Tag Archives: 1989

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 8: Hellgate (1989)

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October 8: A Horror Film Shot in South Africa that passes it off as America (there’s a lot)

Director William A. Levey (Blackenstein, Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!, Slumber Party ’57,  The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, Skatetown, U.S.A., Lightning the White Stallion) filmed Committed in South Africa — it would come out after this movie — with Jennifer O’Neill and Ron Palillo in South Africa. Yes, people wanted to see the star of The Psychic and the beloved icon of Welcome Back, Kotter in a movie together.

That led Levey to get hired to make Hellgate, which was shot in a real abandoned town in South Africa with a cast of South African actors, even if this is said to be America.

I always talk about twenty and thirtysomething teenagers in these movies. Palillo is a fortysomething teenager in this.

He plays Matt, who is heading out to meet his girlfriend Bobby (Joanne Warde) and her friends Pam (Petrea Curran) and Chuck (Evan J. Klisser) at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains. While they’re waiting for him to show up, Bobby tells the urban legend — it’s a long one — of the Hellgate hitchhiker. Yes, on a night just like this, thirty years ago, Josie Carlyle (Abigail Wolcott) — the daughter of a rich gold miner named Lucas (Carel Trichardt) — was kidnapped, assaulted and killed by a biker gang.

After her father killed all of them with an axe, a prospector found a crystal that can do magic, magic that allowed Lucas to reanimate his daughter’s corpse because he never heard that sometimes, dead is better. Maybe the terrifying giant fish they messed with should have ended all of this.

As this story is being told, Matt has picked up Josie, thinking she’s a hitchhiker, and been chased out of her father’s house when caught getting ready for spicy ghost time. Despite being warned by Zonk (Lance Vaughan), the teens all decide to go into Hallgate, where they see a ghost dance with Josie nude among them, as well as the ghost of the man who killed her, Buzz (Frank Notaro).

Before all that long, it’s just Matt and Pam, as Bobby has strangled and turned into a ghostly vaudevillian and Chuck has had his head torn right off. After all this, Matt still decides that it would be a good idea to test the humidity with the spectral Josie — to be fair, she’s stunning — just in time for Pam to shotgun last her out the window. They run from their now zombie friends and steal Josie’s car. To get out, they literally knock a building down on her dad. And now, Josie just wanders the streets.

This movie looks way better than it should and has some good effects. If you ever wanted to see Horshack nude, well, this movie is for you. I’m kind of astounded by this movie, because man, that fish scene is completely soul destroying.

Tales from the Crypt S1 E1: The Man Who Was Death (1989)

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From June 10, 1989, to July 19, 1996, HBO aired Tales from the Crypt, which was based on the EC Comics series. Ah, Tales from the Crypt, the scourge of parents in the 50s, which somehow ran for only 27 issues and yet we’re still discussing it today.

EC publisher William Gaines and editor Al Feldstein loved horror, so they published a story called “Return from the Grave!” in the comic Crime Patrol #15. This was the first appearance of the Crypt-Keeper and a few issues later, the title became The Crypt of Terror — in my high school art club, this is what we named our haunted house and yes, it totally was an EC Comics reference, I was the hugest nerd — and then took on its real title a few issues afterward.

Drawn by Johnny Craig, Feldstein, Wallace Wood, Al Davis, George Evans, Jack Kamen, “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Bernard Krigstein, Will Elder, Fred Peters and Howard Larsen, the look of Tales from the Crypt — and its sister comics The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear — may have the greatest line-up of artists ever.

Gaines often was inspired by — outright ripped off — other stories and movies for the tales inside the comic. Those include the works of H.P. Lovecraft as well as the films The Man in Half Moon Street, Vampyr, The Beast with Five Fingers and several Ray Bradbury b0oks. Unlike nearly everyone else, Bradbury actually read EC Comics and wrote to them: ““You have not as of yet sent on the check for $50.00 to cover the use of secondary rights on my two stories THE ROCKET MAN and KALEIDOSCOPE which appeared in your WEIRD-FANTASY May-June ’52, #13, with the cover-all title of HOME TO STAY,” he wrote to EC. “I feel this was probably overlooked in the general confusion of office-work, and look forward to your payment in the near future.”

EC did more than thirty Bradbury stories and yes, paid him. They appear in the Fantagraphics collection Home to Stay!: The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories.

But it was not to last.

Dr. Fredric Wertham had already written an article in Collier’s entitled “Horror in the Nursery” and for the American Journal of Psychotherapy he turned in “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” In 1954, the next book by Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, and a highly publicized Congressional hearing on juvenile delinquency made comics look so bad — not to mention a government breakup of the monopoly that distributed magazines — ruined the industry.

Gaines wanted the surviving companies fight outside censorship and repair the industry’s damaged reputation with the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Comics Code Authority. There had to be a comics code on every cover of every comic published, which isn’t what Gaines wanted. He also learned that other companies pushed for the words horror, weird and terror to not be allowed on the covers. This basically was everything he published.

All three horror books and the SuspenStory comics were canceled in 1954.

Incredible Science Fiction #33 was the last EC comic book to be published and a reprint of the story “Judgement Day” was nearly censored because at the end, the hero is revealed to be black. Gaines went nuclear.

By the 1960s, EC was sold — MAD Magazine was all they published — and became part of Warner Communications. You may know the two Amicus movies that were licensed — Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. And because Warner also owned HBO, that brings us to this show.

Thanks to an incredible group of producers — David Filer, Walter Hill, Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver — and aired on HBO. This meant that hardly anything got censored.

With A-listers in the casts, great special effects and an original Danny Elfman song, Tales from the Crypt was a big deal.

A lot of credit goes to the Cryptkeeper, who was performed by a team of puppeteers — Van Snowden, David Arthur Nelson, Anton Rupprecht, Shaun Smith, Mike Elizalde, Frank Charles Lutkus, Patty Maloney, David Stinnent, Mike Trcic and Brock Winkless — and voiced by John Kassir. Even kids loved him, which led to toys and a cartoon based on this bloody horror show, making the children of the parents who lost their EC Comics upset that their kids were watching such a program.

On June 10, 1989, the first episode “The Man Who Was Death” aired. It was based on a story that originally appeared in The Crypt of Terror #17.

“Aww, poor little fellas. When I think of their childhood, all those cute little maggots. Hahahahaha. Our story is about a man with nobler ambitions. He likes to kill human pests and he does it in front of an audience. Now that’s entertainment! Hahahaha. So hang onto your hats kiddies, this one’s a real shocker.”

The Cryptkeeper was here and he was ready to share a story directed by Walter Hill, who wrote the script with Steven Dodd and Robert Reneau.

Niles Talbot (William Sadler) has been promoted to being the man who flips the switch on the electric chair. But when the death penalty is abolished, he becomes a vigilante who punishes criminals who get away with it. All until, well, he gets caught and the death penalty returns.

Biker Jimmy Flood (Robert Winley), Theodore Carne (Gerrit Graham) and Cynthia Baldwin (Cindi Minnick) are all executed until the idea of killing the guilty goes to Niles’ brain and he starts wiping out exotic dancers.

That’s the first episode! It aired the same evening as “All Through the House,” but let’s get to that one next week.

USA UP ALL NIGHT: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was on USA Up All Night on January 14 and October 13, 1995; September 13, 1996; June 13 and October 4, 1997.

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.

The poster art on this post comes from Vile Consumption. Buy it!

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child was on USA Up All Night on October 28, 1995; April 5, 1996 and July 19 and October 11, 1997.

What can you say about a movie where the director, Stephen Hopkins (Predator 2, Judgement Night), says “What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”?

A year after the last film, the returning Alice (Lisa Wilcox) and Dan (Danny Hassel) have been dating and seen no sign of Freddy until a shower turns into Alice going back in time to witness the creation of Freddy by the maniacs of the asylum. She tries to forget the dream as she’s graduating high school the next day, along with comic book lover Mark, model Greta (Erika Anderson, Twin Peaks) and aspiring nurse Yvonne (Kelly Jo Minter, Maria, the video store clerk from The Lost Boys).

The dreams don’t go away, with Alice witnessing the birth of a Freddy baby that makes its way to the church from the last film. He tells her he’s learned how to come back to life, just at the moment that he kills Dan. At the same time, she also learns that she’s pregnant with her dead boyfriend’s child.

No one believes that Freddy is after Alice, but Greta soon is killed by being forced to overeat in her dreams. Oh yeah — Alice is also seeing a fully grown boy she calls Jacob who she believes is her future son. Freddy is feeding his victims to her unborn baby — who yes, is also Jacob — to make him evil.

There is an imaginative scene where Freddy kills Mark within a comic book world, as well as the world that Freddy lives in now. But the ending, where Amanda Krueger seals away Freddy and Jacob decides to stay with his mother amidst strange puppet heads gets a little ridiculous. Actually, this entire movie is, supposing that teens we’d want to watch a movie about the terrors of teen pregnancy mixed with the terrors of being an Elm Street teenager.

Supposedly, there’s an uncut version of this movie that’s never been released that would change a lot of people’s opinions on the film. I’ll watch it again if that ever comes out. Yes, I know there was an unrated VHS release but supposedly there’s even more missing.

Maybe it’d be a better film if New Line had given the director more than four weeks to work on it. And get this — the poster was released before the producers had a clear idea what the movie was going to be about, other than the idea that Freddy would be a fetus and the title would be The Dream Child.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Fortress of Amerikka (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Fortress of Amerikka was on USA Up All Night on March 7 and July 10, 1992 and February 27 and December 10, 1993.

Of all the Troma directors, I seem to enjoy the movies of Eric Louzil (Class of Nuke ’Em High Parts II and III, Bikini Beach Race) the most. They just move quick, often don’t laugh at their own jokes and have just what you want: sex and violence.

In this one, a secret mercenary team called the Fortress of Amerikka is terrorizing the entire nation. They’ve been hired by the elite to destabilize the country and increase their control. Yes, this was made in 1989 and not today.

Troma City, California is where the last stand of American freedom will happen. Only John Whitecloud (Gene LeBrock, Father Peter from Beyond Darkness and Dr. Peter Houseman in Metamorphosis) and Jennifer (Kellee Bradley) can stop them.

Kascha, who was in plenty of adult films and was in Caged Fury using the name Alison LePriol, is in this. You know who isn’t? The blonde girl on the poster.

Fortress of Amerikka was famously a dark and murky movie on VHS. Luckily, Vinegar Syndrome has fixed that and released an uncensored version that looks great. The actual movie is about a hundred minutes of rambling violence and nudity that goes nowhere and the idea that it’s a revenge picture between Whitecloud and the sheriff who murdered his brother is, well, I guess what happens even if it feels like it takes forever to get there. Also John Whitecloud gets his ass kicked so many times in this movie.

There’s a beheading, there’s nudity every two minutes, the politics are more muddled than a Cannon movie, a couple playing ukelele gets murdered, almost a whole town gets killed…this movie is a mess and I wallowed in it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Summer Job (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Summer Job was on USA Up All Night on November 9, 1991; May 15, 1992; April 30 and October 16, 1993; January 21 and August 20, 1994 and June 30 and October 14, 1995.

For another review of this movie, click here.

At Parkers Racquet Club, the summer jobs have started and that brings in the regular staff for the season, which includes Kathy Shields (Sherrie Rose, who was Professor Ursula Undershaft in the Black Scorpion movies), Bob (Dave Clouse), Jack (James Summer) and Susan (Amy Lynn Baxter, who was in Karate Warrior 2 as well as the inside cover of Howard Stern’s Private Parts book). There are also some new workers such as Tom (Kirt Earhardt), Bruce (Fred Bourdin), Herman (George Ortuzar), Karen (Renee Shugart, Screwball Hotel), Donna (Cari Mayor, who along with Shugart was in Lauderdale) and Barbara (Chantal, yes just one name, who was also in Dream Trap).

Directed by Paul Madden and written by Ralph Gaby Wilson, the main reason I watched this is because Sherrie Rose was also in Killer Crocodile, Martial Law 2: Undercover, Cy Warrior and most importantly, American Rickshaw.

There’s not much else I can recommend within this movie other than everyone is very attractive and willing to get naked for a teen sex comedy. Also: If you like ELO, well, you’re going to love the band in this, OrKestra. I’ve seen plenty of people say that this is like when the kids on Saved by the Bell worked at the Malibu Sands for a summer, but I always got the idea that Stacey Carosi was 100% making Zack Morris her bottom by night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Skin Deep (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Skin Deep was on USA Up All Night on August 19, 1995; October 11, 1996 and April 19, 1997.

I don’t understand myself. I will defend absolute scumbags like Joe D’Amato and Jess Franco as artists but feel like I need a shower every time I watch a Blake Edwards movie. This has the plot of nearly every one of his movies that I’ve ever seen: Zachary “Zach” Hutton (John Ritter) is an author who has a weakness for alcohol and beautiful women. Hijinks ensue.

The movie starts with his mistress (Denise Crosby) catching him in bed with his hairdryer and they’re all caught by his wife Alex (Alyson Reed). What follows is basically Zach getting laid and nearly killed by a whole bunch of women, including the deranged Molly (Julianne Phillips) who hooks him up to a skin-treatment electro-therapy machine that gives him spasms, a glow-in-the-dark condom sex scene with Amy (Chelsea Field) and being carried to bed by bodybuilder Lonnie Jones, who is played by Raye Hollitt, Zap of American Gladiators. She comes off as the most positive and fun of all the women, despite him clearly being worried that she has such obviously masculine qualities. In fact, she dwarfs Zach who says that he feels like Mrs. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Ritter is fine in this but the role was written for Dudley Moore. Dudley Moore in mind. Moore felt the part was too similar to 10 so he turned it town. This led to a rift between him and Edwards. That may be why the original title was 11. This also feels like IMDB BS to me.

At the very least, Vincent Gardenia is good in this.

Seriously, for all the lessons that Zach is supposed to learn, he really doesn’t learn much. We are in his corner only because he is the hero of the movie and at times, I wasn’t in his corner in the least. What a waste of the charming Ritter, as Edwards keeps making movies about white upper class men ruining their lives through drinking and women only to lose nothing. They’re still running their world at the end, no matter what.

At least in D’Amato movies, the rich are shown to be snuff film watching maniacs and are outsmarted by a gorgeous sex positive woman of color.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: My Mom’s A Werewolf (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: My Mom’s A Werewolf was on USA Up All Night on July 31, 1992; Septmeber 18, 1993 and April 22, 1994.

You may have asked, “Did the director of Death Spa make anything else?” I’m here to answer that affirmatively, with My Mom’s A Werewolf, an oddity that somehow unites some of my favorite disparate stars and plops them into a late 80’s comedy. This movie is ridiculous, yet it got me right from the beginning, thanks to plenty of cheesy synth and MTV era rock — I have a weakness for bands that only got their songs into one movie no one has ever heard of — as well as its loving depiction of a horror movie convention.

Leslie Shaber (Susan Blakely, who between Capone, The Lords of Flatbush, The Concorde … Airport ’79 and Over the Top is all over our site; she’s also Cherry Diamond in Dream a Little Dream) is a suburban mom who has a boring life and a husband named Howard (John Schuck, forever Sgt. Charles Enright from McMillan & Wife, as well as the 80’s version of Herman Munster, the robotic cop from short-lived 70’s series Homes & Yoyo and the Klingon Kamarag, one of the few Star Trek characters to appear in more than one more of the films).

Her daughter Jennifer (Tina Caspary, who makes appearances in tons of 80’s favorites like Can’t Buy Me Love, Teen Witch, Mac and Me and Annie) worries that her parents will get divorced, but she continually gets sidetracked by her horror movie loving friend Stacey (Diana Barrows, who would end up in a horror movie herself, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood). I mean, this girl loves movies so much that she has Prime Evil, Deathrow Gameshow and Galaxina posters up in her room. In fact, this movie mentions Galaxina more than anyone ever has.

They meet a fortune teller (Ruth Buzzi, of course), who tells Jennifer that she has the mark of the pentagram on her face and that soon, she’ll fight an unholy evil.

After being ignored by her husband while he watches football, Leslie goes shopping for a flea collar. The owner of the story, Harry Thropen (John Saxon, who is perhaps my favorite actor of all time) offers her a free flea collar while he eats a mouse. Seriously, he has the dirtiest and scariest pet store you’ve ever seen. So, of course, she falls for him and he ends up biting one of her toes, changing her.

This movie strangely treats the powers of werewolves like vampires, but hey, if you wanted to see Saxon shirtless, this movie is all for you.

This movie turns into sight gag city, with Jewish deli jokes, singing werewolves, a riff on the dentist scene from Little Shop of Horrors (the dentist is Geno Silva, who was the silent killer The Skull in Scarface) and the wolfen mom seeing John Saxon everywhere she goes.

It ends up being daughter against werewolf lord, complete with knowledge straight out of Fangoria. Oh yeah — Solid Gold host Marilyn McCoo and Marcia Wallace, who was the secretary on the original The Bob Newhart Show and Edna Krabappel on The Simpsons also is in here. Keep an eye out for Kimmy Robertson, who was Lucy on Twin Peaks too.

If you go into this expecting nothing to be serious and John Saxon quite literally chewing everything he can, then you’ll enjoy this as much as I did.

You can watch this on YouTube.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Roller Blade Warriors: Taken By Force was on USA Up All Night on March 29 and 30 and November 9, 1991; April 3 and October 9, 1992 and February 6, 1993.

Donald Jackson is the same man who brought us Hell Comes to Frogtown as well as forty more movies, including The Demon Lover, I Like to Hurt People, an entire series of roller blade-themed movies that includes the movie I’m going to talk about now, as well as Roller Blade, The Roller Blade Seven, Legend of the Roller Blade, Return of the Roller Blade Seven, Rollergator and Hawk Warriors of the Wheelzone and an entire series of sequels in Frogtown like Frogtown 2, Toad Warrior, Max Hell Frog Warrior and Max Hell Frog Warrior: A Zen Rough Cut.

Donald Jackson’s movies started weird and stayed that way.

Gretchen Hope (Elizabeth Kaitan!) is traveling the wasteland protected by a nun from The Cosmic Order of the Roller Blade named Karin Cross (Kathleen Kinmont). Except that Karin gets hit with a rock and some mutants drag Gretchen to be sacrificed.

This also has Rory Calhoun in it, which kind of blows my mind, and Suzanne Solari played Sharon Cross, the same character she was in Roller Blade.

I have so many questions, like how do people roller blade in the desert and how can a movie with half-naked women warriors on roller blades actually be boring, but this movie figure that out I guess.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: The Fly II (1989)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Fly II was on USA Up All Night on September 8, 1995; July 26, 1996 and October 3, 1997.

I hate when sequels instantly kill off the characters that you loved in the first movie, but Geena Davis wasn’t coming back for this movie. After giving birth to a larval sac, the son of the child that she had with Seth Brundle, Veronica Quaife dies. Their son grows up to be the normal-looking Martin Brundle (Eric Stoltz) whose physical and mental maturity is highly accelerated. He’s a genius, has amazing reflexes and never sleeps. He’s also aging faster than a normal human and is growing up inside the labs of Anton Bartok (Lee Richardson).

Bartok is trying to figure out the teleportation that caused Seth to become the Brundlefly. By the time that Martin is five, he has the mental and physical abilities needed to be part of this experiment. A dog he had befriended years before was mutated like his father and Martin figures out where it is and euthanizes it. He is showing signs of mutation himself, but know that he will need to hurt someone else to stop it from happening. He also falls in love with Beth Logan (Daphne Zuniga) but obviously that may not last long as he’s rapidly becoming the kind of monster that his father was.

Directed by special effects artist Chris Walas, who created the effects for the first movie. He’s only directed two other things, the Tales from the Crypt episode “‘Til Death” and The Vagrant. He created the Gremlins, the creature effects in House II: The Second Story and the effects in Naked Lunch.

The script had some big talent working on it. There’s Master of Horror Mick Garris, joined by Frank Darabont and Jim and Ken Wheat, the brother team who would go on to write The Birds II: Land’s End. Master of Horror Mick Garris’s original script was about Veronica being convinced not to abort her baby by a religious cult that adopted and raised Martin. As he rapidly ages, Martin learns that he can talk to bugs and would help a gang of kids escape the cult. Another idea had Seth being cloned and his son being the only one who could communicate with him, which became a family-friendly movie about a boy and his bug. Chris Walas hated these ideas and nearly quit because Fox hired Darabont. This is all IMDB conjecture, so it could be all kayfabe BS.

Also according to the always unreliable IMDB. they did an old 50s gimmick in some theaters where they had a nurse in each theater in case audiences were sickened by the movie.