ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn

Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Premature Burial, Haunting Fear stars Brinke Stevens as Victoria, a wealthy woman haunted by recurring dreams of being buried alive following the death of her beloved father. Her slimy husband Terry, played by Ray regular John Henry (née) Jay Richardson, pretends to be supportive while banging his hot secretary Lisa (Delia Sheppard) behind Vicki’s back. It’s not the only secret he’s keeping. Terry owes mob boss Visconti (Robert Quarry) 80 large in gambling debt. Visconti sends bent Detective James Trent (Jan-Michael Vincent) to watch the couple’s house to make sure Terry doesn’t make a break for it. Sweet as she is, it isn’t long before Trent develops an affinity toward Victoria, while at the same time Terry and Lisa are cooking up a scheme to kill Vicki, re-mortgage the house and pay back Visconti before the deadline. 

Rounding out the cast is Robert Clarke as Vicki’s doctor, who may or may not have murdered her father for a slice of the inheritance, and Michael Berryman, who makes a single-scene appearance in a nightmare sequence set in a morgue. 

Shot in six days for $140,000 at an old mansion later used in Ray’s Mind Twister (1994) and Witch Academy (1995), Haunting Fear is part horror movie, part erotic, blurring the lines between Vicki’s nightmares and waking life effectively through the use of editing and noir lighting courtesy of DP Gary Graver. The soundtrack, devoid of an overabundance of ambient sound save for a subdued synth score, adds further to the film’s quiet but steady pace to the final act. 

 It’s here where the film finally dives fully into horror territory. Instead of dying, Victoria breaks free of the wooden box into which Terry and Lisa have sealed her, and goes full tilt crazy, stalking her tormenters with a knife in a giggling frenzy from the shadows. While the first half focuses more on the scheming of Lisa and Terry, the finale is Stevens’ show. Cited as her favorite performance from this golden era of “Scream Queens,” it is Brinke’s meatiest role to date, having been written for her while she and Ray were a couple. Even when she’s going berserk, there’s something in her coffee-colored eyes that elicits sympathy. 

A film buff himself from childhood, Ray’s script pays homage to several classics. The image of Stevens sitting on the floor of the corner of her kitchen, vacantly lost in her own insanity, tapping a large knife tip onto the tile floor is straight out of the Dan Curtis classic Trilogy of Terror (1975.) Further, the scene where Vicki is put under hypnosis and made to recall her past life traumas by Trilogy’s Karen Black is reminiscent of Corman’s lesser-seen The Undead (1957) wherein the protagonist travels back in time in her mind to recall her past lives. If Allison Hayes had survived past the age of 47, it’s a sure bet Ray would have hired her.

True to most of the director’s output from this period, there’s plenty of sex and nudity go around, although sadly, we never get to see Richardson bare all. Come on, Fred! How about a little something for the ladies? There’s even some Basic Instinct-style rough stuff (played for laughs), almost two years before that film hit the scene. Is Haunting Fear true to the source material? No. Then again, no Poe adaptation ever has been. Haunting Fear is therefore best viewed in the spirit with which it was made. A nice little thriller meant to satisfy the 1990s video market. 

Dr. Richard Quicks (Robert Quarry) leads a group of researchers into a haunted house, like skeptic Beth (who was once a lesbian, which a Fred Olen Ray movie totally wouldn’t exploit), on the make Harry and psychic Amy (Brinke Stevens) who of course gets possessed by the house, at which point Father Anthony Vicci (Erik Estrada!) becomes the only person who can save them all — as long as he gets past the fact that he ignored his vow of chastity and slept with a woman. The shame…

Anyways, more exciting than Ponch playing a priest is Michele Bauer playing a nun who gets naked and denies the existence of God and says “You knew your way around a pussy pretty good for a priest.” as well as Tiffany Million — once a GLOW girl, later an adult video star — playing a demonic nun, which is better than just a nun.

Fred Olen Ray never made an Amityville sequel, but this is as close as he’s going to get, as well as making The Haunting, as this movie calls the mansion Heron — instead of Hill — House. This feels like an Italian movie without the excesses that an Italian film would add. No turtles are killed for real, no eyeballs get stabbed and no gigantic demon made from the dead bodies of murdered villages rises from the catacombs. But hey — Erik Estrada trying to resist a Michele Bauer half out of a nun’s habit. That’s worth something.

Don Anthony (William Hickey, Don Carrado Prizzi in Prizzi’s Honor and Uncle Lewis in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) runs the biggest crime family in California. He’s rubbed out by a team of his archrival Don Francisco (Stuart Whitman) and his mistress Gina (Morgan Fairchild). As he lays dying, he tells Monk (Irwin Keyes) to find his son Tony — yes, Anthony Anthony — to keep the family alive.

It turns out that Tony is Eddie Deezen.

Now, the mob has sent Gina to seduce him, as well as Angelo and Sara (Jack O’Halloran and Brinke Stevens) to kill him. Can Monk and the rest of the family get Don Tony ready for the family business or will they all die trying?

This is the last film of “Iron” Mike Mazursky, plus it also has Don Stroud, Dick Miller, Robert Quarry — credited as his Dr. Phibes Rises Again character name Darrus Biederbeck –and Teagan Clive from Alienator in the cast, which is a Fred Olen Ray mark of quality.

Does Ray have a vision? He did cast Deezen as a lead in a movie. I think that says yes.

In my dreams, Ray made a sequel and shot for shot created the end of Goodfellas with the cocaine run with all of the same actors except Deezen takes over for Ray Liotta.

Welcome to the meta world of Fred Olen Ray, as Bad Girls from Mars is about a movie called Bad Girls from Mars and all of the many things that go wrong during filming, including actresses being killed off by a masked killer, which as always pleases the Italian side of my DNA.

Even though the producers are making a killing — wokka wokka — from insurance payoffs, they keep making the movie and bring in Emanuelle (Edy Williams, the one-time wife of Russ Meyer) from Europe to be the lead. She’s out of control the moment she lands in Los Angeles and the killings just keep on happening.

Ray used the sets left over from Roger Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death to make Wizards of the Demon Sword. Before the sets were taken down — a second time — he wrote (with Equinox screenwriter Mark Thomas McGee) and shot Bad Girls from Mars in the day and $19,000 that he had left.

Corman would have been double proud.

Inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, there are references to Batgirls from Mars and bat symbols throughout the film. That’s because Ray was going to hire Adam West and Burt Ward, but they were busy that day.

Literally, that day.

Anyways, it’s a movie where Edy Wiliams says, “The smell of garbage turns me into a wild woman!” and Brinke Stevens plays a woman who’ll do anything to be a star. I may be projecting a bit, but I always think of Brinke as being the sweetest person, even when she’s being the evilest villain in a film. Like I just want to play with her hair, ask how her day was and make sure she’s feeling alright. Let other men obsess over sleeping with scream queens. I just want to be supportive.

You know, Gary Graver worked with Orson Welles and Fred Olen Ray. The difference — among many — was that Welles worked for decades to complete a film and Ray would knock off a few a month. You determine your success by your own values.

This is also called Emmanuelle Goes to Hollywood because that title sells.

Rubens Francisco Lucchetti, who had once wrote for comics and pulp magazines, made this movie to honor Brazilian heroes like Morcego Nergo and O Sombra, with the name of the movie’s villain — The Scarlet Scorpion — taken from a radio series Lucchetti created that was based on Fu Manchu. There’s also Madame Ming, who is pretty much Madame Dragon from Terry and the Pirates mixed with Fu Manchu’s daughter Sumuru (who is also in the Jess Franco movies The Million Eyes of Sumuru and The Girl from Rio). The hero of this movie, Anjo, was a character created and played by radio actor Álvaro Aguiar for the radio series As Aventuras do Anjo, which was broadcast by Rádio Nacional from 1948 to 1965.

This movie is all about just how important radio was to Brazilians, as the public loves the show The Adventure of The Angel so much that its creator has become a millionaire and is about to make a movie about it. Fashion designer Gloria Campos dreams of meeting the announcer and creator of the show as she imagines the adventures come to life in her mind, yet the Scarlet Scorpion may be more real than anyone can imagine.

There’s also a striptease by Roberta Close, the first transgender model to pose for the Brazilian edition of Playboy. Shot a year after her gender confirmation surgery, Roberta fought the government for eight years to legally be female and has also walked the red carpet for Thierry Mugler, Guy Laroche and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Director Ivan Cardosa also made A Werewolf In the Amazon with Paul Naschy and the Coffin Joe documentary The Universe of Mojica Marins. He also made several of his own horror movies before this, such as The Secret of the Mummy and The Seven Vampires.

Even without knowing much about the history of Brazil’s superheroes and radio shows, this is a fun movie that mixes fantasy and reality for entertaining effect.

Super Batman & Mazinger V is a South Korean show seemingly daring the lawyers of major corporations in America and Japan to unleash their full retainers. Is the hero Batman? Is it Golden Bat? What does Castle Grayskull have to do with all of this? Why are some moments animated and others not? What did this have to do with Black Star and the Golden Bat? Why are the bad guys all neon werewolves? And how does Mazinger V exist in the same space and time as Batman? Is it Batman or Betaman?

So many questions. I have more, like why is there a large man dressed like a child carrying a giant robot toy? Did the animated evil queen come first or the live action one? Why does one of the kids have painted on freckles? And what about when Batman or Betaman jumps into a waterfall and literally becomes a cutout photo animation unlike every other moment on this show or movie or whatever it is?

I really don’t know why or how but I’m into whatever it is and want so much more.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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, which is not as true as saying he was the producer of a Superman, the best not mentioned 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.