Dead Boyz Can't Fly (1992) [filmed in 1988]

... aka: Garotos Mortos Não Podem Voar (Dead Boys Can Not Fly)
... aka: L'Amérique éclatée (The Exploded America)
... aka: Neon Red
... aka: Violenti e perversi (Violent and Perverse)

Directed by:
"Howard Winters" (Cecil Howard)

Filmed under the title Neon Red in 1988, this played a few film festivals four years later (the copyright date on the print is 1992) and wasn't released to home video in the U.S. until 1993, where it was pretty much ignored. It wasn't particularly well-distributed here in America but there were also video releases in Brazil, Italy, France, the UK and several other countries. This lays out its goal before our feet with an opening title card that says “Last year, murder claimed the lives of 912 people in Japan, 275 in Sweden, 411 in Australia, 1,102 in Great Britain... and 18,155 in the United States. God Bless America” Considering the U.S. still has one of the highest murder rates of all developed countries nearly thirty years after this was made, this kind of material is as relevant today as it was in 1988. However, violence in and of itself is really sketchy territory for a social commentary and brings upon the obligatory question “Is the movie violent or is it about violence?” Anyone can make an extremely violent movie and claim it's a condemnation of violence without really having anything else worthwhile to really say about it. Since Dead Boyz sets itself up at the beginning as a message movie, one has to at least partially judge it on what it promises. What, if anything, does this have to say about violence beyond the title cards?

John (David John), a weary Vietnam vet and aspiring writer with a much younger stripper girlfriend he can't relate to, opens the film with a brief monologue as he sits down at a typewriter: “This is America. They say it's free, it's safe... Who the fuck are they kidding?” We then cut to the Zenith Employment Agency where sleazebag agent Norman Brody (Daniel C. Mahar) is interviewing potential employees. His first client is Myra Kandinsky (Ruth Collins), a hot, voluptuous blonde with seemingly no employable skills who he decides to take a chance on because, well, she's a hot voluptuous blonde and he wants to get in her pants. High school drop out, budding artist and yo yo enthusiast Buzz (Jason Stein), shows up next only to get laughed out of the office when he brings in his portfolio full of cartoon drawings. Later that night, Buzz sees Myra out on the street and decides to get his revenge by ambushing her in an elevator, where she's raped, stabbed, strangled with a gold chain and then has a “Z” carved into her stomach.

When he's not busy destroying mannequins with a baseball bat while dressed in drag, sociopath Frankie Goosich (Brad Friedman), who prefers to be called “Goose,” is running around doing whatever will get him money, including (he claims) selling crack to 12 year olds. He returns home, ties up his mom ("Bad boys will burn in hell!") and raids her wallet. Goose then heads out and meets up with psycho Buzz and their apprehensive, fidgety friend Jo Jo (Daniel J. Johnson) and the three plot to pull off a “high rise rip” over Veteran's Day holiday weekend and break into a doctor's office where they think they can score all kinds of drugs and money. Meanwhile, idiot detectives O'Brien (Marc Macaulay) and Santini (Kurt Schwoebel) investigate Myra's rape / murder, which eventually leads them back to where the action is. But first they enjoy a nice casual lunch at a fancy restaurant while dozens die!

After getting into the high rise, the three thugs first raid a dentist's office, shoot the dentist and his secretary and torture one of the dental patients by drilling his face and yanking out his teeth. Then it's off to a publisher's office, where they rough up the publisher and beat and sexually assault his niece (who's set to be married in a few days) and her friend. Next up, they make it to the doctor's office and do about the same routine on the doctor and his secretary (who he's having an affair with) before getting their hands on the pharmacy keys and eating a bunch of pills. Penthouse Pet Delia Sheppard shows up as a patient in a distasteful bit where one of the thugs poses as a doctor, gets her to strip off her clothes, feels her up and then kills her and paints her face with blood. A few other characters pop up, like a drunken doorman (Ken Eaton, from FLESH EATING MOTHERS) who's always asleep on the job and a suicidal lawyer whose wife has just left him, and the punks eventually drag all of the survivors into the employment agency and start killing them off. John (the Vietnam vet / writer), who works there as a janitor, manages to survive having his head dunked into a bucket of cleaning fluid and attempts to save the day, but things don't turn out as one may expect.

There's war stock footage spliced in here and there, black comedy, some nudity, lots of blood, gore and violence, American flags all over the place and a very high body count. Performances range from very good (especially Friedman and Stein) to God awful but most of the cast at least appear to be trying. Others who pop up in small roles include Jennifer Delora as a chatty restaurant manager, Sheila Kennedy (a 1983 Penthouse Pet of the Year and later reality TV star) as the stripper girlfriend and Scott Baker (a regular in Chuck Vincent movies) as a cop.

However, I'm not really sure this has much of anything to really say about violence (psychologically, socially or otherwise) aside from sensationalizing it so it looks as bad as possible. I guess that could conceivably be the whole point, but it's not one that hasn't been tackled elsewhere numerous times before. Despite that and some tedious and amateurish spots, this is strangely enjoyable as an exploitation pic: gritty, fast-moving and always pretty entertaining. Once the action moves primarily to the employment agency in the final third, the film offers up one surprise after another and the whole thing is wrapped up in a completely unexpected (and darkly humorous) way.

For years this was believed to be the work of an unknown, one-time director but it turns out that the credited “Howard Winters” is actually the real name of Cecil Howard. Howard was one of the most respected porn directors of the 80s with releases like Scoundrels (1982), Firestorm (1984), Snake Eyes (1985) and Star Angel (1986), all of which were nominated for some of adult cinema's highest honors and were released through Howard's own company, Command Video. The production company behind this one was Command Cinema Corp., likely the more mainstream direction the director, who was out of porn for good around 1990, was trying to take his career. That started and ended right here.

★★1/2

Hellroller (1992)

Directed by:
Gary J. Levinson
Stuart Wall (uncredited)

Some guy who played a few bit roles in a couple of Fred Olen Ray movies like The Phantom Empire and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers decided to make a campy B horror movie all on his own. He really shouldn't have bothered. This inept shot-on-video mess is pretty much a complete embarrassment and a definite contendor for the coveted title of Worst Movie Ever Made. You may also notice a handful of 10-star reviews on IMDb - clearly all written by the same person - trying to pawn this off as some cult film, but don't be fooled. This is as bad as it gets and too calculated in its attempt to be a cult movie that is doesn't even cut it as a good bad movie. Wheelchair-bound, constantly-twitching whiner Eugene (the incredibly annoying Ron Litman) and the woman he always thought was his mother (Mary Woronov, under the alias "Penny Arcade") go dumpster diving. She says "I should have aborted you!" but then confesses that she's not really his mother but his aunt and that his REAL mom (Ruth Collins) accidentally dropped him on his head when he an infant right before being gang raped and murdered by a set of Siamese twins. After the aunt disappears, Eugene goes to the rotten-toothed "King of the Bums" (David H. Sterry) for help, only to find out she's been raped and murdered, too. Already imbalanced and filled with rage to begin with, Eugene then sets out on a quest to "kick ass all over Hollywood" (i.e. go on a senseless killing spree).

Our paralyzed psycho briefly teams up with a mentally-retarded former film director named Donald (played by director Levinson) who was once "the Fellini of horror pictures in Tennessee." I've seen enough cheap horror films by now to realize the retarded director character is a dig at Z filmmaker Donald Farmer of CANNIBAL HOOKERS (1987) fame. Just one month before this video was released, Farmer released a documentary called Invasion of the Scream Queens (1992). Since it featured a photo of Michelle Bauer on the cover taken from this movie, Levinson and co-director Stuart Wall later took "Invasion" producer Sy Yudel on the TV show The People's Court (!!) and (unsuccessfully) sued him for "using property without permission!" Check out the whole amusing and embarrassing segment right here...

So anyway, Eugene and Donald go to a gym and get revenge on a guy for calling Eugene a "crip" and throwing his wheelchair in a dumpster. Eugene then gets a pocket knife from a woman and stabs her in the face with it. They then bust into the hotel room of world famous "model slut" Michelle Novak (Bauer), who's in town to promote her new line of swimsuits. During a scuffle, Eugene convinces Michelle to help him kill Donald and then turns around and guts her in the bathroom.

The lame murder spree continues as Eugene takes an axe to porno actress Hyapatia Lee after she dances, strips and showers, rams a broomstick through a pair of female muggers, kills a topless hooker by ironing her to death and rips out a guy's eyeballs. Sound gory? Sure, but I haven't yet mentioned that most of the victims aren't actually shown being killed, we just get to see the body afterward, including a hilarious moment where a dead woman holds an axe up to her chest to keep it in place. The staging and editing of these scenes is uncommonly bad. During the last few minutes, the killer goes to a mad doctor (Sterry again) and has him whip up a special potion to turn normal people into bums but this idea goes nowhere. There are a few other useless subplots in here as well, mostly revolving around a couple of TV newscasters making dumb jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy and interviewing people saying degrading things about homeless people.

Aside from Bauer (seen doing aerobics in lingerie for several minutes before hopping in the bathtub) and Lee's nude scenes, the only other good thing about this movie is the surprisingly good music. Seeing how no one is credited with doing the score, they probably just stole it from somewhere else. As far as the photography is concerned, it's often so blurry and poorly lit you'd have to have no understanding of how to work a simple camera for it to end up looking this bad. I set up better-looking shots with a 200 dollar camcorder and a lamp when I was 8 years old. For what it's worth, a few other minor B movie celebs pop up in small roles, including Elizabeth Kaitan and Tammara Souza (stars of Assault of the Killer Bimbos), Johnny Legend and Eric Caidin.

This was first issued on VHS on the Dark Side Home Video label and appears to be their one and only release. The box claims the special effects are by the "creator" of Evil Dead II and Luther the Geek, which in huckster speak translates to "some guy who claims to have worked on both films conveniently sans credit." At some point, co-director Wall sold his rights to the film back to Levinson and he altered the credits to take sole ownership, which was probably a smart move on Wall's part. The aptly named VHShitfest later acquired the distribution rights and released this (a better print than what had previously been available) on both DVD and VHS.

NO STARS!