15. KILLED BY TECHNOLOGY: The gadgets will getcha (<-autocorrect that one, phone).
A modern-day retelling of the classic Frankenstein story set in the 80s — I mean, the movie is also known as Frankenstein 2000 as Frankenstein 80 was already taken and Joe D’Amato didn’t make Frankenstein 2000: Return from Death until 1992 and he wouldn’t care if he stole a movie title — The Vindicator was made in Canada and directed by Jean-Claude Lord (who also directed Visiting Hours as well as Toby McTeague the very same year).
The ARC corporation is trying to make the spacesuit of the future which will have a rage mode that takes over the wearer’s mind when they need to survive a dangerous situation, going pretty much full-on rage mode. Why this would be part of the machine is something that I leave up to you, dear viewer. That’s the same question that scientist Carl Lehman has, particularly after some monkeys die when one of the bosses, Alex Whyte, cranks them monkeys up to eleven and lets God or whatever machine logic that runs our simulation play dice. Dead monkeys lead to dead scientist which leads to Project Frankenstein, which is sort of RoboCop a year early.
I kind of like how filmmakers say they’re doing a modern Frankenstein and instead of being somewhat coy and naming the robot Project Prometheus or Project Shelley, they sledgehammer the point home and just say, “Hey smart guy, it’s just called Project Frankenstein, OK?”
If you wonder, “Will something go wrong, sending monkeys in a rage and burning Carl’s new skin off and him going on a quest to find his wife, who is played by the actress who would be Jill Bennett on Knot’s Landing?,” then the answer is, of course, yes.
But hey — this also has Pam Grier as Hunter, a hitman who needs a challenge and that usually involves liquidating anyone who knows or sees or even thinks about Carl in the suit. He’s never called the Vindicator, but hey I know one other Canadian scientist who got burned alive inside his cyborg suit and that’d be Weapon Alpha or the Guardian or Vindicator from John Byrne’s Alpha Flight and Canadians may be too polite to vindicate but I do not believe they are so polite as not to steal a movie title.
Anyways, there are some cyborg zombie battles and Carl’s colleague Burt trying to cuck him from beyond the grave and umbilical tubes being used to drown people and much like the cover of the VHS, I’m making this all sound way more exciting than it is. But isn’t that what renting movies used to be all about? You see a title like The Vindicator and a flaming cyborg — much less one designed by Stan Winston — and you say, “Gimme that.” Maybe a few hours later you regret your decision, but it was only a 93 minute and $2 investment, so life used to be a lot simpler.
Steve is an investigative reporter so bad at his job that he doesn’t realize that Natas is Satan backward and even after dealing with gunslinger zombies, he still brings his friends into danger and a ghoul murders a bunch of them and then a demon shows up. Yes, 1986 was a wild time for movies, a moment when anything could end up on rental shelves.
Jack Dunlap only made one movie. This is it. This is what he has left us to remember him by. Well, that and some minor acting roles.
Of note, the mystical Indian named Smohalla in Natas the Reflection was played by the Nino Cochise, the real life grandson of one of the most famous Native American chiefs of all time, Cochise. He was 104 when this was made and never got to see it because it sat around for three years and he died a year after this movie. I think we can all agree that while death is inevitable and sad, he lived a full life and thankfully never had to sit through Natas the Reflection.
Sometimes, Gary Graver was making movies with Orson Welles. Other times, he was making ultra low budget films that were originally about soldiers burning down a temple to a snake goddess and being hunted years later by a Vietnamese child all grown up. Instead, the producers wanted a slasher set on a yacht. And that’s kind of what we got.
But man, what a cast! John Phillip Law? William Smith? Britt Ekland? Robert Quarry? Jillian Kesner from Firecrackerand Raw Force? Any one of these actors will get me to watch a movie. All of them at the same time? Come on!
Shout out to Justin Decloux, who revealed on Letterboxd that the budget for this came from Fred Olen Ray bringing Commando Squad in under budget and Graver saying that he could make another movie with what was left. After Grave shot the film and made his cut, the producers hated it and asked Ray to reshoot it for $5,000, adding in the crazy weapon and bloodier kills. That same camera equipment for the extra scenes got co-opted to make Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers and the movie ended — and that one — ended up being a big success.
Hey look — Britt Ekland starts this movie off in a straightjacket and it gets goofier from there. I can absolutely respect that. I also love that some actors in this are really trying to act (underline and bold that and make it very large in font size) while others are just trying to make a slasher.
That’s me — I’d rather a movie be a mess with a troubled production history than good sometimes.
Also known as Once Upon A Time…The Devil, we have the almighty Vinegar Syndrome to thank for this movie being newly restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera negative. I’ve had a bootleg of this waiting to be watched for years because I knew someday that I would need to call upon its infernal power to save me from a week of stress, madness and ennui. This would be that week. And man, Devil Story is beyond up to the task.
Just a warning: my description of this film is going to sound stream of conscious at best but trust me, it’s even weirder than my words. A mutant killer in an SS uniform is wandering the countryside and killing anyone unfortuante enough to get in his way. A couple’s car breaks down and they have to stay in a Gothic castle. There’s talk of an Equinox and a pirate ship that crashed into the rocks. Then we meet the mutant killer’s mother, a gypsy who lives with a mummy. There’s a horse that’s either possessed by the devil or Satan himself. There’s also a cat.
This is the kind of movie that’s blessed with large quantities of gore, a woman walking hand in bandage wrapped hand through a cemetery with a mummy and that horse. That horse! Also, the film ends as only it can, with the earth itself opening to swallow a character out of nowhere.
Why are there Florida plates on that car? How much is the pirate ship a reference to The Fog? How did the mutant get kicked in the face by a devil horse, throw up blood for a way too long period of time and then just get back to business as if nothing happened? Why does the mummy have such a thick package and throw up blue goop?
There are movies that people think are weird and then there’s Devil Story, a movie whose narrative changes, synth soundtrack and willingness to be a formless mess endeared it to me. I’m so used to the Jean Rollin classy French horror world and I’m so pleased to know that somehow there can be something like this, a movie that had to escape from some sort of parallel world where it was used as a form of image-based hallucinogen.
Editor’s Note: We’re also discussing the writer and director’s earlier works Pandora (1984) and Dance Macabre (1986) within this review.
The original VHSs/courtesy of mattressparty/picuki.
Thanks to the digital realms, with horror fans willing to rip VHS tapes into DVD-rs for their retro-retail portals and video-sharing sites, the once-lost, extremely-hard-to-find resume of Wim Vink — which has all of the earmarks of the ’80s SOVs we adore at B&S About Movies (thus our joint “SOV” and upcoming “Video Nasties” tribute-review weeks) — is easier to discover.
Well, unless you live in the Netherlands, where these films were shot-on-film stocks and distributed exclusively on VHS tapes, independently, by Wim Vink.
Vink’s was an oeuvre you didn’t hear about during the height of the video ’80s in the U.S. You may have picked up on the films in some of the more, offbeat, pulpy underground mags n’ ragzines of the day; possibly you back-page ordered (Spine and Blood Cult) or back-page tape-traded a grey copy. However, we, the many, had their first exposures via the Internet, as horror aficionados began praising the work on blogs, genre message boards, and websites. Maybe, as I did with Pandora — my first exposure to and the only film of Vink’s I’ve seen pre-Internet — many years ago, you picked up a grey copy (along with the U.S. made but Japan-distributed Cards of Death) at your local comic book store.
Vink’s works are intelligent films rife in scene details, but with very little dialog. They’re films that wear a Romero and Argento influence on their bloody sleeves, only with more of an art house film vibe. Some say the films are “boring and repetitive” — and more so with the only full-length film in the Vink catalog, Heaven is Only in Hell. However, that is the whole point of a Vink joint: the devil, if you will, is in the details: the mundane details. For the mundane is, in fact, our reality. Sure, a “good” or “professional” filmmaker knows how to edit out those moments for “narrative flow,” etc. and so on. Well, you know what: when I want that in my film, I’ll load up an A24 or Blumhouse “shock-scare” set piece.
Me, I’m the guy who watched Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm at the local duplex in 1979 and was jaw-dropped. Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead dislocated my mandibles as a “Midnight Movie.” (And, along the muddy water banks of the Waal, bordering the south-central city of Tiel, it seems Vink lost his own, lower jawbone.) And I’ve rewatched the ‘Cos’s and ‘Ram’s debuts more than I’ve watched Star Wars — and I’ve watched them every Halloween, since. Look, I’m a Dennis Devine SOV-type of guy; the one who has watched Fatal Images and Dead Girls more than the average VHS purist. I can go on and on . . . and on — and I have during this “SOV Week” — about the films of Doug Ulrich and Al Darago (Snuff Kill). I adore the heart and inventiveness of each and every one of these filmmakers.
My only beef: Wim Vink is, unlike Coscarelli, Raimi, and Devine, an utter mystery — at least here, in the U.S. (Well, not so much, anymore, as we’ll discuss, later.) Even the Ulrich-Darago collective under the shadow of Vink, is easier to uncover in our Google world. Vink’s career is a series of fan-blogged and message board bits n’ pieces — and we’re doing our best to pull it all together, for a one-stop, Wim Vink shopping experience, right here, at B&S About Movies, in little ‘ol Pittsburgh, U.S.A. (along the muddy river waters of the Allegheny).
In fact, while many believe Vink’s resume of pro-super-8 and 16mm films consists of only four films — it’s actually a resume of eight films. The others — it seems, are forever elusive in the U.S. — are ZombieHorror (1981), Surrealism (1982), Porror (1988), and the Star Wars homage Luke Skywalker Meets the Horror of Darth Vader (1989).
Yes, Wim Vink’s career demands a box set — complete with a color booklet, commentary tracks, and other various vignettes. Make it happen, Severin. Yeah, we know about the music cues “borrowed,” and it’s a music copyright licensing nightmare. However, Wim Vink’s films must be digitally preserved: he is a Dutch filmmaker of historical importance and deserves to have his oeuvre contained in a luxurious box set. So make it happen, ahem, Arrow Films.
Alas . . . until then, and every now and then, we’ll just have to keep plugging “Wim Vink” into search engines and video hosting sites — with the hope that the remainder of Wim Vink’s resume surfaces, somewhere. . . . I want to set up a theater in Pittsburgh, fly in Vink, and have an all-day retrospective — complete with a question and answer event, then have fans line up to buy DVDs and posters for a signing session. Hell, we’ll invite Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn.
Calm down, R.D. Settle. . . .
The reality is: Wim Vink’s films are, in fact — regardless of the “depth of field” issues that appear from time to time (but that’s more of a VHS tape wear n’ tear issue) — “good” and “professional,” properly-edited films. Vink’s films are not just some U.S., 16mm-blown-to-35mm “backyarder” from the Drive-In ’70s (say, like the pretty fine works of Maryland master Don Dohler), nor an ’80s SOV’er start-n-stop-start shot over months of weekends on the non-thespian “friends and family plan,” on-the-sly, sans permits. Vink’s works consistently hit all of the engaging, cinematography touchstones of well-framed singles and doubles, wides, reverses, cutaways, and even “POV” and “God Shots” in the frames.
The films are also — especially Heaven is Only in Hell — packed with background actors, aka extras: and they’re real, trained actors (some say they’re friends and acquaintances; if so, they so a stellar job). And we know this because of the natural approach of the acting exhibited. No one in Vink’s films are deer-in-the-headlights-I’m-in-a-movie! acting for the cameras. And while Vink’s films are practically void of dialog, the leads are effective — in conjunction with Vink “professionally” setting a scene — in “selling the drama” at hand through staging and body language.
There’s a great scene — sans dialog (as with all of the films; the only audio present is soundtrack music) — in Half Past Midnight where one of the bullies leans over the nurse’s desk-station to speak with her mother: a character whom we’ve already met, earlier, in the film. So, we know they’re “conspiring” to hide the daughter’s behavior that put our tortured protagonist in the hospital, in the first place. In the next scene: mom’s injecting poison — with the purpose of murder.
Vink’s work with that hospital scene takes me back to Francis Ford Coppola’s work in The Godfather, which I rewatched in the same week as Vink’s slight resume. (Settle, hear me out.)
Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone goes to the hospital to visit his father, Don Corleone, to discover the police officers assigned to protect his father — as well as hospital workers — are missing. Then, footsteps. The assassin is coming . . . revealed to be a bouquet-bearing Enzo, the neighborhood baker, only wanting to pay his respects. Michael — without dialog, his mind working — sees Enzo in his fedora and overcoat: he looks like one of pop’s men. So Michael asks Enzo for a favor: stand outside, in front of the hospital. The “presence” will stave off the assassin until the “family members” arrive to protect the Don. No dialog: just staging and actor body-language.
Then there’s the Corleone wedding scene: Today, that extensive scene would be studio-cut to shreds. But it’s a scene with all these, wonderful, engaging little details and events — moments that add nothing to the narrative at hand (the grandfather sings a dirty song in Italian, for example) — but it’s details that need to be there.
Vink’s work is filled with those same, non-dialog and, what seems, superfluous details. Yes, even though Vink is working in the SOV-horror realms, those works, while admittedly rough in spots, are competently produced works (unlike, say, 1985’s abysmal Blue Murder) and probably the best-produced works in the annals of ’80s SOV-to-retail and ’70s 16-to-35mm-to-Drive-In distribution (something like 1967’s abysmal Night Fright comes to mind as the worst-produced 16-to-35mm romp).
While there may be music-cheats (but really “homage”) afoot in a Vink joint, in terms of staging, there’s no “cheat” in a Vink film: we get a staging, prop, and set design competence not prevalent in most other, SOV or 8 and 16mm horrors.
During Vink’s lone feature-length production, Heaven is Only in Hell, that’s a real fire truck and real ambulance in the scene — a scene packed with voyeur extras (voyeurism is one of the film’s subtexts) — and real first responder personnel amid a well-stocked, engaging crowd. We’re inside a real hospital, not some errant room with a bogus, unconvincing dressing. And a real school campus, both interior and exterior. A character is a car mechanic: we’re inside a real garage, and a real hair salon, a real record store, and so on. So, yeah, a Vink production is not your typical SOV or single-digit-mm joint: somehow, all of the locations — regardless of the budget — are booked, and up the overall production values.
Vink’s earliest was Pandora (1984), a shot-on-8mm tale-to-video of Romero-styled zombies, shot-in-Dutch (the only one), concerned with an Evil Dead-styled box with the power to raise the dead. Eh, who needs the English language when you can listen to zombies (loudly) munching. Then there’s Dance Macabre (1986), with more Romero-undead mayhem by a cult that raises a female’s skeletal remains who then attacks people and starts a zombie plague (more munching) in an apartment complex. Both are short in content, but, oh, so long — as all of Vink’s films are — on style: a Lucio Fulci fever dream, if you will.
Pandora and Dance Macabre are extremely hard to find on VHS (again, at least in the U.S.). Today, we’ll review the two easiest-to-find films: the main subjects of this two-fer review, and then we’ll ease into those first two films.
Half Past Midnight(1988)
Courtesy of the IMDb.
Dutch writer-director-make up artist Wim Vink’s next SOV’er concerns a shy, sweet girl bullied at school by her fellow classmates: your typical, ’80s big-haired and mascara-type bitches, and boyfriends. Debbie loves computers and electronics and solders circuit boards (which comes in handy for the later mayhem). She loves photography. She has great relationship with her mom. She rides a bike, everywhere.
Why do her classmates hate her so?
They’re bullies. There is no reason.
Since Vink is a director of details, one of surrealistic-slanted cinematography, there’s little to no dialog to tell us why: for Vink is about the actors selling the story — which they do, both lead and background. Sure, the “story” all seems mundane, at first watch (you can’t watch it just once), but that’s only to heighten the shock of when Debbie gets her revenge by killing her tormentors one by one, in extremely gruesome, bloody ways — and OTE gory and bloody, in the best of ways.
Half Past Midnight is a great example of ultra-low-budget horror. It’s absurd. It’s raw. It’s awesome. And it was shot in Tiel, Gelderland, Vink’s hometown. So it is truly homegrown, which makes us love it, even more.
Half Past Midnight is also, only half an hour long (and in English) — the prefect length, due to its brutality — with its tale of Debbie (Angelique Viesee), an attractive-awkward student, relentlessly bullied by her dickish classmates. One is a voyeur always taking pictures of Debbie’s misfortunes. Her teacher (Ad Kleingeld) takes pity, but with an ulterior motive: he rapes her.
While it’s not established if we are in a high school or college, everyone looks to be beyond their teen years. And that office building looks more “college campus” than “high school” to these eyes. So, that takes the creep-factor off the fact Debbie’s, obviously older, teacher asks her on a date. Now, mind you, without dialog, Vink’s made a statement on how easy it is for a sexual predator to chose and manipulate an insecure victim; the simplest act of kindness to a put upon person can open the door to a graphic event. Again, it’s about the “reality” in a Vink production.
As we mentioned: voyeurism is part of the — non-verbal — subtext. Everyone stands by and watches Debbie being assaulted, brutally, and does nothing. And when one does, such as her lecherous teacher (helps her pick up dumped books and papers; has her collect the student’s papers after class), it’s only as a backdoor for his own assault. Then, the bully who photographs Debbie’s assaults — in an eerie foreshadow of today’s smartphone-viral media sickness — develops the film in a dark room, with a glean in her eye.
So . . . the bullies are back: with a teacher now in their corner. The students ambush-spray an aerosol can in Debbie’s face and blind her. She stumbles into traffic and is hit by a car. She survives, barely. But a nurse at the hospital — the mother of one of the bullies — injects poison into Debbie’s eye.
Debbie dies. (We think.)
Debbie returns from the dead — whatever was injected in her eye, reanimates her (we think) — so she lays waste to the lot of them, going “Ash” on their asses, if you will. Using her electronics skills, Debbie solders herself a belted-power pack, complete with knife sheath, to run an electric chainsaw. And said chainsaw POVs into chests, as butcher knifes go through-and-through necks, as well as sawed off arms, and torso dismemberment, and intestinal flow, ensues, in one of the bloodiest, seven minutes ever committed to film. The only thing missing is a penis detachment by hedge clippers.
So, you thought Deadbeat at Dawn was the ultra-low-budget throwdown. Eh, piffle. Jim Van Bebber is a pussy compared to Wim Vink. Debbie ain’t no Carrie (a definite influence, here, alongside The Evil Dead) that’s for damn sure, for no ESP is required. Just a chainsaw, please. Oh, and lots of loud, screamin’ guitars by Rob Orlemans!
Half Past Midnight is simply fucking amazing. Period. Exclamation point.
The joy of a Wim Vink film is, not only recognizing the musical-homage cues, but the plot and visual cues. In the case of Vink’s only feature-length film, fans cite Michele Soavi’s classic The Church (1989). And if you’re familiar with that film — of course you are — the film unbalances you with its “what the hell is going on” plotting. Soavi’s works (the early ’90s pieces of StageFright, The Sect, and Cemetery Man) are less about fixed, narrative flow and more about image collages; loosely connected nightmares. And as with Vink’s other works: the characters are connected, somehow, then they’re not. The Vink modus operandi: ambiguity.
Here, we meet Mike and Sharon; he works as a garage mechanic, while Sharon works as a bookkeeper at stereo store. (Were they once related; now reincarnated in a future, apart, now searching for one another?) A local house for sale — where someone previously died (when, who knows/or is Mike seeing his future) — begins to haunt his mind, to the point his work suffers. Sharon, likewise, is disturbed by the same visions: the result of her psychic abilities.
Of course, as with the characters in each of Wim Wink’s films: the characters don’t live fast, they slowly exist in boring, mundane lives: going to work, then home, work, home. And it’s the drudgery that make them susceptible to the supernatural, in this case: the ghostly chants urging them to open a well’s portal.
Their dreams/visions concern a centuries old pagan coven, led by a witch and her young daughter (?), and a cursed, ancient well that, as result of progress, is now in the basement of the empty home Mike purchases. Meanwhile, Sharon’s visions overwhelm her to the point that she breaks into the house to find the “Hell Well” in its cellar — set in the middle of a finished, wooden floor, covered by an iron pentagram. And Sharon brings a “sacrifice” from her aerobics class; with fresh blood, she can now descent into the well. Mike? He hesitates and rejects his mistress: he’s strung up “Evil Dead” style by ghostly ropes from the home’s attic’s rafters — and slaughtered.
This time, the soundtrack’s all-original, composed by Angelique Vink (who also plays Sharon), as well as synth-numbers by Sander Brokke and Vincent Hooyer. And, again: sparse dialog, with only the repetitive looping of the film’s opening chant-narration for an unsettling, moody work of horror impressionism (think F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, better yet: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s stellar, Vampyr, from 1932). Again, detractors may say the film is overly repetitive and padded; that maybe so. However, I see it as a purposeful, artistic-narrative choice: Mike and Sharon’s lives are so, utterly empty, their aural and mental visions consume their lives to the point of an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
So, with that, as mysteriously (well, at least outside of the Netherlands) as Wim Vink drifted into the VCR-driven snows of the SOV ’80s . . . he dissipated into the developing, nickle-collated, laser-spinning ethers. For Wim Vink’s visions were not meant for a digital world, only the analog tapes of the past. . . .
Image courtesy Letterboxd. Both are available as a two-fer PAL-VHS in overseas markets.
Pandora (1984)
Oh, Hail Satan and the hell with this being in Dutch with no subtitles. All I know is I’m nostalgia waxing an Amando de Ossorio-meets-Paul Naschy Spanish zombie joint, à la Tombs of the Blind Dead and The People Who Own the Dark. (Hey, did you see the 2020 homage-sequel, Curse of the Blind Dead, yet? Do it!)
Now, when you see the word “Pandora,” you think “box,” but what we have here is a book . . . well, there’s a box, too . . . as well as music cues lifted from Suspiria, The Exorcist, and even some Tangerine Dream*. Of course, the music is gone . . . so we can hear the zombie munching n’ licking n’ slurpin’.
What’s great about Vink’s work is that it’s a body of work that understands film is an art form based in “showing” and not “telling”; for film is 90% visual and 10% dialog (and the stage is the reverse). A film’s images tell the story though props, an actor’s body language and, most importantly: that your actors are not skilled in the craft of acting—but “being.” This was a fatal mistake made by James Glickenhaus (The Exterminator, producer of Maniac Cop) with his debut film, The Astrologer (1975, aka Suicide Cult): he didn’t have a complete grasp of — as does Wim Vink — of cinematography; so his otherwise intriguing film, bogs down with 60 minutes of ponderous dialog against its 79-minute running time. This is a “mistake” not experienced in a Vink film.
So, regardless of language, we have a young woman who requests information on a book; the librarian directs her. Why would a book that can open a doorway for the dead to rise be in the library? Why was the woman looking for the book?
I don’t care.
All I know is, she — we think — has been “possessed” by the book, and having visions of a white-robed witch. And a leaf-covered sarcophagus slides open and four, Bob Clark/Alan Ormsby,’60s era Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things zoms are now the white-cloaked witch’s army of the dead. And they need to retrieve a box — from a businessman who possessed the box.
Fog starts pouring out of the box. One witch stabbing later: lunchtime for zombies — and it’s better than anything dished in Bruno Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead.
Then, the woman who checked out the book, buys that errant “Pandora” box from an antiques shop . . . and the witch and her zombie quartet are back, for the box. And we get a little bit of time displacement, a sudden transport into a cavernous crypt, and an even larger zombie army. . . .
Dutch language, be damned, this film rocks my rocks offs.
Dance Macabre (1986)
In 1978, Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Rob Talpert and Scott Spiegel released their their proof-of-concept short Into the Woods: a tale about a group of friends who desecrate an Indian burial ground while staying at a cabin. Around that same time, Don Coscarelli began filming Phantasm: his tale about two brothers running afoul of a cryptic mortician. Romero released Dawn of the Dead that same year. Dance Macabre is a homage to those films, right down to a music-pinch from Phantasm’s funeral scene, as well as synth-cues from Romero’s, as well as Argento’s and Fulci’s zom-romps (you’ll know ’em when you hear them). And I love the hat tip to Coscarelli, courtesy of a reenactment of Jody first meeting The Tallman, right down to the bone chilling, “Sir.”
Oh, my beautiful Vink surrealism. My only complaint is that the film isn’t longer than 22 minutes. My greatest love: there’s never one moment of silence. Outside of a character’s ritual chant, no one speaks, but the ripped music cues never stop, throbbing, trapping us in a black-metal disco on the cusp of a Dante circle. Well, except for the flesh munching. . . .
We first meet a trio of necromancers digging up a coffin of skeletal remains.
Why? Who cares.
Then we’re traveling down a modern-day road in a 19th Century-styled, horse drawn carriage. In the back: a kidnapped girl, then carried up to the attic of an apartment building. One throat slit and blood flow later: we have a white-eyed, big-haired blonde demon reanimated and on-the-loose (with a knife-licking fetish), impaling knifes into foreheads and ripping across throats of the building’s tenants.
Of course, the dead rise as a plague breaks out in the building. A SWAT team is called in for a little Pittsburgh-inspired cops vs. zombies battle. . . .
Who were the necromancers? Were they in the past? Who’s the blonde? Sure, she’s a witch, but from when and whom?
I don’t care. . . .
I just watched a film with more fun packed into 22 minutes than any 90 minute VHS slopfest I’ve watched in my analog lifetime. Dance Macabre is everything I want in an SOV horror — even though this was shot on 16mm. And it only gets better with Half Past Midnight, and even better-better with the full-length opus, Heaven is Only inHell.
Why didn’t Argento, Fulci, or Romero see the magic in Wim Vink and bankroll a 35mm feature proper? What a fucking tragic, missed opportunity.
The VHS reissues/courtesy of onorato73/picuki.
Were to Watch
You can watch Heaven is Only In Hell on You Tube courtesy of BurialGround5 — what would we do on Saturday nights without BG5?
Someone by the name of Jurgen Telkamp saved Half Past Midnight for the digital realms — god bless you, brother — on You Tube. Devilman666 comes with the back-up assist on another You Tube copy, as well.
You can watch Dance Macabre on You Tube, thanks to Hipster Pobre.
You can watch Pandora on You Tube courtesy of altohippiegabber. Just wow. The memories. Thank you!
Vim Wink’s Complete Resume (Thanks, Alto!)
1981 — ZombieHorror (30 mins) 1982 — Surrealism (25 mins) 1984 — Pandora (30 mins) 1986 — Dance Macabre (22 mins) 1988 — Porror (6 mins) 1988 — Half Past Midnight (32 mins) 1989 — Luke Skywalker Meets the Horror of Darth Vader (5 mins) 1994 — Heaven is Only in Hell (86 mins)
There’s no breaking of the Ninth Commandment, allowed. Not this time.
We know you’ve never seen or heard of this beautiful collision of a Christploitation flick and an ’80s SOV’er for the most epic, greatest SOV in the horror realms committed to video tape. And yes, video store owners, who had no friggin’ idea of what was distributed to them (see the great Spine shelving snafu), gandered at the words of “Heaven’s Gates” and “Hell’s Flames” and, instead of placing the tape in the “Family/Children’s” section (and this is not child appropriate in the least) where it belonged, they tossed it on the horror section shelves.
And there it was for me to score: in the horror section of the video store, a store sandwiched between a Falafel joint and an accident-attorney office. Yes, those hour-long “Christian Scare” documentaries you would see during the sleepless overnights and lazy weekends as you channel surfed past TBN – The Trinity Broadcasting Network* in the ’80s ended up on VHS for distribution on your home video shelves.
Yes, I was a truly blessed, metal-head and VHS lovin’ youth that day of yore . . . courtesy of Paul and Jan Crouch.
So . . . this 50-minute Canuck Christploiter made in St. Catharine’s, Ontario by Reality Outreach Ministries portrays people of various ages and walks of life who die in a variety of unexpected ways (e.g., drug abuse, the bottle, car accidents, muggings-gone-bad, steel girders falling). The way they lived on Earth determines where they will spend eternity: Heaven or Hell.
Oh, and a warning: this is a stage play produced by the ministry and committed to tape.
BUT IT IS STILL EPIC! ROLL THE TAPE!
Thanks, Paul Z, at VHS Collector for the clear image.
Dude . . . when this play’s depiction of Heaven kicks in, it is right out the Estus Pirkle playbook — but HGHF has nothing on The Believer’s Heaven and beats it by a few clouds. Then, when Hell kicks in — complete with a bastardized Gene Simmons-meets-King Diamond-cackling Satan — it holds no candle to Jose Majica Marins’s Coffin Joe depictions of Hell in This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. Oh, ye reader, forget about Estus Pirkle’s multi-colored Rubic’s Cube face-painted Satan in Ron Ormond’s The Burning Hell, for Reality Outreach Ministries has just blessed you with the Satan you always wanted in your nightmares.
Oh, yeah. The rest of the plot.
Well, it’s a bunch of vignettes, as “actors” do “scenes” that warn, you, on the various horrors awaiting those who do not accept Jesus Christ. For example: We have a young couple on a nice, romantic evening in the park (two folding chairs on stage, natch). She speaks about “her psychic said romance is in the air” as her Christian boyfriend warns her on the dangers of “deceptive physics.” Then, a mugger shows up, steals her purse, and shoots both. Dead.
For reals. I am not making this up.
Now, we’re at the “Pearly Gates” and the boyfriend gets in. The girlfriend says, “Wait, why am I here? I’m supposed to be reincarnated!”
Cue King Diamond.
The King and two of his minions grab Blondie and drag her into the red-cellophane fires. Meanwhile, the best part, is the boyfriend pulls the ol’ I-told-you-so gag — with a glean in his eye. Why? Because Christians get off on the ol’ I-told-you-so-and-seeing-you-go-to-Hell gag.
Next vignette.
Two construction worker-buds are on top of a high building (again, folding chairs on the stage). The saved worker witnesses to his troubled work-bro and turns him to Christ. Suddenly . . . a girder (actors, awfully, selling the drama) falls. Both die. Both go to Heaven. But, since the one guy just got saved . . . there’s a paperwork snafu, since there wasn’t time to write his name down in the Book of Life. But don’t worry. Jesus shows up to set the Angel in charge of the book, straight.
For reals. I am not making this up.
Okay, just one more. . . .
A little girl begs her busy, career-driven and charity-committed mom to go to church. “Next, week, Sweetie,” mom brushes her off. Suddenly . . . a car (again, actors — awfully — selling the drama), hits them. Mom and daughter are dead.
Then, mom gets the shock of her life: being a good parent, a loyal wife, and doing good deeds, alone, won’t get her into Heaven. But since the daughter went to church, she goes to Heaven. So, to Hell mom goes. Why? Because working with the homeless and the handicap wasn’t good enough for God — and you turned your back on His son. Yes, King Diamond shows up and takes away mom — to the girl’s screams and cries, begging Jesus to save her mom. Seconds later, Jesus shows up and touches the girl. All is well. The girl skips up the silver and gold staircase.
For reals. I am not making this up. It’s not a fever dream. It’s real.
And you thought Estus Pirkle’s sharpened bamboo into the ear canals of children was sick. We told you this tops a Pirkle joint six days a week and twice on Sundays. It’s pure insanity — stage production, be damned — so how can you not want to watch this? Okay, so it’s not as bonkers as Pastor Kenneth Okonkwo’s two-part, papier-mâché production, 666: Beware, the End is at Hand, but what zero-budget soul-saving epic, is?
“I want the boy! Throw him to the pits of Hell!“
“Forget about your mommy, little girl. She’s mine, now!Ooh, it’s cold gin time again!”
“To Hell with him!Bring the black box to the altar!”
“Like father, like son!For my real name is Kim Bendix Petersen!”
Anyway, it goes on and on and on like this for a glorious 50-minutes, well, near 75-minutes, since the festivities are front and backended with a Pastor’s service. But name your sin: Abortion. Drugs. Sex. Not going to church. Reincarnation. Fortune tellers. The dangers of every and any sins, are depicted, here. Lovers and families are torn apart. People hug Jesus and go to Heaven without a tear or care of their loved one being dragged to Hell.
Yes. Jesus greets you, personally, each and everyone, with a hug . . . as you walk through a literal door, aka gate, under the Angel that’s perched on top of a golden pedestal, on top of the silver and gold staircase — you know, the Angel who makes sure you’re in the Book of Life, sans any paperwork snafus where you died two-second later, after just “being saved” by a buddy.
Now, hear me out for a second: Wouldn’t it be the “Christian thing” to do, that, when your loved one is about to be dragged to Hell by faux-Gene Simmons, that your “Christian Heart” would make the ultimate sacrifice and take your loved one’s place, so they can enter Heaven?
Oops. Sorry for allowing logic into the plot. Never pick at the plot holes. Especially not in Christian Cinema.
Look, it’s a fun and frolicking “SOV Week” at B&S About Movies, so we can poke (sorry) a little fun, here. However, honestly, for a stage play, the production values are pretty decent. The stage is one, single dressing. A simple lighting change is all it takes to transform the silver and gold of Heaven into the red and orange fires of Hell. Sure, it’s not an Oscars-level production, but still, for a church auditorium-cum-chapel gig, it leaves you impressed. Yeah, credit where credit is do: the stage manager, or audio visuals manager for Reality Outreach Ministries, really makes this all work, brilliantly. I wonder if he ever did a film, proper? I’d rent that movie.
However, what is not impressing, are the “actors,” who we assume are volunteering for the cause. The way they jump around, screaming and “rejoicing” on stage with their “I’m in Heaven. Woooo! This is awesome. Angel, is my name in the Book of Life? Yes, I’m in. I’m going to Heaven!” would be a flailing, arms-akimbo thespian tragedy if it wasn’t so gosh darned funny.
Oh, hell yeah, pardon the vernacular, it’s on You Tube and You Tube.
The caveat: The uploads are of two, different productions of the same play. In my opinion, the first version (with faux-King Diamond) — the one I watched on tape all those years ago, is the stronger production of the two. The second version (with Gene Simmons; the second still, above) — which I didn’t know existed until this review — runs a bit longer at 90 minutes, due to it having more Pastor preaching than the first.
Both are still epic. Watch ’em both! Hell, yeah! Also watch this. . . .
* We also discuss the “Christian Scare” era within our review of the Paul and Jan Crouch-produced Six: The Mark Unleashed and its metal music-is-evil component with the fictional film, Raging Angels.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
There is every other movie in the world and then there’s The Abomination.
No hype. This movie is absolutely brain destroying junk transmitted from some terrifying alternate timeline that I hope and pray never reaches our own. It’s a world where televangelist Brother Fogg can pray a tumor out of a woman, who vomits it out, and then that tumor crawls into her son who undergoes a transformation into a killing machine that feeds the many spores of the creature and pushes forward the end of all things.
This is also the kind of movie that starts with a blast forward of all the gore that you’re about to see in this movie and still not feel boring when that gore comes back. And man, that gore comes back and takes over the world of this movie, transforming protagonist Cory’s home into a panormama of teeths and blood and muscle and sinew and gristle and gore.
Man, what’s wrong with Texas? Or right? This movie feels like it wasn’t released and that it escaped, like it should have been destroyed before it infected anyone’s brain but here it is, hiding in its low-fi menace out there waiting for people to watch it and wonder, “Why are people driving so much?” when they aren’t wretching from the endless parade of blood and viscera being literally thrown at the screen and the dubbed soundtrack which makes me love this movie even more, because when you put your budget into gigantic monsters that emerge from appliances and kitchen nooks, you don’t have the cash for synched sound.
Director and writer Bret McCormick also made parts of Tabloid and the films Time Tracers and Repligator. Even at this early stage, he’s showing off a real eye of how to use the budget and how pretty much frighten you through the sheer strangeness of what he’s created.
This isn’t a perfect movie but perfection is an ideal that cannot exist. This is The Abomination.
Hey, there’s nothing like an “SOV Week” to inspire us to fill out the holes in B&S About Movies’ SOV database while we also polish off the unholy triumvirate of Christopher Lewis — the Julius Ceasar of the SOV domains — with Blood Cult, The Ripper, and the sequel to Blood Cult: Revenge. Ah, there’s a catch, afoot: more money means improved production values, so we’ve made the transition from video to 16mm film. But we didn’t know that back then . . . so while it’s not “technically” an SOV, it still is in our video store pumpin’ hearts.
I begged to buy this poster off the video store wall. The mint-deficient halitosis owner wouldn’t budge. Even after taking it down for a new one-sheet, he still wouldn’t sell. He told me, “I’d rather throw it out.” And probably did. Dick.
So, did you read our review of Blood Cult? Then you’re up-to-speed with the dog-worshiping cult shenanigans.
In the grand tradition of notable-successful actors hitting hard times and slumming in an SOV romp to pay the rent (and for a producer to get a marketable name on the Big Box), such as Michael J. Pollard in Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989), adult-film star Amber Lynn in Things (1989), and Janus Blythe of The Hills Have Eyes in Spine (1986), Revenge stars John Wayne’s son, Patrick — the star of the huge (in our hearts!!!!) mid-‘70s drive-in hits The People That Time Forget and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.
Exhibiting still cheesy, but vastly improved technical skills in front of and behind the camera — in a script penned by actor Joe Vance (the dead Joel Hogan from the first film) — star Wayne returns home to investigate the death of his brother from the first film. And he runs afoul of our dog-god cult with a body-part fetish overseen by cadaverous horror icon John Carradine, who, even with the dreck he’s been in (see Cirio H. Santiago’s Vampire Hookers), deserves better than ending his career with an SOV appearance (ugh, I know, 16 mm, but you get the point).
While we still have the slasher element from Blood Cult, things are a bit more supernatural-cum-mystery — no Halloween homages this time, as with the first film — with our cult members using ESP to dispatch their victims with a little cerebral cortex rupturing. It’s not exactly Michael Ironside Scanners explosive, but it’s messy . . . and SOVs (okay, frack, 16mm) have to be Karo food coloring-messy.
A couple of months after the end of the Blood Cult timeline, Patrick Wayne’s Micheal Hogan, the brother of dog-cult victim Joel Hogan, returns to town and comes to help Gracie Moore (a returning Bennie Lee McGowan) now terrorized by the dog cult that murdered her husband and wants her farmland to conduct a sacrifice. Also back are David Stice as our Deputy and Peter Hart as Dr. White. In a QAnon twist: John Carradine’s Senator is the head of the Lord Caninus sect (funny, Ted Cruz strikes me more as the dog cult demigod-type). And more of the same body part collecting to resurrect ol’ Canny, ensues . . . and the “ensuing” includes a head-hatching, leg-removal by bear trap, a Jacuzzi slice n’ dice-cum-decap, and the ESP kicks in for a fleshy BBQ.
You can pick up Revenge, paired with Blood Cult and The Ripper, on a nifty catch-all The Ripper Blood Pack DVD from Amazon. You can also watch a VHS-era rip on You Tube. And speaking of “revenge” . . . bang the head that doesn’t bang with a little Slayer, Exodus, and Venom, for, as you know, metal and horror films are a bloody Reese cup from hell.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
I had several video store memberships back in the day — both with the chains (Blockbuster and Hollywood Video) an array of mom n’ pops — not counting the ones where I wasn’t a member that I’d road trip for a cut-out bin divin’ weekend (if I couldn’t find it as a rental, I’d buy the cutout version) — and my local comic bookstore.
Yes. At the comic book store.
As my neighborhood video store knocked a hole in their wall and the owner dumped all of his warehoused vinyl into the bay next door to not only sell, but rent records like video tapes (of which I recorded many to cassettes), my local comic book store also punched a hole in their wall and opened a dinky video store. Another comic shop — which was bit more of a drive — cleared out a corner and started shelving rental videos, as well. (For a fee, that comic shop would high-speed a copy; used vinyl record stores, before and during the early days of the compact disc, when everything wasn’t yet on disc, copied albums: first to cassettes, and then, eventually CDs.)
The U.S. reissue from the fine folks at Bleeding Skull. Hi, Hog. Dig the shirt.
What my cherish comic honey holes shelved is many of the films we’ve reviewed during our “Regional Horror Week” back in March, our “Hong Kong Week” back in May, and last month’s “SOV Week” and “Video Nasties Week” tribute . . . then there’s our “Japan Week” coming the beginning of next year (cut and paste those “weeks” into our search box to populate those reviews). For when your local comic book store decides to compete in the home video market, you know that they’re going deeper than the mom ‘n pop outlets where your dad is renting The Godfather, mom (mine’s an action whore) wants First Blood — and you’re renting a Wizard “Big Box” “video nasty” to the tune of Headless Eyes. (And let’s not forget our beloved pre-Internet catalog grey-market retailer VSOM – Video Search of Miami and our trusty Starlight Video bootleg catalogs helping us discover the deep corners of the VHS-doms. I miss that: I’d rather the ol’ catalogs and mail-order than the web. I know: shut up, nostalgic old bastard.)
Such a “deep” film is Cards of Death: the feature film debut — and lone film — by actor Will MacMillan. Born in Stuebenville, Ohio, he came to work at the Lovelace Marionette Theatre in Pittsburgh (the hometown of the online publication you’re reading right now). Oh, you know MacMillan. He starred in George Romero’s The Crazies and co-starred alongside Clint Eastwood in The Enforcer. Then there’s a dozen-plus network TV series, as well as Oliver Stone’s Salvador. Then more TV series and a couple of TV movies.
Did my common regional roots to MacMillan, along with the Romero connection, mean anything to me at the time when I rented the grey-version of Cards of Death from my ol’ comic hole? Nope. No more than the Hollywood and rock music lineage of Christopher Lewis inspired me to rent Blood Cult. All I know is that I saw a weird-and-wonderful, never before seen oddity imported and grey’d from Japan and I wanted it. And, as it turns out: it wasn’t an Asian cinema set-piece, but an American (SOV) flick masquerading as Asian cinema. And I think MacMillan inspired all of that later, Asian-VHS insanity from Japan and Hong Kong. I have a feeling, if you read reviews and interviews of the fans and makers of those films: MacMillan is name-dropped, often.
Yep. That’s the one. Originally issued on Japan Sony’s “Exciting Video” label. Only the “U.S.” cover was a fuzzy, laser-printed copy tucked into a clamshell sleeve and dubbed on a TDK-VHS tape.
Anyway, MacMillan wanted to move behind the camera. And with the home video revolution and the new accessibility of commercial video cameras — with the shot-on-video and direct-to-video successes of the likes of the influential SOV game changers Boardinghouse and Blood Cult, MacMillan realized he had a cost-effective way to prove his skills as a writer and director. And, from what I’ve read: to tell Hollywood to “f-off,” as he had grown disenchanted with the business. (I wonder why: he worked consistently; perhaps he lost out on auditions for a couple mainstream roles?)
And, with that, the crime-horror Cards of Death was born.
However, unlike the SOV’ers Boardinghouse and Blood Cult, Cards of Death couldn’t obtain (widespread) U.S. distribution — so no one saw it. Why? With its gratuitous nudity, lesbianism, sex scenes smeared in blood, and on-screen kills — more so than Spine, an SOV also released in 1986 — MacMillan’s vision was a perfect programmer for porn purveyors 4-Play Video, Inc. and producer Xeon, Ltd.’s joint, “commercial” SS – Sterling Silver imprint; the label was created for that porn-slasher hybrid’s marketing into the brick-and-mortar marketplace. Cards of Death would have made for a great, second release for the label — instead of having Sterling Silver go under after the release of Spine. Sure, MacMillan had years of mainstream Hollywood experience behind him. Surely, he had the industry connections. But a scuzzy porn-leaning horror film snipping inspiration from ’50s and ’60s French New Wave existentialism? It’s easy to see why MacMillan was left to his own devices to market and distribute his admittedly unconventional film. (Why do you think Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre; 1989) never got his version of Dune made?)
So, in a business deal with details lost to the analogs of time, MacMillan got the film into the Asian home video market via Sony’s “Exciting Video” VHS imprint. That’s when Cards of Death — like Cheap Trick’s Japan-only released Live at Budokan breakthrough album before it — found its way back the greylands of the good ol’ U.S.A. to be nestled onto my local comic book store’s underground-video nasties shelf. Those shelves also held imported copies of Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap and the grey-market rips of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (which took ten years to officially appear in the U.S.) and the Guinea Pig and Tomiefranchises.
If only MacMillan turned the directorial reins over to Takashi Miike of Dead or Alive fame; for Cards of Death is under the same Sapporo Dome as Gozu(2003), Miike’s bizarre, low-budget direct-to-video horror with its mix of mobsters and ghosts and breast milk and cow-headed men. (Yeah, a Miike remake of Cards of Death is a film I’d pay to stream.) The violence of Cards of Death, while it has its moments, isn’t Evil Dead Trap-brutal — and is certainly not as expertly-crafted as a Miike joint — but it does foretell torture porn before there was an Eli Roth (his game-inspired Hostel, in particular). And that gore comes courtesy of another SFX artist (see our review of Night Feeder) who moved onto bigger and better things: Bryan Moore ended up doing the effects for one of Charles Band’s better Empire budgeters, Dolls (1987), by Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator), and Underworld: Evolution. But let’s not forget Moore’s makeups on the oft-run USA Network’s Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and the much HBO-played C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.
The you-want-to-shower-after vibe of Cards of Death comes in the form of graphic sex scenes: one features a nude, punk-rock makeup lesbian f**king Hog next to a corpse she just offed and drained into their wine goblets — and smear the bloody over their bodies. And if that’s not enough: a chair-cuffed cop (MacMillan as Captain Twain on the case) has his fingers, ears, and nose sliced off — then mailed to the police station. One gamer gets an axe to the chest and a crown of barbed wire around the face and throat — all in-camera. And there’s a (admittedly clumsy) human crushing by a pneumatic walled-device, aka “The Crush Room.” There’s an impaling on a wrought iron fence (because of cost, we don’t see the fall, just the aftermath). Then there’s rape. And strangulation. And sadism. And a chainsaw. And cheese graders used on dairy products and epidermal products. And bullets. And the coke flows. And there’s no mystery — and that seems to be MacMillan’s “narrative choice” — as we know our killers, and since everyone is killing, there’s no Giallo-done-to-death Voorhees POVs typical of the slasher genre for us to “guess” what’s what. MacMillan is about the existential weirdness, with what can be described as a slasher-porn inversion of Ingmar Bergman’s medieval masterpiece The Seventh Seal (1957). Is Hog a representation of death, while the felted-table of tarot card death is MacMillan’s version of Bergman’s errant knight and death perched over a chess board?
But what we do know: The “cards of death” is an underground card game (in a black-plastic draped and burning-neon, new wave room tucked inside a dilapidated warehouse) with its cult-following players fronted by the mysterious Hog — complete with a crudely-drawn spider on his forehead. The game’s stakes are one’s life. To up the weirdness — and which is why Sony Japan snapped it up for Pacific Rim distribution — our male players wear rubber masks (of clowns, skulls; interpret the subtext to your liking) while the females slaughter in full Nazi dominatrix regalia (your subtext guess is as good as ours) as they play a Poker-inspired game, only with Tarot cards. The rules are simple: If you’re left holding the death card in your hand, you die — with a violent Grand Guignol death set-in-wait for you. If you hold a winning hand, you win the pot, but you’ll lose the pot — and you’re own life — if you fail to kill the loser within 24 hours. The game is held every Wednesday. On Thursday, the loser’s body is dumped in the city. And the cops are stumped. And the financial windfall is so substantial, a priest with gambling debts is willing to play the game (he’s the guy that ended up fence-impaled).
So, why does the game exists? What’s the “end game” of the game? Why, after all of the seriousness of the film, do we have black comedy end credits — complete with goofy music, rolling? What’s our “message” take away? Well, what I do know: Cards of Death is grainy. It’s sadistic. It’s repugnant. It should not exist, but it does. Cards of Death is an SOV dream of a simpler, analog membership card time as we searched for the off-beat. And I love it.
But that’s not to say Cards of Death is not awkward and clumsy. While the scenes in the warehouse game room are entertaining and has its directing, thespian, and scripting weirdness-moments, the game’s over when the story returns to the jittery, flat camera work of awkward framing with the (awful acting) cops and their investigation. As with the (even more) awkward police investigation plot-jinxing of fellow SOV’er Spine ditching the bondage-murder antics of Lawrence Ashton — the grime that everyone came for — Cards of Death draaaags when the fuzz show up. We want the new wave weirdness and murderous lesbians. In comparison, the influential Blood Cult, with its admitted share of flaws, is clearly the better-shot film. And Cards of Death is, in turn, better shot than Spine. Got that?
MacMillan appeared in two more SOV-made films: Dark Romances Vol. 1 (1990) and Schemes (1994), so you can search for those to kill the cat. Sadly, we lost Mac in December 2015. You can read his obituary at Hollywood Reporter, People, and Varietymagazine (notice how Cards of Death isn’t mentioned; and one obit is more detailed than the other).
And would you believe that some of the actors from Cards of Death not only moved onto other works, but are still in the business?
Ron Kologie, who stars as MacMillan’s son, Billy, appears in two, recent Lifetime holiday movies: Random Acts of Christmas and A Cheerful Christmas. (You know us and cable Christmas movies around here; denied: Fred Olen Ray or David DeCoteau didn’t make Kologie’s good cheer’ers. Oh, well.) Greg Lawrence, here as Ross, one of our intrepid cops, continued to work in indie features and shorts, including the works of Dennis Devine (Get the Girl). Joel Hoffman, as wrought-iron’d Father Morris, turned up in Slaughterhouse, Slumber Party Massacre II, and the much-loved Stan Winston-directed Pumpkinhead (Hoffman’s since retired; he’s a high school English and Spanish teacher).
You can purchase appropriate retro-VHS reissues — with the U.S. artwork — via Bleeding Skull and Mondo’s joint efforts. Oh, yes! The You Tube gods have delivered a streaming copy. If there is one SOV’er you decide watching this week, make it Cards of Death: even with its flaws, it’s a Dan Curtis, tape-shot ’70s TV movie on acid with a speedball chaser, a dominatrix with an axe, and a coil of razor wire.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In celebration of its 35th anniversary, the 1986 BMX racing film Rad will return to movie theaters nationwide on Thursday, October 14 at 7:00 p.m. courtesy of Fathom Events and Utopia. Featuring a new 35th-anniversary restoration, fans will see — for the first time — A Rad Documentary – Inside the BMX Movie That Changed Everything, which has never-before-seen interviews with the cast and crew and behind-the-scenes footage.
There was also a Rad stunt show and premier tonight at Fantastic Fest. While we couldn’t be there in person, we couldn’t resist sharing this review again, which originally ran on December 9, 2020. We’ll see you in the theater on October 14 and on Helltrack!
If there was one movie that was hard to rent at my neighborhood mom and pop video store, this would be it.*
Leonard Maltin gave this movie his dreaded BOMB review, comparing it to 1950’s car race and 1970’s roller disco movie films. Yeah, Leonard. Wondering why everyone liked it so much?
Shot in Alberta, Canada — look for a young Robin Bougie from Cinema Sewer — this movie may have failed in theaters. but like I said above, it was a top rental film for what seems like forever.
Cru Jones has two choices: take the SAT in order to attend college or race Helltrack, which could mean $100,000, a new Chevrolet Corvette and fame. His mom, Talia Shire, whines so much that you wish that Stanley Kubrick would arrive to cause PTSD to take her out of this film, but no, she just cries that he’s throwing away his future. He is, near-fifty-year-old me can tell you, but have you seen Helltrack?
The thing I never understood about this movie was how could Mongoose have allowed themselves to be portrayed in such a negative light? They were such a big BMX company and in nearly every scene, their owner Duke Best is out to get Cru and to push his own rider Bart Taylor.
Before she went to jail for that college scam, Lori Loughlin played the tough tomboy that the hero fell in love with. Here, she’s Christian Hollings and she BMX bike dances with Cru, setting hearts aflutter. For more Laughlin roles like this, see Secret Admirer and Back to the Beach.
The evil Reynolds twins who try and destroy Cru on Helltrack grew up to be Chad and Carey Hayes, the writers of the remake of House of Wax, as well as The Conjuring movies.
Man, this movie still leaves me with so many questions. How could the town raise $50,000 so quick for Cru? How does he have the money to sign up Bart when he gets kicked off the Mongoose team? Why did my grandparents buy me a Schwinn that weighed as much as a Harley when all I wanted was a BMX bike?
This movie wasn’t on DVD or blu ray for years until Vinegar Syndrome did a limited release. It’s streaming now, so you can finally legally watch it.
Also, look for pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty, who yells to our hero, “Go balls out!” before the Helltrack** race. That was the film’s original title.
*Other movies that fit this bill are Thashin’, The Dirt Bike Kid and The Toxic Avenger.
**None of the stunt racers could complete a lap of Helltrack, with major worries about the giant hill that starts the race. The entire scene took two weeks to film.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.