SLAUGHTER HIGH (1986)

                                  "Talk dirty, Frank! Talk dirty!" "Um... tits"

 If you took FRIDAY THE 13th mixed it with THE TOXIC AVENGER and threw Caroline Munro in there it would seem like a good idea on paper, in reality though I would probably rank this 80's slasher somewhere in the middle of all the many stalk and kill flicks from that decade.  It starts out like your average teen sex comedy and then our nerd character, Marty, gets horribly scarred in a prank gone wrong and from there on out it's exactly what you expect(at least up until the ending when, I think, it may have been all just a dream).  It all takes place on April Fool's Day and that was the original title up until that other APRIL FOOL'S DAY slasher movie came out(the one that had all the fake death's in it and a shitty ending).  This movie here not only resembles FRIDAY THE 13th in plot and bloody kills(a guy's intestine's explode out of his body, a gal takes an acid bath and a guy getting chopped-up by a lawn-mower being some highlights) but they got Harry Manfredini to score it so it sounds pretty much exactly like F13 in a bunch of places and they even go so far as having one character wear a hockey mask at one point and joke around about being Jason. The kills are good and gore-filled(I watched this on an old VHS but I'm pretty sure there's an even gorier DVD release) and this is an OK watch if you dig these type of 80's stupid dead teen flicks. 

DERANGED (1987)

  I can't say I enjoyed this one very much. Directed by Chuck Vincent(who's best known for his porn directing) and with a cast made up of porn performers(Veronica Hart, Jamie Gillis, Jerry Butler) this is a weird psychological-type thriller/horror film with some annoying aspects to it. I generally hate movies where stuff happens in a character's mind and this is what we're shown, I also hate movies where stuff happens that makes no logical sense within the movie and that happens here a lot. Veronica Hart(under her real name Jane Hamilton) acts her ass off in the lead role of a gal who's mentally unhinged and schizophrenic. She's attacked in her apartment by a guy in a ski mask and has a miscarriage which leads to her becoming a murderer. The idea to film this movie from a delusional characters point of view is an interesting one but I don't think they really pulled it off very well. Roman Polanski's REPULSION was obviously a big influence here. I think I'll stick with the 70's Ed Gein-inspired DERANGED over this one.

Dickie-boy just wants some lovin':

HER NAME WAS LISA (1980)

 After LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET director Roger Watkins made a bunch of porn flicks and this one's probably the most well known.  It's a pretty dark tale of a cheap prostitute named Lisa played by Samantha Fox who we first see laying dead at her funeral.  There's a surprising anti-drug message and the whole film is told in flashbacks through various people that knew Lisa including Vanessa Del Rio. It chronicles her downward spiral and is not the most uplifting thing you coulda jerked off to back in 1980. You can tell that Watkins wanted to make something more than just another silly fuck flick and he does.  There's some Led Zeppelin and Kraftwerk tracks among the various borrowed music.  You get some light bondage and a rich guy gets a well-deserved dildo-raping of his ass.  Also one of my personal favorite porn actors Bobby Astyr(who in real life was married to Fox) shows up in a typically goofy role as a scumbag who gets a little rapey.  This is a must see for fans of the era when porn mattered.

THE GLORY STOMPERS (1967)

 The Glory Stompers are a biker gang in this film but not the main gang, that would be The Black Souls.  They are led by Dennis Hopper in full-on bad guy mode and they also have Casey Kasem from America's Top 40 and a large muscular fellow named Magoo who looks like a white version of Bolo Yeung in the group.  This guy, Robert Tessier would later go on to shave his head and battle Charles Bronson in HARD TIMES.
 The plot concerns the kidnapping of one of the Glory Stomper's old ladies and they're quest to get her back before she's sold off into a life of drug-addiction and prostitution to the Mexicans. It's full of the usual biker flick hijinks(drinking, molesting women, hippie pot parties etc.) and it's a decent watch with a groovy soundtrack.

FEROCIOUS BEAST WITH A GUN (1977)

                                                    "Have a drink twat!"

 Italian crime thriller with Helmut Berger playing a psycho rapist/murderer who escapes from jail and along with his gang of subservient cohorts goes on a robbery spree. Marisa Mell from DANGER:DIABOLIK gets caught up in the criminal festivities and supplies some nice nudity to go along with all the gun-play on display. A young gal gets her chest sliced up with a straight razor and a guy gets buried alive and covered with lime in a few of the more violence-filled scenes. This film has a pretty sweet soundtrack and is worth a look if you dig those European cops and criminal-type films. This film shows up on a TV in JACKIE BROWN so I assume Tarantino is a fan. AKA's= MAD DOG KILLER, BEAST WITH A GUN, STREET KILLERS, FEROCIOUS, THE HUMAN BEAST and probably a few more.

"read the paper!":

A SMELL OF HONEY, A SWALLOW OF BRINE (1966)

      "I'm such a bitch." "We all are. But that's just part of being female I guess."                 

This 60's sexploitation flick starts right out with an attempted date-rape scene and stays pretty sleazy throughout.  This is sort of the dirty-movie version of the boy who cried wolf except it's the gal who cried rape.  And just like the above quote reinforces she's a real bitchy character and a total tease to everyone before getting her kicks by ruining the lives of every fellow she meets.  By the end of the film she meets up with an actual rapist(also a garage rock singer and, I think, part-time pimp but I wasn't too clear on that point) and by this point in the film you're rooting for her attacker which makes you feel like a real scumbag but that happens fairly often when viewing films from this era.  There's lesbian ass massages(where we get the classic line of "I may be a bitch but I'll never be a butch", long scenes of ladies changing clothes, the obligatory giant 60's panties and a bloody dream sequence involving whips.  A good watch for old time perverts and degenerates.  Producer Dave Friedman shows up as a juror in a cameo.

SWINGERS MASSACRE (1975)

 This was originally titled INSIDE AMY and is the story of a kind of schlumpy fellow named Charlie who's looking to put a little spark back in his marriage so he convinces his wife to go to a swinger's bar with the awesome name of Filthy McNasty's.  They end back at a party where some partner swapping goes on and apparently ol' Charlie can't get a hard-on under this kind of pressure.  This is the first half of the movie, for the second half stupid Chuck goes on a jealousy-fueled, kill-crazy rampage, which if he stopped to think about it for a second would realize he has no one to blame but himself.  There's no blood in these scenes since he uses boring methods like strangulation and gassing his victims in their cars but you at least get some boobs in the sex scenes to keep things a little interesting.  Sexploitation regulars Rene Bond and Uschi Digart show up in these bits.
 Sometime in the 80's this was retitled as SWINGERS MASSACRE on VHS and marketed as another of the million or so slasher movies released in that decade.  Obviously it fails as a slasher but it's at least a mildly interesting oddball look at swinging(and homicide-inducing impotence) in the 70's.  Gary Kent who starred in the actual slasher THE FOREST has a small part here as a sexy fella.  AKA SUPER SWINGING PLAYMATES

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (2011)

  As usual if you want to see good modern films you have to forget about the U.S. and look elsewhere.  The few Indonesian films I've seen have been mostly very weird horror type things with floating head ghosts and that sort of thing.  This here is completely different than those and is a straight-up action/martial arts film more similar to something that might have come out of Hong Kong back in the 90's except there's way more bloody knife fights and no goofy bits.  You get kung-fu, gun-fu, machete-fu, axe-fu, knife-fu and a few other fu's I'm probably forgetting.  For an action movie this thing works amazingly well.  It's very well choreographed and keeps up the tension level throughout the run-time leaving very little room for boredom to ever set in. The plot is exactly what the title says, there's a police raid of an apartment building run by a crime-boss fellow.  I'm kinda shocked there's not a shitty Hollywood remake of this out yet but I hear the new Judge Dredd movie borrows a bit from this so there ya go.  Check out the original unless your allergic to ass-kicking excitement.

HELL HIGH (1989)

 If you took the movie CLASS OF 1984 and replaced the punk rockers with preppies and replaced the soundtrack with a bunch of lame music you would have this movie. It's not a complete waste of time though because there's also a little girl who accidentally kills a couple on a motorcycle setting up the last third of the movie where they forget which movie they're ripping off and turn this into a straight up slasher flick so at least it's a sort of interesting mash-up kind of a deal.  There's also some nudity thrown in but it looks like it's all from a body double since it's cut so oddly and you never see this mysterious naked bodies face. 
 I watched this online but I might have to purchase the actual DVD at some point because Joe Bob Briggs does commentary on it and his commentaries make even awful movies very entertaining. AKA RAGING FURY

THEM! (1954)

 This one manages to be equal parts goofy giant monster movie and super-serious, end-of-the-world, nuclear-warning science-fiction. The world's greatest, and only as far as I know, giant ants on-the-loose epic. Atomic bomb testing causes giant ants to run amok in the desert. One of the seemingly million giant bug movies that were churned out in the 50's and probably one of the bigger-budgeted ones.  There's a, surprising for 1954, tough woman scientist character and plenty of army vs. gargantuan ants action. Although watching it today the giant ants don't look very realistic it's still pretty remarkable that they actually built these big-ass things and got them to sorta move about(especially when you compare that to the lazy FX work done today). This is helped out by the weird sound effect that's used whenever our murderous monsters appear. This is a fav monster flick from my childhood and essential monster-kid viewing that was played often on Chiller Theater programs and is the movie that's credited with spawning all the rest of the 50s giant bug flicks, so it's hard to say much negative about it. It does get a little talky in a few bits and for a 50's horror/sci-fi movie it's got an unusually long run-time of over 90 minutes whereas most of these things just barely made it over and hour. Still you get lots of army vs. ants action along with the super-serious 50's acting. Also even goofy-looking puppet-headed ants beat modern CGI cartoon shit in my book.




                                                                  Italian poster!:

FORMICULA! (It's German for 'little ant'. Those silly Germans!): 

THE CREATURE WALKS AMONG US (1956)

 The final chapter in the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON trilogy has the monster back in non-3D getting a shirt and a pair of pants and walking about breathing air thanks to his fresh new lungs.  I'm surprised they didn't get him some Frankenstein shoes to complete the ensemble.  He also puts on a few pounds and looks more like a pro wrestler than a swimmer.  It's pretty ridiculous visually but the movie works within it's own strange logic and is a decent enough classic creature feature for a boring Sunday afternoon.  If this was made more recently I imagine their would be an army of creatures for part 4.  There's recycled underwater footage thanks to the lower budget on this one, a monster vs. bobcat fight and the ending sort of teases us that the creature may have committed suicide but they do leave it open for further sequels which didn't happen. Also as with the better monster on the loose flicks you can sympathize with the monster and root for him against all the stupid human characters.


Played with something called THE PRICE OF FEAR which sadly looks like it has zero monsters in it:

VAMPIRE BRIDE (1960)

 Got a chance to catch this obscure Japanese horror flick in an actual theater yesterday and I would say this goes into the goofy but awesome monster movie category.  It's sort of an Asian version of a 50's Roger Corman film where our main character is the victim of some women who are jealous of her beauty so they try to kill her and then she becomes a hairy blood-drinking monster and it's revenge city.  Strangely the vampire here looks more like a bigfoot than your typical suave bloodsucker but that's one of the things that make this unique.  There's also an old witchy woman with a punk rock haircut, a humpback and a gaggle of rubber bats thrown in for some added spook-show thrills.  I'm not sure where you can see this in a theater outside of some weird retro art-house type of place(apparently there's a DVD available somewhere since that's what they projected) but if you ever get the chance check it out for a wacky monster flick where the monster is the hero.

An overview of Shintoho studios, which also brought us the even more goofy SUPER GIANT series:

EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE (1965)

 A group of robots and aliens send Starman, who's kinda like the Japanese version of Superman, to Earth to protect us from this evil brain running roughshod who has an army of guys who wear Batman outfits and some other monster-types.  This was edited together from a few episodes of a Japanese theatrical serial called SUPER GIANT so the cutting is a little wonky at times and often lacks any sense.  The original series was from the 50's and this was first shown here on TV in '65 so it probably looked kinda old even back then.  It actually looks to me like it coulda been made in the 30's like one of those old-time serials except for the kung fu-style fighting.  There's another patchwork film with Starman called ATTACK FROM SPACE which I think is made from even earlier episodes of SUPER GIANT so I guess technically this might be a sequel of some sort.  Both of these are ridiculous and absurd but good for a cheap laugh just for the dumb goofball costumes, dumb plot and silly heroics.  Apparently things have been nutty and weird in Japan for a long time.

Starman, made of steel and sex appeal!: