The most expensive film ever made at the time, Waterworld lives in the same rarified air as Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate, except that it was one of the highest grossing films of 1995.
The thing is, while it cost $175 million, it made back $264.2 million worldwide, as well as having a profitable video and cable release. It’s still making money, because the stunt show based on the movie, Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular, is still running at Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Studios Singapore, Universal Studios Japan and Universal Studios Beijing 27 years after the movie was released.
Writer Peter Rader came up with the idea for Waterworld during a conversation with producer Brad Krevoy literally as a Mad Max rip-off. He probably also read the comic Freakwave by Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy*, which had been nearly optioned as a movie. Co-writer David Twohy even outright said that he was inspired by The Road Warrior and the filmmakers hired that movie’s director of photography, Dean Semler, for this film.
Before filming began, Steven Spielberg warned star Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds not to film on open water, a lesson he learned from Jaws. They didn’t listen and watched the set sink. And hey, Reynolds quit before the movie was done because he and Costner fought so much.
So what did this all lead to?
Waterworld is way better than it’s been said to be. It is, quite literally, Mad Max on jet skis. Costner is the web-footed Mariner, a man who recycles his own urine as drinking water because since the polar ice caps melted, the drinking water is quite limited and the Earth is just plain filled with water. He saves Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and a kid named Enola (Tina Majorino), protecting them from The Deacon, a one-eyed Dennis Hopper, and then uses the map on Enola’s back to find the only dry land on Earth, which is the top of Mount Everest.
It just takes two hours and fifteen minutes** to get there.
*Ironically, McCarthy would later co-write Mad Max: Fury Road.
Steven Seagal is back as ex-Navy SEAL, Casey Ryback, now on a train instead of an aircraft carrier. Instead of Andrew Davis (The Final Terror, Above the Law) directing, Geoff Murphy (The Quiet Earth, Freejack) is making this. J. F. Lawton, who wrote the first one as well as Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, Pretty Woman, Blankman and DOA: Dead of Alive, as well as creating the Pam Anderson show V.I.P., is out and Richard Hatem and Matt Reeves are in. That’s right. The same director who made The Batman once made a Steven Seagal movie. Busey and Tommy Lee Jones aren’t the bad guys. Now, you get Eric Bogosian and Everett McGill.
But hey — Admiral Bates (Andy Romano), Captain Garza (Dale Dye) and Tom Breaker (Nick Mancuso) come back. And you do get Katherine Heigl as Ryback’s niece. Morris Chestnut as a train porter and Sandra Taylor (who somehow was a Penthouse Pet in March of 1991 and also did a Playboy pictorial in July of 1995 to promote this movie; she mentioned not even knowing if her character survived) as a barmaid so calm down. And oh wow, it’s the same train from Runaway Train.
But hey, this is one of Becca’s favorite movies. She loves it more than the first one, no matter how many people say that this was horrible in comparison. You can’t change her loves, which makes me lucky, because she married a fat child who ran upstairs breathless today to let her know that Arabella the Black Angel — a movie that she doesn’t want to see, need to see or should ever see — is on Tubi. And she loves me at least as much as this movie.
It’s the John McClane issue: how can the same hero be in the same situation all over again? Oh well. This would be the end for Seagal, who would not make it to the end of Executive Decision and not get many movies in theaters after 1996.
Originally, Jon Peters was slated to be a producer for the movie. He wanted to bring Gary Busey back, but after he was told Busey’s character had died in the original , he quit. That story sounds like BS, but so does the story that Busey was hired and the casting director had no idea he had died in the first movie. He had the kind of contract where he got paid no matter what. That can’t be true.
Cindy Hannen (Athena Massey) has gone undercover as a high priced call girl to track down a killer, but soon she discovers that she likes her new life.
There are a few reasons why I picked this movie.
Obviously, as you can tell from the title, it’s Gregory Dark week. These quasi-giallo erotic thrillers are kind of his thing, so you know that you’re in good — if somehwhat dirty — hands.
Mrs. V, the woman who runs the brother, is Meg Foster and I can’t tell you how many movies I’ve stuck with just because she’s in them. And hey! There’s our old friend Rena Riffel, a woman brave enough to make her own sequel to Showgirls. And is that Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a pre-fame part? It sure is. And the more prurient minded of you will recognize Lisa Ann.
With I enjoy about Dark’s erotic thrillers is that he makes them better than they need to be, but he never tries to go all Adrian Lynn and make an artistic statement. He knows that he’s making a sexy cop movie and works to make both parts of that, well, work well.
EDITOR’S NOTE: When I first took a look at this film on September 14, 2017, I didn’t seem to like it so much. Maybe I was having a bad day, as my thoughts have grown more rose-colored in the time that has passed.
If you’d like to see it for yourself, Arrow Video has released a UK blu ray of this film, which includes a 2K restoration of the movie, three sets of commentary (critics Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson; “Manglophiles” Matty Budrewicz and Dave Wain and co-writer Stephen David Brooks), Nature Builds No Machines (a brand new visual essay by Scout Tafoya, author of Cinemaphagy: the Films of Tobe Hooper, This Machine Just Called Me an Asshole! (a visual essay by author and critic Guy Adams on the monstrous life of inanimate objects in the work of Stephen King), an interview with star Robert Englund, behind the scenes footage and a trailer.
If you have an all region player, you can get this in the U.S. from Diabolik DVD.
What happens when you put together three of horror’s biggest stars — Robert Englund, Stephen King and Tobe Hooper? That’s the question posed by this film, based on a King/Harry Allan Towers short story that first appeared in the men’s magazine Cavalier before appearing in King’s 1978 collection Night Shift, which also spawned the movies Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive, Graveyard Shift, The Lawnmower Man, Sometimes They Come Back, Trucks (yes, I know it’s the same story as Maximum Overdrive) and Battleground.
Bill Gartley (Robert England) owns the Blue Ribbon Laundry service, which is based around a laundry press that everyone calls The Mangler. His niece, Sherry cuts herself and gets blood all over the machine, which leads to the machine coming to life. It starts to eat anyone who gets too close to it, like Mrs. Frawley, by folding them just like a sheet.
Drunken police detective John Hunton (Ted Levine, Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs) and his ex-brother-in-law Mark — who just happens to study demonology — investigate the many deaths that follow. It turns out the Tha Mangler is how Gartley runs the town — when their virgin daughters turn 16, the town’s most powerful men and women sacrifice them to the machine. Sherry is next.
Sherry is next, but she helps the two men take out the demon — even if it kills Gartley, his lover Lin Sue and Stanner, the foreman. They throw holy water on it and the machine nearly beats them, but they succeed in taking it out. That is — until John talks about the antacids he’d been taking, which once belonged to the now dead Mrs. Frawley. One of the ingredients is deadly nightshade, also called “The Hand of Glory.”
Here’s where the movie descends into bullshittery. It only follows some of King’s story — which was a novella, so we can cut them some slack. It takes passages from Sir James George Frazier’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. But the “Hand of Glory” is usually the hand of a murderer who has been put to death or part of the root of the mandrake plant. That said — the endings of the book and movie are totally different, so I shouldn’t expect anyone to do actual research or make the occult make sense within their film.
The Mangler comes back to life, killing Mark and chasing John and Sherry. She tries to give herself to it to save him, but he stops her. They fall through a manhole cover and escape, with him taking her to the hospital, as he’s fallen in love.
Oh yeah — Mark is friends with an old photographer named J.J.J. Pictureman, who tells him the hidden history of the town before he dies. As John waits for news on Sherry’s condition, he gets a letter from the dead man. He warns him not to trust anyone in town with a missing body part, as they may have sacrificed it to the Mangler.
When John goes to see Sherry, flowers in hand, the machine is back in place and she has replaced her uncle, looking like a female version of him. She waves to him and he notices that her finger is missing. Throwing away the flowers, he leaves.
I worry that my description of this movie makes it sound better than it really is and that people will watch it. Hooper may not have even finished the film, as some say he was replaced by the producer, Anant Singh. It actually played in around 800 theaters, but was considered a failure. Hooper would go back to directing for TV after this.
When I first looked at this a few years ago, I looked down on it. Maybe it’s the years of worse movies in between or perhaps a reappraisal — more likely I miss the time when I could just go to the video store to rent stuff like this — but my memories of The Mangler have grown more fond since then.
This movie went into production before Carnosaur was even done. That’s how it works in Corman world, because this was going to be a big direct to video success. It’s still Aliens with dinosaurs and ends the same way as the first one, as a T. Rex battles a forklift.
What starts as a nuclear meltdown turns into a storage facility packed with cloned dinosaurs. Along the way, you’ll see the boom mic, tape marks on the floor and puppeteers in frame, but the dinosaurs are a little better as the team had a week of post-production this time.
Director Louis Morneau also made some other sequels, like Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead and The Hitcher II: I’ve Been Waiting. Michael Palmer, who wrote it, also was behind another Corman sequel, Watchers III.
You can make fun of these down and dirty sequels all you want, but the crew worked 16 hour days for 18 days in a row, which is a huge effort to deliver a movie under budget and way ahead of expectations. So if some things go wrong, well, so be it. It’s incredible that any movie gets made.
Gregory Widen has had a great career, creating Highlander, Backdraft and this movie, which is a pretty great record. This was the first film he directed and man, it’s stayed with me since I first saw it more than 25 years ago.
Thomas Dagget (Elias Koteas, who somehow can be in a kids movie like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Crash) is a Catholic seminary student who loses his faith after watching a battle between angels and becomes an LAPD cop just in time for Simon (Eric Stoltz) to enter his home, tell him that the war between angels is here and get attacked by Uziel, an angel under the command of Gabriel (Christopher Walken).
Seriously, Walken owns every frame he’s in and he actually has some great company in this one. That said, the cast is packed with heavy hitters like Virginia Madsen, Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer and Amanda Plummer.
None of them would deliver lines like Walken: “I’m an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now until kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.”
Then again, Mortensen does get this one: “Little Tommy Daggett. How I loved listening to your sweet prayers every night. And then you’d jump in your bed, so afraid I was under there. And I was!”
Well, when the cops do an autopsy on Uziel, who has been killed by Simon, and learn that the body has no eyes, both sexual organs and the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. Yeah, this is the kind of movie that drops those strange bits of knowledge on you just to see if you’re paying attention.
I got the opportunity to speak to the film’s producer, Joel Soisson, who said, “The idea was that these Hallmark angels in the Old Testament were not nice at all. They were brutal. And they just take you down. And I looked at it as they hated humans and then we have these predatory angels and nothing had been done like this before. Now, TV is starting to do things like Legion but in 1995, nobody was doing this.
The producers didn’t get it. They really liked the story but said, “What if instead of angels, they were zombies?” And we answered, “Well, that’s not the story.”
When I look back at all the genre things I did, that’s the one that I would remake or make another sequel. Gregory made something as engrossing as The Bible and it’s just as full of paradoxes as The Bible. So whatever you believe, you don’t have to be Christian, you can interpret so many things out of the Scriptures. And the angels are mysteries that we can’t understand and it’s fascinating to me.
I love that we find this conflict between the angels, with Walken’s Gabriel leaving Heaven and trying to start a new Hell, but Satan comes to Earth and says, “Not on my watch.” And Satan helps humanity! There’s humanity and even some John le Carré espionage.”
This is one of my favorite films because it’s so unashamed to be as weird as it gets. If this movie was only the scene where Walken hung out with school children and yelled out, “Study your math, kids. Key to the universe!” it’d already be one that I adore.
It’s years ahead of its time and still feels fresh.
Also known as Scanners: The Showdown, this brings back LAPD scanner cop Sam Staziak (Daniel Quinn) and places him on the case of renegade scanner Karl Volkin. He’s already put the man in jail once before and killed his brother, but now Volkin has been killing other scanners and adding their power to his own.
Volkin gets his revenge by causing Staziak’s mother to kill herself — well, she sacrifices herself instead of letting him scan her — and that leads to a brutal final battle in a warehouse.
Khrystyne Haje is in this, following being in Head of the Class. She’s also in Cyborg 3: The Recycler and Demolition University, but don’t feel bad for her. In 2001, it was reported that she was the quarter owner of a Silicon Valley company worth $500 million.
Director Steve Barnett also made Mindwarp and Hollywood Boulevard II, a movie that I never knew existed until now. Writer Mark Sevi seems to be a sequel master, scripting films like Class of 1999 II: The Substitute, Ghoulies IV, Dream a Little Dream 2, Excessive Force II: Force on Force, Dead on: Relentless II and Relentless IV: Ashes to Ashes.
Plus Robert Forester automatically adds several stars to any movies he shows up in.
Bill Condon wrote Strange Invaders and Strange Behavior before this movie, which didn’t fare as well with the public and critics as the original movie.
Maybe the movie Bernard Rose wanted to make would have been better. Virginia Madsen told Horror News Network, “They originally wanted us to do Candyman 2, but they didn’t like Bernie’s idea for the sequel. They made the Candyman into a slave which was terrible because the Candyman was educated and raised as a free man. Bernie wanted to make him like an African American Dracula which I think it was so appealing to the African American community because they finally had their own Dracula. The Candyman was a poet and smart. He wasn’t really a monster. He was sort of that classical figure. The sequel that Bernie wanted to make was a prequel where you see the Candyman and Helen fall in love. It was turned down because the studio didn’t want to do an interracial love story.”
There was also a plan to turn the Clive Barker story “The Midnight Meat Train” into the second movie years before that story became its own adaption.
That said, this movie — which explores the legend and shows that the Candyman was really an artist named Daniel Robitaille who was born to free slaves after the Civil War — isn’t horrible. It’s just that Candyman is one of the greatest horror movies ever, so making a sequel is such a major burden.
So this one is a slasher where the original was a meditation on race and rage. Maybe I should say something nice about the score.
“Between the worlds and music, something evil was tearing them apart.” — Vidmark’s alternate, copywriter hornswogglin’
As the televangelist-inspiring carnival barkers of old once said, “Step right up! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
So, if you are keeping track of your rock ‘n’ roll flicks, and we know you are, you know that Michael Paré (Moon 44) and Sean Patrick Flanery (Boondock Saints, forever!) each made two of them: Sean Patrick Flanery made this, and the even more obscure grunge chronicle, Girl (2000), while Michael Paré made this, and Eddie and the Cruisers.
In Girl, Flanery was an ersatz-Cobain who becomes the love interest of a wayward, college-bound high school girl. In Eddie and the Cruisers, Paré was an ersatz-Jim Morrison who faked his death.
Here, Flanery’s aspiring, oh-so-not-metal rocker (which a film of this genre needs: metal) runs afoul of Paré’s, well, faux-Tom Cruise — if his Stacee Jaxx from the abysmal Rock of Ages was running Scientology and brainwashing teens into hard rock zombies, like Damian in Black Roses. Oh, only if this film were as cool as that last sentence. . . . If this film was as cool as American Satan.
Of the many foreign and domestic VHS and DVD sleeves issued. The original, disembodied floating-head design trope, wins . . . at least this time.
I just don’t know how to describe Raging Angels . . . this political sci-fi rock n’ roll heavy metal horror romantic musical (Phew!). I don’t know how to assume the “Christian” intent of the film, if any . . . what was its spiritual inspiration? And with five screenwriters (well, two on “story” and three scribes) — and with our fair director taking an “Alan Smithee” credit (plot spoiler: It’s Asian actress Hisako Tsukuba aka’ing on the writing front as Chako van Leeuwen; this is a “Chako Film International Production,” after all) — there’s no way to know whom is wholly responsible for this biblical-plot plethora pathos of analog schadenfreude. (One of the scribes taking a pass on it was Kevin Rock, who worked on sequels to The Howling, Warlock, and The Philadelphia Experiment, as well as Roger Corman’s rights-holding tax shelter, The Fantastic Four.)
Imagine Menahem Golan’s biblical tale of the Book of Genesis‘ Adam and Eve colliding with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust in The Apple, with its subplot regarding the power of love and music . . . and you thought producer Richard Zanuck greenlighting Russ Meyer, an independent X-rated filmmmaker, and Roger Ebert, a first time, inexperienced screenwriter, for a 20th Century Fox “sequel” with Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was a weird picture, with its cautionary tale of innocent hopefuls chewed up and shat out by the Tinseltown music industry.
I just don’t know. . . .
No matter how you pack it . . . see what we mean?
Did the tape of Jon Mikl Thor’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare end up inside the VHS sleeve of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead on Hisako Tsukuba’s personal home video shelf? Perhaps, after watching Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate — and taking into consideration his work as a metal head and musician River’s Edge and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — Tsukuba decided to re-imagine Al Pacino’s Lucifer-as-a-lawyer as a cult-leading rock star? Perhaps it was one too many spins of the likes of ’80s Christian (aka “White Metal”) bands Stryper, Believer, Deliverance, Holy Solider, Messiah Prophet, Whitecross, Trouble (okay, settle, they’re “Doom Metal”), and X-Sinner? (If only I just rattled off the soundtrack listing with that sentence, but alas, I have not.)
Oh, the majesty of it all, with this film’s pinches from Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (Gramercy’s concert hall headquarters; the concert assassination), They Live (recruiting the wayward homeless to boost their ranks), and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (conspiracy, subversion, and government overthrow).
The beauty of Raging Angels is that it is inherently meta: The filmmakers (well, again, Asian actress Hisako Tsukuba, who co-produced Joe Dante’s Piranha, as well as ALL of its sequel/remakes) are using film to push what is best described as a (Tsukuba’s) socialism viewpoint; that a united, one-world welfare state under a supreme leader is the only way for the world to succeed in perpetual peace — which is the very message pushed by the film’s rock star-cum-celebrity spokesperson, Tom Cruise, er, Colin Gramercy (Paré). Ah, it turns out, Gramercy (in a plot twist), isn’t Satan-as-a rocker; he’s been brainwashed by Satan (a George Soros-styled billionaire philanthropist) as the chief advocate for a dopey, 501 c3 tax-evading pseudo-religion masquerading as a “self-help” book and tape-schilling amalgamate.
Like Daddy Rich pimpin’ his prosperity theology says: “There’s a good place in this world for money, and it’s right here in my pocket.”
Yes, praise Green Jesus! By watching this film . . . you will see the light! For watching Raging Angels will quell the “raging angels” within. This film will lead to your spiritual enlightenment . . . as you will learn how to be “your own god.” Yes you can! Just like “prosperity gospel” (i.e., “money gospel”) megachurch overseers Joel Olsteen and Creflo Dollar whom “God tells” to pick the pockets of the flock to buy the Houston Astrodome (to turn into a church; get those flood victims out of here: this ain’t no horse stable with mangers) and private 747s (fitted in real gold-plated fixtures, natch) to “spread the good word.” Hey, God can’t live or fly in junk, dear flockster. Hey, there, Lamor “Brooklyn Bishop of Bling” Whitehead (finally caught by the F.B.I). So, forget that utility bill and tithe to Gramercy: for “God” will provide the water, light, and curb-side pick-ups. The Coalition for World Unity will provide the room and board and you’ll never have to work again . . . as long as you “obey” the word. OBEY!
Eh, sorry, Ol’ Scratch, for I’ve stopped believing. Your attempt to brainwash me into socialism via a bad movie . . . you created a recruitment video for atheism. Besides, your film doesn’t even have backmasking? How can you make a movie with this subject matter and not have someone playing records backwards!
Anyway . . . our not-so-metal-warrior, Chris D’Amico (Flanery), is an arrogant, temperamental rocker on the way up who believes in his hype; and with his alcohol abuse out of control, his band sacks him. And the band he fronts is . . . none other that the aforementioned Holy Solider — ripping through Ronnie James Dio-era Rainbow with “Gates of Babylon” (on screen; here’s the clip), which is this film’s lone high mark (on the soundtrack we also hear their original, “The Pain Inside of Me“). And Chris ends up like Pete Best and Chad Channing (know your Nirvana heritage), as Holy Soldier nets a deal and achieves great success . . . as a metal band . . . during the height of the grunge era (put a pin in that, for more, later).
So, our now penniless rocker, who has beat the bottle and stowed the cockiness, needs a gig. He and his musician-girlfriend, Lila Ridgeway (ex-daytime TV actress Monet H. Mazur, in her feature film debut), audition for gigs in Colin Gramercy’s new, worldwide satellite-cable concert (Paré, unlike in his star-making turn as Eddie, actually sings here, with “The Hunger”). And Colin wants Lila as a back up singer, who quickly falls under the cult-rocker leader’s spell (for all good televangelists have that enclave of chicks to help work through those sermons), but not Chris.
Uh, oh . . . but Lila is changing. She’s not the same girl, anymore. And the drinking didn’t make Chris wreck his car, it was Satan (literally; a ghostly image appears in the windshield). But Lila ain’t buying the excuses, anymore. She dumps him on Gramercy’s word.
Cue Chris’s Grandma Ruth (Shelley Winters!), who, thanks to her horrific dreams and visions (that screws up his new band’s audition), starts with the nagging warnings that “Chris is in danger.” Well, the demons won’t have any of that. Let the demon attack begin. But not before our dead Grandma recruits the eccentric, religious-psychic-preacher Sister Kate (Diane Ladd!) to save Chris and Lila’s souls from eternal damnation. The demeaning of Jesus Christ down to evil-warding, biblical-verse spells and religious trinkets, ensues.
Eh, on the upside: everyone is trying. Grandma Shelly and Aunt Diane are going at it with gusto, and Sean Patrick and Paré always sell the drama — no matter how awful it usually is, as is the case with most of their films.
Finally!
Yes, the final good vs. evil showdown we’ve been waiting for at Colin’s global, subliminal worldwide satellite concert, is here — the concert that will transform the citizens of Earth to the Coalition for World Unity way-of-life once and for all! Well . . . I think it’s best you watch the clip of the final battle, for the rest of the story.
(Sorry video embed elves, not this time; we’re hyperlinkin’ the final battle clip.)
See what we mean . . . did you click through?
Where’s Jon Mikl Thor when we need his bare-chested, bad-ass metal warrior self? Where’s Billy Eye Harper, Lynn Starling and Headmistress with the epic concert show closer? Ah, now I see why the CWU needs to subliminal message their concert: because the concert, with their screeching Christian symphonic rocker signing, Mozart (“One World”), and Colin Gramercy’s “life changing” epic, “The Hunger,” is — as is any Christian “rock concert” held in a church’s chapel-cum-gymcafeditorium that I’ve been too — absolutely, utterly awful (and when you realize the music sucks, they “kidnap” you by blocking the door and will not let you leave before the show’s over . . . and not even then. Screw you, One Bad Pig. Your Red Hot Chilli Peppers-for-Jesus schtick, sucked. At least Ronnie James Dio didn’t abduct me and force me to listen and indoctrinate me).
And that is what is ultimately missing from Raging Angels, the one thing that would have taken this Satan-steals-souls-with-rock-music mess over the top: a soundtrack on the level of the “No False Metal” classic Black Roses. For Raging Angels needs the likes of Lillian Axe, Lizzy Borden, and Carmine Appice’s King Kobra masquerading as the faux bands of the film. This film needed Metal Blade Records’ Brian Slagel as its music consultant to transcend it as the “No False Metal” classic it so wants to be . . . and utterly fails to be.
Granted, Sean Patrick Flanery impresses here (yes that is him singing, with “Come In My Mind“; in fact, here he is belting “One Step Forward” in Girl), but for as much as I enjoy any film with the ‘Flan, his character and the related songs are a bit too — through no fault of his own — douchy to pull off the demonic side of the proceedings. The rest of the soundtrack’s mostly B-Side castoffs — faux-Led Zeppelin’ers Kingdom Come (“What Love Can Be”), Golden Earring (?) (“Twilight Zone”), Boston (“Livin’ for You”), The Mission U.K (“Wasteland”), and well, what do you know, the aforementioned Stryper (“To Hell with the Devil”), and Sweden’s “dance rockers” Army of Lovers (“Supernatural”) (a big deal in Europe, but not in the U.S.) — just aren’t lathing the grooves on my vinyl. And, yes, shockingly, that snippet of “Arrow” by a band called Candlebox is the very same, we-relocated-the-band-to-Seattle-to-be-a-grunge-band, Candlebox. (Odette Springer, who scored Cirio H. Santiago’s Mad Max-rips Dune Warriors and Raiders of the Sun, scores here, as well as co-writing, with Hisako Tsukuba, Monet Mazur’s character’s vocal showcase, “I’m Crying Out for You.”)
And if the lack of metal in this Satanic music flick ain’t cuttin’ it, then, chances are, neither are the not-so-special effects.
When was this made? Well, based on the dated-soundtrack, certainly not during the post-1990 grunge-era. Raging Angels reeks as a film shot at some point during the hair metal ’80s — courtesy of its à la Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, practical-sfx rubbery monsters (taking into account that film’s epic “Plan 9 from Outer Space” Satan vs. Angel battle) and burgeoning-technology CGI. Yeah, the dank n’ moldy aromas of years-languishing on the shelf — as most “Alan Smithee” films do — to then be thou looseth on the shelves of oneth’s local Blockbuster Video, permeates.
In the end, what we ultimately have in the frames of Raging Angels isn’t a errant, “No False Metal” heavy-metal horror film: we have an evangelical Christian Cinema precursor to the rash of low-budget, direct-to-video evangelical Revelation/Apocalypse films triggered by Christian author Tim LaHaye’s mid-’90s end-of-the-world Left Behind novel series. Those best-sellers were, of course, produced into a tetraology franchise by Canadian’s Paul and Peter LaLonde Christian-based Cloud Ten Pictures, which specializes in end-times films.
So, forget about the Black Roses and Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare analogies. The true spiritual cousins to Raging Angels are those proselytizing flicks starring past-their prime actors, such as the Apocalypse tetraology (1998 – 2001) with Gary Busey, Corbin Bernsen, Jeff Fahey, Margot Kidder, Mr. T, and Nick Mancuso, Six: The Mark Unleashed (2004), with Eric Roberts and Stephen Baldwin, David A.R White’s dopey Rapture-flicks, such as The Moment After (which rip off Schwarzenegger’s End of Days to lesser-and-lesser effect), and the biggie of the bunch: The Omega Code starring Casper Van Dien and Michael York. Raging Angels is all of those premillennialist flicks — only with a Satan-recruits-with-music plot device, and worse production values.
Eh, whatever, ye leaders of the CWU. If douchy music from tapered haircut and scruffy soul-patched dudes is the way to global peace, then give thee chaos. At least Satan has better music to-be-brainwash-by. At least I learned that the way to rock is to sling my axe behind my back and wear glittery tank tops.
Here’s the trailer to check out. As for the VHS tapes: they’re out there, but watch out for those DVDs, they’re grey DVD-r rips. And while they look really good, I am still not jammin’ on those Euro Region 2 copies, either. Emptor the caveats and know your regions before you go hard digital, kids.
In all of my years coveting this film for the VHS collection, I never found a copy. Sure, I could easily buy a copy online these days, but, well . . . it’s just not the same as discovering a copy in a video store’s cut out bin — or at today’s library book drives or second hand stores, is it? For the joy is the thrill of the analog chase and the celluloid discovery . . . and then having your expectations deflated as you struggle to get through the movie, and then apologize to your VCR.
Eh, I’ll just free-with-ads stream it on Tubi with ya’ll.
See the light with Christian Cinema!
Don’t fear Satan! Hail Sammy Curr!
All of the Italian and Spanish Omen ripoffs you can handle.
Okay, so let me get this straight in my head: This is a 55-minute, Italian-made anthology horror of three tales consisting of a killer sex doll, a killer handbag . . . and a parody of Joe D’amato’s Anthropophagous. And — being ever the good sport — Dardano Sacchetti, the writer of, well, a large portion of our favorite films at B&S About Movies, appears in the frames.
Just wow. You made my youth worth living, Dardano!
But Sacchetti isn’t the only Italian icon, here: Underground horror greats Linnea Quigley (recently of The Good Things Devils Do), David Warbeck, and Sergio Stivaletti appear, as well as directors Joe d’Amato, Luigi Cozzi, and Lucio Fulci; the late maestro’s daughter, Antonella, has a cameo as a pregnant lady . . . whose fetus is blown out of her vagina into the air. Yes, it’s like that. No, really. And it’s all very dumb, and it’s all very cheap, and it’s all very sloppy . . . and it is extremely sick. So, hell yes, we love it!
Just wow. We never heard of this one. We never once seen it on a U.S. video shelf. And here we are, 26 years after the fact, lovin’ it, over on You Tube.
Look, if the trailer doesn’t sell it . . . turn in your B&S membership card. For we never knew ye. If it does, well, pair this up with Nigel the Psychopath for a Halloween double feature.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
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