right, the director of Race With the Devil, Cleopatra Jones and Final Chapter: Walking Tall was in Hungary, playing a small role in this movie.

Oh yeah again — the robotic drummer in the band The Predator is Barbie Wilde, the female cenobite from Hellraiser II and gang leader Manny Fraker’s girlfriend in Death Wish 3!

It’s not great, you can hear cues from off camera and most of the movie is about getting a concert on the stage. But hey — it’s another bear against man movie and I’ll watch all of those.

CBS LATE MOVIE: Psycho II (1983)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Psycho II was on the CBS Late Movie on April 14, 1989.

Making Psycho II was a thankless task but there’s no reason why this movie is as good as it is.

Author Robert Bloch had already written his sequel, which satirized Hollywood slasher films. Universal didn’t want to film, that, but they did want a sequel. They turned to Road Games director Richard Franklin — a student of Hitchcock — to make this from a script by Tom Holland.

Hilton A. Green, assistant director of the original Psycho, was contacted and asked if he wanted to produce. He wasn’t sure that Hitchcock would have approved the movie, but the director’s daughter Patricia gave her blessing.

As for Anthony Perkins, he turned down the role until he read the script, learning that it was Norman’s story and that he was the hero. Seriously, the entire world is the enemy in this movie, wanting to see Norman become insane again and all he can do is struggle against them.

He just wants to live behind the hotel and work in a diner and allow life to just keep going, finally free from being in a mental institution. But then the calls and notes from mother keep coming and Norman starts lashing out at everyone, thinking that it has to be someone like new hotel clerk Warren Toomey (Dennis Franz) or Lila Loomis (Vera Miles), the sister of the woman he killed so many years ago.

As Norman is locked inside his mother’s room, a female figure keeps killing people throughout town and soon, even in the house. And just how does Mary (Meg Tilly) figure into all of this? Can therapist Dr. Bill Raymond (Robert Loggia) figure it out in time?

I waited for years to watch this as I figured there was no way it could compare. Even when others told me I was wrong, I didn’t believe them. I can admit it. I was very wrong.

CBS LATE NIGHT MOVIE: Vultures (1983)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Vultures was on the CBS Late Movie on March 19 and August 20, 1986.

When Ramon (Jim Bailey) begins to get close to death, he summons his relatives to his bedside to discuss his will and testament. But then the killings begin, wiping out everyone in the will.

Directed and written by Paul Leder (My Friends Need Killing, I Dismember Mama, A*P*E*), Vultures sets itself up like any murder mystery, but how it’s made points to just how incredibly strange it is.

First off, nearly every murder is incredibly bloody, making this feel more like a slasher than a staid Agatha Christie affair. Then, it has a cast of some of my favorites, including Aldo Ray, Yvonne DeCarlo and Stuart Whitman. And is that Carmen Zapata from the Sister Act movies? Meredith MacRae from Petticoat Junction  (and Leder’s My Friends Need Killing)? Greg Mullavey from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman? And Maria Perschy from The People Who Own the Dark, The Ghost Galleon and Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll? How did that happen?

Yet the strangest and most wonderful thing is that this has an “Introducing Jim Bailey” credit.

Bailey is more than one role in this movie, playing several male and female roles beyond just Ramon. He’s also Richard Garcia, the psychic Esperanza, Virginia Garcia, Olivia Mann and a female impersonator in this. Bailey is a versatile performer and often played Vegas, doing impressions of Garland and Streisand. According to this great interview with Daily Grindhouse, Bailey became “one of the go-to performers for male-to-female characters in Hollywood.” He’s Cleopatra, the lover of Anthony Geary’s Serenghetti in Penitentiary III and also shows up in episodes of Night Couty and Ally Mcbeal as well as in the cast of another strange movie I’m fascinated by, The Surrogate, where you can witness him do his Bette Davis act.

The black sheep of the family, Carl (Stuart Whitman), is the main suspect. There are two gory knife attacks — Aldo Ray doesn’t even make it long past the credits, which video blur out the original title, Vultures In Paradise — and a car gets blown up real good. There are twists and turns, but it makes sense that this aired on the CBS Late Movie, because it really does feel like a TV movie. And I mean that in the best of ways, but also a TV movie that has a drag performer not just as a sideshow act but as a crucial and memorable part of the cast in six different roles.

This is one odd movie and I would not have found it without my friend the CBS Late Movie. It’s the kind of movie that I needed to watch in 2023 and not back in 1986 when it aired, because it had to find me.

David DeCoteau wrote a great remembrance of Leder on one of my favorite sites, The Schlock Pit, and revealed that his movie Dreamaniac was shot in the same house as this movie, which was owned by Bill Norton (Big Bad Mama, Day of the Animals).

CBS LATE MOVIE MONTH: Prototype (1983)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Prototype was on the CBS Late Movie on June 5, 1987 and January 28 and May 12, 1988.

Directed by David Greene (The People Next Door, Madame Sin) and written by the team of William Link and Richard Levinson, who wrote and created Columbo, Mannix, Blacke’s Magic, Scene of the Crime and Murder, She Wrote. They also wrote the movie Rollercoaster and the Doug Henning stage play Merlin.

Michael (David Morse) is a government experiment created by Dr. Carl Forrester (Christopher Plummer) and his team to be more human than human. The doctor sneaks Michael home over the holidays and even takes him shopping, which enrages his bosses. When it becomes clear that the military is planning on using creations like Michael to become killers, Forrester goes on the run, taking Michael back to the college he used to teach at. Michael learns that he has self-determination, which leads him to be the one who makes the final decision about his fate, which is setting himself ablaze like a monk or Richard Lynch.

Don’t be fooled by the artwork that appeared on the VHS boxes for this movie. Those make it seem like this is a Terminator remake remix rip-off. This is as far from that as you can get, a thoughtful movie about what would happen when an artificial human comes to life and self-awareness.

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival: Eyes of Fire (1983)

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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.

I watched this film as part of The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN), as part of the Folk Horror: Lands of Cruelty, Beliefs of Terror program which also includes Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Kill List, the 2019 French version of la Llorona, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, Bldg. N, In My Mother’s Skin and To Fire You Come at Last. You can learn more at their official site.

Chattanooga Film Festival Red Eye #8: Silver Slime (1981), Killing Spree (1984) and Possibly In Michigan (1983)

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Silver Slime (1981):

Christopher Gans has made some great movies and gets little credit. His better-than-the-game Silent Hill, Crying Freeman, his segments in Necronomicon and the incredible Brotherhood of the Wolf are among his many accomplishments.

As a student, he made this film, which pays tribute to Bava, complete with a dedication at the end. And you know, in just around 15 minutes, Gans gets it. He understands how giallo works, and instead of making the kind of modern Giallo that everyone tries these days, he crafts a film that looks bad with love and then goes forward, taking what works and creating a near-lunatic energy that feels like where you’d hoped Argento would have kept going after Tenebre and Opera.

Only two actors are credited: Aissa Djabri as Le témoin (the witness) and Isabelle Wendling as La victim (the victim). Like all Giallo directors of ill repute, one must assume that Gans is the killer or at least their hands.

Phillipe Gans and Jean-François Torrès created the music for this, and much like the visuals, it takes the sound of the form and makes it more hard-driving and powerful, while Jérôme Robert has gone on to plenty of work in the French film industry.

This just knocked me out.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Folies Meurtrières (Killing Spree) (1984): Shot on Super 8 at some time in the early 80s in France, this film is 52 minutes of a killer aimlessly killing, killing and killing some more while a fuzzed-out synth soundtrack plays, the kind of music that those that say their films are “inspired by John Carpenter” but just have a neon color palette and a few keyboard songs on the soundtrack dream and wish and hope and pray that they could achieve.

Then everything changes.

And by changes, I mean the end of Maniac gets ripped off.

Look, I get it, this is a cheap knockoff of a slasher that may be bright enough to make fun of the things we accept in these films. But man, I love these lo-fi movies that want nothing more than to make their own effects and do their best to entertain you. They’re not significant movies — they were never intended to be — but they were a lot of fun to make.

I’ve heard that this movie is in the genre Murderdrone, in which “90% of the movie is people wandering around and getting murdered set to shitty lo-fi bedroom synths, and it’s increasingly hard to pay attention, but you can’t look away, and you’re stuck in a murdertrance.” This Letterboxd list has some more of those…

As for the man who made this, Antoine Pellissier, he’s a doctor now.

Possibly In Michigan (1983): Made with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, video artist Cecelia Condit’s nightmarish short has had many lives: as an art project to help her heal from her past, as a scare tactic shown on the 700 Club and as a viral video that got shared without context and was rumored to be a cursed film.

Starting with her film Beneath the Skin, Condit uses her video work to attempt to deal with the cycles of violence that she felt were all around her and so close to her. That’s because, for a year, she dated Ira Einhorn, the Unicorn Killer, who was also one reason we had Earth Day. The entire time that they dated, the rotting body of his ex-girlfriend, Holly Maddux, was in a trunk. A trunk that Condit constantly walked past, one assumes.

It made it onto religious television because, in addition to examiningt the self-destructive behaviors of men toward women, it alsoexaminest female friendships and love.The lead characters, Sharon and Janice, may be a couple, or they may just be supportive women. Or both. Who are we to put any bounds on their relationship?

It’s become a viral sensation several times, as teens try to copy its strange musical numbers and send it to one another as a curse straight out of The Ring.

Our ladies are just trying to shop for perfume — this was shot at Beachwood Place in Beachwood, Ohio, where Condit sat outside the building manager’s office until she was allowed to shoot there; she was given twenty-minute blocks of time, which was a challenge — when Arthur begins to stalk them, a man whose face changes with a series of latex masks.

Arthur is the kind of Prince Charming who shows his love to women by hacking them to pieces; his always-changing face is a way of showing the roles that abusive men have taken in their relationships. We also discover that Sharon is attracted to violent men but also likes making them think that violence is their idea. Regardless, love should never cost an arm and a leg.

The songs, written and performed by Karen Skladany (who also plays Janice), are insidious in the way that they worm their way into your brain. This is the kind of weirdness that is completely authentic in a way that today’s manufactured social media creepypasta weirdness cannot even hope to be a faint echo of.

As frightening as this can be, it’s also a film about absorbing — eating a cannibal is one way, right? — and getting past the worst moments of life without being destroyed by them. This also lives up to so much of what I love about SOV in that while we’ve been taught that the 80s looked neon and sounded like a Carpenter movie, the truth is that the entire decade was beige and sounded like the demo on a Casio keyboard. This doesn’t nail an aesthetic as much as document the actual 1983 that I lived within, minus the shape-changing cannibal and singsong happy tale of a dog in the microwave.

Consider this absolutely essential and one of the most critical SOV movies ever.

The Chattanooga Film Festival is happening now through June 29. To get your in-person or virtual badge to see any of these movies, click here. For more information, visit chattfilmfest.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Junesploitation: Mission Thunderbolt (1983)

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June 24: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 80s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

A cut and paste — I mean, Godfrey Ho’s name is all over his — of new footage with the movie Don’t Love Any Stranger, this starts with a couple making love before she slices his throat with a razor. Then, two women are sight-seeing before a gang attacks them.

There are two gangs in Hong Kong, the Serpents and the Scorpions. Interpol is on the case, sending an agent who targets a boss and pitting gang against gang.

We then go to a karaoke bar where Allison sings “Mickey.” The Mickey you’re so fine song, copyright be damned, this is, again, Godfrey Ho. She’s really there to find out who killed her friend Rosie, which means working in a hostess club owned by Scorpions leader Phoenix. A fight breaks out and the once cheerful singer shreds a man’s face before bonding with Phoenix, who decides to tell her how she got to her position, which mostly involved killing every man that wronged her. Now, she’s at war with the Serpents and their boss Hercules.

There’s also The White Tycoon, who has hired three secret agents — including the aforementioned blonde woman, who is the best part of this, killing numerous marks every time she appears on screen — to sow dissension between the gangs. He also likes to sacrifice chickens to increase his power before he fights the secret agent, who finds him by torturing the blonde woman by placing her face first in an oil drum, adding a rat and then throwing in a cat. And he’s the good guy, but as I’ve learned from Godfrey Ho movies, the good guys are allowed to torture people.

You know, these movies are all flowing together in my brain and now I have so many Thunderbolt-named movies: Majestic Thunderbolt, Scorpion Thunderbolt, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Operation 4:Thunderbolt Angels, Inferno Thunderbolt and Mission Thunderbolt. I plan on watching them all, but there are times that between the fact that they are two movies at the same time and that they all flow together, they put me into a near-murderdrone drug state.

Which is why I am watching them.

I honestly have no idea what is happening in this movie for a lot of the time, but of all the Godfrey Ho movies that I have seen, this one looks the best quality wise.

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE FILMS OF BRIAN DE PALMA: Scarface (1983)

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There’s not much that I can add to the discussion on Scarface, but when you’re doing an entire week of the films of Brian De Palma, skipping it can’t happen.

Loosely based on the Armitage Trail novel and serving as a loose remake of the Paul Muni-starring film, Scarface came about when Al Pacino saw that 1930s gangster movie and thought it could be remade. While he and Sidney Lumet got as far as the idea that Tony Montana was a Cuban arriving in the United States during the Mariel boatlift, but artistic differences between the director and producer Martin Bregman meant that they couldn’t work together.

Lumet wanted a political movie that blamed Reagan for the influx of cocaine into the United States which wasn’t the movie Bergman wanted. He was replaced with Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone was picked to write it. He didn’t want to make a mob movie until he learned that it was to be set in Miami. He had to go to Paris to beat his cocaine addiction, as he felt he couldn’t write the movie while snorting lines.*

Speaking of Miami, this wasn’t even shot there. It’s LA. The Miami Tourist Board declined the request to film there as it feared that Scarface would deter tourism with its themes of drugs and gangsters.

Ah, Miami. In 1980, Cuban refugee and ex-convict Montana (Pacino) arrives there and soon emerges from a refugee camp alongside Manny Ray (Steven Bauer, the only Cuban in the main cast), Angel (Pepe Serna) and Chi-Chi (Angel Salazar). They get their green cards when they kill a former Cuban general for Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), the drug lord of Miami. After that excitement, being dishwasher seems like a major step backward.

They start to work for Lopez and it nearly ends for Tony just as quickly as it started. Under orders of Lopez’s main henchman Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham), Columbian dealers screw them on the deal and kill Angel with a chainsaw while Tony is forced to watch. When Martin Scorsese watched this scene, he turned to Bauer and told him: “You guys are great, but be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood… because it’s about them.”

He was right. Critics lost their minds and audiences walked out during this scene.

Manny and Chi-Chi save Tony and kill the Columbians, as the three get the money and the drugs back to their boss.

Given more power, Tony meets Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), a Bolivian drug dealer who quickly figures out that Omar is a police informant. Tony makes a deal without Frank’s approval, but before long, Frank doesn’t matter. Tony has his empire, Frank’s woman Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a giant mansion that becomes a fortress.

But that can’t last. Tony has moments of actual conscience that doom him and moments of sheer insanity that damn him even further, finally winding up inside his gigantic palace doing a mountain of coke and battling wave after wave of crime soldiers before getting shot in the back, dying in a fountain that says, “The world is yours.”

As you can imagine, this movie barely made it into theaters with all the violence. It was given an X rating for excessive and cumulative violence and for language even after De Palma cut the movie three times. Universal would not release this with an X, which meant they couldn’t advertise the film, so an appeal board composed of twenty theater owners, studio executives and independent distributors voted that an R-rated cut would be released. De Palma claimed that the changes between his final cut and the R were unnoticeable. The MPAA demanded that only the R cut would play, so De Palma released the uncut print and didn’t tell anyone until months after the movie had been playing.

Beyond the music and pro wrestling — say hello to the bad guy Razor Ramon — that were inspired by this, so much of Grand Theft Auto was directly from this movie. It was paid back when two video games came out, Scarface: The World Is Yours — in which Tony somehow survives and gets his revenge on Sosa — while Scarface: Money. Power. Respect. was a prequel to the movie.

It seems like everyone has seen Scarface and probably has the poster and t-shirt. That said, it’s made by a master director and fills every moment of its running time with manic energy. Kind of like the cocaine it was based on.

*Powdered baby laxative was what people were snorting in this. Pacino did so many rails of the fake drug that his nasal passages were torn to bits.

Occhio, malocchio, prezzemolo e finocchio (1983)

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Sergio Martino made four movies in 1983: two comedies with Gigi Sammarchi and Andrea Roncato (Acapulco, prima spiaggia… a sinistra and Se tutto va bene siamo rovinati), the post-apocalyptic 2019: After the Fall of New York and this movie. The title would be the ingredients for a witch’s spell: Eye, evil eye, parsley and fennel. Each of the stories star one of two comedy starts, either Lino Banfi or Johnny Dorell.

In the first story, “The Hair of Disgrace,” Altomare Secca (Banfi) owns an appliance store and plenty of problems, from a wife (Milena Vukotic, Andy Warhol’s Dracula) that has no interest in him and a daughter (Gegia) marrying a man that he hates. Then, one day, Corinto Marchialla (Mario Scaccia, the faith healer from The Antichrist) moves next door and Altomare believes that the man is the cause of all that has gone wrong in his life. His wife tells him to visit the King of the Occult (Franco Javarone), who advises him that he must take the hair from Marchialla’s wife Ludovica (Dagmar Lassander) to remove his bad luck.

Altomare keeps trying to remove all of the hair but the Malocchio, or evil eye, is still on him. It even causes his mistress Helen (Janet Agren, Hands of Steel) to leave him. Can he escape the spell that is on him?

The second story, “The Magician,” is about Gaspar the Magician (Dorelli), who wants to escape the life — and maybe the wife (Adriana Russo, Nightmare In Venice) — that he is in. A witch who is over three hundred years old, Marquise Del Querceto (Paola Borboni, who acted in nine decades of Italian cinema) promises him great power if he can get her pistachio ice cream. This transforms him into a magician able to even make it rain. Yet all the power has gone to his head and he has forgotten to get the witch the ice cream she asked for before her death. This story also has an appearance by Italian magician Silvan, who also performed card trucks under his real name, Aldo Savoldello, in Blonde In Black Leather.

Comedy is hard and often, Italian comedy is hard for American audiences to watch. Beyond the giallo that he was known for by American genre lovers, Martino made plenty of these movies.

You can watch this on YouTube.