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519,164 | 8,239,592 | 129,358 | 1 | A total stinker | Sasquatch spent most of the 90s toiling away in such horrendously lame'n'tame children's movie bilge as " Little Bigfoot , " " Bigfoot : The Unforgettable Encounter , " and " Big and Hairy , " which makes this regional redneck horror / action hybrid a definite anomaly , but still nothing to get all excited about . In the misty backwoods of the Okaloosa Wilderness in Annistan , Alabama , a local Bigfoot creature murders the son of all-powerful rich jerk Milton St . John ( an embarrassingly poor turn by bona-fide exploitation legend David F . Friedman ) . St . John bankrolls an expedition led by insipid nice guy Dr . David Stone ( semi-sentient walking spam chunk Rick Montana in a stupendously lousy non-performance ) to find the foul fiend . Unbeknownst to Stone , the other members of the team are a stereotypically gung-ho , trigger-happy bunch of hillbilly yahoos specifically hired by St . John to bag the beast . R . G . Arledge's lax , ham-fisted direction strikes out in every conceivable department , thereby sinking this leaden bomb to an unforgivably schlocky sub-level of rank amateurishness : the sluggish pacing , putrid acting , wafer-thin cardboard characters , ill-judged stabs at lowbrow humor , the huge letdown creature ( it's some heavy-stepping zhlub in a rubber ghoul mask and black gorilla costume ) , weak off-screen killings , and dissatisfying sudden'n'senseless ending all leave a great deal to be desired . Those looking for a fun , worthwhile Bigfoot flick are strongly advised to search elsewhere . |
517,968 | 8,239,592 | 114,680 | 1 | A horrendously crappy'n'sappy piece of kiddie pic schlock | In the early 90's at the height of the appallingly cutesy direct-to-video Bigfoot kiddie flick craze there had to be at least one equally atrocious and icky-sweet sentimental claptrap yeti children's movie . This disgustingly gooey made-for-Canadian TV tripe starring a hideously wimpy , mewling , lovable'n'huggable emasculated diminutive teddy bear version of the Abominable Snowman scores a definite 10 + on the Vomitably Adorable and Overextended Cinematic Stinko Scale . Burly rocker Meat Loaf snarls it up something grumpy as Big Joe Grizzly , a cocky big game hunter who's hired by an evil multi-millionaire to capture a yeti for his spoiled brat son . The yeti eludes Big Jake's clutches and stows away on a plane that flies to America . The singularly charmless Chantallese Kent portrays the sickeningly twee little girl who befriends the yeti , whom the lass names Hank . Big Jake and his bumbling assistant Blubber ( the supremely annoying Richard Howland ) nab Hank and take him to New York City . The little girl goes to the Big Apple to get Hank back . Bob Keen , a special effects make-up artist whose credits include " Hardware , " " Monkey Boy , " and the " Hellraiser " films , made his unfortunate asleep-at-the-switch directorial debut with this ghastly offal . From the uniformly dire acting to the dreadful ( markedly less then ) special effects to the teeming surplus of stomach-turning heart-warming goo to the awful soundtrack of mawkish pop-slop tunes , " To Catch A Yeti " qualifies as anything but a good catch . The absolute celluloid dregs . |
519,380 | 8,239,592 | 231,496 | 1 | Positively putrid bottom-of-the-barrel direct-to-vid slasher schlock | It's been frequently said that direct-to-video movies are the true contemporary successors to the passionately lauded and beloved scuzzy , low-grade , artistically bankrupt , yet still scurrilously enjoyable scraped - from - the - bottom - of - the - celluloid - gutter drive-in movies of yore . Well , this suitably stinky straight-to-tape slasher atrocity explicitly proves that aforementioned statement to be an honest-to-goodness irrefutable fact . The flimsy , thinly written , just barely there story centers on Billy , a big , dumb , mute , sheltered , socially maladroit retard behemoth whose sole contact with the outside world is a mind-numbing overdose to senselessly exploitative hack ' em up slice'n'dice fright film sludge he's viewed from his bedroom window playing on an adjacent drive-in theater's large screen ( said slimy pics are actually clips from toxically terrible Troma tripe ) . One fateful day Billy escapes from his house and goes to the drive-in to brutally kill folks who include a nasty abusive babysitter , a ramrod security guard , a funky slang-slingin ' Hispanic marijuana dealer , the inevitable horny teen couple doing just what you think in back of a van , and more stereotypically jerky and obnoxious Generation X slacker aholes than you can shake an empty bong at . Boy , does this crudely produced and deplorably awful two-cent dreck ode to laughably chintzy and lousy 70's outdoor picture show crapola possess all the so - spectacularly - stinky - it's - strangely - smokin ' wrong right stuff : fumbling asleep-at-the-switch direction , a paltry script , a mercifully abbreviated 77 minute running time , flat , ugly , eye-straining shot-on-cruddy-digital-video photography , dreadful acting from an amateurishly rank no-name cast , a gratingly repetitious one-note score , ragged editing , a tediously sluggish pace , a few annoying false scares , a smattering of gratuitous nudity and soft-core sex , an ill-advised , would-be meaningful and pertinent subtext about the potentially hazardous effects of watching way too much violent , grossly pandering sleaze-bucket grind-house cinematic fifth , several badly executed murder set pieces , and no finesse , suspense , intelligence or vitality to speak of . In essence , this comparably abominable body count bomb sizes up as a bona-fide latter-day clunker equivalent to the deathlessly dismal ' 76 trash horror classic " Drive-In Massacre . " |
518,466 | 8,239,592 | 80,346 | 1 | Brain-numbingly atrocious no-budget zombie abomination | I must admit that I have this strange grudging respect for the ridiculously prolific and chronically ham-fisted schlock movie master Fred Olen Ray . Sure , a majority of Fred's flicks are total crap , but I still admire the tireless , albeit hopeless Mr . Ray for trying again and again and again to produce a halfway decent picture . I honestly think Fred gives his proverbial all to any given Grade Z dreckfest that he labors on ; the key problem is Fred's so-called " all " doesn't amount to diddly squat quality wise . Still , like I said before , at least the guy tries . " The Alien Dead " was Fred's second disastrously woebegone foray into pure cinematic sludge right after the still unreleased " The Brain Leeches " and it's probably one of the all-time worst pieces of witless'n'worthless celluloid swill Fred has ever regurgitated upon a hapless , unsuspecting public . the banal , no big freakin ' deal plot copiously rips off both " Night of the Living Dead " and " Shock Waves " : A fallen meteorite causes a bunch of bayou bumpkins to plumb mutate into ferocious , rot-faced , amphibious cannibalistic zombies who attack and devour lots of totally deserving hillbilly dorks and dorkettes in a heretofore sleepy and uneventful Florida swamp hamlet . Useless backwater sheriff Buster Crabbe ( who looks amazingly trim and fit in his unfortunate final filmic fling ) basically just takes up space and acts dumber than a tree stump . It's up to both snoopy newspaper reporter Ray Roberts and earnest game warden Mike Bonavia to save the day . Spectacularly shoddy and ramshackle , this agonizingly abysmal clinker represents an ungodly apotheosis of incredibly pitiful cinematic crumminess . We've got fumbling , clueless direction from the always dependably dreadful Mr . Ray ( who also cameos as a doomed hick hunter ) . Then there's a sorry cast of washed-up has-beens and understandably obscure never-wheres who couldn't act their way out of a moldy wet paper bag . The choppy editing , lousy cinematography ( the frequent excruciatingly slow fade-outs are especially crude while the strenuously drawn out slow-motion zombie attack is downright sad to behold ) , poor , scratchy , badly synced sound , lame , phony minimalistic make-up f / x , and comparably dismal ( extremely less than ) special f / x ( the crashing meteorite resembles a large orange flair ) are uniformly pathetic . Several cornball , intensely unlistenable country-and-western songs whine away on the soundtrack and a watery , off-key , annoyingly droning score likewise inflicts a massive headache on the luckless viewer . The really horrible campy dialogue , equally terrible and faltering attempts at deliberately dumb humor , and a wholly insufferable bunch of obnoxiously stupid redneck characters further diminish any entertainment value this turkey might have possessed . Keep your eyes peeled for an astonishingly obvious continuity gaffe involving a three-pronged pitchfork which magically sprouts an extra fourth prong after an old lady zombie gets impaled on it . Of course , there's plentiful , but weak gore ( a dog snacks on a bisected corpse , zoms graphically nosh on limbs and entrails , victims spit up mouthfuls of blood as they're being snacked on , that sort of lame , humdrum nonsense ) and even a little sprinkling of gratuitous female nudity courtesy of a skinny-dipping chick who gets assaulted by a zombie while swimming topless in a lake . In short , Fred Olen Ray's singularly screwy , cheerfully slipshod , and blatantly cruddy film-making anti-style is richly apparent in this early masterwork . In fact , if hideously maladroit cinematic offal was indeed a kind of warped , deviant and degenerate quasi-art form , then this smokin ' stinkeroonie would be its proudly putrid platonic essence . |
518,345 | 8,239,592 | 89,745 | 1 | The world ends with a whimper instead of a bang in this cruddy post-nuke sci-fi clinker | After her striking performance as Matt Dillon's unrepentant junkie nympho wife in the outstanding " Drugstore Cowboy " Kelly Lynch seemed to have one hell of a career ahead of her . Then along came the hilariously horrendous " Roadhouse " and Kelly's credibility as a serious actress went straight down the toilet . Well , it's a good thing that this deservedly obscure pot-holocaust sci-fi stinker never received much attention or otherwise Kelly would probably have never had a career to begin with . Lynch makes her unpromising and unprepossessing acting debut as Osa , who struggles to survive in your typically bleak , rotten and exacting desolate wasteland environment in which hope , jobs and especially water have become exceedingly scarce . Osa's family gets slaughtered by a bunch of mean , sneering , sadistic thugs ( Bill Moseley , Chop Top in " The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 , " pops up as one of the evil leering goons ) . After being trained to be proficient with a crossbow by obnoxiously hearty old coot Trooper , Osa proceeds to enact a harsh revenge on the thugs . Man , is this one beat flick : the leaden pace , dreadful dialogue ( " What are we going to do with you ? You ugly bag of sick st ! " ) , wooden acting , drab , plain cinematography which gives the film a bland , homely look ( the fact that the picture was shot on cheap , grainy film stock doesn't help matters any ) , curious lack of any hard , rough elements which could have supplied some desperately needed gritty conviction , an obvious climax that's telegraphed well in advance ( so much for tension ) , the meandering narrative , very colorless one-note characters ( the head nasty , snarling homosexual villain is actually named Mr . Big ! ) , poorly staged action scenes , bad guys who are too clean-cut and generic to be genuinely menacing , and , most damagingly , writer / director Oleg Egorov's pitiful inability to blend a hackneyed vengeance premise with a comparably threadbare post-nuke scenario with any flair , style , momentum or innovation all add up to one astoundingly crummy and unrewarding waste of time bomb . To sum up , this hideously lousy loser proves to be every bit as flat , arid and dreary as the barren , godforsaken desert landscape it takes place in . |
518,390 | 8,239,592 | 235,414 | 1 | An appallingly awful Bigfoot porno abomination | This astonishingly woeful no-budget early 70's porno atrocity might very well be the worst Bigfoot flick ever to disgrace celluloid . This singularly horrid groaner begins with a blurry , barely in focus , hard to read opening credits title card that clearly establishes the freakishly feeble messed-upness that's tenaciously sustained from ghastly start to hideous end . The story once more is your standard " here we go again " trite premise of six coed ( and decidedly libidinous ) young adults wandering into the woods in search of you-know-who . Forty murderously protracted minutes of preliminary copulation ensues , followed by a last reel ten minute appearance by unquestionably the sorriest , most abjectly unconvincing Sasquatch to ever haul its pitiful raggedy butt in front of a camera . This miserable monster is a laughable sight to behold : he's a hulking , heavy-breathing , repulsively greasy'n'grimy grungeball biker type with out of control shaggy hair , black shoe polish covering his beefy face , a nastily frayed , tattered , beaten all to hell fur coat and a puny penis hanging out of the open zipper of his filthy brown corduroy pants ! Bigfoot proceeds to wearily sodomize two ladies in a pair of harsh , but thankfully abbreviated rape scenes that almost put the infamous ventriloquist dummy sexual assault sequence in " Black Devil Doll from Hell " to shame as far as severely twisted and depraved cinematic misogyny is concerned . Technically , this dud is borderline Doris Wishmanesque in its staggering ineptitude : the tunelessly droning orchestral sludge score , the limply staged , strangely unenergetic and thus totally unerotic sex scenes , lots of ponderously drawn-out trekkin ' through the wilderness travelogue footage , the terminally clueless " I couldn't blurt out my lines or hit my marks with even the faintest hint of skill and ability " - style ( non ) acting , the scratchy sound , the obstinately stiff'n'stationary cinematography ( what few pans and tracking shots featured herein are very awkward ) , the tin-eared dialogue ( sample line : " Beep me now , lover ! Beep me ! " ) , the grimly spiritless , meandering and moribund pace , and the hopelessly listless , let's just get this sucker in the can perfunctory direction all ensure that this horrendous turkey is resolutely rotten in every conceivable department . Don't even bother giving this one a watch . It's not even fun in a so-shoddy-it's-sublime schlock sort of way . Instead it just plain stinks . |
518,464 | 8,239,592 | 72,071 | 1 | The most endless end-of-the-world sci-fi stinker you never want to see | Cute , doe-eyed , adorable brunette sprite Patty Shepard ( the extremely cuddly star of such enjoyably low-rent Spanish fright features as " Crypt of the Living Dead " and " The Witches ' Mountain " ) as the sultry , vampy , kittenish Carol , Pedro Maria Sanchez as her wimpy , passive limp dishrag husband Arthur , Craig Hill as sternly disciplined , grimly determined survivalist military hard-case Robert , Teresa Gimpera as Robert's emotional , histrionic wife Margie , and Fernando Hilbeck as Robert and Margie's bashful , optimistic , and imaginative son Chris , plus a Siamese cat , hole up in an underground shelter to avoid radioactive fall-out after a nuclear war occurs in this slow , talky , tiresomely pretentious , and gruelingly drab end-of-the-world snorefest . The quintet proceed to eat , fret , whine , play pool , throw tantrums , bicker , communicate with other survivors over the CB radio , and succumb to panic . Eventually several ridiculous complications transpire . Carol does a most arousing striptease . The cat dies mysteriously . Chris has sex with Carol and impregnates her . Arthur fatally overdoses on pills . Chris goes topside , receives a lethal dose of radiation , and keels over dead . Margie stabs herself to death with a knitting needle . Carol shoots Robert dead . Carol goes topside to face an uncertain future . All these hysterically overwrought moments are admittedly dopey and unintentionally riotous , but the definite " you gotta be kiddin ' me ! " preposterous howler highlight happens when the bratty , temperamental Carol shows up for supper in a yellow decontamination suit after being admonished for parading around the bunker while clad in only skimpy underwear ! Everything vies for Best of the Worst ( Dis ) honors in this incredibly horrible hoot : Jose Ulloa's stolid , lifeless direction ( Ulloa also co-wrote the stale , long-winded script ) , the interminably sluggish pace , Juan Pineda's deafeningly shrill , droning score , the tin-eared dialogue ( " We are going to have to fight to stay alive " ) , the drippy acting ( even the usually perky Patty seems heavily medicated ) , Antonio Millan's oppressively dark , constricted , and claustrophobic cinematography , the eye-wateringly ugly set design , and especially the dreadful , irritatingly anti-climactic conclusion are all uniformly the pits . Yet somehow the pic's pervasive pitifulness manages to acquire a certain laughable , lovably lunkheaded crapoid appeal . |
518,194 | 8,239,592 | 72,156 | 1 | Great title , lousy movie | Elderly college anthropology professor Ernest Prell ( stiffly played by former 30's bit actor Alan Brock ) and four obnoxiously hip students journey to the remote Pacific coast sandbar of Boot Island to confirm whether stories about an Abominable Snowman inhabiting the woods have any basis in fact . The professor and his students stay at the home of the professor's colleague Dr . Karl Werner ( woodenly portrayed by Tawn Ellis , who's best known as the star of the 50's Grade Z sci-fi clinker " Cat Women of the Moon " ) along with Werner's grunting Native American manservant Laughing Crow . The yeti soon makes its vicious presence felt , randomly dispatching two students and causing the survivors to degenerate into blind panic . WARNING : Major SPOILER ahead . In an absolutely awful would-be shocking twist ending the yeti proves to be a hoax , a ruse concocted by closet cannibals Prell , Werner and Laughing Crow to lure unsuspecting suckers to the island so they can kill and devour them . Any movie which features Hot Butter's insufferably interminable fluke hit instrumental " Popcorn " playing in its irritating entirety at a college frat party early in the action can't possibly be any good . Not surprisingly , this worthless grindhouse garbage qualifies as a crushing disappointment considering the people involved in its production : Besides the notorious 60's husband and wife roughie team of Michael and Roberta Findley ( who blessed us with the sensationally sick " Flesh " trilogy ) , we also got screenwriters Ed Adlum and Ed Kelleher ( the two dudes who are chiefly responsible for the terrifically tacky kitsch hoot " Invasion of the Blood Farmers " ) . Moreover , the cruddy mix of an unremittingly nihilistic tone , a disagreeably campy sense of archly affected humor ( " On the prowl / Hear him howl / Here comes the yeti now , " sings some smartaleck collegian as he plays the piano ) , rotten gore effects , wretched acting , horrendous dialogue ( " We're gonna find it , photograph it , and prove to the world that this fabled beast exists " ) , shoddy cinematography , and the cheesy gimmick of having a simulated heartbeat pound away on the soundtrack whenever the ersatz yeti is about to attack someone thoroughly negate any feeling of fun or entertainment value this dismal loser might have possessed . An unmitigated stiff . |
518,059 | 8,239,592 | 437,353 | 1 | Horrendous junk | If you ever wanted to see a gratingly overwrought Howard Stern all jacked up on speed horribly overplay a demented , cross-dressing , masturbating , mother-hating , whore-slaughtering , high decibel profanity-spewing , corpse-fornicating ( " I love beepin ' ' em when they're dead " ) , smack-shooting , brain-eating , gay-bashing , spastic fit-throwing , hallucinating , totally whacked out of his mind with a toxically murderous mixture of misogynistic rage and psychopathic fury racist lunatic serial killer who went around the bloodthirsty bend because his nasty abusive slut of a mommy liked to shove a beer bottle up his butt as a little boy and now gleefully butchers folks as a crazed nutjob adult when he isn't running around stark naked screaming unprintable vile epithets at the top of his lungs in a hideously redundant , tiresomely strident , completely uninsightful and so aggressively base that it's merely annoying instead of remotely amusing or offensive downright lousy gore opus , then this fetid , obnoxious , sex , rape , nudity and violence-laden worthless chunk of dreadfully puerile splatter porn schlock is just the movie for you . Me ? I'd rather rewatch the outstanding " Henry : Portrait of A Serial Killer " again than sit through this godawful interminable bilge a second time . |
518,526 | 8,239,592 | 78,113 | 2 | A really lame'n'tame Indonesian clone of your standard Italian cannibal jungle adventure romp | Rugged Robert ( hunky Barry Prima ) , snippy Rita ( homely eyesore Enny Haryono ) , and nerdy Tommy ( bespectacled beanpole dweeb Johann Mardjono ) are a trio of eager young college students who along with their macho guide Bisma ( chunky bearded wonder Rukman Herman ) find themselves in deep trouble when they encounter a lethal tribe of primitive cannibals deep in the jungle . Man , does this extremely cheap and crummy clunker strike out something rotten in every conceivable department : Sisworo Guatama Putra's flat , fumbling ( mis ) direction , the poky pace , Imam Tantowi's by-the-numbers hackneyed and predictable cookie cutter script , the slipshod editing , the bland acting , Lee Fioole's sub-par cinematography , the dreadful dubbing , precious little nudity , several poorly staged action scenes ( in one especially unimpressive scene a native feebly wrestles with a python ) , the mild gore , Gatot Sudarto's mostly insipid , only sporadically lively score , a pitifully dumb and nonexplicit attempted rape that's followed by an equally lousy off-screen castration , and the colorless , unappealing main characters ( Rita in particular is insufferably whiny ) all leave a great deal to be desired . The fact that the DVD source print is clearly taken a beat-up VHS tape complete with drop-outs and occasional faulty tracking doesn't help matters in the least . This stinker quite simply lacks the essential sleaze and vigor that it needs in order to qualify as an entertaining piece of trash . Only the beautiful jungle scenery and the inspired use of Kraftwork's insanely funky " We Are the Robots " as the opening credits theme song offer some relief from the overall stupefying tedium . A dismally dull and dissatisfying dud . |
519,389 | 8,239,592 | 91,561 | 2 | A dreary dud of a slasher spoof | A movie theater with a bad history of past gruesome murders reopens . Of course , the bloody killings start anew . Written , directed , shot , scored and edited with an appalling lack of flair and finesse by the singularly talentless Rick Sloane ( who later disgraced celluloid some more with the absolutely atrocious " Hobgoblins " ) , this horrendously ham-fisted attempt at a slasher spoof strikes out something rotten in every conceivable way : the excruciatingly lethargic pacing , the painfully static , grainy cinematography ( there's a stinky surplus of drab master shots featured throughout ) , an annoyingly droning and redundant hum'n'shiver synthesizer score , the flat ( non ) direction , a tediously talky and uneventful script , the groan-inducing sophomoric sense of lowbrow humor , the bloodless murder set pieces , a pitifully unscary killer ( he's just some wrinkled-up old guy in pasty make-up ) , the uniformly obnoxious and unappealing characters , a dissatisfyingly abrupt ending , and lifeless performances from a noticeably uninspired cast all ensure that watching this schlocky swill is about as fun and rewarding as eating rancid raw eels drenched with sour vinegar . This crud totally lacks the necessary crude charm and sleazy vigor required to be enjoyable junk . Instead it's just a bland , plodding and meandering stiff that never catches fire or becomes even remotely amusing in a so-shoddy-it's-smoking sort of way . Only a smidgen of nudity and the delightful presence of the always dependable Mary Woronov as a snarky , sardonic secretary provide a little relief from the overall crumminess of this lousy loser . |
519,109 | 8,239,592 | 167,851 | 2 | A really dreadful and unintentionally funny mess of an Italian werewolf horror flick | This appallingly awful hodgepodge affair is a dull , confused and meandering snorefest about Marco ( insipidly played by the ultra-boring Eddy Endolf , who also misdirected this putrid mess ) , a drab numbskull doofus whose mother practiced black magic and worshiped an evil ape creature . When dear mom renounced her unholy faith in the foul , hairy beast , ape thing got ticked off : he brutally butchered mommy and put a curse on Marco , who has to always wear a cross with seven jewels on it or otherwise he will transform into a hokey murderous werewolf-type hirsute humanoid creature . Marco has his cross swiped , a disastrous event which leads to several gory killings , seriously stupid and cheesy solarized nightmares , a bittersweet reunion with his loving cousin Carmelita ( the pretty , but colorless Anne Belle ) , nasty run-ins with a stolen jewelry ring , corrupt government officials , bumbling cops , and a phony whore fortune teller ( this later gal Marco makes love to ; he transforms into his lethal hairball alter ego in mid-coitus and tears out her throat ! ) , and creepy visions of a kinky devil cult who are not only led by famed Italian muscleman actor Gordon Mitchell ( who mostly just stands around and glowers ) , but also like to hold sick and twisted S & M-themed orgies in a smoky , reddish-hued dungeon basement ( even ape thing participates in the wicked debauchery ; he copulates with a beautiful blonde babe ! ) . Despite the wacky plot's largely unrealized potential for hardcore sleazy trash fright flick thrills , a few raunchy sex scenes , and the abundant violence and nudity , this hideously botched cinematic abomination sure ain't no gem . It's fatally undermined by flat direction , sluggish pacing , poor acting , shoddy make-up f / x , indifferently drawn characters , and , worst of all , an overly talky , rambling and ineptly structured script that awkwardly combines dumbfounding flashbacks and flashforwards , sloppily integrated subplots , dopey dream sequences and a horribly anti-climactic non-ending into one horrendously abysmal melange that doesn't possess the slightest trace of either cohesion or narrative drive . A real stinker . |
518,372 | 8,239,592 | 53,232 | 2 | Jerry Warren strikes out again with this pretty abominable Swedish yeti sci-fi / horror yawner | Jerry Warren's second contribution to the 50's yeti creature feature cycle after the shockingly good " Man Beast " was this simply abysmal atrocity . This time Jerry took a ' 59 Swedish sci-fi / horror flick and shot crummy new footage with frequent co-star John Carradine in standard drippy uptight professorial mode for a shoddily slapped together mess which Warren callously released upon an unsuspecting world in ' 62 . The only odd thing about this devious practice is that for once Jerry didn't butcher a south-of-the-border Mexican cheapie as was par for the course for Mr . Warren ( " Attack of the Mayan Mummy " and " The Face of the Screaming Werewolf " are among the other cinematic crimes against humanity Jerry committed during his dubious career ) . The movie relates the insufferably talky'n'tedious tale of an attempted alien invasion force which sets loose a large , lumbering , murderous yeti-like beast who runs amok and wreaks the expected destructive havoc all over the desolate snow-covered Lapland countryside . An international team of scientists , complete with an annoyingly bitchy token female in tow , investigate the spaceship landing site and eventually thwart the nefarious extraterrestrials . The technical credits are strictly from hunger : the dark cinematography unleashes a hideous torrent of unsightly horrible fade-outs , the blaring score sporadically drowns out the banal dialogue ( a minor blessing in disguise ) , screaming newspaper headlines are clumsily used to fill in gaping holes in the saggy story , the poky pace plods along with all the thrilling momentum of a snail on Quaaludes , the characters are all paper-thin cardboard cut-outs with all the appeal and charisma of a smelly dead skunk , most of the big scary moments take place off-screen , and the actors seem comatose throughout . Taking amphetamines prior to watching this clunker is optional , but nonetheless still strongly advised if you ever decide to give this stinker a stare . |
518,026 | 8,239,592 | 60,536 | 2 | One of the dullest & least enjoyable end-of-the-world movies ever made | In the mid-60's notoriously ill-regarded Grade Z exploitation feature hack Larry Buchanan made a handful of uniformly awful films - - " The Eye Creatures , " " It's Alive , " and this thuddingly dismal dud among ' em - - under the auspices of the legendary B-movie grindhouse studio American International Pictures . These flicks were so bad that AIP deemed them unworthy of theatrical releases and instead tossed them away as strictly direct-to-television fare , where these clinkers have since become firmly established as perennial late night cathode ray timekiller fodder . This is Larry's typically lousy $1 . 98 remake of Roger Corman's admittedly cheap , but still hugely enjoyable sci-fi doomsday classic " The Day the World Ended . " The basic premise remains the same : A motley assortment of people who are unscathed by a lethal nuclear blast hole up in a remote mountainside redoubt run by a hard-nosed survivalist . They quarrel and squabble with each other until a disfigured telepathic cannibal mutant finally attacks the shelter in the last reel . Harold Hoffman's drab , talky , studiously by-the-numbers trite script doesn't offer any fresh , compelling imaginative twists on the original , thus relegating this turkey to tepid Rehash City Snoozeville from cruddy start to dreary end . Moreover , Buchanan's lifeless direction fails abysmally to create either tension or momentum , allowing a stultifying surplus of tedious talk to bring the already leaden pace to a grindingly torpid snail-like clip . Robert C . Jessup's ratty , all-beat-to-unsightly-hell cinematography , the watery , tunelessly droning stock film library score , dreadfully unconvincing make-up ( the mutant looks like some wizened old guy with a severe sunburn and a glowing white fright wig ) , an irritatingly preachy and heavy-handed Christian morality , and the largely wooden acting ( only the always dependable Bill Thurman as a crusty old alcoholic rancher adds any much-needed vitality to the staggeringly static proceedings ) certainly don't help matters any as well . Overall , this insufferably atrocious wash-out sadly rates as one of the all-time worst and most dissatisfying end-of-the-world sci-fi losers to ever limp its crappy way onto celluloid . |
519,103 | 8,239,592 | 47,507 | 2 | The first and worst of the 50's yeti horror films | This rock-bottom ' 54 cheapie clinker is the first and worst fright feature made in the 50's about the legendary Abominable Snowman . This paltry carbon copy of " King Kong " ( natch ) , " The Werewolf of London , " and even the exemplary giant ant humdinger " Them ! " constitutes as a most unfortunate and inauspicious cinematic debut for the yeti . A stuffed-shirt botanist , his comparably blah assistant , and a bunch of anonymous oriental extras embark on a perilous pilgrimage into the Himalayas to discover a rare plant species . The expedition stumbles across a predatory yeti ( a very tall , gangly guy in a threadbare poorly stitched together mangy fur costume ) who in tried'n'true B-movie monster fashion makes off with the first available female he can get his grubby paws on . The team members manage to get the fair damsel back and capture the humanoid beast . They bring it to Los Angeles , only to have the ratty hairball escape and seek refuge in the City of Angel's grimy sewers . An air of total creative and budgetary impoverishment permeates every aspect of this sour lemon . There's lackluster direction by Billy Wilder's no-talent brother W . Lyle Wilder , lethargic pacing , primitive fade-outs , dry acting from a just - hitting - all - the - usual - preprogrammed - marks robotic cast , tedious running-off-at-the-mouth verbose narration ( " The first few days were uneventful , monotonous and routine , " the botanist comments early in the nonaction , a remark which serves as an apt concise critique of the film itself ) , a few stomach-knotting moments of goopy sentiment , and a pitifully unimpressive star monster . But what really deflates this celluloid lead balloon is its complete lack of any trashy vitality - - this excruciatingly sorry and static yeti stinker is so inert and lifeless that it just lies motionless on your TV screen for 71 painfully draggy and dreary minutes of sheer unbearable boredom . |
518,861 | 8,239,592 | 70,673 | 2 | An extremely dull and sub-par 70's low-budget horror revenge stinker | Six starving , desperate geologists are trapped in a cave for two weeks . Five of these guys cut off the arm of a sixth luckless dude and eat it . Shortly after the limb hacking incident , the men are saved by a rescue party . Five years later the understandably embittered fellow who got his appendage severed vows revenge . He begins killing the other five guys by cutting off one of their arms with a hatchet . While the sound premise certainly has plenty of potential , it's unfortunately undermined by a very dull and uninspired execution . Thomas S . Alderman's drab , listless direction and hideously talky'n'tedious script suck all the fun and vitality out of the solid story . The tame , unconvincing gore f / x , Philllan Bishop's shrill , unmelodious droning synthesizer score , the sluggish pace , Bob Maxwell's dark , bland , ugly cinematography and a real groaner of a would-be startling surprise " twist " ending are all likewise uniformly awful . Familiar 70's B-feature faces Deborah ( " Benji " ) Walley , Paul ( " The Bat People " ) Carr , John ( " Outlaw Blues " ) Crawford , Vince ( " The Candy Snatchers " ) Martorano , and Marvin ( " Fangs " ) Kaplan sleepwalk through their insipid parts , thereby failing to bring any energy or conviction to their boring and flatly drawn characters . Early in the film one character gravely intones , " Something's really rotten . " I wholeheartedly concur ; that something really rotten is this incredibly feeble and worthless chunk of atrocious cinematic offal . |
518,115 | 8,239,592 | 235,245 | 2 | A hideously lame'n'tame college-set horror slasher wash-out | Driven Dr . Philip Rothman ( a hopelessly insipid and less than sinister performance by Terry Lenderee ) conducts mind control experiments on students which in turn causes them to become crazy and murderous . Sound good ? Well , it sure ain't . For starters , writer / director Jerry Sangiuliano relates the meandering story at an excruciatingly sluggish pace and fails to build even a modicum of tension . Worse yet , the characters are all blah cardboard stereotypes : we've got the shameless slut ( Donna Bostany , who at least looks hot ) who sleeps with all her professors so she can earn passing grades , the no-nonsense police detective ( flatly played by Joe Lombardo ) who's determined to solve the case no matter what , and even the obligatory weirdo janitor ( Charles Lopresto , who at least looks creepy ) who's always lurking around every corner . Adding additional abject insult to already appalling injury are Larry Gelb's annoyingly shrill and redundant shivery synthesizer score , a numbing surplus of tedious talk , infrequent kill scenes , no nudity to speak of , extremely mild and largely bloodless violence , tacky 80's video game-style ( far from ) special effects , and a dissatisfying limp ending . This movie crucially lacks the necessary energy and sense of misguided enthusiasm to qualify as an enjoyably awful piece of schlock . Instead this flick is about as fun and exciting as watching two elderly turtles copulate . An immensely cruddy and unrewarding stiff . |
519,404 | 8,239,592 | 106,666 | 2 | A cinematic black hole from which there is no escape | You know a film is basically destined to stink worse than dirty old socks when the eternally quality-impaired Fred Olen Ray and the comparably talent-barren Jim Wynorski are listed as executive producers ( worse yet , Ray also co-wrote the " original " story ! ) , longtime hack actor Steve Barkett receives special guest star billing for his quick pre-credits appearance as a doomed astronaut and Martin Sheen's terminally drab , anything but a chip off the ol ' block brother Joe Estevez is the closet thing to a name actor in the entire cast . The horrendously derivative rag-bag premise writes a paltry check that the feeble film itself doesn't even come close to cashing : A huge , fanged , drooling dinosaurian beastie stows away on a spaceship which crash-lands in the dense , verdant , real ferny and swampy Florida bayou . Said bulky ugly creature proceeds to munch on lots of folks , causes several local animals to transform into murderous mutants ( the ferocious killer puppet armadillo is pretty laughable ) and even makes similarly infected humans metamorphosize into your standard blank-eyed , pasty-faced lethal zomboid ghouls . Steve Latshaw's flaccid direction fails to inject any sense of style or vigor into Pat Moran's threadbare script , which in turn serves as a horrible catalog of every last error one could possibly find in The Bad Movie Book of Serious Cinematic Sins . Said sins include a numbing surplus of dreary chitchat , painfully stilted dialogue ( among the choice clunky lines are " I like to watch the news sometimes , but Tom he calls it propaganda " and " This boy scout isn't going to help us find anything " ) , too much meandering around the woods in circles filler nonsense , a grave lack of any inspired or interesting individual flourishes , a poky stab at narrative thrust and , perhaps the picture's grossest , most unforgivable mistake of all , an insipid assortment of tiresomely one-note stereotypical characters ( feisty go-getter female reporter , pompous fat jerk scientist , arrogant macho dude trial guide , meek , skinny nerdy brainiac , shady , double-tongued corporate head and so on ) . The uniformly flat acting , Maxwell J . Beck's primitive cinematography ( the laborious fade-outs and clumsy creature on the prowl POV shots are especially shoddy ) , cheesy computer morphing f / x , the hokey-looking , pitifully unconvincing monster and Jeffrey Walton's droning , insufferably overwrought score definitely don't help matters any as well . Only some welcome gratuitous nudity ( ravishing brunette Blake Pickett in particular makes for a pleasingly ample eyeful sans shirt ) and a clever Hitchcock-style cameo by Sunshine State B-movie institution William Grefe as a photo on a dresser effectively detract from the otherwise overwhelmingly substantial tedium and ineptitude that's in alarming abundance in this truly wretched dreck . |
518,909 | 8,239,592 | 97,497 | 2 | A disappointingly lame'n'tame Indonesian women-in-prison stinker | Virginal innocent Indri finds herself at a house of prostitution run by ruthless pimp MG . Indri winds up incarcerated in MG's private prison after she refuses to make love to him . Of course , Indri and worldly top con Helga join forces and plan to escape . Maman Firmansyah's blah , uninspired direction and Piet Burnama's dull , talky script thoroughly undermine any trashy vitality this flick needs in order to qualify as a pleasing piece of babes-behind-bars exploitation junk : the sluggish pace painfully drags throughout , there's no gratuitous female nudity whatsoever ( the girls don't even show any skin during the obligatory group shower scene ! ) , the expected torture and degradation are both extremely tame and tepid , the moderate crummy gore likewise fails to impress , and even a ridiculous catfight sequence ain't nothing to get excited about . Thomas Susanto's pedestrian cinematography , the laughably lousy dubbing , the excruciatingly overlong 102 minute running time , the sappy theme song , and Gatot Sudarto's cornball score add further abject insult to already appalling injury . Only some decent last reel break-out action offers a little relief from the otherwise overly abundant stultifying tedium . A complete yawn-inducing dud . |
518,173 | 8,239,592 | 62,946 | 2 | An extremely dreary and forgettable clunker | Veteran character actor Marc Lawrence stars as your basic evil scientist who creates a dangerous , murderous , not-to-be-trifled race of robotic killer gorilla slaves . Lawrence's plans to overthrow the world are thwarted by a musclebound lunk ( stolidly played by former Hercules Brad Harris , who shows off his brawny chest as often as possible ) who's ventured into the doc's remote corner of the jungle in order to rescue some beautiful gal Lawrence has abducted . Seedy , grim , slow and humorless , with only the lovely presence of bodacious jungle babe Esmeralda Barros walking around mostly nude and the sporadic cheeseball gorilla gore effects offering any slight relief from Roger Morris ' static direction , a drab , talk-heavy script , uniformly stiff acting from an understandably uninspired cast , tatty production values , inert pacing , pathetically crummy and unconvincing ape suits , and a general air of ponderous , unrelenting tedium , this flick overall sizes up as a sleep-inducing dead slug of a stinker . |
518,382 | 8,239,592 | 76,665 | 2 | Just plain bad | Question : What do you say about a disastrously ill-advised would-be " high concept " entry in the 70's cheerleader exploitation sub-genre which clumsily incorporates elements from the then equally trendy devil worship horror sub-genre , boasts a faded name Hall of Shame cast that includes such sadly slumming folks as a fat'n'tired Yvonne De Carlo , a severely pickled John Ireland , an extremely cranky Jack Kruschen , and the ubiquitous John Carradine in one of his customary abjectly humiliating nothing cameo parts , has almost no nudity to speak of ( this wimpy atrocity is actually rated PG ! ) , that's directed with appalling ineptitude by chronically all-thumbs Al Adamson protégé Greydon Clark and co-written with similarly shabby maladroitness by veteran hack screenwriter Alvin L . Fast ( who also penned the so - awful - it's - downright - awesome rocksploitation hoot " Bummer ! " ) , comes complete with a murderously irritating th-th-thumping disco score , features Lane Caudell ( the star of the delightfully dopey rocksploitation favorite " Hangin ' on a Star " ) in a supporting role that never allows him to warble a single note , has script supervision by Debra Hill ( future producer of the seasonal slasher classic " Halloween " ) , and was garishly photographed by future soon-to-be big deal cinematographer Dean ( " Romancing the Stone , " " Back to the Future " ) Cundey ? Answer : Nothing remotely good or positive , that's what ! ! ! |
518,721 | 8,239,592 | 429,573 | 2 | Crude , unsubtle and terribly overwrought | I must confess that I had pretty high hopes for this horror movie considering its novel 19th century period setting , the claim that the story has some basis in documented historical fact , and a high pedigree cast which includes Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek . The plot about a wealthy family whose heretofore peaceful and opulent abode is suddenly beset by violent and frightening poltergeist activity in which the toothsome teenage daughter ( lovely Rosanna Arquette lookalike Rachel Hurd-Wood ) is the primary target of an angry and potent unrestful evil spirit certainly sounds promising , but alas said plot is severely undermined by director / co-screenwriter Courtney Solomon's dreadfully crude , hyperactive and increasingly tiresome shoot-the-fireworks style . The hyper-kinetic style with its clumsy emphasis on cheap scare tactics , over-amplified sound effects , irritatingly blaring music and a constantly darting here and there restless prowling camera wear the viewer down rather than work the viewer over like it should . Moreover , the needlessly hopped-up and histrionic hitting - you - over - the - head - with - a - frying - pan unsubtle style is jarringly at odds with the period setting , thereby negating any credibility the story might have had . Solomon makes another major narrative blunder by relating the story in flashback ; this particular story structure gives away from the very start that certain characters will survive the punishing ordeal alive and unscathed , which crucially robs the film of all of its tension . The final explanation for why the poltergeist activity is happening strives for poignancy , but Solomon's overwrought approach undermines the pathos substantially . Both Sutherland and Spacek struggle gamely to give the film a bit of class and dignity , only to have their noble efforts lost amidst the grating array of loud noises and tacky jump-out-at-you jolts . The fact that Solomon shamelessly lifts whole bits and pieces from such superior fright features as " The Entity " and " The Exorcist " adds additional appalling insult to already abject injury . If only the story had been done in a more low-key , thoughtful and understated manner this movie could have been a real solid and spooky little scarefest . As it is , very hysterical and ham-fisted , it's a crushing disappointment . |
518,124 | 8,239,592 | 88,896 | 2 | Horrible crud | WARNING This review features major SPOILERS Don't read this particular comment unless you've seen this film first . Shot in chintzy , unwieldy hand-held camera fashion from 1979 to 1981 on cheap , grainy , extremely unsightly all scratched-up Super 8mm film stock with the sound and dialogue poorly looped in post-production , this simply horrendous artsy fartsy college short film school project finally crept onto video in 1985 . Of course , none of this would mean jack if it wasn't for the fact that this hour long abomination stars a gawky , pudgy , insufferably whiny and unappealing Madonna as bisexual bad girl Bruna , a totally obnoxious and unsympathetic skank with a loyal cult of male and female lovers who falls for a moody , sullen , intensely unlikable hipster philosophy student college drop-out slacker jerk ( a highly annoying Jeremy Pattnosh , who also co-wrote the pompous , abysmal script and sings a majority of the atrocious tunes featured on the grating soundtrack ) . Bruna winds up being raped by her overly possessive lovers , which means that the viewer gets to see Madonna's normal-sized breasts prior to her obscenely overdone boob job she got for the pathetic documentary " Truth or Dare . " Worse yet , Bruna suffers further indignities when she's assaulted and molested in a ratty diner bathroom by loutish , grossly overbearing , motor-mouthed , wholly repugnant and irredeemable middle-aged creep Raymond Hall ( a hilariously seedy and degenerate Charles Kurtz , who's the sole actor in this misbegotten bomb who brings any vigor and conviction to his part ) . Bruna , assisted by Pattnosh and her lovers , abduct Hall and ritualistically carve the bastard up at a crazed Satanic party which concludes with the deranged participants drinking Hall's blood and consuming his flesh . Attempting to explore modern-day urban angst , despair and paranoia , with a marked emphasis on sexual deviancy and seething amorality run hideously amok , this stinker hits an infuriatingly steady succession of sour off-key notes throughout : a loud , shrill , abrasively confrontational tone which quickly wares out its welcome , a crummy visual texture that's sheer murder on the eyes , several protracted sub-MTV musical montage sequences ( the film hits its nadir when Pattnosh serenades Bruna in a grimy , graffiti-littered tunnel with an awful impromptu rap song called " Demon Lover " ) , uniformly foul and disgusting characters ( Kurtz's memorably vile sicko is actually the only remotely endearing person in the whole movie ! ) , a murky , half-hearted script which goes tediously overboard on pretentious blather , an irritating Hispanic narrator who makes asinine rambling comments at acerbating regular intervals ( " I mean , he even had an attitude , like a cat who had eaten a canary or a pigeon or something " ) , shoddy production values , and occasional horribly affected fancy-pants cinematic flourishes ( freeze frames , slow motion , archly elaborate wipes and dissolves ) . It comes as no surprise that Madonna , who was allegedly paid a whopping $100 bucks for her troubles , tried unsuccessfully to sue the filmmakers in order to prevent this dreck from being released . It's a genuine pity that she failed . |
519,363 | 8,239,592 | 211,328 | 2 | A dismally dull & dreary dud | Filipino horror films don't come much worse than this unbearably dull , drawn-out stiff which boasts a decent enough plot , but precious little energy in the telling of said story . In short , what we have here is a classic case of cruddy schlock movie-making that crucially lacks the necessary trashy vitality to pass muster as a fun , worthy fright flick . Jock Gaynor , who was also one of the co-producers ( " A Taste of Hell " ' s John Garwood was another one ) and designed the many boring underwater sequences featured herein , listlessly plays a treasure-seeking deep sea diver who discovers a fabled 1850 sunken galleon which contains the corpse of a legendary Moro tribe virgin princess . When Gaynor steals a priceless amulet from the princess ' skeletal remains , the skull-faced sea siren ( the gorgeous Iraida Arambulo , who's naked throughout the entire film except for a hokey monster mask that covers her cadaverous face ) comes back to life and forces Gaynor to kill seven virgins in order to appease the god that the princess was sacrificed to a century earlier . Despite a goodly serving of both gratuitous nudity and bloody violence , plus the enticing sight of sexy female leads Diane McBain and Kim Ramos walking about in skimpy bikinis , " The Deathhead Virgin " proves to be a static , lifeless , sleep-inducing waste of time thanks to Norman Foster's drab direction ( Foster , who started out as an actor prior to becoming a director , had a very uneven career which includes several episodes of Disney's " Davy Crockett " series ) , Fredy Conde's clunky , grainy cinematography , Ward Gaynor's arid , dead obvious , gab-ridden script , such excessive padding as tacky night club scenes , a horrible comic sequence in which Gaynor and his fellow diver buddy Larry Ward get drunk together on the beach , and a cock fight , the pitiful wasting of the great Vic Diaz in the nothing role of an investigating police chief who tries to piece together the whole fantastic story in a logical manner ( Vic does what he can with a thankless part , but even he's let down by lousy dubbing - - some drip with a flat , hollow tenor substitutes for Diaz's wonderfully ripe and oily baritone ! ) , cheesy solarization effects , uniformly indifferent performances from an understandably out of it cast , and Richard La Salle's slushy , overbearing score . So bad that it doesn't even qualify as enjoyable junk , this terribly lame loser of a flick should be avoided at all costs . |
518,095 | 8,239,592 | 65,070 | 3 | A really drab and forgettable jungle adventure exploitation snoozer | The central premise of this dull and meandering snorefest is ripe to bursting with potentially explosive trash flick promise : a motley bunch of insufferably bland British explorers go trekking into the dangerous jungle of Nairobi , Africa and discover the mythical wild jungle lass Tarzana , a total knockout who's really the daughter of a wealthy English lord who grew up in the jungle on her own after surviving a plane crash when she was just a little girl . Alas , talent-barren director Guido Malatesta and equally unskilled screenwriter Phillip Shaw severely undermine said promise with a regrettably poor execution : the slack pacing , the talky , agonizingly drawn-out script , the leaden acting , the infrequent , invariably flat and unexciting action scenes , the crummy dialogue ( " For one hundred thousand dollars I'm obliged to think of something " ) , the horribly unmelodious droning orchestral mush score , a tedious surplus of cheap'n'cheesy travelogue footage , and a tiresome assortment of boringly one-dimensional cardboard characters all add up to one supremely stinky and dissatisfying celluloid lemon . Okay , the sumptuously buxom and voluptuous Euro sleaze movie queen Femi Benussi cuts a striking figure as the luscious , mostly naked feral honey who comes complete with the standard collection of loyal animal companions ( a large elephant that Tarzana uses to ride around the jungle , a sickeningly cute lion , and , of course , the inescapable adorable comic relief klepto chimpanzee ) , but not even Femi's eminently delectable whole lotta woman physique can inject any much-needed vitality into this lifeless and lethargic washout . |
518,845 | 8,239,592 | 96,117 | 3 | A gruelingly sub-par & tedious haunted prison wash-out | The late 80's saw an inexplicable rash of supernatural horror films set in gloomy penitentiary settings . Renny Harlin's superbly gritty and moody " Prison " got the whole haunted hoosegow ball rolling ; it was immediately followed by the markedly inferior " The Chair , " John Saxon's enjoyably trashy " Death House , " the passable psycho picture " Destroyer , " and this hideously limp'n'lethargic exercise in hopelessly comatose tedium . Your usual annoying collection of horribly unsympathetic college student chowderheads lead by insufferably spineless tormented twerp Alex ( the hugely unappealing Nicholas Celozzi ) go to Alcatraz Island to investigate the bizarre circumstances surrounding the sudden gruesome death of up-and-coming rock star Sammy Mitchell ( blandly played by Toni Basil of " Hey Micky " fame ) . Alex's brother becomes possessed by the evil demonic spirit of a vicious cannibalistic US Civil War cavalry commandant and goes on the expected killing spree , thus forcing wimpy Alex to overcome his passivity and make a stand against this ghoulish specter . Although slickly photographed by Nicholas Von Sternberg , with a few decent gore set pieces and a fair amount of spooky atmosphere ( the film was shot on location in the dismal , rusty , rundown ruins of Alcatraz Island ) , " Slaughterhouse rock " nonetheless just doesn't cut it as a solid , effective fright feature . This is largely due to the uniformly obnoxious and unlikeable collegiate smartaleck characters , a tiresomely smirky bunch whose inane comic antics prove to be grating rather than amusing . The flat acting from a noticeably disinterested cast hurts matters all the more , with onetime " Playboy " playmate and undeniable blonde cutie pie hottie supreme Hope Marie Carlton doing an especially irritating Linnea Quigley impersonation as the token oversexed nympho bimbo . Dimitri Logothetis ' direction displays a modicum of flashy visual style , but the tone is unevenly pitched between grim seriousness and goofy , horrendously sophomoric silliness , and , most damagingly , Ted Landon's sloppy , inconsistent , overly complicated and finally quite confusing script miserably fails to develop the necessary internal logic to make the far-fetched story even remotely plausible . In other words , this stinker sadly succeeds in making a scant 90 minutes seem like an excruciatingly drawn-out cinematic jail sentence . |
518,317 | 8,239,592 | 924,498 | 3 | A disappointingly wimpy Hong Kong women-in-prison wash-out | In my ceaseless obsessive quest to watch the most obscure down'n'dirty exploitation features from all over the world I naturally had to have the rotten luck to stumble across this brain-numbing atrocity . Three ladies escape from a hellish women's penitentiary and go on the lam . They decide to get revenge on the various folks who are responsible for sending them to jail . Sound good ? Well , it definitely ain't . For starters , director Roy Rosenberg and writer Gary Capra , Jr . both fail to deliver the lowdown trashy goods : The girls don't show any skin during the obligatory group shower scene ( we see plenty of bare backs and legs , but no bare breasts or buttocks ! ) , plus there's not even a hint of lesbianism and the standard sexually abusive rapist degenerate guard is notably absent . In addition , the flick abruptly switches gears after the ladies break out and turns into a heavy-handed revenge thriller . Moreover , what little violence we get is depressingly tame stuff ( even the expected catfights are nothing to get excited about ) . Jimmy Yu's surprisingly glossy and impressive cinematography manages to rise above the general ineptitude . Ricky Chan's neatly varied score - - it's a groovy mix of pounding rock , lush orchestral mush , and funky soul - - likewise is quite cool . The film also deserves some faint praise for having the audacity to cast an obvious Asian girl sporting shoe polish on her face and an Afro wig atop her head as the token brassy black babe . But overall this clunker still sizes up as a totally blah and dissatisfying lemon . |
518,890 | 8,239,592 | 82,381 | 3 | There's no gas or gusto to be found in this rusty clunker of a futuristic 80's sci-fi dud | A severe gas shortage in the near future forces the government to ban the use of automobiles altogether and make the act of driving one a punishable capitol offense . However , a feisty pocket of rebellious gear-jamming metalhead race car enthusiasts called " burners " obstinately refuse to knuckle under Uncle Sam's oppressive reign , hording what little precious gas is left and happily tearin ' their souped-up cars across the desolate desert terrain . Crusty ace driver Red ( the always exuberant Darren McGavin , carrying on with greater flair and verve than the sub-par material deserves ) and rascally fellow old-timer Indie ( the solid George Touliatos ) are two such guys , whooping it up as they constantly elude getting nabbed by a band of hard-nosed police officers who are very eager to nail their annoyingly evasive hides . While the premise - - basically a science fiction version of a Burt Reynolds-style good ol ' boy outrunning the pigs car chase romp - - has promise , it's fatally ruined by David M . Robertson's limp'n'lifeless ( non ) direction and a paltry , insufficiently thought-out bare-bones script . Moreover , the futuristic setting is depicted with a critical lack of conviction : there are no special effects to speak of , the cars look plain and antiquated , and the spartan costume designs are simply pathetic . Worse yet , the fuzzball baddies led by a sleepwalking Doug McClure are hopelessly colorless and nonthreatening ; only a murderously crazed Native American nutcase trooper ( outrageously overplayed by Alex Diakun ) radiates any necessary sense of genuine menace . The redneck protagonists are equally insipid and unprepossessing ; the picture's already slack pace screeches to a dead halt during the excruciatingly blah romantic courtship scenes between Red's wimpy estranged son Cameron ( the gratingly whiny Robert Charles Wisden ) and Indie's fiery foxy daughter Jill ( vivaciously essayed by cute brunette hottie Mary Beth Rubens ) . But the movie's grossest , most egregious and unforgivable blunders have got to be the copious , but poorly staged and thus unexciting car race sequences and a gruelingly tedious surplus of hideously banal dialogue ( sample line : " Keep your pedal down and your sunny side up " ) . So , despite some good acting and nice photography , this worthless rusty clunker overall sadly remains in teeth-gnashing neutral from the dreary start right on down to the spiritless finish . |
518,685 | 8,239,592 | 75,717 | 3 | A really bad piece of 70's Southern-fried schlock | A pretty obscure back country moonshine opus that's best left buried and forgotten . Carol Lynley , who breezed her way into 70's film buff's hearts by badly lip-syncing to Maureen McGovern's repellently sappy Oscar-winning pop ballad " The Morning After " in the deathless disaster classic " The Poseidon Adventure , " strikes out big time as a snotty , uptight New York City corporate babe who inherits a backwoods moonshine operation from her recently deceased half uncle . Carol grudgingly takes over the illicit business , locking horns with sloppy , cocksure good old boy rotgut driver Gary Lockwood ( a long way down from the glorious " 2001 : A Space Odyssey " and coming on something awful with a rather uncomfortably credible portrayal of a totally disgusting dirt-bag ) over how the business out to be run . Further complications ensue when both the mob and the police decide it's time to either take over the bug juice business or shut it down entirely . While the basic premise could have made for some delectably dopey down-home dumb fun , director James Broderick unfortunately blows it abysmally by allowing the pace to crawl at a deadly slow rate , failing to deliver any bang-up exciting action ( the few car chases featured herein are too flatly staged to have any slam-bang stirring impact ) , placing way too much emphasis on the dreary , uneventful narrative which largely focuses on the very tiresome and redundant bickering between Lynley and Lockwood ( what their romance fails to set off in sparks it more than makes up for in sheer underwhelming boredom ) , and , worst of all , displaying an overall highly off-putting lackadaisical attitude towards the film in general . Additional damage is wrought by the shameful wasting of an extremely solid B-movie cast : late , great crotchety fuddy dud character actor Ryal Dano as Lockwood's flaky , hooch-saturated partner , Mary Woronov in a " blink and you'll miss her " nothing bit part as Lynley's stuffy , bespectacled boss , John Goff as a power hungry local yokel mob capo , blundering fat guy favorite Cliff Emmich ( Rip Torn's loyal , long-suffering chauffeur in the extraordinary " Payday " ) as a clumsy FBI agent , and the seemingly inexhaustible and omnipresent trash flick treasure George " Buck " Flower in one of his standard cantankerous old hillbilly cuss parts . Furthermore , although the technical credits are sound - - Don Peake supplies a spare , peppy score , Ron Wiggins belts out the lively country and western theme song " Runnin ' Moonshine " with agreeable redneck panache , future big deal mainstream movie cinematographer Tak Fujimoto gives the film a nice slick'n'polished look - - even said up to par behind-the-scenes contributions can't compensate for the film's crippling , entertainment-killing dearth of both sorely needed wit and vitality . In short , don't waste your money renting " Bad Georgia Road ; " buy yourself some moonshine and get mighty plastered instead . |
519,134 | 8,239,592 | 28,174 | 3 | A real snorefest | Wimpy stuffed shirt Armand Louque ( blandly played by veteran character actor Dean Jagger in a rare lead role ) joins a group of researchers who want to find and destroy the secret technique of creating zombies . Armand falls for the lovely Claire Duval ( fetching blonde Dorothy Stone ) , who uses the meek sap to get Armand's colleague Clifford Grayson ( the hopelessly wooden Robert Noland ) to marry her . Furious over being used and spurned by Claire , Armand uses his knowledge of voodoo to get revenge . Sound exciting ? Well , it sure ain't . For starters , Victor Halperin's static ( non ) direction lets the meandering and uneventful talk-ridden story plod along at an excruciatingly slow pace . Worse yet , Halperin crucially fails to bring any tension , atmosphere and momentum to the hideously tedious proceedings . The mostly blah acting from a largely insipid cast doesn't help matters any ; only George Cleveland as the hearty General Duval and E . Alyn Warren as the irascible Dr . Trevissant manage to enliven things a bit with their welcome and refreshing hammy histrionics . The drippy stock film library score , the painfully obvious stagebound sets , and the crude cinematography are pretty lousy and unimpressive as well . In fact , this feeble excuse for a fright feature is so crummy that not even the uncredited starkly staring eyes of the great Bela Lugosi can alleviate the brain-numbing boredom . A dismally dull dud . |
518,353 | 8,239,592 | 246,763 | 3 | Stranded in a tediously drawn-out snorefest | Touchy , whiny , hot-tempered Native American basketball superstar Jimmy War Eagle ( blandly played by George Bryson ) while en route to Central America with a large sum of disaster relief money in his possession is forced to crash-land his plane on a remote tropical island because of a severe storm . Jimmy buries the money in a swamp and seeks refuge at a primitive village where he befriends a nice priest ( amiable Federico Roberto ) and a lovely young lady ( the fetching Maria Grimn ) . Meanwhile a couple of no-count layabouts try to find Jimmy's money . While the plot has promise , director George Leskay crucially fails to inject any much-needed style or energy into the generally plodding proceedings . The talky , uneventful script , sluggish pace , numbing surplus of drab dialogue , and especially Jimmy's annoying incessant complaining about the white man's cruel mistreatment of Native Americans are all a grueling chore to endure . The gorgeous tropical scenery , Grimn's stunning brunette beauty , and a smidgen of action towards the very end offer a little relief from the overall tedium , but for the most part this film is way too dreary and drawn-out to provide any real fun and satisfying entertainment . |
519,432 | 8,239,592 | 97,705 | 3 | A real snoozer | Unhappily married rich lady Emanuelle ( luscious brunette knockout Malu ) is fed up with both her brutish , overbearing and disgusting lout husband Michael ( slimy Gianni Macchia ) and other men insensitively treating her like a piece of meat . So Emanuelle dumps Michael and gets involved in a torrid lesbian affair with enticing novelist Leona ( gorgeous stunner Micaela Lyonn ) . Sound good ? Well , it sure ain't so good due to Pasquale Fanetti's hopelessly flat and uninspired direction : Fanetti allows the sluggish pace to crawl along at an excruciatingly slow clip , a dull and drippy quality hangs heavy over the entire movie , and the whole thing crucially lacks any much-needed snazzy style or snappy momentum . While the female leads are certainly attractive ( and look quite delicious sans clothes ) , the soft-core sex scenes fail to generate any true heat because of Fanetti's bland presentation . You know a soft-core film isn't working when such seemingly can't miss ingredients as amply tasty distaff nudity , lesbianism , finger sucking , forced rough sex , erotic chopstick action , and voyeurism come across as boring and uninteresting . The insipidly droning mushy synthesizer score definitely doesn't help matters any . Only the sharp , pretty cinematography and the often nude beautiful bodies of the two female leads make this flick at least remotely watchable . But overall it's a total yawnfest . |
518,664 | 8,239,592 | 85,937 | 3 | Jackie Vernon tries hard to salvage this cheesy and tiresome horror comedy romp | Humor and horror don't easily mix together into a solid , cohesive , evenly balanced and satisfactory whole . It takes real skill and expertise to make such a precarious blending of diametrically opposite elements work well together . Well , this totally ineffective and often painfully unamusing clinker makes for a particularly sad example of just how horrendous a horror comedy can be when said necessary skill and expertise never manage to materialize in the film itself . Late , great wiseguy comedian Jackie Vernon portrays a meek , hen-pecked construction worker who offs his peevish wench of a shrewish wife , chops her up into itty-bitty pieces , wraps the body parts up in tin foil , and stuffs the remains in a freezer . One day Jackie noshes on some of his old lady's remains and subsequently develops an unsavory cannibalistic hankering for tasty female flesh . Pretty soon Jackie starts killing comely , flirtatious , available young lasses so he can ravenously eat their sweet delicious meat in order to appease his insatiable sicko appetite . Wayne Beswick's flaccid direction fails to inject any much-needed hopped-up vitality into this tired'n'tasteless tripe , thus letting " Microwave Massacre " crawl along at an excruciatingly gradual and seemingly never-ending lethargic tempo . The unceasingly crude catalog of bad big breast jokes , cheesy gold chains , poor prostitute japes , hideously unsightly mountainous masses of overpermed curly white guy Afro coiffures , silly swinging singles jests , moronic profanity jibes , scanty denim hot pants , putrid fake penis gags , shabby bell bottom jeans , and sophomoric sexual hi-jinks all prove beyond a reasonable doubt that cheerfully rancid'n'raunchy 70's bathroom humor has dated as well as the leisure suit and 8-track tapes ( i . e . , not well at all ) . However , Jackie tries admirably in a rare substantial lead role ; his droll , low-key sense of nicely bemused " why me ? " humor supplies some faint entertainment in this otherwise extremely tiresome junk . Acclaimed fright film production designer Robert Burns cameos as a mangy derelict who scratches his crotch with a severed arm he unearths in Jackie's garbage can . It's a genuine shame that the negative of this woefully unfunny would-be horror black comedy wasn't tossed in a trash can along with the witless script . |
518,809 | 8,239,592 | 89,299 | 3 | Was this disjointed mess meant to be some kind of spoof ? | Man , is this messed-up movie an unbearably dumb , lousy and often downright dreary piece of junk ! A crazed , bloodthirsty trio kill and terrorize several luckless individuals around the titular area . The freaky threesome are actually a nice , happy dysfunctional family : a crackpot dad who likes to do the dirty murderous deed while wearing a rubbery Richard Nixon mask , a bumbling imbecile son , and another insane , sanguinary idiot male offspring with live maggots residing in his scrambled cranium ( ! ) . A clumsily sincere attempt at a perversely humorous , darkly tongue-in-cheek backroads psycho picture parody , this film's extremely forced , spiritless , grinding - its - wheels - in - the - mud slack execution completely ruins its chances at being a reasonably on-target and effective send-up : Richard Casey's wan , idle direction , mostly flat acting from a generally insipid cast ( only legendary gonzo rock critic Richard Meltzer manages to deliver a lively , up to par performance as a cranky , ill-fated drunken motorist ) , lethargic pacing , weak stabs at grotesque warped humor ( e . g . , one victim steps on a rake right after having his throat cut ) , and a plodding , disjointed narrative all prevent this potentially fun flick from ever kicking into high gear . However , both the fairly rollicking score by Keith Grady and Suzanne McDermott and the passably professional photography by David Golia and Bill Pope neatly rise above the pervasive mediocrity . If it had been done with more polish and vigor this wash-out could have made for an amusing and enjoyably quirky little horror black comedy , but since it's really bland and slapdash it instead qualifies as a very middling and forgettable cinematic dead end . |
519,035 | 8,239,592 | 83,661 | 4 | A pretty dull , slow and forgettable horror washout | Neil ( Martin Kove , the evil martial arts instructor in the " Karate Kid " movies ) and his hottie wife Sherry ( the lovely Mary Louise Weller ; Mandy Pepperidge in " Animal House " ) go to a remote Greek island to find Neil's kooky wayward sister Madeline ( the gorgeous Deborah Shelton , who also sings the ending credits theme song ) . They not only find Madeline , but also shady fortune hunter Frye ( a hale'n'hearty slice of fat , juicy ham from James Earl Jones ) and his blonde bimbo girlfriend Barbara ( the adorable Lydia Cornell ) . Frye awakens an ancient evil sea beast from its centuries of slumber . The creature proceeds to eat a few folks including Barbara while she's swimming topless . The superstitious villagers decide to sacrifice the virginal Madeline to the creature in order to placate it . " Blood Tide " is a good example of a promising story let down by an extremely flat and uninspired execution . The cast is fine ( besides the aforementioned folks , we also have Jose Ferror as the mayor and Lila Kedrova as a nun ) , the Greek locations are breathtakingly beautiful , the plot is fresh and interesting , Weller and Cornell look spectacular in skimpy bikinis , but alas Richard Jeffries ' slack direction keeps the pace crawling along at a gruelingly sluggish clip and fails to create the necessary tension and creepy atmosphere required to make the premise work like it should ( Jeffries later made amends for his bungling here by co-writing the script for the excellent " Scarecrows " ) . Moreover , we hardly get to see the monster and when we finally do it looks pretty hokey and unconvincing . The tedious surplus of drippy dialogue doesn't help matters any either . Only in the last ten minutes does the pace pick up and the suspense kick in , but by then it's way too little much too late to make this anything more than a might - have - been - something - better wasted opportunity . |
517,966 | 8,239,592 | 86,428 | 4 | Stuck in the jungle with Jess Franco | An expedition party made up of constantly bickering and obnoxious jerks go trekking into the dangerous African jungle in search of both a fortune in diamonds and a missing young lady named Diana ( luscious brunette looker Katja Biernet , clad solely in a skimpy loincloth that shows off a lot of her hot shapely body ) who's worshiped as a goddess by a deadly primitive tribe called the Mabutos . Director / screenwriter Jess Franco crucially fails to inject any style or vigor into the generally blah and meandering proceedings , allowing the sluggish pace to crawl along at an often agonizingly slow clip and staging the infrequent action scenes with a singular lack of skill and panache . The lousy dubbing , excess amount of grainy " National Geographic " - like animal stock footage , groovy , jazzy lounge score , terrible acting , talky , uneventful narrative , tepid soft-core sex scenes , and static photography don't help matters any as well . Fortunately , there's plenty of tasty gratuitous nudity on sight to alleviate the tedium to a reasonable extent : Besides the delectable Biernert , both Aline Mess as fierce , wicked high priestess Noba and Mari Carmen Nieto as the conniving , treacherous Lita are likewise real easy on the eyes . The beautiful jungle scenery is very nice , too . But overall this picture sizes up as barely watchable and hence instantly forgettable swill . |
519,218 | 8,239,592 | 50,480 | 4 | A pretty substandard 50's yeti monster horror flick | Half Human was one of a handful of 50's monster horror flicks made about the Abominable Snowman . Although it's a marginal improvement over the abysmal " Snow Creature , " it's alas still no great shakes as a movie . Once more an expedition into the treacherous snowy mountains stumbles across the yeti and its offspring . They also discover a primitive society who worship the yeti ala the backwoods Bigfoot cult in the infamous sanguinary Sasquatch splatter hoot " Night of the Demon . " Unfortunately , the hack American distributors who released this film in the States produced a severely truncated and oversimplified version of this Japanese-made item ( it was done by Toho Studios , the same outfit responsible for " Godzilla , " which coincidentally was also drastically recut for American release ) . They chopped out 30 minutes and replaced ' em with cheap-looking , frustratingly needless and useless insert filler sequences starring the ever-desperate John Carradine ( in his first and probably least humiliating of three Sasquatch cinema gigs ) along with fellow washed-up has-been character actor Morris Ankrum . The sequences with Carradine and Ankrum are acted and directed with all the skill and flair of a first grade elementary school play , thus draining all the punch and tension out of a picture which could have been reasonably effective and interesting on its own . Further damage is wrought by Carradine's asinine narrative commentary ( " Even in death his face still carried an expression of fear , shock and unadulterated terror " ) . In a shameless cost-cutting move Carradine's nonstop blathering drowns out all of the film's original dialogue , therefor eliminating the necessity of any dubbing . It's a testament to director Inoshiro ( " Rodan , " " Mothra " ) Honda's talent that a modicum of spooky atmosphere and a dash of poignant tragedy somehow manage to shine through this chintzy ragbag melange of dreary talk and eye-filling travelogue footage . Moreover , the yeti himself is quite impressive : brawny , limber , and toweringly gigantic , he's a genuinely redoubtable beastman . If there only had been less dull chitchat and more cool creature , this could have been a pretty enjoyable and enthralling romp . But there isn't , so it ain't . |
517,965 | 8,239,592 | 98,072 | 4 | Umberto Lenzi's disappointingly lackluster " danger on the road " psycho thriller | Misogynistic psycho wackjob Mark ( a creepily manic and intense performance by handsome beefcake hunk Joe Balogh ) wears mirror shades , suffers from a severe mommy complex , drives a fancy expensive Winnebago , and has a nasty penchant for picking up stray foxy young female hitchhikers whom he likes to rape , debase and brutally murder . Mark chooses the feisty Daniela ( gorgeous blonde hottie Josie Bissett , who went on to slightly more respectable work as a regular on the trashy nighttime soap opera " Melrose Place " ) as his next victim and abducts her . Daniela's obsessive boyfriend Kevin ( woodenly played by Jason Saucier ) gives chase . Limply directed by spaghetti splatter specialist Umberto ( " Nightmare City " ) Lenzi ( who also wrote the flat , clichéd , talky cookie cutter script ) , with slack pacing , nil suspense , mostly mild and goreless violence , atrocious acting , and a humdrum plot which offers no fresh twists or novel surprises , this strictly from hunger Eurodreck rip-off of " The Hitcher " qualifies as a real stinker . However , both Jerry Phillip's polished cinematography and Carlo Maria Cordio's throbbing rock score are up to par , while the copious gratuitous nudity rates as the single most watchable and enjoyable thing in this whole godforsaken turkey ( said nudity includes several scenes of Bissett in the buff and an especially tasty wet t-shirt contest ) . And hardcore Bissett bashers such as yours truly should get a kick out of the extensive degradation Josie suffers throughout the flick : she's drugged , gagged and handcuffed by our star loony , has her hair cut short and dyed black , gets photographed by nutso while nude and unconscious , and is even forced to watch the freak carve the word " pig " in Kevin's chest . Taking that last nugget into consideration , I guess this picture ain't so bad after all . |
517,995 | 8,239,592 | 56,674 | 5 | So-so historical drama offers too much talk and not enough action | The noble , wise King Sardanapolo ( a solid performance by Hoaward Duff ) and his more soft and naive younger brother Prince Sammash ( likable Luciano Marin ) get into a bitter feud over the affections of sweet and alluring innocent peasant girl Mirra ( gorgeous redhead stunner Jocelyn Lane ) . Meanwhile , the treacherous and ruthlessly ambitious General Arbace ( a perfectly hateful Giancarlo Sbragia ) plots against both siblings . Sounds pretty gripping and exciting , right ? Well , alas it just ain't . Director Silvio Amadio gets the film off to a sluggish start and unfortunately fails to gain any momentum later on , thus allowing the picture to grind along at a pretty slow and meandering rate . Moreover , the talky script by Gino De Santis , Diego Fabbri , and Sergio Spina becomes bogged down in drippy soap opera-style situations and way too much banal dialogue . This film only occasionally bursts to life with the sporadic exciting moment : a thrilling lion hunt , a few stirring rough'n'ready swordfights , and a rousing large scale last reel flood . The capable cast do their best with the static material . Both Tino Santoni's lush widescreen cinematography and the spirited score by Carlo Savini , Mario Mascimbene , and Angelo Francesco Lavagnino are up to par . Watchable , but overall really blah and hence instantly forgettable . |
519,138 | 8,239,592 | 74,494 | 5 | A pretty mediocre and forgettable flick | This strangely colorless film blends elements from several different genres - - Mafia pictures , drug deal features , your basic shoot ' em up actionfest , and a standard car chase romp , all tied together with a mismatched buddy crime-fighting duo - - into a bland mishmash that crucially fails to develop a flavorful distinction which could have allowed all the disparate bits and pieces to jell into a pleasingly coherent and enjoyable whole . Moreover , the unmistakably British Roger Moore is horribly miscast as a partly Italian lawyer who's assigned by a powerful mob capo to nail the three brutal thugs who smuggled a million dollars worth of smack into the country by hiding the dope inside a large wooden cross . Moore , assisted by jocular grand prix professional race car driver Stacy Keach ( who gives a solid , lively performance that's much better than the insipid material deserves ) , pounds the pavement for the dirtbags and uncovers a series of double and triple crosses which lead to a shocking revelation of a grim secret stemming from Moore's shadowy past . Maurizio Lucidi's merely adequate direction remains resolutely workmanlike from start to finish , putting too much emphasis on dull chitchat during the opening and middle of the movie . In addition , the poky , erratic pace and a curious sense of unfortunate restraint prevents this picture from acquiring both the baroque style and trashy vitality it needs to seriously cook . However , things do finally come to life in the reasonably sound and exciting last half hour , with a rousing car chase and a few bloody shoot-outs enlivening the general tedium . Still , the humdrum script that was co-written by noted screenwriter Ernest Tidyman ( who also penned " Shaft " and " The French Connection " ) and future " Grease " director Randal Kleiser , sticks too closely to run-of-the-mill predictable and unsurprising crime thriller conventions , thereby making this mediocre outing a strictly middling and passable time-killer at best . |
518,027 | 8,239,592 | 92,030 | 5 | A huge letdown | 1865 : A sadistic Union army commander forces several Confederate soldiers to walk across a minefield , brutally slaughtering the whole luckless lot of ' em in the process . 1985 : A small group of raw Army recruits go into the same backwoods territory where the massacre occurred for basic maneuvers . The motley assortment of scruffy grunts discover the hard way that the eerie land is crawling with vicious , inhospitable , creepily cadaverous skull-faced zombies who don't take kindly to any trespassers on their sacred terrain . The zoms are still alive because a little psychic boy who witnessed the massacre in 1865 refuses to let the poor buggers die . The kid's beautiful , still alive mother ( the strikingly comely Margaret Shendal ) falls for nice guy GI Ray ( hunky Maxwell Caulfield of " Grease 2 " and " The Boys Next Door " fame ) while the other less lucky squad members get stiffed by the shambling undead Civil War ghouls . Although the seemingly can't miss premise - - a genuinely inspired fright film amalgam of " 2000 Maniacs , " " Southern Comfort " and " Night of the Living Dead " - - promises a good , spooky " high concept " horror movie outing , " The Supernaturals " alas qualifies as a humongous letdown due largely to a terribly dry and rudimentary execution . Director Armand Mastroianni , the same guy responsible for the awfully boring slasher turkey " He Knows You're Alone , " crucially fails to build any necessary tension or momentum , thus allowing this dud to tediously slog towards a rather drawn-out , less-than-harrowing conclusion . Caulfield , Nichelle Nichols ( " Star Trek " ' s Lt . Uhura ) , Levar Burton , Bobby Di Cicco , Talia Balsam , and " Bad Ronald " ' s Scott Jacoby all contribute excellent , creditable performances , but not even their considerable acting skills can inject any much-needed vitality into this lifeless , lethargic loser . The nifty , scarcely seen zombie make-up by Mark Shostrom and Kevin Yagher , a typically nice , moody score by the great , grossly under-appreciated B-movie composer Robert O . ( " Mansion of the Doomed , " " Grizzly " ) Ragland , and Peter Collister's stately , proficient cinematography are all up to snuff , but sound technical credits can't compensate for this snoozer's unbearably dormant , extremely slow and soporific pacing , conspicuously meager two-cent production values , and a hopelessly muddled , confusing story that isn't unraveled in a clear , compelling manner . Co-written and co-produced by longtime hack horror filmmaker Joel Soisson , this stupendously lackluster Sandy Howard production proves to be as successful at evoking chills and involving the viewer as General Custer was at besting the Indians at the Battle of Little Big Horn . |
519,186 | 8,239,592 | 74,769 | 5 | A strictly so-so Satanic cult horror potboiler | Feisty Father Roche ( a lively and engaging performance by Donald Pleasence ) , comely Laurie ( lovely blonde looker Luan Peters ) , and drippy , skeptical New York City detective Milo ( the hopelessly dull Costa Skouras ) investigate the mysterious disappearances of several tourists on a Greek island and discover a nefarious cult of Devil worshipers led by the dapperly dastardly Baron Corofax ( splendidly played to the suavely sinister hilt by the great Peter Cushing ) . Blandly directed by Kostas Karagiannis , further undermined by sluggish pacing , a really talky and uneventful narrative , a crippling lack of tension and spooky atmosphere , and a restrictive PG rating which puts the kibosh on any gratuitous nudity and hardcore graphic violence , this standard Satanic cult horror potboiler barely passes muster as a merely adequate and acceptable diversion . While Brian Eno's spare , wonky electronic score , Aris Stavrou's pretty , picturesque photography , a decent sprinkling of splatter in the literally explosive climax , and the always welcome presences of both Cushing and Pleasence are all up to speed , this disappointingly tame'n'tepid timewaster overall still isn't anything to write home about . It's only worth seeing once and that's about it . |
518,318 | 8,239,592 | 71,465 | 5 | A strictly so-so " Exorcist " cash-in | The vengeful spirit of the old and evil witch Mother Gautere ( the hideously grotesque Tota Alba ) possesses the body of innocent little girl Susan Barnes ( the extremely homely and irritating Marian Salgado ) in order to get revenge on Mr . Barnes ( the bland Angel del Pozo ) , a widower politician who had Mother Gautere arrested and put in jail by the police for kidnapping a baby for a satanic sacrifice . " Blind Dead " series auteur Amando de Ossorio's flat , plodding direction and trite'n'talky script both crucially fail to provide the necessary tension and momentum required to make this fright feature an effective and absorbing shocker . Vincent Minaya's plain cinematography , the crummy dubbing , the primitive ( not so ) special effects , and the shoddy make-up don't help matters any . Only the nicely eerie and elegant score by Diego and Victor manages to be up to par . The solid cast do their best with the mediocre material : Julian Mateos as morally upright priest Father Juan , Lone Fleming as concerned housekeeper Miss Crawford , alluring brunette hottie Kali Hansa as a wicked gypsy witch , Daniel Martin as honest newspaper reporter William Grant , Maria Kosty as spiteful whore Esther , and ubiquitous rotund spaghetti Western regular Fernando Sancho in one of his customary hard-nosed police chief roles . The possession stuff is pretty run-of-the-mill : we get the usual levitations , excessive nasty swearing , and a manifestation of slimy toads . In one amusing scene Susan castrates a guy after strangling him . This movie also scores a few points for its surprisingly downbeat ending . But overall it sizes up as a merely adequate and acceptable timekiller . |
518,338 | 8,239,592 | 82,778 | 5 | A really so-so made-for-TV reunion flick | The second and final " The Munsters " reunion film alas isn't half as solid and funny as the very enjoyable " Munster , Go Home ! " . While the plot has potential - - evil criminal mastermind Dr . Diablo ( a frantically mugging Sid Caesar ) creates robot lookalikes of Herman and Grandpa in order to pull off an elaborate heist - - the execution of said plot unfortunately leaves a good deal to be desired . Don Weis ' flat direction crucially fails to capture the sweet charm and zany energy of the TV show . Instead the movie just plods along while the humor tends to feel both tired and forced . Harry L . Wolf's pedestrian cinematography , Vic Mizzy's mechanically bouncy score , and the shoddy make-up and ( not so ) special effects are also pretty blah and unremarkable . However , the cast do their best with the mediocre material : Fred Gwynne as lovably bumbling oaf Herman and Al Lewis as cranky old Grandpa play off each other well , Yvonne De Carlo is fine as usual , but isn't given much to do as Lily , Jo McDonnell makes for a cute and appealing Marilyn , Peter Fox contributes a likable performance as nice guy detective Glen , and Bob Hastings is a total robust hoot as a jolly opera-singing Phantom of the Opera . While not a complete disaster , this picture nonetheless lacks the essential spark to be anything more than a merely okay diversion . |
518,825 | 8,239,592 | 124,319 | 5 | Pretty blah historical drama | The city of Rome is under siege from an enemy army . After failing to slay the leader of the opposing army , brave General Mucius ( a solid and credible performance by brawny erstwhile Tarzan Gordon Scott ) mutilates his right hand by sticking it in a fire . However , Mucius does manage to develop a truce with kindly King Porsenna ( well played by Roldano Lupi ) and his noble son Arunte ( likable Gabriele Antonini ) . Alas , the evil , treacherous and unscrupulous General Tarquino ( a fine performance by Massimo Serato ) goes out of his way to foil said truce so he can become the tyrannical ruler of Rome . Sound gripping and thrilling ? Unfortunately , this film's potentially stirring plot gets greatly undermined by Giorgio Ferroni's pedestrian direction and Antonio Visone's extremely talky script . The plodding pace in particular saps much of the momentum and excitement from the meandering narrative . Moreover , the infrequent rough'n'ready swordfights are for the most part staged with precious little flair . Only an impressively massive last reel epic battle set piece finally manages to bring the picture to life . That said , both Augusto Tiezzi's crisp cinematography and especially Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's robust'n'rousing score are up to par . As an added plus , Gabriella Pallotta as Mucius ' loyal fiancé Clelia and Maria Pia Conte as the fetching Valeria are quite easy on the eyes . Watchable , but overall kind of dull and instantly forgettable . |
518,045 | 8,239,592 | 72,698 | 5 | A strictly okay 70's made-for-TV supernatural thriller | A classic example of a film which sadly fizzles when it really ought to sizzle . The basic premise is certainly intriguing enough : a handful of folks in planes and boats alike mysteriously vanish in the legendary Bermuda Triangle located just off the coast of Florida . Alas , William A . Graham's blandly by-the-numbers direction crucially fails to provide any much-needed suspense , vitality and spooky atmosphere . Instead the movie gets bogged down in a tedious surplus of dull talk , with precious few scares or action to alleviate the general boredom . The cast do their best with the meandering story : Fred MacMurray gives a typically robust and amiable performance as an affable retired wealthy businessman while both Sam Groom and Donna Mills are solid and engaging as an estranged young couple . Plus future " Different Strokes " TV sitcom star Dana Plato pops up as a spunky little girl whose mother disappears in the Devil's Triangle . Gayne Rescher's pretty , picturesque photography and Harry Sukman's suitably shivery'n'sinister score are likewise up to par . But only at the very end does this largely lethargic snoozer finally come to life and deliver some excitement with a fairly creepy zinger of a surprise ending , but by then it's way too little much too late to redeem this mediocre timewaster . |
518,789 | 8,239,592 | 212,042 | 5 | A strictly so-so film | Workoholic architect Mike Voray ( an engaging performance by the suave Jean-Pierre Aumont ) neglects his fed-up and unfaithful wife Lynn ( the fetching Alix Talton ) . One fateful day Lynn runs out on Mike . The police soon find out that Lynn was murdered and naturally suspect Mike of being the killer . Sound exciting ? Well , it just ain't . George Cahan's bland direction lacks flair and style . Moreover , Cahan allows the pace to plod along at a sluggish clip and crucially fails to build any tension or momentum . In addition , Bill Barrett's talky script gets bogged down in banal dialogue and sudsy soap operaish subplots . On the plus side , the Rio setting adds some much-needed exotic flavor to the tedious proceedings , Aumont's solid acting just manages to hold everything together , the supporting cast is solid , and both Americo Hoss ' stark black and white cinematography and the tasty flamenco score by Luiz Bonfra and Nicea Martins are up to speed . But overall this picture is way to slow and meandering to amount to anything more than an insipid and forgettable wash-out . |
519,038 | 8,239,592 | 409,182 | 6 | Not bad , but inferior to the original | I was expecting this film to be much worse than it was . It's passable and enjoyable enough , but the original was superior in many ways . For example , the original took its time developing the characters before the big wave hits the boat and capsizes it . Here we get roughly twenty minutes of sketchy character development and then BAM ! The wave hits the boat and a motley assortment of cardboard cut-outs . . . oops , I mean characters - - Kurt Russell as a former firefighter and mayor of New York , Emmy Rossum as his hottie daughter , Josh Lucas as a slick gambler , Richard Dreyfuss as a depressed gay architect , and so on - - struggle to get out of the ship before it sinks . Another problem is that it's fairly predictable as far as who lives and who dies . For instance , Kevin Dillon's obnoxious loudmouth loser meets a totally expected untimely fate . Freddy Rodriguez's helpful waiter likewise buys it early on just like Roddy McDowall before him . However , the death of two other characters later on did really surprise me . A third big flaw is the fact that nobody notices a humongous tidal wave in advance . I mean , wouldn't there be a sophisticated radar on the ship which would spot this enormous thing ? I guess not . And exactly where in the great big sea is this gargantuan luxury liner ? We are never told or find out . And the fact that there just happens to be a life raft with a flare gun in it for our survivors to board at the movie's end is a laughably ludicrous contrivance which totally negates credibility . Clearly , the script here is seriously lacking in substance . So why am I giving this honey a ? Well , for starters the cast all turn in solid performances : Russell makes for a properly strong and stalwart lead , Lucas has roguish charm to spare , Rossum is very cute and appealing , and Dreyfuss is his usual reliable self . Wolfgang Petersen's commendably tight and brisk direction keeps the movie rattling along at a steady clip ; there are no lulls to speak of . The breakneck pacing is both the film's greatest strength and biggest weakness at the same time . Sure , there isn't a dull moment , but you never truly care about the characters because they are given precious little screen time to effectively register as sympathetic human beings . Thankfully , we don't get any hammy histrionics from the admirably serious cast . The tension does build to a stirring and absorbing fever pitch as the film plugs along . The overturned ship is believably dangerous and littered with dead bodies ( a nice realistic touch in a film that's otherwise largely bereft of plausibility ) . And the special effects are both awesome and convincing ; the capsizing of the ship in particular is a genuinely exciting and harrowing set piece . So overall this ain't half bad , but the original was much better . |
519,030 | 8,239,592 | 132,726 | 6 | Pretty standard soft-core sexploitation fare | Naive boxer Johnny ( amiable lunkhead Steve Hodge ) gets ruthlessly pushed around by his greedy and mean-spirited manager Sammy Beal ( essayed with suitably slimy aplomb by John Tull ) , who in turn is having problems with nefarious mobster Louie ( a nicely sleazy Fred Finkleloffe ) . Veteran trash skinflick director Bethal Buckalew relates the sordid story at a plodding pace , but fortunately crams this schlock with more than enough gratuitous nudity and sizzling soft-core sex to make this junk a perfectly agreeable diversion . The exquisitely busty'n'lusty Uschi Digard steams up the screen by engaging in scorching hot raunchy sex with Sammy in a swimming pool . The ever-adorable Rene Bond likewise heats things up as a lovely hooker Sammy first terrorizes before doing just what you think with . Leggy and statuesque brunette knockout Mirka Madnadrazsky as the enticing Lisa may not be much of an actress , but she sure looks mighty tasty in the buff . The bluesy theme song provides a solid belly laugh . Ditto the surprise downbeat ending . The acting ain't much , although the always reliable George " Buck " Flower contributes a typically funny and robust turn as affably rundown and stuttering past-his-prime trainer Benny Bravo . Overall nothing special , but reasonably enjoyable fare for fans of this type of undemanding drive-in swill . |
518,947 | 8,239,592 | 75,086 | 6 | A strictly so-so 70's drive-in cheerleader comic romp | This strangely lackluster Crown International Pictures offering was a massive drive-in success , but alas it barely earns passing marks as a merely acceptable timewaster . The main problem with this film is that there's too much emphasis on the supposedly funny , but more often just plain dumb and annoying hotrod-racing antics of Rosedale High School students Robert ( " Massacre at Central High " ) Carradine and Michael Mullins . The much more luscious and enticing female stars Lisa Reeves and Jennifer ( " The Centerfold Girls " ) Ashley are relegated to secondary supporting status while the always appreciated and invigorating presence of the immensely adorable and angelic Rainbeaux Smith is shamefully wasted in a minor small part . Worse yet , this pretty tepid movie isn't anywhere near as raunchy or energetic as other entries in this funky sub-genre . Only a slight smattering of skin and the sporadic hoppin ' moment ( two couples tumbling down a hill , the mandatory chicks - peeling - out - of - their - threads locker room scene , the climactic " Rebel Without A Pause " - inspired chicken car race ) alleviate the general tedium . Still , dependably gruff character actor James Gammon makes for a marvelously hateful villain as a brutish football coach , Reeves , Ashley , Smith , Diane Lee Hart and Susan Player Jarreau are all real easy on the eyes ( and all of ' em take off their clothes , albeit only briefly ) , and the film does kill 90 minutes in a relatively painless and diverting manner . Director Joseph Ruben eventually graduated to bigger and better things with the superior 80's thrillers " The Stepfather " and " True Believer . " |
518,256 | 8,239,592 | 79,027 | 6 | Not half bad | Given that John " Bud " Cardos took over directorial chores three or four days into shooting after original director Tobe Hooper proved woefully out of his league handling a full-scale production crew , " The Dark " definitely isn't the wretched , foul-smelling unmitigated stinker it's often derisively written off as being . Granted , this modest sci-fi / horror tale of a pernicious extraterrestrial decapitating several Los Angeles residents ( the first victim is played by none other than Paris Hilton's real life mom Kathy Richards ! ) does suffer from a rather slow , meandering pace , a few dreary lulls in the action , choppy editing which frequently borders on confounding , and a muddled script ( the alien angle was tossed in at the last minute ; the beast was originally supposed to be a flesh-eating zombie ) , but otherwise it's technically sound . Cardos manages to create a reasonable amount of tension , stages the kill scenes with laudable restraint , and really delivers with the excitingly over-the-top grand payoff ending , a fiery , all-hell's-broken-loose , packs one hell of a bunch final face-off in which the rot-faced intergalactic ghoul turns many of L . A . ' s finest pigs into smoking strips of crisp bacon by shooting laser beams from its eyes . John Morrill's cinematography gives the film a slick , attractive look which successfully bellies the movie's low budget ( Lee Frost was an assistant cameraman ) , making especially impressive use of dissolves and super-impositions . Roger Kellaway's first-rate freaky score also warrants appraisal , boasting an odd , eerie , unintelligible ghostly whispering vocal ( " the daaa-rrk ! " ) that takes on a truly unnerving black mass-like incantatory quality . The superior B-movie cast rates as another significant plus . The always strong and commanding William ( " Rolling Thunder , " " Red Alert " ) Devane as an ex-con turned best-selling crime novelist who's obsessed with catching the alien after it butchers his only daughter , Richard Jaeckel as the rugged , hard-nosed cop on the case , Jacqueline Hyde as an eccentric old gypsy fortune teller , and Keenan Wynn as a gruff , but fair television station manager all contribute excellent performances . Appearing in nifty bits are Vivian ( " Parasite " ) Blaine as a haughty jet-setter , biker film vet Gary Littlejohn cunningly cast against type as a police officer , and a pre - " Miami Vice " Phillip Michael Thomas as a belligerent gang leader . The massive , shambling John Bloom , a bulky , imposing hulk of man who played the monster in Al Adamson's " Dracula Vs . Frakenstein " and the retarded guy in " The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant , " makes for a marvelously menacing murderous fiend . Even the novel casting of pint-sized Top 40 disc jockey Casey Kasem as a pathologist works surprisingly well , mainly because Kasem himself plays his minor part commendably straight . Only Cathy Lee Crosby as a crusading up-and-coming female TV reporter who wants to prove herself to her skeptical sexist pig male colleagues disappoints , proving once and for all that she's more of a pretty face than a genuine actress . Overall , this unjustly maligned movie ain't half bad . |
519,283 | 8,239,592 | 79,777 | 6 | A not half bad , but terribly slow & lackluster 70's post-nuke sci-fi / action flick | Being the hard-core aficionado of post-apocalyptic sci-fi / action features that I am , I naturally was pretty pumped at the prospect of finally seeing this extremely rare , forgotten and elusive genre entry after taping it in its uncut entirety off of cable . I didn't really know what to expect , since this was given a spotty release by Columbia and received extremely negative reviews by the handful of critics who bothered to see it during its fleeting theatrical run . After viewing it I can now say it's neither the best nor worst of its type . Instead , it rates as a strictly middling affair that basically does the trick but never totally amounts to anything truly special or resonant . The plot set-up is standard , but serviceable enough : Following a devastating nuclear holocaust the world has thoroughly degenerated into a bleak , harsh , desolate and dangerous hellhole where all hope has been lost , food is scarce , and vicious vulturous packs of roving ragtag psycho freaks called " ravagers " loot and kill with merciless abandon . A scuzzy band of filthy no-count " ravagers " led by ruthless sleazoid Anthony James viciously rape and murder the lovely wife ( bewitching blonde Alana Hamilton ) of cagey , cautious , constantly on the move loner Richard Harris , who narrowly avoids getting bagged himself . Harris makes a risky and arduous trek across the dry , barren , perilous wasteland , befriending both a lovably crackpot army sergeant ( a delightfully dotty Art Carney ) and a sassy lass ( ravishing brunette Ann Turkel ) during his journey . James and his grimy gang doggedly pursue Harris every step of the way . Harris and his newfound friends discover a heavily fortified redoubt run by benevolently jovial and avuncular dictator Ernest Borgnine . James and his foul flunkies close in to attack the fortress . Donald Sanford's neatly realized script keeps the story moving and further offers a provocative theme addressing the difficulty of regaining hope in the wake of a severe catastrophe which has rendered the world a most feral , unkind and godforsaken place . Unfortunately , Richard Compton's uneven direction runs hot and cold throughout , thereby scuppering a good deal of the sound script's potential . The film gets off to a cracking start , sags a lot at mid-point by becoming much too dull , talky and sluggish , but luckily gets back on thrilling track with a genuinely rousing conclusion . The cast is uniformly solid : Harris does well as the plausibly rumpled and rundown survival-weary protagonist , the ever-slimy lanky beanpole James makes for a splendidly scurvy villain , and both Turkel and Hamilton are quite charming as well as real easy on the eyes . Seymour Cassel as a doomed blind lawyer and the always dignified Woody Strode as a shrewd survivalist contribute nifty cameos . Fred Karlin's stirring score and Vincent Saizis ' grungy cinematography are likewise up to par . Tasty trivia tidbit : Gilda Texter , the cute blonde naked girl on the motorcycle in " Vanishing Point , " designed the ratty costumes . Alas , the often painfully poky pacing , infrequent outbursts of reasonably effective , albeit rather bland action , much too tame violence , and , most damagingly , a restrictive PG rating which prevents the picture from completely achieving the raw , gritty , no-holds-barred ferocious tone this baby desperately needs to fully work prevent " Ravagers " from being an all-out knock-your-socks-off winner . If it was only more lively and down'n'dirty nasty in both its content and execution then " Ravagers " would have rocked . As it is , very flawed and imperfect , but not without a few substantial merits , it's passable , but altogether nothing terribly potent or spectacular . |
518,611 | 8,239,592 | 66,996 | 6 | A strictly so-so woman-in-jeopardy thriller | Saucy free-spirited tart Marianne ( a sweetly disarming performance by the delectable Susan George ) will inherit a sizable sum of money from her wealthy , but severely dysfunctional family on her 21st birthday . Susan will also acquire several documents about the illegal activities of her crooked judge father ( well played by Leo Genn ) . Pretty soon Marianne finds herself in substantial danger . Director Pete ( " Frightmare " ) Walker crucially fails to wring much tension or momentum from the standard woman-in-peril thriller potboiler premise . Moreover , Walker lets the pace crawl along at a sluggish rate , thereby ensuring that a dull quality hangs heavy throughout most of the movie . Norman Langley's pretty , picturesque cinematography makes cool use of fades , dissolves and split screen . Cyril Ornadel's lush , elegant score , the scenic Portugal locations and the haunting melancholy theme song are all likewise solid and effective . Nice supporting turns by Barry Evans as loyal boyfriend Eli , the lovely Judy Huxtable as bitchy half-sister Hildegarde , and Christopher Sandford as bitter ex-suitor Sebastian . Susan George's deliciously considerable pulchritudinous presence keeps the picture watchable : Susan does a memorably sexy go-go dance during the groovy opening credits sequence and looks absolutely smashing in a skimpy black bikini . Unfortunately , Murray Smith's tediously talky script , an off-putting glum tone and the slow-going , largely uneventful plot make this feature a really draggy chore to endure . A merely decent timewaster . |
519,369 | 8,239,592 | 73,758 | 7 | A perfectly enjoyable , if altogether unremarkable made-for-TV timekiller | This failed pilot for a possible TV cop show plays like a watered down made-for-TV version of " The French Connection . " Your standard motley assortment of mismatched law enforcers - - wiseguy narcotics detective from the New York neighborhood Cliff Gorman , stuffy by-the-book FBI agent Donald Blakely , and an eager beaver rookie surveillance expert played by a very young and then unknown Richard Gere - - join together to thwart a nefarious Big Apple heroin drug ring ( late , great longtime favorite sleazeball character actor Joe Spinell pops up as one of the despicable no-count dope dealers ) . The story is every bit as trite and predictable as the above synopsis suggests , but fortunately the brisk direction by Barry ( " Wild in the Streets , " " Across 110th Street " ) Shear , several thrilling action scenes , solid acting from a good cast ( Gorman in particular is quite lively and engaging while Gere acquits himself nicely in one of his first-ever thespic gigs ) , and a pleasingly short'n'snappy 74 minute running time make this item a perfectly enjoyable , if altogether unremarkable diversion . |
519,223 | 8,239,592 | 244,807 | 7 | A pretty good , but flawed and occasionally tedious 70's R & B concert documentary | A cluttered , splintered and technically shabby 96 minute music documentary ragbag depicting a 15-hour special concert held in Ghana to celebrate that African country's 14th anniversary of independence . Many popular jazz and rhythm and blues artists are prominently featured herein , all of whom come through with 100 % on the money performances which are sloppily sandwiched between drably shot , sometimes interesting , but more often pretty tedious footage of tribal dances , resident talent acts which vary from authentically earthy ( the medicine man with the musical ball is simply amazing ) to slick and touristy shallow , star singers sampling Ghanaian cuisine , extensive background historical detail on the South African slave trade , a walk through dilapidated ruins , and pit stops at villages complete with excess shopping and amiable chats with locals . Luckily , the concert footage seriously cooks with high octane unleaded gas . The Staple Singers cut to the heart of the matter with the stirring workers ' rights anthem " When Will I Get Paid ? " and the rousing gospel rock number " Are You Sure ? , " while Roberta Flack wrenches the emotions with the poignant mid-tempo break-up tune " Trying Times . " The Voices of East Harlem engage in a fantastic impromptu a capella street jam and cut loose on the thrilling " Run Shaker Life . " Santana , assisted by excellent guest percussionist Willie Bobo , lay down the blistering instrumental " Jingo " before ripping away into a sensationally sensual , smoldering and spirited rendition of the great " Black Magic Woman . " Rumpled old bluesmen Les McCann and Eddie Harris do a wonderfully spontaneous beat box duet on the plane en route to the concert and team up on stage for the fine raspy-throated blues scorcher " Heyjorler . " Ike and Tina Turner deliver a positively smoking set which includes the cracked New Orleans R & B novelty gem " Ooh Poo Pah Doo , " the classic " River Deep , Mountain High , " and the especially awesome lowdown gritty blues wailer " I Smell Trouble " - - the latter highlighted by Ike's incredibly fiery protracted guitar solo . Lastly , Wilson Pickett closes the concert on an exciting note with a spectacularly incendiary version of " Land of A 1 , 000 Dances , " much to the enjoyment of a totally with-it audience . Although marred by uneven direction by Denis Sanders ( who also helmed the Big E concert picture " Elvis : That's the Way It Is " and the immortal 70's drive-in cult hoot " Invasion of the Bee Girls " ) , occasionally slack pacing , a crucial lack of narrative cohesion , Erik Daarstad's shaky cinematography ( Vilmos Zsigmund was one of the cameramen ) , and Sidney Levin's limp editing , the documentary's overall sincere tone , strong sense of time and history , the flavorsome evocation of an exotic foreign milieu , and , of course , the powerhouse strength of the concert performances make this flawed , yet still solid film well worth seeing . |
518,016 | 8,239,592 | 70,002 | 7 | A pretty good , but flawed made-for-TV musical adaptation of the classic story | Here's a very unlikely and peculiar fright feature : an early 70's NBC-TV musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Victorian-era novella with an unusually cast Kirk Douglas in the dual role of the good-hearted , blandly respectable Dr . Jekyll and his evil , lusty , gleefully immoral and animalistic id-run-amok alter ego Mr . Hyde . What's most surprising about this audaciously imaginative enterprise is how to a sizable degree it works extremely well . There's no denying that the schizophrenic titular part is any true actor's dream role ; Douglas clearly knows this and gladly sinks his teeth into the part , playing the two wildly contrasting characters with lip-smacking brio . The rest of the cast is made up of top-drawer British thespians : Susan Hampshire radiates considerable charm as Jekyll's fiancé , Sir Michael Redgrave portrays Hampshire's prim'n'proper gentleman father to stuffy perfection , Donald Pleasence simply delights as a petty , scraggly street peddler , Susan George has a grand bawdy time as a fiercely proud and blithely naughty saloon showgirl , and Stanley Holloway displays an appropriate amount of concern as Jekyll's loyal , worried butler . Sherman Yellen's script astutely captures the repressive mores and scientific curiosity which defined late 19th century London . The lavish costumes and fog-shrouded sets vividly evoke the period . The score by Lionel Bart , Mel Mandell and Norman Sachs is rather hit-or-miss , supplying a decidedly mixed bag of tunes which range from mediocre and forgettable to lively and enjoyable . The better songs are good , jaunty fun , distinguished by especially catchy and witty lyrics . The cast belt out the songs with terrifically infectious aplomb ; it's a real treat to see Douglas , Pleasence and the underrated George cheerfully rip into their numbers . Alas , there are a few glaring flaws which gum things up to a fair extent : pedestrian , workmanlike direction by David Winters ( who later helmed the laughably bad Joe Spinell psycho vehicle " The Last Horror Film " ) , flat cinematography , and a blurry , rough-on-the-eyes shot-on-video look that results in an ugly and unappealing visual texture . These faults asides , this picture still holds up as an admirably fresh and novel take on an often-told hoary old chestnut creepy tale . |
518,915 | 8,239,592 | 386,783 | 7 | A solid little low-budget slasher film | Six college kids driving back from a rock festival run afoul of a couple of psycho hillbilly brothers when their van breaks down on a remote rural road in the middle of nowhere . You can basically fill in the blanks as to what happens next , so it's a real testament to writer / director / producer / cinematographer / co-editor Marc Selz's skill and talent that this solid little low-budget indie horror shocker packs an unexpectedly strong and startling knock - the - wind - out - of - your - lungs lingering gut punch . This up to snuff number hits all the necessary slice'n'dice body count slasher bases to pass muster as a definite winner : capable direction , likable characters , a shivery gloom-doom synthesizer score , rough , grainy , yet still fairly polished photography which lends a pleasingly raw , stark and jump-out-at-you gritty immediacy to the grisly proceedings , genuinely hair-raising outbursts of ferociously gory and ugly violence , a tightly constructed plot , a refreshingly terse and to the point filler-free 75 minute running time , a substantial amount of hard , gripping and sweaty tension , and , best of all , one hell of a socko surprise twist ending . Overall , there's enough cinematic strengths present and accounted for to compensate for the hit-or-miss acting and extremely variable sound quality . |
518,025 | 8,239,592 | 94,693 | 7 | A pretty good , but uneven B-horror medical action thriller | This fun'n'funky little low-budget B-horror medical action item centers on an illegal underground black market human body organ ring which uses kidnapped young people as involuntary donors . P . J . Soles portrays the ruthless ice-cold bitch who runs the evil operation with tremendous lip-smacking venomous panache while the great William Smith lends his always welcome and commanding presence as the head surgeon . Rugged rancher Ross Hagen ( who also directed ) and his bitter , burnt-out former cop best buddy Hoke Howell hit the streets in search of Hagen's daughter after she gets abducted by crazed flunky Russ Tamblyn ( who gives a gloriously gonzo and over-the-top eye-rolling hambone performance ) . Meanwhile , Clint Howard pops up as a pathetic rapist orderly and his father Rance appears as a corrupt police detective . Gary Graver's typically accomplished cinematography gives the film a nice , polished look . The dialogue boasts a few hard-boiled gems ; my favorite is Howell's splendidly cynical and pessimistic philosophy : " The whole world is a stinking toilet that's just waiting to be flushed . " However , Hagen's direction is strictly hit-or-miss : The opening third is painfully slow and meandering , but fortunately the pace kicks in and the movie gets progressively better as it goes along , culminating in a rousing climax with a thrilling car chase and equally exciting shoot-out that really deliver the slam-bang stirring goods . And the scene where Tamblyn erupts into a psychotic rage and gleefully blows away a little boy is an absolute hoot ! Overall , this baby rates as a pretty solid , although flawed and uneven flick which makes for a perfectly acceptable and enjoyable time-killer . |
518,776 | 8,239,592 | 71,639 | 7 | A really creepy and hence pretty good sleazy 70's psycho flick | This reasonably tense , aberrant and absorbing low-grade early 70's psycho picture is nowhere near as vile or awful as its unjustly lousy reputation would suggest . Yeah , it's the unsparingly grim and twisted story of a depraved Oedipal wreck Norman Bates-style misogynistic pedophile sicko who after escaping from an experimental mental home racks up a tiny body count ( three folks in total ) and befriends a sweet , unsuspecting 11-year-old girl ( the adorable Geri Reischl ) who he considers to be the sole " pure " female he's ever made the acquaintance of , but thankfully both director Paul Leder and screenwriter William Norton ( who also co-wrote " Big Bad Mama " and " Day of the Animals " ) never let the perverse premise degenerate into total gag-inducing filthy sleaze . Instead , they show a surprising amount of taste and restraint , creating a genuinely icky and unsettling atmosphere by chiefly focusing on star lunatic Albert's seething psychosis and severe hang-ups concerning his domineering rich bch mommy . Zooey Hall as the outwardly calm and composed , yet internally volatile and dangerous Albert gives a believably creepy and admirably subdued performance ; Hall laudably eschews the pop-eyed raving histrionics most actors tend to do in such colorfully deranged roles in favor of a more unnervingly low-key approach which in turn makes Albert's sporadic psychotic outbursts that much more convincing and upsetting . Future " Marty Hartman , Mary Hartman " TV show star Greg Mullavey lends solid support as the hard-nosed detective determined to arrest Albert before things get too out of hand . Moreover , the grimy no-frills two-cent production values further lend a certain grungy verisimilitude to the overall bleakly credible proceedings , thus making this flesh-crawling item one of the most disturbingly plausible of 70's grind-house psycho features . |
519,284 | 8,239,592 | 74,885 | 7 | A pretty good and admirable , but seriously flawed Fred Williamson flick | Decent and valiant Vietnam war veteran Johnny Barrows ( a credible and engaging performance by stunningly handsome and charismatic 70's blaxploitation icon Fred Williamson ) gets dishonorably discharged after striking an antagonistic superior officer ( a pleasingly nasty cameo by Aaron Banks ) . Barrows goes back to his hometown and winds up totally destitute after two muggers steal all his money . Worse yet , Barrows has great difficulty finding gainful employment . Crusty Mafia don Luther Adler and his suave son Stuart Whitman offer Barrows a gig as an enforcer , but he politely declines their offer . Instead Barrows takes a demeaning job working as a janitor at a gas station owned by an odious racist redneck jerk ( expertly played by the great R . G . Armstrong ) . Barrows gets arrested by the cops after getting into an ugly fight with Armstrong over his paltry salary . Worse yet , Adler gets rubbed out and Whitman winds up in the hospital after both of them are gunned down by rival drug-dealing gangster Anthony Caruso and his two no-count sons Mike Henry ( foul-mouthed hothead ) and Roddy McDowall ( effiminate toady ) . Whitman offers Barrows $100 , 000 dollars to bump off Caruso and his sons . Now what do think Johnny's going to do ? Although severely marred by poky pacing , a stupefying surplus of tedious talk , a meandering narrative , and an often painfully conspicuous low budget , there's nonetheless a definite sincerity apparent here that's both strangely endearing and weirdly engrossing . Williamson's direction never transcends the merely competent , but he does show a fair amount of flair , a modicum of style , and , most importantly , a true sense of earnest ambition . The opening third is a very clunky chore to endure , but things fortunately pick up in the exciting third act and culminate in an extremely shocking surprise bummer ending which packs quite a punch . Moreover , the music is properly funky , the theme song is a groovy blast , there are a few sharp , snappy edits , and Robert Carimico's laudably polished cinematography makes artful use of fades , dissolves and super-impositions . Elliott Gould contributes an amusingly droll special appearance as a flaky philosophical homeless man who shows Barrows the ropes on how to scrape by as a bum . Jenny Sherman also impresses as Whitman's lovely and loyal girlfriend . The climactic martial arts fight between Banks and Williamson is an absolute hoot . Moral : Peace is hell . All in all , " Mean Johnny Barrows " rates as a pretty good , but flawed effort that's worth checking out if you're a Fred Williamson fan . |
518,844 | 8,239,592 | 82,744 | 7 | Starts slow & clunky , but improves as it goes along | As other folks with their comments on this movie have stated this low-budget early 80's fright film has its fair share of flaws . First off the acting is strictly hit or miss . Melanie Verlin is merely adequate as the teen runaway heroine , John Hall and Charles Jackson are solid and engaging as the two nice young guys who give Verlin a lift , and John Amplas of George Romero's " Martin " is terrifically creepy as one of the vicious backwoods Satanists our luckless trio run afoul of . However , the actor who plays the priest is just terrible and the actress who plays the priest's daughter is likewise pretty bad . Thankfully , late , great tough guy character thesp supreme Lawrence Tierney contributes an excellent performance as Verlin's disgustingly incestuous and alcoholic cop stepfather . Moreover , the first forty-odd minutes of the feature are gruelingly slow , tedious and uneventful . The cheesy soft rock theme song is truly atrocious . The dialogue tends to be flat and stilted . On the plus side the rough , grainy cinematography does work ; it adds a certain gritty documentary-like believability to the horrific proceedings . The deranged family of bloodthirsty redneck Devil worshipers are genuinely scary , especially the crazed chortling fat guy and the eerily beautiful brunette . When the horror elements of the story finally kick in they are every bit as stark , brutal , nasty and frightening as they ought to be . The opening scene where a little girl is savagely beaten to death by the Satanists is positively bloodcurdling . A feeling of nightmarish hopelessness asserts itself in the second half and proves to be powerfully unsettling in its unsparing bleakness . The sequences where people are ritualistically sacrificed are definitely shocking and disturbing . Having the female victims locked up in cages like animals is a cool deviant touch . Tom Savini's minimal gore make-up is top-notch as usual . And the ending has a few neat touches of irony , with the best being how the initially reprehensible Tierney turns out to be the film's hero . Although it's way too imperfect and uneven to qualify as some kind of lost classic ( the clunky opening half is frankly a bit of a chore to slog through ) , " Midnight " overall rates as a pretty solid and effective little rural shocker that gets better as it goes along . |
518,264 | 8,239,592 | 75,205 | 7 | An enjoyable 70's made-for-TV " Jaws " cash-in | The tremendous blockbuster success of " Jaws " beget a whole slew of opportunistic cash-in copies which include " Tentacles , " " Piranha , " " Mako : Jaws of Death , " " Great White , " and this nifty little forgotten made-for-TV killer animal entry that not only emulates the Spielberg smash , but also has striking similarities to the more recent indie horror hit " Open Water . " A ferocious great white shark attacks two oil rig workers , killing one and seriously maiming the other . Smart , responsible maverick marine biologist Rick Dayner ( the likable Phillip Clark ) and cocky , hot-tempered diver Cabo Mendoza ( the equally engaging Richard Yniguez ) venture out into the sea on a dinky jalopy of a boat to bag the brutal beast . Things go extremely awry when the boat gets wrecked by a yacht full of drunken revelers and our two protagonists find themselves floundering in the water as the shark encircles them . Competently directed by William A . ( " Beyond the Bermuda Triangle " ) Graham , with a compact , but derivative script by Sandor Stern ( who also wrote the ' 79 " Amityville Horror , " " Red Alert , " and " Pin " ) , bright , sunny photography by George Romanis , and a rousing melodramatic score by Terry K . Meade , this teleflick starts out rather dull , slow and uneventful , but thankfully picks up steam and becomes a most tense , absorbing and exciting item when our two heroes go after the shark . Furthermore , Clark and Yniguez are excellent and appealing in the leads , with solid support from Jennifer Warren as Clark's loving , long-suffering artist girlfriend , Elizabeth Gill as Yniguez's spunky gal pal , and especially David Huddleston as a rascally old sea salt . Granted , we're not talking lost classic here , but overall this overlooked offering provides a good deal of fun that 70's made-for-TV fans in particular should get a big kick out of . |
518,698 | 8,239,592 | 95,002 | 7 | A not half bad , although very cheap 80's post-nuke sci-fi / action flick | Twenty years after a devastating Third World War , the nuclear fall-out has reduced the landscape into a vast harsh , desolate , infertile wasteland with feral radiation-contaminated nomadic hordes scuttling about . Among the many scattered tribes populating the planet are a pair of warring factions : the barbaric , slowly dying above ground dwelling Tyrogs and the more civil , untainted subterranean Drones . Ordered to capture an uncontaminated Drone woman to prevent the Tyrogs from becoming extinct , scruffy , but decent Tyrog super warrior Zerak ( a surprisingly credible turn from the Incredible Hulk himself , Lou Ferrigno , who sports a black eye-patch and a studded black leather outfit ) captures and subsequently befriends benign Drone lady Racela ( nicely played by the gorgeous Shari Shattuck ) . Uncomfortable with having Racela being used for desperate last chance procreation purposes by his grubby tribe , Zerak , assisted by a rescue party led by Racela's father , decides to spring her and go on the run , therefore starting a bloody feud between the Tyrogs and the Drones . Although quite obviously made on a paltry two-cent shoestring budget and technically real rough around the edges , " Desert Warrior " ain't half bad for a no-budget cheapie . Director Jim Goldman keeps the pace galloping along at a zestful clip . The action scenes are fairly violent and staged with a reasonable amount of vigor ( said action includes lively gun-play , a few down'n'dirty sword fights , and brutal hand-to-hand grappling ) . Marita A . Manuel supplies a bouncy , rousing synthesizer score . The generally grim tone only becomes repellently mushy at the very end . Cinematographer Fred Conrad gives the film a convincingly spare , grainy look . The other tribes are neatly varied ; the black clad sword-swinging ninjas and hairy hatchet-wielding caveman midgets are especially cool . The rather uneven acting is mostly up to snuff , with solid performances from Ferrigno and Shattuck . The script by Carl Kuntze and Bob Davies has a pleasingly thoughtful subtext on man's deep-seated need to survive , draws the characters in unusually complex shades of gray , and offers some intriguing insights into both civil and primitive ways of life ( the Tyrogs are crude , but hearty and honest people while the Drones hide their true rigid fascistic nature behind a polite , polished veneer ) . All in all , this movie sizes up as an acceptable and pretty enjoyable entry in the 80's post-nuke sci-fi / action genre . |
518,191 | 8,239,592 | 638,713 | 7 | A pretty cool episode with a sort of appearance by the legendary Bigfoot | Sasquatch makes a sort of appearance in this pretty cool and enjoyable episode of the popular long-running action adventure TV series . Shrewd and resourceful government special agent MacGyver ( excellently played by the likable and charismatic Richard Dean Anderson ) goes into the Alaskan wilderness for a basic maneuvers exercise . MacGyver stumbles across a rusty abandoned ship nestled on a remote woodland lake . Curiosity gets the best of MacGyver and he boards the boat . He immediately runs into a bestial , aggressive and inhospitable Bigfoot . He also finds and rescues a fair damsel in distress . The show starts off well enough , with a careful , involving build-up , an eerie aura of mystery , a bunch of Native Americans popping up to explain the legend of Bigfoot , and an imposingly monstrous Sasquatch all lending this episode a satisfying sense of genuine creepiness and uncertainty . WARNING : Possible SPOILERS ahead . Too bad the second half degenerates into formula action banality , with the Bigfoot alas ultimately revealed as an artful ruse devised to cover up a band of dastardly oil thieves . However , things nonetheless conclude on a pleasingly ambiguous note with the suggestion of a bonafide Bigfoot roaming around somewhere out there in the vast expansive forest . |
517,987 | 8,239,592 | 61,217 | 8 | Larry Buchanan strikes out again ! | Mad scientist Keith Ritchie ( a dreadfully hammy performance by Tony Huston ) helps evil extraterrestrial Zontar come to Earth so it can take over our planet . It's up to the stalwart , practical Dr . Curt Taylor ( an admirably game John Agar doing his best with seriously subpar material ) to stop the foul alien fiend before it's too late . Poorly directed with characteristic staggering ineptitude by the one and only Larry Buchanan , with plenty of sidesplitting awful dialogue ( favorite line : " So , that's what you look like , Zontar ! You're slimy - - horrible ! " ) , an excruciatingly lethargic pace , static cinematography by Robert B . Alcott ( the endless barrage of drab master shots is sheer torture on the eyes ) , a painfully drawn-out and meandering narrative , lame and unpersuasive ( far from ) special effects ( the laughably tacky bat-like flying creatures are obviously hanging on wires and the titular unsightly beast looks just plain silly ) , a hideously slushy and droning stock film library score , and largely horrible and unimpressive acting ( Susan Bjurman in particular is simply pitiful as Ritchie's shrill , disapproving wife Martha ) , this often hilariously horrendous cheapo sci-fi clunker unfolds with a startling lack of style , verve , suspense , and competence . Buchanan regular Bill Thurman has a sizable supporting role as the local sheriff who falls under Zontar's wicked control . To his credit , Buchanan does manage to convey a few effectively eerie shots of empty and desolate streets , but overall this Grade Z dreck sizes up as yet another amusingly atrocious stinker from one of the most notorious schlockmeisters to ever misuse a camera . |
519,447 | 8,239,592 | 52,549 | 8 | A nifty 50's horror creature feature romp | Chipper newlywed Joyce Webster ( a typically fine and robust portrayal by the ever lovely Beverly Garland ) gets dumped by her husband Paul ( dashing hunk Richard Crane ) on their wedding night . Joyce tracks Paul down to a remote swampland area of Louisiana and discovers much to her dismay that Paul is slowly mutating into a hideous alligator man hybrid . Director Roy Del Ruth , working from a silly , yet sincere script by Orville H . Hampton , maintains a constant pace throughout , treats the admittedly absurd premise with dead seriousness , and does an expert job of creating a flavorful brooding bayou atmosphere . Lon Chaney , Jr . contributes a lively turn as gruff , hearty , lecherous hook-handed local yokel troublemaker Manon , plus there are nice supporting performances by Frieda Inescort as Paul's stern , but loyal mother Lavinia Hawthorne , George MacReady as earnest physician Dr . Mark Sinclair , and Douglas Kennedy as helpful psychiatrist Dr . Wayne MacGregor . Cranes deserves extra praise for effectively evoking sympathy for the grotesque , yet pitiable Paul . Karl Struss ' crisp black and white cinematography , the rousing climax , Irving Getz's booming overwrought score , and the uncompromisingly downbeat ending further enhance the entertainment value of this immensely fun nonsense . |
518,176 | 8,239,592 | 462,482 | 8 | A nifty little thriller sleeper | Amiable federal investigator Steve Kady ( a fine and engaging performance by Jeremy Sisto ) goes to the peaceful remote rural hamlet of Rockwell Falls to take a consensus of the place's population . When Kady stumbles across the alarming fact that the population has remained at 436 for over a hundred years , he discovers that the friendly , yet undeniably strange townspeople are harboring a very evil and disturbing big secret . Director Michelle Maxwell MacLaren , working from a clever and intriguing script by Michael Kingston , relates the absorbing story at a steady pace and does a nice job of maintaining an eerily ambiguous atmosphere for the first two thirds of the movie . Moreover , MacLaren thankfully eschews cheap gore and flashy special effects in favor of putting a welcome and refreshing marked emphasis on the plot and the characters . Sisto excels in the lead ; he receives excellent support from rock singer Fred Durst as laid-back , likable Deputy Bobby Caine , the lovely Charlotte Sullivan as the feisty , enticing Courtney Lovett , Peter Outerbridge as the mean Deputy Christian Hecker , R . H . Thompson as the austere Sheriff Colcutt , David Fox as the sinister Dr . Harold James Greaver , and Frank Adamson as the folksy Mayor Grateman . Both Thomas Burstyn's crisp , sunny cinematography and Glenn Buhr's spooky'n'shuddery score are up to speed . The supremely chilling downbeat ending packs a real jolting punch , too . Offbeat , compelling and well worth watching . |
518,866 | 8,239,592 | 95,677 | 8 | A grim , brutal and disturbing crime drama sleeper | Rural Georgia in the early 70's . Passive teenager Billy Isaac ( a solid performance by Henry Thomas of " E . T . " fame ) aimlessly tags along with his brooding , edgy no-count criminal sociopath brother Chris Isaac ( a frighteningly intense James Wilder ) , Chris ' angry , volatile half brother low-life cohort Wayne Coleman ( chillingly played by Stephen Shellen ) , and their jolly dimwit pal George Dungee ( the excellent Errol Slue ) on an abrupt and senseless crime and killing spree which culminates in the horrible massacre of six members of the Alday family . Adroitly directed in a stark , gritty , no-frills semi-documentary style by Graeme Campbell , with a terse , compact script by Fleming B . Fuller , an unsparingly bleak , fatalistic tone , crisp , unadorned cinematography by Ludek Bogner , credible low-key acting from a fine non-star cast , a twangy , moody score by Mychael Danna , a harsh depiction of hoodlums as dumb , mean and thoroughly unappealing idiots , and shocking outbursts of nasty , ugly and upsetting violence , this grim and disturbing crime drama packs a very strong punch right to the gut . The tight , spare , stripped-down quality of the picture substantially adds to its overall harrowing plausibility ( it's based on a true story ) . An unjustly forgotten and underrated mean'n'lean thriller . |
518,868 | 8,239,592 | 78,203 | 8 | A hugely enjoyable 70's Bigfoot romp | When it comes to delivering plenty of sheer manic anything - for - a - cheap - sensationalistic - jolt supermarket tabloid style thrills , this delectably hokey hoot wins the top tacky prize with deliciously rip-roaring aplomb . Once again your standard motley bunch of instantly recognizable mighty macho man archetypes - - calmly rational leader , rugged rancher , nerdy anthropologist , crotchety mountain man , sloppy cook , noble Native American guy , radical skeptic jerk reporter - - venture into the mountainous Oregon wilderness in search of the eternally evasive , but always alluring Bigfoot . Granted , the trite premise sounds unpromising and the inclusion of the famous Patterson footage is unnecessary , but what this beaut lacks in originality it wholly compensates for with its thrillingly sparky and enthusiastic execution . Director Ed Ragozzino infuses the picture with a crackling sense of urgency , stoking the flick with a joyfully junky vibrancy ( the pace in particular hurtles along at a constant pile-driving tempo ) that's both entertaining and irresistible . Ed Hawkins ' bold , unapologetically lurid script likewise bristles with the same cheeky , dynamic , let's give the audience their grubby money's worth yellow journalism sensibility . The interplay between the expedition members is quite arresting ; the mountain man's hearty tall tales and the reporter's cynicism upsetting group morale are especially enthralling . George Lauris ' floridly dramatic narration , the whooshing , hyperactive cinematography ( dig those crazily lurching POV shots of Mr . Get A Bottle of Nair Already on the prowl ) , the nifty , harmonious country theme song " High in the Mountains , " a jarring grizzly bear attack scene , the fantastic white knuckle Sasquatch demolishes the group's camp grand finale , and Al Capps ' furiously bombastic , barnstorming orchestral score further enhance the infectiously schlocky merriment . While this movie doesn't score points for either restraint or subtlety , " Sasquatch , the Legend of Bigfoot " nonetheless in its own blithely low-rent " National Enquiror " - esquire way sizes up as lots of enjoyably trashy pseudo-doc fun . |
517,945 | 8,239,592 | 411,743 | 8 | An interesting and original contemporary horror sleeper on a familiar premise | Nice guy college student Thierry Richard ( a solid and engaging performance by Marc Paquet ) meets and immediately falls in love with mysterious , yet bewitching redhead Claire ( superbly played by the lovely Marianne Farley ) . Despite his aversion to redheads , Thierry just can't resist Claire . However , Thierry finds himself in considerable jeopardy when he encounters Claire's oddball mother and sisters , who share a very dark and disturbing family secret . Thierry's loyal , happy-go-lucky best friend and apartment roommate Henri Dieudonne ( a marvelously hearty and likable portrayal by Frederic Pierre ) tries to save Thiery before it's too late . Director Daniel Roby , who also co-wrote the smart and inspired script with Joel Champetier , grounds the compelling story in a thoroughly believable everyday world which in turn makes the more horrific elements of the plot that much more chilling and upsetting . Moreover , Roby brings an intriguing air of mystery to the picture and nicely maintains a spooky tone throughout ( the bleak wintry Canadian locations go a long way to enhance the overall eerie and unsettling mood ) . Kudos are also in order for the uniformly fine acting by the capable cast : Richard , Farley and Pierre all do sterling work in their roles while Jessica Malka likewise excels as Claire's crazed and vicious bitchy whore sister Marquise . Eric Cayla's bright , crisp cinematography and the funky , rattling score by Rene Dupere and Martin Lord are both up to speed . Best of all , there's even a potent and poignant central message about how far one is willing to go for love and a refreshing absence of any dumb obtrusive humor to diminish the severity of the horror . This movie offers proof positive that you don't need a lot of fancy special effects , excessive gore , or flashy film-making to create a strong and effective fright feature . Well worth checking out . |
519,227 | 8,239,592 | 83,677 | 8 | A nicely gritty and trashy 70's drive-in exploitation film noir crime picture | Brassy , sharp-witted , take-charge vixen-on-wheels Ellie ( leggy , beauteous 70's B-movie perennial Tiffany Bolling at her most trampy and tantalizing ) and her adorable , dewy-eyed , flirtatious younger sister Myra ( cute , tiny , girlish Robin Mattson , who served her time in such grind-house schlock as " Candy Stripe Nurses " and " Return to Macon County " before moving on to more respectable work in the soap operas " All My Children , " " General Hospital , " " Ryan's Hope , " and " Santa Barbara " ) are a pair of delectable , no where near as " innocent " as they seem country babes who live in relative squalor with their gross , irritable , lecherous step-dad Charlie ( a memorably vile Leo Gordon ) , a real scuzzbucket who gets blasted by a shotgun-hefting Ellie after he attempts to rape Myra . Ellie and Myra hightail it to the big city and hole up with their wealthy , crooked Uncle Ben ( the ever-gruff Scott Brady ) , who's elbow deep in assorted illegal activities . Ben's shady sleazeball partner Eddie ( a sensationally slimy performance from consummate hambone thespian Alex Rocco ) and Eddie's equally no-count libidinous pal Digger ( a coolly vicious Timothy Brown ) hire dopey , wishy-washy private eye Larry Evans ( an amiably addle-pated Steve Sandor ) to pick up a valuable suitcase full of mucho stolen loot ; Ben sends Ellie along to make sure the pick-up goes smoothly . Naturally , Larry and Ellie become an item , acquire the package , and decide to keep the hot cash all for themselves . They hightail it to Mexico . Eddie and Digger give chase . Graced with an appropriately amoral , cold-blooded tone , several suitably mean and jolting plot twists , languorous , but steady pacing , a nice streak of bitch-black humor ( Digger and Eddie accidentally blow away the wrong couple at a seedy motel ! ) , and generous offerings of sex , violence and nudity , " Bonnie's Kids " makes for a really enjoyable , fairly surprising and pleasingly junky nickel'n'dime crime melodrama which nicely fits into the then faddish film noir tradition ( Bolling in particular makes for a marvelously bitchy and conniving femme fatale ) . Arthur ( " J . D . ' s Revenge " ) Marks ' solid direction and the clever script carry the day with commendably brisk , no-frills efficiency , capably abetted by Carson Whitset's funky , insouciant , rumbling jazz score , Robert Charles Wilson's adroit , animated , occasionally leering cinematography ( Mattson takes a welcome nude bath at the very start of the picture and Bolling is first seen in an eye-catching rear end sticking up at the camera shot , looking mighty desirable in a tight , clingy hash slinger uniform ) , a gritty subtext which explores with stark frankness the grim reality concerning greed and betrayal , a wonderfully wicked surprise bummer ending , and top-rate cameos from veteran character actor Max Showalter as a sludgebag traveling salesman and a pre - " Cagney and Lacey " Sharon Gless as a weary greasy spoon waitress . An unjustly neglected little sleeper which was often double-billed with the fantastic " The Candy Snatchers " at drive-ins back in the day . |
519,256 | 8,239,592 | 70,445 | 8 | A choice scuzzy chunk of hardcore nasty 70's psycho exploitation horror sleaze | Simone ( Manuela Thiess ) , Sheri ( Sherry Alberoni ) , and Corrine ( Gyl Roland ) are three showgirls en route to Las Vegas who find themselves stranded when their car breaks down in the middle of the remote Nevada desert . They run afoul of Andre ( a truly inspired portrayal of full-tilt intense insanity by the one and only Andrew Prine ) , a severely deranged Oedipal wreck misogynistic psycho who abducts lovely young stray ladies so he can use them in a menagerie for his own personal circus . Meanwhile , Andre's grotesquely disfigured mutant father occasionally gets loose and murders folks . Director Alan Rudolph , who went on to helm such acclaimed art-house hits as " Welcome to L . A . , " " Remember My Name , " " Choose Me , " and " The Moderns , " does an expert job of creating and maintaining a grim , sordid , and unpleasant tone of seething madness and depravity . The raw , unflinching violence against women is genuinely brutal and ugly stuff ; this picture reaches its skin-crawling nasty peak when Andre has a large boa constrictor wrap itself around one hapless lass . Moreover , we also get a decent smattering of tasty nudity and a handy helping of grisly gore . E . Lynn's rough , but fairly accomplished cinematography astutely captures the dingy , dusty , and desolate aura of the isolated desert location . Tommy Vig's wonky , spacey , droning score likewise adds considerably to the overall harsh and unnerving quality of this resolutely foul-minded trash . Jennifer Ashley pops up as a traumatized mute hippie chick ; she was mistreated by Prine some more in the even sleazier and hence better " The Centerfold Girls . " The groovy theme song " Evil Eyes " and the nihilistic bummer ending totally hit the slimy spot as well . A satisfyingly mean'n'grungy serving of vintage 70's grindhouse junk . |
518,248 | 8,239,592 | 73,854 | 8 | Butch and Toby return for more enjoyably silly fun | Likable clod Toby ( the engaging Antonio Cantafora ) and his ill-tempered partner Butch ( bulky behemoth Paul Smith ) pose as a couple of priests in order to elude being arrested by the authorities in Africa . Toby and Butch deliver a statue of the Virgin Mary from Africa to Amsterdam . Unbenownst to the clueless duo , they're really smuggling diamonds . A bunch of equally inept mobsters give chase . Director / co-writer Giuliano Carnimeo and co-writer Pierre-Louis Alberti concoct a disarmingly inane , good-natured and inoffensive comedic romp that goes heavy on the always raucous and often uproarious broad humor , with off-the-wall slapstick chases and no-holds-barred wacky fights being the order of the day ( a lengthy riverboat chase in a canal and a hysterical bash'em up restaurant kitchen fight set piece rate as the definite sidesplitting highlights ) . The winningly breezy , natural and relaxed chemistry between Smith and Cantafora adds immensely to the picture's infectiously goofy charm ; they receive fine support from Jacques Herlin as the shrewd Inspector Nelson and Franco Pesce as the jolly Father Remos . The jaunty score by Juniper and the incredibly catchy theme song further energize the lively proceedings . A pleasingly dippy hoot . |
518,895 | 8,239,592 | 78,158 | 8 | An enjoyable sequel to the excellent original | Psychic alien siblings Tia ( a charming performance by the adorable Kim Richards ) and Tony ( a solid turn by Ike Eisenmann ) go to Los Angeles to check out human life in the big city . Trouble occurs when Tony gets abducted by evil , arrogant scientist Victor ( the always fine Christopher Lee in smoothly sinister form ) and his greedy accomplice Letha ( a perfectly wicked portrayal by Bette Davis ) . It's up to Tia and an amiable gang of scruffy delinquent kids to rescue Tony from this dastardly duo . Director John Hough , working from an eventful script by Malcolm Marmorstein , relates the absorbing plot at a constant brisk pace , maintains a pleasingly lighthearted tone throughout , makes nice use of the gritty LA locations , and stages the thrilling action scenes with considerable flair ( a lively and lengthy car chase rates as the definite exciting highlight ) . Richards and Eisenmann are both excellent in their roles ; they receive sound support from Lee , Davis , Jack Soo as jolly truant officer Mr . Yokomoto , the ever-creepy Anthony James as cowardly flunky Sickle , Denver Dyle as the gregarious Uncle Bene , and Richard Bakalyan as gabby , irritable cab driver Eddie . AIP biker flick regular Adam Roarke has an uncredited bit part as a museum security guard . The street gang members are a genuinely likable bunch of harmless minor league miscreants . The special effects are pretty nifty . Lalo Schifrin's funky 70's TV cop show-style score totally hits the groovy spot . Frank V . Phillips ' polished cinematography is likewise up to par . A fun family feature . |
518,056 | 8,239,592 | 78,159 | 8 | A charming and enjoyable Bigfoot children's movie | This charmingly pleasant and tenderhearted sequel to the hugely successful " The Legend of Boggy Creek " is a follow-up in name only . Stories abound in a sleepy , self-contained fishing community of a supposedly vicious Bigfoot creature called " Big Bay Ty " that resides deep in the uninviting swamplands of Boggy Creek . Two bratty brothers and their older , more sensible tomboy sister ( a sweetly feisty performance by cute , pigtailed future " Different Strokes " sitcom star Dana Plato ) go venturing into the treacherous marsh to check out if the creature of local legend may be in fact a real live being . The trio get hopelessly lost in a fierce storm and the furry , bear-like , humongous , but very gentle and benevolent Sasquatch comes to the kids ' rescue . Tom Moore's casual , no-frills direction relates this simple story at a leisurely pace , astutely capturing the workaday minutiae of the rural town in compellingly exact detail , drawing the assorted country characters with great warmth and affection , and thankfully developing the sentiment in an organic , restrained , unforced manner that never degenerates into sticky-sappy mush . The adorable Dawn Wells ( Mary Ann on " Gilligan's Island " ) gives an engagingly plucky portrayal of the kids ' loving working class single mom while Jim Wilson and John Hofeus offer enjoyably irascible support as a couple of squabbling ol ' hayseed curmudgeonly coots . Robert Bethard's capable , sunny cinematography displays the woodsy setting in all its sumptuously tranquil , achingly pure and fragile untouched by civilization splendor . Darrell Deck's score adeptly blends flesh-crawling synthesizer shudders and jubilant banjo-pluckin ' country bluegrass into a tuneful sonic brew . In addition , this picture warrants special praise for the way it uncannily predicts the 90's kiddie feature Bigfoot vogue by a good 15-odd years in advance . |
519,311 | 8,239,592 | 78,166 | 8 | An excellent and unjustly overlooked 70's drive-in gem | A surprisingly taut and involving 70's B picture sleeper which has undeservedly slipped through the cracks and into obscurity . Gid Barker ( coolly played with firm inner resolve by Glenn Corbett ) , a fiercely self-reliant nonconformist loner Vietnam veteran , returns after a two year tour of duty to his jerkwater hometown of Benton , Florida to meet a decidedly chilly and unwelcoming committee that's more like a lynch mob . Back in the day Gid was a hell-raising womanizing troublemaker , so the guys in town are eager to put the thumbscrews to him . Gid winds up killing a man in self-defense when one dude picks a fight with him in a bar . Gid steals a souped-up pink Plymouth Fury and with his loyal , laid-back Native American pal Ray ( affable Doug Van ) and old flame Shirley ( sweet Ivy Jones ) in tow goes on the lam . The dead man's vengeful father ( a stern , steely Morgan Woodard ) forms a posse ( the always welcome Bill Thurman as an odious racist deputy among ' em ) to track Gid down . Gid in turn opens up a king-sized barrel of pure destruction on the seething , hateful little backwards hamlet . Skillfully directed by Robert J . Emery , this exciting and resolutely tough-minded winner packs an unexpectedly powerful punch , thanks to David Hall's compact , incisive script , a strikingly unflattering portrait of hicksville heartland America as a resentful hotbed of repressive toe-the-line conformity ( Gid's refusal to go along in order to get along makes him a much despised and ridiculed pariah ) , Vic Caeser's jaunty country and western score , complexly drawn characters , thrilling outbursts of deftly staged action , Jack Richards ' solid cinematography , across-the-board aces acting , and a painfully on-target " you can't go home " central message . A fine , gritty and shamefully neglected drive-in gem . |
519,158 | 8,239,592 | 260,221 | 8 | Just say nope to dope , kids | Here's a choice cheesy chunk of laughably overwrought anti-drug scare propaganda that was actually shown to high school kids in the 60s and 70s in order to dissuade them from getting hooked on the hard stuff . Clean-cut young John ( played by future mainstream movie character actor Kevin Tighe ) begins his downward spiral into dope and despair by doing bennies and beer . Evil , shifty drug dealer Pete ( the sleazy-looking Gerald LeRoy ) gets John to start smoking pot and then next thing you know poor John is strung out on smack ! Director Mel Marshall and screenwriter Edward Brennan lay on the anti-drug message something thick in this hilariously clumsy and unsubtle unintentional laugh riot . Patrick Miller's gloomy , heavy-handed narration is especially sidesplitting with its frequent use of then hip , now hopelessly dated " groovy " slang words . The ragged editing and raw , scratchy cinematography by Jay Lovins both add immensely to the overall campy amusement of this vintage 60's class room kitsch hoot . |
518,534 | 8,239,592 | 132,184 | 8 | A nifty and enjoyably spooky regional horror obscurity | Five people decide to spend a whole evening at Hanley House , a creepy rundown abode with a notorious local reputation for being haunted . Pretty soon weird things begin to happen : Strange noises can be heard emanating from the basement , cars won't start , and otherworldly voices speak to a mental medium from the other dimension . Will our brave quintet survive the night and still be alive come dawn ? Competently directed in a plain , straightforward manner by Louise Sherrill ( who also wrote the tight , compelling script ) , with stark , grainy black and white cinematography by Claude Fullerton , acceptable acting from a game no-name cast , a spare , wonky , droning score by David C . Parsons , a suitably spooky atmosphere , and a groovy-rockin ' R & B instrumental tune occasionally blasting away on the soundtrack , this fright feature makes for fun viewing . The dusty , desolate backwoods Texas setting adds some tasty regional flavor to the proceedings while the plot has a few nice twists and turns in it . While admittedly slow and talky in spots , the movie thankfully does improve and become more increasingly eerie and unsettling as it goes along . Fans of overlooked low-budget independent horror fare are advised to seek this one out . |
518,030 | 8,239,592 | 83,660 | 8 | Cool early 80's psycho horror flick starring 50's teen idol Frankie Avalon as a crazed killer | 50's teen idol Frankie Avalon gives a surprisingly solid , credible and even fairly creepy performance as Paul , a crazed , murderous flute-playing mental patient who develops a psychic link with sweet gimpy teenage girl Marion ( appealingly played by the adorable Donna Wilkes of " Jaws 2 " and " Angel " fame ) after his blood is used for an operation she undergoes . Pauls escapes from the asylum , steals a van , and drives cross country so he can meet Marion in person , bumping off a few folks along the way . Monty Turner's gratingly redundant droning synthesizer score tends to be more annoying than effective , but fortunately Alan J . Levi's able direction , Steve Posey's polished cinematography , some witty dialogue ( " I've got a hangover that would make King Kong climb a wall " ) , a decent amount of gore , and the uniformly fine acting from an interesting cast are all up to par . A radically cast against type Avalon in particular has a field day with his juicy homicidal fruitcake part : Frankie plants a hatchet in a guy's face , strangles a hot young lady after making love to her , and , best of all , vigorously engages in a strenuous mano-a-mano no-holds-barred physical confrontation with veteran tough guy actor Richard Jaeckel ( who's excellent as usual as Marion's stern , cranky , overbearing dad ) . Lenny Montana , the hit-man who winds up sleeping with the fishes in " The Godfather , " served as a co-producer , co-wrote the script and pops up in a small supporting role as an amiable tugboat skipper . A fun little fright flick . |
519,115 | 8,239,592 | 73,836 | 8 | Taking the night train to Sadism City | Lisa and Margaret are two sweet , if less than innocent teenagers taking a train ride across the European countryside on Christmas Eve . The unlucky pair run afoul of a couple of vicious sleazy thugs and an icy cold wealthy woman on board the train who proceed to rape , torment , debase and eventually murder poor Lisa and Margaret . Director / co-writer Aldo Lado wrings plenty of gut-wrenching claustrophobic tension from the edgy , unsettling story , adroitly creates a gritty , threatening atmosphere rife with sadism and perversion , addresses the troubling issue of random everyday gratuitous violence with truly jolting results , and delivers a few savagely powerful moments of startling brutality ( the sequence where the virginal Lisa gets gruesomely violated with a knife is especially ugly and upsetting ) . The performances are uniformly excellent : Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo make for very attractive and appealing fair damsels in distress while Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi are frightfully credible and disgusting as the greasy low-life criminal villains who are memorably first seen in the picture beating up a sidewalk Santa for his money . But top acting honors clearly go to the strikingly lovely blonde Macha Meril , who gives a positively chilling portrayal of the cruel , haughty rich bitch who gladly joins in on the hoodlum's ferocious degradation of Lisa and Margaret . Gabor Pogany's slick , handsome cinematography works wonders with the tightly confined setting while the great Ennio Morricone supplies a typically haunting , throbbing and melodic score . Demis Roussos ' beautiful ballad " A Flower Is All You Need " is used as an achingly ironic bookend for all the harsh barbarism . A nice'n'nasty Euroslime exploitation thriller . |
518,696 | 8,239,592 | 52,602 | 8 | A fun little mystery thriller quickie | Feisty mystery writer Cornelia van Gorder ( superbly played by Agnes Moorehead ) rents a country house called the Oaks for the summer . A lethal criminal called the Bat terrorizes the area . Meanwhile , bank president John Fleming ( a nicely weaselly Harvey Stephens ) has embezzled a million dollars . And suave Dr . Malcom Wells ( the always terrific Vincent Price ) knows more than he's telling about what's going on . Writer / director Crane Wilber relates the compellingly twisty story at a brisk pace and effectively creates a sizable amount of tension . Joseph Biroc's sharp black and white cinematography makes artful use of dissolves and vertical wipes . Louis Forbes ' shuddery score likewise does the trick . Moorehead and Price are both wonderful in their juicy lead roles ; they receive fine support from Lenita Lane as chatty , excitable maid Lizzie Allen , Gavin Gordon as the hard-nosed Lt . Andy Anderson , John Sutton as reliable , but suspicious chauffeur Warner , and Darla Hood of the Little Rascals fame as the adorable Judy Hollander . Moreover , the masked , clawed , black-clad the Bat makes for a nifty villain ; his true identity turns out to be a genuine surprise . Witty and concise , this movie overall rates as a hugely entertaining feature . |
518,060 | 8,239,592 | 70,458 | 8 | An enjoyably creepy 70's made-for-TV horror shocker | Roy Thinnes of " The Invaders " TV series fame gives a typically fine performance as David Norliss , a cynical and skeptical investigative reporter working on a book which debunks various supernatural occurrences and paranormal phenomena as phony baloney frauds . While researching his book Norliss crosses paths with widow Ellen Cort ( the ever-lovely and appealing Angie Dickinson ) , who claims that her recently deceased husband ( an impressively robust turn by Nick Dimitri , who sports some truly ghoulish make-up and uncanny yellow eyes ) has come back to life as a murderous gray-skinned zombie . Norliss finds out much to his dismay that this particular case is all too real and by no means yet another far-fetched hoax . Expertly directed by the late , great Dan ( " Trilogy of Terror " ) Curtis , with a smart and compelling script by William F . ( " Logan's Run " ) Nolan , an arrestingly creepy and mysterious atmosphere , an eerie and rousing score by Robert Cobert , a snappy pace , polished cinematography by Ben Colman , genuinely shocking and stirring outbursts of surprisingly brutal violence ( Angie blasts the zombie with a shotgun ! ) , and a thrilling fiery conclusion , this failed pilot for a possible spin-off show sizes up as an often quite scary , always engrossing and overall superior made-for-TV fright feature . Moreover , the sound acting from a solid cast counts as another major asset : Both Thinnes and Dickinson are strong and sympathetic , with bang-up support from Claude Akins as a hard-nosed sheriff , Don Porter as Norliss ' concerned publisher , Vonette ( " Blacula " ) McGhee as a helpful occult store owner , Stanley Adams as an excitable truck driver , and Patrick ( " The Cheerleaders " ) Wright as a deputy . Short ( it's only 72 minutes long ) , spooky and extremely well-done all around , " The Norliss Tapes " is definitely worth checking out . |
519,194 | 8,239,592 | 95,719 | 8 | A really fun & enjoyable late 80's killer bug gore horror hoot | A disgusting batch of cannibalistic cockroaches caused by your usual illegal'n'unscrupulous scientific mishap terrorize a heretofore dull and peaceful small island community . Sure , the plot sounds dumb and unpromising , but luckily the solid direction by Terrence Winkless ( who co-wrote " The Howling " ) , several quirky and engaging secondary characters ( Stephan Davies in particular steals the film with a sidesplitting portrayal of the burg's klutzy , sloppy , eccentric resident exterminator who prefers to be called " a pest control agent " ) , a clever script by Robert King which has occasional dollops of amusingly macabre black humor ( the single most bravura darkly funny comic moment is when endangered waitress Nancy Morgan butchers a bunch of roaches in her diner while " La Cucaracha " blasts on the soundtrack ) , pretty gruesome and creepy roach attack scenes , nasty and convincing make-up f / x by Cary Howe , a nice turn by the underrated Diana ( " Stripped to Kill , " " Spellbinder " ) Bellamy as a whiny old battle axe with a broken foot ( the scene where the roaches crawl into her cast is a real hoot ) , and a wonderfully wicked performance by gorgeous redhead Terri ( " The Terror Witin " ) Treas as a bitchy , cold-hearted evil lady scientist who derives erotic pleasure out of the roaches nibbling on her fingers make this baby a pleasantly enjoyable winner . The only flaw here is the three weak leads : Robert ( " Empire of the Ants " ) Lansing as the corrupt mayor , Lisa ( " Deadly Eyes " ) Langlois as Hizzoner's bimbo daughter , and Robert ( " Ghost Town " ) Luz as the earnest , drippy sheriff are all numbingly bland . That fault aside , " The Nest " overall rates as a superior revolt-of-nature killer animal fright feature . |
519,024 | 8,239,592 | 191,244 | 8 | An amusingly goofy Bigfoot romp | This refreshingly playful and tongue-in-cheek romp is part fact , part fiction and all enjoyable in its pleasingly facetious telling of a legendary backwoods Bigfoot who periodically pops up in the Georgia forest around an equally mythical mountain to scare the hell out of the local yokels . Klutzy middle-aged newspaper copy boy Bestoink Dooley ( winningly played by George Ellis ) , eager to nail a hot scoop , goes venturing up into the hills to find out if the stories about Mr . Out of Control Excess Body Hair have any basis in truth . Director Massey Cramer displays a light , frothy touch throughout ( Cramer co-wrote and produced the merely okay dope deal opus " The Florida Connection " ) . Joseph Shelton's sometimes sharp cinematography offers some eye-catching visuals of the eerily calm lakes and woods , plus several creepy shots of the creature prowling around the dense , fog-shrouded forest . A spooky atmosphere is effectively developed and the monster attack scenes are executed with a goodly amount of punch . Former yo-yo champion , spookshow performer , soft-core writer / director / producer and all-around extraordinary cinematic jack-of-all-trades exploitation huckster par excellence Donn Davison ( who's billed here as a " world traveler , lecturer , and psychic investigator " ) clearly shot inserts for this little killer-diller ; they were probably done for a belated 70's release in order to cash in on the then scorching hot Sasquatch craze . Davison makes for a wryly entertaining host as he cites facts about Bigfoot which include the famous Teddy Roosevelt incident and conducts droll interviews with wide-eyed folks who've had scary run-ins with the beast ( " Is this gonna be on television ? , " one awestruck gal asks Davison at the end of her interview ) . Tim York's tuneful'n'twangy country theme song " The Ballad of McCullough's Mountain " smokes in no uncertain terms ( " Some say he breathed fire like a dragon / Some say a giant ape with a human soul " ) . Okay , this silly picture sure ain't no celluloid masterpiece , but as far as Sasquatch cinema movies go it's well above average . |
518,555 | 8,239,592 | 105,169 | 8 | An excellent , involving and unfairly overlooked early 90's female psycho thriller sleeper | Female psycho movies - - " The Witch Who Came from the Sea , " " Silent Scream , " " The Babysitter , " et al . - - tend to possess an uncommon and therefor refreshing sensitivity , going out of their way to depict their troubled , murderous protagonists as people who were cruelly victimized early in life and hence themselves have become spiteful , vengeful victimizers . This eerie , unfairly overlooked sleeper , one of the few distaff serial killer entries in the largely male dominated 90's psycho movie genre , rates highly as a sterling addition to this unusual and intriguing cycle . Daphne Zuniga , who began her film career with appearances in the college-set 80's slasher items " The Dorm That Dripped Blood " and " The Intitiation , " delivers a striking , fantastic , scarily believable performance as an extremely pliant and puzzled , but still quite cunning and dangerous asylum escapee who assumes the personality of everyone she kills . James Wilder is solid and engaging as the feckless , irresponsible , swaggering cowboy loner who becomes Zuniga's latest victim . Willful , no-nonsense small country town deputy Alexandra Paul ( who's also Wilder's understandably bitter former girlfriend and jilted would-be wife ) and helpful nice guy FBI agent Don Harvey track Zuniga down , desperately trying to catch her before she racks up a hefty corpse tally . Fleming B . Fuller's direction completely hits the bull's eye : a goodly amount of tension is deftly created and maintained , the steady pace never slackens , the characters are credibly drawn ( the strained , regretful relationship between Wilder and Paul rings especially true ) , the lean , strong and compelling narrative doesn't overstay its welcome , the acting is uniformly top-notch ( Harvey , who's usually cast as hateful sadistic villains , does a rare pleasant and appealing turn in an atypical decent dude part ) , the bleak , parched desert locations are nicely taken advantage of , and the occasional outbursts of violence are properly brutal and genuinely startling ( the opening sequence in which Zuniga throttles a nurse with a wire coat hanger is particularly jolting ) . Zuniga's amazing , complicated , even pitiable and unexpectedly moving portrayal of the emotionally unstable and mercurial killer clinches the whole deal : she's alternately demure and sexy , fearsome and lethal , vulnerable and impenetrable , lucid and confused , a dizzying array of contrasting moods which makes her character in equal degrees frightfully unpredictable and wholly fascinating . More importantly , like the classic truly memorable and oddly affecting horror movie monsters of yore , Zuniga at heart is almost as much of a victim as the people she preys on , a tragic person who has to take on other people's identities because she can't live with the shame and the guilt she feels as herself after having killed her own abusive mother at a young , tender age . This latter element adds a stunningly effective dash of deeply poignant pathos which elevates this chillingly dead-on picture to the status of a surefire winner . |
518,086 | 8,239,592 | 66,144 | 8 | A hugely enjoyable serving of Spanish horror exploitation trash | This flick gets off to a rip-roaring start with a hapless lovely lass being tied to a stake and severely whipped prior to getting decapitated by a savage voodoo tribe . A motley group of explorers go to Africa to study the wildlife in the area where the ritual occurred back in 1910 . Come nightfall the expedition members fall pray to deadly zombie natives and equally lethal vampire ladies wearing skimpy leopard skin bikinis . Writer / director Amando De Ossorio delivers plenty of tasty gratuitous nudity , a smattering of grisly gore , a smidgen of steamy soft-core sex , and even a reasonable amount of misty'n'spooky gloom-doom atmosphere . De Ossorio treats the silly story with utmost seriousness , which in turn adds considerably to the film's tacky charm . The cast all give acceptable performances ; the ubiquitous Jack Taylor in particular does well as a stuffy professor . Better still , the women are all very hot and attractive : Kali Hansa , Maria Kosti , Loreta Tovar and Barbara Rey . Francisco Sanchez's bright , polished cinematography ( the occasional use of stylized slow motion is really nifty ) , the endearingly crummy dubbing , and Fernando Garcia Morcillo's funky-throbbing tribal score further add to the overall trashy fun . |
518,713 | 8,239,592 | 91,338 | 8 | An unintentionally hilarious and hence quite enjoyable 80's college slasher hoot | Undoubtedly the most uproariously ridiculous of the popular 80's kill-the-collegians slasher movies , a cool little slice'n'dice sub-genre which includes such gnarly gems as " The Dorm That Dripped Blood , " " The House on Sorority Row , " " Girls Nite Out , " " The Initiation , " and " Sorority House Massacre . " This one's wafer-thin plot is about a gala April Fool's Day bash held in a haunted house which turns sour when a psychotic lunatic in a deep-sea diving suit ( yes , you read that correctly ) starts to pick off moronic college students in assorted grisly ways ( the guillotine decapitation qualifies as the definite splatter highlight ) . WARNING : Possible SPOILERS ahead . At very end of this gut-busting howler the killer is revealed to be the vengeful ghost of a college pledge who was accidentally killed twenty years ago ! With its great deadpan direction by veteran Canadian schlock horror director William Fruet ( who next gave us the lively big killer bug riot " Blue Monkey " ) , absurd plot , charmingly goofy characters , slick photography , funky score , a scene-stealingly geeky performance by Ralph Seymour ( one of the imperiled campers in the superior sylvan slaughterfest " Just Before Dawn " ) as nutty campus nerd Martin , and a funny cameo by the ever droll Paul Bartel as uptight English Professor Zito , this sublimely silly affair overall sizes up as a delightfully dopey dilly . |
517,905 | 8,239,592 | 66,154 | 8 | A very brutal , chilling & potent end-of-the-world film | Cornel Wilde , widely regarded as one of the truest and purest of cinematic primitives due to his blunt , sinewy , straightforward and nonjudgmental presentation of " civilized " man and his disturbingly easy capacity for violence given the correct stimulus , here depicts a very chilling vision of societal collapse in this ecology-minded sci-fi end-of-the-world movie . Mankind's gross polluting of the environment begets a lethal virus which kills off the earth's crops , resulting in famine , mass panic and hysteria , rioting in the streets , and the violent breakdown of society itself . Rugged , resilient and resourceful former military man survivalist Nigel Davenport , his equally strong and durable wife Jean Wallace ( Wilde's real life spouse and frequent lead in his pictures ) , Davenport's fragile , virginal daughter ( " Vampire Circus " ' s adorable Lynn Frederick ) and son , the daughter's nice guy fiancé , a loutish brute and the brute's slutty wife leave London and make a perilous pilgrimage across the desolate , dangerous countryside . Many wayward travelers join the group and form a ragtag army which fends off a savage gang of murderous rapist bikers . Wilde relates this grim premise with his usual stark , spare and no-frills muscular style ( although the occasionally clumsy use of flash-forwards badly dates this film ) , keeping sentiment to a bare minimum , tautly maintaining a properly bleak tone , offering up an upsetting array of jarring visuals ( i . e . , a dry , barren landscape littered with animal corpses ) , and refusing to resort to cheap moralizing , but still clearly spelling out the harsh , albeit absolute necessity for killing in order to remain alive and persevere in a barbarous world . A bit crude and rough around the edges , but overall an extremely powerful and unsettling film . |
518,113 | 8,239,592 | 73,736 | 8 | An enjoyably dippy serving of melodramatic 70's drive-in junk | Smooth hotshot lawyer Jerry Bounds ( a solid performance by Adam West of TV's " Batman " fame ) clashes with huffy and powerful rival veteran attorney Pike Smith ( a pleasingly crusty and lively portrayal by John Anderson ) over a big case involving a water company . Smith hires the sultry and enticing Londa Wyeth ( perfectly embodied by the gorgeously voluptuous Ahna Capri ) to pose as a jury member and befriend Bounds so he can be disbarred from the profession . Director / co-writer Hikmet Avedis , who also appears in the film as sleazy low-rent private eye Ace Sharkey , relates the engrossingly lurid story at a steady pace , maintains a lighthearted tone throughout , and sprinkles in a handy helping of tasty female nudity ( lovely blonde Christianne Schmidtmer has a small , yet memorable role as a nude model while Capri looks positively smashing sans clothes ) . The sturdy cast of familiar faces helps out a whole lot : Alvy Moore as the lecherous Bailiff Humbolt , Marlene Schmidt as Bounds ' concerned , supportive wife Elizabeth , Harvey Jason as Pike's laid-back swinging artist son Hardin Smith , Charles Knopp as hard-nosed Judge Davis , and Chuck Boyd as wimpy law firm head Arthur Farley . Massoud Joseph's crisp cinematography and Shorty Rogers ' get-down funky score are both up to speed . Moreover , the insanely groovy theme song sung by Lou Rawls , some amusingly dated slang ( " far out " ) , a hysterically overwrought disbarment trial , and a simply sidesplitting surprise downbeat ending all greatly add to this picture's considerable kitschy appeal . In fact , this movie often plays like an R-rated feature length 70's exploitation version of an episode of " Perry Mason . " A fun little diversion . |
518,897 | 8,239,592 | 105,179 | 8 | Repent all you sinners or face the deadly wrath of Father Jonas ! | In 1957 deranged and dangerous Catholic priest Father Jonas ( excellently played with frightening intensity by James Carver ) kills two fornicating teenagers . Thirty-three years later Father Jonas escapes from the cellar of the church he's been imprisoned in and returns to the monastery from his youth . Said monastery has been converted into a summer home where a pair of teenage couples go to celebrate prom night . Director Clay Borris and screenwriter Richard Beattie craft an extremely dark and twisted slice'n'dice body count fright feature that benefits substantially from a grimly serious tone , a creepy mood , a steady pace , several gory and nasty murder set pieces , a smidgen of steamy soft-core sex , a considerable amount of tension , and a brutal and harrowing last third . Better still , there's no silly disruptive humor to diminish the severity of the in-your-face harsh and unflinching horror ; Father Jonas in particular registers strongly as one extremely scary and vicious dude . In addition , the brooding religious angle gives the picture an extra sick and subversive edge . Nicole de Boer makes for an appealing heroine as the sweet and virginal Meagan ; she receives sound support from Alden Kane as Meagan's nice guy boyfriend Mark , Joy Tanner as shameless slut Laura , Alle Ghadbran as the equally brash Jeff , Brock Simpson as eager young priest Father Colin , and Fab Filippo as Mark's bratty peeping tom younger brother Jonathan . Rick Wincenty's polished , agile cinematography keeps the camera constantly moving and boasts a handful of fluid tracking shots . Paul Zaza's spooky'n'shuddery score likewise hits the skin-crawling spot . A superior slasher horror outing . |
518,281 | 8,239,592 | 95,740 | 8 | An enjoyably junky piece of 80's slasher trash | Hey , you ever have one of those nights when you couldn't decide if you wanted to see either a terminally brainless T & A laden " Porky's " on the beach sex'n'booze lowbrow comedy or a comparably vacuous seaside mystery horror slasher pic ? Well , you can actually see ' em both in one gloriously junky 90 minute sitting thanks to this crackerjack handy-dandy combo hybrid of the above-cited sub-genres . An enigmatic psycho biker dude whose face is obscured by a dark visor electrocutes a sizable volume of fun-loving , hooch-sodden , hormone-crazed hedonistic collegiate chowderheads partying their sun-tanned butts off during Easter vacation in Miami Beach , Florida . The murders totally baffle the local cops , who in time-honored B-pic tradition wish to keep the whole thing hush-hush so the resort town can still milk mucho money from the addle-pated twenty-something tourists . So , it's up to the token serious , self-disciplined nice college guy ( amiable Nicholas De Toth , who makes for a refreshingly earnest and unmacho reluctant protagonist ) and a sweet barmaid gal ( winningly played by the incredibly cute ultra-honey Sarah Buxton ) to find out who the true culprit is on their own . Done with the right amount of energy and competence to qualify as a perfectly acceptable and enjoyable serving of " screw intelligence and just give me the lowdown trashy horror exploitation flick goods " Saturday night schlock , this engagingly drecky beaut proves to be a whole lot of top-notch dopey fun . Director Umberto Lenzi , working from a slim , yet serviceable script by Larry Kirkpatrick ( who also wrote the equally dumb , but satisfying " Primal Rage " for Lenzi ) , keeps the proceedings lively and eventful by tossing in a rowdy gang of hog-ridin ' hellions called the Demons ( ! ) , a bunch of thrashing ' heavy metal tunes roaring ' away on the soundtrack ( the theme song " Don't Break My Heart " by Kristen really smokes ) , a few wet t-shirt contests , several grisly murder set pieces ( Alessandro Rambaldi did the great , gruesome gore f / x ) , a throbbing ' rock score by Goblin's Claidio Simonetti , crude condom gags , plenty of attractive babes in skimpy bikinis , a " Jaws " - style " let's keep this homicide stuff quiet ' cause it's bad for business " cover-up conspiracy sub-plot , more idiotic horny toad college revelers than you can shake an empty beer can at , and even a little gratuitous female nudity . The stand-out supporting cast adds greatly to the overall sleazy merriment : John Saxon lends his usual sturdy , hard-nosed , imposing presence as a mean , hectoring , buzz-crushing police captain with a kinky S & M bondage fetish for chains , leather and dog collars , Lance LeGault gruffs it up nicely as a stern hell-and-brimstone preacher , and Michael Parks makes the most out of a miner part as a fidgety , alcoholic coroner . Okay , it sure ain't no work of immaculate art , but " Welcome to Spring Break " definitely does the trick as a pleasingly upfront and undemanding timewaster . |
519,161 | 8,239,592 | 264,323 | 8 | A great deal of gleefully gory fun | A motley assortment of college kids on a cross country road trip take an ill-advised detour and find themselves in the quaint Southern hamlet of Pleasant Valley . They run afoul of the crazed cannibal local yokels who are celebrating their annual barbecue festival . Director / co-writer Tim Sullivan does a real bang-up job with this wickedly sick and twisted blackly humorous remake of the Herschell Gordon Lewis schlock splatter classic : Sullivan relates the story at a nonstop zippy pace , ably creates an amusing tongue-in-cheek tone ( the witty " Deliverance " dueling banjos parody is quite funny ) , and pours on the gruesome gore with infectiously demented glee ( grisly highlights include a hapless lass being quartered by horses , a guy drinking acid , a girl getting crushed by a huge bell , one poor dude having his privates eaten by a hick chick with sharp steel teeth , and a nasty double decapitation with barbed wire ) . Better still , several hot babes take off their clothes and bare their beautiful bodies . Why , we even got plenty of saucy sexual perversion going on that runs the gamut from bestiality to incestuous lesbianism ( the latter thanks to a delectable distaff pair of literal " kissin ' cousins " ) . Moreover , the game cast totally go to town on their roles . Robert Englund in particular has a field day as the jolly one-eyed Mayor Buckman . Lin Shayne as the sweetly insane Granny Boone , Giuseppe Andrews as the suavely deranged gentleman Harper Alexander , Scott Spiegel and Johnny Legend as a couple of merry singing minstrels , Wendy Kremer as wildcat hillbilly harlot Peaches , Bill McKinney as an unhinged chef , Travis Tritt as a creepy gas station attendant , Eli Roth as wacky stoner Justin , and Peter Stormare as the stuffy Professor Ackerman all likewise have a grand time with their parts . Steve Adcock's polished cinematography and Jonathan McHugh's spooky , flavorsome score do the trick just nice . A refreshingly gross and tasteless blast of a blithely depraved over-the-top comedic horror romp . |
519,187 | 8,239,592 | 83,629 | 8 | A delightfully sleazy and over the top piece of Southern Gothic horror trash | Absolutely absurd , preposterously hyperbolic and incredibly incomprehensible pseudo-Southern Gothic small town horror monster mystery rubbish , executed with such fervid go-for-broke zeal that it manages to become freakishly entertaining almost despite ( or perhaps even because of ) its brooding melodramatic atmosphere . 1964 : Newlyweds Ronny Cox and Bibi Besch get lost on a remote Mississippi backwoods road . Some horrible , monstrous sub-human cannibal thing that's in dire need of both a bath and especially a shave ( it's got the ugliest , nastiest hairy legs you never want to lay eyes on ) escapes from a cellar that it's been imprisoned in and rapes Besch , impregnating her in the process . 1982 : Cox and Besch now have a teenage son ( an admirably game portrayal by Paul Clemens , who tries very hard in an impossible role ) who's suffering from an odd , seemingly incurable disease . With sonny boy in tow , Cox ( who gives a hilarious deadpan performance , mouthing the most asinine dialogue with a remarkable poker face ) and Besch return to the seedy , squalid hillbilly hamlet located nearby the woods where Besch was attacked . Next thing you know , Junior starts periodically changing into a hideous , dangerous , gigantic humanoid insect creature , viciously slaughtering various scuzzball local yokels who in one way or another are accountable for his woeful plight . It ultimately transpires that the poor lad is possessed by the vengeful spirit of the unsightly flesh-eating furry-legged fiend , meaning that repercussions of past atrocities are finally catching up with the present . Got that ? The feverishly overwrought direction by Philippe Mora ( who previously did the excellent " Mad Dog Morgan " and went on to helm the wonderfully wretched " Howling II : Your Sister Is A Werewolf " ) , combined with American International Pictures composer Les Baxter's thunderous , suitably overblown score , Tom ( " Prophecy , " " Cat People " ) Burman's riotously rubbery and unconvincing make-up f / x , an impenetrably convoluted plot , a handful of outrageously gruesome and splatterific murders , a climactic transformation scene that's uproariously bungled by both Mora and Burman , and the alarmingly hammy acting from a manic supporting cast which includes a particularly hysterical Don Gordon as the scummy burg's oily , bewigged jerk of a mayor ( with his wire rim glasses and bad hairpiece Gordon bears an uncanny resemblance to noted sci-fi author Harlan Ellison ) , the adorable Kitty Moffat as a sweet , comely hick chick , John Dennis Johnson as Moffat's abusive , overbearing redneck dad , Luke Askew as a corrupt undertaker , Logan Ramsey as a belligerent fat cracker , Ron Soble as a boozy Native American who knows what's really going on , and a pre - " Designing Women " Mesach Taylor as the token black deputy ( only Sam Peckinpah regular L . Q . Jones as the earnest , yet feckless sheriff and the ever-reliable R . G . Armstrong as an equally sincere , but ineffectual folksy physician display any restraint amid all the eye-rolling histrionics , although their commendable subdued efforts prove to be all for naught ) , ensures that this sweaty , ludicrous and hopelessly muddled misbegotten mess plays like a gloriously ripe and ridiculous unintentional elaborate cinematic shaggy dog joke parody of the demonic possession fright film sub-genre . |
519,289 | 8,239,592 | 439,815 | 8 | Good , silly , very clever & witty B-horror / sci-fi flick fun | Okay , let's start this here review by stating for the record that this sure ain't no remarkably innovative or original genre-changing masterpiece of significant cinematic importance . In fact , this perfectly fun'n'funky little fright feature at heart is just your basic good'n'goofy B-movie sci-fi / horror romp that gets down to brass tacks , satisfies all the basic horror requirements ( gore , thrills , action , alien parasites and ornery zombies ) , and benefits tremendously from a refreshing dearth of high-faluting pretense . Moreover , it's genuinely heartening to see a recent horror film that isn't yet another sequel , remake or adaptation of either a video game or comic book . Instead , this appealingly giddy'n'goofy romp harks back to such choice 80's scarefests as " Slugs " and especially " Night of the Creeps . " The plot is pretty much very ordinary and run-of-the-mill stock formula stuff : a meteorite crashes in the woods nearby a sleepy podunk hick burg . Pernicious extraterrestrial slugs come out of the meteorite and taken over the body of rich local businessman Grant Grant ( a deliciously juicy and dynamic performance by the great Michael Rooker of " Henry : Portrait of A Serial Killer " fame ) . Grant starts acting mighty peculiar , stockpiling vast amounts of meat and dead animal bodies in his cellar . He also impregnates the town tramp so she can reproduce more alien slugs . Naturally the slugs are unleashed and a majority of the townspeople are turned into raving ghouls who spit acid saliva and have an insatiable appetite for meat . It's up to the sheriff ( winningly played by Nathan Fillion ) , assisted by Grant's lovely young babe trophy wife ( the engagingly perky Elizabeth Banks ) , to try to stop the alien menace before it destroys the whole world . Yikes ! Sure , the narrative is hokey , derivative , and nothing terribly new or special , but thankfully writer / director James Gunn ( who wrote the surprisingly good " Dawn of the Dead " remake ) brings a substantial amount of wit , verve and infectiously pure love and affection to the standard scenario . Gunn nicely creates a properly creepy mood in the opening third , keeps the pace crackling along at a speedy clip , and stages the shock moments with considerable brio ( the scene where a beautiful teenage hottie gets attacked by the slugs while taking a bath is a real dilly ) . Kudos also to the uniformly solid and spirited acting by the tip-top cast : Fillion makes for a strong and likable hero , Banks is a likewise assertive and attractive heroine , and Gregg Henry is an absolute hoot as the coarse , smarmy , foul-mouthed good old boy idiot mayor . Granted , " Slither " is no classic , but it's plenty of easy'n'breezy undemanding fright film fun that's highly amusing and entertaining in equal measure . And that alone makes it ideal viewing for a taking a break and relaxing from it all Saturday-night-at-the-movies type of creature feature experience . |
517,983 | 8,239,592 | 78,089 | 8 | A nifty little indie sci-fi winner | I first saw and fell in love with this immensely enjoyable low-budget science fiction treat on some Saturday afternoon creature feature show . It tells the story of a motley spaceship crew who find themselves stranded on a strange and unknown planet populated by hostile and hungry dinosaurs . The intrepid bunch soon learn that they must fight back against the dinosaurs or else they will all perish . Director James K . Shea brings a winning blend of flair and energy to the fun premise ; he maintains a snappy pace throughout and stages the dinosaur attack scenes with considerable vigor . The acting is pretty hit or miss , with top thespic honors going to the hulking James Whitworth ( Papa Jupitor in the original " The Hills Have Eyes " ) as the tough take-charge Jim . Henning Schellerup's cinematography gives the picture a fairly polished look . The wonky synthesizer score by Kelly Lammers and John O'Verlin likewise does the trick . The characters are nicely drawn and engaging . But it's the impressively ambitious special effects that really add a great deal to the movie's funky charm and effectiveness : The stop-motion animation dinosaurs are totally cool , plus Jim Danforth supplies a few neat matte paintings . Although admittedly modest and rough around the edges , this film overall still makes the grade as a very lively and entertaining romp . |
518,758 | 8,239,592 | 179,920 | 8 | An enjoyable thriller | Shrewd and evasive ex-Nazi and top assassin Oscar Snell ( nicely played suavely sinister aplomb by Bruno Cremer ) is determined to rub out King Faoud ( a suitably arrogant Lukas Ammann ) . Snell's sole weakness is his sweet tooth ; he leaves candy wrappers at the scene of his every crime . It's up to no-nonsense CIA agent Mark Stone ( a smooth and solid performance by Kerwin Matthews ) to find Snell and stop him before it's too late . Directors Federico Chenkens and Maurice Clothe ( the latter also co-wrote the compact and eventful script ) keep the movie humming along at a snappy pace and stage the plentiful rousing shoot-outs and down'n'dirty fisticuffs with a reasonable amount of skill and brio . The Rome , Italy locations add a pleasing extra exotic flavor to the lively proceedings . Moreover , there's also a welcome smattering of tasty peek-a-boo almost nudity from a bevy of beautiful ladies ( King Faoud's dancing harem girls are especially luscious ) . Popping up in neat parts are Marilu Tolo as fetching physician Sylva , Venantino Venantini as Stone's jolly partner Costa , Werner Peters as slippery underground crime kingpin Guardino , and the ever-imposing Gordon Mitchell as Guardino's brutish henchman Toni . Fausto Zuccoli's cinematography makes inspired occasional use of a hand-held camera . Gianni Marchetti's groovy , dreamy , get-down hip and playful swinging jazz score may be inappropriate , but it still sounds insanely cool just the same . A really fun and diverting romp . |
518,252 | 8,239,592 | 73,764 | 8 | An amiably inane and immaterial 70's drive-in romp | A trio of naive , but eager young Midwestern women go to California to teach summer school classes at Regency High School . Perky , willful Candice ( " Hollywood Boulevard , " " Chatterbox ! " ) Rialson starts up and coaches an all-female football team ; she also becomes romantically involved with gawky , but amicable fellow student teacher Christopher Barrett . Stuffy Bible banging chemistry teacher Pat ( " T . N . T . Jackson " ) Anderson manages to loosen up after she falls hard for surly juvenile delinquent Will Carney . Pert , liberated photography instructor Rhonda Leigh ( " Cover Girl Models " ) Hopkins has sex with both a two-faced male chauvinist jerk and a more decent , understanding guy . This thoroughly inane , amiable , episodic and animated New World Pictures comedic teen sexploitation item sizes up as a hugely enjoyable outing : writer / director Barbara ( " Humanoids from the Deep " ) Peeters keeps the pace quite zippy and the tone suitably lighthearted throughout , the ceaseless barrage of jokes about breasts , buttocks , fat guys , uptight high school authority figures , sex ( of course ) , dirty little old lady peeping toms , dorky middle-aged dudes on the make , and gross macho bozos are very crude , but still pretty funny , the expected romantic interludes are surprisingly tasteful and erotic , the Los Angeles strip club footage is authentically tacky , the sappy bleeding heart " let's give the kids a chance " posturing never becomes too icky-cute , the feminist subtext is slight , yet sincere , there's a reasonably decent automobile chase and a nice subplot about a stolen car ring , and the climactic women only football game manages to be really amusing , if nothing too spectacular . Moreover , the always dependable Dick Miller cuts loose with a riotously hammy performance as a crooked , sexist , vulgar macho swine football coach , the three female leads are sexy , lively and appealing , Eric ( " The Hills Have Eyes " ) Saarinen's handsome , agile cinematography provides lots of lovely , gorgeously lit visuals , and J . J . Jackson's bouncy , ebullient score will plant a mile-wide smile on your face that you won't take off for a week . Now , what more could you possibly want from a blissfully insubstantial , but infectiously effervescent and entertaining goofball time-waster ? |
518,958 | 8,239,592 | 87,998 | 8 | A lovably amateurish low-budget early 80's sci-fi / horror delight | A meteorite containing a large , toothy , voracious , slow-moving multi-tentacled extraterrestrial with an insatiable appetite for human flesh crashlands in a sleepy small town . The wicked intergalactic fiend promptly scarfs down two campers and then goes into the basement of a house where a teenage monster movie fan ( likably played by Charles George Hildebrandt ) lives , eating the kid's parents as well . And this is just in the first ten minutes alone ! The rest of the picture does a surprisingly expert job for the most part of maintaining a fast and frantic headlong clip . Sure , this blatantly cheap'n'chintzy homemade sci-fi / horror creature feature has its flaws - - clumsy direction , wooden acting from a game , but lame no-name cast , murky cinematography , occasionally sluggish pacing - - but there's a downright infectious sense of zesty go-for-it energy and enthusiasm evident throughout that's both quite endearing and hugely entertaining in equal measure . Moreover , this lively romp certainly doesn't skimp on the gleefully graphic and excessive outrageous splatter : gory highlights include a severed head being ravenously gorged on by the hungry beasts , a hilarious sequence with the nasty alien critters attacking a bunch of old ladies , plenty of shots of blood spurting all over walls and roofs , a college student having her head chomped off by the enormous main monster , and the main monster blowing up real messy at the exciting conclusion . Plus the characters are believable , well-developed and genuinely engaging to boot . The " it ain't over yet " sequel set-up final freeze frame is absolutely sidesplitting . A total howler of a low-budget campfest . |
519,046 | 8,239,592 | 78,319 | 8 | A really enjoyable 70's made-for-TV trucker flick | Mighty macho manly man idols don't come much tougher or grittier than truckers . At least , that's what such 70's features as " White Line Fever , " " Breaker ! Breaker ! , " and " Convoy " would like us to think . These films all helped to make truckers seem like modern-day American desperadoes of the asphalt trails who are the backbone of this great rugged country . Well , add this nifty made-for-TV item to this ever-worthwhile and enjoyable sub-genre . Criminally underrated guy's guy par excellence James Brolin once again proves he's most definitely got the stuff as Clayton Ray Dennis , an honest , hard-working , but immature and hopelessly broke Diesel demon who's struggling to retain both his integrity and independence . Clayton's currently having a difficult time of it : he's three weeks late on back payments to his rig , keeps getting stuck with crummy low-paying jobs , and his loving , but fed-up wife Jesse ( a fine , feisty Jennifer Warren ) is seriously thinking about leaving him . Desperate for cash , Clayton and his crotchety , garrulous road hog buddy KW ( a rambunctiously hearty slice of Grade A thespic ham by the incomparable Rip Torn ) decide to haul stolen cows for oily , lowdown dirty freight racketeer Pinky Pincus ( a deliciously slimy portrayal by Strother Martin ) . Pinky treats Clayton nice for a spell , then betrays Clayton by killing KW . So Clayton , who's not the sort to take anyone's crap lying down , opens up a gigantic can of whup-a clobbering on the fat , sniveling little weasel Pincus . Director Harvey Laidman keeps the pace chugging along at a speedy clip and stages the action scenes with considerable aplomb . Nice supporting performances by Melanie Griffith as a cute truckstop waitress , Lou Frizzell as an obnoxiously overzealous skip tracer , and Don Calfa and John Dennis Johnson as greasy gear jammers . Charles Bernstein's bang-up score deftly alternates between groovy romping rock and mellow melodic country mush . Juice Newton and the Silver Spurs supply a lovely , forlorn theme song , " Wouldn't Mind the Rain . " Granted , it ain't no " White Line Fever , " but this baby still rates as a solid and satisfying trucker's revenge opus just the same . |
518,459 | 8,239,592 | 73,941 | 8 | An unjustly overlooked sleeper | Sweet , clumsy grease monkey Bobby ( an endearing turn by the likable Paul LeMat ) is miserably dissatisfied with his dead-end garage mechanic job . Brassy , but tender-hearted counter-girl Rose ( the lovely , lissome , wholly bewitching Diane Hull ) is patiently waiting for the right man to walk into her life . Bobby and Rose meet cute , go on a swell date , get embroiled in a dire supermarket shoot-out , and become wanted , frightened , totally reluctant and hopelessly out of their element fugitives who hot foot it to Mexico in order to avoid being arrested by the police for a murder they didn't commit . Directed with a sure , easy hand and a sharp , observant eye by Floyd Mutrux ( who also wrote the tight , colorful and eventful script ) , further buoyed by William Fraker's bright , crisp , sunny cinematography , a nifty golden oldies soundtrack , fine location shooting ( shadowy , neon-lit pool halls , gaudy roller rinks , ratty Tijuana side streets ) , several amusingly quirky touches ( Bobby's hot rod failing to start after he pulls over and amiably chats with two motorcycle cops is an especially choice wryly funny moment ) , a relaxed , but steady pace , a few bracing'n'bravura action set pieces ( the harrowing automobile car crash set to the pounding , incessant beat of Little Eva's " The Loco-Motion " is particularly striking ) , and a gripping , realistic , grimly fatalistic and uncompromisingly downbeat tone which fiercely deromanticizes any sense of wrong-headed " glamour " intrinsic to the couple on the premise , this pleasant surprise rates as a pleasingly idiosyncratic and decidedly insouciant treat . LeMat and Hull make for a nice , appealing pair ; they receive bang-up support from Robert Carradine as Bobby's ambitious , upwardly mobile social climbing pal Moxey , Tim McIntire as coarse , irascible , but still engaging redneck Buford , Noble Willingham as Bobby's big-hearted , gregarious Uncle Charlie , Edward James Olmos as a shady , menacing pool hustler , and Cliff Emmich as a quarrelsome loudmouth restaurant patron . Solid and commendably tough-minded , " Aloha , Bobby and Rose " measures up as a worthwhile and unjustly under-appreciated little sleeper . |
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