April 28: Alan Smithee — IMDB has 115 movies credited to the Alan Smithee pseudonym, which was created by the Directors Guild of America for use when a director doesn’t want their name on a movie.
This movie’s Alan Smithee is the combination of Terry Windsor, who had only directed Party Party when this was made, and his replacement Paul Aaron, who was unhappy with the final movie. Arron also wrote The Octagon and directed A Force of One, which doesn’t prepare one for comedy.
Morgan Stewart (Jon Cryer) is the son of Republican Senator Tom Stewart (Nicholas Pryor) and has spent most of his childhood at a boarding school while his mother Nancy (Lynn Redgrave) manages the family life, all with a plan of increasing the elder Stewart’s chance to be President. Yet when the Senatorial race gets hard, the idea of a son looks good in the media, so Morgan comes back home.
Morgan is really into horror movies, wearing a shirt for The Undead and putting posters for House of Wax, Dial M for Murder, The Mole People and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Curse of Frankenstein, Attack of the Puppet People, Psycho and Tales of Terrorup in his room. I mean, he even has a Zombie poster, a Day of the Dead shirt and goes to the mall to meet George Romero. We never see George’s face, he seems too small and he doesn’t have on a giant fishing vest, so I think it’s not him.
Seeing how Tom’s campaign manager is played by Paul Gleason, you know that something bad is going to happen. It’s pretty rote, but I mean, what did you expect?
But Morgan seems pretty cool. He has a Tobe Hooper-signed chainsaw, right? I was kind of hoping he’d use it on his mother after she takes down and tosses all his amazing posters. But man, even in today’s world where women go to horror conventions — I’m married to a lovely one! — the fact that Morgan meets Emily (Viveka Davis) while waiting to get The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero signed seems a bit like a science fiction film.
Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show or use these links:
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987): You can pish posh this movie by its title or the fact that it rips off A Nightmare on Elm Street or that it’s ridiculous that it has a slasher who has a Warlock guitar with a giant drill at the end. Or you can just do what I did: utterly enjoy every single minute of it. Also, of note, this is the only slasher series to be completely directed by women.
I never saw the original film and I’m here to tell you that I don’t think that matters at all. All you need to know is that Courtney Bates (Crystal Bernard from Wings) survived, teaming with her sister to kill the dreaded Driller Killer (and no, not the one from the Abel Ferrara film.
Now that she’s in high school, Courtney is dealing with nightmares from the ordeal from the first film. She’s also made friends with Amy (Kimberly McArthur, Playboy Playmate January 1982), Sheila (Juliette Cummins from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, the scummiest of the entire series) and Sally (Heidi Kozak, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, who noticed during filming that her jean shorts got shorter every day, due to a costumer literally doing that each night, continuity be damned), who have all started an unnamed band (although the songs are performed by the very Go-Go’s-sounding group Wednesday Week). The girls decide to go away for the weekend so they can work on songs, but they end up watching Rock ‘n Roll High School (director Deborah Brock would go on to direct the sequel to that movie) which leads to a pillow fight and Sheila ripping off her bra, because women can make exploitation movies too.
Surprise! Bros Jeff and T.J. sneak up and spy on the girls before busting in and frightening them. The house is a mess as a result. This image sums up everything there is to know about this movie:
If it seems strange that this movie often focuses on name brand sodas. Mostly Pepsi, but also New York Seltzer. Yet I know that there’s also no way that any of those brands want to be associated with this film.
Later that night, Courtney and Valerie fall asleep in the same bed and our heroine has a dream that the killer murders her friend, then she wakes up in the kitchen floor. Her visions get more and more intense, but the arrival of potential boyfriend Matt makes her happy.
I say that and then within moments, she sees Sally’s zits burst her entire head open. No one can find Sally, so the cops get called. Officers Krueger and Vorhees show up — this is also a film that refers to the last movie’s house as the Cravens and Courtney’s last name is Bates — but assume the teens are all on drugs when Sally shows up alive. Oh yeah — Sally has the last name Burns to pay homage to Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who was played by Marilyn Burns.
Everyone else goes to town for dinner, leaving Courtney alone with Matt. He surprises her with a cake, like he’s the Jake Ryan to her Samantha Baker, and they start to have sex. Keep in mind that she never blows out the candles and we keep cutting to the cake, blazing away. The killer appears and impales Matt, throwing one of his bloody appendages onto the burning candles. He chases Courtney downstairs right into her friends, who call 911. Of course, the cops blow them off, so they’re on their own against a 1950s rockabilly greaser with a total 1980s guitar, trapped in a neon-hued house with Patrick Nagel prints on the walls.
Just as Sally argues with the cops, we see the drill come through the backside of the wall, covered in her blood. Sheila and T.J. get injured and almost get away, but the killer catches them after an angry neighbor (producer Don Daniel as Mr. Damnkids) tells them to get off his driveway and T.J. bites the big drill.
Meanwhile, Courtney, Amy and Jeff try to leave in a car, but the killer drills right through Jeff. The girls run into the house and barricade themselves inside, which means that they don’t come to the aid of Sheila, who gets killed after the killer breaks the fourth wall, saying “Now it’s time for the fun part,” and sings a song called “Let’s Buzz.”
Should every slasher have musical numbers? Nope. But at this point of the movie, I was inclined to follow this wherever it led.
Amy falls to her death as the girls run away through a construction site, while Courtney uses a propane tank to light the killer up. In the morning, the police come and we think it’s all over. No, this movie has more endings than a Tolkien film. First, Amy comes back to life and laughs in the killer’s voice. Then, Courtney wakes up in Matt’s arms, who ends up being the killer. Finally, she is in a mental asylum and the killer’s drill appears near her bed.
Originally called Don’t Let Go, this is probably one of the strangest slashers I’ve seen that doesn’t have Bigfoot kill someone with an oven (Night of the Demon, please stand up). There’s also a scene where a dead and frozen chicken leaps from a refrigerator ala the zombie head in probably Fulci’s only contribution to Zombi 3, then proceeds to leak chocolate sauce/blood all over our protagonist.
Slumber Party Massacre2 is 77 minutes of your life that you’ll be glad you wasted. From catchy 80’s singalongs to softcore dreams that descend into graphic violence and a killer who owns every scene of the film — and has nothing to do with the first or third movies in this trilogy — this is why I stay up all night and watch movies.
PS – Don’t steal anything from this movie. The notice at the end reads: Any unauthorized exhibition, distribution or copying of this film or any part thereof [including soundtrack] is an infringement of the relevant copyright and will subject the infringer to severe civil and criminal prosecution as well as a midnight call from the Driller-Killer.
April 22: Terror Vision — Write about a movie released by Terror Vision. Here’s the list.
Video Violence (1987): Writer and director Gary Cohen was working in a video store and noticed that no one was renting any of the classic films that he loved. They were all renting slashers.
One day, a mother asked him if I Dismember Mama had any sex in it. He told her that it didn’t, but it had plenty of graphic violence. She told him that if it didn’t have sex, it was find for her kids. This scene is in the movie, except they are discussing the movie Blood Cult.
Steve and Rachel have just moved to a new town, setting up a mom and pop rental shop that seems to exclusively rent out slashers. One of their customers — probably Howard and Eli, whose sports store seems to be a front for mayhem — accidentally returns a video tape of one of their murders, which soon reveals that everyone in this sleepy little SOV town is a killer.
If you look closely on this box, it has J.R. Bob Dobbs of the Church of the Subgenius on it, claiming that he has approved this movie. Your tolerance for SOV horror will determine how much you like this yourself.
Video Violence 2 (1988): At some point after the events of the first movie, Eli and Howard have decided to start broadcasting a public access show from their basement, one that has viewers from home sending in their own kills as if this was America’s Bloodiest Home Videos.
It has an electric chair, a gang of woman seducing a pizza guy until deciding to repeatedly stab him, a commerical for some killing implements and a live guest becoming, well, a dead one. And where the first film starts to make you wonder if you’re just as bad as the killers for loving their work, this one decides to go full Herschell Gordon Lewis and make the whole thing a ridiculous, if not blood spraying, laugh fest.
Either that’s going to work for you — I love it — or you’re going to feel like this whole thing is a poorly acted waste of time, which is a sad state for you to be in. You have to love a film that has The Shape, Freddy and Norman Bates all show up and bother the same girl in the same shower.
Hurry up and get the set of both of these movies from Terror Vision. Last time I looked, there were only 2 left.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
When a gorgeous photographer named Elys Trumbo (Eva Grimaldi, Obsession: A Taste for Fear) watches the leader (Bruno Bilotta, Demons 2) of a motorcycle gang kill someone, only one man can protect her: Robert Malone (Fred Williamson).
Were you expecting someone else?
Manny Cobretti?
Yes, this movie is Cobra but made in Italy by director Stelvio Massi (Arabella, Magnum Cop) and writer Danilo Massi (who yes, is his son, and also the writer of Convoy Busters).
Williamson starts the movie by stopping a swimming pool hostage situation with a shotgun — yes, there’s nudity, this was made in Italy — and is the kind of action hero who can look dangerous wearing a leather trenchcoat and still be secure enough to have a cat for a pet. He also has Chief Max Walker (Maurice Poli, Malombra, The Murder Secret) as his boss and has to save Max’s daughter. And wow! His daughter made the movie for me because she’s played by Sabrina Siani from The Throne of Fire.
What I love most about this movie is that the biker gang is in our reality but dress like they’re from after the end of the world. I guess Cobra did the same thing.
As good as Stallone’s movie was, there was never a sequel. Black Cobra got three, two directed by Edoardo Margheriti and another by Umberto Lenzi which has Bobby Rhodes in it.
If you dig this, check out the book “How the World Remade Hollywood” by Ed Glaser from McFarland Books. You can also read the interview that I did with Ed.
UPDATE: Thanks to Ed Glaser and Rutledal on Twitter, I learned that there’s a fifth Black Cobra movie, The Last Mission of Detective Malone, that is Godfrey Ho-style assembled from footage from Black Cobra 2 and Umberto Lenzi’s Bridge to Hell. You have no idea how happy this makes me.
Directed by Călin Cazan and Mircea Toia (who also made Delta Space Mission) this Romanian science fiction animated movie is at once several films you’ve seen before and then like nothing you’ve seen before.
In the year 6470, two married explorers receive a distress signal from a female astronaut who went missing years before. Leaving their son Dan safely on their ship — or so they think — they go missing as well as the ship crashes into an alien planet that their son must soon learn to survive, then find his parents and battle the evil Von Kleefe.
The art style of this film brings to mind Heavy Metal and other 80s fantasy like Rock and Rule and Fire and Ice, particularly as the animation uses rotoscoping. Obviously, it has a debt to Star Wars, but then it has telekinetic blob aliens, a synth soundtrack and so many moments that become purely psychedelic.
This also has the most calming feel of any animated space opera I’ve ever seen. It’s literally a chill out movie and I mean that in the most glowing of ways. It’s the perfect comfort cartoon.
The Deaf Crocodile blu ray of The Son of the Stars has a new restoration by Deaf Crocodile from the original 35mm negative, a commentary track by film journalist Samm Deighan, an interview with co-director Călin Caza and an essay by Stephen R. Bissette. You can get it from Deaf Crocodile.
Not every Jess Franco movie was directed by Jess. I mean, not every Stephen King book is, supposedly. I’ve heard Tabitha King may have written a few of his books or at the very least the central ideas. That’s how strong reltionships work. Well, Lina Romay, Jess’s muse, directed this while he wrote it, composed the music and probably just about anything else that had to get done.
In case you didn’t get it from the title, this is Jess and Lina making Falcon Crest but with porn, just like how Phollastía is Dynasty. Angela Channing (definitely not Jane Wyman) has brought the entire family to the wine fields to share the secret of their success: the wine is mixed with, well, look it’s a Jess Franco movie. It’s mixed with baby batter, so to speak. When mixed with wine, that guy gravy has the tendency to drug people and that’s how Angela takes over her entire family’s will.
In case that wasn’t enough, a small dog licks a man’s ass. I have no idea why this is in the movie, as I don’t remember that ever happening to Lance Cumson, despite his name. Also: incest, in case you were wondering if Franco wouldn’t go down that route.
I have no idea why there’s no Dallas by Jess and Lina. I can only imagine what’s in the oil.
The American adult film industry isn’t the only one that made parodies of popular pop culture. Even Jess Franco was on hand to do this, making Phalo Crest and this film which places Lina Romay as Jean Collins — get it, this is Dynasty — and yes, this was shot at the same time and on the same sets but this at least has the look of the TV show and, most importantly, the shoulder pads-heavy fashion.
Franco used the name Betty Carter for this, taken from a jazz vocalist with a scat singing style. You can understand why Jess took this name as Carter was known for doing everything in her “…bold, inimitable way — regardless of the commercial consequences — to the passionate delight of her fans and the occasional exasperation of record-company executives and club owners,” according to her San Francisco Chronicle obituary. Franco would use the name Lennie Hayden for Phalo Crest, in case you wondered.*
He also used the name Chuck Evans for his screenwriter credit.
Franco actor Antonio Mayans turned down this film but acted as its agent as he sold it. In an interview, he mentioned that he had no issue when Jess would use the same set for mainstream and an adult film, as it saved money and could even make a profit, but to make movies specifically to be adult and no other art coming out of it wasn’t something he thought Jess should do.
*For a breakdown of all of Franco’s jazz-related alternate names, this Tom Clark article is incredible.
John G. Avildsen is probably best known for movies with fighting in their center, like the two Rocky and three Karate Kid movies he made. Here, he’s working from a script by Warren Lane, which was based on La bonne année by Claude Lelouch.
Nick (Peter Falk) and Charlie (Charles Durning) are two old timer thieves looking for one last big score. That score is a Harry Winston jewelry store in Palm Beach, but for all their planning Nick’s potential love interest Carolyn (Wendy Hughes) might throw these cons off their game. Their mark is her boss Edward Saunders (Tom Courtenay) and his security team, which they throw off through a series of disguises.
Hollywood once seemed addicted to remaking French films — 12 Monkeys, And God Created Woman, The Jackal, Jungle 2 Jungle, The Birdcage, Blame It On Rio, Diabolique, Oscar, The Toy, True Lies, Three Man and a Baby, so many more — and this is another example. It’s a cute movie that didn’t get seen much when it first came out, which gave it a bit of appeal.
Fok Ming-ming (Michelle Yeoh, as ever amazing) and Secret Agent 001 (Derek Yee) are Chinese secret agents who learn that the city of Kaa Yi is being turned into a weapons manufacturing site by Japanese occupation forces. Along with a drifter (Richard Woo) and Princess Chin-chin (Cindy Lau Chin-Dai), they must rally the people to defeat the Imperial Japanese Army.
Directed by David Chung and written by Kan-Cheung Tsang, this is part World War II movie and part Indiana Jones. How amazing that Yeoh and Yee share the duties of being adventurers and if anything, Yee feels like he has to keep up with her?
It’s also astounding that Yeoh keeps smiling through all this action, including an ending battle that has a cast of hundreds as modern technology meets sharp swords. Between firing a gigantic gun, flying a biplane and numerous hand to hand battles, this is all her film. If you want a movie you can just sit back and enjoy, well, Magnificent Warriors is more than up to the challenge. It feels like a huge video game that you just want more of.
The 88 Films blu ray release of Magnificent Warriors has a new 2K restoration from the original camera negatives, commentary with Asian cinema expert Frank Djeng, interviews with Yeoh and Tung Wei, a poster and a book on the movie. You can get it from MVD.
International terrorist leader Fatima (Sandahl Bergman, She, Hell Comes to Frogtown) tries to hijack a plane and runs right into a secret task force called the Retaliators and their leader Eric Matthews (Robert Ginty, Exterminator 2) and finds herself critically wounded. For some reason, the U.S. government takes her and turns her into a cyborg killing machine — I mean, she already was a killing machine — and sends her after her former friends. Sounds like a great plan said no one ever, as the moment she’s hit in the head, she remembers that she’s a bad girl and now has the robot powers to dispense even more death and destruction than ever before.
Director Allan Holzman also made Forbidden World, Grunt! The Wrestling Movie and Out of Control, so he knows how to make a good rental movie. Writer Robert Short also wrote Scared to Death and Rage of Honor, so yeah, he also knows how to make an entertaining film.
Keep in mind this is a Trans World Entertainment movie and not Cannon, because if Cannon made it, it would somehow even be even crazier and yes, this is also a movie that has Sandahl Bergman machine gun a school bus full of children. Things would be better if this movie inverted the screen time that Ginty and Bergman have, as she’s the best thing in this.
Bonus: Paul Walker’s third acting job after appearing on Highway to Heaven and in Monster In the Closet.
The Kino Lorber blu ray release of Programmed to Kill has a 2K Scan of the 35mm Interpositive, new commentary by director Allan Holzman (moderated by filmmaker Douglas Hosdale), a new interview with writer Robert Short, an alternate opening and a theatrical trailer. You can get it from MVD.
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