Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

United States - 1969/71

Director - Al Adamson

VidAmerica, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

9 1/2 Ninjas

9 1/2 Ninjas

United States - 1990

Director - Aaron Barsky

Republic Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

This low budget ninja parody film neatly secures a place among the most irritating films of all time with a spectacularly grating performance from, everyone in the film. Granted, there are a number of brilliant double entendres and visual puns sprinkled throughout, the script is actually quite good, it's just the execution that's lacking. Not in the enthusiasm category mind you, but the subtlety category. I realize that subtlety is not the stock in trade of physical comedy, quite the opposite, but when all is said and done with a film like this, one almost feels emotionally abused rather than entertained. I'm not stupid, you don't need to punch me in the face with ham, just humiliate yourself and everything will be fine. Perhaps that's the problem. When the characters are so annoying that you can't empathize or identify with 'em, even when you're laughing, it's no longer funny.

Lunch Wagon

Lunch Wagon

United States - 1981

Director - Ernest Pintoff

Media Home Entertainment, 1982, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes
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In the metropolitan areas of the United States, the food truck has now become ubiquitous. The taco truck was probably the first contemporary incarnation, but you can find just about anything these days. A few blocks from my apartment in Seattle, in the parking lot of a gas station/convenience store you can get fresh sushi, while a little further down the same street, Haitian Creole is available. Although they’ve been around practically forever, this level of cultural variety is a relatively recent development. I cannot of course speak for anywhere else, but virtually all of these rolling establishments seem to have appeared in the last 10 years, most in the last five. Talk all the nonsensical ignorant trash you want about immigration, but even bigots love a curry.

Presumably intended to be just as exotic as the smorgasbord of international options now available from food trucks, Lunch Wagon unfortunately comes from an era when, as its name implies, the typical vehicular dining establishment offered a much more banal culinary experience, like hot dogs and burgers. It is also, again one can only assume, supposed to be more titillating than the average food truck of today* since its owners are two scantily clad and buxom young women (prominently advertised on the box as former playmates Pamela Bryant and Roseanne Katon.) Unfortunately both the exotic and titillating spins on the food truck premise, which might under other circumstances actually work really well together, are afterthoughts. The truck itself, painted pink and named the “Love Bites,” plays only a peripheral role in the film, serving predominantly as a vehicle (literal and figurative) for a septic stew of lounge-act comedy.

A thrilling surprise cameo by Evel Kneivel pinball!

Move it Proles!

After inheriting their lunch wagon from Dick van Patten, our two leads recruit a sexy cook and begin selling food to construction workers. By parking over a particular manhole cover however, they run afoul of a swanky white-collar criminal type who is using said manhole to gain access to a bank. With the help of freshly landed (color coordinated) boyfriends, the female trio manage to foil not only that dastardly plan but another, less dastardly but no less annoying plan by another set of cloying “comedians.”Snagged on the undercarriage of this heretofore thrilling ordeal and dragged along like week-old road kill is yet another tangentical story, this one a talent show which goes on for days and days and is notable only for an early appearance of Missing Persons whom repeatedly perform their song Mental Hopscotch.

It’s an apt metaphor for a film that jumps all over the place yet somehow still lands on a conclusion. Using a food truck as the crux of your film is clearly not a lucrative source of material. As Wheels on Meals, the only other film with a foundational food-truck demonstrates, some other element is critical (in that case incomparable kung fu.) Instead, Lunch Wagon takes its cue Loose Shoes style, from the trashy and titillating exploitation trailers that are entertaining when compressed into 3 minutes, but stretched to feature-length become a chore.

Yes, it's that good.

*Here in Washington State there are a number of drive-up coffee joints that “offer” young women in lingerie or bikinis making the coffee. I suspect these exist elsewhere in the country as well. However, the interior of food trucks in my experience are not typically attractive, sexually or otherwise. 

Bloodfist V: Human Target

Bloodfist V: Human Target

United States - 1994

Director - Jeff Yonis

New Horizon Home Video, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 24 minutes

Bimbo Movie Bash

Bimbo Movie Bash

United States - 1996

Director - various

Cult Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 30 minutes

Not really a movie in its own right, just a compilation of clips from various low budget T&A flicks of the Corman/Olen Ray school. Unfortunately, or not depending on your point of view, this copy was trashed and unwatchable.

# 600 - Breathing Fire

Yes it's true folks, this is officially our six-hundredth post on Lost Video Archive.

To commemorate I'm dropping a review that I've been sitting on for almost a year, something both representative -it is random and generally "low quality" (by normative standards, not mine)- but also atypical -it's on DVD and martial artsy. I love you all so much I give you this gift.

So please, raise a glass to Lost Video Archive and peruse my babblings on the nugget of 90's that is:

Breathing Fire

United States – 1991

Director – Lou Kennedy, Brandon Pender, Brandon De-Wilde

Echo Bridge Home Entertainment, 2004, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Lesh do shome training....

When Uncle David comes to their father’s home in search of sanctuary, two brothers, Tony and Charlie (Jonathan Ke Quan) discover that the washed-up drunk is another in the long and vaunted cinematic tradition of expert martial-artist Vietnam veterans. Uncle David has taken custody of a young woman, the daughter of a war buddy who was killed by a ruthless criminal gang of (other) martial artists. When the thugs, including the ever-bulging Bolo Yeung come looking for the girl, the brothers want to help, but find that Uncle David is reticent to get them involved. When the thugs prove to be too much for David to handle, (even with the help of a pint of whiskey,) he reluctantly takes Tony and Charlie under his tutelage. In an inspiring and epic montage of choreographed grimaces, sincere grunts and underage shirtless-boy backslapping, Tony and Charlie become a hypothetically formidable low-rent recreation of Double Dragon.

Fortunately for the plot up to this point, the helpless female token has completely failed to recognize that her own host, Tony and Charlie’s father Mike is the leader of the very gang that smashed down her door and murdered her parents. Of course it helps that everyone else has also remained happily oblivious to Mike’s glaring sleaziness and casual indifference toward the pugnacious goons who keep dropping by to smash things and snatch the girl away. But that was before Charlie and Tony were green berets. Once they have tested their mad skills against some bartender-karate-midgets they have a revelation just in time for the big showdown with dad. Of course, as we’ve known all along thanks to some extremely convincing flashbacks, Mike is also the sociopathic, racist kung-fu ‘Nam vet who murdered Charlie’s Vietnamese mother during the war. Guilt-tripped by his brother into adopting the orphan, Mike got his revenge with the kid's name. The child will always be an enemy.  Nevertheless, this revelation comes just in time to unburden our spectatorial minds for the unambiguous third act climax.

With all of this historical mayhem revealed, the multigenerational camaraderie that has sustained tension until now predictably falters. Mike and Tony go their own ways and David and Charlie bitterly follow suit. But this premature bifurcation is not to last, for there remains a final reunification, a coming to terms which in the presence of anything “’Nam” must symbolically, if only superficially, represent the healing of the American nation itself. In a scene typical of the heartwarming coming of-age watered-down karate film that was so popular at the time, Charlie and Tony spar out their differences at the California State Tae Kwon Do Championships and all returns to normalcy in a moving fraternal-love-conquers-all freeze-frame embrace as the credits roll up and the salty eyeball liquid of joy rolls down.

Now that you're done with that, go read my friend Karl Brezdin's review of this fucker at his wonderful blog Fist of B-List. He's got better screen caps than me! Go!

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3

Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out

United States - 1988

Director - Monte Hellman

International Video Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

The third installment in this infamous franchise picks up sortof where the second film left off. Ricky, the younger brother of the original killer having eyebrowed his way to vengeance in the last film is now (played by a new actor, Bill Mosely) recovering from traumatic and near fatal cranio-cerebral obliteration at the hands of the police. His doctor, a highly unorthodox man, has installed a plastic dome on Rickys’ head in order that we might be grossed out by the sight of sloshing fluid.

Alas, said fluid is the only opportunity for merriment in this otherwise trying film. Acclaimed director Monte Hellman, the Corman-school auteur behind such great existential films as Two Lane Blacktop and The Cockfighter directed this puzzling digression into banality. I really want to blame somebody else for this film, but Hellman was at least partly responsible for writing the script, and has asserted that while not his best movie, this is his best work.

To be honest I suppose Silent Night, Deadly Night III does bear some measure of its director’s mark, but Hellman appears reluctant to make a horror movie. And who can blame him. He’s being asked to pick up the pieces of a terrible sequel and somehow renew a squandered franchise. Many of the elements of his own road-movie narratives are here, but they’re hampered by horror standards Hellman seems forced to include. Nor are the horror standards; Final Girl, psychic connection with killer, mad doctor, gritty practical cop; ever given much room to really breathe. I’m not exactly a cheerleader for formula, but I can appreciate it when an exploitation film, like home cooking, gives you the predictable comfort you crave.

That seems to me to be exactly the opposite of Hellman’s proclivity for traveling and searching films which leave questions unanswered and often unasked. Silent Night, Deadly Night III is caught between this hodgepodge of incomplete ideas, both counterintuitive and predictable yet fully neither. I’m not going to defend the ramparts of genre exclusivity and argue that the two should remain separate. That the film is coherent is remarkable, but a success it isn’t.

Lone Runner

Lone Runner

Italy - 1986

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour 23 minutes

Predating 1987's Swayze soaked sleeper Steel Dawn by a full year, Lone Runner confirms (because I saw it second of the two films) that after the apocalypse there will be a big demand for metrosexual hair styles. Of course that's entirely because the 80's were so damned awesome that the future, even if it's a post-apocalyptic one, will be just like the 80's. When society falls to its knees only heroes will have designer sculpted stubble.

Last time I found myself at the short end of the Deodato stick was back in 1968's Phenomenal, but Lone Runner offers a strong challenge for supremacy of the bummer pile. Fortunately, Deodato had the good sense to kindof remake it a year later, or at least re-imagine it in a far more entertaining way with 1987's Barabarians. I've seen my share of post-apocalypses, even Italian post-apocalypses (the best kind), and to be honest, most of them are pretty lame. Lone Runner's robed nuke-mutants and endless wandering can't be any worse than She Wolves of the Wasteland right?

I feel like I should give Lone Runner another chance just to be fair, but the memory is such a disappointment that I'm not sure I can muster it. Perhaps it's one of those films that is a drag the first time because you have such high hopes that the crash is all the more profound. Next time I'll be ready for you Lone Runner, next time your stupidity will be fun.

Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen

Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen

Italy – 1969

Director – Ruggero Deodato

Wizard Home Video, 1984, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 26 minutes

It is no exaggeration to say that Wizard Video’s 1884 big-box version of Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen is the most shocking of VHS disappointment in recent memory. Wizard was Charles Band’s first distribution enterprise specializing in graphic exploitation films. Ruggero Deodato may not be one of the finest directors that Italy has offered up, but without regard to the quality of his work, he is one of the more interesting. As I slowly work my way through Wizard’s and Deodato’s respective catalogues (which only overlapped here,) I have come to expect at the very least banal entertainment.

Here we have the famous mask of Tutankhamen, stolen from a museum and replaced with a forgery the night before the opening of its Paris exhibition. The forgery is passed off as the original and then stolen, the original passed off as a forgery and one or the other put in place of the original. Several groups of shady characters vie for the treasure which never appears after the opening scene. Phenomenal is actually the name of a masked character who pops up randomly throughout the film to fight people involved with the thievery and keep the mysterious quotient unnecessarily high. Actually the dwindling plot is so bent on confusing the real identity of both Phenomenal and the authenticity of various copies of Tut’s mask and who has them that I got tired of the switches. I actually sat through it twice, but stopped giving a fuck about 30 minutes in.

I am looking for someone or something to blame for Phenomenal’s great disappointment. There are a number of factors that are important to consider here when looking for a suitable culprit, let us start with the sources. Production funding for Phenomenal was provided by star Mauro Parenti. Based on the result, most of it funded his vanity. Not to be forgotten is that Phenomenal is a knockoff of the already intellectually undemanding formulaic heist/caper movie pattern that gave us the James Bond franchise and Danger: Diabolik; the ad-nauseum repetition of predictable individualistic male-fantasy violence and sexual innuendo. It is also important to remember that Phenomenal was also Deodato’s first feature length film. He was fresh from assistant directing various exploitation movies as assistant to better known genre mentors like Antonio Margheriti.

But in my opinion the most important thing to consider is Wizard Video’s big box release which I have in my possession. Although they’re known for packaging low budget films in great box art, but it’s not looking promising here. This is the only version that I know of available in the States. It runs a generous 85 minutes, yet clearly lacks the “rampant nudity” which Fab Press's book on Deodato had promised. If you’ll forgive my shallowness in lieu of the foregoing evidence, breasts might have been a welcome relief from the tedium which I have just twice undergone for the sake of “history.”

Although theis scene was in the movie, all nudity has been cut from the Wizard cassette.

 Each of these elements is necessary for Phenomenal’s failure, but none is alone sufficient. The catastrophe that has just unfolded makes me glad for the concept of director as auteur/artist and the invention of the “Director’s Cut”. Unfortunately though, if such a version of Phenomenal were to exist it would likely still be hard to watch. That box is so big and beautiful and I wanted so badly to enjoy myself, but such a thing is not to be.

A slightly different version of this review originally appeared in Paracinema # 12. Lost Video Archive appears in each issue of Paracinema. Number 16 is coming out soon, with a new installment of LVA, we of course recommend that you pick it up ASAP

The two smaller images come courtesy of Tele Port City whom was also rather disappointed with this film..

Obsession: A Taste For Fear

Obsession: A Taste For Fear

Italy - 1988

Director - Piccio Raffanini

Imperial Entertainment Corp., 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 30 minutes

Some of my favorite future-sci-fi movies are the ones set in a year which, by the time I see the film, has already passed. I just love laughing at vintage dreams. Even post-apocalyptic films usually do the same thing. They may be dystopian but usually they are typified by fantastic technology and absurd fashion, strange languages. But my, things sure didn’t end up nearly as awesome as they thought they would. Still you can’t help but sympathize with the poor optimistic suckers. Just like we all often do, these films imagined and hoped for something different and better than what they had. Most of them did anyway. There was one era which was so narcissistic that it didn’t really look forward for the future so much as in the mirror.

It is hard to see it now except in film because that is such an all encompassing medium. But if movies are any kind of cultural barometer, the 80’s was so convinced, so all fired sure that the it was the raddest that stuff would ever get, that it cocieved a future that looked, sounded and acted just like itself. Obsession: A Taste For Fear takes this sort of instantaneous self-adoration to new circular depths. It starts with a cookie-cutter thriller/Giallo plot in which young women keep turning up dead and at one time or another everyone is a suspect. Australian actress Virginia Hey stars as Diane, a snotty fashion photographer whose ex-husband George makes abstract video porn. Both call their work “art” presumably because it features boobs, neon and computer screens; all sure to be popular in the future. Soon, their shared models begin to get killed off, their deaths filmed in videos that look just like Diane’s photos and George’s pornos. And just like Obsession: A Taste for Fear. Of course, this makes both of them prime suspects and a surly cop chases them around between scenes of harshly-lit softcore and second-string period hits on the soundtrack. Finally Diane’s gay assistant is revealed to be the killer and Diane herself retreats cathartically into her pornographer Ex’s reassuring grasp. Ladies and gay men take note; the future may remain less than liberatory.

Wow, I honestly don’t know if I can compute that. If the future is exactly like right now how do we know it’s even the future? Truth be told, Obsession does have an odd looking car in one scene and I heard a rumor about a ray-gun somewhere. There are a few computers that clack and bleep so that’s peripherally, hintingly supposed to be the future I guess. What gave it all away though was the overwhelming sense that what was happening on screen, and on the screens on screen, and on screens on screens on screen, was the most significant and important thing that could happen. It was the feeling of imminence exuded like last night’s cocaine from every solipsistic pore of Obsession that made it an exercise in self abuse. It’s the sort of future that looks great in everything except the rear-view mirror.

Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex

United States – 1995

Director – Jonathan Betuel

New Line Home Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

Sometimes in the process of poisoning my mind with all these films I stumble across one that, despite its relative availability, just demands closer inspection. After watching Theodore Rex, there are a lot of things going through my mind. It’s a mess of confusion and wonderment up there, a jumble of emotion, fright, anger and even some sadness. I feel a little bit dirty. In case you are too young, have forgotten, or never had the pleasure of knowing at all, I’ll give you a quick refresher on the plot. In a nominally sci-fi future dystopia, detective Katie Coltrane (Whoopi Goldberg) partners with a bumbling, human-sized talking Tyrannosaurus Rex (“Teddy”) to solve the murders of several other dinosaurs. Much “hilarity” ensues. However, there is something much more problematic here than the fact that a talking dinosaur has just been given a job as a cop.

On the surface Teddy is an “adult” who drinks, chases women and has a job.  But because he talks, dresses and acts like a child, he is the film’s demographic selling point and titular hero.  Despite, or perhaps because of, his best efforts to channel Axel Foley, our “hero” is given all the attributes of the constantly frightened or mistake-prone sidekick. The subsequent hour and a half wallows in the resentment of his human counterparts. They make no secret of their contempt when such an obviously inferior creature is given a toy job on the police force in order to placate dino-rights activists, (I’m not making this shit up.) Even Whoopi uses the closet-bigot’s time honored phrase “you people,” (errr, dinosaurs.) In this light, we must recall that Theodore Rex is a product of the decade that gave us such PC Tokenism as the Americans with Disabilities Act and the backlash against Affirmative Action. As such, its bitterness towards childlike-adults (read: the mentally handicapped) reeks of the sort of recrimination familiar to an artist forced to sacrifice his aesthetic vision on the altar of commercial viability. Beneath its kiddie, buddy-cop exterior, Theodore Rex is an agonized cry of outrage at the decline of that great imperialist institution, “meritocracy”.

When confronted with movies of highly subjective quality, one often hears the question “why did this seem like a good idea?” This is an understandable response, a reflexive reaction to offended sensibilities, but it’s too loosely used against movies that venture into uncharted territory. Specifically the question lacks definition, being too subjective to serve as any real criterion. Humans are after all gifted with creative, imaginative minds which should be used and enjoyed even if their vision is sometimes more than a little out of their grasp. This film however is one movie for which this overused question is entirely appropriate. The anti-hero has a long tradition in narrative storytelling. Theodore Rex however, takes the unprecedented step of removing the hyphen from the trope and being literally against its hero. This sort of meta-ethical flip-flopping is dangerous, because it dissolves the existential barriers between film, audience and film-maker. It is a mind-warping paradox that can lead to feelings of betrayal and revulsion for all three parties, and ultimately to the sort of resentment that causes a writer/director to quit making films altogether.

Blood Hook

Blood Hook

United States - 1986

Director - James Mallon

Prism Entertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 25 minutes

Witchfire

Witchfire

United States – 1985

Director – Vincent J. Privitera

Video Treasures, 1990, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 32 minutes

When I saw this on the shelf at the thrift store, I felt that I was being pressured, browbeaten, and even taunted into buying it by the singular, menacing name on the box. Shelley Winters. The movie sinks or floats on the power of that name alone, and that is all you need to know to justify its purchase, rental or theft. Not knowing who Shelley Winters was only deepened my feelings of guilty ignorance, playing upon heretofore suppressed feelings of inadequacy and making it all the more necessary to paper over the deep rifts in my spirit with the purchase of this dollar ninety-nine indulgence.

Shelley Winters many years before Witchfire

During a long career that began during the Second World War, Winters began as an up and coming blonde bombshell actress, but rejected this role both on screen and in her public persona, and instead actively challenged expected feminine norms. Some 45 years later in Witchfire, she actively challenged my tolerance for shrill, embarrassing nonsense. Her character Lydia is a patient at a psychiatric hospital where the handsome young doctor has just driven his car off a cliff. In an attempt to calm their psychoses, the interim doctor allows Lydia and two other aggrieved female patients to attend his funeral. Led by the intrepid Lydia the ladies escape and hide out in the nearby woods at her childhood home. It is there that she burned her family to death as a child, resulting we are left to assume for lack of any evidence other than the criminally deceptive title, in her subsequent mental illness and pharmaceutical treatment for such. Lydia claims to be a witch with the ability to cast a spell which will resurrect the dead doctor and bring him back to comfort them. Without their medication however, the three women begin the descent into unscripted madness. When a strapping hunter conveniently appears, they assume that he is the returned doctor and a few tepid minutes of climax splutter and ooze across the screen like the exudate from a carbuncle.

Witchfire, but not Shelley Winters

Witchfire is a slow-motion train-wreck in progress engineered (literally) by the nonsensical ad-libbing of Winters. I am not embarrassed to admit that I devolved into a more primitive mental state, debasing the film at every turn, and seeking whatever crude and degenerate sport I could make of this scintillatingly flogable carcass. What my desperate vulture-like mind latched on to were an extra’s boobs, (see right. Despite a love scene with The Hunter which generated some base anticipatory tension, patient Julietta (Corinne Chateau) doesn’t grace the screen with her presents) and the little kid from Over The Top (David Mendenhall) who performs the exact same role here, and receives a satisfying smack across the face from his dad, the very same Hunter. That I enjoyed these two moments so much is equally the fault of Witchfire and my own weak will, but assigning blame is irrelevant when the end result is the same.

Leslie Nielsen's: Bad Golf My Way

Leslie Nielsen's: Bad Golf My Way

United States - 1994

Director - Rick Freidberg

PolyGram Video, 1994, VHS

Run Time - 46 minutes

Pretty Kill

Pretty Kill

a.k.a. Tomorrow's A Killer

United States - 1987

Director - George Kaczender

Lorimar Home Video, 1987, VHS

Starring - Yaphet Kotto, David Birney and Season Hubley

In my anticipation of Kotto Week, I scanned a bunch of VHS boxes for films starring our man of the hour (week). I normally post on Mondays and Fridays, but for the coming week I've switched it up a bit. I hope that all of you regular readers will visit the other contributors who are participating in the event, and if you want to take part in the next one (there will be more of these) I hope you'll get in touch with me.

Slashdance

Slashdance

United States – 1989

Director – James Shyman

Rentertainment, 1990, VHS

Run Time – too long

God bless anything shot on video and I specifically mean video tape. It betrays a certain confidence in the format that is absent from later incarnations of enthusiast cinema. Back then, clever titles and box art were all a buyer had to go on, and that is exactly what brings us to Slashdance, a film so quintessentially box-art reliant that it brings to mind the “I Will Dance on Your Grave” series from Eden Entertainment. Each of which was a terrible homemade horror film packaged under lurid cover art and a series title intended to conjure Meir Zarchi’s rugged I Spit on Your Grave.* These days the internet makes it possible to instantly exchange information on the contents and quality of a film and thus avoid the crushing disappointment that typified such deceptively packaged stuff as Slashdance and I Will Dance On Your Grave: Cannibal Hookers. Now we use the web to talk about how “cool” shitty it is, and want it all the more.

Unfortunately that level of communication does not grace Slashdance itself which is barely held together by vaguely cross referencing dialogue and a cast of well built women who thrash and wobble their way around a tiny collapsing theater stage in New York. Don’t get me wrong, there is lots of talking, everyone is always talking, but they never really put a consistent narrative dialogue together, there is no “communication”.

Ironically one of the temptations of very-low budget film-making is to compensate for a lack of expansive physical atmosphere, locations or even violence and nudity, with extra dialogue. But convincing, realistic dialogue is really hard to write, and all that verbal padding inevitably ends up strained and innocuous, and often delivered in absurdly affected voices. The assumption seems to be that regular conversation is full of crude physical innuendoes rather than anything subtle or simple. In trying to make up for a lack of anything else, Slashdance has overstocked its shelves with the cheapest but hardest to produce commodity. It literally took me three sit-downs to make it all the way through this film.

It is true, I have an affection for the 1980’s which belies my otherwise bellicose attitude toward fashionable retreads. Nevertheless, my attachment to that ultimately unremarkable decade remains firm. The film that I think captures the self absorbed essence of that era is Flashdance, for it bonds painful vanity, leg warmers and faux empowerment in a single profoundly shallow package. Slashdance also seamlessly combines several distinct elements into one convenient nugget. Boring and painful however, are significantly less iconic than Irene Cara’s “What A Feeling”. When you know you have a shitty product I guess you can’t be blamed for trying to recoup your losses by loading your box art with the very things with which you have utterly failed to imbue your movie. Forgive me if it makes me sad when I think of all the lost potential of that cover art and the inspirational namesake, my optimism sometimes forces me to suffer through any debasement.


*. A.K.A. Day of the Woman, 1978, The unofficial sequel, Savage Vengeance stars the actress from the original, and ironically was one of the films in Eden's I Will Dance On Your Grave series.

This review originally appeared in Paracinema Magazine #9, April 2010.

The Supernaturals

The Supernaturals

United States - 1985

Director - Armand Mastroianni

Embassy Home Entertainment, 1986, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 25 minutes

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