Will Death Nurse 2 reuse most of the first film and push me into a Shot on Video K hole in which I shake and shiver and scream for release? Yes, of course. It has to be this way.
You know when they used to set up movies serials and then bait and switch the ending so that all the ways you spent the last week debating how the hero would survive — yes, I know none of you were around in the 30s and 40s for this — and then they’d just screw around and do whatever?
This movie does that because all the tension of the detective at the door is defused when Nurse Edith Mortley just stabs him, feeds him to the rats and feeds the rats — endless repetition — to the patients.
“In the circle of life
It’s the wheel of fortune
It’s the leap of faith
It’s the band of hope
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding”
At least in this film we learn that Gordon is only a veterinarian — which explains the dog heart to human transplant in the original movie — and Edith never finished nursing school.
Edith kills everyone in this, getting away with everything, until the bodies start to stink, so she covers them with lime and the rats run into the streets and the movie ends the same way the last one did, with her slumped on the couch, waiting for the cops.
This movie takes footage from the last film, Criminally Insane and Satan’s Black Wedding to extend its nearly sixty minutes of screen time and still feels too long by five hours.
What was the fetish in the late 80s for prison and electric chair-theme films? Was everyone just excited that Ted Bundy was finally getting his capital punishment? Just from my count, I can call on Prison, Shocker, The Horror Show, Death House, Terror at Alcatraz, Slaughterhouse Rock and Destroyer.
The Chair is James Coco’s last movie and it was directed by Waldemar Korzeniowsky, whose wife Carolyn Swartz wrote this. If you haven’t heard of either of them, well, this is about the only movie they’ve done.
Coco is the psychologist at a jail with the goal of actually getting its hardener criminals released into the world as productive citizens and not making money for the government like happens now. That said, the ghost of the last warden, who was electrocuted by his prisoners in a riot, is all over the place, sending zaps of energy and projecting his eyeball into a lightbulb, which is a very upsetting visual.
For horror fans, Stephen Geoffreys from Fright Night would be the big draw. Paul Benedict, who was Harry on The Jeffersons and often plays a judge or a priest or some other authority figure, is also here, as is Trini Alvarado from The Frighteners.
Coco died during the making of this movie and its dedicated to him. I figure he haunted Korzeniowsky and Swartz for making this stinker.
At a Halloween party ten years ago, a young boy named Mark Walters was almost killed by his drunken, alcoholic father who tried to drown him in the apple bobbing water. Now, the boy has grown up and is ready to begin a murder spree.
Mark is off his pills, he’s killed the grandmother who raised him and he’s having a party at Hollow Gate that will draw in plenty of victims. He’s not to be screwed with or made to watch you screw. A young couple that makes fun of him by making out in a car while he watches are surprised when he sets a fuse and blows them up real good. And if you turn him down to go see the movies, he’s going to strangle you.
Maybe don’t even go around Mark.
He also takes a page out of Terror Train and Bloody Mania by switching costumes with every kill. Mark takes that even further by having whole characters — an English foxhunter, a soldier, a doctor and a rancher — that he plays while he puts teenagers in the ground.
There are also two golden retriever that know how to kill and are just so happy about it.
Hollow Gate isn’t great, but the more bad slashers come out this century, the better it gets.
16. VIDEO STORE DAY: This is the big one. Watch something physically rented or bought from an actual video store. If you don’t have access to one of these sacred archival treasures then watch a movie with a video store scene in it at least. #vivaphysicalmedia
When a video store clerk (Kevin Dillon) has learned a horrible secret. His store is renting a black and white 50s science fiction movie that is brand new, was created by aliens and leads to people being brainwashed. Sure, that could happen.
In the hands of anyone other than director and writer Jeff Lieberman (Squirm, Blue Sunshine), this would be a trifle, but this movie gets to the bottom of one of my major issues: sitting in a room all day and watching movies until I can’t stay awake any longer, then watching more movies.
I mean, I wish that Village Video was real, a place where women like Belinda Watson (Deborah Goodrich, April Fool’s Day) would stroll through hoping to find Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses and I guess the only place that would come close is Scarecrow Video, whose challenge this month inspired hunting down this old VHS chestnut that only got a physical release on DVD and blu ray when Liberman got the rights himself and DIY-distributed it.
Man, Kevin Dillon was getting into all kinds of 50s and 60s throwback shenanigans in the 80s, huh? Beyond the fake science fiction alien movie populated by all asian extraterrestrials, he was also in The Blob remake and Heaven Help Us.
So yeah, it’s not all that great — Lieberman claims that the producers ruined it — but any movie that has a murder-causing VHS tape and Jennifer Tilly in it can’t be all that bad.
Sam the Bossman assigned me this movie for our October 2021 “Slasher Month.” He knows the Aussie accent irritates me to tears (you frackin’ bastard). Initially, I clipped Marty DiBergi’s Spinal Tap documentary and typed: “Vegemite Shit Sandwich.” Then, I came to my critical sense and typed: “Poltergeist meets A Nightmare on Elm Street.” I added a theatrical one sheet and a trailer. Hit send. Done. Next review.
Then Sam sent me a “WTF” text and he gave me shite about “word count.” Okay, then. Here we go. You want words, you got ’em: “Remember how cool Eyes of Fire was? Well, Stone of Death is the shitty version of that movie. Aka this one as Stones of Bore.”
Still not enough words? Damn. Okay, here we go. . . .
Actually being stoned — by rock, not by joint — would be better.
The teenaged residents of a housing development on the suburban outskirts find themselves in trouble upon discovering their real estate tract was built on top of a sacred aboriginal graveyard* — where lurks the spirit of an aboriginal witch doctor, aka a Kadaicha Man, who placed a curse on said lands.
As with Mr. Krueger: the Kadaicha Man comes to them in their dreams, and leaves them in the possession of the ancient trinkets of the title. The crystal stone, of course (Kadaicha are aborigine stones, if you care; don’t worry, the trailer will educate with the correct pronunciation), marks them for death — demises that arrive in a series of explainable “accidents,” à la James Wong’s later and pretty fine, Final Destination.
So, yeah, a mash-up of A Nightmare on Elm Street** and Poltergeist . . . are you lovin’ or hatin’?
Well, the kills are low-budget minimal, which means lots of cutaways . . . then seeing what happened after said cutaway. The effects are cheap, the acting is questionable, the plot is troped and full of holes. However, the spiders let loose in the library for one of the from-beyond-kills is pretty decent. But one good scene does not a decent film make. So dump this supernatural slasher in the outback and let the crocodiles gnaw on it.
And don’t you dare pay a dime to stream Stones of Death. Watch it for free on You Tube.
So goes another “Slasher Month” for this October 2021 at B&S About Movies. Goo’ day, mate!
* There’s more folksy burial ground tomfoolery with Night of Horror (1981), which gives us Confederate Civil War ghosts, as does Armand Mastroianni’s borefest, The Supernaturals (1986), and Ghostriders (1987) with its western ghosts deep in the heart of Texas (a well made, but a boring, VHS eject). An honorable mention goes to William Grefe’s awful but fun drive-in nostalgia romp Death Curse of Tartu(1966) with its burial ground Indians. You can learn more about the “folk horror” genre with the Shudder exclusive documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.
Andreas Wells, a brilliant, neurosurgeon patriarch (a very good Jan Rubes; you know him from D2: The Mighty Ducks), gathers his dysfunctional family at a remote, snowy estate for an erotic battle over the fortunes of Charles MacLoed, his own, eccentric, dying father (by an ever better Ray Walston* who works the “dirty old man” angle with aplomb; yes, he was “Mr. Hand” from Fast Times at Ridgemont High).
The greed brings Thomas Wells (a good Kevin Hicks in his second film; you might remember him as “Sir D” in Cool as Ice), the two-years estranged son, to the estate with his fiance Marie (Gulp! Eye-popping redhead of crystal-blue eyes, Lydie Denier, of Paramedics; she was Nicole Bernard in the U.S.-imported series, Acapulco H.E.A.T). The soon-to-wed couple plan, once grandpa dies, to kill his father for the family’s estate. However, the tables turn as Marie finds herself the unwilling victim of the elder Wells’s sex kinks as well as their immortality experiments (in a basement lab, natch) to reanimate their cryogenically suspended wife/daughter-in-law — and Marie’s doped up along the way to bring on the hallucinations, and even screwier dreams, to muck up reality.
Blood Relations is one of the better Canuxploitation splatter joints. What begins as a 19th century-influenced, Lovecraftian erotic thriller (but set in the present day), soon delves into a Gialloeque mystery, only to become a sickly twisted, bizarre-gore set piece: a Gialloesque-cum-film noir with a brain-prodding serial doctor.
Writer Stephen Saylor (who never wrote another film?) and director Graeme Campbell (still at it, with five Hallmark Channel holidays flicks) start it off purposeful and slow, but be patient: this Amicus-styled film with Full Moon ’80s overtones has a wicked payoff that ranks alongside the twisted ’80s rentals The Brain and Severed Ties. The set design is attractive and expertly captured in the lens, while the red herring support actors of Lynee Adams, as Dr. Wells’s mistress Sharon, and Sam Malkin, as the ubiquitous, odd-ball groundskeeper Yuri, in the sexy-horror shenanigans, are excellent.
When it comes to brain transplant movies — with gratuitous nudity and capped brains poked with needles — this is the prefect watch for a month of October Halloween watching. Do it! Do it as a stream on the Internet Archive.org and enjoy this off-the-radar gem (the upload isn’t great, but the flipping and tracking static adds to the rental nostalgia).
* Ray Walston, who also appeared in Paramedics, gets the B&S About Movies love thanks to his creepy work in Blood Salvage, Galaxy of Terror, and Popcorn.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
David (Eric Foster, Cry Wilderness) and Lynn have just become orphans and are sent to live with their mother’s parents (Len Lesser, who was Uncle Leo on Seinfeld plays the grandfather) in their stately Victorian mansion. Yet the moment they arrive, strange things start happening, like the mysterious woman (Brinke Stevens!) who appears out of the shadows again and again, seemingly stalking them. There’s also been a series of murders and David starts to wonder if his grandparents could be the killers.
This was directed by Peter Rader. He followed this with Hired to Kill, the Escape to Witch Mountain TV movie and also wrote Waterworld. It was produced by Niko Mastorakis, who knows a thing or two about movies with killers in them.
This isn’t an expected slasher. There’s definitely a very human drama going on here and things build to a pretty satisfying ending, if one that’s downbeat.It’s also totally the movie that M. Night Shyamalan was trying to make with The Visit, except that he spent $5 million on that film and this one cost much less.
You have to wonder why more slashers didn’t have a killer with a fighter pilot helmet. Maybe Joe has one on in this because it came out after Top Gun, unlike the majority of slice and dice movies. Regardless, it’s a great look*, even if the quality of this movie isn’t always top of mind.
Don’t get used to any of the victims. I mean that — everyone, including their unborn children — is fair game for the three killers. In addition to Joe, there’s Rich and Gene, hillbillies who treat their mother with the same kind of reverencee as Addley and Ike do their mama in Mother’s Day.
McBride would follow this gory assault on senses with Woodchipper Massacre, which is just as disgusting and I say that with love. Despite the lack of taste, budget, effects and acting on display here, this movie made me laugh numerous time and really, isn’t that why we watch these things? There’s no defending my love of this film — much less any SOV piece of junk — but there is no need for defense. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures and I am unashamed to admit that I like plenty of absolutely revolting and poorly made movies.
*It also covers the face of co-director Jon McBride and probably allows him to have others in the shot while he directs.
Slasher film coincidences: five friends visit a crippled uncle, a taxidermist who lives next to a movie set, and they all start dying just like the movie that’s being made.
This was all we needed in 1988, you know?
Also, this movie had the tagline “Ken Sagos, the kid who survived Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is back!” I mean, that’s better than “Ken Sagos, the kid who Freddy killed in Nightmare on Elm Street 4 is back!”
I mean, how many movies have a cursed screenplay to blame? And how many have a metal band — The Dirty Dogs — play a song called “When the Axe Comes Down” and then blow a dude’s head up real good? And dude — thanks to the website We Are Cursed to Live In Interesting Times, I can tell you that the songs in Death by Dialogue were produced by Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion and founder of Epitaph Records.
There’s also a girl taking off someone’s head with a scarf.
Death by Dialogue is way too long, but how can a movie get better when a woman sets a man ablaze with a flamethrower? That said, this is a movie not aware of its own stupidity, which is really how it should be, and it just keeps piling on the inanity and sometimes, you just let a goofball slasher and Ken Sagos star vehicle fill your slasher addict veins with sweet movie drugs.
Sixteen years ago, the Clouster family was killed when a movie crew blew up the wrong house. Yes, that really happens. And yes, a crew decides to make another film right where that happened and some of the surviving — or zombified — members of the long-dead family are going to kill every acto, acrtress and craft service person who dares to start emoting.
This movie is 77 minutes long and the last ten minutes or so are a recap of the film, so I wonder if this is a parable about how a second in Hell feels like an eternity in normal human understanding. There’s some serious theory of relativity going on here, as this seemingly lasts forever and I may just be still watching it and writing about it now is all a dream. In short, this movie seemingly never ends and the fact that it’s punctuated by the same rainforest sound effects despite being set nowhere near a rainforest is not lost on me.
Writer/director James Shyman also made Slash Dance. I have’t seen that yet, but my nightmare is that I insert the DVD and it ends up being Hollywood’s New Blood all over again.
B&S About Movies 
You must be logged in to post a comment.