Spike and Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys from Fright Night) are cousins who live under the overly watchful eye of Hoax’s super religious mother, Lucy (Sandy Dennis, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, God Told Me To). They couldn’t be more different. Hoax is a nerd afraid of everyone, while Spike is a motorcycle-riding bad boy with the girl of his cousin’s dreams, Suzie (Lezlie Deane, Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).
Both boys start using the novelty phone number 976-EVIL, which reads them creepy-themed fortunes for a few dollars. The real truth is quite sinister: Satan uses the line to find people to give them what they want in exchange for their souls. There’s a great scene here where a religious investigator goes to the home of 976-EVIL, After Dark, Inc. There is room after room of people, Santas, phone sex women, and so much more, but in one dusty, cobwebbed closet lies the machine that powers this foul enterprise.
By the end of this movie, the cousins’ power dynamic has shifted, and the literal gateway to Hell appears in front of them. The way there is littered with ’80s clichés and a tone that is never sure if it fully wants to be comedic or horrific.
Still, this movie is not without its charms. The Deftones wrote the songs “Diamond Eyes” and “976-EVIL” about the film and it was popular enough to bring Spike back for the direct-to-video sequel 976-EVIL II: The Astral Factor. And England met his wife, set decorator Nancy Booth, while directing this movie. She would sneak R+N into the backgrounds of scenes that he would discover each day while watching the dailies. And hey, how many movies have uber religious old women get devoured by cats?
April 26: Oh Giorgio! — Pick a movie with a Giorgio Moroder score. Here’s a list to get you started.
Also known as Mamba, this has video game designer Gene (Gregg Henry) get upset when Eva (Trudie Styler, soon to marry Sting) leaves him, so he injects hormones into a mamba to kill her.
Directed (and co-written with Lidia Ravera) by Mario Orfini, who also directed another Moroder-scored movie, Jackpot, this film also features Bill Moseley in the role of the man who sells the snake.
Then, in real time, we watch Eva get stalked by that mamba. Watch as she gets dressed and it slithers by. She takes a bath and there’s the snake. And then…it gets closer while she narrates everything in her brain. It’s no Venom.
It’s shot by Dante Spinotti, so it looks good. However, it doesn’t really go as hard as you want it to. That said, the Moroder score may make this worth watching.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
Beyond being a historian of exploitation films, Frank Henenlotter has made some outright insane movies like Frankenhooker and Basket Case. What other kind of mad genius would hire horror host Zacherle to be a worm named Aylmer, who creates drug-like relationships with his hosts while demanding to eat the brains of everyone they love?
That blue phallic worm secretes a highly addictive hallucinogen directly into the brain, forcing Brian to leave behind his life, his girlfriend and any hope of normalcy, all while being pursued by the old couple that had imprisoned the parasite and who know way too much of his history, leading to some of the longest and most hilarious expository dialogue I’ve seen in a film.
During the fellatio scene — yes, a woman puts Aylmer inside her mouth — the crew walked out, refusing to work on the scene.
There’s a great moment where Duane and Belial from Basket Case meet Brian on a train before he ends up killing his girlfriend. I realize that’s a spoiler, but nothing can prepare you for this movie. It’s truly one of a kind.
You can watch this on Tubi or on Shudder with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
You know how slashers go: you need to get the horny teens to wind up in a secluded place with some promise of sex and drug hijinks. An abandoned mental hospital? That’s not frightening — it’s a good place to screw!
Of course, inside the walls of this old asylum, there’s more than just a place to party hearty. There’s also a deformed maniac who just so happens to be the attorney that split final girl Kiki’s parents up and caused her mother to die a decade before. Again, in slashers, there are no coincidences. Everything has been ordained, as if by freakish fate.
Now, the former Attorney Mitch Hansen has become The Coroner, a serial killer who uses surgical tools to wipe out anyone in his way.
The dual roles of Kiki and her mother Judy are played by Patty Mullen, Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1986 and 1988’s Pet of the Year. You may also remember her from playing the title role in Frankenhooker and being married to Joey Image, one of the drummers for The Misfits.
However, Jane — one of the many friends of Kiki set up to die, as is the wont of the slasher — would grow up to be Kristen Davis. Yes, from Sex and the City. So if you ever wanted to see her get her face sawed off…
There’s also a punk band played inside the asylum named Tina and the Tots. Tina is played by Ruth Collins, who was also in Witch Academy and was paid $100 extra to show her breasts. Because you know, you can’t have a slasher without them (actually you totally can).
This was all written by Rick Marx, who also was behind the movies Taboo American Style 1: The Ruthless Beginning, Wanda Whips Wall Street, Blonde Justice #3 and Christy In the Wild. In case you didn’t guess, those are all adult films. He also wrote Snapped for Chuck Vincent, Warrior Queen, a biography on WOR late-night fixture Joe Franklin and the two Gor movies.
Behind the camera? None other than Richard Friedman (Scared Stiff, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge). This movie is all over the place in tone and presentation, but if you rented it back in the late 1980s- it’s pretty much a perfectly goofball slasher that would go well with a six-pack and pizza- you probably have much fonder memories than I do. After all, if you went and watched Bloodsucking Freakswithout seeing it through the lens of being 15 years old and landlocked in a small town, you probably wouldn’t understand why people liked it either.
You can get this on Blu-ray from the fine folks at Arrow Video or watch it for free on Tubi!
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 25 and 26, 2025. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 25 are the first four A Nightmare On Elm Street movies.
I’ve often written off all of these films after the first three—one being the originator, two being a strange metaphor for growing up gay, and the third being a bravura Dokken soundtrack sporting a thrill ride that was amongst the first slasher films I ever watched.
After the final battle in the last film in this series, Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Wes Craven intended to end the franchise. With the original protagonist, Nancy, sacrificing herself to stop Krueger, the rest of the Dream Warriors have been released from the insane asylum and are back to being normal teenagers.
However, Kristen (Tuesday Knight, replacing Patricia Arquette) believes that Freddy isn’t dead, drawing Joey, Kincaid and Kincaid’s dog Jason into her dream, where they show her that Freddy’s boiler is cold. There’s been a rift between these former friends, as the boys are seen as freaks and Kristen has joined the popular crowd with her martial arts practicing boyfriend Rick (Andras Jones, Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), Alice, Sheila and Debbie.
Soon, Kincaid has been killed in the junkyard from Dream Warriors, where Freddy comes back after a dog pisses fire onto him. Yes, that really happens. Then, Joey finds a naked girl swimming in his waterbed in a sequence that’s glossy, ridiculous and awesome all in equal measure. He’s soon dead and Kristen passes out when she finds out, bringing Freddy after her. She swears to get revenge, but once her mother gives her sleeping pills to ensure that she gets rest, she is felled by the “Bastard Son of a One Hundred Maniacs.” However, she is able to give her dream power to Alice which she’s gonna need because with each kill, Freddy gains the abilities and personalities of Alice’s dead friends.
Sure, these movies would get much worse, but if you’re looking for a film that’ll make the middle of the night just fly past, you can’t go wrong with this one. I was surprised how much I liked it, which is kind of the point of this challenge, right?
This movie is filled with plenty of out-there kill scenes and flip dialogue that finally makes Freddy the actual hero of the film. There’s a girl who gets turned into a cockroach and smashed into a Roach Motel. Then, there’s the scene where Freddy shows Alice all of his victims on a “soul pizza” that must be seen to be believed.
Say what you will about Renny Harlin, but in this follow up to his American debut Prison, he really takes the series all the way into the surreal, basing each of the murders on actual nightmares that he had, as well as crazy moments that push the film into meta territory when Alice goes from a movie theater into an actual movie while the rest of the cast watches.
This was the highest grossing movie in the series until Freddy vs. Jason, which it earns with an all-star team of special effects artists, a soundtrack boasting bands like the Vinnie Vincent Invasion, Blondie, and the Fat Boys, and an ending that boasts a twenty foot tall practical model of Freddy being destroyed by the souls of those he has taken.
For even more fun, here’s a video from fast food lovers The Fat Boys that features them getting Freddy’s house as an inheritance and having to spend the night there.
Available on Blu-ray for the first time outside Germany, thanks to Radiance films, The Cat is about a team of bank robbers — Junghein (Heinz Hoenig) and Britz (Ralf Richter) — who hold a bank hostage for 3 million German marks. Yet what the police don’t know is that Probek (Götz George), the true criminal, is hiding outside, directing their every move.
Directed by Dominik Graf and written by Uwe Erichsen and Christoph Fromm, this is a movie is planning and control. Probek thinks he has every angle covered, but he didn’t plan on the bank manager’s wife, Jutta Ehser (Gudrun Landgrebe). She may be even more in control and better at schemes than he is.
Unlike an American heist movie, this isn’t about action. Instead, it’s about the waiting, the moments in-between, the times where tension increases until ready to explode. It does, trust me, but this film has no problem waiting. That makes it so much more different than the robbery films that I am used to.
The Radiance Films limited edition release of The Cat comes inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. It has a high definition digital transfer newly graded by Radiance Films and overseen by director Dominik Graf, interviews with Graf, screenwriter Christoph Fromm and producer Georg Feil, scene commentary by Graf, a trailer and new English subtitles. You can get it from MVD.
He said of this movie, “That’s why Surviving Edged Weapons is so fascinating. It’s like a police department gave some kid like fresh out of film school $30,000 and this kid was like, “I’m gonna make a masterpiece.” I swear to God, so it opens with two cavemen in an argument, and one of the cavemen takes a sharp rock and stabs the other and then the narrator comes in and says, “Since the dawn of time, men have been using edged weapons to kill each other.” It’s so weird. It’s so profoundly weird. I can’t get over it.”
No matter how much he prepared me for it, I wasn’t ready.
According to Calibre Press’ website, director Dennis Anderson and author Charles Remsberg published Street Survival: Tactics for Armed Encounters in 1980. They claim that “this book changed the law enforcement landscape by introducing new tactics, personal stories, and real scenarios. Within a year of its publication, the Street Survival Seminar was born and quickly grew to become the most popular and respected resource for officer tactical training in the country.”
While they no longer sell this video on their site, they do have a course entitled “Advanced Leadership in a Police Reform Era” that uses children’s building blocks to spell the word “defund.” There’s another called “Surviving Hidden Weapons” that uses a lipstick tube with a blade. I obviously need to see that.
But first, let me explain Surviving Edged Weapons.
I’ve heard that this was made in Canada and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, even though Calibre is based in Glen Ellyn, IL. They also sell a koozie that says, “One drink away from telling everyone exactly what I think.” Keep in mind that everything else on this site is about police response.
Narrated by Ronald Rolland, this has the production quality of Unsolved Mysteries and I mean that as a compliment. And yes, this begins with a Cain and Abel murder that explains that edged weapons have been with us forever. Then, your jaw will drop as this alternates between police officers showing off their scars and discussing how they’ve been stabbed — including an astounding ending where a cop is brought to tears by the memory and cries the thickest, deepest, saddest tears I have ever seen in my entire existence — and being an action movie, to the point that stuntman Dan Inosanto (who shows up in Game of Death, Sharky’s Machineand Out for Justice) is in it.
So yes, Officer James Phillips may say, “In my mind, I’m never gonna die in no ghetto. Absolutely never. A man turns around and punches me in the head, the fight’s on. If he cuts me, the fight’s on. If I’m shot, the fight is on. I’m not losing no fight to no scumbag out there in no ghetto, period. That’s it. No son of a bitch out there is gonna get me. The only way he gets me is cut my head off, and I mean that. I’ll fight you til I got a breath left in me. I don’t think any of those animals in that street can beat me. I’ve been going that way for eighteen years of street service, street duty, and that’s the way I’m gonna keep on going. You don’t lose the fight.” But you also get a Black Mass being interrupted by the police, a domestic disturbance turning into a meatcleaver going directly into someone’s head and a series of wounds closing with a full-on uncut dead cock on camera.
You will learn how criminals place knives in their jeans so they cut up cops hands, discover how the streets are non-stop terror and hear a man say, “Fuck me? Fuck you!” in a way that Bob Odenkirk had to have heard it. The VHS cover of Halloween is shown as part of our country’s knife culture and the narration says it “glorifies the blade.” A man in a Corvette with the license plate KILME stabbing himself. This is at once so much better than it needed to be and more reactionary than you’d expect a cop training video to be, even one made nearly forty years ago.
I’m saying this with no hyperbole. This is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve ever seen and if you come to my house and want to watch movies with me, there’s a really good chance I’m going to suggest we watch it. It’s like the unmade Death Wish 6 but on a smaller scale, shown to real people to prepare them for the thankless job of protecting the lambs from the wolves. It makes me reflect on how liberal real life me is and how jingoistic and needing for carnage movie watching me is, a juxtaposition that sometimes throws me into panic, but there you go. This movie will make you confront things, like how you might not like the fact that we live in a police state, but you certainly don’t want to do that job, and you even step away with some level of respect. Or worry. I can’t figure it out, but I’ll get back to you when I watch this four or five more times.
Jenõ Hódi is the founder and managing director of the Budapest Film Academy. He studied in America at Columbia University, where he was taught by Milos Forman, Brian De Palma, Frank Daniel, John Avildsen and Dusan Makavejev. This all leads us to the films he made in the U.S., and like any director breaking into films in the 1990s, he made movies that would succeed on video and cable, like Guns & Lipstick and the vampire movie Metamorphosis. That also means that he has an erotic thriller on his resume. Or a slasher. It’s in-between, so maybe, just maybe, it’s a Giallo.
John Doe (Joe Paradise) is a maintenance man at Gotham College who deals with the abuse he’s given every day by killing rats in experiments and lining their bodies up in a fridge. He has a plan to use laced ice cream to murder women, which will get him a million dollars. What will he do with all that money? I don’t think he knows or cares.
One of his victims was almost Denise (Darnell Martin, who would go on to direct I Like It Like That, thanks Outlaw Vern!), who survives and ends up having an undercover cop named Dino Andretti (Jeffrey R. Iorio) protect her and her roommate Pamela (Monica Breckenridge). The police think John Doe is going to come back after Denise, and they’re right, as he comes after her just as Pamela finally shoots her shot and tries to go from roommate to partner. That’s a horrible time for a slasher killer to show up, but here we are.
But how he does it pushes this movie into another place. As Pamela is swimming, John pelts her with basketballs in the dark before getting close and killing her. Then, he Weekend at Bernie’s her body and then uses a chain to try and choke the life out of her. That’s commitment. How does she fight him? She uses a pitching machine to blast him right in the nuts.
Alright, I love this movie.
Not only does this have a heavy metal song over the credits, but the killer quotes Hall and Oates. The director made this at Columbia with other students before he graduated, yet it’s better than so many other slashers despite coming out in late 1988. A heroine who stops eating ice cream—which saves her life—so she can do a shower scene? I’m shocked that this isn’t winking at us more.
Dino may be the worst slasher cop ever, as he stays in the apartment with the girls, trying to make it with both of them, goes through Denise’s underwear, exposes himself to Pamela, and turns on gigantic sunglasses — the kind you buy on vacation as a joke and never wear — when told to settle down. He then ends up in a relationship with the final girl because you can’t get thrown off the force for this kind of behavior in a 1988 direct-to-video slasher movie.
Defund the slasher police!
How has this never been released by Vinegar Syndrome? It’s totally their kind of movie!
Directed and co-written by Sollace Mitchell (with Karyn Kay), this is the story of Anna (Patricia Charbonneau), a newspaper writer who feels a distance from her live-in author lover, Alex (Sam Freed), who is only excited about getting to writer about fast food.
One evening, she thinks she’s received a dirty phone call from him, the spice she’s looking for in her life. Instead, she’s in a dive bar waiting to meet a stranger, running away and accidentally watching two criminals, Jellybean (Stephen McHattie) and Switchblade (Steve Buscemi) too closely. They think she has their money. She has no idea who they are, much less the heavy-breathing caller who keeps dialing her almost every night.
Every man around Anna is a milquetoast that still wants to control her. So when she gets caught in the world of dead cops and someone who calls her in the middle of the night, telling her to make love to herself with an orange that gets juices all over her thighs, can you blame her when she whispers, “Push orange slices into my cunt with your tongue” and asks the caller to penetrate his own orange before realizing her lame boyfriend has been watching all along?
Anna is also pretty dumb, I must confess. Is her life so bereft of thrills that all she has are phone calls? She’s gorgeous. She doesn’t even need a boyfriend, as she has a career. Maybe she’s co-dependent, as her friend Cori (Patti D’Arbanville) calls out:
Anna: Cori, I’m not the only woman who gets obscene phone calls.
Cori: No, but you’re the only one I know who talks to them.
I wanted this to be closer to either a Giallo or a movie that let Anna finally explore her kink with someone less dull than her lame best male friend. I want her to have more. I want her to be smarter. I want her, in short, to explore her wants.
As a sad aside, co-writer Karyn Kay died way too young, at 63, killed by her 19-year-old son Henry Wachtel. After her career in Hollywood, she’d started teaching Creative Writing at LaGuardia, a New York City performing arts school. In this article on Crime Reads, the author shares her real-life experience of having Kay as a teacher. It’s worth a read.
If you’re interested, Anna gives her phone number in this movie: 212-627-2363.
Man, was Nello Rossati dating Franco Nero’s daughter or something? Not only did he get him into this movie, but a year later he would be the person — well, his pseudonym Ted Archer did, but you get the point — to finally get him to come back to his most famous role in Django Strikes Again. He also made the giallo La gatta in calore(assistant directed by Lamberto Bava and shot by Aristide Massaccesi!), a Napoleon-sploitation film called Bona parte di Paolina, a sex comedy called The Sensuous Nurse with Ursula Andress and Jack Palance, the poliziotteschi Don’t Touch the Children!, another sex comedy called Io zombo, tu zombi, lei zomba about four zombies running a hotel, a giallo-esque film named Le mani di una donna sola in which a lesbian countess seduces married women until insane asylum escapees chop her hands off, and an I Spit On Your Grave revengeomatic called Fuga scabrosamente pericolosa that stars Andy Sidaris villain Rodrigo Obregón.
Needless to say, I’m a fan.
Ted Angelo (Nero) starts the movie off literally telling a woman that he’s too tired to make love. Is this the great hero of Italian cinema? He seems exhausted throughout but it works; he’s a writer fallen on hard times and harder drinking. He’s supposed to be writing a book on pre-Columbian civilizations, but he’s falling deeper and deeper into depression and drunken days to the point that he’s fired by his publisher — and ex-wife — Maureen De Havilland (Miss World 1977 Mary Stävin, who by this point had already appeared in Adam Ant’s “Strip” video, Octopussyand A View to a Kill, as well as releasing the exercise album Shape Up and Dance with footballer George Best).
It seems like Ted’s luck is changing when he’s shown a ton of writings that came from a shipwreck of Spanish conquistadores. Except that the ship isn’t on the bottom of the ocean. It’s in a cave. And maybe that luck’s bad, because everyone connected with the ship, like art dealer Alonso Quintero (William Berger) is dying under mysterious circumstances. And oh yeah. That shipwreck in a cave is also inside a UFO.
The only real good luck that Ted gets is when an art historian and friend of Quintero named June (Deborah Barrymore, who is not related to Drew, but is instead of the daughter of Roger Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) helps him out.
What follows is a delirious descent into madness to the point that if you told me this was all a drug trip, I’d believe you. First, Ted is almost run over by former Nazi Heinrich Holzmann (George Kennedy, who is only in the movie for this one scene), then the camera crew he hires ends up being CIA spooks who want to murder him, then the KGB gets involved and then things get really weird.
Ted gets the idea that Maureen has the kind of connections that can save him and June. As they wait for her, a cyborg Rodrigo Obregón attacks them and only stops when he’s hit by a bull. He gets torn apart and sounds like he’s trying to say the words to “Humpty Dumpty” and man, I literallyjumped aout of my chair in the middle of the night I was so excited. He looks like Johnny Craig drew him!
Somehow, the movie then decides to top itself as another Rodrigo Obregón cyborg that looks exactly the same shows up with Maureen, who removes her skin to show us that she’s one of the aliens that have been on Earth for twelve thousand years and now are in control of most countries and multinational corporations.
At this point, is there any hope for any of us?
Yes, this is a movie where a gorgeous Swedish woman takes off all of her epidermis — of course we see her breasts, this is an Italian movie — to reveal that she’s a lizard alien that fulfills the worries of David Icke, then she vomits slime all over herself and tries to kill Franco Nero with her giant tongue.
If you told me this was an actual alien, I would believe you.
The first few times I’ve tried to watch this, I couldn’t get into it. It was too slow and felt too downbeat with Nero’s character feeling hopeless. So don’t be like me. I beg you, stick with this for an hour. Just an hour, because it’s not bad. I mean, yes, Franco Nero survives a car chase by throwing eggs, but it’s just slow, not badly made.
But the last thirty minutes make it all worth it.
When you get there, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
This is a movie all about the foreplay and then when it’s time to get to the actual sex, it’s the weirdest and best Penthouse Forum sex you’ve ever had and you feel like there’s no way that it happened and no one will ever believe you.
Also: Franco Nero screams almost every line and I respect that.
Also also: This is like a budget They Live by people who never saw that movie.
Also also also: This ends with Franco Nero living in a Cannibal Holocaustparadise and a song that sounds like something Disney characters would sing to.
The Cauldron Films blu ray release of Top Line has a 2K restoration from the original negative. Extras include interviews with Nero and Ercolani, a featurette on the alien theories of the film by parapolitics researcher Robert Skvarla and an in-depth audio commentary by film historian Eric Zaldivar including audio interviews from cast members, Deborah Moore and Robert Redcross, as well as additional insight on Italian cult films with actors Brett Halsey and Richard Harrison.
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