THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985)

 This Canadian kid's movie seems to be pretty popular with nerds who worship the 1980's. Why that is I'm not exactly sure. I certainly don't recall it being a big deal back in the 80's, in fact I don't think I ever even heard of it back then.
 The plot deals with this kid who gets so scared that his hair falls out. Then a couple of homeless ghosts give him this recipe for dome goop that will make hair grow(i.e. the titular "peanut butter solution"). Unfortunately it grows like crazy! There's also an evil French(French-Canadian?) art-teacher who kidnaps kids and keeps them as slaves which is a bit creepy. There's also our main character's Asian(Asian-Canadian?) friend who rubs some of the peanut butter hair solution on his balls which is pretty risque for a children's film. It's all pretty stupid but what else would you expect? The worst thing about this is the music by Celine Dion who might be one of my least favorite singers ever!
 I wouldn't recommend actually watching this to anyone but perhaps if you're an 80's nut or Canadian or if you did watch this when you were a kid in the 80's  it will give you some sorta thrill.

EASY (1978)

         

                             "I want you to put your fingers in the butter and put them up my ass"

 Jessie St. James plays the lead role in this porn about a teacher who gets sexually assaulted by a couple of students which then makes her realize that she's a nymphomaniac. Then she quits teaching altogether and moves to the big city and has lots of sex including this one scene involving a blind guy and a stick of butter. Then she finds true love but Georgina Spelvin shows up and they have a ridiculous cat fight that turns into a lesbianic clam-bumping session. Then she finds true love again but watch out for the twist 70's downer ending! Pretty standard stuff for a late 70's adult film.
 There's a scene in this with Desiree Cousteau where I think they make a reference to DIXIE RAY HOLLYWOOD STAR which was an earlier porn flick by director Anthony Spinelli that had Cameron Mitchell in it.

KILLING MACHINE (1976)

 Sonny Chiba plays the Japanese guy who created Kempo(Kenpo?) karate in what I imagine is a pretty loose interpretation of events in the man's real life. It's a pretty straight ahead heroic role for Chiba with none of the ambiguity/anti-hero stuff present in THE STREETFIGHTER but it's still pretty good. You get rape and revenge including a guy who gets his genitals snipped off with scissors and fed to a dog which is a fairly rough scene. Also a guy gets his arm sliced off with a sword and pants are pissed in fright. Besides this there are tons of kung fu fights and lots of arms are broken. Worth a look if you like martial arts extravaganzas.

MURDER WEAPON (1989)

 This is basically a slasher movie mixed with a typical stupid David DeCoteau(directing here under the alias of Ellen Cabot) booby movie. So it's really just an exceptionally dumb slasher flick. Maybe the most annoying thing is the way the movie starts out with no sound and continues that way for about 10 minutes! Linnea Quigley stars(and was also the producer) as a mental patient who gets out of the asylum and along with her equally crazy sister(Karen Russell) has a party where all of their ex-boyfriends show up(the most familiar to me being Ricky, the killer, from SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT PART 2). Then things get bloody. The most memorable effect involves a sledge-hammer to some guy's head which squishes like some sort of a gore-filled melon(which it very well may have been). There is one guy at this party who is supposed to be portraying a metalhead which is good for a chuckle. Besides a few giggles and the opportunity to see lots of bare female flesh on display this is pretty skippable stuff.
 Lyle Waggoner, featured in lots of cool TV-shows in the 70's, shows up very briefly as a doctor. The original working title of this was BEVERLY HILLS CORPSE which would have been way better than the forgettable, action-movie-sounding(the poster even wants us to think this is a LETHAL WEAPON rip-off for some reason?) title they went with.

DEADLY EMBRACE (1989)

 We get plenty of boobs here(mostly thanks to the lovely Linnea Quigley) and that's really about the only positive thing I can say about this. There is a plot about a love-triangle(or maybe a love-rectangle if you include Jan-Michael Vincent who isn't exactly in the movie a whole lot despite being top-billed) which ends up in some homicidal murder. Getting to the climax of this film takes forever though and the pacing of this thing is very snail-like. Michelle Bauer also shows up briefly as "the spirit of sex" or something and naturally gets nekkid! This was supposedly shot in 3 days so I guess that's impressive but it's all a little too drama-heavy with little payoff except tits. Fortunately there are many other movies you can view Linnea's naked chest in to avoid sitting through this.

Whoever uploaded this first part of the movie musta forgot the other parts:

GARDEN OF THE DEAD (1972)

 Probably the best thing about this zombie flick is the version that I have of it runs under one hour! Now I imagine perhaps at one point there was a longer cut of this but it's not very good so I don't really feel any need to see it. The zombies in this thing don't follow any of the Romero rules. They get shot in the belly and fall over dead, they run around like maniacs, they use tools(mostly pick-axes) to kill there victims, they don't eat flesh and they get killed by light. That's right, so if you have a flashlight handy these would be the easiest zombies to kill ever! Why anyone in this movie wastes bullets shooting at these creatures is beyond me. The coolest thing to me about this whole film is the way these monsters are created by huffing formaldehyde. Apparently this prison has a bunch of formaldehyde that is being disposed of and the prisoners decide to get high off of it. This then leads to the old life-after-death-crazy-mixed-up-zombies shtick. Maybe worth a look only because it's so short! AKA TOMB OF THE UNDEAD
 This was originally released as the 2nd movie on a double-bill with GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE which was probably a good night out at the drive-in anyway.

THE ENFORCER (1976)

 In the third Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry movie our badass cop teams up with that chick(Tyne Daly) from CAGNEY & LACEY and takes on a multi-racial gang of anti-American militant terrorists. Now never having actually watched CAGNEY & LACEY I have no idea if Daly's character is in any way similar to the one in that show but from what I recall from all the commercials during shows that I did watch back in the 80's they were some kinda detectives so I guess so.
 This chapter in the super popular series is pretty typical and doesn't come near the power of the first one or even some of the cool stuff in the second movie, MAGNUM FORCE, with the killer cops and stuff. Also the ending is not all that spectacular, excluding one thing that might surprise someone viewing this for the first time that I will not reveal, and it just kinda ends how you would think. Still Eastwood, as usual, is great in this role so worth watching just for that if you dig the man and if you dig 70's action movies at all you probably should.

The dirtiest Harry of them all!(not really but that is a great tagline!):

NIGHTMARE SISTERS (1988)

 The first half hour or so of this is really talky and dumb but then our three main ladies, Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer(credited as Michelle McClellan) and Brinke Stevens, become possessed by a demonic succubus and become naked and horny. This leads to prolonged scenes of bubble bath taking, molesting food and humping stuff. It also leads to growing fangs and biting guys' genitals since this is a horror film(or at least a comedy disguised as a horror film). It does remain consistently stupid throughout but if you don't mind ample nakedness and lame jokes it's a fun harmless movie to watch on a Sunday morning to chase away a hangover.  Also they manage to use a pretty punk rock-ish soundtrack which is nice. Quigley also gets to perform a punk music video and has a throwaway line that references her most well-known film RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.
AKA SORORITY SUCCUBUS SISTERS

GODZILLA VS. THE THING (1964)

 This is the fourth movie in the original GODZILLA series and follows KING KONG VS. GODZILLA(and I guess it's also technically the 2nd movie in the MOTHRA series following that film). In this one Godzilla takes on Mothra, the giant moth and his two kids who are a couple of grubworm-looking caterpillar things that hatch out of a giant Easter egg. The big G's 60's movies are pretty goofy and this one is no exception. They would get even goofier later on when he has a son and teams up with a giant robot and stuff like that. Probably one of the best things in this is the use of music by Akira Ifukube and the two little magical fairies who return from being in the original MOTHRA in 1961. This movie played so many times back when I was a kid that it's hard to judge it subjectively without nostalgia clouding my perception but if you dig Godzilla movies at all this isn't a bad one to check out. The fight scenes are definitely unique to this movie since Mothra and kids aren't your typical guy-in-rubber-suit sort of foes that usually populate these movies so that's something.
 The Japanese version of this, titled MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, is 29 minutes longer and while I haven't watched that version yet from what I know it's mostly just missing some footage of the army fighting Godzilla.
AKA GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA

The American AIP release of this referred to Mothra as The Thing and kept his appearance a secret in the movie posters and trailers. Though they do show the two baby Mothras:


In Japan not so much of a secret:

  

ROLLERBALL (1975)

 To me most sports movies are a waste of time but if your movie is set in a future where everything is run by mysterious evil corporations and the sport we're focusing on is a bastardized version of roller-derby where guys use spiked gloves to smash their opponents faces in and run each other over with motorbikes then I'm in. Being a movie made in Hollywood of the 70's there's message about the virtue of individuality vs. the non-virtue of a ruling class of decision-makers that run everything. The director also claims this movie is anti-violence and while I can see that idea in there there's also an awful lot of blood and brutality that would appeal to viewers who are not so peace-loving and just wanna see people getting messed up. A relic of a time when the mainstream didn't automatically mean commercial garbage.
 There was a remake of this in 2002 with LL Cool J but since that's way past the era of anything worthwhile coming out of Hollywood I can't imagine what kind of maniac would bother watching it.

Gratuitous use of Beethoven's Fugue in D Minor!:

THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE (1968)

 This is Jean Rollin's first movie and while I'm generally a fan of his films this is also probably my least favorite of his works. To be fair, technically this is two short films stuck together to make a feature so that helps explain the disjointed feel that it has. It's also probably the most artsy of Rollin's movies that I've seen and acts as a sort-of unfinished blueprint for the themes he would explore in his future endeavors. There are two positive things that stand out about this. One, of course, is the ample female nudity on display. It seems that vampire women in this world cannot figure out how to close their tops over their nipples. The second is this awesome paper mache? and bedsheets giant makeshift bat that shows up near the end of the movie which might be one of the goofiest things ever. Besides these two assets this is a slow movie to plow through. For Eurotrash/Rollin-completists only. AKA QUEEN OF THE VAMPIRES and VAMPIRE WOMEN



Still better than CGI!:

KINGFISHER THE KILLER (1981)

 
                        "You just mean you want me to go to bed with you. Not... much... else!"

 Either this movie has one the most drastically abrupt cliffhanger endings or the version I watched of it was missing a few minutes of it's ending but either way I think I get the drift. It's starts out pretty action-packed with this dude fighting off a gang of fellows with bad intentions. Then a mostly naked lady gets used as a human shied and blood splatters as she's stabbed right in the back and an old lady is drowned in a bathtub! From there it settles into a fairly standard kung fu revenge plot where our hero tries to exact vengeance on his ex-partner. What makes this stand out is the absurd dubbing in a few scenes which give it all an unintentional comedic element. Also the inclusion of music from Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA give it a totally out of place creepy vibe. Also this title seems a little bizarre to me. I guess their making a reference to the bird since I guess that could be the fighting style the main character uses but it mostly makes me think of that  black guy from AMOS N' ANDY. An OK waste of time for 3am insomniac viewings. AKA THE FINAL DUEL
 This is listed a few places as having been directed by Godfrey Ho but I'm thinking they just slapped his name on it since it doesn't seem like it was made in Hong Kong at all and it's also credited as being directed by someone named Wisan Suntisucha so I'm guessing that's correct cuz it sounds way more Thai to me.



King Fish:

CARNIVAL OF BLOOD (1970)

 This film definitely has more of a 60's HG Lewis splatter film-feel to it than a typical 70's horror flick. Some of the clunky gore highlights include a decapitation, a tongue and some eyes being gouged out and some guts ripped right out of a lady's belly. There's also an amazingly hardcore New York-feel to everything thanks to the thick accents everyone employs. Shot in Coney Island for what looks to have been about $5 for the fake red blood this is basically a slasher movie set on the boardwalk. This was about a decade before slasher movies really got going so I guess they weren't too sure how to make that very entertaining. The thing that does make this one watchable, to me anyway, is the bizarre characters that show up, the fact that pretty much everyone in the movie is totally and completely unlikeable so you can't wait for them to get killed. As a bonus you get to see Paulie(Burt Young, for some reason credited here as John Harris) in his first role as a hunchback appropriately named Gimpy. Worth a look if you dig trashy gore or just Coney Island-flavored oddities. AKA DEATH RIDES A CAROUSEL. Director Leonard Kirtman's other horror feature CURSE OF THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN played on double-bills with this.
 There is another movie with the very similar title of MALATESTA'S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD from 1974 but that one features Herve Villechaize and looks insane so I need to check that out soon.

Two bloody chillers!:

FANTASY MISSION FORCE (1983)

 So Snake Plissken, James Bond and Rocky Balboa exist within the reality of this movie and are considered to join up with our team of mercenaries but unfortunately they go with a ragtag team of criminal-types including a couple of seemingly gay fellows, a guy who looks like an Asian Elvis(or is he the Asian James Bond?), a guy named 'Greased Lightnin' who wears his sunglasses at night, a couple of ass-kicking kung-fu ladies and others. Oh and Jackie Chan and his girlfriend end up sorta helping out along the way. This movie is basically an insane Hong Kong version of THE DIRTY DOZEN that is supposed to take place during World War II despite there being 70's muscle-cars covered in swastikas that appear toward the finale and I think most of it takes place in Germany?? Of course I could be wrong about that since not a whole lot of what happens makes much sense. This does have my favorite type of ending for any movie where almost everyone dies. There's a spoof of(homage to?) THE ROAD WARRIOR. The music is lifted directly from HALLOWEEN and PLANET OF THE APES at times and the film goes from standard action movie with exploding stuff to kung fu to what seems like a spaghetti-western to a musical scene to a haunted house/horror movie-motif to wacky comedy. Basically this might be the best movie ever with little time to get very bored watching it. Of course if you stop and try to figure out what it all means your head may explode but that's way more fun than your standard martial-arts flick and may be my favorite Jackie Chan flick ever! AKA DRAGON ATTACK





I used to own this VHS tape but it managed to destroy a VCR on me which I think only goes to show the raw power of this film!: