Tag Archives: 1987

Murder, She Wrote S3 E13: Crossed Up (1987)

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Season 3, Episode 13: Crossed Up (February 1, 1987)

Even when Jessica is sick in bed, people still die, and she’s in the midst of it all.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

William Windom and Tom Bosley are back as Dr. Seth and Sheriff Amos.

Michael Horton? Oh no. Grady is in this.

Colleen Camp plays Dody Rogers. She’s been in everything from Battle for the Planet of the Apes to Clue, Sliver, Death Game, Police Academy 2 and 4, Smile, and so much more.

Tony Dow plays Gordon Rogers. He’s Beaver’s brother!

Stephanie Dunnam plays Leslie Cameron. She was in Silent Rage and Play Dead.

James Carroll Jordan plays Adam Rogers, Gisele Mackenzie is Mona, Sandy McPeak is Morgan Rogers, Henry Brandon is Abel Gorcey, James McIntire is Deputy Wells, and Yolanda Nava is a TV announcer.

What happens?

Jessica has hurt her back putting in new windows, so she’s stuck in bed. Dr. Seth says that she needs at least a week more bed rest and gives her a Life Alert bracelet in case she falls and can’t get up. So she’s stuck with Grady making every tuna fish recipe he knows, and if you’ve seen the horrible women Grady has dated on this show, you know that he loves the smell of tuna.

She picks up the phone to call someone and overhears a voice hiring someone to kill an old man. She begs Grady to go tell the news to Sheriff Amos, and he runs out on his bike, nearly getting run over, which makes me sad because I’d love to watch Grady get run down, have the van back up and then roll over his fecund corpse again.

Anyway, everyone acts like J.B. is an idiot, not someone who has already solved two seasons’ worth of murders. Amos just wanted to eat at Mona’s Diner, which means that, from what I’ve seen so far on this show, a small town like Cabot Cove has at least five diners, so nearly one diner per hundred people who live there. No wonder the tourist trade is so important.

The murder Jessica was trying to stop happens, and it’s lumber industrialist Jedediah Rogers, who has three boys — Adam, Gordon and Morgan — who are all about to get rich. Except, well, his journal and will are missing. He also has a granddaughter, Leslie, whom Grady bones up over. She tells him that her grandfather was changing the will to give her all the money and that she has his journal.

Meanwhile, Jessica is solving the case from her Serta. Abel Gorcey, the man who would be the killer, died hours before the actual murder. Amos ends up interrogating everyone while wearing a tape recorder so he can play it for Jessica, who suddenly hears an allergic Gordon on TV and realizes — that’s the killer.

Then this goes all giallo, and a masked killer breaks into J.B.’s place to knife her. Lucky for her, Seth gave her the bracelet, and she called the fire trucks just in time to save her life.

Who did it?

Dody is working with Gordon.

Who made it?

This was directed by the last episode’s bad guy, David Hemings, and written by Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle, who created the TV shows Cobra and The Pretender.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No, she’s too busy being in pain and under the covers.

Was it any good?

Yes! It’s Rear Window, but still fun.

Any trivia?

The lightning bolt during the storm is the same one that the U.S.S. Minnow sailed past in the opening of Gilligan’s Island. They flipped the shot, so you don’t recognize it.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Jessica Fletcher: Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve overlooked something obvious? That you’ve done something wrong?

Dr. Seth Hazlitt: Yeah. Every time I vote for Amos.

What’s next?

Jessica tells the story of her new novel about a college student accused of killing his music professor, who plagiarized his compositions.

Murder, She Wrote S3 E12: The Corpse Flew First Class (1987)

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While on a flight to London, a wealthy woman’s chauffeur dies suddenly, and when the priceless necklace he was carrying turns up missing, it becomes a case of murder.

Season 3, Episode 12: The Corpse Flew First Class (January 18, 1987)

JB is headed to London to research some dusty old Victorian slaying, because apparently, Cabot Cove doesn’t have enough corpses to keep her busy this week. But before she can even touch her complimentary peanuts, the guy in 4B, Leon Bigard, decides to kick the bucket right there in coach.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

Mary Jo Catlett plays Mrs. Metcalf. She was Rosemary in Serial Mom. 

Robin Dearden is Kay Davis.

Pat Harrington Jr., Schneider from One Day at a Time, is Gunnar Globle.

David Hemings is investigator Errol Pogson. He was in so much, but Deep Red is the one.

Kate Mulgrew is Sonny Greer. Captain Janeaway!

Gene Nelson is Louis Metcalf, Andrew Parks is Fred Jenkins, Vince Howard is Blanton, Robert Walker Jr. (Star Trek’s Charlie X) is Otto Hardwick, Charles Hoyes is Carney, John S. Ragin is Dr. Clint Strayhorn, and Chris Robinson is Capt. Whetsel. 

James Shigeta, Takagi from Die Hard, is John Sukahara.

The dead person, Leon Bigard, is played by Mark Venturini, who was Suicide in Return of the Living Dead. 

Lia Sargent is Elizabeth Welch. She’s done a ton of animated voices.

In smaller roles, Charles Davis is Mr. Stegmeyer, Don Maharry is Mr. Miley, Crystal Jenious is Mrs. Miley, Ron Barker is British Chief, Ian Howard is a security man, Ron Southart is Bobby, Jim Malinda is a photographer, Curtis Hood is a porter, John Straightley is a customs man, Gerald York is a man on the phone, and Robert Bakanic, Dotty Ertel, Buddy Gates and Walter Spear are passengers.

What happens?

Leon was the bodyguard (read: boy-toy) for heiress Sonny Greer. He was also carrying the Empress Carlotta necklace, a bauble worth more than a mid-sized European country. When Leon expires, the necklace vanishes, and J.B. Fletcher has to solve a locked-cabin mystery at 30,000 feet.

Enter Inspector Pogson of Scotland Yard. Usually, the local heat wants to throw J.B. Fletcher in jail, interfering, but Pogson realizes pretty quickly that he’s outmatched by a woman who writes mystery novels and has a 100% conviction rate. What follows is a high-altitude whodunit where everyone on the flight is a suspect, the motive is pure greed, and the only thing more dangerous than the killer is the airline food.

The craziest thing is that Gunnar Globle is based on Roger Corman. He’d like Jessica to touch up the script for Off-road Aliens 2, and I’d like her to take on that project. He could also be a reference to the Cannon Go Go Boys, Golan and Globus.

Sonny Greer turns out to have poisoned Mr. Bigard. Jessica finds out that they were in a situationship and he’s been moving on, ready to break up with her when they get to London. She kills him before that.

There’s also the matter of the Empress Carlotta necklace, which Mr. Hardwick was planning to steal. Maybe he had some help. We’ll see. When it’s switched out for a fake, John Sukahara turns out to be a gem expert and calls it out as fake.

Between a necklace and a murder, that’s a lot on one plane. But when you let Jessica fly, I’m shocked no one died.

Who did it?

The real enemy is Pogson, who planned to switch out the necklace and retire.

Who made it?

This was directed by Walter Grauman and written by Donald Ross, who also wrote Hamburger: The Motion Picture.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No. It seemed like she was going to bang it out with the inspector, but once he’s bad, she can’t get with him.

Was it any good?

Yes. A great cast!

Any trivia?

The Blues Brothers is the in-flight movie.

Twelve of the characters have the last names of musicians, singers or arrangers who worked for Duke Ellington.

This was made on the set of Airport 1975.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Jessica Fletcher: Mr. Globle… Here’s your script. You know, I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the sophisticated imagery and the poetic wit. I see it as a cross between cinema verite…

Gunnar Globle: Imagery and cinema verite?

Jessica Fletcher: I think if you change the title, it might do very well in those quaint little, uh, art theaters.

Customs Man: Anything to declare, sir?

Gunnar Globle: Yes. This is a dud.

What’s next?

The phone lines get crossed during a storm, and Jessica can’t convince anyone that what she heard was a real murder plot. It’s directed by David Hemings, who was in this episode!

Murder, She Wrote S3 E11: Night of the Headless Horseman (1987)

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Accused of murdering his own bully, soft-spoken poet Dorian Beecher relies on Jessica’s assistance to prove his innocence.

Season 3, Episode 11:  Night of the Headless Horseman (January 4, 1987)

What begins as a humorous deception ends in a murder investigation; now, Jessica must clear Dorian’s name after his elaborate lies make him the perfect suspect for Nate Findley’s death.

Who’s in it, outside of Angela Lansbury?

Dorian Beecher, who is behind all of this, is played by Thom Bray, who was in Prince of Darkness and The Prowler.

Brady kid Barry Williams plays the victim, Nate Findley.

Sarah Dupont is played by Karlene Crockett, who was in Eyes of Fire. 

Bobbie is Judy Landers, who was in Dr. Alien and so many other movies. Her sister, Audrey, was in two episodes of the show.

Sheriff Sam Rankin, the law around here, is Doug McClure from The Land That Time Forgot. 

Hope Lange plays Charlotte Newcastle. She was Bronson’s wife in Death Wish. 

Dentist Penn Doc Walker is played by Charles Siebert.

Dorn Van Stotter is Guy Stockwell from It’s Alive. 

Fritz Weaver from Creepshow is Edwin Dupont.

In smaller roles, Brandon Douglas plays Todd Carrier, Donald Thompson is Robert, Adam Ferries is Brendan, Sanford Clark is a man, Gary Pagett is a deputy, Tom Ohmer is a cop, John England is another guy, Bill Baker is a young blonde guy in a car, and Forry Smith is a man. 

What happens?

After that beginning, with Dorian being accused of murder, he then gets harassed by a figure dressed like the Headless Horseman. He thinks it’s Nate Findley who wants to steal his girlfriend, Sarah. But no, it’s just a kid at first, then Doc Walker, who has stolen Nick’s horse. 

But Doc, well, poor Doc has been going through it too. Nate killed his fiancée, Gretchen, and then basically told Doc that he did it. 

Lots of death for such a new small town.

Who did it?

Doc Walker isn’t your typical villain. He’s a sympathetic figure driven by grief, which makes the episode’s ending hit much harder.

By the end of this, Nate is dead, the groundskeeper is under arrest for embezzlement, the dentist is under arrest for murder, Gretchen is also dead, and Sarah has broken up with Dorian. Dorian is not guilty, at least.

The fact that Nate killed Gretchen before the episode even started suggests that this quiet town has been harboring a monster for a long time. Jessica doesn’t just solve a murder; she lances a boil that has been festering in the community.

Who made it?

This was directed by Walter Grauman and written by R. Barker Price, who also wrote David Schmoeller’s Catacombs.

Does Jessica dress up and act stupid? Does she get some?

No! Come on!

Was it any good?

I liked it. I really liked it.

Any trivia?

McClure, Lange, Crockett, Siebert and Weaver have all been in multiple episodes of this show.

Give me a reasonable quote:

Jessica Fletcher: You’re up for a murder charge. Murder! Twenty years to life. Maybe more!

What’s next?

While on a flight to London, a wealthy woman’s chauffeur dies suddenly, and when the priceless necklace he was carrying turns up missing, it becomes a case of murder.

Doctor Bloodbath (1987)

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Dr. Thorn (Albert Eskinazi) isn’t your average medical professional. He’s a man who treats a turkey baster like a surgical instrument, and his patients like scraps for the bin. In a brisk yet grueling 57 minutes, Thorn balances a busy schedule performing cut-rate abortions, moonlighting as a serial killer to finish the job at his patients’ homes and ignoring his wife, Claire (Irmgard Millard), in favor of staring blankly at the wall or dreaming of ritualistically stabbing baby dolls.

If you’ve already left from that description, well, you aren’t reading this.

For the rest of us who have stuck around, welcome to the world of Nick Millard.

The doctor is in, and he brought a cleaver, a hammer and a knife. You will see what happens in grisly detail, and by that, I mean the effects of magic you may have come to expect from Millard.

Like a true SOV auteur, Millard doesn’t let a good asset go to waste. Much like the Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel naming shell game, Doctor Gore is a masterclass in recycling. It features the same droning, hypnotic soundtrack and even reuses the credit sequence from Crazy Fat Ethel, listing actors who aren’t even in the building. It’s not just a movie; it’s a lore-heavy puzzle for the depraved.

The plot thickens when Claire reveals she’s been funding and bedding a Polish poet. When she ends up pregnant and asks her husband to handle it, the movie shifts from a standard slasher into a domestic nightmare of epic, low-fi proportions.

Less than an hour of your life lived in endless drone and muddy VHS distortion. You should be so lucky.

Delitti (1987)

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Directed and written by Giovanna Lenzi (who also appears in this movie as Julie Garrett) and Sergio Pastore (married to Lenzi at the time; he also directed Crimes of the Black Cat), Delitti arrives after the Giallos of the 70s and even the revival in the 80s, as erotic thrillers were just putting a different name on the same genre. 

The weapon for the killer in this case is the uric acid in coffee with sugar, which creates hydrogen cyanide and transforms into a poison capable of murder. This is Giallo BS Science at its finest; uric acid is “a natural byproduct of purine metabolism in the body, and while it can lead to conditions like gout when levels become too high, coffee does not appear to increase uric acid levels or create hydrogen cyanide.”

It certainly can’t turn your face into a death mask, like in this movie. Even if it also contains snake venom.

Anyways… at least this has music by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis, or as we know them, Oliver Onions. So it has that going for it.

This has an inspector trying to learn who is using this poison to kill people and a killer who likes to dance. I get it. I feel the call of the dance as well, but I’m not stalking women and forcing them to see my gyrations. There’s a ton of dance in this, as one couple literally frugs before they, well, fuck. Or they would, if the dude hadn’t pulled a knife and made the detective walk right in. And it turns into a karate fight? And has dialogue like this? “Enough of your polite evasiveness, inspector. Let’s just say it like it is: that my brother was gay and liked to dress in women’s clothes was already generally known, wasn’t it?”

Oh, Delitti, you crazy.

Also: There’s a strange fight with choking between two lingerie-wearing women who then take a shower together.

Also also: A dwarf who likes to make snuff films.

As for the cast, we have Michela Miti as Betty. She was also in Gialloparma and Andrea Bianchi’s The Seduction of Angela. As you can imagine, for the star of a Bianchi film, she’s naked for much of this movie. Saverio Vallone is Bob; he was also in Antropophagus. Sascha Darwin was in plenty of Fulci’s late movies, such as Touch of Death and Voices from Beyond, as well as two of the Fulci Presents movies, The Murder Secret (there’s Bianchi again) and Bloody Psycho. Solvi Stubing is also on hand, making her first movie in five years and long after her heyday of making movies like Strip Nude for Your Killer (yes, I see you, Bianchi). And is that Gianni Dei I observe, Patrick from Patrick Still Lives?

Grotty sex scenes, music taken from A Blade In the Dark, lots of synth, so much dancing and a closing line that says, “Be careful who you hang with girls. Make sure that he is not a snake lover…”

They say this is the worst giallo ever made — also the only one directed by a woman, until Knife + Heart — but it’s so relentlessly weird that I enjoyed myself.

Sadly, during the premiere of this movie, Pastore suffered a fatal stroke. That’s one way to avoid the critics.

You can watch this on YouTube.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Garbage Pail Kids (1987)

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The Garbage Pail Kids were created by Art Spiegelman and released by Topps in 1985. Yes, the same cartoonist who made Maus. He and Mark Newgarden worked together as the editors and art directors of the project, with Len Brown — the same person who Wally Wood named T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agent Dynamo after and one of the creators of Wacky Packages and Mars Attacks — as the manager and art by John Poundart for the first series, then Jay Lynch, Tom Bunk, James Warhola — the nephew of Andy Warhol — and more.

These cards were a huge success and sold worldwide (they’re called Mr. Creepy in Japan, Totally Broken Kids in Germany, The Filthies in France, Snotlings in Italy and The Garbage Gang elsewhere). They were quite controversial and banned in many schools. And then Original Appalachian Artworks — the same Xavier Roberts who stole the look of Martha Nelson Thomas’ soft-sculpture dolls that came with a birth certificate — sued, and they had to change the logo. But by 1988, the kids were gone. Yet they came back in 2003 and never went away. You can even get blockchain-backed high-end versions of them now.

Look, I’m someone who doesn’t believe in “so bad it’s good” and has found the light in the darkness of so many so-called bad films. This one challenged my will to live, but there are times during it when the overwhelming badness of the film approaches surrealist art, and I laughed so hard that my head began to throb and I was sure this was the stroke that would wipe out my lifelong hard-earned knowledge of Mattei, D’Amato and lesser scumbag directors.

Dodger (Mackenzie Astin) works in the junk store of magician Captain Manzini (Anthony Newley) and is also the target of a gang of toughs led by Juice (Ron MacLachlan) while loving that bad dude’s girl, Tangerine (Katie Barberi), from afar.

To break up all that preteen angst, a garbage can falls from the sky containing green ooze and the Garbage Pail Kids: the always snotty Messy Tessie; the Hawaiian shirt-wearing flatulent Windy Winston; the throw up on command Valerie Vomit (played by Debbie Lee Carrington, memorable as the small-statured Martian rebel in Total Recall); the whining baby Foul Phil; the acne-scarred superhero Nat Nerd and the toe eating reptilian hybrid nightmare called Ali Gator.  None of these characters are in any way endearing, cute, or ugly. They’re borderline upsetting, and the more I think about it, the more I love this movie for being so dead and vacant.

After having our protagonist covered with sewage and abused by the gang, only to be saved by the Kids, it still has Dodger in love with Tangerine, who wants to be a fashion designer and puts the GPK into service as pretty much slaves. The kids steal a Pepsi truck — I can’t imagine Pepsi would have loved how they’re presented in this — and then go to a Three Stooges festival, which makes them so insane that they drink beer with bikers, and Ali Gator gets to eat some toes. Despite being babies and children, the GPK get drunk on beer, which is encouraged by the film, and sing songs so inane that I again started to laugh the kind of frenzied guffaws that only happen when I endure severe physical pain.

Despite the kids being put into the State Home for the Ugly, a place where Gandhi and Santa Claus are executed because this is a movie for children, they escape, ruin a fashion show and refuse to go away, not even following the rules of Mr. Mxyzptlk.

If it seems like Dodger and Tangerine seem on again, off again and ill-matched, well — Astin and Barberi dated and broke up mid-movie. That wasn’t Austin’s only issue. He got the movie without telling his father, John Astin, who tried to get his son out of this film.

Rod Amateau directed and co-wrote this, and his career was, well, something. He started his career doing stunts in movies like Rebel Without a Cause and Mighty Joe Young (he was also a stunt driver for Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker and Thunder Run after this directing career took off) and then wrote and directed episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, produced and directed 78 episodes of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, produced and directed The New Phil Silvers Show, directed nearly every episode of My Mother the Car and also made The Statue, one of the few movies Roger Ebert ever walked out on, as well as High School U.S.A., the movie that convinced Joel Robinson to leave Hollywood; Son of Hitler, a Peter Cushing movie that never played outside of Germany; and he also wrote Sunset, one of the many Blake Edwards films — and mistakes — that a nascent Bruce Willis would make.

I can’t even imagine the horror movie that John Carl Buechler — who did the effects for this as well as TerrorVision, Dolls, Hard Rock Zombies, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and many, many more, as well as directing Cellar Dweller, Watchers 4 and Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood — had planned.

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie grossed just $661,512 during its opening weekend and eventually $1.6 million on a $1 million budget, but was still seen as a major disappointment. Astin told Mental Floss, “The heroes of the entire experience are the seven little people actors in costumes every day in triple-digit heat in the San Fernando Valley. They couldn’t see or hear. There was only so much time they could have the heads on before they ran out of oxygen.”

Effects artist William Butler went even further: “I think it was a stupid idea of a stupid screenplay, with stupid designs, that made for a cacophony of stupidity.”

Princess from the Moon (1987)

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Released as Toho’s 55th Anniversary Film in 1987, this movie is based on The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, a 10th-century Japanese fairy tale about a girl who comes from the Moon and ends up as a baby inside the stalk of a glowing bamboo plant. Directed by Kon Ichikawa, who wrote it with Shinya Hidaka, Mitsutoshi Ishigami and Ryûzô Kikushima, it begins with bamboo cutter Taketori-no-Miyatsuko (Toshiro Mifune) finding Kaya (Yasuko Sawaguchi) inside that tree. She looks like his recently deceased daughter — who died because the family had no money to pay for her care — so he takes her home just in time for her to quickly grow into an adult.

She’s beyond gorgeous, so every man wants her. She decides to put them through a series of trials to even get close to her. Two of the men are unworthy, and when the third tells her that he failed but is honest, she plans to marry him. Instead, she is called back to space. If this reminds you of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you won’t be alone. And hey, there’s a sea monster!

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2025: Lady Beware (1987)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Unsung Horrors Rule (under 1000 logged views on Letterboxd)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

After watching this film, I feel like I need to take a bath in Diane Lane’s open-air bathtub, but for much different reasons than her stalker did.

The year 2025 will go down for many things, some good, some bad, but as far as my Letterboxd stats go, it will be the year I discovered Karen Arthur.

The Mafu Cage, a twisted tale of two sisters starring Lee Grant and Carol Kane, completely blew my mind. Director Karen Arthur really knows how to ratchet up the claustrophobia, leading to some anxiety-inducing scenes. She also knows how to make the small feel big. The Mafu Cage was adapted from a stage play, but Arthur is able to downplay any restrictions found in a play. After watching The Mafu Cage, I had to seek out her debut film, Legacy, an adaptation of a one-woman show depicting a woman’s descent into madness. Talk about unsung, it only has 45 logged views on Letterboxd. 

After these first two films, Arthur became primarily a television director, which had a stigma about it in the 1970s and 80s. If you couldn’t cut it as a film film director, you were shuffled over to television, the perceived inferior media. If television was seen as less than, it surely did not stop her from producing the highest of quality. The Rape of Richard Beck turns the tables on the traditional rape-revenge film, with Richard Crenna earning an Emmy award along the way for his portrayal of a cop who does not play by the rules (or, actually, literally plays by his own set of rules), but finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Speaking of the Emmys, Arthur became the first female to win a Best Director award for an episode of Cagney and Lacey. While television work fills most of her resume, Arthur did have one other feature film in her, the erotic thriller Lady Beware.

Released about a month before the mother of all erotic thrillers, Fatal Attraction, Lady Beware tells the story of Katya (Lane), an ambitious young woman who does not take no for an answer, nearly demanding a place as the window dresser for a Pittsburgh department store. Katya’s displays prove to be controversial and provocative, but one person whose attention she receives is Jack, a married X-ray technician who begins an unhealthy obsession with Katya, quickly escalating from obscene phone calls to breaking and entering.

Unfortunately, the finished project did not get the approval of Arthur herself. The producers attempted to amp up the exploitative side of the film, including nude scenes of Lane that Arthur says she would not have included. She stated that she considered removing her name from the film (would that have made it a film by Alice Smithee?), but would not because the actors cannot remove their names.

Still, despite being a bit of a mess (side characters are introduced, only to be abandoned, no doubt most of their performance ending up on the cutting room floor), Lady Beware is a very interesting watch. It could have been the performance that elevated Lane from child star to adult actress. She would have to wait almost 15 years for Unfaithful to bring her the attention she deserved all along. 

Lady Beware is currently stuck on VHS, desperately needing restoration from one of these boutique physical media labels. Paging Cinematographe! I think this film would fit perfectly in that collection.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2025: Faceless (1987)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and providing them with happy homes.

Today’s theme: Lina Romay

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Adam Hursey is a pharmacist specializing in health informatics by day, but his true passion is cinema. His current favorite films are Back to the Future, Stop Making Sense, and In the Mood for Love. He has written articles for Film East and The Physical Media Advocate, primarily examining older films through the lens of contemporary perspectives. He is usually found on Letterboxd, where he mainly writes about horror and exploitation films. You can follow him on Letterboxd or Instagram at ashursey.

I really do not have the expertise to write anything about a Jess Franco film. It’s not going to stop me though. 

Faceless is only the sixth Franco film I’ve watched. And the ones I have watched may not be the ones that spring to mind. Venus in Furs and Bloody Moon seem to be popular (at least according to Letterboxd). My favorite film of his has been The Other Side of the Mirror. And then I’ve watched some really random ones: Night of the Skull and Bahia Blanca. So I do not have a great handle on Franco’s filmography.

I have seen Eyes Without A Face. And I’m not the only one apparently. Faceless owes a lot to Georges Franju’s classic tale of a doctor trying to successfully graft another person’s face onto the face of his daughter. I’ve never really tried to make a ranking of my favorite horror films of all time, but if I did, this one would surely be high on the list.

Apparently, Jess Franco uses this motif a good bit in his films about Dr. Orloff (played by Howard Vernon). Again, I’m really at a disadvantage because I just have not watched these films. But I really want to. And after watching Faceless, I feel a great need to prioritize these Franco films.

In Faceless, we are treated to Helmut Berger as a plastic surgeon who has made an enemy in a former patient who blames him for a botched procedure. When this patient tries to throw acid on his face, he ducks and unfortunately his sister receives the burn. So one does what one has to—get his assistant (Brigette Lahaie, an actress whose films I should also prioritize) to start kidnapping models, and contact the infamous Dr. Orloff to perform face transplants. Unfortunately for them, one of the models they kidnap is the daughter of Teddy Savalas (criminally underused here). He hires Christopher Mitchum (of all people) to go to Paris and find his daughter.

Faceless has pretty much everything I look for in a horror movie this time of year. A stellar cast. An interesting enough plot to keep my interest. Some over the top gore. I really cannot ask for much more.

This selection feels a bit like a cheat since it was supposed to highlight Spanish actress Lina Romay, long time collaborator and eventually the wife of Jess Franco. In Faceless, she only appears in a cameo as Dr. Orloff’s wife. There were definitely plenty of other films to choose from. If nothing else, this day has been a good reminder that I really should focus on more Jess Franco in the new year. Maybe I will make a goal to have Franco be my most watched director of 2026. 

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2025: The Soultangler (1987)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year, they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which works to save the lives of cats and dogs across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Bleeding Skull!

About the Author: Parker Simpson is a writer and podcaster focusing on cult films and their social impacts. They currently cohost Where Is My Mind, a podcast focusing on underappreciated films from a variety of genres and countries. They have also held panels, chartered local organizations, and written articles to their blog. When not writing or studying, they like to spend time with their pets and go outside. Check out the podcast Linktree and blog.

Homemade horror films are a huge hit or miss of mine. Oftentimes, I’ll get frustrated with the boring visuals (both film and video), Z-grade acting, and disjointed pacing. Then I remember I couldn’t make anything half as charming, so I shut up and take some sleeping pills to further disjoint the experience. This is no different with The Soultangler, a late 80’s riff on the reemerging mad scientist genre. In it, Dr. Lupesky invents a drug that allows the souls of the users to transplant into corpses. Naturally, this comes with some very severe side effects, from mild hallucinations to downright madness. 

If you’re like me, you could see this as slightly… derivative of a well-known cult classic. The Soultangler initially seems like a rip-off of Stuart Gordon’s classic Re-Animator, taking a doctor’s fascination with life and death to the extremes while characters around him are extremely concerned about what he’s doing. In the latter, you see a clean-cut, no-nonsense Jeffrey Combs slyly manipulating everyone around him as he weasels his way out of every situation. Here, we see a grease-ridden, basement-dwelling hubris-ridden maniac who seems to be significantly more attracted to women yet hates them more than his counterpart. You might be able to see who I like more based on the wording. That being said, I would argue that watching Dr. Lupesky ramble about his work is a strong point of this film, and that he is dissimilar enough to disqualify his character as a mere clone of the indomitable Herbert West.

The film’s main flaw is the pacing. Most SOV/16mm horror films of this era slip into a time distortion, where 15 minutes feels like an hour or more. The Soultangler is no different; this thing drags its feet from the 5-minute mark until the final 15. It is a challenging watch on a small screen, with no one around you to comment on the small yet quirky aspects of everyday life that inevitably pervades all folks in its ilk. Additionally, the majority of the camera work and acting are all stiff as a rod. The saving grace that undercuts those criticisms is the weirdness that suddenly pops up at any given moment. Completely unsynced audio that made me restart a scene? Killer original music? Believable investigative reporting? C’mon, you can’t help but love it. The cherry on top is the goopy gore that is scattered throughout the film; the finale in particular is a lot of fun.

I didn’t hate this. I really wanted to love it, even. If anything, it proved to me that these sorts of films are an acquired taste, which is maybe something I don’t have at this moment. That’s ok; it doesn’t take away the fact that Pat Bishow made a relatively entertaining film with an extremely low budget, and that on its own is remarkable. 

Thanks to the folks at Bleeding Skull for dropping myself and many others a line to this (and many other unknown gems)!