Blood Hook

Blood Hook

United States - 1986

Director - James Mallon

Prism Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 25 minutes

Zombie Island Massacre

Zombie Island Massacre

United States - 1984

Director - John N. Carter or James Broadnax depending on who you ask

Troma Entertainment, 2000, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

Yay, now that Halloween is over I can post horror movies again. I love being a contrarian.

Play Dead

Play Dead
United States - 1984
Director – Peter Wittman
Academy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS
Run time – 1 hour, 26 min.

Play Dead is part of the long tradition of evil animal films which itself is a sub-premise of the classic man vs. nature theme. Though it wasn’t the first such entry in the subgenre, Jaws ushered in a host of spinoffs in the video-era that wound down to sporadic entries featuring all nature of random animals from alligators to earthworms turning aggressive and attacking humans. Seems like the relative popularity of Cujo (1983) spawned a brief attempt to coat-tail the evil dog concept. Play Dead is an incredibly absurd case in point.

At her mothers funeral, Audrey and her boyfriend Glen have a confrontation with Audrey’s aunt Hester. She’s been at odds with the rest of the family ever since Audrey’s father rejected Hester for the deceased. Now Hester hangs around her house drinking brandy and talking to Audrey's dead father and her dog Gretta. Typically, after a few glasses Hester will break out the satanic acoutrements and chant some incantations over the dog which at these special moments refers to as “canis diabolis” and adorns with a pentagram necklace.

This time she means business, and the day after her ritual she pays a visit to Audrey and presents her with the dog, as a gift. Prior vitriol and hatred aside, apologies are quickly accepted, hands shaken and all of that and Audrey graciously accepts an unfamiliar 100 pound carnivorous gift from her mortal enemy.
That night after visiting for dinner, Audrey’s brother returns to his car where the waiting dog, having calculated the velocity and mass of an oncoming vehicle leaps from cover and startles him into the path of the car where he is killed, or anyway some blood runs from his mouth and there is a funeral. Greta has harnessed the awesome powers of geometry and physics to mastermind a series of untraceable “accidental” deaths.
Devastated by her compounding filial devastation Audrey listens to her collection of food-court ambiance records and invites Glenn over for a romp between the poorly edited shots of body doubles with different breast sizes. Her face looks a little frightened, but “her” hands eagerly ply Glen's generously bulging shorts as Greta watches patiently nearby.

Suddenly a good-ol’-boy detective is investigating the death of her brother, squeezing out homely anecdotes all the while. Audrey’s neighbor is electrocuted by Greta who opens the bathroom door in effusive and unnecessary slow-motion, picks up the hot curling iron and drops it into the tub. Waiting long enough for the convulsions to stop, she then carefully removes it from the tub.

Next it’s Glen’s turn. After a totally exhausting tennis game with Audrey he sits down next to a tree and promptly falls asleep with Greta leashed to his wrist. The dog quickly runs around the tree and Glen wakes just in time to be choked to death by the leash. But is in the coroners report where the crescendo of logically and visually dissonant scripting comes to a head. The coroner and detectives assessment is that someone choked Glen to death with one incredibly strong hand, and that Glen fought back with one hand, while the dog stood idly by. The nature of film requires the suspension of disbelief, but really, that’s your theory? When the detective finally starts to suspect the dog, it's too damned late and she quickly dispatches him with a quick dose of lye powder in his alka-seltzer (Greta is also comfortable with basic chemistry). Hester suddenly decides that her work is done, and leaves her initial victim Audrey alive to cry about her mullet.

Rather than a clever script or a good idea for one, it’s clear that the backers for this movie just found a well-trained dog and decided to build a movie on that premise alone. And it’s abundantly clear why Troma, in an effort to build their reputation picked up this film for distribution.

This box art is from Horror Playground.com in case you couldn't tell. There also exists another alternate non-Troma video sleeve which I am hoping to track down soon.

One British and two French and VHS covers courtesy of the generous Agressions Animales.

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

New Stuff

Some newly acquired VHS tapes and a DVD title I was hoping would be screenable at Kung Fu Grindhouse.
I heard I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist was just bizarre, and it's an early Troma production so it's bound to have something going for it.
When I saw Space Camp on the clearance shelf I snatched it up thinking it had to be one of those promotional movie projects, almost like a safety video with a plot, but in this case with an obvious commercial aspect. It is commercial but it's also plotty enough that it has a DVD release. Eh, whatever, I guess it can still be entertainingly bad even if it's not hard to find.
To Sleep with a Vampire, hmmmm, I'll admit that one intrigued me because of Charlie Spradling (Ski School, Puppetmaster 2), but there is another reason as well. It's one of the super cheap films that were filmed at Roger Cormans studio during I think the middle 90's. At that time they were cranking out skin flicks in 3 or four nights, using the same sets that bigger budget (in the Corman sense) films were using during the day. Just two actors and some dialogue. That's it.
Soul Brothers of Kung Fu was a random purchase from HKFlix because the plot semed amusing. Fortunately it is, despite the fact it was released by BanZai Media who has a penchant for releasing grainy, faded, fullscreen VHS transfers as "Special Edition".
Soul Brothers stars Bruce Li as Bruce Li, an awesome martial artist who idolizes Bruce Lee but works as a day laborer in Hong Kong. He saves a young black kid from being beat up, and starts training him. Over the course of the film they incur the wrath of some mafia dudes I think, and Bruce starts to practice a crazy pressure point technique involving the testicles. Well that's creative. Anyway in the end of course they confron the bad guys and Bruce uses his awesome new skill to actually stab the baddies to death with his fingers. All the restored footage advertised on the back of the sleeve was really not noticeable except for the alternate ending which ran (in full screen) after the climax. It was a lot gorier and happier if you can believe that. All in all Soul Brothers was pretty good, the fighting was pretty coarse and there were some talky bits but the payoff was decent, and thankfully, the print was actually good.

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:

Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy

Maniac Nurses Find Extasy

United States - 1990

Director – “Harry M. Love”, a.k.a. Leon Paul De Bruyn

Troma Entertainment, 1997, VHS

It’s always a crapshoot with anything distributed by Troma because they’ll pick up some pretty flaccid garbage, but there’s occasionally some gold in there too. Maniac Nurses has elements of both.

Relaxing after the (unsuccessful) operation, one of the assistants performs a prolonged striptease while the rest of the ladies, much like myself, stare slackjawed, as the narrator elaborates on the various types of “white trash” they once were, and how they all became despondent sadistic hedonistic nurses. “Their whole life is one big suicide attempt, a suicide attempt in luxurious surroundings.” A lesson in morality to be sure, driven home by the spiraling hypno-cam. Ilsa’s failure to please the golem-like living Barbie doll Sabrina leads to deep feelings of guilt which can only be assuaged by a topless (at last) whipping session, and a camper-hunting expedition. The latter results in much of the aforementioned gore, and a coup attempt by Greta, Ilsa’s assistant, who reveals (via narration) the origins of Sabrina and the mystery of the Elvis tattoo birthmark, which in the final on screen tally is all too much for her fragile mind to take, and she goes of the deep end.In fact, without the hilarious bargain psychoanalytical voiceover, and a few drinks to keep this trainwreck of bloody naked sillyness remotely linear, it might have been almost too much for me too.

The monotonous voiceover narration starts almost immediately and gives the subsequent absurdity a bizarre, mindbending Weekly World News/surrealist feeling, which is punctuated by paroxysms of remarkably effective low budget gore.

What we know is that Sabrina is the young “lolita age” plaything of Ilsa, (no reference intended right) the head nurse (of 4 total) at a “clinic” which specializes in sadism. Sabrina lounges catatonically in her undies, stroking herself and a low quality war comic with a gleaming revolver while the voiceover explains how twisted her brutal surroundings have made her.
Unable to pleasure Sabrina out of her psychosis, Ilsa gets the idea to turn a new victim into a “robot love doll”, a bloody affair made bloodier by one of the assistants hacking the corpse apart with a chainsaw.

Alternate Covers:

Of all four, only the last features people who actually appear in the film.

Highest Quality:

The attention to detail should be a hint as to the quality of the film contained within.