Braddock has been in the news a lot lately, being the adopted home of John Fetterman. Yet for years, Tony Buba has been there, making documentaries about the former steeltown where he was born and continued to live, all while working in movies, doing sound for George Romero films and showing up with his brother Pasquale as drug dealers in Martin and bikers in Dawn of the Dead.

Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy takes place at the end of the eighties, a time when so much of America gave up on Pittsburgh and its surrounding mill towns. Where once Braddock was Pittsburgh’s shopping center with seven movie theaters, by the time of this movie it was falling to pieces — it would get worse — as the mills in Homestead were being closed by U.S. Steel, who said they were in the business of making money, not steel.

I grew up directly between Pittsburgh and Youngstown with a grandfather who spent his whole life in the blast furnace after liberating concentration camps. He used to tell me about getting frostbite on one side of his body and a suntan on the other as he worked at J&L in Aliquippa and would come home covered in dirt and grime in the small hours of the day, sleeping when everyone else was awake and then going back the very next day and doing it all over again.

Buba plays himself, trying to make a movie with Sal Caru, a local character who was also in one of his shorts Sweet Sal. Except that Sal thinks that just because Werner Herzog liked the movie, Tony is going to leave Braddock behind, just like the steelworkers did when they started making money. He’s ready to battle everyone in his way, leaving rambling explentative-filled answering machine messages demanding an audience.

There’s a moment before his confession that Tony looks at an animated card of Jesus and times when he thinks about how expensive Hollywood things are, how the rich men running the mills spend as much in a day as people in Braddock make in a year and how he can’t waste anything. He feels guilty about things like wanting to leave his hometown behind for Hollywood before realizing this is where he belongs.

While I’m a transplant to the greater Pittsburgh area, living in Mount Oliver, Edgewood, Allentown, Homestead, Dravosburg, West Mifflin, McKeesport and now Monongahela in my life, I feel such an emotional tug to this place. You can look at the Waterfront shopping area built on the top of the dead Carrie 6 furnace and see that even though this town is now about tech, we haven’t forgotten the past. I still miss Alexander Graham Bell’s bar on 8th, a place in Homestead where every table had a telephone and you could call table to table. I’ve hunted down where the old drive-ins were, the defunct movie theaters, the places that Pittsburgh used to be.

The struggles within this film of the steelworkers are long gone. So many of us have forgotten them, so many are gone now to be honest. My grandfather has been dead twenty years by now and I miss him and those stories every day. But Pittsburgh trudges on, even as one of the few mills still open is right down the street from my house now, the Clairton works, making the air itself the worst in the state. It smells like eggs on a foggy day, but once you couldn’t wash your clothes outside if you lived above the mills and Homestead ceremony is filled with the bodies of union men and the Pinkertons who got off boats to try and break their line, one of the largest instances of armed warfare inside our country.

I came away from this knowing why Tony Buba loves Pittsburgh because I think sure, we might complain about it, we might wish it were different, but we love everything about this town. We’re lifers. I couldn’t imagine caring about anywhere else.

You can buy this from Kino Lorber.

When Monkey Shines came out on video, I was probably 16 and had watched Dawn of the Dead hundreds of times. I was also an edgelord kid who hated everything and didn’t like this at all. I didn’t understand that directors can change and grow. I just wanted more gore.

Based on the book by Michael Stewart, this was director and writer George Romero’s first major studio feature and had — for him — a big budget of $7 million. Shooting in Pittsburgh — Carnegie Mellon and Murrysville are two of the locations — in the late summer and early fall of 1987, this had a long post-production and editing process as Romero shot more film than he ever had before, plus had to learn to work with live monkeys.

That said, there are also four Tom Savini-designed puppets. If you guessed that Frank Welker does her voice, you are correct.

After athletic law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) is hit by a truck, he loses control of his arms and legs and must learn to live in a wheelchair controlled by sips and puffs, which is nearly all he can do. His friend Geoffrey (John Pankow) suggests that he get a helper monkey and specialist Melanie Parker (Kate McNeil) helps him by getting Ella trained in working with him. It lifts his spirits and he finds himself growing close to Melanie.

The secret is that Geoffrey has been experimenting on these monkeys and is close to losing funding if he doesn’t get results. He has injected Ella with a special drug that boosts her intelligence. What he doesn’t know is that it causes her to share emotions with Allan, first him feeling her ability to run through the grass in his dreams, then killing a bird that drives him crazy and even setting the home of the surgeon who may have screwed up his operation — and now lives with his ex-girlfriend — on fire and killing the man and his lost lover.

Now the rage that goes through both of them begins to feed on itself and everyone in their way pays, even if Allan doesn’t want it to happen. While this has a studio-demanded happy ending — spoiler warning, he crushes the monkey with his wheelchair which doesn’t seem all that happy — Romero filmed a different way to close this, as Geoffrey’s boss Dean Harold Burbage (Stephen Root) steals the remaining drugs and injects them into all of the test monkeys. After Allan regains his ability, Burbage is assaulted by animal rights protesters who had earlier attacked Geoffrey for experimenting on monkeys. When he returns to his lab, we learn that the monkeys have completely taken him over.

Romero said of the ending, “I thought my ending played well, but I’d admit that the testing results were overwhelmingly in favor of the current version. To Orion’s credit, they said —  it’s up to you, we’ll release it either way. So I decided to go along and not fight it. But I’ll always miss it.”

I may like this more than I did when I first saw it, but it remains the first film where I noticed that I wouldn’t necessarily love every movie by every director, even George Romero. Supposedly, he had to cut half of what he shot to hit the right length of the film, but even still, it feels like there is both too much going on and too little of a story at the same time, which I realize is a juxtaposition.

Director Karen Shakhnazarov said, “In my opinion, the essence of the film Zero City is that a person mythologizes history, distorts it. And, constantly distorting history, he distorts his own life. In essence, we do not know history — it is, in principle, unknowable for us. We constantly use the past to achieve some goals in our modern life. But in this way, by distorting our past, we also distort our present. This concerns not only the USSR and not only Russia. This also applies to the United States, and France, and China, and Brazil, and in general everyone. This is common. For me, this topic is related to the very existence of man. This is the main theme of Zero City for me.”

Deaf Crocodile Films Co-Founder and Head of Distribution Dennis Bartok summed up this film so well when he called it “…a fascinating mix of genres: part mystery, part science fiction, part political satire, part surreal comedy. When the film was released in 1988, the Soviet Union was only three years away from breaking up — and it’s impossible not to look at Zerograd as a metaphor for the U.S.S.R. in its last stages, with Leonid Filatov’s brilliant, baleful performance as the Everyman engineer who gets caught in the Moebius strip of Zero City, unable to go backwards to Moscow and unable to go forwards. Just like the Soviet Union itself at that point in history.”

Craig Rogers, Deaf Crocodile Co-Founder and Head of Post-Production and Restoration, added “Zerograd comes from the same D.N.A. as Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Surreal, wild fun. I’m so glad this film will finally be seen by a North American audience!”

An engineer named Varakin (Leonid Filatov) has come to a remote city where nothing makes sense, even if everyone acts like it does. He takes part in the investigation of the murder — or suicide — of a chef named Nikolaev, who may be his father and who shot himself after Varakin refused to eat a cake modeled after his own face.

Varalkin is soon trapped in a place where the real and unreal exist in the same plane of reality, where a receptionist does her job in the nude, prosecutors seek to commit crimes of their own and strange museums fail to tell you what is true and what is an illusion.

I’m so excited that this movie is now available in America, because it’s really something, a mix of strange bureaucracy, rock ‘n roll making its way to Russian and just plain weirdness.

Zero City is now available on blu ray. It has a new 2K restoration from the original 35mm picture and sound elements by Mosfilm, a video interview with director/co-writer Karen Shakhnazarov, moderated by Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile Films, a new commentary track by film journalist Samm Deighan (Diabolique magazine, Daughters of Darkness podcast) and a new booklet essay by filmmaker, writer, punk musician and genre expert Chris D. (The Flesh Eaters; author of Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film). You can order it from Deaf Crocodile.

Don Mancini took his trouble relationship with his dad, his experiences of being alienated as a gay man and his worries about the impact of 80s sell sell sell on children and turned it into a series of films that still exist to this day. It’s a cauldron brimming with influences, from Trilogy of Terrror‘s evil doll — literally the POV shots in this come from that seminal made for TV movies –to the Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” and no small bit of cultural appropriation from the Cabbage Patch Kids to make Chucky into a horror icon.

The best part of this movie is that it knows to hold back from revealing Chucky. Tom Holland is a great director and he made the most of this film, which starts with Detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon) finally bringing Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) to justice. After being shot, Ray remembers the voodoo imparted to him by John “Dr. Death” Bishop (Raymond Oliver) and his soul transfers to a Good Guys doll.

Karen Barclay (Catherine Hicks) is trying to raise her son Andy (Alex Vincent) all alone. She wants to get him a Good Guy doll, but they’re as expensive as they are hard to find. Yet when she gets one from a homeless man, things seem too good to be true. Well, they are, because the film continues tease the existence of Charles Lee Ray inside Chucky, but when Karen tries to burn the doll, it unleashes a torrent of expletives and begins chasing her through the apartment.

As part of the voodoo, Ray can only leave the doll to take over one body, the first person he revealed himself to. If Andy is to survive, his mother and Detective Norris must stop Chucky by taking out his heart.

For as iconic as Dourif’s voice is, he wasn’t the first choice. John Lithgow was going to play the role, but Holland had worked with Dourif on the movie Fatal Beauty. Then, they wanted Chucky to sound like an electronic toy before deciding on Jessica Walter as the voice. I mean, it worked for Pazuzu having a powerful female actress voicing those lines. Luckily, when Dourif got his schedule free, he made Chucky’s voice the one we know, love and maybe even are afraid of.

Magic of Spell is the sequel to Child of Peach and, if anything, it might be even weirder than that movie and that makes me happier than I can even explain to you.

Momotaro the Peach Boy is back and played by a woman named Lam Siu-Lau. Tiny Dog, Tiny Monkey and Tiny Cock are back too and their goal is to rescue the Ginseng King — a living ginseng plant — from a demon wizard who wants to use the plant person to become regain his lost vitality and youth. How would he do that? By bathing in the blood of thousands of dead boys in a hot tub as well as the pulped flesh of the ginseng royalty as well as perhaps Peach Boy’s skin. He also kills Peach Boy’s mother just so this can be even more frightening for kids and yes, this is a children’s movie.

This demon has quite the gang on his side. There’s a transgender ghost with the most perfect hair. Samurai ghosts. Evil puppet skeletons. Buddha statues with laser beams. A strong man who can become a rock lord. And oh yeah, a green fish man who shoots a bazooka.

That said, Tiny Cock can transform her body into a pecking rooster head that can peck out eyeballs.

If you’ve read this far and are wondering, “How can this be?” It can. This movie kept blowing my mind and it made me wish every movie was sped up and had wirework. Your ears will also be delighted, as this movie steals at will from the soundtracks of The Shining and Phantasm.

This movie starts with Peach Boy flying faster than an arrow to rescue a rabbit.

All movies should aspire to be this unconcerned with being strange. Watching movies like Magic of Spell will reaffirm your faith that humans have some business being on this planet.

You can watch this on YouTube.

This is the actual sales pitch for this movie: “The fate of the entire hotel industry is at stake. A group of evil black ninjas has threatened to insinuate themselves into the industry, take over, and transform the operation into something unspeakable.”

One part of this movie is 1984’s Mixed Up, which was directed by Chow Chun-Gaai, and is about three hotel switchboard operators saving the life of their rich boss. The rest is purple ninjas, hopping vampires and whatever other footage Godfrey had lying around that day.

I would say that watching this movie is like someone switching channels during a commercial and you end up missing a bunch of the movie you really wanted to watch, but that would make you think that this movie has some semblance of coherent storytelling.

This is the kind of movie where a giant pig is launched off the roof of a hotel and lands on an old man and his wife, killing them both. Then a vampire emerges from the dead hog. If you can get with that, you can get with this movie that never even tries to make sense.

Can virgin piss kill a vampire? Why do the zombies have rubbery arms? Are you ready for music cues from Mad Max, The Road Warrior, The Addams Family and Phantasm? Do you want to watch a vampire get way too fresh with a lady ninja in a bikini?

The answers are maybe, I don’t know, totally and yes.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: License to Drive was not produced by Cannon and was theatrically distributed by 20th Century Fox in the U.S., but in the Netherland, it was distributed Cannon Releasing Corporation. I must like this movie, because I wrote an entirely new article about it despite writing about it back on June 12, 2021.

Check out the amazing trading cards created at http://www.phantomcardboard.com/2020/10/license-to-drive.html

Greg Beeman was a major creative force on the TV shows Smallville and Dark Skies. But before that, he directed License to Drive, which was written by Neil Tolkin.

It’s the most simple of teenage stories: Les Anderson (Corey Haim) wants a driver’s license to impress his dream girl Mercedes Lane (Heather Graham). She gets drunk, his grandfather’s Cadillac gets totaled, Les’ friends Dean (Corey Feldman) and Charles (Michael Manasseri) do even more damage to it. But hey if you were a teenager in 1988 — I was 16, so I was definitely the target audience — this probably spoke to you.

Big points to the filmmakers for casting Carol Kane and Richard Masur as Les’ parents. Also, between “Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car” by Billy Ocean, a cover of “Drive My Car” by Breakfast Club and “Mercedes Boy” by Pebbles, this has some of the most expected needle drops ever. Sammy Hagar must have been waiting for the call, because he had the perfect song.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Red Scorpion was not produced by Cannon but was theatrically distributed by Scotia/Cannon in Germany. In the U.S., it was Shapiro-Glickenhaus Ent. who released it (after Warner backed out of their initial distribution negative pick-up deal with the Abramoff brothers). Thanks to The Punisher Book ’89 — check them out on Twitter — for the revision!

This movie really needs a movie to be made about it.

It was produced by Republican Party lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who had championed sending U.S. aid to anti-communist guerrilla movements such as the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. He established the International Freedom Foundation, which was financed by the South African apartheid regime. That makes sense, if only because Abramoff hired Arne Olsen to write a screenplay about the Angolan Civil War. with the money he allegedly received from South Africa. Why? Well, propaganda. They wanted to destroy international sympathy for the African National Congress.

Production began in Swaziland but was delayed after South African agents assassinated eleven ANC members. Moving the shooting of the film to Namibia, which was under South African occupation as South West Africa, Red Scorpion ended up being boycotted by Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid for being made in the country during apartheid. That caused Warner Brothers to pull out, as their deal with Abramoff stipulated that the movie not be made in South Africa. And, well, people were protesting the actual studio.

Meanwhile, soldiers and actual military equipment — like captured Soviet T-54 tanks — were provided by the South African Defence Force. The movie was even shot at one of their studios. But thanks to all the stop and starts, the movie was about ten million over. And Abramoff expected a more family friendly war movie, but he hired Joe Zito, who made The Prowler, and he got a film where Zito hired Tom Savini to go nuts all over again with the special effects.

Based on Jonas Savimbi, an Angolan South African ally and anti-Communist, Red Scorpion places Dolph Lundgren as Lieutenant Nikolai Petrovitch Rachenko, a Soviet Spetsnaz operative from the Ukraine — is this movie not relevant today?– sent to join Soviet, Czechoslovakian and Cuban forces as they battle anti-communists. Sent to kill the leader of the rebels, the mission is scrubbed when they anticipate him and escape, which ends up with Rachenko’s superiors torturing him. He escapes from the gulag and is rescued by natives who brand him with a red scorpion, making him one of them. As you can imagine, Lundgren goes wild killing everyone in his path.

That tribe that saves him is totally real. Their leader, Regopstaan, was 95 years old and agreed to be in the movie if his people could also appear.

Not to be a gun geek, but man — that FN FAL that Dolph uses at the end of the movie is mixed with a twin barrel AO-63 assault rifle and if real could fire six thousand rounds per minute.

By the 2000s, according to an article on Tedium, Abramoff was at the “center of a wide array of lobbying scandals, sometimes involving obscure parts of the United States like the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam” and getting set for “a prison stay, having just been sentenced in a fraud case involving a casino cruise line.”

The fact that this movie was made in the way that it was is astounding. Of course Cannon would release the video.