Scream for Vengeance! (1980)

... aka: Crying for Revenge

... aka: Schrei nach Rache (Screaming for Revenge)

... aka: Vengeance

Directed by:

Bob Bliss

She's a big city girl, student in her third year of college, granddaughter of a state senator and claims to be independently wealthy. He's a small town boy, community college graduate and doesn't have two quarters to rub together. When Jenny Bradley (Sally Lockett) and Mark Davis (Nicholas Jacquez) cross paths at a laundromat late one Friday night, he somehow manages to work his charms ("charms" being rather creepy and sex predator-esque leering in this particular instance) on her and talks her into grabbing a bite to eat after she finishes up. All on her, of course. Meanwhile, across town, jewelry store owner Anthony Lomas (Leonard Belove), his wife Del (Jane McMahon) and their teenage daughter Shari (Susie Gardner), who keeps flipping her shit because they're running a little late and some boy is supposed to call her, are heading home. 

Hey Shari, there are worse things that could happen! You know, like rapey robbers with nylons pulled over the heads breaking into your home, gagging you, tying you to a chair and threatening to kill you unless your father agrees to take them to his store and give them all the diamonds they can carry.

While three of the robbers - Mason (Walter Addison), Gandon (Steve Scearcy) and Dreyer (R.E. Roudebush) - run off to the store, the fourth stays at home with the mom and daughter. Unfortunately for the ladies, the one they're left with - Luke (Bob Elliott) - is a deranged, heavy-breathing pervert who immediately makes a beeline for the kitchen knives and decides to have a little fun while his pals are away. Naturally, his eyes gravitate right toward the daughter. He speculates about her age and whether or not she's a virgin, plays with her hair, rubs her legs ("soft and warrrrm"), sings to her ("Soft. Sweet. Sweeeeet sixteen. AHHhhhHH yeah."), rips open her top and feels her up. When he tries to take her into the bedroom, the mom fights back and lands a few kicks before the attacker stabs her to death and cuts her throat. Shari is then slapped around, kicked, thrown on the ground, stripped naked, raped and shot to death. She also misses her boyfriend's call.

Back in town, the jewelry store heist is going off without a hitch until an alarm is accidentally triggered. The three thieves panic, shoot the father, run outside, shoot a pedestrian and then carjack Jenny and Mark, who just so happen to be leaving the laundromat at around the same time. Mark is locked in the trunk, Jenny is thrown in the backseat and roughed up a bit and the thieves retreat to a remote country cabin in the Ozarks to hide out, where they'll soon be joined by Luke.

Disappointed at their jewelry store haul, the gang realize that Jenny comes from a wealthy family and plot an extortion attempt. They make her record a message to her parents letting them know what's going on and then three of them leave to go into the nearest town to find a payphone to make their demands known. Left alone to watch the hostages, Dreyer gets hot and bothered looking at porn mags and decides to try to rape Jenny, but Mark manages to break free from his ropes just in the nick time. A broken bottle over the head and a shotgun blast later and Jenny and Mark are free. They hop in a truck and try to get the hell outta Dodge but the remaining thugs catch up to them on the road and they're forced to flee into the woods by foot, with the killers in hot pursuit.

This very low budget regional production from Kansas City, made by a first (and only) time director, combines a number of popular exploitation subgenres (home invasion, hostage thriller, hunting humans...), but doesn't do any of them particularly well. Not that this is terrible either. Despite being middling to poor in most technical areas, the pacing feels about right and it's at least made with a certain basic competency. The first half hour has a few suitably nasty / sleazy bits but the film then curiously dials it back for the remainder once it relocates to the cabin. The biggest issue here is that the plot is simply too ordinary and predictable, making the film as a whole utterly forgettable. The fact it was made in the 70s when a lot of other filmmakers were pushing boundaries with similar material doesn't help the film's plight much either.

Filmed over the course of several years, finally completed in 1979 and, per an advertisement in the October 1980 issue of Variety, released theatrically the following year by Manson International... only not in the United States apparently! I don't believe this was seen by American audiences until the 1986 Magnum VHS release. There were also VHS releases in Argentina (on the Magnum Golden label), the UK (on the Intervision label), the Netherlands (on the Standard Video label), France (Proserpine), Germany (Video Medien Pool) and Greece (Video Standard). In Australia, it was banned in 1982 (reasons cited were for violence and sexual violence), but a cut version missing around six minutes was released there in 1984 on the Video Classics label. I believe most of the other VHS releases also have some cuts as most run below the 93 minute time that was submitted to Australian censors. The version I watched (the Dutch release) ran 89 minutes.

Though hardly an essential title, I'm still surprised that no one has picked this up for DVD or Blu-ray distribution as of yet. Any DVD releases you find online are bootlegs derived from one of the previous VHS releases. Since much of the second half takes place outdoors, this is a title that could conceivably be improved upon somewhat (at least visually speaking) with a proper restoration.

★★

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

... aka: Esclavas del espacio (Slaves of Space)

... aka: Esclaves du futur (Slaves of the Future)

... aka: Jäger der verschollenen Galaxie (Hunter of the Lost Galaxy)

... aka: Les captives de l'espace (Space Captives)

... aka: Mujeres Encadenadas (Chained Women)

... aka: Otrokyne z konce vesmíru (A Slave from the End of the Universe)

... aka: Rebelião nas Galáxias (Rebel of the Galaxies)

... aka: Slave Girls

Directed by:

Ken Dixon

Aboard a prison spaceship, a pair of bikini-clad captives; the soft and curvaceous Daria (Elizabeth "Cayton" / Kaitan) and the athletic and toned Tisa (Cindy Beal), break their chains, escape their cell, conk a few dumb guards over the head with a metal pipe, steal a spaceship and then crash land in the ocean on an unknown, though human-friendly, planet. Well, human-friendly when it comes to the atmosphere, at least! Daria crawls out of the water onto a tropical island, makes her way through the jungle and ends up at a castle fortress filled with very peculiar things. For starters, the main room of the fortress is filled with weapons and all manner of dead, stuffed animals, plus nearly all of the windows have been barred. Second, the crazy-eyed, black-clad castle owner, Zed (Don Scribner), is shady and sinister from the second he first introduces himself and spends his days sleeping and his nights hunting. Third, Zed has two android assistants who've been programmed not to divulge too much information to strangers and one of them is tasked with keeping guard over his secretive "trophy room." Finally, two other "guests;" Shela (Brinke Stevens) and her brother Rik (Carl Horner), are also present and ended up stranded there under similar, mysterious circumstances. In both cases, it appears their spaceships were intentionally drawn there by gravitational pull. On the more positive side, Daria's sister in crime shows up there unharmed, so at least there's that.

Our plucky heroine soon learns that there were four guests there only a week earlier, but two have since mysteriously disappeared without a trace. No explanation is provided by their host as to where they went. However, each had been invited into the trophy room prior to vanishing. Rik confesses to Daria that he believes they're all being kept prisoner there. For what reason, he doesn't quite know. However, the excuse Zed uses for why he can't take any of the stranded travelers off the planet - his own spaceship needs repairs - doesn't quite fly since his androids sneak out to make supply runs with it.

As it turns out, Zed isn't just interested in hunting wild animals, but also humans. After killing his victims, he decapitates them to add another "trophy" to his collection and is also a sexual sadist who likes chaining naked girls up, knocking them out and then raping them. During one memorable shot, Stevens is seen lying unconscious and naked on a slab while a shirtless Zed smokes a post-rape ciggie and one of his robots gives him a back massage! Afterward, Stevens' character is used to force the brother into another hunting "game." It doesn't end well for Rik when he becomes ensnared in a giant spiderweb and is shot to death. Wanting more of a challenge, Zed then decides to release all three women into the woods simultaneously, giving them only hunting knives and a one-hour head start. He then goes after them with his crossbow.

Not a bad idea at all here, an updating of Richard Connell's classic 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game (most famously adapted for the screen way back in 1932), given a sci-fi twist and home video exploitation elements. This is also the kind of competently-crafted B-movie that's all but extinct nowadays. You know, actually shot on film (35mm even) with real production design, hand-crafted John Carl Buechler monsters (they throw in robots, mutants, green-blooded zombies AND an impressive Predator-like "Phantazoid Warrior") and whatever optical and visual effects they could squeeze in for the meager budget (in this case, 90,000 bucks). I'd say about every penny of that ended up on the screen. Crucial elements for this type of film (energy, swift pacing, atmosphere, spirited acting, nice colors...) are all here, as well as some humor (my favorite bit being the bickering robots), minor gore, sometimes hilariously pseudo-philosophical dialogue and plenty of skin from the three lovely female stars, though done with some restraint and as an accompaniment to the story, not the entire reason for the film's existence.

Leading lady Kaitan was always considered a second tier Scream Queen during the 80s and 90s and spent most of her time fighting a losing battle competing for bubbly blonde B-movie roles against the reigning queen of such parts: Linnea Quigley. Though Kaitan's career had some promising blips of life during the 80s, it eventually devolved to the point where she appeared to just be getting Linnea's leftovers; evidenced by the fact she was first in line to replace Quigley when she bailed out early from the Vice Academy comedy series. I'm not saying this to denigrate Kaitan in any way as I quite like her as an actress. She was gorgeous, came off as very pleasant on-screen and had fair acting chops. Just like Quigley (here's that comparison again!) she was underrated for her comedic talents, which can be seen in all their glory in Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988) and several other films. I'm only pointing out that the lane she was traveling in during much of her heyday was already very much occupied, which probably explains why she didn't have quite the staying power of Quigley. Her co-star here, Stevens, has also had a more enduring career, though I don't find her darkly alluring qualities at all comparable to the much more sprightly Kaitan and Quigley. Nonetheless, the three of them always get grouped together.

I must also admit that I was taken aback seeing what became of Kaitan (now going by her married name Elizabeth Ruiz) after she finally threw in the towel on her acting career in the mid-90s. I know one can't expect an actor to be anything like their roles in real life, but her working as a personal assistant for truly nasty hatemonger David Horowitz, author of such books as Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes and BLITZ: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (published just a few months before he lost the election by over 7 million votes) did genuinely surprise me. But, as this film poetically reminds us, "Fate certainly weaves a curious tapestry."

Slave Girls received another sort of notoriety in its day when the late Jesse Helms, former North Carolina Senator / Moral Majority co-founder, whose beliefs were pretty aligned with where Horowitz is today, actually brought this movie up on the Senate floor as an example of an "indecent" film that should be banned from TV as part of a failed Cable Act amendment he was pushing. That piece of moronic legislation finally had the final nail put through it by the Supreme Court in 1996. After this brief setback, Helms went back to fighting for other worthwhile Christian causes like defunding AIDS research and eliminating free school lunches for impoverished children.

Fully financed and pre-sold around the world on the basis of its title alone, this was a video store and late night cable (including frequent airings on USA Up All Night) staple here in America and much of the rest of the world for many years. It's also one of the most profitable films from the entire Charles Band universe and has been released on VHS (Urban Classics) and DVD (Cult Video, Koch Vision) numerous times, plus received a Blu-ray release in 2019 courtesy of Full Moon. With all that in mind, it's a surprise that director Ken Dixon did not make any other films after this. Prior, he was tasked with putting together a bunch of film clip compilation shelf fillers for Band, including The Best of Sex and Violence (1982), hosted by John Carradine, Famous T&A (1982), hosted by Sybil Danning, Filmgore (1983), hosted by Elvira, and ZOMBIETHON (1986), which had fun new zombie scenes shot to link together the archive footage. Slave Girls certainly showed enough promise to merit additional work for Band but it never occurred.

Clips from this were later repurposed into the utterly useless T&A compilation Bimbo Movie Bash (1997), which was released on VHS and DVD and as a CD-ROM "game" by Full Moon. Nearly 30 years later, Brinke got to duplicate her death scene for Band's surprisingly fun Trophy Heads (2004), which seems to have otherwise taken quite a bit of inspiration from this.

★★1/2