Tag Archives: 1994

Tales from the Crypt S6 E4: Operation Friendship (1994)

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Directed by Roland Mesa (the man who made Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation) and written by Rob Ross, this is all about Nelson DeMears (Tate Donovan), a computer programmer whose ideas are taken by Jack (John Caponera), a supposed pal who uses them to get ahead. But Nelson doesn’t need a horrible friend like Jack when he has had an imaginary one for years, Eddie (Peter Dobson). Eddie always wants him to stand up for himself, but when he learns that Nelson has fallen for a therapist named Jane (Michelle Burke), he worries that he’s about to be erased from his friend’s life.

“Oh, hello boils and ghouls. It’s me, your favorite creep from the deep, Shock Cousteau. You’re just in time. I’m about to dive into tonight’s tale. Care to join me? (in his normal voice) Good, then strap on a couple of scare tanks and prepare yourselves for a cold, wet hack-sploration of my favorite kind of marine life: croakers. (chuckles; he fires the harpoon, which hits someone offscreen and makes them scream in agony) Oops. It concerns a couple of boo-som buddies who’re about to put their relationship to rest. I call it: “Operation Friendship.””

By the end, Eddie shows that sometimes, what’s best for Nelson is for him to take over and do things his way. If he has to throw his best friend out a window to do that, why not?

This is based on “Operation Friendship” from Tales from the Crypt #41. That story was written by Otto Binder and drawn by Jack Davis. It’s very different from what ended up on the show, as it’s about a scientist who cuts out most of his friend’s brain to keep it in a vat and hang out with him while the 25% is thrown into his body. His wife never notices.

In the Heat of Passion II: Unfaithful (1994)

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Imagine if Roger Corman produced a Giallo. Well, didn’t he do this a whole bunch of times with all of those erotic thrillers? An in-name-only sequel directed by Catherine Cyran (writer of Slumber Party Massacre III), this has Phillip (Barry Bostwick) marrying a series of age-appropriate women like Jean (Lesley-Anne Down) and bringing his young daughter Casey (Teresa Hill) to live with them. But like a plot out of a Caroll Baker/Umberto Lenzi movie, Phillip and Casey are truly lovers and kill off the wheelchair-bound rich woman before they have to deal with her lawyer, Howard (Michael Gross). But then it turns out that Jean may not be as dead as she seems.

This movie almost doesn’t want the erotic part of its genre. At one point, after getting high at a goth club, Casey brings home another club girl named Lisa (Betsy Lynn George) for a three-way with her much older lover. Instead of showing that, it’s all in dialogue, and we cut to the following day. As a result, this feels more like a TV movie than an actual erotic film. That said, Teresa Hill is gorgeous, but I’m also someone who grew up in the pre-Suicide Girls days of nascent goth girls who had no set way of wearing their makeup and couldn’t easily find Manic Panic and Urban Decay at Target.

The story is better than the first, however. I’m always a fan of criminals falling for someone who is even more dangerous than them, and this gets that right, with supernatural ghostlighting (I’m copyrighting that phrase) and Alex Keaton’s dad playing lover against lover.

Also known as Behind Closed Doors, this was made in the same house as Carnosaur 2. As always, I have to thank The Schlock Pit for that knowledge.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Tales from the Crypt S6 E3: Whirlpool (1994)

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Master of Horror Mick Garris and writer A.L. Katz crafted this, the third of the premiere episodes of the sixth season of Tales from the Crypt. It’s a deeply meta narrative, where Rolanda (Rita Rudner), an artist for the Tales from the Crypt comic book, grapples with an abusive boss, Vern Caputo (Richard Lewis). He dismisses her, she retaliates, and the police end her life. But the horror doesn’t end there. She awakens in her bed, forced to relive the same day over and over, trapped in a nightmarish cycle.

“Looks like it’s curtains for me kiddies. Then again, maybe the Venetian blinds would look better. I don’t know. When I started this little makeover, I was pretty excited. I thought a little Slaytex paint, some new scream doors, maybe even some scare conditioning. I could turn my little doomicile into a regular pied-à-terror. But, I tell ya, kiddies, between the dust and the ghost overruns, your pal the Crypt Keeper’s going out of his mind! Which is kinda like the woman in tonight’s terror tale. It’s about a comic book artist who’s about to experience a terrible case of déjà boo. I call it “Whirpool.””

As the episode draws to a close, a startling revelation emerges. Rolanda is, in fact, Vern’s superior, and the entire narrative is a product of his comic book. He’s ensnared in a time loop, experiencing the same abuse he once inflicted on her. It’s a jarring role reversal that plunges us deeper into the twisted world of EC Comics.

This is based on “Whirlpool” from Vault of Horror #32, written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Johnny Craig. In that story, a woman is trapped in a world of unending horror, which may or may not be all in her mind.

Tales from the Crypt S6 E2: Only Skin Deep (1994)

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The sixth season premiered on HBO on October 31, 1984, with “Only Skin Deep” — along with “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” and “Whirlpool” — an episode directed by William Malone (feardotcom, Scared to Death) and written by Dick Beebe, who also worked with Malone on House On Haunted Hill.

Carl (Peter Onorati) is a woman-beating loser who shows up at a party knowing an ex will be there and makes a scene, as everyone knew he would, before meeting a masked woman named Molly (Sherrie Rose, Mary Jo from American Rickshaw), who says that she is dressed as “a synthetic shield with a corpse inside.” She takes Carl home, but that’s probably not a good idea for either of them.

“Hmm, I see your raise and I call! Bleed ’em and weep! Spades beat hearts every time. Oh, hello creeps. So glad you could join me for my weekly game. My deal! Hacks and chokers are wild. Are you in? Good. So’s the man in tonight’s terror tale, except his game is relationships. It’s a ghoulish little gamble I call “Only Skin Deep.””

The night of wild passion they share takes away Carl’s anger, but it won’t last, as she wants nothing to do with him afterward. He soon learns that attacking her is the worst thing he could have done, as she has no true face. Soon, he doesn’t have one of his own.

This episode was based on “Only Skin Deep!” from Tales from the Crypt #38, written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Reed Crandall. The comic is very different, as Herbert and Suzanne meet yearly at Mardi Gras. One year, Herbert becomes tired of being separated from her for a whole year and asks him to marry her. Suzanne still refuses to remove her witch mask, even after she marries him and they consummate their relationship. Then, when he tries to remove the mask himself, he rips off her face and watches her slowly die. Good Lord! Choke…

Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III (1994)

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Jackson Barr is back to write the third in the Body Chemistry series, along with director Jim Wynorski, who seems perfect to make this movie. There’s also a new actress playing sexpert Dr. Claire Archer, as Shari Shattuck (star of two Cannon films, The Naked Cage and Number One With a Bullet, as well as video store classics like Arena, Uninvited and Death Spa) takes the reins — literally — from Lisa Pescia.

The not-so-good doctor has come back to Los Angeles, where Freddie Summers (Chick Vennera) is trying to make the movie of her life, along with studio boss Bob Sibley (Robert Forster) and producer Alan Clay (Andrew Stevens). Clay wanted his wife, Beth (Morgan Fairchild), to play the role of Claire, but there’s a problem. The sexologist knows Summers from her past — he was a character in the first movie — and only agrees to make the film if Clay has an affair with her.

It’s nice that Andrew got his mother Stella a part, even if this is softcore pornography. She doesn’t get nude, but Delia Sheppard and Becky LeBeau sure do. And hey, this starts with Robert Forester physically attacking two nude sex workers in a frenzy, a fact that is forgotten after it happens, kind of like the real Hollywood.

All Alan wanted to do was make nature films. Now he’s making exploitation movies and stuck between two gorgeous blondes. That doesn’t sound like the worst life. Despite having a successful online show — in 1994! — and being a best-selling writer, Dr. Claire Archer still needs to wrap men around her wizard’s sleeve and use people because she’s evil. Yes, a woman in charge of her sexuality, who knows how to use it to get ahead and has become popular because of it, has to be a harridan.

I prefer Pescia in the role, but this has enough for me to enjoy, including the filmmakers grabbing a crew member to play Morton Downer Jr. in a flashback.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Tales from the Crypt S6 E1: Let the Punishment Fit the Crime (1994)

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As we start a new year, it’s time to begin a new season of Tales from the Crypt. The sixth season premiered on HBO on October 31, 1984 — along with “Skin Deep” and “Whirlpool” — and was directed by Russell Mulcahy (The Hunger, Highlander and early innovations in music videos like Ultravox’s “Passing Strangers,” Billy Joel’s “Allentown,” numerous efforts for Duran Duran — “Rio,” “Save a Prayer,” “The Wild Boys,” “The Reflex” and so many more — and even the first video MTV played, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star) and written by Ron Finley, one of five episodes scribed by this author.

The Crypt Keeper starts the show by cackling, “”From overseas and underworld, it’s the Crypt Keeper Noose Network. Good evening, creeps. In the news tonight, wolfman bites dog, vampires say life sucks, mummy takes the wrap after years in “de Nile,” and illiterate zombies insist they’re better dead than read. This just in. And our top story tonight is a nasty little soundbite about an ambulance-chasing lawyer who is about to bleed in the toughest case of her life. I call it “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime.””

This starts a lot like Nothing But Trouble. As lawyer Geraldine Ferrett (Catherine O’Hara) passes through the small town of Stueksville, she’s pulled over for having a bad license plate—well, a vanity one that states SUE EM —and hauled in front of three judges (all played by Joseph Maher) and defended by a public defender who knows so much less than her, Austin Haggard (Peter MacNicol).

Perhaps if she wasn’t so busy handing out her business card to people in wheelchairs and bragging about her past cases, she might realize that this hamlet is filled with weirdness, like the anachronistic pictures of public hangings in the lobby.

Haggard lives up to his name, a poor lawyer who gets her sentenced to a dungeon and a hundred lashes. Again and again, she tells him,  “I’d rather be dead than you.” With each judge she meets, the punishments become harsher and the supernatural lifts up its head, as she’s visited by the ghosts of patients who died once she shut down a pacemaker company.

The true punishment is that she’s given community service and takes over Haggard’s role as he goes to the electric chair for his crimes, happy to be free of this town and what could have been decades of cases like this. He tells her, “I’d rather be dead than you,” as he gets zapped.

This has some more cute wordplay in it. Stueksville may be “the sticks,” but it’s also purgatory, a place where the river Styx could flow. The title comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado — “My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time. To let the punishment fit the crime.” — and explains the punishments of The Lord High Executioner, which are similar to the three judges in this episode.

The title of this episode, “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime,” is in name only when compared to the EC Comics story that appeared in Vault of Horror #33, written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Jack Davis. The tale is about a town wondering what the punishments for crimes will be as children parade coffins through the streets, inspiring the theme of justice and punishment in this episode.

September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama 2024 Primer: Cemetery Man (1994)

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September Drive-In Super Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on September 27 and 28, 2024. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included) for an additional $15 per person. You can buy tickets at the show but get there early and learn more here.

The features for Friday, September 27 are The Raven, The Terror, The Little Shop of Horrors and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Saturday, September 28 has The Beyond, Opera, Cemetery Man and A Blade In the Dark.

Throughout the 1990’s, Michele Soavi kept the traditions of Italian horror alive. Starting as an actor in films like Aliens 2: On Earth, City of the Living Dead, Demons and The New York Ripper, Soavi would also become an assistant director to greats such as Dario Argento (Tenebre, Phenomena), Lamberto Bava (Blastfighter and the previously mentioned Demons) and Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Brothers Grimm). Finally, he’d graduate to creating his own films, including Stagefright, The Sect and The Church.

Cemetary Man is based on Tiziano Sclavi’s novel Dellamorte Dellamore (the best translation is “About Death, About Love”). Sclavi also created the comic book Dylan Dog, whose protagonist looks exactly like this film’s star Rupert Everett (and which was also made into a 2011 film).

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, My Best Friend’s Wedding) takes care of the Buffalora cemetery. He lives in a shack, with death and his mentally challenged assistant Gnaghi his only friends. Quite frankly, his life sucks. Young punks in town tell everyone he’s impotent. And his only hobbies are putting together a skull-shaped puzzle and crossing out dead people’s names in the telephone book.

That said, he has a hell of a job to do. The gates of the cemetery read “For those who will rise again,” and after a week, the dead rises from their graves, ready to kill the living. Francesco must kill them when they rise, even if no one wants to hear what a problem he’s facing. Again, the townspeople think he’s a moron, the mayor doesn’t care and, according to Franco, the town’s bookkeeper, he’d have to do a ton of paperwork if he really wanted the help.

While watching a funeral, Dellamorte falls in love with a widow. He waits for her to visit the graveside of her dead husband, then takes her on a tour of the grounds. As they have sex on the graves, her dead spouse rises and fatally bites her. Or maybe it’s a heart attack. Or maybe she isn’t even dead.  That said, seven days later, she also rises from the dead and Dellamorte must put her down as well.

Meanwhile, Gnaghi falls in love with the mayor’s daughter, Valentina. Even when she’s decapitated, he won’t fall out of love, instead digging up her head and starting up a romance. And the widow rises again, leading Dellamorte to believe that he was the one who killed her, not her husband. This causes him to either go insane or to begin seeing the truth, as the Angel of Death appears to him, begging him to stop killing the dead and only kill the living.

The widow has become the unattainable object of Dellamorte’s desire. He even tries to talk a doctor into removing his penis so that one aspect of her, the assistant to the new mayor (oh yeah, Valentina killed her dad when he shunned her new relationship) who is afraid of penetration, will fall in love with him. That relationship ends when she is raped, loses her phobia and marries her attacker.

Dellamorte then goes into town and kills anyone who said he was impotent. Meeting a prostitute in a bar, he realizes that she is also his unattainable love. He kills her and everyone in her apartment by setting it on fire.

Remember that bookkeeper, Franco? Well, he’s killed his whole family and the other murders that Dellamorte has done are all pinned on him. He drinks iodine to kill himself, but before he dies, Dellamorte visits. While visiting, he kills a nun, a nurse and a doctor, finally trying to confess to everything but no one will believe him.

Death reveals himself again and laughs that Dellamorte has not figured out what the difference between life and death is. So our hero packs up the car, grabs Gnaghi and tries to escape the town. As they race out of a tunnel, their car wrecks and Gnaghi is critically injured.

Dellamorte fears that the rest of the world has ceased to exist. He decides to kill himself and Gnaghi before his assistant is miraculously healed. He throws Dellamorte’s gun off a cliff and the two men decide to go back home.

If you’re looking for a narrative film that makes sense, this is not the movie. If you’re seeking a dream meditation of life, love and loss, then fire up your DVD player. Or streaming device, it is 2017 after all. Shot in a real abandoned cemetery, there are moments of poetic beauty and grace, like when the floating fool’s fire lights dance around the graves as Dellamorte and She make love. And there are also moments of abject horror and dread, as the film has an incredibly memorable personification of death.

Soavi would drop out of filmmaking to take care of his sick son in the late 1990’s, returning to work in television in the early 2000’s. Here’s hoping that he gets another chance to return to features, as Cemetery Man is everything I love about film — strangeness that is not easily accessible or categorized.

Junesploitation: Surviving the Game (1994)

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June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is 90s Action! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

How awesome is it that Ice T has played both the hero and the villain in movies that are remixed versions of The Most Dangerous Game? He started here as Jack Mason, the homeless man hunted by the rich and powerful and just three years later, he would be Vincent Moon, the crime overlord who has gathered a hundred of his best killers to, well, kill one another in Mean Guns. It’s as wild as the journey that took him from singing lyrics like “I got my twelve gauge sawed-off, I got my headlights turned off, I’m ’bout to bust some shots off, I’m ’bout to dust some cops off” to playing Detective Fin Tutuola for a quarter of a century on prime time cop TV.

Ernest Dickerson has made a cool path in his career, too. Starting as the cinematographer for several Spike Lee movies, as well as John Sayles’ Brother from Another Planet, Robert Townsend’s Eddie Murphy Raw and James Bond III’s Def by Temptation, he directed some really interesting films, including Juice, Demon Knight and Bones. He’s since directed episodes of The Wire and The Walking Dead. 

But back to the most dangerous game

In just a few days, Jack Mason has lost his dog and his only human friend, another unhoused man named Hank (Jeff Corey, who was blacklisted and became an acting coach before returning to acting and being in movies like Jennifer and The Premonition). Between that, being on the streets of Seattle and never dealing with the loss of his wife and daughter, he decides to kill himself. He’s saved by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton, a powerhouse of an actor who nearly spent his life in prison) who runs a soup kitchen and refers him to Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer), a man who runs hunting parties and needs someone who knows how to survive to guide a party that includes CIA psychologist and hunt leader Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey), Texas oil tycoon John Griffin (John C. McGinley) — who is also grieving over a lost daughter — and wealthy Wall Street trader Derek Wolfe Sr. (F. Murray Abraham) and his son Derek Wolfe Jr. (William McNamara)

Of course, the hunt is to kill human game. And his time on the street has taught him how to be more ruthless than any of these evil people or even the ones who have been led to be part of this group. You know, kind of like Hard Target without the splits.

Writer Eric Bernt also was behind Virtuosity, Romeo Must Die and then you see that he also wrote Highlander: Endgame and the remake of The Hitcher and you want to be nice but man, really?

That said, I kind of love this movie because the cast is pretty great and I’m all for Ice T snarling nearly every line of dialogue that he has.

APRIL MOVIE THON 3: It’s Pat (1994)

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April 27: SNL: A movie based on an SNL character.

Julia Sweeney created the character Pat O’Neill Riley for Saturday Night Live but it wasn’t intended to be a mystery as to the character’s gender. Sweeney said, “I’d been an accountant for like five years, and there was one person I worked with in particular who had a lot of mannerisms like Pat. This person sort of drooled and had the kind of body language of Pat. I started trying to do him. I was testing it out on my friends and they were just like, “Yeah, it’s good, but it doesn’t seem like a guy that much.” Like I couldn’t quite pull off being in drag convincingly enough. So then I thought, maybe that’s the joke. I’ll just have one joke in here about how we don’t know if that’s a man or a woman just to sort of cover up for my lack of ability to really play a guy convincingly.”

First appearing on December 1, 1990 and showing up in twelve other episodes, Pat is of another era, a time when non-binary and transgender people were seen mostly as someone to joke about. Let’s be honest, they still are and even worse today. But for a time, Pat was the first character of its type.

Sweeney said about this film — yes, everyone from SNL was getting a movie at this stage — “I wrote It’s Pat with Jim Emerson and Steve Hibbert. We had a great time writing and a lot of fun making the film. The movie didn’t do well at the box office, not by a long shot. In fact, It’s Pat became a popular example of a film so despised that it got a zero percent Rotten Tomatoes rating! I guess in that way, it’s sort of a badge of honor. But I can’t help it, I love this film. It has so many people in it who I love, and loved. Many are dead: Charlie Rocket, who played Kyle, and Julie Hayden who played his wife (who died of cancer a couple of years after the film premiered,) my dad who played the priest who married us, and my brother Mike who had one line at the wedding shower of Pat and Chris. And there are so many good friends in the film too: Kathy Griffin and Dave Foley and Kathy Najimy and Tim Stack and Tim Meadows. And the band Ween! We had so much fun together.”

Yes. Ween is in this. It still makes me laugh that they show up.

Pat (Sweeney) and Chris (Dave Foley, who continually has played women in nearly every show that he’s been part of) have met, found out that they both like to eat and become engaged. Yet Pat can’t get her life together, she has a neighbor (Charles Rocket) obsessed with her and an appearance on America’s Creepiest People turns her into a celebrity, which causes the couple to break off their engagement. The entire free world then becomes obsessed by whether or not Pat is a man or a woman while Pat tries to get Chris back.

Sweeney didn’t want to make the film. She said, “I resisted it completely. I just didn’t know how we could make it last for two hours. But 20th Century Fox was really keen; our producer was really keen. So we thought, OK, we’ll write the script. And after three months, we fell madly in love with the script. Unfortunately, Fox did not.”

This was made by Touchstone Pictures instead of that studio.

It also has an uncredited writer.

Quentin Tarantino.

Playboy: You were hired to do a rewrite of It’s Pat. As one now familar with the perspiring androgyne from Saturday Night Live, is Pat a he or a she?

Tarantino: The androgyny aspect is only a part of Pat’s appeal. What I love about the character is that Pat is so fucking obnoxious. To tell the truth, I don’t know what Pat is. But I know what I want Pat to be: I want Pat to be a girl. There was only one sketch that Julia Sweeney, the actress who plays Pat did on Saturday Night Live that gave a clue to what Pat is. It was the sketch that Pat did with Harvey Keitel. They’re stranded on a deserted island and they have sex — and Harvey still doesn’t know what Pat is. And the thing is, they kissed in it. At one point they were thinking of taking the kiss out of the sketch. But Harvey, being Harvey, demanded they keep it in, that there’d be no integrity without the kiss. So that was the first time we’d seen Pat in an intimate situation — a smooch. There is a certain way that you hold your head, the way you come in for a kiss. And sitting there, watching it, I thought that Pat didn’t kiss like a guy. Pat kissed like a girl.

Sweeney was so upset after this that she never wanted to play the Pat character again. However, she had previously agreed for Pat to be honored as mayor for the day”in West Hollywood on Halloween. She would play Pat one last time on October 31, 1994, but claims that it was “halfhearted and pathetic.”

VISUAL VENGEANCE ON TUBI: Children of Dracula (1994)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Did you know that Visual Vengeance has a ton of movies on Tubi? It’s true. Check out this Letterboxd list and look for reviews as new movies get added. You can find this movie on Tubi.

When I spoke to Bret McCormick, I had not seen this movie yet and wanted to know more.

B&S: You’ve also made some docs, like Children of Dracula, which seems ahead of its time now in shining a light on a culture some would see as aberrant. What was that process like?

BRET: We ran ads in an alternative newspaper in Dallas and one in LA and then screened through the respondents. It was a very quick production. I was very glad Joe Estevez agreed to narrate. I didn’t take it very seriously at the time.

I’m so glad that Visual Vengeance has released it to streaming.

“Are you a Vampire? Vampire’s victim? Have fantasies about Vampires?” That’s the ad circulated in major Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and got hundreds of responses. After all, Interview With a Vampire had come out that year.

Directed by McCormick and Christopher Romero, this has a series of people who explain how they either became fascinated by vampires or became one. Well, one lady can only make raw bacon and eat it which doesn’t seem to be the kind of life that we were promised by the Hammer films, but what can you do?

One of the people who shows up in this is Tony Brownrigg, the son of S.F. Brownrigg and Libby Hall. He’s acted in quite a few films and made a sequel to one of his father’s films with Don’t Look In the Basement 2.

There are also trailers spaced throughout that include The Twilight People, Andy Warhol’s Dracula and The Velvet Vampire, which are all beyond great picks if you want some different views of how movies deal with vampirism.

In the days before basic cable becoming, well, a lot like this movie, these are the films that you’d find in the horror section of your mom and pop rental store but they may not have had a true home. Most of those shops didn’t have a documentary section. I would have totally rented this and yes, made a copy of it, and made people watch it and laughed when they thought I was strange because I had memorized so many of the interviews.

You can watch this on Tubi.