I could have been the best, I could have had it made. Because of you and all the rest I wound up in a grave. In my dying day, revenge I swore I’d take. Now your time is running out! Let’s kill for killing’s sake!

1984’s Rocktober Blood starts with Billy “Eye” Harper singing “I’m Back” while his girlfriend and backup singer Lynn Starling watches. Billy tells her off, telling her he’s going out on a date with someone else. Before he leaves, he tells her he wrote the song “Rainbow Eyes” for her. Everyone in the band leaves except Lynn, who tries to record some of her own tracks before turning down the recording engineer’s come on and going to the jacuzzi upstairs alone.

Billy returns, only to kill the engineer while he’s playing pinball by slicing his throat. Then, he impales the engineer’s assistant (he must have hated the mix) before smoking some drugs in  a metal one hitter while looking like Larry Sweeney. Lynn has no clue any of this has transpired, but she soon  finds out that he’s killed both of them. Billy wants to make sure his message is coming through as he begins laughing like a villain. Lynn discovers the assistant’s body as Billy continues to laugh and menaces her with a knife, demanding that she sing. A passing security guard saves her life and we cut to two years later and the Rocktober Blood Release party.

Billy was captured, tried and executed while Lynn and the remaining band members changed their name to Headmistress. VJ Rick Righteous stops by, does some coke and interviews Lynn about Billy’s murder spree and having to finger Billy, which led to his conviction.

Then, while the bands are playing and everyone is dancing and getting their faces painted and smoking cigarettes and breakdancing, a mysterious figure appears and tells Lynn she needs to meet with her manager. It’s all a ruse, because it’s Billy — back from the grave, just like he said he would be.  Lynn is left crying in the corner, emotionally decimated by whatever Billy said to her.

I really have to note that there is way too much breakdancing for a heavy metal movie. In my experience, these worlds never played well together.

Lynn goes away to a cabin, but Billy’s music follows her everywhere she runs, so she tries to aerobic exorcise Billy away. There are more girls sweating in this scene than a Bruce Seven video. The phone keeps ringing, leading to an insane prank phone call (sampled on Acid Witch’s “Midnight Movies” EP) that has the caller begging for “hot steaming pussy blood all over my face.” The phone just keeps ringing and ringing, even when its off the hook, but look out! Billy’s in the house!

He starts killing anyone that is close to Lynn, including drowning one girl with a high collar in the jacuzzi. He keeps hiding the bodies so that everyone thinks she’s gone crazy again.

Also – the sets for this are the most 80s sets you’ve ever seen. Everything is wood grain and giant bathtubs and giant houseplants. It’s nearly 70s more than 80s. But who the fuck carpets a bathroom?

Also, the film makes every opportunity to show nudity, if you’re interested in those things. Fun fact: in the VHS pre-internet era, this was as good as it got for most kids under 18.

Security gets increased and the head security guy acts like a complete prick to Lynn, making fun of her for being so afraid. Well, you know, if your boyfriend killed a ton of people and then stabbed you, well, maybe you’d be a little worried.

After all this craziness, Lynn decides that she’s going to dig up Billy’s grave…and Billy is in it. So who is it that’s screwing with her? We don’t have long to wait. Billy shows up backstage and a groupie asks, “Who are you?” “Death,” he responds as he kills her with a hot iron. Yes, he literally irons her neck. This just took this review from a frown to a smile.

Lynn and the band are getting ready to perform when Billy reappears to tell her that he’s really Billy’s twin brother John…and she let the wrong man die. He wrote all the songs by himself and tonight, he’ll perform them and kill her at the end of the show. Holy shit, I love John. I love how he randomly says stuff like, “Fucker!” He makes this movie so much better than it is before he finally reveals himself.

The band takes to the stage and security guards save the day. Again. Ugh. At least John gets to scream “I’m Back” as they take him away.

Rocktober Blood isn’t an easy watch. The music is way better than the film, thanks to Sorcery. A band that played metal while two master magicians playing Merlin and the devil battled on stage, they’ve been on my radar since I first saw the trailer to Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Stunt Rock. I don’t have the right words to explain to you my love for this trailer, so I’ll just share it.

Do you have a metal horror movie I missed? Yeah, I know Deathgasm is probably a good one, but I’m more about the cruddy VHS films, what can I say? But let me know — I’m sure there will be another week of metal movie marijuana massacre meltdown soon.

Be sure to check out out review of Rocktober Blood 2: Billy’s Revenge, part of our “Box Office Failures Week” and our second look at Rocktober Blood by R.D Francis to commemorate the July 31, 2019 death Nigel Benjamin, the “voice” of Billy Eye Harper.

Let’s face it. I love portmanteau movies. From Tales from the Crypt to Asylum, The House that Dripped Blood and The Monster Club, a good part of our DVD collection is devoted to these films (mostly of the Amicus variety). 1984’s The Dungeonmaster attempts to be both a narrative and portmanteau all at the same time — to sometimes uneven results.

Also known as Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate and Digital Knights, this Charles Band-produced effort (Puppet Master, Subspecies, Re-Animator) made up of seven different segments, all connected by the battle between Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn ) and Mestema (Richard Moll, who played Bull from TV’s Night Court, as well as The Sword and the Sorcerer, House, Wicked Stepmother and more). Again, it’s a film that struggles to find a tone — it wants to be Tron as much as it wants to be a filmed version of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Paul may not be able to balance a checkbook, but he loves to jog and he’s great at fixing computers. In fact, the dude is so good, he has 2017 iPhone tech that tracks his jogging. If you watch the film today, you’ll be like, “Yeah, so what.” But keep in mind, this is a 33-year-old movie.

At some point, Paul did a neural net experiment that allows him to talk to X-CaliBR, his female personal computer. This is the only futuristic tech in this world, so I guess we all have to accept that people’s brains can be wired to their CPUs.

Paul keeps having dreams where he is making love to a beautiful woman. The more knowledgeable of you out there will realize that this scene doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the movie. It was probably to secure foreign distribution with the amount of flesh on display.

Paul lives with his girlfriend Gwen live together, but she’s super jealous of how close he is to his computer. None of that has anything else to do with what happens next — the sorcerer Mestema — who has spent thousands of years looking for a worthy opponent — kidnaps both of them.

What follows are the portmanteau segments, where Paul and his laser wristband must travel through different dimensions and time to battle Mestema and win back Gwen.

PART 1: ICE GALLERY

Ever seen Waxwork? So did everyone working on this. That said — the visuals are pretty nice here, with various monsters and killers throughout history all frozen inside a giant cave. Why is Albert Einstein there? Is it a comment on his role in the nuclear bomb? No one ever really explains that — this is a movie that you either damn for being stupid or fill in the narrative gaps yourself.

PART 2: DEMONS OF THE DEAD

I originally learned of this film from the Alamo Drafthouse’s Trailer War compilation. This scene is prominently featured in the trailer, with Fulci like zombies being dispatched with laser beams. It is, as I am often heard to yell, “Fucking awesome.” It’s written and directed by John Carl Buechler, who was Jack Cracker in the first two Hatchet movies.

PART 3: HEAVY METAL

In this segment, directed by Charles Band, our heroes battle 80s metal kings W.A.S.P. If you love Blackie Lawless, well, this is the movie for you, as he is front and center and menacing Gwen. Sadly, Chris Holmes does not appear with his mother in this scene.

PART 4: STONE CANYON GIANT

Stop motion style fun here, with a giant canyon monster blocking Paul from progress. This segment was written and directed by Dave Allen, who got his start with Equinox and worked on a huge variety of films from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to *batteries not included, Willow, the Puppet Master series, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and so much more. Sadly, he died from cancer in 1999.

In a strange moment of Wiki research, I learned that Allen used to be married to a woman named Donita Woodruff. She learned that Allen had an ex-girlfriend named Valerie Taylor, which led to a fight between the two women. Woodruff suspected that Taylor had a criminal past and found enough evidence to get the police to arrest her in 1996 for a 1979 South Carolina murder. Taylor pleaded self-defense and served two years, while Allen and Woodruff would divorce two years later. There’s even a book about it — Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Illicit Passion, Buried Secrets, and Murder.

Check this out — “Donita, a young, single mother of two lives in the day-to-day confinement of a small town in rural Oklahoma. Hungering for a second chance and the bustle of the big city, she decides to move her family back home to Los Angeles. Still hurting from previous romantic relationships, Donita is hesitant to start anything new; anything until she meets Academy Award nominee David Allen—successful, handsome and charming. The two are quickly swept up in a whirlwind romance. Life seems too good to be true but even wedding bells can’t hide the secrets her new husband has. Suddenly, Donita and her children are caught in a Deadly Masquerade, a world of vicious lies and double lives, where nothing is as it appears.

Mysterious phone calls, a questionable ex-lover, an unsolved murder, all begin to unravel in Donita Woodruff’s true-life account, Deadly Masquerade. When the perfect man reveals a sordid, double life, she is forced into a series of stunning revelations. Now, she only has one choice—to take matters into her own hands.”

Seriously — they should have just film this book NOW. Because I just learned that Valerie Taylor used to be a man. And that’s why Woodruff was so freaked out! AGAIN –Wikipedia will lead you down some crazy wormholes.

PART 5 – SLASHER

All of a sudden, the film becomes a cross between Quantum Leap and a horror movie. It’s written by lead actor Jeffrey Byron and directed by Steven Ford (the son of former U.S. President Gerald Ford — fuck, this movie has a veritable rogue’s gallery of backstories). Paul has to escape from the police to rescue Glen from a serial killer.

PART 6 – CAVE BEAST

A cave beast blocks the way and Paul must fight his way past it. Look — not all of The Dungeonmaster has to be complicated.

PART 7 – DESERT PURSUIT

Mad Max style racing across the desert that seems to end with our characters dying in a head-on collision in a sequence written and directed by Ted Nicolaou (Bad Channels, TerrorVision). In case you’re wondering, yes, these are the same vehicles from Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.

Finally, Paul challenges Mestema to a one on one battle, which ends when Paul throws the sorcerer into a pit of lava. At this point, Gwen decides that X-CaliBR8 isn’t so bad and that she can finally marry Paul.

Like any portmanteau, there are some good and bad parts in equal measure. Richard Moll is awesome in this, just chewing scenery and blasting out some insane dialogue. The zombie scene is good, as is the giant. But your life won’t change watching this film. If you’re looking for something to put on as a soundtrack to a party or some great visuals, it’s certainly good for that.

Shout Factory put this out on blu ray in a double set with The Eliminators, which makes me happy that such a strange, goofy set of films can get such a prestige treatment.

PS – A sequel segment was filmed for the anthology Pulse Pounders and only shown once, but since Empire Pictures closed, no one is sure as to when it will be released. Moll and Byron came back for this sequel — which I’d love to see.

Pulse Ponders was to be another portmanteau with three stories: The Evil Clergyman, Trancers: City of Lost Angels and The Dungeonmaster II: A Sorcerer’s Nightmare. Some of it has come out, so here’s to the full release!

There are movies. And then there are movies that change your entire life. Buckaroo Banzai is the film that changed mine. Why did I just have to be one thing when Buckaroo could be a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and probably the last hope of the human race? “Is, ahh… is somebody… is somebody crying?… out there in the darkness? Somebody crying?”

This is also a film that confounds me — how the fuck did this ever get past the bean counters of Hollywood? It’s an insane proposition — we’re thrust in the middle of Buckaroo’s adventures with the hope that we’ll think it’s awesome that so much has gone on before. For me, it is, but I can only imagine how confused 1984 audiences were watching this.

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller, RoboCop) and Dr. Hikita have finally created the oscillation overthruster, which allows Buckaroo to drive his jet car through a mountain, then another dimension. A brain is left behind on the bottom the car, though.

News of the jet car reaches Dr. Emilio Lizard (a never better John Lithgow), who invented the overthruster with Hikata way back in 1938…the same year that aliens landed in New Jersey. For real. Are you still with the film? Well, hold on. It’s about to go even crazier.

Buckaroo’s Hong Kong Cavaliers are like the Shadow and Doc Savage’s Fabulous Five, except they’re also great musicians. At a tour date, Buckaroo notices a suicidal woman in the crowd named Penny Priddy (a never hotter Ellen Barkin who imprinted my brain on what girls should look like at a very young age). As he sings to her, she tries to kill herself, which is mistaken for an attempt to Banzai’s life. Yep — every single one of the Cavaliers are packing heat. But Buckaroo insists on bailing her out of jail, even before he discovers that she’s the long-lost sister of his dead wife. Still with the movie?

Man — let me try and sum up what happens next. At a press conference, strange men kidnap Hikata and due to an electrical shock, only Buckaroo sees them for the lizard aliens that they really are. The good aliens, who all look like rastas and have the first name John, show up and explain that they, the Black Lectroids, have been at war with the Red Lectroids for thousands of years. They plan on nuking Earth unless Buckaroo can make sure that the Red Lectroids never get their hands on his invention.

Will Buckaroo save the Earth? Will Penny fall in love with him? Will New Jersey fit in with the rest of the Irregulars and why did he have a whole cowboy outfit with him? Why do they call him Perfect Tommy? Who is Hanoi Xan? Why didn’t Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League ever get made?

This film will leave you with more questions than answers. And that’s good. That’s the way life is and how it should be.

Also — nearly every one of my favorite character actors is in this film — Christoper Lloyd, Dan Hedaya and Vincent Schiavelli all play aliens. Even Yakov Smirnoff shows up as a national security officer.

Fox publicity said of the film, Nobody knew what to do with Buckaroo Banzai. There was no simple way to tell anyone what it was about—I’m not sure anybody knew.” They didn’t even try to advertise the movie, which found its audience, as its specifically a movie made by weirdos who don’t feel the need to explain the joke for weirdos who will explain the joke for themselves. What other movie has references to 19th Century evangelist Dwight L. Moody, Gravity’s Rainbow and song Rocket 88?

Buckaroo taught me the early Zen with which I would try to comprehend this crazy life. And that no matter how much the world wants you to be normal and says you have to excel at just one thing, you can be anything. And then something else, too. Buckaroo said it all in one simple phrase: “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.”

PS – Screenwriter WD Richter would also add many more quotes to the universe via Jack Burton with his work on Big Trouble in Little China two years later.

PSS – Ever wonder what my favorite end credits are?