Three years later and it’s time for more entrapment of parents.
Jeffrey Wyatt (Barry Bostwick) is the widowed father of identical triplet teenage girls — Lisa, Jessie, and Megan (Leanna, Monica and Joy Creel) — and after getting them off his hands all summer, he has to tell them that he’s now engaged to Cassie McGuire (Patricia Richardson), who is redesigning their family home with the help of Susan Evers (Hayley Mills), who has already divorced Brian Carey from the last film.
The girls have some drama too, as Lisa is dating two boys, David (Chris Gartin) and Hawk (Jon Pennell), and gets the help of her sister Jessie, who ends up having to sing Janet Jackson karaoke. Well, Lisa and her sister get in trouble and she responds by letting her dad know how much she hates Cassie. Susan then tells the girls that she did the same games with her sister when she was young.
You know what? They still play those games and this is one of those movies where the leads break up a marriage at the altar. Or before. At the storage shed, I guess.
Mills said that she would never do another sequel and here we are, after Good Morning, Miss Bliss became Saved By the Bell and she didn’t just make this one, she made the sequel, which was also directed by Mollie Miller. This was written by Deborah Amelon (who wrote Exit to Eden) and Jill Donner, who wrote Voyager from the Unknown and seven episodes of the series that would come from it, Voyagers!
Captain Donnie Yan (Donnie Yen) and Madam Rachel Yeung Lai-ching (Cynthia Khan) are on the trail of cocaine dealers. When she goes off script and gets found by a dockworker named Luk Wan-ting (Yuen Yat-chor) who thinks that she’s an illegal immigrant. He feels bad for her and gives her money and a place to say. As Donnie stays after the criminals, she learns that Luk’s brother Ming (Liu Kai-chi) is being attacked by criminals that he owes money to. The two fight off the gang and when her cover’s blown, Rachel gets back on the case. At the same time, their partner Peter Woods gets shotgun blasted by the real boss behind all of the drug deals is a CIA officer named Mr. Robinson.
I’ve just explained about the first ten minutes or so of this dense film, one that builds tension and then goes as wild as any of the other movies in this series.
Luk Wan-Ting is a witness to that murder and gets framed for it. He escapes the police and a killer, which sends our heroes after him. She thinks he’s innocent based on their past history and he thinks that he’s not, so we have some tension between our supercops. In fact, things get even tenser when they start to wonder which cops they can trust and decide to hide out with Luk and attempt to get him to testify.
The final fights in this film — once the plot is solved and we can, as they say, get to the fireworks factory — are incredible. The battle between the CIA agent (Michael Woods) and Yen on top of a building has more action than every movie that will come out of Hollywood this year. There’s also a great battle between Khan and karate champion Farlie Ruth Kordica that has the two falling from huge heights and kicking each other repeatedly. Also: if you like glass being broken — I do — this movie will give you all the shattering and smashing of glass that you can handle.
Director Yuen Woo-ping is a name you should already know but if you don’t, he’s the director of Drunken Master, Tiger Cage, Iron Monkeyand so many more movies. He also was the fight choreographer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Fist of Legend, Black Mask, the second and third Matrix and Kill Bill 1 and 2. Seeing his name means that you’re about to have your mind absolutely blown.
88 Films’ In the Line of Duty Series includes 1985’s Yes, Madam!, 1986’s Royal Warriors, 1988’s In the Line of Duty 3 and 1989’s In the Line of Duty 4. This film is available in Cantonese and two different English dubs and extras like a commentary by F.J. DeSanto, an interview with Donnie Yen and trailers. There’s also a gorgeous book and posters for each movie. You can buy the set from MVD.
In a promotional image for Riverbend, one side has Margaret Avery, letting you know that she was in The Color Purple (it omits that she was also in Terror House). On the other side, Steve James, star of American Ninjaand Delta Force.
This allows you to know what world you are from.
If you’re like me, any movie with Steve James means so much more than any Oscar-winning cultural force.
Made in the post-Cannon world by Sam Firstenberg — this was for Prism Entertainment Corporation — this movie has a completely ludicrous and therefore awesome conceit: Three rebellious African-American army officers — Maj. Samuel Quentin (James), Sgt. Tony Marks (Julius Tennon) and Lt. Butch Turner (Alex Morris) — refuse to enact a Mai Lei-style massacre and kill innocents. They’re due for a court martial and sent to Georgia. Being black men in the white man’s army, they know that there’s no way things are going to be fair, so they escape.
They end up by total luck in Riverbend, finding a home with sympathetic widow Bell Coleman (Avery). She says she can only keep them for a few days, but Quentin is a man of justice that realizes that the town is in the grip of racist cops like Sheriff Jake (Tony Frank). Jake drops n bombs as casually as I discuss Jess Franco, which is all the time, and also is the man who shot Bell’s husband in the back in broad daylight when he tried to formally complain about how the cops treat black people in Riverbend. This film also wonders if that’s enough and decides that it has to somehow make a white Southern racist murdering coward cop even worse and has her assault a young girl named Pauline (Vennessa Tate).
Instead of leaving town, the army men are talked into staying around and training the black side of town to take over, which they do, and put every single white person either in jail or in a building with a bomb in it, all to bring the media to Riverbend where they’ll learn of the racism. And oh yeah, why Quentin and his men left Vietnam.
This movie is exactly why — if you’re a Cannon fan especially — that you love both James and Firstenberg. James rarely got the chance to be the lead — this and Street Hunter are about it before his untimely death — and he commands the screen. He gets to do action, drama, some shirtless time for the ladies and even a love scene, which man, the stages of grief in Rivertown are short when the widow Coleman is already sleeping with another man days after her husband gets gunned down. Then again, if I died tragically due to a racist cop and my wife was keeping Steve James in our place, I’d look up from Hell or through the dimensions from Limbo or whatever is in the next world and give my blessing, because look, Steve James is such an upgrade from me it’s the very definition of upgrade.
As for Firstenberg, he’s pre-Tarantino rewriting history with a black town following the “by any means necessary” pledge and taking over their own town by force. Amazingly, it works, as at the end, every black person is not dead but instead meeting their white neighbors in the street and warmly hugging and shaking hands just minutes after releasing them from a kidnapping and bomb threat. One and done scriptwriter Samuel Vance somehow made a science fiction movie here, because in the real world, the National Guard would be dropping bombs on this town.
You also have to adore any movie set in 1966 that has a synth driven basic training montage.
And man, Tony Frank. The guy was in a movie with a huge black cast and is just out there spitting the most coarse racism in their faces. I know sticks and stones, but this feels like the roughest way to get emotion and he’s acting the hell out of his role, somehow becoming worse than every single white Mr. Big in every blacksploitation movie put together.
This movie has Billy Jack and Walking Tall energy and I mean that as the biggest compliment. This totally knocked me out and was so unexpected; I had no clue it existed much less how powerful — and strange — it is.
Liberty (Mile O’Keefe) and Bash (Lou Ferrigno) once were in the service and fought in Central America along with Jesse (Richard Eden). They’re trying to keep young people out of the drug trade and off the streets, but they can’t even keep Jesse from getting all mixed up and killed. That means it’s time for a new war. A war on the streets of America.
Reading this paragraph and thinking that Ator and Hercules are teaming up, well, you might think that this movie is going to be awesome.
I wish I could report that it was.
This is the second time that Myrl A. Schreibman has done this to me. His film Angel of H.E.A.T. figured out a way to make a spy movie with Marilyn Chambers and Mary Woronov boring.
The people that wrote it came from such disparate roles in the movie business. Monica Clemens produced two other movies, The Last Ride and Cop-Out; Douglas Forsmith was in the art department for films like Commando, Cobra, St. Elmo’s Fire, Memorial Valley Massacre and Hunter’s Blood and also worked as the assistant property master on Exorcist II: The Heretic; and Tina Plackinger appeared in roles that called for athletic women, such as health club woman #1 in Armed and Dangerous, working out in The BodySculpture System and as the harem mistress in Wizards of the Demon Sword.
Liberty also has a girlfriend who barely likes him, Sarah (Mitzi Kapture, Silk Stalkings) and when she gets pregnant, they spend a lot of the movie talking about abortion.
I wanted to see Miles and Lou beating up perps not a long talk about choice.
I mean, you have two guys who are more known for action than acting and you make them act.
Myrl A. Schreibman, you have done it again. And by it, I mean fuck it up.
April 4: Remake, remix, ripoff — A shameless remake, remix or ripoff of a much better known movie. Allow your writing to travel the world (we recommend Italy or Turkey).
The true joy of Italian exploitation cinema is that sometimes, you expect a complete ripoff and are instead rewarded with something if not better than the original, then at least different. Shocking Dark AKA Terminator 2 seems like it’s going to be one James Cameron movie and ends up being another. Night Killer was sold in Italy as a sequel to Texas Chainsaw Massacre— it was released using that film’s Italian title, Non Aprite Quella Porta 3 (Don’t Open the Door 3) — and has elements of A Nightmare On Elm Street yet at heart it’s a very deranged portrait of a marriage gone wrong and a woman on the verge. One only has to look at perhaps the most successful ripoff ever, Zombi 2, to see how Lucio Fulci took the basic idea of ripping off Zombi AKA Dawn of the Dead yet somehow going further and stranger than George Romero.
Alien from the Abyss AKA Alien from the Deep has a poster that might make you believe that you’re about to see one of the many remix remake and ripoff versions of Ridley Scott’s Alien (there are a whole bunch in this article).
Yet this movie does what the Italian genre directors do best and get inspiration and then go their own way.
It’s directed by Antonio Margheriti AKA Anthony M. Dawson. He made plenty of movies that cashed in on other films’ successes, including Codename: Wild Geese (The Wild Geese), The Last Hunter (The Deer Hunter), Hunters of the Golden Cobra, Jungle Raidersand The Ark of the Sun God (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Lightning Bolt (a James Bond-style movie) and Tornado: The Last Blood (Rambo: First Blood Part II). He also made Castle of Blood and its remake Web of the Spider, And God Said to Cain(which inversely was pretty much remade in America as High Plains Drifter and inspired Eastwood’s Unforgiven), the giallo Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye, Yul Brynner’s last movie Death Rage, the John Saxon shocker Cannibal Apocalypse. And, of course, he made Yor, Hunter from the Future.
Margheriti was the master of lighting, which he needed as he would set up multiple cameras to get shots from every angle, as well as different levels of close-up, giving him coverage faster so he could shoot fast. He was also great with miniatures and, as you can tell from this movie, he seemed to just love exploding things.
Instead of space, this movie is quite earthbound. Jane (Marina Giulia Cavalli, billed here as Julia McCay; she was born in Portland, Oregon but found fame in Italian movies like Fashion Crimes and Complicazioni nella notte) and Lee (Robert Marius, Cop Game, Warriors of the Apocalypse) are ecological activists trying to discover why E-Chem is dumping toxic waste into a volcano. Colonel Kovacks (Charles Napier!), the man running the show, tries to take them out with his henchmen and helicopters. Lee gets captured, but Lee runs into the jungle where she meets Bob (Daniel Bosch), a snake farmer who falls for her and gets rebuffed quickly. He literally milks snakes of their venom for a living, a fact that really makes her upset.
While all this is going on, Dr. Geoffrey (Luciano Pigozzi, using his Alan Collins name; if you’ve seen any number of Italian exploitation you’ve seen Luciano) tries to warn everyone that the toxic waste and magma are combining to send a message into space that’s soon answered by a ball of fire that falls from the sky. Inside that burning bit of cosmic comet is an alien that looks like HR Giger but made from elements you can discover at your local Rome — or the Philippines, this was made there — Home Depot. Don’t take that as an insult. I absolutely love the monster in this movie and am obsessed with his gigantic lobster claw.
Just when the movie is getting a little too Romancing the Stone between Jane and Bob — they flirt like no two human beings ever have before, saying dialogue that feels alien and insane like “Don’t you touch me, you snake squeezer!” and man, they’re either going to kill one another or have the best sex anyone ever has had in a jungle movie that forgets that it’s supposed to be Alien — the M-16 carrying bad guys bust in and his trained snakes attack, leaping out all over the place and wasting bad guys left and right. Did I cheer? You know I did.
Keep in mind that the alien doesn’t show up until an hour into the movie, which would have upset me when I was young but old me finds that absolutely perfect. And by alien, we mostly just see his oozing black claw bathed in Italian horror lighting and so much fog. Instead of having a cool suit to fight the alien in, like the Power Loader Ripley wore in Aliens, our heroes just have construction equipment. Oh yeah, and a flamethrower, which Dr. Geoffrey delivers just in time to get stepped on by the xeroxomorph.
The word balls gets thrown around like, well, balls and the monster is more like a puppet, plus there’s a obvious mannequin death scene as all good Italian movies must possess. Napier is a real life special effect, starting the movie at eleven and going into numbers beyond the charts, eating scenery as if he’s Donald Pleasence in an Italian Wendy’s.
Man, how can you not be entertained by this? There’s a scene where Jane literally does a laundry list, saying “I’m singlw. Catholic. Angelo Saxon. And I don’t trust men who milk snakes” which made me laugh out loud. Cavalli is really spunky and cute in this and Margheriti is the least scummy of Italian genre directors as she just teases nudity whereas Mattei would have had her running through the jungle nude and reenacting that worm scene from Galaxy of Terror.
I’m so excited that Severin has re-released this on blu ray. Their new version has a 4K scan from the original negative, interviews with Margheriti’s son Edoardo and the North American debut of the documentary he made about his father, The Outsider – The Cinema of Antonio Margheriti. Order it now from Severin.
EDITOR’S NOTE: These first appeared on the site on June 21, 2020 and June 22, 2020. I love both of these movies so much and am so excited that Vinegar Syndrome is releasing them.
Both movies are newly scanned and restored in 4K from a 35mm original camera negative and a 35mm archival positive. There are also interviews with Gianella and Gabriela Hassel, composer, Eugenio Castillo, Carlos East Jr. and Ernesto East, and special effects artist Jorge Farfán. You need to order this double movie set from Vinegar Syndrome.
Starting with this film, Rene Cardona III would put his own spin on horror films. This movie feels like someone stayed up all night mainlining every single Amityville unconnected sequel — trust me, as I have done this — and then decided to make their own cover version before the booze wore off.
Way back in 1889, a witch had taken over a small Mexican town, but an inquisitor was able to use a sacred amulet to force her into the flames and save his village. When he tosses all of her belongings — including a cursed doll — into a well, he never dreamed that a little girl would find it a hundred years later and put her family through hell.
This movie has it all. Bleeding walls, refrigerators teeming with rats and no small amount of snakes and spiders. It also has Julio, the affable teen who hopes to save the family and the babysitter that he is in love with. He’s played by Pedro Fernandez, who is more than an actor, as he’s a TV show host and singer.
This movie has a great scene where the kids play with a toy car — which has possessed their father’s car — and try to push it into the fireplace. These are the reasons why I love movies like this, the small moments that make me realize just how little reality can intrude within.
If this ever came out on blu ray — and it totally should, because the DVD versions are out of print and are prohibitively expensive — I will add my critic byline to it: “If you thought Ghosthouse was completely inane and ridiculous, have I got an awesome movie for you!”
PS: This pairs nicely with Cathy’s Curse so you get a real North/South exploitation exorcism adventure.
Vacaciones de Terror 2 (1991): I was wondering if I could love the sequel as much as the original and I am here to tell you that I love this movie more than is humanly possible. Vacaciones de Terror is fun. The sequel, that also has the added title Diabolical Birthday? It might be the best movie I’ve watched this year.
The niece’s boyfriend from the first vacation — Julio (Pedro Fernández — is in his own adventure, helping the daughter of horror movie producer Roberto Mondragon (Joaquin Cordero, who was in Dr. Satan and El Gato) celebrate her birthday. Of course, the witch from the first movie and comes back, gets split in half and become a lizard-like monster while possessing everyone through an evil birthday cake that bleeds rivers of blood.
What would make this movie better? What if Mexican pop star Tatiana shows up and has a musical number? Yes, this happens. It makes the movie so much better than it has any right to be.
Pedro Galindo III took over the director’s chair from Rene Cardona III and honestly, he knocks it way out of the park. I mean, the witch is oozing sores all over the place and launching fireballs at people at a kid’s birthday party on Halloween while a longhaired singer and another singer do battle against her.
The moment that Tatianna — playing Mayra Mondragon — sings the song “Chicos,” I lost my mind. Seriously, my dog is a chihuahua and I think he must have some instinctive Mexican heritage because every single time I play this song — and trust, I’ve watched this movie double digits in the last few weeks — he goes absolutely loco.
There’s also a moment where Studio Mondragon has a Cocktail poster up and you wonder, “In the strange Mexican universe that is this film, did Roberto Mondragon produce a Tom Cruise movie? Or is so unprofessional that he has a poster of a movie he didn’t make up in his studio?”
Have you ever watched Troll 2 and wished, “I wish someone made this in Spanish and added musical numbers, but also crazier special effects and strange Mexican sorcery and baby dolls?” Have I got amazing news for you. This movie has all of that and so much more.
I went into Mexican Horror Week with the hopes of enjoying some films. I have somehow discovered a movie that will stay with me for the rest of my life.
April 2: Forgotten Heroes — Share a superhero movie that no one knows but you.
Rem Lazar is not a comic book but man, he’s a hero and one that has obsessed me since I first saw him as part of the Found Footage Festival.
Director and writer Scott Zakarin may have gone on to create one of the first web series called The Spot, but I always thought that Rem Lazar was either a Christian kid video or something from one of those alien planets that was sent to our world and would always seem like we would never understand it. You know, like it was from Canada.
Ashley (Courtney Kernaghan) and Zack (Jonathan Goch) have the same imaginary friend, superhero Rem Lazar and they paint a mannequin to look just like him. And by just look like him, it looks like the deranged dreams of children left alone for too long.
Those fantasies come true and Rem Lazar (Jack Mulcahy, who was Frank in the first two Porky’s movies) comes to magical life — no hat like Frosty needed — and he’ll go away in a day unless they find his Quixotic Medallion. This will involve battling the frightening CGI video effect known as Vorock, who is played by Zakarin. Yet all they must do to best him is tell him how much they love him. Also: they must sing. Sing a lot.
This was also part of a list of movies that the essential Scarecrow Video was attempting to keep alive after the death of VHS. Nick Prueher of the Found Footage Festival said, “We first saw Creating Rem Lezar on VHS in a stranger’s living room in Denver at about 3 in the morning — ideal viewing conditions for this wonderfully strange artifact from the 80s. We thought it was religious at first — either that or Canadian — because something just seemed off. But it turns out it’s neither! It’s just a wholly original kids movie with catchy songs that are still in our heads years later.”
Now the Found Footage guys are part of re-releasing this movie in high definition for its 35th anniversary. It also has a 30-minute documentary on the making of this oddity with interviews from Mulcahy, Zakarin and composer Mark Mulé. It’s exclusively available on the Found Footage Festival web store.
If I am left to my own devices for long enough, I end up singing songs from this movie. After all, “When I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of a dream.” You can’t argue with that kind of thinking.
EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another article about this movie here.
I grew up in the middle of the Satanic Panic, a time in which I would be sent to guidance counselors who worked with local priests and police to ensure that Satan would not take over our town and one assumes that Satan would come in through horror movies, heavy metal and role playing games. Five thousand bodies of unidentified kids were showing up every year, or so they said, and every police officer knew an occult expert they could call on. Most of them came to my church to meet us one on one.
My wife can’t always comprehend the contempt I have for the police, but between being a chubby skateboarder nerd and also being obsessed with gore, speed metal and religion, I grew up constantlyfeeling under surveillance in a small minded small town, a place where people still battle over the seperation of church and state and a mobile Nativity drives past the municpal building, a place where it can no longer be but parks long enough that everyone feels that God is pleased.
There are four types of Satantists or so we are led to believe: the dabblers who spray paint walls and knock over tombstones; the religious ones that are seldom in trouble; the dangerous non-trad ones and then there are the generational ones, like something out of Hammer movies that have worshipped the left hand path since they came to America.
Interestingly, black metal gets called out here — mainly they name Venom — while three years later the really scary moments of black metal itself would play out, the kind of murder and arson that this documentary can only dream of.
This comes from the world where He-Man was teaching children to embrace the dark arts — man, they should have watched Thundercats instead because that show is packed with occult themes — and Richard Ramirez loved AC/DC, so therefore anyone who listens to Back In Black could be a killing machine with a pentagram carved into their hand.
If you ever wondered, “How did we as a society get to the outlandish world of QAnon?” I am here to inform you that we have been there at least as long as I have been alive. This is a place where just because the Church of Satan — bonus points for the glance at the Temple of Set, started by U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, a psychological warfare specialist — just so happened to exist. Man, did these guys pay royalties for just grabbing all that footage from Satanis? Isn’t stealing a sin?
In my hometown there were whispers of the pentagrams on the walls of the closed elementary school. It’s why we never got MTV — as a substiute we were given Hit Video USA, a Christian channel that edited the videos before they were played — until the early 90s. I’d say look how I turned out, but a quick glance at the stuff that I watch points to me still being headed to an eternity in Hades, huh?
Written, produced and directed by J. R. Bookwalter, The Dead Next Door has some famous folks helping out, as Sam Raimi served as executive producer — The Master Cylinder — and Bruce Campbell dubbed the voices of Raimi and Commander Carpenter.
This took four years and about $125,000 to make. It’s not technically SOV, as it was shot on Super 8.
Against the wishes of some still alive humans, the government creates Zombie Squad 205, an anti-walking dead special task force after the undead start to take over the world. Raimi, Mercer, Kuller and crew head to Ohio –Bookwalter’s home — and battle a cult that wants to keep zombies alive because God told them to. That is, if they can get the team to stop watching Evil Dead and in action.
This movie came out as there were few zombie films and had so much hype. It’s a low budget but high talent love letter to Romero’s films, feeling very much a continuation of Day of the Dead. I’m not sure if fans wanted so much humor, but that’s what they got. It feels like a video game and I mean that in all the very best of ways.
It’s short, sweet and drowning in sheer gore, too.
You can watch this on Tubi or buy it from Makeflix.
Ulrich (Mark Gauthier) and Michael (Jarrett Parker) are brothers from the age of warriors and sorcerers. They get arrested for witchcraft and kidnapping Princess Luna (Devon Pierce), a crime they have nothing to do with. The real enemy is Salatin (Brendan Dillon Jr.) who has escaped with Luna to another dimension — Beastmaster 2 alert, it’s Los Angeles — and get back home, except that Ulrich ends up turning evil. Sorry to spoil that, as it’s the most original part of this.
David Marsh directed, wrote, produced, edited and did the special effects for this and well, he had a vision. Did the vision live up to what was in his head? Who can say? He somehow made this with hardly any budget, thousands of ideas, a cast of unknowns and extras who came from the Society for Creative Anachronism.
There’s a lot of fog, some awesome zombies, wizards who show up in mirrors and two out of time wizards screaming at cars (and one of them excited about how much more attractive sex workers are in 1989 than where he comes from).
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