1988 in Film – Missile Test

October Horrorshow: Backwoods (1988), aka Geek!

Backwoods 1988 VHS box What happens when a filmmaker doesn’t provide a regular stream of fodder in their cheap slasher flick? Not a lot of good, that’s what.

Backwoods, sprung from the mind of Dean Crow, who directed and has a story credit, is about as low rent as a slasher can get. The budget looks to have been somewhere in the four figures, and the majority of the film takes place either in the woods or in a rundown house. The movie has a total of six cast members. That’s it. Six. Including the slasher. That meant there were not a lot of bodies for the bad guy to pile up. Not only that, there was not a single on screen death attributable to the slasher. How does one make a slasher flick, and the slasher has the lowest body count of all the characters? That’s quite a storytelling challenge Crow set for himself.

From the waning days of slasher flicks’ golden era, 1988, Backwoods follows couple Karen and Jamie (Christine Noonan and Brad Armacost) as they hike into the low mountains of northern Kentucky for a bit of camping. The area they chose used to be home to a fundamentalist Christian sect that wanted to sever all ties with civilization. They died off, as so many of those sects did, leaving behind nothing but local legends about the spooky woods they inhabited. A local ranger (Gary Lott), tries to steer them elsewhere, but Karen is determined to head into that dark stretch of wilderness. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Backwoods (1988), aka Geek!”

October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner

Shot on video horror flicks can generally be sorted into two camps. One, those made in Hollywood, but outside the studio system; and two, regional cinema. The main difference between the two is that the regional movies, made by filmmakers such as Tim Ritter, J.R. Bookwalter, and the Polonia brothers, are true outsider art, unconcerned with the way things are supposed to be done while making a movie, while those sprouted from the Los Angeles area have things like unionized crew, professional editing, etc. What both of these broad categorizations have in common is that the movies are objectively bad, no matter where they come from. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Death Row Diner”

October Horrorshow: Cannibal Campout

Here it is! The first shot-on-video horror flick of this year’s Horrorshow. And it’s a good one…relatively speaking.

From way back in 1988 comes Cannibal Campout, from directors Tom Fisher and Jon McBride, working from a screenplay by McBride. No misdirection in the title with this flick. There is a campout, and there are cannibals.

The woods of New Jersey are the setting, as they are in many a horror flick. Four college students, Jon (McBride, who also produced and edited), Carrie (Carrie Lindell), Chris (Christopher A. Granger, who also handled sound, music, and was a camera assistant), and Amy (Amy Chludzinski) head off into the wilderness of New Jersey for a weekend away from the rigors of college life. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Cannibal Campout”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Death Chase

Filmmaker David A. Prior has become a favorite here at Shitty Movie Sundays. Whenever we see his name pop up in the credits of some cheapie action flick the air shimmers with excitement. Low rent. Joyous and lacking all shame. Gloriously stupid. Prior, sadly lost in 2015, had an innate sense of what made action flicks of the 1980s work. He could never muster the technical skill to push these flicks into a higher tier of objective quality, but he knew that keeping things light and preposterous was the starting point for successful action at the time.

Death Chase, which Prior directed from a screenplay by James Hennessy, Craig L. Hyde, and himself, is a take on battle royale/most dangerous game tropes, wherein a deadly game of tag is being played on the mean streets of Los Angeles. The marker for who is ‘it’ in the game is a silver pistol. Whoever holds it must defend themselves from other players of the game. Whichever player still has the pistol after all the other players are dead, wins the game and a sizable cash prize.

The game is being overseen by a board of rich white dudes, led by The Chairman (C.T. Collins). Running the game on their behalf is Steele (Paul L. Smith), who appears like a deus ex referee whenever the game, and the movie, needs a kick in the pants to start moving again. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Death Chase”

Lo spettacolo dell'orrore italiano: Paganini Horror

Happy Halloween, folks. We come to the end of another glorious month of blood, gore, supernatural threats, silly plots, and fun. Early on in preparation for The Italian Horrorshow, I was focused on the big names and the big titles from Europe’s boot. But, it didn’t take long to regress to the mean. This site’s bread and butter is bad cinema, and the final film of the Horrorshow reflects that. Oh, boy, does it.

From writer/director Luigi Cozzi comes Paganini Horror, a story about a pop band that gets more than they bargained for when they use a previously unknown composition by famed violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini as the basis for their new song. Continue reading “Lo spettacolo dell'orrore italiano: Paganini Horror”

Lo spettacolo dell'orrore italiano: Witchery, aka La Casa 4 – Witchcraft, aka Witchcraft (Evil Encounters)

More Italian title trickery! Upon release in Italy, this morning’s film was titled La Casa 4 – Witchcraft, a sequel in name only to La Casa 3 – Ghosthouse. It’s an unfortunately common thing overseas, not just in Italy, for movies to be marketed as a sequel to an unrelated film. Most of the time, we don’t have to deal with that shit here in the States, so we were given the simple title Witchery, although the print I saw used the title for the film’s release in Australia, Witchcraft (Evil Encounters). How silly the business of movies can be.

The good news is, Witchery stars Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff. I’ll repeat that. Linda Blair, adorable teen star of The Exorcist turned prolific b-movie actress, and The Hoff. Continue reading “Lo spettacolo dell'orrore italiano: Witchery, aka La Casa 4 – Witchcraft, aka Witchcraft (Evil Encounters)”

October Horrorshow: Evil Dead Trap, aka Shiryô no wana

This year’s Horrorshow theme is Italian horror flicks, and by coincidence, today’s non-themed movie happens to be a Japanese film that does all it can to resemble an Italian horror flick…and just about every big-time horror flick one can think of. It’s a good thing it does it well.

From 1988 comes Evil Dead Trap, directed by Toshiharu Ikeda from a screenplay by Takashi Ishii, both of whom had made their bones in adult movies. The film follows television presenter Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) and her small crew as they investigate the origins of a snuff video that was sent to their office. Clues in the video lead the group to what looks like an abandoned military facility. After digging into some clues on my own, specifically some faded signage, it looks like Ikeda and company filmed the movie at Camp Drake, a location once used by the United States Air Force’s 1956th Information Systems Group, out of Yokota Air Base west of Tokyo. How’s that for some Google-fu? Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Evil Dead Trap, aka Shiryô no wana”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Space Mutiny

What a gloriously stupid movie. I’m pretty sure that writer, director, and producer David Winters didn’t set out to make one of the greatest shitty movies in the annals of shitty movies, but, that’s exactly what he did. Mission accomplished. Take a bow. Revel in the applause.

But, wait, there’s more.

Winters had to leave the set just prior to filming due to bereavement, so the bulk of this flick was directed by Neal Sundstrom, who had been hired as assistant director. And yet, there’s still more!

After Sundstrom delivered a cut, the movie was deemed too short. There needed to be more movie. So, David A. Prior, who has an unimpeachable CV in b-movies, was brought in, uncredited, to shoot some scenes featuring writhing space witches that are totally unconnected to the rest of the movie, just to push this dog’s running time to the 90-minute mark. As much as I appreciate Prior, I’m an even bigger fan of a movie having no superfluous fluff, and if that means an 80-minute running time, then all the better. Oh, if that were the only flaw in this movie. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Space Mutiny”

Shitty Movie Sundays: Robowar

Short of watching a mockbuster from The Asylum or its ilk, one would be hard-pressed to find a film that is more of a ripoff of a big time Hollywood production than Robowar, from Italian auteur Bruno Mattei. The victim in this case is Predator. From characters, to plot, to location, to certain scenes, all the way down to individual lines of dialogue, Mattei squeezed everything he could out of Predator short of being sued into oblivion. The only major change was substituting a rogue bionic soldier for the alien hunter

From 1988, Robowar stars prolific b-movie actor Reb Brown as Major Murphy ‘Kill Zone’ Black, the leader of a squad of commandos called B.A.M., for Big Ass Motherfuckers. For real, that’s the name. Black is the analogue of Dutch from Predator. Others include Max Laurel as Quang, the Billy analogue; Catherine Hickman as Virginia, the Anna analogue; Mel Davidson as Mascher, the Dillon analogue; Jim Gaines as Sonny ‘Blood’ Peel, the Mac analogue; and Massimo Vanni, Romano Puppo, and John P. Dulaney as interchangeable analogues to the remaining main characters in Predator. There’s even a general who gives Black and his men their mission, but he was unlisted in the credits. His only significance is a voice that sounds uncannily like Lee Van Cleef’s. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: Robowar”

October Horrorshow: Zombi 3

What’s great about a zombie flick is that it doesn’t need much of a plot to be a success. It can just lurch from set piece to set piece until the main cast is winnowed down enough to call it a day. That makes zombies a perfect subject matter for Italian director Lucio Fulci.

Zombi 3 is the 1988 entry in a film series that requires its own Wikipedia page to make sense of. According to the internet, so it must be true, the screenplay was developed by Rossella Drudi, but it was her husband, Claudio Fragasso, who got the credit. Lucio Fulci is the only credited director, but, again according to the internet, he delivered a 70-minute cut that producer Franco Gaudenzi was not happy with. So, Gaudenzi enlisted Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to carry out reshoots, with Fragasso handling most of the work. The result is an 84-minute long film that makes up for its lack of cohesion with a boatload of blood and guts. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Zombi 3″