EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing In Common was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1989.
Nothing In Common is responsible for what I do for a living.
I won tickets to see this movie from a trivia contest on WKST radio in New Castle, PA. As I sat in the theater, I was amazed by the office that David Basner (Tom Hanks) worked in as ad guy. There were markers everywhere, everyone was stressed but having so much fun and people were playing guitars at their desks. Surely advertising was the most fun job ever!
Almost three decades later I can tell you that none of this is true.
David’s parents Max and Lorraine (Jackie Gleason and Eva Marie Saint) have finally split up. David’s just broken up with his girlfriend Donna (Bess Armstrong). And what’s even worse, his dad has lost his job. And at the same time, he’s pitching Colonial Airlines and dating the owner Andrew Woolridge’s (Barry Corbin) daughter Cheryl (Sela Ward).
You can imagine that 14-year-old me was amazed that normal looking guys could dare Sela Ward if they were funny and worked in advertising.
Max has been a horrible husband, father and even caretaker of himself. His diabetes is out of control, leading me to a lifelong fear of losing my feet after watching this. But David comes through for him, even though his father doesn’t deserve it. Oh Garry Marshall, you got me.
This is the movie that took Tom Hanks from funny guy to someone who could be in dramatic movies. Sadly, Gleason would be dead just a year after this film. He’s pretty fearless in it, playing someone who we should have no sympathy for whatsoever. He made this while he was deathly sick with colon cancer, liver cancer, thromboses hemorrhoids, diabetes and phlebitis.
Writers Rick Podell and Michael Preminger would write the TV movie Gleason which starred Grad Garrett as The Great One.
And hey — it has Thompson Twins playing “Nothing In Common” which was their first release as a duo.
EDITOR’S NOTE: House aired on USA Up All Night on January 31, 1998.
Steve Miner has so many cinematic sins to deal with — Soul Man, My Father the Hero, Big Bully (the next to last live action film Rick Moranis would appear in), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later— that you almost forget that he started his career making the second and third installments of Friday the 13thand today’s movie, House.
Roger Cobb (William Katt, Carrie) has some issues. As a Stephen King-ian popular horror writer, he feels fenced in by the horror genre. He has writer’s block. His wife has left him. His son disappeared and no one can find him. And the aunt that raised him just hung herself in the haunted house where he was raised.
Cobb intends his next book to be about what he went through in Vietnam, so he decides to move into the house. His strongest memories involve Big Ben (Richard Moll, fulfilling the contract that either he or Robert Englund appear in every 80s horror film), a soldier who bullied him back in ‘Nam who was injured and left behind for the enemy to capture.
Everyone’s a fan of Cobb, from his new neighbor Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers) to his real estate agent and the cops that investigate him. He just wants to write. But with all the monsters in his head — and real monsters in the house — that doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.
Things get worse when his wife visits and turns into a monster, only to be killed by a shotgun blast. At this point, the film flirts with making Cobb the real monster, but it’s a narrative shift that is never followed up on. Then, as he buries his wife, his hot neighbor comes on to him. What he thinks will be a night of hot sex turns out to be him watching her young son, but that goes wrong when little monsters try to steal the kid,
Finally, Cobb falls into his medicine cabinet into an alternate dimension that predates the Upside Down of Stranger Things by several decades. He rescues his son, but not before Big Ben attacks him again. Finally, Cobb realizes that all of his fears are inside his head and he destroys the monster with a grenade before leading the house to find his son and wife, who is magically returned to life.
House was produced by Sean S. Cunningham and featured music by Henry Manfredini, who also worked on the Friday the 13th films. Fred Dekker wrote the original script, but most of the humor is credited to Ethan Wiley.
This is a good example of pre-CGI monster moviemaking. Big Ben looks great, a triumph of practical makeup, as do the creatures that populate the film. And it’s interesting that this movie explores PTSD and the dark side of war years before many were ready to face it.
The look of the film reminds me of late-period Fulci minus the gore. I’m referring to the film stock itself, which doesn’t have much richness, looking more like a TV movie than a theatrical film.
House isn’t a movie that demands that you watch it, but if you’re looking for something in the middle of the night, it always provides a fun distraction. You can’t dislike a film that has a large fish on the wall come to life and try to kill someone.
EDITOR’S NOTE: State Park was on USA Up All Night on December 21, 1991; August 1, 1992; April 23 and October 16, 1993 and January 10, 1997.
I love saying the name of the director of this movie. Boon Collins.
He also directed Spirit of the Eagle, Abducted II: The Reunion, The Protector and Sleepover Nightmare. But he also wrote the story and screenplay of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, so wow, you know? He wrote this, too, along with Lindsey Bourne, who also wrote the sequel.
Renee (Roberta Weiss) is a city girl trying to jog in the Canadian Rockies who is being chased by a crazed mountain man named Vern (Lawrence King-Phillips) who finally takes her to his cabin in the middle of nowhere. But Vern didn’t count on the fact that his father Joe (Dan Haggerty) would help Renee escape.
Based on a true story, well, Joe eventually gets hurt, Renee loses her pants and Vern goes shithouse. Actually, I buried the lead because it’s totally based on a true story, the one about Kari Swenson, a pretty major athlete who was a bronze medal winner as a member of the 1984 U.S. relay team competing in the first women’s Biathlon World Championships in Chamonix, France.
Following the 1984 biathlon season, Swenson took a job at a Big Sky, Montana ranch where she could also Also our country doesn’t do enough for our Olympic athletes. That said, one day as she was training, she was abducted by Don Nichols who wanted to make her his son Dan’s wife. As twenty people searched for her, Don warned that he would shoot anyone who tried to take her. When they got close, Swenson yelled to warn the searchers away. Don Nichols ordered his son to shut her up and shoot her. He did and she survived — thanks to her breathing abilities as a runner — when the bullet collapsed her lung.
Swenson hated how the men were presented in the media as mythical mountain men, as she only saw them as criminals. There was another movie, The Abduction of Kari Swenson, made for NBC with Tracy Pollan in the lead and Swenson as a technical advisor.
She returned to training, earning a spot on the United States Biathlon team again and competed in the 1986 biathlon competition in Oslo, Norway. She finished fourth, retired and became a veterinarian.
I really have to see the sequel because it gets supernatural and has Jan-Michael Vincent and Debbie Rochon in it.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Raiders of the Living Dead definitely aired on USA Up All Night — I remember watching it! — even if my lists can’t give me an exact date.
A regional New Hampshire film with a synth score that was reedited with new footage by Sam Sherman with that iconic Independent-International Pictures logo at the start of the show?
If you’re wondering, “Is it weird?” My answer is, “Would it be on our site if it wasn’t?”
While filming on this movie originally began in New Hampshire by co-writer Brett Piper as a movie called Graveyard, it was finished by writer-producer Samuel Sherman, the man who formed Independent-International Pictures with Al Adamson.
In an abandoned prison, a doctor is using executed convicts to form a labor force of the living dead. Meanwhile, Jonathan (the one-time Flick and future adult actor Scott Schwartz) has turned his dad’s LaserDisc into a laser gun and decides that he should hunt down zombies with the help of his girlfriend, grandfather, a reporter and a librarian (who was played by Zita Johann, the female star of Universal’s The Mummy, lured out of retirement by Sherman).
There are three versions of this. A sixty-minute version by Piper called Dying Day, an initial take on the footage by Sherman called Dark Night and then Raiders of the Living Dead, which is one of the best carny movie titles ever.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Message from Space aired on USA Up All Night on September 30, 1989 and October 5, 1991.
I’ve seen Spookies in the double digits and I still have no answers for so many parts of the movie’s plot, motivations or reasons for existing. Hours of research have been spent reading up on the film, looking for the truth as to how such a strange movie escaped from some wall beyond sleep to infect my waking life.
There are moments of Spookies that are utterly terrifying — an incredibly realistic looking grim reaper, a spider sucking the life out of a man and zombies good enough to fit into a Fulci film. Then there are farting monsters, a wolf boy and acting on sub-Ed Wood level. How can all of these pieces fit into one movie?
That’s because, well, Spookies is more than just one movie. And despite its flaws, I love it.
Much like another of my favorite bits of 1980’s video insanity, Night Train to Terror, Spookies has its roots in a strange fashion. Whereas the former film is three movies all stitched into one, Spookies is a movie that was finished, then torn apart and finished again by a totally different creative team.
Spookies was once a movie called Twisted Souls, which was written and produced by Frank Farel, Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran, with the latter two men directing. It was filmed at the home of James Jay — one of the Founding Fathers — in the summer of 1984 before the producers and their financial backer ran into artistic differences. That meant that while the film was shot, the editing and post-production was never finished.
How much of Twisted Souls is left? Everything where the people arrive in two cars, as well as the monster attacks in the house came from this footage, including the demon girl with the Ouija board, the muck men, the snake demon, the grim reaper and the muck men.
A year later, the financial backer hired Eugenie Joseph to direct more footage and splice it into the original film. She hired an entirely new cast, which would be the scenes where the boy looks for his birthday party, the guy in the tree, the cat boy, the old magician, all of the zombies, the blue boy and the witch in the basement.
This would all make some semblance of sense if any of these multiple plot points and characters ever crossed over. But they really don’t. Unlike Night Train to Terror, which at least attempts to weave its three stories into one portmanteau narrative, Spookies just throws things at you until you really have no idea what’s next. Imagine if Evil Dead made even less sense and changed its tone and narrative every five minutes and you’ll gain some idea of what this movie is like. Think Demon Wind, but with more rambling insanity, more characters and way better effects.
Here’s the best I can do at summing it up: Billy runs away from home when his parents forget his birthday like he’s Samantha Baker or something. As he goes through the woods, he meets a man who is soon stabbed by a werecat dressed like Adam Ant and then finds an old mansion decorated like a birthday party. Thinking it’s for him, he opens a gift and finds a severed head before the werecat buries him alive.
We’re never going back to Billy. Seriously, that’s it.
A group of teenagers — along with some adults who are way too old for them to all be hanging out together — come across the mansion and decide to party. There’s Duke, who claims to be the leader and brags that he’s a horny ghost. Linda, his girlfriend. Her friend Meegan and her older boyfriend/daddy figure Peter who seems exasperated by the teenage antics. Then there’s Rich, who wears a t-shirt of himself and only speaks through a hand puppet. Oh yeah — and Carol, who gets possessed by the Ouija board. And a British woman and her American husband. I may have missed or combined a few characters, because watching this movie is very much like doing a gravity bong hit and then trying to describe everything that happened in the last twenty minutes you spent lying on the floor and attempting to stay within this plane of existence.
None of these mismatched pals counted on battling Kreon, an ancient warlock who has kept his dead wife Isabelle preserved for seventy years. He needs human victims, so he uses his bootleg Ouija board and an army of demons of all shapes and sizes to kill them off. We’ve covered some of them above, but there are also an electric octopus, a skeleton witch and reptile demons. Oh yes — I nearly forgot that an Asian woman becomes a spider.
Everyone finally dies, but Kreon’s wife runs away, chased by zombies in a scene that actually approaches true fright. It’s seriously one of the best parts in the film. She escapes to a car and a man drives her away, but he’s really the werecat. A man bursts from his grave and it’s Kreon, who laughs as the credits roll.
I have so many questions.
Why does Kreon burst out of the ground other than to just act cool? I mean, is bursting from your grave cool?
Why do the muck men — who appear terrifying — fart?
is Korda the werecat the son of Kreon and the queen who has been trapped for seventy years?
How did they talk Richard Corben, the noted comic book artist and painter of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album cover to do the poster for this?
Why does the grim reaper explode?
Why does RIch have a hand puppet that he talks to?
Why has this never been released on blu ray in an era where every film has been rediscovered?
To answer some of that, this movie ran mostly on USA between 1988 and 1991. There was also a Sony Video VHS release. In 2003, UK company Vipco Entertainment released a Region 2 PAL DVD mastered from that VHS. My copy is one of the ones released in 2017 by French company Intercontinental Film and Video under the title Les Spookie, which claims to be from a new 2K scan. It still looks beat up and worn, so who knows.
This is not the first copy of Spookies that I have bought.
This article at The Dissolve gives some answers, though.
From the film’s ex-Green Beret cinematographer’s son dying from crib death on the set to the film’s original FX guy getting fired (he was replaced by a 16-year-old Gabe Bartalos (who created the Leprechaun) and future Emmy Award winner Jennifer Aspinall), it’s packed with info. And the blame for the farting zombies lies with executive producer Michael Lee, who wanted to call the movie Bowel Erupters. And somehow, out of all of this, Errol Morris’ cinematographer Bob Chappell ended up shooting the new footage (much of the crew went on to work with J, Michael Muro on Street Trash).
This is truly a lost film, despite what the back of the French release claims (“We have found the lost film!”). The original ending has never been seen, although Al Magliochetti, the visual effects artist, has an interpositive of it. And the rights, which were owned by Michael Lee, Sony, then Vestron, and then Lionsgate, are murky. No negative or print has been found.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Amazons aired on USA Up All Night on May 25 and 26 and November 10, 1990; June 14, 1991; January 18 and September 19, 1992; April 2, 1993 and February 26, 1994.
Sword and sorcery was a big part of the films that Roger Corman released in the 1980’s. To be fair, different sword and sorcery cycles — peblum to Conan ripoff — have always been part of Corman’s films.
Amazons is from Argentina and is based on the Charles R. Saunders story Agbewe’s Sword. Saunders was born in Elizabeth, PA, about fifteen minutes from where we live. He settled in Nova Scotia where he worked for a local newspaper and wrote several well-received short stories about the African-American community there. He also, in his spare time, created the world of Imaro and became one of the first writers to create African-American-centric sword and sorcery stories*.
Based on the real-life female warriors of the West African Kingdom of Dahomey, Amazons tells the story of several female warriors, like Dyala (Mindi Miller, Caged Fury), Tashi (Penelope Reed), Tashinge (Danitza Kingsley, Blackout) and Vishiti (Maria Fournery, Deathstalker).
What is not based on reality is that there’s a woman in this movie who can transform into a lion. So know that going in. Neither is the Sword of Azundati, which the trailer seems to think is Excalibur. But hey, who cares about reality? There are Amazon fights galore, including one battle between one of the women and a giant snake. That’s really why I watch movies.
*He also wrote Stormquest, another movie that was made with Sessa directing. It’s all about a female-dominated society coming to realize that they may be wrong by excluding men. It’s one of the last of ten Argentinan barbarian movies that Corman would produce.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to Matthew Hale on Letterboxd, I’ve learned that there are alternate versions of this Mill Creek box set. For the sake of completeness and my obsessive compulsive disorder, here’s this missing movie.
Directed by Jeffrey Delman from a script by Delman, J. Edward Kiernan and Charles F. Shelton, Deadtime Stories was originally called Freaky Fairy Tales. That makes sense, as two of the three stories are based on Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks.
Delman originally wanted to have the song “Li’l Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs to play over the opening credits, but was unable to use the song because the clearance rights were too expensive. You need to have a Striking Distance budget to get that. He also wanted “Surfin’ Bird” and “Walkin’ on the Rain,” but again, he had a small budget.
All of these stories are told by Uncle Mike (Michael Mesmer) — named for SNL and National Lampoon writer Michael O’Donoghue — who is trying to calm down his nephew with three horrifying stories. That story is very The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I have no idea why he would think that these fairy tales filled with gore would make a kid stop being wild, but I didn’t make this movie. In the first story, a fisherman’s son (Scott Valentine) is sold as a slave to two witches, while the second is about a prescription mix-up between a grandmother and the wolf who is after Red Riding Hood. Finally, Judith “Mama'”Baer (Melissa Leo), her husband Beresford “Papa” Baer (Kevin Hannon) and their son Wilmont “Baby” Baer (Timothy Rule go on the run and discover that Goldi Lox (Cathryn de Prume) is in their hideout.
It’s goofy but I enjoyed it. Then again, I always like anthology films.
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 panorama of teeth 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 to 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.
I can’t even explain how excited I am about this release. Beyond the new producer-supervised SD master from original tape source — I’ve never seen this movie look better — there’s a limited edition slipcase by The Dude, 1 12-page mini-comic book, commentary with director Bret McCormick, Rob Hauschild and Matt Desiderio of Visual Vengeance, a second commentary with Tony Strauss of Weng’s Chop Magazine, interviews with McCormick, Blue Thompson, Victoria Chaney, The Abomination‘s original VHS distributor: Michael Jack Shoel, a locations tour, several reels of outtakes, raw footage and behind the scenes, an image gallery some of Bret’s Super 8 films, a trailer archive of his films, a 6-page book with an essay by Tony Strauss, a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set, a reversible sleeve with the original VHS artwork and more.
Honestly, I can’t think of another movie that will come out on physical media this year that I will care more about. This is everything. You can get it from MVD.
No one should ever attempt to play any of the roles of Charles Bronson, because no one can stand up to that level of comparison. But if any man can, it would be Cüneyt Arkin, the dizzying battling star of many a Yeşilçam film, playing in everything from movies influenced by Star Wars (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam), Rambo (Vahsi Kan), ninja movies (Ölüm Savasçisi AKA Death Warrior), Mad Max (Ölüme Son Adım) and the magic that is Kiliç Aslan AKA The Sword and The Claw and Lionman.
Here, he’s making Death Wish 2and if it were anyone else, I would be enraged.
Instead, I’m overwhelmed by just how right this is.
Co-directed and co-written by Arkin, who worked with Remzi Jöntürk on the filming and Mehmet Aydin on the writing, this is a down and dirty shot on video remake remix rip-off of one of Michael Winner’s most nihilistic and mean-spirited movies. It has all the beats — yes, the assault scene; yes, the daughter jumps out the window although we don’t see the gory result — and ends with Arkin using a blackjack and a knife to get the revenge that must be his.
The three punks that ruin Arkin’s life in this are the weirdest movie punks you’ve ever seen. They sport strange bushy hair, nonsensical jewelry and hang out in clubs that look like an abandoned Chess King. This movie also has some of the oddest soundtrack picks this side of Godfrey Ho with just as much concern for copyright and by that I mean absolutely zero.
From Arkin’s daughter dancing to a synth version of “Memory” from Cats and an appearance of the theme from Chariots of Fire to Michael Sambello’s “Maniac,” Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill,” Michael Cretu’s “Samurai,” the bad guys using “Go Home” by Stevie Wonder for their theme and, perhaps most wonderfully, a long disco bar scene set to Chrissie Hynde and UB40’s “I Got You Babe,” this movie reminds me of one of Negativland’s best lessons: Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value.
Korkusuz is also known as Rampage and Fearless, is the second movie that director Çetin İnanç made that follows the blueprint of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Starring bodybuilder Serdar Kebapçılar as Serdar, this has some pretty realistic looking locations and weapons, thanks to the movie being filmed in a real commando camp in Foça. I say realistic except for the rocket launcher, which is made of wood and painted.
Serdar is on an undercover mission to destroy the terrorist element in Turkey. He saves the life of the leader of the terrorists’ brother. Ziya is at least a good enough leader to not believe that this man who came out of nowhere and can’t be cut by knives isn’t a government agent, so he’s waiting to turn on him. He even buries him in mud up to his neck and hits him with a hose of water at one point, but as we all know, Serdar is going to end this guy before the end of the film.
Serdar also was in Kara Simsek, which is Rocky inspired; Intikamci (The Avenger) which has elements of Road Warrior and also has Commando as one of its titles and Asi Kabadayi, which is called Turkish Wolverine despite the fact that it was made in 1986 and the only tie to the Canadian superhero is that Serdar has a metallic spiked glove that also has claws and shoots arrows, which Weapon X cannot do.
*The other is Vahşi Kan(Wild Blood). That movie has Cuneyt Arkin and zombies in it, so guess which one I like more?
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