How did I get this far into SOV movies without more Donald Farmer?
The band Rikk-O-Shay is trying to get big in the heavy metal business, and you know what would help? If their lead singer Michelle Shock (Carol Carr) wasn’t woshipping Satan and biting off their male groupies’ cocks to drain them of their blood. She tries the same thing to Derrick (Nikki Riggins), who is one of the band’s two backup singers and let’s just stop there and say that no other hard rock or metal band seemed to ever have dedicated singers outside of Motley Crue and their Nasty Habits backup singers and dancers (the fact that I knew they were named Donna McDaniel and Emi Canyn maybe says something about how much I read Hit Parader as a teenager). This already seems unrealistic.
Well, Michelle invites Derrick over for some demonic fellatio, and he ends up nearly dying too, so they replace her with a new singer named Jamie Summers, and she’s neither the Six Million Dollar Woman nor the Brat. She’s played by Melissa Moore, Glaze from Vice Academy Part 2 and Angelfist. She’s soon overcome by the same demonic possession thanks to Michelle.
The fact that a full demon-suited monster is coming after a band because they screwed with their demonic leader, well, this is the kind of movie that seems like a Jack Chick pamphlet come to life. As I watch years after I was a Rip! obsessed lover of metal, well, I found it all so very charming. So much blood, so many puppet demons, Tennessee instead of the Sunset Strip, video in the place of film. This is at the center of so many of my loves — devil movies, SOV, heavy metal, gore — all within one great compilation. Rock on.
Extras on the Visual Vengeance release include commentary with producer/director Donald Farmer, a Heavy Metal Horror Primer Video Essay with Justin Decloux and Adam “Riot” Thorn; interviews with Nick Riggins, Jesse Raye and Rick Gonzales; behind the scenes image gallery; excerpts from a Donald Farmer Q&A; trailers; a reversible sleeve featuring original VHS art; a folded mini-poster; “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set; a limited edition O-Card and a limited edition Scream Dream guitar pick. You can get this from MVD and Diabolik DVD.
Lately, I’ve noticed that several of my favorite films fit into a very specific genre with no prescribed name. If it had one, it would probably be something like, “coming of age while the supernatural lurks around the corner.”
That brings us to the West German film Laurin. A film that has been rarely seen outside its native country — which always lends the lure of the occult to the proceedings — it’s a perfect example of these films.
Laurin is a nine-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother in a quiet Bavarian town. Since the death of her mother — whose relationship with Laurin’s father was primal and lusty, as evidenced by them nearly making love in front of her — and the seafaring disappearances of her father — which increase after her mother’s death — she has retreated into a world of school time drudgery punctuation with moments of sinister make-believe. By night, she finds herself haunted by visions of a dilapidated castle owned by a man in black and his sinister dog, where each window finds a child trapped and clawing at the glass. These waking dreams stand side by side with a true nightmare: her friends and classmates are disappearing, one by one.
I’ve always been struck by how these films apply the supernatural to the worries that accompany the journey from adolescence to adulthood. As one’s body and feelings toward sexuality change, so too does how we see the world. And while the terror of child abduction is very real, to a child, the only form of explanation must be a fairy tale monster.
Laurin is a sumptuous affair, one that contrasts the dreary and washed-out world of adulthood with the kaleidoscopic fantasies of childhood; the kind of dreams that only Mario Bava could properly light, color and frame.
Without revealing the end of this film, the rising sunlight that would often proclaim victory over Satan feels rather hollow. As Martin Mathias, the hero of George Romero’s Martin, would tell us — much further along than adolescence — “There’s no real magic ever.”
I’ve often wondered about the time in my life when I went from having my destiny controlled to being in charge of it myself. The questioning that ensued and the realization that adults didn’t have all the answers are perfectly essayed here. In my experience, horror films remain the most honest of all genres. Despite cloaking our fears in the capes, cowls and fangs of the nosferatu, they hold up a mirror to ourselves. Whether or not you appear in it is up to you, dear reader.
The Visual Vengeance release of Laurin has a director-approved 2K HD transfer from the original 35mm film elements, complete and uncut, in both English- and German-language versions; feature-length audio commentary by film historian Troy Howarth, author of Innocence Lost and Robert Sigl and the Curse of Laurin; updated subtitle translations for the German version assisted by Robert Sigl; the original VHS rough cut of Laurin from Sigl’s private collection, featuring set-recorded audio allowing viewers to hear the actors’ real voices prior to overdubbing, a new interview with Sigl; two shorts, The Christmas Tree and Coronoia 21: It Comes with the Snow; The Making of Laurin archival documentary; interviews with Dóra Szinetár, Barnabás Tóth, cinematographer Nyika Jancsó and film historian Jonathan Rigby; Robert Sigl Bavarian Film Awards Presentation; 8 photo galleries featuring never-before-seen images from Robert Sigl’s personal archives; a collectible folded mini-poster; a blu-ray sleeve featuring original home video art; a 6-page liner notes essay by Tony Strauss of Weng’s Chop magazine; a limited edition mini-postcard set reproduced from German promotional materials; a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set; a limited edition O-card by Justin Coons and a trailer. This will be available from MVD and Diabolik DVD.
Sometimes, the chemistry between two legends is enough to carry a movie. See No Evil, Hear No Evil is the definition of that sentence: a high-concept, low-brow collision that remains a mandatory watch for anyone obsessed with the glory days of the Pryor and Wilder pairing.
Directed by Arthur Hiller, this was the third of four collaborations between comedy titans Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. It’s a classic odd-couple setup: Dave (Wilder) is deaf, and Wally (Pryor) is blind. They become an unlikely team when they witness a murder in Dave’s newsstand. Wally hears the shot, Dave sees the killer’s shapely legs, and what follows is a frantic, slapstick-heavy chase through NYC and New Jersey involving a stolen gold coin, a secret superconductor and a whole lot of hijinks, as they say.
The cast is a weird, wonderful mix of genre staples. You’ve got Joan Severance, who had the perfect cold, calculated look for the villainous Eve (and thiose gorgeous gams that Dave notices) and a young Kevin Spacey is in full “goon” mode as Kirgo, long before he hit A-list status. Look for the legendary Anthony Zerbe—a guy who has been in everything from The Omega Man to License to Kill—playing the blind villain, Sutherland.
The production was a legal mess before a camera even rolled. Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor (who wrote Lovers and Other Strangers) sold the script in 1984 but later sued Columbia Pictures for a massive payout after being cut out of the rewrite process. Before Wilder was cast, the studio considered Jim Belushi for the role of the deaf store owner. That would have been an entirely different—and significantly less charming—kind of movie.
While the critics at the time—including Roger Ebert—hated it, calling it a “dud,” the audience didn’t care. It sat at number one at the box office for two weeks. My wife absolutely adores this movie, and we watch it at least twice a year.
There is one really good thing that came out of this: Wilder attended the NY League for the Hard of Hearing to prepare for his role. He worked with speech pathologist Karen Webb, who would become his fourth wife. That’s good luck, as he’d already turned down the movie twice, as he was worried the film would mock people with disabilities. He changed his mind when, during his research and meetings with real deaf people, he was told, “People with handicaps do have a sense of humor.”
Writers Earl Barret and Arne Sultan created Too Close for Comfort, so from all the Cosmic Cow fans, thank you.
That said, the film’s opening completely ignores everything we’ve learned before. Mary Lou, now played by Courtney Taylor instead of Lisa Schrage (boo!), has been in Hell since she died at a school dance in 1957. But she has a nail file and has been chipping away at the chains that bind her for decades, finally escaping back into our world. As she returns to Hamilton High School — totally in Canada, but overly American thanks to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and flags a plenty and non-Canadian football — she starts off on the right foot by killing a janitor and using a jukebox to blast the pacemaker out of an old lover’s chest.
Speaking of those American flags, one night, a totally average high school student, Alexander Grey (Tom Conlin), leaves his girlfriend, Sarah Monroe (Cynthia Preston, who is in another beyond wild Canadian film, Pin), behind as he soul-searches about his total average-ness. He’s discovered by Mary Lou, and after some two-person push-ups on the stars and bars, he’s under her spell.
It works. His grades go up. He becomes a football hero. And he’s never had better sex ever.
So what’s wrong? Well, Mary Lou is killing everyone in his way.
Like the guidance counselor who doesn’t believe in our protagonist? She gets her face burned off with battery acid. His football rival gets a ball thrown through his stomach. And soon, even Alexander’s slacker best friend Shane gets his heart ripped out.
Alexander is conflicted. He loves his average girlfriend, but she’s already dumped him for a nerd. Well, a nerd who gets killed by AV equipment. And as we’ve already learned about Mary Lou, she will not be stopped when she wants something, even if her female rival has learned how to use a flamethrower.
Ron Oliver wrote the screenplays for the second and third films in this series (and directed this one). The original title was The Haunting of Hamilton High, as there was no plan to connect these to the Prom Night series. The money for this came from Live Entertainment. A few days before filming started, Oliver ended up going to dinner with the family that owned that company, only to learn on Monday that production had been delayed because the sons had killed their mom and dad. You know them as Erik and Lyle Menendez. Another Oliver fact: he and his partner were married by Udo Kier. One more? He wrote and directed several installments of the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark?
This can’t live up to the preceding version, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t try. I’ve always loved that Mary Lou is the lone slasher who embraces sex and forces men to become the final survivor — but never lets them live.
Satan’s Storybook prefigures the streaming horror anthology films that litter our streaming services today, yet it’s miles above them, not just in its two tales, but in a connecting story that makes you want even more.
Directed and co-written by Michael Rider, who was also a zombie in the shot on video Hororama, this movie starts with the bride of Satan (Leslie Deutsch) — who by the way looks amazing and just like a late 80s heavy metal album cover come to life — being abducted by ninjas, one of whom is her sister, who is played Ginger Lynn, so of course I was beyond in love with this segment. This upsets Satan so much that he demands that his jester tell him some stories to keep his mood light. This segment hints at a third story, as well as more of the story that is never delivered, and honestly, that’s the only thing about this movie I dislike, because it leaves you wanting so much more.
“Demon of Death” is all about Zeek Heller (co-writer Steven K. Arthur), a serial killer who abducts metal and horror fans — she has a Scared Stiff poster on the all-black walls of her room — Jezebell Jones (Leesa Rowland) and even wipes out her family before being sent to rot in jail. He’s just like so many metal dudes I knew in 1989, except, you know, he randomly looks up girls in the telephone book — placing this firmly in 1989 — and kills them. Then he gets arrested by the law, who say things like “The only thing that stands between you and Old Sparkey is us, and we don’t give a lizard’s dick if you do fry, you buttplug!” The trial goes on and on, and right before they throw the switch, Jezebell does some black magic that doesn’t turn out the way she planned. It’s grimy and grainy, and you can see people reading their lines off scripts, which some reviews proclaim as the sign of a bad movie, as if they’d never watched SOV before.
The second segment, “Death Among Clowns,” has a clown named Charlie (Grady Bradner, the writer of The Howling and Cameron’s Closet in his only movie as an actor) hanging himself in his dressing room and then engaging in lengthy dialogue with another clown named Mickey La Mort, who is played by this film’s director and writer, Rider. This is the segment that usually makes people hate this movie, as it seems to go on forever, yet I love it. Mickey the clown keeps getting more demonic as the segment moves on, and basically this is two writers putting together endless dialogue in one location — with a Howling IV: The Original Nightmareposter no less — and no twist ending. Exactly what you think is going to happen — a clown dragging another clown to Hell — happens. It’s. Kind of fascinating, like a near murderdrone with no murder.
This movie has so much fog throughout that one wonders if it was considered a pack-in with fog machines so people could learn of their power.
Satan’s Storybook has the feel of Night Train to Terror, and I mean that in the best of mind-melting ways. There are so many moments in this that make little to no sense at all, and that’s what I demand from my films. If anything, this is a movie where Ginger Lynn magically transforms from a ninja to a barbarian princess, and if you can’t find some wonder in that, I think you should give up watching films and reading this site. Bring on the synth and distorted voices. Bring on the rubber-masked demons. Bring on the fog, the glorious fog.
If you miss the days when science fiction movies relied on practical effects, wild concepts and pure imagination rather than endless CGI, there is this movie. Coming from the creative minds of Robert Dyke and Tex Ragsdale, this kicks off with a brilliant premise: during the 1969 Apollo 11 landing, a robotic eye secretly watches the astronauts leave. Fast forward twenty years and a routine Space Shuttle mission discovers a 14,000-year-old human corpse and a mysterious pod in orbit. Once on Earth, the pod does what any good 80s killer robot would do. It builds itself a cybernetic body out of lab equipment and human remains, leading to a glorious shotgun showdown.
From there, Moontrap turns into an Apollo-era search-and-destroy mission to the Moon. What makes the movie work so well is its casting. Sci-fi royalty Walter Koenig (Chekov from Star Trek) plays the cynical Colonel Jason Grant and he is paired perfectly with the legendary Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead) as Ray Tanner. Campbell brings his signature dry wit to the lunar surface, making the dialogue pop even when the plot dips into standard survival-horror territory.
Realizing the moon is basically a hotbed for killer robots, NASA dusts off the last remaining Apollo rocket and sends Grant and Ray Tanner, back to the lunar surface. Once on the moon, they find the ruins of an ancient human civilization and wake up a beautiful woman in stasis named Mera (Leigh Lombardi). She warns them about the Kaalium, killer cyborgs who love nothing more than turning organic life into spare parts. Before they know it, the Kaalium steal their lunar module, blow up their command module real good and leave our heroes stranded.
What follows is a great, claustrophobic survival story. Poor Bruce Campbell gets taken out (spoiler!), and Grant and Mera are captured and put aboard a massive Kaalium ship heading for Earth. But not before Grant makes a tent on the moon’s surface and despite being menaced by cyborgs, still has the time to feel up an ancient, reanimated woman. It’s a man’s world.
The cyborgs need the NASA tech to complete their ship, but Grant rigs the stolen module to self-destruct and he and Mera blow their way out into space, using the recoil of his gun to jet away like a couple of badass space cowboys while the alien vessel explodes behind them. They make it back to Earth, Mera learns English, and they live happily ever after… until the classic it’s not really over stinger shows a surviving Kaalium pod sitting in an Earth junkyard, getting ready to build a new body.
It would sit there for a long time.
James Glickenhaus—the legend behind The Exterminator—was ready to go big with a sequel titled Moontrap 2: The Pyramids of Mars. It sounds like the kind of high-concept, space-faring madness we all craved, but thanks to the usual grind of studio financial woes, it died. Fast forward to 2011, and Robert Dyke and Tex Ragsdale announced a graphic novel campaign. The idea was to use the art as a visual pitch to secure funding for a film. It was a noble effort, but the backers didn’t bite and the project got the axe before it even started.
But you can’t keep a good space-killer down. By 2014, the Moontrap team was back at it with a new project: Moontrap: Target Earth. Now, they were quick to clarify that this wasn’t a direct sequel, but a standalone adventure set in the same universe. Instead of just picking up where Grant and Mera left off, they pivoted to a story about an archaeological dig unearthing an ancient craft and a young woman (Sarah Butler) getting whisked off to the moon to unlock the mystery.
They actually got the cameras rolling in Michigan, bringing in Charles Shaughnessy to play the heavy and Damon Dayoub as our lead adventurer. It’s a different vibe, sure, but after all those years of what ifs and cancelled graphic novels, seeing the Moontrap movie try to become a franchise makes me happy.
I rented this from Prime Time Video as a kid and had a great time with it. If I ever get stranded on the moon’s surface, I’ll be looking to get lucky too.
Wow, you have no idea how excited I am about this.
I saw VHS art for the movie Urban Warriors and saw something I have never seen before: the Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater line.
If you’ve spent any time looking at the history of the Cannon Group, you know that the company was essentially a house of cards held together by Menahem Golan’s ambition and a lot of pre-sold tape rights. They didn’t even bother starting their own domestic home video label until 1989. By that point, the wheels were already coming off the Go-Go Boys’ wagon and they were slashing their production budgets to the bone.
They needed product to fill the shelves of that new home video arm and they needed it cheap. That’s how they ended up dumpster diving into the international market, picking up some oddball productions.
I went to the source of all things Cannon, Austin Trunick, who already covered this four years ago on the Cannon Film Guide Facebook page, saying “In the late ’80s, Cannon tried to squeeze some money out of several of their older distro titles that hadn’t been fully exploited on the video market. Their idea was to have modern stars introduce the films, which resulted in the “Michael Dudikoff Presents Action Adventure Theater” line of tapes.”
Much like the 22-26 action adventure films that bear the title Sybil Danning’s Adventure Video for the USA Home Video company, this was a way to use an action star to make some money with no risk.
There are only four of these, so why don’t we get into them?
The Bronx Executioner (1989): Welcome to a post-apocalyptic wasteland where humanoids and androids are locked in a nonsensical war for supremacy. These androids bleed human blood, look like guys in leather jackets and apparently spent their entire R&D budget at a RadioShack clearance sale. If one of them had an Italian name, it would be Roberto Batty.
The film follows our rookie deputy, James (Gabriele Gori, Attrazione Pericolosa), who arrives in the Bronx to replace the legendary Sheriff Warren. And here is where the fun begins: Warren is played by the iconic Woody Strode, but every single frame of him is shamelessly recycled from the 1984 movie The Final Executioner.
As for the Bronx itself? It’s a series of mounds of dirt and a derelict country villa that has never seen a New York City zip code in its life. James, fresh from a police academy that apparently consists solely of doing chin-ups on a metal pole, is tasked with policing this chaos. But the movie quickly gets bored with him, and shifts focus to Dakar (Alex Vitale, Jakoda from Strike Commando!), a humanoid leader who spends the better part of the runtime screaming into a walkie-talkie while driving a jeep through the Italian countryside.
When a cyborg goes on a killing spree, you’d expect some stakes, right? Forget it. You won’t get an explanation of who, why or what the hell is happening. The narrative is a patchwork quilt of stock footage, recycled scenes and incoherent voice-overs. As for the big bad, Margie is the quintessential evil android, strutting around in a dog collar and proclaiming, “Violence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” She’s the heart and soul of this mess. And she’s played by Margie Newton, who got all painted up in Mattei’s Hell of the Living Dead and was Aphrodite in Cozzi’s The Adventures of Hercules.
Director Vanio Amici is an equal-opportunity recycler. Why film a new action scene when you can just use the one you already shot five minutes ago? It saves time and prevents you from having to rewind to watch the faceless extras get blasted again. For a long time, people thought he was Umberto Lenzi, as the name on the credits is Bob Collins. Amici only directed one other movie, Detective Malone, which remixes two of Lenzi’s Black Cobra movies, further muddying the movie waters and making nerds like me wonder who really made it. As for the rest of his credits, he mainly worked as an editor with a resume that includes Black Demons, Karate Warrior 6, Aenigma and many adult films. Perhaps his toughest challenge was being the editor for Troll 2. I wonder how he was able to make it make as much sense as it does.
This has it all and by all, I mean perms, leather jackets, headbands and a finale so dramatically deep that it tries to mimic Blade Runner before hitting a hard freeze-frame.
Dakar: James, can I tell you something?
James: Sure. What?
Dakar: I always envied you. I wanted to be like you.
James: You mean human?
Dakar: It was just… a dream.
It’s a total mess. I loved it!
Cross Mission (1988): Leave it to Alfonso Brescia—working under his Al Bradley alias—to decide that what the jungle combat — Rambsoploitation — genre really needed wasn’t just more stock footage of explosions, but literal demons. What else can we expect from the director of Murder In Blue Light, Iron Warrior, The Beast In Space and an entire series of Star Wars rip-offs?
Cross Mission starts off as your standard, run-of-the-mill exploitation flick. General Romero, played by Antonio Poli, is the iron-fisted ruler of a small Latin American nation. He’s got the whole “I’m a good guy” routine down to a science, publicly torching marijuana fields to impress the U.N. inspectors. Of course, once the inspectors pack up their clipboards and head for the airport, it’s back to the narco-trafficking business as usual.
When a marine named William (Richard Randall, whose only other role is in a TV movie version of A Christmas Carol) decides to investigate the racket alongside a crusading reporter named Helen (Brigitte Porsche, her only role, and no, she’s not an adult star), things spiral into the usual jungle chaos. Do huts explode? Do some of the good guys die and need revenge? Does the hero get ready for the last battle in a montage, putting on a special outfit to show the audience he’s finally done playing nice? Yes to all of these things.
But here is where the movie veers off the tracks and into the territory of the sublime. Just when you think you’ve seen every trope in the book, Brescia hits you with the supernatural. General Romero isn’t just a drug lord; he’s a practitioner of the dark arts. He’s got the ability to summon a diabolical small demon named Astaroth, played by Nelson De La Rosa (the mini Brando of The Island of Dr. Moreau and the titular Rat Man), at will. When he’s shooting blue lightning at people, the movie suddenly shifts from a generic war film to an Italian bit of magic.
Brescia would go on to direct Miami Cops the following year, but Cross Mission remains a singular, bizarre experiment. It doesn’t fully succeed as a war movie, and it doesn’t fully succeed as a supernatural thriller, but for the sheer audacity of blending the two? It’s a more than decent one-time watch. You come for the jungle action, but you stay because you need to see how a magic little guy fits into an exploding helicopter subplot.
Lt. Bill Rogers (Andy Forrest, also in Massimo Pirri’s The Kiss of the Cobra, Tonino Valerii’s Sicilian Connection, Lenzi’s The House of Witchcraft, Hunt for the Gold Scorpion and, oddly, the Giandomenico Curi-directed Italian Lambada movie and yes, there were two movies with this title in the same year), Sgt. Mario Pazilbo Esposito (Carlo Mucari, Snuff Killer and Obsession: A Taste for Fear) and Blitz (Paki Valente) have broken out of a POV camp. Rogers is an American pilot who trades a POW camp for the Yugoslavian wilderness after getting shot down. Espozi has the nickname Spaghetti because he’s Italian — in an Italian movie — and Blinz is an Austrian deserter who realized his side was losing.
Our motley crew of POWs managed to link up with some partisans and a local Orthodox priest. The partisans are desperate, looking for pilots to take their last two functioning planes and turn those German-held hillsides into a fireworks display. But while they’re busy flying for the resistance, the boys get wind of some serious loot. Vanya (Francesca Ferrè), a nun who traded her habit for a submachine gun, tips them off about a haul of priceless gold chalices stashed away at the St. Basil convent.
According to Andy J. Forrest, Ferrè was functionally blind without her glasses and ended one take by walking directly into a tree.
After pulling off two successful bombing runs, the POWs stop caring about the war effort and start plotting a heist. They leverage their pilot skills to score some hardware, then convince Vanya to lead them to the chapel. She thinks they’re on the level, but these guys are just mercenaries in disguise, ready to double-cross everyone for the gold.
There’s a Fabio Frizzi score, which is nice, and Luigi Ciccarese as cinematographer. He shot plenty of Bruno Mattei’s later movies, especially his SOV 2000s efforts, as well as tons of adult. Along the way, Lenzi stole battle scenes from The Battle of Sutjeska and Partizanska eskadrila.
It’s not the most exciting war movie you’ve seen, but it does have a genuinely impressive train explosion and watching our guys lean out of a biplane to drop bombs by hand is the kind of practical, low-budget ingenuity that makes these films so charming.
Urban Warriors (1987): You know you’re in for a wild ride when the opening act consists of a montage of mushroom clouds followed immediately by stock footage of volcanoes erupting. Then, we meet Brad (Bruno Bilotta), our hero, and his buddies, Maury (Bjorn Hammer) and Stan (Maurice Poli), who are hanging out in an underground lab when the power goes out. When they finally decide to crawl out of their bunker, they discover that the world has ended. And apparently, the end of the world is synonymous with an immediate, city-wide explosion in the local population of leather-clad biker gangs.
Vari’s vision of the future looks suspiciously like a gravel pit and a single abandoned factory. That’s the kind of set design that makes a Cirio Santiago movie look like a Cecil B. DeMille epic.
The mutants here are a special breed. According to Brad—who, again, as you may remember, was just working at a power station and doesn’t seem like a scientist—these guys suffer from a mutation that apparently destroys their inner ear whenever the sun goes down. Before you can say uno, due, tre, quattordici, all these bad ass post-apocalyptic warriors have vertigo.
The aesthetic is exactly what you’d expect if a group of guys raided a discount S&M shop and then realized they needed to re-qualify for their motorcycle licenses. Watching Brad’s buddy Maury emerge from a shack wearing a full-on studded leather helmet and a white scarf—while manning a bike with mounted weapons—is reason enough for the world to end.
Brad’s journey is a masterclass in survival priorities. After watching his buddy Maury get killed—a tragedy clearly caused by failing to stick to a strict vehicle maintenance schedule—Brad doesn’t weep. He gets himself some leather, finds a woman (Rosenda Scharschmidt, Dark Bar) to get busy with and promptly gets attacked because she wants his spinal marrow. At least he defeats the leader of the mutants, played by Alex Vitale, who will always be Jakoda from Strike Commando. Oh yeah — Malisa Longo from Cat In the Brain and the titular star of Helga, She Wolf of Stilberg –– is in this barterdown bootleg too.
This was Giuseppe Vari’s return to the director’s chair after a decade away, and spoiler alert: it was also his final film.
Much like another Michael Dudikoff Presents film, The Bronx Executioner, this takes scenes from The Final Executioner. Even stranger, I have heard Paolo Rustichelli’s theme described as either a cover of “White Lines” or the Art of Noise cover of “Dragnet.”
Directed by Bob Balaban (yes, the guy from Christopher Guest comedies) and written by Christopher Hawthorne. Parents finds the Laemle family — Nick (Randy Quaid), Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Michael (Bryan Madorsky) moving into the California suburbs. Between seeing his parents making love and watching his father do an autopsy, Michael is a bit screwed up. His dreams are horrible and he believes his parents are cannibals. But what if he’s right?
But what can you do when your parents want to feed you the meat of your guidance counselor, Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis)?
The film’s most unsettling quality is its visual obsession with food. Director Bob Balaban utilized macro photography and heightened sound design to make the sound of a knife hitting a plate or the sight of a pot roast look like a crime scene. To make the mystery meat look particularly unappetizing and gelatinous, the production used a mix of brisket, food coloring and heavy amounts of glaze.
Siskel and Ebert disagreed on this; a big surprise was that Gene loved it and Roger didn’t. However, Ken Russell compared it to Blue Velvet and claimed that it was better than Lynch’s movie.
While Randy Quaid has certainly moved into legitimately weird territory in real life over the last decade, his performance in Parents is often cited by critics as a masterclass in repressed 1950s aggression. He isn’t playing crazy. He’s playing a man who is desperately trying to appear normal, which is much scarier.
Joseph W. Sarno. Yeah, that Joe Sarno. The Ingmar Bergman of 42nd Street. The man who gave us Inga and Abigail Lesley is Back in Town. If you’re looking for a guy who understood that the distance between high-art Swedish angst and low-rent skin flicks is about the thickness of a silk stocking, Sarno is your man.
Yet imagine a slasher flick filmed in the Swedish woods, directed by this very same softcore legend, with a plot that feels ghostwritten by a nun on a bad trip. That would be Helgerån, which was also released as Sacrilege.
Sara (Christine Moore, a Roberta Findlay veteran from Lurkers and Prime Evil) shows up at the Church of the New Disciples looking for salvation. She’s got a heavy burden: her twin sister is back in Lapland playing house with Satan and possibly gestating the literal Antichrist by having sex with goats. Also, her mom got her head lopped off and spiked like a volleyball in the intro, but the case is colder than a Nordic winter.
Enter George (Kurt Sinclair), a reporter who is supposed to be investigating the sect but mostly just stares at Sara with puppy-dog eyes. When Sara decides to lead a missionary trip to the old country to save her sister’s soul, George follows. Along for the ride is Sister Naomi (Shannon McMahon, another Findlay alum from Blood Sisters), who has a calling for Sara that isn’t exactly sanctioned by the Vatican.
Oh, you’re surprised by a Sapphic plot in a Sarno movie?
Once they hit the forest, the repressed religious zealotry starts to boil over. Everyone is horny, everyone is crazy, and one girl even wants to go full Sound of Music minus the habit and plus some demented spinning. But while the missionaries are busy struggling with their magic underwear, someone is skulking through the brush with a hand scythe, slicing off hands and heads.
Holy shit — I loved this movie. It’s a slow-moving film in which nothing is paid off, filmed by a man who wasn’t just a smut peddler. He was obsessed with the way sexual epiphanies could shatter repression, which in this movie, he takes that very same theme and grafts it onto a slasher. It’s a heady, talky and occasionally overwrought brew about delusion and madness.
Is Judith really the Sara that gets to have sex and are two people trapped in the same body? Is she a sick young woman? Will men — and a woman? — perhaps wonder which version they’re sleeping with and if one of them is a succubbus?
For a movie directed by a guy who was literally filming legit porn concurrently, it’s also surprisingly chaste for a movie where everyone is DTF in a way that destroys their lives. You get some blouses pinging off and brief topless shots, but it’s more interested in the idea of sex than the act.
The gore, however, is another story. The scythe work is hokey but effective. And at nearly two hours, Sarno may be testing your patience. It’s a marathon of melodrama and some truly wooden acting from Sinclair, who sounds like he’s reciting a grocery list rather than investigating a satanic cult, all in a film that appears to look like it was made for TV, yet with exposed breasts and bloody unattached heads.
But that’s exactly why I drank this in like a sweet glass of Punsch.
Another reason I was all in? The print looks rough. We’re talking tape rolls, tracking issues and VHS static. The fuzziness makes the low-budget decapitations look almost real. It’s a lost oddity from a director who lived in the gutter but kept his eyes on the arthouse stars. It’s not a masterpiece, but in a world of cookie-cutter slashers, this one is a beautiful, bloated freak-out.
April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. 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.
After the absolute banger ending of Halloween 4, where little Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) went full-tilt boogeyman on her foster mom, we all expected the next chapter to be The Bad Seed of Haddonfield. Instead, Michael Myers, who was shot approximately ten thousand times and dropped down a mine shaft, survives by floating down a river like a waterlogged log of pure evil.
He’s nursed back to health by a hermit and a parrot (yes, really) for a year. Once he wakes up, he kills his benefactor and heads back to town to find Jamie. Jamie is now mute, institutionalized, and sharing a psychic link with her uncle. While Dr. Loomis screams at a child to find a killer, Michael stalks a group of teens led by the hyperactive Tina, leading to a climax in the old Myers house involving a laundry chute and a mysterious Man in Black who has some very aggressive feelings about police stations.
Yes, The Shape takes a page out of Frankenstein, as an old hermit nurses him back to life after the last film’s mine shaft death sequence. Then he goes right back to killing and stalking his niece. The one exciting moment, when a mysterious stranger in black kills nearly the entire cast at the conclusion of the film, suggests that whatever happens next, it’s going to be awesome. I agree with Donald Pleasence and Danielle Harris, who wanted to continue the story of Jamie turning evil after stabbing her stepmother in the past film. Instead, we got Michael crying. Crying! You don’t make the Shape shed a tear unless it’s made of blood.
Here’s an interview with my wife about this movie and why she loves it.
BECCA: One word: Tina. Michael and his convertible… Mikey. That mean asshole, he gets hit with a rake and Michael Myers steals her car to get him. I love that Michael just knows how to drive a stick shift and navigate a 1989 Camaro like he’s in The Fast and the Furious. It’s ridiculous and I live for it.
SAM: How many times have you seen this movie?
BECCA: Five billion. It’s one of the ones I rented every week. I don’t know why my parents didn’t just find this and buy it. It would have saved them $2.00 a week at the local Video King.
SAM: This movie feels like a fever dream directed by someone who had never seen a Halloween movie but had seen a lot of European art house films and Miami Vice. Why are there two bumbling cops with clown sound effects? Why did they change the Myers house into a Gothic Victorian mansion that definitely wasn’t there in 1978?
BECCA: Because it’s the 80s, Sam! Style over logic! Plus, Donald Pleasence is at his absolute most unhinged here. He’s basically using a traumatized child as live bait. He’s more of a villain than Michael is at points. He’s literally barking at her!
SAM: It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess. It gave us the Thorn tattoo and the Man in Black, setting up a sequel that would eventually involve Paul Rudd and Druid cults. It’s the moment the franchise decided that slasher wasn’t enough and supernatural soap opera was the way to go.
This is the middle child of the Thorn Trilogy. It’s loud, it’s confusing, it has a mask that looks like an angry potato with long hair and we love it anyway. Watch it for Danielle Harris giving a performance that is way better than the script deserves.
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