Honestly, the fact that it’s taken me so long to get this movie up on our site is a major failure that I’d like to personally apologize for to each of you.
Dear reader, I am sorry.
Even a teenage Sam, looking furtively for prurient content late night on HBO and Cinemax knew that this movie, also known as Gwendoline, is one strange movie. It’s one part comic book adaption of the Bizarre BDSM comic strip Sweet Gwendoline by John Willie, one part old movie serial, one part softcore nudie and another part Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff. A lot of that mixture adds up and even when the movie starts to sputter, you still have to admire it for what it is.
If you haven’t seen it, well…you pretty much must.
After being captured by thieves and sold into white slavery, Gwendoline (Tawny Kitaen, as if you need another reason to watch this) is rescued by Willard (Brent Huff, Nine Deaths of the Ninja) and reunited with her maid Beth (French actress Zabou Breitman). It turns out that she is in China searching for the butterfly that her father spent his whole life looking for. And now, she has offered Willard money to take her to the land of Yik-Yak, which is filled with cannibals and a tribe of Amazon warriors who ride each other like horses and engage in gladiator battles.
That’s because the last time the volcano went off, all the men died and somehow, the women have survived by capturing men and having those violent battles to determine which woman gets to procreate with their prisoners of war, as decided by their queen (Bernadette Lafont, who was the face of French New Wave).
Oh yeah — and there’s also the villainous D’Arcy (whose likeness was based on creator Willie and is played here by Jean Rougerie, who was in A View to a Kill) who keeps tormenting our heroine and the fact that she has to make love to Willard while the queen watches and a volcano goes off. You know, just another ordinary day.
This was the last film made by Just Jaeckin, who fogged up the screen with 1974’s Emmanuelle and 1981’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, two movies that would play infinitely on Cinemax on Friday nights at 1:10 AM and made a legion of teenage boys get weak in the knees at the very mention of the name Sylvia Kristel.
The U.S. theatrical version of this movie clocks in at around 87 minutes, while the more libertine French cut is 105 minutes long. As for what is in those 28 exorcised minutes, I invited you to use your imagination, or better, just order the Severin blu ray, which also has interviews with creators Jackin and Willie.
It’s way better than it has any right to be and is one of the few sexy movies to be both a complete story, a rip-roaring adventure yarn and have actual palpable sexual tension. I’m so glad that I was finally able to get it up here on the site — pardon the obvious pun — and recommend that if you’re an open-minded grown-up that you check it out for yourself.
Join us as we pay tribute to the late Tawny Kitaen’s career with our exploration of her films.
Some people would watch this movie because it’s the debut of Alyssa Milano, but those people have no idea who Rainbow Harvest is. Rainbow was in two made for TV movies, a few TV shows and a handful of movies, including Mirror, Mirror and then she disappeared. She’s wonderful in this, a streetwise teenager who wins over Milano’s rich little girl and teaches her the ways of the world.
Danny Aiello plays her dad and instead of preaching, he beats her up repeatedly.
This won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984 and is probably the only movie ever reviewed on this site that has honor. So it has that going for it.
I promise to make up for this veer into respectability by watching something morally abhorrent next.
The best Science Fiction holds a mirror up to the society from which it sprang. Brother From Another Planet (1984) does this in several innovative ways. Written and directed by John Sayles, it tells the story of a three-toed empathic runaway alien slave (T2’s Joe Morton) stranded on earth. Despite the fact he cannot speak and is never named, he is one of the most sympathetic aliens ever committed to film. He hears and feels the past through surfaces. Upon landing on Ellis Island, he becomes overwhelmed by the voices of the past – a full 36 years before Klaus in The Umbrella Academy.
As much as Morton is the star of the film, Harlem – where “the brother” finds sanctuary – is his co-star. All the locations are real and at times it looks as if the people in the background were passers-by rather than paid extras. On life as person of color in the city, one character offers the opinion, “I’d rather be a cockroach on a baseboard up here, than the Emperor of Mississippi.” The brother likely feels the same way, albeit about his home planet.
At times, the narrative feels more like a series of short films, than a feature film, with each scene introducing a new character as the brother navigates his way through new earthly experiences. When he’s not working at fixing old arcade games with his special powers, he hangs out in a local bar.The regulars speculate as to his predicament, although they never guess he’s not “one of them.”
The brother’s silence leaves ample room for one-sided conversations. Funniest of all is when a couple of tourists from the mid-west spend hours drinking with him believing themselves to be interacting with a genuine big city “local.” All the people the alien encounters offer him a chance to learn about humanity. Conversely, they all see a bit of themselves in him, completely oblivious to his true identity. It’s a powerful testament to the phenomena of psychological projection while also tackling the nature of xenophobia. Essentially, what the film is saying is that it’s what we believe about others that leads to understanding and fellowship, regardless of whether those beliefs are rooted in truth.
The residents of Harlem all treat brother kindly, giving him shelter and a job. He even falls in love, although it’s never clear if he’ll see her again. Like many of the vignettes in the plot, this one is left open-ended.
The only unsympathetic characters in the entire film are the two white “men in black” pursuing “brother” from their home planet (played by Sayles himself and a young David Strathairn.) The film concludes with others of the brother’s kind who have also assimilated into earth society coming to his assistance. Seeing they’re outnumbered, the pursuers humorously flee proving there’s power in numbers if only we’d realize it.
Overall, it’s a great movie and very different for 1984. Back then, everyone was in love with cute little aliens with glowing fingers. Brother From Another Planet isn’t sci-fi for kids and thankfully, has none of the ‘80s trappings. There are precious few special effects (although the brother’s removable eyeball that records the past was very realistic), it has only one cute kid who is not the least bit precocious, and the visitor from space never goes home. What does it have that those other films don’t? A great deal more intelligence. It’s filled with enough American history analogies and yes – heart – to keep even the staunchest sci-fi fan happy. Given the current state of racial and immigration affairs in the United States and across the globe, the film’s message of acceptance has definitely withstood the test of time. In short, I liked it. A lot. Fans of great writing, documentary-style filmmaking and terrific acting will, too.
A toast! Let’s raise those waxed cups n’ strawed A&W Root Beers to Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz and his return to the big screen with Robert De Niro starring in the remake of Harry’s 1982 feature, The Comeback Trail.
Prior to his tenure as a screenwriter, director and producer, the New York born and raised Hurwitz worked as a professor of film and drawing at several New York institutions, including a prestigious tenure at New York University.
That’s what I get for hiring a high school kid to do the sign. Eh, you get what you $5.00-buck-an-hour pay for, right? Know your “rose” suffixes, kid.
He made his debut as a filmmaker with 1970’s critically-acclaimed The Projectionist — a film noted as the acting debut for a then unknown comedian named Rodney Dangerfield — in a tale about a lonely projectionist (Chuck McCann) who imagines himself in the films he shows. Hurwitz also translated his life-long love of Charlie Chaplin in the 1972 sophomore effort, The Eternal Tramp.
While his films would see distribution with major studios, such as MGM/United Artists (Safari 3000), and major-independents, such as Almi Pictures, a division of Carolco (The Rosebud Beach Hotel), and Compass International (Nocturna), Hurwitz produced and directed 12 pictures, 9 of which he wrote, independently.
His resume features two films produced with a pre-Empire Studios Charles Band: the late ’70s sexploitation pieces Fairy Tales and Auditions. Hurwitz also wrote and directed 1972’s Richard, a social parody on President Richard M. Nixon. He re-teamed with his lifelong friend Chuck McCann in 1982’s The Comeback Trail, a somewhat semi-autobiographical tale about two independent film executives against-the-odds in producing a western with a washed-up cowboy star.
“Rose” BLANK And the $50 response is . . . “Is a Rose” The$150 response is . . . “Wood” And the $500 response . . . “Bud”
What the hell? Napoleon Solo? Well, it was either Match Game . . . or do a film with Harry. Oh, shite . . . say it ain’t so, Solo! The “comeback trail” isn’t paved with Harry Hurwitz films, Mr. Vaughn. Just ask Christopher Lee. . . .
Repeating the semi-documentary cinéma vérité style of 1978’s Auditions, Hurwitz also concocted 1989’s That’s Adequate; a Spinal Tapish tale about a troubled film studio that features an eclectic cast of comedians with Sinbad, Richard Lewis, and Rick Overton alongside a starbound Bruce Willis, Maureen “Marsha Brady” McCormick as a Space Princess, Robert Vaughn as Adolf Hitler (which is “funny” to fringe movie fans, when we remember Vaughn starred in 1978’s The Lucifer Complex), Susan “Laurie Partridge” Dey as a Southern Belle, and Robert Downey, Jr. as Albert Einstein. (Seriously: the film is that crazy.)
Harry’s most significant screen credit was working as one of the five screenwriters on a tale about the 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz, the 1981 Chevy Chase-starring Under the Rainbow for Warner Bros.-Orion Pictures. And we can’t forget Harry dipping his toes in the Blaxploitation pool as a producer with 1983’s The Big Score starring Richard Roundtree and the late John Saxon*.
Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz passed away on September 21, 1995, at the young age of 57 from heart failure while awaiting a heart transplant at the U.C.L.A Medical Center. This Drive-In Friday is for you, Harry. May your films live on for a new generation of video fringe enthusiasts. And they do!
In the ultimate show of respect to Harry’s imagination, on November 13, 2020**, the remake of The Comeback Trail, starring the Oscar acting elite of Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Tommy Lee Jones, was realized by writer-director George Gallo of Bad Boys fame.
Way to go, Harry!
Now, Mr. Gallo . . . about that Safari 3000 remake. . . .
What do you get when you go into business with a noted Las Vegas belly dancer who appeared on TV’s The Beverly Hillbillies . . . then cast Lily Munster, a B-Movie Dracula, and a couple of on-their-way-down ’70s disco stars — and negotiate a deal with MCA Records to release a disco-flavored soundtrack double album to promote the movie?
You get a Harry Tampa box-office boondoggle with John Carradine making back dick jokes. Can Countess Dracula turn her gay singer crush, straight? Do we care?
And to think the Compass International — a studio that had a worldwide hit on their hands with their debut release, John Carpenter’s Halloween — backed this vampire hookers romp. But they also made Roller Boogie, Tourist Trap, Blood Beach, and Hell Night . . . so you know where this disco Dracula romp is heading. Flushing is required.
What do you get when you go into business with United Artists and convince them a Smokey and the Bandit ripoff set on the African tundra will work?
You get a Harry Tampa box-office boondoggle with Christopher Lee frolicking with baboons and the guy who voiced the CP3O knockoff in Luigi Cozzi’s Starcrash. Does the fact that David Carradine is behind the wheel giving us some serious Death Race 2000 and Cannonball vibes save this VHSflotsam? No. And we wished ol’ Dave got off a couple of his dad’s bad dick jokes from Nocturna to compensate for the fact that Stockard Channing’s comedic timing makes the monkeys look good.
Intermission! With the stars of our next feature on tonight’s program! Let the tight pants and smoke wash over you!
What do you get when you contractually flim-flam cinema’s requisite Count, an ex-Runaway, a B-Movie apoc anti-hero, a washed up Tom Hanks TV sidekick, and wardrobe left overs from Glen Larson’s crap-ass Buck Rogers remake for TV?
You get a Harry Tampa ripoff of Bob Clark’s Porky‘s set in a South Beach Miami hotel. Do the adult film actresses working as topless bell hops for Madam Bobbi Flekman from Spinal Tap’s management team seducing Paco Querak from Hands of Steel save it? Do the cut-rate AOR-synth soundtrack ditties from Cherie Currie save it? No. And we wished Christopher Lee stuck to his original plan of torching the joint for the insurance money.
Movie 4: Fleshtone(1994)
What do you get when Harry Tampa answers paid cable’s call for “after hours” erotic thriller programming fodder for the wee-lads who can’t get dates on Saturday nights?
You get the bassist from the bane of our New Wave existence — Spandau Ballet — as a struggling painter twisting down a soft-core film noir spiral in this final, bitter sweet Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz’s effort completed a year before his death.
Truth be told, Martin Kemp, who been in the acting game in the U.K. since the ’70s before finding fame as a MTV favorite, is pretty decent here (he was in Sugar Town with John Doe and Michael Des Barres) as the noir schlub who can’t stay away from dangerous women who enjoy erotic sex games. And it’s nice to see Tim Thomerson (yep, the one and only Jack Deth from Trancers) on top of the marquee in this who-killed-her potboiler.
Do the adult film actresses that Harry likes to cast for that extra titillation-inspiration and lesbian sex scenes helping? Does the fact that the singularly-named Daniella also starred in Anal Maidens 3 and Assy 2 exciting you? How about those exotic Jo-Berg, South Africa locations?
Eh, a little . . . but in reality, this is probably the best of Harry’s films, courtesy of Kemp and Thomerson giving the material some class, and ’80s U.S. TV actress Lise Cutter isn’t so bad, but she’s not leaving the direct-to-video realms any time soon.
Yes! You Tube comes through in the clutch! You can enjoy Harry’s final film on You Tube. You can watch the other films on tonight’s program via the links in those reviews.
* We honored the career of the late John Saxon with our “Exploring: John Saxon” featurette.
**The Comeback Trail premiered at the 43rd Mill Valley Film Festival on October 12, 2020. It was initially scheduled to be theatrically released in the United States on November 13, 2020. However, due to the affects of COVID on theaters, Cloudburst Entertainment has pushed the release date to sometime in 2021.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Moviesand publishes on Medium.
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally reviewed this movie on October 9, 2019. However, the new release from Arrow Video made us sit back and watch it one more time, especially the great extra features that they always include.
The Last Starfighter is all about Alex Rogan (Lance Guest, Halloween 2), whose life is going nowhere but the trailer park where he takes care of everyone else and dreams of finding a better life with his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Marie Stewart, The Apple). His only escape is a video game called Starfighter, a video game that takes him to the Frontier, where he battles Xur and the devilish Ko-Dan Armada.
Of course, the game is just there to recruit him for a galactic battle and they send the Music Man — err, Centauri — who tries to talk him into joining up with the war effort. Either way, I’m still so amazed by the fact that Robert Preston is in this movie.
Another great character is reptilian navigator Grig, who is played by one of my favorite character actors, Dan O’Herlihy. Between this movie, Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and the Old Man in RoboCop, every time I see O’Herlihy in a film, I can’t help but smile. Here, he does it all while completely covered in reptilian makeup.
It’s a very simple, but effective, space opera that fits well into the science fiction of 1984. Credit the great direction by Nick Castle, who you probably already know played Michael Myers in the original Halloween, before making this his second film after Tag: The Assassination Game.
The beauty of the Arrow re-release — beyond the gorgeous 4K rescan of the 35mm negative — are all the extras. Not just one, but three commentary tracks are on this (star Lance Guest and his son Jackson Guest; Mike White of The Projection Booth podcast; director Nick Castle and production designer Ron Cobb), along with interviews with Catherine Mary Stewart, composer Craig Safan, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel, special effects supervisor Kevin Pike, a breakdown on the landmark effects and even a featurette with game collector Estil Vance, who has actually made the game from the movie.
I have to say, the Castle and Cobb commentary is packed with info, from who is playing the aliens to how the effects came together to even plenty of fun asides about how they tried to tie the video game world and real movie world together. It’s like listening to two friends talk about a really great time in their life. Castle is super honest about the lack of time they had to film and things he feels could be better today. It’s exactly the kind of thing that film lovers get into the most and, as always, Arrow delivers the goods.
You can get this blu ray from Arrow, who were kind enough to send us a copy.
Day 25: Hey, Baby, Can You Dance to It? This one has to have at least one substantial dancing scene in it. (And this one has a LOT!)
“Where Sex and Laughter Run Riot.” “Make your reservation for an explosive time at . . . The Rosebud Beach Hotel.” — From the Harry Tampa-employed copywriter’s department
Remember the crack I made about Concentration, the ’70s NBC-TV game show and its subsequent board game, in the context of our 2020 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 4 review? In that review I remembered little Jennifer Bates from the Georgia-shot Evil in the Woods grew up to work with director Bret Wood of Kino International, who recently returned to the big screen with Those Who Deserve to Die.
Well, this review is another “concentration” moment: for who else would remember the name of actor Daniel Green and go, “Holy Concentration, Batman! That’s Paco Querak!” And seriously: who else do you know that remembers the character names of D-grade Max Rockatansky and Snake Plissken knockoffs?
“I’d like to solve, Bill. ‘Daniel Green as Paco Querak!'”
Answer: me. And I am damn proud of my gifted “superpowers” that can’t save the world for shite . . . but Sam is lucky to have me on the staff at B&S About Movies to remember such things. Even Bill Van Ryn is amazed of the utter celluloid shite I can recall . . . for an VHS-analog-programmed brain is a terrible thing to waste. (Bill? You’re two weeks behind on the Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum plug payments. Don’t make me send Mr. Querak to collect and go apoc on your ass.)
So, back to Paco . . . sometime after doing the network TV rounds with episodes of Three’s Company, Matt Houston, and The Scarecrow (!) and Mrs. King, and The A-Team — and before his entry in the annals of Apocdom with Sergio Martino, aka Martin Doleman (2019: After the Fall of New York), in Hands of Steel — Daniel Green made his big screen debut in this Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz production.
Yes, the same guy who thought meshing vampires and disco was box office gold and that the road to the Oscars was paved with Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run good intentions. And ‘ol Harry’s never one to pass on a trend: a “trend’ that Robert Freese of Videoscope Magazine expertly pontificated in his “Exploring: ’80s Comedies” featurette for B&S About Movies. (I accept Paypal, Roger. Again, Paco’s only a phone call away.)
Vampires, African Tundras, and South Beach Hotels, oh, my!
As Robert pointed out, after the Snobs vs. Slobs subgenre (Animal House, Meatballs, Stripes, Caddyshack), the next popular and most common comedy subgenre of the ‘80s was the Sex Comedies/Teen Sex Comedies or — what Robert accurately refers to as — the “Everybody gets laid” movies. And while sex comedies were bountiful in the ’70s and continued in the ’80s, with Tom Cruise’s big screen debut in Goin’ All the Way, Private Lessons, and Waitress!, it was Bob Clark’s Porky‘s, released in 1981 amid those films, that set the stage: for Porky’s was the Star Wars of comedy films.
And Harry Tampa jumped on that porcine ripoff train, baby.
Hey, but wait a minute . . . Harry was already in the sex comedy game! In 1970 he brought us The Projectionist starring Chuck McCann and Rodney Dangerfield (aka the requisite slob vs. snob actor with Caddyshack and Easy Money). And how can we forget that 1978 dirty-ditty Fairy Tales, starring Sy Richardson of Charles Band’s softcore version of Cinderella. And how can we forget Harry’s other Charles Band co-production: Auditions, a documentary on the casting call for the never-made sequel to Fairy Tales. (And while I don’t recall it as “sex comedy”: did you know Harry made Richard, a 1972 satirical biopic on President Richard M. Nixon. True story.)
“R.D. Dude? We get it. You’re a fan of Harry Hurwitz films. So, what’s this all have to do with ‘dancing’ and the Scarecrow Challenge?”
Well, in the universe of Harry “Tampa” Hurwitz, not only do you get lots of beach frolicking and dancing . . . and Paco Querak. You also get Colleen Camp (Valley Girl), Bobbi Flekman from the Polymer A&R Department, Eddie Deezen, Chuck McCann, Hamilton Camp, a has-been Bosom Buddy, and an ex-Runaway. And since Harry had Christopher Lee on the hook from last year’s Safari 3000, he’s shows up, too.
Yes, you heard me right: Sir Christopher Lee in a sexploitation movie.
You heard me right: Runaways, Paco, Draculas, and Buck Rogers. Oh, my!
And “Oh, my!” is right, because this thing — as most ripoffs are — is a mess. Like a Golfballs! ripoff mess. Like a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hotel mess — only with a few just-for-the-hell-of-it shots of topless bellhop women (by adult film stars Monique Gabrielle, Julia Always, Durga McBroom, Tina Merkle, Julia Parton, and Paula Wood), you know, to sell those tickets . . . but this, like Nocturna, didn’t sell any tickets. . . .
So, the ol’ Count owns a dying hotel on Miami Beach that he’s ready to torch for the insurance money. But his daughter Tracy (Colleen Camp) convinces him that her milquetoast-workaholic fiancé (Peter Scolari) can run the hotel. And Papa Drac hates ol’ Pete, so he’s got a plan in place for the hotel to fail so his daughter dumps him. And to make it all work: Tracy hires hookers (led by Madam Fran Drescher) to work as bellhops to “service” the clientele. And Eddie Deezen . . . is Eddie Deezen . . . the same Eddie Deezen we just reviewed in Beverly Hills Vamp. And if you know your Eddie Deezen you know what we Deez, ah, mean.
“Hey, what about the Runaways?”
Well, Cherie Currie, who long quit the Runaways (of duBeate-o fame) at this point, was attempting to forge a solo career with her sister Marie Currie, which put out their only album, 1980’s Messin’ with the Boys (their cover of Russ Ballard’s — by way of Rainbow and St. Louis’ Head East — “Since You’ve Been Gone” hit #95 on the U.S. Top 100). So why they’re here — as dialogless singing maids — four years after the failure of that album, is anyone’s guess. Well, there’s no guessin’ necessary because, hey, it’s a Harry Tampa production and common sense goes out the 10th floor of the Rosebud (well, actually, the hotel is the “Fiesta,” but that’s plot piffle).
“Hey, wait a sec, R.D? So, is Buster Crabbe in here? You mentioned Buck Rogers.”
Nope, he died in 1983.
“Gil Gerard?”
Nope. The red jump suit.
“The . . . what the frack, R.D?”
The Currie sisters rock out wearing the same jumpsuits Markie Post from NBC-TV’s Night Court wore during her season one guest stint as Joella Cameron on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (the 1979 two-parter “The Plot to Kill a City” if you’re interested). As it turns out, the Universal Studios’ wardrobe department made two suits for the episode — and were shocked to re-discover the matching wares, when fitting the Currie sisters for the film.
Oh, and get this: the sci-fi connection continues . . . as Jay Chattaway, who scored the film, went on to compose the music for the Star Trek TV franchise. Oh, and he scored Maniac, Maniac Cop, and Maniac Cop 2.
Sadly, the Rosebud soundtrack — which the Currie sisters co-wrote with producer Dan Ferguson and their bassist, Stephen Crane — intended to be their follow up to Messin’ with the Boys, was never released. The Currie Sisters’ band also featured ex-Boz Scaggs and soon-to-be Cinderella drummer Jody Cortez (he recorded their hit album Night Songs but left the band before its release). Their guitarist, Duane Sciacqua, was a member of Marie’s husband, Steve Lukather’s, (Toto) solo bands and, with Stephen Crane, Sciacqua recorded an album for MCA Records under the KICKS moniker (“All My Love“). Sciacqua’s since toured and recorded with Glenn Frey, Joe Walsh, and Paul McCartney, and scored Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra.
While you can enjoy the Currie sisters tearin’ up their beach concert, you can enjoy several songs from the soundtrack, via film clips, on You Tube — and yes, each of the clips features LOTS of dancing, as per the Scarecrow requirement!
You can watch — and dance to, and drool to Fran Drescher in a bellhop uniform — The Rosebud Beach Hotel on You Tube. And all kidding aside, Harry. We love you. Thanks for VHS and cable memories.
Hey, be sure to check out our “Drive-In Friday” tribute to five of good ol’ Uncle Harry’s films!
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
If a slasher film can have a pedigree, which in this film’s case comes from its cast, let this be one of them. Seriously, there are some heavy hitters on hand here!
Detective Dinardo (Mike Connors, Mannix) is on the case in New York City, where those who live in a fancy apartment building are those who are dying horribly. All fingers seem to point in the direction of a doorman (an impossibly young Ian McShane), so Dinardo does what any good cop would do. He puts a rookie named Kate (Anne Archer) into harm’s way.
Other than some TV work, this was the first major acting that Maureen O’Sullivan had done in the twelve years since The Phynx. Further boosting this movies megawattage of stardom are Leon Isaac Kennedy (Penitentiary, as well as an early trailblazer of the porn leak thanks to a film he made with his then-wife Jayne Kennedy), Ruth Ford (who would know of high-living NYC apartments as her two spaces inside the Dakota were valued at $8.4 million when she died in 2009), John Heard (everything from Home Alone to C.H.U.D.), Carrie Nye (who in addition to being in The Seduction of Joe Tynan, was married to Dick Cavett), Murray Hamilton (whose resume is vast, but all you need to do is mention his work as the mayor of Amity), character actor Val Avery and Sully Boyer (The Entity, Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws).
This is Tony Lo Bianco’s only directing job, as he is better known in front of the camera, starring in movies like The Honeymoon Killers, Mean Frank and Crazy Tony and God Told Me To). Also known as The Doorman, it’s part of that subset of late 70’s and early 80’s slashers that depict the juxtaposition between the high rise and the low scum of end of the century — and the world — NYC. You can easily pair this with The Fan, Eyes of Laura Mars or even The New York Ripper.
Shot with the ArriVision 3-D camera system, Silent Madness wasn’t just late to the 80’s 3D revival, it was late to the slasher madness too. It was directed by Simon Nuchtern, president of August Films. He brought over plenty of foreign films and had them re-edited for American tastes, like the film that the Findlays shot in Argentina called TheSlaughter, which was released as Snuff. He also brought Karate Kiba to U.S. theaters with a new open and called it The Bodyguard and that’s why we call marijuana chiba, as well as directing New York Nights and Savage Dawn.
You have to love how Wikipedia has the writer of this movie, Bob Zimmerman, linked to Bob Dylan. Nope. This Bob was part of the camera crew for Don’t Go in the House and Nightmare. His co-writer was Bill Milling, who may be better known as an adult director using the names Philip Drexler Jr. (A Scent of Heather) and G.W. Hunter (Heart Throbs), Craig Ashwood (All American Girls), William J. Haddington Jr. (When A Woman Calls), Chiang (The Vixens of Kung Fu (A Tale of Yin Yang), Jim Hunter (Up Up and Away), Luis F. Antonero (Temptations) and Bill or Dexter Eagle (Virgin Snow). Some of the dialogue was written by Nelson DeMille, who would go on to write the book The General’s Daughter. They were all working from a story by Nuchtern.
The Cresthaven Mental Institute is, charitably, a mess. It’s also packed with patients, so they decide to just declare several of the patients cured, which means that Howard Johns (Solly Marx, Honcho from Savage Dawn, the Samurai from Neon Maniacs and plenty of stunt work too) is let go instead of John Howard. Years ago, after peeping on some sorority sisters, they had decided to strip for him — because that’s how we dealt with Me Too moments back then, kind of like giving someone a whole carton of cigarettes to smoke when all they wanted was one, and that’s a bad euphenism and I don’t condone this kind of behavior — and he lost it and killed them all. So to prove that the nature vs. nurture argument is a joke and the seventeen years of treatment did nothing, the very first thing John does when he gets released is kill an aardvarking couple in their van with a hatchet and a sledgehammer.
Dr. Joan Gilmore (Belinda Montgomery, who has been the love interest for The Man from Atlantis, Crockett’s ex-wife on Miami Vice and Doogie Howser, M.D.‘s mother) realizes that something smells bad in Denmark — or Cresthaven — and starts looking into this, only to learn that Howard Johns was already dead when the computer snafu happened. She teams up with a reporter and goes undercover as a legacy at the sorority where everything when wrong all those years ago, because she obviously realizes that she’s in a slasher movie and the killer always comes back to the scene of the crime.
There are so many plot threads going on here. There’s also the conspiracy at the mental hospital and the cyborg experiments being done on the patients that goes nowhere. Additionally two killers hired by Dr. Kruger* (Roderick Cook, who shows up in two of Becca’s favorite childhood films, 9 1/2 Weeks and Spellbinder, movies no seven-year-old should be watching and that’s why I love her) are on hand to kill off our protagonists. And there’s the killer coming back to the sorority house.
I’ve gotten this far and forgotten to inform you that Sydney Lassick (sure, he was Mr. Fromm in Carrie, but he’s also in Skatetown U.S.A.; 1941; Alligator; The Unseen and shows up as Mr. Lowry in Lady In White) plays the law in this and the house mother is Viveca Lindfors (The Bell from Hell, Creepshow). And two of the teens — Janes and Paul — are played by Katherine Kamhi and Paul DeAngelo, who we all know better as Meg and Ronnie from Sleepaway Camp.
Shot under the title DarkSunday, with alternate names thrown about like Beautiful Screamers, The Omega Factor” and The Nightkillers, I have really no idea why this is called Silent Madness.
Teens are killed by vice, by steam, by nailgun and by aerobicide, while drills and crowbars and broken mirrors take out some of the antagonists. You’ll wonder, when we knew that toxic masculinity and the health care system were both the biggest issues we’d be facing as a society way back in 1984, why did we just concentrate on making sure the slasher killer was dead instead of working on the root cause? And that’s why we are where we are, except you know, there’s no real Jason Vorhees. Or Howard Johnson. Or John Howard.
Vinegar Syndrome has announced that they are putting out a 3D movie this year. This would seem to be the right one, seeing as how it fits perfectly into the other films they’ve released.
*Seeing as how this was really shot in 1983, it’s prescient that the bad guy has that name and works out of a boiler room.
“A bloody trail of seemingly senseless murders leads a terrified young girl into a nightmarish web of police corruption and deadly, psychopathic madness!”
We haven’t had a killer judge on our site since we talked about Lindsay Shotneff’s — working as Lewis J. Force — Night After Night After Night.
Made in 1981 but not released until three years later, this is one of those movies where I have to use my scale of “Is it a giallo or a slasher?” It does have some attempts at fashion — which I’ll get to — but it’s grimy and near artless, with no attempt at a great soundtrack or color palette. So let’s say it’s a political conspiracy/woman gone wrong slasher, a hybrid that is pretty much a rarity.
There are also innumerable scenes of people eating in this, including one scene in a diner where a loud old homeless man dislikes his soup so much that he stands up and urinates in it before starting a fistfight.
One of that place’s waitresses — Janet (Pamela Collyer, Meatballs III: Summer Job) — has no money and a controlling low-level mobster boyfriend named Dino (Jack Langedijk, who was in the 2000 version of Left Behind). Her friend April (Nanette Workman, who sang backup for the Stones on “Honky Tonk Woman” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”) suggests that hey, maybe she should try some hooking. After all, April has all of these fabulous outfits — her housecoats look like something Ric Flair would wear to defend the belt against Tommy Rich in Greensboro — and smokes all the time, so why not? Janet shares this idea over pillow talk with Dino and gets thrown out of bed naked, so she decides to stop being controlled and start selling her body.
Is this going to become a slasher soon? Just as I think that, a mental patient (Walter Massey, Happy Birthday to Me, Zombie Nightmare) kills a doctor and nurse and runs into the night.
Back to Janet being a hooker. Now, her friend April has brought her in to sleep with a rich client who looks like Rip Taylor and acts like Evelyn Quince. They’re attempted — and creepy — menage a trois is interrupted by the lights going out and the maniac killing everyone but our heroine, who the police blame for the killing. So in the question of giallo vs. slasher, Janet must now become the detective and solve this. However, she is not a stranger in a strange land and the fashion sense of this movie remains horrid, so we are still in slasher country, even if the mysterious killer has on black leather gloves.
Oh and hey — the cop who accuses our protagonist of the crimes is slasher vet Roland Nincheri (Visiting Hours, Terror Train). Suzanne DeLaurentiis, who produced the film D-Railed that we covered last year, is also in this.
Terror in the Aisles once was only available as a bonus feature on the Shout! Factory Halloween IIblu ray, but now that it’s available on its own, I’m excited for other people to see it. It was a multi-watch on HBO for me when I was young. Even better, this played theaters!
Andrew J. Kuehn revolutionized movie trailers — he created the trailers for Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, Top Gun, the Indiana Jones movies and more — before he started producing and directing movies like Get Bruce and the remake of D.O.A.
There are so many scenes clipped into this film, which is hosted by Donald Pleasence and Nancy Allen who are sitting with a crowd of fake moviegoers who react to the rapid-fire scenes as they come hard and fast. Instead of a laundry list of films — I mean, do you want to read 78 (91 in the network TV version) titles? — let me tell you the more interesting ones, like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Phantom of the Paradise, Suspiria, The Car, The Legacy, The Funhouse and, of course, the first two Halloweenfilms.
For some reason, even though nearly every movie here was R-rated (Dawn of the Dead was released unrated), this film had to endure several cuts to avoid an X rating.
You can watch this on YouTube or order the new stand-alone blu ray from Shout! Factory.
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