Money obsessed mercenaries Sammy and Klaus are on a mission to escort the seriously ill prime minister of a South American country that has just been taken over by rebels. And by South America, I mean Louisiana. But no matter — the rebels are on their trail and our protagonists make their way to a hospital filled with three female nurses and a female doctor that they force to heal the prime minister, then they assault each of them in softcore non-sex sex scenes and — of course, it’s Italy — the women fall in love with the guys as if they had a meet cute.
Even a staunch D’Amato defender such as myself has a hard time saying there’s anything good in this one. Maybe Joe was getting tired, maybe he thought military sex romps were what was hot for ’91, maybe he’d made too many adult films by this point or maybe this was all he could do at this stage in his career. This is the kind of movie where nurses get worked up about their co-workers getting attacked by military men, so you know, it’s as scummy as his other films without the energy and art to make up for it.
You have to hand it to Joe D’Amato. Most people would just make one ripoff of 9 and 1/2 Weeks. Instead, Joe stretches his series of three films out to 33 days, which is a little under 5 weeks or around half as much time as its inspiration and there’s some goofy logic to that.
Actually it’s seven movies I learned after writing this, so that means that Joe hit 77 days, or 11 more than the 66 days of 9 1/2 weeks, so the numerology all works out, right?
While Adrian Lyne had Sarah Kernochan, Zalman King and Patricia Louisianna Knop to write his screenplay, Joe makes due with the team of Rossella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso for the first film. And what a film it is.
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights (1988): Sarah Asproon (Jessica Moore AKA Luciana Ottaviani AKA Gilda Germano, who also appears in Sodoma’s Ghost, Convent of Sinners and Top Model) is writing a book about her last one hundred lovers, but she’s only had ninety-nine. Then she meets Michael on a boat and despite the fact that he’s about to get married (Mary Sellers plays his fiancee Helen and you’ve seen her in Stagefright, Ghosthouse and The Crawlers), she makes him agree that they will be lovers for — everybody yell out the title — eleven days and eleven nights.
There’s an actual budget to this film and it was shot in New Orleans, so it has an American feel, which is exactly what late 80s Italian movies were shooting for. There’s even a moment where the couple go see Stagefright in a theater and Michael falls asleep, waking up to Helen remarking, “What a beautiful film. So touching! So romantic!”
So yeah, this movie has a honey scene just like the film that inspired it, but I kind of like this one better. D’Amato is at his best when he’s shooting gorgeous women being gorgeous and Moore is, well, one of those reminders that there just might be a God somewhere. A reminder that there may not be is the acting by her co-star Joshua McDonald and the horrible ending where she tells him that he was just being used to be in her book but fell in love, so he bends her over, takes her roughly from behind and leaves her for his boring fiancee. For a film that spent most of its running time with a heroine in charge of her sexuality, this was massively upsetting.
The moral: Don’t look for Italian sexploitation movies to have good messages.
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2 (1991): D’Amato and Drudi reteamed for this sequel in name only, even though the character of Sarah comes back. Now she’s played by Kristine Rose and has been married and separated and given the new job of the executor of the estate of Lionel Durrington, one of her past lovers and the richest man in Louisiana.
Guess what? This is actually the third film in the series because Sarah was the lead character in Top Model, which is also listed in plenty of places as Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2. Look — it wouldn’t be Italian movies if it wasn’t confusing.
There are four heirs and one after another, they all get with our heroine, who will determine which one is worthy of the money based on how good they are in bed, one supposes. Sonny is the only one with no interest in Sarah, even when she danced for him at a strip club, but that’s because his last girlfriend was abused in front of him by friend of the family Alfred, who is also trying to get the money.
Because Italian films really don’t care about how insane or twisted — actually, this is what they run toward not from — things get, Sarah disguises herself as Sonny’s old lover and goes to the impotence institute and gets a rise out of him.
By the end, she realizes that no one deserves the money, so she comes up with a plan. She’ll write a book about the family and its secrets while they split the $500 million with a mystery person. They quickly sign and yeah, the mystery guy is the man who was supposed to be dead and we have a happy ending. We also have Laura Gemser in the blink and you’ll miss it role of Sarah’s jogging publisher and Ruth Collins from Lurkers, Doom Asylum andPrime Evil show up.
For a movie about people getting naked, D’Amato has plenty of women in sweaters show up. I’m all for this.
Also: This has also been listed as The Web of Desire and Eleven Days, Eleven Nights Part 4 because Italian movies are wonderful and confusing.
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 3 (1989): Also known as Pomeriggio caldo (Hot Afternoon), this film points to the genius that is D’Amato. Instead of just making a sexual thriller — trust me, it still has plenty of sex — he worked with writer David Resseguier — who has to be a pen name for someone — to create this downright weird story of heading to New Orleans and just fading into it.
Someone says, “This is a place that paralyzes you. You don’t fall in love with a person here, but rather you become grossly obsessed with the environment. It’s not like our world.”
That’s what this movie is about, as well as the fact that a young reporter has come to the French Quarter to write about Nora, a woman who just lost her husband to voodoo. He takes along his wife, who plays a game with him where he encourages men to try to bed her while having no real interest in her. This predictably backfires and she leaves him for a muscular voodoo man — I am not making this up — and he starts going insane realizing what he’s lost. And oh yeah — he also gets to bed Nora, which seems like a way better thing than pining for someone he never really cared about.
Every actor in this movie is horrible and wonderful, often within the same scene, and it has an odd pace and overall sadness that keeps it from being fully erotic, which is awesome when you think about it. The scenery is great and then Laura Gemser shows up just to dance at a voodoo ritual and all movies should have her show up and dance and then get back to the story. Every one of the Disney Star Wars movies would be incredible if the woman who is forever Black Emanuelle would show up and writhe in a sweaty frenzy and then wave goodbye.
Seriously, I fell in love with this movie, which is kind of like a sexier — well, is that movie even sexy? — The Beyondwith no house but a much more erotic bathtub scene.
Top Model (1988): Remember when I said there was another Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 2?
This time around, Sarah (Jessica Moore from the first movie) is still writing, but she’s gone undercover as a call girl, which was suggested by her publisher Dorothy (Laura Gemser). Using the name Gloria, she quickly becomes the top girl — some would say the top model — until someone figures out her secret and begins blackmailing her, which makes no sense as she’s already famous for a book where she slept with a hundred men.
She’s also got a crush on an IT guy named Cliff who thinks that he might be gay. I mean, if Jessica Moore is all over you and you need to question it, I’m not stepping on any LGBTQ landmines by saying that yes, you are gay. It’s fine, it’s a great choice and it’s probably what Cliff ends up choosing as the couple is divorced by the time the second part two in this series comes around.
But hey — how about that theme song?
To prove that America is the most puritanical country there is, there was an R-rated Top Model version made just for U.S. cable with still scenes replacing the lovemaking in motion and any reference to Cliff perhaps being gay cut from the film.
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 5: Dirty Love (1988): I mean, this movie is totally Joe D’Amarto making Dirty Dancing and casting Jeff Stryker and Valentine Demy, who went from waitressing to lingerie model to D’Amato star while she was 17.
D’Amato also throws Fame and Flashdance into the ripoff magic blender and emerges with a movie that has the sex those movies were missing and so much more to spare. Demy plays Terry, who leaves behind a small town where her father wants to pick out her husband and doesn’t want her to dance, so Footloose too?
This movie packs in all the sleaze you imagine that a Joe D’Amato movie called Dirty Love should have. In a world where movies don’t live up to their names or posters, for the most part Joe outdid himself every time.
If you’re watching this and wondering, “Where have I seen Robert before?” He’s Aimee Mann’s jerk of a boyfriend in the ‘Til Tuesday video for “Voices Carry.”
Bonus points for Laura Gemser showing up as a masseuse (and the costume designer).
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 6: The Labyrinth of Love (1993): Valerie (Monica Seller, Dangerous Attraction, Madness, Legittima Vendetta) travels to Saigon to work for a family that she soon seduces. I mean, the whole family. The matriarch. The widower. The grandfather. The gay college student? All of them.
I have no idea why a movie set in the 1930s is in the Eleven Days, Eleven Nights series, but you know, I tend to forgive Joe D’Amato all manner of things. Even when a movie is slow when it should be red hot eroticism, I say things like, “That’s a nice shot” or “I mean, Joe did make Buio Omega.”
Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 7: The House of Pleasure (1994): Lord Gregory Hutton (Nick Nicholson, who somehow was in both Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Firebird Conspiracy, War Without End, SFX Retaliator, Born on the Fourth of July and Beyond the Call of Duty, which means he either made up his IMDB listing or man, he’s been in the highest of the war movie highs and the lowest of the low) goes to the Far East on his honeymoon with his wife Eleanore. They stay on a silk farm and Eleanore falls for Lin, the young man of the house (Marc Gosálve, who is also in D’Amato’s China and Sex and Chinese Kamasutra).
This is one of those movies like Emmanuelle where a young wife finds her sexuality while her husband watches, but this has the technology of 1994, which means video cameras. And hey — Joe went to Asia to shoot this (along wih Tales of Red Chamber, China and Sex, The Labyrinth of Love and Chinese Kamasutra), so there’s some production value.
For all the negativity heaped on the films of D’Amato, when he’s getting the opportunity to tell these simple stories and shoot beautiful women to some sexy sax, he always delivers. Are these movies essential watching? Or course not. Are they better than they should be? Definitely.
Thanks to Adrian on Letterboxd for transcribing the Eleven Days, Eleven Nights 3 quote above.
Fate is you surfing around the various movie-centric pages you’ve “liked” on your social media platforms — and having the cover of Todd Sheets’s ode to sorority babes on Paul Zamarelli’s VHSCollector.com group starring back at you.
Fate also means you have to review that movie of your youth for the future analog generations of snowy n’ white noised video horndogs — regardless of that film’s actual lack of horns, hooters, and dogs.
Sheets is part of the ’80s SOV vanguard inspired by the self-made, 16mm exploits of New Jersey’s Don Dohler who gave us charming, ’70s drive-in schlock such as Fiend. It was the efforts of Dohler that paved the way for the shot-on-video and released straight-to-VHS purveyances of Dennis Devine, Donald Farmer, Jon McBride, Brett Piper, and Mark Polonia — each who we’ve gone on about at the site, to your ad nauseam chagrin.
The resume of “Kansas City’s Prince of Gore” dates back to Blood of the Dead, issued as two, two-part shorts in 1985. The Karo syrup and Spirit Gum mayhem got really interesting with his energetic, sixth production — which became Sheets’s most successful rental — Dead Things (1986). While many SOV’ers are long since done and gone (Justin Simonds of Spine fame, vanished; Farmer and Polonia are still spinnin’ the sprockets) — Sheets is still at it (and on film #51) with his most recent offerings of Hi-Death (2018) and Clownado (2019).
Now, you are most likely questioning our raving about these camcordered efforts and their makers. You must understand that we, the Allegheny cubicle farmers of B&S About Movies — as our buds over at Wild Eye Entertainment complemented us — are doing our part to hold up the old guard of the genre-writing filled zines of the ’80s that first covered this then new sub-genre of shot-on-video films. So we give SOVs a break — a very wide berth (see Nigel the Psychopath, as an example) — that we would never give to the direct-to-streaming horror that gets released today . . . well, unless that 21st century DTS’er is from one of the ’80s old guard, such as Donald Farmer — who got his start with Cannibal Hookers (1987) and most recently released Shark Exorcist (2015) and Bigfoot Exorcist (2021) — and Mark Polonia — who recently released Noah’s Shark (2021) that’s written by fellow, digital SOV-rebooter, John Oak Dalton.
While the video box claims this fifteenth production from Sheets is a “sequel” to David DeCoteau’s USA Network cable-run Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988), in reality — outside of DeCoteau producing the film and the title similarity — it’s not.
DeCoteau, if you’re not familiar with his works, is also part of that ’80s SOV vanguard: only he, unlike his analog brethren, was able to transition out of the shot-on-video realms to produce actual “films” distributed by indie shingles (Wizard Video and Empire Pictures) with the likes of Dreamaniac (1986) and Creepozoids (1987) — both which, like Sorority Babes, not only became top home video rentals but also oft-programmed cable television favorites. And double-D, as with Donald Farmer and Mark Polonia, is still making movies, only more successfully: Decoteau just released his 25th “Wrong” movie for the female-centric Lifetime channel, The Wrong Valentine (2021).
So, with most of the adult film-centric cast from the real “sequel” to Prehistoric Bimbos in Armageddon City (1991), Sheets weaves this tale about five well-endowed bimbos of the down-and-out Kappa Beta sorority given a chance to join the more fashionable and popular Felta Delta house. The “death” comes in the form of their initiation: spending the night in an abandoned and rumored-to-be-haunted college. Complicating matters is that the girls screwed with an antique crystal ball during a seance (between their floor games of Twister) that unleashed a force trapped inside. And the entity is pissed and follows them to the abandoned college. Also along for the ride are two, pizza-delivering frat nerds trying to score and two crusty antique dealers who’ve tracked down the ball and only they can reseal the demon back inside.
Again, we give these camcorder, brick and mortar-released SOV flicks a lot of critical wiggle room, but man: this one really is a mess and it has none of the charms of the cheaper and less skilled Nigel the Psychopath. The frames are perpetually soft focused, the “acting” is non-existent to the point of bimbettes reading off-camera cue cards, the juvenile sex jokes don’t land, the effects are cheap ‘n’ fake (a self eyeball removal; a 2×4 shoved down the throat), and regardless of sleeve’s promise: there’s little-to-none of boobs and blood we came for. Hey, it’s only 70 minutes of your time and a forefather to today’s direct-to-streaming horror films. So view it as a historical, celluloid artifact to file away in your grey-mattered trivia banks to amaze your friends with your film knowledge. You know, like I am doing to you, the three people who read this review (okay, one: namely me).
In the end, this wasn’t bloody and trashy enough for me back then or now during this second go around — not after the joys of renting Sheets’s two-part Blood of the Dead and Dead Things all those snowy n’ white noised years ago. And here I am, all these digital years later, lamenting my Todd memories (to myself) and getting free on-the-job screeners of his latest flick, the aforementioned-linked, Clownado. So, while the circle completes . . . the circle should really be broken because I am too old for this SOV shite. . . .
“Get that motherf**king VHS tape out of my motherf**king VCR!”
You can learn more about and continue to follow the career of Todd Sheets through his Extreme Entertainment website and Facebook. Be sure to check out our exclusive interview with Todd from October 2022 as he talks about his career and his Video Vengeance reissue shingle. During the last two weeks of January 2022 we had another, another “SOV Week” blow out and reviewed another of Todd’s films, Nightmare Asylum (1992). In fact, we’ve reviewed quite a few of his films and this link will populate what we’ve done, thus far.
An artist needs a model to paint the Virgin Mary — and as you do — asks a local pastor to recommend him a model. The holy man decides on Vita, who the artist soon has obsessed and haunted, have dreams and waking nightmares of spiders, even when she’s sent away.
I read a review that argues that Vita suffers from Stendhal Syndrome — no, not the Argento movie — the very real affliction that causes people to become lost in works of creativity. During one of these visionary moments, the artist attempts to assault her and she runs home, passing out and having a vivid dream of giving herself to a spider and then wakes up covered in bites.
Shot in Latvian and in the Russian language, this is a movie that feels like it escaped from the formerly restrictive and hidden part of the world.
There’s also a drug in film form scene in which Vita wanders through Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgment and it’s astounding to see every piece of that painting become real and alive.
This film fits right in with the world of women discovering their first sexuality through the supernatural — Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Lemora: A Child’s Story of the Supernatural, Laurin and Alice or the Last Escape are other examples — and all of those movies have their own unique take, as does this. In any hands other than director Vasili Mass, this may have been straight-up exploitation. Instead, it emerges as a horrific thing of beauty.
I had the revelation that Things was only the torture test for this film, the gateway drug, the get past this excess to enter the doors of perception because Wicked World takes all the bonkers intensity of that film and somehow compounds it.
Grant Ekland (director Barry J. Gillis) is a cop who is haunted by the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a psychotic slasher named Harold (Eddie Platt). But now the system is letting Harold free — as he obsesses about how he hates his nurse, sliding boards, helicopters and life — and Ekland has the chance to end his life.
This is all cut around moments where Harold kills people and asks them if they want to live, including one girl who deadpans, “I’d like to become a famous actress! You can’t kill me! I’m too young to die! A model! An actress!”
Also: Gillis loves the female behind, I can tell you that much.
This is the kind of movie that’s inspired by a Black Sabbath song, that has a message at the beginning about boxer Arturo “Thunder” Gatti being drugged and murdered in Brazil. I have no idea what that has to do with anything that we see next, but when it comes to Gillis, I have learned to not ask.
Honestly, I’ve stared down some of the most aberrant movies the world has to offer and this one gave me reason to doubt my sanity. It’s the kind of thing I hunt for, a movie that ends with a long rant about how we need microchips to control our impulses if we want to survive, as well as a great soundtrack by Marshall Law and some of the most jarring editing I’ve ever seen.
Toronto used to seem so polite. I didn’t realize it had this movie in its orbit.
I can only imagine that George Kennedy’s agent called him, excitedly, and told him. “I got you one of those slasher movies!”
And Kennedy replied, “Those were big from 1978 to 1982, what else is there?”
His agent replied, “But this one is going to shoot in the Netherlands! It’s a great script.”
Kennedy signed, clenched his massive fist and wanted to yell, “Don’t you know I was in the Battle of the Bulge and was in a whole bunch of important movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Dirty Dozen?” But all he could get out was a joke: “This better not be like that movie four years ago that had a monster instead a cat puppet.”
George Kennedy is in this movie for all of ten minutes, playing a surgeon named Dr. Bruckner who has some shady research going on before he wrecks his car and spends seven years in a coma before he wakes up and goes all Haddonfield Memorial on a bunch of kids, including teen idol Koen Wauters. But that isn’t Kennedy any more, as the character is all wrapped up in bandages, and the man who was Joe Patroni was off to be in Final Shot: The Hank Gathers Story.
Now, not to start this argument, but this movie seems like just as much a giallo as a slasher, as Sharon Stone’s Angela Anderson is sexually repressed, has been attacked in an elevator, has used scissors to defend herself and is in love with. set of twins, one a soap opera star and the other a wheelchair-bound artist and both played by Steve Railsback.
Dr. Stephan Carter (Ronnie Cox) believes that some event in her past with a red-bearded man named Billy. Well, she soon finds Billy dead in an apartment that has a caged raven that keeps yelling that she’s a killer and exhibits throughout that tell the story of her life, so I’m now completely so sure that this is a giallo that I expect her to run through a room full of bats and then find dogs all strung up in a medical experiment before watching two women in paper dresses fight at a party.
Would Ronnie Cox be married to Michelle Phillips? I guess in the world of this movie, sure. And who is to say what happens when someone starts dressing like Billy — who ends up in reality being the stepfather that Angela’s mother killed — and taking the mental games to the highest of highs.
This movie also has a total Guy Caballero moment — “The wheelchair is for respect!” — and taught me that yes, ravens have a repertoire of 100 or more vocalizations, allowing them to mimic human speech and singing.
Is this movie even a slasher? I don’t know. It’s actually a mess, a film that asks you to believe that a 26-year-old Sharon Stone is a virginal innocent, that twin brothers both fall for her and someone is willing. to build an entire apartment devoted to her. It makes the first hour feel like forty years, which is a major accomplishment. Major people made this movie, which shocked me.
Oh man, the 1990s. Or should I say the 70s, because that’s what this movie is really about.
Also called Alex In Wonder, this is the story of sixteen-year-old high school senior and ballerina Alex (Angela Gots). Everyone around her is obsessed with sex, from her friends to the boys in school to her parents — who pretty much run a commune — have broken up (her father is played by Robert Hayes and Ellen Greene is her mother).
What’s a girl to do?
This Drew Ann Rosenberg film feels like something I’d be watching after getting home drunk in 1991, throwing on the TV and just starting at it until slowly getting into the story. And hey — Ellen Greene was Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors and in Talk Radio, so I definitely enjoyed her work here.
Rosenberg said, “I’m incredibly excited to announce the twentieth anniversary release of our film. Set in the 1970’s, it’s a timeless story that will appeal to viewers of all ages; an homage to the late Judy Blume, a writer whose stories gave me, along with many other teenagers, a safe space to explore issues dealing with sexuality, puberty, divorce and bullying in a non-judgmental, funny and honest way. Enjoy the ride!”
Sex and a Girl is available to rent and own on North American digital HD internet, cable, and satellite platforms through Freestyle Digital Media.
17. HEADS OFF AT THE PASS: Something with a decapitation in it.
The Aftermath was, I believed, the shining career moment of auteur Steve Barkett, but man I was wrong. So wrong.
I referred to Barkett in that review as someone that “looks like every stepfather in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the kind of guy that takes you fishing even though you don’t really want to go and says stuff like, “I really care about your mother” and “You don’t have to call me dad, unless you want to” while at nights you ball your fists up and sob hot, wet tears while he and your beloved mother act out the next ten pages in Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex.”
This one takes place nine years later, so just imagine. He’s been your stepdad awhile, things went weird but kind of bonded and now your mom is dead and he still wants to be in your life but has gone full Q-Anon. This would be the hero of this tale, Richard Flynn, who really does have a maybe son in this played by his real son, and it’s all about a woman cucking a demon lord with a detective which doesn’t seem all that smart but there you go, that’s the world of Empire of the Dark. The end of all this is that Angela, the love of our hero’s life, is about to be killed — as is her son — by Godfrey Ho’s multi-xeroxed actor Richard Harrison, so Richard makes the choice, saves the kid and lives with it.
A few years — maybe twenty — later and we have a Demon Slasher on the loose and Angela coming to Richard in his dreams. What follows is pure scum magic, as the grocery store from Cobra gets ripped off, Joe Pilato shows up with his guts unchoked upon and his hair frosted white and his ability to overact still in place, ninja demon Satan worshippers attack at will, every woman wants a mustache ride from our amply proportioned ex-cop bounty hunter stepdad leading man, sword fights and training montages, more women wanting to taste some of that Frito-dust laden poon broom on Richard’s mug, puppet demons, priests blessing guns, headlobbing and all long dead lovers coming back from the other side and you can only imagine what problems that causes for social security and taxes because just changing your married name can be a real handful.
My God, this movie is wonderful. It’s as if in the intervening decade Barkett dreamed of making something dorkier than his first movie and by all that’s bad in movies, he did it. And I love him for it. I wish he made fifty more films, but the two he did get out there still have the power to destroy minds.
10. RITUALS: It’s good to have a routine, even if it’s evil.
This is a Shot On Video remake/remix/rip-off of Re-Animator that has the worst quality filming, the most drone soundtrack and ends right in the middle of a scene. Some people will say that that sounds like a bad time. These are not the kind of people that you want to hang out with.
This movie also has long dialogue sections, longer montages of science happening and something else called God Science, which involves regenerated serial killers out of the grave. Also, no one seems to notice that Dr. Strain’s face is basically falling off. Were the people of his area that polite? Was this made in Canada?
I used to record drone black metal and actually recorded a laundromat behind some of my guitar parts to give it a sound that was covered up with strange mechanical noises and the sound of water. I can only assume that the people that made this movie did the same, because so much of it is barely audible, which makes it even better, because you can just drop out and allow the power of this junk to warm your veins.
Also — I have no idea if this is shot on 16mm or video and if you’re the kind of person ready to fire off an angry mail because I don’t know, I’m ready.
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