Originally airing on November 22, 1985 on NBC, this made for TV movie was written by William F. Nolan, who wrote the novel Logan’s Run, as well as the scripts for The Norliss Tapes, Burnt Offerings and Trilogy of Terror. It was directed by E. W. Swackhamer, whose credits include episodic television across all genres.
Also known as Bridge Across Time and Arizona Ripper, this movie begins with Jack the Ripper drowning in the Thames river. A century or so later and London Bridge has been rebuilt across the world in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
From the moment the final stone is set into the bridge, strange murders start happening. No one knows how they’re happening, but one man has a theory. And that man is policeman Don Gregory. played by David Hasselhoff. He thinks that Jack the Ripper is back.
This movie is packed with some of your favorite TV and genre stars. Stephanie Kramer from TV’s Hunter plays the love interest. Randolph Mantooth, Clu Gulager and Adrienne Barbeau all show up, as does Rose Marie from The Dick Van Dyke Show.
If you can believe that Hasselhoff can be a cop, you can swallow that blood on the rocks of London Bridge can bring back Jack the Ripper. It’s an 80’s TV movie, so it’s not the fastest moving thing you’ve seen. But it’s a nice reason to shut your mind off and enjoy seeing Clu and the Hoff go one on one. And hey — Adrienne Barbeau!
The back of the VHS box for this movie promises that “A new horror classic is born!” It also states that “Tom Savini, the master of film gore — whose credits include Friday the 13th, Day of the Dead and a cameo role in Creepshow — brings new dimension to the character in this startling version of the Ripper legend.” Keep in mind that Savini used to get down on his knees at conventions and beg forgiveness for this one. He was paid $15,000 for a one day of acting. One would argue that he should have done something — anything — else with his time.
Christopher Lewis, the director of this affair, is the son of actress Loretta Young. He attended USC film school with George Lucas but by the 1980s, he was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma and hosting their afternoon newsmagazine show PM Magazine on KOTV. His wife, Linda, was working in the promotions department and regularly produced and starred in a show called Intermissions with Linda Lewis, which used her face to face interviews with movie stars on their press junkets to promote new films.
The Lewises wanted to stop promoting other peoples’ movies and make their own, which started with their first shot on video effort Blood Cult. It was one of the first shot directly to video movies released into video stores and earned the couple $475,000 in profit. That leads us to their second film, The Ripper.
A student and his teacher, Mr. Harwell, spend most of the movie calling one another about movies. Seriously, I started wondering if this film was about their affair and how no one in 1986 would be able to understand it. But no, it’s really about Harwell teaching a film class about famous killers and coincidentally finding the ring of Jack the Ripper. You remember the ring of Jack the Ripper, his famous ring, right? No? You don’t? Me either.
There’s also plenty of Jazzercise looking classes taught by Harwell’s wife and Whitechapel recreated on the streets of Tulsa. One of the locations, Colonial Antiques in downtown Tulsa, was where the ring buying sequences was shot. The Lewises Mercedes was stolen while these scenes were filmed.
The most amazing thing about this movie is that the writer took to IMDB to dismiss some of the critiques of the film and set straight how much the Lewises changed up his words. Magical.
There are some gruesome effects as the Ripper kills off young women, but otherwise, there’s not much here. Even Savini can’t save this with his mustache twirls, as if he were a yinzer Snidely Whiplash.
I’ve seen plenty of bad movies, but never one quite so bad as The Ripper. Let that sink in and decide if you want to see it for yourself.
When two tabloid reporters from The Sensation — Jack Harrison (Jeff Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Ed Begley, Jr.) — are sent by Gil’s dad (Norman Fell) to get the story of a lifetime in Transylvania. It seems that the old man has a videotape of Frankenstein’s monster chasing two men and he wants to tell his readers that the beast actually is real. Soon, the two men are in the midst of scenic — and strange — Transylvania.
This movie contains perhaps the richest cast of my 80’s comedy favorites possible. There’s John Byner from TV’s Bizarre and Carol Kane as a married couple of servants who get into all manner of mischief. A pre-SeinfeldMichael Richards is so great as Fejos, another servant who owns every scene that he’s in. Plus, you get Donald Gibb (Orge from Revenge of the Nerds) as a wolfman, Joe Bologna as the mad scientist Dr. Malavaqua, Jeffrey Jones as the mayor and Geena Davis as the vampire Odette.
Strangely enough, this entire film was financed by Dow Chemical Company. It turns out that Yugoslavia, where the film was shot, had prevented the company from taking back money that it had made there. To free their frozen funds, Dow used them to finance the production inside the country and then make a profit.
Writer and director Rudy De Luca has worked mainly with Mel Brooks (Life Stinks, Screw Loose, Dracula: Dead and Loving It,High Anxiety and Silent Movie), but this is the only film that he ever directed.
It’s a better movie when it doesn’t explain away the monsters and just lets things get crazy. But there are plenty of laughs along the way, so just enjoy it while it lasts.
Luigi Cozzi decided to bring back Lou Ferrigno to be Hercules one more time. Now, Hercules must search for the seven thunderbolts of Zeus, which have been stolen by renegade gods. There was only one trouble: he only had three weeks to film this one, so plenty of the story is padded out by showing scenes from the last movie.
The movie begins by telling the story of Zeus’ Seven Mighty Thunderbolts that have kept peace throughout creation. But one day, Aphrodite, Hera, Poseidon and Flora (Margit Evelyn Newton, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, Ferdinando Poggi and Laura Lenzi) steal them, taking away the leader of the god’s power and sending the moon flying at Earth.
The Little People tell the sisters Urania and Glaucia (Milly Carlucci and Sonia Viviani, who is in Nightmare City and The Return of the Exorcist) that only Hercules can save them. Zeus — remember how he had no power — sends Hercules back from the stars to help mankind, but the evil gods resurrect King Minos (William Berger) from the last movie and have Dedalos (transgender actress Eva Robin’s) help him with her powers of science.
Hercules battles everything in this movie from giant apes to Slime People, a Gorgon, a knight that fires lightning bolts and hangs people from trees, the fire monster Antaeus, the Queen of the Spiders and then Minos, who transforms into a giant laser dinosaur, to which Hercules says, “Watch this” and becomes a laser King Kong. No, that’s not the drugs talking. This really happens.
Zeus then grows Hercules as big as the universe and he moves the moon and Earth back to where they belong. Then, Urania sacrifices herself, as her body contains the last thunderbolt. Zeus then allows both her and Hercules to live amongst the gods in space.
Cozzi claims that this movie wasn’t planned as a sequel. He was asked Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to come in and save The Seven Magnificent Gladiators and they loved the scenes that he shot. Then, they asked him to write a story around them and film more footage with Ferrigno, all without telling him that he was really shooting another Hercules film.
While not as amazing nor as entertaining as the original, the end — with the laser monster fight — must be seen to be believed.
After co-starring in the first Deathstalker film, Lana Clarkson would return to star in this Roger Corman produced schlockfest. Sadly, despite comedic turns in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (she’s Vincent Schiavelli’s wife in a quick scene) and Amazon Women on the Moon (I really need to get to that movie soon), as well as other action films Vice Girls, her career stalled by the early 2000’s. Sure, she did comic conventions and sold autographed memorabilia on her web site, but she was subsidizing her nascent stand-up career — her dream was to be a comedic actress — with a part-time job at the West Hollywood House of Blues.
A month later, she followed famous music producer and noted lunatic Phil Spector back to his mansion and “kissed his gun” in his words. A major trial ended with 19 years of jail time for the creator of the Wall of Sound. But let’s not dwell on the sadness of Clarkson’s end. Let’s celebrate her starring role in a movie that somehow is at once a feminist adventure epic and a misogynistic wallow in the muck.
A peaceful barbarian village — is there any other kind — is all in a tizzy about the wedding of Queen Amethea (Clarkson) to Prince Argan (Frank Zagarino, Tan Zan: The Ultimate Mission). But look out! Lord Aarkur and his men attack, taking Argan and Taramis (Dawn Dunlap, Forbidden World) captive.
You may be thinking — oh cool, this movie is woke and the man is the captive in peril, not the woman, who is the hero — but this is a Roger Corman sword and sorcery movie. So even through Amethea, Estrild (Katt Shea, who went on to direct Stripped to Kill, Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2) and Tiniara are going to fight and kill lots of evil creatures and baddies, they’re also going to get naked, tortured and me too’d for pretty much the entire film.
I was going to write, “I don’t know the audience for a movie that wants to see barbarian women get raped,” but I totally know the audience.
Let’s try and get past it. Actually, you can’t get past it. But maybe you can get revenge.
By the end of the movie, Estrild is a harem girl, Tiniara has been killed, Taramis becomes Arrakur’s concubine and our main heroine, Amethea, has been tortured repeatedly but comes out on top, tossing the interrogator into a pit of acid after using “her feminine strength to squeeze his manhood painfully” as per Wikipedia. Yes, this is a woman where a woman literally kills with her vagina.
So there’s that, I guess.
Amethea, Argan and the rebels join with a bunch of gladiators in the attack to fight Arrakur’s army. Man, that’s a lot of alliteration. Anyways, our hero fights the big bad and is disarmed and nearly killed before Taramis stabs him in the back and kills him. So even in her moment of triumph, a Corman film reveals that women need treachery to win, not outright skill.
The first film from Corman’s Concorde company, Barbarian Queen was directed by Héctor Olivera as part of a nine-picture deal. Corman wanted low-budget sword-and-sorcery films. Olivera wanted to create more personal film projects. This union led to this film, as well as Cocaine Wars, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Two to Tango and Play Murder for Me. I think Corman’s vision won out, sadly.
There’s an in-name-only sequel and Clarkson played a character called Amethea in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II who has nothing to do with this character. There was also a third film planned.
In later years, Corman has claimed that this movie inspired Xena: Warrior Princess. I must have missed all those episodes where Xena was tied up for most of the story and repeatedly diddled. Seriously, Corman’s movies are more and more troublesome the further we get away from them. I’m all for sleaze and shock, but not when they’re presented to me as empowerment.
Ruggero Deodato brings together Richard Lynch, twin muscleheads called the Barbarian Brothers, George Eastman and Michael Berryman and the results are everything you dreamed that they would be. Within the first ten minutes of this film, I had already screamed from my couch in pure glee, so happy to be alive and watching an Italian barbarian movie — times two! — that was unashamed to be this stupid.
The Ragnicks are a tribe of peaceful traveling entertainers. Think sideshow — as they journey on horseback, one of them is even throwing knives to practice. They’ve recently adopted twins — Kutchek and Gore — and are protecting the magic ruby of their tribe. But soon, Kadar (Lynch) takes Queen Canary hostage. The young twins attack, biting off his fingers. However, he promises that if he takes Canary as one of his concubines, that he and his men will never kill the twins.
Kadar is a dude with a plan. A fifteen-year plan, really. He raises each of them separately, telling them their brother is dead, and has them routinely beaten by a masked man — either silver or gold depending on the brother. Then, when they have gone through all the whippings and strength trials ala Conan, they will fight and kill one another. That way, he can keep his promise and keep getting some of that sweet freakshow loving from the queen of the sideshow.
The brothers knock off their helmets — forgot that part of the plan — and escape into the woods where they find their old people who now live in misery. They also find Ismena, a thief who is imprisoned by their old tribe. The Ragnicks believe that this is magic and try to hang the twins, but their necks are just too big to lynch and they win over their old friends.
Hijinks ensue — like arm wrestling George Eastman and battling a dragon in the Forbidden Land. It gets a little long at the end, but the ride there is pretty decent, with the Forbidden Land itself looking like where most of the budget went.
If you’re a fan of the Barbarian Brothers — David and Peter Paul — they also show up in D.C. Cab. It’s kind of amazing to me that they were born in Harford, Connecticut and never ended up in the WWE.
Shout! Factory released this movie alongside the Lee Majors vehicle The Norseman. You can get it right here.
My father, grandfather and uncle used to play this game when we had cookouts, late into the night, where they would list the initials of a famous actor and they’d all have to guess. Tom Mix, Rex Allen, Tex Ritter…the list would go on and on. Then there would be “LL” — who of course ended up being Lash LaRue.
Lash started his career as the Cheyenne Kid, the sidekick of singing cowboy Eddie Dean, whose whip wasn’t just for show. Lash was an expert in using one, able to disarm villains and perform other tricks (he was also the trainer for Harrison Ford as he prepared to play Indiana Jones). After appearing in all three of the Eddie Dean’s singing western films, Lash starred in eleven “Marshal Lash LaRue” strange western films for PRC, a Poverty Row (the name given for the lower than B-level studios that churned out films in the 1940’s) studio and Eagle-Lion. Unlike many cowboys, Lash spoke with a street patois, not unlike the actor he resembled, Humphrey Bogart (so much so that character actress Sarah Padden (Murder by Invitation) asked if they were related. When Lash said no, she looked him dead in the eye and asked, “Did your mother ever meet Humphrey Bogart?”).
But unlike those big-time Hollywood stars, Lash would actually come to your town, showing off his whip skills and convincing young cowboys and cowgirls that there was at least one movie star hero who could actually do all of the things he did on screen.
Unbenowst to Lash, his role as a villain in 1972’s Hard on the Trail was actually in an adult film. While he had a non-sex role and had no idea that the film was X-rated, he spent the next ten years repenting as a missionary.
That brings us to 1985’s The Dark Power, a regional horror movie made by director Phil Smoot, who also directed Alien Outlaw, which also starred LaRue.
A North Carolina regional horror film, this one starts with a near full minute of a yard sign. Yep. It reads:
SAMMY & EARL
“THE FIX-IT BROTHERS”
IF WE CAN’T FIX-IT… THROW IT AWAY!
CALL 99 FIX-IT
What follows is a fat child messing around with a bow and arrow, juxtaposed with wild dogs chasing after him, POV-style. Once the four dogs catch up to him, he runs for about ten feet before falling down and crying. Luckily, he’s saved by Ranger Girard (Lash, of course) and his skills with the bullwhip, which never come near the dogs thanks to some, well, poor editing and sound dubbing.
Meanwhile, one of the Ranger’s friends, a Native American mystic, expires Citizen Kane-style after saying the word, “Toltec.” Turns out that the Toltecs were Aztec occult priests who liked to live inside the Earth and build great evil power. The bad news? They’re coming back, thanks to their eagle symbols that no one understands but the ranger. Luckily, a local news girl and her inept cameraman — everything he shoots turns green — are here to tell the tale.
The Native American mystics house is sold to some college kids, who take turns eating snacks, working out in leotards, being racist to one another, drinking beer and taking baths and showers. It’s as if they demanded that some kind of inhuman force rise and kill them all, one by one. Good news — they’re gonna get what they asked for.
While all that’s going on, the reporter keeps flirting with Lash, who has gone from looking like Bogie to looking like a grandfatherly man with Q-Tip-esque hair. Imagine a more well-groomed Santa Claus, in a Scoutmaster outfit, with a whip. I guess I can see how some ladies — and bear lovers — could be into this. I mean, just check out this sexy dialogue:
Mary: Of course, some girls might be a little crazier about whips than others.
Ranger Girard: You know about my whip?
The Toltecs rise from their graves, accompanied by a soundtrack that is recorded on what can only be described as an xylophone and kazoo symphony. Also — they speak like the characters from a cartoon and slap one another often. Let the art below illustrated both their look and the cultural sensitivity of this movie:
The townspeople all suck. Let’s be honest. They’re all fat, mean and given to fits of pure stupidity. They even let their fat children steal their vehicles. Thank God Lash is there to defend them, beating on zombie Aztec priests with the power of his whip skills, slur yelling dialogue like, “All right, you demonic bastard, let’s take this outside!” and “Feel my whip, you son of a bitch!”
Man — at one point Lash was one of the biggest stars in the country. Yet here he is, in one of his last films, gamely swinging his whip at the undead. It’s not great. But it’s certainly entertaining.
You can see the Rifftrax version of this film on Amazon Prime.
Have you ever said to yourself, “I’d like to watch a super young James Spader with weird looking bleach blonde hair menace a super young looking Lori Loughlin to the point that I worry for her safety?” If so, you’re a maniac. But hey, you’re on our site, so we have to be nice and tell you that this movie exists. It’s Sean Cunningham’s (Friday the 13th) 1985 opus, The New Kids.
No offense to our friends from Horror and Sons, but Florida is the most frightening state in the nation. Just ask Abby (Loughlin, years before she became Aunt Becky or a convicted felon) and Loren McWilliams (Shannon Presby, who quit acting soon after this movie and became a lawyer). Their parents (Tom Atkins is their military hero dad!) have been killed in an accident and they’ve moved to Glenby, a small town that seems way more like hell — and not the happiest place — on Earth. Their Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones, C.H.U.D., Q the Winged Serpent and Johnathan Kent on TV’s Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) and Aunt Fay (who did American voices for Gamera the Invincible and Godzilla vs. Hedorah) take them in, getting them to help them operate a gas station and amusement park, which is based on Santa Claus. If you’re willing to accept this entire paragraph and still say, “I’d watch that movie,” congratulations. You’re as goofy as me.
The kids do pretty well in their new life, with Loren instantly hitting it off with Karen, the vivacious daughter of the local sheriff. And Abby starts seeing Mark, who is played by Eric Stoltz, who also made Mask and lasted five weeks as Marty McFly in Back to the Future the same year that this movie was made.
What gives us the dramatic reason for watching this movie? Eddie Dutra (Spader) and his gang suddenly intrude and remind us that Flordia may be the home of Disney, but it’s also the nexus for American death metal. These boys just randomly do coke and make bets as to who will have nonconsensual sex with Abby first.
Dutra and his gang gradually grow more and more vicious, keying cars and even throwing Abby’s beloved pet rabbit’s bloody corpse at her while she attempts to take a shower — a scene that reminds you that Cunningham may be working for a major studio here, but he has roots in exploitation.
Finally, there’s a showdown at the amusement park that the kids call home, with Dutra covering Abby in lighter fluid and throwing lit matches at her (!) while his gang holds her down and fights over who gets to molest her.
It all ends with the bad guys attacked by dogs, thrown from the Ferris wheel, electrocuted and beheaded by bumper cars, and finally, Dutra lit ablaze by a gas pump that he has turned into a flamethrower. No, I don’t think that gas pumps work that way, either.
Becca woke up and came downstairs to watch some of my late night viewing of The New Kids and said, “This is one of those movies where they just show you stuff that happens to people and it’s all horrible. In fact, this movie is horrible. Who would even like this kind of movie?”
This is when my wife learned that I’m the kind of person who would like this kind of movie, which confirmed my theory: no one can be that good at being a lunatic without being a lunatic. There’s some dark stuff in Spader’s closet, right? Well, according to this Movie Web article, every year Spader and Stoltz get together to watch The New Kids together.
Mill Creek has released The New Kids on blu ray, complete with retro VHS packaging. They’ve been re-releasing some really interesting films as of late and the quality of the transfers has been pretty great. Plus, they’re very affordable and easy to find at stores like WalMart. I’m a big fan!
In the mid-1980’s, prime time soaps like Dynasty and Dallas were still big news. I can see the meetings on this potential series in my mind: what if we took some Dark Shadows, a little bit of Satanic panic and then mixed them all in with the greed of the Me Decade? The potential for a series was here, but The Covenant only winded up being a strange TV movie featuring evil cats, José Ferrer and lots of fire.
The Nobles are a fabulously wealthy family but all their power comes with a secret: they’ve pledged themselves to the devil. Now, they’re grooming their youngest child to remain a virgin until she’s 21 — man, I thought Satanism came with lots of sex — so that she can be part of the blood sacrifice that must occur every hundred years.
The Judges are the only ones that can stop them, but it also turns out Diana (Jane Balder, who used to eat mice on V), the young second wife of the family’s patriarch VIctor Noble (Ferrer), has some secret machinations of her own that could cause even more chaos.
Want to know how evil Victor is? He used to advise Adolph Hitler. Yep. That evil. And his wife Diana is also his niece so we can check off Satanism, Nazis and incest all in one movie.
She also has a twin sister, Claire, who is played by Michelle Phillips. All of the women in the family have supernatural powers, such as the ability to set dudes on fire. Which comes in handy, trust me.
You’ve also got Kevin Conroy (the voice of Batman!) in the cast, as well as Barry Morse as Zachariah, the leader of The Judges; Jennifer Cooke (Megan from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives); Judy Parfitt (Vera Donovan from Delores Claiborne); Bradford Dillman; James Saito (the Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and even a quick part for a young Tia Carrere.
Director Walter Grauman also directed 53 episodes of Murder, She Wrote as well as the TV movies Are You in the House Alone? and Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. He was also a distinguished war vet, being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and eight other air medals for his 56 combat missions during World War II.
Dan DiStefano, who worked on cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Flash Gordon, Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, Mr. T as well as the short-lived TV series Misfits of Science, wrote this. He was joined by J..D. Feigelson, who was the writer of Wes Craven’s Chiller, Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Horror High.
Grauman, DiStefano and Feigelson also were behind another TV movie, Nightmare on the 13th Floor, which is all about a reporter discovering that a hotel has a hidden 13th floor where a murderer lives.
I would have been 13 or so when this show aired and while it would have intrigued me with its dark parts, all the machinations and soap opera would have probably bored me. Now that I’m old, I can see how this show could have worked. But then again, I’m also enough of a realist to know that it would have aired on Friday nights, the dead zone for horror and science fiction related TV.
Want to see it for yourself? I posted the YouTube video above and you can also buy it at True TV Movies.
Day 31 of the Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge is 31. In the Graveyard. The graveyard seems a fitting place to end a journey. But for some it might just be the beginning…ZOMBIES!!! How did it take so long for this, one of my favorite movies of all time, to make it to the site? This is quite literally the ultimate drive-in movie to me — it moves fast, it’s ridiculously quotable and it’s packed with laughs and gore.
If you ever wondered where the fact that zombies like brains come from, look no further. This is the film that did it.
July 3, 1984. Louisville, Kentucky. The Uneeda Medical Supply company. Frank (James Karen, Poltergeist) is showing off all of the strangeness within the warehouse to new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews, Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI). There are all manner of body parts, skeletons from an Indian skeleton farm, half dogs and drums containing the leftovers of a military experiment gone wrong, the kind of horrifying thing that they would make a movie about. A movie like, say, Night of the Living Dead. The problem is, Frank accidentally releases the gas in one of the tanks and reanimates corpses and bodies and half dogs throughout the warehouse.
A quick call to the owner, Burt (Clu Gulager, The Initiation) provides only minor help. Trying to figure out how to control the situation and keep his business out of trouble, the three men hack a walking corpse to bits. But it just won’t die — the movies lie! Even a shot to the brain can’t stop the living dead. They turn to Ernie (Don Calfa, Weekend at Bernie’s), a mortician friend, to burn the bodies — which releases the reanimation process into the open air and the graveyard next door.
I never realized in all the times I’ve watched his that Ernie is supposed to be a Nazi in hiding. Now that I see the clues (he listens to the German Afrika Corps march song “Panzer rollen in Afrika vor” on his Walkman while embalming bodies, he carries a German Walther P38, has a photo of Eva Braun and refers to the rain coming down like “Ein Betrunken Soldat” (German for “a drunken soldier”), it makes a lot of sense. Director and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon confirms this theory on the DVD commentary.
Meanwhile, Freddy’s friends learn about his new job from Tina, his girlfriend. There’s Spider, Scuz, Suicide (Mark Venturini, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), Casey (Jewel Shepard, Raw Force), Chuck and, most importantly, Trash (Linnea Quigley in the role of her career). The scene where she announces that the worst way to die would be for “a bunch of old men to get around me and start biting and eating me alive. First, they would tear off my clothes…” is one of the silliest and goofiest excuses to have nudity in a movie, but it works.
As her friends blast 45 Grave and watch Tina disrobe on top of the grave of Archibald Leach (Cary Grant’s real name), Tina looks for Freddy. However, she’s been found by Tarman, the half-melted corpse in the barrel that started this whole mess. And it doesn’t get any better, with zombies calling in paramedics to die (“Send more brains!”) and even the police getting destroyed by the undead. And if you think the military is going to do anything other than nuke the town to hide the truth, then you’ve never seen a zombie film before.
This is a movie unafraid to feature shocks and laughs in the same frame. It comes from the writing team of John Russo and Russell Streiner, two of the names behind the original Night of the Living Dead. When Russo and George Romero went their separate ways, Russo got the rights to the name “Living Dead” while Romero would be allowed to make sequels. The original plan was for Tobe Hooper to direct this movie, but he would go on to make Lifeforce. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Lifeforce, Total Recall and the Alejandro Jodorowsky chose to supervise special effects when he tried to make Dune) agreed to direct, but only if he could rewrite the movie so that it wasn’t seen as a ripoff of Romero’s film.
This is a film packed with in-jokes, like how Freddy’s jacket says FUCK YOU on the back of it and has a totally different jacket for the edited version that says TELEVISION VERSION on it. And there are even more little MAD Magazine-style bits throughout, like the hidden message on the eye test poster in Burt’s office.
I can’t hide how much I love this movie. From the production designs to William Stout to the special effects work (including puppeteer Allan Trautman as Tarman), this movie moves fast, takes no prisoners and continues to surprise me. I always find something new with every viewing.
Want to see it for yourself? Grab the 30th Anniversary blu ray from Shout! Factory or watch it for free with your Amazon Prime membership.
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