Tag Archives: 1989

Chattanooga Film Festival 2025 Red Eye #2: Baoh the Visitor (1989), Call Me Tonight (1986) and Dragon’s Heaven (1988)

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A triple feature of anime in the middle of the night. What better way to spend the evening?

Baoh the Visitor (1989): This movie takes over a year of manga and makes it fit into a 45-minute  original video animation (OVA). Created by Studio Pierrot and distributed by Toho, this is an early release by Hirohiko Araki, who would go on to make JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.

17-year-old Ikuro Hashizawa has been taken by Doress and given a parasitic worm which transforms him into BAOH (Biological Armament On Help), giving him incredible superpowers which will also kill him in 111 days when the worm eats his brain. RFK, eat your stupid heart out.

BAOH is trying to escape along with 9-year-old psychic Sumire and her marsupial, Sonny-Steffan Nottsuo. They are being watched by Dr. Kasuminome, who created — perhaps too well, as he says — BAOH, along with his assistant Sophine and an army of monsters, including Number 22, Colonel Dordo and Walken, a psychic killing machine who melts objects before they can reach him. He sees BAOH as a worthy target and even burns the sigil for the creature onto his chest like some deranged Dr. Manhattan.

Hideaki Anno, who co-directed Shin Godzilla, was an animator on this movie.

Call Me Tonight (1986): We’ve all been there before, right? Phone sex girl Natsumi Rumi decides to actually meet one of her callers, Sugiura Ryo. The problem? When he gets worked up, he turns into a monster. She tells him that she’s familiar with Freud and decides to work out his issues.

So yeah, an anime, My Demon Lover, but also one that has references to Fright Night. It also doesn’t skimp when it comes to the transformation parts, as each time it’s almost a totally different monster. For all the promise of tentacle sex that you would expect in this, it’s more about titillation, as Natsumi wants to keep teasing Sugiura until he can control his transformations. Then what? We never find out, as another girl — and some bikers — ruin everything.

Dragon’s Heaven (1988): In the year 3195, humans and robots have gone to war. During one of the battles, a sentient combat suit named Shaian loses its pilot and shuts down for a thousand years. His enemy, Elmedin, is still alive, but Shaian has found Ikuru, a junker, who joins him as his new partner.

Obviously, creator Makoto Kobayashi loves Moebius, as this looks like his art come to life. He was also a major name in Japan’s scratch-build model world, which means that in this, he decided to make human-sized versions of the robots and have them fight in a live-action opening to the film.

Since making this, Kobayashi has worked as a mechanical designer on Space Battleship Yamamoto 2199 and on everything from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to Giant Robo, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Urotsukidôji: Legend of the Overfiend.

I’ve never seen anything look this gorgeous in an anime. Thanks to the Chattanooga Film Festival for introducing this to me!

SEVERIN BLU RAY RELEASE: High Tension: Four Films by Lamberto Bava

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Severin has a fantastic new release coming. Let me quote them here:

“In the late ‘80s, Lamberto Bava agreed to direct a four-part anthology series for Italian TV under the title High Tension. But when executives saw the completed features’ extreme themes and graphic violence, their broadcast was blocked for nearly a decade and they have only existed as grey market bootlegs since. Severin Films now presents their Official Worldwide Blu-ray Premiere: Tomas Arana stars as a horror director stalked by evil forces in The Prince of Terror, written by Dardano Sacchetti and featuring grisly FX by Sergio Stivaletti. In The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, adapted from a short story by poliziotteschi novelist Giorgio Scerbanenco, the survivor of a home invasion seeks vengeance. Daria Nicolodi stars in School of Fear, which is about a student academy with a dark secret. And in the giallo shocker Eye Witness, Barbara Cupisti stars as a blind woman who sees a murder. All four films are scanned in 2K from the original camera negatives with Italian and first-time ever English tracks, plus over 5 hours of Special Features and a Soundtrack CD curated by Simon Boswell featuring music from High Tension, The Mask of Satan, Demons 2, Delirium and more.”

The Prince of Terror: I’ve made a real 180 on Lamberto Bava. Maybe it’s because the first of his movies that I watched was Devilfish. I should have really started with Macabre, A Blade In the Dark or any of his TV movies and then I’d feel a lot different. And years ago, I unfairly compared him with his father instead of allowing him to be judged on his own merit.

I am sorry, John Old Jr.

This movie pulls the Body Double fake out as soon as it starts, as you get the jump scare of a woman — Magda (Marina Viro) — escaping an RV only to see her boyfriend drown in a swamp and become an inflated zombie and begin stalking her through a swamp.

This isn’t happening.

Instead, it’s the set of director Vincent Omen’s (Tomas Arana, The Church) latest movie. He hates the script from his longtime writer, Paul Hilary (David Brandon, who was the director in Stage Fright, so dumb that he let his cast stay in the theater where a killing machine was hiding), so he gets him fired before heading out to play golf. While he’s hitting the front 9, he’s interviewed by a reporter (Virginia Bryant, The Barbarians) who asks him about the rumors that he’s much older than 37 and his public perception as the “Prince of Darkness.”

He holds up one of his golf balls, which has 666 on it. Obviously, he’s into this persona.

After he finishes playing, he goes home to his wife Betty (Carole Andre, Yor Hunter from the Future), daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) and dog Demon. Yes, he is definitely into this demonic side. That evening, he and his lovely spouse are supposed to join his producer (Pascal Druant) and Magda for dinner. And then, golf balls explode into their home, sinister phone calls start and end only when the phone lines are severed, and their cute little dog is killed—by having his fur removed, and then he’s just thrown in the garbage—because this is an Italian movie. Then, a bald killer with a huge knife (Ulisse Miniverni) appears.

By the end of the movie, Omen gets shot, his wife gets her leg ensnared in a bear trap and his daughter gets buried alive in the basement. Plus, the toilet flushes blood and the security guard is replaced with a robot. It’s an all-over-the-place plan from Paul, the writer, and actor Eddie Felson– the bald monster — who both want to get back at Vincent.

Special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti got a workout here, as when Vincent gets his revenge, he starts attacking people with golf balls, including one that blows up a man’s wrist and another that goes Fulci and blows up an eyeball. There’s also a good Simon Boswell score.

I wonder how much of this story was writer Dardano Sacchetti getting his scripting revenge on former friend and co-creator Lucio Fulci. That scene where he’s accused of stealing ideas and it becomes obvious that Omen has no ideas of his own, as well as a bloody script emerging from a toilet, seems to lead one to feel that way. It’s fun in a TV movie way—I love this era of Italian TV movie horror—but it certainly doesn’t aspire to the heights that Fulci reached.

Extras on the Severin release include commentary by Mondo Digital‘s Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth, author Of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years Of Italian Giallo Films and interviews with Bava.

The Man Who Wouldn’t Die: This was originally going to air in 1989. Due to concerns about the violence of these films, it didn’t play on Italian TV again until 2007. The other three aired in 1999.

Written by Gianfranco Clerici (Strange Shadows in an Empty Room) based on a short story by Giorgio Scerbanenco, this is about a gang of five burglars that art dealer Madame Janaud (Martine Brochard, Murder Obsession) hires to steal art from a rich man’s villa. Led by Fabrizio (Keith Van Hoven, Demons 3), the thieves (including Lino Salemme, who did coke out of a Coke can in Demons and Stefano Molinari, the demon in the movie on the TV in Demons 2) tie up the man of the house and his wife, then take everything they can get their hands on so that Janaud can sell them to art collector Mr. Miraz (Jacques Sernas).

The problem is that one of the gang, Giannetto (Gino Concari) screws over the gang and cuts up the most expensive thing they take, Renoir’s “After the Bath.” He hides in the villa’s garage and returns for it later.

That would be bad enough, but Giannetto attacks the husband and then assaults his tied-up wife while the man watches. He gets enraged and kicks the offensive moron in the head and kills him. Fabrizio kills both the husband and wife, then wraps the body of Giannetto in a carpet. The gang argues about what to do, so instead of killing him, they strip him and dump him in the woods. Somehow, he survives and comes back to life in the hospital. He wants revenge, but he’ll be lucky to stay alive, as a giallo killer starts to murder all of the gang, with one’s face getting smashed, another being done in by toilet—head smashing and drowning, and a smooshed head for the last crook.

This was originally to be made by Lamberto’s father, Mario, who had been working on a script with Rafael Azcona and Alessandro Parenzo. It’s not Lamberto’s best work, but the kills are very well filmed and the Simon Boswell score is good.

Extras include interviews with Bava and Dardano Sacchetti.

School of Fear: Directed by Lamberto Bava and written by Dardano Sacchetti (who wrote nearly every Italian movie that you love), Roberto Gandus (Macabre, Madhouse) and Giorgio Stegani (Cannibal Holocaust), School of Fear is part of the second series of TV movies that Bava was hired to make.

If you have children, let me remind you never to allow them to attend European educational facilities like the Swiss Richard Wagner Academy for Girls, the Tanz Akademie or the Giacomo Stuz private school. I mean, a child drowns at the beginning of this movie, and that’s moments into it.

Diana Berti (Alessandra Acciai) arrives at the school and instantly encounters problems. There’s a deformed child in the shadows, her skirts are too short for the school’s leader (Dario Nicolodi), and oh yeah, she has past traumas that the school keeps bringing to the fore. You know what isn’t helping? The last teacher in her role died by going through a plate glass window, and they never fixed all that broken glass.

The real problem, as always, is the children. They play some secret game that the last teacher — the one who took a header through a closed window — was already worried about after she learned just how frightening it can be from one of her students.

This game takes them into the abandoned parts of the school, which are haunting for adults, much less little ones. These kids, however, are borderline monsters, able to hack into video signals, showing an image of her impaled on the front gate just like the last teacher and using Diana’s past sexual assault to remind her that no one will ever believe her when she tries to expose how horrible they behave.

They’re right.

The children are from the upper crust, the school has too good a reputation, and after all, look how sweet these young men and women are as they sing in the choir. Surely they couldn’t have done all this. Even her police inspector love interest, Mark Anselmi (Jean Hebert), thinks she’s being ridiculous about it all.

This movie is absolutely worth watching. It features a classroom of kids tearfully tearing to pieces the morality and art of Pier Paolo Pasolini while a child who looks like a dwarf in a red jacket runs wild on the grounds.

Extras include interviews with Bava, Roberto Gandus and Simon Boswell.

Eye Witness: Elisa (Barbara Cupisti) and Karl (Giuseppe Pianviti) are in a department store at closing time, waiting until no one is watching so that she can steal a shirt. She’s stuck there alone as Karl runs out to get their car and while the store is closed, she sees a secretary get killed by her manager (Alessio Orano)

Or, well, she doesn’t.

Because Elisa is blind.

Directed by Lamberto Bava with a script by Giorgio Stegani and Massimo De Rita, this is a made-for-TV giallo in which police commissioner Marra (Stefano Davanzati) investigates the suspects, who include the secretary’s lover (Francesco Casale), as well as Elisa and Karl. At the same time, the manager thinks that Elisa knows who he is because he believes she can sense him.

There are moments here, when it isn’t trying to be Wait Until Dark, when the film aspires toward the giallo of the past. I love the idea of a rehabilitation center for people with disabilities that tries to get them to expand their abilities. And of course t, he manager tracks Elisa in the hopes of killing her in a scene with echoes of Tenebre and “Blind Alleys” from Tales from the Crypt mixed with some incredible POV shots and great editing.

Unlike most giallo, we know the killer from the beginning. But that’s fine. The tension here comes from how close the killer gets to our heroine. And yes, as always, the cops are the absolute worst. Defund the giallo police, I always say.

Extras include commentary by Mondo Digital‘s Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth, author Of So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years Of Italian Giallo Films and interviews with Bava and Barbara Cupisti.

You can preorder it now from Severin.

Up Your Alley (1989)

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I have no one to blame but myself.

Why would I think a romantic comedy with Murray Langston — The Unknown Comic — as an unhoused man falling for an undercover reporter played by Linda Blair be any good?

It gets even worse.

I’ve been looking for this movie for about six years.

Yes, I waited and waited to see a movie directed by Bob Logan, who gave us not only Repossessed and Meatballs 4, but was so in the Linda Blair business that he made How to Get…Revenge, that I almost bought a very expensive VHS of this.

I just spent a week with normal people, and I could see them start to stare whenever I deviated from the expected path of loving movies. None of them needed to know how many Linda Blair movies I’ve seen — this is 39 of 74 — or how I immediately recognized Bob Zany and Ruth Buzzi in this. Do they need to know about movie drugs?

You just keep chasing the dragon and sometimes the dragon chases you. Here, reporter Vicky Adderly (Blair) decides to go all Street Smart and get the real story on street people who are very much like the fun people who help Angel. At least in this movie. Except that this is more like the last two Angel movies than the first two. If you understand that, you’re as messed up as I am.

Somehow, the heavy-set guy in this, Sonny Griffith (Bob Zany), keeps getting nearly killed and is almost wiped out by a giallo-style murderer. This is a comedy, so keep reminding yourself, and it has the typical third act where everyone finds out that Vicky really isn’t homeless.

Also: Yakov Smirnoff.

Also also: Without the paper bag, The Unknown Comic looks like a shitty John Ritter or a Temu Ron Silver.

Keep in mind that I have learned nothing from this, and I have so many other movies that I am hunting down, only to be either disappointed or have a Road to Damascus moment.

You can watch this on YouTube.

That’s Adequate (1989)

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Watching The Projectionist last week and then this, I felt like I was seeing the open and close of director and writer Harry Hurwitz. Now I have to go back and watch his Harry Tampa movies and Safari 3000.

Hosted by Tony Randall, this is a fake doc about the life and films of Max Roeebling (James Coco). It’s very ZAZ in that it keeps throwing jokes at you and unless you’re as obsessed by the history of bad movies as I am, you just might hate this.

But for those of you who want to take the ride…

Adequate Studios has been around since the 1930s and just copies what everyone else is doing. Hollywood epics (but dirty). Shakespeare (in animal costumes). A more violent Three Stooges. And somehow, Bruce Willis, Robert Downey Jr., Stiller and Meara, Sinbad and Robert Townsend show up and we get to see the career of Baby Elroy and Young Hitler (which stars Robert Vaughn!,) which is just Hitler in George Washington’s story.

Not Necessarily the News fans will be happy to see Anne Bloom and Stuart Pankin, Brother Theodore and Professor Irwin Corey appear and Susan Dey sings a folk song and then goes down on someone.

Not all the jokes land. Most people who will review this on Letterboxd will hate it, because they didn’t grow up in a time when all movies weren’t instantly available and you could find this weird late 80’s movie in a video store and wonder, “How can all of these people be in the same movie?” I don’t care how many of the jokes work, I laughed at the We Are the World comedian part and Bob Elroy Meets Frankenstein. If a movie can make you giggle a few times, I say it’s a success.

I mean, Joe Franklin is all over this. That’s worth at least three stars alone.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Underground Terror (1989)

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With that VHS art, I wanted to love this. I thought it was going to be an under the city horror movie, but no, it’s action. John Willis (Doc Dougherty) is a cop that has lost his public standing thanks to an article by reporter Kim Knowles (B.J. Geordan AKA Forbes Riley; Splatter University). Then, they have to find a way to work together to stop attacks on New Yorkers led by the recently escaped mental patient Boris (Lennie Loftin).

Also released as Underground and Juez, Jurado y Ejecutor, this was directed by James McCalmont, whose only other director credit is for Escape from Safehaven. He did shoot American Tickler, The Satisfiers of Alpha Blue, The Rejuvenator and Voodoo Dawn, while also working as a gaffer on Let My Puppets Come, Gums, My Demon Lover and director of photography on Evolver, Fist of the North Star and The Silence of the Hams. That’s what I call a career.

The writer, Brian O’Hara, also wrote Rock ‘n’ Roll Frankenstein.

I wish I could tell you that this was some big find or worth the time to track it down. But it isn’t. If only I could report otherwise.

SEVERIN BLU RAY RELEASE: The Mask of Satan (1989)

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The Mask of Satan was also released as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil in the U.S. and Japan. If you want me to explain all that, you can click here.

This is part of the Sabbath TV series which also includes Pedro Olea’s La leyenda del cura de Bargota, Imanol Uribe’s La Luna Negra, António de Macedo’s The Curse of Marialva, Daniel Wronecki’s María la Loba and Gertrud Pinkus’ Anna Goldin, la última bruja.

A group of skiers on the Swiss Alps fall into a chasm opened during an avalanche, which kills one of them named Bebo, played by Michele Soavi, who can’t seem to get away from movies in the Demons series. Soon, they find a metal mask — this happens so often in Demons movies — and discover a body buried between the ice. Digging around causes them to get buried deeper in the snow, so deep that they find an underground city where a witch was executed. And that witch? Well, she decides this group of skiers would make the perfect instruments for her revenge.

Lamberto decided that if he was going to make another movie in the Demons saga, why not remake his father’s Black Sunday while he was at it. That movie was filmed because the elder Bava was a big fan of Nikolay Gogol’s short story Viy, who often read it to his children. When he was allowed to choose the storyline for a movie he wanted to direct, he decided Gogol’s story, which also inspired the 1967 Russian film.

Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) is the de facto leader of this group and his girlfriend Sabina (Debora Caprioglio, using the last name of her fiancé Klaus Kinski here; she’s in the Kinski-directed Paganini and the Tinto Brass movie Iaprika) breaks her leg and it’s instantly healed. Is it any wonder that she’s soon possessed by the dead witch Anibas, who has the same name as her only reversed? What kind of coincidence is that?

There’s also a blind priest that everyone adores making fun of, which makes you wish for the entire cast to be killed. You just may get what you wish for. Speaking of the cast, Mary Sellers from Stagefright is in this, as is Eva Grimaldi from Ratman, as the demonic form of Anibas. What a demonic form it is. After she begins seducing our hero, her young breasts instantly transform into withered old teats and her feet and hands are replaced with chicken claws. At the same time, she spits white fluid all over. She also has the facial scars Barbara Steele wore in Mario’s version. Plus, Stanko Molnar is in the cast as a weird priest. He showed up often in Bava’s early movies like Macabre and A Blade In the Dark. He’s also in the Antonio Margheriti TV mini-series Treasure Island In Space, which has an insane cast: Anthony Quinn, Philippe Leroy, David Warbeck, Ernest Borgnine, Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Bobby Rhodes.

This is a hard movie to review, as you must compare it to one of the greatest movies ever. Even Lamberto, I think, would admit that his father remains the best director. But his son tries, he really does. And this film is pretty entertaining. But Black Sunday is the kind of film that will live forever. Lamberto was able to create some fun visuals and effects here, plenty of gore and some great music from Simon Boswell and gooey effects from Sergio Stivaletti, who directed The Wax Mask and did the effects for Demons, Hands of Steel, Demons 2, The Church, The Sect and Cemetery Man.

It has the same title as Black Sunday in Italy: La Maschera del Demonio. There’s also plenty of nudity and a scene where the witch’s tongue comes so far out of her mouth that she starts choking Davide and he’s like, well, alright, I guess I’ll have sex with her now.

It’s entertaining, as all Italian late in the game horror is to me. And that’s enough to recommend it to you.

Severin has released the North American Blu-ray premiere of this film, which has interviews with Bava, Mary Sellers and Deborah Caprioglio. It looks great and I love that I can get rid of my bootleg, which looked like it was multiple generations of VHS dubbed to DVD. Please, Severin — more Lamberto late 80s releases please.

You can get this from Severin.

The Banker (1989)

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Spaulding Osbourne is a super-wealthy businessman played by Duncan Regehr, who you may know as Dracula from The Monster Squad. He’s come to Los Angeles with a crossbow, a penchant for murdering call girls and the need to paint his face as well as a South American symbol in their blood. His next victim might be Sharon (Shanna Reed), a news reporter on his trail, but not if her ex-husband, Sgt. Dan Jefferson (Robert Forster) can help it.

You read that right. In an American Giallo, Robert Forster is hunting the hunter in the urban jungle. This doesn’t stop there with the wild casting, as Richard Roundtree plays Dan’s captain, and Jeff Conaway and Leif Garrett appear as the pimps who supply Osbourne with the sex workers he needs for his laser-sighted Most Dangerous Game.

Directed by Willaim Web, who also made the beloved Party Line — at the same time! — and written by Dana Augustine and Richard Brandes (Devil In the Flesh), this starts with a Teri Weigel sex scene, which was definitely for the foreign investors.

Forster is the whole reason I watch this. His character has crawled into a bottle since his wife left. He doesn’t have a house. Instead, he lives in his nephew’s treehouse. And he’s mad at everyone around him. This is only topped by the killer’s rituals, which include painting up while watching an entire wall of TVs playing footage of volcanos and sharks.

This isn’t great, but it’s perfect if you watch it before the drunken blackout in the hours between pure darkness and early light.

You can watch this on Tubi.

MOVIES THAT PLAYED SCALA: Society (1989)

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Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

Brian Yuzna produced Re-Animator, but didn’t direct his own film until this body horror comedy which took three years to be released. It’s blessed with special effects by Japanese FX master Screaming Mad George that are really the star of the film.

Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock, son of the best Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) has a great life. His family is rich, he’s popular, he has a new Jeep and a hot cheerleader girlfriend. Yet he doesn’t feel that he fits into high society. This feeling gets worse when his sister’s ex-boyfriend gives him an audio tape of his family engaging in a murderous sex act.

Meanwhile, he keeps noticing a mysterious girl named Clarissa (she masturbates in front of him at a pep rally in a scene that’s frankly sexual in a mainstream non-sex film) and falls for her, despite her hair eating mother. If you’ve noticed that Society may be a completely insane movie, you’re right.

Of course, it turns out that the rich are aliens and Billy’s family is incestual and all of the most well-to-do folks in town are part of a ritual called the shunting, where they suck the life out of poor people. So how do you beat an alien like that? Well, you fist him and pull his asshole inside out, that’s how.

While some of this was based on a project that Yuzna started with Dan O’Bannon, writer Woody Keith claims to have based it on real people that he knew in the Beverly Hills. Gulp.

For fans of Halloween 2, that’s the exact same hospital that was Haddonfield Memorial. So there’s another reason to watch this again.

MOVIES THAT PLAYED SCALA: The Killer (1989)

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Thanks to the British Film Institute, there’s a list of films that played Scala. To celebrate the release of Severin’s new documentary, I’ll share a few of these movies every day. You can see the whole list on Letterboxd.

I can honestly say that this movie changed my life and the way that I experience film. I found it at Something Weird Video, a Pittsburgh store that had many movies that did the same for many people. My brother and I must have watched this every night for months, obsessing over the gunplay and the honor-bound Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat), who must do one last kill to save the sight of a woman he blinded, Jennie (Sally Yeh). It was unlike anything we’d ever seen, nearly an Italian Western in Hong Kong, a place where cops like Detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) can discover that he has as much in common with a criminal than his fellow police officers.

In The Killer, man’s laws don’t matter. What does is the brotherhood that can be built between two men. What matters is the fact that you are responsible for your mistakes, that a child’s life is worth nearly being killed or arrested, that you can show people mercy even after they’ve tried to have you murdered. Movies would change after this, as Hong Kong started making more ballet-like gun violence films, a style that made its way here before director John Woo followed, starting with the JCVD movie Hard Target before making blockbusters like Mission: Impossible 2.

The first time I saw a church filled with broken plaster and bullet casings and doves flying all around, I had one of those moments where I knew that I would never have this experience again. It was like trying a drug for the first time, the rush of a first kiss, holding someone’s hand. My heart started to race and I knew that I had to keep chasing this feeling.

Producer Tsui Hark was extremely unhappy with this film and planned on recutting it, making Li Ying the hero instead of Ah Jong. The schedule to make this was tight and Woo and editor David Wu never were going to make these cuts. Hark didn’t have time and it was such a big success that it enraged Hark, who is said to have starting tossing things out of his office window when he found out.

Woo had a higher aim than most Hong Kong action movies, which are often content to rip off American movies. This was dedicated to Martin Scorsese and inspired by Mean Streets. There’s also a lot of Leone and the movie Le Samouraï in The Killer.

Yet when this first played in the U.S., it was badly subtitled and sold as an action comedy.

SEVERIN BLU RAY RELEASE: Scala!!! shorts disc two (1982, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990, 2024)

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The third disc of Severin’s new Scala!!! Or, the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits blu ray set has several documentaries and some shorts that are worth the entire price of this release. You can buy it from Severin.

The Art of the Calendar (2024): Kier-La Janisse has created this look at the art of film programming and marketing. Starting with the first repertory cinema calendars in California and Chicago in the late 70s and early 80s, this expands to interview several film programmers, including Mike Thomas (founder of Strand Releasing), Kim Jorgensen (founder of Landmark Cinemas), Craig Baldwin, Chicago film historian Adam Carston and Mark Valen (programmer for the Scala).

Thanks to this age of physical media and streaming that we live in, small theaters like the ones featured in this film, are always in danger of going away. More than just a “things were better back then” view, The Art of the Calendar presents a strong reason for you to support the movie houses around you, particularly the non-corporate ones that need you in their audience.

Also: If you love graphic design and the art of selling movies, this is an essential watch.

Splatterfest Exhumed (2024): This documentary covers Splatterfest ’90, the notorious all-night horror festival held at London’s legendary Scala Cinema. Directed by Jasper Sharp with David Gregory as supervising producer, this gets into how this well-remembered weekend was put together by a teenaged Justin Stanley and how it was amazing that it even happened at all.

Splatterfest ’90 was the UK premiere of several movies and the showing of several favorites, including Combat Shock, Evil Dead II, Brain Dead, Rabid Grannies, Within the Woods, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Document of the Dead, The Laughing Dead, The Toxic Avenger 2 and Bride of Re-animator; promo reels for Maniac 2, Horrorshow and Hardware; as well as the opportunity to meet horror icons like John McNaughton, Greg Nicotero, Brian Yuzna, Buddy Giovinazzo, Roy Frumkes and Scott Spiegel.

What emerges is a combination of people extolling the virtues of just how this event brought so many together with the challenges of running just such a massive undertaking. You also get to hear from those who were in the audience, such as Graham Humphries, Sean Hogan and Severin founder David Gregory.

My favorite parts in this concern how in the middle of the night, bootleggers suddenly arrived to sell tapes of banned video nasties and how The Comic was presented as the first film from a “new Hammer,” which stopped when the audience nearly rioted during the movie. It was so bad that the organizers didn’t show Cold Light of Day, another film by director Richard Driscoll.

This is perfect for lovers of horror, as well as movie history. I had a blast with it and am sad that I couldn’t have been in the audience.

Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie (1986): A proof of concept for a sequel to Maniac that never happened, this was directed by Buddy Giovinazzo (Combat Shock) and written by Joe Cirillo and its star Joe Spinell.

Shot in a bar that Spinell frequented and filled with his friends, this was a concept featuring Spinell as Mr. Robbie, a drunken kid show host who is dealing with letter after letter from abused children. The only way that he knows to deal with them is murder. What’s strange is that this is the same plot — and nearly the same name for its protagonist — as An Eye for an Eye/The Psychopath, a movie that finds Mr. Rabbey attacking parents who beat their children.

You only get a few minutes of what may have been, but when I see the craggy face of Joe Spinell, I feel like life could be OK. In some other world, I’ve bought this several times and just got the UHD release of it, having to explain to my wife why I keep buying the same film so many times.

I adore that Giovinazzo did a commentary for this, explaining how it happened and some of the sleazier things that he learned about the cast and where this was filmed.

Horrorshow (1990): Director and writer Paul Hart-Wilden wrote the script for the little-seen — and great — movie Skinner. He also wrote Living Doll, but Dick Randall gave it to George Dugdale and Peter Mackenzie Litten to direct.

It’s got a simple story — a man tries to stay in a room only to learn that it’s still possessed by a demon that has already killed one person — but it has plenty of gore to make it stand out. Its creator is obviously a big horror fan and his commentary on working on this is quite interesting. Hart-Wilden is still working, directing the TV series 31 Days of Halloween.

Cleveland Smith: Bounty Hunter (1982): Directed by Josh Becker, who wrote it with Scott Spiegel, this is a little-watched short that has many of the players of the Evil Dead series, including Bruce Campbell as the hero, Sam Raimi as a Nazi and Robert Tapert as a native.

As you can tell, Cleveland Smith is pretty much Indiana Jones, down to being chased by a bolder, but he also gets caught in quicksand and is nearly killed by a dinosaur. He has a whip, just like Dr. Jones, but he also has a ventriloquist dummy and a special pair of pants known as the Waders of the Lost Park.

This is totally politically incorrect and as dumb as it gets. I mean that in the best of ways.

Mongolitos (1988): Director Stéphane Ambiel made this short that the Scala ad copy claimed “Taking ten minutes to do what John Waters achieved in ten years.” This is great for selling the movie, but it’s nowhere in Waters league. That said, it has something to offend everyone, including shooting up with toilet water, puking up a turd, pushing a transgender woman’s head into the bowl while taking her from behind while a nun teams up on her and then everyone eating feces with crackers. I can only imagine that some people will be horribly upset by this, but it’s made so goofily that you can’t help but laugh at it. Somewhere, staunchly British people are also upset that the French are doing a Monty Python sketch with poo eating.

The Legendary H.G. Lewis Speaks! (1989): Herschell Gordon Lewis is at the center of the Venn diagram of my life, someone who was a leader in my two obsessions: movies and marketing. Just hearing his voice makes me feel good about things, like everything is going to work out alright. When you see his older face and his wry smile, you may almost forget that he once used animal guts dumped in Lysol over and over again in the Florida heat to upset almost everyone before anyone even considered what a gore movie was.

This was filmed on October 4, 1989, when Lewis spoke at the Scala before Gruesome Twosome and Something Weird. Before he went on stage, he asked to be paid in cash. At once a gentleman in a suit and a carny lunatic, at the dual poles of juxtaposition, only he could wax so enthusiastically about fried chicken and trying to figure out how to get Colonel Sanders into one of his movies.