This starts out as REEFER MADNESS except about alcohol instead of weed and not as entertaining. Towards the end our main screw-up, Fred(Noel Reyburn), shoots up dope out of the blue in a wacky twist. It all ends up getting very Jesus-y for the big climax. It's overall pretty dull overly-dramatic juvenile delinquent-scare stuff(even though all the "teenagers" look way too old for the parts they're playing).
The director here, Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., went on to make THE BLOB which is a way better 50s movie with old-looking "teenagers" to watch.
The original version of this film, made back in 1945, was titled TWICE CONVICTED (not sure if that was ever released) but then they added some footage at the beginning and end and slapped that snazzy FLAMING TEENAGE moniker on it.
This one is a bit of a rough one. Starting out with some real war atrocity photos, and a strangely funky score, we then switch to a couple of tales featuring lots of torture, rape and similar feel-bad experiences. The list of barbarism is pretty extensive. You get castration, an ear hacked off, a 12-year-old girl blinded, a lady ripped apart by oxen, decapitation, crucifixion, a foot smashed into a bloody pulp, toes lopped off, gorey spearings and probably a few more things I've blocked from my mind. The first story illustrates how Shogun weren't very fond of Christians and didn't mind showing it and features a really unlikeable warlord who really gets off on torturing his captives and as a bonus raping one unlucky virgin gal. There's really not much of a story to this one and is basically just a highlight reel of some pretty nasty spectacles, especially for 1976. The second yarn concerns a fellow who spends the night at a whorehouse and when he can't pay the charges he's incurred the next morning is basically turned into a slave for some pretty nefarious characters. This part had a few twists and turns to it which made it a bit more interesting and made me feel like a bit less of a ghoul for enjoying it. This film is something gorehounds should definitely track down if they wanna see a bloody mix of a samurai flick with a splatter movie. AKA SHOGUN'S SADISM
I've never seen the first movie in this series, THE JOY OF TORTURE, but supposedly it's more on the classier side of things than this so I might have to check that out when I'm feeling particularly artsy.
One of the funkiest openings to any Japanese movie I've ever seen!:
I've seen this slasher flick a couple of times now and it's pretty forgettable. The only thing that makes it even slightly stick out is that all our victims-to-be work at a carnival. Some machete whacking antics are the main highlight of a pretty standard entry in this genre. Some wet boobs are shown, heads roll and hands move around after they are hacked off. Not really much better or worse than any of the gazillion other 80s teen-murder epics.
The director here, David Nelson, was on OZZIE AND HARRIET when he was a kid and was the older brother of Ricky Nelson. His other directing gigs were mostly made-for-television stuff.
A family of retarded mama's boys, sorta like those inbred-mongoloids in THE HILLS HAVE EYES, that live in the Swiss Alps are disturbed by a heavy metal band who decide to shoot a video full of bikini-clad hotties there, because why not go someplace really fucking cold to have almost nekkid gals dance around? The stupidity of almost everyone in this will be pretty familiar to fans of the slasher genre but this one did get on my nerves from time to time. There are some decent kill-scenes including one crazy booby-trap one with a lady sliced completely in half by a wire! There's also lots of nudity supplied by our cheese-metal models and some great silly metal including the super dumb title track. This one seem to fly under a lot of slasher fans radar and I'm not sure why but if you've already seen all 7 million of the other slasher flicks out there give this one a spin for a few chuckles and gory thrills.
This film was made by an English production company even if it seems way more Swedish due to it's chilly filming locations and director(Mats Helge Olsson).
David Bowie does a very good job here, with the help of some great-looking makeup, playing what is not your classic vampire, but a new(for the 1980s anyway) type of blood-drinking creep. It's all very goth with the band Bauhaus kicking the film off with their gloomy "Bela Lugosi's Dead" tune and Catherine Deneuve playing an immortal Egyptian vampiress. Director Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, gives everything a very BLADE RUNNER-ish artsy-look. You get to see Susan Sarandon's boobs, a very young girl gets viciously snuffed and the ending (forced on Scott by the studio) doesn't make much sense. If they did change the ending a bit I probably woulda dug this a lot more as it is it's still a pretty stylish ride that would probably appeal a little more to 80s-obsessed mopey goth-types than myself.
Not sure what's actually going on in a lot of this movie but that's mostly due to watching a version of this that has tiny little English subtitles that frequently fall off the bottom of the screen. What I could make out though seemed like a pretty decent film about a cop who has a traumatic experience and then is afraid of guns. He's sent to a police station on an island where some gangs end up using the old ultra-violence and rape on each other. There's quite a bit of violence towards women, a couple of rapes, a guy who dies from a tree-stump up the ass and some unintentional humor from the wacky subtitles I could decipher. If you can find a good-looking, better-translated print of this somewhere(not sure if this exists?) I would recommend this for some John Woo-style, but way sleazier and goofier, Category III nastiness.
A band of cowboys, and one blonde lady, travel into Injun land in a greedy search for gold. They get picked-off one-by-one by an all-female group of topless Indian maidens. Amazingly, since this was released in 1959, we get to see long shots of our redskin-ladies, and their pale-face leader chief-lady, dancing around and letting their bosoms bounce about. That is really just about the only interesting thing about this western, well that and the fact that the screenplay was written by Ed Wood. Kinda dull but watch it if you wanna see one of the first topless-features I can think of.
A sub-par Abbott & Costello rip-off duo(Wally Brown & Alan Carney) promise zombies for a Broadway show and then have to go to the jungle and find one. While there they bump into Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor who just so happens to make zombies. This movie is really dumb and you can't help but imagine it woulda been way better with A & C in the starring roles and was titled ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE ZOMBIES! but if you can deal with a dumb 40s comedy, with the classic black slave zombie-type and a typically great Lugosi performance, I guess it's passable.
Somehow Brown and Carney made a whole series of films together but this looks like the only one that's even slightly interesting and I don't think Lugosi was in any of their other comedies.
Judging by that bloody Australian VHS-cover image up above you would think this might be one of those super grimy Jess Franco naughty nun extravaganzas but it's not really. I guess because this is one of the earlier examples of this women-in-prison-like sub-genre it's way more on the artsy-fartsy/tamer side of things. We do get a little lesbianism, some mild whipping and nun suicide but nothing is very explicitly shown outside of all the perky boobies. This is not to say it's a terrible film. It is a bit slow in spots but overall it's worth a look if you can deal with a drama on a snowy Saturday morning and if you've already seen all the wilder nuns-humping-nuns classics. If not check out SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST for a great Japanese version of this weirdo fetish. AKA UNHOLY CONVENT and DIARY OF A CLOISTERED NUN
The actual movie poster gives you a better look at the actual content of this film:
Way before he blessed the world with his magnum opus BLOODSUCKING FREAKS director Joel M. Reed made a couple of sleazy 60s sexploitation epics. This one features a young Jennifer Welles, before she became a big star in 70s hardcore porn, in the softcore story of a young gal with a very monstrous stage mom(Honey Hunter, sadly this is her only appearance) who knows the way to get ahead is to use your sexy feminine charms on anyone and everyone who can make you a big Hollywood star. There's a very John Waters-esque stilted acting style going on which gives everything a super campy feel and the movie takes some odd turns. The assorted characters are quite the scummy menagerie including a photographer who practices shooting pictures of a blow-up Easter Bunny, a bald scumbag director and Georgina Spelvin(before she became infamous in THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES) as a lesbian talent agent which leads to the expected girl-on-girl scene. Reed himself also shows up in a small role. The main downside to this is it all ends on an unsatisfying note after a fairly powerful buildup but hey ya gotta start somewhere.
For some reason I always assumed this was a prequel to the similarly-titled Mexican monster-filled flick THE SHIP OF MONSTERS but it isn't at all. This one is more like the Mexican version of ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN except that they replace the famous duo with only one moronic bumbling idiot named Clavillazzo. Most of the film is a pretty straight-on comedy until it finally ends up in a castle chock full of south-of-the-border versions of famous monsters of filmland including a Frankenstein monster(who's also a very Lurch of THE ADDAMS FAMILY-like servant), a Wolf-Man, a very skinny Mummy, a Creature From The Black Lagoon, an ape-man and a Dracula(played by German Robles who stars in a lot of these early Mexi-horrors including the title role in the EL VAMPIRO series). While our main funny-man can get a little grating at times this is such a goofy oddity that it needs to be seen by monster-kids who want to see a fairly obscure monster mash-up.
So I guess the stereotype of everyone in Canada being nice is blown apart by this film about a gang of hooligans who terrorize a douchey rich dude and his model friend. This is a really good example of grimy 70s sleaze where just about everyone outside of the main female character(played by Brenda Vaccaro who went on to be in almost everything on TV after this) is a piece of crap. I guess you could also look at this as a good feminist film if you overlook the oddball rape scenes. It all plays like a very lower-budgeted, less deep version of STRAW DOGS. The weirdest thing to me was that one of the producers here was Ivan Reitman who went on to produce GHOSTBUSTERS and tons of similar big mind-numbing Hollywood-dreck. I guess everyone has to start somewhere before selling out to the Devil. AKA THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE
This trailer makes this movie seem like a haunted house deal which it isn't:
The dumb decade known as the 80s begat the even more retarded 90s which this is clearly a great example of. Horror movies in America were now forbidden from being serious at all and everything had to include as many "witty" one-liners as possible. Thanks Freddy Krueger!
The plot here involves a serial killer turned into a psychopathic snowman. I'd only previously seen the even worse sequel, REVENGE OF THE MUTANT KILLER SNOWMAN, up until this year and this one is slightly better. The main reason for this is the shower/rape by carrot-nose sequence starring Shannon Elizabeth(who I only really know from that Jay and Silent Bob movie but she also went on to become a big name in boring Hollywood crap that your mom probably watches). Of course you could just watch that one scene and call it a day but if you like comedy/slashers I guess this is the film for you.
