Note: You can read another take on The Power here.
The Power has a great poster, a wild ending and isn’t that enough?
Directed and written by Stephen Carpenter (the creator of the TV series Grimm) and Jeffrey Obrow (The Dorm That Dripped Blood, The Kindred), this is all about an Aztec demon called Destacatyl who possesses people in the form of a doll.
There’s a near-maniac professor — who is obsessed with the doll — who goes by the name of Wilson (Stan Weston) and he’s given to dreams of killing off his students when they don’t listen to his speeches on the Aztecs. As if this needed more, Julie (Lisa Erickson), Tommy (Chad Cowgill) and Matt (Ben Gilbert) all go to a cemetery with a Ouija board and the doll — which is of course the idol that the Aztec demon is inside — his parents got him on their vacation. Did he learn nothing from the Bradys trip to Hawaii? And then there’s Jerry (Warren Lincoln), the first person to grab ahold of it, which vexes everyone. And Sandy (Suzy Stokey), a reporter of the paranormal who wants to know more about…The Power.
There’s one really scary moment in this. Sandy leaves her bedroom after a nightmare and we can clearly see a bearded crew member in the mirror on her door.
I’m kidding. The ending is actually really awesome and worth you watching the rest of the movie. I love that it rambles a bit to be honest.
Here’s a drink to enjoy during the movie.
Destacatyl
1 oz. tequila
1 oz. 99 Bananas
3 oz. orange juice
.5 oz. lime juice
Pour all ingredients into a shaker with ice.
Shake it up and pour over a pyramid of crushed ice.
You know what they say. If you can’t get John Milius, grab the dude who directed Mandingo, Soylent Green and the Neil Diamond remake version of The Jazz Singer, Richard Fleischer. That’s exactly what Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis did here. It makes sense, though, as Fleischer had also directed The Vikings, one of the films that had inspired Milius as he created Conan the Barbarian.
This time, however, gore was out and humor was in. That said, the original story is by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, the comic book writers who were behind so many of Conan’s Marvel Comics stories.
Conan (Schwarzenegger) and his companion, the thief Malak (Tracy Walter, Bob the Goon from Batman) are tested by Queen Taramis (Sarah Douglas, Ursa from SupermanII). She has a quest for him and should he succeed, she will bring Valeria back from the dead. He must escort Jehnna, the queen’s virginal niece, to restore the horn of the dreaming god Dagoth (yes, Conan and HP Lovecraft aren’t far removed).
Our heroes are joined by basketball star Wilt Chamberlain as Bombaata, the leader of the royal guard, who has orders to kill Conan as soon as the gem is secured. To combat the wizard who has the gem, Conan brings back Akiro the Wizard (Mako) from the last movie. And soon, they save Zula (Grace Jones!) from some villagers and she joins their quest.
They come to the castle of Thoth-Amon, who is played by former pro wrestler “Judo” Pat Roach. Roach is in a ton of movies that you know and love and you know exactly who he is, but may not know him by name. He’s the flying wing mechanic in Raiders of the Last Ark, the bouncer in A Clockwork Orange and General Kael in Willow. He turns into a giant bird and kidnaps Jehnna and then turns into a monkey man inside a hall of mirrors. His death destroys the entire castle. This whole sequence makes the movie!
When they return, Taramis’ guards attack (Sven-Ole Thorsen, who played Thorgrim in the first film is one of them, this time called Togra), but Bombaata claims to have no idea why. Jehna starts to fall for Conan, but he explains his devotion to Valeria to her. Soon after, they learn that Jehna will be sacrificed to awaken Dagoth, who is played by Andre the Giant!
Everything works out for Conan and he decides to leave his companions behind for further adventures. Sadly, despite years of promising, no new Arnold starring film has reached the silver screen.
Despite this being a toned down film, it’s packed with great scenes. If only it was all as awesome as the sequences where Conan battles Thoth-Amon, including the mirror battle. Still, it’s way better than Red Sonja and any Conan project that would follow. The more I watch it, the more I enjoy it.
The Arrow Video release of Conan the Destroyer has a brand new 4K restoration from the original negative by Arrow Films. There are four commentaries: director Richard Fleischer; actors Olivia d’Abo and Tracey Walter; actor Sarah Douglas with genre historians Kim Newman & Stephen Jones and genre historian Paul M. Sammon, author of Conan: The Phenomenon. It also has a newly assembled isolated score track in lossless stereo.
Extras include new interviews with casting director Johanna Ray, costume designer John Bloomfield, art director Kevin Phipps, stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong John Walsh and author of Conan the Barbarian: The Official History of the Film. There are archival features including an interview with writers Roy Thomas & Gerry Conway, an interview with composer Basil Poledouris, trailers and an image gallery.
It all comes with a double-sided fold-out poster, six double-sided collectors’ postcards and an illustrated collectors’ booklet featuring new writing by Walter Chaw and John Walsh, and an archive set report by Paul M. Sammon.
You can get Conan the Destroyer on blu ray from MVD and 4K UHD from Arrow Video. They also have the Conan Chronicles with both films on 4K UHD and blu ray.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s movie is brought to you by AC Nicholas, who has graciously become a Big B&S’er, a monthly supporter of the site and got to pick an entire week of movies. Would you like to have me write about the movies of your choice? It’s simple!
Go to our Ko-Fi site and donate. There’s no set amount and I won’t tell you what to do. In fact, if you just keep reading for free, we can still be friends.
Join as a monthly member for just $1. That makes you a Little B&S’er.
As a Medium B&S’er at just $3 a month, if you pick a movie or a director, I’ll write about them for you. In fact, I’ll do one for each month you subscribe and even dedicate the post to you.
For $5 a month, you basically get some major power. As a Big B&S’er, I’ll write an entire week on any subject you’d like. How awesome would that be? In fact, I’ll do it for every month you’re a member. Do you think any of your other movie sites will do that for you?
For his last movie, Radley Metzger — Gérard Loubeau is credited — chose to adapt the French story Frontispiece by Pierre Serbie, which is a lot like Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Carol Levy (Alone In the Dark) plays the twin roles of Audrey Swallow and Lucy Darling, two women who are as different as they look alike.
One of them is a virginal girl about to married and in need of experience; the other is a high class call girl. As you can imagine, everyone gets what they want, even if getting back to switch places in time proves somewhat of a difficult proposition.
Originally playing on The Playboy Channel, this is a return to the softcore films that Metzger was known for and not his Henry Paris films in the 70s and early 80s. You may also find it as The Fantasies of Ms. Jones.
The Return of Godzilla (1984): The 16th film in the Godzilla franchise, this was the last film produced in the Shōwa era and the first film in the Heisei series. It is at once a sequel to the original 1954 Godzilla and a reboot. The King of the Monsters would return to his roots as an enemy of human beings, if only for a few movies, and it was jarring for kids who grew up with the cute and cuddly version.
Directed by Koji Hashimoto and written by Shuichi Nagahara with a story by Tomoyuki Tanaka, this begins with the Yahata Maru caught in strong currents off the shores of Daikoku Island and a creature that makes its way out of a volcano. Godzilla is not the only creature, as there are also gigantic sea lice called Shockirus.
In the universe of this movie, the Godzilla attack of 1954 happened and people are aware of the kaiju. They are not, however, in the know that it may be back. People are in total fear of Godzilla, with an example being that Professor Hayashida refers to him as a living, invincible nuclear weapon. The Japanese government finally has to reveal that there is another kaiju when it destroys a Russian submarine and almost starts World War III.
Other countries want to nuke the monster but the Japanese government asks them to keep from doing that and allow them to use their new SUPER X weapon and its cadmium shells, which can slow down the nuclear reactor inside Godzilla. Of course, the Russians have set their nuclear weapon to fire automatically on Tokyo but can’t stop the countdown. The American counter-missile destroys it, an EMP pulse stops SUPER X and brings Godzilla back to life. That said, you can always defeat a kaiju — at least for the end of the movie to happen and before it comes back — by blowing it up inside a volcano.
Special effects director Teruyoshi Nakano said, “We went back to the theme of nuclear weapons, since that was the theme of the original film. Japan has now learned three times what a nuclear disaster is, but at that time Japan had already had two. The problem was that Japanese society was gradually forgetting about these disasters. They were forgetting how painful it had been. Everyone in Japan knew how scary nuclear weapons were when the original movie was made, but it wasn’t like that by the 1980s. So in those meetings, we decided to remind all those people out there who had forgotten.”
This was the first Godzilla movie since 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla. There was a rumored color remake in 1977, The Rebirth ofGodzilla, as well as Godzilla vs. the Devil and Godzilla vs. Gargantua. There was a push in Godzilla’s 25th anniversary to make a new movie and series creator Tomoyuki Tanaka wrote Resurrection of Godzilla that had Godzilla fight Bakan, a shapeshifting monster and dealing with nuclear waste. Steve Miner and Fred Dekker almost made a stop-motion 3D movie as well, but budget kept getting in the way of these new movies. It took the 10,000 members of the Godzilla Resurrection Committee to make the movie happen.
Godzilla was back, even if it wasn’t exactly a box office success. There’s always America, right?
Godzilla 1985: In the same way that Godzilla was re-edited to be Godzilla King of the Monstersin America — and re-released as the American edit in Japan in 1957 as Monster King Godzilla — Toho worked with New World Pictures to release The Return of Godzilla in North America under the title Godzilla 1985. They even brought back Raymond Burr to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original movie.
New World’s plan was to make a remix with Leslie Neilsen voicing much of the dialogue, turning a very serious movie about nuclear power into a goofy comedy. Raymond Burr disliked this and supposedly that’s where this ended.
Burr’s scenes were done in a day. The reverse shots, where the actors were speaking with Burr, were shot the next day. The major change is that while Soviet Colonel Kashirin dies trying to stop the missile launch in The Return of Godzilla, in this edit, the Russians make the choice to nuke Tokyo. Director R. J. Kizer (Hell Comes to Frogtown, Death Ring) said that New World was a conservative company and demanded this. They also demanded Dr. Pepper product placement all through the movie, even asking Burr if he would drink it in a scene. He stared at Kizer until, well, you don’t see Raymond Burr drinking a Dr. Pepper in this, do you?
I love that New World also decided that they would make a music video for this movie, “I Was Afraid to Love You (Love Theme from Godzilla 1985)” by Jill Elliot.
Interestingly enough, this is one of the first movies to be based on the scientific agreement that dinosaurs evolved from birds and not lizards. Godzilla follows birds due to the homing instinct that he has and that’s the same way that he’s lured to the volcano.
If you read critics’ reviews for this movie, they seem to wonder why Japan keeps making movies that are poorly dubbed with cardboard movies and people in rubber suits. This speaks to me of a lack of imagination and a childhood that wasn’t spent joyously watching Godzilla fight Megalon, Hedorah, Gigan and more. Compared to the CGI American films that came in its wake, this is a lean and frightening take on the creature.
You can guess what movie this is trying to be. Also known as Lost on Adventure Island, this begins when Anna (Crystal Holland, who was only in two other movies, Surrender In Paradise — which is also about a shipwreck but at least has Ginger Lynn and Lois Ayres in the cast — and A Little Bit of…Hanky Panky) runs away from home and sails the seas, at least until her ship hits a battleship and she wakes up on an island filled with dinosaurs and, yes, King Dong who is really Supersimian, a female giant gorilla who is interested in Anna’s lover Alex (Chaz St. Peters).
Directed by Yancey Hendrieth, who also plays Buddy the Gorilla, and who wrote this along with his wife Dee, who plays Anna’s mother, this has a cast and crew that didn’t make another movie. Even Keith Finkelstein and David Dane, who did the stop motion effects for the dinosaurs and Supersimian. Buddy is just an ape suit.
It’s no Flesh Gordon, so just imagine how rough of a watch this was. Yet when someone asks, “Have you ever watched a porn parody of King Kong?” I can answer positively.
12. GUERILLAS IN THE MIDST: One involving soldiers or set during a war.
Code Name: Wild Geese is not the sequel to The Wild Geese but don’t let that stop you from watching it and making the filmmaker’s money.
This is directed by an absolute master of the low budget war movie, Antonio Margheriti, written by Michael Lester and produced by a man who made seventeen movies with Jess Franco, Erwin C. Dietrich.
DEA agent Fletcher (Ernest Borgnine) heads an operation to cut off the supply of opium out of Hong Kong. As always with these deep cover government jobs, the money has to come from somewhere. Here, it’s funded by an American businessman named Brenner (Hartmut Neugebauer).
Working with his partner Charlton (Klaus Kinski), Fletcher hires Robin Wesley (Lewis Collins, who is also in Margheriti’s Commando Leopard), a man who has just lost his son to heroin. He’s all for this mission: to burn down heroin operations throughout the Golden Triangle alongside an army of mercenaries like Klein (Manfred Lehmann) and helicopter pilot China (Lee Van Cleef). As you can expect, there are twists, turns and double crosses. Most importantly, it has Mimsy Farmer and a flamethrower mounted on a helicopter.
Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.
Today’s theme: Unsung Horrors rule (movies under 1000 views on Letterboxd)
The Washington Post called Earl Ownesby the “South’s king of Grade B movies.”
They described this movie with this purple prose: “The lights dimmed, and within minutes, there was a fist fight, a hooker was carved up by a hood and an ex-con was framed for her murder. And before scores were settled, a prison guard was impaled on a stick, bullets turned bad guys into Swiss cheese and countless people were slaughtered, all in the name of revenge and profits. Most died slowly, foaming red Karo syrup at the mouth.”
Making movies out of a studio complex in the Appalachian town of Shelby, N.C., Owensby gave America — he said “My audience is grass-roots America. The guy who comes out of the textile mills in the Carolinas or the car plants of Detroit or the wheat fields of Kansas. They’re gonna love Chain Gang.” — movies like Wolfman, Rottweiler, Buckstone County Prison, Tales from the Third Dimension in 3D and so many more. He made them cheap. He knew what people wanted.
Buckstone County Prison is a lot like this. He wasn’t afraid to throw some BS in his ads — “First there was Cool Hand Luke then Billy Jack, but there has never been anyone like Seabo.” — and it did pretty well. Chain Gang is a lot of the same as Mac McPhearson (Owensby) is framed for murder — he was just trying to save a stripper from getting beat up, but they hunted them down and killed her — and tossed into Black Creek Prison Farm and has to escape to get back at those that did him wrong.
If you’re running a prison scam, don’t have the guy you sold out come to do your yard work as part of the prison gang work. That’s my advice to all future drive-in bad guys.
Director Worth Keeter started making movies for Owensby and went on to direct tons of American sentai shows like Beetleborgs and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He also made L.A. Bounty, which if anything at least has that Sybil Danning in the fog poster art, The Order of the Black Eagle and Unmasking the Idol. Writer Todd Durham went on to write Hotel Transylvania.
A lot of the mid 80s Ownesby movies were made in 3D. There isn’t a lot of 3D needed for this, but there you go. It was still in 3D. A male prison movie in your face!
EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare On Elm Street was on USA Up All Night on July 25 and October 30, 1992; October 2, 1993 and July 15, 1994.
Upon watching this again for the first time in probably thirty years, I was struck by how European the movie feels. Perhaps it’s the color tones throughout, suggesting the patina of Italian horror cinema (both Fulci and Craven cite surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel as an influence). It could also be John Saxon having lead billing. Or just that it doesn’t feel like any horror cinema that was currently being made in the United States.
The real villain of this piece is not Freddy Krueger — more on him in a bit — but the parents of Elm Street who have allowed secrets and their assumed authority over their children to do unspeakable and unspoken things. All of them are haunted by it, divorced, depressed and self-medicating with over-dedication to their jobs or their addictions.
There are stories that David Warner was originally going to play Freddy, but that’s been disproven. After plenty of actors tried out and failed to win the part, it went to Robert Englund, who darkened his eyes and acted like Klaus Kinski (!) to get the part.
The other feeling I have about this movie is that it owes a major debt — as all horror movies post 1978 do –to John Carpenter’s Halloween. Much like that film, the true horror happens within the foliage of the suburbs, with shadow people showing up and disappearing. Much of the action on the final night happens within two houses. One of the main characters has the ultimate authority figure, a policeman, for a father. And the cinematography by Jacques Haitkin glides near the characters and around them, much like the Steadicam shots that start Carpenter’s film.
The film starts with Tina Gray (Amanda Wyss, who puts the events of Better Off Dead into motion by breaking up with Lloyd Dobler) waking up from a nightmare where a disfigured man chases her with a bladed glove. I loved the way this scene looks, as you could almost consider Freddy off-brand here, as his arms grow comedically long and he moves way faster than he would in the rest of the series. Yet by keeping him in the shadows, he’s absolutely terrifying.
When Tina awakens, her nightgown has been slashed and she’s afraid to go to sleep again. She learns that her friends, Nancy (Heather Langenkamp, who left Stamford University to be in this), Glen (introducing Johnny Depp) and Rod (Jsu Garcia, credited as Nicki Corri) have all been having the same dream. To console Tina, they all stay at her parent’s house overnight. But when Tina falls asleep, Krueger is waiting. Rod awakes to find Tina flying all over the room and up the walls — an astounding effects sequence in the pre-CGI era — and he flees the scene after her death.
Soon, Rod is arrested by Lieutenant Don Thompson (Saxon), Nancy’s father. Freddy now starts pursuing her, chasing her as she falls asleep in class (look for Lin Shaye as the teacher) and later in the bathtub, as his claw raises like a demented and deadly phallus between her thighs. Rod tells her how Tina dies and now she knows that the same killer is definitely after her (Garcia’s watery eyes and lack of focus made Langenkamp think he was acting his heart out; the truth is he was high on heroin for real in this scene). She tries to find the killer, with Glen watching over her, but he’s a lout and easily falls asleep. Only the alarm clock saves her, but no one can save Rod, who is hung in his sleep while rotting in a jail cell.
Nancy’s mom Marge (Ronee Blakley, who was married to Wim Wenders, sang backup on Dylan’s song “Hurricane” and is also in Altman’s Nashville) takes her to a sleep clinic, where Dr. King (Charles Fleischer, Roger Rabbit’s voice) tries to figure out her nightmares. She emerges from a dream holding Freddy’s hat to her mother’s horror. Soon, she reveals to her daughter that the parents of Elm Street got revenge on Freddy Krueger, a child murderer after a judge let him go on a technicality. In a deleted scene, we also learn that Nancy and her friends all lost a brother or sister that they never knew about.
While Nancy is barred up in her house by new security measures, Glen’s parents won’t allow him to see her. Soon, he’s asleep and is transformed into an overwhelming fountain of blood. Nancy falls asleep after asking her father to come in twenty minutes. He doesn’t listen and she pulls Freddy into our world. On the run, she screams for help until her father finally comes to her aid, just in time to watch a burning Freddy kill his ex-wife and them both disappear.
This is an incredibly complex stunt where Freddy is set ablaze, chases Nancy up the stairs, falls back down and runs back up — all in one take! At the time, it was the most elaborate fire stunt ever filmed and won Anthony Cecere an award for the best stunt of the year.
Nancy then realizes that if she doesn’t believe in Freddy, he can’t hurt her. She wakes up and every single one of her friends is still alive, ready to go to school. As the convertible hood opens up in the colors of the killer’s sweater, she realizes that she’s still trapped by Freddy, who drags her mother through a window.
In Craven’s original script, the movie simply ended on a happy note. Producer Robert Shaye wanted the twist ending so that the door was open for a sequel, something Craven had no interest in. Four different endings were filmed: Craven’s happy ending, Shaye’s ending where Freddy wins and two compromises between their ideas.
Fantastic Fest 2023 is from September 21 to 28 and has so many movies that I can’t wait to see. You can learn more about this movie and when it is playing here.
Teenage Mother may have been 9 months of trouble, but Tammy the teenage timebomb is eighteen years of bottled-up frustration about to explode.
Vern (Dave Shuey) and Clorette (Linda Miller) have moved Tammy (Sara Lee Wade, who was a set dresser from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and Return of the Living Dead and worked in props on Lady In White and was also in Darkroom) from Mississippi to California and now that she’s off the farm, she’s never going back.
But despite the Baptist veneer, maybe Vern’s a little turned on when he spanks Tammy. Why else would he let her wear mommy’s high heels and walk all over his face? Mother isn’t much better, giving forced enemas to her daughter as punishment. Is it any wonder that when Tammy meets Link (Jack Catalano) she goes all Mallory Knox?
The two of them are in and out of bed when they’re not killing everyone in their way and oh yeah, staying away from one-eyed obsessed girlfriends and prison boyfriends and dead bodies stinking up the joint. These two make anything a party.
After all, Tammy says, “By the fourth day, Burt was starting to stink pretty bad. But we even turned disposal of his body into a fun-packed afternoon.”
References to Richard Gere being a coprophagy fantasy object, a last girlfriend who stood up on the rollercoaster and lost her head and an audacious final beat that was filmed — with no permit, come on, this is a $2000 SOV blast to your brain — inside the Magic Kingdom.
The James Dillinger who made this was really James Robert Baker, who left a “stifling, Republican Southern Californian household” to explore speed, booze, art and his hidden homosexuality as his father sent a private detective on his tail. He ended up going to UCLA for film and made two movies, the one we’re talking about and Mouse Klub Konfidential, which tells the story of a Mouseketeer who becomes a gay bondage pornographer and came so close to celebrating Nazism that the 1976 San Francisco LGBT Film Festival was scandalized and may have caused Michael Medved to abandon his dream of film making and instead become a film critic or whatever the fuck he is.
After five years of writing scripts, he was already burned out on Hollywood and started writing novels like Adrenaline, in which two lovers on the run battle homophobia and the oppression of gays in a Republican-dominated America; Fuel-Injected Dreams, which is about Phil Spector; Boy Wonder, the oral history of Shark Trager, who was born in the back seat at a drive-in movie and became a filmmaker and Tim and Pete, in which the lead characters deal with the AIDS crisis by planning to kill Reagan. That book was so controversial that he was labeled “The Last Angry Gay Man” and he couldn’t find anyone to publish his later books.
Baker ended up killing himself with carbon monoxide in his car, just like two of the characters in this movie — spoiler warning — which is a tragedy. After his demise, he became better known and Testosterone became a movie in 2003.
This gets compared to John Waters a lot but I think that’s because it’s the easiest comparison to make. People really talk like this, this kind of filthy explosion of violent noise and you can hear the need to be heard in every word. Now, you may have to strain to hear it, as the video quality is, well, shot on video in 1984 but you should lean in as close as you can.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ellie aired on USA Up All Night on February 1 and October 19, 1991 and August 7, 1992.
If there’s a hicksploitation hall of fame, Shelley Winters should probably be in it. She’s in one of the movies that defines so many of the genre’s themes, The Night of the Hunter, as well as some of its best — and most exploitative examples — films, such as Bloody Mama and Poor Pretty Eddie. She also plays a housekeeper Katy who has also had a space baby sometime in the past in the astounding 70s blast of odd called The Visitor.
Somewhere in the Deep South, this is all about barefoot farmer’s daughter Ellie (Sheila Kennedy, Penthouse Pet of the Month for December 1981 and the 1983 Pet of the Year) getting revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of her stepmother (Winters) — who killed the kindly old man while she chowed down on fried chicken.
She only has one weapon. Her body. And she knows how to use it.
George Gobel, Edward Albert and Pat Paulsen all show up, but the main thrill of the film is its rampant nudity. Somehow, this movie is also a version of the Greek myth of Elektra, if you can wrap your mind around that.
Director Peter Wittman was also behind exactly one other movie, Play Dead, where a woman kills with her brain and her dog. It’s not great or even good, but it’s the kind of movie that you stayed up to watch on a Friday night on Cinemax. If you never did that, you’re probably going to hate this. If you did, you have a near-limitless capacity for enduring boring films. Not that I would know or anything.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.