Sarah (Tiffany Shepis!) has come from New York City to Italy on a spiritual quest to become part of the New Order convent where she plans to live out her life as a cloistered nun.
As Bunyan wrote in Pilgrim’s Progress, “Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gate of heaven.”
Sarah begins having visions of a young nun who was on the same journey that she was on and how her life became anything but a serene journey to discover God’s grace. And that means to find the divine, you need to have your ear drums pierced, your eyes filled with acid, your hands burned and your tongue removed. Then she magically heals but not before flashbacks filled with monstrous infants.
For as over the top arty and — at times — silly as this gets, you have to give it to Shepis for being committed. She’s actually a pretty good actress, but most people will only be watching this for the nudity and sapphic scenes that nun movies promise. Well, you’ll get it, but you have to wander the desert like some kind of prophet before you get that revelation. Hope you enjoy eating all those locusts and wild honey.
Directed and written by Ivan Zuccon (The Darkness Beyond), this is another attempt at me trying to find my way into the horrors of Italian film post late 80s. Sometimes, the results are successful. This is around halfway one of those times.
Filmed back to back with Pumpkinhead: Ashes to Ashes, the fourth Pumpkinhead movie played in Dayton, OH before it showed up on SyFy. Despite being a Southern story, it was filmed in Bucharest, Romania.
It sets up a real Hatfield and McCoys situation and literally, I mean that, as this is about the feud between the two families. Ricky McCoy and Jody Hatfield are in love and this feud won’t stop them from hooking up. Then Pumpkinhead gets summoned and the ghost of Ed Harley (Lance Henriksen) shows up too and nearly everyone dies.
Director and writer Michael Hurst also made the House of the Dead 2 TV movie and Mansquito, so there you go. Also, Romanians playing rednecks. There needs to be a Letterboxd list of that.
Long before Milko Davis made his mainstream debut to worldwide streaming audiences with the fun apoc-when-animals-attack romp, Tsunambee (first released in 2015, but rebooted in 2020 to streaming), he made his micro-budgeted streaming debut with this retro-zom feature starring Richard Grieco of 21 Jump Street fame (Lifepod, Art of the Dead). Sure, this movie is old. But you know the older stuff is our jam at B&S About Movies, especially when it evokes the Italian ’80s apoc’ers and zoms of yore. So, with the news of Milko’s newest flick, Phantom Patrol on the horizon, well, let’s get to reviewin’, padre!
However, before we get started: this review has Six Commandmentsof the Wasteland as told by Lord Humungus. Don’t trip over the burning V-8 carcass on your way to the petrol compound — and obey in fear of the wrath of the Wez:
Thou shalt not speak of Neil Marshall’s walled-up frackslop that is Doomsday . . . besides, that came a year later.
Thou shalt not speak of Luc Besson’s junkhole Lockout . . . besides, that’s not until 2012.
If thou shalt EfNY-evoke, at least err to the side of the cooler, Xavier Declie-starrer, The Survivor, which came before.
All ’80s Spanish-cum-Italian Eurasian George Romero undead knockoffs are permitted.
Okay. Now that you understand the B&S About Movies apoc-headspace . . . on with the show.
World War III, via a nuclear weapon spiked with a biochemical agent known as Agent 9-X, has rendered the Earth a wasteland — with humans reduced to battling the armies of the walking dead. The chemical agent’s side effect: the dead need to consumer human flesh to stop their decaying process. Since there’s no cure: an infected human turns over within a day. While there’s no way to kill the zombies, humans have been successful in quarantining the dead in a Liberty Island-styled perimeter.
The humans outside of the zomrimeters — thanks to Dr. Wells (a one-and-gone Elijah Murphy) and his lab assistant (an also one-and-done Amanda Scheutzow) — have synthesized a Paraquat-type destroying chemical spray to kill the zombies.
During a helicopter run to test the agent, the zombies were able to shoot down the copter via rock catapult (these zoms can also use crossbows and swing swords), leaving Wells and his team the prisoners of the zombified Colonel Crow. Crow, of course, must be stopped: he’s militarized the zombies (some have a nice, ’70s cloaked-skeletal Amando de Ossorio vibe) as an organized army planning an all-out offensive against the survivors.
To get them out, Dr. Lewis (a really hamming-it-for-the-hell-of-it Richard Grieco; caveat: he’s gone after the first 30-minutes) recruits our ersatz Snake Plissken (but we’d rather err to Micheal Sopkiw’s Persifal from, yes, 2019: After the Fall of New York*) in the form of war criminal Captain Dewey “Chopper” Crenshaw (played by Gary Sirchia; kudos for not resorting to the oft-apoc used “Stryker”) to lead a platoon into the quarantine zone. His mission: rescue the doctor and assassinate his ex-superior, Colonel Crow — who put Crenshaw behind bars in the first place. To get them through that wall (thank god for cinematic junk science): the loopy Lewis designed a techno-trinket that opens portals through solid matter.
As with Aliens before it: Crenshaw’s squad has their “Ripleys” in the form of Lieutenant Gena “Razor” Kane (director-in-her-own-right Zoe Quist) and Roxanne “Trigger” Trejo (Laurie Clemens Maier, in her debut; a dozen later, under-the-radar shorts and indies). Crenshaw, of course, has his own, close-to-the-vest plans for Wells and his assistant, Stephanie — as all of the we-love-’em post-apoc fights and Italian zom-peplum, ensues. Yeah, if you want a film with zombies cognizant enough to build catapults, fire cross-bows, and swing swords: this is your movie and a bag o’ chips.
Wow. The critics and streamers of the digital divide are rough on this script by prolific sfx make-up artist Michael Ezell (Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell; most recently for 2021’s Malignant). Look, it was Milko Davis’s first film — and probably made for less-than-under lower-five digits (maybe even less than the mid-four digits). It’s a low-budget zombie movie set in the post-apoc milieu . . . so why are you streaming it expecting The Walking Dead for the sake of the sweet baby of the Nazarene? When you know it’s low-budget: expect the worst-to-the-cheesy and just enjoy the heart and soul put into the work, okay?
Look, Richard Grieco is a righteous thespian in my book; I should be so lucky, as once an actor, myself, to have risen to the levels to be in Grieco’s shoes: a traveling thespian troubadour assisting indie filmmakers. Grieco, as does Eric Roberts these days (and lately, Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage; see Precious Cargo and Arsenal for examples), lent a helping hand to a new-on-the-scene Milko Davis to get his debut film on the shelves. In the distribution realms: it’s all about that recognizable name on the box and Grieco got Davis started . . . and now the Mik is eight films into the insanity. That’s rad in my book . . . even if the Mik is wondering what the frack has he gotten himself into . . . and he should have went into haberdashery at Nigel Tuffnel’s House of Suits and Colanders, when it was offered to him.
Yeah, I think the zoms, here, look pretty decent and the proceedings far exceed a Bruno Mattei* or Shaun Costello or Jean Rollin or Andrea Bianchi’s zom-joint. And if you’ve seen Hell of the Living Dead, Gamma 639, Zombie Lake, or Burial Ground, with their guacamole-face paint zoms, you know what me mean. (Okay, maybe not Burial Ground. Why do I love that film so much?). I dig the whole John Carpenter Escape from New York-cum-Assault on Precinct13-evoking of it all.
Yes. I’d rather a Milko post-apoc zom joint . . . than that way-too-long, CGI’d McDonald’s zom-fast food disaster that is Zack Synder’s Armyof the Dead. So, yes, Milko’s practical, in-camera effects for the win for his reminds of my beloved Bruno Mattei joints! So, uh, hellah yes: Richard Grieco for the win over Dave Bautista. Why else do you think we’ve also reviewed the Rickster in After Midnight, Clinton Road, The Journey: Absolution, and Impact Event — while reviewing no Dave Bautista’s flicks (no, Sly Stallone is our raison de revoir for Escape Plan 2: Hades and Escape Plan: The Extractors; no, Spectre was a “Bond Week” entry).
I am guilty — as was Sam Panico, the Overdog of B&S About Movies (know your obscure apoc villains), in his review of Plankton (1994) — of probably making this sound way better than it is? Well, I’ve now watched this twice (thanks Walmart cut out bins) and I love it even more because you can see there is a glisten of a rough diamond the frames. So, I was right, right? Milko is on to his sixth film with Phantom Patrol, after all. He also keeps improving his game with each of his subsequent films Tsunambee, Jurassic Thunder and Jurassic Dead.
Okay, that’s enough with the critical prattling. Let’s watch this fan-uploaded trailer — and excuse the low-rez of it all; it’s the upload, not film itself.
You can get used-to-new DVDs of Raiders of the Damned on Ebay (through multiple sellers, natch) and stream it on Amazon (again, I got mine from a Walmart Electronics cut-out barrel o’ fun; I’ve seen ’em at Best Buy, well, back when they carried movies). Eh, sorry, no freebie streams via You Tube or Tubi. Yeah, we need a free-with-ads stream!
Do you want to be a part of a Milko flick?
In November 2021, Team Milko launched a Kickstarter campaign for the production and release of his next film, Phantom Patrol. You can also learn more at the official Facebook page for Armageddon Films and Milko’s IMDb page. (Update: The current campaign has end; however, keep checking back as a new campaign will launch in the coming months to support the production.)
* Hey, we had one hell of an apoc blow out with our two-part “The Atomic Dust Bin: 10 Post-Apocalyptic Films You Never Heard Of” featurette. Join us for the radioactive fun for 20 films — and more! We had Raiders of the Damned on the long-list for it and it got lost in the digital shuffle. Too many films to write about! Hey, it took us a while to get to Future-Kill and Robot Jox, as well. But they all get done, eventually.
** Come . . . explore the works with our “Exploring: Bruno Mattei” featurette, if you dare. You know you want to. Click it, you celluloid masochist of Italian crap.
I’ve added a lot of YouTube subscriptions and one keeps posting weird off brand slashers with covers that have nothing to do with the actual films and they get me every time, so let me share my pleasure and pain with you.
IMDB tells me that director C. Rattapol made this one and only movie. I guess that’s probably a good thing, as this looks like the end period Mattei shot on video movies with none of the lunatic zeal or willingness to outright steal scenes from big budget movies.
I’ve seen this also called Spider Woman: Death Web. Anyways, it’s all about a witch who gets burned on the stake, but then she gets possessed by a giant spider just in time for the torch carrying villagers to destroy her and then we go into modern times and a bunch of teens on vacation come up against Thailand CGI circa 2007, so just imagine.
If the films of the 70s — well, let’s say the excesses of Russ Meyer and the drug and biker movies that I love so much — prove to me that there’s no way I would have survived the excesses of the decade.
There’s another truism — the movies of that era have people and imagery that look like no one and nothing else. Yet Anna Biller — who created this and The Love Witch — is the rare filmmaker that is able to recapture that past without merely creating a pastiche that has no heart and soul of its own.
VIVA may take its look and feel from the classic exploitation cinema and vintage Playboy magazines of the early 70s, with the gaudiest apartments outside of a Sergio Martino movie and colors that practically bathe your eyes in a soft and lush bath of joy. Yet on the inside of this taffeta-wrapped box lies hints that 1972 wasn’t always what was seen on drive-in screens.
There aren’t many films that are inspired by both the works of Hugh Hefner and Luis Buñuel — I would say that this is the only one — and for that, the world is a much worse place.
Biller wrote, directed, edited, designed the costume and stars in this film, which is the most self-aware movie I’ve seen that features unself-aware characters, which is some kind of meta backflip trickery when you get right down to it.
Barbi (Biller) starts the film happily married to the workaholic Rick, all while dealing with harassment at every turn, from her boss to her friends Mark and Sheila. Yet when her husband continually chooses work over her, she decides that she’s a single woman. And with Sheila also now single, the two ladies decide to go into the oldest of all professions, like something out of a Barry Mahon film.
Can a movie based on films and magazines that pretty much defined the male gaze break through and become a strong piece of feminist art? When it’s as well made as this film, the answer is yes. That said, this is a film that definitely feels like it will work better for an audience who understands camp and has a beyond working knowledge of the material that inspired it.
As I watched a scene where Barbi got ready for her man to come home, I was struck by one of the first women I ever dated that cared about make up. I felt horrible that she was spending so much time putting on a frustrating pair of false eyelashes and said, “You don’t have to do that. I think you look just fine without them.” And she replied, “Maybe I’m not wearing them for you.”
I’m glad that I learned that lesson. And glad that I watched this film.
You can get the new blu ray of VIVA from Kino Lorber, about whom Biller said, ““I am thrilled to work with Kino Lorber, who releases the best classic and contemporary films, and to see VIVA discovered by a whole new group of fans. VIVA is important to me both as a piece of cinema and as a response to the excesses of the sexual revolution, and I’m excited to see the types of conversations it will generate in the era of #Metoo.”
Want to learn more about Anna Biller? Here’s her official website.
When the rest of the world makes zombie movies that are either boring or sub-Troma winks at the camera filled with humor that breaks the tension, Bruno Mattei remains single-mindedly devoted to making the kind of undead movies that made me love the genre.
In short, in the sad world we find ourselves in where zombies have become boring, Bruno Mattei alone reminds us that these kinds of movies can remain incredibly fun.
After a team of adventurers loses their gold, they go through a fog bank and end up on an island of the living dead. There, nearly everyone dies as they’re pursued by shambling, blood puking monsters that never stop. Oh yeah, there’s also another higher caste of zombies that act like a cross between the Blind Dead and vampires, hypnotizing unwilling victims into becoming their thralls, even if they have to charm them with flutes!
I’ve come away from Mattei’s late period — he made this movie a year before his death — digital video films with great fondness, particularly for Yvette Yzon, who has taken over for Laura Gemser in his movies, starring in this, Zombies: The Beginning, The Jail: Women’s Hell, A Shudder on the Skin and two Segreti di Donna films for Mattei.
Here, she’s Sharon, not only the final girl but the Lara Croft of this story. The rest of her crew is pretty worthless, except for Snoopy, who gets his name by always wearing a Snoopy t-shirt. This is an astonishing choice for a zombie film and one that I applaud. He’s played by Jim Gaines, who has been in plenty of Mattei films like Robowar, Zombie 4, Strike Commando and even shows up in The One-Armed Executioner.
Screenwriter Antonio Tentori has been there for the dark night of the soul that aging Italian horror filmmakers must endure, being the scribe for everything from Argento’s Dracula 3D to Fulci’s Cat in the Brain and D’Amato’s Frankenstein 2000.
Only Sharon survives, but it appears that she becomes a zombie. No worry — she comes back perfectly healthy in the sequel, Zombies: The Beginning. Yes, only Mattei would name the second movie — or third, if this is in the same universe as Hell of the Living Dead — with a title like Zombies: The Beginning.
What are we to think of a movie that has not only the Necronomicon but also the De Vermis Mysteriis and the Cask of Amontillado? A film willing to rip off The Fog, Night of the Living Dead, Ghost Ship, Fulci’s eyeball scene in Zombi, the Blind Dead movies and even Mattei’s own Hell of the Living Dead? A movie that outright steals footage from The 13th Warrior, Interview with the Vampire, Deep Rising and House of the Dead?
We are to celebrate it. Thank you, Bruno Mattei, for always making it cheap, gross and upsetting, but never ever boring. The spirit and flame of 1980s Italian horror was kept alive by you longer than anyone.
You have to give Bruno Mattei credit for sheer force of will. At a time when most filmmakers retire — he was 76 when making it and died the very same year — he was hitting. the Philippines and making a zombie movie on digital video when the rest of his Italian exploitation filmmaking contemporaries were dead, retired or no longer relevant.
Dr. Sharon Dimao (Yvette Yzon, who was also put through the Mattei ringer in the first film in Mattei’s zombie saga, Island of the Living Dead, as well as The Jail: The Women’s Hell; she’ll return to play this role again in Dustin Ferguson’s Hell of the Screaming Undead) has already survived one zombie attack and spent years recuperating in Buddhist temple, hiding from the bosses that fired her from the Tyler Corporation.
Oh, you didn’t realize that Mattei was going to turn a zombie movie into Aliens? Let me remind you that this is the very same man who turned an Aliens movie into Terminator 2 with Shocking Dark.
Somehow, a member of the company named Paul Barker convinces her to head back to the island, along with a team of mercenaries who get to use Goldberg’s entrance music when they fight the walking undead. Somehow, there are also zombie little people, which thrilled me to no end, along with a plot stolen from Resident Evil and actual footage lifted from Crimson Tide. As if that wasn’t enough, the poster is an exact Xerox of Fulci’s City of the Living Dead.
Sadly, this was Bruno’s last movie. Everyone has to die some time, but if anyone could have lived forever, making scumtastic movies that cashed in on the latest trend, I wish that it could have been Vincent Dawn.
Many people have been credited with saying “Talent borrows, genius steals.”
Between being directed by Bob Odenkirk and written by Will Forte, who also stars, I had high hopes for this goofy comedy and they were definitely lived up to.
John (Will Arnett) and Dean Solomon (Forte) grew up in isolation as they were raised by their single father Ed (Lee Majors) at an Arctic research station. Now that they’re in the normal world, they have no idea how to interact with other people. Now that Ed is in a coma, the brothers decide that they can wake him by having a child, which proves to be nearly impossible.
I mean, it’s mostly a one-joke premise — the woman they pick to adopt a child from (Kristen Wiig) is having a baby with a black man (Chi McBride) — but I was in the right mood for a ridiculous comedy, much less one that had Majors in it.
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran on February 23, 2020, as part of our “Box Office Failure Week” of film reviews. We rerunning it as part of our “Leek Majors Week” tribute.
If you ever wondered: Is there a film with an almost $20 million dollar price tag that the acting and technical unions had to shut down because none of the actors or crew were paid? Is there a film that still hasn’t been released—thirteen years after it completed production? More importantly: Is there a film where Lee Majors (being a really good sport about his “pop culture” status) goes “Six Million Dollar Man” on Dan Conner’s ass? Is there a film where Lee Majors makes prank phone calls looking for “Phil McCracken” with Johnny Brennan of The Jerky Boys?
And that movie is this reported “remake” of director Sean S. Cunningham’s second post-Friday the 13th project, the 1983 teen comedy, Spring Break (here’s that film’s theme song by Cheap Trick). The story is a familiar one: a group of four friends who were bullied in high school decide to seek revenge against those now college freshman bullies during a Florida Spring Break in 1983. Shot in outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the film was produced by Big Sky Motion Pictures, the production company of the film’s writer and director, Mars Callahan, who’s best known for the acclaimed Poohall Junkies starring Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Walken (and the little seen What Love Is starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.).
While the title makes you think this is a direct-to-DVD knockoff of a Judd Aptow sex-joke fest, you’d be wrong. Spring Break ’83, co-directed by Sam Raimi associate Scott Spiegel (Intruder, co-writer of Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn), carries an $18 million dollar price tag and was intended as a theatrical release.
And look at that cast. The talent we love here at B&S About Movies is everywhere you look! It’s a B-Movie fan’s dream wet dream with Robert Davi (Maniac Cop II), Erik Estrada (Do or Die, the Hallmark Channel’s Dead Over Diamonds), Morgan Fairchild (American Horror House), John Goodman (C.H.U.D), Lee Majors (The Norseman), Joe Pantoliano (The Final Terror) Joe Piscopo (Dead Heat), Richard Portnow (Howard Stern’s dad in Private Parts), and Adrian Zmed (The Final Terror, William Shatner ‘80s TV series TJ Hooker). Fans of cable television’s Hannah Montana, iZombie, and Henry Danger (and its spin-off, Danger Force) will notice Andrew Caldwell in one of his earliest theatrical roles as “Mouth”; he’s also appeared in Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, Drillbit Taylor, and the latest Matrix installment, Revolutions (2021).
It’s been reported the film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. However, it actually didn’t screen at the festival: the film was shown at an (unnamed) venue in Park City, Utah, at the same time Sundance was taking place. Piggybacking the film onto the festival did nothing to help the film find a distributor. The film’s once official website now leads to a 404 error and the legal disputes over who owns the film’s negative still continues. . . . And we’re sure Lee has stories to tell. We wonder if he ever got paid?
About the Author: You can read the music and film criticisms of R.D Francis on Medium and learn more about his work on Facebook.He’s also a staff writer at B&S About Movies.
Based on the Cartoon Network series and directed by Alex Winter — yes, that Alex Winter — Ben 10 Race Against Time is a great live-action version of a kid-friendly series that you may have slept on.
Ben Tennyson has the power of the Omnitrix, which allows him to transform into a multitude of super-powered different characters (for ten minutes at a time) to protect the galaxy, a job his grandfather (Lee Majors!) has done for decades. But now, Eon wants to destroy our her and use the Hands of Armageddon to open a gateway to his home dimension and unleash war upon our planet.
It turns out that Eon is an alternate reality version of Ben gone wrong, one that has learned how to get past the time limit of the Omnitrix. Only four of the powered forms — Diamondhead, Grey Matter, Heatblast and Wildmutt — show up here, but I really enjoyed getting to see a live-action version of a cartoon that I really dig.
Winter would also direct a sequel, Ben 10: Alien Swarm. And hey — Lee Majors is the perfect actor for Max.
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