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Friday, December 27, 2019

Electric Blue 36 (1986)

... aka: Electric Blue '36'
... aka: Electric Blue 36: Young Vampires in Love
... aka: Electric Blue Presents Young Vampires in Love

Directed by:
Robert Veze

Holly (Krista Pflanzer) has bigger aspirations than shaking her ass at a sleazy strip club run by demanding owner Danny. She plans to finally "make it" with her all-female band "The Topless Teasers." All he's interested in is her making it back in time for the midnight show when a big time Hollywood agent will be showing up to listen to her demo tape. But first, Holly and her girls - including drummer Boomer (Tami White), airhead guitarist Bubbles (Candie Evans) and another one whose character name is as unknown as the actress portraying her - are going to check out their new digs. The girls have rented "The Old Carter Place;" an abandoned, run down house out in the middle of the sticks that's a perfect place for the band to practice. They can make as much noise as they want without bothering the neighbors... because there are no neighbors. They find the place a dirty, dark, cobweb-strewn wreck but soon will have bigger problems on their hands when their commotion accidentally awakens a couple of centuries-old vampires in the basement.







The vampires are a cranky old Jewish codger named Victor Von Jugular (who comes off like a really bad second stage Vegas lounge act) and his whiny nephew Boris (who is played by the same blonde guy who played "Homer" in Electric Blue 32). After resting for a hundred years, Victor is ready to revitalize himself with some fresh blood while Boris is bored with the traditional vampire lifestyle and wants a "human experience" like romance with a beautiful woman. The uncle rages, "You're five thousand years old! When are you going to grow up?" but the two soon come to an agreement. As they spy on one of the band's topless jam sessions, Boris agrees to let his uncle have the three other girls if he can have Holly.

Boris trails Holly to the strip club, where he watches her and some other strippers (porno gals Krista Lane and Tami Lee Curtis) dance and then keeps getting interrupted trying to bite her. Boris finds himself falling in love with her "beautiful neck and great gazongas" while the big Hollywood talent agent Holly rushed back to the club to meet turns out to be a sleazy shyster. Meanwhile, the older vampire runs into all kinds of problems with the airhead band mates, first of which being they're all kinky and insist he let them tie him up and whip him. After he runs away from them he tries to attack a girl (Careena Collins) on a park bench but flees when her boyfriend threatens to knock out his teeth and then meets a horny gay man and runs off again in terror. Will Boris find true love? Will Holly's band "make it?" Will Victor ever get to eat?







As usual, in between the framing story we get a bunch of vignettes. "Allegro" is set at an exclusive European ballet academy and features a buff guy (who looks about as much like a male ballet dancer as Arnold Schwarzenegger) fantasizing about one of the dancers (Olga Behr). "Electric Blue Reports" covers American "video fever" and a new service called "The Video X Project" that allows paying customers to hire adult film performers to star in their own specialty videotaped fantasies. Investigative reporter Mad Max (Scott Baker) decides to do an expose on the service and gets involved in casting, costume selection and even directing the scene. He hires Marc Stevens and Danielle Martin to "star" in his little opus but gets so excited during the filming process that he does his own scene with a crew girl (Siobhan Hunter).








We also get "Critic's Corner" reviews for the adult films Coming of Angels 2 and Some Kind of Woman (both 1985 releases), "Winter Winds" featuring a montage of various winter sports like ice sailing, bobsledding and ski jumping all set to Bohemian Rhapsody, "Off White" involving a female painter having a fantasy about one of her handsome Beverly Hills clients and "Fantasy Woman" which purports showing female exhibitionists (including a briefly seen Gail Harris) in action but is clearly filmed in front of a green screen.







Well folks, this is what it is. Silly / bad comedy (including more bad vampire puns than you can shake a stake at) and gratuitous nudity mostly provided by 80s porn stars who typically showed more elsewhere. Personally, I'd have preferred they cast more obscure centerfold models like Pflanzer, who you usually don't see much of, instead of all the hardcore performers with hundreds of titles under their belt but I'm sure this boiled down to getting girls willing to disrobe who also had a little experience in front of the camera. The lackluster main story is lifted somewhat by a few of the better vignettes, especially the "Video X Project" one, which should have been expanded upon and made into the main story of one of these tapes.





Also need to point out that this is a review for the American version of Electric Blue 36, not the UK version, which was subtitled "Twin Peeks" and features different scenes and models. The U.S. #36 played only on the satellite Playboy Channel and was never released to home video. I already did a brief run down of the differences between the UK and U.S. versions of this series on my review for ELECTRIC BLUE 32, so go there for more info.

13 comments:

spookyx3 said...

krista lane made an obsessive completist out of me. she appears here for less than 15 seconds. good news is i since found out she did lots more of these shows, so, yay!

fun to see chuck vincent regular scott baker in the best of the vignettes alongside another favorite, siobhan hunter (PRETTY PEACHES 2). and tami white, who seemed to change her 'nym every other vid for a while.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I think outside of Droid aka Cabaret Sin this is the only thing I've ever seen Krista Lane in. I know she got lead roles in a few of Chuck Vincent's R rated films. The one I've had on my watch list forever is called Thrilled to Death, which I think is a psycho-thriller so I may be able to include it here. I do wish more of the Electric Blue tapes had horror-ish content so I could write them up cause they're a lot of fun to watch!

Baker I've seen much more of cause I've seen a lot of those Marilyn Chambers comedies that played on cable all the time, plus some Vincent movies I've actually seen like Cleo/Leo and Bad Blood (liked both of these quite a bit). Seeing how he's also in Thrilled I should probably hunt that one down already.

spookyx3 said...

THRILLED TO DEATH has a murder or two, and a couple quite unpleasant scenes. more straight thriller than anything else, IMO. difficult to discuss without spoilers. definitely worth a look if you enjoyed some of the other platinum pictures releases. well acted. same leads as SENSATIONS (1987). the DVD is VHS sourced; soft cloudy picture, couple of audio dropouts. these films deserve better.

talking of IMDb getting it wrong: for _years_ they had krista in the cast of amir shervan's SAMURAI COP, confusing a rarely used early AKA, "cameron", with the actual actress in the part, cameron oppenheimer, who goes by her first name. zero resemblance between them, but this mistake was repeated in countless reviews, and i think even an interview with co-star robert z'dar. how does that happen? infuriating.

[i'll try to stay on topic in 2020.]

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I'm not sure why most of Vincent's catalogue hasn't been given proper DVD releases. There's a lot of pretty good stuff in there. You'd figure at least some horror distributor would pick up Deranged and Bad Blood, but nope! The description of Thrilled about a couple "terrorized" by another couple had me thinking it may have a place here but that plot description may be an exaggeration.

Vincent's film If Looks Could Kill looks like it may be somewhat horror. The cover art has a crazy man holding a machete but I'm not sure if this is false advertising or not.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091254/mediaviewer/rm4155460096

spookyx3 said...

the crazy man is jamie gillis. that cover art is loosely based on the final shot: in the movie he's holding some sort of antique/prop cutlass. yeah, IF LOOKS COULD KILL turns to horror in the last 15-20 minutes. until then it's all REAR WINDOW (BODY DOUBLE?) voyeurism and mystery.

maybe you'll end up including THRILLED; i don't think it crosses over.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Sounds like I should watch Looks first even though Thrilled has a better cast. The only other Vincent thriller I've seen that I haven't mentioned is Enrapture, which was pretty good, too! I have a copy of Bedroom Eyes II but haven't gotten round to it yet. I don't remember liking the original very much.

spookyx3 said...

> There's a lot of pretty good stuff in there.

i'd kill for a restored set. i think i like his farcical R-rated comedies best. great sarcastic dialogue, timing and instincts. otherwise, DERANGED is hard to beat.

IF LOOKS COULD KILL may have been his first mainstream thriller. it's actually a remake/revision of one of his _last_ x-films, VOYEUR (1985). works better with the singular focus on sex, and the psychological toll of the shadowing job, without the added murder-frame & psycho stuff. good cast: robert bullock, taija rae, sheri st. claire, scott baker & jack wrangler.

i don't remember a thing about ENRAPTURE or BEDROOM EYES II!

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I suppose one could count Voices of Desire (1972) as a thriller though it's more a softcore film with some horror. Not sure if you've seen that one or not but it's fairly interesting. I think it was made before he even started doing hardcore films.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I'd be first in line to get a Blu-ray of Deranged. Seems more people appreciate it now than when it was released. The horror magazines, who were fawning all over far worse films back then, were really unfair to it.

Anonymous said...

if you're going to use Immy's info, you might give him credit, especially since you used
all of his pictures he posted on VEF.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

I made every single screen cap shown here and did every bit of the writing but I certainly appreciate VEF users for uploading extremely rare videos such as this so I can review them here. Thanks for the visit and big thanks to Immy if he uploaded this video.

Anonymous said...

Krista pflanzer was in penthouse magazine centerfold! She is still Beautiful and smart she works in the Education field teaching children with special needs.

The Bloody Pit of Horror said...

Glad to hear she's doing well!

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