Tag Archives: exploitation

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Delirium (dir by Peter Maris)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1979’s Delirium takes place on the mean streets of St. Louis and the surrounding countryside.  Crime is out of control and something has to be done about it!  Thanks to Earl Warren and the Carter administration, the police are powerless to stop the criminals.  (“Miranda rights my ass!” you can almost hear the film’s screenwriter shouting.)  So, the wealthier citizens of St. Louis get together and hire a bald Vietnam vet named Eric Stern (Barron Winchester) to lead a paramilitary group of vigilantes.  One of Stern’s men is another vet, Charlie (Nick Panouzis).  Charlie suffers from PTSD and it turn out that being a part of a militia is not the best way to deal with war trauma.  Who would have guessed?

Charlie snaps.  He starts killing people, in both St. Louis and the surrounding farms.  One victim is a hitchhiker who is dumb enough to hitch a ride from him and then to taunt him when he refuses to go skinny dipping with her.  It turns out that Charlie’s been impotent ever since he came home from the war.  He doesn’t respond well to jokes about it.

As Charlie claims more and more victims, both the police and vigilantes search for him.  The police want to stop his rampage,  The vigilantes don’t want Charlie to accidentally reveal their existence.  The whole thing ends in violence, gun fights, and flashbacks in which Vietnam looks a lot like rural Missouri.

Delirium is a film that I first noticed on my list of Tubi recommendations a few months ago.  I finally watched it last night and I have to admit that my first reaction was, “What the Hell was that?”  Delirium is bizarre mix of slasher horror and vigilante thrills, the type of mishmash that one can only really find in a grindhouse film.  That the budget was low is obvious in every shot.  The wealthy conspiracy meets in what appears to be a hut. As I previously mentioned, the Vietnam scenes were clearly filmed in Missouri.  The acting is largely amateurish, with the exceptions of the intense Nick Panouzis and the absolutely insane performance of Barron Winchester.  The film was gory enough to have earned a spot on the infamous Videos Nastys list but, as is so often case, what was shocking in 1979 seems rather tame in 2024.  I did like the conspiracy aspects of the film.  The idea of a group of wealthy people putting together a vigilante squad without actually bothering to do any background checks on the people they recruited actually has a good deal of potential.  The film is a mess but it’s a mess in the oddly fascinating way that many low-budget 70s films were.  The mix of ambition and a low budget often led to watchable oddities like Delirium.

The main thing that really stuck with me about Delirium is just how annoyed and angry almost every single character in the film seemed to be.  Even the cop trying to stop Charlie seems like he was pissed off about having to actually do his job.  I guess St. Louis does that to people.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Fraternity Demon (dir by C.B. Rubin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1992’s Fraternity Demon, Isha (Trixxie Bowie) is a succubus who is summoned into the real world by a nerdy frat boy who is doing something with a personal computer.  To be honest, I’m not totally sure what nerdy Dave (Al Darrouch) did to summon the succubus but she shows up in the real world and proceeds to have softcore sex with some 30 year-old frat boys in her quest to find Dave.

To be honest, I should have stopped this film as soon as I saw the New York skyline and “Troma Presents” at the start of it.  I’ve seen enough Troma films that I knew exactly what I was getting myself into but I kept watching the film just in case it turned out to be some sort of lost masterpiece.  Unfortunately, the film turned out to just be another boring Troma softcore film, featuring bad acting, bad humor, and terrible sound quality.  I honestly cannot begin to put into words just how wooden most of the acting was.  This was apparently C.B. Rubin’s only film as a director and watching the film, one can see why.  Fraternity Demon is an 86 minute film that feels like four hours, largely because the director obviously had no idea how to tell a story cinematically.

That said, I stuck with the film because everything that I read about Fraternity Demon said that the film was worth sitting through for the performance of Shock-Ra, the band that plays the fraternity party.  And I will say that I did like Sh0ck-Ra.  They reminded me a bit of X, the Los Angeles punk band that I’ve been obsessed with ever since I watched The Decline of Western Civilization a few months ago.  Speaking of punk, the film features a character who apparently lives on the front steps of the frat house.  He wears a Black Flag t-shirt and he growls at people.  He was probably the best actor in the film, assuming that he was an actor and not just some guy who the director couldn’t convince to leave.

Let’s see, what else was amusing in this film?  The fraternity was named SUX.  The sorority was named ASS.  That was pretty dumb but it made me laugh because, when I get delirious in my boredom, I tend to laugh at dumb things.  Nerdy Dave and his potential girlfriend, Kelly (Deborah Carlin), were kind of a cute couple.  One of the sorority girls comments that she likes a shy guy that she’s seen in at the frat house.  Kelly immediately says, “Dave?” because, of course, frat houses are only allowed to have one shy guy.

I initially assumed that Trixxie Bowie was an adult actress slumming in a Troma softcore flick but it turns out that Fraternity Demon was her only film role.  She made her debut as a star and then she never made another film.  Her performance in this film isn’t particularly good but she does manage to get off a few good one-liners.

Is that 500 words yet?  It is?  Good, let’s end this review.

Seriously, no more Troma films for me….

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Blind Date (dir by Nico Mastokaris)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1984’s Blind Date, Joseph Bottoms stars as Jonathon Ratcliff, an American who works in Greece.

Jonathon would appear to have it all.  He has a good job in an exotic land.  He has a nice home.  He has a beautiful girlfriend named Claire (Kirstie Alley).  He has co-workers who love him so much that they insist on throwing him a birthday party and giving him his cake while he’s making love to Claire.  Jonathon enjoys jogging and listening to music and spying on his neighbor, which the film treats as a harmless little thing that all men do.  I mean, I guess we should be happy that Jonathon isn’t disguising himself as a taxi driver and murdering the women that he picks up with a scalpel.  No, someone else is doing that.

Jonathon suddenly loses his eyesight.  Fortunately, Dr. Steiger (James Daughton) has a solution.  He’s created a computer program that turns sound into very primitive, grid-like images.  As long as Jonathon is wearing his headphones, he can see … kind of.  At first, it’s all good fun.  Jonathon beats up the extremely flamboyant muggers who have been harassing him at the subway station.  And he continues to spy on his neighbor whenever she’s getting undressed which is not cool considering that Claire has stayed with him through his entire ordeal.

Meanwhile, the scalpel murders are continuing….

Now, to be honest, I assumed that Jonathon was going to form some sort of mental connection with the killer and start seeing the murder through the killer’s eyes.  Instead, Jonathon just hears the killer walking with one of his victims and he ends up investigating on his own, despite not really being able to see well.  Basically, the whole idea of Jonathon being blind doesn’t have much to do with the thriller aspect of the plot.  I could maybe accept that if the film hadn’t spent a huge amount of time explaining in pain-staking detail how exactly Jonathon’s “eyes” work.  The action literally stopped for a huge chunk of the film’s running time so that the film could make its most ludicrous plot point seem even more ludicrous.

Greek director Nico Mastokaris is obviously trying to do an Argento-style giallo with Blind Date and, indeed, Argento himself has a noted habit of including intriguing but ultimately pointless red herrings in his films.  Just as Asia Argento having the Stendhal Syndrome proved to be a bit inconsequential to The Stendhal Syndrome, Joseph Bottoms being blind is inconsequential to Blind Date.  That said, Argento can get away with that sort of thing because, even in his weaker films, he’s clever stylist and he usually maintain a solid narrative pace.  Blind Date, on the other hand, is rather draggy and Joseph Bottoms is not a particularly likeable hero.

On the positive side, James Daughton (he was the head of the evil frat in Animal House) gives a genuinely interesting performance and Kirstie Alley is likable as the neurotic Claire.  For the most part, though, one can see why the sequel promised in the closing credits never came to be.

6 Ed Wood Trailers For Horrorthon

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since the 10th of October was the 100th anniversary of the birth of director Edward D. Wood, Jr., it seems appropriate to dedicate this week’s edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse Trailers to him!

Below …. can you handle six trailers for six Ed Wood films!?

Watch, if you dare!

  1. Glen or Glenda (1953)

2. Jail Bait (1954)

3. Bride of the Monster (1955)

4. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1957)

5. The Sinister Urge (1960)

6. Meatcleaver Massacre (1977)

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Wizard of Gore (dir by Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1970, Herschell Gordon’s Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore tells the story of Montag The Magnificent (Ray Sager), a magician who has a rather macabre stage show.

After lecturing his audience about how everyone secretly wants to see blood and violence, he selects a female volunteer from the audience.  Both the woman and the rest of the audience are hypnotized.  Montag’s tricks all involve mutilating his volunteers.  One volunteer is chainsawed.  Another gets a metal spike driven into her brain.  Another is drilled by a giant punch press.  (Like seriously, how does one store a giant punch press?)  The hypnotized audience only sees Montag using his various instruments of torture but they don’t see the wounds or the blood or the intestines.  (The movie audience is a bit less lucky.)  The victim is hypnotized into not realizing that she has essentially been murdered but, when the hypnosis wears off after the show, they promptly drop dead, mysteriously mutilated in the same way that everyone saw Montag miming on stage.

Naturally, the police arrest Montag and the movie ends.

No, actually, it doesn’t.  Even though it’s obvious that Montag is the murderer and that he’s hypnotizing people, the police don’t arrest him because his hypnotized audience swears that Montag didn’t really hurt anyone during his stage act.  However, television host Sherry (Judy Cler) and her lunkhead boyfriend, Jack (Wayne Ratay), both come to believe that Montag is the killer and they try set up a plot to expose him on national television,  Montag can’t hypnotize people through the television …. can he!?  And if he can do that, who is to say that he hasn’t hypnotized the people in the theater who would have been watching The Wizard of Gore when it was first released?

The Wizard of Gore appears to have been Herschell Gordon Lewis’s attempt to comment on his own status as a director who was notorious for making gory films.  (His 1963 film, Blood Feast, is often referred to as being the first gore film.)  Montag is a monster who appeals to his audience’s desire to see something extreme and forbidden.  For all of Montag’s evil, he can only exist and get more victims because people are willing to watch him torture strangers.  Lewis was not exactly known for being a particularly artful director but the shots of Montag’s victims screaming in terror while Montag’s audience silently and unemotionally watches are about as close to a genuinely powerful moment as you’re likely to find in a Herschell Gordon Lewis film.  The Wizard of Gore, with its commentary on the gore genre that Lewis himself largely invented, is one of Lewis’s more self-referential films.  And with it’s trick ending and shots of people suddenly collapsing with their intestines literally spilling out of them, it’s also one of Lewis’s stranger films and that’s saying something when you consider just how many odd films Lewis made over the course of the 60s and 70s.  (There’s a reason why one of his better films was called Something Weird.)  The Wizard of Gore is definitely a Lewis film, with his trademark stiff actors and non sequitur dialogue giving the whole thing a dream-like feel.

There’s a scene in Juno where Jason Bateman tells the film’s title character that Herschell Gordon Lewis is a superior filmmaker to Dario Argento and that The Wizard of Gore is scarier than Suspiria.  As soon as I heard that, I knew his character was going to turn out to be a sleaze and I was right.  The Wizard of Gore is a historically interesting film, especially for those who love the old grindhouse films.  But it’s no Suspiria.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The Sinister Urge (dir by Edward D. Wood, Jr.)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1960’s The Sinister Urge opens with a shot of a blonde woman running down a highway while clad only her underwear.

As I watched this scene unfold, I was reminded of a chapter in Hollywood Rat Race, a non-fiction book about the sordidness of the film industry that was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr.  The chapter takes the form of a letter to aspiring young actresses who come to Hollywood, convinced that they’ll become stars.  In the chapter, Wood asks what the innocent young ingenue will do if a director tries to force her to film a scene in just her underwear.  Will you give in, Wood asks, or will you stick true to your values?  Wood seems to suggest that the actress should say no, no matter how much pressure the director puts on her.  Of course, Wood himself was a director, as well as a writer.  In fact, he directed The Sinister Urge.

The Sinister Urge is about the dark side of the film industry.  Police Lt. Matt Carson (Kenne Duncan) and Sgt. Randy Stone (Duke Moore) are investigating a series of murders.  The victims have all been women and they’ve all been killed in the same park.  Carson and Stone suspect that the murders might be connected.  Gee, guys, ya think so?

The murders are being committed by Dirk Williams (Dino Fantini), a knife-wielding teenager who works for the local pornographic filmmakers, Johnny (Carl Anthony) and Gloria (Jean Fontaine).  Dirk has become addicted to viewing pornography and it’s driven him crazy.  Johnny, who laments that he was once a serious filmmaker before he found himself reduced to directing and distributing “smut” to make money, is full of guilt and self-loathing.  Gloria doesn’t care about anything other than making money through selling smutty pictures and movies.  She doesn’t care that she’s helping to produce a product that is inspiring the sinister urge that drives Dirk to kill.

Can Dirk be stopped before he attacks innocent Mary Smith (Jeanne Willardson), who has fallen into the clutches of Gloria’s smut syndicate?  (That’s a great band name, by the way.)  And how will Dirk react when he learns that both Johnny and Gloria are thinking about sacrificing him for the greater good of their evil organization?

The Sinister Urge is an over-the-top melodrama that is clearly an Ed Wood production.  (Posters for Plan 9 From Outer Space and Bride of the Monster appear in Johnny’s office.)  Some of the actors deliver their lines stiffly.  Some of them delvier their lines with just a little bit too much emotion.  The hard-boiled dialogue is full of cliches.  The action sometimes comes to a complete stop so that the cops can discuss the threat of adult films.  The film may be sordid but it’s all presented with such an earnest DIY style that it becomes rather fascinating to watch.  At one point, Wood spliced in footage from a totally different film because why not?  Wood had the footage.  The Sinister Urge was running short.  Why not pad out the length with something totally unrelated?  That never surrender spirit is why Ed Wood remains a beloved figure 100 years after he was born in Poughkeepsie.

Sadly enough, this was Wood’s final “mainstream” film.  After this film, he could only find work writing adult novels and writing and directing the same type of movies that are criticized in The Sinister Urge.  (One has to wonder if The Sinister Urge was Wood’s attempt to satirize the moral panic of the time.)  Sadly, Wood sank into alcoholism and died 17 years after this film was released.  He was 54 years old.  His films, however, live on.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Dreamaniac (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1986’s Dreamaniac, Adam (Thomas Bern) is a total dork who lives with his much more popular sister, Pat (Ashlyn Gere).  Adam aspires to be a heavy metal superstar and he is very much interested in the occult.  He’s been having dreams about being visited by a sultry and mysterious woman named Lily (Sylvia Summers).  When he performs a Satanic ritual to summon her for real, Lily offers him anything that he wants.  Instead of asking her to turn him into the world’s greatest guitarist or something smart like that, Adam asks to be irresistible to women.

Seriously, Adam, if you were the world’s greatest guitarist, you would be getting laid all the time whether you were irresistible or not.  The ugliest guy in the world is still be sexy if he can play guitar.  Take a look at the Rolling Stones and its long history of ugly guitar players who all looked good as long as they were playing.  Take a look at …. oh, I don’t know.  I’m tired and I’m just trying to pad out this review because there’s not much to be said about this movie.  Let’s move on.

Anyway, Adam gets his wish but he also has to kill the women so that Lily can take their soul and …. eh, that’s stupid.  Like Adam, why would you agree to such a counter-productive agreement?  Adam was so desperate to get a girlfriend that he apparently didn’t consider that none of them would really live long enough for him to have a real relationship with them.  What an idiot.

After Adam sells his soul or whatever it is that he’s supposed to be doing with Lily, Pat throws a party at the house and a bunch of shallow sorority girls and fraternity boys come over and everyone dies one-by-one, usually right after having sex.  No one really notices that everyone at the party is dying but then again, no one in this movie really seems to like anyone else so maybe they just don’t care.

Dreamaniac kind of ticked me off, largely because the title should have been Dream Maniac instead of Dreamaniac.  I guess I would have let them even get away with something like Dreammaniac.  But Dreamaniac, with only one m, just doesn’t make sense and looking at the word makes my multi-colored eyes tear up.  This may sound like a petty complaint but there’s honestly not much to be said about Dreamaniac.  It’s one of those low-budget, shot on video horror films where the lighting is often so dark and the soundtrack so muddy that you’re never really sure what’s happening on-screen.  I dare anyone to watch this film and seriously try to tell one character a part from another.  I had no idea who half the characters were and quite frankly, I didn’t care.  This was one of David DeCoteau’s earlier films and it has none of the subversiveness that distinguished DeCoteau’s better efforts.  (Considering the harsh tone of this review, I feel like I should point out that DeCoteau has directed some truly entertaining movies.  Dreamaniac is certainly not the film that should be used to judge his overall career.)

Of course, today, DeCoteau is best known for directing the “Wrong” films for Lifetime.  And really, I think the only thing that could have saved Dreamaniac would have been Vivica A. Fox showing up and saying, “Adam, you picked The Wrong Succubus.”

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: The New Kids (dir by Sean Cunningham)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, this movie is awesome!

Within the first five minutes, the film features not only a training montage but also a scene where a family cheering good news immediately gets a phone call delivering bad news.  (“SHUT UP!” our hero yells at his friends and family.)  By the time the film hits the five minute mark, it has managed to denounce communism, terrorism, laziness, and drunk driving!  And that’s even before James Spader shows up as a cocaine-sniffing teenage crime lord!

First released in 1986 and directed by the same guy who did the first Friday the 13th, The New Kids tells the story of Loren (Shannon Presby) and his sister, Abby (Lori Loughlin).  Their father (Tom Atkins) was a badass army colonel who fought communists, received commendations from the President (and that President was Ronald Reagan so you know those commendations were for doing something cool and not just for posting memes on twitter), and who taught his children self-defense.  Every morning, he exercised with them and drilled into their heads the importance of being disciplined and willing to stand up for themselves.  Sadly, their father and mother were both killed in a car accident after meeting with President Reagan at the White House.

Though they’ve been taught how to survive in the world by an expert, Loren and Abby are both teenagers and the law says that they need adult supervision.  They move down to Florida and stay with their Uncle Charlie (Eddie Jones),  Charlie owns a run-down amusement park that he’s decided to call Santa Land.  He figures that tourists who are driving to “Walt Disney World and Epcot” will want to stop off at Santa Land.  Personally, I think the tourists will probably want to keep driving to where they actually want to go but who knows?  Uncle Charlie does have a petting zoo and there is something oddly charming about the idea of Santa hanging out in the bayous of Florida.  I mean, there’s a reason why Santa Claus And The Ice Cream Bunny is beloved by viewers all over the world.

At the high school, everyone notices Loren and Abby.  Abby gets  a dorky boyfriend named Mark (Eric Stoltz …. no, really!) and Loren starts dating the sheriff’s daughter, Karen (Paige Lynn Price).  Unfortunately, the new kids have been noticed by Eddie Dutra (James Spader) and his gang of inbred rednecks.  Dutra and his gang deal drugs and have a pit bull who they’re hoping to enter into dog fights.  (“Went straight for the jugular,” one gang member says at one point.)  Dutra decides that he likes Abby, which leads to Loren getting protective, which leads to Dutra and the boys waging their own war on Abby and Loren and everything eventually comes to a deeply satisfying Straw Dogs-style conclusion at Santa Land.

The New Kids is one of those films that succeeds by being thoroughly absurd and over-the-top.  Dutra and his gang aren’t just evil.  Instead, they’re downright Satanic in their determination to destroy the new kids.  The gang is fearsome enough, especially Gordo (Theron Montgomery), who is the fat future forklift operator from Hell.  But what really makes this gang memorable is the fact that their leader is James Spader, with bright blonde hair, a smooth Southern accent, and moves that are so assured that he sometimes seem to be dancing across the screen.  Dutra’s evil and the cocaine that he snorts leads to him making some bad decisions but he’s got style.  As for the New Kids, Shannon Presby is a bit bland as Loren but that blandness actually provides a nice contrast to Spader’s more flamboyant performance.  Lori Loughlin is likable and kicks Gordo in the balls, which is pretty cool.  (Gordo more than deserved it.)

Cheerfully sleazy and unapologetically ridiculous, The New Kids is 80s exploitation cinema at its best.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Simon, King of the Witches (dir by Bruce Kessler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Simon (Andrew Prine) is a bearded man who lives in a storm drain and who says that he is on a quest to become a god.  He also says that he’s a warlock and he wants to make sure that everyone understands that there’s a huge difference between being a wizard and being a warlock.  Don’t call Simon a wizard!

Simon’s quest for godhood hasn’t led to much success so he makes his living selling trinkets and charms to gullible people.  One night, the police arrest him for vagrancy.  While sitting in jail, Simon meets Turk (George Paulsin), a gay male prostitute who quickly becomes Simon’s first disciple.  With the help of Turk, Simon is introduced to upper class society.  It turns out that Turk’s clients include several very wealthy people.  Simon is a hit on the party circuit.  Slumming hippies view him as a potential guru.  Wealthy people view him as a humorous oddity.  Simon meets other occultists and starts to engage in bizarre rituals.  He finds time to date Linda (Brenda Scott), the daughter of the totally square district attorney.  Some people insist that Simon is a fake and some people say he is the real thing.  For his part, Simon is soon getting revenge on all of his enemies and taking part in all sorts of freaky ceremonies as he continues his quest for supreme power.

Don’t let the supergroovy name fool you.  Like a lot of films about the 60s and 70s counterculture, Simon, King of the Witches is remarkably dull.  The action moves slowly.  The plot never really makes that much sense.  Andrew Prine gives a wonderfully over-the-top performance as Simon but the rest of the cast never really seems to wake up.  The film’s most interesting moments are the ones where Simon effortlessly switches from upper class society to “street” society.  Undoubtedly, this film’s portrait of jaded people looking for the new thing and getting taken advantage of by a sociopathic grifter felt very familiar in the 70s.  And, actually, I guess it still does.  There’s still a lot of wannabe gurus out there and a lot of people who have neither the willpower nor the intelligence to see through them.  But the film itself just too boring to really be effective.  Probably the most interesting thing about the film is that Simon seems to be a mix of Charles Manson and Rasputin.  Like Manson, Simon knows how to take advantage of those who are lost and seeking a place where they can belong.  And, like Rasputin, Simon turns his sordid lifestyle into an asset when he’s trying to thrill the stuffy old folks.

As I mentioned earlier, the film’s saving grace is Andrew Prine’s intense performance as Simon.  Prine himself was an up-and-coming actor with a bright future ahead of him until his girlfriend, Kathryn Kupcinet, was murdered in 1963.  As the boyfriend, Prine was immediately a suspect.  Though the police quickly cleared him, the scandal still derailed his career and he ended up spending the rest of his career in films like The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Amityville II, and Simon, King of the Witches.

The TSL Horror Grindhouse: Do Not Reply (dir by Daniel Woltosz and Walter Woltosz)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What a disturbing movie!

2019’s Do Not Reply is about Chelsea (Amanda Arcui, who previously played Lola during the final seasons of Degrassi), a high school student who is super-excited to have found an online boyfriend.  Brad (Jackson Rathbone) seems like he’s funny, handsome, and charming and he’s even got a semi-tragic life story!  Now, it should be mentioned that there are some immediate red flags about Brad.  Brad seems to be just a bit too perfect and the story of his life — being adopted and having parents who won’t even spend the money necessary to get him a new phone — seems to be a little bit too on-the-nose as far as getting Chelsea to feel sorry for him is concerned.

Brad and Chelsea agree to go to the Halloween dance together.  Brad says that he’ll show up as a zombie football player and he requests that Chelsea show up dressed a cheerleader.  (RED FLAG!  RED FLAG!)  To the surprise of no one, Chelsea meets up with Brad at the dance and is promptly kidnapped.

Brad, it turns out, is not a teenager with parents who refuse to buy him a new phone.  Instead, he’s a man in his 20s who lives in a surprisingly nice house.  He’s been meeting and kidnapping teenager girls for a while.  He holds them prisoner in his house, requiring that they wear cheerleader uniforms while cleaning the place.  Brad wants the house to be spotless.  He wants his prisoners to adore him.  He wants them to be very polite and well-mannered whenever they eat the dinners that he prepares for them.  One girl who tried to escape was several beaten by Brad and locked in her room, where she suffers as a warning to the others.  Meagan (Kerri Medders) and Heather (Elisa Luthman) both seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and they not only go out of their way to keep Brad happy but also to keep Chelsea from trying to escape.

If he’s in a good mood, Brad rewards his prisoners with “outdoor time,” which means that he allows them to wear a VR headset and visit an imaginary park.  Brad spends most of his day wearing his headset, not only searching for new realities but also reliving all of the terrible things he did in the past.  Brad is one sick man, his madness apparently inspired by his incestuous feelings towards his deceased sister who was — wait for it — a cheerleader!

The premise is a disturbing one, precisely because it is based on reality.  There are internet stalkers out there and there have been internet murderers as well.  Most of them aren’t as wealthy or handsome as Brad but they’re still out there, preying on those who are too naive to question their intentions.  While there’s definitely more than a small element of exploitation to the film (with the camera tending to linger over the cheerleader uniforms almost as intensely as Brad does), the film is ultimately on the side of Brad’s prisoners.  As opposed to the hyperarticulate madmen who tend to populate films like this, Brad is a loser from the start and the moment when his victims finally start to get the upper hand on him is a cheer-worthy moment.  Though the film gets off to a rather slow start, Amanda Arcuri, Kerri Medders, and Elisa Luthman all give good performances.  It’s a flawed film but it gets the job done.