EDITOR’S NOTE: This appeared as part of Slasher Month on October 12, 2020. All the Puppet Master movies will be covered this week, so here it is again.
Puppet Master 2 begins in 1990 as André Toulon’s grave is being excavated by Pinhead, who opens up the coffin and pours a vial onto his creator’s skeleton while Blade, Jester, Tunneler and Leach Woman watch. Soon, the skeleton raises his arms and Toulon is back from the dead.
Then, we return back to the hotel where Megan from the last movie has been killed and as a result, Alex is suspected of her death and is in an insane asylum. Nothing about the reanimated dog is mentioned.
Soon, the puppets are trying to steal away parapsychologists Carolyn Bramwell, who Toulon believes is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. There’s also a new puppet named Torch along for the ride. This one also explains why the puppets kill — they need brain tissue to stay alive.
This one ends with Toulon double crossing the puppets in the hope of bringing his wife back from the dead. Like I said before, no one should screw with the puppets, not even the Puppet Master.
Strangely enough, the only reason why Leech Woman was destroyed in this movie was that studio executives at Paramount hated her. Another bit of trivia — look for Mr. Punch from Dolls on Toulon’s shelf.
Puppet Master II is the only movie that David Allen, who created the puppet special effects for the first film, directed. Check out our review of The Dungeonmaster to learn way more than you may want to know about this talented artist with a dark secret.
Man, Ross Hagen got into directing and made some movies that just sleaze it up. The Glove, B.O.R.N. and this one hit just right for me and Hagen directed this with John Stewart, who directed Action U.S.A. and wrote it with David Chute and David Reskin, who also wrote Skinheads, Dark Future and Hidden Obsession, another John Stewart directed movie that pairs up Jan-Michael Vincent and Heather Thomas. Hoke Howell also wrote the script, which was based on a story by Carol Lynn and Stewart.
These are the kinds of things that get me way excited about a movie.
Like how it took six people to write a movie about women getting naked and getting sexual with guns.
Hagen is also Jack, a photographer of nude women. Calendar girls. He also likes them to be, as Perry once sang, to be involved in scenes where their sex is violent. The girls are Cindy (Keely Sims), Juliette Cummins, Susan Jennifer Sullivan and Dona Speir, who is above all others thanks to her appearances in so many Andy Sidaris movies.
It’s not the most exciting movie — it does have a transgender killer so there is that — but it looks nice because Gary Graver was making sure the cameras got the best looking images of, well, sex and murder. He knew what sold.
Israeli director Tanya Rosenberg only made one movie and this is it. And that’s a shame because I haven’t seen a movie that can somehow combine the roughest moments of 70s exploitation with female characters that are given plenty of agency and personalities that are explored more than their bodies. I mean, yes, it’s scummy as it gets, but it also surprises you at every turn.
Babe & The Ball Girls — Babe (Laura Albert who went from sexy scenes in movies like Angel III and Dr. Alien to the stunt work she still does today and oh man, I can’t forget that she’s in Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari), Donna (Lee Benton), Wanda (Rhyve Sawyer), Stony (Julie Hall), Louise (Paula Manga), Connie (Sabrina Hills), Ingrid (Randi Randolph), Shorty (Sonjia Redo) and Mickey (Lisa Zambrano) — have been brought to this backwater swamp by Mino Collins (Ken Carpenter) to play against his son’s softball team. Despite the guys getting physical and actually even breaking Stony’s nose, the girls easily defeat them and leave a few of them with aching balls. Their coach and manager Midnight (Ross Hagen) wants to get them out of town, but Collins isn’t paying up and his son Roy (Gregory Scott Cummins) recovers from getting a softball to the ball bag by trying to assault Mickey and Connie. Midnight saves them and gets stabbed for his troubles; the rednecks chase the bus and half the girls want to fight back and the others want to run.
Things don’t go so well. This is a dark film that somehow combines Deliverance with A League of Their Own and who knew that could even be a thing? It also has George “Buck” Flower sneaking into the locker room of the ladies and getting pummeled while wearing a hat that says “The check is in the mail.”
Writers Craig Clyde and James L. Hennessy also wrote China O’Brien 2 before this, so you know they know direct-to-video pacing. They were joined by writer Jim Makichuk, the very same person who directed, wrote and produced Ghostkeeper.
This is a movie that delivers slow-motion death on every side in this war, women in barely there outfits playing softball for money and a crossbow.
When I grew up, one of the biggest events in my hometown was when a Globetrotters-like softball team called The King and His Heart came and played against our hometown’s best softball players. Led by Myrle Vernon King, there only had a pitcher — of course that was Myrle — a catcher, a fast baseman and a shortstop against full teams. When asked why his team only had four members, Myrle would sometimes say that they needed someone to get on every base and still hit, but if he was feeling cocky, he’d say that no team could take on his pitching so thought that he should just reduce the roster to just himself. He may have been right, as during a February 18, 1967 charity game, Myrle struck out Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Brooks Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Maury Wills and Harmon Killebrew in order.
It’s so odd because this movie is erotic and exploitative yet it doesn’t make you feel bad about it. It helps when the women kill the men, doesn’t it?
You can consider Hard to Die either Tower of Terror or Sorority House Massacre III: Hard to Die. It’s kinda sorta a remake of Sorority House Massacre II with some of the same cast and the same director, Jim Wynorski. He made that movie for Julie Corman. Now Roger wanted the same movie.
He also had sets from Corporate Affairs, which was set in an office building. In Mark Thomas McGee’s Katzman, Nicholson and Corman – Shaping Hollywood’s Future, he talked about the issues that the location created as he wrote the movie with James B. Rogers: “This change in locale presented Jim and I with a problem—how to get the women out of their clothes and into their underwear. Try to imagine someone like David Lean or William Wyler wrestling with a dilemma like this.”
The trick that made the movie? The fact that it was set on different levels of a building. McGree added that this led to the knowledge that the characters “…could discover a lingerie company on another level. The sequence where these ladies become so excited when they discover these frilly and sexy undergarments (and just can’t wait to try them on) is as ridiculous and infantile as anything you can imagine.”
That’s from the guy who wrote this.
This movie also uses footage from Slumber Party Massacreto have the driller killer possess janitor Orville Ketchum who just stares at the five ladies who work at a lingerie company in the tower. That’s because the ladies broke the object housing the killer’s spirit that Dr. Ed Newton (Forrest J. Ackerman) was planning on destroying.
Dawn (Gail Thackray, an early internet porn entrepreneur and the creator of Hustler’s Barely Legal), Diana (Karen Mayo-Chandler), Jackie (Deborah Dutch), Tess (Melissa Moore) and Shayne (Bridget Carney) have to survive the night while wearing lingerie and carrying guns, which when combined with the title of this movie may lead one to believe that this was an Andy Sidaris film. Also, seeing as how it’s really a Wynorski movie, it has cameos by Monique Gabrielle and Kelli Maroney. He used the name Arch Stanton here, which is the name on the grave with the gold hidden inside from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
John Lafia was one of the co-writers of the first film and came back to direct the sequel with creator Don Mancini also coming back. Andy Barclay (Alex Vincent) is also back, but unlike so many slasher sequel characters, his life has changed so much since encountering the possessed doll with the spirit of Charles Lee Ray. His mother was institutionalized after the end of the last movie and now he’s in foster care being raised by Phil and Joanne Simpson (Gerrit Graham and Jenny Agutter) along with Kyle (Christine Elise), a punk rock mean girl that my wife, when questioned on this film, said, “She had the wardrobe and attitude that I wanted when I was a kid. And she smoked!” Keep in mind Becca was six or seven when she watched this at least a hundred and fifty times.
Meanwhile, the Play Pals Corporation has convinced shareholders that the Chucky incident never really happened. That means that as soon as the line fires up, there’s an incident and Charles Lee Ray finds himself back in the body of a Good Guy doll.
Of course, this ends in the factory where the dolls get made as Chucky starts to become human and needs Andy for a host. Kyle bonds with him and together they blow the doll’s head up real good.
I love how John Lafia made this movie from the point of view of a kid. He used very wide lenses, low angles, bright colors and a deep depth of field to show the world as a place larger for children than grown-ups.
This was a number one box office smash the day it was released. Not everyone loved it. Gene Siskel asked, “Who was this trash made for and would you want to sit next to them in a theater?”
Born and raised in New York City, Steve James was born into an entertainment family. His dad was trumpet player Hubie James, his uncle was James Wall (Mr. Baxter on Captain Kangaroo) and his godfather was actor Jon Seneca, who often took him to 42nd Street to watch action movies.
He also crossed over from the action film genre and made stuff like Mask, Johnny Be Good, The Brother From Another Planet and by beng Kung Fu Joe in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and its little-seen TV sequel Hammer, Slammer & Slade.
Sadly, James was often the second banana in his films but is always memorable. Even sadder, he died way too young at the age of 41 from pancreatic cancer. He was going to play Jax in the movie version of Mortal Kombat before his death and man, I can’t think of a cooler thing that could have happened.
There are two constants about James: everyone that worked with him speaks glowingly of him and Cannon fans absolutely love him. This movie is one of his few opportunities to be the lead and man, I wish we had received so many more.
James is Logan Blade — has there every been a more 90s name? — a former cop turned bounty hunter. He was blamed for several crimes as a cop and cleared, but he never went back, because he’s a man of honor. Now all he has is a trailer and a dog named Munch, a girl named Denise (Valarie Pettiford who is almost fed up with him and, well, still a job to do.
That job is to stop Angel (John Leguizamo), who leads the Diablos in a street war against another gang, the Romanos. He has a weapon to help him do exactly that in the form of Col. Walsh (Reb Brown), who surgically strikes and takes out most of his rivals in the opening. He follows up being a worthwhile asset when he rescues Angels from being transported to prison after Blade catches him.
Reb Brown never got to be a bad guy all that often and that is also a shame. He’s great in this — actually he’s pretty great in everything he did — as he wants to start a new war in the U.S. because he never got to win in Vietnam. He’s pretty much the darkside Rambo, if Rambo constantly wanted to be compared to Alexander the Great and kept referencing historical warfare. He ever tries to bring Blade over to his side, but we know that these two have to fight to the death after he kidnaps Blade’s girl.
Also, yes, Reb Brown screams pretty much for this entire movie. That’s what we want. That’s what we get.
The Romanos are led by Frank Vincent as Don Mario Romano. Vincent is pretty much required if you make a mob movie, as he also appeared as BIlly Batts in Goodfellas the same year as this movie. He was also Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos and Frank Marino in Casino.
Another actor in this, Thom Christopher*, is pretty important to me, as he was Hawk on Buck Rogers.
Yet this entire movie is all about Steve James, who dresses like a western gunslinger with a long duster and cowboy hat, walking the mean streets of New York City wiping out bad guys. This is everything I’ve ever wanted for James and it’s — again that word — sad that this was the only Street Hunter movie when this could have been a direct-to-video series that went on for a long time.
James co-wrote this movie with its director, John A. Gallagher, who is still making movies today.
*Thanks to Andrew Chamen for helping me fix the typo on this name.
In the divorce of Golan and Globus, it seems as if Menahem got not only Charles Bronson — 21st Century FIlms released Death Wish 5: The Face of Death — but also Michael Winner, who directed, co-wrote*, produced and edited this film. This would be the final collaboration between Golan and Winner.
Michael Caine and Roger Moore are Dr. Daniel Hicklar and Sir John Bavistock, nuclear physicists who believe they have invented a limitless supply of cold fusion energy. They are also con men Sidney Lipton and Gerald Bradley-Smith, who want to use their resemblance to those two men and steal their formula and get rich.
This movie has more dog sex than a Linda Lovelace loop, which should tell you the level of humor you’re about to get. At least it has a cast that you can be excited seeing when they show up, like Sally Kirkland as a former lover of both men, a closing cameo by John Cleese, Deborah Barrymore (the daughter of Moore and Italian actress Luisa Mattioli) playing a British agent named Flo Fleming, Patsy Kensit, Alexandra Pigg (star of British soap opera Brookside), Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart on Dr. Who) and Jim Bowen, who hosted the ITV game show Bullseye.
The final scenes for this film have one of the smallest crews ever on a major movie. Winner operated the camera, cameraman David Wynn-Jones held the reflector and Cleese moonlighted as the sound man as the sound recorder was concealed in a book he carried.
Caine’s agent told him not to do this movie, but he had always wanted to work with his friend Moore. His agent was probably right; he did a much better version of this movie two years earlier with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
*The other writers were Leslie Bricusse (Doctor Dolittle, Scrooged), Nick Mead, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran (Marks and Gran worked on the TV shows Goodnight Sweetheart and Birds of a Feather together).
Based on Le Cinquieme Singe by Jacques Zibi, this film has Ben Kingsley playing Cunda, a man who catches snakes for scientists to earn money to catch the eye of a widow. He ends up being bitten by serpents, which leads to a dream about four chimpanzees and then they show up in his waking life, leading him on a series of misadventures. While he just wants to make money off the monkeys, he finds himself growing to love them.
The Fifth Monkey was directed and written by Éric Rochat, who yes, made multiple versions of The Story of O and produced Jodorowsky’s Tusk, but he’s the man who made Too Much, the story of a robot with a heart for Cannon.
According to The Unknown Movies — and a reader of that site named Maurice — “…after 20% of the movie was completed, Golan wanted to replace the director of photography and partly also Rochat, which really killed the movie. The Brazilian crew quit, Kingsley insisted that Rochat stayed, and a new contract was written which made Kingsley, Rochat and the new director of photography, all directors of the movie.” This same writer also claims that Bubbles the chimp was in this.
Rochat himself emailed that site too, saying: “For your information, I was actually the producer of the film as well by contract, then the titles were made in LA by Menahem Golan. At the screening of the first copy, to my great surprise, Menahem had given himself the credit of producer. When I complained about it, he came up with the following line: “You have enough credit as it is, writer, director! You’re not going to fight me over this, are you?” I was so exhausted by the whole fight during the shooting that I let it go. Now one word in favor of Menahem, he loves movies and gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a go at it.”
I love that 21st Century keeps being an untapped mine filled with magical gold.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This originally appeared on the site on May 2, 2022.
Written by Stephen Tolkin and directed by Albert Pyun — who interned on a Toshiro Mifune TV series under Akira Kurosawa’s director of photography before making movies like Cyborg, Alien from L.A., Radioactive Dreams, The Sword and the Sorcerer and so many more — this film started at Universal, who got the rights after the CBS TV movies.
The rights were then sold to The Cannon Group with the idea of Michael Winner directing a script by James Silke (Ninja 3: The Domination) and supposedly starring Michael Dudikoff as Cap and Steve James as the Falcon, the sheer idea of which makes my brain delirious. The Variety ad that announced this movie initiated Jack Kirby’s lawsuit against Marvel, as it claimed that Stan Lee created the character and not he and Joe Simon, who invented Cap all the way back in 1941 and Lee didn’t bring the character back until 1964.
After two years of development, Golan left Cannon in 1989 — stay tuned for August on this site for a sequel to Cannon Month — and as part of the settlement, he was given control of 21st Century Film Corporation and the film rights to Captain America.
Then, comic book fans waited. And waited.
It premiered in 1991 in the Phillipines as Bloodmatch as part of a double feature with Snoopy, featuring an ad that trumpeted Golan as the producer of Superman. Maybe it was better to say that instead of saying that he produced Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Also, Jean Claude Van Damme is not in this movie, no matter what that ad claims.
So that’s how we got a Captain America played by Matt Salinger, the son of the writer of The Catcher In the Rye, and fighting Scott Paulin as the Red Skull, who was a child prodigy that the Axis experimented on, sending Dr. Maria Vaselli (Carla Cassola,Demonia) to America where she creates the Super Soldier Syrum.
There’s some good casting here, and by that, I mean character actors that get me a -typing. those would be Ned Beatty, Darren McGavin (the younger version of his General Fleming character is played by Billy Mumy while his A Christmas Story wife Melinda Dillon is in the cast as Steve Roger’s mom ), Ronny Cox as the President and Michael Nouri.
The one thing I do like about this film is that in the years after World War II, the Skull has built a conspiracy crime family with his daughter Valentina De Santis (the character Sin in the comic books, she’s played by Valentina De Santis) that has assassinated everyone from the Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King to Elvis, which he claims was the one time they did the wrong thing. Now, they want to brainwash the President and Cap, along with Sharon Carter (Kim Gillingham, playing that role and Bernice, the 1940s girlfriend of our hero), must stop him.
So how weird is it that the son of J.D. Salinger, whose book was often in the hands of programmed assassins, is battle the man who programmed said assassins, at least in this movie?
Ronnie Cox once said that the script to this movie “remains to this day the finest script I have ever read… how those guys messed that film up, I will never know.” And Stan Lee, ever the PR man, said that the reason for the reshoots was because “Pyun did it so well and so excitingly that everyone in the audience (at the screening) kept clamoring for more.”
Sure, True Believer.
As for Jack Kirby, everything you know in comic book movies is the result of his creativity. Even after his death, his family has attempted to gain the money and recognition that that creation deserves. When most comics these days struggle to be released once a month, Kirby was at one point — according to Mark Evanier — drawing twenty pages of comics a week, up to five pages a day, which is about a full issue of a comic every week. All for no real ownership, no insurance and no promises. For just one month’s example, in November 1963, Kirby drew 139 pages of comics and seven covers. His Fourth World era contract was for 15 pages a week, so Kirby gave then twenty.
Think about that the next time you watch everyone make money from his work.
21st Century Film Corporation put out several Edgar Allan Poe films and why not? They’re all well-known names from a well-regarded horror author and best of all, you don’t have to pay to use them. All four 21st Century Poe movies were produced by Harry Alan Towers and having him teamed up with Menahem Golan is like when the X-Men and Teen Titans united to fight Dark Phoenix and Darkseid.
New teacher Janet Pendleton (Karen Witter, Playboy‘s March 1982 Playmate of the Month) has come to Ravenscroft Reform School, which also has head doctor Gary Julian (Robert Vaughn) and Doctor Schaeffer (Donald Pleasence in a really bad wig and worse accent) in the faculty, so certainly nothing bad can happen, like a Reagan-masked killer walling young women into the basement, right?
You don’t remember that time when Poe wrote about guys in Reagan masks?
How about when he had a girl using a mixer to curl her hair and scalp herself?
Arnold Vosloo from The Mummy plays a cop, Ginger Allen plays the worst of the bad girls, Nia Long plays Fingers who gives her friends switchblades, Gary’s father is John Carradine in his last role and guys from the all boys’ school head down to the dungeon to party with the girls and that’s how murder happens.
Director Gerard Kikoine also made Edge of Sanity and Master of Dragonard Hill — as well as plenty of adult films and editing Jess Franco’s Countess Perverse and Lorna the Exorcist — while writers Jake Chesi and Stuart Lee have only this movie to their credit. Most of the music from Frederic Talgorn is taken from Edge of Sanity. The song “Love Bites” from Ninja 3: The Dominationis also in this which makes me wonder if Menahem also got the rights to a bunch of music when he left Cannon.
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