PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

Friday Night Movies 703

Malatesta's Carnival Of Blood is a 1973 horror movie that briefly played the drive in circuit in the south when it was new. It first made it to DVD in 2003, what went out of print, and now it's available again. The story is by Werner Liepolt and the director is Christopher Speeth. It's the only film Christopher made, he died last year at age 78.

The movie is set in a crappy carnival theme park, the now gone Six Gun Territory in Willow Grove Pennsylvania. The seedy place is owned by Malatesta and run by his right hand man, Mister Blood. Mister B is secretly a vampire and Malatesta keeps cannibals in a pit. They eat the customers and staff. Some of the new staff members are there looking for their son who also disappeared from the park. They decide to fight back when the cannibals come creeping up on their trailer. Sadly, they aren't up to defending themselves and it's chompy chompy for them.

I read that Christopher Speeth was an actor who appeared in local theater and TV. His first job directing is pretty uneven, he might have developed into a better film maker but it never happened. He was also saddled with a weak script. Werner's script is not very fleshy and the dialog isn't that great. I won't be buying me a copy.

I hadn't remembered that I had seen The Ghost when I brought the Cult Action DVDr home from a recent trip to Half Price Books. It's a 1963 Italian horror film. I looked it up on my Watched Movie List, turns out I had seen it back in 2007, in one of those 50 Movie Packs I like so much. I looked at the DVD today and it's an English dubbed and pan & scan. The DVDr I bought the other day is widescreen and in Italian with English subtitles. Tucked into the front of the DVD box is a paper sleeve with another DVDr. The second disc is an English dubbed pan & scan version that looks like it might be the same print as the movie in the 50 Movie Pack. None of these versions look that good but the widescreen version is pretty piss poor. Still watchable but annoying.

The company that put the DVDr out is Cult Action and they've got a sale going on at their website, 6 for $60. Here's how they describe themselves.

Welcome, collectors! Thank you for visiting our website.

Cult Action is a film archival and transfer service specializing in rare, hard-to-find & out-of-print films from all over the globe. Whether it's action, adventure, horror, war, mondo, sleaze, exploitation, sci-fi, or just plain hard-to-find films, we're sure that we have have just what you're looking for.

Founded by true fans of these obscure genre films., Cult Action releases feature the best, most complete & uncut prints available. And catering to the serious collector, we obtain rare artwork and promotional material for our deluxe box art. The quality of our expert transfers and professionally designed box art is simply unmatched. 

Our customers enjoy fast professional service, a great selection and the best value ANYWHERE!

We currently have hundreds of genre titles listed in the archive and more coming in all the time, so be sure to bookmark this site and keep a lookout for exciting new releases!

Regards, The Cult Action Team

Sounds like a bootleg house to me. Still, you never know what you might find in a place like that. I haven't looked through their list to see if there are even 6 movies I might want. They'd have to have something special, the chance I'd pay 10 smackaroonies for a movie like The Ghost are slim.

Here's my old post from 2007.

The Ghost is the first up on Side B. It's a slow movin' ghostly revenge movie. Barbara Steele plays the leading lady, who with her lover, a doctor, kills her husband, also a doctor. That takes a half hour, or a third of the movie. The evil pair spend the next 15 minutes looking for the dead husband's safe key. It's hidden somewhere, maybe in the house, maybe in the grounds, maybe in the coat the dead man was buried in. After searching the decaying dead man they find the key, but there's no money in the safe. Things take a turn for the melodramatic briefly, then the spookin' starts. I never found Steele, who seems very popular among the horror fans, to be that great an actress nor that stunning a beauty. I never went nuts over Sophia Loren either, just a type thing, I guess. Steele does have some eyes. They creep me out. Things go to hell for the evil couple and then there's some retribution and an ironic ending. Nice. Not a great movie but better than the average in this box.

I didn't rate it at the IMDb in 2007, so I did today, I only gave it a 5. Almost 25% of the votes were a 6 but I don't think it's quite that good. Just average. I might never watch it again and it wouldn't matter.

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That high pitched whine you hear is either me complaining about our first movie or it's H P Lovecraft spinning in his grave. Howard Lovecraft And The Frozen Kingdom is a 2016 animated movie about an 8 year old H P Lovecraft. It's abysmal. Really, it's so fucking annoying and tedious, all I could do was stare and occasionally swear at the TV screen. The animation is so-so at best, it's pretty low budget, though colorful. Lovecraft's mythos have been so white washed and watered down they're boring. The characters are kind of creepy but not in a Lovecraft kind of way. The screenplay isn't that good, the characters are often annoying when they're talking, then the movie drags along when they aren't. I gave it a 1, out of spite. I see that it scores a 5.6 on the IMDb and about 60% of all the votes are over 5. Unbelievable. If only there were an e-slap app, something to send a resounding slap to the faces of the voters. A physical slap, not a digital slap, the kind of slap that's so hard it makes the slappee shit their pants. Perhaps a series of slaps. Flesh on flesh and their anguished wails are music to my ears.

The Ghoul is a 1933 Boris Karloff movie. It's British and it was filmed at the Lime Grove Studios. Thirty years later that studio became home to the first two seasons of Doctor Who. Built in 1915 Lime Grove went through a major update in 1932, making it one of the best equipped studios of the day. The BBC bought the place in 1949 and by the time Doctor Who moved in, it was out of date and too small.

That's not the only DW connection, one of the writers of the script, Roland Pertwee, is the father of Jon Pertwee, who was the third Doctor. DW had moved out of LG by the time Jon became the Doctor but he shot some links there in 1991 for The Troughton Years video. Three months later the studio closed.

The Ghoul is based on a play by Leonard Hines and Frank King, the adaptation is by Rupert Downing, Roland was joined by John Hastings Turner on the screenplay. T Hayes Hunter is the director. The screenplay is substantially different to the play. They give the mysticism of the play an Egyptian flavor to capitalize on Karloff's recent hit The Mummy.

Boris Karloff plays a man who wants to cheat Death. He's got a fancy magical jewel he's spent most of his fortune on. It's part of an ancient Egyptian secret ritual. His servant steals the jewel and Boris rises from the grave craving his gem. His house  is packed with victims, the lawyer, a couple of relatives, one of their friends, a priest and more are in the dead man's way. There's a bit of a body count even though Boris doesn't return from the dead until about 50 minutes into the 80 minute movie. He shambles around and people are running about. The jewel gets passed along a bit but Boris finds it again.

When Boris tries the ritual with the Sphinx statue he gets tricked and dies. There's a bit of a romance between the two cousins and some of the scumbags get theirs in the end. As a movie it's alright, not great, it gets a 5.9 and I gave it a 6. It's more a 5 than a 6 but it is somewhat entertaining for the cast. Ecxept for that annoying woman, she was like a low rent Zasu Pitts. It's the first film role for Ralph Richardson and Cedric Hardwicke is also in the cast.

We watched a British Blu-ray that was nice. I thought I hadn't seen the movie at first but later a few scenes made me think I had. Turns out I bought a 2004 cheapie DVD from Target, it was in the seasonal stuff for Halloween one year, only a buck. The image is not as nice but it's watchable, it's the whole movie, and I already have it. You can also see the movie on YouTube and that's a watchable version too. I put a link to the movie in one of the title above. There's also an MGM DVD available.

Friday Night Movies 700

First up is Deadly Dreams, a 1988 psychological thriller, written by Thom Babbes and directed by Kristine Petersen. Thom has a part in the film but his script is a bit whiffy. A young boy sees his parents killed by a man the father wronged in business. The boy grows up and still has issues about the death of his parents. He meets a young woman and they start a relationship. All the while he keeps having nightmares and seeing things that others aren't seeing. It gets worse and worse as the movie progresses then it turns out to have a greedy mundane reason at the back of it. Not bad, certainly not great, it gets a bit tedious for a while in the middle. Luckily, it gets riled up for as while as it comes to a conclusion. I wouldn't much feel the need to pick up a copy.

Our second feature was Cathy's Curse, a 1977 horror film that was funded by France and Canada. It was filmed in Westmount suburb of Montreal. The richest suburb in Canada at one point. A family move into a nice big house that used to belong to the dad's father. The little girl gets possessed by the spirit of a long dead girl who died in a fire. I didn't find it was keeping my attention in the middle there. The effects make up is pretty weak. Just all in all a movie that deserves a below average score on the IMDb. Some say it's so bad, it's good. That's crap. It's just a dull possession movie with so-so actors and a weak script. I'm not going to seek out a copy, that's for sure.

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In 1973 Ross Hagen produced and starred in Wonder Women, a James Bond like spy film. That's if James Bond was an American who's completely incompetant at that spy thing. Nancy Kwan is the only actor of any stature in it, though some people have a soft spot for Vic Diaz and Sid Haig, they just aren't known actors out of a small circle of genre fans.

Nancy is an surgeon with a color coded gang and a secret lair. She's developed a brain transplant procedure and to supply the young bodies she's taken to kidnapping known sports athletes. She may have the book learning but she's lacking the survival skills in the big bad world of crime. I mean Ross Hagen takes her down. In comparison Ross isn't quite a Barney Fife but he's no Poirot. Ross is more of blunder and smash kind of investigator.

It's kind of fun, it's kind of dumb, the action scenes are laughable, the car chase redonkulas. On the plus side, there's a good bit of nudity and those evil ladies are easy on the eyes. The script is pretty silly at times, I'm laughing, other times, double d's, dull dialog. I was glad to have seen it, but I doubt I'll pick up a copy. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

Who Can Kill A Child? is a 1976 Spanish film about some murderous children on an island. The kids have killed nearly all the adults on an island off the coast of Southern Spain. They've nearly cleaned out the town when our vacationing couple arrive in a boat. They've just traveled 4 hours in a small motor boat and the wife is pregnant. You can see from the photo below that they're showing a bit of red on their skin. Finding a vacant town, except for the children, seems odd but they stay on after finding the hotel. The children turn out to be violent and at first the hubby tries to shield his wife from the truth. That's never that good an idea but it's what people do. They find out that the kids went crazy the night before when they started killing.

We'd already had an idea where this is going from the incredibly heavy handed 10 minute intro to the movie. It's a short history of 20th century war and all the atrocities that have been heaped on the civilians of war torn countries. They seem to imply that the following story is a response to the violence heaped on the children. All that was presented in grainy B&W, the film moves into the modern story by switching to color.

The children chase the few survivors around and the couple find a couple of adults alive. They find that the adults of the town didn't understand their children turning on them and they didn't fight back. With that attitude, the townies don't last long. The kids chase the couple around and at the end, it's just the hubby and the kids. He fights back bravely, answering the title question, and in an ironic bit of business he gets blasted by the arriving police. The movie ends with the children heading for the mainland, the unbelieving police dead on the wharf. I hope the Spanish on the mainland do a better job of surviving than they did on the island.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador is the writer and director, he adapted Juan Jose Plans novel. I had seen one of Narciso's only other feature films, The House That Screamed, back in 2012. He mostly made TV. I had to agree with Roger Corman about the 10 minute B&W opening, Roger removed it for the AIP release in America. It goes on so long that by the time it's over I'm pretty much against the movie. I already knew war sucks and children die, I didn't need to be slapped in the face by it. The movie itself works fine without the opening. I just can't buy the movie's premise that only one guy would fight back when children come attacking. Mind you, I'm often disappointed in the lack of survival instincts of the victims in horror movies. I don't think I need to watch this one again.

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Terminal came out this year. I don't always see the new films, and dropping Netflix DVD will mean I see less. I'll have to rely on Amazon Prime for my allotment of crappy new SF movies in the future. Terminal isn't SF, it's more fantasy. A revenge film with a hint of Alice In Wonderland. It's written and directed by Vaughn Stein. It's his first movie as a director, he'd been 2nd Unit Director or Assistant Director on over 20 other films, some of note. Vaughn's heavy with the style. It looks cool but for a while in the middle he forgets to move the story along at an appreciable rate. While the film is stylish it's not anywhere as stylish as Tears Of The Black Tiger was the other day. When you get down to the core of the story, there's an abused woman who's killing all sorts of people for revenge, and she's bat shit crazy. Reminds one to mind what they do. I didn't mind watching it but I wouldn't need to go buy myself a copy to watch again someday.

I would buy a copy of Alien Autopsy but only if it was really cheap. It's a 2006 British film that's got one of the few times Jimmy Carr tried acting. Don't give up your day job Jimmy. Ant and Dec play the two guys who originally brought the Alien Autopsy film to the world. I remember that happening, it was back in 1995, and Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield tried to fool the world with a faked reconstructed film of an alien autopsy at Roswell in 1947. The movie version makes it all out to be a rather silly story and while there's a laugh or two, it could use more jokes. Jonny Campbell is the director and William Davies is the writer. Jonny was the director of The Casual Vacancy and many other British TV programs, including a couple of episodes of Doctor Who. Not much comedy there. William is more know for writing comedies, maybe the most famous are Twins, the two Johnny English movies with Rowan Atkinson, Puss In Boots, and the first How To Train Your Dragon film.

Friday Night Movies 697

Another Wolfcop is a 2017 sequel to the 2014 Wolfcop. It's the further adventures of a cop who's a werewolf. It's written and directed by Lowell Dean, who directed 13 Eerie and Wolfcop. I liked both enough to purchase them. Lowell has a new post apocalypse movie coming out. SuperGrid was shot in and around Regina Saskatchewan, and parts of the film are shot in a former Sears warehouse. It has some of the same actors that are in the Wolfcop movies.

Leo Fafard plays Wolfcop, Lou Garou when he's not all that hairy. The lady is Amy Matysio, she plays Sergeant Tina, she knows Lou is werewolf from the last movie. She's trying to cover for him and keep the rookies from finding out their Sergeant is also a werewolf. It's tough living a lie. Tina's been in a lot of TV shows and movies. She was in three episodes of Corner Gas, one of my favorite Canadian TV shows. Lou was in Corner Gas: The Movie, he played a werewolf in a fantasy scene.

That's Lou and Serena Miller, who plays Kat, and below is Yannick Bisson. Some might have seen Yannick's internationally acclaimed Canadian TV show Murdock Mysteries. I know I have. Here he gets to play the villain and swear, who wouldn't like that. Yannick's got a plan to release a horde of shape shifters on the world and he's picked Lou's town to fuck up. Lou's gonna fight back, and lucky for him, he's got some help from Sergeant Tina, Deputy Daisy, the late Willie Higgins and his sister Kat.

Lucky for the town's people, the villains prove to be easily killable. It made me laugh once in a while, it's got some gore, there's some action and goofy stuff going on. I could see buying this to watch again.

Beyond Re-Animator came out back in 2003 and it's the second sequel to Re-Animator. It's directed by Brian Yuzna and the script is by Xavier Berraondo and Jose Manuel Gomez.

Jeffrey Combs returns as Herbert West, the mad scientist in all his glory. At the start of the movie his glory is short lived as he's arrested and sent to prison. Thirteen years later the brother of one of Herbert's victims has grown up. He'd seen his sister die and did nothing to stop the infected man from killing her. He saw West in the police car and at the same time found a syringe of West's re-animation formula. Thirteen years later he's a doctor and he tracked West to the prison. His arrival will bring about the apocalypse to that institution. It's a good reminder to slow the fuck down on that obsessive kind of behavior.

It's been a while since I saw the movie, which for some reason is listed in my Watched Movies List as having first seen in 2015. I would have thought it was earlier than that.  That's when I gave it a 6 on the IMDb. I just downloaded the 2515 ratings I have given and sorted them by title. I had very few ratings at the beginning, I started in 2005 but it picks up after 2008. You can have a look at all the ratings I've given by downloading the Excel file below. No Excel, No Lookie.

Download IMDb Ratings 8-18-18

I still enjoyed the movie, and while it isn't quite as good as it's predecessors, I should pick up a copy.I didn't care that much for the young doctor who's obsessed with Herbert West. He's just an idiot, obsessed with all the wrong things. If only he'd have picked up a chair and bashed that infected guy, so many wouldn't have died.

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The Weekend Murders is a 1970 Italian film pretending to be a British murder mystery. Sergio Danati wrote the screenplay and Michele Lupo is the director. Sergio has a better handle on the story than Michele has on the directing. but neither is that great.

When the family patriarch dies the family congregates at the family estate for the reading of the will. Everything went to the granddaughter and everyone else got the shaft. Shortly after the various relatives start getting murdered. Sadly it takes an age to get to the good stuff and Michele ruins those scenes with some fucking annoying music and sound effects. I know it's 1970 and everyone was experimenting with smoking banana peels. I hope they were all high, otherwise there isn't much of a reason to do thing's that way.

The Inspector from Scotland Yard comes calling but he turns out to have little on the local Mr Plod. Not many of the characters were people I'd want to know. Fifty-one percent of the IMDb votes are a 6 or a 7, that seems high, especially when the middle drags so much. It averages a 6.2 and I gave it a five, it's just not quite there.

The comedy in The Backlot Murders is a bit better but it's still only so funny. The characters aren't much more likeable but there's no entertaining character like our policeman in the first film. It's more fun, I laughed out loud on a couple of occasions but I laughed more at it than with it. It's a 2003 film, directed by David DeFranco and written by him, Paul Arensburg and Steven Jay Bernheim. A shitty rock band goes to shoot a video on a film company lot. Some of the movie is filmed around the Psycho mansion and a set from The Lost World. Someone starts killing everyone and we have to wait a while before we find out who it is. Most of the actors were fair to poor but Priscilla Barnes and Charles Fleischer stand out from the rest. They both made me laugh. I was laughing more with the film than at it. It's still not that great a film, maybe one of the reasons that David isn't directing much anymore. I probably wouldn't pick either of these up if I see them cheap.

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Kingdom Of The Spiders is a 1977 horror movie about invading tarantulas. Allan Caillou and Richard Robinson wrote the screenplay and John "Bud" Cardos is the director.

William Shattner is veterinarian in a small town in Arizona. He calls in some help when a calf dies, frothing at the mouth. The specialist, Tiffany Bolling, comes to town and says it's spider venom. No one believes her at first but when the locals start disappearing, then they listen a bit. Once they start finding the bodies, it's too late to do much and the movie ends on a bit of cliffhanger.

The Wikipedia says they bought $50,000 worth of tarantulas, at $10 each, and then added rubber spiders to the total. That 50K was 10% of the budget. When the movie was made, Shattner was married to Marcy Lafferty, who plays his sister in law in the movie. The great Woody Strode is in the cast, the woman playing his wife, Altovise Davis, was wife of Sammy Davis Jr.

All in all it was entertaining and fun to see again. I'd lost any plot and story in the years since I saw it the first time, that was back in the 80s when it was on VHS tape. I don't have a copy, but I see YouTube has a copy that's part of a Commander USA episode. It's watchable, though there are some commercials still in the program. There's a regular copy that doesn't look too bad, either.

Our second feature was Security, a 2017 action film starring Antonio Banderas and Ben Kingsley. I like Antonio but I could give a toss for Ben. He plays the baddie with some stylish facial hair. He's after the 11 year old daughter of a mob accountant. She was headed to court but Ben sicked his posse on the convoy. The girl got away and wound up at the Mall that Antonio has just started to work at. He's a former Captain in the Marines who's down on his luck. He begs for any job, this is the one that they sent him too, his luck still sucks. Antonio rallies the 4 other security guards but they're not any match for Ben's professional scum. As you can guess Antonio has to do most of the heavy lifting. It's nothing new or original but it delivers a good average action film. I don;t know that I would need to see it again but I'd pick up a copy for a couple of bucks.

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There was a 1978 Dr Strange TV movie that didn't get released on DVD by Shout Factory until a couple of years ago. I watched it from Netflix in 2016 and eventually found a copy that was cheap enough to pick up. None of the other fellows had seen it, so we watched it first.

John Mills plays the sorcerer that will become Peter Hooten's Master and teach him some magical stuff. Clyde Kasatsu plays John's right hand man. Jessica Walters plays the evil Morgan LeFay, she's come back to Earth to wreck havoc. Anne-Marie Martin plays the young woman who gets caught up in evil and needs savin'. The movie plods along introducing all the characters. There's a bit of a battle between Jessica and John, then Peter gets thrown in there. He's not too happy being the chosen one but he eventually settles down to the job. This was supposed to be a pilot for a possible TV series but that wasn't to be. Sadly the movie just isn't that exciting. It was mostly a silly whim purchase. I would recommend it more for it's place in history, as lackluster as that is. Still, this movie does so much better when viewed with our next movie.

The Immortal Wars wins the title, hands down, for the dullest and most vapid movie that needs to be seen with extreme fast forwarding. Yet we sat through the whole things, struggling to stay awake. On top of that, there isn't any war and no one is immortal, as far as I can see. It's the work of Joe Lujan, he wrote, directed, exec produced, edited, did wardrobe and costume design, production design, set decoration, special effects and visual effects. He's totally to blame for this horrid piece of unimaginative crap. I haven't seen the comic it was based on, there might be some blame to share.

It's a shit future, some people have some sort of powers, they're rounded up and made to fight in a to-the-death battle on a TV show. The movie doesn't explain how that all would work but that's common with these sort of stories. We just get a narrow slice of whole picture. Sometimes it's easy to forget to wonder what's the fuck's going on, say when the movie is exciting or entertaining, but this movie doesn't have that advantage. Eric Roberts is in charge of the TV program and he plays a fairly good prick of a guy. No stretch for him, some of the other actors have a bit of a struggle. Speaking of struggle, the hand to hand fighting is poor, the script is poor, the pacing is poor, nearly everything on screen is poor. Then they drag the whole movie through a CGI dip, making the images all tinted and dirty. The movie drags along and there's nothing good to say about it. There are better similar movies out there. Friday Night Movie night Joe is right when he said, "I'd rather be watching The Running Man again". Wouldn't we all.

Friday Night Movies 691

Dracula 3D is a 2012 Dario Argento film. The film was the first time Dario worked in 3D. We didn't see it in 3D but there didn't seem to be much of anything that would have made the 3D stand out. Dario co-wrote the script with producer Enrique Cerezo and writers Stefano Piani and Antonio Tentori. It adapts some of the Bram Stoker novel but makes up some shit of it's own.  The ever malleable vampire lore, huh.

Thomas Kretschmann plays Dracula and Rutger Hauer plays Van Helsing. I liked Rutger but I can't say I cared much for Thomas's Dracula. Interestingly, Thomas played Abraham Van Helsing in the 2013 Dracula TV series and Rutger played Dracula in the 2005 Dracula III: Legacy. I haven't seen either. It seems like there's always some Dracula stuff to be catching up on. Asia Argento is the only other cast member that I knew.

Johnathan Harker comes to the small village of Passo Borgo, to work for Count Dracula. Mina, Jonathan's wife, will arrive in a few days. Jonathan gets chomped on pretty quickly and Mina arrives with him supposedly in the city on an errand for the Count. Really, he's in a box in the dungeon, growing some teeth. Mina's friend Lucy is the daughter of the Mayor. The city officials have made a secret pact with the vampire, he helps the village financially for snacking rights and they do what he says. When they don't, there's no saving them from the vicious blood sucker. They would have been better off to kill the prick, right from the start, dead. No saving Lucy either, she's turned by a chomp on the back of the knee.

Late in the movie Van Helsing arrives and he spends the last half hour hunting down the vamps. The movie has a bit of the look and feel of a Hammer film and that was kind of fun. The script was mostly standard vampire stuff. The giant mantis was a surprise but the Dracula flies weren't. There's some nudity and splashes of blood. Sadly, the CGI was often a let down. It's the sort of stuff you expect to see on the SyFy channel, grey and unfinished. All told I doubt I would bother with it again. There's nothing special about it. That mantis was fucking weird.

Our second movie could have used a man sized mantis to liven it up. Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist is sometimes known as Sister Street Fighter 4 but it's not part of the series that spun off of the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter movies. It came out in 1976 and it was directed by Shigehiro Ozawa who had directed the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter films. It was his last film and sadly it's not as entertaining as the Sonny Chiba films.

A couple of gals get thrown into a fight to the death with some drug dealers who run a movie studio. There's a mix of talking and fighting. Some of the talking was dull and some of the fights were hard to see what was going on. I don't think it;s more than average and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to see it again.