Tag Archives: 1998

Chattanooga Film Festival 2026 Red Eye #8: Hollywood Mortuary (1998) and Demon Queen (1987)

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Hollywood Mortuary (2000): Pierce Jackson Dawn (Randal Malone) was one of the greatest make-up artists of the early 20th century. However, his death is quite strange. It came after he wanted to work with horror stars Pratt Borokov (Tim Sullivan) and Janos Blasko (director and writer Ron Ford) for producer Leonard Schein (Wes Deitrick), even though Blasko had overdosed and Borokov had to be convinced through death and reanimation to make the movie. Yet instead of acting, they begin killing.

Featuring interview segments with David DeCoteau, Conrad Brooks, silent star Anita Page and former Hollywood starlet Margaret O’Brien, this is basically Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff coming back from the dead to destroy unsuspecting people. For that alone, as well as how it’s shot, kind of like a documentary, you have to enjoy it. It’s a low, low, low budget affair, yet when has that stopped a movie from being worthwhile?

If you love old movies and didn’t have any worries about watching movies, no matter what format they were shot in, you’re going to love this. If you demand things have an actual budget and not spend time throwing deep cut horror jokes at you, well…

You can watch this on YouTube.

Demon Queen (1987): Donald Farmer has 40 directing credits, including Cannibal Hookers, Red Lips, Shark Exorcist and Chainsaw Cheerleaders. This is an early SOV title from him, with a video store clerk who tries to get people to rent horror movies and a female demon—well, a vampire, but let’s make the title work—who moves in with a drug-dealing couple.

It’s also 46 minutes or so with 6 minutes of credit and sound that you can barely hear. So, you know, pretty great. It also has drone synth compositions of a single long note, massive amounts of video effects that probably felt dated by 1987, and tons of actually pretty decent gore.

If this had better quality and was shot on film, I probably wouldn’t care as much. There’s just something about the beyond-faded quality of Shot On Video that gives these movies a heart that they may not have had otherwise.

JUNESPLOITATION/ARROW BOX SET RELEASE: Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits!: Who Am I? (1998)

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DAY 26: Jackie Chan!

A group of elite, multi-national commando operatives pulls off a midnight raid in the South African jungle to kidnap three scientists who have been experimenting with a highly volatile, weaponized meteorite ore. The mission goes off without a hitch, but the higher-ups, specifically the crooked, power-hungry CIA operative Morgan (Ron Smerczak), want the prize all to themselves. Morgan sabotages the escape helicopter, causing it to crash into the wilderness.

The lone survivor of the crash is a commando played by Jackie Chan. He wakes up with a massive case of amnesia and absolutely zero memory of who he is, where he came from or how he learned to break bones with lightning speed. He is taken in and nursed back to health by a local African tribe. When they ask him his identity, he repeatedly screams his frustration at the sky: “Who am I?!” Taking him literally, the tribe adopts him under the name “Whoami.“

After rescuing a lost rally car racing team, “Whoami” gets a ticket back to civilization, where he catches the eye of a seemingly sweet but incredibly suspicious news reporter named Christine Stark (Michelle Ferre). Unfortunately for him, his sudden media exposure alerts the corrupt masterminds behind the original double-cross. With assassins, black-ops agents and the CIA hunting him across Europe, Jackie has to piece together his fractured memory while turning everything from Dutch furniture to footwear into deadly weapons.

The movie features one of the most terrifying, legendary stunts in cinema history. Jackie slides down the steep, sloped glass exterior of the 21-story Willemswerf building in Rotterdam, Netherlands, with absolutely no safety wires. The stunt required Jackie to break his fall by tumbling over a ledge at the bottom. He reportedly took multiple takes to perfect it, severely injuring his back and ankle in the process. And in the final seven-minute brawl on top of the Rotterdam building, Jackie uses his improv style against Ron Smoorenburg’s insane flexibility and Kwan Yung’s rapid-fire close-quarters strikes.

Depending on where you watched it, you saw a different movie. The original Hong Kong cut runs over two full hours and keeps the mystery intact, letting the audience piece together the plot alongside Jackie. The North American edit trims the runtime down to around 108 minutes, heavily cutting the early scenes with the African tribe and re-editing the opening special ops sequence so the audience knows exactly what happened right from the start.

Extras on the Arrow Video release include commentary by critic James Mudge; Breakout! Part 6, a new featurette in which critic James Mudge, actor Glory Simon and second unit cinematographer Ray Wong look back at the film; From Drunk to Slam Dunk: Jackie Chan in the New Millennium, a new featurette in which Mudge, Simon, Wong, stuntwoman Kathy Hubble, stuntmen Wang Yao and Mars, critic David West and others look at Jackie’s career in the years since the films in this set; The Making of Who Am I?, a three-part archive behind-the-scenes featurette; trailers; an image gallery; Who, When & Where, an expanded interview with Wong and Jostling with Jackie, an expanded interview with Simon. You can get this from MVD.

JUNESPLOITATION: Biohazard 2 (1998)

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DAY 15. George Romero!

As a yinzer, I have seen every Romero movie many, many times. So other than his OJ Simpson documentary and Iron City Asskickers, I had no idea what to do.

Do I go to the George A. Romero Archival Collection at Pitt and write about one of his unproduced scripts like Black Mariah, Cartoon, Chain Letter, Cherubs, Cupie, Dark Secrets, Dark Young Things, Darque Passages, Dead Man’s Catch, Death of Death, Divine Spirit, Dracula, Dreamwalker, Enemies, Figments, Flying Horses, Funky Coven, George Romero’s Scary Tales, Germs, Ghost Town, Gogiro (Loves You), Golem, GPS, Hell, Hell Hotel, Hell Bent, Hot-L Diablo, Honus, House With a Clock In Its Walls, Jack and the Beanstalk, Meatmarkets, Midnight Show, Monster MASH, Moonshadoes, Native Tongue, Night of the Living Dead: The Series, Nuns from Outer Space, Peter and the Wolfman, Scream of Fear, Shop Til You Drop…Dead, The Calling, The Collaboration, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Raven or Jacaranda Joe?

How about Welcome to Dead House, an unproduced adaption of the first Goosebumps book that has the dead of Dark Falls become zombies instead of ghouls? Supposedly Tim Burton was to direct and other scripts were written by John Sayles, Mick Garris and Alan Ormsby.

Then I remembered — Bill and I did a talking head doc about Romero’s Resident Evil project and it never got released, so why not use the research I did?

It all started when Romero directed a live-action commercial promoting the video game Resident Evil 2 in Los Angeles. The 30-second advertisement featured the game’s two main characters, Leon S. Kennedy (Brad Renfro) and Claire Redfield (Adrienne Frantz), fighting a horde of zombies while in Raccoon City’s police station. This commercial was only shown in Japan where the game is known as Biohazard 2. 

Trust me — this thing looks great. A million dollar budget for 30 seconds of commercial? Amazing.

Frantz said to Variety: ““It was an honor to work with a legend like Romero,” Frantz said. “All of the zombie TV shows and movies that we see today are because of him. He started an entire horror film revolution.”

That’s true. We wouldn’t even have this video game without him, as so many of the things accepted about zombies come directly from him and his films.

Resident Evil was created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara and released for the PlayStation in 1996.It is credited for defining the survival horror genre and returning zombies to popular culture. Game design started in 1993 when Capcom’s Tokuro Fujiwara told Shinji Mikami and other co-workers to create a game using elements from Fujiwara’s 1989 game Sweet Home on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Sweet Home was based on a movie that was released around the same time.  The cinematic nature of Sweet Home led to Biohazard.

Capcom was so impressed with Romero’s work, it was strongly indicated that Romero would direct the first Resident Evil film. He declined at first — “I don’t wanna make another film with zombies in it, and I couldn’t make a movie based on something that ain’t mine.” He reconsidered and wrote a script for the first movie. which was eventually rejected in favor of Paul W. S. Anderson’s version.

Romero’s Resident Evil was set in the Spencer Mansion and focused on Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. It’s a lot more faithful to the game than the Paul W.S. Anderson movies and has giant snakes, man-eating plants and mutant sharks. Barry Burton, Rebecca Chambers, Ada Wong and Albert Wesker were to also appear. Not a gamer, Romero had his assistant Jason play the game for him so he could get a feel for it.

The ending to the film would have been similar to the best ending to the first Resident Evil game. Romero even got Berni Wrightson to do artwork for Tyrant, the villain.

Buts adly, Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto bluntly stated at the time: “Romero’s script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.” There’s also rumor that the movie would have been NC-17 so he wasn’t picked.

Romero also said in an interview with Paul Weedon, “…this guy named Bernd Eichinger, who came in and said “No, this is not what I want.” And that was it. And he had no idea what a video game was. This is the guy that made House of the Spirits and Das Boot and he just had an impression of what he wanted the thing to be, which sort of flew in the face of all of us – Capcom and his own guys. So that was it.”

Alan B. McElroy (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Wrong Turn) and Jamie Blanks (Valentine, Urban Legend) also were said to work on treatments.

While not a gamer, Romero was smart enough to recognize that they led to the return of zombies. He said, “I do think the popularity of the creature has come from video games, not film. Zombieland was the first zombie film to break $100 million at the box office, and therefore Hollywood got interested. The remake of Dawn of the Dead did about $75 million … But dozens of hugely popular video games have had a bigger impact.”

Luckily, he saw the benefits of this new fame for the walking dead. As Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema says, “Whatever criticism one might want to level against the first Resident Evil movie, it had an undeniably positive effect on the zombie’s fortunes. Dragged into the mainstream by the videogame franchise and Anderson’s blockbuster, the living dead suddenly achieved a degree of respectability they’d never had before. It was as if, after seventy-odd years of being ignored, they’d finally received their invite to the Hollywood party. Within mere weeks of Resident Evil‘s opening came a series of press releases and announcements suggesting that the zombie had finally broken free of its marginal roots: a remake of Dawn of the Dead had received the greenlight, a big-screen adaptation of arcade game The House of the Dead was going into production; and, perhaps most exciting of all, George Romero announced at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors Convention in August 2002 that he was in serious talks with Twentieth Century Fox to complete the fourth and final installment of his trilogy — provisionally dubbed Land of the Dead, with a $10 million budget and a planned R-rated release.”

You can watch this on YouTube.

ARROW VIDEO 4K UHD RELEASE: Soldier (1998)

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Paul W.S. Anderson gave us Mortal Kombat—a movie that proved you could turn an arcade game into a theater-filling spectacle—and then followed it up with Event Horizon, which is basically Hellraiser in outer space. So when it was announced he was teaming up with Kurt Russell and Blade Runner scribe David Webb Peoples for an old-school sci-fi actioner? You bet your ass I was first in line.

Soldier is a movie that got absolutely buried at the box office because people expected Star Wars, but what they actually got was a beautiful, hyper-violent cross between Shane and a Cannon Films action exploitation flick.

Kurt Russell plays Sergeant Todd 3465. He doesn’t say much—in fact, he only has 104 words — the whole two-hour running time, which is pure cinematic economy. He’s a veteran warrior raised from birth to freeze his emotions and kill anything in front of him. But progress marches on, and the delightfully slimy Jason Isaacs shows up as Colonel Mekum, introducing a new batch of genetically engineered super-soldiers led by Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee). Todd gets his clock cleaned by the new model, gets pronounced dead and is dumped with the trash on a waste planet called Arcadia 234.

Except Todd isn’t dead. He gets taken in by a group of interstellar refugees, learns how to do crazy things like “smile” and “not murder people,” and then has to go full action star on his old unit when they show up to use the planet for target practice.

Peoples has explicitly stated that this takes place in the same universe as Blade Runner. Look closely at the junk piles on Arcadia 234 and you’ll see a spinner vehicle. Look at Todd’s military record on the computer screens—he fought at the Shoulder of Orion and the Tannhäuser Gate! However, it was not intended as a sequel. Peoples told author Danny Stewart in the book Soldier: From Script to Screen, “No, I never had any thoughts about that… I wrote Soldier in 1984. Very quickly on my own. I wrote it because I saw the first Terminator in the theater, stunned. And it was such a wonderful movie. I’d always wanted to write a movie in which there was a tough guy who would be seemingly unsympathetic in the lead, and I felt that The Terminator was almost there. Later in the sequel, it was determined he was the hero, but at the time, he was sort of a villain. But the fact is, he was so great. I went off, and I decided to write about this soldier.“

Plus, you get Gary Busey as old-school commander Captain Church; Connie Nielsen as Sandra, the woman who teaches our hero how to be human and Michael Chiklis as Jimmy Pig.

I love how this ends, as 3465 and his old men end up rescuing the planet and adventuring out into deep space. This has always been a movie that deserved a much bigger audience than it got.

The Arrow Video release of this film features a brand-new 4K restoration approved by director Paul W.S. Anderson. Extras include an archival audio commentary by director Paul W.S. Anderson, co-producer Jeremy Bolt and actor Jason Isaacs; interviews with James Black, assistant director Dennis Maguire, associate producer Fred Fontana and production designer David L. Snyder; VFX Before and After, a brand new behind-the-scenes look at how the film’s special effects were created with visual effects supervisor Craig Barron; Weapons of Mass Creation, interviews with visual effects supervisors Craig Barron and Van Ling and miniature supervisor Michael Joyce; A Soldier’s Journey, a brand new interview with Danny Stewart, author of Soldier: From Script to Screen; We Don’t Need Another Hero, a brand new retrospective on the film with film historian Heath Holland; an electronic press kit; on-set interviews with cast and crew; trailers; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Orlando Arocena and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by film critic Priscilla Page. You can get it from MVD.

APRIL MOVIE THON DAY 30: The Paranormal (1998)

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April 30: Visual Vengeance Day — Write about a movie released by Visual Vengeance. Here’s a list to help you find a movie.

In the decaying industrial suburb of Englewood, the historic Grandview Theater is facing its final curtain. But as the last reel of a forgotten, low-budget schlock-fest titled Grave Rot spins, the screen doesn’t just display images. It’s taking over reality.

Disillusioned paranormal investigator Kyle Jennings, a man who spends more time debunking haunted toasters than fighting demons, is hired by the theater’s desperate owner. Jennings expects a faulty projector or a squatter. Instead, the moment the clock strikes midnight, the lobby doors fuse into solid brick. The celluloid on screen tears like flesh, and the grainy, grey-skinned zombies from the film crawl into the velvet aisles. To survive the night, Kyle must physically enter the flickering world of the film to find the director, a vengeful spirit who died during production and is now editing reality to ensure a bloody finale.

The film utilizes a unique visual gimmick: the Bleed. As the supernatural force grows stronger, the theater begins to lose its color, taking on the high-contrast, grainy look of the 16mm film. Characters find themselves tripping over jump cuts and teleporting five feet forward or backward in time as the physical film strip in the booth glitches.

Kyle and Mina, cynical teenage projectionist, are chased through the lobby, but the geography has shifted. The popcorn machine is overflowing with what looks like teeth, and the movie posters on the walls have become windows into other scenes from the film. They have to use a flashbulb from an old camera to momentarily freeze the undead, who react to light like physical film stock.

Kyle realizes the only way to stop the infestation is to burn the original negative. He steps through the screen and enters a surreal version of the theater. In this realm, the laws of physics are dictated by 1990s editing tricks. He has to defeat the Director by cutting him out of the scene with a heavy-duty film splicer and slicing the Lost Reel, a cursed segment of film that contains the Director’s soul. It’s hidden somewhere in the theater’s crawlspace, and Kyle has to find it while being hunted by a creature that can only move when the projector shutter is closed.

Todd Norris, who directed and co-wrote this with C. Wayne Owens, has made a movie where you don’t say, “Well, it’s good for the budget.” Instead, it takes advantage of the cost and the SOV framework to create something stunning, with brains and heart, that doesn’t exist in movies that cost so many times more than this did. I was knocked out by this, another stunning surprise in the growing canon of criminally underseen should-be classics.

Visual Vengeance has LOADED this one up. It has a new director-supervised transfer from original tape elements, two commentaries (one by director Todd Norris and the other with Norris and composer Paul Roberts); new cast and crew interviews; Norris and Todd SHeets interview; bloopers; deleted scenes; The Paranormal Channel 5 TV Airing Bumpers; short films; trailers; a poster; Stick Your Own VHS stickers; a limited edition O-CARD featuring art by Uncle Frank; a Ghost Finder — yes, an actual ghost finder so you can hunt down spirits in your own home — a promo flyer and original sleeve art by The Dude. Get it from MVD.

VISUAL VENGEANCE BLU-RAY RELEASE: Vampire Time Travelers (1998)/I Know What You Did in English Class (2000)

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I’ve never seen any of the movies that director and writer Les Sekely has made like Night of the Living Date, The Not-So-Grim Reaper and The Alien Conspiracy: Grey Skies, but I have seen this and I totally am hunting for the rest.

This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images and a ghost man in a closet and vampires who can move through the timestream and random muscicvideo sequences where people are encouraged to “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Most of the other reviews I’ve read for this film are either beyond angry that they endured it, wondering whether or not the humor was intentional or not, or nearly shut it off but stuck with it and still aren’t sure what they have seen.

As you can imagine, these are the movies that obsess me.

Natalie is a vampire who was killed by Buffy — yes, this is intended to be a reference — which has her call to her sister Lorelei (Jillien Weisz) from beyond the grave and demand revenge by killing Buffy’s sister Sue Anne Marie (J.J. Rodgers) and her fellow pledges to the Alpha Omega sorority. One of them is a talented guitar player — she can play “Eruption” seemingly without fingertapping and sleeps with her axe — who has The Man Who Never Calls Back (the director!) on speed dial, hoping to sign to his label and escape college. Another is a nerdy girl named Jenna (Micky Levy). There’s also another who is impossibly tall.

There’s also a Hooded Man who gets some kids to go to the Old Crenshaw Place, where Lorelei has been trapped in a coffin for five years. They’re promised porn magazines and instead of looking in the woods like every other kid in the 80s and 90s did, they find a coffin and a vampire who comes back but isn’t strong enough to bite necks any longer so she must “Bite Her In the Butt.”

Like I said, some folks are going to watch this and see the budget and that it doesn’t look like movies do today — come on, people — and dismiss it. For others, they will savor moments like when a vampire goes up in flames and says the last line from Ms. 45. “Sister!”

I found an interview with Sekely online about this movie and it notes that he also composed the movie for this and considered it his baby. Of the film, he said, “Vampire Time Travelers, in one word, is … fun. A little scary, mostly campy, and even slightly sexy … fun. (We didn’t have the budget to be serious). It’s Woody Allen meets Stephen King … meets MTV. To sum it up … You know when you have a dream, it’s a bunch of strange scenes and events, one after another, that are not connected. Well, Vampire Time Travelers is a lot like that … except the events are connected. Basically … go with it!”

I Know What You Did in English Class (2000): Directed and written by Les Sekely (Vampire Time Travelers), this is similar to that film and this quote that I used to describe that one is even more accurate: “This movie feels less like a narrative movie and more like someone made a Dark Brothers or Rinse Dream adult movie mainstream, giving it constant blasts of words and images…” If I say Party Doll-A-Go-Go and you get it, you’re a pervert, and we should be friends, and you’ll know exactly what kind of strange editing and barrage of sound effects and dumb jokes that entails.

Years ago, students destroyed the life of their teacher. Most of them got over it, but only one still feels some empathy and wonders what happened to her, perhaps because his girlfriend is also a teacher. Yes, you now get that this is not a rip-off of I Know What You Did Last Summer, except for being close to the title.

I can see that as a movie that would anger many viewers, as it doesn’t even let up with being silly, even when it’s trying to be heartfelt. The sound effects, if anything, get louder and more repetitive, kind of like Max Headroom repeating himself. It was something in the way 90s and 00s movies could be edited and doesn’t seem to have survived until today. Yet here’s this film, rescued by Visual Vengeance, a little shot in Lakewood, OH effort about demons, classroom hijinks and the regret of growing up, mixed with male gaze rear-end shots and a Troma-like sensibility without nudity. I haven’t seen many movies like it, so you should try it at least.

Extras include commentary with director Les Sekely; interviews with Sekely, JJ Rodgers, Angelia Scott interview, Director of Photography Dennis Devine and Assistant Director Steve Jarvis; Not So Grim Reaper short; Visual Vengeance trailers; a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set;  I Know What You Did In English Class with commentary by director Les Sekely; a reversible sleeve featuring new I Know What You Did In English Class art and a folded mini-poster. You can get this from MVD.

APRIL MOVIE THON DAY 1: Ernest In the Army (1998)

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April 1: Fool Me! — Share a foolish film for the holiday.

In the ninth and final film in the Ernest series, this time, we find our hero, Ernest P. Worrell (Jim Varney), wanting to drive a big rig and somehow enlisting in the Army reserves. It’s a big leap from being the golf ball collector to being part of a UN force in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Karifistan, a place in danger of being invaded by Islamic madman Tufuti of Arisia (Ivan Lucas).

Yes, even when I try to escape the news, the war in the Middle East comes back all over again, and now, Ernest is battling infidels.

Ernest has already engaged United Nations peacekeeping commander Pierre Gullet (David Muller), so when things go bad — when Ernest gets into the shit, like they said in ‘Nam — our hero must break into a prison camp called Sector 32 and finally drive that big truck, this one with a Pluton missile. Also: Gullet is the bad guy, selling out the world to a bad guy who seems just like Dr. Klaw on Inspector Gadget.

Varney still did commercials as Ernest P. Worrell up until 1999, but he was suffering from cancer while making this. As for creator/director/writer John R. Cherry III, he had planned for Varney to star in a non-Ernest comedy film, but Varney had gotten so sick while shooting the movie that Cherry couldn’t bring himself to finish it. When Varney died two years later, he retired. Also, my Vietnam joke a paragraph or so ago? Yeah, Cherry served in Vietnam and used Ernest Productions to create a new life for himself. He felt this film was his most personal, and now I feel like a jerk for writing that.

This film and the previous movie, Ernest Goes to Africa (1997), were shot back-to-back in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa. It was called Stormin’ Ernest then, and that title shows up in the credits.

This is… look, Ernest turns out to be the long-awaited messiah foretold in a Middle Eastern prophecy. I don’t know how this happened or was filmed, but there you go.

You can watch this on Tubi.

SRS BLU RAY RELEASE: Truth or Dare? Legacy (1986, 1994, 1998, 2011)

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Originally released in 1986, Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness has become a cult horror classic. This low-budget film, shot on 16mm, still resonates with fans of 1980s horror. It gained renewed attention when Elijah Wood called it his all-time favorite horror movie.

Truth or Dare remains one of the first direct-to-video, and it’s high time someone — like SRS — put them all out in one set.

Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness (1986): In the 1985 horror anthology, Tim Ritter created a short called “Truth or Dare” in the movie Twisted Illusions. A year later, he’d expand that story into this slasher.

While most 18-year-olds were worrying about prom, Tim Ritter was in Palm Beach County orchestrating a bloodbath. Despite the SO aesthetic common to the era, shooting on 16mm gave it a slightly more cinematic, if not grimy, texture.

The drama behind the scenes was as chaotic as the film itself. The creative differences”between Ritter and producer Yale Wilson led to Ritter being locked out of the editing room and taken off the credits. Wilson’s cut was the one that hit the shelves of mom-and-pop video stores, leading to a long-standing rift that Ritter finally resolved in later “Director’s Cuts.”

Mike Strauber (John Brace) finds his wife Sharon in bed with his best friend Jerry, and poor Mike has the kind of mental breakdown that inevitably turns one into a slasher villain. 

The hitchhiker sequence is the film’s first true water-cooler moment, as if anyone works in a real office anymore or would discuss SOV murders at said water cooler. As Mike drives, he hallucinates a passenger who goads him into a self-mutilating game of Truth or Dare. The practical effects here, with Mike slicing into his own arms and chest with a razor blade, are uncomfortably tactile. When the camera reveals the passenger seat is empty, we realize we aren’t watching a standard slasher; we’re watching a breakdown.

A year later, Mike gets released from the Sunnyville Mental Institution. Blame budget cuts. Blame too many patients. Blame the fact that Mike is both crazy and smart. His good behavior is noticed, and the first thing he does when he gets out is kill Jerry and then go after his ex-wife. When he’s wounded in this murder attempt, he goes back to Sunnyville and is soon back to hallucinating disfigured patients telling him to destroy his face and wear a mask. After one of the attendants is dumb enough to taunt Mike with a photo of his ex-wife, he stabs the orderly with a pencil to the eye, Fulci-style and finds a cache of weapons, because that’s exactly what is sitting around a mental hospital.

At this point, Mike just goes wild, committing crimes such as hitting a stroller with his car — the baby launches high in the air — and then going back to roll over the mother; machine gunning an entire bench full of senior citizens; doing a drive-by chainsawing of a Little League player, and finally trying to kill his wife all over again. Oh, Mike, they’re just going to put you back in Sunnyville.

Ridiculous in all ways and therefore worth watching. I also believe that Rob Zombie completely stole the papier-mâché first mask Michael wears in his remake from this movie.

Truth or Dare: Wicked Games (1994): You can kind of sort of consider this the sequel to Tim Ritter’s Truth or Dare, even if it has none of the same characters, except that Gary (Kevin Scott Crawford) is the cousin of that first movie’s Mike. He’s having a lot of the same issues that that guy once did as he comes home to catch his wife riding another man. Now, a copper masked killer is running around and Gary’s friend Dan (Joel D. Wynkoop) starts to think that his buddy is that slasher.

We’re back to Sunnyville Mental Hospital, where Dr. Seidow (co-writer Kermit Christman) and it turns out that there may be more than one killer. Spoiler, there totally is or maybe this is all in Mike’s head and he’s been thinking of killing again. Dan is into kinky sex, Dr. Seidow is a maniac obsessed with one of his patients who likes to burn herself with cigarettes and all three — four — of them hate women.

The opening is a deliberate echo of the first film, the ultimate déjà vu of domestic betrayal. However, Gary’s reaction is less of a silent break and more of a loud, messy implosion. It sets the tone for a movie that isn’t just about a killer, but about a community of broken, predatory men.

It’s also the only film I’ve ever seen where a slasher takes a moment to take a bite of a sandwich while chasing his victim. It also has someone get killed with a sprinkler. By that, I’m saying they get a sprinkler jammed right through them.

Replacing the papier-mâché with a copper mask gives the killer a more urban legend feel. It’s cold, reflective and fits the 90s direct-to-video aesthetic while maintaining that homemade creepiness that makes these movies feel like they were found in a basement.

There’s another somewhat sequel to Truth or Dare, Writer’s Block, but that movie doesn’t have insane genius — I say that in the nicest of ways, trust me — of Tim Ritter, who imbues this with plenty of ridiculous energy. Is it central Florida giallo? Nearly.

Screaming for Sanity: Truth or Dare 3 (1998): In the years since Mike Strauber first put on the mask, a whole universe has started to swirl amongst him, like the man who treated him, Dr. Dan Hess (Joel D. Wynkoop), who also hates Mike; Clive Stanley (Ken Blanck), who was a victim of Strauber’s murder spree and lost his wife and child when they were run over in the first film; the man treating him, Dr. Reznor (Maurice Mayberry Jr.) and Ken Kregg (Franklin E. Wales), who is selling merchandise related to the killings.

In the original 1986 film, Clive was just a background casualty of Mike’s nihilism, the man who lost his wife and child in the infamous stroller/car sequence. Clive isn’t just a survivor; he’s a man whose soul was deleted by Mike Strauber. His habit of slicing himself open isn’t just a callback to Mike’s razor-blade game; it’s a physical manifestation of his Survivor’s Guilt. He is literally carving Mike’s legacy into his own skin.

Oh yeah, the copper mask is back and worn by people who dream of being Mike or want to have sex with him. Plus, Dr. Hess is also being stalked, and his wife even gets nailed to a wall. Having Joel D. Wynkoop return, this time as Dr. Dan, creates a delicious bit of casting confusion for Ritter fans. Is he the same Dan from Wicked Games? In the Ritter-verse, the faces remain the same even as the roles shift.

Hess represents the medical establishment that failed to contain Mike. His hatred for Strauber isn’t just professional; it’s visceral. Watching his life get dismantled, specifically the brutal imagery of his wife nailed, proves that in the Truth or Dare cinematic universe, being near Mike Strauber is a death sentence for your loved ones.

Directed by Ritter, who wrote it with Ron Bonk and Kevin J. Lindenmuth, this is the Truth or Dare? sequel I always wanted. This is totally for continuity nerds, where a supporting character becomes the lead.

By ending on a cliffhanger, Ritter essentially promises that the critical madness is an infinite loop. It’s not about Mike the man anymore; it’s about Mike the Idea.

And hey — footage from the first movie comes back! This then sets up the next film, which I appreciate.

Deadly Dares: Truth or Dare Part IV (2011): Tim Ritter updates the franchise’s core theme: the dangerous intersection of fragile male egos and deadly games. In 1986, Mike Strauber was driven mad by a private game; in 2011, Tuner Downing (Casey Miracle) is driven mad by a public one.

Directed by Ritter (who wrote the script) and Joel D. Wynkoop, this follows the theme of all these films: women break men when they dump them, games of truth or dare can quickly turn deadly, and lots of people will be killed. Rose (Heather Price) Tuner’s girlfriend left him because he wouldn’t get naked for a dare video. This leads Tuner to DareTube.com, which acts like the Ice Bucket Challenge, except the dares get as wacky as you’d hope.

This entry ditches the 16mm grain and the 90s camcorder fuzz for a sharp, sterile digital look. It makes the violence feel more real and less cinematic, mimicking the actual videos found on the dark corners of the internet.

Tuner’s friend Axel (Billy W. Blackwell) and his perhaps new girl, Dara (Jessica Cameron), grab a video camera and head out to record dares, while Tuner paints his face copper. As those dares get more intense, Tuner breaks into the mental hospital where Strauber has been kept, only for it to end up being Rose, who was trying to see if he’d do the ultimate dare to prove his love. She stabs him, he dies…

Turning the final girl into the villain is a sharp subversion. When Rose reveals that the breakout was a test. It reframes the entire franchise. It suggests that the women in this universe aren’t just victims; they are the architects of the games that destroy the men.

The final revelation that the entire movie — the breakout, the murders, the betrayal — has all been a dying hallucination as Tuner kills himself is the ultimate “Ritter” ending. It’s a return to the psychological roots of the original. Mike Strauber’s legacy isn’t a body count; it’s a mental illness that convinces you to destroy yourself.

I Dared You!: Truth or Dare Part V (2017): Directed by Tim Ritter and Scott Tepperman, this centers on a man named Dax (Tepperman) has gone insane after a past attack by Mike Strauber. Since then, he’s grown angry not just at his attacker, but with the man who let him go, Dr. Dan Hess (Joel D. Wynkoop), who is now a private detective.

Before we get to that. we see Dax in a video store, where he finds a copy of the original movie. A woman grows angry at him and chases him from the store, as he steals a porn magazine. As he reads it in the woods, he is attacked by Strauber, becoming one of the victims of the infamous chainsaw car attack from all the way back in 1986.

Now, Chainsaw Dax wears a half-mask, much like the man who ruined his face. He starts killing — and playing truth or dare — while Hess searches for people using the DareTube.com site, which has been up for a few years, so they must have good SEO.

The man who treated Dax, Dr. Desmond Hall (Jim O’Rear) was really setting this all up, putting Dax on the path to murder, setting him up with Sara (Trish Erickson-Martin) and putting him after Hess, all because that man stole his woman. So Dax goes and records Hess having sex with Linda (Ashley Lynn Caputo) and posts it on the internet, which in no way seems as godo of a revenge as killing someone. Linda gets kidnapped and Hess has to do a series of dares, like taking heroin which is just a bunch of video effects, to save his wife.

After cutting off his own finger, robbing a bank, hitting a cross-dressing Dr. Hall with an axe and jaming a syringe into Dax’s eyeball, Hess finds his wife and walks away.

Seeing Dax find a physical copy of the original Truth or Dare creates a movie-within-a-movie loop. It suggests that in this universe, Mike Strauber’s crimes were so infamous they were turned into the very exploitation films we are watching. By the time Hess walks away, the franchise has come full circle. It started with a man losing his mind over a cheating wife and ends with a man losing his finger (and his dignity) to save one.

Extras on this SRS blu-ray release include all new commentary tracks, short films, trailers, photo galleries, interviews, making ofs, behind the scenes footage and more. You can get this from MVD.

Planet Manson (1998)

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You know the style of Rinse Dream and the Dark Brothers? What if they did that, but there was no penetration? Well, I think it would be close to this movie. Well, there is a blowjob, so give them that much.

A note to the non-perverts: I’m referring to the neon-lit, 35 mm grindhouse-on-video adult vibe that was big at one point in the late 80s and early 90s. See Party Doll-A-Go-Go, Cafe Flesh, New Wave Hookers or Nightdreams (which is nearly too fancy to fit in).

Directed by Jacques Boyreau and filmed at the Werepad artspace in San Francisco, this features numerous characters pitching ideas for exploitation movies to a producer with skeleton hands, which I would like to think is a tribute to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. The club has a 60s look, people do kung fu like Dolemite, and there’s just a lot of talking. There was a time when I’d have to search all over for a VHS of this. Now, I just got online.

It was probably more fun to be there than it was to watch.

You can watch this on YouTube.

MVD REWIND COLLECTION 4K UHD RELEASE: Knock Off (1998)

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For all the amazing Hong Kong movies Tsui Hark made, he only has two Western films to his credit. Both star Jean-Claude Van Damme, but only one co-stars Rob Schneider. This would be that movie. It also features fight choreography and second unit direction from Sammo Hung, but many of his longer battles were cut from the film that was finally released. This movie almost had Jet Li in it, but he decided to make Lethal Weapon 4 instead.

Marcus Ray (Van Damme) and Tommy Hendricks (Rob Schneider) own V Six Jeans and are about to be busted for selling knock offs of their own product by Karen Leigh (Lela Rochon, Waiting to Exhale) who is not only their boss, but also a CIA agent out to ferret out the spy within the company. There’s yet another CIA agent named Harry Johannson (Paul Sorvino!) who is really a double agent for terrorists and the Russian mob. And to top all that off, Tommy is CIA too.

It turns out that the knock off jeans and some baby dolls are laden with nanobombs. Go with me here: they were made by former KGB agents who now work with terrorists who are using the Russian mob to get them on the black market all so that they can extort $100 billion dollars from the world’s governments. Who you gonna call? The copy guy and Van Damme, that’s who.

Knock Off is totally ridiculous, but you kind of know what to expect going into it. Van Damme as a fashion magnate? Sure, why not? At least he doesn’t get crucified on a ship or have an old guy stretch him out in this one.

The MVD 4K UHD release of this film has extras like an archival audio commentary by action cinema experts Mike Leeder and Arne Venema; a collectible 4K LaserVision mini-poster and reversible cover art. There are also interviews with Steven E. de Souza and Moshe Diamant; a trailer and a making of. You can get it from MVD.