Also known as Time Warp Terror, this movie was inspired by 1950’s horror films. On this island where the kids get trapped, it’s always 1959. It also has the band Cry No More all over it, lending it the perfect bit of 1980’s cheese that you may be looking for. Imagine The Beyond, but for kids. That’s pretty much what this is.
The final feature film directed by legendary British horror filmmaker Norman J. Warren (a long-time resident of the video nasty list), Bloody New Year is about a bunch of kids named Rick, Janet, Lesley, Spud and Tom, who save American tourist Carol from the bouncers and a ride operator of an amusement park. They end up stealing a boat and making their way to an island which has The Grand Island Hotel, a place where its always been New Year’s Eve 1959.
There’s even a movie theater that’s showing Fiend Without a Face, which plays before Spud gets offed. Actually, just like Shakespeare, everyone dies, becomes a zombie and all end up back at the New Year’s Eve party. Such is life and death in the resort areas of the U.K., I guess.
DAY 24: Short Attention Span Theater: Watch some shorts or anthology things.
Jeff Burr and fellow director Kevin Meyer dropped out of USC to finish their American civil war drama Divided We Fall. Bur would follow that up with this film, which somehow got Vincent Price on board.
So how’d that happen? Burr would tell Michael Varatti, “The producer and I got his address from a celebrity address service, and we went up to his door with the script and a bottle of wine in hand.”
Amazingly, they weren’t shown the door. In fact, Price himself answered it. “He had every reason to ignore us, and even if it was on a polite level, he could have said, “Okay boys, contact my agent,” but he was just so gracious. He invited us in, sat and talked with us for about 15 minutes, took the script, and that’s how it all started.”
Other than Dead Heat, this would be Price’s last horror role.
As for Burr, he’d go on to direct Stepfather II, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Puppet Master 4 and 5: The Final Chapter, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings and many more.
After watching an execution, reporter Beth Chandler travels to the small Tennessee town of Oldfield, where historian Julian White (Price) tells her four stories about the sinister past and present of the town.
First, a grocery clerk (Clu Gulager!) tries to win over his boss and all hell breaks loose. This segment may be why this movie was retitled The Offspring for its U.S. theatrical run.
Then, a wounded man (Terry Kiser, Bernie from Weekend At Bernie’s) learns the mysterious secret of eternal life.
In the third story — and perhaps the most intense — a glass eater falls for an innocent young girl and pays for it, thanks to his previous relationship with the carnival’s snake woman (Rosalind Cash, The Omega Man).
Finally, after a Civil War battle, Union Sgt. Gallen (Cameron Mitchell!) and his men discover that the town of Oldfield is populated by war orphans who they don’t take as seriously as they should.
Two-time Bond girl Martine Beswick — and Sister Hyde from Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde — shows up, as does Lawrence Tierney and Miriam Byrd Nethery (who would play Mama Sawyer in Burr’s Chainsaw film. It’s also the final role for Angelo Rossitto, who was Master in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, along with roles in Freaks, Galaxina, The Trip, Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein and so many more films.
While not as solid as an Amicus portmanteau, this certainly has its merits. You can check it out yourself on Vudu or order the blu ray from Shout! Factory.
DAY 14. S.T.D. Madness: No, not syphilitic symptoms! Science, Transformation & Dabbing; a cracked scientist’s creative palette.
Producer Sandy Howard (A Man CalledHorse, The Neptune Factor — look for that one in oh, a few hours on our site, The Devil’s Rain!, Meteor) had a three-picture deal with RCA-Columbia back in the glorious days of direct to video store movies. Along with Dark Tower (where Freddie Francis (numerous Hammer and Amicus favorites like Trog and Tales from the Crypt) and Ken Widerhorn (Shock Waves, Return of the Living Dead Part II,Eyes of a Stranger) combined forces to become Ken Barnett, directing Michael Moriarty and Jenny Agutter as they battled a haunted high rise) and Nightstick (in which a renegade cop and Leslie Nielsen battle terrorists), he dreamed up a ripoff of Aliens that would take place in a hospital that was called Green Monkey due to the theory that that’s where AIDS came from. Hey — it was 1987.
Helping matters was the 30% Canadian tax benefit, as long as the film was shot in the Great White North with mainly Canadian talent. That means that Saskatchewan native John Vernon is going to show up in most of these films. That’s a welcome thing in my eyes.
Marwellia Harbison is an old woman who loves her plants, but her Micronesian plant is drooping and when handyman Fred Adams inspects it, it pricks his finger. Soon, he collapses and she takes him to Hill Valley Hospital.
Doctors Rachel Carson (perhaps named for the Pittsburgh native whose book Silent Spring advanced the global environmental movement) and Judith Glass see the man and are shocked to discover he already has gangrene.
Ther next patient is the partner of Detective Jim Bishop (Steve Railsback, Helter Skelter, Turkey Shoot), who was shot point blank by criminals.
But back to Fred, who starts shaking and puking up a gigantic insect in pupa form, which they hospital techs put into a bell jar. For some reason, this hospital is also testing military-grade lasers and can analyze monstrous bugs that come out of the stomachs of old men. It’s really all things to all people, a deus ex machine for all seasons.
Marwella and the paramedic who helped Fred now have the same symptoms, and when Fred himself goes into cardiac arrest, the shock paddles cause his chest to explode in a torrent of blood. When the doctors all demand that the hospital be quarantined, hospital director Roger Levering (there’s that John Vernon role we’ve been waiting for!) refuses, as he doesn’t want to cause a panic.
Can things get worse? Of course. Remember that bug in the bell jar? Well, a lab tech is ordered to keep an eye on it, which she instantly forgets when her boyfriend brings the promise of weed and sex in the parking lot. Then, to compound matters, a group of sick kids decides to screw around and pour blue powder all over the beast. That blue powder ends up being some growth hormone, which of course was just lying around the lab. So now, in addition to the virus spreading throughout the hospital, there’s also a gigantic bug killing people left and right.
Can our heroes stop the bug — and the outbreak — before the government enacts the Return of the Living Deadprotocol and nukes the hospital from orbit? Well, you’re just going to have to watch for yourself.
Don Lake, who is in six different Christopher Guest movies and is the writing partner of Bonnie Hunt, shows up as an entomologist. And if you’re looking for cameos by people that you know you love, look no further than SCTV alums Robin Duke and Joe Flaherty (Pittsburgh’s own Count Floyd) who are a couple preparing to have a baby in the midst of this insectoid madness. And this is also one of the very first acting roles for Sarah Polley, who would go on to star in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. She’s one of the kids dumb enough to pour that blue growth powder all over that bug.
Blue Monkey is also known as Insect and Invasion of the Body Suckers, both of which have magnificent VHS box art.
So yeah. Blue Monkey. A movie that hasn’t been rediscovered and re-released as a $50 blu ray by a boutique label yet. Once you could rent it for 99¢, now you’ll pony up the big bucks for it. Until then, you can order it from VHSPS, which is where my copy came from.
DAY 666. THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP: A mass, ritual or summoning scene celebrating the Dark Prince.
Holy shit, this movie.
The poster art for Necropolis has called out to me many times and I’ve just never found the time. Now, I’m sad that I didn’t get to this sooner. This movie can’t be from our Earth. It’s too odd to be made by human hands. It’s oddly perfect, the kind of movie that I become an evangelist about and beg people to watch it. Then, they never get it like I do and think I’m insane.
Thanks, Scarecrow Challenge.
Necropolis is a one and done movie written and directed by Bruce Hickie, who I assume is from some parallel Earth, because it’s the only way I can understand the creation of this film. It was originally released by Empire Pictures before Lightning Video put it out on VHS and then it was later re-released by Vestron. My copy came by way of Full Moon, whose Grindhouse line has been re-releasing some awesome stuff.
Sometime back in the 1600’s, a witch named Eva (LeeAnne Baker, who was in Breeders and Mutant Hunt looking like every punk rock dream of my teenage years) abducts Dawn from her wedding ceremony and attempts to sacrifice her to the Lords of the Flies before Henry, a former slave, breaks on in and banishes her to Hell. Eva lets everyone know that she’ll get her revenge.
Now, Eva has returned to the streets of New York, sexing and killing her way through all manner of victims to get her Devil’s Ring back from the reincarnated Henry, who is now a street preacher who helps junkies get off smack. Meanwhile, Dawn is back as a reporter — saying everything as deadpan as possible in a British accent — while Billy is a New York cop. Everyone in this movie is as stereotypical as possible except Eva, who is really the heroine of the film to me. I’m all for her wiping every single one of them off the face of the Earth, even if we never really get a reason and even when she does, it just means she gets to walk the streets of New York City and look cool smoking a cigarette.
Let me tell you, you’ve never seen a film where a street priest who has an office in a closet and uses crosses make of sticks to repel evil battles an evil witch — who looks like Tianna Collins or Lois Ayres — that eats the goo of human brains and then uses it to nurse demons from her six breasts.
There are all levels of acting in this movie. Some folks read their lines like legitimate actors while others are clearly reading off of a cue card plastered to the wall. The effect is kind of mesmerizing, to be honest.
Much like Night Killer, this is one of those movies where I was screaming at the screen “I love this movie!” within minutes of it starting. There are also moments in the movie where Eva just starts dancing for no reason and I love each and every time that happens. In fact, I wish she danced throughout the entire film. She spends most of the movie making people kill themselves or have sex with her, which of course ends with them dying.
Also, this movie was made with all the budget and aesthetic quality of a Rinse Dream or Dark Brothers adult film. I mean that as the highest of all compliments. Seriously, this is the movie that I will be forcing people to watch with me for the rest of the year and well beyond.
Full Moon is making a sequel/remake/reimagining of this later this year called Necropolis: Legion. It doesn’t look anywhere near as fun as the original, but there are lactating evil breasts with mouths for nipples in the trailer, so watch at work at your own peril.
As for Necropolis, You can watch this for free on Tubi or order it from Full Moon. Or, you know, just come over the house and watch it with me. Bring some beer.
Let’s not beat around the radioactive bush and go straight to the Def-Cons.
The Def-Con 3 caveat: Contrary to the VHS cover, the Russians do not “strike back.” Not by missiles. Not by a Red Dawn or Invasion USA invasion. It’s just Americans fighting Americans. There’s no Russian collusion; the enemy is within: his name is John Tillman.
The Def-Con 2 caveat: Don’t let the bogus post-apocalypse marketing and the multiple-alternate art works fool you. This isn’t a Mad Max swindle. This is a straight-up First Blood double-cross—with a pinch of Panic in the Year Zero (1962) and a love-triangle dash of The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1958) because, well, you have to have a sex scene where a guy, whose wife’s dead body isn’t even cold—and facing the end of the world—must shimmy-sham his best friend’s wife. (Way to elicit our sympathies, John Rambo, uh, I mean, John Tillman.)
The Def-Con 1 caveat: I grew up reading the long-running, best-selling pulp-paperback series Mack Bolan: The Executioner. I also read a few of Jerry Ahern’s entertaining knock-off, The Survivalist, which concerns John Rourke, an ex-CIA operative turned weapons and survival expert, in the aftermath of a nuclear war. This run-of-the-mill action-film swindle is a straight-up double-cross. It’s not an adaptation of The Survivalist books (issue #1), as the producers faux-lead us to believe—although the film tells the exact same book-story. This Sly Stallone and Jerry Ahern screw job couldn’t be a more blatant copyright infringement if it was The Running Man sticking it to novelist Robert Sheckley’s (The 10th Victim) The Prize of Peril.
So, in a non-budget that wouldn’t cover the day’s catering bill on First Blood—or finance a day’s shooting on a Cirio H. Santiago Rambo-knock off—this post-non-apocalypse has no choice but to be set in the present with the same ol’ cars, architecture, and weapons . . . and a red text-on-black screen opening title sequence, followed by more words-on-screen telling us where we are, followed by National Guard maneuvers stock footage spliced-in with mushroom cloud stock footage, backed by voice-over narration, followed by more-words-on-screen telling us where we are.
We know where we are: Rambo land sans Stallone to class up the joint—and no Mark Gregory to Trash up the Bronx.
Wait a minute. I’m acting like a dickhead doomsayer loading in cases of Bandit and Snowman-smuggled Coors (we’re in Texas, after all), powdered milk and porno-mags into a 50-megaton bunker. This is a B&S Movies’ movie. This is one of your movies.
The Survivalist has it all: Two actors from multiple Stallone movies. Yakity-yak stock footage atomic bombs. The awesome Steve Railsback. Beer-swilling redneck hoards. Pansy rioting hoards of twelve people. More rioting hoards of those same twelve people. Bogus hospital rooms. Motorcycle rapist wimps. Epic maintain-the-speed-limit car chases. The über-cool Cliff De Young. Non-vehicular mayhem. Motorcycles don’t so much as crash; they fall over. Rogue army officers more concerned with murder and rape than restoring social order. No National Guard hardware, i.e., jeeps, trucks, transports, or helicopters. Camouflage fatigues off the rack at Bass Pro Shops. TV dream queen Susan Blakely. A National Guardsman biker gang because the movie couldn’t afford jeeps. One unarmed helicopter. Lots of driving. Lots of fishing. Lots of looking up at that one helicopter. Campfire tales. Campfire love. Faux-Harold Faltermeier Beverly Hills Cop synthesizer doodling. And, most importantly: Marjoe Gortner.
Hell, yeah. It’s a schlock-cinema dream come true.
It’s all about a “nuclear device detonation” in Siberia and the USA is blamed. Cold War mob rule ensues; the U.S suspends the Constitution and declares martial law. Why onenuc-accident in Russia (it could have been a power plant failure?)—with no retaliatory strikes on U.S soil—causes flag burnings and government shut downs of travel, bank closures . . . I know, I know. I’m over thinking the plot, again.
Meanwhile, back in a small town in Texas, Jack Tillman (Steve Railsback), an ex-CIA operative turned survivalist, and his pacifist doctor-friend Vincent (Cliff De Young), debate on the proper course of action as the same two-dozen dippy looters run rampant in the streets for TV sets and two cowering omega-cops (not baseball caps with “Police” patches again . . . Omega Copalert!) fail to maintain order.
Before Tillman can get his family the hell out of apoc-dodge to retrieve his son from a remote summer camp . . . (Oh, no. Here we go again: In typical apoc-fashion, the “Big One” drops and male hormones go into rape and murder mode; see the superior Ravagers and No Blade of Grass) . . . Tillman returns from getting cash n’ gas and finds his wife and daughter murdered. So he hits the road to rescue his son—in a beat-up, run-of-the-mill “Tillman Construction” pick-up truck with fishing poles (a guy’s gotta eat in an apocalypse!) and sans a machine gun turret—with Vincent and his nurse-wife Linda (Susan Blakely)—which sets up the ‘50s-era end-of-the-world “love triangle.”
Then the First Blood starts to flow in the form of a National Guardsman dickhead (instead of a town sheriff), and former Tillman Vietnam nemesis, Lt. Youngman (Marjoe Gortner; cloning his dickhead-rapist National Guardsman role in the 1972 disaster epic, Earthquake; 1972’s Marjoe). During the rioting, Tillman humiliates Youngman in a backhoe vs. motorcycle mishap; Youngman goes into Brian Dennehy-mode and his sole prime directive—as society falls apart—is to bring his arch-rival, Jack Tillman, to justice. The rest of society be damned and to hell with the Russians. Tillman must die. Call Troutman before someone gets hurt.
Overall, The Survivalist isn’t a bad movie; it’s not Survival 1990-inept. It’s just cheap and mediocre with a desperately needed injection of sadistic Mad Max craziness to elevate it beyond its flat TV movie-action trappings. You end up being pissed that the great Steve Railsback—as with Gary Lockwood in the somewhat similar Survival Zone—has to do these “films” to eat. Yep. Welcome to Blood City (1977), Keir Dullea.
(Did I just watch and review Survival 1990, Survival Zone, The Survivalist, and even Omega Cop, for the sake of B&S Movies? What’s wrong with me?)
Remember, you can also enjoy Steve Railsback in Lifeforce, Turkey Shoot, and Trick or Treats (all reviewed on B&S), Marjoe Gortner in Star Crash, Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw, Viva Knievel, and Mausoleum (all reviewed on B&S), and Cliff De Young in the video rental hits F/X (yes, Brian Dennehy!!), Flight of the Navigator, and Shock Treatment. And there’s Susan Blakely who, in addition to appearing in the ‘70s disaster hit, The Towering Inferno, worked with Sly Stallone three times: The Lords of Flatbush, Over the Top, and Capone.
The sad footnote to this film: It was the final film of the iconic David Wayne who, as always, brings his acting chops to the table in his cameo as a kind-curmudgeonly backwoods gas station owner. Wayne deserved better for his omega bow. The dude got his start alongside Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in the hit comedy classic Adam’s Rib (1949), and the smart ‘70s sci-fi piece The Andromeda Strain, but is best known as the Mad Hatter on TV’s Batman.
Equally insulting: J. Kenneth Campbell, a great character actor and requisite TV heavy-dickhead (pick a series)—from the sci-fi hits The Abyss and Mars Attacks, and Sly Stallone’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot—is reduced to a perpetual television image (a pseudo voice-over narrator telling us what’s going on) as the White House Press Secretary.
The out-of-left-field projectile: The Survivalist was directed by Sig Shore, the producer of the Blaxploitation classic, Superfly (1972). He made his directing debut casting Harvey Keitel (?) as a record producer cavorting with Earth, Wind & Fire (?) in the 1975 disco-fucked musical, That’s the Way of the World (aka Shining Star). His fifth and final film was the nobody-asked-for-it-and-nobody-saw-it-sequel-because-it-didn’t-have-Ron O’Neal: The Return of Superfly (1990; because of the big studio Shaft reboot with Samuel L. Jackson).
And that’s why a VHS fringe-freak like me watched The Survivalist: I love ‘70s blaxploitation and music films—and Sig made one of each. So he gets a pass on wasting an hour thirty minutes of my life . . . and Sam the Bossman’s (but spare Becca, the “B” of it all). And yours.
So, you still don’t believe this one has it all?
Well, see for yourself: a VHS rip is uploaded on You Tube. And that’s the only way to see it, since it’s out of print, the VHS is ultra-rare, and it’s not available on DVD. And, even though the film has nothing to do Ahern’s The Survivalist pulp series, you can check out this listing of all 33 titles and, yikes, Wikipedia has the 4-1-1 on all of the books, and then some.
Or, may we suggest you can pass this Rambo 40.0 . . . and visit with the original Rambo, now back in theatres with Rambo: Last Blood?
Uh, oh. Are these alternate titles and artwork? Nope.
Not to be confused with . . .
Or with . . .
Our two-part apoc blow out!
March 2020 Update: Sad news to report. Thanks to McSmith and his site The Books That Time Forgot, we’ve come to learn than Bob Anderson, the main writer for the revived series of The Survivalist books, passed away this January at the age of 72. McSmith loves his Ahern books, he reviews them all, HERE.
Godspeed, Mr. Anderson. Thanks for the cool reads!
December 2022 Update: B&S About Movies’ reader Mark Brett, who is part of the Shore family tree, provided us with some additional insights to the film:
“Sig’s son Michael was married to my sister, so I’d met Sig several times. He actually gave me a VHS copy of Jack Tillman: The Survivalist and a movie poster of it, along with a [press kit promo] poster from Sudden Death [1985; stars Denise Coward from the U.S. daytime TV drama The Edge of Night, as well as Brett Piper’s Galaxy Destroyer].
“Sig’s sons played the rapists in the movie; his son Michael was the guy who killed Cliff DeYoung, and Michael Shore is listed incorrectly as “Michael Mayfield” on IMDb. As far as the other credits: Barbara Shore, Sig’s wife, helped with a lot of the writing and manners obviously were changed so it didn’t just look like a SHORE-fest on the credits.
“The actual vehicle Steve Railsback was driving [the Tillman Construction” truck we called out] was an Isuzu Trooper. Michael said, if I remember correctly, he picked it up from a California dealer and drove it about 4 hours to the set. He also said Marjoe was a good guy on the set.
“That said, as far as the “writing” goes: they pretty much made up everything while watching TV in bed on the last few films, according to my sister Lisa. Sig was putting a movie together called Tommy and the Ghost—a really horrible movie. I was asked to be the stunt guy for the kid on the dirtbike who races Tommy. They wanted a few jumps; Sig just asked what some of the types of jumps are called, and he threw them into this movie—without actual showing what they were supposedly doing. I only saw the movie once on my sister’s VHS copy. It was BAD!
“Michael Shore used to do sound editing years ago. I just wish I could’ve discussed movies more with Sig and Michael. I believe Steven Shore was in the film industry for a while, as well.
“All this said: I watch all these horrible movies for the same reasons [you do]. So, I figured I’d share some minor insights on Jack Tillman: The Survivalist.”
Our thanks to McSmith and Mr. Brett for their kindness; for using social media and blogging/comment platforms in a positive light to express their joy of books and film.We appreciate your positive reinforcement of our efforts to preserve films such as The Survivalist for others to discover.Hey, someone has to coddle lost and forgotten films like UFO Target Earth and The Spirits of Jupiter.Working together, we can make it happen!
About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Steel Dawn has a pretty great post-apocalyptic pedigree. Brian May — not the Queen guitarist — who did the music for the first two Mad Max films wrote the score. Anthony Zerbe, who was Matthias in The Omega Man, shows up as does Brion James, who was Leon Kowalski in Blade Runner, and Christopher Neame, who was in No Blade Of Grass.
And then we have Patrick Swayze as the hero, Nomad. Yes. Swayze.
Nomad was once a soldier, but his family was tortured and killed. Now, he wanders the desert, seeking the killer of his mentor and seeking revenge for his family. This brings him to the town of Meridian, where he learns how to be a farmer as he works alongside Kasha (Swayze’s real life wife Lisa Niemi), her son Jux (Brett Hool — trust me, between the producer, director and one of the stars, this was a Hool family project) and her foreman Tark (James).
Damnil (Zerbe), a local landowner and his gang — which coincidentally includes the man that Nomad wants revenge on, Sho (Neame), want a monopoly on the water supply. It just so happens that Kasha has a source of pure water that she plans to give to the entire valley. Hijinks ensue — Tark is killed, Jux is kidnapped and Nomad kills everyone before walking off alone.
Like all the smart post-apocalyptic films, this movie realizes that it shouldn’t be ripping off Mad Max, but should instead rip off Westerns like Shane. The scenery makes up for a lot of the plot’s shortcomings, particularly the desert scenes. There’s one astounding visual where Nomad walks past a shipwreck partially buried in the desert. That ship is supposedly the Eduard Bohlen, a cargo ship that wrecked off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast in 1909.
There are some days when I wake up and don’t want to do anything but watch the films of Cirio Santiago. Seeing as how he produced 64 films and directed 105, so either I need to not do anything like work for awhile or just be content in the fact that I will always have a new film from him to enjoy.
Cirio made a ton of post-apocalyptic films. This is but one of them, all about a gun that can change the balance of power. It’s called — you guessed it — the Equalizer 2000. It’s no Blastfighter, but what is?
Three groups of people — Ownership, the Rebels, and the Mountain People — are battling for the control of the future after the bomb. Slade (Richard Norton, who played himself in Abba: The Movie, which I now must hunt for, and the Prime Imperator in Mad Max: Fury Road) was once one of the Ownership, but when his dad is killed, he goes off on his own. That leads to him making the titular gun along with Karen (Corinne Alphen — yes, she was once Corinne Wahl — the June 1978 and August 1981 Penthouse Pet of the Month and 1982 Pet of the Year; she’s now a professional Tarot card reader). That brings them into conflict with Deke (Robert Patrick!).
According to the absolutely astounding Internet Movie Firearms Database, the Equalizer is “based on a Colt Model 653 carbine (most likely Colt/Elisco Tools Model 653P, Philippine license-manufactured version), fitted with an M203 grenade launcher, a pair of overhead shotgun barrels and a pair of bottom mounted missile launchers. The launchers doesn’t produce muzzle flash when firing, and the hissing sound is akin to a compressed air blast.”
At the end of the movie, the Equalizer is destroyed and hot, wet manly tears burned down my face. But I wasn’t crying. I just had some radioactive sand in my eyes.
On the Code Red Blu-ay release of this movie, writer and actor Frederick Bailey says that he was inspired by Anthony Mann’s Winchester 73 as he wrote this film. You can grab that from Kino Lorber or watch this for free on Tubi and Amazon Prime.
Steve De Jarnatt has exactly three theatrical movies on his resume and all three are unique and intriguing works of art. Strange Brew, the blend of Hamlet and Canadian humor starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as their SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie, was his first writing credit. Miracle Mile, in which Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham fall in love on the last day of mankind, went unmade for nearly a decade after De Jarnatt wrote it. He bought it back and ended up directing it himself, fighting to keep the film’s tone and downer ending intact. Beyond Cherry 2000, he’s spent most of the rest of his career in television — he wrote the X-Files episode “Fearful Symmetry” — as well as his short story “Rubiaux Rising” appearing in the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories.
In the future of 2017, America suffering through an economic crisis brought about by the end of manufacturing. Sound familiar? Well, at least we haven’t seen the country broken down into city states and lawless lands in between.
Society has become so legalized and hypersexualized that all encounters need legal contracts written before they can happen. That’s why most men rely on female Gynoids as romantic partners. Anton LaVey would have loved how this apocalypse ended up.
Business executive Sam Treadwell is one of those men. The love of his life — after a bad breakup — is a Cherry 2000 model (Pamela Gidley, who was also in Thrashin’, The Blue Iguana and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me). But after she breaks down after getting wet, she’s damaged beyond repair. Her memory disk can bring her back, as long as he can find a body in the lawless Zone 7. And for that, he’ll need a tracker.
Edith Johnson (Melanie Griffith) is that person, one of the toughest trackers around. Of course, she’s also beyond gorgeous and melted down my 15-year-old brain the first time I saw this (between Body Double and Something Wild, I think we can see how I ended up with a short-haired blonde firecracker for a wife).
To get Cherry back, our heroes will have to go up against the wasteland overlord Lester (an amazing Tim Thomerson), who is more self-improvement guru and 1950’s household devotee than military commander. It also turns out that Sam’s ex-girlfriend Elaine is one of Lester’s many wives, now calling herself Ginger. The group wants Sam to join after it seems like he’s the lone survivor of their attack, but Edith returns to save him.
You can see where this is all going to end up. Sam’s going to understand that he needs a flesh and blood relationship and Edith’s hard exterior is going to fall away once she realizes that Sam is stronger than she thinks. But getting there is most of the fun and this film, which confounded Orion Pictures with its combination of genre and tone, is pretty much forgotten. That’s a shame.
Cherry 2000has some great casting, beyond Thomerson and Griffith, who shine in their roles. Cowboy actors Harry Carey Jr. and Ben Johnson (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Terror Train and so many more) also appear, with this being the ninth film that they acted in together. And keep an eye out for Marshall Bell (Kuato’s host in Total Recall and the evil coach in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge), Laurence Fishburne as a lawyer and perennial baddie Brion James.
If you can find this strange little movie — it went unreleased for years until Griffith became a star with Working Girl — do so. I was lucky to find a DVD for way less than it should be and cherish it. It’s currently playing for free on the Pluto TV channel. If you own a Roku or Apple TV, Pluto TV is absolutely essential.
Stirling Silliphant wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, as well as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Village of the Damned, Telefon, The Enforcer, Shaft In Africa and more than 700 hours of prime-time television drama to his credit. He was also a close friend and student of Bruce Lee, who he featured in the movie Marlowe and four episodes of the series Longstreet. They also worked together on a script called The Silent Flute, which was eventually filmed as Circle of Iron.
Those are some fantastic credits. Somehow, someway, he eventually found himself working with Sylvester Stallone to write the screenplay for the movie that would take arm wrestling from the bar to the mainstream. And who was ready to direct?
Lincoln Hawk (Stallone) is a man trying to rebuild his life. While he does that, he’s driving a truck and arm wrestling. His ex-wife Christina (Susan Blakely, My Mom’s a Werewolf, The Concorde … Airport ’79) wants him to bond with their son Michael (David Mendenhall, Space Raiders, Streets and the 12-year-old drug dealer in the Diff’rent Strokes episode where Nancy Reagan shows up) because she knows that she’s dying.
Michael has been in military school and calls everyone “sir.” His grandfather, Jason Cutler (this movie is yet another in my quest to see every film with Robert Loggia in it), hates Hawk and never wants him in their family.
On the journey from Colorado to California, Michael develops a deep bond with his father, who teaches him the art of arm wrestling and the essence of manhood. However, their reunion at the hospital is marred by the news of Christina’s demise. Blaming his father for not being there in her final moments, Michael returns to his grandfather’s home. Hawk, in a desperate attempt to free his son, ends up getting arrested. The mansion where Cutler resides may look familiar, as it was also featured in The Beverly Hillbillies.
Michael visits Hawk in jail, informing him of his decision to stay with his grandfather. Determined to win back his son’s trust, Hawk sets off to compete in the World Armwrestling Championship in Las Vegas, with a grand prize of $100,000 and a new, larger semi-truck. In a bold move, he sells his truck and places a $7,000 bet on himself at twenty-to-one odds. The discovery of the letters Hawk had written to him over the years, trying to establish a connection, further fuels Michael’s belief in his father.
Hawk advances to the final eight but suffers his first loss in the double-elimination tournament and hurts his arm. Cutler summons our hero and tells him that he’s always been a loser, but if he leaves forever, he’ll give him $500,000 and a better truck than the prize.
Hawk refuses and makes it to the finals, taking on his rival, the undefeated Bull Hurley. His son finds him and gives him the emotional energy he needs to survive, just as Hawk doesn’t only beat Bull but gains his respect. Somehow, Cutler gets over ten years of being a complete asshole and is happy about Michael and Hawk being reunited because that’s how eighties movies work. The guys get so sweaty in the final battle that they have to get the strap, and people go wild for it. It’s pretty impressive, and you’ll yell, “Get the strap!” too.
The film’s climactic finals were shot during a tournament organized by Cannon, the production company. This year-long competition, starting in Beverly Hills, featured events across North America, Europe, Israel, and Japan. The actual crowd and the B-roll footage of matches at the Las Vegas Hilton are what you see in the movie. The scene where Michael Bociu breaks his elbow? That’s as real as it gets.
If you’re into pro wrestling, Terry Funk, Reggie Bennett and Scott Norton show up here (Ox Baker, who was in Escape from New York, and Manny Fernandez and The Barbarian almost made it into the movie). Plenty of professional arm wrestlers like professional arm wrestling personalities such as Allen Fisher, John Vreeland, Andrew “Cobra” Rhodes, John Brzenk (who inspired the story) and Cleve Dean are also on hand.
The music in this movie is astounding. Kenny Loggins sings “Meet Me Halfway” numerous times, and there is also some Giorgio Moroder, some Asia, some Robin Zander, some Eddie Money and Sammy Hagar singing “Winner Takes It All,” which was also made into a music video to promote the film.
The film received three nominations at the 8th Golden Raspberry Awards in 1988. David Mendenhall won two for both Worst Supporting Actor and Worst New Star, which seems kind of crappy for them to abuse a kid. Sylvester Stallone was nominated for Worst Actor, an award he’s won four times, but he lost to Bill Cosby in Leonard Part 6 this time.
Stallone has claimed that if he had directed this, he would’ve changed the setting to an urban environment, used scored music instead of rock songs, and made the Las Vegas finale more ominous. These changes would have significantly altered the film’s tone and atmosphere. So why was he in it? He answered, “Menahem Golan kept offering me more and more money until I finally thought, “What the hell – no one will see it!””
Speaking of Stirling Silliphant, he only did the screenplay. Actor/writer Gary Conway (American Ninja 2: The Confrontation) and director/writer David Engelbach (America 3000, Death Wish II) created the original story. Engelbach cried when he saw the finished movie, remarking that his original draft “wasn’t nearly as dumb as the final film and was more about truck driving and arm-wrestling than it should’ve been.”
When this movie came out, my brother and I were in our early teens and couldn’t wait for it. There was an entire line of toys that had knobs in their backs that allowed them to arm wrestle and, even better, an actual competition table. We begged our parents for it nearly every day for six months, but our mother continually told us to use an actual table. She had no vision. At this point, I could have a father-in-law who hates me, a bedridden ex-wife and a son who doesn’t know me, but I could flash anyone and put their arm down in no time. Get the strap!
Even more magical, fifty miles from the filming of this movie, Sergio Martino had assembled an Italian/American crew to create Hands of Steel, the only Road Warrior by way of The Terminator truck driving movie that also has arm wrestling in it. Coincidence? Do you know anything about Italian cinema?
Wherever exploitation movies break ground, John Saxon is there. When Bruce Lee stars in Enter the Dragon, there he is, backing him up as Roper. As Mario Bava creates a proto-giallo in The Girl Who Knew Too Much, he stars. Early slasher film? Look to Saxon in Black Christmas. Want a Star Wars clone? There he is as the Darth Vader of Battle Beyond the Stars. Eighties horror sequel madness? He’s the big name in A Nightmare on Elm Street. And he’s back as Craven and Argento deconstruct the slasher and giallo genre with New Nightmare and Tenebre.
Yet for all his work in film, John Saxon only directed one movie: 1988’s Zombie Death House. The original director bowed out at the last minute, so Saxon agreed to both act in and direct this film. He’s since claimed that the producers imposed more car chases and gore than the script asked for, so what ended up on the screen didn’t live up to his true vision. That may be because they only had nine days to write this movie and the producers demanded that it be like The Godfather.
Who knows what that vision may have been, because what emerges starts as a mob crime drama. Dennis Cole stars as Vietnam vet Derek Keillor, a man who may have won medals in war, but found no opportunities at home. Cole had a decent run as a guest star on plenty of TV shows, but was probably better known for marrying Charlie’s Angels star Jaclyn Smith. He also shows up on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, as his son Joe was shot to death in a crime that remains, well, unsolved. That’s one of my favorite episodes, as Joe was Henry Rollins’ roommate, so it just seems so odd to have a punk icon and Robert Stack on the same show.
But I digress. Derek can only find one job: limo driver for mafia boss Vic Moretti, played by Anthony Franciosa from Tenebre. Our hero can’t help but fall for Vic’s woman, Genelle. He pays for his impudence by getting set up for her murder — Moretti drowns her in the bathtub, providing an opportunity for nudity — and sent to death row at Townsend State Prison.
That’s where the real story begins. Government agent Colonel Burgess (Saxon) has taken over the prison from a henpecked warden — his wife literally tells him she plans on dumping him in front of their cherubic daughter and skateboarding son — and begun to subject the prisoners a genetically altered version of a virus called HV8B.
Who would invent such a thing? Oh, just Tanya Kerrington (Tane McClure, the only actress I know who was in both Legally Blonde and Death Spa), who was once a scientist but is now an investigative journalist.TK, as Tanya wants to be known, is here with her cameraman trying to bust the Colonel’s use of prisoners as test subjects. She picked the right day for this, as ten minutes after she arrives, the zombie virus makes everyone go bonkers.
This is a film of amazing coincidences. Like how Derek is jailed alongside Moretti’s brother Frankie, so he uses him as a hostage to lure Vic into the prison. That’s when the first zombie shows up, using a modified sleeper hold to rip off a guard’s head before being shot hundreds of times. Oh yeah — somehow Ron “Super Fly” O’Neal shows up in this mess, too.
Credit where credit is due — Saxon is awesome here, a total maniac who wants to create an American army that can win wars like Vietnam, so he creates a zombie plague that makes people do insane things. That seems like a good idea, right? And Franciosa chews every bit of scenery he gets near, like the scene where he kills his brother’s jailhouse lover.
All of the maneuverings of the plot do allow for a very Carpenter-like storyline to emerge: everyone in the prison has been infected and therefore quarantined. Can they survive the siege both within and without the prison? There are some moments of lunacy — a lunch lady zombie hoarding Twinkies in a scene that predates Zombieland by a decade or so and a dream sequence near the end that exists only so we can see TK nude — but things don’t descend to the level of a Nightmare City as you’d hope.
I do wish Saxon had directed more films, though. And I really wish his script for an Elm Street sequel called How the Nightmare Began had been made. It concerns therapist Frederick Krueger being blamed for a series of murders that have been really committed by the Manson Family. You have no idea how much I wish that movie got made.
Zombie Death House isn’t a movie that many celebrate. I wouldn’t even know about it if Saxon hadn’t directed it. But here I am, at 5 AM, watching it and celebrating the fact that it contains a heroic child skating through a maximum security prison and running across an infected lunch lady feverishly hoarding a stack of Twinkies. I mean, you have to love that someone convinced the Dead Kennedys to give them the rights to “Chemical Warfare,” which plays over the closing credits. And only in the 1980’s would filmmakers figure out a way to get the film’s hard as nails biochemist/investigative journalist heroine naked by the end of the movie.
If this ever gets rediscovered, celebrated as a hidden gem and released as an expensive blu ray with multiple slipcovers like so many other lost 80’s movies, remember that you heard about it here first.
UPDATE October 21, 2024: Lance was about to record this for Unsung Horrors with Erica and wrote to ask, “I wanted to check in with you and your crazy ways of finding facts about films. Do you happen to know who the original director was that bowed out before Saxon took over? Do you have any insights into the production of the film? I found a few things online but this thing is quite the mystery (which I actually like haha). Thanks!”
This took me down a rabbit hole online and when I realized that Retromedia released it on DVD, I thought that Fred Olen Ray may have something to do with it. I asked Jenn Upton, who edited Fred’s book Hell-bent for Hollywood f he said anything about working with Saxon.
Here’s what Jenn shared:
“John Saxon starred and directed the prison-zombie film, but he just, for some reason, struggled with the finale. They shot the finale three times before someone finally said, “Look, this isn’t working.” They called me, and said, “Could you come down and help us out?” I said, “Okay,” because the producer, Nick Marino, was a friend of mine. I went down and I shot a sequence where the heroes are escaping from this prison and coming out in Bronson Canyon while ziombie-inmates try to kill them.
John Saxon, who I effectively replaced as the director, had to continue on the show as an actor in these scenes and I’ll admit it was very uncomfortable, but he was extremely professional. John and I talked a lot about what we were
going to do.
The writers, producers and director had not prepared any means whatsoever for these people to escape from the prison into Bronson Canyon. They hadn’t even considered how to achieve it.
At lunch time, they handed out sandwiches to the cast and crew that arrived on three-foot-screenlike plastic serving trays.
I asked the caterer, “Can you leave me three or four of those?”
I took them and made a little tunnel exit from three plastic bread trays held together with nothing more than a thin piece of wire, like pipe cleaners. There were enough trays for the top of the tunnel and two sides. We sat it on the ground and the actors crawled out through the three bread trays into the cave.
The shot showed just a little bit of the bread trays, and then you would see the actors crawl out. That’s how they got from the prison into the cave. It probably seemed ridiculous to everyone at the time, but it worked. The audience only sees what the camera shows them.
We shot the end of the movie in Bronson Cave at night while the director of House of Wax, Andre De Toth was visiting. He wore a pirate’s patch because he only had one eye and also had his neck in an impressive-looking brace. He tripped over the generator cables in the dark and took a bad fall right in front of me. I was very concerned for him, but from the state of things I believed this sort of mishap had happened to him many times before.
Andre was around a lot because he was also friends with Nick. He later directed a great portion of Nick’s even lower budgeted Terror Night (1987.) Michelle Bauer told me that Andre directed all of her scenes, even though he vehemently denied ever working on the film.
Nick watched my Death House footage and then, liking what he saw, he decided he needed more action. He concocted a new scene that would shoot in the back alley behind the adult video company, LA Video, the parent company of Camp Video. In the new storyline, LA Video honchos, Salvatore Richichi and Jim Golff played gangsters selling plastic explosives shaped like dashboard Jesus figurines.
A car races down the alley, smashes into them, blows up, and a kung fu fight breaks out with the hero, Dennis Cole. All in a night’s work.
I did that additional scene as well, and at the end of the day I never thought to ask, “Hey, am I getting paid anything for this?”
The answer was no. Three days. I spent three grueling days on that movie and didn’t get a dime. Not a fucking dime and I probably didn’t get any credit either. I don’t remember and I don’t want to.”
Fred also added: “On Moon in Scorpio, Gary Craver did direct and called action and cut but when I got to Death House, I decided that I wasn’t going to go down that route. And I did not let Saxon be involved in the directing at all. He was involved as an actor only and we got along fine, but I did things my way and I called action card. And did the shots the way I wanted them without any input from him at all.”
Make sure that you buy Fred’s book, Hell-Bent for Hollywood, on Amazon.
Thanks to Lance and Erica for asking and Jenn for her help, as this is some movie archaeology that got to the bottom of a fact that people always report and it may not be the whole truth.
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