Author Archives: Jedadiah Leland

I Want My R-TV: Spellcaster (1992, directed by Rafal Zielinski)

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Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!

In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities.  British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos.  (A music station that actually plays music?  Imagine that!)  Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star.  Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.

The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check.  The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money.  They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart.  Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.

The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying.  For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting.  Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it.  When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber.  It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.

With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late.  By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age.  The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.

Rebel Days: All-American Murder (1991, directed by Anson Williams)

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Artie Logan (Charlie Schlatter) is a wannabe James Dean who keeps getting kicked out of school because he is such a rebel.  His father, a judge, gives Artie one more chance.  Artie can either enroll at Fairfield College or he can go to jail.  Artie chooses Fairfield, where he meets and falls for the beautiful and popular Tally Fuller (Josie Bissett).  However, no sooner does Artie show up for their first date than someone sets Tally on fire and crashes through a window.  Artie is the number one suspect but Detective P.J. Decker (Christopher Walken) still gives him 24 hours to solve the murder and clear his name.  Artie investigates and discovers that Tally was not the innocent, all-American girl that everyone thought she was.  This leads to a nudity-filled flashback that explains why All-American Murder was an HBO mainstay in the 90s.  It also leads to other people being murdered by snakes and hand grenades.

Despite some bloody murders and the presence of Walken and Joanna Cassidy in potentially interesting supporting roles, All-American Murder fails because it asks us to accept Charlie Schlatter as being a charismatic rebel.  When Joanna Cassidy tells him that he’s a “renegade,” not even she sounds like she believes it.  The murder mystery is intriguing but Artie is so obnoxious that you want him to go to prison whether he’s guilty or not.

All-American Murder was directed by Anson Williams, who is best known for playing Potsie on Happy Days.  The Fonz could have framed Ralph Malph for this murder in half the time that it takes Artie to solve it.

Linda Blair In Oz: Fatal Bond (1992, directed by Vince Monton)

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Fatal Bond is another Australian exploitation flick starring Linda Blair.

In this one, Linda plays a hairdresser named Leonie.  When a drifter named Joe (Jerome Ehlers) crashes a birthday party that Leonie’s attending, it’s lust at first sight.  Even though Joe is a violent womanizer who steals milk and headbutts anyone who looks at him crossly, Leonie still takes him home with her.  Soon, Joe is crashing in Leonie’s bedroom and Leonie is providing Joe with an alibi whenever the police come looking for him.  (Joe says that he has a lot of parking tickets.)  When one of Joe’s one night stands turns up dead, Leonie starts to suspect that Joe might be responsible.

Like Dead Sleep, Fatal Bond features Linda Blair as an American who lives in Australia and who has bad taste in men.  While Linda Blair has never been a great actress, she’s almost always brings grit, determination, and a will to survive to her roles.  Unfortunately, none of that is on display in Fatal Bond, where she’s such a pushover that she lets Joe take over her life.  There’s not really much to the whole serial killer storyline either, especially not when the murderer’s identity will be obvious to anyone watching.  There’s also another subplot in the movie about Joe searching for his brother, who has gone missing.  Fatal Bond doesn’t know if it’s a Linda Blair thriller or a standard Australian crime film.

Don’t be fooled by the sexy cover art.  I love a good Linda Blair movie but Fatal Bond was just boring.  If you do see the film, keep an eye out for Joe Bugner, the former heavyweight boxer who once fought Muhammad Ali.  Bugner has a small role as a lowlife criminal in Fatal Bond.  His partner-in-crime is Mel’s younger brother, Donal Gibson, stepping into a role that was originally earmarked for Russell Crowe.

 

 

Music Video of the Day: We Need A Gimmick by Nekrogoblikon (2015, directed by George Nienhuis)

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Who are Nekrogoblikon?

This is what it says over on their website:

What happens when you put a bunch of bloodthirsty, music-loving goblins together? Well, a lot of disembowelment, but also a lot of catchy tunes. Formed six millennia ago, and practicing only every other leap year on a full moon, the band has perfected their brand of crushing goblin music.

Nekrogoblikon is also a band that was formed in 2006 in Palo Alto, California and who have built a loyal cult following by performing songs about goblins.  In 2012, the band uploaded a video to YouTube for their song, No One Survives.  It was about a goblin trying to win the affection of one of his co-workers (played by Kayden Kross).  No One Survives became a viral hit so their video for We Need A Gimmick features John Goblikon (played by David Rispoli) using what he’s learned to help Nekrogoblikon find the gimmick that will keep Earthlings from realizing that the members of the band are actually goblins from outer space.  Along the way, the video parodies rap, EDM, and Justin Timberlake.  And, of course, Kayden Kross returns.

Nekrogoblikon has shown a longevity that would probably surprise those who originally dismissed them as merely being a novelty act.  On April 13th, they released their 5th album, Welcome to Bonkers.

 

 

Going There: Bad Blood (1989, directed by Chuck Vincent)

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Oh man, this is a twisted movie.

Yuppie lawyer Ted (adult film actor Randy Spears, credited here as Gregory Patrick) is shocked when he sees a painting of a man who looks just like him.  He is told that the portrait was painted in 1964 and that the man in the painting is the late husband of the artist, Arlene (porn legend Georgina Spelvin, credited here at Ruth Raymond).  Arlene goes on to reveal that Ted is actually her long-lost son and then she invites him and his wife, Evie (Linda Blair, credited here as Linda Blair), to come out to her mansion.  What Ted doesn’t realize is that Arlene believes that he is actually her husband reincarnated and she is planning on doing away with Evie so that she can have her son all to herself and do what it is she wants to do with him.  Yes, this film goes there.

Chuck Vincent was one of the leading directors of the Golden Age of Porn.  Unlike most other adult film directors, his movies were popular with not only the public but also with critics.  (His best-known film, Roommates, received a rave in the New York Times.)  In the 80s, Vincent tried to make the move into mainstream film, mostly directing sex comedies and dopey thrillers.  Most of his mainstream films featured adult performers in dramatic roles, which made them very popular on late night cable.

Bad Blood feels like a combination of Fatal Attraction and Misery.  There’s even a scene where Arlene ties up her son in bed and then breaks his toes to keep him from leaving.  (Bad Blood, though, came out a year before Rob Reiner’s film so the resemblance is probably a coincidence.)  Spelvin, who was widely regarded as being the best actress to ever regularly appear in pornographic movies, gives a great, demented performance as Arlene and Linda Blair is also good as Evie.  Chuck Vincent was a good director, even when he was doing schlocky straight-to-video stuff like this.  Perhaps because of his background in adult films, Vincent never hesitated about taking his films to the places where other directors would be scared to tread.  Sadly, Vincent died in 1991 and most of his movies have fallen into obscurity.

Weekly Trailer Round-Up: Destroyer, The Aftermath, Escape Room, Monster Party

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In the upcoming film Destroyer, Nicole Kidman plays a detective who is haunted by her past.  This film, which is getting a lot of Oscar buzz for Kidman’s performance, will be released on December 25th and its trailer kicks off this week’s trailer round-up.

The Aftermath is the latest Keira Knightley historical drama.  This time, she’s the wife of a British colonel in post-war Germany and she is tempted to cheat with a German widower.  The Aftermath will be released on April 26th, 2019.

Escape Room is the upcoming movie based on the game that all the kids are talking about.  Can you find the clues and figure out how to escape from the room before you die?  Escape Room will be released in January, just in time for everyone to compare it to Saw.

Finally, Monster Party invites you to attend the dinner party from hell.  Despite being a horror movie, Monster Party will be released two days after Halloween, on November 2nd.

Dreaming of Linda Blair: Dead Sleep (1992, directed by Alec Mills)

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Maggie Healey (Linda Blair) is an American nurse in Australia.  Freshly separated from her drug addict boyfriend, Maggie gets a job working at a mental hospital.  Dr. Jonathan Heckett (Tony Bonner) is experimenting with “dead sleep therapy,” where the patients are kept drugged at night.  Maggie notices that the patients keep dying and that Dr. Heckett doesn’t care so she teams up with an annoying activist to investigate what dead sleep therapy is actually about.

This was on TCM at 3 a.m. last night, airing right after Dreamscape.  Dead Sleep might be disguised as a horror film but there’s nothing scary about it.  When the patients are in dead sleep, they don’t even have nightmares, which is a huge missed opportunity.  The movie is so sloppily put together that it doesn’t even reveal why Dr. Heckett is putting his patients in dead sleep, other than he’s just evil.  Linda Blair delivers her lines as if she is reading them off a cue card and the entire movie look like it was filmed at a community college.  The only amusing thing about the movie was that all of the male patients got to wear hospital gowns when they went under deep sleep while all the female patients slept topless.  Normally I wouldn’t complain but it was so blatant what the filmmakers were doing that it was hard not to laugh when the movie tried to pivot to being a serious drama.  A film starring Linda Blair has no right to be this boring.

Everyone’s Crazy: Committed (1991, directed by William A. Levey)

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After her lover and employer commits suicide, nurse Susan Manning (Jennifer O’Neill) needs a new job so she applies at an experimental mental hospital that is known as the Institute.  The director of the Institute, Dr. Magnus Quilly (William Windom), explains to her that he cures his patients by allowing them to live out their fantasies in a controlled environment.  He asks Susan is she’s prepared to “commit” herself to being a nurse.  Susan says that she is and signs the papers that Dr. Quilly hands to her.

Too late, Susan discovers that Dr. Quilly didn’t hand her an employment contract.  Instead, Susan has just signed her own commitment papers and is now a patient at the Institute!  Dr. Quilly tells her that, as he does with all of his patients, he will allow her to live out her fantasy of being a nurse.  After discovering than an electrified fence makes it impossible to escape, Susan starts working as a nurse but she soon discovers that she is not the first person to be tricked into working at the Institute and that almost all of her predecessors died under mysterious circumstances.

Committed is one of many films about what happens when the lunatics literally take over the asylum.  (This is a plot that was first used by Edgar Allan Poe in The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.)  The film is hurt by its low-budget but veteran B-movie director William A. Levey does a good job playing up the claustrophobia of being trapped in one location and Committed features eccentric performances from actors like Robert Forster, Ron Pallilo, and Sidney Lassick.  Committed asks, “Who is actually sane in an insane world?” and answers, “Everyone’s crazy!”

The best thing about Committed is that it stars Jennifer O’Neill, a beautiful model-turned-actress who found brief stardom when she appeared as the war bride in Summer of ’42.  Though O’Neill’s career never lived up to the promise of her first film, she was a better-than-average actress and she’s pretty good in Committed.  Both she and the film keep it deliberately ambiguous about whether or not Susan is really a nurse or if her whole backstory is just something that she’s fantasized.

Committed is a well-made B-movie from the golden age of straight-to-video thrillers and late night HBO premieres.  Despite a low-budget, this movie shows the good work that a cast and a director can do when they’re fully committed.

Cowboys and Zombies: Ghost Town (1988, directed by Richard Governor)

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When an abandoned car is found in the desert, Deputy Langely (Franc Luz) is dispatched to the scene.  While Langely investigates, a man suddenly rides by on horseback and takes a shot at him.  Searching for the man, Langely comes across an old ghost town.  After he passes out in a seemingly abandoned building, he wakes up and discovers that he’s surrounded by old-timey western folks.  There’s a barmaid and a blind gambler and a blacksmith.  They are all spirits who are being held hostage by an undead outlaw, Devlin (Jimmie Skaggs), who long ago made a pact with Satan that gave him control over the souls of all the people in the town.  Now, Devlin has kidnapped Kate (Catherine Hickland), a woman from the modern world, and it’s up to Langely to not only rescue her but also set free the spirits that are trapped in the ghost town.

There’s nothing unexpected about this hororr/western hybrid, which was produced by Charles Band’s Empire Productions.  The combination of two different genres leads to double the clichés but the film itself is still entertaining in its own cheesy way.  The town is atmospheric and spooky, Franc Luz is a passable lawman, Jimmy Skaggs is a devilish villain, and Catherine Hickland shows that she deserved to be known for more than just being David Hasselhoff’s first wife.  Despite a troubled production that went through three different directors, Ghost Town is a decent B-movie that should be enjoyed by anyone who ever played cowboys and zombies.

 

Under the Sea: Goliath Awaits (1981, directed by Kevin Connor)

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1939.  War is breaking out across Europe.  The British luxury liner Goliath is torpedoed by a German U-boat.  Presumed to be lost with the ship are a swashbuckling film star, Ronald Bentley (John Carradine), and U.S. Senator Oliver Barthowlemew (John McIntire), who may have been carrying a forged letter from Hitler to Roosevelt when the boat went down.

1981.  Oceanographer Peter Cabot (Mark Harmon, with a mustache) comes across the sunken wreck of the Goliath.  When he dives to check out his discovery, he is shocked to hear big band music coming from inside the ship.  He also thinks that he can hear someone tapping out an S.O.S. signal.  When he looks into a porthole, he is stunned to discover a beautiful young woman (Emma Samms) staring back at him.

Under the command of Admiral Sloan (Eddie Albert), who wants to retrieve the forged letter before it does any damage to the NATO alliance, Cabot and Command Jeff Selkirk (Robert Forster) are assigned to head an expedition to explore Goliath.  What they discover is that, for 40 years, the passengers and crew have survived within an air bubble.  Under the leadership of Captain John McKenzie (Christopher Lee), they have created a new, apparently perfect society within the sunken ship.  Cabot discovers that the woman that he saw was McKenzie’s daughter, Lea.

McKenzie is friendly to Cabot and his crew, explaining to them the scientific developments that have allowed the passengers and crew to not only survive but thrive underwater.  The only problems are a group of outcasts — the Bow People — who refuse to follow McKenzie’s orders and Palmer’s Disease, an infection that only seems to infect people who are no longer strong enough to perform the daily tasks necessary to keep McKenzie’s utopia functioning.   Even when people on the boat die, they continue to play their part by being cremated in Goliath’s engine room and helping to power the ship.

Everything seems perfect until Cabot announces that he has come to rescue the survivors of the Goliath.  Even though Goliath is starting to decay and will soon no longer be safe, McKenzie is not ready to give up the perfect society that he’s created.  McKenzie sets out to prevent anyone from escaping the Goliath.

Goliath Awaits is a massive, 3-hour production that was made for television and originally aired over two nights.  (The entire 200-minute production has been uploaded to YouTube.  Avoid the heavily edited, 91-minute version that was released on VHS in the 90s.)  It’s surprisingly good for a made-for-TV movie.  Because a large portion of the film was shot on the RMS Queen Mary, a retired cruise ship that was moored in Long Beach, California, Goliath looks luxurious enough that you understand why some of the passengers might want to stay there instead of returning to the surface.  Beyond that, Goliath Awaits takes the time to fully explore the society that McKenzie has created and what it’s like to live on the ship.  McKenzie may not be as benevolent as he first appears to be but neither is he a one-dimensional villain.

Mark Harmon is a dull lead but Robert Forster is just as cool as always and Christopher Lee is perfect for the role of misguided Capt. McKenzie.  The movie is really stolen by Frank Gorshin, who is coldly sinister as Dan Wesker, the Goliath’s head of security.  McKenzie may by Goliath’s leader but Wesker is the one who does the dirty work necessary to keep the society running.

Goliath Awaits also features several character actors in small roles, with John Carradine, Duncan Regehr, Jean Marsh, John McIntire, Jeanette Nolan, Alex Cord, Emma Samms, and John Ratzenberger all getting to make a good impression.  (Ignore, if you can, a very young Kirk Cameron as one of the children born on the Goliath.)

Goliath Awaits is far better than your average made-for-TV movie from the 80s.  With any luck, it will someday get the home video release that it deserves.