Tag Archives: John Henry Richardson

Insomnia File #68: Mind, Body & Soul (dir by Rick Sloane)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable or streaming? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If you’re having trouble sleeping tonight, you can go over to Tubi and watch 1992’s Mind, Body & Soul.

Brenda (Ginger Lynn) has a new boyfriend!  After years of getting stuck with duds, Brenda is happy to finally be dating Carl (Jesse Kaye), who is handsome and successful and has a thing about wanting her to drip hot candle wax on his body.  Everything’s going fine until Carl asks her to come hang out with some friends of his.  It turns out that they’re all Satanists and they’re planning on sacrificing a woman.  Fortunately, the police arrive before the sacrifice can be carried out.  Unfortunately, all the Satanists run off and leave innocent Brenda takes the blame.

After she’s arrested and spends several days in jail, Brenda is finally bailed out by defense attorney John Stockton (Wings Hauser).  Because Carl apparently blew up her apartment (and, the police say, himself with it), Brenda doesn’t have anywhere to stay.  She accepts John’s offer to stay at his place.  John promises to be a perfect gentleman.  He’s a former probation officer and he just wants to help.

And Brenda definitely needs some help!  She suspects that Carl isn’t really dead.  She keeps having bizarre visions of the robed and masked leader of the cult.  She suspects that the cult might still be after her and, when she agrees to appear on a local talk show to tell her story, she finds herself stunned to be sitting across from an actual witch.  Her former cellmate, Rachel (Tamara Clatterbuck), has just been released from prison and is willing to help Brenda out.  Again, Brenda needs the help.  The cult is after her and it’s going to take a lot of intelligence to survive and that’s probably going to be Brenda’s downfall because it’s hard to think of a dumber character than Brenda.

(Seriously, if my boyfriend took me to a Satanic cult meeting on a date, I would be out of there before they even got around to the human sacrifice part of the night.)

This film is so incredibly dumb that I don’t even know where to begin.  Occasionally, I’ll see an incoherent horror film and I’ll give it a good review because the incoherence can sometimes add to the terror.  Two of my favorite directors, Lucio Fulci and Jean Rollin, both deliberately made horror films that didn’t make sense because they were tying to capture the feeling of being in a nightmare.  Mind, Body & Soul makes sense as long as you accept that Brenda, Rachel, and almost every other character in this film is mind-numbingly dumb.  The plot works as long as you accept that there is not a shred of intelligence to be found amongst any of the characters, including the bad guys.  This is a dumb film that is never scary.  It does feature a fair amount of nudity, which I imagine was probably meant to be the film’s main selling point.

On the plus side, Wings Hauser is always entertaining.  You’ll be able to guess the big plot twist that involves his character but no matter.  With his quick smirk, he at least seems to be enjoying himself.  As was so often the case, Hauser’s performance is the only one in this film that feels like an actual performance.  Wings Hauser was an actor who always gave it his all, even while appearing in something like this.

Previous Insomnia Files:

  1. Story of Mankind
  2. Stag
  3. Love Is A Gun
  4. Nina Takes A Lover
  5. Black Ice
  6. Frogs For Snakes
  7. Fair Game
  8. From The Hip
  9. Born Killers
  10. Eye For An Eye
  11. Summer Catch
  12. Beyond the Law
  13. Spring Broke
  14. Promise
  15. George Wallace
  16. Kill The Messenger
  17. The Suburbans
  18. Only The Strong
  19. Great Expectations
  20. Casual Sex?
  21. Truth
  22. Insomina
  23. Death Do Us Part
  24. A Star is Born
  25. The Winning Season
  26. Rabbit Run
  27. Remember My Name
  28. The Arrangement
  29. Day of the Animals
  30. Still of The Night
  31. Arsenal
  32. Smooth Talk
  33. The Comedian
  34. The Minus Man
  35. Donnie Brasco
  36. Punchline
  37. Evita
  38. Six: The Mark Unleashed
  39. Disclosure
  40. The Spanish Prisoner
  41. Elektra
  42. Revenge
  43. Legend
  44. Cat Run
  45. The Pyramid
  46. Enter the Ninja
  47. Downhill
  48. Malice
  49. Mystery Date
  50. Zola
  51. Ira & Abby
  52. The Next Karate Kid
  53. A Nightmare on Drug Street
  54. Jud
  55. FTA
  56. Exterminators of the Year 3000
  57. Boris Karloff: The Man Behind The Monster
  58. The Haunting of Helen Walker
  59. True Spirit
  60. Project Kill
  61. Replica
  62. Rollergator
  63. Hillbillys In A Haunted House
  64. Once Upon A Midnight Scary
  65. Girl Lost
  66. Ghosts Can’t Do It
  67. Heist

Cleaning Out The DVR Yet Again #1: Unwanted Guest (dir by Fred Olen Ray)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR!  It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet.  So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR!  She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Thanksgiving, November 24th!  Will she make it?  Keep checking the site to find out!)

unwanted-guest-lifetime-movie-college-coed-ted-king-kate-mansi-days-of-our-lives

The first film that I watched in my latest quest to clean out my DVR was Unwanted Guest, a Lifetime film that I recorded off of the Lifetime Movie Network on October 22nd.

Unwanted Guest tells a familiar Lifetime story.  A seemingly innocent and deceptively mousey college student, Amy (Kate Mansi), is invited to spend the holiday break at the home of her best friend, Christine (Valentina Novakovic).  It seems like a nice thing to do, right?  After all, Amy says that her family is in Europe and Christine is still struggling to adjust to having a new stepfather.  Amy gets a place to stay and Christine gets a friend.  It’s a win win, right?

Well, no, not quite.

When we first meet Amy, she’s wearing glasses, no makeup, and seems to be kind of meek.  It doesn’t take a psychic to know that Amy will soon take off her glasses, let down her hair, and start wandering around in lingerie.  However, even beyond that, Amy is soon drugging Christine, tricking Christine’s mother into falling off a stool, and seducing Christine’s stepfather.

(When he asks her why she’s wandering around the house in just a t-shirt, Amy replies, “If my shirt bothers you, I can take it off.”)

Of course, Amy’s not just manipulative.  She’s also a murderer.  In fact, it’s surprising the amount of people that she kills over the course of one holiday break.  I always find it kind of odd how skilled people in Lifetime movies are when it comes to killing people.  I mean, Amy even knows how to disable the brakes on someone’s car!  I wouldn’t even know where to begin!  I mean, how do you learn stuff like that?  Wikipedia, I guess.

Of course, Amy doesn’t just kill people.  There’s also a really icky scene where she kills a hamster.  If you didn’t already dislike Amy, you will after the hamster scene.

Unwanted Guest is not just a Lifetime film.  It’s also a Fred Olen Ray film and, even by his standards, it’s deliriously and wonderfully over-the-top.  One thing that I always like about Fred Olen Ray’s films is that they make no excuses for what they are.  Unwanted Guest is so unapologetically melodramatic and joyfully tawdry that it’s impossible not to enjoy it.  This is one of those films that you watch and you think, “Surely, they’re not going to go there…” and then, suddenly and without apology, they do!  It’s a lot of fun.

Add to that, Kate Mansi does a really good job in the role of Amy.  If there’s a Hall of Fame for Lifetime movie psychos, Amy deserves to be included!