107. Grave of the Vampire and 108. Mutant

Jump to Mutant (1984)

107. Grave of the Vampire (1972)
Director: John Hayes
Writers: David Chase, treatment by John Hayes
From: Pure Terror
Watch: archive.org

A child born from the rape of a woman by a vampire grows up to hunt his evil father down.

The movie opens with a couple going to a graveyard to make out, which is always a good idea and promises a quality outcome. As the guy proposes to the girl, the vampire Croft rises from his grave. Croft kills the guy, rapes the girl, and runs off when the gravedigger comes by.

There’s some material that feels like it’s going to be important—the detective investigating the murder and rape is closing in on Croft, the woman is told to abort the baby because it’s not alive and is actually feeding off her, the baby being born as an early version of Blade--but ultimately comes to nothing. The detective is killed by Croft at the graveside, the woman insists the baby is her lover’s child and so refuses to abort him, and the rearing of a half-human/half-vampire child isn’t explored.

This constitutes the first third/half of the movie, and there’s a lot the movie does well. First is the issue of the rape. It’s an inciting incident so, in that sense, is essential to the story, but the movie never makes it an angle for exploitation or entertainment. The assault happens off-screen so you’re not watching someone’s assault displayed for fun. Plus the cops investigating the case take her seriously, never question her story, and never halfway blame her for her own assault. She’s the victim and they’re focused on the person who committed the crime. I know it sounds PC to highlight it, but this manages to be a movie about an assault that does it right, and it was done in 1972. It’s 44 years later—figure it out, filmmakers!

The detective is interesting as well. Since he dies relatively quickly, he doesn’t get defined a lot, but he’s sketched out pretty well for the time he’s on-screen and the initial impression is that he’s going to be a mentor or Dr. Loomis figure for the kid: “He was there the night of the assault, figured out it was a vampire, but no one believed him. Now, twenty years later, the child of that assault is coming to the detective to hunt down his vampire father and stamp out the evil for good!” That movie sounds awesome. Unfortunately, this one has the detective killed by Croft at Croft’s graveside and that’s the end of that plotline.

Also the end of the production values. This is the moment when the movie shifts to the woman having the baby and, during the first few difficult weeks, learning that the baby will only drink blood. This starts to look like an Andy Milligan movie, that anachronistic moldering Gothic made in a contemporary space aesthetic. I like that look. There is a pleasure, sometimes, to seeing the seams because you get the sense that you could do this too. And the overall aesthetic of this first part works pretty well. There’s a nice tone, atmosphere, and then it just falls away for the rest of the movie.

Jump ahead, the child, James, is an adult, has learned the truth about his father, and has been tracking him around the world, seeking revenge. How this revenge has manifested or been funded is never explained. We only get introduced to it all through voice-over, and are told that James has finally found him.

Croft is teaching a night class (of course) about myths and fears under the name Professor Lockwood. James has signed up as a student and antagonized Lockwood briefly by mentioning Croft. After class, Lockwood flirts with Anne, one of his students who reminds him of his dead wife.

Anne and her roommate Anita live in the same building as James. James comes down to find a party being thrown, Anita takes him aside to ask about Croft, and then Anne leaves with James because she didn’t anticipate coming home to a party. She and James hook up which Lockwood sees in a vision. He visits Anne and Anita’s apartment, but only finds Anita. She says she knows he’s Croft and asks him to turn her. He kills her instead. Anne finds the body and is expectedly disturbed.

Not that it seems to matter much in the movie because we cut to Anne talking to brand new characters about the séance that Lockwood has invited them all to because apparently that’s happening now. Anne, James, and the sundry deadmeats join Lockwood for the séance. Lockwood tries to get his late wife to possess Anne, but Anita possesses her instead and reveals him as the vampire—a revelation that carries no weight because James is the only one who cares and he already knows.

You fail. You fail at movie-making.

The spirit leaves, James takes Anne upstairs to recover on one of the beds, and Lockwood kills the deadmeats. James finally confronts Lockwood, reveals that James is Lockwood’s son, and they fight. James kills Lockwood, but in the final moments, the vampiric curse seems to take him over and the movie ends with him as a vampire. And a goofy title card.

What starts as a low-budget, atmospheric piece devolves into an episodic muddle. The three parts—conception, classroom, climax—don’t feel linked, like the writer and director had the three big events they wanted in the movie, but didn’t know how to make the energy flow. I was ultimately disappointed by this because I enjoyed the beginning so much. There was a lot of promise that just petered out. The movie, frankly, felt like a mini-series that got cut down to a 90-minute feature: the key moments of each episode were present, but the material linking them got cut for time.

On the upside, the film is in the public domain and there’s a nice MPEG2 on Archive.org. Due to the rape at the beginning, it’s a little difficult to riff this movie, but it’s good enough to pass the time on a Saturday afternoon.


108. Mutant aka Night Shadows (1984)
Directors: John “Bud” Cardos, Mark Rosman
Writers: Michael Jones, John C. Kruize, and Peter Z. Orton from a story by Michael Jones and John C. Kruize
From: Pure Terror

Two brothers get stranded in a small Southern town while on a road trip. Strange figures start stalking the streets at night and, when one brother disappears, the other has to start digging to find out the truth.

We open with a man walking through the yard of a darkened house. He finds curious ooze on the ground and puts it in a specimen jar. He goes into a cellar through the outer door and gets attacked by hands that burn, and he never appears in the movie again.

We cut to Josh and Mike driving down a country highway. Josh is telling Mike to lighten up and, to demonstrate his point, closes his eyes and lets go of the wheel allowing the car to go wherever it may on the road. Mike tells him to quit and Josh almost has a head-on collision with a truck. The truck turns around and runs Josh and Mike off the road into a gulley, leaving them stranded.

It’s in this introduction to our heroes, and, yes, Josh and Mike are the heroes, that you find the problem with the movie. Josh is being stupid and almost gest Mike killed. Mike just takes it—I mean, he doesn’t even try to grab the wheel to keep the car going straight. He just whines at Josh to quit it. And the truck that runs them off the road is full of giggling rednecks laughing at them for being city boys, but Josh almost ran right into their truck. He’s the problem, not them. The movie forgets where our sympathies lie.

So the brothers walk to town, arrive at night, and Mike finds a body that’s been attacked by someone with powers similar to whatever killed the man at the beginning. Mike wants to call the police, but when they go into the bar to ask for help, they run into the rednecks again and a fight breaks out. Josh actually makes things a bit worse. The sheriff is there, though, and breaks it up, telling Josh and Mike to leave by morning. Mike tells him they found a body, but when they investigate, the corpse is gone and a bum wearing almost identical clothes is found instead.

The sheriff drops them at a boarding house where Josh and Mike are given separate rooms and this is the part where you’d expect something to happen to Josh because he’s the jerk, the comic relief, and Mike is the character who’s starting to suspect something about this town and investigate. So of course a monster reaches out from under the bed and takes Mike. We’re left for the rest of the movie with the cinematic equivalent of the asshole on the other end of the bar that you’re so glad you don’t have to deal with.

Things don’t develop too dramatically from there. Josh asks the cute barmaid for help getting to a gas station since the town is eerily deserted, and she agrees after she swings by the school since she’s also a teacher. School’s been canceled as well and there’s a crying child there because he’s afraid of how weird his parents are acting at home. Teacher sends him home anyway—thanks lady!—and Josh finds a corpse in the school basement. He gets into another fight with the head redneck and then hides in the teacher’s car.

The sheriff and local doctor are confused about the state of the body so the doctor does her own autopsy. She starts describing the effects of the disease that seems to have killed the victim while her assistant is going through them and ultimately turns into a monster.

An hour in, we finally see one of the monsters. And they look. . .

Okay. Actually, they’re not terrible at all, but it’s mostly pancake makeup spread all over their skin. They look a bit like the dead souls in Carnival of Souls so it’s not that bad, it’s just not dramatic.

Anyway, there are a few red herrings—Josh is suspected of involvement with the killings, he’s still trying to find his brother, and there are nods to the sheriff and doctor having had a relationship. Eventually Josh tracks the contamination back to the local chemical plant which is causing the zombie outbreak, the town is completely overrun by zombies that night, and Josh and the teacher are saved at the last minute from the monsters by the sheriff and the state police.

The movie’s not terrible, I just didn’t care. The production values are okay and it looks nice enough, but the plot’s lacking and the characters never drew me in. Making the jerky brother the protagonist was a real misstep because I spent the movie going, “If you stopped being a prick for five minutes, ya might get somewhere.” Frankly, this feels like something Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have seriously considered doing for an episode. Rifftrax, it turns out, did.

I grabbed the Rifftrax a while ago, which was lucky because, as of this writing, it’s no longer available. According to one of the comments on the page, this has been the case since at least early September. The movie may have been mistakenly thought to be public domain and someone has stepped forward to make their claim or the Rifftrax contract to distribute the film expired. So it may come back. Definitely a strange occurrence.

So, yeah, it’s okay. You can make jokes around it and it’s not overly-boring, it’s just never that compelling or over-the-top either. It is more than perfunctory, which is to its credit, but it’s also probably part of that subset of 80’s horror movies where the VHS cover art was far more dramatic than anything in the film itself.

105. It Happened at Nightmare Inn and 106. Horror Rises From the Tomb

Jump to Horror Rises From the Tomb (1973)

105. It Happened at Nightmare Inn aka Una vela para el diablo (1973)
Director: Eugenio Martín
Writers: Antonio Fos and Eugenio Martín
From: Pure Terror

Laura, a British tourist arrives at a pensione in a small Spanish village expecting to meet her sister. The sisters who run it, though, tell Laura that her sister has left without a forwarding address. Laura's suspicions grow as other young women renting rooms likewise disappear.

Taking a cue from We Hate Movies' Spooktacular and The Flop House's Shocktober, all the movies this month will come from the Pure Terror set, a distinction that makes no difference whatsoever.

This is also, basically, the first anniversary of the Misery Mill. The first post with movies went up on October 9th, 2015 and featured Carnival of Crime and Absolution. Since the underlying purpose of this whole project is to find material for a potential horror host show, it only seems appropriate to start the second year focusing on horror films.

All that, of course, is said to avoid talking about It Happened at Nightmare Inn. This is a 67-minute movie that feels like a three-hour snooze. Although my blurb focuses on Laura as the main character, the movie generally focuses on Marta and Verónica, the sisters that run the pensione. After the credits end, the movie starts in the kitchen with them discussing what happened to “that girl” in oblique terms until Laura arrives. She's looking for her sister May who Marta and Verónica insist just checked out that morning, although they're being very suspicious about it. Laura checks in anyway, hoping to find May or at least news of her.

The movie plods along from there. Laura talks to people in town about her sister, Marta stares disapprovingly at a guest who runs around town in a too-short skirt, and implications about May's unfortunate fate come up in conversation between Marta and Verónica.

The young guest comes home drunk one night, tries to force Marta to take off her clothes, and Marta stabs her. I think this is the moment where Marta is supposed to be recognized as the villain, but it does feel like self-defense.

It's around this time that we learn Marta had been engaged, but her fiancé skipped out on the wedding at the last minute to run away with a “modern, foreign girl.” This, then, is the motivation, the why behind all the killings. Mrs. Voorhees killing camp counselors because their sexual distractions left her son to die, Marta killing liberated women in revenge for being left at the altar.

Anyway, Laura can't prove anything and checks out as a young woman with an infant checks in. Rumors spread around town that she's not married so the sisters decide to take the child to an orphanage and eventually raise him as their own. They murder the woman only to discover that she was married, but seeking a divorce, which Marta insists makes it okay. This sounds like Mike Pence's America.

Laura breaks into to the pensione to search the massive cisterns of wine in the basement, but hears Marta approaching before she can check the final one. She comes back the next day with a man, hereafter referred to as “Dead Meat,” who'd met both May and the murdered tourist. That night, he checks the final cistern and discovers a body. Marta stabs him in the back.

Meanwhile, that morning a woman had an allergic reaction to the food at the pensione and her husband grabbed the bit of food that she'd eaten. When it's checked later that night, it's revealed to be an eyeball. Verónica had drawn wine from the wrong cistern.

Laura discovers Dead Meat's body, is gagged and bound by the sisters, and is running through the pensione trying to escape as a mob approaches. The sisters grab her just as she falls against a window on the first floor, pulling the curtain down, revealing the sisters' actions to the mob that's just arrived. Close up on Laura's gagged, tear-stained face, THE END.

The movie has been heavily edited and it shows. There's a scene where Marta goes walking through town, hears the voice of a young man that works in the pensione, and spies on him and his friends skinny dipping. The next shot, she's disheveled, covered in scratches, and trying to rush home discreetly. I don't know if that was a scene of violence or if she took advantage of him, because he never shows up in the movie again and it's never mentioned.

There's also an odd logic at work. The town is so small that it doesn't have a police department—Laura is sent to the mayor to voice her suspicions—but is large enough to have so many tourists coming and going that three disappearing in the space of a week goes unnoticed.

This is one of those movies that would have been better if they'd pushed it a little further. Marta is running everything, but is she enacting the Puritanical will of the town (a local gossip is the one that tells her that the mother isn't married) or is she trying to get revenge for her fiancé abandoning her? Also, so many of the shots imply that the victims are being butchered and fed into the oven, only they're not. Let them get cooked and fed to the tourists! Why not? The revelation comes when a guest accidentally eats human flesh, so why not have them doing that all along?

Obviously, the movie missed the mark for me. It's just so blah in so many ways. It's Googlable if you'd like to watch it yourself and, while my copy doesn't have any copyright notice on it, it was originally Spanish so may very well have been GATT'd.


106. Horror Rises From the Tomb aka El espanto surge de la tumba (1973)
Director: Carlos Aured
Writer: Paul Naschy
From: Pure Terror

Hugo uncovers the severed head of Alaric, a warlock executed centuries prior. Now freed, Alaric starts exercising his diabolical powers in the hopes of resurrecting his sorceress wife.

This post has become an unintentional Spanish film double feature, and, like It Happened At Nightmare Inn, this movie is likely covered by GATT. I was initially excited about because I thought it might be one of the Coffin Joe flicks. Turns out that it’s a Paul Naschy flick.

On the upside, it turns out that it’s a Paul Naschy flick!

We start with a slow—which is the watchword for this movie, so much of it is slow—procession of medieval figures leading a witch and a warlock to their execution. The warlock, Alaric, is played by Naschy, beheaded with his head placed in a box to be buried separate from his body so that his soul may never find rest. The witch, Alaric’s wife, is stripped, hung from her feet, and whipped before also being executed. Most of that happens off-screen or between edits, but it lends a sordid tone to the film that, curiously considering how I’ve talked about these other movies, I kind of liked. There was no pretense that it was anything but sordid and I like when movies recognize what they are.

Jump to the present day where rich playboy Hugo, also played by Naschy, is checking in on his artist friend Maurice. Maurice is hung up on a painting that he can’t quite get right. It’s a figure in black, but the face just won’t come together.

You can guess where it goes from here.

Hugo and his friends go to a medium because Hugo’s heard rumors that Alaric’s head is buried on his property out in the country. As they contact the spirit and get the exact location, Maurice has a breakthrough on his painting and realizes the face is Alaric’s—the same as Hugo’s.

They all pile in a car, drive to the country, get harried by bandits that they easily dispatch, and learn that the townspeople in the region are a bit odd. They dig up Alaric’s head, but some thieves open the crate that night thinking it contains treasure. Alaric possesses one of them and kills all the witnesses present. Elvira, the daughter of one of the victims, comes to Hugo and Maurice with the news.

Alaric’s head is reunited with his body, he possesses Maurice and his girlfriend Paula, Hugo falls in love with Elvira, and Alaric raises the dead to stage a zombie attack on Hugo in the house. The scene doesn’t work narratively, but, according to Wikipedia, Naschy had just seen Night of the Living Dead and wanted to include something similar in his movie. You can tell just by looking.

Hugo and Elvira find a talisman that her father had hidden for just this occasion, but Maurice returns and kills Hugo. He tries to kill Elvira, but she hits him with the talisman and breaks the spell. Alaric and Paula run around town being vampires preparing for the great sacrifice which will allow Alaric’s wife, who’s possessing Paula, to be returned to her own body.

Climatic battle, everyone dies except Elvira who, having saved the day, wanders off in a daze and throws the talisman into the lake.

This movie lost me about halfway through; the energy just fell off. Until then, it moves at its own pace, but there’s just enough sense of weirdness to make it compelling. Once the zombie homage hits, though, it feels like they’re just playing for time. You can sort of guess where things are going to go from the start, although I’ll admit to being surprised that Hugo wasn’t possessed by or didn’t become the reincarnation of Alaric. They’re both played by Naschy and it seems like that would be the obvious turn.

However I think the movie is kind of fun, not despite the inevitability but precisely because of that. We know what’s coming so the pleasure becomes all the surrounding details—the setting and atmosphere. When the couples are driving up to the land, they’re attacked by a pair of bandits. Hugo kills one and the other runs into the woods where local townsfolk catch him and then execute him in front of the group. These folks are in a strange place and that weirdness, the particular Gothic tone of the movie, is really appealing. This could easily be adapted to a nice Call of Cthulhu game as parts of it feel vaguely Lovecraftian.

So, in short, not great but not without its charms. Good enough to have on while you’re doing ironing or taking care of other small chores.

103. Don't Open Till Christmas and 104. Treasure of Tayopa

Jump to Treasure of Tayopa (1974)

103. Don't Open Till Christmas (1984)
Director: Edmund Purdom
Writers: Alan Birkinshaw (additional scenes), Derek Ford
From: Drive-In

A serial killer stalks the streets of London in the run-up to Christmas murdering people dressed as Santa.

A man in a Santa suit is making out with his girlfriend in the back of a car when they're both murdered. Later, at a party, a man dressed as Santa gets a spear thrown through him. This happens in front the Santa's daughter Kate and her boyfriend Cliff. Inspector Harris and Detective Powell of Scotland Yard are put in charge of the case, one they have to solve quickly since, as a newspaper headline notes, there's only “three killing days till Christmas.” Enjoy that because that's the end of this movie's wit.

Cliff is strangely glib about Kate having watched her father get murdered and keeps trying to get her to go outside, loosen up, just relax. “Why you so uptight? I mean, you just witnessed a brutal murder last night, and it was your dad. I don't want to be crass, but you can't mourn forever.”

He meets up with a photographer friend and the couple go to the photographer's studio to find him taking pictures of a model doing light bondage. Cliff tries to talk Kate into joining in, and she leaves in a huff because what the hell, man? Seriously! The funeral hasn't even been arranged! Cliff sticks around, makes out with the model while she's dressed as Santa, and the killer shows up. Cliff bolts (our hero) and the killer threatens the model, but doesn't kill her after she shows him her tits. Cliff, having been at the scene of two encounters, is now the primary suspect, but is also not part of the movie from this point on.

Meanwhile, Giles, a man claiming to be a reporter, is contacting Detective Powell to imply that Harris is the real killer. Powell keeps giving him the brush-off, but becomes increasingly suspicious of Giles himself and has him followed.

A Santa gets killed in a peepshow booth and the girl who was working there is taken in for questioning. She didn't see the killer's face, so can't identify him. Rather than accept the police escort home, she goes back to work and is immediately kidnapped by the killer.

Just geniuses throughout this picture. Pure geniuses.

Kate starts investigating Harris and finds out he visits a mental institution every week. When she meets with Harris for dinner (because two (?) days after your father's murder it's normal to accept a date from the chief inspector), he tells her it was to visit his brother who was committed as a child. Kate goes home and finds Giles in her apartment where he admits to being both the killer and Harris' brother, and the reason he's been killing is he wanted to give his brother “a real case to work on.” Powell calls Kate, but Giles kills her as she answers. Powell hears her death and rushes to the apartment where he chases Giles into a junkyard. Giles is cornered, but somehow manages to electrocute Powell anyway.

Giles returns to his lair where Sherry, the peepshow girl, is tied up. He unties her because she promises not to try to escape, and tells her she's going to suffer for all the evil that infuses Christmas. She runs, manages to shove him over a stairwell, but when she investigates the body, he suddenly wakes up and kills her.

Flashback to Giles as a child seeing his dad dressed as Santa cheating on his mother. His mother walks in, the couple fights, and Santa-dad shoves her, knocking her down a stairwell and killing her. Which means he wasn't killing just to play Moriarty to Harris' Holmes, but actually did have something against Santas. Or maybe not. It's impossible to care.

Cut to Harris' apartment on Christmas. Harris has been fired from the department and is opening a gift that was sent to him at the beginning of the murders. It's a music box with a note indicating it's from his brother which, of course, explodes, killing him. The End.

The movie makes no sense. They say it's going to take three days, but what follows takes far more than three days, although it's impossible to tell what the timeline of this movie is. None of the characters even matter because it's not their story. The movie is just a series of people dressed as Santa getting murdered in various ways—the most notable one having his face pressed down over an open flame after singing “Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire.” Of course the forced irony of him dying then is entertaining, but he just bursts into flames. It's hilarious.

The rest of the movie, though, not so much. It's not even clear who the main character is supposed to be. In one version of this movie, it would be Cliff trying to clear his name, save his girlfriend, and redeem himself in her eyes. In another, it'd be Inspector Harris using whatever tools he has at hand to get to the bottom of what's really happening. It's neither of these things, though. It's just some anonymous figure murdering random people in Santa suits. That's not a plot. The strange thing, for me, is that I've written so much about this. The movie sounds like it's full of plot and incident, but it's not at all. The movie itself is only 86 minutes, and it drags because none of it matters.

The movie, in and of itself, isn't particularly fun, but works all right if you don't pay attention to it. I screened this as part of a Winter Solstice party a couple years back, and it works okay in that context: no one's really paying attention and can pop in and out of the movie when a hilarious death is occurring. For those who are curious, the party was a sundown-to-sunup movie marathon with Gremlins, Black Christmas, Christmas Evil, Don't Open Till Xmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, and, planned, but not watched, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. There's no shortage of great winter/Christmas/Solstice-themed horror movies and you can leave a comment with your recommendations. I may do it again this year using exclusively Krampus-themed flicks. I don't think I'll ever return to this movie, though.


104. Treasure of Tayopa (1974)
Director: Bob Cawley
Writers: Robert Mason, Philip Michel
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A group of treasure hunters are trekking through the Mexican wasteland in search of Tayopa, an abandoned mission. They’re followed by a stranger intent on ending their journey and threatened by divisions within their group.

The movie opens with footage of an actual cockfight and can there be any more succinct review of a movie than, “You literally watch something die”? From the cockfight, we launch into a voice-over telling us the “Legend of Tayopa,” only it doesn’t relate the legend or tell us anything about Tayopa. Coincidentally, I’m in the midst of grading student papers, so the failure of creators to tell us what they’re trying to tell us is the leitmotif of my day.

The narrator appears on-screen, listed in the credits as “Host,” because he's not actually part of this movie, and finally tells us that Tayopa was a 16th century Spanish mission in Mexico. The missionaries forced the local natives to mine for gold until the natives rose up and killed them. Since then, the exact location of the mission and its treasure has remained a secret.

Thus Kathryn Delgadillo, the last descendant of someone associated with Tayopa, bearing her family’s undefined curse from that place and knowing its secret location. She’s narrating the movie now and has important information relating to Tayopa or the curse or herself, but it’s lost in a bad edit so that we can return to the real star of this movie: the music.

So little happens on-screen until the second half, and that may be generous. The structure of the film is narration—musical montage—narration—musical montage—dialogue—musical montage. This was less a movie than a music video collection for generic lite FM desert ballads.

In the movie itself, Kathryn's team of treasure hunters has the stoic and experienced Tom as leader, quiet and affable Felipe as translator, and sociopath man named Sally to work the metal detector. Three guesses as to who’s going to make trouble. Early in their journey, they encounter a stranger who seems to only speak Spanish. Felipe gets directions from him to the mountains, but the stranger, who speaks English, overhears them mention Tayopa and follows them from a distance. Later, his band of thieves harasses the group, but ultimately leaves them alone.

Sally can’t leave it be, though, and takes Felipe back with him to kill the band because they jostled his horse. Yeah. Forget, "scuffed my Adidas," this is "bumped my horse" (although that does sound like a euphemism that would be worth fighting over). Before Sally carries out his plan, we get to see the band discussing killing the treasure hunters and kidnapping Kathryn to rape cause every character on every side in this movie is charming. The stranger tells them to wait and goes off to monitor the hunters while Sally and Felipe arrive and murder everyone. The stranger returns to find Sally’s hat at the scene and so dedicates himself to seeing them all dead.

The stranger steals all their horses, the group treks across the scrub on foot, Felipe starts narrating because apparently this is Abraxas and everyone deserves equal time on the mic, and they find water. Everyone goes swimming, Sally tries to assault Kathryn, but Tom stops him and threatens to shoot him if it happens again.

They finally arrive at Tayopa, but can’t find the treasure. Sally eventually finds the mine, assaults Kathryn, then kills Tom and Felipe. Kathryn, presumed dead, follows Sally back to the mine and brains him with a rock. Then she stumbles away looking for help. She kills and eats a snake, which I don’t think was a prop, is visited by a monk that gives her water, but it’s not clear if he’s a hallucination or not. Then the narrator reappears to say the treasure is still out there.

So a real slog of a movie. The big problem is that there’s nothing happening and no real outside threat. Sure, the stranger steals their horses, which puts them in real peril, but never actually rises to the level of the threat posed by Sally. And there’s never any doubt that Sally’s where all the trouble is going to come from. Early on, the treasure hunters make reference to the fact that they can’t be found by Mexican authorities because they’re carrying guns, but that never becomes an issue. Also, the curse is invoked at the beginning, but the details of it are never articulated. Was the whole trip a manifestation of the curse? I don’t know.

Ultimately, there’s no content here, very little movie, just long stretches of bad music with mediocre visuals. If I wanted that, Nickelback has a Vevo, I’m sure. So not a recommend. There’s what appears to be a valid copyright notice at the end, but Mill Creek smooshed their logo on to my copy so it doesn’t matter anyway.

101. Spare Parts and 102. The Island Monster

Jump to The Island Monster (1954)

101. Spare Parts aka Fleisch (1979)
Director: Rainer Erler
Writer: Rainer Erler
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A honeymoon goes terribly awry when the husband is kidnapped by an ambulance and his wife has to enlist the aid of a trucker to find out what's happened.

Monica and Mike are honeymooning in New Mexico when they check into a quaint little hotel. Shortly after they check in, an ambulance arrives and chases them across the desert. Monica escapes, but the drivers hold Mike at gunpoint and inject him with a sedative before putting him in the back.

Monica flags down a passing truck driven by Bill. He doesn't believe her story until the ambulance shows up at a truck stop far outside its region looking for Monica. The two of them decide to return to the hotel in hopes of getting themselves kidnapped to find out what is actually going on.

The ambulance kidnaps them, but truckers up and down New Mexico are tracking it, eventually hijacking the drivers themselves. Bill and Monica find out the ambulance is part of an organ-harvesting ring and the victims are being delivered to a “Dr. Jackson.” Bill and Monica put on the drivers' uniforms and go to the hospital.

While Bill is trying to get information, Dr. Jackson herself finds Monica and gives a general overview of the organ donation process. She then puts Monica and Bill on a plane to New York with several “patients,” including Mike, revealing that she knows who Monica is and gives her an address.

Monica and Bill are drugged on the plane, but Monica manages to wake up as they're landing and escape. That night, she's arrested by the police who aren't inclined to believe her story, but Dr. Jackson has arrived and turned herself in. She and Monica go to the hospital where Bill and Mike have been taken, rescue them, and, at the last minute, Dr. Jackson kills the intern who's been blackmailing her all this time. After she drops off Bill, Mike, and Monica, the evil nurses run her ambulance off a bridge and she dies. The trio are sent back to New Mexico to put their lives back together as best they can.

This is a slow, made-for-TV German film that, while a little too long, does a pretty good job of creating and holding tension. The revelation that Mike has been taken by organ harvesters doesn't come until 50 minutes/an hour into the movie so there's just a mounting tension of Monica having been dropped into an unbelievable situation that slowly becomes more believable for those around her.

The movie also has an interesting transition of control. Initially Monica is a freewheeling newlywed who's then running scared. Bill assumes authority and is largely running the story until Monica meets Dr. Jackson. Then Monica is the sole actor, making decisions and trying to regain control. Finally, Dr. Jackson shows up and takes control as the primary protagonist. That final move is a bit disappointing—it was nice seeing Monica become the central figure and Dr. Jackson's return ended up prolonging the ending—but it works overall. There's also the constant tension of trust: is Bill in on it, is Dr. Jackson helping or not, are the cops in on it? Nothing is certain until the very end.

While the movie could easily lose a half-hour without sacrificing any quality, it's actually pretty good. There's no specific villain so the story plays out as people dropped into a ghoulish, uncaring system that even those at the center of can't fully control or understand. I find that's an interesting moral space to explore and I enjoyed the movie for its Kafka-meets-cheap horror sensibility. There's virtually no violence and zero gore, but was consistently tense nonetheless. Definitely a recommend.



102. The Island Monster aka Il mostro dell'isola(1954)
Director: Roberto Bianchi Montero
Writers: Roberto Bianchi Montero and Alberto Vecchietti from a story by Carlo Lombardo
From: Cult Cinema; Drive-In

A drug syndicate is using a children's hospital as a front to distribute their wares. When a new Lieutenant is put in charge of the case, the syndicate kidnaps his daughter.

Boris Karloff plays a drug lord that runs a isolated hospital for children. He uses his ability to order medicine from overseas to have drugs smuggled to him. The local authorities are aware of the drug trade itself, but connect it to Gloria, a singer at a local bar. While she's part of the scheme, it's Karloff that's running the show.

The police assign Lieutenant Mario Andreani to the head of the group trying to take down the syndicate. He tells his wife and daughter that he's going to be off the radar for a bit while he does undercover work. He's dispatched to try to seduce Gloria to find out what she's up to, but he's already been marked by the syndicate and they want Gloria to seduce him.

This plot doesn't go anywhere because Mario's wife decides to surprise him with a visit while he's leading an undercover operation. She gets jealous of Gloria, abandons their daughter at the hotel, and that leads to the kid being kidnapped.

Then not much else happens. The kid is being ransomed, Mario is back on the mainland because he's been sussed out, and Gloria is trying to get out of the drug game because she's had enough. The Lieutenant's dog somehow figures out that Karloff is the one that's kidnapped the girl, follows him to his hideout by stowing away in the back of a truck and then, somehow, in a small motorboat. The dog is a better cop than any cop in the movie.

Nothing happens for a long time, then the Lieutenant shows up as a representative of the Genoa mafia, or something. The dub was both mumbled and muffled so I could only understand about half of the useless dialogue. He's posing as a representative for the group that's going to make the big drug buy that will let Karloff and his entire band retire. Gloria recognizes him immediately, but doesn't rat him out.

The night of the deal comes, Gloria rescues the kid from the hideout, the cops close in on Karloff, and, as he's fleeing from the cops, he picks up Gloria and the kid. After they pass the drop-off point, Gloria realizes who he is, fights him, and gets shot. Karloff runs off with the girl, the Lieutenant and the dog chase him, and the dog distracts Karloff so Mario can shoot him. Family reunites and the movie ends.

Another big, wet fart of a movie to make me question my poor life choices, this isn't so much about villainous drug lords as the peril of bad parenting. It would have been a nice noir thriller if the mother hadn't taken her kid to vacation in the middle of a drug sting. What person married to a police officer does that? And then she just leaves the toddler alone in a hotel room. Getting kidnapped was probably the best possible outcome: at least the kid has adult supervision that's invested in her safety!

The dog is the only hero in the movie going full double-0-Lassie on the crooks which is as funny as you imagine. When the dog arrives at the island on the boat that it impossibly hid itself on, the dog jumps into the water to swim for shore. Only, the dog doesn't come back up after jumping off the boat. The camera holds on the spot the dog went in, there are a bunch of air bubbles, and then they stop. Cut to Karloff walking onto the shore. There may have been multiple dog actors in this movie.

It's stupid. The whole thing is stupid, and not in a fun way. The dub is terribly done, almost as though the actors are guessing at what they're supposed to be saying as opposed to reading from a translated script. The plot doesn't go anywhere, the characters don't matter, and the key events depend on people being stupid. By all rights, this should be public domain because how could anyone possibly care about it? But it's been GATT'ed so it's back under copyright. Frankly, no big loss.

99. The Demon and 100. The Disappearance of Flight 412

Jump to The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974)

099. The Demon (1981)
Director: Percival Rubens
Writer: Percival Rubens
From: Chilling
Watch: archive.org

A serial killer stalks a young teacher while being hunted by a psychic investigator.

We start with the nameless, faceless killer breaking into a house and kidnapping a young girl. Her mother is left bound with a plastic bag over her head. The killer takes the girl into the woods where she sees something that horrifies her, but we can't see it because the print is too dark. The killer leaves town by strangling a driver and going into the city.

Two months later, our lord and savior, Cameron Mitchell is brought in as a psychic investigator. He gets some images of the killer and where he's living now, but nothing concrete or particularly useful.

I speak only truths.

Meanwhile, Mary, a young teacher, starts having visions of the killer. That night, the killer assaults, I think (murky print), her friend and co-worker after she leaves Boobs Disco, and, yes, seeing that club's sign was the highlight of the film. Two motorcyclists pass by, scaring the killer, who I will, for obvious reasons, refer to as “Brock Turner” for the rest of this post. The friend runs away, never to be seen in the film again.

Mary is concerned about her cousin (?) Jo dating a rich boy because she doesn't know how he made all his money. The next half-hour/forty-five minutes is them courting.

Slenderman got swole.

Back with the grieving parents, Mitchell provides sketches of his psychic visions: two pictures of Brock Turner without a face and a detailed drawing of his apartment building. The father is obsessed with vengeance, tracks down the building in the city, and gets killed by Brock Turner. The mother blames Mitchell for everything that's happened and shoots him in the face, ending that plotline entirely.

Jo and her boyfriend have a night at the house alone, Brock Turner kills the guy, then Jo, then Mary comes home. Turner chases her throughout the house with Mary ending up in the kitchen several times, but never grabbing a knife. She finally constructs some Home Alone-esque trap in the bathroom, and stabs Brock Turner in the neck. Then she runs screaming from the house as the credits roll.

I joked with a friend, and maybe before in an earlier review, that the Chilling set is so named because “Boring” wouldn't sell. This is a slow, dull, serial killer pic that clearly had some editing done after John Carpenter's Halloween. Brock Turner wears a generic white mask and most of the movie you don't see his face at all. There are occasional shots that echo Michael Myers' stalking Jamie Lee Curtis and it really feels like the mask shots were added after the fact, especially since he doesn't seem to be wearing it when he's killed, but is when there's a cut-away to his body.

A dull, dull movie. I was constantly asking, “What even is this?” and there's no revelation about who the killer is, why he's killing people, or why he's focused on these two women. The only reason the movie's called The Demon is that Mitchell refers to the killer, enigmatically, as “the Demon” just before he's shot. This isn't depressing or grim like a lot of these cinematic failures are, it's just dull. There's a lot of gratuitous nudity that makes it clear how the producers were hoping to sell the film. This is in the public domain so I've uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive here, but I can't recommend it in any way.


100. The Disappearance of Flight 412 (1974)
Director: Jud Taylor
Writers: George Simpson and Neal R. Burger
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

After spotting three UFOs on radar, the crew of Flight 412 are diverted to an undisclosed location and interrogated about their experience.

Flight 412 is engaged in standard exercises when a radar unit on the ground detects three unidentified objects in their vicinity. Two Marine jets are scrambled, but vanish once they reach the clouds, the unidentified objects vanishing with them. NORAD takes over the situation and redirects Flight 412 to Digger Base where the four members of the crew are isolated and questioned repeatedly about the events.

Meanwhile Colonel Pete Moore tries to find out where his crew has gone and what happened to them in the sky. He keeps getting stymied by military officials and double-dealing. Eventually he finds where his crew was taken, confronts the security personnel, and, the next morning, gets his crew back.

Outraged at the situation, Col. Moore takes his crew to the General to tell him what really happened. The General reveals that the military has a policy of keeping UFO sightings under wraps. The Colonel promises his crew that, eventually, things will change and they'll be able to tell the truth. A voice-over notes that four months later, a similar event happened with many witnesses, but the silence endured.

A simple mid-70's made-for-TV movie that works pretty well until just about the end. It opens with a bit of faux-documentary material about UFO sightings and expresses the tautology that if even one of the claims is real, then UFOs are real, or, as I have it in my notes, “If any reports are true. . . Aleeums!” Then it cuts to the actual movie that has far too much narration by a bargain-basement Rod Serling telling us things we can clearly see.

What we see, though, is kept nicely contained. The crew boards, flies, and encounters the phenomenon on radar, not in person. So while there's a nice chunk of stock footage of military planes through the first act, the movie quickly gets to its actual story: the experience of these Air Force members being involved in a UFO sighting. They have to endure low-level brainwashing about what they saw. Meanwhile, Col. Moore is trying to figure out what happened to his people, completely ignoring the alien element.

The movie's at its best when it's about the Colonel trying to find his men. The crew don't have much personality or character—they never have time to differentiate themselves—so the Colonel is the only one making choices. The conclusion that involves him indignantly demanding the General release the truth about aliens makes for a weak ending, though. It's clearly the moment when the movie goes from being a nice, compact story to being a polemic about UFOs.

To the film's credit, it's short, it's entertaining most of the time, and moves pretty well. It's public domain and there are a couple copies on the Internet Archive already. I've added an MPEG version here so it's there for people to do whatever they like. Definitely riffable, but also not a terrible watch on its own. Just turn it off once they leave the interrogation. That's where the movie should have ended.

097. Hands of Steel and 098. Chain Gang Women

Jump to Chain Gang Women (1971)

097. Hands of Steel aka Atomic Cyborg aka Vendetta dal futuro(1986)
Director: Sergio Martino
Writers: Sergio Martino, Elisa Briganti, John Crowther, Ernesto Gastaldi, Dardano Sacchetti, and Saul Sasha with additional dialogue by Lewis E. Ciannelli, from a story by Sergio Martino
From:Sci-Fi Invasion; Pure Terror

A cyborg dispatched to assassinate an ecologist defies his orders and ends up hiding out in an Arizona arm-wrestling bar.

We open with a montage of urban landscapes collapsing under the weight of industrialization, the homeless bent under the weight of their lives. Billboards and posters featuring the messianic environmentalist Rev. Mosley are everywhere with his hopeful rallying cry, “You have no future.” I'm sorry, but isn't the despotic, dystopian message supposed to be put forth by the villain? This is the first sign that the movie, if it's going to have a message, is going to muddle it completely.

Mosley is supposed to give a speech that night at a rally, but Paco Queruak (who not only looks nothing like a Paco, looks like he's never met anyone named Paco) breaks into Mosley's hotel room and punches the blind, wheelchair-bound leader in the stomach so hard that Mosley's spleen ruptures.

Paco escapes, driving through acid rain that literally eats through his car. He trades it in at a junkyard for one that gets him into Arizona before breaking down. Rather than abandon the car, Paco shoves it over a cliff where it flips countless times and then, of course, explodes. He walks to a bar he sees in the distance where he meets Linda, the owner. She tells him arm wrestling is popular in this area and sets him to work chopping wood out back.

Meanwhile, Turner (Jon Saxon! Hooray!), the villainous owner of a company that was often targeted for criticism by Mosley, has dispatched people to capture and kill Paco. Turner funded Paco's creation and so Paco's trainer finds the doctor that made Paco a cyborg and kills him. Then Turner's agent kills Paco's trainer and hooks up with a hitman to track Paco down.

At the bar, Paco gets into an altercation with Raul, a generic asshole, and beats him at arm wrestling. Raul then tries to fight Paco and Paco defeats everyone in the bar. The next day, Raul returns with the tri-state champion to challenge Paco to an arm-wrestling match, Indian style: the loser's hand is pressed into a box containing a rattlesnake. Paco agrees, but Raul sets him up to get beaten and stranded in the desert. Paco makes it to the match anyway, defeats the champ, and kills the rattler just before it's about to bite the guy.

The FBI figure out the assassin must have been a cyborg and start catching up to Paco, the hitmen find out exactly where he is, and Paco tells Linda that he was sent to kill Mosley but found the will not to. All the forces collide with Turner sending a female cyborg to kill Paco, Raul betrays Paco once more and gets killed, and Paco eventually kills all of Turner's men as well as Turner himself. As he emerges from the final battle, the FBI descends asking him to surrender and Linda tries to convince him he won't be harmed. He reveals a head wound to her that only shows circuitry and suggests that Paco never existed, that he's been a robot all along. The film ends with a title card saying this is the start of “the era of the cyborg.”

Does this help? This doesn't help.

I'd like to say this is a solid slice of 80's Italian cheese with Jon Saxon adding a side of ham, mostly because I think that phrase is clever. The movie never quite gets crazy enough, though. Raul's death, for instance, should be over-the-top and laughably bad. Instead, Paco squeezes Raul's head. No bulging eyes, no blood, no pop, just “squeeze. . . dead.” Likewise, Paco kills Turner by literally tearing his heart out, but we never see the heart or the hole. Commit to your silliness movie!

There are hints at the beginning that this will be some ham-fisted, post-apocalyptic message movie about the environment—you have a messianic environmentalist as the assassination target and then Paco drives through an area of acid rain that literally has a sign posted for it! All that disappears once we get to the bar and the movie becomes truckers arm wrestling. Finally we close with an extended action sequence that has some ambition—the female cyborg echoes Evil Dead nicely—but not much.

The movie's just relentlessly okay. It's never overtly bad or especially boring, but it never rises to the point of doing anything interesting either. This was featured on Best of the Worst #28, and they drill down to the best parts pretty nicely.


098. Chain Gang Women (1971)
Director: Lee Frost
Writers: Lee Frost and Wes Bishop
From: Cult Cinema

Billy Harris is assigned to the chain gang with just six months left on his sentence. When his fellow inmate decides to escape, Billy is, literally, dragged along, and has to manage the moods of the increasingly-dangerous Weed.

Billy Harris only has six months left on his marijuana charge but, due to bad luck, is taken off his job in the prison library and sent to the chain gang at the hard labor camp. He's chained to Mike Weed, a man doing life for having murdered a girl. When the other prisoners revolt, Weed forces Harris to escape with him since neither can go alone.

Harris' girlfriend lives in the nearby town so the pair meet up with her. Their first day there, Weed sends Harris to buy clothes and then rapes his girlfriend. She tries to help them escape into Atlanta, but they're turned back by a roadblock. Weed hunts down a ranch for them to lay low at and Harris sends his girlfriend away.

The ranch is owned by an old man and his child bride. They tie up the old man and Weed rapes the girl in front of him. The girl begs Harris to take her with them when they leave because she's essentially a prisoner of the old man.

The trio try to take back roads but run into another roadblock. They return to the ranch only to find that the old man has escaped. He sneaks up on Weed, chokes him to death, and then shoots Harris. The final scene is him telling his wife to go to bed and that, “Everything's going to be just like it always was.”

A title that promises disappointment and yet still manages to surprise with its lows. The movie starts out all right with Billy being put upon, but takes a hard turn at the first rape. PS. I just had to use the phrase “first rape” when discussing a movie. That could be the whole review.

The expectation from that starting point is that Billy is going to get away or, at least, that the story will be about him trying and failing to get away. He ends up taking a backseat, though, to Mike Raperson and his wacky misadventures. If that weren't enough, we then get the child bride situation that's literally set up with Weed and Harris looking at the old man through a window, describing the girl as his daughter, and then watching them have sex. It's revealed later that she's only 17. So, yeah, add a sprinkling of that to your movie.

The movie loses its way when it decides it wants to be edgy. Until then it's a slow, but alright escape flick. Twice, during the chase scenes, the screen splits into four parts that are sometimes showing different images, sometimes four copies of the same one. It's a nice, simple effect and I wish the rest of the movie had lived up to that one bit of cleverness. Definitely not a recommend.

Story Slam: DIY

A new Story Slam piece just over 4 months later! I really want to get back on that wagon. This is me talking about Dungeons & Dragons as entrancement, escape, and an alternative to small-town life. Also the KKK. An alternative to the KKK. But that's a really small part of the story.