VIDEO DEAD

AMANDA BY NIGHT (1981)

2012-01-27T17:32:00.000-08:00

I've seen this movie referred to as an adult version of the Jane Fonda movie KLUTE but I've never seen that one so I can't say how close this is. I have read that was a big inspiration and the basic plot, about prostitutes getting murdered, is similar. What I do know for sure is what you get here is probably one of the most well made XXX movies ever. The acting is all around good, the story about prostitutes being murdered is engaging and the sex scenes make sense and don't feel completely shoehorned in as they often times do in movies like this.

Our two main characters are played by Veronica Hart and cult Eurotrash movie fav Robert Kerman and this movie really shows them at their best. Packed with greats from the olden days of porn like Ron Jeremy(who has a standout rape scene with Lee Carroll), Jamie Gillis(as a sleazy hitman named Friday), Lisa DeLeeuw and a bunch more. I particularly thought Samantha Fox, as a heroin shooting strung out junkie whore, really added a lot to the grittiness on display. A great movie to show to someone that epitomizes why it was called the golden age of adult films.

The director Robert McCallum a.k.a. Gary Graver went on to make a bunch more XXX flicks on into the late 1990's but I doubt he ever topped this one.

Oh Ron, you were so svelte back then!:

THE NIGHT OF A THOUSAND CATS (1972)

2012-01-26T16:00:00.000-08:00

Hugo Stiglitz stars here as a woman-killing psycho, named Hugo, who grinds up his victims and feeds them to his cats. He also keeps their heads in glass jars for some reason. I had only seen Stiglitz play the good-guy/hero role in stuff like CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD and CEMETERY OF TERROR before so this was something different for him. I mean it would have been something different if Hugo acted any differently but after watching this I'm starting to think Mr. Stiglitz is not such a great actor since he doesn't really do anything which would give you a clue that he's playing a nutso strangle-happy guy. He does fly around in a helicopter a lot which seems like a strange way to stalk women but hey whatever works for ya. There's also a big burly henchman named Dorgo which reminds me of MANOS, THE HANDS OF FATE and then I feel better that I'm watching this crappy movie instead of that one.

One strange thing, among many, in this movie is why a guy who we see treating his cats like shit(he chucks one over a fence like it's a piece of trash and drowns one in a pool) keeps a thousand of them at his place. I guess he just digs watching them eat. Perhaps this is answered in the uncut 90 minute version. I've only seen the American DVD which is just over 1 hour long so I imagine there's quite a bit missing here.

Made in Mexico and directed by bad-movie legend Rene Cardona Jr. this movie is also known as BLOOD FEAST which seems like a horrible title for a movie featuring a guy that just chokes out his victims but I suppose the cats do get a blood feast of sorts.
I would recommend this only if you're a big fan of trashy Mexisploitation cinema since it does get pretty monotonous after awhile(and that's only the hour-long cut!). You would be better of just watching Rene's more exciting NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES which he made with his dad a few years before for superior bloody south of the border thrills.

Free burial insurance! Good deal:

THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES TO WASHINGTON (1977)

2012-01-24T17:05:00.000-08:00

Joey Heatherton takes over the title role as Xaviera Hollander and the first thing you notice is she's completely lost her Dutch accent and seems nothing like the character from the first film. Then things get weird. Going into this expecting it to be a continuation of the first movie you're in for quite a shock as you quickly realize that they replaced most of the dramatic elements with slapstick comedy and endless cameos of TV stars of the past. It starts off with Joe E. Ross from CAR 54 WHERE ARE YOU?, then you get Rip Taylor as a photographer, then the dad from LAVERNE & SHIRLEY, Ray Walston from MY FAVORITE MARTIAN, the general from I DREAM OF JEANIE, the guy from F-TROOP, Odd-Job from the James Bond movies, legendary midget-actor Billy Barty and those were just the ones I recognized. The list goes on and on. I was happy to see one of my favorite character actors, Mr. Sydney Lassick as a government-employed TV censor but even he couldn't save what is really a hodgepodge mess of a film. There's 70's commercial-spoofs thrown in for no real reason and I would have thought they were trying to go for a sort of AIRPLANE! satire-movie vibe except that movie didn't exist yet. Also the movie tries to shoehorn in a stupid plot about The Happy Hooker being put on trial for being immoral but these bits in-between all the silly chaos going on ends up with a jarring feeling and none of it works much at all. I think if I made this sequel I woulda went the complete opposite direction and made it a hard-edged thriller with crazy sex-hi-jinks but at least we get more boobs popping out in this than the first and that's about all I can say that's positive about it.

Stereotypical Arabs were a lot less angry in the 70's:

Joey Heatherton Happy Hooker Goes To Washington 01 -

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (1951)

2012-01-24T14:32:00.000-08:00

You get Raymond Burr, starring here, as an unruly worker who ends up killing a guy and getting a curse put on him by an old witch-lady. Naturally she turns him into a big murderous gorilla because that's what you want to do to angry guys, give them the strength of an ape. Obviously this movie is pretty nonsensical all around and the gorilla suit looks really fake as it almost always did in these old horror and jungle flicks. This also really doesn't work as a very good horror film at all since nothing is very tense or frightening.Woody Strode has a small part as a police officer and Lon Chaney Jr. is also here as a police chief and it's kinda weird seeing him in a good guy role for once in his career. Chaney doesn't have as big of a role as you might expect from seeing his name in big letters on the poster and it's really Burr's picture. The director of this, Curt Siodmak, is way better known as a writer of some of the Universal classic monster flicks(most famously THE WOLF MAN) and a bunch of other classics, maybe he shoulda stuck to writing.
I own this flick on a cheap-ass VHS as well as DVD just because it's part of a gorilla movie box-set and generally I am a fan of simian-cinema though this one is really down towards the bottom of the barrel.

CAT PEOPLE (1982)

2012-01-23T23:11:00.000-08:00

It's nice that in the 80's the remakes they made were at least remakes of old movies and not things that had just been made a year or two before like they do now. Being a big fan of the original 40's CAT PEOPLE I had to check this one out. Also being a fan of the works of director Paul Schrader(HARDCORE) I figured this one couldn't be that terrible but unfortunately it's not very good. The main problem I had is the pacing of the movie is really ponderous and hard to get through with your eyes open. It is a beautifully shot film and the the sets and stylistic choices look really nice, unfortunately it takes so long for stuff to happen that you lose interest pretty quickly. There is one gory scene where Ed Begley Jr. gets his arm ripped right off by a panther which was the highlight for me and it was nice that we get lots of totally naked Nastassja Kinski but that wasn't enough to make me choose a nice nap over ever watching this again. As is usually a good rule stick with the original formula.

THE HAPPY HOOKER (1975)

2012-01-22T06:15:00.000-08:00

The 70's rating system was a strange creature. Films full of bloody murders(BLOOD AND LACE) would oftentimes get a PG-rating and then movies like this one would come along and get rated R strictly for the sexy subject matter. Surprisingly there's little actual nudity in a film that's all about a woman's journey through the world of prostitution and finally ending up becoming a world famous madam. It's all based on a best-selling book at the time so maybe due to the infamy of it all they had to keep the kiddies away.
The film itself, to me, plays almost like a TV-movie drama and not so much an exploitation flick which you might expect. It is probably the only movie where you can see Lynn Redgrave dancing around in her underwear before going on to becoming a more respectable actress so that's something. It's interesting that the 2 big high-profile madams after Xaviera Hollander(the Mayflower Madam and Heidi Fleiss) only got TV-movies made about their exploits and that kind of makes sense since it is all really a big TV-tabloid kind of a story anyway. I did like the all-black gang of bad-ass street hookers that we meet in a holding cell, it's too bad the movie wasn't about those chicks. The other thing that kind of lets you down while viewing is that the plot never really goes anywhere and if you know the basic story of The Happy Hooker you know just about everything that you'll see here. Check it out only if you're a big fan of high-priced escorts.

PENITENTIARY (1979)

2012-01-21T03:16:00.000-08:00

I've viewed all the movies in the PENITENTIARY trilogy back in the VHS days and I remember little bits and pieces from each one. Don't ask me what scene is from which movie though since they've all kinda blurred together in my mind. I know Mr. T is in part 2 and I know there's a midget called "The Big Thump" or something like that in part 3 but the only thing I recalled from the first one was that it was the obviously lowest-budgeted of them all so upon viewing this again recently it was almost like watching a completely new film. This must be what Alzheimer's disease is like. What a joy it will be to watch TAXI DRIVER all fresh again when I'm 87 years young.
Being on a low-budget definitely works in this films favor giving it a more gritty and dirty look and making it seem like a place you never want to end up especially if you're a white guy since about 95% of the inmates here are black fellows and from what I know of prison life racism is still very popular there.
Most people would probably rate the Sean Penn movie BAD BOYS as the best example of a men-in-prison film but I would put this series over that just for my personal love of the exploitation elements present and you're just in for a better time watching it. It's interesting that this movie played in grindhouse as well as arthouse theaters upon it's initial release. I guess the more dramatic scenes with the wise old black trainer do add a little deeper meaning than your typical sweaty guys shanking each other flick but not enough to distract from the more sleazy parts. Even if this first part is the least memorable it's still a fun watch for some jailhouse brawling action. You also get the expected man-on-man action and that includes some off-screen ass-raping. Also a boxing movie is mixed in for added manly thrills. Also look for Porky from PORKY'S as the sweaty rotund warden which is a perfect role for him really.

I love how a funky rock band just starts jamming in the prison yard. Reality maybe wasn't the strongest aspect of this film:

INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)

2012-01-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

If there's another movie that screams "THIS IS THE 1950's!!" louder than this one I have no idea what that could be. It's the classic tale of Martians invading the Earth and it all revolves around a little kid. It's also got the same kinda premise as INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, which came out a few years later, where people's bodies are being taken over by the alien menace and it's up to our non-conformist hero to save the day. Of course this is a common theme in 50's sci-fi and is usually chalked up to the anti-communist ideas of the day. The Mars-men suits look pretty silly by the standards of today(just looks like they're wearing some indoor/outdoor carpeting but the ping-pong ball eyes are a nice touch) and the little head Martian(who's really just a head in a glass bubble) still looks pretty cool. Apparently that role was played by a creepy little midget lady. Midgets always spruce films up.
There are two different endings to this classic depending on if you're watching the American release(it was all a dream) or the alternate European cut(that shit really happened!). I think the dream-ending one is a little bit of a cop-out as it usually is but overall the film would probably work way better if you're a little kid with an imagination or just a classic sci-fi fan who doesn't mind some clunky FX and a kid who can be annoying at times as most kids are. Look for Barbara Billingsley(June Cleaver from LEAVE IT TO BEAVER) as a secretary in one scene.
There's a rumor that this was originally shot to be shown in 3-D and the title sequence looks like it's coming right at ya but apparently this is a false rumor.
This was remade in 1986 by Tobe Hooper starring Karen Black and I remember it not being that terrible back when I originally saw it but it's been a long time.

WHY? WHY? WHY? Could Happen.. but probably not:

DEADLY WEAPONS (1974)

2012-01-15T18:20:00.000-08:00

This movie is great in a lot of ways because it's all about a woman(Chesty Morgan) who has enormous boobs that she uses as the titular "Deadly Weapons". Yes she suffocates men between the 2 massive mounds of tit-flesh she possesses. It's also a completely bizarre film due to it being filmed by the legendary Doris Wishman. Her style of shooting random objects comes into play along with strange overdubbing of people's voices and a plot that seems to have been written by a young kid obsessed with breasts. It's also a bit weird that a soft-core sex movie which I'm assuming was supposed to have been a turn-on for the gentlemen who saw this originally in the theater is about the most un-erotic thing you could ever let yours eyes behold. The main problem here is our star Miss Chesty always seems so miserable and I guess I would be too if I had to lug around ridiculously huge melons like hers all day. I think she smiles maybe once or twice throughout the whole film which makes me think filming this wasn't the happiest event of her life. In addition to the negative vibes you might pick up on the potato-shaped Chesty isn't exactly a beauty pageant winner either and the outfits they put her in are amazing awful examples of what I'm guessing was maybe fashionable for a 1920's burlesque show and even that's a little doubtful. The outrageousness of it all does prevail as you get a stupid plot about mobsters and Chesty's revenge for them killing her boyfriend. You also get DEEP THROAT star Harry Reems as one of the tough guy baddies and a little blood here and there. Worth a look just for it's unbelievability if not anything else.
There was another Wishman flick the same year(most likely filmed at the same time) called DOUBLE AGENT 73 where Morgan gets a camera implanted in one boob and becomes a top-heavy secret agent.

deadly weapons (1974) (chesty morgan) cult - exploitation

NEW WAVE HOOKERS (1986)

2012-01-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

The 80's were a decade when porn was steadily on the decline. Shooting on video took over and films were dying off due to the comparable expenses involved. Despite this The Dark Brothers churned out some memorable titles in this decade, two that I recall most vividly are LET ME TELL YA BOUT WHITE CHICKS and this one here. It seems that the brothers style of script-writing consisted of throwing random elements into a hat and picking them out. How else would you explain Jamie Gillis playing a Japanese punk rock pimp and another guy who is half dog/half telephone? It's these random scatterbrained elements that make this throwback to the VHS age such an interesting watch.
There seems to be at least 3 different versions of this movie floating around. The original one features an underage Traci Lords, this one, at least here in America is technically illegal. The second version has Traci replaced on the video box with Ginger Lynn and Lords scene cut out and the 3rd is a weird one with all the racist dialogue cut out. Did I mention this movie is jam-packed with racist moments? You get Mr. Gillis calling his partner(played by the guy who also played the black guy "Sticks" on HAPPY DAYS) a negro(in a super-exaggerated Japanese stereotypical accent) constantly amongst other politically incorrect moments. I guess upon later release they didn't want a stupid filthy nonsensical porn featuring people selling women's bodies to offend any sensitive viewers? I was lucky enough to catch this playing in a crazy little theater recently and it was worth trekking out of my basement of doom for.
There were 5 sequels throughout the 90's which didn't really have anything to do with the original story and a sorta remake/homage in 2006 called NEU WAVE HOOKERS. I might check those out if I didn't already know that more modern-day porn is for the most part a complete waste of time.

Cool opening song by the band The Plugz:

STREETWISE (1984)

2012-01-11T17:53:00.000-08:00

Documentary about messed-up kids living on the streets in Seattle back in the 80's. Not a scripted movie, there's no narration like a typical doc and you as the viewer are just given a little view into the lives of some pretty unfortunate young people. Everything is told from their point of view. 14 year old prostitutes, suicidal runaways, dumpster-diving degenerates and your more typical hopeless human throwaways. I recall watching this movie on PBS years ago and it works well as liberal propaganda to show how messed up our society is on the bottom rungs. Not having any particular political agenda myself I just enjoyed seeing the spotlight on a segment of society that most comfortable Americans would rather never think about. Reality in general seems to bore most middle-class folks as they submerge themselves in their fake "reality-TV" and make-believe "news" programs. Things like this would play all the time if TV really meant anything but anyone who bothers to think about it knows that isn't the case.
I was curious about the one older pot-smokin' hippie-looking guy, Jack. that hung out with one of the little kids. His story was never really told except for saying he was a guy you could trust. I guess he was too old to focus on in this but I kinda wanted the camera to follow him around.
The director of this, Martin Bell, went on to make a more Hollywood-ized/"real movie" version of this called AMERICAN HEART with Eddie Furlong but I doubt it would be nearly as interesting.

THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK (1972)

2012-01-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

Director Charles B. Pierce was a bit of a trend-setter with THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN in '76 which was an early slasher type flick and this one which kind of sets down the blueprint for the whole pseudo-documentary thing that became popular with THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. In addition to that it's also an early example of a Bigfoot movie which became quite a popular genre throughout the rest of 70's. He smartly used a bunch of non-actors and shot in a fairly straight-forward documentary style with reenactments of supposedly actual events which only adds to the realism. It also reminds me a bit of that show IN SEARCH OF... which it also predates.
The monster itself is technically not a Bigfoot since he lives in the swamps of Arkansas and seems more soggy but their aren't many differences besides that. The movie itself seems a bit over long since there's really no plot and just a bunch of little scenes of monster shenanigans but it is a fun spooky watch and I do recall catching this when I was younger on a TV showing and being a little creeped out by the whole thing thanks to the overall atmosphere created. My favorite scene has got to be the guy trying to take a shit until the old bog monster interrupts him. The main negative for me would be the terrible folk-songs that pop up during the movie that could have cut down that running time a bunch.
Amazingly this movie was a huge box-office hit and packed drive-ins all over for a while after it was released. It was also the 7th highest grossing movie of 1976 which is incredible for something that looks like it was shot in someone's swampy, woodsy backyard. It was truly the time of real independent film-making where anyone with enough guts to try and make a movie had a shot. Too bad those days are long gone.
There was a RETURN TO BOGGY CREEK in '77 which didn't really have anything to do with this one and a BOGGY CREEK II in '85 also directed by Pierce, which I've only seen on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER and it seemed pretty awful. There's also a couple of more recent BOGGY CREEKS(including this piece of crap here: BOGGY CREEK) but I'm gonna stick with the original.

HOUSE OF WAX (1953)

2012-01-08T17:30:00.000-08:00

Vincent Price plays the sort of role that he would become famous for in what is one of the most gimmicky horror flicks of the 50's. The fact that this was shot in 3-D is shoved in your face constantly(which woulda seemed way cooler if I was watching it in 3-D). There's stuff flying at your face, everything from battle mace's to rubber-balls, and seemingly a commercial for the 3-D process right in the middle of the movie as someone starts talking to the audience telling them to watch out for his bouncy balls and whatnot. I do recall them showing this along with CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON on TV a lot back when they would do those 3-D TV specials back when I was a kid. I was always more of a fan of the Creature since he was a way cooler monster and I guess I still feel the same way. I also feel like this movie is specifically made to be viewed in a theater and watching it in any other way loses a great deal. There was even an intermission in the DVD version that I viewed recently.
So check this out if you get the chance to see it the way God intended or if you're just a big Vincent Price fan. It's also got Mr. Charles Bronson in one of his earliest roles as a mute henchman named Igor so that's something to see right there.
This was remade in 2005 but all I remember from that one was that Paris Hilton gets killed in a pretty brutal way and there was an actual house made entirely of wax. Like the screenwriters said "hey man let's take the title literally and make a house of wax!"- fucking idiots! Also technically this 50's version is a remake of a 1930's flick called THE MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM which had Fay Wray in it. I've never seen that one but I'm sure it's better than that new shit.

The most ballyhoo-packed trailer ever!:

THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF (1962)

2012-01-06T20:52:00.000-08:00

Director Jess Franco is up there among my favorite directors of cult and oddball cinema. Of course watching his movies is always a gamble since they range from amazingly strange oddball classics(like this one) to stuff that is almost non-view-able(like his newer shot-on-video stuff) to everything in-between but they almost always have that touch of sleazy, jazz-fueled madness that Franco is infamous for. The guy has made almost 200 films so there's still a ton of stuff I've never seen and probably never will have the chance to but I imagine if I ever did manage to see all his movies some great puzzle would be solved and I would finally "get it" or maybe my brain and eyeballs would just melt-away in a puddle of cinematic sewage. Either way I'm sure it would be unforgettable.
Franco had directed a few films before this one but it's his earliest flick that I've seen and the one I always think of as kicking off his long road through low-brow sleazeball cinema history. It's really just a take-off on Franjus's EYES WITHOUT A FACE which came out 2 years earlier but less artsy and with added nudity(if you watch the uncut version) and a more Universal monster movie vibe. The titular Dr. Orloff(whose name is taken from Bela Lugosi's character in THE HUMAN MONSTER) is played by Howard Vernon(who Franco would reuse in loads of similar roles) and he's naturally obsessed by the idea of grafting a new face onto his scarred daughter by using the skin of local barroom whores. Orloff is assisted by a strange cock-eyed blind man named Morpho who helps Orloff by biting his abducted victims on the neck to subdue them. He also gets to do all the heavy lifting. There's also an ex-lover of Orloff's/maid character who is the only one who treats Morpho like the sweet boy he is under that gruff monster exterior. All the weird characters that pop up add to the offbeat feeling that this movie has from a local town lunatic to a drunk that looks like Chico Marx. It all adds up to what I really think is Franco's high-point as far as telling a straight forward story before his filmography nose-dived into some very off the wall concotions and his obsessions with zoom-lens and hairy pubic areas consumed him. Mr. Jess would go on to use this same plot in at least 4 or 5 very similar movies over the years but check out his first attempt for a true Euro-horror classic complete with a KING KONG ending.

Do you like to quiver and quake?:

HARD TIMES (1975)

2012-01-02T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is probably one of my favorite Charles Bronson flicks because he's basically playing a bad ass throughout the whole movie. He's a guy who doesn't say too much and does his talking with his fists. This, of course, would go on to define Bronson throughout most of the rest of his career. Directed by Walter Hill(his first movie) who would go on to make THE WARRIORS and starring James Coburn and Martin Strother this one is well-acted and really well done all around for a film with a pretty simple plot-line about street-fighting and being a tough guy with honor and all that. It's sort of an earlier, grittier version of ROCKY really. Also appearing in a main villain role is a bald headed fellow named Robert Tessier who would go on to play Mr. Clean in commercials. So if you ever wanted to see a fight between Mr. Bronson and Mr. Clean here's your big chance.

HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP (1980)

2012-01-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

This movie is great because what you get is basically an old-fashioned 50's style monster movie updated to the 80's with nudity and rape-happy mutant fish-men. According to this flick bad salmon causes fish to turn into horny humanoids and it all starts off with a bang as a kid gets killed and a boat explodes. From there a dog gets throttled to death and it just gets nastier as we go on. One of the weirdest things in this whole movie is probably the part where a ventriloquist gets killed and the eyes of his dummy keep moving back and forth like he was some kinda haunted evil dummy. Unfortunately he never returns to battle the fish-people in a big devil-dummy Vs. killer walking-fish showdown.
I've seen a lot of comparisons between this and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and I guess I can see that but this movie will never be thought of as the classic CREATURE is and it's also like 10 times as nasty as that 50's movie ever was. This was made for Roger Corman's New World Pictures company and there are rumors that Corman had additional scenes of gore and rape filmed when he wasn't happy with the finished product from female director Barbara Peters. It certainly made the movie a lot less dull to me.(IMDB lists two directors because of this)
A remake was done by cable channel Showtime in 1996 using some footage from the original but cutting out most of the sex and violence. I guess this was because movies weren't allowed to be very exciting in the 90's. Great job Showtime, now I'll never watch that.

HOSTEL PART III (2011)

2012-01-01T10:08:00.000-08:00

I know it's popular among many horror fans to hate anything in the "torture-porn" genre and I do hate the SAW movies(at least the first one and what little bits I've seen of the others) but I never had a problem with these HOSTEL movies. I caught the first two in the theater and thought they were entertainingly stupid movies obviously made by a horror fan. I know it's also popular to rag on director Eli Roth but I don't know the guy personally and don't really care if he's an asshole or not. I'm sure there are lots of movies I like that were made by complete assholes.
This direct to DVD sequel isn't directed by Mr. Roth but by Scott Spiegel who slasher movie fans will remember as making the killer-in-a-supermarket flick THE INTRUDER and he's worked a lot with Sam Raimi so I guess that gives him some kinda horror cred there. There are a few problems with this movie, first the only hostel in the movie isn't even the main setting and is gone before the story even gets going, second one is that it takes places in Las Vegas which changes the whole feel of the series and finally there's a death by cgi cockroaches scene which might be one of the stupidest ways I've ever seen anyone die in a movie. There's also a rip-off of a gore scene from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. But in saying that even if it doesn't fit right in with the other two films I enjoyed it for what it was, which was another stupid movie full of stupid characters being captured, tortured and killed(modern day version of a slasher flick really). They throw a few twists into the expected formula, some of which don't make much sense if you think about them too hard, but at least they made the effort to try something slightly different. Hopefully this is the last in this series though since I think the whole "torture-horror" thing seems more dated than ever at this point.

THE SHE-CREATURE (1956)

2011-12-31T18:32:00.000-08:00

So according to this movie, if I understand it correctly, mankind has evolved from these creatures that look like a mix between THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and an insect or maybe a crab. The one in this movie is a female so, of course, it has big boobs. This sounds pretty ridiculous but the monster looks kind of cool for the era it was made in and she is pretty neat while slapping people dead with her big crazy claw-hands but unfortunately she never chops off any heads like my fav 50's monster THE MONSTER FROM PIEDRAS BLANCAS(which is another creature this She-Creature resembles).
For a cheap American International Pictures monster movie this one has a pretty convoluted plot about a hypnotist who can bring manifestations of a person's past lives to physical reality. It also could have used a little more monster action and a lot less talking about how dumb the whole idea of this hypnotist having actual powers really is(we already know that!) and the whole love triangle sub-plot is not particularly exciting either. The wacky butler whose bow-tie flies off when he gets excited was unexpectedly goofy.
If you're a fan of stuff like THE WASP WOMAN or any of the other quickly made 50's AIP monster flicks this should work for you. I did like how the movie ended with "THE END" followed by a big question mark but as far as I know there was never any GROOM OF THE SHE-CREATURE made. This title was used by Cinemax in 2001 for a movie that was supposedly an homage to this but it has a very different plot and I've never seen it.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)

2011-12-29T18:07:00.000-08:00

I picked up a few of these Hammer Collection movies cheaply on VHS recently and have been working my way through them. Not being a huge fan of Hammer studios in general most of the stuff has been at least mildly entertaining but this one is probably my least favorite so far. It's a little surprising since I've only heard good things about this and have even seen it near the top of a few people's lists of favorite Hammer flicks. I did like the silly Satanic rituals on display and it all seems shot well enough maybe it's just the fact that Christopher Lee plays the movie's hero that throws me off. I mean the guy is so great at being the evil villain! Why didn't they cast him as the head of the devil-cult? Was Peter Cushing too busy for this good-guy role? I think that would have made the movie a bit more entertaining to me. Another thing that stood in a bad way were the terrible special FX, especially the scene of the giant magical tarantula attacking which looked really awful but I guess I should be happy that it wasn't some CGI cartoon crap. Also speaking of magic this movie relied on lots of magic spells and whatnot which I found pretty dumb. I probably won't be watching this again anytime soon but if you're a real Hammer fan apparently it's wonderful. A.K.A.-THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

FEMALE JUNGLE (1955)

2011-12-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

If you ever wanted to see Jayne Mansfield make out with Lawrence Tierney this is the movie for you. Mansfield is featured here in her first movie, Tierney, best known to Tarantino fans as Joe from RESERVOIR DOGS, plays a heavy drinking detective(meanwhile in real life he was a heavy drinking actor) and as a bonus you get John Carradine as a classy fellow who wears an ascot. It's mainly for these three that this movie is worth checking out and they all do a pretty decent job but overall it's a pretty standard film-noir-ish murder mystery about a guy running around strangling gals. Luckily it's only a little over an hour so you don't have to waste too much time with it. I was also a little disappointed that this wasn't a women-in-prison picture since the title seems custom made for that kind of sleazy flick.

SUE PRENTISS, R.N. (1975)

2011-12-19T17:08:00.000-08:00

This porn flick starts out strangely enough with one of my favorite 70's porn actors Bobby Astyr coming up from an underground expedition with a few other guys covered in muck. Apparently there was a big epidemic of giant alligators living in the New York City sewer system back then and porn stars were sent down to take care of this problem. From there our heroes get decontaminated and fucked and sucked by a bunch of nurses including Annie Sprinkle who I best recall from making love to a burn victim in one of Nick Zedd's short films. Also eating Chinese food leads to a big orgy. After the weird opening scene it all gets pretty typical and, even with Mr. Astyr's amusing crazy ramblings, is only worth watching if you want to see a few chubby chicks and some hairy guys rolling around.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

2011-12-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

Producer Val Lewton is responsible for a bunch of neat little 40's horror flicks like I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE and a few Boris Karloff titles. He's probably one of the most famous producers in classic horror films and this is my fav from his filmography. This is the kind of movie I hated when I was a kid because it deals more with characters relationships and not enough monster action but watching it as an adult I can appreciate the subtlety and subtexts that are apparent throughout the movie. Most of the reviews I've seen for this over the years point out the comment that it makes on the sexual repression of women and a woman's fear of her own sexuality but to me this movie always seemed like a thinly veiled metaphor for a lesbian who tries to become a member of the "straight" world and since it was made in the 40's this couldn't be made very clear without it being censored out of existence. Of course this might not have been the original intention at all and I'm just putting a modern spin on it. Either way it's all done with a really noir-ish, moody atmosphere and you do get a little cat-lady monster action in the big finale.
There was a sequel to this made a couple of years later and a remake in the 80's. I've never seen either one but I remember the trailer to the 80's version playing on TV when it first came out and it seems like they had no trouble embracing the sexual ideas only hinted at in the original. Gotta check that out sometime.

PICASSO TRIGGER (1988)

2011-12-17T14:48:00.000-08:00

Working my way through the Andy Sidaris box set in chronological order I think HARD TICKET TO HAWAII is my fav and this one is probably the worst so far. By this point Sidaris' formula consisted of teaming up two hot chicks as secret agent types, a bunch of explosions, gun-fu, an overly convoluted plot, exotic locales(a good excuse to go to places like Hawaii and Las Vegas no doubt) and top it all off with plenty of naked chicks. This one also has a Fabio-look-alike kung-fu guy, a Michael Jackson/Billy Blanks-looking fellow who doesn't do much of anything and a little blood-spillage. You also get some really lame striptease vignettes from our lady heroes, Hope Marie Carlton and Dona Spier, and a bad-guy's eyes get poked out THREE STOOGES-style. Not the worst thing you could watch but it coulda used more craziness to put it over the top.
Nine more films to go in this set. Watching them together would be way too repetitive but at least that's a lot of boobies left to go!

Fabio-Fu in French!:

SCREW BALLS (1983)

2011-12-17T12:54:00.000-08:00

Whereas the 1970's were the high-point for horror films the 1980's really were the high-point for stupid teen sex comedies. It really only seems natural since most of the horror films were just comedies in disguise anyway that this would be the era to go to for cheap laughs and naked boobs. There were 70's T & A flicks but they didn't perfect the simplistic formula until movies like PORKY'S and guys like the writer of this, Jim Wynorski, started churning them out. Watching this Canadian filmed movie today it feels like it was made on a different planet. It's so cheaply done and also riddled with insensitive sexist jokes that no one would ever give this a major release today looking like this. It's also brilliantly done in giving the viewer exactly what you want from a movie like this. Why this film is set in the 60's I'm not sure since that never really seems to fit the look or feel of anything going on. Our gang of heroes cover all of your expected stereotypes including a preppy, a nerd(if you ever wondered what the lead singer of THE TOY DOLLS would look like with his cock stuck in a bowling ball here's your chance to find out), the new kid, the jock and a fat guy named Jerkovski(who naturally can't help jerking-off everywhere). You also get a big-boobed stripper scene, a girl who deep-throats sausages for fun, teddy-bear humping, strip-bowling and characters named Purity Busch and Bootsie Goodhead and it all takes place at T & A High. What more could you want from a dumb teen flick?
Director Rafal Zielinski went on to make LOOSE SCREWS(a.k.a. SCREWBALLS II) and SCREWBALL HOTEL because apparently back in the 80's you could make a living spitting out really dumb flicks.

Upskirts!:

DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

2011-12-16T17:58:00.000-08:00

DAWN OF THE DEAD has almost always been there in my life. It started out as movie I had just heard about from my older cousins. They were lucky enough to have actually seen it during it's initial run at a local drive in theater. It was spoken of with awe and disgust having apparently caused at least one cousin to vomit all over the place due to the unexpected gore quotient. Hard to believe it now but this movie was groundbreaking in that category at the time. I only dreamed of the day I would get to see this notorious classic having to make do with just fantasizing over the pictures in my well read FANGORIA magazines and making up my own story-line in my little deranged head. It's strange to think back about a movie that was etched in my mind as a classic before I even saw it. Finally somewhere in the 80's we got a VCR and this had to be one of my first VHS rentals and all my dreams came true. The movie turned out to be something that even surpassed the insane film I had imagined it would be.
DAWN as well as being a classic horror-filled follow up to director George Romero's original zombie flick, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, works equally well as an action flick and also just as a gross-out gore flick. There's not too many other films I can think of that mix action, blood and spookiness together and work very well(also there's a bit of humor thrown in here and there but not enough to make you groan like almost every horror film made after the 1980's got going). You get tons of kills, including intestines ripped from stomachs, glorious 70's super bright red blood splattered everywhere, machete mayhem, shotgun blasts, kid zombies getting whacked, a kick-ass biker gang, a chopped-off zombie skullcap, machine-gun hi-jinks etc, etc... any real horror fan already knows all this stuff.
Having recently watched the Dario Argento producers cut of this flick I have to say I prefer Romero's version a bit more since he mixes the use of library music with stuff from the band Goblin a lot better and it seems to have been edited in a more linear way. That might also just be because that's how I grew up seeing the film and it's what I'm used to. Either way it's still the high-point of the whole zombie film sub-genre for me.

SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT (1974)

2011-12-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

I've owned this movie for years on a cheap-ass dollar DVD and just now managed to make it through the whole movie without falling asleep. I think maybe I should get a medal for this. If you haven't figured it out yet this movie is really slow going. On the surface it has a lot of things going for it. For one it was released in the magical cinematic year of 1974. Some of the greatest horror and exploitation films ever came out this year. Another positive is Mary Woronov who is in a ton of great Roger Corman flicks and is one of my personal favorite actresses. But even her greatness, along with John Carradine, who doesn't really do much here, don't really make this film worth seeking out. I will give the film credit for creating a really creepy atmospheric mood and if you watch it alone at 3am it does give you a bit of a spooky feeling thanks mostly to the whispering murderer here. There's also a couple of giallo-esque moments with a black-gloved killer who gets a couple of bloody kills in but it's all kind of spread out among a bunch of boring and confusing dialogue scenes.
I've seen people give this movie credit for inspiring Bob Clark's BLACK CHRISTMAS which I guess is based on the phone calling killer's weirdness but it seems kind of stupid to say one was copied from the other since they both came out around the same time and even if this is true Clark made a way more entertaining film. Check that one out for a real holiday slasher classic and only watch this if you're a cheap DVD buying gentleman like myself.

RASPUTIN: THE MAD MONK (1966)

2011-12-13T17:45:00.000-08:00

Christopher Lee gets to play a villain a little bit different than the Dracula's and Frankenstein monsters that he normally did in this one. Here he plays a monk who seems to have some supernatural healing and hypnotic powers as well as being a nifty dancer. I like the way this film starts out since old Rasputin is portrayed basically as a long-haired drunken part-animal who then turns into a bit of a woman-beating rapist. After this he's kicked out of his monastery and goes about climbing the social ladder using his charms and spooky powers. We're never really told exactly what the hell his powers really are so basically he's just an evil dude. The rest of the movie pretty much plays out like the more typical Hammer films of this time with the monster doing naughty things until he's tricked into getting himself killed. Not the best or worst from Hammer but an OK time-waster and you get a hand chopped off, acid thrown in the face, a slit-wrist suicide and just about the most G-rated sex scene I've ever seen.
Director Don Sharp would go on to make the great zombie biker flick PSYCHOMANIA. RASPUTIN was released in America on a double-bill with THE REPTILE and you got a free clip-on beard. Not sure how that was supposed to protect you from Rasputin but that's the gimmick they went with.

BLACK CANDLES (1982)

2011-12-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

This Spanish movie is mostly just a bunch of soft-core sex scenes interrupted occasionally by some talking about Satanism. The only really memorable scenes involve a portly fellow having a large sword shoved up his ass for knowing too much about the devil group and one that even tops that where a lady fucks a goat in a barn because that's the kind of kinky bestiality shit Satan is into. The goat-fucking scene is cut from the VHS version I have of this but if you need to see it uncut it's right there on YouTube for all the kiddies to watch. Unfortunately this isn't quite enough for me to recommend anyone else sit through this flick unless devil-praising, artsy euro-porn really turns you on.

The story goes that director Jose Ramon Larraz was trying to push the envelope in Spanish exploitation films with this after the death of Spain's leader Francisco Franco. You see Franco didn't like sex in films very much and he tried to keep things pretty clean while he was in charge. So what Larraz did here is jam-pack his film with sleazy sex and talk of the devil. I can appreciate the effort but unfortunately even the director himself didn't really like the way this film turned out since he disowned it after it was released and didn't like to talk about it. Larraz earlier on did make a pretty decent lesbian vampire flick in England called VAMPYRES which you're better off watching than this.

SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT PART 2 (1987)

2011-12-11T06:24:00.000-08:00

Caught this last night in a cramped little theater in Brooklyn full of loud obnoxious drunken and/or pot-smoking hipsters and mutants and that's probably the best way to watch this sequel to the notorious controversial holiday classic. Almost half of this movie is comprised of a bunch of flashbacks to the first movie so watching them back to back is probably pretty pointless. It's also pointless trying to understand how Ricky, the little brother of the original Santa Claus-killer, who's telling us these tales, knows exactly what happened since he's not even present in most of the flashback stuff. The new material is also pretty similar to the first since it's just little brother Ricky going nutso, finding a Santa suit, murdering attempted rapists, his girlfriend and her creepy ex-boyfriend and ironically enough, for me anyway, a guy who talks loudly in a movie theater. The main difference is that it's supposed to take place in December but everything looks very Spring-like outside.
The most memorable scene, and popular YouTube clip, has our hero/villain shooting some suburban slob putting out his garbage cans while yelling "garbage day!" that delighted the weirdos and brought the house down last night. So if you think you would enjoy a stupid 80's Christmas slasher flick where overbearing nuns are just about equally as naughty as serial killers then have a couple of beers so you can drown out the worst acting you've probably ever seen and check this out.

Happy Garbage Day everyone!:

GODZILLA VS. THE COSMIC MONSTER (1974)

2011-12-10T12:28:00.000-08:00

One of the sillier Godzilla flicks. Not quite as silly as that one where he does flying dropkicks and teams up with a giant robot(this movie here) but pretty close. In this one some aliens who look like they came from THE PLANET OF THE APES build a giant robot Godzilla(MECHA-GODZILLA!) to take over the Earth, or at least the Japanese part of the planet. There's a giant floppy-eared dog monster named King Seesar and the spiky-backed monster from GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN(Angilas) shows up and gets his jaw broken in a bloody battle. There's also a couple of secret agent/spy types running around and a lot of unintentional comedy. This looks like it might have been one of the cheapest Godzilla movies ever made since everything looks especially super fake from the awful monster costumes(besides Mecha-Godzilla who looks pretty neat) to the Halloween-masked ape aliens but I think that's what makes it such a memorably awful film and a great throwback to my childhood of watching these movies on the 4 o'clock movie every day during Godzilla week here in New York.
Watching this more recently in a theater was an interesting experience especially when myself and the group of friends I was with were told to not be so loud during the film. I guess having a good time during a silly film is insulting to hardcore Godzilla fans. What a bunch of assholes. Maybe they should start showing these movies in churches where theses morons can sit in silence and enjoy their rubber-suit wrestling matches in peace.

This movie was originally released in the U.S. as GODZILLA VS. THE BIONIC MONSTER until THE BIONIC MAN T.V. show producers sued over the use of that word:

and later on it was rereleased as part of this monster-rific triple bill:

ROCKTOBER BLOOD (1984)

2011-12-08T16:35:00.000-08:00

"The ultimate Rocktober blood and gore show!"

Oh ROCKTOBER BLOOD you're so stupid. What you have here is a really bottom-of-the-barrel slasher flick that mixes a little heavy metal in with a confusing story of a lead singer maybe coming back from the dead and killing ladies. Being a fan of stupid slasher flicks in general this one is even a little too crappy for me. The main problem is the story-line which makes no sense but it's also not helped any by the strange pacing of the film and the not-so-good acting. On the surface you have all the elements that you need, gratuitous nudity, bloody slashings and even a super cheesy rock band thrown in for a few chuckles. Also there's a neat climax where a head is chopped off a gal and tossed into the audience in the middle of a concert(that's a great trick that more bands should try to emulate). Unfortunately all these things don't make this one very easy to sit through. I'm sure there were better metal slasher flicks in the 80's, maybe something like TRICK OR TREAT, oh no wait that sucked also, OK just stick with my personal fave dumb rockin horror flick HARD ROCK ZOMBIES and ignore this crapfest.

Cheese Rock!:

BLOODY CHRISTMAS (1999)

2011-12-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

A stupid but amusing short French flick about a Christmas tree gaining sentience and seeking revenge on an unlucky fellow. It's all in French but that doesn't matter because you would have to be a complete imbecilic moron to not understand this movie. There's a sequel out there also. There's also a similar but way better and way gorier Canadian short film called TREEVENGE about chopped-down Christmas trees getting their vengeance that may have been influenced by this. You should definitely check that one out if you dig this at all.

"Bloody Christmas" by silviasegarra

THE IMPOSSIBLE KID (1982)

2011-12-07T18:35:00.000-08:00

"Goddamned midget! He's beginning to get my goat."

If you enjoyed the exploits of Filipino midget star Weng Weng in FOR Y'UR HEIGHT ONLY then you have to catch this sequel for more wacky adventures of secret agent 00. More insane stunts from our little guy including some death-defying tight-rope walking, using a bedsheet as a parachute and a crazy mini-motorbike jumping over a cliff bit as well as all kinds of kung-fu/chop-socky antics. One thing that did get on my nerves with this one is the repetitive use of the Pink-Panther theme as well as a couple of other musical cues that show up over and over again until you want to stick chopsticks in your ear-holes. But if you can overlook that you will get to see the amazing spectacle of a 3 foot tall man beating the living shit out of full-grown bad-guy terrorists. Speaking of our terrorists their leader wears a nifty hood like a true super-criminal and they're not above sneaking around in awful drag get-ups so that's something. Other highlights include our little hero getting stuck in a birdcage after being captured, Weng getting all the chicks he can handle and the action-packed finale where Weng gets his hands on a machine-gun that's bigger than him and runs around killing mother-fuckers.
A sequel titled LICENSE EXPIRED is promised in the end credits but I'm pretty sure that one was never made and that's a damn shame.

THE WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN (1971)

2011-12-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

The 5th film in the Paul Naschy Wolfman(or El Hombre Lobo) series is(along with FURY OF THE WOLFMAN) one of the ones I've probably seen the most times. It was always the most accessible starting back when it was on a cheap-o VHS tape and later on when it ended up on every horror movie 10, 20 or 50 pack DVD set. So solely for nostalgic reasons it might be my fav. Having caught this recently in a theater it remains a fun if not creaky old throwback to the days of the great Universal monster mashes. In this one Naschy comes back to life again(after dying in FURY) and hooks up with some ladies, as he always does, and then later on runs into a vampire chick who likes to spread her undead disease around. Also one of the zombies from TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD shows up in one scene for no real reason. You get plenty of bare barrel-chested Naschy here, since he loves to show-off his awesome pecs so much, and of course some hot women turned into bloodsuckers.
These Naschy werewolf flicks are all somewhat similar so you know what to expect going in and if you can dig an updated version of the classic monster movies of the 30's with some boobs and blood thrown in then you're in for a good time. I tend to enjoy these Spanish films more than their duller British counterparts made by Hammer films just because they always have a crazier feel to them and a slightly more chaotic vibe. Check it out for some neck-ripping, blood-drinking, head-chopping thrills.

BIG BAD MAMA (1974)

2011-12-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

This Roger Corman-produced boobs/car-crashing/gangster classic is an all around good time for fans of trashy drive-in flicks from the high-point of this type of cinema. The movie is jam-packed with cult movie stars and a few more mainstream types. Of course you get Angie Dickinson looking very hot as Mama and one of her 2 super hot daughters is the great Robbie Lee from SWITCHBLADE SISTERS and the other one is Candy from THE CANDY SNATCHERS. Mama's two main love interests are Tom Skerritt from ALIEN and Captain Kirk himself, Mr. William Shatner. The legendary Dick Miller also has a fairly large role as a bumbling cop out to stop our criminal heroes in their misadventures. I also spotted the late great director Paul Bartel boogieing down in a party scene. With a cast like that it would probably be pretty hard to not have something at least mildly entertaining and I think this one just has a great vibe going through the whole movie that it's hard not to have fun watching it. It also doesn't hurt that it's full of pro-feminist sex and shoot-outs. It's interesting that all the people we're supposed to root for in the film are on the wrong side of the law and people get shot and killed but it's all done with such a comic-book/cheesy feeling that you never get too worried that things aren't gonna work out even when they don't. There was a sequel in the 80's by Jim Wynorski but I don't recall much about it. Might have to check that one out again soon.

GOODFELLAS (1990)

2011-12-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

Most people would probably go with THE GODFATHER as the greatest mobster film of all time but this is the one I would choose and I've re-watched it way more times than Francis Ford Coppola's epic.
What can you say about this movie? Everyone and their Uncle Nickie knows this movie inside and out and probably quotes it on a semi-regular basis. Martin Scorsese re-invents and perfects the gangster movie and it's all based on actual events. He also proves that he is one of the most important American filmmakers ever. Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci would both go on to become walking parodies of their on-screen personas partially due to the popularity of this film. Ray Liotta would go on to have his brains eaten in that Hannibal Lecter movie and Mr. Scorsese would go on to pretty much remake this a few years later as CASINO and that movie was also just about equally amazing. In this one you get an iconic kitchen knife stabbing, a foot shot off and plenty of beatings and shootings to go around. Also interesting and unique is the way the voice-over narration jumps from one character to the next giving you differing points of view to create a believable world of criminal hi-jinks. Martin Scorsese's mom shows up playing Pesci's mom which is one of my favorite scenes just because it seems so silly in the middle of such a deadly serious course of actions. Easily one of the best films to come out of the awful decade known as the 90's. If you haven't seen this yet what the fuck are you waiting for?

ROLLING THUNDER (1977)

2011-12-04T07:35:00.000-08:00

Written by the man who gave us TAXI DRIVER, Paul Schrader, this tale of a Vietnam Vet returning home after being a prisoner of war and finding his life not what it once was is up there with movies like DEATH WISH among the top 70's revenge flicks. Things start out slowly and build up to a typically action-filled finale but in-between we get an interesting look at a man who basically considers himself dead and just going through the motions of life as things unravel and just get worse and worse. I think it's thanks to the slow build-up that I get sucked into this movie every time I watch it. Tommy Lee Jones plays our main protagonists war-buddy who is more than happy to help him out when the shit hits the fan. Jones is pretty awesome as he tell hookers he has to leave to go kill a bunch of people and star William Devane does a great job of showing emotions without use of much dialogue to do it. James Best(Rosco P. Coltrane from THE DUKES OF HAZZARD show) shows up as a bad-ass who's not above sticking a fellow's hand down a garbage disposal just for a few stupid silver dollars.
As everyone already knows Quentin Tarantino named his production company after this movie which is pretty cool. Too bad that company doesn't exist anymore.
I caught this in the middle of a horror marathon yesterday and even though it's not a horror film at all it was the highlight for me. I say check it out for some hook-handed, sawed-off shotgun, revenge-filled entertainment.

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: A FAMILY PORTRAIT (1988)

2011-11-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

This never really seems like a proper documentary but is in actuality just a bunch of interviews edited together with the actors who played the cannibalistic, psychopathic family in the original TCM. It's a really low-budget looking thing with the guys just sitting around and bullshitting for about an hour. It was probably way more interesting to people back when it came out then it is now since most hardcore horror fanatics have probably seen at least a few of these people at one of the ten-thousand horror conventions that take place every year. There's only so many times you can hear someone tell the same stories before it becomes tedious. That being said though this does give anyone who might not know everything about this film a good look behind the curtain at what it was like to shoot in a house full of rotting meat in the peak of a Texas summer. Doesn't look like much fun really but what they created will live on forever(or until we all blow ourselves up anyway) so I guess it was worth it for that. This is probably kind of obsolete now since there are better-made actual documentaries on a few of the releases this movie has received on DVD but back in the VHS days I thought it was kinda cool.

THIS LADY IS A TRAMP (1980)

2011-11-27T05:15:00.000-08:00

Samantha Fox (not to be confused with the 80's pop singer of the same name) stars here as a rich lady who tells her filthy, sex-filled life story and we get to experience it all in flashback sequences. These include her playing under-aged in the first bit with pigtails and a lollipop so we know she's just a little girl, a live sex show where we get Ron Jeremy's classic sucking-his-own-dick gag and a lady that ties her pussy-lips in a knot(classy stuff here), a silly s & m scene and then some more standard 70's style, pimply-assed hump and moan scenes. Gloria Leonard shows up with a huge Afro which is weird and R. Bollla from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST plays a rich man who Fox snags for a husband and then cheats on right on their honeymoon. While this isn't the best example of a great 70's porn it's a decent enough time-waster and director Chuck Vincent, as usual, puts out an entertaining flick.

Original trailer: http://1oldporn.com/Tramp.htm

THE DUNWICH HORROR (1970)

2011-11-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Produced by Roger Corman and made by AIP studios this is a tale of ancient monsters in a small town. The movie isn't a complete waste of time but it is really slow in getting to anything good. The good bits are the weird 60's style psychedelic scenes and the really silly tentacled monster, at least those parts are entertainingly bad. There's also some brief, fleeting nudity when our monster rips the clothes off one of it's female victims before killing them. I think that's very nice of him and as a viewer I thank him. The rest of the movie is filled with lots of talking about the Necronomicon and other HP Lovecraft-inspired stuff. As with most Lovecraft adaptions this one is apparently not very true to his original story. Star Sandra Dee is a weird choice for this film since before this she was known for starring in GIDGET and other all-American wholesome roles like that. I really only knew her from being mentioned in that song in GREASE. Here she seems kind of stupid but I think she's supposed to be a sort of naive tool of evil or something along those lines. The video box I have of this talks about her having a nude scene but I musta missed it because all I saw were some scantily clad scenes. It's also a little weird how the VHS box makes it seem like it's some kind of Devil-worshiping movie cuz it isn't at all. There's been a few other DUNWICH remakes over the years but I've never seen any of them and would imagine if they're similar to this, but without the groovy 60's vibe, I can skip them.

AMERICAN BOY: A PROFILE OF: STEVEN PRINCE (1978)

2011-11-26T05:50:00.000-08:00

Besides all the well known, super successful, mainstream movies director Martin Scorcese has made over the years he's also made a bunch of interesting oddball short films and little documentaries on various subjects. This one is about the guy who played the speeded-up gun/drug-dealer in TAXI DRIVER. If you're as obsessed with that film as I am this is an interesting look at the actor behind that role. This guy has led some life from being a road manager for Neil Diamond to being a junkie to just getting into all kinds of general strange hi-jinks. He seems like the kind of guy you would want to hang out with and have a few beers. In the movie's most insane bit he tells a story about blowing a guy away with a 44 Magnum that's really unforgettable. It's also interesting to note that Quentin Tarantino stole the scene of Uma Thurman being shot up with adrenaline to the heart from this guy's real life. Has that guy ever had an original thought?
In 2009 there was a sequel to this by another filmmaker in something titled AMERICAN PRINCE but I've never seen that one.

This movie was considered lost for many years but apparently a bootleg was floating around because it's online now:

MEMPHIS HEAT: THE TRUE STORY OF MEMPHIS WRASSLIN' (2011)

2011-11-24T17:22:00.000-08:00

There was a magical day I recall from when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when, thanks to my dad, I first saw a Professional Wrestling match on TV. Already being a huge fan of comic book superheroes and monster movies this seemed like the most amazing sport in the world to my young mind. Some of these wrestlers seemed like true monsters to me back then. Guys like George "The Animal" Steele, "King Kong" Mosca, Andre The Giant and Killer Khan sure didn't look like any actual human beings I ever encountered in real life. Growing up in the New York City area in the 70's and 80's I was really only able to see the WWF programs and didn't get to watch stuff from other areas until we got cable later on. I did know about Memphis and the other promotions from all the magazines that were around back then but never got to see much of them. It was a different world before the internet made almost every obscure little thing accessible. As the 80's went on wrestling became more of a cartoon and it lost whatever credibility it had for me from those early days but sometimes it's fun to look back and remember how awesome it all seemed at the time. It's funny how the 80's were also the decade that horror films became excessively cartoonish. I guess it was something in the air.
This documentary is a really well done look at a local promotion that was more popular in that area than anything else at the time and I think even if someone doesn't know much about wrestling they would enjoy it for some of the insane stories that are told. Going from the 40's up until modern times it hits on such disparate things as the carnival days, race relations back in the old days, insane wrestling fans, greedy promoters, midget-wrestling, Andy Kaufman and tons of other wacky stuff all told by the people who went through it. If you are, or ever were, a wrestling fan this is something you will want to check out.

You can buy it here: http://www.memphisheatthemovie.com/

99 WOMEN (1969)

2011-11-20T23:20:00.000-08:00

While there had been women in prison movies made before this one, since the 50's and probably before that, prolific sleaze director Jess Franco has to be given credit here for making one of the first truly grimy women-in-prison flicks that set the standard for what was to come in the 70's. While it never reaches the sleazy heights of the Roger Corman produced stuff that came later like CHAINED HEAT or even Franco's own ultra slimy BARBED WIRE DOLLS it kind of sets the template for those flicks and a hundred others. You get chicks in long shirts with no pants practicing their lesbianism, a limping Herbert Lom from MARK OF THE DEVIL as the rapey warden, a large snake getting fucked up by a pocket knife and then some gang rape happens when our prisoners escape and run into some male prisoners from a neighboring prison who just so happen to be escaping at the same exact moment. The only thing missing is the obligatory shower scene. These gals seem to be way too dirty for that. Check it out for historical value or just skip ahead to BARBED WIRE DOLLS if you're a real hardcore sleaze-hound. There is a French release of this film with hardcore sex scenes inserted and a few different cuts with more or less explicitness depending on what country it's from.

"Whisper to your friends that you saw it":

TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA (1970)

2011-11-20T12:29:00.000-08:00

After Clint Eastwood made all those epic westerns in Italy with Sergio Leone he came back to Hollywood and pretty much played the same character here for a few years before going on to Dirty Harry and all that stuff. Some of his American westerns were really good but this one is only so-so. It doesn't have the down and dirty grittiness of Leone's pictures or anywhere near the stylish direction. Director Don Siegel, who's most famous for the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, does pull off some beautiful shots using the Mexican landscape unfortunately plot-wise the movie drags quite a bit during the mid-section of the film. It seems like endless scenes of our two heroes just riding around and talking take place. If you make it to the end there is an all-out battle scene with limbs getting chopped-off, swords getting stuck in faces and other assorted bloody fights but it's a long sit to get there. Co-star Shirley Maclaine went on to make mainstream garbage that probably won a bunch of awards and also became some kind of a koo-koo nutso proponent of psychic-powers who claims to be able to talk to ghosts and that sort of thing.

"Mr. Action himself!":

CRITTERS (1986)

2011-11-20T07:54:00.000-08:00

I was never really a huge fan of the movie GREMLINS but obviously a lot of people were because it was such a huge mainstream hit in 1984 that it spawned countless awful rip-off films. Everything from GHOULIES to HOBGOBLINS to TROLL to MUNCHIES to this piece of crap were spewed out in hopes of keeping peoples interest in little stupid and/or cute monsters alive. The main problem I have with most all of these movies is they're all just bottom of the barrel comedies thinly disguised as horror or sci-fi flicks. This is also the problem with a large percentage of horror/sci-fi films in general cranked out in that horrible childish embarrassment of a decade known as the 1980's. While a few of these stupid GREMLINS clones might be worth a watch for a cheap laugh or two( TROLL for it's Sonny Bono appearance and GHOULIES for being a total shameless copy of the Joe Dante flick minus the feel-good family bullshit parts) this one can be skipped without worry of missing anything worthwhile. How this movie went on to spawn 3 sequels is astounding. I guess it just goes to show where peoples minds were at 30 years ago.

Fucking puppet monsters!:

SATAN WAR (1979)

2011-11-19T11:32:00.000-08:00

Not to be confused with STAR WARS, this movie starts out with a crazy psychedelic opening sequence which reminded me of the opening of the Japanese ULTRA-MAN show and then becomes a sort of pseudo-documentary about Satan or demons or something like that and then morphs into a really awful AMITYVILLE HORROR rip-off. It's really bad, there's no gore or nudity and the music is more grating than terrifying. The movie is one of those so bad that it could be hilarious if it didn't go on for so long. The movie itself isn't even very long, this segment lasts only about an hour, but it sure does feel like it creeps along. A cross keeps turning upside down, a chair comes alive and attacks a lady, a coffee pot shits itself all over the stove, a bunch of other stupid stuff happens and finally a guy shows up in a black robe walking around with a big knife. As terrible as this is I'd still rather watch it again than ever have to sit through one of those boring PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies. The weirdest thing about this is that after this main story is over there's a whole different sequence involving voodoo dancers for no reason at all unless this was at one time a movie reenacting strange things from around the world in various parts. I have no idea if there's a longer version out there but I don't care that much to find out. Sally Schermerhorn and Jimmy Drankovitch, the stars of this, never worked again and the director, Bart La Rue, never directed anything else so I guess that's a good thing.

TREEVENGE (2008)

2011-11-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

Before he made HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN director Jason Eisner did this silly, but gory as hell, short about Christmas trees getting revenge for being chopped down, stuffed in people's stupid homes and decorated in a gaudy fashion. It's filled with really obnoxious people you can't wait to see knocked off and a liberal use of the theme from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. There's gratuitous eye-violence, tree on man rape, baby killing and all the things that would make Christmas movies more enjoyable to your average gore-hound. Of course it's all really dumb and absurd but because it was shot so well it works for me. Watch it at your next family gathering this holiday season, I'm sure they'll love it.

CABOBLANCO (1980)

2011-11-19T05:02:00.000-08:00

If you've ever watched the classic 1940's film CASABLANCA and thought to yourself "This movie is OK but I wish there was some Charles Bronson ass kicking scenes" then this might be the movie for you. In my ongoing quest to watch every movie with Bronson in it this one is a little odd. It's not really a straight forward action flick and it's not the typical revenge flick that we normally got from Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson throughout the 80's. It's more of an adventure/drama film with bits of action thrown in here and there where we get Mr. Bronson in more familiar sequences beating up Nazis and that sort of thing. The main thing that makes this interesting is getting to see Charlie actually act outside of the one-dimensional characters he normally got to portray. It's also the last time he would be given that opportunity since after this it was all about those Cannon films-produced DEATH WISH sequels and clones. The downside to this particular flick is that most of it is really talky and way more mainstream Hollywood-like than anything I would ever recommend anyone watch. It exists solely as an oddity for Bronson fans like myself although I think it's probably his one film that my grandma probably would have enjoyed more than the others.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

2011-11-14T18:25:00.000-08:00

Director Sam Peckinpah was responsible for what, in my opinion, was the greatest American western ever made, THE WILD BUNCH. With that film he helped usher in a new type of violent cinema that would help propel the 70's towards the ground-breaking decade it became. It pushed the envelope and it also commented on the value of honor and staying true to your word. It also blurred the line between hero and villain. There were really only subtle degrees of morals and/or circumstances separating both groups. But that was in 1969 when the envelope needed to be pushed forward, by the time this movie came around in '74 it probably all didn't seem quite as fresh. When released GARCIA was trashed by critics and was a box office flop. That's a shame because while there are a lot of similarities between this and THE WILD BUNCH I think it's a strong film on it's own. The Mexican/western setting, star Warren Oates and the slow-mo shoot-outs are a few of the obvious similarities. Here Oates portrays someone who, as the film goes on, slips deeper into madness as things unravel. There's also the Mexican General from BUNCH as a similar Mexican big-shot. He always makes such a great sleazy looking character and Peckinpah used him often for exactly that. There's also no real hero here just a portrayal of a man who ends up with nothing left to lose so he becomes a desperate creature. Kris Kristofferson also shows up as a rapist biker which is something you don't see every day and some of the scenes with Oates talking to the titular head in a bag are pretty humorous. While this never reaches the high points of its predecessor it still works for me as a classic piece of cinema made by a true master.

MONDO FORD (2000)

2011-11-13T16:45:00.000-08:00

This is a short spoof of not only Mondo movies but also wacky conspiracy theories in general. If, like most sane humans, you find people that are obsessed with conspiracy theories to be insane lunatics that should seek mental help immediately you will probably find a few laughs here. The film is made to look like it was created in the 60's and the narration is just some snippets of a "Learn To Speak Italian" album which I think makes it even crazier. You get aliens, Bigfoot, and even the Loch Ness Monster showing up to enjoy the JFK assassination plot goofiness. This originally played as part of the Tromadance short film festival and is part of that DVD. I've never seen any of the other shorts on there and buying Troma DVDs is a risky business that you should partake in at your own peril so be warned.

BARBARELLA (1968)

2011-11-13T11:55:00.000-08:00

This is probably one of my favorite sci-fi movies. At least as far as non-serious, goofy, comic-book inspired sci-fi movies go. This here, along with DANGER: DIABOLIK(which also starred John Philip Law), is probably among the best representations of what a comic book would look like if you were to transfer it to a film screen. Everything is brightly light and oddly colored and since this was made in '68 everything seems very psychedelic and it's probably a good film to drop acid to before watching. The whole movie is just jam-packed with weird things that would only exist together in the comics. You get an angel, a pleasure machine, crazy-ass non-aerodynamic looking spaceships, killer birds, killer dolls with teeth, robot assassins, orgasm pills(exaltation transference pellets actually), wacky 60's pop tunes and Jane Fonda looking her absolute hottest ever! Way hotter than in those stupid aerobics videos my mom used to watch.
Fun facts: 80's band Duran Duran took their name from the power-mad villain in this. There was some talk of a remake starring Rose McGowan a while back but I think that's been cancelled. I'm sure it would be pointless and horrible. Director Roger Vadim had stated that he wanted to make a sequel at some point but now that he's dead that seems less likely. This film was originally released unrated with a "mature audiences" warning and then later on re-released with a PG-rating. I'm not sure what the differences are since every version I've seen of this, except for a few TV-showings, has Barbarella's boobs on display right there during the opening credits but not really any other nudity to speak of just lots of different hot outfits.

THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH (1974)

2011-11-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

This is a movie I first saw when I was probably about 7 years old. They used to play it on TV quite a bit in the late 70's no doubt due to the fact that it stars "Rocky" Sylvester Stallone and "The Fonz" Henry Winkler. Of course they're not actually playing their more well known characters but when I was 7 I didn't really know any better. To me back then this was like watching an early adventure of two of my childhood heroes teamed-up together in the same gang. It was kind of like seeing Superman and Spider-Man together. That shit was just awesome to my younger self! I also recall being slightly traumatized when Fonzie gets hit by a car. For some reason I remember him dying in this movie. He doesn't, he just ends up with a broken leg but I probably turned the movie off in horror after his accident. Re-watching this movie now I think it's a little too talky and more about relationships than gang rumbles but Stallone does a pretty decent job in one of the lead roles and it's all really well shot. I also couldn't help but compare it to the way better similar movie THE WANDERERS which sort of deals with some of the same themes as this. The other negative thing is a lot of the music in this seems more like 70's versions of 50's songs than anything genuinely from that era. Still it's an interesting look at two big Hollywood stars given a chance to actually act before they became big names and stereotypes of themselves.

This song sums everything up really well!:

REVOLUTION (1968)

2011-11-11T00:59:00.000-08:00

This isn't a very good documentary or even a very watchable film. It's a tough to get through rambling look at hippies in the late 60's in San Francisco without any narrative or much of a point of view. It's sort of like a shorter, crappier version of the movie WOODSTOCK except the hippies come off as way more annoying in this. They basically seem like air-headed homeless people begging for handouts like bums. Full of naive platitudes and they all just look like they smell bad. The "squares" interviewed also seem pretty stupid and are typically judgmental pricks, so I'm not sure who I'm supposed to side with here. The music is OK if you're into bands that jam on endlessly. There's way more interesting and informative docs out there about these times that you should watch before this one. I would also recommend dropping acid and staring at a wall for a more exciting trip.

BLOOD DINER (1987)

2011-11-09T20:16:00.000-08:00

"armed with a meat-cleaver in one hand and his genitals in the other..."

As a general rule I don't like a majority of the silly 80's horror movies that they spewed out because they're mostly just really fucking stupid and seem to have been made for retards which would describe pretty accurately people who love that horrible decade. There are a handful of exceptions to this rule. This movie is one of them. Originally shot as a sequel to the legendary HG Lewis' BLOOD FEAST making this movie a serious piece of cinema would have been really dumb and unnecessary. This movie is also pretty similar to the early works of Troma studios in that things happen in a fairly chaotic manner. You get naked aerobics, pro wrestling nazis, zombies, a talking brain in a jar, lots of cool 50's tunes and tons of ridiculous over-the-top gore. You also get a lot of stupid joke scenes which would probably turn off many hardcore horror fans but I still dig it enough to have re-watched this movie a bunch of times over the years and always find myself entertained enough to go back again and again. It's also way better than the official sequel to BLOOD FEAST that Mr. Lewis came out with a few years back.

CAT O' NINE TAILS (1971)

2011-11-09T18:24:00.000-08:00

I can appreciate the first two films of Dario Argento but they've never really been my favorites from his body of work. I think DEEP RED is the movie where he really hit his stride full force and made some really good films from then on up until around THE STENDAHL SYNDROME after which he turned out some pretty hacky stuff. This one is Dario's second film and it's probably closer to a Hitchcock film and is way less graphic than most of his other bloodier giallos. There is a guy who gets smushed by a train so that's something to watch for. It features Karl Malden as a blind man who likes to do puzzles. Now I remember Mr. Malden as the American Express guy who made all those commercials telling me "don't leave home without it" so maybe that's why I find it so hard to buy him as a blind guy who hangs out with a little girl and solves crimes in his spare time. The soundtrack is by the great composer Ennio Morricone but it doesn't really stand out much and seems sorta bland. Another major problem with this film is it's generally pretty boring and you kind of have to pay attention if you want to follow the plot so it all seems like quite a chore for little pay-off. Still it's better than the crap Mr. Dario is making currently and it is available on a dollar DVD so maybe it's worth watching if you're on a low-budget and aren't too picky.

JUST BEFORE DAWN (1981)

2011-11-07T18:42:00.000-08:00

As far as slasher flicks go this has always been one I've really dug. Directed by the great Jeff Lieberman who also did the equally great killer worm flick SQUIRM and the LSD-crazies epic BLUE SUNSHINE, I first encountered JUST BEFORE DAWN playing at a horror convention in a little conference room. The two people I was with got up after about 30 minutes of stalk and slash goodness and left in bored disgust. That made me like this movie even more because clearly those people were not as cultured as I and could not appreciate the simplistic elegance of this ode to backwoods breeding mishaps. Seeing this more recently on a big screen as part of an all-night horror marathon just reinforced my positive vibes towards this film.
What you basically get here is a FRIDAY THE 13TH rip-off predictably set in the woods with a group of campers/victims. The one main drawback is there are only about 10 people in the whole movie so your body count is obviously not very high but it makes up for that by having a family of inbred weirdos running around and one final kill scene that's totally over-the top ridiculous. You get some boobs, some nasty crotch violence, a totally out of place disco-dancing scene, that guy who ran the camp in SLEEPAWAY CAMP as a Crazy Ralph character and a goofy killer who laughs like Muttley from those old Laff-A-Lympics cartoons. You also get George Kennedy as the standard ineffectual sheriff character who talks to his plants and horse and only decides to do something helpful after people start showing up dead. There's also a sort-of twist ending that you can pretty easily figure out before it happens. You can do much worse than checking this one out.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

2011-11-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

At this point there's not a whole lot anyone can say about this milestone horror epic that hasn't been said before a million and one times. This movie has been picked apart by scholars and idiots alike. People have ascribed it a social significance that seems to have been mostly unintentional by the filmmakers and every serious horror fan would have to admit that this film was the starting point of a new era in horror. An era that would be marked with increasingly graphic and horrific elements in film that mirrored our own societal ills quite a bit more relevantly than something like THE BLOB or THE WOLFMAN ever set out to. 70's horror for all practical purposes starts right here and movies that came before, for the large part, instantly seemed quaint and hokey in comparison. I've probably viewed this movie as much as possible without my eyes falling out of my head and it always entertains on some level. From an old cheap-ass VHS tape I had to MTV's Halloween showings to this being on almost every horror movie DVD set this film is inescapable. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The one thing I have noticed, the more times I watch this film, is how my sympathies in this movie have shifted from the Ben character to that of Mr. Cooper. Sure it's easy to like Ben, he's the hero, he seems to do almost everything right and keeps his cool. Cooper on the other hand is almost the stereotypical uptight family man and although it's never explicitly stated we're led to assume that he's probably some kind of a racist as well. The problem is after viewing the movie so many times you realize the Cooper is right about the basement being the safest place and about all the barricades set up not really being strong enough of a defense against all those zombies. The way I figure it if they just listened to him everyone would have been way better off. Maybe if he wasn't such a nervous, sweaty balding man he would have gotten the respect he deserved. Of course this would not have made quite as entertaining a movie and I suppose we have Ben to thank for this film going on to influence every zombie film made after it.

HAUNTEDWEEN (1991)

2011-10-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

Most people think that slasher movies died when the 80's came to an end but unfortunately, even before SCREAM came along in '96 and we got a bunch of shitty/smart-ass/self-aware Hollywood-ized slasher flicks, there were still a bunch of low-budget hack and kill movies being pumped out by maniacs and/or stupid people. This one here is about as low-budget as you can get from a shot-on-video killer on the loose tale that hits every cliche of this, already by this time, completely worn out genre. The FX consist of some fake blood being thrown on people and the rest of the budget seems to have gone towards Halloween masks and a van that gets shot and instantly explodes. The grating background music sounds like it's from some kind of an instructional video. This was filmed in Kentucky using locals who I'm assuming weren't actual actors of any kind. The fact that they gave this thing a feature length running time is astounding. Most of the time is filled with a bunch of unimportant dialogue which dares you to sit through it. I was also a little bit disappointed that the title didn't refer to a ghostly possessed penis. The positive things I will say about this is there are a couple of attractive ladies who do have the decency to at least get their tops off before being butchered and there's a nifty sequence where our masked killer puts on a show of killing people in a haunted house that sorta reminded me of a shitty version of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS but I'm not sure if it's worth sitting through this whole thing just for those couple of bright moments. There is a HAUNTEDWEEN II promised after the credits but thankfully I don't think that ever happened.

Believe it or not Hanks here with the extra stupid accent is actually our hero:

SON OF SAM (1977)

2011-10-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

This movie is a really big mess! It starts off with a pre-credit sequence that lists a bunch of serial killers and then we get a full song by some 70's lounge singer named Johnny Charro and then we get a sorta-proto-slasher movie. The main problem with this movie is it appears to have been patched together by some very inept filmmakers. There's weird cuts, lingering shots of nothing, inexplicable use of slow-motion, weird freeze-frames for no reason and just strange editing choices all around. In addition the acting is down there around BLOOD FEAST levels. It's overall a tough movie to sit through without feeling like you might lose your mind before it's over. Probably the weirdest death scene has a fellow who gets slashed up by being strangled with a telephone cord? This movie also really doesn't have anything to do with the real life "Son Of Sam" David Berkowitz and originally had the more boring title of HOSTAGES. The print I viewed didn't have the "ANOTHER" in the title like every poster seems to. The cool-looking poster is definitely the best thing about this whole movie!

SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

2011-10-24T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've had this movie sitting on my to-watch pile of DVD's for a long time now. I kept putting it off mainly because all I've heard is how terrible this movie is and what a disappointment it was coming from Mr. George A. Romero, the man responsible for basically creating the modern-day zombie movie as we know it. Another scary thing is that this is a sequel to DIARY OF THE DEAD which I also didn't feel was a very good film except for maybe the opening scenes of dead people starting to rise. For the most part after watching this one I would have to agree that this movie is, as expected, just basically not very good. It sorta reminded me of that scene in DAWN OF THE DEAD where a biker gang has a pie fight with zombies and what it would be like if you stretched that out for 90 minutes. Except in that scene I always thought that at least the bikers were cool(and it would probably make an entertaining film if we followed them around) and in this no one was in any way cool or interesting and I didn't care about anyone. Every character is pretty much an asshole and nothing seems to be very serious. Also there's a completely distracting use of bad CGI for every little spurt of blood that makes it even more cartoonish. Also why was the island set in the old west with horses and stuff? Also why was everyone on this island Irish? Also was this supposed to be a comedy cuz it's barely a horror film? Also, and most importantly, is Romero still capable of making anything worthwhile? It's looking pretty doubtful at this point. While there are way worse zombie films out there considering this one was made by someone who, at least at one time was capable of making classic horror flicks it's all pretty sad and only slightly better than your typical bottom-of-the-barrel, no-budget backyard-made zombie crap movie.

BARFLY (1987)

2011-10-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

"Your mother's cunt... STINKS like carpet cleaner!"

Having been a huge fan of Charles Bukowsi's writings since I was a stupid teen this movie has been one that I've probably re-watched more than any other in the drama category. It's a movie that I love for it's depiction of a mostly crazy yet completely individualistic person. This person is, of course, just a thinly veiled personification of Mr. Bukowski himself. It's this personal touch that gives the movie such a strong resonance and deep feeling and also moments of complete absurdity. If there's any negative aspect to this film it would probably be the all too Hollywood feeling that many of the scenes fall into. The fight scenes are the most unrealistically staged looking things that you would expect to see in your typical American action film and some of the characters and their actions seem very cartoonish but regardless of this the movie never fails to entertain me in the many viewings I've given it. The main credit has to go to Mickey Rourke who shows his acting abilities that place him up there with actors like DeNiro and Pacino in portraying a person most people would call a loser but I think in many ways he's better than most of the plastic people we worship in this sick society. It's too bad Mr. Rourke wasn't born a decade earlier when there were more quality films being made that he would've fit right into. Rourke would go on to win awards for his starring role in THE WRESTLER, which I think is a great film also, but he really should have won something for this also. It's also a great film to watch while drinking excessively. There was a sorta-remake made of this in 2005 with Matt Dillon called FACTOTUM but you're better off sticking with the original.

THE WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY (1964)

2011-10-15T05:43:00.000-07:00

"Maybe that stupid mummy has fits and undresses. Who knows what he has beneath his clothes?"

The sixties were a decade chock full of silly superhero comic book movies. I woulda thought it was all Batman's fault but that goofy show hadn't started yet and Mexico was already pumping out these wrestler/superhero flicks. They were mostly masked wrestlers but also, like in this one, a few lady wrestlers starred. I guess it kind of goes along with the women's lib movement starting up at the time since you get scenes of ladies throwing men around and generally kicking their asses. In addition to this we get an evil Asian bad guy(who looks way more Mexican) named The Black Dragon in the dubbed version, judo girls, a goofy comic relief guy and best of all a mummy(who doesn't really show up until the last third of the movie). The mummy's origin is all told with stock-footage from 1957's THE AZTEC MUMMY which would be used a few more times over the years. This mummy character seems to also be half vampire since he can turn into a bat and a spider and is afraid of the sun. Why this is I'm not sure. Maybe if you take a vampire and mummify him this is what happens but I don't recall that ever being clarified. Overall this is a fun goofy flick but only for lovers of really bottom-of-the-barrel silly Mexisploitation. There was a re-edited(with 60's pop music) version of this titled ROCK 'N ROLL WRESTLING WOMEN VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY but I recall that being really awful. The wrestling women here had appeared together prior to this in DOCTOR OF DOOM where they fight a guy in a KKK hood and his gorilla henchman and the Aztec Mummy would go on to star in THE ROBOT VS. THE AZTEC MUMMY.

Apparently there was a shortage of Asians in 1960's Mexico since our judo chicks also look suspiciously Mexican:

EXECUTIONS (1995)

2011-10-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

This is a strongly anti-capital punishment, made for video, documentary which looks at methods that people have used around the world to kill other people in the name of justice. It is a really good historical look at the barbaric practices of humanity even if it is completely slanted to make you hate the death penalty in all forms. We go from the guillotine in France to Nazis in World War II to Communists in China and Russia to the electric chair in America and on to the lovely practices of beheading in the Middle East amongst other places I probably never want to travel to. The most memorable and shocking clip here is of a man in Lebanon who is shot multiple times(including in the face) and somehow keeps breathing.
Personally in theory I think the death penalty makes perfect sense. I mean if someone kills someone I care about taking them out seems logical. The grey area comes in when we give the power of vengeance to a government that will undoubtedly misuse it. Also leaving the power of life and death in the hands of an angry mob(as is shown here with middle eastern stonings and such) is an even worse idea. So while I agree with the basic concept of an eye for an eye when put into practice it's a pretty hard thing to justify in a societal structure. I also think, despite what is argued in this video, that lethal injection doesn't seem like that horrible of a way to check out and it would definitely be my preferred method if I had a choice.
I think this would probably appeal to fans of mondo-movies and stuff like FACES OF DEATH even though it's not quite as gory, features actual footage and is way more thought-provoking than just your typical shock for shock's sake gore vid. There was an EXECUTIONS II that came out the same year as this.

BOGGY CREEK (2010)

2011-10-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

My recollection of the original 70's THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, from catching multiple TV showings about 30 years ago, is a little foggy but I do recall it being a sort of pseudo-documentary thing about a Bigfoot monster in a swamp in the Southern U.S.A. Sort of a feature length episode of IN SEARCH OF... without Leonard Nimoy's great narration. It was sorta spooky and atmospheric, at least from what I remember as a kid watching it. This movie here doesn't seem to have anything to do with the original recipe. It's not a remake and it's not a sequel(there already was a sequel in the late 70's). I guess it's what the cool kids call "a re-imagining"(which means they just stole the title). This movie basically plays like a crappy slasher flick complete with uninteresting characters that you don't care about. I do generally love slasher flicks and I also do generally love Bigfoot movies but this mash-up isn't what I hoped it would be(NIGHT OF THE DEMON still holds the crown in that mixed-up genre). I noticed one of the young fellows in this just seems to be here to show off his 6-pack abs and dreamy good looks(too bad I don't know any 14-year old girls into horror movies I could recommend this to). Our featured crazy-psycho slasher is a tall hairy monster with sharp fingernails. He also likes to eat people but only a little nibble(to show who's boss I guess). Also he doesn't kill women, he takes them back to his secret Bigfoot lair to screw and make more Bigfoots. I'm not sure what the lady Bigfoots do but this movie isn't worth thinking that much about. It's also probably not worth wasting your time on watching unless you prefer horrible pop music, shitty modern editing(shaking the camera a lot) and boring kill scenes to go with your slasher/monster flick. Another thing that pissed me off was the non-ending where nothing is really explained. I would give this movie one star for starring an actor named Texas Battle. That name is awesome! I gotta go back and re-watch the original sometime to forget about this.

INSIDE DEEP THROAT (2005)

2011-10-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

The most profitable and arguably the most important film in the history of X-rated cinema is looked at in this really well done documentary that cost about 80 times what the original film did back in 1972. It features commentary by people like John Waters, Larry Flynt , Al Goldstein as well as just about everyone who had something to do with DEEP THROAT. Also you get all the insane voices of the morally righteous who are so assured of their superiority that it's amazing that anyone ever did(and even more amazingly still do!) take people like this seriously. Overall I found this movie to be actually pretty depressing when you realize that the high point of cinema is so far behind us as a culture and all that is being produced today(whether you're talking about mainstream or adult movies) is recycled garbage with not even the first inkling of an original idea involved. On the flip side I guess you could say that the adult industry is a whole lot safer to be involved with nowadays since it's a legitimate business without the criminal element that was such a big part of it back then. Unfortunately it doesn't produce anything worthwhile to anyone with half a brain these days. As is pointed out in this film the dream that hardcore cinema would keep growing and take over the mainstream died with the infiltration of cheaply made VHS movies but maybe(hopefully) they just had it backwards and eventually Hollywood would keep getting raunchier and raunchier. It's too bad 39 years later we're still waiting for the day to come when filmmakers have real artistic freedom. There's an R-rated and an NC17-rated version of this out there.

CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (1993)

2011-10-10T17:30:00.000-07:00

Before SOUTH PARK became a super huge mainstream hit TV show, that you can't avoid if you try, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put out this wacky gory musical comedy version of the Alfred Packer story. Just like that show that helped popularize that sort of brainless one-note comedy that all the kids love, in shows like THE FAMILY GUY, this movie is just a series of ridiculous events strung together with a stupid story-line. It's about a group of gold prospectors who get lost in the wilderness and end up eating each other. It starts out with a bloody tongue-getting-ripped-out-of-a-head cannibal attack scene and then gets sillier from there on out. You get a wacky tribe of Indians played by Japanese folks, a Southern Confederate Cyclops monster and unnatural love for a horse. The team's later movie ORGASMO was probably a bit funnier to me but this one is still worth watching if you're not completely sick of this style of random anarchist humor yet. Most of the musical bits are as awful as you would expect but I'm sure that's the whole point. This was distributed on home video by TROMA and I will say it's way more entertaining than 90% of the shit released on that label.

THE MUTILATOR (1985)

2011-10-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

The 80's were a great time as far as low-budget cheesey slasher movies being released on VHS went. You got stuff like SLEEPAWAY CAMP and SPLATTER UNIVERSITY along with a billion other titles and they were all exactly what you expected. So if you were a gore-obsessed little creep like myself these were good times to own a VCR. Looking back these movies are not as great as I may have remembered them but they're still fun enough in a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of way. This one has a guy whose wife is accidentally shot dead by his son so naturally, in a movie of this type, he has no choice but to get drunk on Jack Daniels and then go bat-shit crazy and start mutilating teenagers to death. If you watch the unrated version you get even bloodier kills including a large fishhook through a vagina scene which is pretty nasty. There's also a goofy theme song that sounds like it belongs in a teen sex comedy titled FALL BREAK which was also the original title of this flick. It shows up every once in a while in case you forget what a stupid-ass movie you're watching. It also features your typical stupid ending with the killer coming back from the dead a couple of times and a cheap "shock" finale. So all in all you've got boobs, blood and a maniac who uses a battleaxe, a chainsaw and a few other nifty household items. What more could you want from a dumb slasher flick?

DEAD MEN WALK (1943)

2011-10-04T13:44:00.000-07:00

Watching this movie made me appreciate how great Bela Lugosi is. Not that Mr. Bela is in this movie, it just seems like something he shoulda starred in and I'm sure he would have done a way more entertaining job than George Zucco does. While I'm sure Mr. Zucco was a good enough actor for the times he just seems way too much like your everyday normal middle-aged, balding white guy to be very scary. It's like if someone's dad ran around pretending he was a vampire it would probably be more embarrassing than frightening. The story here is about a couple of twins both played by our buddy George. One is a doctor and the other one is an evil son-of-a-bitch vampire. The vampire is way more interesting of course and he even has himself a dim-witted henchman named Zolarr(played by the king of crazy sidekicks Dwight Frye) which is always a good idea. He also appears to be a ghost at certain times for no real reason. Overall this is obviously a really cheap movie rushed out to cash in on DRACULA's earlier success and it's pretty mindless and only mildly entertaining. It helps a lot that the whole movie runs only about 60 minutes before it's all over because parts of this are pretty slow and easily lead to boredom. I did learn watching this that apparently burning a vampire/ghost's body during the day kills him. So that's good to know. Check it out only if you dig the classics.

THE DRILLER KILLER (1979)

2011-10-02T16:51:00.000-07:00

"You into rock and roll head trips, baby?"

Abel Ferrara is one of my all-time favorite directors. The guy would go on to make way more polished films than this one and is probably best known for KING OF NEW YORK and/or BAD LIEUTENANT. Being a fan of cult/underground films though this one is probably my favorite of his followed closely by the also great MS. 45. I also generally love movies(like TAXI DRIVER) where the main character's life is unraveling and there's a slow downward spiral into madness. The fact that this movie is so unpolished and looks like it was directed by a true maniac works highly in it's favor. It's sorta like if you took a slasher film and slammed it into a gritty punk rock documentary about a loser artist who's slowly slipping into madness. Like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE the film has that documentary look and feel that makes you feel sleazy just by observing it. It's funny how almost every review I've ever read of this points out the low-budget and ugly-look as detriments when they're really the film's strongest assets. You get the expected killer drill scenes including an impressively done(for the budget) head-drilling, lesbian showering, gratuitous crappy punk rock music, a rabbit's corpse mutilated and tons of bad acting. I would say if you're hardcore into typical 80's slasher flicks this one might not be for you. Even though it's often lumped in with those this exists in a special place above those brainless purely splatter-for-splatter's-sake flicks. Anyone who can appreciate insane cinema should check it out. I still need to catch Ferrara's earlier porn flick because I can't imagine what that was like.

MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

2011-10-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

I've tried watching this movie a couple of times and fallen asleep very soundly. Having finally endured the whole thing I have to say this is probably one of the worst horror films made in the whole decade of the 70's. Things just sorta happen throughout the movie with only a half-assed explanation given. There's a town full of pretty well behaved zombies that work as a team. They do eat their victims but we never actually see that on screen. We never actually see much gore at all just a little blood that comes out of peoples eyes for no reason and a nice throat-slitting pre-credit sequence. There's a zombie guy that looks like he stepped out of THE OMEGA MAN who shows up everywhere. The most memorable scene is that fellow biting a mouse's head off and drinking it's blood but I feel like I've seen that in way better films also. This was shown last night on a double bill with THE DRILLER KILLER and the difference between those two films is like night and day. D.K. is a loud in your face movie filled with energy and there's always something fucked-up going on. It's also not hard to follow whereas this thing is just a muddled mess that's not worth trying to decipher. It's sort of like if you took your typical nonsensical 1980's Lucio Fulci gore film and removed all the gory bits and added an annoying voice-over. That would be fucking awful and that's what you get here.

ITALIAN STALLION (1970)

2011-09-30T18:20:00.000-07:00

"I'll be velvet-mouthed on your shank of love."

This would be a totally forgettable soft-core porn flick if it wasn't the debut film of Sylvester Stallone. I've only seen this re-edited version so I can't say if the original film(titled THE PARTY AT KITTY AND STUD'S) makes any more sense than this. This here is just like they filmed a bunch of crappy loops and loosely strung them together to make something that plays for about an hour. You get to see Sly's limp Italian sausage throughout the movie and I don't blame him for that since nothing is really all that sexy that's on display. There's some lesbianism, a flasher, a little s & m action and it all ends with a big orgy which consists of ugly hippies wiggling around on each other and playing ring-around-the-rosie while awful music plays. I think the weirdest scene is when Stud(played by Stallone) punches a mirror and Kitty licks the blood off his hand all sexy like. Only worth watching if you're some kind of Stallone fanatic. Anyone else will be instantly bored.

CHAINED HEAT (1983)

2011-09-29T14:49:00.000-07:00

"Don't you walk away from me, you chalk-faced whore!"

This is probably one of the best of the whole women-in-prison genre of sleaze-fueled epics. It's got so many great elements to it including the mandatory exploitation ones that include your basic boobs, blood and beasts. It also has probably the best cast of any of these sleazy caged chick flicks. You got Linda Blair playing the basic, boring, goody-goody role. She's supposed to be the person who the audience empathizes with but I pretty much hate her and think she makes terrible decisions throughout the whole movie. Also she has a crappy haircut which may have also made me not sympathize with her as much as I would have normally. The real star to me is the great Sybil Danning as the leader of all the white convicts. She's awesome as usual as the main bad-ass. There is one scene where she wears mom jeans that I didn't care for but besides that she's fantastic! Who else could stand up to Tamara "CLEOPATRA JONES" Dobson as the leader of the black gal gang? I did notice on my latest viewing that her gang seems to consist of a grand total of about 4 people which seemed a little lopsided in whitey's favor here. As far as beasts go there's Sybil's sidekick, the butt-ugly Spider, who appropriately enough gets killed while hanging out on a crapper. There's also Dean Wormer from ANIMAL HOUSE himself as our ultra-scummy porn-making warden here. This guy has to have the most amazing office in the history of wardens. I especially dug the stuffed jungle cat with light-up eyes and the luxurious Jacuzzi in his office/swinging bachelor-pad. Henry Silva plays a drug-smuggling prison employee in a subdued role for a guy who you always see being quite intense in most of his other films. He does get to smack Blair around a little which reminds you of some of his more typical tough-guy roles. There's also a ton of other memorable characters with names like Boots, Grinder and Bubbles. Mix all these characters into a cartoonishly stereotypical world of trash and debauchery and it's exploitation movie gold. You get rape, a black chick sliced up with razor blades, gratuitous showering, lots of cat-fights, lesbian make-outs, a new-wave chick, death on the toilet, an 80's strip-tease show and just about everything a lover of lowbrow cinema could want. I was lucky enough to view an actual film print of this one last night and it made me appreciate it just that much more. In addition to a slew of unrelated movies that were re-titled as sequels there was an "official" Part II to this that starred Bridgette Nielsen and came out ten years later but I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with the original.

3 SHOTS OF A WINCHESTER FOR RINGO (1966)

2011-09-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

This movie is known under a few different names; THREE GRAVES FOR A WINCHESTER, THREE BULLETS FOR RINGO etc., but whatever you want to call it, it's pretty awful. The plot is a messy convoluted one about a deed and a family battling over something or another. For me there were two memorable scenes in this whole thing. In one we see a young boy screaming as he's being pulled slowly towards a fire to get information out of someone and in the other a woman is hung up, with her arms spread all Jesus-like, high above a town while a shoot-out takes place. That's about it. Mickey Hargitay who is great in BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is just really bland here as is most everyone else. Both Hargitay and Gordon Mitchell were in HERCULES-type films before switching over to Italo-westerns like this. I would say skip this one unless you dig lots of talky-talk and some really badly staged, illogical shoot-outs.

THE WITCHMAKER (1969)

2011-09-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that this movie isn't really very good. It's full of lots of talking about witchcraft and devil-worshiping and the action is pretty stretched out through the running time. But that being said this was a movie that I used to catch on New York's channel 9 Chiller Theater, or maybe it was the 4 o'clock movie, every once in a while back when I was a kid and I remember it scaring me. So just for the sentimental value alone I rate this one higher than it realistically should be. Being shot in the swamps of Louisiana I feel the movie does do a good job of creating a good spooky atmosphere throughout the whole film. It also features a performance by a large fellow in a furry vest who's a warlock or "a berserk" as they refer to him and this guy used to give me nightmares so I guess if you were a monster obsessed kid in the 70's he crept around in your head for a while at night when you were trying to sleep. Of course the movie also features Alvy Moore who was a familiar character on GREEN ACRES which kinda kills the scary tension that mighta been built up. There's also a lack of nudity from all the hot-looking witches and their victims and that's a damn shame and seems very strange since there's almost a naked lady right there on the poster. My DVD of this film is titled THE LEGEND OF WITCH HOLLOW and for some reason that sounds really silly to me. Probably cuz it reminds me of that stupid SLEEPY HOLLOW story. I can't really recommend this one unless you have a fond child-hood attachment or maybe you have a fetish for girls hung upside down before being sacrificed to Satan.

THIS MAN CAN'T DIE (1968)

2011-09-26T16:27:00.000-07:00

Guy Madison was a big cowboy actor back in the 1940's and also made a few of those Italian swords'n'sandals flicks before heading into starring in this spaghetti-western. The fact that he was an old time American western star really stands out when you compare him to someone like Clint Eastwood who was so good at portraying the flip-side of what those characters represented. He's also not a particularly compelling character in this movie. The plot is about as basic as westerns get: a guy's family is murdered: his sister is raped and then our man Guy shows up for revenge time. Notably the only nudity you get is not in the love scene but whenever a female is violently attacked. Way to titillate sleazy viewers Italy. The most realistic thing in this whole film, and the only thing that really separates this from more common U.S.-filmed westerns at this time, is the way many of the evil gang is offed by our hero who takes many of them out by atypically shooting them in the back and sneaking around in the shadows. Besides this though there's really not much to make this stand out from a million better Italian shoot-em-up movies.

Silly theme song, "Life is too marvelous for you...":

DR. TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON (1973)

2011-09-25T05:33:00.000-07:00

This movie has a great title that unfortunately is never lived up to by the actual film. It sounds like we're in for something along the lines of BLOODSUCKING FREAKS but what you get is a lot more of a subdued tale of inmates running an asylum. It's barely even a horror film despite being marketed that way. The movie was made in Mexico by director Juan Lopez Moctezuma who also was a producer on EL TOPO. This movie has sort of a similar feel to that epic but in a very watered down way. Sort of a surrealism-light situation. You get a pretty mild rape scene thrown in, a little nudity, people acting crazy(including an amusing chicken-man) and endless scenes of talking which make this mostly a big snooze-fest. This has also been released under the title of THE MANSION OF MADNESS which is apparently uncut but I've never seen that version and can't say if it's any gorier or more exciting than this cut American release.

THE CREEPING TERROR (1964)

2011-09-25T02:35:00.000-07:00

Movies that are labeled "the worst movie of all time" generally aren't as bad as all the hype would lead you to believe. This movie is really bad but there are way duller and more inert movies that are completely forgettable. This one is at least memorable for it's ridiculous monster which consists of a couple of guys under what appears to be a very shitty-looking carpet or maybe some old raggedy-ass quilt of some sort. It has a sort-of insect-looking head and I think they were going for a monster caterpillar sort of thing. The story is about a UFO that crashes which contains two identical stupid-looking monsters. It's almost all told in a dull monotonous voice-over narration which is always a bad sign with these old creature feature flicks. The high-point of this whole film is catching some up-skirt shots of various women as they are gulped down by our slow-moving monster that they could have easily ran away from. Supposedly a real monster was built for this and stolen before shooting started so they threw this abomination together in a few minutes. I'm sure it couldn't have looked any worse than this thing. Check this out only if you're into bottom of the barrel junk cinema.

Apparently they made a documentary about this flick and not surprisingly they claim director, A.J. Nelson was a crazy person:

SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

2011-09-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

This is more of an old-time murder mystery than a horror flick. It's also pretty dull and even comedic in parts and the mystery parts don't really make much sense in the end. The only thing that makes this worth watching at all is Bela Lugosi and his sidekick, the great midget actor Angelo Rossitto(who was in everything from FREAKS to MAD MAX 3). Basically any scenes without either of these two is really ponderous stuff. Unfortunately our little midget hero splits about halfway through the movie and is never mentioned again. It's also weird to see a cheap-o B-movie from the 40's that's in color(and I'm pretty sure this is Lugosi's only color film). There's also a weird-o in a blue mask who peeps through the window every once in a while and a totally nonsensical ending. Luckily this one is on a lot of cheap-ass horror compilations DVD's otherwise it's probably not worth the effort of seeking it out.

THE THING THAT COULDN'T DIE (1958)

2011-09-24T14:41:00.000-07:00

OK so there's this decapitated head of a Satanist in a box and he hypnotizes a retarded fellow to kill for him. Then the big guy is shot dead by the police so he gets a chick to carry him around. This movie drags along at a snails pace and really doesn't have much of a pay-off. Our monster(who's now just a goopy-faced guy with a reverberating voice) finally gets reunited with his body and then is quickly killed by a crucifix necklace that's placed on him. Only a couple of guys get killed in the whole movie(including our Satanist who gets his head chopped-off but that sorta doesn't count since he comes back). There's also a lovely lady with super-natural-type abilities who doesn't do much but get freaked out about everything. The monster attack music from CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON shows up as well as other typical 50's sci-fi themes. There's a ton of way more entertaining 50's monster classics that you should watch before this one.

APACHE BLOOD (1975)

2011-09-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

I acquired this movie as part of a spaghetti-western box set I picked up a while back. Why it's in this set I have no idea. For one thing it's an American western and for another thing it's probably one of the worst westerns I've ever seen! The whole movie is about this small group of cavalrymen who fight a small band of Indians. That's it! They go back and forth killing each other one at a time until there's only two people left and then they fight it out. I suppose there is a way of making this non-plotted mess slightly interesting but these filmmakers had no clue how to do that. There's barely any dialogue and our Indian hero is named Shee Clit Soak. Now I'll grant you that I'm just an ignorant white man but is Clit really an Indian name? And Shee Clit Soak? That's not even a good porn star name!! Also that was supposed to be the original title of this film. I can't imagine why they woulda changed that one. I would definitely say avoid this one unless you need a good nap since besides the gunshots this is a pretty quiet film.

Spoiler alert! Thanks to YouTube you can save your time and jump right to the nonsensical ending:

HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987)

2011-09-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

"One man's dream is another man's lunch"

Tons of topless beauties standing around in model poses and as an afterthought there's a story about diamond smuggling gangsters or something like that. As a bonus you also get a large puppety-looking killer snake on the loose, a transvestite spy character, sumo wrestlers and some awkward kung fu thrown in. Also gratuitous use of a grenade launcher and unnecessary violence towards a blow-up sex doll. The boat from director Andy Sidaris' MALIBU EXPRESS shows up and this is supposed to be a sequel to that flick although you get no appearance from Sybil Danning's tits which is disappointing and only a fleeting reference to the events in the first movie. There's also a horrific theme song which you get to hear in full as the director shows off the plane he rented in a long music video sequence. Sidaris' movies although really stupid and filled with equally dumb characters who make bad jokes are all filmed really well with that slick direct to cable TV look and I can see why this guys movies became staples of late-night sleaze programming for a few years as they're really fun disposable garbage entertainment filled with former Playboy playmates. Also the snake scenes are more enjoyable than anything in that shitty cgi-filled ANACONDA movie. I especially enjoyed the old snake in the toilet gag.

ANITA: THE SHOCKING ACCOUNT OF A YOUNG NYMPHOMANIAC (1973)

2011-09-18T04:21:00.000-07:00

This early 70's soft-core Swedish sexploitation flick is probably only of interest to fans of the sexy Christina Lindberg star of the great rape/revenge flick THEY CALL HER ONE EYE. This pic came out a year before that eye-gouging epic and features Lindberg as a 17-year old schoolgirl who's also a nymphomaniac. Just about every few minutes you get the lovely Christina naked either having really depressing sex with various dorks or giving out blow-jobs to filthy old men or doing a nice striptease in front of her family. How can she be cured of this deviant behavior? Apparently having an orgasm is her key to happiness and a fulfilling love life. Not exactly the deepest or most psychiatric-ally accurate portrayal of human sexuality ever put on screen but still a pretty fun little dirty movie for the most part despite the sort of doomed downer vibe our naughty heroine gives off. It's weird that many of the films of Sweden(even silly sex films) have that unintentionally gloomy feeling to them. It must be something about living in such a chilly environment or maybe it was just a 70's thing. Check it out for the supreme boob display!

Makes a great double feature with British flick SEX EXPRESS!:

MALIBU EXPRESS (1985)

2011-09-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

This movie could have just as easily been titled SYBIL DANNING'S BOOBS because this movie showcases her gargantuan tits in and out of dozens of different outfits and she looks amazing in every one. Probably the best I've ever seen her look in anything. There's also a bunch of other chest-balloons on display thanks to a few Playboy Playmates who also appear. This movie was directed by 80's breast aficionado Andy Sidaris. His films were the mainstay of USA's UP ALL NIGHT program back when cable was worth watching except of course, back then they always cut the explicitness right out of the films so it's nice to finally get to see these big booby epics the way god intended them to be seen thanks to the Sidaris box set that came out a while back. This tale is about a private investigator so it all basically plays out like an episode of MAGNUM PI but with the addition of plenty of bare ass. This guy even has the standard PI mustache and gets laid constantly. Also his main squeeze is Ms. Danning, that lucky bastard! There's also a family of hillbillies that show up for comic relief, really bad kung-fu and a little blood when people start getting knocked of by a mysterious killer. One scene has a semi-rape thing going on and the girl ends up enjoying it in the end. This was the only part of the flick that seemed like it was straight out of the 70's. While this is nowhere near the awesome insanity of a typical Russ Meyers' boob-a-thon it's still a mildly amusing time-waster even if it does drag on longer than necessary and wraps everything up in a way too complex explanation for such a silly movie. The whole thing is about a sliver above being a porn flick with its simplistic plot being just an excuse for as much gratuitousness as you can cram into 100 minutes or so. Probably only of interest to horny tit-obsessed guys or ladies who might have some lesbian leanings.

INSIDE (2007)

2011-09-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

Part of the French new wave of extreme horror flicks, along with stuff like MARTYRS and HIGH TENSION, this film is really just a showcase of extremely violent and gory set-pieces but it's also very enjoyable for what it is. Unlike many gore for gore's sake-type films this one is set up well enough that you actually care about the main character who happens to be a pregnant woman. Her natural vulnerability in that state is used well to garner sympathy from the audience and pull us, as the viewers, into the ordeal on display. You can tell this isn't a modern American film because of the levels that the violence delves into. It's just not the type of film that you will find playing at a multiplex in the U.S. anytime soon. Comparing this to MARTYRS, as I have heard some people do, is kind of a joke, I mean this movie really doesn't have any deep or significant meaning at all and doesn't leave you with much to think about after it's over. Sort of like an action movie with brutality thrown in. Regardless of the fact that the plot is extremely simplistic I find all the gore-hound elements too hard to resist and would recommend this to anyone with a strong stomach although I imagine if you're pregnant or have ever had kids this would probably be a good one to skip.

STRIPTEASER (1995)

2011-09-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

"I don't know about anyone else but I've certainly got a hard-on!"

I could have sworn that I'd seen this movie before but it was the sorta similar STRIP FOR ACTION(which also starred Maria Ford and Nikki Fritz) and that tells you what kind of a generic tale you're in for. What you get here is a fairly simplistic movie about a weird Lou Reed/Howard Stern-looking guy who holds a strip-club hostage for some reason. I think it was something to do with him being a nutso-wackjob. Eventually everything leads to a big shootout ending and it's all pretty pointless. Of course it's all really just an excuse to see some good-looking stripper action and a bunch of bouncy boobs. While STRIP FOR ACTION was disappointing in the nakedness department this one delivers quite a bit of bare ass and lovely bouncy boob as pretty much all the ladies in the cast get fully nude for your viewing pleasure. There's also one absurdly fake-looking set of rock-solid chest-balloons which show how far we've come in the bolt-on breast business since the mid-90's. Leatherface from TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III shows up as a bartender. Worth a watch if you like bottom of the barrel 90's made-for-video junk with boobs and people getting shot. Also the whole movie is only a little over an hour long which is a big plus and you get some pretty memorable one-liners, like the one above, from our psycho gunman.

MOONRUNNERS (1975)

2011-09-02T16:47:00.000-07:00

I was never really a huge fan of THE DUKES OF HAZARD but plenty of people in the 80's were and it was a pretty unavoidable phenomenon at the time. This movie is basically the blueprint for the TV show and they're both based on a real-life moonshine runner named Jerry Rushing. You even get two of the same character names from TV and narration and music by Waylon Jennings. The difference is in this there's a little sex, a main character dies, our heroes are moonshine runners and the Boss Hogg character actually runs a whorehouse. These are all big pluses in my book and I'd choose watching this movie again over that silly TV show any day. I was lucky enough to catch this a few days ago at a theater that was serving genuine moonshine which I'm sure heightened the experience a bit. I also have to add that the movie could have been trimmed a bit as it seems to go on a little long towards the end. There were a few spots where it could have been wrapped up sooner but dragged on. Besides this minor flaw I'd say check this out for some decent 70's moonshine-filled hicksploitation car-crashing goodness if that's your thing. This movie was originally promoted as a sort-of sequel to 1958's THUNDER ROAD but it's not really. It just also stars James Mitchum who was in the earlier film and it's also about moonshine running.

MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970)

2011-08-31T15:04:00.000-07:00

There were a few really good witch hunting/burning flicks from the 60's and 70's stuff like THE CONQUEROR WORM with Vincent Price and Ken Russell's THE DEVILS and I guess you could throw THE WICKER MAN in there too, but out of all those this one is the one I've gone back to and re-watched the most. I'm not exactly sure why I like this one over all the others except maybe just for the fact that it is so gratuitous in it's display of the insanity of religion. You get a tongue ripped out of a poor innocent rape-victims mouth by the roots, water-torture, branding, stretching, fingers lopped off, various more torture and a little more rape all in the wonderful name of organized religion. As a result this film appealed to me as a young gore-hound and I can still go back to it now and appreciate the message. Udo Kier is, as always, really good as the sympathetic withchfinders helper and this movie also stars a guy named Herbert Fux which sounds very porno-star-ish. The soundtrack on this sounds really similar to the slow music from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. There were a bunch of movies re-titled as sequels, all the way up to MARK OF THE DEVIL PART 5:RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD which was just one of the blind dead movies, but unfortunately there never was an official sequel. I like to think if there was a sequel our large breasted heroine would get some nasty revenge on Herbert Loms evil Christ-crusader/witch-raper but maybe that's too happy of an ending to such a realistic portrayal of the dark side of human behavior.

REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955)

2011-08-22T17:17:00.000-07:00

I recall them airing this flick a few times back in the 80's on local TV as one of those special 3-D showings that you would get once or twice a year. It was also colorized in that crappy early way they used to colorize black and white stuff for added cheesiness. It is altogether a pretty pointless film, I mean THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON needs a sequel about as badly as a cow needs another pair of tits, but Hollywood being the greedy ass-hats that they are, and obviously were even back in 1955, this was thrown together a year after the original monster movie classic. The creature, even though he was clearly killed at the end of the first film, is somehow alive again and taken to an aquarium where he's put on display. Yeah, screw science and research and all that kind of thing, let's just charge people to see him swim around while we poke him with a stick, brilliant! The movie isn't a complete waste though since you get Clint Eastwood's first film role(he appears for about a minute as a lab assistant) and you get an awesome little monkey wearing clothes doing tricks who also should have gotten way more screen time! To top things off the end scene is just a replay from the first movie, where the monster dies again, to leave you with that completely ripped-off feeling as the movie closes. Of course the creature would be back once more in THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US but I don't recall anything very exciting from that one except that they completely changed the creature into a bulky, generic, air-breathing monster who wears clothes.

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958)

2011-08-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

This movie is best know to me, and most movie nerds around my age, as the movie that George Lucas borrowed from for his basic outline of STAR WARS. While this movie does have some of the basic elements, a princess who's kingdom has been destroyed, an evil empire, sword-fights which are sorta like light-saber duels, two bumbling characters which you can see inspired C3PO and R2D2, it's also about as different from Lucas' film as GODZILLA is from JAWS and no one would ever call STAR WARS a remake of this. This movie is also really long which is not something I appreciate in most films but you get some beautiful shots(it was Kurosawa's first film shot in widescreen and he makes amazing use of this with some large scale scenes involving tons of people) and as usual with this director there's an interesting enough group of characters to keep you involved in the story without tuning out. Toshiro Mufune as always plays the bad-ass samurai hero who takes no shit which is great. Overall this one doesn't stand up to, and is even sort of dull, when compared to something like THE SEVEN SAMURAI for all-out samurai action but it's still worth checking out if you dig the Japanese classics that Hollywood rummaged through to get ideas for years to come.

CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954)

2011-08-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

This turned out to be the last of the great Universal studios classic monster flicks and it's a pretty strong way to finish up. The creature is a sort-of proto-evolved, scaly man-beast who has the hots for the way more evolved Julie Adams(who shows as much skin in her bathing suit as mainstream 50's cinema would allow.) There's a bunch of questions that never get answered. Like, why does the creature kill people? If he's a one-of-a-kind creature, how old is he? Does he have genitals or does he drop his sperm on eggs like a fish? I suppose the 50's were the wrong era to ask such questions. I've been lucky enough to have seen this classic in 3-D in theaters twice now and it's definitely the preferable way to view it. In addition to the obvious things shoved in your face the underwater scenes look really sweet. The plot is super simplistic and has become the cliched "searching for a mysterious monster" blueprint but it was the one that made it a cliche so show a little respect you slob. They will inevitably end up remaking this one of these days with some shitty-looking CGI monster but they'll never top the simplicity and style of the original and as with most of these remakes it will be a forgotten footnote while the original will be remembered forever.

DARK STAR (1974)

2011-08-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

John Carpenter's first feature-length film is more of an oddity than a very entertaining film. This one started out as just a short and then it got morphed later on into something longer. Plot-wise it's basically a mostly pretty boring spoof of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It's supposed to be funny but really doesn't get much above the slightly humorous point. In addition to seeing Carpenter's debut it's also weird seeing writer Dan O'Bannon as one of the goofy astronauts who gets to run around chasing a beach ball with feet that's supposed to be an alien creature and get into slapsticky fights with his crew-mates. A few years after this O'Bannon would go on to write ALIEN with a much different looking creature running around a spaceship. Only interesting as a curiosity for hardcore Carpenter fans.

THE FATAL FLYING GUILLOTINES (1977)

2011-08-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

The Shaw brothers made the original THE FLYING GUILLOTINE back in '72 and then came the amazingly awesome MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE in '75 and then this one which might be the worst out of them all but it does feature a flying decapitating weapon which is always fun to watch. Unlike the other movies these flying guillotines seem to have some kinda electric motors on them which make them buzz around and seem like the most absurd unbelievable weapons that don't belong in a movie set in old-time China. Unfortunately most of the numerous scenes without the killer hatbox are pretty generic and boring. The plot is about a guy trying to get a cure for his dying mom from some old kung-fu-crazy Shaolin monks who aren't very helpful and make him go through all sorts of trials. What a bunch of selfish pricks! Then the rest of the movie is about monks vs. some douche-bag prince. Only worth a look if you're super bored on a Saturday afternoon and dig some old-school kung fu silliness and like watching heads roll.

Them Germans make some sweet trailers!:

DEMON POSSESSED (1993)

2011-08-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

A desolate cabin in the middle of nowhere and strange demonic possessions? Where have I seen that before? Yes, in another shining example of why the 90's were a vast cultural void barely worth remembering, what we have here is a shitty rip-off of THE EVIL DEAD moved to a snowy locale. The acting is painfully bad and all the characters are super bland and forgettable. There's also voice-over narration from an old lady like we're watching THE TITANIC or something. If you dig action-packed scenes of snowmobiles racing around maybe this one is for you. You also get a stupid death by ceiling fan and a giant ice-sickle in the eye but unfortunately no rape by trees. Probably the most exciting thing about this movie is the cover of the VHS which promises us a way sexier movie than we get.

From AIP, but not the good Roger Corman AIP:

MANNAJA (1977)

2011-08-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

1977 was heading towards the very end of spaghetti-westerns being produced in Italy. This one, subtitled A MAN CALLED BLADE, is sorta unique just for having its hero use a hatchet which he throws at people that fuck with him and of course a whole bunch of people fuck with him. The movie starts off with a bang as our typically blonde-haired/blue-eyed hero is tracking down a wanted man(played by Donald O'Brien who is best known, to me anyway, as DR. BUTCHER from the zombie gore classic DR. BUTCHER M.D.) and we get a hand chopped off graphically. This falsely makes you think you're in for a pretty bloody ride but the movie kinda lets you down from there. I still enjoy the film even if it does end up being way more of a typical revengey sort of tale than you would have hoped for and I think Maurizio Merli does a pretty amazing Franco Nero impression throughout the film and the whole thing does remind the viewer of Nero's earlier spag KEOMA which was a hit in Italy so I guess it makes sense that they would wanna copy that formula.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

2011-08-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

While it might be hard to believe today, at one time Hollywood didn't just remake every single movie that had ever been made and done so with no creativity. That started sometime around the 90's and I believe it was that piece of shit PSYCHO remake that kicked all that nonsense off. So anyway, back in 1978 remakes were still sorta novel and they would usually try to put some sorta different spin on things. That being said this one isn't all that different from it's 50's original except for some updated effects work which show more of the actual transformations from a regular person to one of them pod people and you also get to see where the evil spores come from. The film also replaces the Communist-scare paranoia of the original with a more general societal paranoia. You get the classic 70's downer ending and even some total nudity by one of our main actresses thrown in towards the end which is nice. Also Mr. Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, shows up as a psychiatrist and Jeff Goldblum plays a smart-ass type character which he does a lot. While this one never matches the quality of the '56 version it's still an interesting update and is way better than the Abel Ferrara '93 remake and though I've never seen it I'm also willing to bet it beats the 2007 Nicole Kidman version also since I've never heard anything good about that one.

SUPER FLY (1972)

2011-08-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

"Eight-track stereo, color T.V. in every room and can snort a half a piece of dope everyday. That's the American dream nigger. Well ain't it?"

This one's right up there alongside THE MACK at the top of the blaxploitation heap as one of my favs from that genre. Blows away the much better known SHAFT by a long shot and besides the line about the 8-track stereo seen above SUPER FLY never gets as goofy as a lot of the other 70's urban classics. There's also an actual message in there about bettering yourself and not getting caught up in the man's system. Even if you are a gangster and a pusher and see yourself outside the law and mainstream society you're still perpetuating a cycle that ultimately destroys everything. Another unique aspect of this film is our main man Priest, played brilliantly by Ron O'Neal, isn't a pimp but a pusherman and the head of a network and although he will throw your girlfriend out on whore's row if you come up short with his drug money, as another character points out, Priest really doesn't have the heart to be a cold-blooded pimp. O'Neal plays Priest as a very sympathetic character and that's why the movie works so well. Priest or Youngblood as he's sometimes referred to knows that he will end up dead or in jail and is smart enough to devise an alternate plan for himself. Unfortunately for O'Neal his acting was so good that many people really thought he was a criminal and he wasn't offered many leading roles after this which is a shame. The city on view here is a gritty and bleak one and you get a view of 70's New York streets that's as far removed from today as possible. The whole city just looks slummy and dangerous and many parts of it were just like that. This one also gets added points for being a movie about the black experience actually directed by a black man which wasn't as common as you would think back in the 70's. You also get an amazing soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield who also plays in a nightclub scene. Definitely something that to me always seemed deeper than the typical black exploitation movie from this era. There were a couple of inferior sequels, SUPER FLY T.N.T. in '73 with O'Neal which I don't recall anything special about and THE RETURN OF SUPER FLY in '90 with some guy with a horrible 90's buzzcut playing SUPER FLY which I've never seen and from everything I've heard about it don't really want to. Stick with the original.

AND GOD SAID TO CAIN... (1970)

2011-08-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

The cool thing about this is it's a spaghetti-western that stars the patron saint of insanity Mr. Klaus Kinski and he gets to play a hero which is something I haven't seen him do before. A man wrongly sent to prison for ten years and then released to seek vengeance on those who wronged him. Yes, it's about as simple of a plot as you can get and of course he's a bit of an unhinged brooding hero cuz that's what Klaus does best although in this he's nowhere near as crazy as in most of his other roles. The bad part is that Kinski is dubbed(at least in the English print I saw) so he doesn't have his lovely German accent. Also the action scenes mostly consist of our hero hiding and picking people off sniper style which, although very smart and a good plan(realistically who the hell would choose a showdown in the street when hiding works so much better?) isn't very cinematic or exciting. Unfortunately the rest of the film isn't really all that good overall either but has a few neat Gothic touches (wind-blowing, perpetual darkness, organ playing and a church-bell ringing constantly) and is probably only of interest to hardcore Klaus Kinski fans.

DEAD MEN DON'T MAKE SHADOWS (1970)

2011-08-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

This spaghetti-western has lots of problems. For one the plot is a convoluted mess. To figure out who all the characters are and what the hell is going on never feels like it's worth the trouble since the movie is also completely unengaging right from the start. The music also sucks and consists of some kinda easy-listening horn-blowing throughout the film. Another thing is the way the movie drags along at a snails pace. The only positive thing I can say is the movie was well shot by sleazemeister Joe D'Amato and scenes at least looked good even if you didn't care who was gunning who down. Also the title kinda sounds cool but is actually pretty stupid since if you prop up a dead guy he's gonna make a shadow. I would say skip this one unless, like me, you are some kind of sick self-hating masochist who bought a DVD box set of 44 spaghetti-western flicks and feel compelled to sit through all of them no matter how bad.

WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS (1971)

2011-08-08T00:11:00.000-07:00

As a young man renting this odd little mash-up of genres back in the VHS days this movie crushed my hopes and dreams of seeing all-out werewolves on wheels action and I really should hate this movie just based on the fact that the title lies to me but deep down I have slowly forgiven this movie over the years and really don't. While it's true that there isn't really the promised scenes of werewolves riding around on choppers chompin' on folks this still isn't that terrible of a movie overall. They probably shoulda found a better title though but since exploitation films are more often than not about getting your ass to buy a ticket than delivering the goods this one is a perfect example of a true exploitation flick that exploits it's audience as well as the biker genre. What you actually get besides a gang of biker wolf-people is a gang of typical hairy 70's bikers who are pretty much complete assholes to everyone they run across until they run into a gang of Satanic monks who drug them and pull all kind of Satany shenanigans on our gang of dirtbags. The best word to describe this movie is probably "meandering" since this movie just pads it's short run time with the expected scenes of bikers, including folk-singer Barry "Eve Of Destruction" McGuire, riding around to generic music intertwined with scenes of devil rituals. The gang is called The Devil's Advocates so fooling around with the devil, and stupidly eating bread and wine offered by creeps in hoods and robes, somehow doesn't seem all that strange to the group. If you make it to the last ten minutes you finally get one lone werewolf on a motorcycle and while that does seem like a lot of crap to wade through to get to anything resembling what the awesome movie poster promises us there's something about this flick that I find enjoyable and very re-watchable. It's probably just because I really love most biker movies and the concept of melding one with a horror flick is just too good to pass up. Also until someone comes along and tops this, which is pretty unlikely since the 70's are long gone, by default this one will remain the world's greatest werewolf/biker flick.

THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957)

2011-08-02T20:59:00.000-07:00

1950's cinema was full of giant bugs, everything from spiders to ants to grasshoppers, and as far as those types of movies go this one is pretty generic. It's filled with plenty of talking and military strategy scenes which drag it down and a romantic subplot with a not very attractive couple you don't care about. If that's not bad enough there's also generic stock-footage to wade through. Also praying mantis' aren't all that scary-looking and I'm pretty sure they don't roar like monsters. One unintentionally homosexual scene has a bunch of military men dancing with each other on a base. I guess the only positive thing I can say is the mantis looked realistic enough through most of the film but you would be better off watching 1954's THEM for some superior giant insect action.