God bless you, Lucio Fulci. By 1989, things were so rough that you loaned your name to several movies that said that they were presented by you. Those five films — Bloody Psycho, Hansel e Gretel, Massacre, Sodoma’s Ghost and Touch ofDeath* — are all of varying qualities, but when they work, well — they work. They deliver what our basest instincts want in a Fulci film.
Directed by Leandro Lucchetti (who also wrote Vampire In Venice) from a script that he wrote with Giovanni Simonelli (the writer of the giallo The Crimes of the Black Cat and the director of Hansel e Gretel), it’s all about psychic Dr. Werner Vogler, who has come to a castle to heal the broken body of the lady of the house, who has a special relationship with her maid. And if you’ve seen enough Italian horror, you know exactly what I mean.
Somehow, the faith healing tai chi doctor ends up hooking up with the granddaughter of the crippled woman and they have without a doubt the most upsetting sex scene I’ve ever seen in which they pour liters upon liters of dairy products all over one another and scoop it out of one another’s mouths. Seriously, I must have watched this scene three times just to write how appalled I was by it.
There’s also a creepy doll, lots of dreams of murder and a corpse in a wheelchair. Then, this movie was pronounced dead and its best effects were packed in ice to later be transplanted into Cat in the Brain.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. As I watched this in the basement in the middle of the night, Becca had fallen asleep to a marathon of the other Halloween movies, so that this film — which copies the Carpenter format down to a song that is near-identical to the theme that he wrote — would play music or a scene, I could hear the original coming down through the vents.
John Radley was abused by every kid and his mother, all of his animals died on him, his daddy gave him a name and then he walked away and then he falls down a well after a prank and gets sent to Oakhurst State mental hospital. Scarred and not in our reality any longer, John can no longer feel empathy or pain.
Now, he’s killing everyone who ever done him wrong, taking their body parts and offering them to the only person who ever treated him right, his childhood crush Gretchen. The fact that he’s doing that as toppings on the many pizzas he delivers to her makes this even more disturbing.
La casa del sortilegio (The House of the Spell) finds our old friend Umberto Lenzi making a TV movie that fits right into his Ghosthouse style and I, for one, could not be happier.
This is one of four films in the Doomed Houses series of films that also includes his The House of Lost Souls and Fulci’s The Sweet House Of Horrorsand The House of Clocks. And he decides that what this movie needs is lots of the hero having visions of losing his head and having it thrown into cauldrons and giant vats of soup. And you know what they say, there ain’t no fake severed head like an Italian fake severed head.
Also: our hero Luke has a tarot-obsessed wife named Martha and if I know my Italian exploitation conventions — and you know I do — anyone named Martha is evil.
Also also: Italian directors hate cats and Lenzi says, “I guess I’ll continue that tradition,” and has a scene where someone throws at TV at a black cat and it exposes on impact.
You better believe that the words La Casa were really big on the posters for this. I mean, by posters it played on TV. Ah, you know what I mean.
Lenzi makes a film that may not be a narrative wonder, but if you made a supercut of all its weirdest scenes, you’d find a priest being beaten to death with a crowbar by a witch, a boyfriend chopped into pieces and dumped down a well and a basement where it snows and the daughter becomes a ghost. And maggots!
“You have to have maggots in this sauce,” screaming Lenzi, mad with cooking energy in the kitchen.
This movie is also called Ghosthouse 4 and for that I love it sixteen times as much.
Yes, if you’re going to watch one Bollywood Freddy movie — hello Mahakaal — you should watch another.
This movie is a mess, but it’s also a buffet of the first three A Nightmare on Elm Street films all at once with many of the best kills being redone on a much smaller budget.
This one is about Ranjit, a stalker who gets put in a mental asylum after he won’t leave some teens alone, and one of them — Rekha — hates him so much that it gives him the supernatural power to ruin lives. After nearly being strangled in a game of tug of war, the kids toss the nascent ek hajaar paagalon ka kameena beta into a campfire, so the kids do the right thing and hide the body becauseI Know What You Did Last Summer wouldn’t come out in India for 8 years.
Watching Bollywood versions of your favorite films takes some getting used to, as this starts with nearly an hour of stalking and courtroom drama before suddenly becoming a greatest hits package, along with not funny at all comedy filler and multiple song and dance numbers, all so that the running time is so long you really could have watched all the movies that it was inspired by — ripped off — in the same time.
One night at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, the nurses and doctors throw a party, but you just know that that dude with the darkest eyes, the devil’s eyes, is going to show up, right?
But what if Jason Vorhees showed up?
And what if Leatherface came over?
Then a zombie looking for a copy of the original film in this series?
Sure.
It’s wild, because these guys seem absolutely unhinged compared to the ways they’ve killed before. Leatherface saws off a woman’s leg and beats her to death with it. Jason pours acid in a guy’s face. And then Michael does everything from scissor stabbing to shoving a broken bottle in a woman’s face. He saves his best or grossest or most creative kill when his BM gets ruined when a victim wonders in, so The Shape drowns the guy in the brownest of water.
Then everyone raps.
There’s no way this movie isn’t better than Halloween Kills.
Toni Daniels doesn’t want to write the same college newspaper stories as everyone else at Tambler College. Luckily for her — or maybe not — there’s been a series of on-campus disappearances and at least one murder, all connected to Rush Week (and that one murder connected to a nude modeling session inside the science building that had to be for the infamous “foreign investors”).
Rush Week came way late to the slasher boom and as such has been forgotten. Leave it to the maniacs at Vinegar Syndrome to find it, fix it up and then explain to us just why it has merit. One of the joys of this movie is that it springs major music surprises on you, like The Dickies showing up and a random Gregg Allman cameo as a character named Cosmo Kincaid.
There’s also some star power with Roy Thinnes as Dean Grail and Kathleen Kinmont, who was in Bride of the Re-Animator and Halloween 4 as Kelly Meeker, makes an appearance.
This movie straddles the line of giallo and slasher, not for any artistic merit, but for the m.o. of its killer, who wants to purify the college of all of the sinful women who keep taking nude modeling jobs and posing in the buff in lecture halls. What Have They Done with Your Daughters?
Director Bob Bralver is mostly known for his stunt work, but he’s directed plenty of TV — The A-Team, Riptide, Knight Rider — and also made American Ninja 5 and Midnight. You may be forgiven if you think that this resembles a TV movie, as it’s relatively bloodless, but it replaces any viscera with more nude flesh than several films — if that’s your thing. I mean, you’re reading our site so it probably is.
The Tall Grass Country Club is a gorgeous piece of heaven on Earth, but just like Amity, once a major tourist event starts happening, it doesn’t matter how many dead bodies show up. Things will proceed according to schedule. Except that instead of a great white, Tall Grass is dealing with, well, a possessed lawnmower.
I got past the Troma logo at the beginning — their cityscape and jingle have made me rage quit many a film — and am glad I did. Blades is an adorable film if your definition of adorable means that people are repeatedly torn to shreds by landscaping equipment gone wrong.
This is the kind of movie that can get away with the tagline “Just when you thought it was safe to putt.” And the closing credits set up a sequel that never came: Hedges. “Just when you thought it was safe to trim.”
Blades was written by the same man who wrote and directed Girl School Screamers, John P. Finnegan. That should give you a little fair warning of what you’re in for.
Bobbi Young AKA David DeFalco* co-wrote and stars in this movie, which was shot in the metal bars — “The Living Room” — of Province, Rhode Island. Research has shown me that Bill Conti — yes, the man who wrote the song that Rocky runs up the steps to — as well as Blu Cantrell, Combustible Edison, Deer Tick, Jeffrey Osbourne, Six Finger Satellite and Throwing Muses may come from the Renaissance City, but very few hair metal bands (and yes, I realize Vital Remains and The Body are from there, but they are very far removed from the music in this movie).
The movie is all about Bobbi killing women he picks up in nightclubs, but also video effects. It’s the kind of movie that George Lucas might say of, “Maybe you shouldn’t use so many of those transitions.”
This is the kind of movie where the budget did not include cops and emergency crews, so according to an interview from Kotaku Australia, the production got someone to actually call 911 for the end of the movie.
The article goes on to explain that the sledgehammer kill that is so brutal in this movie also nearly killed the girl in the scene doing it, as DeFalco didn’t understand that he had to hit the styrofoam head and missed his mark by 5 inches, striking the actress directly in the head with the wooden handle and knocking her out.
You know, my cousin made a Shot On Video movie once and my grandmother made us all sit down and watch it. She beamed with pride the entire time the film played, which was mostly an endless scene of a drunk old man screaming and not letting the story go on, as they had to shoot in one of his friend’s houses. Then, my cousin’s character killed his girlfriend and had sex with her, but his character had VD, so he ripped off a condom and it was filled with blood.
“I’m so proud of you,” my grandmother said.
Heavy Metal Massacre is somehow worse than that movie.
*Oh man — DeFalco was also once a pro wrestler and on his 2005 film Chaos, he had an extra scene called “Inside the Coroner’s Office: A Tour of the L.A. Coroner’s Crypt” where he walks around the mortuary and talks about Los Angeles’ most disturbing crimes with technician Michael Cormier, who later died from massive organ failure in what has been said to be a conspiracy related to the Obama administration.
On the site Awesome for Awesome’s Sake, the video is said to be “17 minutes of a greased up, shirtless Dave “The Demon” DeFalco (the writer/director of Chaos) flexing and ranting (wrestler style) about how brutal the world (and his movie) is and how much Roger Ebert sucks…in front of real dead bodies (wrapped in plastic)!”
Then, Cormier “walks us through the various crypts pointing out all sorts of stuff, like dead babies (wrapped in plastic) and dead fat people (wrapped in plastic)!”
This is followed by DeFalco and Cormier discuss their new project The Devil’s Doorway, in which their theory of how meth “opens up a doorway to another dimension allowing demons to possess these meth-heads and then these possessed speed freaks commit brutal crimes!”
Here’s the link that I found on YouTube about it. Any time I think I still can’t be stunned about movies, something amazing comes my way.
So yeah. Cormier died right around the same time as Andrew Breitbart in very much the same way. He ingested arsenic 24 to 48 hours before his death and it’s never come out as to why.
Oh, this friggin’ SOV’er . . . it’s a bizarre gem that wastes no time and is everything that the SOV porn-backed Spine strove to be — and failed. It skips the opening title cards and gives us two 30-year-old virgin teenagers making out for the first time — well, Marybeth gives herself away for the first time — on a backwoods rural road — and goes porn. Then the tits and dicks are a-floppin’ (we don’t see any penis, but you get the point). One silhouette figure in the fog later (it’s not an owl, Marybeth) and we get an ice pick in Biff Preppy’s ear and Marybeth — breasts a-flyin’ — gets another ice pick through the mouth into the tree trunk, and that’s after our black-clad killer in a beret — and no mask — gives her a quiz about dying and blood. So, you see: if you fail, you die. (And that’s an important “plot point,” so keep that under your beret, for later.)
Okay, so two kills are on the tote board. Roll the opening title cards with the not-Whitesnake metal tune about “moving violations” and “being under the gun” and “lost desires.” Is the SOVness as cheesy as the unpoofy hair metal?
Oh, hell yes. And so much more. This is a movie where, if you’re not a baptist, you’ll be forced into being a baptist. So, yeah, baptists are dying here: brutally. Luckily, the female ones wear lingerie and, once they take off the glasses and let down the hair bun — they’re “hot” as you know what. Yeah, so we think this is a bunch of adult film stars nom de plumin’ for mainstream legitimacy between the Penthouse reels.
Not Body Heat. Not Basic Instinct. Not Fatal Attraction. But wants to be. But Jack likes his ice picks like Catherine Trammel. But he’s no Michael Douglas.
In case you’re wondering — and if that opening kill salvo doesn’t put you wise: Fatal Exposure isn’t a repack of Dennis Devine’s SOV debut, Fatal Images (1989), although this, as with Devine’s flick, centers around cameras. But the camera isn’t haunted. But the photographer is: by Jack the Ripper.
I know. I know. Another Jack the Ripper movie? As if Christopher Lewis’s The Ripper, and Jeff Hathcock’s Night Ripper! and Peter Sasdy’s Hands of the Ripper, and Jess Franco’s (who fucks up any genre) Klaus Kinski-starring Jack the Ripper, and Lucio Fulci’s nothing-to-do-with-Jack Halloween ripoff The New York Ripper wasn’t enough . . . now we get SOV’in Jack Rippington, he the great, great grandson of the pride of White Chapel. So, Jack Jr.’s not possessed by a spirit, just a couple of f’d double helices from granddad Jack’s semen sacs.
So, what’s Rip’s (Blake Bahner, formerly of the U.S. soap Days of Our Lives) glitch? He photographs women . . . and drinks their blood, as it’s his “viagra,” if you will — so Jackie is a sort of vampire. As with this week’s review of Murderlust pinching-foretelling the serial killer exploits of Dennis “BTK” Rader, this time we’re getting a pinch of ex-race car driver and faux-photographer Christopher Wilder who used women to lure other women under the guise of “modeling” for him.
So, to than end, Jackie finds, not a new victim, but “love” with Erica — he picks her up in a cemetery; she’s “turned on” by death. She’s perfect: he uses her as bait to lure women for him to photokill. Of course, Erica (Ena O’Rourke, in her film debut; vanished shortly after) is as dumb as Marybeth who kissed the ice pick, earlier. And Erica will make — finally, after all the searching — a great incubator for Jack’s son to carry on the family’s business: making great art for: okay, you see, the real reason the original Jack the Ripper killed all those women: for his photography endeavors. Oh, and it gets weirder: Erica is a doppelganger for Jackie Rippington’s great grandmother. Calling Dr. Freud: Jack wants to oedipal grandma. Lovely. Let loose the semen sacs o’ double helices.
So, speaking of the ice picking that opened the movie: under 20-minutes in, we get a stockade decap and a gym drink tumbler blood refill. See, we told you baptists were going to die . . . in a soft-core sex slasher that ended up on Showtime’s late night “after dark” weekends all those cable-years ago. Circular saws, electrocutions, and a wide array of SOV-cheap gore, long, soft-core bedroom sex scenes padding the short running time, moonshine jugs of chloroform, a lingerie bondage scene, bumbling sheriffs, serial killers breaking the fourth wall, serial killer inner thoughts via voice overs, southern plantations that aren’t Dunsmuir Mansion but wants to be such, wooden actors (trying), and Bloody Mary drink jokes cut footloose across Alabama — with nary a banjo on anyone’s knee — ensues.
Master-pieces. Yuk, yuk. And Bits and Pieces is the title of another, earlier, SOV. A homage? Probably not. “Shocker,” meaning Wes Craven? Nah.
If you read our reviews for our “SOV Week” tribute, we’ve sunk pretty deep into the analog mire — but the quagmire gets quaggier via Google as you’ll find so many more SOVs from the ’80s and ’90s to overwhelm the VHS shelves of your analog mind. And this directing effort from Peter B. Good, the producer behind the death-docs Faces of Death III and IV (he made his directing debut with the 1978 sci-fi/haunted forest romp The Force on Thunder Mountain*) is one of the better SOV’ers of the ’80s that will be one of those analog scuzz’ers you’ll return to for a few more views over the years — as have I. It’s a shame this was Good’s final directing effort, as Fatal Exposure showed a lot of potential for future growth.
We found a nice, clean VHS rip on a really great, You Tube retro-VHS page, The Burial Ground 5. Enjoy!
* Yes, you know us all too well, for we have since reviewed the VHS slopper that is The Force on Thunder Mountain. Once a film title is dropped, the tape worm bores into the cortex and it must be excised by sheer QWERTY force.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Kansas cult filmmaker Donald Farmer made his first film, the short Despondent Yearning, in 1973; by 1976, he completed his sixth short, A Taste of Flesh: based on those titles, we’re guessing they’re skin flicks. After Christopher Lewis single-handedly birthed the home video SOV-market by bypassing con-fest screenings, Grindhouse theaters, and four-walling Drive-Ins for one-off showings, instead opting for distribution exclusively on the new “screens” created by the home video market for Blood Cult (1985), Donald Farmer was inspired to shoot his first feature-length film (90 minutes): Cannibal Hookers (1987).
As you can tell from the artwork, in conjunction with the title, the major and regional chains didn’t stock Cannibal Hookers: only the more out-of-the-way mom & pop outlets for us wee-lads with more discriminating tastes carried it (see Snuff Kill); even then, it was behind the beaded curtain at most of those outlets. While Farmer cleaned and shortened the running time for the impossible-to-find Demon Queen (1987), it was his third film, Scream Dream (1989), that was his first film to receive the most wide-spread distribution on the main floor in the horror section. And for a wee-metal head (moi), the cheesy mixture of rock and horror of the Hard Rock Zombies and Shock ‘Em Dead variety made Scream Dream an instant rental.
Since his meager SOV ’80s beginnings, Donald Farmer has amassed another 30-plus credits, with titles such as Vampire Cop (1990) and Cannibal Cop (2017), the too-irresistible-not-to-rent Chainsaw Cheerleaders (2008), Shark Exorcist (2015) and, we’re guessing, its sequel, Bigfoot Exorcist (2021). In between, Farmer also completed two documentaries on cult film: The Bizarre World of Jess Franco (1988) and Invasion of the Scream Queens (1992), the latter features Janus Blythe of fellow SOV’er, Spine (1986).
Cannibal Hookers
So, when you’re renting a film such as Cannibal Hookers, the title, in conjunction with the cover, its tagline, and a couple of film stills on the back cover of a ripped-out neck and chest is all you need to get the gist of the situation. Plot means nothing, as the copywriters opted to only tell us to “be prepared for a film that is depraved, with bloodsucking terror” that includes ne’er-do-well johns being sliced n’ diced. Of course, in the SOV greylands adrift on the boarders of the adult film industry, there’s more than likely a couple of incognito adult film actresses in the cast and more than likely — like Spine — shot by a porn company looking to move into the legit horror realms. But guess what: there’s hardly any nudity here, just like Spine. But Sheila Best, aka Tara the Southern Bell from G.L.O.W. for your wrestling fans, is pretty good as the bitchy “Carmilla” of the sorority.
Regardless of the suggestive box art, Cannibal Hookers is not the all-out slaughterhouse cross-pollination of the cannibal and vampire genres marketed: this is a “comedy,” after all. And when you’re dealing with a movie that concerns two sorority pledges forced into Sunset Boulevard hooker-servitude for the night, you know you’re getting a T&A comedy. Of course, the sleazy Gamma Zeta Beta sorority is a lesbian vampire coven — and our two pledges are the newest flesh-eating zombie hookers (a great cult title if there ever was one) to join these ladies of the night.
The gore . . . well . . . this is a film where you see the blade coming down, the scene cuts to a scream, and a limb falls into the shot, à laThe Spirits of Jupiter comes to my mind. But at least it’s all shot-in-camera practical effects (CGI blood splatter is the bane of my existence). In terms of SOVs overall: Cannibal Hoookers is a rougher VHS ride than most, one that’ll make you load up your copies of the superior Spine and Snuff Kill (1997) for one more spin.
You can view the trailer for Cannibal Hookers and learn more about Donald Farmer’s early career as he talks about the making of the film in the third episode of the SOV The True Independents web series as a You Tube sign-in. You can learn more about the full documentary at SOV Horror.com, your one-stop shop for all things horror.
Scream Dream
Donald Farmer impressively upped his game in this story about heavy metal’s newest superstar, Michelle Shock — whose albums are in the racks next to the faux metal gods of Black Roses (1988). As with those hypnotizing rockers led by the demon-morphing Damien in that film, Michelle Shock lords a supernatural power over her fans: a power so strong, just watching her videos has an effect on the males of the metal species. As with Black Roses, and the guys from Holy Moses in Hard Rock Zombies (1985) before her: when Shock’s band arrives in town to put on a concert, the town rises up in protest.
Needless to say: when the rock starts, the teenagers start to disappear. And when the rumors of Michelle Shock’s (a brunette) devil worship proclivities cause the promoter to cancel the show, her manager replaces her with (a blonde) Jamie Summers (ex-Playboy Playmate Melissa Moore, who’s done her share of Jim Wynorski flicks, such as Sorority House Massacre II and Linda Blair’s Repossessed). Shock then calls forth a demon (an impressive on-a-budget full body-and-mask by Tom Savini-crew member Rick Gonzales) to extract revenge on her band. We soon come to learn Michelle was actually possessed by a demon that’s been body-hoping metal singers over the years — and it now possesses Jamie to carry on the carnage.
The rock and the gore . . . well, we’ve always said Rocktober Blood (courtesy of its first and third acts, natch) is the best of the heavy metal horror flicks, and that hard fact still holds true. We’ll even go as far to say that, in a neck-to-neck race, Dennis Devine’s all female-rocking Dead Girls, crosses the finish line against Farmer, first.
While it’s as campy as Cannibal Hookers, Scream Dream ditches the comedic to play as a straight horror piece, one that’s helped by the familiar and experienced Moore adding a bit of thespin’ class to the SOV proceedings. And it’s kind of hard to hate a film that gives an unknown band, in this case, Rikk-O-Shay, a chance to get their hair-metal grunge tune “Ball Buster” out to a mass audience via a movie . . . that starts with a chainsaw-to-the-vagina bondage dream sequence and a blowjob-castration by demon-babe mouth.
You can view the trailer for Scream Dream as a You Tube sign in.
Demon Queen
Thank you, Massacre Video, for supporting the cause.
So, thanks to the fine folks at Massacre Video, the once hard-to-find Demon Queen is easily accessible for us horn-doggers who need it in our home library.
Ditching the sorority sister hi-jinks of Cannibal Hookers and cheese metal of Scream Dream, we’re now inside a video store with another ne’er-do-well clerk who implores members to rent his favorite horror films, for no other reason to pad out the film’s already-thin plot. The “plot,” such as it is, concerns a homeless female demon, natch, who’s actually a vampire (a bitch’s gotta drink), who moves in with a drug-dealing couple on-the-hook to a dwarf coke dealer for 6Gs.
Hey, it’s an easy swallow at only 46 minutes (40 if we cut the 6 minutes of end credits) — even with its cochlea-straining sound and repetitive Casio-whining synth music, so what’s the problemo? You know you love this stuff: it has all the over-the-top on-the-cheap gore and analog-tape effects that remind of those cheesy Missing Persons and Simple Minds camcordered-hits of early ’80s MTV yore. Oh, yes: the out-of-place “dream sequence” set piece from Scream Dream is back: only our succubus hottie does the dreamin’ as she de-hearts a guy. Meanwhile, those real-life heart-rips turn her victims into fine, Romeroesque citizens. Torn, bloody hearts against naked breasts and fleshy face rips, ensues.
Oh, yes! As with Cannibal Hookers and Scream Dream: I love every minute of the SOV-heart of it all; your own Dalton-ness down by the roadhouse, may vary.
While there’s no online streams of Cannibal Hookers, there’s a streaming copy of Scream Dream on You Tube. You can find DVDs of both films — which are not digitally restored, but straight VHS-to-DVD rips — on a couple of different imprints specializing in cult horror films. You can find Cannibal Hookers DVDs at Amazon and Walmart, while copies of Scream Dream are available at DVD Planet.
Oh, and guess what?! The SOV-lovin’ lads at Letterboxd Funtime You Tube makes my night, as I can sit and watch Demon Queen for the first time, ever. I’m stoked! Sam the Bossman is equally stoked, as he’ll be reviewing that film for our “SOV Week” blow out in September 2021.
Wow, it’s good to be home again, jammin’ on a “new” Donald Farmer SOV’er. Sweet!
From the Never Say Never Department: During the last two weeks of January 2023 we had, yet another, another “SOV Week” blow out — and gave Scream Dream a second, alternate look. Be sure to click through our SOV tags at the bottom of any of our SOV reviews to populate our ever-growning SOV catalog of shot-on-video films from the ’80s and beyond.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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