INSEMINOID (1981)

 If the idea of a stupid British rip-off of ALIEN sounds good to you then this here's your film. This sci-fi horror combo takes place on a cold cloudy planet where there's some kinda inseminating monster running around. We don't really get to see much of this creature besides his little impregnating/raping scene and all of the murdering takes place by people who are controlled somehow by our malevolent alien. There are a couple of puppet alien babies but they don't do a whole hell of a lot. You also get a woman who tries to saw her own foot off to save herself from a trap which seems sorta dumb to do when you're in a hostile environment wearing a protective astronaut suit. Ultimately nothing is really explained very deeply and it all ends very anti-climatically. This film is sorta reminiscent of the British Alien-rape flick XTRO but you're better off just watching one of the Roger Corman ALIEN clones like GALAXY OF TERROR.
 I've seen the R-rated cut of this and it seemed very choppy to me during any of the gore scenes so I'm thinking there might be an uncut version out there somewhere also which would be a slight improvement.
A.K.A. HORROR PLANET

THE UNSEEN (1980)

 Ever since first seeing ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST I've been a huge fan of character actor Sydney Lassick.  The man just always brings a smile to my face.  When I heard there was a horror flick starring my man Syd as a creepy old fellow with scary secrets I knew I had to check it out.  THE UNSEEN is pretty much everything I hoped it would be.  OK maybe it coulda used a little gore, cuz that's always icing on the cake, but even without it you get a really crazy tale full of incest, murder and general insanity.  Sydney, as usual, is amazing in the role he was born to play as a tubby lecherous fellow that Barbara Bach and her friends somehow trust enough to spend the night in his place when they get stuck in a little town.  This just shows Sydney's vast range in acting styles to go from a kindly old gent to a raving, lady-slapping nut-bag from scene to scene.  I've seen this lumped in with slasher flicks and I can see why cuz there is killing going on but I think there's enough oddball elements to put this in it's own category.  
 The last half hour of this really needs to be seen to be believed when a character who reminded me of Sloth from THE GOONIES mixed with Curly from THE 3 STOOGES mixed with Leatherface shows up and all hell breaks loose.  I would recommend this movie just for that if nothing else.
 The movie was directed by Danny Steinmann who also did FRIDAY THE 13th PART 5 and SAVAGE STREETS so he's alright in my book.

PENITENTIARY II (1982)

 While nowhere near as gritty and dirty as the first PENITENTIARY flick this one goes the more goofy path with more over-the-top type characters. It starts out with a STAR WARS-ish opening scroll describing the events of the 1st movie for people who missed it. It also ups the ante with the actors involved including Mr. T as a Genie-pants wearing sideman to our main character of Too Sweet Gordone. There's also Ernie Hudson, best known as the black guy from GHOSTBUSTERS, who's supposed to be bad-guy Half Dead even though that was played by someone completely different in the first film. Rudy Ray Moore also puts in a quick cameo and does a little rappin'. Throw in a horny little midget prisoner a silly character named Do Dirty and a returning cross-dressing comedian inmate for fun and mix it all into a pretty nonsensical plot. I would say stick with the first one for more realistic sweaty men-in-prison griminess but go with this one if you dig the wacky 80's style more.

 Part III is probably the movie people remember most from this trilogy since it was released by Cannon films and is even more ridiculous with a deadly midget-wrestler entering the scene.

SUPERCHICK (1973)

"Last one in bed gets no head."

 This movie is basically a superhero flick for poly-amorous women.  Our main character even has a stupid superhero alias of Tara B. True until she takes her hair down, puts on some skimpy clothes and becomes "Superchick".  Of course since this is 1973 it was directed by a man and it was written by men so this might not be #1 on female empowerment types lists of female-empowering types of movies but you do get plenty of boobs to go around.  There's also lots of typical comedy and action bits thrown in and the plot is pretty thin so it never gets in the way if you just came here to ogle pretty naked ladies.  One annoying thing is the theme tune which is played about a zillion times throughout the run-time.  John Carradine and Ushi Digart both show up briefly.  I guess this is for you if silly, sexy, light-hearted romps are your thing.

Fun fact:
Star Joyce Jillson went on to become a famous Astrologer and worked for president Ronald Reagan as his personal Astrologer which makes me think Ronald Reagan was a pretty simple-minded fuck of a leader to believe in such voodoo nonsense.  

THE VAMPIRE IS ALIVE (1989)

 We start off here with a couple of Caucasian ladies trying to write a script for a movie in a remote house.  Then we switch to some Asian ladies in a kung fu movie and from there we flip-flop back and forth a few times and the movie ends when ROBO VAMPIRE shows up and beats up a hopping vampire? Apparently this is supposed to be some kind of a sequel to ROBO VAMPIRE but you can't tell from the story-line so I'm thinking they just had the costume laying around and threw it into the mix for the hell of it.   I've seen plenty of Godfrey Ho movies that splice 2 films into one mess of a movie but I think here we might actually have 3 different flicks mashed up into one insane blob.   Maybe producer Thomas Tang was trying to one-up ol' Godfrey with this.  To make things more disjointed one of these movies is horror and the other ones seem to be action or kung fu so we go from a standard haunted house plot into a lady assassin plot(which isn't explained at all) and vice-versa.  Ultimately the whole movie plays out like a sort of greatest hits of bat-shit crazy Asian cinema.  There's a checklist of nutso elements that make up this thing which include cannibalism, hopping vampires, ninjas, kung-fu, gun-fu, slapstick car crashes, someone killed by a telephone, a kung-fuing zombie and a show-stopping moment when our main character gives birth to a vampire kid who pops out of her vagina like it's on a trampoline.  The movies that get ripped-off here include JAWS, PSYCHO, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET(there's a Freddy Krueger-gloved monster), and a shitty version of the CARRIE ending rounds things out.
  While I can't say this is a very good film it's definitely not boring unless wacky shit bores you and if so you stink.  A.K.A. COUNTER JUNGLE, COUNTER DESTROYER and THE VAMPIRE IS STILL ALIVE

Hipity-hop kung-fu:

SHE'LL DO ALRIGHT (1981)

         “Didn’t you know you can get cancer from making it as lesbians?”

Originally titled LOVE DREAMS in '81 this is a weirdly(and hilariously) dubbed euro-porn flick starring John Leslie, Sue Nero and Herschel Savage(who looks a lot like David Hess to me here). It concerns a woman looking for employment and winding up in the homes of various perverts and weirdos. The most memorable moment has an old grandpa character recounting war stories full of whores and tits.  I've only seen the cut soft-core version of this, since that's what they threw on the Uncle Farts' DVD collection this is on, so I can't tell you if the sight of actual penetration makes it all worthwhile but this version is pretty awful. Nice artsy camera shots and stupid dialogue notwithstanding I think you can safely skip this one without many worries.

LOOSE ENDS (1985)

The majority of shot-on-video porn from the 80's looks exactly like this. The only slight difference is this one might have a bit more anal hi-jinks going on. There's a sliver of a plot about star Janey Robbins not being satisfied by stupid guys who fuck her so she turns lesbian and gets Erica Boyer's hand up her ass(not her fist cuz I think that might have been illegal at the time but a good 4 fingers) then she ends up with another chick in a threesome and then it's back to guys in a big orgy finale. Some other generic porn stuff happens in there also. I would say check this out if you really love anal scenes or if you're a big Erica Boyer or Janey Robbins fan, although you could probably find a few actual movies they were in that are better than this. The legendary Harry Reems also shows up in 1 bit with Boyer.
 There were 5 sequels to this that I know of. I'm betting there's not much difference between any of them.


With special introduction by a couple of gal-pals that like to hang out and watch lesbian porn scenes!:

SCREAM OF THE WOLF (1974)

Peter Graves, best known to me as that guy from MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and the voice of the BIOGRAPHY series, stars here as a hunter investigating a series of strange murders that the public think is a werewolf. This is a TV movie so most of the kill scenes take place off-screen and there's no blood to be seen, also no nudity. What they try to do instead of that stuff is fill the movie with some interesting plot devices. Like what if, unlike just about every other werewolf movie, a guy was really happy to be a wolfman and had no remorse about it? Or what if there were actual motives for our monster attacks?
The film was directed by Dan Curtis who was responsible for tons of famous TV stuff like DARK SHADOWS and TRILOGY OF TERROR and has the feel of your standard 70's TV stuff with a twist ending that wraps things up in a familiar style. The main problem with the ending is that it takes away most of the horror movie elements and leaves things with more of a thriller conclusion. Not terrible for a TV movie but not something I'd recommend unless you're a big fan of 70's style kitschiness.

CURSE OF THE DEVIL (1974)

 A pretty typical werewolf flick starring ol' barrell chest himself Mr. Paul Naschy. I think I like his wolfman flicks best when he fights vampire chicks or abominable snowmen or even samurais but you don't get anything like that here. There is an axe-weilding maniac running around in the woods chopping off women's heads but he's not much of a foe and is taken out by Naschy in human form very quickly. There are also some witches at the beginning but they get promptly hung and burned at the stake which sets everything in motion. The werewolf attack scenes are fairly lackluster but you do get a bit of super bright red blood here and there. I think the highlight for me was seeing a werewolf in a suit looking like a proper gentleman which is just silly.  In general Naschy's wolfman here looks very poodle-like and oddly goofy with his neatly-coiffed hairdo which doesn't help with the scary vibe they were aiming for. The naked euro-bush was a nice touch though.

YOG: MONSTER FROM SPACE (1970)

 Some glittery alien space-dust hitches a ride on a satellite heading back from Jupiter.  The space probe crashes near a pacific island and then we get a giant silly-looking octopus named Gezora who has big light-up eyes and runs around on his tentacle legs killing islanders.  Have you ever seen an octopus waltz around like a bad-ass?  It looks fucking ridiculous and was pretty much the highlight for me. Godzilla never shows up like you might expect but some scientist-types figure out giant rubber octopuses hate fire.  Then a giant lobster monster shows up(no, not Lobstora!) along with a giant turtle(no, not Gamera!).  They end up fighting it out cuz these movies always have to end with 2 big monsters fighting.  Apparently the space dust(Yog?) is responsible for all this nonsense and he's finally defeated when he tries to take over a Japanese man with a strong will, also some bats help out for some reason.  This one is strictly for fans of wacky-ass Japanese monster mashes and I probably woulda loved it when I was 12 since you get 3 monsters crammed into one flick.  A.K.A. SPACE AMOEBA

THE BABY (1973)

 Wow, this movie is one very very strange film.  A family keeps a mentally-handicapped full grown man in diapers and a crib and treats him like a baby.  Needless to say this is one pretty fucked-up family which consists of a mom(who looks quite a bit like Joan Crawford) and her two wacky daughters.  There's incest involved, a naughty babysitter, some booby-suckling and "The Baby" gets shocked with a cattle-prod to keep him in line.  A social worker enters the picture and things head towards an even stranger twist ending.  It's hard to say anything about the finale without giving it all away but it definitely leaves you feeling like you may have seen one of the weirdest ideas for a plot ever put on film. I'm shocked this ending hadn't already been ruined for me by some jerk-off reviewer since that seems to be a popular thing to do but amazingly it wasn't.

The trailer makes this seem like a horror film which it really isn't but more of a strange tale that might creep you out:

THE LAST SHARK (1981)

 I haven't seen Bruno Mattei's CRUEL JAWS yet but as far as Italian JAWS rip-off movies go this one is my favorite shitty spaghetti-killer shark flick so far.  It's pretty much exactly what you would imagine with pretty awful mechanical monster shark FX inter-cut with stock footage of actual sharks(thanks to this the shark's size keeps drastically changing from moment to moment), lots of gory scenes with people losing limbs and half their bodies to our hungry predator, a shark eating a helicopter(which also happens in JAWS 2), bad dubbing and an overflowing helping of general cheesy madness.  The shark roars when he gets angry which seems like an odd choice of a sound effect and Vic Morrow gets to play the Quint role.  Thank you Enzo Castellari for directing this along with all your other crazy-ass movies.

Fun facts: 

This was released in the U.S. as GREAT WHITE for a really short time before Universal sued over it being a JAWS-clone and that was the end of that.  

This was released as JAWS 3 in a few countries.

JOHNNY FIRECLOUD (1975)

                          "One of these days you and me are gonna tangle assholes"

 If you took the movie BILLY JACK and got rid of all the hippie stuff and turn it into more of a straight ahead exploitation/drive-in movie type of a deal you would end up with this tale of an American Indian who returns from the army and gets treated like shit by all the rednecks in his hometown.  Things eventually get crazier until Indians start ending up dead and then Johnny gets his savage revenge.  You get rape, gore, racism and pretty much everything you could ask for rolled up in, as the tagline screams, "a hate story!"  Definitely one of producer David Friedman's better made films and worth a look for fans of 70's rednecksploitation.
 Actress Sacheen Littlefeather(who shows her breasts here but unfortunately it's during a gang-rape scene so not really all that sexy) is probably best know as the chick who showed up in place of Marlon Brando when he refused the academy award in '73.

INVOLUNTARY BIRD (1971)

I've only seen a highly chopped-up print of this thing on DVD that plays a little over 40 minutes but I really have no desire to watch the full cut of what amounts to a really tedious soft-core porn flick starring some very hairy folks unconvincingly rubbing their uninspired genitals together. There is some kind of a plot going on about drugs and crime or something but most of that seems to have been cut out in favor of the long humping scenes that are scored with boring instrumental muzak versions of songs like "You've Made Me So Very Happy" and the theme from HAIR. Whoever shot this also decided we would rather look at a sunburned back, stare up a man's nostrils, watch a girl rub her nose on a limp-dick or other such idiotic things for 5 minutes each than see anything remotely hot. The groovy sideburns on one fellow may have been the highlight for me and that's pretty sad.
 Save yourself and stay away from this one unless you get it as part of the UNCLE FARTS DIRTY MOVIE collection in which case at least the animated bits will give you a chuckle even if the movies might make you want to poke your eyes out.:

BUMMER! (1973)

  A tale of a shitty rock band brilliantly named The Group and the groupies that follow them.  While I wouldn't say this movie is particularly good it does have a couple of cheesy elements that make it watchable and the ending sorta makes it all worthwhile.  Another positive is one of my favorite 70's blaxploitation chicks, Carol Speed as a hot groupie who likes to wear patches on her jeans to show off her ass.  The other interesting character is the fat, sweaty guitarist named Butts who we see go from being just an annoying creepy fuck(a stand-out scene is where he forces 2 girls to strip and then shoves them into a hot shower so that he can watch and masturbate on the toilet) that almost everyone hates and ignores to becoming a rapey, murdery type of a fellow.  You have to wait until around the last 30 minutes or so for the good stuff though and it does get to be a long trek along the way.  The movie is padded-out quite a bit with bad music, a shitty proto-music video that plays like a slide-show and boring relationship talk but if you can make it through all that you get a cool explosive finale.  I guess I'd recommend this one to 70's exploitation/sleaze fans with patience.
 Producer/B-movie legend David Friedman shows up towards the end as a police lieutenant looking a little slimmer than I've ever seen him before.

Typically slow-moving scene!:

SLAVE GIRLS OF THE SS (1973)

From what I can figure out this was originally called NAZI SEX EXPERIMENTS and was put out by Something Weird Video then it was re-edited by Alternative Cinema, they just added some pointless unnecessary WWII footage at the beginning and end, and released it as SLAVE GIRLS OF THE SS on DVD.  It's also been titled SEX SLAVES OF THE SS somewhere along the way.  No matter what you call it though it's a pretty bad comedy/nazisploitation porn flick.  The sex scenes are filled with particularly ugly people, there's super unrealistic torture scenes, shitty comedic bits and to top it all off you get an androgynous dwarf-looking henchwoman(that I think is supposed to be a henchman?) named Fritz(but sometimes called Fritzenia) that kills any boners that could possibly be popped during this movie.  This little troll being is the last thing anyone would want to see in a sex movie and it's movies like this that make me feel bad for our perverted forefathers who had to somehow figure out how to masturbate in a theater to this.  Those poor sleazy weirdos, although maybe if you're a neo-Nazi the rousing German marching music will get you off.  The fellow who plays our main stupid character Dr. Cock-Luv went on to be in  ILSA, HAREM KEEPER OF THE OIL SHEIKS and SLACKER where he doesn't show his cock at all.  Throughout the movie a few loops are thrown in here and there to bring it up to it's hour long running time. The short duration of this film is pretty much the only good thing going on here.

                                Ilsa would kick Fritz's silly ass!

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976)

This British sci-fi flick starring David Bowie as a sad lonely alien who ends up wandering around the Earth trying to get back to his home planet is pretty cool as far as the visuals go but I can't say much for the actual narrative. It's all very uninspiring as the main plot deals with a character who can't relate to the humanity around him and I felt just as unable to relate to Bowie's character while I watched it which doesn't really help make the point that I think the filmmakers were going for. I know our alien here is supposed to be a metaphor for the feeling of alienation within modern society and all that but I just didn't really care enough about what happens since it's all done in such an artsy artificial style. I do give the movie credit for being very out-there and strange which you don't see much in the safe world of sci-fi cookie-cutter movies made after STAR WARS hit, I just personally couldn't get into it. Maybe if I turned off the sound and played some Ziggy Stardust tunes over the visuals it would be more comprehensible. Remade as a TV movie in 87 which I can't imagine was very good.

SURGIKILL (1989)

  Director Andy Milligan is responsible for some of the worst, most boring horror movies I've ever seen but like a self-loathing masochist every once in a while I forget how bad they really are and I return to his movies for more punishment.  This was Andy's last attempt at making a movie and here he has the idea that he could make a comedy mixed with a silly slasher movie.  Of course, as expected, it fails miserably at being either one of those things.  The comedy is like an ultra-retarded/stupider version of one of those NAKED GUN movies and the horror bits consist of slapstick gore and rubber body parts being thrown around.  There's a drag queen receptionist, an Oliver Hardy look-a-like, stereotypical black mugger and bad jokes repeated over and over again.  In between this awfulness we get what feels like endless scenes of nonsense dialogue where you feel the minutes tick away and wonder if it's worth it to keep watching.  In an amazing feat of endurance I did make it to the end and can say that when it comes to making bad movies Mr. Milligan would be hard to top and makes someone like Ed Wood look like a genius in comparison.  You might want to avoid this one.

If this movie were only 5 minutes long it might have almost been bearable:

THE DEADLY SPAWN (1983)

 The first time I saw this was on a big-box VHS as RETURN OF THE ALIEN'S DEADLY SPAWN which was the distributor's attempt to link this to ALIEN as some kind of bizarre sequel. Of course this movie doesn't have anything to do with Ridley Scott's classic but it is a classic in it's own grubby way and a good example of an ultra-cheaply made, gore-added homage to 50's alien invasion monster flicks which to me works perfectly.  This movie also proves that if you have just a little ingenuity and even the slightest bit of intelligence your movie can be entertaining and not look like it was shot in your parents backyard like 99% of the low-budget garbage shit out today.  Heads roll, faces get ripped-off, there's a blatant rip-off of the ALIEN-chest-burster and there's a great stand-out scene where a bunch of kooky vegetarian grannies are terrorized by our monsters and our hero is a monster-movie-obsessed kid which is something I can sure relate to.
 Caught this recently at a showing where the director did a Q & A and from his stories it's a pretty big miracle this movie turned out looking as good as it does.  Check it out!

THE SATISFIERS OF ALPHA BLUE (1980)

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HARD BOILED (1992)

 As I've probably said here more than once before the 90's were a bleak time for U.S. cinema.  Anything cool that remained from the 70's had been turned into complete shit by the awfulness of the 80's and now we were entering the black hole of a self-aware mocking parody of consciousness which still lingers on today like an old stale fart.  Real horror films were practically non-existent and action movies had become lifeless predictable boring jokes. The only place to find anything remotely different was Asia and directors like John Woo.  It's hard to see looking back now, after he had been co-opted by the Hollywood shit-spewing machine, to remember how fresh his films seemed at the time.  There really wasn't any comparison.  The violence, action and stuntmen willing to risk their lives just to make a scene look good were sorely lacking from most American flicks in this genre at the time.  Compared to some haf-assed jokey movie like DIE HARD this movie seems so much more iconic to me.  Check it out for Chow Yun-Fat as a cool mother-fucker and people eating in restaurants full of birdcages.  If you are gonna watch this though stick with the subtitles since the dubbed version makes this movie seem way too fucking goofy. 

SOUL VENGEANCE (1975)

 Made by Jamaa Fanaka the guy who gave us the vastly superior PENITENTIARY series this movie is not so much a prison flick as a more straight forward blaxploitation film but unfortunately it's not a very good one.  The story concerns a black fellow who gets beaten by racist white cops.  While this happens he sorta gets castrated.  How does someone sorta get castrated?  How the fuck do I know?  They make it seem like he's castrated and then magically later one his schlong grows back or something.  It is clearly a magical dick since it hypnotizes white bitches to make them do his bidding and it helps him get revenge on the cops and anyone else who had a hand in sending him to jail.  In what is really the only memorable scene in this mess of a movie our hero's cock grows longer than an elephant's trunk and strangles an evil white man.  While this might have some deeper socio-political meaning that I could go on about for endless paragraphs if I was a thinking man I'll just say it was one silly fucking ridiculous, but memorable, scene and really the only thing worth sitting through this movie for.

A.K.A. WELCOME HOME, BROTHER CHARLES:

TENTACLES (1977)

 I don't think I've ever really seen a good review or even heard anyone say anything positive about this JAWS-rip-off flick but I didn't think it was all that bad. Maybe I've seen too many shitty Italian JAWS-rip-off movies already but to me this one was an interesting mish-mosh of different elements mixed together in a 70's style soup of exploitation cheese that I enjoyed for what it was. It's an Italian/American co-production directed by a guy who would make similar semi-entertaining dreck like BEYOND THE DOOR and PIRANHA 2 and it stars a bunch of Hollywood types who had seen better days which gives it that TV-movie of the week feel(and I do love star-studded 70's TV-movies!).  There's Shelley Winters, Henry Fonda, John Huston, Crazy Lee from THE WILD BUNCH(Bo Hopkins) and Sheriff Lobo himself Claude Akins.  Some of the FX look decent especially when they use a real octopus and you get an octopus versus a killer whale finale which was pretty neat.  An added bonus is a baby getting killed which I can't imagine happens in too many other PG-rated movies.

SUPER MECHA KUCHA HAPPY FUN MONKEY BASH DX PART 4 (200?)

 What you get here is a look at Japanese culture through the prism of offbeat comedy skits, extreme game shows, stupid sitcom type situations, music videos, oddball commercials(some with big name American celebrities that would never be seen doing commercials over here) and general wackiness.  If you are actually Japanese maybe it wouldn't all seem as alien as it does to my stupid white ass but either way it makes a good spectacle to put on as background for a party or just for something bizarre to help joggle your synapses.  There's a lot of cross-dressing fellows on display, a recurring show with a family of mannequins, Japanese superhero spoofs and plenty of strange outfits.  I get the idea from watching this that men in Japan like to get dressed up in revealing outfits and let it all hang out.  Best watched in little snippets and not the complete 90 minutes all at once as it made my brain hurt after a while.  I was also a little disappointed that there actually weren't any monkeys involved in this volume.    
 
Doing a little research I discovered that these compilations are thrown together every year by what might be the most awesome movie theater in America today the Alamo Drafthouse down in Texas so if you live anywhere near there you can actually watch these on a big screen if you're nutty enough:

FREEBIE AND THE BEAN (1974)

 For the most part, I think I hate buddy-cop movies.  I can't recall any off the top of my head that  are worthwhile.  They're almost always a shitty combination of action movie cliches with stupid comedy bits and two guys bickering.  I guess I'm more of a fan of the serious loner action star.  This movie you could probably blame for setting the template for what was to come since it's one of the first in this sub-genre but what you do get here, that isn't in the subsequent family-friendly 80's and beyond versions, is stuff like blatant racism(The Bean is the name of our leading Mexican cop and he also gets called a dumb spic at least once), sexism, a cross-dressing killer and a general un-PC slant to everything.  This only goes to show that even genres that I don't care much about were better made in the 70's.
 There's lots of familiar faces that show-up throughout this flick including the camp counselor from SLEEPAWAY CAMP as a police lieutenant, Rhoda, the Jewish lady from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW as a Hispanic housewife and Hot-Lips from M*A*S*H as a mob-wife.

Apparently this played, at one time, as part of on an action/kung-fu double-feature show: