Tag Archives: 1988

La maldición del monasterio (1988)

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Also known as The Curse of the Monestary, Blood Screams and The Bloody Monks, this starts with a whole bunch of minks dying to satisfy the blood urges of a demon or to steal gold or who knows what, but it’s non-stop monk death and you know me, I’m in for this movie as of immediately.

Karen (Stacy Shaffer, Cannon’s The Naked Cage) is traveling through Mexico along with a magician named Frank (how if Russ Tamblyn even in this movie?) and she just wants to escape and she falls for a boy named Jaime (Rafael Sánchez Navarro). They jump the train and I start wondering, is Karen Frank’s wife? His daughter? Is there any connection? Is she one of those giallo heroines who is gorgeous yet brings death to everyone around her because she has some strange malady? And hey Jaime, take my advice from watching so many movies: don’t go back home and solve the mystery of your father’s death.

This movie has 75 minutes to share with you enough to fill up ten other films; the magician being racist to Mexicans who laugh at him, a witch (Isela Vega, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia) who has possessed a woman, Karen’s mysterious past, Jaime’s mysterious past, Karen’s mysterious dreams of Jaime’s mysterious past, zombies who are the monks we saw die earlier, missing gold, Russ Tamblyn doing magic tricks and acting as his own stuntman as he dove off a train in a move that seems ill-advised for anyone much less an actor already 54 when this was made and oatmeal-based makeup.

Jaime and Karen get blamed for a series of murders when we know that it was the zombies that did it because we’ve seen enough Blind Dead movies. Perhaps the biggest mystery of this movie is that it was distributed by Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures and released on video by Warner Brothers.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Alone in the Neon Jungle (1988)

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This tale of Suzanne Pleshette fighting corruption in the Pittsburgh police force — seven years before the murder by cops of Jonny Gammage, never forget — was something I’d hoped would be a Yinzer giallo, but instead it’s simply a by the book TV movie where she takes over a police station dahntahn and roots out the bad apples.

It does, however, have a great shot of her Mount Washington deck and Tony Shalhoub drinking at the Cricket Lounge during the day and one would assume that’s because his character knows that’s when the money-strapped students of Pitt University come to tryouts. I wouldn’t speak from experience.

This was also called Command In Hell and that better be a reference to Pittsburgh being called Hell with the Lid Off and not an insult. It’s bad enough that they call Liberty Avenue “The Sewer” and never even make it to Chez Kimberly.

Danny Aiello is the chief of police, long before he got famous, and nobody in this movie looks, sounds or acts like they are from Pittsburgh.

It’s directed by George Stafford Brown, who was Officer Terry Webster on the 70s cop drama The Rookies, and written by Mark Rogers (the Police Story TV movies) and Stephen Downing, who wrote for T.J. Hooker, Police Woman and Emergency.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Junesploitation 2022: Curse of the Blue Lights (1988)

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June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is free! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

As the world has grown smaller thanks to all of us being connected 24/7/365, the weird pockets of regional filmmaking may not exist. After all, you can download the latest Polonia movie or watch it on Tubi, right? But in 1988, odd little movies could still just show up at your video store with nothing telling you what they were all about or where they came from.

Dudley is a nothing happening town that only has a few things for teens to do and all of them get you in trouble. The Blue Lights of the title are both a place for them to have furtive backseat car sex and also see the strange glow that could either be aliens or the ghosts of a train wreck from long before any of these kids were born.

Four kids back from college for the summer — Ken (Patrick Keller), Alice (Becky Golladay), Paul (Clayton A. McCaw) and Sandy (Deborah McVencenty) — and three guys who are probably never getting out of Dudley — Bob (Kent E. Fritzell), Max (Tom Massmann) and Sam (James Asbury) — decide on one of those boring long hot summer nights to go see the lights for themselves.

Oh yeah — that train fire also had a petrified monster within its wreckage known as The Muldoon Man and that’s what they find. Now, if I discovered a ten-foot-tall monster in my drunken teens, I would totally not touch it or even be anywhere around it, no matter how much Pucker, Yuengling or Fireball I had to drink. No, instead they decide to haul it off in a truck — what no one wanted to go mudding instead? — and try and make money off it.

If you guess that the creature gets away — or someone steals it — you’ve seen enough horror movies. So instead of doing the sensible thing like drinking on someone’s porch, the teens all head to Sunny Hill Cemetery, more specifically the tunnels under the graves. That’s where they learn the truth: the Blue Lights are to signal the return fo Loath (Brent Ritter), a gigantic undead leader of a cult of zombies who want to return the dreaded Muldoon Man to life by devouring the living. Somehow, they get away, with Paul stealing the disc they need to complete their ritual, and the zombies follow.

How do you stop them? Maybe the witch (Bettina Julius) can help.

If you’re reading this and think, “That’s way too much for one movie,” you’re right and also wrong, because gloriously regional movies existed outside the purview of La La Land and studio notes so deliriously madcap things could happen. Like, well, this movie.

Also, perhaps most amazingly, this movie looks like a million bucks thanks to the sets and special effects by Michael Spatola (Return of the Living Dead, Predator 2) and Mark Sisson (A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Subspecies). Sure, there are way too many primary characters and yes, perhaps too many monsters to keep track of, but isn’t it nice sometimes to totally lose track of something and have it still be fun?

Even better, Curse of the Blue Lights is based on several suburban — rural? — legends of  Pueblo, Colorado, which is where it was made. The Blue Lights really is a parking spot for teens where they would see mysterious blue lights in the nearby river bottom.

The Muldoon Man was real, too.

This supposedly prehistoric petrified human body was discovered in 1877 — seven years after his infamous Cardiff Giant hoax — by a con man named William Conant at a spot now known as Muldoon Hill, near Beulah, Colorado. The figure had a brief tour of the United States before it was revealed to be a hoax. Named after pro wrestler William Muldoon, it was made of clay, plaster, mortar, rock dust, bones, blood and meat.

Director and writer John Henry Johnson also made two documentaries, Zebulon Pike and the Blue Mountain and Damon Runyon’s Pueblo. Turns out that the Consumer Infomation Catalogue isn’t the only great thing to come out of that town.

You can watch this on YouTube. Maybe technology isn’t all bad.

Ninja Night Thunder Fox (1988)

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Brad and Bonnie may share a detective agency but as soon as you realize that Godfrey Ho directed this, the sooner you’ll come to accept that Brad (Marko Ritchie) and Bonnie (Hsu Ying-Chu) are from two different movies that are only connected by the telephone, the same way that Chrissy Snow could keep talking to Janet Wood and Jack Tripper despite the contract negotiations of Suzanne Sommers.

How do we know we’re in America when we’re watching Brad speak to Bonnie by staring at her photo as if this is a late 80s Facetime? The Coca-Cola cans everywhere, of course.

After that call, Brad takes a call from a girl named Pam who wants to hire him to take her case before she’s killed by this movie’s big bad, Decker (Mike Abbott), who has bad guys in his employ from yet another movie, Tiger and Ringo. He’s running a modeling school that hooks girls on drugs and then into white slavery and somehow does this by uniting multiple films into one strange and branching narrative.

So what does the modeling school teach?

Aerobics.

Will Bonnie go there?

Of course.

She’s from a movie called Lover and Killer and she’s awesome.

Meanwhile, we keep cutting back to Brad, who somehow becomes a red ninja because suddenly someone remembered that this was a ninja movie and then it all ends with a gunfight.

Huh?

This is also known as Ninja Phantom Heroes. There are moments where you have no idea what is going to happen next or even where the story is and the confusion feels like when drugs work. When the high isn’t scary and you’re doing what Huxley said about the doors of perception and you’re just feeling that life makes sense because this ninja madness makes no sense whatsoever.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

There’s a moment in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood where Eddie, while watching the debut of Plan 9 from Outer Space thinks “This is the one I’ll be remembered for.” It’s almost certain Ed never had that thought. Similarly, Fred Olen Ray probably never thought his little horror comedy shot over 5 days on a series of weekends using equipment rented for another film would be “the one.” If you’ve never seen a Fred Olen Ray film, or you’re about to induct a new virgin into your own basement B-movie cult, this is the one to watch. Often imitated but never duplicated, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers is Ray’s self-professed “message film” about the dangers of heading to a hotel with a lady of the night. “Because they might be a chainsaw-wielding maniac!” 

Here, the hookers in question are members of a chainsaw-worshipping cult who dismember their clients in service of their gods and master Gunnar Hansen of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. Elvis-loving Mercedes (Michelle Bauer) delivers the most memorable kill totally nude in a shower cap while bloody Halloween shop rubber prop body parts fly around.

Although the dismembered body parts were fake, the chainsaws were real. Even when the chains were removed, Ray insisted on extreme caution from everyone on the slippery, blood-soaked set because “Anybody who is not scared shitless of a moving chainsaw blade is a fool.” 

Jay Richardson plays film noir prototype private detective Jack Chandler who stumbles upon the cult while searching for a missing runaway named Samantha (Linnea Quigley) amongst the dive bars and strip clubs of 1980s pre-“cleaned up” Hollywood. In the end, Sam and Jack defeat the cult while chaos in the temple erupts around them, while every single crew member runs through the frame screaming.

The film is silly and fun and utterly harmless despite what the British Board of Film Censors would have you believe. Yes, they banned both the poster and the film itself for a time during the “Video Nasties” panic. Here we are, 35 years later, and police have arrested not a single British prostitute for involvement with an underground chainsaw cult. Come to think of it, that brothel I lived next door to for a while in London was pretty suspicious…

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Phantom Empire (1988)

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The Phantom Empire is a very meta film. Its title refers to the 1935 Gene Autry movie serial — which was kind of remade as part of the show Cliffhangers! — as well as having Robby the Robot in its cast, Jeffrey Combs’ character Andrew Paris saying that he went to Miskatonic University (the same school from Re-Animator) and vehicles from director Fred Olen Ray’s movie Star Slammer and Logan’s Run show up, as well as footage from 1977’s Planet of Dinosaurs. Maybe by referential sometimes I’m also saying cost-effective.

Ray got the idea for this film while filming Commando Squad in a Bronson Canyon cave. He wrote the script over the weekend and then started filming the day after Commando Squad wrapped, using the same cast and crew. That’s impressive but the original inspiration for the 1935 Phantom Empire is wilder. Writer Wallace MacDonald came up with the entire movie — plot, characters, their names, costumes, literally every single moment of the serial — while he was being treated with nitrous oxide by his dentist.

A cave creature with millions in diamonds around his neck emerges from a cave and rips someone’s head off before it’s stopped. A party is made of Cort Eastman (Ross Hagen), Denae Chambers (Susan Stokey), Andrew Paris (Combs), Professor Strock (Robert Quarry) and Eddy Colchilde (Dawn Wildsmith, Ray’s wife) to enter the caves and see what they can salvage.

They soon find a hidden world, Robby the Robot and a queen played by Sybil Danning, which is really why most people rented this. Throw in Michele Bauer as a cave girl and that’s why they definitely rented this.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Jailbird Rock (1988)

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Jesse (Robin Antin, who helped form the Pussycat Dolls and choreographed Paris Hilton’s Carl’s Jr. commercial) murders her abusive stepfather and gets sent to prison, a prison filled with all the WIP cliches, like delousing showers, mean girl butchery thanks to Maxine Farmer (Rhonda Aldrich, Cynthia from Boogeyman II) and her henchwoman Echo (Robin Cleaver) and a mix between prison blues and the clothing that would define breakdance.

When I hear phrases like “women in prison plus breakdance,” a part of me passes out I get so excited and I wake up and the other part of my brain is just yelling at the screening and dancing around the room like I’m on Solid Gold in 1982.

Luckily, Jesse has the nerdy Peggy (Valerie Jean Richards, Hard Rock Nightmare, Appointment With Death), singing tough girl Samantha (Jacqueline Houston) and Mouse (Annie Livingstone, Skatelady from The Wizard of Speed and Time) on her side.

It also has a cruel warden played by Ron Lacey, who once he was Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark knew he’d only be slimy villains. And even though director Phillip Schuman made the X-rated Randy, which starred Juliet “Aunt Peg” Anderson and Desiree Cousteau, he forgets that most people come to WIP movies for the nudity and sleaze, not girls practicing long and involved dance numbers under the guise of escape.

Filmed in 1984 and released long after the death of the craze in 1988, you should watch this in the only way that matters: a battered VHS rip dubbed into a language that  it was not shot in.

MILL CREEK DVD RELEASE: Through the Decades: 1980s Collection: Little Nikita (1988)

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River Phoenix and Sidney Poitier made one well-regarded political thriller together — Sneakers — but did you know they did another?

Directed by Richard Benjamin and written by Bo Goldman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and John Hill (Quigley Down Under), Little Nikita does what The Americans did several decades earlier. Jeffrey Nicolas Grant’s (Phoenix) parents — Richard (Richard Grant) and Elizabeth (Carolina Kava) — are really Russian deep cover agents that have actually forgotten their mission and settled into America.

Things would be fine if it weren’t for the Soviet killer called Scuba (Richard Lynch) and his mission to murder these sleeper agents one by one. Konstantin Karpov (Richard Bradford), a Soviet spy catcher, wants to stop him. And so does Roy Parmenter (Poitier), who wants revenge on Scuba for killing his partner several decades ago.

It seems like no one was happy with this movie, as Phoenix felt Benjamin treated him like a child and that the Russian characters were too simplistic. Worse, Columbia Pictures chief David Puttnam told Benjamin that it was one of the worst movies he had ever seen and tried to get editor Jim Clark to fix the film.

It bombed at the box office, as did the movie that pretty much remakes it, Abduction.

The Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1980s Collection has a ton of great movies at an affordable price. It also has Punchline, Who’s Harry Crumb?, Vice Versa, The New Kids, Roxanne, Blue Thunder, Suspect, Band of the Hand and Like Father, Like Son. You can get this set from Deep Discount.

MILL CREEK DVD RELEASE: Through the Decades: 1980s Collection: Vice Versa (1988)

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Back in 1882, F. Anstey’s wrote the novel Vice Versa and Hollywood is so happy that he died before they’d have to pay to make and remake and remake again his work. This time, Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold are Charlie and Marshall Seymoure, the father and son who must change their lives by changing identities, this time by using a supernatural skull that needs the intervention of James Hong, forever solving the supernatural problems of white people.

Director Brian Gilbert would go on to make more art-based movies like Tom & Viv while writers Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais would write Flushed Away and The Commitments. Sadly, Judge Reinhold claimed that this movie was the decline of his career, saying “That’s when the phone stopped ringing.”

Seeing as how this is on the same box set as Like Father, Like Son, it’s amazing how close both films follow the same story down to hair metal soundtrack. There are only so many ways to tell a story, yet seeing as how both movies came out within six months of one another that seems like more than a coincidence.

The Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1980s Collection has a ton of great movies at an affordable price. It also has Punchline, Little Nikita, Roxanne, The New Kids, Who’s Harry Crumb?, Blue Thunder, Suspect, Band of the Hand and Like Father, Like Son. You can get this set from Deep Discount.

MILL CREEK DVD RELEASE: Through the Decades: 1980s Collection: Punchline (1988)

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David Seltzer, who wrote The Omen and Prophecy, was excited about comedy clubs all the way back to 1979, but the script sat for years unmade before producer Daniel Melnick found it in the Columbia files. Tom Hanks Steven Gold character was the hero of the movie, but comes off so mean at parts that it just didn’t work. Instead of making this a small movie with no stars, Columbia president Steve Sohmer reached out to Sally Field, who came on board as the producer and co-star.

Both Hanks and Field worked for months to improve their timing on stage, with Hanks training with comedy writer Randy Fechter and stand-up comic Barry Sobel, while Field studied under comic Susie Essman and sitcom writer Dottie Archibald.

Steven Gold (Hanks) is a failed medical student obsessed with his stand-up career, someone who uses the skills he should have in the operating room to dissect what makes stand-up work.   Lilah Krytsick (Field) is a housewife with the dream of making a career that she can own outside of her boring life cooking dinners and raising children with her husband John (John Goodman, ironically playing the wife of a Roseanne Barr-type comedian, ironically in the same year that he would play Barr’s TV husband; fellow ABC actor Candace Cameron is one of their daughters).

The true joy of this film is in seeing the stand-ups work on their material, as well as the actors and real comedians selected to play them, like Damon Wayans, Sobel, Pam Matteson, George McGrath (the singing nun in this movie also wrote Big Top Pee-Wee), Taylor Negron (who was trained for comedy by Lucille Ball), Barry Neikrug, Angel Salazar, Mac Robbins, Max Alexander, Paul Kozlowski, Marty Pollio (a real-life juggling comedian), Casey Sander, George Wallace, Michael Pollock and Bob Zmuda as a heckler.

Romeo, the owner of the club in this movie, is played by Mark Rydell, who hadn’t acted since The Long Goodbye. He’s much better known as a director with The Rose and On Golden Pond being his best-considered movies.

Comedians are screwed up people. This movie won’t change that notion. That said, it got me emotionally a few times and has some decent moments.

The Mill Creek Through the Decades: 1980s Collection has a ton of great movies at an affordable price. It also has Like Father, Like Son, Vice Versa, Little Nikita, Roxanne, The New Kids, Who’s Harry Crumb?, Blue Thunder, Suspect and Band of the Hand. You can get this set from Deep Discount.