Directed by Rusty Lemorande and Albert Pyun, this is a sequel — of sorts — to Cannon’s Alien from L.A., this film suffered as many late Cannon films did due to lowered budgets*. In fact, the pre-production work and storyboards were wasted as the final film bears little resemblance to the script. Lemorande — the producer of Yentl and Captain EO — originally started as the director and stopped when the film was about halfway completed. He claims that he only made eight minutes of this movie.

Actually, he posted a note on IMDB: “I’m the named director of the film. Only the approximately first 8 minutes of the film were written or directed by me. The remainder of the film is actually the sequel to Alien In LA which was tacked on and renamed Journey to the Center of the Earth in order to fulfill contractual commitments by the production company to foreign distributors. The remainder of the footage I shot (my film) has never been seen by the public (and few others) due to the lack of funds at the time to shoot and insert the many special effects shots required. The storyline of my version/script is entirely different from that in the above-titled film (the released version).”

Two years after the filming stopped, Pyun came on and this became a sequel, but he wasn’t happy with this movie either and doesn’t have his name on many of the re-releases.

Kathy Ireland plays Wanda Saknussemm, is back but the truth is, the footage in this comes from a canceled sequel to Alien from L.A. That may explain why there’s a whole different story with Crystina (Nicola Cowper) being in charge of rock star Billy Foul’s (Jeremy Crutchley) dog and some young kids taking the dog’s basket into a cave to discover a different world, which ends up being Atlantis using the sets from the first movie over again.

Somehow, Pyun made this movie with zero budget and somehow turned out something. I’m not saying that it’s good, but it is something. I wonder how Pyun got Emo Philips to even be in this.

*The budget is so low that George S. Clinton’s music from Avenging Force and American Ninja 2 gets used as the soundtrack.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I originally posted this article on October 31, 2019 but was reminded of this film when the new Arrow Video blu ray was released. It’s one of my favorite slashers, sadly one that was released too late to have many people care about it. 

The Arrow Video blu ray release of Hell High has a new 2K restoration from the original camera negative approved by cinematographer Steven Fierberg, a new audio commentary with director/producer/co-writer Douglas Grossman and cinematographer Steven Fierberg, archival audio commentary with director/producer/co-writer Douglas Grossman and an archival introduction and audio commentary with film critic Joe Bob Briggs. 

It also has new interviews with Grossman, Fierberg, Christopher Cousins, Maureen Mooney and composers Rich Macar and Christopher Hyams-Hart. Plus there’s a location tour, deleted scenes, alternate opening titles, trailers and TV spots, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Ralf Krause and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring liner notes by Michael Gingold, including an exclusive interview with stunt coordinator/actor Webster Whinery.

You can order this bu ray from MVD.

I love that Arrow kept the Joe Bob Briggs intro to the DVD release of this film, as he so perfectly explains why this is an amazingly original slasher that more people need to see.

I had no expectations of what this movie would be like when I discovered it on YouTube. I figured that it would be about a high school class menaced by some sort of slasher villain, but I had no way to prepare for the gritty and just plain weird film that I would be confronted with. This is an incredible feeling and why I keep writing this site, as I want to discover these experiences and share them with others.

Unlike the typical slasher, this film finds itself spending time with the victim — high-school science teacher Miss Brook Storm (Maureen Mooney), who is barely keeping it together after some repressed childhood trauma. It’s also about a former quarterback named Jon-Jon who grows sick of the game and his sinister teammates, so he falls in with the delinquents like Dickens, Queenie and Smiler.

Speaking of that childhood trauma, it starts the film. In a swamp, a man and a woman are making love when he decides to start beating her with a doll that belongs to a little girl. The little girl watches and grabs some mud, waiting for the two to leave the swamp. As they do, she throws it in the man’s eyes and he wrecks, sending the man and woman into poles which impale them as the little girl stares at the accident she’s caused. Yes — that’s Ms. Storm and this murder has now become an urban legend as some believe a swamp monster is the real cause of these two killings.

As Jon-Jon becomes part of this new gang, they decide to ruin the football game by driving on the field in the middle of a play and stealing the game ball. It might seem like this movie has become a teen sex comedy at this point, but don’t worry. Soon, it will stop meandering and get even stranger.

The gang now puts on Halloween masks and belts Ms. Storm’s home with swamp mud before the shenanigans turn into full-blown sexual assault. You’d think that Queenie, the lone girl in the gang, would be against this, but even she joins in, subverting the very slasher nature that you expect from this film.

This is a movie that I want more people to see. Please go out of you way — you don’t have to thanks to Arrow Video — to watch it.

I’m beyond happy that social media did not exist for Tim Burton’s Batman. Could you imagine how upset — more than letters columns, fans in comic book stores angry about the film and the 50,000 protest letters sent to Warner Brothers — they would be about Batman being played by comedic actor Michael Keaton? The guy who made Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure making Batman? Didn’t we come so far from the Adam West Batman which people still hated and had not reevaluated in 1989?

Producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan had purchased the film rights of Batman from DC Comics in 1979 and Uslan continued pushing the dark detective side of the character when every studio wanted camp.

This was almost made a decade earlier, as Tom Mankiewicz completed based on the comics by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, who was hired to do the concept art. It never happened — at one point, William Holden was going to play James Gordon, David Niven almost was Alfred Pennyworth and Peter O’Toole would have been the Penguin –despite Joe Dante and Ivan Reitman — who wanted Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy as the Dynamic Duo — getting involved.

At this point, Batman in the comics had become a grim and gritty force of crime-fighting vengeance. The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: The Killing Joke became critical successes and despite an Englehart script that got closer, it was Sam Hamm who would take the story and make it work.

It took another Burton success with Beetlejuice to get this movie greenlit. Yes, comics were not big business in 1989. Bob Kane, who always had his name listed as Batman’s creator despite Bill FInger probably doing all the work with none of the savvy to get the credit, endorsed the film in the face of disbelieving comic book fans.

With Keaton on board, the role of the Joker had plenty of potential actors attached, such as Tim Curry, Brad Dourif, Ray Liotta, James Woods, Robin Williams, David Bowie and John Lithgow. Burton wanted John Glover, which I would have loved. But the studio always wanted Jack Nicholson.

Comic book fans were happy with this casting. As for Nicholson, he reduced his $10 million fee to $6 million for a cut of the film’s earnings and merchandise, which ended up making him around $90 million dollars.

The third star of the film would be Gotham City itself, a place designed by Anton Furst, who Burton had wanted to work with since he saw The Company of Wolves. He would later say, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so naturally in tune with a director. Conceptually, spiritually, visually, or artistically. There was never any problem because we never fought over anything. Texture, attitude and feelings are what Burton is a master at.”

The city was based on Brazil and Blade Runner, as well as the idea that Gotham was — in the words of Furst — “what New York City might have become without a planning commission. A city run by crime, with a riot of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going.”

Before Batman‘s release in June of 1989, a whole new wave of Batmania took over with $750 million worth of merchandise sold. I can’t even explain to people not alive for that summer what it was like or the lines of people waiting to see this movie. It was incredible, levels of fandom not seen since Star Wars.

For once, in the face of so much hype, a movie delivered.

Gothan is on the edge of chaos, as always. Boss Grissom (a perfect Jack Palance) openly challenges the authority of the police and government. His associate Jack Napier (Nicholson) is making time with his best girl Alicia Hunt (Jerry Hall). And reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) and photojournalist Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) are investigating a human bat that has started destroying criminals.

Napier and Batman face off at Ace Chemicals and the mobster crashes into toxic chemicals, transforming body and soul into the Joker. He takes over the mobs of the city and declares war on Gotham and Batman, who of course is Bruce Wayne (Keaton) and who has fallen for Vale.

Sure, it’s simple in retrospect, but that’s because it’s become part of the fabric of our fandom. Even today I marvel at the fact that Prince did this soundtrack, that Nicholson got his buddy Tracy Walter into the role of Bob the Goon — who had his own action figure and we figured was a major new bad guy only to unceremoniously be killed off by his own boss — and that character actors like Michael Gough and Pat Hingle could so easily become who so many of us envision Alfred and Commissioner Gordon.

Batman changed culture. It’s why superhero movies were finally taken seriously, even if it took Marvel to finally cement that. It launched Batman the Animated Series, perhaps the greatest comic book adaption of all time, a show better than its source material. And according to Scott Mendelson, it led to an increased importance of opening weekend box office receipts, less time between movies playing in theaters and being released for home viewing which killed second-run theaters, big time merchandising tie-ins and PG-13 being the best possible rating for box office.

As for Melniker and Uslan, all their hard work really added up to nothing. Their 1992 case against Warner Brothers claimed they were “the victims of a sinister campaign of fraud and coercion that has cheated them out of continuing involvement in the production of Batman and its sequels. We were denied proper credits, and deprived of any financial rewards for our indispensable creative contribution to the success of Batman.” The films made $2 billion but the settlement offered by Warner Brothers to the production team was minuscule.

Batman is a film that holds up for me. It was released at a magical time, my final summer at home before college, seeing my love of comic books shared on a big screen surrounded by my brother and best friend. I can still imagine it as if it were yesterday, my brother endless repeating the Joker lines we’d seen in endless trailers and commercials until the lights went down. “Wait until they get a load of me.”

Fabrizio De Angelis — who directed, co-wrote with Dardano Sacchetti and produced this movie — was so sure of its success that he made the sequel immediately afterward. You know, De Angelis doesn’t get mentioned all that often when people bring up Italian sleaze merchants, but the guy made three Thunder movies and six Karate Warrior movies, so he knew how to replicate a successful formula. He also produced so much great junk, such as The Last Match, The Beyond, Cop Target, Emanuelle Around the World and so much more.

Kevin (Richard Anthony Crenna, son of Richard, providing his own wardrobe and also getting dysentery while making this), Jennifer (Ann Douglas), foxy Pam (Sherrie Rose, Summer Job),  Bob (John Harper) and Mark (Pietro Genuardi) are sailing down a river in Santo Domingo to report on the water’s radioactivity. What happens if that radioactivity also gets into a crocodile? You won’t have to wait forever to find out.

For a while, they’re guided by Conchita and her dog Candy, but when that mutated reptile rises and destroys her, instead of the local government led by Judge (Van Johnson) figuring it all out, they frame the youngsters for murder, as Judge and Foley (Wohrman Williams) are the reasons why the town is in this whole mess.

There’s also Joe (Ennio Girolami, Viking from Sinbad of the Seven Seas), a hunter who knows the truth and is the Robert Shaw to no one’s Roy Scheider. The real star of the whole show is the gator, who pops up repeatedly and wipes out man — and spoiler warning — canine alike, but Joe is also man enough to literally surf on the thing.

If Becca and I ever get out to the Amazon, after watching this, Cubby is staying home.

You can get both this movie and its sequel from Severin or watch Killer Crocodile on Tubi.

When Henry Jekyl was young, he caught his father cheating on his mother in the barn. Caught, he was beaten by his dad as the half nude woman laughed at him, forever intertwining sex with violence and repressed sadomasochistic longings.

Welcome to a totally different take on the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Many years later, Dr. Jekyll is experimenting with the human mind, but really he’s just mixing ether with cocaine, which drives him insane and transforms him into Mr. Edward Hyde. Actually, it goes even further than that because it turns him into Jack the Ripper, a killer of women of the night who look just like the woman his father slept with all those decades ago.

That mix of ether and cocaine also allows him to play master to prostitutes and their clients where they lose their inhibitions and end up murdering one another. Meanwhile, his wife Elisabeth (Glynis Barber) begins to suspect that perhaps her husband has something to do with all the Whitechapel murders.

Director Gérard Kikoïne also made the 1989 version of Buried Alive (with Ginger Lynn, Robert Vaughn, Donald Pleasence and John Carradine), Lady Libertine, the Cannon film Master of Dragonard Hill and Love Circles. It’s a strange movie, as the costumes and money seem to be modern, yet it’s set in the Victorian era. Perkins doesn’t make the full makeup transformation as most actors do, but goes wild in the way he carries himself, adding another different killer to his career of odd characters. It’s definitely not for everyone — it mixes huge doses of sex with violence, which always seems to upset people — but for those ready for its surreal take on Jack the Ripper and a classic horror novel, there are plenty of rewards to be had.

Leonard Maltin said that it was, “Tasteless, pointless, and unpleasant.” That’s a standing ovation where I come from.

The Arrow blu ray of Edge of Sanity has a new 2K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative by Arrow Films, as well as brand new audio commentary by writer David Flint and author and filmmaker Sean Hogan, interviews about the movie with Stephen Thrower and Dr. Clare Smith, author of Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture, features on director Gérard Kikoïne’s career and him discussing the film, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys and a collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Jon Towlson. You can order it from MVD.

The final film between director J. Lee Thompson and Charles Bronson, Kinjite was the ninth movie they made together and was going to be shot back to back with The Golem, a movie I wish had been made.

When reviewing the movie, the Los Angeles Times said, “If you think you might be offended by it, don’t go. You will be.”

While in Japan, a businessman had watched a woman be assaulted on the subway without complaint. And when he comes to Los Angeles, that moment continues to obsess him to the point that he attempts to recreate it and he learns that American women refuse to suffer in silence. Running from the scene of his attempted crime, he’s mugged and as others in the community learn of the crime and begins attacking men who resemble the businessman.

The woman who was involved is Rita Crowe (Amy Hathaway), the daughter of LAPD vice-squad detective Lt. Crowe (Bronson). And when he learns that the man that tried to hurt his daughter has just lost his own daughter to a child prostitution ring. Now he must get past his hate for the man and prejudice against the Japanese to do his job.

There’s not really a happy ending here — the girl is saved but the experiences she’s endured have ruined her to the point that she overdoses — and Bronson and his partner (Perry Lopez) go against their badges and attempt to murder the gang to stop them from ever doing what they did again.

Beyond the last film they did together, this was Bronson’s last Cannon movie — he would make Death Wish V with Golan — and Thompson’s final movie. It’s a dark movie in two careers where plenty of equally dark corners were explored ending with a man satisfied with finally finishing the job he set out to do.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Act of Revenge is all about Annabella Allori (Margie Newton, Hell of the Living Dead, The Adventures of Hercules) and how she gets revenge for her brother and mother (Francesca Guidato Berger, whose husband Helmut is also in the cast). After opening a law firm in her hometown, people start dying.

And by dying, I mean that this is one of the few giallo — it’s closer to an erotic thriller, but by 1989 obsessives will take what we can get — where the protagonist murders someone with a skillful blowjob. Also: two women make love by pouring tea all over one another, which feels like the most unsexual sapphic moment ever.

Written and directed by Ninì Grassia, Act of Revenge predates the opioid crisis by making a pharmacist the target of revenge. I’m no lawyer, but I’m unsure if Annabella’s scheme couldn’t have been better set for the boardroom than the bedroom, but then we wouldn’t have this movie.

After some time, the giallo gives way to the softcore sexual thriller, a genre that sadly seems like it’s gone away. This isn’t the best example, but at least Newton is wonderful in it.