Christ on a (Ben) Cross!

With all these religious horror movies coming out recently, it seems like a good time to pick out 1988's The Unholy from the pile and give it a go. This was another one that I have no explanation for never watching back in the day, as it was a video store mainstay. Let's chomp that wafer and get down to business.

Shortly after arriving at his new parish, Father Michael (Ben Cross) discovers that the last two priests who held his position were brutally murdered at his altar. Will he be next?

Yeah, this one isn't bad. I learned that this script was originally written in the seventies to capitalize on the success of The Exorcist and The Omen, but was then shelved. I can see that, as the characters and societal underbelly that Father Michael encounters does feel more of that decade.

Ben Cross - who would have made one of my faves Paperhouse around this time - is solid here and a good sport about having his junk covered in snakes. He's also surrounded by a bevy of character actors in this including Ned Beatty, Hal Holbrook, Peter (Profiler FTW!) Frechette and Will Russ. The score by Roger Bellon is terrific, even by eighties standards.

Ben Cross as Father Michael in The Unholy.

I found it amusing how nonchalantly the clergy talk about Church cover-ups in this movie when in hindsight, a few dead bodies and some indiscretions with the opposite sex were the least of their dirty laundry. Just another indication of how different things were some fourty years ago.

Can you keep a secret?

I do have to admit, The Unholy does get a bit bogged down with exposition and I found myself nodding off in the middle. However I perked up for the finale which is definitely worth the price of admission. The effects provided by Bob Keen, who worked on Clive Barker's films among others, fucking brings his A-game. Full creature suits, giant animatronics, exploding midgets, you name it!

 

In fact, I'd say that guy looks like the love child of The Brain and Syngenor. Oh, I didn't even mention the sexy negligee-d demon played by Nicole Fortier. Let's just say that ol' Father Michael was made of stronger rosary than I. 

My Girl Wants To Party All The Time!

Next VHS off the pile was the 1988 slasher Party Line. I certainly recalled the coverbox, but never got to it back in the day because it was one of a SLEW of titles that almost seemed interchangeable. Let's pick up the phone and call! I hear it's private, confidential, one-on-one and discreet!

Crazy sibling serial killers Seth (Leif Garrett) & Angelina (Greta Blackburn) cruise telephone chat lines for victims, while hothead detective Dan (Richard Hatch - the Battlestar one, not the gay Survivor one) remains one body behind.

Party Line was amusing, but this was admittedly not top-tier stuff. For those who were not alive in the eighties, there were all kinds of call-in services available, some not even for degenerates. I remember calling one called Dial-A-Joke a few times, until my father confronted me with the subsequent phone bill. Hell, there was even one to hear Freddy Krueger.

Anyway, I digress. For a movie called Party Line, the phone sex stuff actually makes up little of the movie. Characters would disappear for chunks at a time, tagging out for stretches of police procedure and generic nightclub revelry. I was being generous when I used the word slasher earlier. I guess technically it's accurate as the killer's weapon of choice is a straight razor, but it's really more of a tame erotic thriller. Save for a few slit throats, it is fairly anemic too.

We do get a lot of weirdo scenes with the "complicated" shenanigans of Seth & Angelina. It's a lot of simping and leering from the former and the latter slapping him around for it. It's... awkward. It sure was a banner year for Garrett, who also appeared in Cheerleader Camp in '88. 

Imdb tells me that viewers thought Hatch was miscast. I don't know if I agree, I think it more that the detective character as a whole was miscast. Everyone knows the "hard boiled cop who doesn't play by the rules" trope, but this was ridiculous. He pulled his gun out so much in this movie, he might as well have had fused to his hand ala Videodrome. And, since when do District Attorney employees visit crime scenes? Seems like a conflict of interest, but I guess Dan & Stacy (Shawn Weatherly) had to meet somehow.

Speaking of conflicts, when the teen using the party line in the beginning finally reappears again, Dan actually has the brilliant idea to have said sixteen-year-old help them in their investigation. Does any of this sound like it would hold up in court, people? However, after the inevitable plot twist and kidnapping of Stacy, I was happy that she didn't need to be saved at the end. She made short work of Mama's boy Seth, even with her hands tied. You go, girl!

Call me Nancy Lew-d.

Party Line was run-of-the-mill fare that needed more of a hook than just the passing fad it hung its hat on. Hider in the House had the wild card magic of Gary Busey and Fear had Ally Sheedy's psychic superpowers. This just has well, people perving on and off the phone. I want more for my dollar-ninety-five per minute, ya know?

Horror Movie Guide: Bloodsuckers

The next title in the Guide was 1971's Bloodsuckers aka Incense For The Damned. This was a title that I had no knowledge of - not even the coverbox rang any bells - but it did have some prestige talent involved with the likes of Peter Cushing and Patrick Macnee so I was cautiously optimistic?

To avoid scandal, colleagues of an Oxford student Richard (Pat Mower) travel to Greece where he has apparently fallen in with a weird hippie cult.

Unfortunately, Bloodsuckers was a bit of a slog and definitely reeked of something that had issues behind the scenes. Imdb mentions money problems and re-shoots and that tracks. When your first act consists largely of voiceover narration - basically just explaining what happens in the following scene I might add - it sadly shows how much confidence the filmmakers have in their product. I guess it makes sense that director Robert Hartford-Davis wanted his name taken off the project.

Sadly, that prestige I mentioned hardly matters, as Cushing was likely on set for no more than two days. MacNee has decidedly more to do, going full John Steed bad-ass for a bit before getting knocked off a cliff by some ridiculously fake looking boulders. What were left with is this weird pent-rangle between Richard, his friend Tony (Alex Davion), his pupil (lover?) Bob (Johnny Sekka), his betrothed Penelope (Madeleine Hinde) and his vampire dominatrix Chriseis (Imogen Hassall). I know, it's a lot to take in, but trust me; it sounds a lot more interesting than it actually is.

This is not what it looks like, I assure you...

Apart from the lazy narration, it didn't start out all that bad. While we see our heroes travel to the beautiful locale of Greece, Richard & Chriseis drop some acid and a six-minute psychedelic orgy ensued. As Kevin Nealon used to say, “I was interested.... interested... VERY interested...”

I was beginning to think that Bloodsuckers might be a soft porn that they tricked Cushing into appearing in, but then it was over and it became clear this was likely added after when the filmmakers realized most of their movie was dull as dirt. This would have been around the time of the hysteria surrounding hippie culture so I can see why those scenes got played up, as well.

Also, for a movie called Bloodsuckers - though admittedly that was one of many titles - it has a noticeable lack of vampirism. I appreciated the angle of sado-masochism and its relation to male impotence explained in a scene with a welcome appearance by Edward Woodward, but I also would have liked a little more Rollin if you know what I mean. Hassall was a unique beauty (who sadly died young) and I would've liked to seen her do more in this than just die from a 10-foot fall off some steps. I COULD'VE SURVIVED THAT!

Imogen Hassall as Chrisies in Bloodsuckers

Then to my disdain, after this movie should be done, it goes on for another TWENTY MINUTES. Oh well, at least its final moments are more like the vampire story it is purported to be. The Guide seemed to hold it in higher regard. Perhaps they were familiar with the source material - a old tome called Doctors Wear Scarlet.

Horror Movie Guide: The Blood Spattered Bride

Okay, now I've been unceremoniously freed from distraction, I can get back to plugging through the Guide. The next entry was Vicente Aranda's 1972 film The Blood Spattered Bride, for which I of course knew the title - even before it showed up in Kill Bill chapter card - but was quick to find that I didn't know thing one about its actual subject matter.

Newly hitched Susan (Maribel Martin) moves into her husband's (Simón Andreu) family estate where she begins having nightmares about a former denizen who murdered her husband on their wedding night.

For some reason, I always figured this was a rape revenge film, something like I Spit On Your Grave or They Call Her One Eye, and the first five minutes with the apparently imagined assault didn't really steer me away from that assumption. Not having any knowledge of the Carmilla novella on which this movie was based, I thought I might be watching a more rape-y version of And Now The Screaming Starts, until the bloodsucking started finally happening around an hour in.

I initially thought this movie was Italian, not only because of the names and Mario Bava aesthetic, but who else would shotgun a poor fox in the FUCKING FACE on camera? The Spanish apparently. That was a hell of a jolt, in amongst all the nakedness and lascivious behaviour. I recognized Andreu from his work with director Luciano Erconi, but everything else was foreign to me.

Just one of Blood Spattered Bride's many memorable images.

I read that The Blood Spattered Bride gained notoriety in part due to its rejection of fascism, but to me it seems more of a “smash the patriarchy” kind of joint. I don't think they are the same thing... right? The Guide seemed to think this movie palatable, at least for a Gorgon Video title anyway.

Horror Movie Guide: The Black Room (1982)

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you, there are indeed TWO movies logged in The Guide called The Black Room, this one helmed by Norman Thaddeus Vane & Elly Kenner from the early eighties. Apart from the vague recollection of the coverbox, I had about as much knowledge of this one as I did its thirties namesake.

A married man named Jason (Stephen Knight) rents a room to use as a secret sex den, but doesn't realize his landlord Larry (Jimmy Stithis) has his own nefarious plans.

This Black Room is an odd duck. I can't say that I've ever seen anything quite like it. 

I guess what I found most baffling were the character reactions. First off, there's Jason who when viewing the room doesn't seem to bat an eye that the room is totally blacked out and only lit with candles. I mean, I GUESS he's only there to fuck, and his landlord does offer to pre-pour the wine and put on smooth classical jams. How about some Chopin this time?  

But then, there's the wife (Clara Perryman) who seems to oh pshaw her husband every time he openly talks about his sex den. It's only when she finds the keys in Act Two, she's like “wait, he was being serious”? And her reaction? “Well, I'm gonna start using it too”. I'm going to take a wild guess and say the whole Swingers movement was in full swing in 1982. :P

However, the joke's on them because Larry and his sister Bridget (Cassandra Gava) are murdering their visitors ala H.H. Holmes and harvesting their blood to treat his aggressive anemia. I was onboard with this movie's unique take on vampirism (not unlike Romero's film Martin five years earlier), but they sure did get their money's worth out of those transfusion scenes.

This film probably cost very little to make and they did a few things to up their game, like finding a nice Hollywood Hills house location and some well shot Steadicam footage. They unfortunately couldn't afford that Super camera from Barry Lyndon because that would've helped with those Black Room scenes. I'll blame some of this on my muddy YT rip, but this movie was dark as hell, to the point I had to take the moans and groans as proof the characters were having sex.

I also kept waiting for Linnea Quigley to show up - she was seventh billed at the hop - only to find that she had even less to do in this than she did Silent Night, Deadly Night and Graduation Day.

The Black Room was palatable fare, but this may be the first time that the Guide liked a movie more than I did. I'm willing to bet they were sick of the overabundance of the slashers flooding the market at the time and they found this “adult” material a breath of fresh air.

Q is for A Quiet Place to Kill (1970)

Q's beyond The Winged Serpent and Quatemass are not abundant so I had to dig deep. Fortunately, due to Shudder's fairly large Euro-horror catalogue, I was able to pull this one out.

After recovering from a injury while racing, Helen (Carroll Baker) accepts an invitation to visit her ex-husband Maurice (Jean Sorel) in Majorca, only to be sucked into a murder plot.

This was my first giallo for Alphabet Slop and I'd almost forgotten how much fun they are. Everything is just amped up. The music is boppier, the locales are prettier, the clothes are flashier, and the women, hoo boy, the women are nuder. Now, I wouldn't call QP2K a horror persay, truth be told it's really only gialli adjacent - it has more in common with Diabolique than it does Deep Red - but with more treacherous seaside driving. Seriously that dash-cam made me very uncomfortable.

Carroll Baker & Jean Sorel in A Quiet Place To Kill

Cinephiles often equate director Umberto Lenzi with his cannibal films, but he was a very versatile director. Seven Bloodstained Orchids is an underseen gem and Nightmare City is terrific schlock. I talked about the endless superfluous dialogue scenes that sucked the life out of Open House. Well, QP2K has those same scenes, except Lenzi knows how to make them sing. He'll show some skin, have two men play chess who very clearly have NO IDEA how to play chess, or ahem.. .murder some pigeons. It is Lenzi, after all...

Yes, let's shock zoom over to the ladies. Lenzi mainstay Baker was stunning and rocked a mean leather jacket. Her rivals Anna Proclemer & Marina Coffa were no slouches either. I was surprised to see Coffa had little work after this movie because she had real presence and reminded me of someone I couldn't put my finger on. Margot Kidder? Jen Connolly? 

Anyway, this was a good bit of fun from Lenzi's catlalogue and I can see myself checking out the other two films in this apparent trilogy - Paranoia & So Sweet, So Perverse - at some point in the future.

K is for The Kiss (1988)

I had intended to do Killer Workout for K, but while I was at an event at The Revue this week, I saw a trailer for this eighties movie called The Kiss. I had a vague recollection of the coverbox, but certainly knew nothing of it so I took a chance.

After the death of her mother, Amy's (Meredith Salenger) long lost Aunt Felice (Joanna Pacula) shows up and begins to infiltrate her and her father's lives.

The Kiss kind of fucking rules. It is a weird hybrid between a sexual thriller (this is was the period between Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct where that shit was fire) and a supernatural horror. When I find a random movie like this, I'm happy if there are one or two moments I can latch onto, but this was a picture that kept on giving.

Let's start with the effects, which were abundant. Like shockingly so. Felice's powers off many people in Final Destination-esque ways. You remember that urban legend about getting sucked into an escalator? Well, this is the first movie (I've seen anyway) that actually visualized that. Also, our witchy antagonist has a familiar, a delightful cat puppet that could be bros with the one in Uninvited. Both 1988, what a year!

The cast is good, peppered with Canadian actors like Mimi Kuzyk and Peter Dvorsky - the guy with the “hand” grenade in Videodrome, but what blew my mind was that Terry, the dude bro who keeps losing his ear stud was Shawn Levy. Yes, Deadpool and just fucking slayed with season four of Stranger Things Shawn Levy. I wonder if Ryan Reynolds busts his balls about this movie on a daily basis.

Continuing with the revelations, as I said, this film was shot in Canada, Montreal to be specific. I can't believe this movie isn't talked about more by our brethren. I could go on for a while about this movie - Chekhov's hedge trimmer, the weird incestuous allusions, the musical sting lifted from Carpenter's Prince of Darkness and the climax where our heroine struggles to get out of the pool when there is a ladder LITERALLY two feet to the left -

- but I feel you should really experience this for yourself. This is a great movie night movie. While The Kiss might not have the clout of something like The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, it's still fucking bonkers and deserves to be seen.

Bouncing... On The Beach!

This week's VHS is David DeCoteau's 1993 alien sex comedy Beach Babes From Beyond.

Three babes from space (Sarah Bellomo, Tamara Landry & Nicole Posey) crash land on Earth and quickly find themselves at a California beach party. Wacky misadventures ensue!

With the Deadly Ten being shot right now, I'd thought I would pull out a Full Moon title I'd never watched, but always wondered about. Beach Babes From Beyond was the first release of Full Moon's off-shoot company Torchlight that specialized in movies of a more erotic nature. It's a little weird to me that Full Moon's other major side project was the kid-friendly Moonbeam. I wonder if they ever mixed up those tapes at the factory. I would have totally switched Prehysteria with Virgin Hunters given the chance.

Anyway, DeCoteau was credited as Ellen Cabot for this movie and I'm sure there is a story behind this. Ten bucks says it's a money thing. I wager that his other job on the movie was way more important.

Beach Babes From Beyond had the distinction (and they let you know this on the poster and the trailer) of featuring four famous relatives in Joe Estevez, Don Swayze, Joey Travolta and Jackie Stallone. You throw in Burt Ward and Linnea Quigley and you've got quite the genre buffet here. Man, without his moustache, it is quite remarkable how much Estevez looks like his brother, Martin.

Space Babes Sarah Bellomo (left) Nicole Posey & Tamara Landry.

As far as movies go, it's your average sex comedy template that gets a LOT of mileage out of its beach party footage. I would guess that half of this movie's seventy-minute running time is musical montages featuring multiple helpings of such hits as “Bouncing on the Beach” and “I've Got a Woody”. I will give it points for having a character named Hymen Hassler though.

Beach Babes delivered on the nudity, but the love scenes are best described as exercises in enthusiastic licking. Overall, it was amusing enough, but even I have to admit it's barely a movie. To be honest, if you want a more entertaining version of this, check out Scott Schrimer's Space Babes From Outer Space. It may not have as many boobs, but it makes up for it in practical creature effects.

Since this was a Full Moon production, you can always count on the Videozone segment, which featured a making of featurette (where the cast talked about doing the aforementioned love scenes on their first day of shooting) and trailers for Trancers 4, Subspecies 3 and Virgin Hunters. Say what you will about Charlie Band's empire, but he basically invented the concept of home video BTS. And he continues to evolve it with the Deadly Ten.

Totally Worth it!

This week's VHS is Nick Kazan's 1993 erotic thriller Dream Lover.

After successful architect Ray (James Spader) falls in love with the seemingly perfect Lena (Mädchen Amick), he begins to suspect she may not be who she says she is.

This movie was a blast and wholly indicative of the thrillers that were coming out at this point in the nineties. I won't get into this genre's long sordid history, but I recall 1981's Body Heat really kicking off the whole explicit thriller – Brian De Palma had been dabbling with it, but women rarely played a central part in his narratives – but the flood gates didn't open until Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction in 1987. Then it seemed like a new title hit the shelves every week during my video store tenure.

My main question coming away from this movie is; “has there ever been a more beautiful creature than Mädchen Amick?” She set the screen on fire here and was one of several actresses who spent the mid-nineties erasing their good girl image – in her case built up in her stints on Twin Peaks and Sleepwalkers – and running chest first into some smut. God bless her.

While most of it follows a fairly predictable nineties thriller arc, I must admit that Dream Lover definitely offered up one of the more dour and abrupt conclusions. I was actually shocked to find that writer Kazan was happily married (and still is to this day) with two kids because the script did not strike me as scribbled down by someone who liked, or at least trusted, women. Then again, who knows where this shit comes from? I'm willing to bet the son of Elia Kazan saw some shit growing up.

In addition to seeing a LOT of Amick - it was the “special sexy unrated version” after all - I got to watch James Spader spade it up, so there was really no downside here. Dream Lover was trashy to be sure and maybe not as well put together as say, one of my personal faves, John Dahl's The Last Seduction, but it's hella entertaining and did I mention Mädchen Amick is hot AF?

In Sickness & In Death...

This week's VHS is a random title from the stack with a semi-familiar coverbox, Patrick Jamain's 1985 thriller Honeymoon aka Lune de Miel.

To avoid deportation, Cécile (French starlet Nathalie Baye) pays for an arranged marriage to stay in the country while her incarcerated lover awaits trial. Unfortunately, her “husband” Zachary (John Shea) tracks her down and wants more than she bargained for.

Despite being somewhat misrepresented by its coverbox (a common practice during the home video boom that I'll never wise up to) Honeymoon was an interesting view for a few reasons. A French/Canadian co-production set in New York, we actually do get a lot of cool footage of vintage Big Apple, even if I suspect most of the interiors were split between Montreal & Paris.

I was immediately struck by the setup, as the opening credits feature the lower half of a woman in a red dress (one of seemingly only two outfits she wears throughout the entire film) running through the streets of New York. I wonder if this wasn't some sort of nod to Gene Wilder's Woman in Red released the previous year. Anyway, at the end of the scene Baye, now in full frame, runs by a live band in the street playing the exact song that I'd been listening to the entire sequence. I was like wait, what? Sadly, this was the only time that something like this happened which made it all the more conspicuous.

As I explained before, Cécile's Plan B to stay in the country was to pay for a (presumably illegal) arranged marriage. This was not a well thought out course of action, as she literally just randomly pointed to a file on the desk of the broker (played by Mulder's father Peter Donat) and went “this one.” I guess this process was a thing back in the day? Hell, maybe it still is. Normally, these couples never met apparently, but Zachary had other ideas.

It was the dynamic between the two early on that held my interest, as given her situation Cécile reacted pretty rationally. It was only when he later conveniently came to her aid during an altercation with a would-be date rapist (played by Canuck oh-that-guy Alf Humphreys no less) that she started to warm up to him. A few more bad (and equally unlikely) choices later and well, she was in deep shit.

Nathalie Baye as Cécile in Honeymoon

I have to go back to this whole arranged marriage process though, because there's a scene where the broker comes to her later is like, “yeah, so that guy, you picked the newest file on my table and I hadn't properly vetted him. He could be trouble.” Now, that this guy was listed with the Better Business Bureau or anything, but first off... Why the fuck was this guy's file in the list if he wasn't checked out? And why did you not say something at the time?! Not cool, dude.

In a way, Honeymoon was a little ahead of the curve. Obviously, Brian De Palma had been making sexually charged thrillers for a while by this point – Will Fruett's 1984 picture Bedroom Eyes comes to mind as well – but they were largely racier renditions of Alfred Hitchcock's ouevre. Even stuff like 1981's Body Heat seemed more rooted in American film noir. Honeymoon feels like the type of thrillers that exploded after the popularity of Fatal Attraction in 1987 where a character made a bad decision that immediately came back to haunt them.

John Shea as Zachary in Honeymoon

Honeymoon was not what was I was expecting, but it was still a decent watch with a unique hook and lots of great New York flavour. By the mid-nineties, there were literally hundreds of movies like this one on video store shelves so it's neat to see one of the progenitors.

Edit - Just after I posted this I discovered Alf Humphreys passed away the same day I watched this movie. Rest in peace, you were a ubiquitous performer and it was great to see you at the My Bloody Valentine reunion in 2009.