This movie knows how to get a great cast together: Chad Lowe as its hero, along with Patrick Warburton, Tyra Banks, Amanda Plummer and R. Lee Ermey as some of the tenants that he’s watching over.
The last man in his place disappeared and now, after being accused of murder, it feels like Lowe’s Stan Warden is facing the same future. There’s also a fun script, written by Eerie, Indiana and Strange Luck creator — and the man who directed one of the original Fear Street TV movies — Karl Schaefer.
It’s also goofy in all the best ways — the owner’s name is Dr. Caligari, it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s brother Iggy, certain apartments are just missing — and seems like it could have been a series.
I’ve seen some bad reviews on this, but maybe it just hit me right. Or maybe I always cut Tobe Hooper — yes, he directed this! — a break. I wasn’t expecting much and ended up walking away finding somethingh mildly fun.
New Line was doing so well with Freddy that they thought that they could do the same with Leatherface, not realizing that while he’s the most out front member of the Sawyer Family, there is an entire brood to tell the stories about.
The final film to get an X before NC-17 was created, I will say that this movie brings the gore, even after the battle between the MPAA and New Line. I mean, the movie starts off with Leatherface taking off a woman’s face, so know what you’re getting into. Yet this was submitted eleven times for a review and most of the gore was lost; this was after the original script by David J. Schow (who also wrote the scripts for The Crow, Critters 3 and 4 and many other movies) had a naked man being literally sliced into two pieces. I assume the MPAA had more issues with seeing a nude man than the gore.
Directror Jeff Burr got fired early in the film’s production, but when no one else wanted the job, he was back on. He’s already made another sequel, Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy, and would also made Puppet Master 4 and 5 as well as Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings. He started his career with From A Whisper To a Scream and also directed The Werewolf Reborn!, Frankenstein & the Werewolf Reborn! and Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy.
The original trailer for this might be better than the actual movie — that’s Kane Hodder as Leatherface! — but you can’t deny a movie that has Ken Foree and Viggo Mortensen in the cast. And hey — Caroline Williams shows up in a cameo as Stretch, now a reporter.
The problem with the Chainsaw sequels — actually, this goes for nearly any sequel to a major movie — is that the first two movies are wildly different takes on the form and really hard to outdo. At least Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation tries to do something really out there with the conspiracy theory wildness.
So what I’m saying is that after this, perhaps the movies aren’t as good. Probably they’re not good at all.
Shot as Panga by director Sean Barton (who only directed this one movie, but has edited many more) on location in South Africa in 1989, this film was added to the Curse series of films. None of these movies are connected and you know, that’s kind of how we like it. You can call it Witchcraft, Blood Sacrifice or Curse III: Panga, if you’d like.
Geoff Armstrong (Andre Jacobs) and his wife Elizabeth (Jenilee Harrison, Cindy Snow from Three’s Company and Jamie Ewing Barnes on Dallas) are running a large sugar plantation in East Africa. Things go wrong when the sacrifice of a goat by the locals get interrupted and a witch doctor calls a demon from the sea that kills everyone in the Armstrong family except Elizabeth.
Elizabeth gets help from Dr. Pearson (Christopher Lee) and to break the curse she must lure the witch doctor into the sugar cane fields and set him on fire. Seems like a good plan, I guess.
The fish man is designed by The Fly special FX artist Chris Walas, so this has that going for it. It’s not really all that exciting, nor is at as devoted to being entertaining weirdness like the first two films in the Curse non-series.
Dean Koontz — whose own website proclaims him as the “International Bestselling Master of Suspense” — has sold over 450 million copies of his books, but it always seems like he’s a little behind Stephen King. I mean, that’s not a bad thing, as King was just a monolith when it came to selling books. But Koontz was successful as well. as in the VHS rental wild late 80s and 90s, so many of his books became movies. Watchers, which is very, very loosely based on one of his books, has three sequels alone.
Other Koontz film adaptions include Demon Seed, The Passengers (based on his noel Shattered), Whispers, Servants of Twilight, Hideaway, Intensity, Mr. Murder, Phantoms, Sole Survivor, Frankenstein, Odd Thomas and Black River.
Koontz’s golden retriever Trixie was often on his book jackets and even wrote two books, Life Is Good: Lessons in Joyful Living and Christmas Is Good. She was a service dog that had been trained by Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), a charitable organization that provides service dogs for people with disabilities, an organization that Koontz discovered while writing his book Midnight. Over the years, he helped the group raise $2.5 million in funds, so Trixie was their gift to him. So you can see why having a supercanine golden retriever in a story made sense to him — which is what Watchers is all about.
Watchers (1988): It’s a rivalry as old as time: a golden retriever with special abilities battling the mutated monster known as the OXCOM (Outside Experimental Combat Mammal).
The dog soon makes friends with Travis Cornell (Corey Haim) and his girlfriend Tracey (Lala Sloatman, who was dating Haim; she’s also the niece of Frank Zappa and is in Amityville: A New Generation). Of course, the government wants the dog back, so they send NSO agent Johnson (Michael Ironside).
This movie kills everyone it comes across, with either OXCOM or Johnson basically wiping out a small town, whether to kill or to keep the murders secret.
Amazingly, this was originally written by Paul Haggis, who would go on to write Million Dollar Baby, Crash and yes, create Walker Texas Ranger.
Watchers II (1990): Hey, I think that Marc Singer — he’s the Beastmaster — and Tracy Scoggins — from Dynasty and The Colbys — are fine replacements in this film that finds OXCOM and a golden retriever still battling one another.
Singer is a Marine gone AWOL. Scoggins is an animal psychologist from the top secret laboratory and the OXCOM still is a goofy rubber suit. And sure, this may be the same movie we just watched, but when has a sequel being the same as the first movie ever stopped us?
Screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris used the name Henry Dominic — the same alter ego they’d use for Bloodfist II, Flight of the Black Angel, The Unborn, Severed Tiesand Mindwarp — as neither were members of the Writer’s Guild of America. Brancato and Ferris would go on to write The Game, as well as The Net.
Thierry Notz also directed The Terror Within which makes a lot of sense once you see this movie.
Watchers 3 (1994): Oh yes, this third one was shot in Peru, executive produced by Roger Corman and has one of my favorites, Wings Hauser, in the middle of the never-ending war between mutant and mongrel. Yes, this time it’s the deformed Outsider, which lives only to kill, battling Einstein, a golden retriever with an IQ of 175.
To stop the monster, Hauser is put in charge of a squad of military men and criminals. Now if you’re thinking, “Would Roger Corman rip off Predator?” let me just say that yes, he would. He did. And he would do it again.
Written by the same man who penned Carnosaur 2, let me tell you, I will regret nothing on my deathbed except probably the time I spent watching this movie. Eh, who am I kidding? I’d watch it again if you asked with any nicety in your tone.
Watcher Reborn (1998): You know what you never realize as a kid? As bad of a director as George Lucas can be, he’s one of the few people able to reign in the hammy tendencies of Mark Hamill, who plays a detective in this one who has just lost his wife and son to a fire that was probably caused by a mutant because that’s how it goes.
Lisa Wilcox, Alice from A Nightmare On Elm Street 4and 5, plays the scientist who introduces him to a golden retriever, this time named Alex and being not as smart as he was the last time, only having an IQ of 140. This one also has a pit bull and the man who ruined Night Gallery in syndication, Gary Collins, so you know that my heart is on the side of the animals and not the humans. I’m also on the side of all murderous mutants, because as Emily Dickinson wrote, “The heart wants what it wants, or else it does not care,” and we’ve gone about proving this inscrutable wisdom true ever since.”
Low Rawls — yes, the man who sang “You’ll Never Find Another Love like Mine” — has a cameo as a coroner, so if you ever get asked, “What do Lucio Fulci and Lou Rawls have in common?” and a gun is at your temple, I have provided you with the knowledge that will save your life.
Should you watch the Watchers movies? Look, I don’t want to tell you what to do with your life. I mean, you could also ask, “Should you watch a hundred Jess Franco movies in one month?” The answer is always going to be yes for me as I try and get the highest of movie highs, no matter how bad the strain seems to be.
Conan the Barbarian and its success just meant that Italians could go back to making the peplum films they made for more than a decade in the 50s. The locations were there, the props were easy and all it took was the germ of an idea to send tons of Italian filmmakers out and about to make their own sword and sorcery movies, like Franco Prosperi’s Gunan, King of the Barbarians and Throne of Fire, Umberto Lenzi’s Ironmaster and Michele Massimo Tarantini’s Sword of the Barbarians.
For my money, no one made a better barbarian movie on a smaller budget than Joe D’Amato with his Ator films. Made from 1982 to 1990, three of these four films were filmed by D’Amato under his David Hills name. The other one was directed by Alfonso Brescia and D’Amato didn’t like it! As for actors, the first three feature Miles O’Keeffe and the fourth has Eric Allan Kramer as his son.
Instead of just being a big dumb lunk like Conan is in the movies — we can discuss Conan being a thief in the books and comics any time you’d like — Ator is also an alchemist, scholar, swordmaster and even a magician who can materialize objects out of nowhere.
We’ve pulled together our past reviews of Ator’s films, added some content and put them all in one place to introduce you to these astounding movies and hopefully get you watching them.
Ator the Fighting Eagle (1982): Once, Ator was just a baby, born with the birthmark that prophesied that he’d grow up to destroy the Spider Cult, whose leader Dakar (a pro wrestler who appeared in Titanes en el Ring against Martín Karadagian) tries to kill before he even gets out of his chainmail diapers.
Luckily, Ator is saved and grows up big, strong and weirdly in love with his sister, Sunya. It turns out that luckily, he’s adopted, so this is only morally and not biologically upsetting. His father allows them to be married, but the Spider Cult attacks the village and takes her, along with several other women.
Ator trains with Griba, the warrior who saved him as a child (he’s played by Edmund Purdom, the dean from Pieces!). What follows are pure shenanigans — Ator is kidnapped by Amazons, almost sleeps with a witch, undertakes a quest to find a shield and meets up with Roon (Sabrina Siani, Ocron from Fulci’s batshit barbarian opus Conquest), a sexy blonde thief who is in love with him.
Oh yeah! Laura Gemser, Black Emanuelle herself, shows up here too. It is a Joe D’Amato movie after all.
Ator succeeds in defeating Dakkar, only to learn that the only reason that Griba mentored him was to use him to destroy his enemy. That said, Ator defeats him too, leaving him to be eaten by the Lovecraftian-named Ancient One, a monstrous spider. But hey, Ator isn’t done yet. He kills that beast too!
Finally, learning that Roon has died, Ator and Sunya go back to their village, ready to make their incestual union a reality. Or maybe not, as she doesn’t show up in the three sequels.
Ator is played by Miles O’Keefe, who started his Hollywood career in the Bo Derek vehicle Tarzan the Ape Man, a movie that Richard Harris would nearly fist fight people over if they dared to bring it up. He’s in all but the last of these films and while D’Amato praised his physique and attitude, he felt that his fighting and acting skills left something to be desired.
Ator the Fighting Eagle pretty much flies by. It does what it’s supposed to do — present magic, boobs, sorcery and swordfights — albeit in a PG-rated film. It’s anything except boring. And it was written by Michele Soavi (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect, Cemetery Man)!
You can watch it on Tubi in either the original or RiffTrax version.
Ator 2 – L’invincibile Orion (1984): Joe D’Amato wanted to make a prehistoric movie like Quest for Fire called Adamo ed Eva that read a lot like 1983’s Adam and Eve vs. The Cannibals. However, once he called in Miles O’Keefe to be in the movie, the actor said that he couldn’t be in the film due to moral and religious reasons. One wonders why he was able to work with Joe D’Amato, a guy who made some of the scummiest films around.
Akronos has found the Geometric Nucleus and is keeping its secret safe when Zor (Ariel from Jubilee) and his men attack the castle. The old king begs his daughter Mila (Lisa Foster, who starred in the Cinemax classic Fanny Hill and later became a special effects artist and video game developer) to find his student Ator (O’Keefe).
Mila gets shot with an arrow pretty much right away, but Ator knows how to use palm leaves and dry ice to heal any wound, a scene which nearly made me fall of my couch in fits of giggles. Soon, she joins Ator and Thong as they battle their way back to the castle, dealing with cannibals and snake gods.
Somehow, Ator also knows how to make a modern hang glider and bombs, which he uses to destroy Zor’s army. After they battle, Ator even wants Zor to live, because he’s a progressive barbarian hero, but the bad guy tries to kill him. Luckily, Thong takes him out.
After all that, Akronos gives the Geometric Nucleus to Ator, who also pulls that old chestnut out that his life is too dangerous to share with her. He takes the Nucleus to a distant land and sets off a nuke.
Yes, I just wrote that. Because I just watched that.
If you want to see this with riffing, it’s called Cave Dwellers in its Mystery Science Theater 3000 form. But man, a movie like this doesn’t really even need people talking over it. It was shot with no script in order to compete with Conan the Destroyer. How awesome is that?
You can get this from Revok or watch Cave Dwellers on Tubi.
Iron Warrior (1988):
I always worry and think, “What is left? Have I truly exhausted the bounds of cinema? Have I seen all there is that is left to see? Will nothing ever really surprise and delight me ever again?” Then I watched Iron Warrior and holy shit you guys — this movie is mindblowing.
Alfonso Brescia made a bunch of Star Trek-inspired Star Wars ripoffs in the late 70’s, like Cosmos: War Of the Planets, Battle Of the Stars, War Of the Robots and Star Odyssey. Before that, he was known for working in the peplum genre with entries such as The Magnificent Gladiator and The Conquest of Atlantis. And some maniacs out there may know him from his Star Wars clone cover version of Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast — complete with the same actress, Sirpa Lane — called The Beast in Space.
Today, though, we’re here to discuss Brescia taking over the reins of Ator from Joe D’Amato after Ator the Fighting Eagle and Ator 2: The Blade Master. I expected another muddy cave dwelling movie livened up only by nukes and hang gliders. What I received was a movie where a frustrated artist was struggling to break free.
This movie goes back to the beginning of Ator’s life, where we discover that his twin brother was taken at a young age. Now, our hero travels to Dragor (really the Isle of Malta) to do battle with a sorceress named Phaedra (Elisabeth Kazaand, who was in the aforementioned The Beast) her unstoppable henchman, the silver skulled, red bandana wearing Trogar (Franco Daddi, who was the stunt coordinator for both Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Curse), who is the Iron Master of the Sword.
Princess Janna (Savina Gersak, who was in War Bus Commando) and Ator (the returning Miles O’Keefe) join forces and man, Janna’s makeup and hair is insane. She has what I can only describe as a ponytail mohawk and has makeup that wouldn’t be out of place on the Jem and the Holograms cartoon.
Imagine, if you will, a low budget sword and sorcery film that has MTV style editing, as well as gusts of wind, constant dolly shots and nausea-inducing zooms. It’s less a narrative film as it is a collection of images, sword fights and just plain weirdness. Like Deeva (Iris Peynado, who you may remember as Vinya, the girl who hooks up with Fred Williamson in Warriors of the Wasteland) saying that she created both Ator and Trogar to be tools of justice? This movie completely ignores the two that came before — and the one that follows it — and I am completely alright with all of it!
Supposedly, D’Amato hated this movie. Lots of people hate on it online, too. Well, guess what? They’re wrong. This is everything that I love about movies and proved to me that there is still some cinematic magic left in the world to find.
How about this for strange trivia? When they made the Conan the Adventurer series in 1997, Ator’s sword was repainted and used as the Sword of Atlantis!
Quest for the Mighty Sword (1990): If there’s a 12 step group for people who watch too many Joe D’Amato movies, well I should be the counselor, helping talk people off the ledge after they think they need to watch Erotic Nights of the Living Deador Eleven Days, Eleven Nights or…hell, I can’t do it. For all people heap scorn on the movies of the man born Aristide Massaccesi, I find myself falling in love more and more with each movie.
D’Amato hated what Brescia did with his creation, so he starts this one off by killing Ator and introducing us to his son. Obviously, Miles O’Keefe isn’t back.
This one has nearly as many titles as Aristide had names: Ator III: The Hobgoblin, Hobgoblin, Quest for the Mighty Sword and Troll 3.
That’s because the costumes from Troll 2 — created by Laura Gemser, who is in this as an evil princess — got recycled and reused in this movie. D’Amato proves that he’s a genius by having whoever is inside those costumes speak.
Let me see if I can summarize this thing. Ator gets killed by the gods because he doesn’t want to give up his magic sword, which he uses to challenge criminals to battles to the death. The only goddess who speaks for him, Dehamira (Margaret Lenzey), is imprisoned inside a ring of fire until a man can save her.
That takes eighteen years, because Ator the son’s mother gave the sorcerer Grindl (the dude wearing the troll costume) her son to raise and the sword to hide. She then asked him for a suicide drink, but he gave her some Spanish Fly and got to gnome her Biblically in the back of his cave before releasing her to be a prostitute and get abused until her son eventually comes and saves her because this is a Joe D’Amato movie and women are there to be rescued, destroy men and be destroyed by men.
This movie is filled with crowd-pleasing moments and seeing as how I watched it by myself, I loved it. Ator (Eric Allan Kramer, Thor in the TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns and Little John in Robin Hood: Men In Tights) looks like Giant Jeff Daniels and his fighting skills are, at best, clumsy. But he battles a siamese twin robot that shoots sparks, a goopy fire breathing lizard man who he slices to pieces and oh yeah, totally murks that troll/gnome who turned out his mom.
This is the kind of movie where Donald O’Brien and Laura Gemser play brother and sister and nobody says, “How?” You’ll be too busy saying, “Is that Marisa Mell?” and “I can’t believe D’Amato stole the cantina scene!” and “What the hell is going on with this synth soundtrack?”
Here’s even more confusion: D’Amato’s The Crawlers was also released as Troll 3. Then again, it was also called Creepers (it has nothing to Phenomena) and Contamination .7, yet has no connection with Contamination.
Only Joe D’Amato could make two sequels to a movie that has nothing to do with the movie that inspired it and raise the stakes by having nothing to do with the original film or the sequel times two. You can watch this on YouTube.
While there have never been any official Ator toys, check out the amazing custom figures that Underworld Muscle has made:
Thanks for being part of all things Ator. Which of the movies is your favorite?
Tara Buckman blasted me into puberty when she showed up in the Lamborghini with Adrienna Beabeau in Cannonball Run and for that we should always remember and thank her. Well, maybe not totally into puberty — I was nine — but I finally understood why guys in movies were going crazy for women.
Frem memorably playing the mother who gets her throat slit in Silent Night, Deadly Night to roles in Hooper, Xtro II: The Second Encounter and showing up in D’Amato’s Blue Angel Cafe and the unforgettable Night Killer, Ms. Buckman has won me over.
In High Finance Woman — a title so ridiculous that I often drive around yelling it at people just to get their reaction — she plays Brenda Baxter, a successful broken who sleeps with people to get insider trading information. People like Albert (Louie Elias, the older brother of James Stacy, which means he was the ex-brother-in-law of both Connie Stevens and Kim Darby; he also had a scar on his chin from a fight scene gone awry on Spartacus when Kirk Douglas drowned him a soup cauldron), her rich man who is the only mentor she’s ever had.
Then she meets Alex (Charlie Edwards, whose only other role is in Hitcher in the Dark and God bless Filmirage), a poor journalist hired to write a story about her career. They fall in love, she reveals to him that she’s basically a high-priced escort for her clients, they break up, she starts dating Albert, Alex proposes, she breaks it off with Albert and then finds out that — surprise! — he’s the father of the man she’s engaged to, so Albert pays her off to never see her son again.
Then Albert dies and his mistress gets all the money. And that would be…Brenda, which means that she may never end up with Alex until his new job sends him to interview another high finance woman who is…yes, Brenda. Oh what a tangled web we weave, Joe D’Amato.
As with all 1990s Joe movies, Laura Gemser makes a cameo and yes, she’s a prostitute. But hey — free trip to America, right?
Look, some day Vinegar Syndrome is going to re-release all of these D’Amato movies for $40 in a cool slipcase in the proper aspect ratio and people are going to be losing their brains over getting them. Get in on the basement floor now, find them online and just have some fun. They’re not great, but they have great synth sax, incredible overacting and amazing posters. What else do you want?
Starting her career as a dancer in the Beastie Boys’ video for “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” Ruth Collins has been in so many touchpoints in my movie-watching life. There are Psychos in Love, Firehouse, Doom Asylum and appearances in three Robert Findlay movies, Lurkers, Blood Sisters and Prime Evil. It just stands to reason that she’d be in not just one but two Joe D’Amato movies — this one and ElevenDays, Eleven Nights 2.
in Any Time, Any Play, she’s a nightclub singer named Kelly whose ex comes back to work at the club, which means that she decides to sleep with anyone and everyone — hmm, Any Time, Any Play — until they get back together, which upsets the mob bosses that really run the place.
Shot around the same time as Passion’s Flower in the same area — and even sets — as the first Eleven Days, Eleven Nights, this one suffers by comparison. Laura Gemser does show up in a cameo as a saleswoman and as always breaks my heart.
Otherwise, this is one of the 90s D’Amato movies that only lunatics like me need see.
The Laughing Dead is the kind of movie that you need to make a commitment to.
Not long. Like 35 minutes or so, so that you get through the slow stuff like meeting everyone on the vacation bus tour and discover who they are, but trust me, it’s worth it because before all that long, a disgraced priest has done an exorcism that opens the world of the Aztec demons and we’re playing a game with a severed head and brains are being smashed by buses and somehow a kaiju battle ensues.
Yeah, The Laughing Dead has the movie drugs you’re looking for, you just have to act cool and chill for a bit and once everyone straight and boring leaves, we’re all going to get really, really messed up.
Thai born filmmaker Somtow Sucharitkul directed, wrote, produced, scored and acted in this Category 3 film transported by Mexico and man, what a United Nations of wonderment this all is. He also wrote Burial of the Rats, which has this same strange energy.
The humor may fall flat, the plot may not make any sense, but you’re here for wild things. This movie will deliver those. You just need to forgive some things.
Well . . . after Sam dug up a Halloween-inspired review of Nick Millard’s obscure Satan’s Black Wedding (1976), I decided to answer the challenge with this Fauzi Mansur low-budget obscurity: an awfully-dubbed mess about Fernanda, an underground radio disc jockey who coos her self-composed tales of the macabre — after one to many viewings of Dario Argento’s Tenebre (1982), well, maybe Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright (1987), sans the books or the stage and a radio studio, instead (and a chintzy one, at that). And as with any Italian or Indonesian horror: You need a love interest-detective of the John Saxon variety on the case: we have one, and he has a sexual relationship with our hot, blonde radio jock.
Almost a Venom cover. Don’t sue ’em, Cronos.
Okay, so Fernie’s tales of Satanists to serial killers are either: Based on her dreams. Or premonitions of future events. Or her psychic connection to the killer. Regardless: either she’s in the mind of the killer, or he in hers, as it inspires a rash of killings that duplicate her radio tales. Her current story is a continuing tale about a group of Satanists attempting to sacrifice two teenagers. The brother escapes: he goes on to use ritualistic murder to resurrect his sister, Sara. Hey, who is that creepy blonde girl always showing up around the killings? Who is that witch with the purple guacamole face? You mean it’s not the brother, but the sister all along? Yeah, he has an incestuous, “Satanic Attraction” for his little sis. What’s that, Scooby? Why it’s the radio station owner? Those damn, pesky kids ruining the ritual!
Oy! This movie.
Brazilian filmmaker Fauzi Mansur wrote and directed his first film in 1969 and made a total of 41 films (mostly soap opera-styled sexploitation flicks known as “pornochachada” in its homeland), two of which made it to U.S. shores via home video: Incesto (1976) and Sadismo (1983). The first deals in a Giallo-styled noir concerning a family’s manor on a secluded lagoon; the latter with a rash of sexually perverted murders plaguing a city. Those films were issued on VHS as result of Mansur’s final two, American-inspired slashers making it to U.S. VHS shores: Satanic Attraction, and its loose companion film, Ritual of Death — after one too many viewings of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979).
Sure, it’s a little bit incomprehensible: Again: Is a killer recreating Fernie’s stories? Are her “dreams” really dreams or a psychic connection to the killer? Are the stories of the past she tells, in fact, the past? Me, as a viewer: I think it has more to do with Mansur crafting a tale of gothic ambiguity (Edgar Allan Poe is name-dropped) than filmmaking incompetence to the incomprehensible. Sure, there’s a little too much chitty chat by soap operaish bad actors . . . and the awful English dub doesn’t help. Unfortunately, the dub doesn’t rise to the ADR-craze of those makes-Italian-Giallos-look-in-sync ditties of: “I want to take communion, but not in my mouth, but down in my ‘hoo-hoo,’ you dirty nun ‘boinker” and “When are you going to ‘screw’ your housekeeper,” from the frames of Germany’s Magdalena, Possessed by the Devil (1974). At least the absurdities are all of the “What the fuck, now?” variety of a Paul Naschy joint, such as Horror Rises from the Tomb. But hey, at least a goat head is used like a bar of soap . . . and razor blades flow like water. . . .
Yeah, the Giallo supernatural-to-American slasher gore is cheap, but when the slice n’ dice comes, it is very gory — in a goofy kind of way: Mansur’s style in Satanic Attraction takes me back to such India and Turkish delights as the shot-for-shot The Exorcist copy, Seytan (1974), the Italian cannibal rip of Savage Terror (1980), the Phantasm rip of Satan’s Slaves (1982), The Evil Dead clone that is Mystics in Bali (1981), and the dual A Nightmare on Elm Street buffets of Khooni Murdaa (1989) and Mahakaal (1993). Hey, its better than a ’60s Herschell Gordon Lewis bloody hell.
To think Phantasm had to make cuts to achieve an R-rating . . . and the sphere was questionable. Here, based on uptight ’80s standards, the clumsy gore of Satanic Attraction would have pulled a theatrical “X” on the big screen. That gore includes a masked killer who comes up under a woman laying face down in a garden hammock: he disembowels-by-sword. Two young lovers on a boat get the ol’ shish kabob — and the killer steals the woman’s body because, well, he needs her blood for that sibling resurrection ritual. Another victim is so high, she doesn’t realize the killer spiked her bar of soap with razor blades. Another girl comes to be kidnapped after discovering a severed pair feet standing in her backyard — and her husband’s body next to them.
Whatever. I’m remembering José Mojica Marins and his Brazilian, pre-Freddy “Coffin Joe” romps and Spain’s Bigas Luna with my VHS joys of Anguish and Ignacio F. Iquino’sBloody Sect. So all is well.
I love this flick in all of its amateur ridiculousness. Trust me. Give this film a chance, as it comes with a nice, little twist. As did Commander Balok: You’ll relish it as much as I.
Low rent art. We love it. Here’s my membership card!
The ridiculousness continues . . . with an even deeper pinch of Soavi’s Stage Fright . . . along with Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1984) . . . and a soupcon of A Nightmare on Elm Street. This time, instead of a radio jock: we have an acting troupe that steals an Egyptian “Book of the Dead” with an intent to adapt it into a stage play. Brad, the auteur of the thespian travelers: he’s already a bit around the bend as he’s into Satanism and weird text that triggers hallucinations (an ancient Indian ritual under the bowls of a theater) as he scarfs on raw goat livers for lunch. So guess who is cast as The Executioner, the lead of the play?
Yeah, Brad’s been possessed by the book.
Now he is The Executioner, in full costume, hacking and slicing the thespian troupes as he unleashes goat heads, frogs, and a disgusting cases of acne (coping the “mirror scene” in Poltergeist (1982): only more puke-inducing). There’s a John Carpenter-styled gutting-by-claw hammer, a slicing-by-errant-train wheel (actually a large, stage-pully gear), a disembowelment-by-wind machine, and an eyeballs-floating-in-the-bathtub gag. Green goop oozes from faces and hands and there’s a nice face ripping. To what end: Well, Brad’s a ghost, you see, and he wants to return to the flesh — and the bad actors from Rio are all part of the reanimation process. Well, maybe it’s that old dude (a fat Tall Man) in the bowler hat triggering all this dreams-reality-hallucinations tomfoolery.
Yeah, there’s a reason for those “X” and “NR” ratings on the VHS slip cover: The blood is everywhere and it’s nice n’ juicy. The women are hot and the nudity is bountiful — even if they all act like hunks of driftwood — and the gore and the lighting is oh-so-’80s Italian Giallo. So all is well . . . even with a dub that’s worse than the one in Satanic Attraction, if you can believe that: Who was in charge of the ADR? Bill Rebane, with his “the-ac-tor-re-ads-in-this-fi-lm-dr-i-ve-yo-u-to-no-t-li-sten” actors’ emoting? And if you’ve seen a Rebane ditty, such as Invasion from Inner Earth (1974), you know what I mean (especially from Brad the Execution’s mom whom, at first, I thought was Diane Ladd!).
However, considering the corners, the disgusting corners the Italians would cut in their ’80s splatter fests: Is that goat head a prop or the real thing procured from a slaughterhouse? If that’s real goat head, kudos to pornochachada vet Vanessa Alves frolicking in that blood-filled bathtub with said head. I can hear Mansur say to Alves, “Not worry, sweetie. Is prop,” when it wasn’t. Remember Ruggero Deodato and the turtle?
As with Spain’s Bigas Luna and Ignacio F. Iquino seeing the U.S. slasher writing splattered on the wall: Fauzi Mansur took his shot and I think he did alright. He does not suck. So I’m campaigning for Arrow or Severin to double-disc these two Fauzi Mansur’s flicks and pull them out of grey market obscurity. In fact, pack all four of his U.S. VHS-distributed flicks in a nice box set with a biographic booklet.
But, hey. I’m the guy who raves about the slight, SOV-based resume of Wim Vink to the dismay of many a (conventional) horror fan. So what do I know? I’m just a schmuck in Pittsburgh writing film reviews in my mother’s basement jonesin’ for some raw livers and a glass of milk. Damn, this half-hood cowl is hot and making me itch. . . .
EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally reviewed this movie on October 12, 2019. Now that Blue Underground has released a UHD and blu ray set, we thought it’d be a good time to write about it again. We’ve taken the original article and added some nuance, as well as info on how to order.
This set comes with both Ultra HD Blu-ray (2160p) and HD Blu-ray (1080p) Widescreen 1.85:1 feature presentations, as well as audio commentary by William Lustig and filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, who has a Maniac Cop series in development with HBO. You also get a making-of feature, a deleted scene, a gallery, a Cinefamily Q&A with Lustig, the isolated music track and trailers.
Bill Lustig and Larry Cohen return to tell the next adventure of Maniac Cop Matthew Cordell, who somehow survived being skewered with a pole and a dunk in the rivers of New York City last time. Now, he’s got a junked out police car and is patrolling the city and killing past enemies like officers Jack Forrest and Theresa Mallory (Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon).
Officer Susan Riley (Claudia Christian, Calendar Girl Murders) is now on the case of not only the Maniac Cop, but a killer named Steven Turkell (Leo Rossi, Bud from Halloween II) who has joined forces with the titular character. Turns out that for some reason, the Maniac Cop wants an entire army of criminals on his side. Look for Clarence Williams III from Mod Squad as one of those crooks named Joseph T. Blum.
Detective Lieutenant Sean McKinney (Robert Davi!) is also trying to stop the Maniac Cop, even promising him an honorable burial and exoneration for his crimes. For what it’s worth, our antagonist gets to kill the three inmates who scarred him and then takes our Turkell in a fiery explosion.
Of course, the credits roll with Maniac Cop’s hand bursting out of his coffin. You can’t keep a bad cop down.
Also appearing: Charles Napier, James Earl Jones, Danny Trejo and Hank Garrett, who once wrestled as The Minnesota Farmboy before going into comedy and appearing as Officer Nicholson on Car 54, Where Are You?
Sadly, Joe Spinell was to play Turkell the murderer, which would have united Maniac Cop with Maniac. However, Spinell died before filming began and the film is dedicated to him.
Although top billed in the credits and on the posters, Bruce Campbell is killed 17 minutes into the movie and has about 3 minutes of screen time. He also hates when people bring this movie up, as it reminds him of a painful time in his life. He always fires back — in a hilarious way — on hecklers who don’t follow this rule at conventions, which has led to goofballs purposefully asking queries about it just to get roasted by him.
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