Born Innocent

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...

Who would cut an innocent cover insert?

Born Innocent

United States - 1974

Director - Donald Wrye

Program Hunters Incorporated, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

Born Innocent is technically a women-in-prison film, but I say "technically" with a heavy dose of seriousness because it is not the kind of exploitation you expect from that subgenre. Born Innocent plays on the fears parents have of maladjusted or "different" daughters falling in with the wrong crowd or lashing out, and being sent to juvenile detention. Particularly because it was made for television, Born Innocent carries an air of fearmongering that defies any attempt to really "have fun" watching it. In a way though it prefaces Chained Heat by throwing innocent Linda into lock-down with a bunch of savage girls. She quickly learns what real rebellion means by getting her ass handed to her. But don't expect your typical women-in-prison antics here, not even the shower scenes have any "redeeming" qualities.

Director Wrye is definitely an advocate of traditionalism, having directed a number of films glorifying the rugged individual character of American myth. He seems particularly concerned with the effects of post-industrial society on the archetype of the American Family and the dream promised by postwar prosperity, especially as it relates to the expected roles for men. In a number of his films including The Man Who Could Talk to Kids, Divorce Wars, The Face of Rage and Heart of Steel among others, he looks at the ways in which the norms of masculinity and the father/husband figure fall short of mythic expectation.

Born Innocent (right down to the title) follows in this trend. Chris (Blair) has an abusive paranoid father and a cowed and vacant mother (Kim Hunter aka Dr. Zira!). After running away several times Chris ends up in a reform school for girls who, like herself are largely the product of broken or damaged families. While there, Chris in particular, but all the girls become the damaged goods we all expect to come out of a "correctional facility".

Of course, this operates on the unspoken assumption that women need to be protected, and it is men's role to do the protecting. What Born Innocent suggests is that if the role of the father/husband as guardian and provider of the family is undermined, the innocence of girls, and women is imperiled. If Chris's father can't act as her masculine protector ostensibly because his status outside the family is challenged, this will lead her to fall into corruption and impurity.It's a complicated story, but it is of course exactly what happens.

The controversy that surrounded this TV-film when it was originally broadcast in September of 1974 was largely due to the scene in which Chris is raped by the other girls. The scene was removed from later broadcasts and didn't reappear until home video. Allegedly the film inspired a real rape committed on a little girl by several other girls. The victim's family sued NBC and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Call me crazy, but I think it was the fact that it was women performing the act rather than men that was so abhorrent to the public. If it had been men, nobody would have blinked, because that's expected. Nobody sued the network because her dad knocked Chris and her mother around, they didn't need "inspiration".
Upset the normative gender status-quo and people get all riled up.
I'm just sayin'.

As far as I can tell author Creighton Brown Burnham hasn't written a damn thing else. This however is the novelization of the made for TV movie written by Bernhardt J. Hurwood.

All these rad sites have contributed great posts to Blair Week, go check 'em out:
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Camp Movie Camp - Grotesque and Nightforce
The Horror Section - Hell Night
Full Moon Reviews - Bailout
Illogical Contraption gets Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things drops original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins - Exorcist II
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter - The Chilling
Ninja Dixon - The Witchery
Unflinching Eye - Linda's fall from grace.
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets and Born Innocent

Rental Store - Video Update

Video Update in Mukilteo, Washington was once the establishment that carried my fine VHS copy of that Warbeck infused Italian UFO flick Miami Horror.

Video Update was a franchise however and I have another label of theirs on a different cassette HERE.

Savage Streets

In collaboration with a selection of the finest film blogs the infranet has to offer Lost Video Archive is proud to contribute this quality post to Blair Week, a six day extravaganza expounding on the virtues of Linda Blair and her legacy of quality motion pictures. Don't believe me? Just read on...

Savage Streets

United States 1984

Director - Danny Steinman

Vestron Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 33 minutes

Somewhere along the way I became a Linda Blair junkie. I think this is a fairly common weakness, but because it is frequently predicated on a rather shallow but unsurprising appreciation for cheap nudity it’s not something readily admitted. I’m pretty sure it happened when I was about 13 and my friend’s older brother loaned us his Night Patrol video. It’s a movie loaded with crass low-quality humor that I didn’t quite get at the time, but I did understand tits, and Night Patrol has a healthy share of those. I was also old enough to understand that a great deal of the films tension rested upon the protagonists desire to get in Linda’s pants, which to everyone’s great delight happens at the end. By that time I was already sold down the river.

Linda didn’t turn out to be such a great actress, but that revelation came at a time when there was plenty of work available that didn’t require much acting per-se. The childlike behavior and almost unnatural innocence she brought to The Exorcist, turned out to be  an asset in her career as an adult. Linda came of age at the exact moment that American exploitation film was at its peak, and Savage Streets is premium example.

Made the same year as Night Patrol, Savage Streets claims right there on the back cover to invoke yet another Linda vehicle, the previous year’s epic Chained Heat. Initially this claim is confusing because plotwise, Savage Streets actually appears to be an example of that brand of juvenile dystopia films particular to the 1980’s. Typically these featured hyperbolic warring punk-cum-new-wave street gangs who combined Bowiesque face paint and teased hair with studded leather and switchblades. They were the heirs to the delinquent youth scare films of the 50’s but they tried to fuse the modern mosaic of pop cultures into a hyperbolic but plausibly threatening future. Punk, rap, and metal among other subcultural in-groups were all equally threatening attacks on the status quo and contemporary exploitation films often combined them all into one militaristic drug soaked nightmare in films like my personal favorite, Death Wish 3. Savage Streets is rife with the childish arrogance that made parents of the 80’s shudder for thought of a future ruled by their own coke addled offspring. The best part of all this of course, is that scare films usually end up becoming popular with the generation they portray.

In Savage Streets Linda is the leader of one such group of unruly high-school girls whose smoking-in-class contempt for such elders as school principal John Vernon sends shivers up the spine. Such virulent threats to the status quo however are couched within the safety of other standard distractions. The rest of the high-school landscape is a choice mix of comedic flirtations and shirt-ripping shower cat-fights, a veritable teen-women-in-prison-comedy that just proves youth rebellion of the future is, if nothing else, still predictable. When her deaf sister (Linnea Quigley) is brutally raped and her best friend killed by another more violently unhinged gang reminiscent of a watered-down Warriors, Linda perms her hair and goes full vigilante, invoking Jenifer Hills and Paul Kersey all in one pouty-lipped self-aware package.

It should be pretty clear at this point that Savage Streets is much more than just a delinquent youth movie. That may be an overarching theme, but within it are mixed other distinct sub-genres of exploitation. I realize that describing the film in terms of its resemblance to other genre standards makes it sound like an incomplete copy of them all. But the awesome thing about Savage Streets is that it doesn’t overburden itself with any complicated logic, or try to be clever or original. In fact, it’s honest to the point of self  mockery. And that’s exactly what’s great about it, it is a paper thin and imminently predictable string of cheap thrills. There is no reason to feel at all guilty about enjoying every minute because it doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.

All these sites contributed rad content to Blair Week:
Satan's Hope Chest - Chained Heat and Savage Island
Camp Movie Camp - Grotesque and Nightforce
The Horror Section - Hell Night
Full Moon Reviews - Bailout
Illogical Contraption - Repossessed
Lines That Makes Things - original Linda inspired artwork
Breakfast In the Ruins - Exorcist II
B Movies and Beyond - Summer of Fear
The Manchester Morgue - Rollerboogie
Happy Otter - The Chilling
Ninja Dixon - The Witchery
Unflinching Eye - Linda's fall from grace.
Lost Video Archive - Savage Streets and Born Innocent

Star Strike

I ran across this advert today in an old magazine and couldn't help but post it.

The Supernaturals

The Supernaturals

United States - 1985

Director - Armand Mastroianni

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 25 minutes

I came across this film while looking for another civil war zombie film I saw years ago called Curse of the Screaming Dead. The Supernaturals itself has little to recommend it. Beginning with the cover art which features a historical discrepancy so glaring I won't even begin. Furthermore, although set in the 1980's when the US military was entirely volunteer, the characters whine and bicker and laze about as if they were draftees. And finally, there is no gore whatsoever. A perfect opportunity in the golden age of American splatter cinema to cash in on the ubiquitous confederate catchphrase of the modern era "The South Will Rise Again," and they went and wasted it. Curse of the Screaming Dead used it, but that movie is also terrible so it was more or less squandered.
 On the plus side, The Supernaturals does have original music by Robert O. Ragland, and it co-stars LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow and TNG.

Brain of Blood/Brainwaves

Brain of Blood

United States - 1971

Director - Al Adamson

Magnum Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 47 minutes

Brainwaves

United States - 1983

Director Ulli Lommel

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 23 minutes

Each of these films is remarkable in its own way, but I find Brainwaves particularly so because of all the connections. The original music was composed by Robert O. Ragland who has done music for numerous other low budget action and horror films including The Supernaturals. I can never forgive star Tony Curtis for cock-blocking my homeboy Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, nor can I forgive director Ulli Lommel for the painfully sycophantic Blank Generation. Fortunately both of them did plenty more trashy films to make fun of so I can't take it too seriously.

UK video sleeve from ItsOnlyAMovie.co.uk 

Hungarian VHS insert from Deliria Hungaria

Tombs of the Blind Dead

I added new VHS boxes to several movies that have been posted here in the past. I found a very old Media Home Entertainment release of the British thriller Schizo.
In addition I added several  UK sleeves, one for the Texan film The Outing bearing the original title "The Lamp" and another for the Canadian film The Vindicator.
Bionic Ninja got a new VHS thing, and
Goin' All the Way got a new poster image. Check 'em out!

And, just so this post isn't pure text here's a sweet Dutch VHS box for one of my favorite zombie movies of all time. Can't remember where I got the image.

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.

R.I.P. V.H.S.

My friend Phill and I made these shirts commemorating the death of our beloved magnetic format. They say Kung Fu Grindhouse because one of the things we do with KFG is to screen old movies that never made it out of the VHS format. If any of you VHS nerds out there are interested in a hand printed RIP VHS shirt, shoot me an e-mail and we'll discuss. We sold out of them in 10 minutes last month but I'm planning on screening a few more.

Yorythmics: Sweet Hunter From the Video Future

What do Yor The Hunter From the Future and the Eurythmics: Sweet Dreams the Video Album have in common?

Why, those crazy tab-boxes from RCA/Columbia Home Video of course!
Allow me to wax nerdy for a second; these boxes are super cool, even more so than those crazy double-flap boxes that VCII was putting out in the early 80's. What can I say, I like technical packaging. I also like that the brand was identified by the similar package design. This was typical of the period when home video was still a new concept and studios wanted people to associate a certain level of quality with their brand. Branding and trademarking took place in packaged food products in the late 1800's in exactly the same way. Of course, when home video took off they realized it was a big waste of money to have to make thousands of fancy die-cut boxes like this and everybody switched to the standard single flap-top/open bottom. And who said the future would be better?

Yor The Hunter From The Future

Italy - 1983

Director - Antonio Margheritti

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Eurithmics: Sweet Dreams The Video Album

United Kingdom - 1983

Director - Derek Burbidge

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1983, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 2 minutes

Rental Store - George's T.V.

Hard Times

Hard Times

United States - 1975

Director - Walter Hill

One of Hill's and Bronson's better films, this is my favorite poster for Hard Times. It reminds me of a poster and/or hand colored photograph from 1933. Maybe that was the point? I'm going to label it as drama rather than action because it's more about the relationships between Bronson and other folks than it is about the boxing. Appropriate and timely. At the moment you can watch the whole movie at IMDB, and I recommend it.
Bronson had appeared earlier as a boxing instructor, coaching none other than Elvis in Kid Galahad.

 This Japanese ad if from CinemaisDope.com

All of these posters come courtesy of IMP Awards.

The poster above looks like work by by Bob Peak, but it's too small to see any signature and it may just be a copycat. IMP Awards has a page of his artwork including the iconic Apocalypse Now and Star Trek posters here. You can also Google his name and come up with an assload of great 70's Peak art like this sweet Old Hickory Bourbon advert.