I like going to the gym. It’s something I would have hated as a geeky kid, being surrounded by people working out, but today, I really find myself looking forward to doing cardio or situps and even lifting weights. I may hate that my gym serves pizza or that so many people text while they should be doing sets, but at least a demonic woman has never taken my gym over and tried to kill everyone. That happens? Well, have you seen Death Spa?
This little-known gem came to people’s attention after being the subject of an episode of How Did This Get Made?
Also known as Witch Bitch, this feels like the most 80’s movie ever. However, it came out in 1989, which means it feels instantly dated. But hey, Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead) is in it!
Michael Evans owns the titular spa. He’s just lost his wife, who had a pregnancy gone wrong and became paraplegic, so she set herself on fire in a field. As you do. Now, she is possessing the Starbody Health Spa. From turning a shower murderous to overloading a computerized Universal style machine to tear a man apart, this is one gym that demands that you spray down the machines and use proper etiquette. There’s also a possessed blender and a freezer with murderous fish, which look like no seafood I’ve ever seen before.
If you’re coming looking for nudity, this movie is packed with it. Oh the late 80’s, when the internet was just a dream and kids found porn in the woods and rented movies like this.
The film also features Merritt Butrick in his last role. He played Captain Kirk’s son in the Star Trek movies and was Richie in Fright Night Part II. And hey! That’s Rosalind Cash from The Omega Man as a police officer!
There’s also a love scene involving asparagus if you’re into that. Make sure to not skip leg day!
Here’s a drink when you break up a sweat.
Witch Bitch
2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. lime juice
2 oz. Gatorade
3 oz. Mountain Dew
Fill a large glass with ice, then add gin and lime juice.
Now, it’s Gatorade’s turn, then fill the rest of with Mountain Dew. Fancy, huh?
The last time we saw Henry Morrison/Jerry Blake, he was all shot up and stabbed in the heart, mumbling “I love you” and falling down the steps. Who knew that he’d survive that and come back to do it all over again?
Jerry Blake is a survivor. Since the end of the last movie, he’s been recovering in a Puget Sound mental institution, one that he soon escapes. Before you can say “new identity” he’s become Gene Clifford and has moved into the planned community of Palm Meadows outside Los Angeles.
He’s already found a new potential family with Carol Grayland (Meg Foster, Masters of the Universe, They Live) and her son, Todd (Becca fave Jonathan Brandis). As the therapist to all of the local wives, he learns that her husband Phil ran away last year and when he tries to come back to his family, our stepfather hero kills him and covers it up.
The mail carrier, Matty Crimmins (Caroline Williams, Stretch from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2!) sees through his identity when she finds mail addresses to the real Gene Clifford that reveals him to be a black man. You know what happens to people who figure out the stepfather’s identity? Yep. They get removed and their wine gets taken.
Those bottles of wine and the song “Camptown Races” end up fingering Gene, with Carol confronting him just before they’re due to be married. Despite being stabbed, the stepfather almost succeeds in killing again until Todd stabs him with a clawhammer. Then comes the best part in this entire film: mother and son walk out to “Here Comes the Bride,” while a choir reacts in abject terror to the fact that they’re covered in blood.
Oh man — our kinda sorta hero isn’t dead yet. He makes his way to the altar before saying, “Until death do us part.” Oh man. Well done, dude.
After a test screening of the film, Harvey and Bob Weinstein complained about the lack of blood and demanded re-shoots. Director Jeff Burr (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Puppet Master 4, Puppet Master 5: The Final Chapter, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings) and O’Quinn refused, so the shots were added in by another director.
Stepfather 2 isn’t quite as good as the original. But hey — if you’re looking for one more movie where a dad wipes out his family…
Synapse Films has released this film on DVD if you’re ready to see it with your dad.
So many of the films that I love, I learned about from the zine Cinema Sewer. Generally, if Robin Bougie recommends a film, you know you’re in for something astounding. And if he recommends a film while also warning you off from it, then you’re probably going to get something that scars you for life.
Here’s what he had to say about Things: “My friends, this is the worst movie ever made.
I don’t mean like the way Troma makes bad movies. I’m talking about bad with the best of intentions, like all of the best “bad” movies. You like tormenting yourself with hilariously trashy, moronic, gory, IDIOTIC bad films??THINGS is the fucking KING of bad movies. This is the movie you put on when you have a get together of pals — and just blow them away. Trust me, you have never seen anything like this in your life. It’s absolutely astonishing in how it is able to MENTALLY WRECK anyone who watches it.
You think you’re bad ass? You think you’ve seen the most insane hardcore shit around? You’ll seriously be weeping and sobbing on the floor in a puddle of your own drool half way through THINGS. Try it and see if I’m joking. JUST FUCKING TRY IT AND SEE IF I’M JOKING!!”
Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film in 1989 for around $35,000, Things was the first Canadian shot-on-Super 8 gore movie that was commercially released on VHS. I can only imagine what people thought if they ever picked this up in a video store. We used to challenge our friends to finish Bloodsucking Freaks when we were kids, because that was the goriest blast of strangeness we could get in our hometown. I fear what I would have grown up to become if I had seen Things when I was in my teens.
Wikipedia is ill-prepared to give a synopsis of this film, saying “A husband with a fanatical desire but inability to father children is driven to force his wife to undergo a dangerous experiment. This results in hatching a non-human life form in his wife’s womb, and the birth of a multitude of things.”
It’s kind of about that. There is also a lot of people drunkenly walking around an apartment talking about Aleister Crowley and Salvador Dali, too. There’s a lot of beer drinking and arguing. And then there’s former adult film star Amber Lynn in one of her first mainstream roles, playing a news reporter who has nothing to do with the rest of the film, with stories about George Romero fighting copyright law.
There’s also a sandwich eating scene that is given just as much importance as the rest of the plot.
This is the kind of movie that I wake up at 5 AM to watch by myself so that I don’t have to deal with Becca coming in and saying, “What the fuck is this shit?” What the fuck is this shit, indeed!
Canuxploitation.com said of the film, “Shot for pocket change in the bleak suburban wilds of Scarborough, Ontario, Things is nothing less than a violent filmic assault on its audience, putting viewers through a punishing gauntlet of technical ineptitude so heinous that it defies every basic assumption about what constitutes a horror film.” They also referred to it as “an entirely dehumanizing film event.”
I don’t know if that’s praise or scorn, a fact that seems to sum up most people who have seen this film. We know it’s bad, we hate that we watched it and yet we feel that we must share it with others so that they can experience whatever the fuck we just watched for ourselves.
In no way is this a good movie or one I feel that anyone who isn’t prepared to deal with psychological torture to watch. There are Casio keyboard tones distorted, chopped and screwed while people worry about going to the bathroom or discuss how they wished their brother had been born a midget. It’s like if David Cronenberg got all fucked up on some old weed that you found in your sock drawer and sat down to scream a story at you through a child’s megaphone toy, pausing every once in awhile to flip on different channels on the TV.
I resisted watching this for so long. And now I’m infected. All I can do is spread the contagion. You can grab the Intervision DVD release of this movie at Severin‘s website if you are brave or stupid enough to want to see it.
The movie starts as researchers discover that the natives are practicing voodoo, so they kill the priest, who places a curse that brings the dead back to life before he dies. Only a young girl named Jenny (soon to be played by Candice Daly, Liquid Dreams) survives thanks to an enchanted necklace her parents gave her.
Years later, she returns to the island to find out exactly what happened. And she isn’t alone — she’s brought a gang of mercs with her. There’s Tommy (Don “The Dragon” Wilson!), Dan (Jim Gaines, American Ninja), Rod and Louise, Rod’s girlfriend. And then there are also some hikers — Chuck (played by 80’s gay porn star Jeff Stryker), David (Massimo Vanni/Alex McBride, who is in a ton of Italian exploitation as an actor and stuntman) and Mad — who have found the underground temple where the curse was originally created.
Of course, they bring the curse back and David is eaten and Mad killed. Rod soon gets bitten and ends up killing his girlfriend. David comes back and kills Dan. Seriously, our cast is pretty much cannon fodder. Tommy volunteers to stay behind and blow the base up to take out the zombies as Jenny and Chuck run back to the cave.
There, Chuck is attacked and killed by zombies while Jenny removes her protective necklace and becomes a super zombie that can rip out its own eyeball and survive. And then, Fulci style, the movie just ends.
The cave set looks a ton like the sets of City of the Living Dead. And the movie really jumps all over the place. But does any other zombie movie have as catchy a theme song as this? Alright, does any zombie movie not called Return of the Living Deadhave a song this good?
Severin has the definitive release of this, complete with interviews with Daly (recorded before she died in 2004), Stryker, Fragasso and Drudi. You even get a CD of the soundtrack. What are you waiting for?
“Venice before the year 2000. Squares, museums and churches. Tourists crowd the streets. Venice is threatened by the high tide. The seaweed is killing the oxygen in the waters and the putrid waters are corroding the foundations of the city. This is Venice today. What will happen tomorrow?”
Say what you will about Bruno Mattei, but the dude knows how to grab you from the first frame of travelogue footage!
The film starts in a control room, where a bunch of dudes in grey and yellow futuristic jumpsuits watch a research base and most of Venice fall into chaos, as one guy keeps screaming that there are mutants everywhere. There are no survivors, just chunks of videotape that they watch.
Basically, if this feels more like Aliens than the Terminator rip-off you were expecting, buckle the fuck up. While this movie was released as Terminator 2, Mattei and his cohorts Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, who activated their Wonder Twin powers of insanity to create Troll 2, refuse to stop at covering one film. Oh no — this movie is too strange for that.
They decide to assemble a team — the Mega Force! — to investigate and they bring Sara, a scientist, along to find the diary that has the answers to this breakout. Samuel Fuller from the Tubular Corporation asks to come along, just like Bishop. The fact that two of the members of the team are Geretta Geretta and Tony Lombardo from Rats: Nights of Terror are all the reason I needed to purchase this. The even more amazing fact that Geretta is playing a tribute version of Vasquez from Aliens is the icing on this slice of exploitation tiramisu.
Geretta’s first line is “Alright you bunch of pussies, I’m back and I’m kicking ass!” Then, we watch one of the kinda sorta Space Marines on Operation: Delta Venice practice his nunchakus with his back to the camera. Come on dude — work the hard cam. Also: the Mega Force’s base looks like a high school locker room. Also also: they are not Megaforce.
There’s a member of the Mega Force that has long blonde hair and wears Oakley glasses and a red bandana. I love him already. Geretta’s character, Koster, then starts to yell about Italians being allowed on the mission and gets into a racially motivated fight with another crew member. Mega Force! Get it together!
If you haven’t picked it up yet, I love this fucking movie. This is why I watch Italian low budget genre films all wrapped up in one messy package. The acting is either way too intense or has stilted line readings, sometimes within the same sentence. The costumes are laughable. And the action is everything you wish there was more of in other films without pesky things like character development and a plot to get in the way.
Every time I worry that I’ll never find a film like 2019: After the Fall of New York or 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Italian filmmakers surprise me with something wonderful. All you need are some vests, bike helmets and soccer pads and a fancy synth score and you have a futuristic army ready to do battle with whatever the hell the bad guys in this movie are.
The Mega Force finds a bunch of people inside the alien eggs, but those people beg to be killed before grabbing and choking Koster. Soon, the aliens or mutants or whatever they are decide to throw people around and kill everything in their path. If you love movies where people fall to their deaths, this should be in your collection.
If you thought there wouldn’t be a Newt character, you aren’t watching much Italian cinema. Yep — in the midst of all this craziness, a small child has survived.
The best scene in the film has the soldiers all trapped in a room and the scientist vainly trying to open the door by pushing the left button. Clearly, there is a button on the right, too. She ignores this and keeps jamming the left button like someone trying to make the elevator get there faster. Finally, after screaming, monsters blowing up and much death, someone finally tells this brilliant scientist to just push the button on the right. Holy shit — this movie is awesome.
I have learned many things from this movie. No matter what language you speak, your scream sounds pretty much universal. You can fire a Franchi SPAS-12 one-handed and accurately hit a target. And while I previously was taught that seaweed is really algae and algae helps provide much of the Earth’s oxygen, in the world of this film this is not true. Basically — fuck science!
I wonder — was Samuel Fuller named for the director? Why is Venice the center of the world? And why, when I knew this was also called Terminator 2, was I so surprised and elated that the Bishop character was also a Terminator?
Finally, the ending — if you think that they’re not gonna get time travel somewhere in this wedding soup…just wow.
If you come to a party at my house in the next few months, chances are that you will be forced to watch this movie while I scream like a maniac and laugh my ass off. You have no choice but to comply.
Of course, Severin put this out. Grab one now — don’t delay!
After years of hating the franchise, Paramount finally decided to give the Friday the 13th series a higher quality of budget and directors. Hey — it only took six movies!
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)
Associate producer Barbara Sachs helped dream up several concepts for this film and according to writer Daryl Haney, “She wanted it to be unlike any other Friday the 13th movie. She wanted it to win an Academy Award.” GQ ran a great article on this film.
Originally intended as a crossover with Freddy Krueger, the logline for this film was, “What if Carrie fought Jason?” What ended up happening was one of Becca’s favorite films in the series.
Directed by John Carl Buechler (Troll, The Dungeonmaster), who also contributed to the special effects, this film establishes the definitive Jason. This is also because it’s the first appearance of Kane Hodder in the role.
Jason is still at the bottom of Crystal Lake, but as Tina Shepard watches her alcoholic father abuse her mother, her mental powers emerge and she drowns her father.
Fast forward and she’s a teenager (Lar Park Lincoln, House II) whose mother (voiceover artist Susan Blu) and Dr. Crews (Terry Kiser, Bernie from Weekend at Bernie’s!) have taken her back to that house to study (exploit) her powers.
Dr. Crews bedside manner is, in a word, the shits. He screams at Tina until her powers start working. She gets upset and runs outside, wishing that she could bring her father back from the dead. The only problem? She brings Jason back instead.
There is also — can you even be surprised at this point — a house of teens throwing a party for Michael (William Butler, 1990s Night of the Living Dead). They include Russell, Sandra (Heidi Kozak, Slumber Party Massacre 2), Kate, Ben, Eddie (Jeff Bennett, the voice of Johnny Bravo), David, Maddy, Robin (Elizabeth Kaitan, who was in the Vice Academy movies), Nick and Melissa.
Tina can foresee that they will all die and Jason lives up to her visions. She’s the Final Girl and has to lose everything, even her mother. As she fights back with her powers, she pulls the mask off his face, revealing it to be decayed and near demonic. Finally, her father rises from the dead and drags Jason back underwater. Yet even after all of that, we can still hear the theme song as someone finds the killer’s mask.
The working title for this film was Birthday Bash, but the original script was even titled Jason’s Destroyer. There were 9 different cuts sent to the MPAA to avoid an X rating, which is still amazing to me. Even more upsetting is that Paramount threw away all of the cut footage, so there’s little to no chance that an uncut version will ever be seen. I still think that the rumored 1989 Dutch release on VHS, which includes all the gore, is an urban legend.
A cool bit of trivia for Friday the 13th fans: the narration in the beginning of the film is by Walt Gorney, who played Crazy Ralph in the first two films.
Kane Hodder really proves why he should be Jason here, as he almost died in a stunt where he fell through the stairs and achieved the record for the longest uninterrupted on-screen controlled burn in Hollywood history at 40 seconds.
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
Just like a band that continually says that they are going to retire, this was also intended to be the final film in the series. It takes Jason out of his element and features probably one of the greatest horror movie trailers ever:
It’s just so ridiculous that you have to see the film, you know?
Well, it’s not the last film in the series, but it’s the last one that Paramount would produce until 2009, as New Line Cinema would take over after this. And the working title? Another Bowie song, Ashes to Ashes.
The movie starts with a teenager playing a prank on his girlfriend, dressing like Jason. But the boat they are on reanimates him and he kills them both.
Soon, the SS Lazarus is setting sail from Crystal Lake to New York City to celebrate the graduation of the senior class. Along for the ride are biology teacher Dr. McCulloch and his niece Rennie, English teacher Colleen Van Deusen, J.J. (Saffron Henderson, the voice of Kid Goku and Kid Gohan on Dragonball Z), boxer Julius Gaw, popular girls Tamara and Eva (Kelly Hu, The Scorpion King) and video student Wayne. Oh yeah! And Toby the dog!
Everyone but McCulloch, Van Deusen, Rennie, Julius, Toby and Sean are killed, so they escape aboard a life raft to New York City, where Jason stalks them in the Big Apple.
This movie is packed with some audience pleasing moments, like J.J. getting killed by her own guitar, Julius’ head getting punched into orbit after trying to outbox Jason, a gang that gets Rennie high and makes her even more freaked out by Jason, her uncle getting killed after it’s revealed that he tried to drown her as a child…oh man, this one is packed with greatness. And then Jason drowns in a sewer.
Due to the box office results of this film, Paramount sold the series to New Line. We’d have to wait 4 years for the results. That said — this movie made $14,343,976 with a budget of $5,000,000. That’s not horrible numbers.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
At Camp Crystal Lake, an undercover government agent lures Jason into a trap, blowing him up real good. I saw this scene in a movie theater in Youngstown, OH (former murder capitol of the US!) and the crowd cheered their name being mentioned as a place Jason had been seen.
Soon after, the body is being examined by a coroner who is moved to eat the heart and ingest the spirit of Jason. He goes right back to Crystal Lake and right back to killing him. And now comes the part of the story that no one has ever figured out until now, making the story just like Halloween(again!): Creighton Duke (Steven Williams, Dr. Detroit) is a bounty hunter who learns that only members of Jason’s bloodline can truly kill him. Even worse, if he can possess a member of his family, he’ll become invincible.
The only living relatives of Jason are his half-sister Diana Kimble (Erin Gray!), her daughter Jessica, and Stephanie, the infant daughter of Jessica and Steven Freeman (John D. LeMay, who played Ryan Dallion on the otherwise unrelated Friday the 13th: The Series).
Jessica is now dating tabloid TV reporter Robert Campbell (Steven Culp, Rex Van de Kamp from Desperate Housewives), yet it is Steven that saves her from Jason. He gets blamed for her mother’s death and just Robert is about to take advantage, Jason goes into his body, all with the goal of impregnating his half-sister and making a perfect Jason baby. Oh incest, we were waiting for you to show up.
Meanwhile, Jason wipes out most of the police in town. But then Duke the bounty hunter steals the baby and demands that Jessica meet him at the Vorhees house alone, so that he can give her the mystical dagger that can kill Jason. Now this film has become The Omen.
Despite all this, the heart that is Jason grows into a demonic infant and then crawls into a dead woman’s vagina and is reborn. Yes, you just read that sentence correctly. And man, I said that 5 was the scummiest entry in the series!
It all works out — the dagger releases all of the souls that Jason has accumulated and demonic forces drag him into hell. At the end of the movie, a dog finds Jason’s mask and of all things, Freddy’s gloved hand pulls it into the ground!
Mike McBeardo McPadden wrote about watching this scene on 42nd Street, where the crowd went wilder than any he’d ever experienced and that a man screamed to no one in particular, in the dark, “Freddy wants somebody to play with … IN HELL!!!!” Man, I wish I was there for that. You should also totally grab his Heavy Metal Moviesright here at Bazillion Points Books.
Finally, after all these years, Freddy and Jason were set to battle. But guess what? We’d have to wait ten years for it to happen. Because after all, Jason had to go to space first.
Did you know that Larry Cohen wrote, produced and directed the last film Bette Davis was ever in? No? Well, she dropped out after filming began, citing issues with the script and how she was being photographed, but Cohen claims that it was due to her ill health. Regardless, the results are…interesting.
Davis plays the title villain, a chain-smoking witch (Becca sees her as the hero of the story) who marries Sam (Lionel Stander, Max from Hart to Hart) while his vegetarian family — daughter Jenny (Colleen Camp, the maid from Clue) and husband Steve (David Rasche from Sledge Hammer!) — are on vacation.
When Davis left the film, her character becomes a cat and her daughter Priscilla (Barbara Carrera, Never Say Never Again, Condorman) takes over as the film’s villain. She mostly argues with her other about switching bodies and sleeping with Steve.
People get shrunk, Tom Bosley, Seymour Cassel and Richard Moll (remember, all 80’s horror and science fiction must have either him or Robert England in it) show up and there’s a crazy moment where Jenny discusses how much she misses her mother and they show a photo of Joan Crawford!
This is…well, it’s weird. You can tell the movie fell apart when Davis left days into filming for a dentist visit and never came back. Her ADR was all done by Michael Greer (Thorn from Messiah of Evil!), who was an accomplished female impersonator. What a strange film!
Are you ready to be further confused by the House and La Casa numbering and naming structure? The Horror Show had been financed through pre-sales of foreign distribution rights using the title House III. By the time filming began, the film was definitely going to be part of the series, then United Artists thought that The Horror Show was a better title for the U.S.
OK. Makes sense so far, right? But when House IV came out in 1992, many of us couldn’t remember there being a House 3. And with the internet in its infancy, not many of us knew that The Horror Show was also La Casa 6 in Italy. Confused yet?
It gets worse. The Horror Show is about a killer named Meat Cleaver Max, played by Brion James, who is sentenced to the electric chair and dies. But wait — he’s made a deal with the devil and comes back to haunt the cop who put him away — as well as that policeman’s family — with supernatural powers.
There are also some character actor appearances — Lewis Arquette (father of the Arquette family of actors) and Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs). But this movie feels the weight of the late 80’s push for movies to be sequelized, in the same way that Shocker felt like it was made to set up a franchise.
But wait — isn’t that the same plot as 1989’s Shocker with Horace Pinker making a deal with the devil to come back and haunt the football player who helped capture him? Yes. You are 100% correct. The same year, The First Power had the same exact storyline, too! You could also point to 1987’s Prison and 1988’s Destroyer as having similar concepts, but The Horror Show/House 3/La Casa 6 and Shocker go beyond that and feel like the same exact movie (except for the pop culture elements that Craven injected into his take as he tried to create a new Freddy).
And again — this has nothing to do with the two House movies that came before, which have nothing to do with each other either, other than the title. Whew!
Let’s just get to the movie, where Meat Cleaver Max escapes and frames Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen, Near Dark) for a new series of crimes and haunts the house where his family lives. Only a parapsychologist can help them now.
Of course , everything ends up happy. Of course, the cat survives. Of course, they get a 5-year supply of chili at the end. What?!? Seriously — I regret the time I spent watching The Horror Show and that doesn’t happen all that often. I’m not the only one embarrassed. Noticeably in the opening credits, Allyn Warner is credited as Alan Smithee. I love that they spelled Allan Smithee — the pseudonym when someone wants their name taken off a movie — incorrectly.
Want to see The Horror Show? Shout! Factory has you covered, as they’ve released the film to blu-ray. Or you can grab the House 3 version that Arrow Video released at Diabolik DVD. It’s also streaming for free with commercials at VUDU.
I wonder, quite often, why hasn’t there been a new Friday the 13th for nearly 9 years? Then I watched every single one of the films, back to back to back (and back) and I can tell you that they’re endless repetitive movies that ended up relying on gimmicks to get by. Is there a new idea that can make them fresh (yes, there is Hollywood, comment right here to get my ideas)? Has anyone even asked Jason Vorhees if he even wants to come back?
Unmasked part 25 is all about Jackson, a serial killing maniac with a hockey mask who is tired of killing. He can’t even remember why he started killing, other than a horrible childhood that he feels absolves himself of all guilt. Nothing makes sense until he meets Shelly, a blind girl who makes him see that there can be more to life than ripping out peoples’ hearts.
The world knows so much about Jackson’s life that his murders have been filmed in a series of films called Unmasked (or Hand of Death, if you’re watching the film’s other title. This makes no sense when we get to the marquee at the end, but I doubt they had the budget to film that scene twice.). His father was a killer too, one who could have been the world’s greatest if only he had the heart to kill his wife and son. Instead, they moved to America, where Jackson was believed dead after drowning at a summer camp (if you didn’t get the reference, this is so not the film for you). Now, he lives with his drunkard of a father who constantly laments the days when he was a killing machine and how bad of a son he has.
Shelly offers an escape — as a blind woman, she can’t see his scarred face. She even understands his need to wear a mask at all times. In fact, she blindly — pardon the pun — understands everything that Jackson throws at her.
Unmasked part 25 is a wildly uneven film to say the least and perhaps that’s part of its charm. At times, like when Shelly is trying to introduce Jackson (clad in red boxers with “bad boy” written on the ass) to BDSM, it’s played like a broad comedy. At other times, such as when he reads her Byron or talks about how everyone wearing a mask at Halloween angers him, it reaches a grimy paw at the heartstrings. And there are also moments — like when Jackson literally tears a man’s face off (played by Christian Brando, whose ill-fated life could have been a horror movie) — it’s a straight-up slasher movie with more than decent special effects.
Once Jackson learns that Shelly is pregnant with his child and that the more time he spends around normal people, the more he wants to kill. As the film spirals to its downbeat ending, the masked killer learns that he can never walk away from his fate, not when there’s an Unmasked part 26 on the marquee.
Unmasked part 25 has some moments that made me cringe — the BDSM scene is played for laughs and Jackson can’t understand why his partner would enjoy sex and roughness together, yet he can only be aroused after killing. It’s an oversimplification of a much more complicated mindset, but then again, you don’t watch gore movies for subtext, right? But it’s also way better than you’d expect, attempting to tie the murders of a masked maniac to the real world. It’s also never been released on DVD, so if you want it, you’re going to have to search iOffer or eBay.
UPDATE: If any label was goign to get this on blu ray, it was going to be Vinegar Syndrome. Run to your internet device and order this NOW!
Sometimes, I watch movies in the middle of the night, after working long shifts of meetings, copywriting and brainstorming. Whatever brains that still exists in the mush and at this late hour are often exposed to sheer lunacy via films that I find on YouTube. When I awaken, my first thought is often, “Was that movie real or a nightmare?”
Elves is one of those films.
Kirsten and her friends innocently take part in an anti-Christmas pagan ritual in the woods, but then she cuts her hand and awakens a demonic elf who ends up being part of a Nazi plot to create the master race that Hitler always dreamed of. Yep, instead of the pure Aryan Nietzsche paradigm, the Führer dreamed of a world where human and elf hybrids would populate the globe.
Through one of those moments of perfect horror movie luck, Kirsten is the last pure Aryan virgin on earth. Nope, this isn’t a post-apocalyptic film. That’s just the way things are these days. Her grandfather was once a part of all of this, but he’s since reformed. Oh, he’s also her father, because inbreeding was a big part of keeping the bloodline pure.
But hey, Kirsten has no idea that any of this is going on. She’s just trying to get through the hell of holiday retail, working in a department store. That’s where she meets Mike McGain (Dan Haggerty, TV’s Grizzly Adams), an alcoholic homeless ex-cop who takes over for the store’s Santa Claus when the original is killed by an evil elf. Yes, I just wrote that sentence, perhaps the most batshit crazy one I’ve ever assembled in all my years of writing.
Mike starts living in the store, eating food that he steals from the snack bar where Kirsten works. One night, he saves her when the Nazis come to the store and kill all of her friends.
Will Kirsten survive? What does her mom think about all of this? Have you ever wanted to see a movie where an elf electrocutes a woman in a bathtub? What the fuck is an elfstone anyway? These and several other questions will and won’t be answered.
This is a film rich with purely inane and insane dialogue, including a lecherous cocaine using Santa that states, “Santa said oral!” and our heroine bemoaning that her only friend is a cat. There’s also a great scene where Mike goes to see a professor during a holiday dinner and the man describes how elves and Nazis are having this big ritual and incestual sex bloodlines in front of his children.
Geek note: Mike goes to the library and asks what the Dewey Decimal System Number is for the occult. The answer? 666. Nope. The real number would be 130, the code for books on parapsychology and the supernatural.
Is this film any good? Fuck no, it’s horrible. And I loved it. It’s my holiday gift to you and I’m so happy to share such a patently warped film with all of you.
B&S About Movies 
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