Teen Lust

Teen Lust

United States - 1978

Director - James Hong

Lightning Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

The distinction between savage and civilized culture is often a hazy and subjective one. Our parents humor seems naive to us now while ours seems cynical to them. But that’s a long and ugly debate which is better served elsewhere because I’m not here to argue about comedic-relativism except as it applies to Teen Lust, an independent comedy produced and directed in 1978/9 by the man of the week, Mr. James Hong.

By most measures, Teen Lust is just your average, albeit extra low budget, teen sex comedy. It’s got sweet cars, over-acted nerds, stoners, an overweight outcast, nudity and loads of lowbrow humor. The protagonists are two just-graduated high-school girls who take summer jobs at the local police department as part of the Explorer Scout program (now called Venturing.) Over the course of the film’s antics and jokes about the mentally disabled, both girls end up having sex with their cop-mentors. These days of course statutory rape is pretty much frowned upon. Relatively speaking though, in 1979 it was a humorous opportunity to show adult men fondling (what are supposed to be) teen aged girls. I would like to think that this indicates some measure of cultural advancement since then, but I doubt that a movie genre that fundamentally relies on sexist objectification is much of a litmus test.

Still, while wallowing in the usual, Teen Lust does do something rather uncommon. Boys in these films are typically congratulated for having sex with older women (getting experience) and/or sleeping around (proving their manhood,) while the girls are confined to the virgin/whore/ dichotomy. In Teen Lust though Carol and Neely essentially reverse this role and become “self actualized” through this little act of rebellion. It’s a bit of a slippery twist the film is performing at this point, suggesting that it is both okay for women to be sexually liberated and yet, still necessary (or at least recommended) for their identities to be defined by their sexual utility and/or attachment to men. The box art is a perfect example of this faux-rebellion, giving us a double-layered objectification experience. As the girl on the box ogles (or hallucinates?) the undressing hunk, we ogle her ogling. In a way it lets us off the self-analysis hook by saying more-or-less “See, they do it too, so it’s okay!”

Without getting too pedantic and concocting a bunch of wind-baggy socio-cultural analysis it would be best to cut to the quick; Teen Lust is not a very good movie. Released under at least three different titles at various times in its 33 year history, it has earned a mostly negative reputation from the people who bother to write online reviews. Appealing to some of these viewers is the fact that Carol is played by Norwegian actress Kirsten Baker who graced a dozen or so low budget features in the early 80’s. But between the boobs (not hers,) which can only carry a movie so far, the jokes only get worse (and more offensive) and Teen Lust begins to drag. It reminds me of Tim Kincaid's "legit" films with the disjointed narrative feeling of a porno minus the sex. It has a sequence of events and a conclusion, but in many respects they feel unrelated. They exist in the same space, but seem unable to coalesce. Sure, Hong's first attempt at non-adult directing is bad in that endearing low-budget laughable-good-try kind of way, but in the end, especially at the end, it doesn’t have much point.

Thanks to all the Week of Hong Contributors

Illogical Contraption - Bloodsport II and Bloodsport III
Fist of B-List - The Dynamite Brothers
From the Depths of DVD Hell - Big Trouble In Little China and Balls of Fury

Direct to Video Connoisseur - South Beach Academy and Caged Fury

She Blogged By Night - Seventh Sin

Booksteve's Library - Two China Girls

Lines That Make Things - The A Team (TV episode)
Temple of Schlock - Hot Connections
Explosive Action - Ninja III: The Domination
Thrilling Days of Yesteryear - Classic TV with James Hong 

Lost Video Archive - Teen Lust, Gladiator Cop, Cyber Bandits and Blade in Hong Kong

Tim Kincaid Interview

Well, I tried.
I wrote several e-mails to one of my favorite trash-movie directors, Joe Gage/Tim Kincaid asking for an e-mail interview. Alas, he declined to even acknowledge my request at all. I think it was because my questions were too "political", apparently he doesn't like that. Fair enough I guess.
On his blog he did recently post a link to another interview so that will have to do for now, but I have not given up.
 

She's Back

She’s Back

United States – 1989

Director – Tim Kincaid

Avid Home Entertainment, 1992, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 29 minutes

Knowing little to nothing about the timeline of Carrie Fisher’s life outside of a basic film chronology makes it difficult to correlate separate events, and thus a bit harsh to make assumptions. However, I think it’s a safe bet that one of her well publicized periods of heavy drug use coincided with this film. The maniacal chatter constantly spouted by Beatrix (Fisher) in She’s Back is either symptomatic of cocaine use or shameless desperation. With all due respect to Mr. Kincaid, I can think of no other reason why a top rung actress with cult status would appear in such a low budget picture. What I’m getting around to is that while this film is largely unnoticed on Fisher’s dossier, for the converse reason it is like a sore-thumb on Kincaid’s. In either case her presence is both toxic and regenerative, it makes what could have been excruciatingly boring into something painfully entertaining.

With all of that firmly in mind you might anticipate some real shit-pitching monkeys-at-the-zoo type of shrieking insanity here, and it comes damn close. Indeed, the constant harping and nagging of a coke-addled hypochondriac housewife would, in normal circumstances drive any person to homicide, but in She’s Back, it fills the vacuum left by the other, less capable members of the cast. The story comes directly from the mind of Buddy Giovinazzo, a man familiar with wailing claustrophobia as writer and director of the heroin steeped, post-‘Nam sensory assault Combat Shock. In the static atmosphere of a Kinkaid film, Giovinazzo’s Jersey-cynicism and Fisher’s narco-chattering actually turn She’s Back into a skincrawling minimalist performance piece. All of this proved critical to my ability to continue watching the film.

In fact, Beatrix’s (Fisher) needling does drive someone to homicide, namely her spineless husband Tom (Robert Joy), with whom she shares a constant exchange of wheedling psychological abuse, and the thugs who invade her home and really do kill her. What there is of a script really resembles a free for all improvised to make use of Fisher’s condition. Actually, this is the perfect way to explicate Bea’s return from beyond the grave to henpeck Tom into revenging her against the thugs. Like a pair of cheap co-dependent pet birds Bea and Tom batter themselves silly against the walls of the films crippling budgetary cage, bickering and pecking each other into a neurotic mess.

With these two caught in a literal death-struggle of symbiotic nagging, there’s no room to develop any other characters, not that anyone was trying. I always got the impression that Kinkaid simply cast his films with the first people to call back about the advertisement. These folks are no exception and they’re just as stunned with the proceedings as I was. With the exception of Tom and Bea’s neighbor, a Korean War veteran who’s been through the shit and isn’t fazed by anything, (and is thoroughly sauced), everyone stands there with a mixture of amazement and discomfort that makes their stilted acting seem more like a healthy fear of the mentally unstable. Considering the similarity of my own reaction it’s hard to blame them. Once again a Tim Kincaid movie is actually made rational and even tenuously brilliant by the selfsame lack of acting and logic that would otherwise be its downfall.

Breeders

Breeders

United States - 1986

Director – Tim Kincaid

MGM Home Entertainment, 1999, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 17 min.

Considering that gay porn is Tim Kincaid's primary source of income, it should come as no surprise that a film called Breeders is nothing less than mockery of straight people, in particular women. Honestly the fact that the film is preceded by an MGM classics advert on this VHS is an ignorant denial of what Breeders is at its core. The co-association of Kincaid with When Harry Met Sally and Raging Bull is frankly, priceless.



A girl gets kicked out of some jerks car and, while walking away in a huff meets a nice elderly German man who suddenly gags and melts a little bit and grabs her dress off with a nasty oozy meat hand.
The next day, Dr Gamble Pace (Teresa Farley, of Kincaid’s Bad Girls Dormitory) and Detective Dale Andriotti investigate the crime at the hospital. The victim is being treated for a sexual violation which resulted in acid burns to her face and psychological trauma which Pace profoundly diagnose:
“This is the kind of case that makes me want to kill every man who was ever born.” Says Gamble,
“What do you mean?” says Andriotti.

At a fashion shoot in a dirty apartment an underweight girl poses in ugly bathing suits. When everyone else bails for lunch, she stays behind to do a bunch of coke and exercise naked. (But she is NOT having sex, she’s saving herself for marriage, you got that?) The photographers gay assistant (Ed Jr. from The Mutilator) returns for his wallet and suddenly mutates into nasty black mostly unseen monster. A pulsing knob covered hose slides up the unsullied model's leg while she screams.
(Not sure what just happened while the monster was almost totally offscreen?)
Cut to single jagged skyscraper thrusting into the pristine sky.


A frightened nurse at the hospital where these two victims are being held returns home after a hard days work and strips off her uniform, stepping out a few minutes later to find that her date has broken into her house. she explains to him at length that she’s an old fashioned girl, y’know, a virgin, a condition she explains with fascinated curiosity. Turning around from the frozen dinner she's preparing she finds the date inexplicably dead and bleeding from the face and the monster waiting offscreen to breed with her.

The fashion-shoot photographer rants into the phone, barely in control of her sanity, then speaks at length about her virginity with her friend the hair stylist. The stylist explains that she's saving her maidenhead for a guy who's "not gay". Uhh, that shouldn't be too difficult. Photographer sweats out the guilt of having brought her deceased model all the way from (extremely puritanical but coke sniffing) Wisconsin. Over a sheet of slides and a glass of wine she squeezes out a painful monologue, and for her troubles is the next victim of the monster.

Pace and Andriotti fumble around and speculate wildly in front of a massive computer box, occasionally popping up to chew scenery and harass the victims with blank stares each time they roll in. It finally takes Dr. Pace’s assistant Dr. Ira Markum (successful makeup artist Edward French, the only decent actor in this film) who identifies a strange particle on the slide samples. No, not a spore from the unaddressed rivers of black fluid that pours from between the victims legs after each violation. Instead, it's a tiny piece of brick dust which can only have come from a few key buildings in the city.
Namely the very one that Pace and Andriotti are in, marked with a big red throbbing X on their “brick dust detector” computer box’s screen. As their minds are busy being blown by this sudden deluge of crucial information all the victims magically heal and get out of their hospital beds buck-naked and wander off. This too is a shocker revealed to our insipid heroes only as it grinds line-by-line out of the computer box.

You look familiar, don't I know you from two seconds ago? New haircut?

Since they don't have anything better going on at the moment the Super Detective Duo decide to check out the super rare brick collection in the basement. There they discover suddenly sinister Dr. Markum presiding over a wierd kiddie pool of semen where all the catatonic victims have returned to slather each other with goop and wallow in post virginal ecstasy.
After convincingly explaining a plot that bears little resemblance to what happened in the past hour, Markum’s facial hair vanishes just as he begins to mutate into something even more hideous than his sweater.
The elusive detective duo watches blankly before lighting his new monstrous form on fire. The ladies writhe nearby in their pool of natural lotion smearing themselves with all the slippery MGM classic they can get their hands on .

Lets see, a very cool poster, an extremely cool VHS box, and and a completely misleading VHS box.

The Mutilator

The Mutilator

United States - 1985

Director – Buddy Cooper

Vestron Video, 1987, VHS

A bunch of incredibly dull college kids on fall break whine unconvincingly in the local cafeteria because they have no plans, oh what a drag. But wait! Ed’s dad, Ed Sr. calls and tells him to close up his beachside condo for the season. This sudden paternal outreach seems a little bit odd to Ed at first, since, he confesses, he and his dad have hardly spoken since the day Ed Jr. accidentally blew his mom in half with dad’s shotgun, on dad’s birthday, after which dad went on a drinking spree with moms corpse. But since his friends want nothing more than to fill their idle time with three word sentences and light beer, he is quickly won over to the idea of having a party.

Look at that jacket, if you saw these people wouldn'y you wanna kill 'em too?

The kids head up to the condo, swindling minorities and swilling beer all along the way. When they arrive they find Ed Sr.’s collection of exotic weapons, sacrificial masks and texidermied animals all described with more practiced recitation by Ed Jr. (Matt Mitler who appeared in 2 Tim Kincaid movies).
Hey, what usually hangs in that spot on the wall?
Oh, just my dad’s battleaxe, I wonder where it’s gotten to?
I could guess but…oh, there’s Ed Sr. hiding in the closet breathing heavily and fondling said axe. So much for suspense.

After dinner at the rough-hewn raw wood picnic table the three couples settle down for a rousing round of light beer and Monopoly. One bored couple heads off to shag, ending up at a swimming pool where, after she’s kind enough to briefly secure this heavily edited films R rating, they are both dispatched by the censors. (He’s supposed to get it from an outboard motor propeller, but with the edit, it’s impossible to tell) Anyway, after everybody else goes for a walk on the beach, they go back and drink more beer. This has been going on the whole film, yet, none of them is drunk. Maybe they’re always drunk and just trying not to fall below a certain level of intoxication; that might explain the acting and dialogue.

When it gets late, one of the other guys goes looking for the swimming pool couple (only after his girlfriend offers some boob upon completion of the mission, otherwise he didn’t give a shit about ‘em). Soon he too is missing, and the remaining three go and search for the first three. The boob-bribing girlfriend (ok, I admit, they’re probably worth it) is grabbed and “mutilated” (we must assume) with the gaffe-hook of poster fame, and Ed and his girlfriend flee in terror, quickly stumbling in rapid succession across the previously unfindable “mutilated” bodies of their four friends. Apparently, and I can only guess here, all the “mutilation” is so horrible that it drives Ed and his girlfriend to shrieking crocodile tears, our inquiry must unfortunately rest on such circumstantial evidence however, because most of the “mutilation” occurs on the editing room floor. Ed and his girlfriend run wailing to their car where the headlights illuminate something even more horrible, Ed Sr., ready to supply more missing mutilation. In this final goofy scene, there are a few brief splashes of gore, the car lighter which seems to do more stabbing than burning being the most notable. Even if it was all restored, I get the feeling it would be like a low rent slasher-film singlewide trailer with nice lampshades.
I tell you what was mutilated, my sense of cinematic wonder and naive optimism.

This review is based on the 84 minute R rated VHS tape version in the box seen above which has almost no gore whatsoever. According to other peoples accounts there should be some gore, actually quite a bit of good gore, all of which seems to have been edited out of this version. The Mutilator can be found online on a wildly overpriced DVDR rip with footage restored from an uncut VHS tape. Quite possibly one of the saddest moments of my life when a poster which has just about everything awesome going for it turns out to be the only good thing the movie has going for it. I’ve seen bad movies that have good art, but never terrible movies that have unassailably perfect art.

The incredibly awesome poster (OK the title design is pretty bad, but otherwise), same concept as the box, different (better) art.

I Was A Teenage TV Terrorist

I Was A Teenage TV Terrorist

United States - 1985

Director – Stanford Singer

Lightning Video, 1987, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 25 min.

Produced by Susan Kaufman, the sister of Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, I Was A Teenage TV Terrorist is billed on the box (in very tiny type) as a TROMA Team release. Fortunately, (or not depending on your opinion of them) it was not produced by Troma per-se, just distributed. It’s infinitely smarter than anything they’ve done.
Paul is kicked out of his mother’s house for general disorderly conduct at school and sent to Jersey City to live with his dad. Along with his aspiring actress girlfriend Donna, he shows up to find that his dad is the vice president of Romance Entertainment, an extremely low budgetTV station and a raging unmitigated jerk who in order to teach them some responsibility gives them both the lowest pay possible working in the basement cataloguing piles of junk for an equally vicious and cruel ex-military woman named Murphy.

Paul’s dad also sets them up in a seedy roach motel managed by Rico, the awesomest Cuban super the world has ever seen, and the subsequent domestic vignettes are easily the best parts of this film. Even though the production values are really low on I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist (and besides the mega cheap sounding midi-music this is the only similarity to Troma) the acting is actually pretty damn good. It comes across as a very intentional mockery of contemporary (1984-5) television (though it would help if I could remember any TV from those days besides Sesame Street) Paul and Rico deliver some truly hilarious dialogue, but unfortunately with the exception of Martin Scorsese’s Bad movie for Michael Jackson neither of them did much of anything else, ever. It’s the same with everyone in this film with the exception of J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner who was in, among a few other things, Tim Kincaid’s Mutant Hunt and Robot Holocaust and Chuck Vincent’s Slammer Girls before pursuing a career in forensic psychology.

Finding themselves more or less starving to death, Paul decides to make a little extra cash by selling some of the uncounted gear from the basement. Meanwhile Donna is fired by a director (Ornsteiner) when she tanks her first acting role in a commercial for frozen asparagus. When Murphy finds out about Paul’s side income she blackmails the couple into giving her a cut of the profits. So, abused by all parties concerned, Paul and Donna somehow come up with a crazy plan to get revenge by planting a fake bomb in the TV station. In the process of investigating, Paul’s dad finds out about Murphy’s doublecrossery, and she is fired, but Donna, taking advice from an acting instructional book, encourages Paul to continue with the terrorist scheme. During a subsequent attack, one of the news reporters sees Paul on the set and blackmails him into kidnapping the company CEO in such a way that he will get an exclusive of the story. During the kidnapping Paul takes matters into his own hands and delivers a diatribe on the mindnumbing effects of crap TV. Unfortunately this “message from our sponsors” comes across a little flat and too late in the movie to really have any impact, but it doesn’t seem to matter and I’m not sure it was supposed to considering the film itself more or less did this in a sortof subversive Dada-ist aping of television ridiculosity and our eager consumption of it. In it’s own way, I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist does the exact opposite by emphasizing the content at the conscious expense of visual gratification.

According to Wikipedia some guy was arrested for watching this movie on an Alaska Airlines flight to Moscow, but this doesn’t make any sense to me because last time I checked Alaska Airlines doesn’t have a route to Moscow, and the film is out of print and never made it to DVD. Lack of evidence online leads me to believe this is bullshit, but I’m still hopeful, both for the arrest, and the DVD because it’s definitely worth it.

Ubiquitous Punk Lady

If you watch splatter movies from the 80's then you'll recognize this face, or more likely, the haircut. This woman was the ubiquitous punk rocker that gave so many low budget horror and sci-fi films legitimacy.
I don't know who she is, I can't figure it out by looking at the cast list for any of the movies she's in because I can never remember more than one or two at a time.
For all I know, this is a mystery that has long ago been solved by other movie nerds. Not me. Hell she probably has her own website.

The above image was captured from Tim Kincaids Mutant Hunt, a film in which Punk Lady has a mystery role. I have no idea what her purpose in the plot actually is.

Here she is in Street Trash about to set a homeless guy on fire, and later getting booked at the police station.

And making an ass of herself as one of the freaks in a Hitler moustache in Troma's Class of Nuke 'Em High

Anyway, if you know of any other movies she's in, or who the hell she is let me know and send an image please.

The ongoing list of movies featuring Ubiquitous Punk Lady:
Slammer Girls
Mutant Hunt
Street Trash
Class of Nuke 'Em High

Mutant Hunt

Mutant Hunt

United States - 1987

Director – Tim Kincaid

Wizard Video (distributed by Lightning Video), 1985(?), VHS

Mutant Hunt is one of the eight or so films helmed by Tim Kincaid during his brief detour from adult film. That story is far more interesting than the plot of this film, but I digress.
An evil scientist named simply “Z” turns on his not so evil coworkers and sics his cyborgs (also known as mutants in this film, keep in mind, the terms are interchangeable.) on them, but they escape. They find a mercenary, Riker and his pal Felix, who will help them kill the evil cyborgs. Another scientist meanwhile, a rogue, named Domina is cooking up her own cyborg scheme for her own reasons; she’s a Euphoron junkie.
Euphoron? What’s that in English? They kill for pleasure stupid, ever since the Space Shuttle Sex Murders.
In the future, all the apartments, (do they have those?), have hardwood floors and baseboard moulding. At least except for Riker’s fly joint, a second floor walk-up (boxing gym?) with jagged whitewashed brick walls that have carefully positioned nails laden exclusively with melee and missile weapons. It might be hard to call out Chekhov’s Gun here, because Riker does use a few of these weapons on the spot while wearing tighty whities, but there’s plenty enough that don’t get used either, and none of it after this one scene.
Felix, Riker's sidekick is called on his implanted earphone by Darla using a touch-tone pay-phone only to spend the rest of the movie (not only as the quasi spastic awe inspiring fight choreographer) looking like he’s hoping this film will bolster his burgeoning (mid 80’s NYC) rap career. Despite the use of laser guns in the first 10 minutes of the film, everything else is strictly lo-quality grappling.


At Darla’s converted basement/loading dock crib, which is furnished with 70’s laminated wood furniture, she and Riker knock the dust off, proving my childhood memory of this movie to be at least partially false at least on the extremely brief nudity front.
Hey, the gore effects in this baby are pretty damn good for being on the cheap, hell there were movies coming out in the mid 90’s that wished they had effects this good. That little tag on the box cover is obviously exaggeration, but what with all the gooey mutants and dismemberment it aint bad. I still gotta give it up to Mister Kincaid though for successfully hanging all the rest of this trash on that.

Here is the text of my original review of Mutant Hunt published roughly in 1997, in my zine “Sorority Slasher Massacre on Planet B” which reviewed only tapes that were available for rent in the local shop "The Video Stop":

DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT rent this movie, under any circumstances. This is the most horrible movie I‘ve ever seen. The plot stinks, the acting reeks, the sets suck. The whole thing seems like a porno movie with a wannabe premise. But there isn’t even any nudity! Ugggghhhhh this was so horrible. Gag gag gag.
Well, wait a minute, if you like super horrible movies, or you wanna suffer, this might be good for you. But so might a bullet to the head. Plan 9 From Outer Space looks like an epic classic masterpiece whatever compared to this crap! (I have since also changed my opinion of Plan 9)

In 2009, I honorably submit an appeal to my former self to commute my death sentence to a sentence of suffering, through Tim Kincaid movies to which I now happily submit.

Oddly, or not so perhaps, I was right about one thing way back before (my hippie parents allowed me to have) the internet, Mutant Hunt does come across as a porno without the fuckin’. Tim Kincaid is the maestro of early gay porn from back in the mid 70’s, properly revered and honored in the community. Mutant Hunt was part of a three year period of non-adult filmmaking which was underwritten at least in part by Charles Band of Full Moon Features. Much of the music from Mutant Hunt and other of Kincaid’s “standard” features was lifted directly from Richard Bands scores for Full Moon movies. In any case, Kincaid returned to porn in 2001 to fill those empty sets with sweaty friction. In the meantime he did leave a legacy of "straight" trash for us to suffer through happily (including a film hilariously titled "Breeders". Get it?).

Watch the Mutant Hunt trailer at Cult Trailers
My friends at Direct to Video Connoisseur have a great review as well.

Here's a Dutch video cover courtesy of Rolfens DVD with the same artwork. I think it's awesome that artist C. Winston Taylor made sure the mutant/cyborgs shirt had a sleeve that extended along with his arm, and that the incredibly voluptuous victim has camel toe.