Favorites :: Vintage Ads: If You Don't Tune in By Midnight...

Other Points of Interest:

Newspaper ads for Prom Night's theatrical run at the Morgue.

The Cult Movie Project: #3 (of 200) :: Blood on the Blackboard -- Well, Sort of, But Not Really :: Renee Daalder's Massacre at Central High (1976)

About a million years ago, I caught Renee Daalder's Massacre at Central High (1976) in the wee hours of the morning on one of the SuperStations -- you know, when the SuperStations didn't suck. And now I've seen this civics lesson, thinly disguised as a horror movie, uncensored, complete, and commercial free. I wrote it up years ago, too, and now, despite seeing Cheryl "Rainbeux" Smith and Lani O'Grady completely starkers (-- and Kimberly Beck, Robert Carradine and Derrel Maury if we're really keeping score), my opinion on the film hasn't changed all that much. About as subtle as an After School Special by way of George Orwell, William Golding, and George Romero, the message gets mixed-up and lost somewhere in a succession of bloody -- make that, fairly bloodless, coups.

Massacre at Central High was the first film brave enough to use the M-word in it's title after Tobe Hooper's classic Texas-style massacre had sent the country into a tizzy two years before. And as originally conceived by producers Harold Sobel and Bill Lange, they were looking to make another bloodbath in that same severed vein. Things changed when Daalder was hired to write and direct a picture to fit that title. He had been recommended to Lange by his friend, Russ Meyer (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, both of which we'll be getting around to reviewing for this retrospective), for whom Daalder had worked as a cameraman. And while Lange liked the film Daalder eventually made it had become less of an exploitation piece and more of a political allegory. The producer also knew it lacked the horrific punch he had asked for and sensed they were gonna take a bath on its subsequent release. And they did.

I believe it was George Orwell who said all revolutions are doomed to failure. For no matter how good the intention, once the seat of power is overthrown the revolutionaries, in most cases, become worse than those who came before them. In the film, this is represented by a group of slackers, slobs and nerds, who are pushed around by the jocks and preppies, until they find a catalyst in a transfer student to overthrow this Gestapo-like clique. This catalyst, David (Maury), starts the revolution after he is permanently injured by the jocks when he refuses to join them, triggering our massacre. It should be noted that these actions take place because these others refused his overtures to stand up for themselves and fight back. But once all the jocks are eliminated -- except for David's old friend, Mark (Stevens), whose days are numbered -- after a brief transition period, the school reaches a serene equilibrium; but this doesn't last as the power vacuum left by those killed is filled by their former victims and the violence begins anew.

Okay, a friendly piece of advice to all future filmmakers out there: If you have the word "massacre" in your title but it's nearly an hour into your film before anyone is, well, massacred, you're p'rolly gonna piss off your target audience. Now, my biggest problem with Massacre at Central High is not with the blunt political overtones but with the jumbled mess Daalder asks us to make out of them. However, I do feel sorry for any slasher fans who rented or bought this based on the title and some notoriously misleading VHS box art. The body count is fairly high; it just isn't very graphic. Anyhoo...

Every class and social strata are present and accounted for in the microcosm of Central High but, according to Daalder, and his mighty morphin' metaphors, none are worth a damn when it comes to power and leadership as the oppressed become the oppressors. At first it's railing against the Junior Gestapo, and then later its suggesting that things might have been better while they were in charge. Status quo is good? Change is good? Which is it? Make up your damned mind already, movie. Most contend the whole crux of the plot is to somehow get the neutral Mark and his girl, Teresa (Beck), to grow a spine and join the fight. Only when they finally take a stand against David, at the end, does the chaos truly end. But! With everything we've seen so far, whose to say -- or how can we believe -- that a school run by Mark and Teresa is going to be any better? Fie and *pfui* on that, I say. 

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"We have entered a surreal world, where corpses dance, where in the absence of elders it is the young who set up a caste system and individually come to represent various ideologies. Could Central High be the dream world of some history/political science student. (Daalder's use of blackouts certainly contributes to the dreamlike effect.) It's a weird notion I know, with shades of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) -- the dream of an asylum inmate -- but it's probably the only one that gives logic to the film."

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX-- Danny Peary
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The Fine Print: Massacre at Central High was watched via a digital purchase through Amazon Prime. Watched as a double-feature with Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979). What's the Cult Movie Project? That's three down, with 197 to go. 

Other Points of Interest:

Detailed review of Massacre at Central High at 3B Theater.

Newspaper ads for Massacre at Central High at the Morgue. 

Massacre at Central High (1976) Evan :: Brian Distributing Corporation / EP: Jerome Bauman / P: Harold Sobel / D: Rene Daalder / W: Rene Daalder / C: Bertram van Munster / E: Harry Keramidas / M: Tommy Leonetti / S: Derrel Maury, Andrew Stevens, Kimberly Beck, Robert Carradine, Lani O'Grady, Cheryl "Rainbeux" Smith

Happy Holidays :: The 9th Annual All-Night Christmas Craptacular Movie Marathon that Almost Wasn't.

Way back in August, yours truly suffered a two-punch combo of a gall-bladder attack and a massive coronary upheavel. Over the months since, the gall-bladder has been removed from the equation but my heart still isn't palpating quite right even though a succession of doctors and specialists assure me I am A-OK and on the mend. On the bright side, these health woes have put my Annual Seasonal Affective Disorder Blues into proper perspective. So, there is that. This also brings us to the Annual All-Night Christmas Craptacular Movie Marathon, where I spend the one night a year the paper I work for doesn't go to press with a pecan pie, a bottle of Wild Turkey, a foot-long sub, and do battle with a dusk till dawn onslaught of fractured, theme-specific films.

The problem? One, I don't drink anymore; two, since all this started I tend to turn into a pumpkin around 2am; and three, if I sit too long in one position my angina acts up something fierce. Yoinks! And so, after contemplating on just skipping the marathon altogether this year, I settled on a compromise instead: a three movie marathon on Christmas day, a pie, a sub, and some noble intentions. As for the theme this year, I wanted some holiday specific horror with the caveat that they had to be ones I'd never seen before. And after some digging into the bowels of YouTube, I managed to cobble something together for your post-Yuletide reading pleasure.

First up we had Elves (1989), which, turns out, is a tad misleading in that only one singular Elf ever appears in the picture. Ever. But, he is a Nazi Elf, so there ya go. Anyhoo, try to get your head around this: seems some crackpot scientist escaped from Nazi Germany and set up shop in America where he incestuously tinkered with his own blood-line over the next four decades, finally spawning the perfect Aryan virgin to mate with a glorified sock-puppet to fulfill a prophecy and create a new master race of Super-Nazi Elves that [Lugosi/] "Vill conquer da vorld!" [/Lugosi].

Now, the perfect offspring in question has no desire to have sex with a slack-jawed and barely articulate armature, who seems more interested in consuming beetles than consummating their relationship anyways. This I'm-my-own-grandaughter also works at the local mall, where she befriends the new mall Santa, played by Grizzly Adams, who replaced the old one who just had his balls stabbed off by our evil Nazi Elf while doing lines of cocaine in the john. (In the Elf's defense, he did threaten to molest his reluctant bride to be.) A cat toilet drowning, a cap-gun shoot-out at the mall, random Nazi face-punching, explosions, hot library research action, a bath-tub electrocution, and some of the most hilarious plot-dumps, courtesy of Dr. Science and Professor Exposition, all follow, leading us to thee *ahem*, forgive me, climax. *snerk*

Where does one begin when discussing the bone-headed hilarity of Elves? The plot is asinine. Gloriously so. The highly quotable dialogue is so blunt and matter of fact it causes constant ripples in the Space-Time Continuum. ("I've got to find the connection between the Nazis and the Elves." "Horrible day at work. Santa got murdered.") Special shout-out to Julie Austin as our virginal sacrifice. She deserved better than this flick. Also special nods to Christopher Graham as her snotty, foul-mouthed and perverted little brother, Deanna "Land of the Giants" Lund as Austin's cranky, cat-drowning mother and sister (complete with extended fake-boob nude-scene), and to Dan Hagarty as the pickled pickle-barrel with a beard who fails us all.

I, for one, welcome our new Elven Overlords. 

 

Up next, I was always hesitant to rent Silent Night, Bloody Night (1972) back in the glory days of VHS rentals at the late and lamented Video Kingdom. See, that delightfully macabre cover, courtesy of Paragon Video, would always stare back at me as I passed it in the Horror Aisle, where I always tried to avoid eye contact with that skull, whose blackened eyes tended to follow you, no matter if you ducked into the Action or Romance aisle. Now, having finally seen it, I am kicking myself over and over again for not giving it a spin sooner.

For you see, as the film progressed, despite the horrid print I watched on YouTube, I became totally engrossed in this morbidly creepifying tale, even though it barely made a lick of sense. I'm telling ya, once you thought you had a handle on things, the film kept pulling the rug right out from under you. Thus and so, the gist of it as you fight to stay upright is the old Butler mansion, which doubled as an insane asylum back in the day until something "bad" happened, is up for sale, much to the agitation and hand-wringing of several locals and the sole Butler heir, who breaks out of another asylum and makes a beeline for home, where somebody is knocking off all our players after luring them to the old homestead.

What Silent Night, Deadly Night lacks in cohesion is more than made up for in mood, mayhem and murder. (That flashback revolt at the Butler Asylum was AH-mazing in both concept and execution.) The cast really helps sell this runaway train of flashbacks and plot twists -- most of them leftover cogs from Andy Warhol's Factory. This film is a fever dream, and felt like a competent Andy Milligan flick to be honest. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'ma gonna go and order the restored version on DVD because I'd like to experience this film exactly as the lunatics who made it intended. TO THE AMAZON!

Once that order was placed, we wrapped up this Holiday Horror Triple-Feature with Don't Open Till Christmas (1984), which, sadly, wasn't as gonzo as Elves or as mesmerizing as Silent Night, Bloody Night, leaving me with a whole empty six-pack of "meh." Which is odd once you dig into the pedigree of this flick a bit. I mean it was produced by exploitation legend, Dick Randall, who had a hand in everything from skin flicks (Around the World with Nothing On), to Euro-Trash (The French Sex Murders), to Filipino midget spies (For Your Height Only), to gonzo giant creature features (Crocodile), and was directed by Edmund Purdom, an actor who was a favorite of Joe D'Mato and was in Randall's whackadoodle slasher knock-off, Pieces. But I'm telling ya, Don't Open Till Christmas is just awful because it commits one of the biggest cardinal sins by boring me to tears.

Also, turns out, as the film dragged on indefinitely, certain sequences kept sparking old memory streams, convincing me that I HAD seen this before but nothing stuck, apparently. (One day removed and most of this mess of a film is already gone again.) Quick and dirty: Some psycho has it in for Santa Claus and goes around killing anyone unfortunate enough to be decked out in the Red Suit and false beard. That's it. Stalk, stab, repeat. Oh, sure, there's a succession of Scotland Yard's finest trying to bring a stop to this nonsense but they mostly fail. There's another subplot about a kidnapped stripper, a witness to one of these Santacides, being held captive so we can get the how and the why but by then I simply did not care. And the less said about the rock-stupid ending the better.

Don't Open till Christmas is nigh incomprehensible. Even a musical number by Caroline Munro can salvage anything. Characters disappear. There is no real hero. The plot seems to keep changing its mind. And it appears to be edited with a Cuisinart. Further digging shows Purdom quit when he was only half done, leaving the production scrambling for nearly two years -- TWO YEARS -- to complete and release the film. This is the kind of garbage that gives slasher films such a bad reputation. Though it should be noted that almost all the victims here are male, and the one Santa who survives was a woman. A naked woman, naturally. *sigh*

And on that sour note, thus concludes our truncated 9th Annual Christmas Craptacular Movie Marathon. Until next year, Boils and Ghouls, Happy Holidays one and all. Or Bah! Humbug, where applicable. 

Recommendations :: We Rec'em, You Wreck'em :: Another Batch of Flicks that Might Be Worth Your Time to Avoid at All Costs! Or Maybe Not. Then Again...

The film that John Wayne backed out of and turned over to Randolph Scott so he could make The Searchers, 7 Men From Now (1956) sparked a fantastic seven movie odyssey with director Budd Boetticher and netted a career redefining arc for Scott. Here, our hero plays a former sheriff tracking down the seven men who killed his wife during a hold-up. Things get complicated when his search is side-tracked by a couple of stranded pioneers, circling Chiricahua, and gunslinger Lee Marvin. To say much more would give away too many twists the film righteously earned; and so, you'll just have to take my word that this thing is amazing. Trust me. And that final shoot-out? Wow. 

I had the perfect tagline for this film when it was first announced: "See it B-4 it's too -- Wait. B-4? @%#* You just sunk my Battleship!" Anyhoo, kinda embarrassed for how long it took me to realize the alien invaders' missiles / depth charges were a simulacrum for the pegs from the Milton Bradley board game. Actually, it's kind of hilarious how relevant the game is to the action in Battleship (2012). What's even more amazing, is it actually kinda works. The chicken burrito bit at the beginning was pretty hilarious, but then I was grinding teeth for the following 40 minutes or so until the alien invasion got up to speed. Wasn't sure if they were trying to poke holes into Michael Bay and his Bayisms or going for a flagrant copy. Either way, it was kind of a lets heave everything at the wall and who cares if it sticks. And hows come all the old Fudds from Taylor Kitsch's Wackiest Ship in the Navy not rate any medals at the ending ceremony? *pfeh* 

Just a quick note on a matinee screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), which was pretty great but the most poignant moment came at the end of the movie, where, like good conditioned little monkeys, we stuck around for any stingers and all we got was monkey chatter and the sound of a monkey urinating (I think). Well played, 20th Century Fox. Well played. 

Finally managed to catch up with I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998). Based on an unused script by Edward D. Wood Jr., overly-maligned as the worst filmmaker of all time, Billy Zane is quite amazing as a thug who escapes from a sanitarium in a stolen nurses uniform, robs a bank, loses the money in a cemetery, and spends the rest of the film tracking down and killing a group of funeral attendees, thinking one of them must have taken his loot. Basically a silent movie in desperate need of a shot of Thorazine, choc-a-bloc with stock footage and celebrity cameos, the film is quite the trip as our character shimmies and shakes his way through the seedy underbelly of LA-LA Land; and trying to describe something that is experimental or avant-garde at best and Tim Burtonesque -- minus the sentimentality for the subject matter, replaced with the delirium of a bourbon-soaked fever dream -- at the worst, the end result is kind of a mess. An interesting mess, to be sure, but still a mess. 

For those of you unaware, Scandinavia has carved itself out a nice little genre niche with a series of frozen slasher movies -- movies that put their American counterparts to shame, mostly, if I'm being honest. And with Blood Runs Cold (2010) we have another supernatural slasher / 'spam i en stuga' flick, where a group of friends fall prey to a ski-mask wearing zombie/cannibal and his trusty axe. First, I dug how a GPS error sits the whole thing in motion. Also, very well executed as far as the murder set-pieces are concerned. And my only real beef is that instead of a dub or subs, the filmmakers, targeting an American release, had their Swedish actors speaking English and the obvious second language thing is too easy to detect and a distraction both in delivery and in the script -- which doesn't help with its f-bomb carpet bombing to make the dialogue sound more 'Murican is egregiously ridiculous. Totally paint by numbers, but strays outside the lines enough that the ending picture still satisfied. 

As for The Killing of Jacob Marr (2010), now THIS is how you do a throwback 'Spam in a Cabin' movie, people, where, for once, seeing too many of these damned things is actually counter-productive. For, I ask you, What would happen if you had a stalk 'n' slash movie where the characters aren't complete douche-nozzles, and therefore, you don't want to see any of them die, where calmer heads prevail despite the mounting evidence and ratcheting tension, where they do everything as right as possible, and yet everything still goes wrong? Something you'd like to see? Well, here's the movie you've been waiting for. It's been a long time since a movie from this genre out-foxing me this badly, in a good way, where it kept pulling the rug out from under all expected plot twists and situations -- situational 'rules' set in cinematic stone. It had me from the beginning, and I rooted for it 'til the end, where it kinda fumbled and reverted to form right before the credits rolled, but! It's not necessarily a bad ending, and by then, I was too giddy over what had come before to let it slide. Highly recommended for those inclined to these kinds of things. 

Back on mother Earth, The Bletchley Circle: Cracking the Killer's Code (2012) is a crackerjack British mini-series about a quartet of mustered out code-breakers reuniting ten years after World War II's end to track down and stop a serial killer. Using the same scientific and mathematical principles and geographic profiling used to sniff out Nazi troop movements, they soon have the killer's pattern and modus operandi sussed out. Some interesting melodrama leavened into this ersatz police procedural/historical drama and, in a refreshing twist, the authorities actually give credence to their theories; but, profiling isn't an exact science; and when a couple of tips don't pan out it's up to these ladies to stop the killer. A killer whose elusive shrewdness has them looking for someone else who signed the official secrets act at war's end. A fantastic combination of The Snoop Sisters and The Profiler, this was just great and I was all kinds of happy to discover there are two more story arcs of mysteries out there for these smart, tough-as-nails ladies to solve. 

Also from Britain, we have Invasion (1966); an extremely interesting sci-fi exercise that, basically, boils down to a 'Country Cottage' alien invasion flick. We begin with a mysterious blackout at a rural hospital, followed by the arrival of a 'John Doe'; the comatose victim of a pedestrian vs. auto encounter. And as the hospital staff (Edward Judd, Valerie Gearon) try to treat him, it slowly but surely becomes apparent that they're not dealing with anything human. From there, we discover why the patient is on Earth, and who is after him, with the hospital staff caught in the middle -- literally stuck inside a force bubble that is slowly roasting them alive. Slow and deliciously deliberate (I dug how everyone took everything the aliens say at face value), admittedly, the film works a lot better during the unraveling of what the patient is before it reaches a fairly wonky climax. Still, the end result is worth an appreciative look. 

Meanwhile, Samuel Fuller gives us some fabulous, two-fisted melodrama concerning a 'Circulation War' between two rival newspapers; one an idealistic upstart, the other a well-established edition that's drenched in yellow ink, who both publish from New York's fabled Park Row (1952). The whole conflict is personified by their respective publishers and the screen just crackles when Gene Evans and Mary Welch rip each other to shreds, betraying the mutual attraction between them. And the harder these two push each other apart, the more the violence escalates. Fuller, a former reporter, struggles a bit while trying to find the balance between this important history lesson and the schmaltz, but it all evens out in the end. 

More miss than hit, Cracking Up (1977) is a sketch comedy showcase using a massive California earthquake as a framing device for the vignettes. 1970s tastelessness abounds, with plenty of soon to be familiar faces (Fred Willard, Michael McKean, David Landers, Harry Shearer, Edie McClurg) littering the landscape. Nearly worth it for an Abbott 'n' Costello riff on a concert booking skit involving The Who, Guess Who and Yes but no, not quite.

Kind of an odd mash-up of Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962) and Michael Crichton's Westworld (1973), this exercise in guerrilla film-making, shot on the sly at DisneyWorld, is quite the surreal trip. Kinda amazing how the innocuous can become insidious with only the slightest of shifts in perspective as a family vacation, well, goes off the monorail a bit. Is the dad going crazy? Or is he just one big old pervert as he becomes obsessed with two French touristas. Or is something far more sinister going on? Well, it all depends on how you interpret the ending of Escape from Tomorrow (2012). I, for one, appreciated the ambiguity of the climax, leaving me with several theories and an itch to watch it again. Your mileage may vary on the tolerance of such things.

Also watched Varan the Unbelievable (1961) for the first time since buying it some *gack* thirty years ago on VHS tape. Better than I'd remembered but still not very good. Wildly disjointed due to the clumsy additional inserts to westernize it. From a design standpoint, the monster, what little we actually get to see, again, thanks to some shoddy editing, looks pretty cool -- especially when he's on all fours with his tale whipping around. (And I really dug those Creature from the Black Lagoon front paws.) And the destruction he causes is top notch. If nothing else, it rekindled a desire to track down the original Japanese version. 

And finally ... *ahem*  Sing us a Space Shanty, Cap'n Elba?! "Okay. Are you ready kids?" Aye-aye, Cap'n! "I can't hear you..." AYE-AYE, CAP'N! "Oooooooh-ohhhhh, Whose bald in the noggin' and made the lethal Black Goo?" En-gin-EEeers! "All genocidal and the color of blue!" En-gin-EEeers! "If expensive prequels be somethin' you wish?!" En-gin-EEeers! "Then hop on aboard the Prometheus!" ... GAH! *eyegitty*eyegitty*eyegitty* Yes, well, outstanding F/X saddled with barely sketched out caricatures, with loathsome people doing idiotic things, getting themselves killed in moronic ways, and saddled with designated heroes we're supposed to root for solely because they ARE the designated heroes in the script ... I could go on ranting, but, eh, it just isn't worth the effort. If nothing else, Prometheus (2012) is a haunting reminder of how far sci-fi and fantasy films have improved since the 1990s and the forlorn genre days of Godzilla (1998), The Haunting (1999) and The Wild, Wild West (1999). 

Recommendations :: What You Should or Shouldn't Be Watching. Choose, but Choose Wisely.

Well, with it's heart in the right place and a foot squarely in its own mouth, Gila! (2012), Jim Wynorski's remake of The Giant Gila Monster, boldly goes exactly where you think it will go and, you know what? I'm totally cool with it. The F/X are endearingly wonky, we actually get to see the monster eat people this round, and the attempts at a period piece are totally half-assed. Again, didn't care. And just when you think they forgot to make Chase sing the Mushroom Song, they don't. I had a grand time with it but, as always, your mileage with this frommage homage will vary.

Perhaps the closest we may ever get to a Wes Anderson horror movie, the end result of A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012), a tale of a writer (Simon Pegg) so sick of writing a series of children's books he goes cold turkey with a new project on Victorian serial killers, is a mixed bag of mounting paranoia, tension, sight gags and pratfalls as the author faces down his own personal demons. Is it real? Is it a delusion? Will our hero decipher it all before it's too late? Will you care? Well, that depends on your tolerance of such things. Pegg acquits himself rather well in service to a script that is somewhere between admirably ambitious and catastrophically convoluted. From a production design it's mesmerizing, from a story standpoint, however, it's kind of a mess. So, lets call this one an interesting misfire that's well worth a watch.

Finally got around to watching The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and, well, contrary to what I'd heard, it wasn't THAT terrible. I will echo a sentiment that an origin reboot so soon after the Raimi trilogy was totally unnecessary -- Gwen Stacey could just have easily been introduced without having to start all over again (however, without it we would've been shafted out of a great Uncle Ben), and taking the franchise in a Twilighty direction is a huge misstep. Andrew Garfield makes a fine Peter Parker (an odd skater-punk/emo/hoodieholligan/ nerd) but his Spidey-schtick could use a little work along with the chemistry between he and Emma Stone that was trying so darned hard to spark but never quite ignited. (For that, I mostly blame some clunky dialogue that no one could make work.) Sheen and Fields were great, especially Sheen, and Leary did pretty good with a fairly token role. And though the Lizard could have gone through about three more punch-ups, design wise, beyond that, the F/X were a lot better than anticipated (from what I saw in the trailers), the story actually made sense, and, in the end, I actually cared what happened to these people. Color me pleasantly surprised in an expecting a train-wreck but wound up with locked bumpers after a slight fender bender.

Immediately tagged as The Endless Bummer upon its release and suffering from this stigma ever since, John Milius' tale of the effects of aging and entropy on the lives and friendship of a trio of surfers cemented in youth through the turbulent 1960s, to me, feels a lot more honest and earnest -- and definitely less romanticized, than it's contemporary, American Graffiti. A semi-autobiographical tale, one could argue that the three main characters in Big Wednesday (1978) -- Jan Michael-Vincent, William Katt and Gary Busey -- serve as a triptych for Milius (a man out of time, a strong sense of duty, and a self-destructive insufferable ass). The story focuses on Vincent, a local surf legend, who remains the same as everything else changes or moves on around him for better or for worse. (One of the more pleasant surprises in the film is the end-result of him knocking up the local beach-bunny. Usually, this ends in ruination, but here, it not only succeeds but their relationship thrives.) In the end, however, the one and only universal constant in all of their lives is the surf, which never changes. And it is this link, no matter how far they drift apart, that will bind this friendship forever.

Well, that was a helluva thing. An inexplicably effective first-person shooter / found footage / torture porn / World War II period piece, Frankenstein's Army (2013) regrets nothing while it does a naked cannonball into the splatter-punk pool. The plot about a Russian patrol being lured into a trap to capture the Mad Baron is fairly irrelevant because once the дерьмо hits the вентилятор, they're nothing but fodder for the F/X to buzzsaw thru, which are both top-notch and kinda overwhelming as things pile up in the third act. And it nearly lost me, but the ending and final coda had me giggling like an idiot. The steampunk inspired production design and phantasmagorical creature creations it wrought are worth the watch alone. (The only beef I had with the movie is don't tease me with 'The Sherman Tank that Walks on Two Legs' and then don't do anything with it.) Decadently gross and gooey, violent, surreal, and definitely not for the squeamish, but for those inclined to such things the film is absolutely ah-mazing.

In Fast Break (1979), Gabe Kaplan trades in one batch of Sweat Hogs for another when a Jewish delicatessen owner lands his dream job as a collegiate basketball coach. The catch, the job is located in the deserts of Nevada, and to keep this job at Podunk U, the new coach must beat the big instate rival. To accomplish this, he recruits four ringers from his native New York to come with him. (The fifth starter turns out to be Reb Brown.) I'll admit I don't find Kaplan all that funny and yet I am completely flummoxed over my fascination with him, which brought me here in the first place. The only twist on this underdog tale is one of the ringers is a girl disguised as a boy, which leads to a fascinating love/hate romance with a fellow player. There's another subplot with Kaplan's wife? Girlfriend? refusing to go with them. Beyond that, no real surprises or nothing you haven't seen before, but, eh, it's entertaining enough.

Jonathan Demme gets his Robert Altman on something fierce in this slice of life look at a Nebraska town and its denizens connected by a web of CB radios. All of the overlapping vignettes in Citizen's Band (1977) are fascinating but the main focus is on Spider (Paul Le Mat), a self-appointed CB vigilante who works to get those who abuse and clog up the airwaves with useless chatter (be it religion, racists screeds, or wireless sex) that gets bogged down in some rote family problems. Meanwhile, a supporting thread with a trucker (Charles Napier), his two wives, and his mistress all converging on the same town is a hoot and half. All of that and an outstanding cast leads to high marks all around, Good Buddies. 10-4.

Okay, The Vulture (1966) is kind of a goofy but fairly worthless Edgar Wallace knock-off that's still worth the watch for, perhaps, the greatest monster origin explanation ever when Broderick Crawford (subbing in for the audience) keeps asking the hero to explain each step of the atomic process that bred the mutant half man half vulture over and over again until he finally gets the gist of it and declares it all a bunch of horseshit.

And then there's Phobia (1980), where we got John Huston slumming through a fairly turgid whodunit about a psychiatrist and his radical (meaning patently ridiculous) 'implosion therapy', whose patients start dying off via what they fear the most. What's most fascinating are the therapy sessions themselves, which consists of hands on or A/V immersion for each patient's phobia, which run the gambit of heights, to snakes, to gang rape, which basically means traumatizing the hell out of them in hope that this will somehow snap the stricken out of it. Some novelty interest on the casting with Paul Michael "Starsky" Glaser as the head quack and John "Baltar" Colicos as the lead detective. Beyond that, not a whole there to recommend.

I walked into Rituals (1977) expecting one thing and got something completely different when five doctors go on a hunting trip deep in the Canadian wilderness. Days from anywhere, they draw the wrath of someone lurking in the woods, who picks them off at leisure while these civilized men slowly devolve in front of our eyes into something that just might be able to survive these attacks as they're run ragged and survival instincts kick in. (I know I'll never look at Hal Holbrook the same way again.) Released in the States as The Creeper, I'm hesitant to call this a Deliverance knock-off because I don't want to poison the well, but, it is what it is. It's also really, really quite good and very disturbing on a primal level as far as these Canuxploitation cash-ins go. The only complaint I have is the killer's motivations seem a little too specific, meaning if these men had been anything but doctors this all might not have happened. Maybe. I don't know. Just watch it. Trust me.

After the highly successful Made for TV combo of The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson teamed up again for another modern monster tale, this time focusing on the probability that a werewolf is buzz-sawing through the locals of a small California town in Scream of the Wolf (1974). Peter Graves plays a writer who, as the bodies and the baffling evidence keep piling up around him, suspects his old hunting buddy (and Count Zaroff and Nietzsche enthusiast), Clint Walker, might be the culprit. Graves pales when stacked up against Darren McGavin, but Walker is kinda amazing as the dead-eyed sociopath who feels mankind has been down out of the trees for too long. So, yeah, this is less about the supernatural and more of social commentary, resulting in a set-up that is a ton of fun but whose Scooby Doo resolution kinda fizzles and splutters. And when you couple this with those earlier collaborations mentioned, only makes this one an even bigger disappointment.

What we gots here is a Korean thriller about a disc jockey's last night on the air being terrorized by her #1 fan cum serial killer, who holds her two children and her sister as hostage to force her to comply with his very specific on-air requests. Yeah, Midnight FM (2010) is one of those movies. And though it holds few surprises, it held my interest through it's mounting implausibility (and struggling to keep up with the subtitles) and had me rooting for our heroine and one of her daughters, who did most of the legwork to derail this highly baroque scheme. The film kinda takes a drastic left turn about halfway through from mounting terror to police procedural to an all out chase movie, but I appreciated how the DJ used another obsessed fan to counter some of the psycho's very precise demands. Demands that require compliance to the letter or another toe comes off one of the hostages -- or worse. Also morbidly fascinated by the station format, which allows our heroine to espouse film-based philosophy in-between selections from soundtracks. Anyhoo, I dug it.

"Lestrade will have his three buckets of ash, but we will keep the name." -- thus, Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) wraps up the Jack the Ripper case in A Study in Terror (1965), another take on the English super-sleuth ferreting out the world's most notorious serial killer. Kinda sobering that the plot machination for both A Study in Terror and Murder by Decree, which basically boils down to carpet bombing White Chapel in the hope of knocking off the right prostitute some Upper Class Twit of the Year dipped his wick into to save the family name, feels so sadly plausible.