Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

Just hearing the name of this movie is enough to turn a few heads. I had a professor that always told me about this movie and I finally threw some money down and ordered it. I wasn’t too disappointed. If you are looking for some fun 80’s cheese, this is the ultimate. Directed by the man who brought you Witchouse, Beach Babes from Beyond, Creepozoids, and countless other films that should have never been made like the killer boy band movie, Ring of Darkness. Ugh. Anyway, David DeCoteau is a legend in his own right. He got his start in the same place a lot of big name filmmakers did with none other than Roger Corman.

Sorority Babes starts with a group of college boys who get mixed up with a sorority initiation prank. The final initiation, after an approximately 10 minute spanking scene, is to steal a trophy from the bowling alley at the mall after hours. The gang of kids head out only to run into a girl named Spider (Linnea Quigley) who is robbing the alley. They finally get a hold of the trophy and accidently unleash a mischievous imp into the mall. He grants them wishes that of course go painfully wrong and makes some really bad jokes at their expense. Gotta hate those imps.

I had a really good time watching this. I just wish I would have waited to have a group of people over to watch it for the first time. It’s definitely the kind of movie you crack open a case of beer, order a pizza, and laugh at all the way through. It’s hard to review this movie because it doesn’t take itself seriously at all. DeCoteau knew what he was making and went for it. Nothing in the story is believable and why should it be?

The characters were all really formulaic and I think I loved them for that reason. It had all of your typical 80’s teen movie characters. There were preppy girls, nice girls, nerds, a bully, a punk and a bumbling old janitor. I was happy to see Linnea Quigley was the punk, Spider, who was robbing the bowling alley. She played her usual Return of the Living Dead Trash character and was great. She is probably the reason most people watched this movie when it came out! 

For all of you Linnea Quigley fans out there, here is a clip from her 1990 release: Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout. Just got a bootleg of it and I’ll definitely have to put it next to my Chuck Norris: Private Lesson tape.

Scared Stiff

This movie just popped up on my radar recently and I was able to pick up the VHS fairly cheap online. It seemed fitting to throw on the blog. Scared Stiff is from 1987 and it is also known as The Masterson Curse.

Scared Stiff is tells the story of a family that gets more than they bargained for when they move into an old mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. Pop singer Kate Christopher (Mary Page Keller), her son Jason, and Psychiatrist David Young (Andrew Stevens) move in together after Kate met David under his care. Soon after moving in Kate begins to have visions/dreams about the slave master of the house. Soon strange things are happening to them and others surrounding the family and the mansion.

This damn movie felt like a chore to watch for the first hour. The acting is stiff, the characters are not well developed, and the story isn’t totally there. They deal more with the history of the house than they do any real character development of the main three characters of the movie. You are given little bits of pieces to put the story together and it never really gets explained fully. Most things are explained with the simple answer… CURSE.

Scared Stiff has an interesting, original premise and it does hold your attention to an extent.  I am going to attribute the good things in this movie to one of the three writers of the movie, Mark Frost. Frost was one of the creators and writers on Twin Peaks. This movie having three writers was probably the reason it had so many downfalls. Director Richard Friedman should have just let Frost have his way with the screenplay.

I digress. The last half hour was really fun. If there was anything worth watching this movie for, it was this. There are some really fun cheesy and at points gory effects thrown at you. Transformations into beasts, skin falling off, a dead body flying through the window, etc. All of that good stuff. That’s what I paid $4 to see!

Pigeons.

Terror In The Aisles

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been a little while, things have been crazy lately. Last weekend was Cinema Wasteland and I dropped quite a bit of money on movies, so there should be a nice amount of reviews coming up. The first movie I looked at was one that has been eating away at me to watch. Thankfully, I found a bootleg of Terror In The Aisles (1984). I talked to quite a few people about it over the weekend and I really feel like I missed out watching this one when I was a kid. Everyone had such fond memories of it and it seemed like the kind of movie you grow up with being a horror fan.

Anyhow, Terror In The Aisles is sort of a documentary. It doesn't really give you any insight into the genre, which is what I was hoping for. The back of the VHS has a whole list of celebrities that are in it. They were just referencing the movie clips compiled. The only two celebrities that actually talked were Donald Pleasence (Halloween) and Nancy Allen (Dressed To Kill, Robocop). There was an interesting clip from Alfred Hitchcock: Men Who Made The Movies that featured Hitchcock discussing how to create suspense in a scene.

The entirety of the movie was made up of Pleasence and Allen amongst a crowd of people in a movie theater. They would introduce themes like the Devil, sex, killers and then proceed to show clips from dozens of recognizable movies. Eventually it would relate back to them in the theater repeating the infamous mantra, "it's only a movie... it's only a movie."

If you are looking for some mindless viewing or a nice classic horror compilation this one will do it for you. Like I said earlier, don't expect to take much out of this. There is not much on the obscure front since all of the movies they draw from are pretty well known. Despite the movie's shortcomings, it is definitely a fun movie. Terror In The Aisles is one of those movies that every horror fan should have on their shelf.

Street Law

A few months ago I reviewed Vigilante and said I may follow up with a review of its Italian counterpart. Well, here it is:

This film tells the story of a righteous Italian citizen, Carlo Antonelli (played by the legendary Franco Nero), and his quest for justice. Antonelli is caught in the middle of a bank robbery and later kidnapped and beaten. He goes to the police and finds that they are incapable of providing any means of justice or assistance. He then enlists the help of a criminal, Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), to set up his revenge plot. Much to his girlfriend's (Barbara Bach) dismay, Antonelli creates a scenario that springs police into action and criminals into hiding.

I thought everything was spot on in this film. Franco Nero played his part with an incredible amount of passion. You could see the pain in his face during every shot and every scene. It also helped immensely that Nero performed all of his stunts. The director, Enzo Castellari had worked with Nero quite a bit during their careers and I think it comes out strong in this movie. Castellari knew Nero's strengths and ran with them.

Castellari did some unique things in this film compared to most in the revenge genre. All of the crimes during the beginning credits were based off of actual news and police reports. He wanted the plot to really reflect the mentality of citizens in the city. I also enjoyed how immersed into the criminal world Antonelli was. As most revenge films do, Street Law looks how someone can fight violence with violence and not become what they are fighting against. Even Antonelli's growing friendship with the criminal Tommy shows the similarities between the two characters.

Besides being incredibly well done, there was a lot of interesting facts surrounding film. First of all, tell me how this is a sequel when Street Law was released in 1975 and Vigilante was released in 1985. Even William Lustig credited this as being an inspiration for Vigilante. Also, Enzo Castellari was fairly infamous in Italian cinema for inventing the Italian police thriller genre. He worked with Franco Nero on an earlier film called High Crime and this was the first time Italian audiences had seen a film like this that wasn't from the States. Both films were great successes and sparked hundreds of other similar Italian films to be made.

The Unnamable

It's a difficult feat to translate an H.P. Lovecraft story to film. I still think Stuart Gordon is the best we've seen thus far with Re-Animator and the far less acclaimed From Beyond. Although, The Unnamable (1988) was quite enjoyable despite the previous statement.

This movie follows two groups of delinquent Miskatonic University students following up on a local legend of a monster who was born and hidden away in the attic of an old house in the woods. It has you're typical teen slasher set up with two groups of guys, the nerds and the jocks, trying to impress the unlikely female companions and getting picked off one by one.

The performances were all kind of campy except for Katrin Alexandre, who played the abandoned monster Alyda. Her movements in costume looked incredibly inhuman and extremely creepy. You have to give her credit for how they pulled the monster off, considering the description given in the short story was "a thousand shapes of horror." That's Lovecraft for you. Mark Kinsey Stephonson also put forth a valiant effort playing the knowledgeable Randolph Carter but ended up looking like he was unsuccessfully channeling Jeffrey Combs.

The Unnamable is a lost classic of the 1980's in it's own right. You may remember seeing this title gracing the shelves of your grimiest video store. If you happened to get your greasy hands on a copy of the VHS or the recent and short lived Anchor Bay release consider yourself lucky... sort of.

P.S. Read Lovecraft.

Demon Wind

Since the temperature outside in Cleveland was hitting single digits, I decided that tonight was the perfect night to sit down with a movie that has been on my checklist for a long time. Demon Wind came in the mail on VHS this afternoon and I was more than pleased. My room was glowing blue from the VCR as I cracked open a beer and sat down with some pizza to warm up. I pressed play and never looked back.

Demon Wind tells the story of a troubled young adult named Cory (Eric Larson) and his quest to discover his families dark past at an old farm in the middle of nowhere. Cory drags his hapless girlfriend and arsenal of friends, including two random magicians, to their own personal hell.

First off, the writing was terrible. Nothing really had much of a reason or an explanation. "Main" characters were being brought into the story thirty minutes into the movie. I still enjoyed the storyline for the main reason it had that 1980's goal oriented plot. Most of the movie it felt like I was watching a video game unfold. Again, that is not particularly a bad thing in my mind. Next we have the acting... or lack of acting. Each character seemed to sink lower and lower to a new level of incompetence. My favorite is when the first victim is taken. She is turned into a bloody doll by a nasty little demon girl and nobody seems to care. The story literally takes a five second halt before continuing on like it never happened.

All of this aside, I will be damned if this isn't a delightful romp through the hills of hell. The makeup was disgusting, the gore was plentiful, the audio work was reminiscent of Evil Dead, and there was the perfect amount of gropage. If you are a fan of Night Of The Demons, Demons or Evil Dead, you will enjoy this movie.

This movie has not yet hit DVD and I don't know if it ever will officially but the VHS is available on amazon.com and bootleg DVDs have been spotted on ioffer.com. I will leave you with the amazing artwork from the VHS case and the poster.

Vigilante

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of Fred Williamson and William Lustig films. You put these two together and it is a sure classic. Robert Forster plays an apprehensive protagonist. His character starts out questioning the morals of the group of vigilantes led by Williamson, but soon after the plot's unfolding conflict with a local gang he begins to reconsider. Although the story seems very played out for revenge flicks of this time, Vigilante gives a fresh feel by mixing urban action films and spaghetti westerns. William Lustig even said at one point that this movie was meant to be a nod to the Italian revenge films. 

Another notable part of this film that really stands out is the music. It has a very spaghetti western sound to it. It sounded almost like some of the later scores that Ennio Morricone and John Carpenter worked together on. Unfortunately the soundtrack is very hard to come by. Fania records put out a record with the songs by Willie Colón (who also plays the gang leader in the film) and Hector Lavoe but nothing from the score is on this album. I was hoping with the recent Blu-ray release of the movie from Blue Underground someone would release it but no such luck. Maybe someday...

This is still one of my favorite revenge movies and if you haven's seen it... hunt a copy down now!


I have a copy of the Italian "sequel" to Vigilante, Street Law (starring Django himself, Franco Nero) coming next week. Maybe I will do a follow up review.

Check out the trailer for Vigilante!