Skinned Alive (1990)

... aka: Escolados vivos

Directed by:

J.R. Bookwalter (uncredited)

Jon Killough

In 1985, Bookwalter began filming his low budget zombie opus The Dead Next Door for his fledgling production company Tempe. Put into context of when it was made and released, the film was quite notable for a variety of reasons. For starters, it was shot entirely on Super 8, which was a film format until-then reserved almost exclusively for amateur home movies and vacation videos. While Dead wasn't the first to do that - Mark Pirro, for instance, had already shot several of his earlier films on Super 8 - it was a much more ambitious undertaking. Taking four years to complete and with an estimated budget of 125,000 dollars, it would later be called "the most expensive Super 8 movie ever made." Around midway through the production, the film also attracted the interest of both Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, who were fresh off their success of the second Evil Dead. Raimi (who billed himself as "The Master Cylinder" in the credits) chipped in some money as executive producer while Campbell did some voice-overs and worked on audio. That ended up getting Dead some genre press coverage which then resulted in this small regional movie becoming a minor cult film on home video. That in turn led to a number of other independent horror productions over the next few decades from the same people.

Though (mostly) directed and written by Killough, who'd worked on all of Tempe's previous films, Bookwalter's stamp is all over this one. He produced, directed (both as second unit and in a finishing director capacity), did the music, did the titles and receives credits as camera operator, foley artist, sound effects and sound engineer. He also oversaw the re-edit and remastering of the film in 2002 for its initial DVD release. Most of the actors seen here had appeared in previous Tempe films, and many of them also worked various jobs behind the scenes on this one as well. This is the type of ultra low budget production where most of the folks involved had to wear multiple hats in order to get things done. Even so, this one almost never got done!

Skinned Alive is a Texas Chainsaw-inspired tale detailing the exploits / killing spree of a white trash family of serial killers as they travel around the Ohio countryside. The trio of psychos is led by Crawldaddy (Mary Jackson, and NOT the same actress from The Waltons as most websites currently state), the wheelchair-bound, eye-patch-sporting, beer-guzzling, constantly cackling and cursing matriarch of the clan, who suffers from some gender identity issues (she sometimes prefers to be called "daddy"), endlessly berates her idiot offspring and brags about killing her own mother. Her children are manic, pill-popping Phink (Scott Spiegel - INTRUDER) and man-hating blonde seductress Violet (Susan Rothacker), who share incestuous desires for one another and are every bit as obnoxious as their ma. The family get by operating a traveling tannery out of a black van and murder whoever they stumble across, skin them and make leather goods from their hides.

Having to be in Columbus the following day, their van picks the perfect time to break down in some "shithole redneck town." They offer friendly mechanic Tom Miles (Lester Clark) a thousand bucks if he can fix it ASAP, and he agrees to let these weirdos camp out in their basement for the night in the meantime, where they're constantly annoyed by his chatterbox wife, Whinnie (Barbara Katz-Norrod). In between, they indiscriminately kill whoever they happen to run across while shouting inane dialogue. That's about it as far as plot is concerned.

What this mostly amounts to is an excuse to show off gore fx, with awful, childish "comic" dialogue used to try to paste it all together. The first victim, a hitchhiker (played by the director), is kicked in the face, beaten with a hammer and then shot in the head. An obese guy (Michael Render) stumbles upon the killers after being stranded on the roadside when his "God damn piece of Jap shit" car breaks down. After offering them free tickets to "Wayne Newton's Las Vegas All Nude Revue," he's chased through a cornfield, impaled with a flying machete and shot multiple times. A delivery man (Mike Shea) has his fingers hacked off, a Jehovah's witness (played by Bookwalter) is immediately shot in the front yard in broad daylight then later skinned in the basement and another guy (James L. Edwards) listening to a Walkman and eating cheese puffs gets run over in front of a store. No one seems to really care.

Clearly having more space to fill than what the thin main story will allow, we're introduced to Tom and Whinnie's depressed next door neighbor, Paul Hickox (Floyd Ewing Jr.). Paul is an ex-cop first seen wearing a "Boycott Jane Fonda American Traitor Bitch" shirt, sucking down an entire fifth of vodka for breakfast and passing out. He lost his previous job for accidentally killing an innocent woman and is now going through a nasty, bitter divorce with his bitchy wife, Louise (Jennifer Mullen), who's already gotten custody of the kids and all of his money, and is in the middle of also getting the house. She and her divorce lawyer / lover (Michael Tolochko, also the cinematographer, executive producer, editor and camera operator) show up unannounced to rub salt in the wound by mocking him as he's packing up his stuff. While this should get us in Paul's corner, he's a sullen, self-centered drunk, a wife beater and as big of a shithead as anyone else in the movie, killers included.

Now a well-placed insult or use of profanity can certainly be funny if it's in the right context and done appropriately, but when half the dialogue of your film consists of juvenile attempts at crude humor, the effect becomes numbing and just plain irritating after awhile. Supposed zingers like "fat fuckwad" "dingleberry" "walking abortions" "dick cheese" "stupid fucking idiot jerk-off" and "fat crippled butt fuck" constantly being screamed at the top of lungs by terrible amateur actors playing detestable yet oddly flat characters just isn't much fun. Sad too because this could have been a pretty decent indy horror had the director / writer not coached the cast to act like this (bad actors / non-actors can be likable and personable if handled correctly) and the script not been so terrible.

Aside from some nice colors and autumnal Ohio scenery, the only other redeeming factor in this < 20,000-budgeted, 16mm production are the make-up effects by David Lange and Bill Morrison, with David P. Barton (who'd go on to work for KNB, Kevin Yagher and on many big budget Hollywood films) listed as a consultant. We get plenty of gore and blood here, including a head hacked in two, a body being completely obliterated by machine gun fire, a machete stuck in a shoulder, disembowelments, skinned corpses, a chest carving and much more. These bits are fun; the rest not so much.

Credited director Killough worked as a production designer and actor on a few other Tempe films (like Robot Ninja and the aforementioned Dead Next Door). According to Bookwalter, he also walked off the set at some point and never completed his own film, which forced him to step in and direct additional scenes to push the running time up to around 70 minutes, not including the slow credits. This appears to have severed Killough's ties with Tempe permanently since he didn't work for them again after this. The very busy David DeCoteau was the executive producer.

This was originally given an unrated VHS release on the Cinema Home Video label in 1990, which featured an unrelated photo of Linnea Quigley from MURDER WEAPON (1989) on the front cover. Ample footage from this also ended up padding out the same companies Shock Cinema documentary series.

Many DVD releases on numerous labels followed but those can all now be cast aside for the 2 disc "Ultimate Edition" Blu-ray release from Makeflix. It features the best possible restoration of the film (all things considered) and includes multiple audio commentaries (including a new one with the director and another with Bookwalter and Lange carted over from the 2002 DVD release), interviews with most of the cast and crew, a number of short making-of documentaries, behind the scenes footage, two episodes of a public access sitcom called Roommates many of these same folks worked on and a lot more. There was also a limited edition VHS release for collectors.

★1/2

Astro-Zombies, The (1968)

... aka: Astro-Zombies - Roboter des Grauens (Astro-Zombies: Robots of Horror)

... aka: Space Vampires

... aka: Space Zombies

Directed by:

Ted V. Mikels

A woman killed in her garage by a masked fiend brandishing a gardening tool is but one of many recent "mutilation murders" in the Los Angeles area over the past six months. C.I.A. chief Mr. Holman (Wendell Corey) calls Dr. Eric Porter (Tom Pace) and Chuck Edwards (Joseph Hoover), from the C.I.A.'s "subversives division," into his office to try to get the bottom of things. Eric has spent the last few months undercover as an assistant to Dr. DeMarco (John Carradine), a brilliant scientist who'd already been tossed out of the government aerospace research center for his unorthodox experiments with organ transplants and "thought wave transmissions through radio frequencies" but has been continuing his work elsewhere. Dr. Petrovich (Victor Izay), a former colleague of DeMarco's, is called in to provide additional insight into just what DeMarco has been up to. It's Holman's belief that a foreign government may be interested in stealing DeMarco's research and using it for their own nefarious purposes. Either that or DeMarco is already willingly working with a hostile foreign country. The dialogue is so hopelessly muddled it's actually difficult to tell.

Elsewhere, DeMarco is busy in his basement lab creating what he calls "astro-men" while his loyal, mute hunchback helper Franchot (William Bagdad) is occasionally sent out to acquire victims (from car crashes and such). Whenever fresh corpses are procured, they are immediately strapped to a table and have some kind of a metal cap placed over their head, which is plugged into a machine that's hooked up to some kind of computer system. After a switch is flipped, they're then drained of all blood, placed in a "thermal freeze vault" to keep cellular deterioration from occurring and then must go through a "synthetic heart transplant." And that, along with specially-programmed computer chips and other attached gadgets and doodads, is how you create astro-men!

Carradine is handed a bunch of rambling, pseudo-scientific dialogue to "explain" the process, which is so needlessly complex it only succeeds in making viewers mentally check out. This wire goes there and this switch turns on that and that won't work without this special microchip or attachment and that transmitter operates this but not that... on and on it goes. I didn't have a clue what he was talking about most of the time!

Other victims are claimed, both by a rogue astro-man, one of whom sneaks into Petrovich's lab and stabs his assistant Lynn (Janis Saul) to death before harvesting her organs, as well as foreign spies, who make short work of any C.I.A. agent who happens to be closing in on them at any given time. The latter are led by cult star Tura Satana (Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), who plays a "Dragon Lady"-type spy named - you guessed it - Satana, and is after Carradine's secrets when she isn't putting lit cigarettes out on people's faces or nonchalantly unloading her gun into them. 

With her voluptuous body, pasty white face make-up, large fake eyelashes, thin drawn-on eyebrows, bright red lipstick over a tight mouth and amazing gown selections with slits in all the right places, Satana cuts quite the memorable figure here. Though her actual performance isn't quite up to par with her Russ Meyer film appearance, she's still clearly one of the most interesting aspects of the production. As for the Japanese-American actress' little spy ring, which includes Dominican Rafael Campos (LADY IN A CAGE) as the switchblade-happy Juan and stocky Italian Vincent Barbi as the barely-coherent Tiros, I'm not sure what organization or country they are supposed to represent exactly.

Joan Patrick co-stars as Janine Norwalk, who happens to be DeMarco's former assistant who also happens to be Petrovich's current assistant who also happens to be Dr. Porter's girlfriend who also happens to be a primary target of the escaped astro-man because he happens to have been a patient of hers prior to being transformed into an astro-man. Small world, eh? Janine eventually agrees to set herself up as bait to lure the zombie back to the lab but things don't go quite as planned.

While a few of the scenes are admittedly entertaining or unintentionally funny, and there's some camp value here, it's not quite enough to send this into SBIG territory. The film mostly just comes off as cheap, slow, directionless and incoherent. The plot is poorly developed and difficult to follow, the bad guys' motivations are murky at best, the film is flat out ugly to look at most of the time and there aren't nearly enough scenes featuring the titular creatures. Not that the astro-zombies are much to look at (it's just some guy wearing a cheap rubber mask), but at least the few scenes with it / them attacking people inject some much-needed action into this otherwise lifeless film. Most disappointingly, and despite the title, there is only one "zombie" in the film until the very last scene when there are a whopping two. They're also not from outer space.

You know what's not a good use of screen time, talent or we - the viewers' - time? Having to sit and watch a static shot of Carradine's wobbly hands fumble around with some kind of computer for three minutes, which consists of him removing two screws from a panel, pulling out a box, unscrewing the box, putting some kind of microchip inside, screwing the box shut again, sliding the box back into the computer, shutting the panel again, tightening the two screws again, hitting a button and then unscrewing the two screws on the panel again, pulling the box back out again, unscrewing the box again and removing the microchip! In what universe is that not boring as fuck?

There are endless similar scenes that go on for far too long (people driving around, walking, talking...) and are completely pointless. Around three to four minutes are also set aside to show a body paint-covered topless dancer performing her bongo drum-accompanied routine in a club, which is a welcome diversion as it's at least pleasant to look at.

Carradine never once gets to leave his cheap lab set and his performance is further hampered by the indecipherable gibberish he's forced to spout. Just a decade earlier, top-billed Corey had been acting in major studio films for the likes of William Wellman and Alfred Hitchcock, so this was quite the fall from grace for him, though not a surprising one going by the anecdotes I've read about his real life. A lifelong alcoholic, he made an unsuccessful bid for Senator in 1965 but was defeated in the Republican primary and ended up passing away from cirrhosis of the liver just six months after this film was released at the age of 54. Unlike Carradine, who at least tries, Corey gives your standard don't-wanna-be-here paycheck performance and his two scenes are long, drawn out and extremely dull.

The budget was just 37,000 dollars. Mikels also co-scripted, edited (using his real name Theo Mikacevich) and produced, plus has an uncredited cameo as the drum player. Wayne Rogers, later of M*A*S*H fame, co-wrote and was the executive producer. Roger had previously collaborated with Mikels on the softcore film Dr. Sex (1964). In 1982, the punk band Misfits released a song titled "Astro Zombies" inspired by the film (and on their album Walk Among Us), so at least something good came from all this.

After its 1968 theatrical release, 1971 theatrical re-release and its run on TV as part of an AIP syndication package, this well-distributed title turned up on home video countless times. It was released no less than three different times on VHS by Wizard under three different titles, starting with its original title in 1981, then Space Vampires in 1985 and then again as Space Zombies in 1986. Wizard also recycled footage from this to pad out their compilation tapes Filmgore (1983) and ZOMBIETHON (1986). Additional VHS releases from Mad Monster Video, Troma Team and other companies followed. In 2000, it made its official DVD debut courtesy of Image, and then was put out on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in 2016. Some of the earlier releases of the film had been cut to remove some of the minor gore (including a machete decapitation) and the dance scene. The full running time of the uncut version is 92 minutes.

Over thirty years later, Mikels returned with the extremely cheap sequel, Mark of the Astro-Zombies (2004), which featured Satana again, along with cult stars Liz Renay and Brinke Stevens. That was followed by Astro Zombies: M3 - Cloned in 2011, with Satana (in her final film role; she'd pass away the following year) and Francine York, and Astro Zombies M4: Invaders from Cyberspace in 2014, which featured Beverly Washburn, of Spider Baby fame.

★