Tag Archives: 1988

Hellbent (1988)

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Director Richard Casey made one of the most bonkers movies I’ve ever seen, Horror House on Highway 5. I’m pleased to report that this movie — which melds Faust — no, not that Faust — and the Los Angeles music scene in mix of the first two Decline of Western Civilization films to create a blast of pure strangeness. Imagine if the Dark Brothers (Night Rhythms) or Rinse Dream made one of their films with no pornography, but after doing even more drugs and never sleeping. It’s that good.

Lemmy (Phil Ward, who shows up Horror House on Highway 6, as well as being the art department for Space Mutiny, if you can believe that) is the lead singer of a band that’s not going anywhere until he meets Mr. Tanas — pronounced tannis, like the root or spelled backward like…oh you get it — who offers him fame in exchange for his soul.

That’s the basic story, but this cough syrup drinking, drug abusing, machine guns in the recording studio affair is unlike any movie you’ve watched before.

David Marciano, who plays Mr. Tanas, would go on to appear on the show Homeland. Phil Therrien, who was Dr. Mabuse in the two Highway films, is also in this.

If you’re looking for a movie where a hobo screams “Black Betty,” where a mother looks for her son by killing everyone she comes near, where sound engineers act like jerks to everyone near them, where singers proclaim that they are Satan’s son, a gang shows up called Satan’s Cheerleaders and a cursed establishment is named Bar Sinister, well, look no more.

It’s not great, but it’s awesome. If you understand that sentence, you’re going to love this movie.

If I can chime in, Sam?

Just when I think you’ve reviewed “everything” at B&S About Movies. Why do I doubt my brother-in-VHS arms would not have reviewed the two-movie oeuvre of an ex-rock video director who gave us two of MTV’s most-aired videos: Blue Oyster Cult’s “Burning for You” and Aldo Nova’s “Fantasy.” I remember this SOV-VHS, as well as the bonkers Horror House on Highway 5 (it’s only a matter of time before we get a remake — with a killer in a Donald Trump instead of Richard Nixon mask), and I’d always felt Hellbent was a Satanic, F-up version of Suburbia, which is an excellent punk-era rock flick from Roger Corman directed by Penelope Spheris. But the Decline movies by the divine Ms. Spheris work as well, in comparison. You need another Faustian rock ‘n’ roll tale, be sure to check out the Paul Williams-starring Phantom of the Paradise. And watch Hellbent. You have to. It’s the shite.

You can get the Blu-ray of Hellbent from Vinegar Syndrome or watch it on Amazon Prime.

Slugs (1988)

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Known in Spain as Slugs, Muerte Viscos, this movie is based upon the novel Slugs by Shaun Hutson. You may think, do I really want to watch a movie about slugs? And then you see who directed it: Juan Piquer Simón, the director of Pieces, one of the most insane pieces of cinema ever filmed.

Trust me, you want to see this. You want to see it right now.

When a rural town discovers that black slugs spawned from the disposal of toxic waste have infiltrated their water supply, all bets are off. Only a health inspector named Mike Brady has a chance to save any of them, but the authorities ridicule him at every turn.

You’re not watching this for the story. You’re watching it for the moments when slugs come ripping their way out of human bodies, like the guy who has them come out of his nose while he’s toasting a client or the unfortunate couple whose post-coitus comes with a nasty case of murderous mollusks.

Slugs don’t have teeth and certainly don’t kill people like they do in this film. Screw that — these slugs are awesome. This is the kind of movie that I will force you to watch when you visit, yet I’ll be jealous that this isn’t my first time watching it.

You can watch this on Tubi and Amazon Prime.

Paperhouse (1988)

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Based on Catherine Storr’s book Marianne Dreams — which was also the inspiration for the early 1970s British TV series Escape Into Night — Paperhouse was an early film from Candyman director Bernard Rose.

11-year-old Anna Madden is dealing with mono and the fever she endures is giving her horrifying dreams in which the house she’s drawn during the day becomes a real place. After drawing a face at the window, she meets someone else, a boy named Marc who is suffering from muscular dystrophy.

Sadly, Elliott Spiers, who played Marc, suffered a negative reaction to an anti-malaria medication that he never recovered from. He dies at the Royal Free Hospital in London just before the second film he appeared in, Taxandria, was released.

Anna’s father is an alcoholic who has been away from his marriage. She draws him one day in the hopes that he can carry Marc away to safety, but her true feelings emerge and she draws him with an angry expression. That drawing becomes an angry ogre who chases the children whole brandishing a hammer.

To top that off, Charlotte Burke — who played Anna — never acted after this film. Years after it was made, she called Rose and told him how much she loved the movie. In fact, she loved it so much that she never wanted to do another film afterward.

This movie is pretty astounding — a dream world where children’s fears become living and breathing monsters. Sadly, it was never released in the US on blu ray or even DVD. Luckily, it is currently available on Amazon Prime. Please check it out while it’s still streaming. It’s so worth your attention.

Iced (1988)

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Sometimes, slashers go into the winter. This would be one of those times.

This was directed by Jeff Kwitny, who also directed Lightning In a Bottle, Illegal Alien and Beyond the Door III, which is also known as Death Train and has nothing to do with any of the other Beyond the Door films. I mean, that’s par for the course. Bava’s Shock was also sold as Beyond the Door II. If you want to see that one, Vinegar Syndrome has just released it.

We’re here to talk about Iced.

A group of teens watch one of their friends die while skiing. Yeah, that was a crazy idea — Jeff and Cory were racing to see who would get Trina. Cory was in love with her, Jeff was a jerk, he catches the two of them in bed together and then, you know, he goes off the trails and crashes into the rocks.

Five years later, they have been invited to the opening of a ski resort, but there’s someone in ski gear that starts to kill them one by one.

Normal people wouldn’t recognize a single actor in this one, except that I’m not normal and can tell you that lead actress Debra De Liso was in Slumber Party Massacre. Janette is played by Lisa Loring, who in addition to being married to adult star Jerry Butler, was Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family. Rodney Montague, who played Biff, went on to be a visual effects artist. And that’s pretty much it.

If you’re wistful for 80’s movies with bad interior design and worse hair, good news. This movie has all of that and a Casio synth soundtrack that is at odds with every single scene that it plays behind. That’s pretty much a good review around here.

Psychotronic Challenge 2019 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge: Day 31: American Gothic

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DAY 31. THE GOLD WATCH: One set in a retirement home or elderly community. A fitting wrap-up, eh?

John Hough quietly has become one of my favorite directors to seek out. His Hammer effort, Twins of Evil, is one of the best late era films that the studio would make, the perfect blend of Hammer’s sumptuous glamour and style mixed with the coming need for more violence and nudity in their films. There’s also Legend of Hell House, The Incubus and Biggles, all very interesting and unique efforts.

Here, Hough brings together Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo to tell the tale of two old folks and their insane daughter. In fact, everyone in this movie is crazy.

Cynthia (Sarah Torgov, Meatballs) has been destroyed since her baby drowned in the bath. Five of her friends — Jeff, Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman, who played John Lennon in Chapter 27, which is somewhat ironic, no?), Lynn, Paul (Stephen Shellen, The Stepfather) and Terri — take her on a vacation trip that ends up crash landing on a deserted island. Luckily — but not really — they find a cottage.

The cabin is owned by an elderly married couple known as Ma and Pa (Steiger and DeCarlo). Their weirdness comes out when Pa flips out at Lynn for smoking and gives them the rules, such as no swearing and boys and girls being seperated. Oh yeah — they also have a middle-aged daughter Fanny (Janet Wright, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains) who acts like she is 12 years old.

They also have a son named Woody (Michael J. Pollard), who somehow turns swinging into a death sentence for Rob. And oh yeah — they have another brother named Teddy (William Hootkins, who shows up in everything from Burton’s Batman to Dust Devil, Hardware and Raiders of the Lost Ark. You’d probably know him best as Porkins from Star Wars).

Fanny has a doll that’s really a mummified infant. And she wants Jeff all to herself, so she uses a statue to stab out his eye and kill him. Actually, everyone dies but Cynthia and then even worse things happen to their corpses, if you can imagine that.

By the conclusion, Cynthia has joined the family as yet another child before the sins of her past cause her to freak out all over again, killing the entire family one by one. This is one of the few slashers I’ve seen where the final girl becomes the killer. This is definitely unlike any other film you’ve seen.

You can get it from Shout! Factory.

2019 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 30: Don’t Panic (1988)

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DAY 30. IT’S YOUR SPECIAL DAY: Brutal birthdays.

It appears like director and screenwriter Ruben Galindo Jr. wanted to make his own version of A Nightmare On Elm Street but somewhere along the way he decided to he’d like to make a Mexican version of an American teen sitcom, too. Honestly, if you told me Ruben came from another dimension, I’d believe you just as much. This is one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen — I’ve watched it three times just to try and get my thoughts together — and if you take a look through the films on our site, you can see that that is no idle boast.

Our hero Michael is going through some stuff. His parents are fighting so much that his dad sends him and his mom to Mexico City, where his mother decides to drink herself into oblivion. While trying to fit into his new school, he turns seventeen and his frien Tony gives him a Ouija board.

Now, unbeknowst to us, the viewers, Michael and Tony had a past session go wrong with a Ouija board, so this really was a bad idea. Virgil — what a name for a slasher villain — is released and begins killing people.

Now, up until this point in the film, this has felt like a teen coming of age movie, filtered through the lens of a Mexican filmmaker trying to create a movie that would make sense for American audiences. But just like how huge chunks of The Last American Virgin seem to make no sense to Western eyes, this movie also feels like it was beamed down directly from space.

How else do you explain the fact that our hero — who appears to be in his late 20’s playing a high schooler — wears dinosaur pajamas for nearly the entire film? This isn’t some Troma movie trying to play it all for laughs. This is a serious movie with such lunacy inside it that you can’t take it seriously.

It does, however, have awesome special effects courtesy of Screaming Mad George, including a face that emerges from a TV years before The Ring and huge chunks of gore, like a person stabbing through the chin and the blade emerging inside their mouth.

This film was a total surprise and delight to me. I’m shocked that Mondo Macabro or Severin hasn’t picked this up yet, because this is the kind of movie that would sell for them. I found it heartwarming just how insane and inane and odd this all was. Now pardon me, I’m about to watch this movie for the fourth time.

Phantom of Death (1988)

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Ruggero Deodato, how I love you. I love that you somehow convinced a real actor, Michael York, to be in an insane film about a man getting progeria way past its due date and murdering people left and right. I can get how you got Donald Pleasence. I can even sort of understand how you got Edwige Fenech. But Michael York?

York plays Robert Dominici, a pianist who suffers from that previously mentioned genetic condition that causes him to rapidly age, and by that, I mean that his face starts looking like Klaus Kinski. To make up for the bad hand he’s been dealt, he starts killing people and targeting Inspector Datti ‘s (Pleasence) daughter Gloria.

Deodato would later say, “I did Phantom of Death because it was based on a true element — the idea of growing old. And I got to work with Michael York and Donald Pleasence.” He also threw in that the producer demanded Fenech, who was miscast. This is also one of the few movies where she isn’t dubbed, so you get to hear her real voice.

Hide and Go Shriek (1988)

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The poster for this says it all: In the tradition of Friday the 13th and Halloween…

Notice: It doesn’t say from the makers of. Or from the people who brought you.

Also known as Close Your Eyes and Pray in the U.K., this movie is all about a bunch of teens having a graduation party in a furniture store before they’re stalked and slashed by a cross-dressing killer. Obviously, the movie Chopping Mall doesn’t exist in this universe, because I’d never celebrate in a furniture store after that one.

After the murder of a hooker, we get right into the story, as four couples all gather in the aforementioned furniture store without realizing that an ex-con is living in the basement.

A game of hide and go seek turns into two different sexual situations that are broken up by the cross-dressing killer, who uses a trident to kill the first two of many. And of course, despite those two being missing, the gang continues its carnal lock-in and just goes to sleep.

This is yet another continuation of the trope of sex equals death. There is, however, an amazing kill in this one where an elevator completely severs the heads of one of these teens.

It also has an amazing reveal at the end: the killer ends up being Fred’s gay prison lover, who feels like the kids were coming between them. Yes, Fred was dating all of the kids. That makes sense, Zack. Yes, Zack is the killer’s name. Have you ever heard of a frightening killer named Zack?

Director Skip Schoolnik also edited Halloween 2 — the original — so he should know a thing about a good slasher.

You can get this from RoninFlix.

2019 Psychotronic Scarecrow Challenge: Day 17: In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I Murders (1988)

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Day 17 Evil in Broad Daylight: Scary stories aren’t just for the night time

Tracy Keenan Wynn is the gold standard in screenwriting and teleplays. Look at that resume: The Glass House (1972; TV’s Alan Alda, Vic Morrow of Message from Space and Clu Gulager of Hunter’s Blood), the platinum standard of football—and prison movies—The Longest Yard (1974; Burt Reynolds), The Quest (1976; Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson), The Drowning Pool (1975; Paul Newman), and the Peter Yates-directed ocean adventure, The Deep (1977).

And Wynn wrote a film that—if it had been shot and released as a theatrical feature film in the U.S (it was a theatrical in Europe), it would have swept the floors with Oscar nods (even wins) for David Soul, Michael Gross, and Ronnie Cox. So, do yourself a favor: beg, borrow and steal to watch director Dick Lowry kicking ass with the greatest series of continuing-storyline franchises in TV history. There isn’t a theatrical franchise that holds a candle:

  • In the Line of Duty: A Cop for the Killing (1990)
  • In the Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas (1991)
  • In the Line of Duty: Street War (1992)
  • In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco (1993)
  • In the Line of Duty: The Price of Vengeance (1994)
  • In the Line of Duty: Hunt for Justice (1995)
  • In the Line of Duty: Blaze of Glory (1997)

And, if you need another great football comedy from the man who knows his pigskins: Search out the TV Movie Pigs vs. Freaks (1984) fronted by the stellar character actor, Eugene Roche. Then there’s the teen drug movie Angel Dusted (1981), with the always reliable John Putch (Jaws III, 1983).

I know, “What the hell R.D? Enough with squeezin’ the Charmin over some screenwriter dude. Get back on the tracks and tell us about the movie already.”

I was living in Dade County, Florida, during the time this movie chronicles, and trust me when I tell you: we were scared shitless in broad light to the point that people were afraid to go inside banks. If you saw an armored car (which the antagonists of this film were hitting) in the front of a bank or strip mall, you kept on driving. Back in the undeveloped days of South Florida, a body turning up in The Everglades with two taps to the head or missing limbs was a once a month occurrence. Ted Bundy dumped his bodies down here. In my misguided punk adventures as a bassist, we wrote the songs “Serial Killer Alligator Alley” and “Serial Killer Express.”

Also putting bodies into the Glades were two ex-Army Rangers by the name of Bill Matix (Michael Gross; TV’s Family Ties, Tremors franchise), and Mike Platt (David Soul; TV’s Starsky and Hutch, Magnum Force). They were blatant, cruel, and just didn’t give a fuck: Matix, to get out of his Ohio-based marriage to marry his girlfriend: he murdered his wife, collected the insurance, and moved to Florida. When Platt’s “payday” of fixing and selling pinball machines goes sour, well, the guy who sold the machines regrets it. And their clueless family believes all the mystery “cash” is the spoils of their (fantasy) joint C.I.A. drug-covert ops. “We take out the dealers and the agency lets us keep the money,” Matix the wife-killer tells his love—and not nicely.

Another harrowing scene (criminally cut from the 2005 DVD reissue): When the agents get a jump on Matix and Platt in a stolen gold Monte Carlo bunkered in the Everglades, Mike Platt causally sighs: “Let’s go to work,” as he mounts up his weapon. They’re going to kill more people, and they are just causally “going to work,” like it’s a normal, sane job.

It was on April 11, 1986, when South Florida’s TV and news radio outlets broke from regular programming with a story regarding a bloody shootout in a quiet Miami neighborhood. The drug wars connected to Castro’s Mariel Boat Lift were so bad at the time; everyone assumed it was rival drug gangs.

The images on the news and in the papers the next day told a different story: Two F.B.I agents were dead. There were multiple wounded. Cars were crashed and scattered everywhere, pockmarked with bullets in a scene lifted from a Cirio H. Santiago post-apocalyptic romp. Madix and Platt were adrenaline-drunk and determined to escape the authorities and went the Bonnie and Clyde route—times 10. They would not go down. And if they did, they were taking everyone with them. Watch it for yourself (spoiler alert!).

As I said: The cast on this is Kiss-double platinum: Ronny Cox (Deliverance, 1972) as Bureau Chief Benjamin Grogan, Bruce Greenwood (Commander Christopher Pike in the Star Trek reboots) as Agent Dove, and the supporting actors portraying the rest of the squad—along with their wives—aren’t superfluous; all are fully-character arc’d and your heart sinks when the shootout goes down. And David Soul and Michael Gross—we know them most intimately from their respective TV series and they completely shed those roles and absorb themselves as, what is best described as two serial killers with a bank robbery fetish.

Yes. When it came to the golden age of “Big Three” TV Movies, NBC never disappointed. Ah, but caveat emptor movie collectors: Watch the online VHS rips of the home-taped original/first-run version of the film. The 2005 DVD from Platinum Disc is criminally edited and missing scenes. Why a reissues company would execute any cuts and shorten an already short TV movie at one hour thirty-two minutes insults Wynn’s painstaking scripting in creating sympathetic characters to heighten the impact of the film’s harrowing conclusion:

— A scene of dialogue during an F.B.I beach party that occurs before they all take a group picture with the greenhorn agents they’ve welcomed into the family: Losing this scene diminishes the impact: you know that’s the last they’ll be together.

— A scene in the shooting gallery where Grogan is asked if he’s good with the gun without wearing glasses: It’s a chilling piece of foreshadowing of Grogan’s fate that we know, but he doesn’t.

— A crucial, seat-gripping scene when an agent loses his revolver after drawing it from the holster during the vehicle chase and placing it between his knees. During the subsequent crash, he loses it out the door and is unable to recover it during the gun battle.

So watch the uncut VHS TV-taped rip on You Tube either HERE or HERE. The DVDs are available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble if you want a digital copy for your permanent, home movie collection. This is one time where I’ll support a grey market DVD-R rip of a VHS recording of Lowery’s original 1988 cut.

It has to be mentioned: David Soul had two #1 singles: 1976’s “Don’t Give Up on Us Baby” in the U.S and “Silver Lady” in the U.K. He’s been on the road for years throughout Europe, where’s he’s a respected, sellout solo artist. Definitely check out David in the excellent U.S TV movies (overseas theatricals) The Fifth Missile (1986; full movie/You Tube) and World War III (1982; full movie/Archive.org). If you pick up Mill Creek Entertainment’s Prime Time Crime: The Stephen J. Cannell Collection, you can watch all eight episodes of David’s excellent and criminally cancelled F.B.I procedural, Unsub (1989; the one Stephen J. Cannell produced-TV series that flopped).

About the Author: You can read the music and film reviews of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook. He also writes reviews for B&S Movies.

2019 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 12: Maniac Cop (1988)

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DAY 12. THE FRACAS AND THE FUZZ: Something revolving around cops and criminals.

Beyond being the CEO of Blue Underground, Bill Lustig will get a forever pass just for making the films Maniac and the three movies in this series. I mean, Bruce Campbell, Tom Atkins and Robert Z’Dar in the same movie? And it’s written by Larry Cohen? Count me in.

There’s a series of murders going on in New York City, all being committed by someone in a police uniform, which leads to complete panic. However, that policeman is even more frightening than anyone dared dream. He’s not just a cop. He’s a…Maniac Cop.

Ellen Forrest thinks that her husband Officer Jack W. Forrest, Jr. (Campbell) is the Maniac Cop, following him to a hotel where she catches him in bed with fellow officer Theresa Mallory (Laurene Landon, Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, Wicked Stepmother, your teenage dreams). She runs from the room right into Maniac Cop, who kills her, a murder for which Jack gets the blame.

Detective Lieutenant Frank McCrae (Atkins) believes that Jack was framed. He gets Jack to tell him about his fling with Mallory, who is currently undercover working as a prostitute. She and McCrae fight off the Maniac Cop, who is cold to the touch, doesn’t breathe and shrugs off several bullets.

The trail of the killer leads to Sally Nolland, a fellow female officer who Mallory confided in. She’s played by Sheree North, whose life was pretty interesting. In the mid-1950s, 20th Century-Fox groomed her as a replacement for the studio’s leading — and volatile — leading lady, Marilyn Monroe. They even had her test for two roles — The Girl in Pink Tights and There’s No Business Like Show Business — that Monroe was up for. To add insult to injury, the studio gave her Monroe’s wardrobe.

In March 1954, North dealt with a scandal when a stag loop of her in a bikini surfaced, but the studio capitalized on the bad press. Her next leading role was opposite Betty Grable in How to Be Very, Very Popular, a part Monroe had turned down. She was suspended by the studio as a result and this led to North getting into Life magazine with the headline “Sheree North Takes Over From Marilyn Monroe” emblazoned on the cover.

How to Be Very, Very Popular is a forgotten film today, but at the time, North’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” dance proved memorable. The studio kept trying, casting her in two movies with Tom Ewell, Monroe’s co-star in The Seven Year Itch. While their second pairing, The Lieutenant Wore Skirts, was a success, the studio soon grew disinterested and began hyping a new blonde star — Jayne Mansfield.

Part of that reason may have been North standing up for herself. Her agent advised that she turn down a role that parodied Monroe in The Girl Upstairs and when Elvis dropped out of The Way to the Gold, North hated his replacement, Jeffrey Hunter.

After North’s contract with Fox ended in 1958, her career slowed. She did a series of TV shows, appeared in John Wayne’s last film The Shootist, was in Destination Inner Space and finally acted alongside Elvis in The Trouble With Girls. Ironically, she played Marilyn Monroe’s mother in the made-for-television film Marilyn: The Untold Story.

Today’s audiences would probably remember her best for two sitcom roles: Blanche’s sister Virginia on Golden Girls and as Cosmo Kramer’s mother Babs on Seinfeld.

But I digress…

McCrae follows Noland to a warehouse, where she meets with the Maniac Cop. She calls him by his real name, Matt, which leads McCrae to discover the history of Matthew Cordell (Z’Dar), a cop who was jailed for brutality before his fellow prisoners mutilated and murdered him. Of course, he was also set up after discovering corruption all the way up to the mayor’s office. It turns out that he survived — barely — and has been waiting to get his revenge ever since.

From here on, we get the shock and awe we were looking for, with Officer Cordell wiping out cops left and right. Yet even being impaled on a pipe at the end of the film can’t stop the rage of this now undead peace officer, who rises to murder the mayor as the film closes.

Look for Sam Raimi, Richard Roundtree and boxer Jake LaMotta, Lustig’s uncle, in cameos.

This is a fun movie that I have no complaints about at all. It’s fun, fast-moving and is filled with stunts and violence. If you’re expecting an Oscar-winning movie, well…

After years of rumors, a new Maniac Cop is on its way. According to Variety, the series will be the first production of Nicolas Winding Refn’s byNWR Originals, a part of his cultural site byNWR.com and will air on HBO.

Here’s the press release: “Set in Los Angeles, Maniac Cop is said to be told through a kaleidoscope of characters, from cop to common criminal. A killer in uniform has uncaged mayhem upon the streets. Paranoia leads to social disorder as a city wrestles with the mystery of the exterminator in blue. Is he mere mortal, or a supernatural force?”

Sounds interesting. Want to know about the other Maniac Cop films? Stay tuned — we’ll be covering them both today.