Hotwire

Hotwire

United States - 1980

Director- Frank Q. Dobbs

Paragon Video Productions, 1984, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 35 min.

On the basis of the preview I saw on the Mongrel tape I found at goodwill, I picked up Hotwire, a movie about stealing cars and fallin’ in love, duh.

Rednecky right from the getgo, it remains to be seen if this is intended to pander, or to mock redneckery. Greasy hardass cop Harley, George Kennedy, raids a hotel room in which Billy Ed is humpin’ to arrest him on trumped up charges of car theft. While doing time in jail, Billy Ed is visited by Fair Deal Farley, Harley’s equally greasy used car salesman twin brother, also played by George Kennedy. Farley offers Billy Ed a pardon if he’ll come and work for him as a repo-man. With little to lose, Billy Ed agrees and is soon cruising the streets with a rough and grimy bespectacled old car thief who claims to have first hotwired a Model-A. George Hammersmith Forney, better known as The Weasel (Strother Martin) a wheedling dirtbag who guzzles Firebird by the bottle, curses, fights and would be wearing fingerless gloves if this wasn’t set in the Southish.

Together The Weasel and Billy Ed engage in various car thieving, or repossessing as it were, antics set to the same knee-slapping banjo music I’d expect to hear in Hazard County. Billy Ed soon gets sick of Farley’s slick-dealing and tells him to shove the job, but some awkward crosscut scenes of the twins discussing his incarceration and a homely but off-limits girl-next-door return him to the hotwire fold.

Deciding to play both fields with a newfound confident insolence, the idea here being that he is “hotwiring” someone else’s girl, Billy Ed finds himself courting the surrogate daughter of the town crime-boss-with-the-sheriff-in-his-pocket. Billy Ed is surely going to have a hell of a time of the rest of this movie, but if the comedy sticker someone rather generously applied to the box indicates, it will probably end with some kind of homely redemption and some hotrods.

Craze

(No matter how bad a movie is, that shouldn't give some scissor-happy jerk the right to chop up the video box.)

Craze
1974 – United Kingdom
Director – Freddie Francis
Paragon Video Productions, 19??, VHS

I’ve learned to be wary of films starring Jack Palance, films about witches, and films made in the UK. Rarely do any of these categories deliver on their own but this is the first time I’ve seen them all boldly thrown together. In a basement somewhere Palance leads a black magic ceremony centered on a googly eyed African idol. After some spooky talk, a woman does a little topless hustle in front of the Chuko idol and unconvincingly cuts her stomach open.

After the best part of the movie is over, an older woman shows up to argue about her prior membership in the coven and during a scuffle with Palance is impaled on the idols pitchfork.
Besieged by unpaid bills and debt Palance is at his wits end and at the point of having to close his little failing antique/import business. Just as his pasty British fop of an assistant finds out about the murder and starts spiraling into a whine-fest, Palnce throttles him into silence, and discovers a secret drawer full of gold coins hidden in his favorite desk.

So sweet, this means the sacrifice worked, or at least that’s what Palance thinks. Wasting no time, Palance heads to a local bar, er, Pub and picks up a waxy looking Italian woman, takes her home, gets high, gets laid and when she won’t do a striptease for Chuko he gets chokey.

Rather soonish after that several Oriental chaps show up at his little storefront and eagerly purchase some authentic Ming vases which a previous conversation established as unsellable. Hey the bucks, er, Pounds are just rolling in now! Sweet old Chuko is paying in dividends, and despite his assistants reckless suggestion of a party, Palance decides to invest his newfound wealth in a bottle of cherry brandy which he uses to get a big pasty fat chick in leopard print drunk.

Finally killing his own aunt as a sacrifice, Palance has gone perhaps too far and has to identify her corpse for the police, his grief about as convincing as his intermittent shoddy English accent. A clever fade effect using Chuko’s eyes is used to show how evil he has become while he grins with gluttonous delight as his aunt’s will is read, and then read again thanks to an editing mistake in the film. His assistant starts whining like a pussy again and Palance visits a BDSM call-girl while the assistant visits three double scotches to get his dander up before returning to the shop to confront his boss who, surrounded by angry pale British, finally breaks.

Jack Palance tries to make it through Craze.

This PG yawn fest was pretty much exactly what I expected from any of the aforementioned three film-sinking elements. I had hoped that the combination of the three might result in some fantastic plumbing of the sloppy depths of terrible, but no, it failed even at that. It didn’t help that Palance had a thin little mustache which remided me of Charles Bronson. I love Charles Bronson, I hate Jack Palance.

Daddy's Deadly Darling

Daddy’s Deadly Darling
AKA Pigs
1972 – United States
Director – Marc Lawrence
Paragon Video Productions, 1985, VHS

A dad who molests his daughter throughout her minute-long life montage gets his when she brutally murders him. The daughter, Lynn, is committed to an asylum but steals a nurses outfit and a car and busts out into a rural location and a rock song featuring a jews harp.

Out in the sticks, an old bald farmer named Zambrini (writer/director Marc Lawrence) apologizes to a dead body for having to feed it to his pigs, continuing the snappy dialogue, Zambrini reveals the origin story of his flesh hungry swine.
Lynn (Toni Lawrence, the directors daughter) shows up at the creepy dark farm and takes a job in Zambrinis café where, according to the terrified old ladies in the next shot, he feeds the pigs to the general public. Unfortunately for the old women, the Sheriff refuses to arrest Zambrini for stealing bodies from the graveyard because “dead bodies have no civil rights.”


Awakening sweaty from a dream in which Zambrini had slashed her apart with a straight-razor, Lynn goes for a midnight snoop around the farm and is caught and threatened by the Z man. The next day, while serving some ham to a local, Ben, he tells her about the other pretty girls who disappeared and got fed to Zambrinis pigs. Afterwards, she has another creepy talk with Z man, but stays on board for the free phone priveliges so she can make crazy raving phone calls to her dead daddy.

Later, Ben forces her to go on a date, and tries to rape her but is stopped short by the Sheriff who drives Lynn home but then also gets a little creepy. The solution to that problem is to invite Ben over for a romp between the sheets and a straight-razor emasculation. Finally!, sandwiched between those loony phonecalls and plot development scenes there’s some moderately creepy parts.

Zambrini finds Lynn rocking in the corner sobbing apologies to “daddy”. What a pair these two make, Zambrini mumbling away incoherently and Lynn outwardly in total control. But really, she’s stark raving mad and between conversations with “daddy” possibly hallucinating screaming telepathic anthropomorphic pigs.

By the time she snaps again and kills someone in another mostly bloodless stab scene, there’s been so much crazy crazy babbling under the influence of rednecky Sheriff procedural that, despite the wandering cleavage, to his and my detriment, Zambrini and I had both forgotten who the killer was. This low budget-rural slasher precursor to Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a lot of the genuinely creepy ideas that would be put to more effective use by its successors.

A cool old(?) poster for the title Pigs:

The 2002 Troma DVD release:

Boarding House

Boarding House
United States - 1982

Dir. – Johnn Wintergate

Paragon Video Productions, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 35 min.

Could be a sci-fi adventure, nice crude digital credits and wobbly synth music. Grating beepy CPU readout drones out police case history about murder scene and subsequent haunted house.

Man drowns and his wife shoves her hand into the disposal resulting in an initially blood-spattering but eventually off screen death? More computer readout crap. At a hospital, a nurse is induced by a sniffling off-screen presence to hang herself, and her friend tears his own entrails out at the sight of her corpse. Ok, now for the logical part.

Years later, a sleazy new-wave rocker dude named Jim inherits the property and decides that it would be sweet to rent the rooms to hot chicks, so he can check ‘em out all the time, and hopefully have sex with ‘em, right? Yeah!
A bunch of girls move in!

The next day one of them is stabbed through the hand with an ice pick by an off screen assailant, presumably the gardener. (never proven) The victim later hallucinates herself being murdered in the shower, then comes to, as a blonde, and does some work in the garden! Jim practices his telekinetic powers in his tightie-whities, and later, poolside, the girls giggle and massage him into planning a party. Yay!
Jim allows a detective posing as a random passerby to use the phone, but after hooking up with one of the girls he is shabbily added to growing dead meat pile.
What is happening!? Jim telekenetifies a soapy bathtub maneuver to impress one of the girls, Victoria, then subjects us to another bulge display. Some of the girls, in aninexplicable attempt to add some (derivative) psychological fear, are menaced by a killer wearing a bloody pig head. Some of the girls begin having horrible bloody nightmares, and as if that wasn’t bad enough Jim starts forcing himself on them physically. On the beach he tries to rape one of them, but he is knocked unconscious with a rock, and she bleeds profusely over her entire body, ostensibly crushed to death by the power of the killers mind.
Victorias skeezy tight-shirt bell-bottomed band shows up for the pool party, and then there is a nonsensical universally degrading pie fight. Band plays some banal, bore-n’-roll while the rest of the characters get drunk and die in blurry close-ups in various states of telekinetically induced psychosis stupidity. The killer is revealed in a cloud of canned smoke to a great deal of confused silence.

Possibly one of the most shoddily cobbled together good idea films I’ve ever seen. What could have been a cast of unsympathetic jerks, pretty girls and copious bloodshed all dancing to a bizarre low budget cacophony ended up a perplexing, if fun mess. I get the impression that the bits of gristly homemade genius that pepper this otherwise pretty, but bland exploitation casserole were the only remaining vestiges of the director/writer/makeup man/stars simpleminded vision, hacked and edited to death by boneheaded philistines.

Watch the Boardinghouse trailer at CultTrailers.

Mongrel

Mongrel

United States - 1982

Dir. – Robert A. Burns

Paragon Video Productions, 1984, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

This video tape opens up with a series of previews of other movies available from Paragon, Boarding House, The Witching, Molly and Lawless John (starring Sam Elliott), Just Before Dawn, One Armed Executioner, The Beyond (as Gates of Hell) and Hotwire. These trailers are awesome and gruesome, I wonder if the films live up to their acclaim, I’m willing to find out.The Mongrel title sequence is awesome too, pretty foreboding. Ken, a random dapper dude moves into a big rambling mansion with a bunch of unknowns, and a vicious barking dog in the front yard. Jerry, a nervous shy bookworm gives him a tour and a warning about the roommates before running off. Woody (Mitch Pileggi, or “Skinner”of The X-Files) is the asinine hotshot balding redneck Jerry warned Ken about. When one of the other roommates, somebody named “Toad”, taunts the snarling dog with a steak, the dog breaks its chains and mauls him. Everyone reacts with strenuous Seriousness, and with stage play sincerity, and Woody shoots the dog.

To get revenge on Ken for making a pass at the girl roommate, Sharon, a jealous Woody and Ike electrocute him to death, whoops. Soon, Jerry starts to lose his shit, getting sweatier and sweatier, hearing things in the hall at night, and ranting wildly. Each time the belchy growling mongrel sound stacks up the mostly offscreen body count, Jerry matches shot for shot with a sooty shrieking paranoid schizo panic scene.
But the dog is already dead, so that sound is coming from somewhere, I knew that irritating little shit was up to something, you don’t get that grating and harpy-like for no good reason.

The perfect kind of early 80’s gore-horror movie that has a lot of promise, a lot of ambition and a really low budget. Often this type of thing seems to overreach itself, but sheer sincerity and the tactile onscreen filth and decrepitude make Mongrel well worth drinking through.