How — when movies have the opportunity to do reshoots and change angles and not be live — do films make wrestling look cheaper and worse than it is in real life?

Directed and written by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian (the makers of The Hitchhikers, ‘Gator Bait and Rocktober Blood), this movie stars Jan MacKenzie from ‘Gator Bait 2: Cajun Justice as Luscious Lisa, a rookie wrestler due to go up against Magnificent Mimi (Mimi Lesseos) after being trained by Pattie (Sue Sexton) for the very real world of pro wrestling.

MacKenzie is also Beverly and Fred’s daughter and their son Ben also wrote the script with them, so I wonder what exactly they were thinking when they had a scene inserted — pun intended — of their daughter’s character working a naked no holds barred post-match match with promoter Diamond Dave.

If you loved 90s women’s wrestling, MacKenzie was really Luscious Lisa in GLOW, where Trudy Adams (Pam) also appeared as Amy the Farmer’s Daughter. Other GLOW favorites like California Doll, Tiffany Million, Envy and Big Bad Mama are also on hand, while Sexton and Black Venus were both long-time wresters. And if you watched WCW Nitro, you definitely recognize Lee Marshall’s voice.

Meanwhile, Lisa’s grandfather (Robert D. Bergen) was once a wrestler named Killer Kane whose finishing hold “The Snap” killed a man just like Ox Baker’s Heart Punch. So yeah, there’s a lot of drama in this and even more cheesecake, which the born-again Sebastians tried to square up reel by having a sermon at the end of the movie, which is quite a juxtaposition but God does move in very mysterious ways.

Speaking of mysterious things, who did the absolutely berserk audio mixing in this movie?

More remake than sequel, Alligator II starts with rich villain Vincent Brown (Steve Railsback) dumps some of the Future Chemicals into the sewers which goes right to the baby alligator from the end of Alligator.

Detective David Hodges (Joseph Bologna) and his wife Chris (Dee Wallace, forever battling against eco horror) realize that all the parts of people are coming from an alligator and try to get a big party at Brown’s casino on the lake cancelled, but you know how it goes. When your mayor is Major Healey from I Dream of Jeannie (Bill Dailey), these things happen. Actually, watching movies where small minded governments ignore ecological terror and shout down people and ruin lives really feels on topic. Maybe a bit too much.

With Hodges and Officer Rich Harmon (Woody Brown) on one side and alligator hunter “Hawk” Hawkins (Richard Lynch!) and his team, which includes his brother Billy (Kane Hodder!) on the other, you know that there’s going to be a lot of people torn apart and wolfed down.

What I did not expect was the lengthy pro wrestling scene which is filled with movie and wrestling crossover actors, like Professor Toru Tanaka, Alexis Smirnoff, Chavo Guerrero, Count Billy Varga, Gene LeBell and Bill Anderson. The man who would be the next Hulk Hogan, Tom Magee, is also here as a strongman that gets launched by the alligator’s tail.

Director Jon Hess made Watchers, while writer Curt Allen wrote Bloodstone. This movie is pure junk in the best of ways, just scene and people chewing, Richard Lynch breaking down over the loss of his crew and rocket launches against a monstrous alligator. Watch it in the pool.

Shakma was played by a baboon named Typhoon and I should really just end this article here because I can’t top that.

Christopher Atkins has left The Blue Lagoon behind and now has a pet baboon named, well, Shakma. For some reason, he trusts his college professor Sorensen (Roddy McDowall) enough to inject his pet with some hormones to limit its aggression. This goes horribly wrong and Shakma goes, well, ape shit. I know, I know, baboon shit. Sorensen then tells Atkins’ character that he will euthanize Shakma.

So after all that, after a man killed his baboon, Atkins’ character Sam, his sister Kim (Ari Meyers) and his friends Gary, Bradley, Richard and Tracy (Amanda Wyss) all LARP with Sorensen in his real life roleplaying game and wait, this guy just — let me highlight this — killed the hero’s pet who is just a few steps down evolutionary-wise from being human.

These morons then trust a man way too old to be playing games with them to take out the fire alarms and lock them in the same building where a not-so-dead — and even more red ass enraged — Shakma just wants murder.

A movie filled with some of the absolutely most brainless characters ever, Shakma wipes out everyone. You’ll yell stuff like “Shakma is an animal, how can it cut the power?” and watch this with the knowledge that they made the baboon legit mental by continually saying its name, like some weird pro wrestling heat, and Amanda Wyss was quite rightly afraid of even being close to the belligerent baboon.

I can’t even oversell the main fact of this movie: every human in it is the dumbest human you will ever see. God bless Shakma for having the sense to take them down.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Shot at the same time as Killer Crocodile and directed by Giannetto De Rossi (who also directed Cy Warrior but is mainly known for special effects on films like Zombi, The Humanoid, Dune, High Tension and more than sixty other movies. He co-wrote the film with the producer — and director of the original — Fabrizio De Angelis and Dardano Sacchetti.

Ennio Girolami is back as the hunter known as Joe and Richard Anthony Crenna is on hand again as Kevin, the environmentalist turned croc killer, as a second mutated reptile starts eating everyone it can get its jaws on.

They’ve come to the swamps of the Caribbean with reporter Liza (Debra Karr) as she investigates bad businessman Mr. Baxter, who doesn’t see why radioactive waste is a detriment to the holiday resort he’s just opened.

This one is filled with padding — lots of flashbacks to the first movie — but it makes up for that by having the titular monster go through the wall of a house to get at people, then eat a nun and top that by snacking on a whole bunch of kids. Nobody is safe and the body count comes in at 21, which is pretty respectable.

You can get this with the original movie from Severin or watch Killer Crocodile 2 on Tubi.

With a subtitle of Yo Soy La Ley (I Am the Law) — a title it was re-released under a year later — the fourth Siete en la Mira film moves away from the gang on gang violence to just featuring two killing machines. Roberto “Flaco” Guzman (a man with more than 200 credits, mostly from the VHS era in which he poses with a revolver on the cover; he also directed 1989’s Pánico en el bosque, a movie that ups the video box ante by having a woman with long white hair holding a machete in one hand and a man’s severed head in the other) is Tulio Rodriguez, an absolutely ruthless murderer who teams up with Lorena Herrera’s female assassin. Herrera was a model who won the famous “Look of the Year” content in Mexico, then became an actress in movies like this, Policía Secreto and Octagon and Mascara Sagrada in Fight to the Death before finding her way to being a pop singer and telenovela star.

They’re opposed by Jorge Reynoso (Siete En La Mira 2: La Furia De La Venganza) who is one of those tough Mexican guys who shrugs off multiple bullets and keeps on coming. Both the heroes and usually the main villains of these violent Mexican films are able to do as if they were Miguel Myers.

This movie has some harrowing — and therefore entertaining — moments, like when a man about to be lynched has the stage beneath him destroyed piece by piece or when a child interrupts Tulio assaulting his mother and shoots him in the eye with a BB rifle. Tulio then shoots the mother — who he’d just been inside — once to drop her and then another time in the head before unloading an entire clip into her now dead body. There’s also the sight of the short and somewhat chubby 56-year-old Guzman making sweet love to the 23-year-old  Herrera who is quite literally a statuesque vision. Maybe there’s hope for all of us.

There’s no hope for most of the people in this movie, because everyone gets shot repeatedly and that’s the ones who were lucky. The end has the three leads exchanging gunfight before Tulio gets shot in every appendage, kind of like some wild Catholic saint painting that you’d stare at and wonder why religion often indulges in such bloodlust, all before he dies and falls directly into an already dug grave.

Damián Acosta Esparza, who also made the third movie in this series, made El Violador Infernal, a movie that still makes my heart race, and thirty other movies with words like trágico, sangre, muerte and venganza in the title.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Bikers battle punks with Fernando Almada as the authority figure caught in the middle. Yes, his character was dead in the second movie in this series, but I get the feeing that this is a sequel in name only.

One of the gangs even goes to a high school where they make their money selling drugs to students. Two brothers, Raúl and Humberto, get involved, with Humberto dedicated to staying in school and Raúl joining the gang in their battles against other toughs as well as robbing trucks. Then, Humberto is killed, and his brother must reevalute his ways.

At the end of this movie, a bad guy keeps shooting Almada who keeps getting up and gritting his teeth like he doesn’t have time to bleed. Once, I saw my grandfather get stabbed — and another time he was in an accident in which most of his back was burned to a crisp — and the guy didn’t register the day or cry or even make much of a noise.

He would have loved Fernando Almada.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.