Tag Archives: 1992

2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 3: Un orso chiamato Arturo (1992)

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3. TWILIGHT YEARS IN THEIR CAREERS: An aging American actor in an overseas production.

In the interview with Sergio Martino on the All the Colors of Giallo blu ray from Severin, he mentions that he only lost money on one movie.

This is that movie.

I watched Un orso chiamato Arturo as it was meant to be seen. On a YouTube link with a Rai Movie HD logo in the upper right corner, in Italian with no English subtitles and with someone else yelling translated Russian dialogue over the existing soundtrack.

George Segal was a big star from when he was in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 until the mid 70s. He was so popular that he would show up on The Tonight Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour playing banjo and singing. That led to two albums, the solo The Yama Yama Man and A Touch of Ragtime with The Imperial Jazz Band.

Notable films of his A-list years include Where’s Poppa?,  A Touch of Class, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Owl and the Pussycat and Fun With Dick and Jane. Segal even hosted the Oscars in 1974 along with Gene Kelly, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw.

Then things went downhill.

He told the Chicago Tribune: “In the first 10 years, I was playing all different kinds of things. I loved the variety, and never had the sense of being a leading man but a character actor. Then I got frozen into this “urban” character. About the time of The Last Married Couple in America, I remember Natalie Wood saying to me … “It’s one typed role after another, and pretty soon you forget everything. You forget why you’re here, why you’re doing it.” Then my marriage started to fall apart … I was disenchanted, I was turning in on myself, I was doing a lot of self-destructive things … there were drugs … I’m also sure I was guilty of spoiled behavior. I think it’s impossible when that star rush comes not to get a little full of yourself, which is what I was.”

By the 90s, he was a character actor. And for audiences today, well, he may be better known for his work on sitcoms like Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs.

But for some time…he was a star. A big one.

At this point in his career, Segal was in movies like Look Who’s Talking, All’s Fair, For the Boys, Me, Myself & I and the Dolph Lundgren action movie Joshua Tree.

And this brings him to Italy.

Sergio Martino is a director I celebrate. His five-picture run from The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh to Torso may be the most consistent work of any Italian genre director. But by 1992, he was mostly making TV miniseries like Delitti privati in addition to direct-to-video action like After the Condor and erotic thrillers such as Craving Desire and Foxy Lady.

Martino would direct and co-write this movie with Nino Martino, who also wrote The Throne of Fire and Razza Violenta. It was produced by his regular partner, his brother Luciano and shot by cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando. He was behind the camera for a lot of Sergio’s work all the way back to All the Colors of the Dark, as well as working on Detective School Dropouts, Cop Target (a Umberto Lenzi movie with Robert Ginty in it. How did I miss this?), Ironmaster and Devilfish, He directed one of his own movies, La ragazza di Cortina, under the name Maurizio Vanni.

Segal plays Billy, a composer on a tight deadline. He soon meets Alice, who claims that she’s his biggest fan, but she’s really a spy. She’s played by Carol Alt, who took her supermodel career to Italy where she first worked in movies like Via Montenapoleone, I miei primi 40 anni (based on the life of Marina Ripa Di Meana), Bye Bye Baby (opposite Brigitte Neilsen!), Duccio Tessari’s Beyond Justice, Treno di Panna, Mortacci, La più bella del reame, La più bella del reame (with Bud Spencer and Jean Sorel!), Miliardi (a loaded cast including Donald Pleasence, Billy Zane, Lauren Hutton, Florinda Balkan, Alexandra Paul — the virgin Connie Swail! — and Sorel), a TV series named Il principe del deserto (Rutger Hauer, Omar Shariff, Elliot Gould, Brett Halsey; Italy was rich in 1991 at least for TV projects!) and a TV movie named Due vite, un destino with Michael Nouri, Rod Steiger, Fabio Tesi and Burt Young, not to mention a script by Dardano Sacchetti!

I’m saying that Carol Alt might be a supermodel but she worked with some of the bigger names of Italian genre and American action film.

The cast also includes Stefano Masciarelli (the mayor in Cemetery Man), Hal Yamanouchi (the only actor I know who can be in a Joe D’Amato movie — Endgame — and a Wes Anderson movie — The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), David Brandon (Peter from Stagefright, Ariel from Jubilee), Christina Englehardt (Demonia, Skinner) and when Segal wins the Oscar at the end of the movie — only The Lonely Lady and The Howling III: The Marsupials have cheaper looking award shows — it’s presented to him by Edmund Purdom. Of course.

This is supposedly a spy movie and, yes, Alt dressed like a geisha and clubs Yamanouchi with an oar at one point. There’s also a teddy bear named Arthur that is like a Teddy Ruxbin and holds a secret that everyone wants. At one point, the teddy bear is smoking a huge cigar and talking. It was basically shouting in Italian while someone translated it into shouting Russian and all the whole, poor George Segal is mugging for the camera, hoping that someone somewhere loves him.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Sequel

Directed by David Price — the son of studio boss Frank Price — and written by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler (they both also worked on Bordello of Blood), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is anything but, as it’s the first of what would be nine sequels. Two of them were reboots.

Hemingford, Nebraska isn’t Gatlin but it’s close enough. Two days after the events of Children of the Corn, the people of this town adopt the orphans of Gatlin and one of them, Micah (Ryan Bollman), starts talking to He Who Walks Behind the Rows and yes, the sequel is ready.

John Garrett (Terence Knox) is in town reporting on the children and his son Danny (Terence Knox) has come along for the ride. John’s career is bad, but not as bad as his life, as he’s going through a divorce and Danny hates him for it, so he fits right into all these creepy children.

After some lighting wipes out some reporters John knew from back when life was better, he gets down to business and starts sleeping with bed-and-breakfast owner Angela Casual (Rosaline Allen) and no, I won’t go for the easy joke and say that she lives up to her name. Danny might, because he’s mad that his dad is getting it on so quickly, but he also meets the creeptastic Lacey Hellerstat (Christie Clark) who drops some knowledge on him about her hometown.

While all that drama is happening, Micah and his child gang get to work dropping houses on people and using voodoo dolls to kill people while they’re in church. They even throw an old woman and her mechanized wheelchair through a window. I am a strange person, I realize this, but I laughed like a lunatic during this.

Somewhere in all of this, there’s a Native American professor named Dr. Frank Red Bear (Ned Romero) who throws some exposition on this sequel fire and claims that this has happened before but good news, there’s a prophecy that there’s a good spirit and not a bad spirit. Or maybe it’s people selling bad corn which has a green gas that comes out of it.

Dr. Frank Red Bear gets some great dialogue.

Dr. Frank Red Bear: Koyaanisqatsi. It means life out of balance. My ancestors would have told you that man should be at one with the earth, the skies, and water. But the white man has never understood this. He only knows how to take. And after a while, there’s nothing left to take. So, everything’s out of balance. And we all fall down.

John Garrett: Wait a minute… so that’s what happened here in Gatlin?

Dr. Frank Red Bear: No… what happened in Gatlin was, those kids went ape-shit and killed everyone.

As if they’re been challenged to go as hard as they can, the children lock every adult in a building and set it on fire, killing almost every character in the movie before kidnapping Angela and Lacey, taking them into the cornfields and trying to get Danny to sacrifice them.

Now, as you sit there, you may ask yourself, “Do I want to watch a child get pulled into a harvester, but not before he has a demon face?”

Of course you do. This movie delivers.

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is now a good spirit by the end as Dr. Frank heals from being dead after shot with an arrow as his ghost paints some rocks.

The director claims that a local Christian group protested the movie and left a dead rodent for him as a warning, so they made their own church for the movie.

You can blame former New World exec Larry Kuppin for this. After there hadn’t been a sequel for years, he picked up the filming rights and formed Trans Atlantic Entertainment. This studio existed just to make sequels to several New World Pictures films, including this movie, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Hellraiser III and Avenging Angel. They also announced sequels to Wanted Dead or Alive and Crimes of Passion which didn’t get made.

Trans Atlantic also produced Female Perversions, Death Ring, The Vineyard, Rage and Honor II, Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, Tollbooth, Cirio Santiago’s Vulcan, ’68, I Shot a Man In Vegas and The Tale of Tillie’s Dragon.

In fact, the same crew shot this and Hellraiser III back to back to save money.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: California Hot Wax (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: California Hot Wax was on USA Up All Night on June 25 and December 18, 1993 and May 20, 1994.

Ready to be confused?

California Hot Wax is also Bikini Carwash.

However, it is not 1992’s The Bikini Car Company or 1993’s The Bikini Carwash Company, both of which also aired on USA Up All Night.

Neither are All American Bikini Car Wash from 2015.

This movie is also not Starhops even though it’s the same exact story.

Three Southern Californian women — Kelly (Gloria Nelson), Lita (Tess Martinelli) and Monica (Augusta Lee) — have lost their restaurant to an evil landlord named Rocky (Steve Rothman), who has sons named Rocky II (Dexter Everhart) and Rocky III, kicks them out. They throw all their food at him and all over themselves, which means they have to go to a carwash to clean themselves up and all the boned out dudes watching them start paying them money for no reason.

Scott (Jody Bradley), the owner of the carwash, goes into business with them as the Bikini Carwash as long as he opens a restaurant for them which is called Eat My Taco.

Butch Hartman — yes, the guy who created Danny Phantom and The Fairly OddParents, acts in this movie. It was probably made when he was just getting into animation as he was also on Growing Pains, Days of Our Lives, Generations and Just the Ten of Us from 1987 to 1991 while he was also on working on movies like An American Tail, My Little Pony, It’s Punky Brewster, Dink, the Little Dinosaur and Pocahontas. He was also a contestant on the Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour around this time.

Other cast members of note include Carla and Carmen Morelli, twin sisters who appeared in several issues of Playboy and Basket Case 3 together; adult star Carol Cummings (who also used the name Kimberly Spiess for mainstream movies like this, Psycho Cop Returns and Last Dance); Darlene Sellers (Dinosaur Island); Elizabeth Young (Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part 2 and 3); Sandra Wild (Sandy from Fit to Kill) and Sharon Kane, who is a member of the AVN and XRCO Halls of Fame who you may know best from Alex De Renzy’s Pretty Peaches.

California Hot Wax was directed by Jan Marlyn Reesman, who acted in Fatal Instinct and Crystal Force, and written by Karl J. Niemiec, whose IMDB claims is the grandson of Detroit Polish mobsters.

Cool. This movie isn’t all that good, but if you were in puberty, it was probably pretty good while it lasted.

 

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Personals (1990)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Personals was on USA Up All Night on September 25, 1992.

A made-for-TV movie in which a quiet librarian is a by-night femme fatale (Jennifer O’Neill, which is the whole reason why I watched this) who uses the personals to find her victims. Evan Martin (Robin Thomas) is a reporter who gets caught by her and his widow Sarah (Stephanie Zimbalist) must hunt her down.

Personals was directed by Steve Hilliard Stern, who also made Rolling Vengeance and The Park Is Mine. It was written by George Franklin (The Incubus), Arlene Sanford (who went on to direct plenty of projects) and Brad Whiting Jr.

It’s a Canadian made-for-TV erotic thriller without much erotic that originally aired on USA.

You can watch it on YouTube.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell was on USA Up All Night on July 18, 1992 and January 22, July 23 and August 27, 1993.

Sheila (Sheila Caan) plays our lead, a woman looking for her dead twin Sandy, who was sacrificed in the desert with her man turned into human barbecue. Now on the way to Vegas, she’s menaced by that same cult, led by Robert Tessier and protected by a sheriff played by Bo Hopkins.

Originally known as Mark of the Beast before Troma got the rights, this was directed and written by Jeff Hathcock, who also made Victims!, Night Ripper! and Streets of Death.

I mean, it does have Tessier saying. “Now you shall know the hard-on of sin!” and has more ways to get its lead nude — showers both man-made and natural, regular old naked for being naked’s reasons too — than you can imagine. It’s also so dark that there are times I had no idea what was going on. And seriously, people involved in the occult, if you go to a town with a name like Ellivnatas, please look at it backward. Just do that to be safe for any words that seem off.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Kickboxer 3 (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Kickboxer 3 was on USA Up All Night on June 7, 1996; March 22 and July 12, 1997 and January 7, 1998.

Frank Lane (Richard Comar) is running a white slavery ring in Brazil, just as kickboxing champion David Sloan (Sasha Mitchell, Cody from Step by Step who somehow has taken over from JCVD after Tong Po killed his brothers shortly after Kickboxer; yes, your happy ending was ruined in the sequel) and his trainer Xian (Dennis Chan) arrive in Rio de Janeiro for a championship bout. He’s nearly robbed by a street kid named Marcos (Noah Verduzco) but he ends up becoming friends with him and his sister Isabella (Alethea Miranda).

Lane is the manager of Eric Martine (Ian Jacklin), the Muay Thai fighter that David is defending his belt against. He destroys a young fighter in an exhibition, turning the fight into the grudge match you’d hoped that it would be. Of course, Isabella gets kidnapped and the whole thing becomes a fight for her life, but any movie that ends with a cute street urchin stabbing an evil white guy in the stomach is OK with me.

This was directed by Rick King, who also made Prayer of the Rollerboys and was a writer of Point Break. On the amazing Hidden Films, he spoke about how rough this movie was to make and how hard Mitchell was to deal with.

“The guy was a nutjob,” King said plainly. “The crew hated him and liked me. One of the grips was a cop, and he said, “If that guy ever touches you, I’m gonna arrest his ass and throw him in the nastiest Brazilian jail you’ve ever seen.””

Writer Dennis A. Pratt also wrote Leprechaun 4: In Space.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Miracle Beach (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Miracle Beach was on USA Up All Night on March 10 and October 7, 1995; December 21, 1996 and September 19, 1997.

Scotty McKay (Dean Cameron) is a beach bum who used to be rich. Then he finds a lamp and a genie named, well, Jeannie (Ami Dolenz). Thanks to her, he’s pretty much rich again and has Jeannie to do everything he wants, even win over a supermodel named Dana (Felicity Waterman, Vanessa Hunt from Knots Landing). Except that Jeannie isn’t allowed to assist her master with love and why would she? She’s the one in love with him.

Sometimes I get down on myself. Then I think about Vincent Schiavelli. He was seriously talented and yet here he is, playing a mystic in Miracle Beach when he should have been acting in way better movies. Yet he always showed up and worked hard. Martin Mull, too, who is in this as the stock bad guy. Pat Morita and Alexis Arquette are also in the cast.

This movie was made in PG, R and unrated editions. So the family could watch one version and another could be on USA Up All Night. Oh yeah! Monique Gabrielle shows up! And it was called Miracle Beach: Hard Bodies II in Australia.

Director Skott Snyder directed a whole bunch of Playboy videos and writer Scott Bindley wrote the cartoon The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature as well as Cop and a Half: New Recruit and Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite. That totally all makes sense.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT WEEK: Fraternity Demon (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Fraternity Demon aired on USA Up All Night on November 24, 1995; June 8, 1996 and March 28, 1997.

C.B. Rubin directed one more and this is it. Written by Steve Tymon, who also was the writer for Ring of Fire II: Blood and Steel, Witchcraft V: Dance With the Devil, Deadlock: A Passion for Murder and Mirror, Mirror III: The Voyeur, Fraternity Demon starts with an entire opening scene edited together from outtakes from Getting Lucky.

A sex demon by the name of Isha (Trixxie Bowie) is brought to our world by sexed-up Professor Erickson (Charles Laulette) and she proceeds to run wild, basically aardvarking young men and taking their sexual energy. As you can imagine, all the fray boys are afraid of her. And if you enjoy any of her lovemaking scenes, don’t worry. They play again in a montage — or is it padding? — near the end of the movie, as if Fraternity Demon is having its running time flash before its eyes before the credits.

That said, Shock-Ra, the band playing the party, is pretty good.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: Bikini Beach Race (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Bikini Beach Race was on USA Up All Night on September 10, 1993; May 28 and November 18, 1994; September 23, 1995 and January 3, 1987.

According to Dave Wain, on his amazing The Schlock Pit, other than the director, Ron Jeremy and Dana Plato, this movie is totally a University of Miami film school movie.

It’s about a bed race — yes, a race with kid race car beds — that Milo (Xavier Barquet), Jaime (Nick Santa Maria), Byrdie (Waverly Hill) and Cheese (Mathew Mark) are trying to win. Luckily, they have a boat pilot by the name of J.D (Plato) who is their ringer.

Speaking of Plato, she was struggling to get her career back on track. She’d appeared in the January 1989 issue of Playboy and this same year she would be in the controversial Sega CD game Night Trap. A year before, she had gone to a Las Vegas video store, pulled out a pellet gun and asked for all the money in the cash register. The clerk called 911 and said, I’ve just been robbed by the girl who played Kimberly on Diff’rent Strokes.” She came back to the scene of the crime — she took $134 — and was arrested. Wayne Newton paid her $13,000 bail, half of which she was able to give back to him with her salary from this movie. Sadly, she would die in her sleep on May 18, 1998. It was thought to be an accidental overdose but later ruled a suicide. The day before, she had a Howard Stern Show appearance where she was lambasted by his callers. Around a decade later, her son would also kill himself.

I won’t even talk about Ron Jeremy and his sex pest arrest because this whole thing has been dark enough for a USA Up All Night beach sex movie. Actually, it’s all kind of dark, because writer Xavier Barquet — who was also the actor who played Milo — died at 46, way too young, of respiratory failure.

Director Eric Louzil also made Fortress of AmeriKKKa, Class of Nuke ‘Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown and Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid.

You can watch this on Tubi.

USA UP ALL NIGHT MONTH: 976-EVIL II: The Astral Factor (1992)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: 976-EVIL II aired on USA Up All Night on February 22 and April 26, 1997.

By writing Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time and House IV and directing Sorority House Massacre II, Deathstalker II (which he also wrote), Big Bad Mama II, Ghoulies IV, The Skateboard Kid 2, Body Chemistry IV: Full Exposure, Friend of the Family II, Sorceress II: The Temptress, The Escort III, The Bare Wench Project 2: Scared Topless, The Bare Wench Project 3: Nymphs of Mystery Mountain, The Witches of Breastwick 2, Bare Wench Project Uncensored and Bare Wench: The Final Chapter, Jim Wynorski may be the king of the sequels. Let’s add 976-EVIL II, a movie that somewhat continues the story begun in the Robert Englund 976-EVIL.

Also known as 976-EVIL II: The Astral Factor, this movie is all about Spike, a leather jacket-wearing loner from the first film, again played by Patrick O’Bryan, and final girl Robin battling Professor Grubeck, who is in full command of astral powers and a Satanic horoscope phone line.

“Out of the darkness and into the light comes your horrorscope on this dark and stormy night.”

There are two great reasons to watch this. The first is Brigitte Nielsen, who did this movie for scale after losing a pool game bet to Wynorski. And the other is a bravura sequence that combines the two best-known public domain movies of all time, Night of the Living Dead and It’s A Wonderful Life, as one of the girls becomes stuck between the two films and ends with Zuzu Bailey transforming into Kyra Schon and stabbing the girl with a trowel. It’s an astounding piece of filmmaking, one that comes out of nowhere (the script had the girl absorbed by a video game and the budget couldn’t handle it) and delivers.

You also get appearances by Philip McKeon (TV’s Alice) and George “Buck” Flower, as well as some great lighting and usage of budget.

This movie is way better than it has any right to be. Seriously, you should check it out right now, because I can’t believe this hasn’t received a high end re-release yet.