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.

You can watch this on Tubi and Vudu for free.

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 2000 has 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?

None other than Cannon Group co-owner Menahem Golan, the director of Delta Force, Enter the Ninja and The Apple. Yes, that Menahem Golan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ8d_czhqeA

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.

The first time I saw the trailer for this movie, I knew that it was exactly the kind of movie that i was looking for. I strongly believe that most movies would be better if they had a sax-driven montage where monster truck death machines were assembled.

It was directed by Steven Hilliard Stern, who also was behind The Park Is Mine, Mazes and Monsters and the Still the Beaver TV movie.

The five drunken lout sons of strip club owner Tiny Doyle (Ned Beatty, who legally must be in every redneck movie) rule the streets of an unnamed small Southern town. One of them, Vic, gets drunk and runs Big Joe Russo’s wife Kathy (Susan Hogan, The Brood) off the wrote, killing her and their two daughters. All he gets is a $300 fine.

Big Joe goes after Vic, but the Doyle family kill him and assault his son Joey’s girlfriend Misty. That’s when Joey does whatever you and I would do — he builds that monster truck with a flamethrower, a drill and a metal cutter and goes off on everyone who has wronged him.

If you love monster trucks smashing cars, then I can’t recommend this movie enough to you.

You know what they say about vehicular-based revenge. Get two parking spaces.

It’s impossible to describe how ubiquitous Flowers In the Attic and the novels of V.C. Andrews was if you grew up in the early 1980’s. The 1979 novel that this film is based upon is but the first of the eight books in the Dollanganger series. But before we get into the film, let’s discuss the real story of, well, where the stories come from.

Cleo Virginia Andrews was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. As a teenager, she fell down a school stairwell, which resulting in injuries that would eventually give her crippling arthritis, leaving her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That said — it didn’t seem to slow her down, as she became such a successful commercial artist that she supported her family after the death of her father.

She didn’t become a writer until much later in life, completing the original draft of Flowers In the Attic at the age of 52. An editor suggested that she “spice things up,” so she made the revisions in one night. It worked — within two weeks of its release, the book topped the best-seller charts.

Her books aren’t without controversy because they don’t shy away from some of the darkest behavior in humanity. Flowers, in particular, has been removed from many high school libraries due to its depiction of incest.

There’s also the belief that the novel is based on a true story. Virginia herself admitted that “a few incidents are autobiographical, and she has also stated that her stories have been influenced by experiences of friends and family, her own dreams and memories, and even popular and literary fiction.” This quote comes from an incredibly in-depth investigation of the book, as published on The Complete V.C. Andrews site.

Even in the pitch letter, Andrews described the tale as “the fictionalized version of a true story” and “not truly fiction.” The site cited above also claims that a relative believed that Andrews had a crush on a doctor who treated her for spinal injuries that had confessed to her that “he and his siblings had been locked away in the attic for over 6 years to preserve the family wealth.”

According to the article “Her Dark Materials” on Slate, Andrews sold Flowers in the Attic to Pocket Books for just $7,500. Yet when the author died in 1986, the author — whose condition meant that she rarely did book tours or TV interviews, was the kind of celebrity who could live in after her death.

You might be tempted to look up how many books she’s written. There are more than forty books with her name on them, but she only truly wrote 39 of them.

After her death from breast cancer in 1986, writer Andrew Neiderman was hired by the Andrews family to become her voice, making him the world’s most famous ghost writer. Since then, the franchise has grown from 30 million books sold worldwide to well over one hundred million books published in 95 countries and translated into 24 languages. Her name has so much value that the IRS deemed it a taxable asset and sued her estate for $1.2 million.

If Andrew Neiderman’s seems familiar, he also wrote The Devil’s Advocate as well as Pin, which must have been his audition for being able to write books all about strange incest and the supernatural. Seriously — I’ve hyped Pin before, as I feel that it’s a movie worth seeing.

By 1987, it was time for a movie version of the film. Andrews died before it was released, but was able to meet the actors and see much of her story come to life. You can see her in a brief cameo as a maid in Foxworth Hall, cleaning the windows after Chris and Cathy attempt to escape.

At one point, Wes Craven was direct this film and had even completed a screenplay that disturbed producers with its levels of violence and incest. Obviously, they hadn’t read the source material — yet they still stole many of his ideas for their revised ending to the film. Craven was replaced by Jeffrey Bloom, who also directed Nightmares and Blood Beach.

After the death of their father, four children find themselves struggling to survive. They are teenagers Chris (Jeb Adams, son of Nick Adams) and Cathy (Kristy Swanson, The Phantom and the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and their twin siblings Cory and Carrie (Lindsay Parker, daughter of UFO drummer Andy Parker), who travel with their mother Corrine (Victoria Tennant, former wife of Steve Martin and one of the stars of Inseminoid and Aunt Lydia in the original The Handmaid’s Tale) to meet their grandparents.

The funny thing is, the kids have never met their grandparents, who never even knew that the kids existed. Corrine’s mother Olivia (Louise Fletcher, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Exorcist II: The Heretic) is bonkers, obsessed with religion and demanding that the children be kept in a locked room so that no one else knows that they exist and so that their grandfather Malcolm (Nathan Davis, Father Henry Kane from Poltergeist 3) never know that they are there.

Olivia also drops a bomb on the kids: their mother was disowned because their father was really her uncle and her father’s half-brother. They are the children of sin and incest, with Corinne now having to pay the price by submitting to bullwhip sessions from her mother. She has one goal: to become part of the family again and get back in her father’s good graces before he dies and leaves his fortune to her. Then, she can take the children and escape to a better life. They just have to make due, stuck in an attic.

Before you know it, Corinne has disappeared from her children’s lives and Olivia has taken over, obsessed with her belief that Chris and Cathy will become lovers.  She even starves them to the point that Chris has to feed one of the twins his own blood just so he can survive. Honestly, I don’t think things work that way, but we’re living in the world of V.C. Andrews now, so you just accept these kinds of things.

While the kids are near death, their mother has been hooking up with lawyer Bart Winslow (Leonard Mann, who appeared in several spaghetti westerns, as well as The Humanoid, Cut and Run and Night School). Soon after, Cory is dead, killed by arsenic on a cookie that also kills his pet mouse. If you start to think that this movie is too dark, you are not made of the sterner stuff that it takes to be part of the Andrews universe.

Oh the twists and turns, as the kids hope to escape the home on the very same day they learn that their mother is marrying Bart. That’s when they discover one more revelation — their grandfather has been dead for months and their now rich mother will lose her inheritance if it is ever revealed that she had a first marriage or any children from it. That’s when they put it all together — their mother had been the one poisoning them.

her first marriage, even after his death, she will be disinherited and lose all of her money. They realize that Corrine was the one poisoning the cookies, not their grandmother, and their mother was trying to kill them all so no one would know of their existence and secure her inheritance.

The ending of the movie is pretty much completely different than the book. It was shot at Greystone Manor, where The Big Lebowski, The Witches of Eastwick, Death Becomes Her, Phantom of the Paradise and so many more movies have been filmed.

The director claims that after he finished the film, the producers approached him to refilm a new ending. He’d already had issues with the numerous producers and the two studios making the movie, as they’d made numerous tweaks to his script, tearing out many of the plot points and themes of the novel, including the incestuous relationship between the oldest siblings.

Their big new idea was that the siblings accidentally kill their mother, an idea that was taken from the Craven script. Bloom couldn’t change their mind, so he quit and another director finished the film.

In 2010, Bloom did reveal that after a disastrous initial test screening, nudity and scenes of incest were cut. The other reason given for the changes was that the studio wanted a PG-13 rating and not an R. Kristy Swanson also confirmed these additional scenes being cut in a 2014 interview. The biggest cut was that butler John Hall, who has a much larger role in the Andrews book, was nearly completely taken out of the film despite many of his scenes being filmed. Alex Koba, who played the role, said, “They had three different endings for that movie, and they picked the worst one, the one you’re seeing now.” To top all that off, Victoria Tennant got so upset about the ending where she was hung that she walked off the set.

The original ending finally showed up when Arrow Video released a UK blu ray of the film in 2018. Here’s to hoping that is finally released in the United States. If you’d like to see Craven’s script, here it is. In fact, the cardboard poster in the original DVD of this film has Hilary Henkin and Wes Craven credited for the script and says that it was directed by Craven. There’s also a. 1994 Virginia C. Andrews Trivia and Quiz book that has a page from the script.

You can watch this movie for free on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

BONUS: You can listen to Becca and me discuss this movie on our podcast.

The fact that Scared Stiff has been given all of the care of a Criterion release is a testament to why Arrow Video is one of the best labels out there in the rapidly dying world of physical media and the fact that there are still movies out there waiting to be discovered.

Kate Christopher (Mary Page Kellar, Pretty Little Liars) is a pop singer who had a nervous breakdown but is now getting it back together thanks to David (Andrew Stevens), her psychologist boyfriend. Together with her son Jason, they move into an old colonial mansion that comes packed with secrets, like a horror-filled diary and a trunk filled with the mummified bodies of a woman and her son.

Scared Stiff started as a Mark Frost script (the second Frost written movie we’ve covered this week, along with The Believers), but grew into complete lunacy, packed with every single shock tactic possible, from exposed brains to body horror style transformations and pre-CGI digital effects. It was directed by Richard Friedman, who went on to direct Doom Asylum, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge and the recent Acts of Desperation.

I love that this movie also features MTV-style videos, a ridiculous Native American lamp that grows gigantic, the goopiest of gore, a lynched handyman that doesn’t show up again until the perfect time in the film, a hallway filled with fog that sends people back and forth through time, a villain who sells slaves when he isn’t choking out little kids and turning into a literal monster, dead babysitters in a fountain and a shock finale that made me laugh out loud in the best of ways. I’ve said it so many times here, but how do basically forgotten movies from 1987 end up being better than anything released today?

Want to see it for yourself? If you grab a copy from Diabolik DVD, you get an exclusive slipcase! This gets a big recommendation, as it comes complete with Arrow’s usual high standards, including a thirty-minute documentary that covers every aspect of the creation of Scared Stiff.

I was inspired to watch this after watching Good Bad Flicks, who always do an expert job of getting me excited about movies.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by Arrow Video, but we’d have purchased it anyway. That has no impact on our review.

Based on Nicholas Conde’s book The Religion, The Believers is a movie that often goes where other films have the sense — or good taste — not to. Cats with their heads cut off, goats being killed, the bodies of kids being found sacrificed in rituals — if you’re coming into this one expecting a fun ride, beware. This gets pretty dark.

Think I’m kidding? The movie starts with the death of Cal Jamison’s (Martin Sheen) wife Lisa when she gets electrocuted by touching a malfunctioning coffeemaker as she also stands in a pool of spilled milk. Yes, you read that right.

This death moves Cal and his son Chris to New York City, where the elder Jamison finds work with the NYPD as a psychologist. One of his first patients, Officer Tom Lopez (father of Princess Leia, Jimmy Smits) has been infiltrating a cult but is now caught in the clutches of brujeria-influenced madness. Before you know it, Smits has literal snakes in his stomach and he’s cutting them out with a knife.

Robert Loggia shines here as Lieutenant Sean McTaggert, who is leading the case as they seek who is committing all of these ritualistic child murders. Could it be a conspiracy that goes the whole way to noted businessman Robert Calder (Harris Yulin, the judge who caused big issues for the Ghostbusters)? And when the cult targets young Chris, can anyone be saved?

Helen Shaver shows up as real estate agent/love interest Jessica Halliday and the film also features Elizabeth Wilson (the evil Roz in 9 to 5), Lee Richardson (who — along with child actor Harley Cross — also appears in The Fly II) and RIchard Masur from John Carpenter’s The Thing, the dad in License to Drive and the grown-up version of Stanley in the TV version of It.

This comes from a great pedigree, as director John Schlesinger was nominated for two Best Director Oscars for Darling and Sunday Bloody Sunday, winning one for Midnight Cowboy. He also directed another awesome thriller, 1976’s Marathon Man. And get this — Mark Frost, who would go on to co-create Twin Peaks wrote the screenplay.

I find it interesting that this film positions santeria as the good magic against the bad magic of the Caribbean. Even more intriguing is that this film influenced the santeria-based cult of Adolfo “The Godfather” Constanzo and supported by serial killer Sara “The Godmother” Aldrete in Matamoros, Mexico.

You can watch this for free on Vudu or grab the new blu ay release from Olive Films.

DISCLAIMER: Olive Films sent us this movie for review, but that doesn’t impact our opinion.