Today, we have another cute little Christmas film from the insanely prolific director, Fred Olen Ray.
In 2014’s Christmas In Palm Springs, Dina Meyer is a divorced workaholic who is due to give a presentation in Palm Springs. Patrick Muldoon is her ex-husband, who would like to get back together with her. Fortunately, their children want them to get back together as well and will do anything to make it happen….
It’s cute and Christmas-y and Ian Ziering and David Chokachi in small roles. (You may remember Chokachi as the speedo-wearing Baywatch lifeguard that my friend Evelyn nicknamed “The Bulge.”) And it’s also a Starship Troopers reunion. Personally, I just like it when Patrick Muldoon shows up in these movies!
As a horror fan, I always appreciate a good slasher film. As dark and as disturbing as they can be, they’ve also helped me to face down a lot of my own real-life fears. Watching a good slasher film can be cathartic. You may be scared when you’re watching and, if you’re like me, you’ll probably put your hands in front of your eyes during the more graphic kills but, when the end credits roll, you feel proud of yourself for having made it all the way through.
Again, that’s a good slasher film.
A bad slasher film can be, if you’ll excuse the expression, absolute terror.
Mouse of Horrors is not a good slasher film. It’s a film about Chloe (Natasha Tosini) and her friends who, after about 15 minutes of filler, finally go to the “fun fair.” It turns out that the fair is not very fun because it’s home to Dr. Rupert (Chris Lines) and his two sons, one of whom wears a mouse mask and another of whom wears a bear mask. They’re Mickey and Winnie, though they’re never explicitly called that over the course of the film. (The Mouse is played by Lewis Santer while the Bear is played by Stephen Staley). Dr. Rupert needs body parts so he sends his two sons out to collect them. As you may have guessed, this leads to a lot of scenes of spurting blood, hacked-off limbs, and screams. Mickey and Winnie do not speak but Dr. Rupert does. In fact, the old man will not shut up. Even if he wasn’t some old weirdo demanding that his sons hack up random people, Dr. Rupert would be an annoying old crank.
Let’s give some credit where credit is due. The Mouse has potential and physically, Lewis Santer does a good job of portraying The Mouse’s jumpy style of movement. The Mouse mask is creepy, or at least it is at first. Eventually, I got bored with looking at the Mouse and, by the time the Bear started fighting with the Mouse, I no longer cared much about looking at either of them. Still, the killer is one of the most important parts of a slasher film and the Mouse had potential. The setting of the carnival also had potential, though most of it went unused.
The rest of the film, though …. ugh! Seriously, this was one of the worst edited films I’ve ever seen, including one scene where a day for night scene went totally day for a few shots. The story dragged. (It takes 20 minutes to get them to the fun fair when the film really should have started with them already there.) I was never quite sure where the Mouse was in relation to anyone else in the film, negating any chance of generating suspense. Why was the town suddenly deserted? Why did everyone else at the fun fair suddenly disappear except for Chloe and her friends? Why did the Mouse go the local pub to kill a bartender instead of just staying at the fun fair? Does the Mouse walk around town with his mouse mask on? How does he get away with that? I’ve always been the first to say that enjoying a horror film requires a certain suspension of disbelief but the audience has every right to expect some sort of reward for playing along. This film doesn’t offer that reward.
Get ready for a lot more films like this. Copyrights are expiring and everyone wants to either make a film based on their childhood nightmares or get revenge on their English teacher for making them read a book in high school. This was not the first killer Mickey film and I doubt it will be the last.
Evil Toons opens, disturbingly enough, with David Carradine hanging himself. Carradine is playing Gideon Fisk, the owner of both a run-down mansion and an ancient book that appears to be bound in human skin. Though Fisk kills himself, he still appears several years later so that he can deliver a copy of the book to the four girls who have been hired to clean his home.
The girls are all students at Miskatonic University, a name that will be familiar to any fans of the work of H.P. Lovecraft. (Those same fans will also have figured out that the book is the Necronomicon.) Jan (Barbara Dare) and Terry (Suzanne Auger) want to get the house cleaned so they can get paid. Roxanne (Madison Stone) wants to party overnight with her idiot boyfriend, Biff (Don Dowe). Shy and intellectual Megan (Monique Gabrielle) is mostly just worried about surviving until morning. After the girls open the book, they get Megan to translate the Latin writing within. This brings to life a cartoon monster, one who looks much like a combination of the Big Bad Wolf and the Tasmanian Devil but which is far more bloodthirsty and horny than either of them. After killing one of the girls and possessing her body, the Monster stalks the other inhabitants of the house.
Not meant to be taken seriously in any way shape or form, Evil Toons was made by Fred Olen Ray for $150,000. That probably explains why, despite the title, there’s only one evil toon and it only gets a minute and a half of screen time before possessing its first victim. Most of the dialogue is deliberately obtuse, with none of the girls showing any alarm upon realizing that forcing Megan to translate the book has condemned everyone to an eternity of torment. The good thing is that there are enough funny lines to hold your interest and the cast is game (and frequently undressed, which is probably why this film still has a cult following). Monique Gabrielle proves that she can scream with the best of them while Madison Stone is genuinely funny as Roxanne, delivering her lines with a playful quirkiness and even indulging in a little physical comedy with a hard-to-open wine bottle.
Fans of B-horror will be happy to see Dick Miller in the role of Burt, the man who hires the girls to clean up the house. After leaving the girls at the house, Burt goes home and watches Bucket of Blood (starring Dick Miller, of course) on television. “How come that guy never won an Academy Award?” Burt asks. Burt’s wife is played by scream queen Michelle Bauer, who gets a guest starring credit for a two-minute role that consists of her reminding Burt what Friday night is supposed to be for.
Evil Toons is undeniably dumb but I laughed more than I was expecting too. I think it helps that the movie confirmed what anyone who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons has always suspected. Most cartoon characters aren’t that innocent, especially the ones that are drawn in the margins of the Necronomicon.
In this sex-filled take on The Haunting of Hill House, Robert Quarry leads a group of researchers to a haunted house. Amy Goldwyn (Brinke Stevens) is the smart psychic who knows the house isn’t safe but who still gets possessed by a demon and ends up hammering a nail through her palm. Beth (Kathrin Lautner) is the self-described “bitch” who has a lesbian past because this is a direct-to-video 90s film. Harry (Oliver Darrow) is the cocky womanizer who gets seduced by a succubus. The house is haunted by the spirit of a fallen priest and his demonic nuns. Only another priest, Father Anthony Vicci (Erik Estrada!), can save the researchers but that holy water that he’s carrying around is only going to work if he regains his faith and seeks forgiveness for his past sins.
As far as I know, Spirits is only available on VHS. So, if you do watch it, you’re going to need a VCR that works. Considering how easily an old VCR can break down and how it’s nearly impossible to get them repaired, you’re going to need to realize that Spirits could very well be the last tape you ever watch on the old machine. Do you want to take the risk? I took the risk and, for what it is, Spirits is not that bad. It’s a Fred Olen Ray films and it’s got Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer in it so you know what you’re going to get. Still, after I finished it, I realized that, if Spirits had been the last thing I ever watched on that old VCR, I would have been pissed. If my VCR is going to break, I’d rather it break while I was watching a tape full of hours of Must See TV from 1996.
Spirits has a few things to recommend it. Brinke Stevens was one of the best of the direct-to-video scream queens and she actually does give a “real” performance as Amy. The sight of Erik Estrada, playing a tortured a priest as if he was a character on a particularly racy telenovela, was certainly entertaining. Finally, there was Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry, as the main ghost hunter. Otherwise, Spirits is a typical direct-to-video Fed Olen Ray film, with cheesy music, terrible special effects, and laughable dialogue. There’s a lot of nudity, of course but you can find the same amount of nudity in films that you can safely watch on DVD or Blu-ray. If you’re going to risk the VCR, the movie is going to need to have more to offer.
What do you get when a producer like Roger Corman notices that Jurassic Park was the most financially successful film of 1993?
Dinosaur Island!
Directed by not just Fred Olen Ray but also Jim Wynorski (and if that combination isn’t enough to spark your interest, I don’t know what is), Dinosaur Island is about what happens when a cargo plane transporting three AWOL soldiers back to the United States crashes near an uncharted island. Led by no-nonsense Capt. Briggs (Ross Hagen), the soldiers make it to the island.
They discover that the island is full of beautiful cavewomen who spend much of their time topless. For the film’s intended audience of teenage boys, that’s good.
They discover that the women are ruled by a queen (Toni Naples) who hates men. That’s bad.
When the women notice that one of the men has a smiley face tattoo, they decide that he is the chosen one who has been prophesized about in the ancient scrolls. That’s good, I guess.
Chosen or not, the men still have to battle the Tyrannosaurs Rex that rules the island. That’s bad. Or is it good? I don’t know anymore.
To save money, Roger and the gang reused the dinosaur who appeared in Corman’s previous Jurassic hit, Carnosaur. They also reused a lot of stock footage from that film. The Carnosaur footage often doesn’t match with the footage that was shot for Dinosaur Island but I don’t know that anyone would expect anything less from Corman-produced rip-off of Jurassic Park. There are some films where the cheapness of it all become a selling point and this is one of them. The special effects are less important than marveling at how the movie got a dinosaur without spending any money.
Dinosaur Island is a bad movie with less than convincing special effects and a lot of overacting but it seems to be aware of its limitations so it’s hard not to like it. It’s obvious that Ray and Wynorski both understood that there was no way that they were gong to be able to make a serious film with the resources that they had available so instead, they shot a flat-out comedy that made fun of its own cheapness. It was the right approach to take, even though the film’s jokes are as often groan-worthy as they are funny. Among the cast, Ross Hagen seemed to have the best understanding of what was needed because he deadpans his way through the entire film, delivering his weird lines with a straight face and giving a performance that wouldn’t be out of place in Airplane! or one of the other ZAZ films.
Not surprisingly, this was a popular film on late night cable back on the day. It’s combination of boobs, jokes, and dinosaurs made it a Cinemax mainstay. Rewatching it, I knew how stupid it was but I couldn’t help but laugh at a few parts. I enjoyed viewing it again. Nostalgia is more powerful than any dinosaur.
When a new maximum security prison is finally ready to be opened and filled with dangerous criminals, Warden Glover (Arthur Roberts) gives a tour to reporter Tracy Quinn (Landon Hall). Unfortunately, the tour is interrupted when a group of terrorists led by Murdock (John Lazar, who is best-known for playing the homicidal record producers in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls) infiltrate the prison and take over. Their plan is to set off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and trick the United States into a retaliatory strike against the Middle East.
Fortunately, the Warden is able to free the five prisoners who had already been transferred to the prison before it was taken over by terrorists. It’s now up to the prisoners to defeat the terrorists and defuse the bomb. They’ve only got an hour to prevent a war! Fortunately, the prisoners are being led by former CIA agent, Mace Richter (Paul Michael Robinson). Mace is only in prison because he was framed after a hostage rescue went wrong. (It turned out that the hostage was in on the plot so Mace killed him.) Amazingly, the terrorists from that operation are the same terrorists who have now taken over the prison. What a coincidence!
Maximum Revenge is a Fred Olen Ray movie so you know what you’re getting. The film rips off Die Hard by having Mace and the crew take out the terrorists one-by-one. Despite the fact that they’ve only got an hour to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, Mace and Tracy still drop everything so that they can have sex in one of the prison offices. It seems like that could have waited until after World War III had been prevented but then again, it’s a Fred Olen Ray film. No matter what else can be said about Fred Olen Ray, he knows what his target audience is watching for.
Paul Michael Robinson is not an extremely compelling action star and the fight scenes are pretty rudimentary. The prison is obviously an office building and the frequent inserts of the bomb very slowly counting down from 60:00 are good for a laugh or two. (Most bomb timers count down in seconds but I guess this one was meant to count down in minutes. At one point, though, the timer reads 16:86.) Even though the prison doesn’t appear to be that big and the terrorists aren’t that impressive, the timer is still somehow allowed to get all the way down to 00:01 before anyone does anything about it. That tells you all you need to know. The best thing about the movie are the end credits, which are filled with joke names. My favorite was the electrician named Sparks McGee.
Sybil Danning is top-billed in The Tomb but she only appears at the very start of the film. She lands an airplane on a landing strip in the middle of the Egyptian desert and then gets into a gunfight with two archeologists who have robbed a tomb and are now trying to sell off the artifacts. When one of the archeologists aims his handgun at the plane and pulls the trigger, the plane explodes. Though Sybil survives the gun fight, that’s it for her in this movie. Since whatever modern-day audience The Tomb may have is largely going to be made up of nostalgic Sybil Danning fanboys, most people will probably stop watching once it becomes obvious that she is never coming back.
The rest of the movie is about the archeologists selling off the artifacts to greedy collectors like Cameron Mitchell (who spend the entire movie sitting in his office). This ticks off the ancient Egyptian princess, Nefratis (Michelle Bauer), and she sets off to kill all of the collectors, one-by-one.
Like The Awakening and Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb, The Tomb claims to be based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. Actually, The Tomb is just an early Fred Olen Ray film, complete with Ray regulars like John Carradine, who gets even less screen time that Danning and Mitchell. Like most early Ray films, it suffers due to a low budget but Ray’s enthusiastic, never-say-die spirit keeps things moving right along. With most of the top-billed actors only appearing in a scene or two, the movie belongs to Bauer and she does the most that she can with her role, tearing apart hearts and swearing vengeance with real gusto.
One final note: during the opening credits, The Pharohs, a band that performed while wearing headresses and wrapped in banadages, performs Tutti Frutti. That almost makes up for Sybil Danning only appearing in 3 minutes of the movie.
The movie known as Bloody Movie was originally filmed in 1987, under the title Terror Night. However, it was never released. There are plenty of rumors about why it wasn’t released. Some people say that it was because the film was produced with Mafia money. Some people say it was because it used a lot of footage that was lifted from other movies and the producers apparently didn’t bother to clear the rights. Of course, it’s also totally possible that the film wasn’t released because it wasn’t very good. I mean, that does happen.
Regardless of why, the film apparently sat on the shelf for 20 years. It was finally released by Fred Olen Ray’s Retromedia and retitled Bloody Movie. That said, the DVD that I own (and watched for this review) was released by Legacy Entertainment and still had the Terror Night title. The transfer on the Legacy DVD was notably bad. From what I’ve been told, the Retromedia release looks a lot better.
Now, there’s a lot bad things that can be said about Terror Night. It’s low-budget, which is one of those things that can be overcome by a clever director but, in this case, it just results in Terror Night looking cheap. It’s poorly written, full of one-dimensional characters who were shallow even by the standards of a late 80s slasher. This is also one of those movies where formerly respectable actors pop up for five minutes cameos. Whenever one of those actors shows up, all the action stops so that they can earn their paycheck. Aldo Ray is homeless and doomed. Cameron Mitchell is a cynical cop and doomed. Alan Hale, Jr. is an affable security guard and apparently not doomed. There’s no real reason for any of them to be there but there they are! There’s also a biker couple who show up for no particular reason, along with the typical collection of teenage victims.
But yet, there are moments when Terror Night goes from being bland to being almost transcendently odd.. There are moments of comedy mixed in with some surprisingly mean-spirited death scenes. Necks are snapped. Heads are chopped off. Bodies are split in half. It all gets rather messy and the presence of all those old time actors makes the sudden gore scenes feel all the more strange.
However, the main thing that distinguishes Terror Night from the other slashers of the era is the identity of the killer. (And, before anyone yells at me, this is not a spoiler. There is never any mystery about who the killer is.) Lance Hayward is not a zombie like Jason Voorhees or a silent symbol of evil like Michael Myers. He’s not seeking vengeance for some crime in the past. Instead, he’s a former silent screen star. (It seems like Hayward would have been close to 90 years old at the time of Terror Night. He’s still surprisingly spry.) Hayward commits his murders while wearing costumes from his old movies. Adding to the strangeness of the whole scenario is that actual silent footage is spliced into the murder scenes. Most of the footage comes from movies like The Thief of Baghdad, The Black Pirate, and the Gaucho. You have to wonder if Douglas Fairbanks cheated the director’s father or something.
(Since Hayward spends most of the movie in costume, I’m assuming that he was mostly played by stuntmen. When Hayward actually shows his face, he’s played by one-time Oscar nominee, John Ireland. At the height of his career, Ireland co-starred in films like All The King’s Men.)
As to why a silent scream star would be murdering teenagers … well, your guess is as good as mine. It’s a strange film, a mix of gore and nostalgia. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it but I still always appreciate anything this strange.
Sybil Danning is top-billed in The Tomb but she only appears at the very start of the film. She lands an airplane on a landing strip in the middle of the Egyptian desert and then gets into a gunfight with two archeologists who have robbed a tomb and are now trying to sell off the artifacts. When one of the archeologists aims his handgun at the plane and pulls the trigger, the plane explodes. Though Sybil survives the gun fight, that’s it for her in this movie. Since whatever modern-day audience The Tomb may have is largely going to be made up of nostalgic Sybil Danning fanboys, most people will probably stop watching once it becomes obvious that she is never coming back.
Through the Shattered Lens 