Zombi 2 (1979)

... aka: Island of the Flesh-Eaters
... aka: Island of the Living Dead
... aka: Zombie
... aka: Zombie 2: The Dead Are Among Us
... aka: Zombie Flesh Eaters
... aka: Zombies 2

Directed by:
Lucio Fulci

In 1978, George A. Romero revolutionized horror cinema with his trend-setting classic DAWN OF THE DEAD. Filmed on a modest budget independently in Pennsylvania, the movie combined solid direction, sophisticated storytelling and until-then unseen levels of gore to become a huge international hit, despite the fact it played theaters with a self-applied X-rating. It also pulled off the impossible by getting positive [and most certainly deserved] critical notices across the board, even from the majority of critics reputed to have a strong distaste for the genre. So it's not surprising that many other filmmakers across the globe tried to cash-in, particularly in Europe. This Italian effort by Lucio Fulci was one of the first to do so and went on to become one of the most famous of all the copycats, possibly because it was released overseas as an actual sequel to Romero's film; Dawn was titled Zombi, Zombie was titled Zombi 2. Though the films share the slow, shambling, flesh-eating resurrected dead and high levels of gore (plus snippets of the same score), the similarities pretty much end there. Absent are Romero's sharp satire and humor, his relatable and enjoyable characterizations, the sweeping, increasingly hopeless apocalyptic tone and the deftly-directed action and horror sequences. Fulci's film is a dirtier, grittier, more primitive affair, which drops anything substantive and gets right down to basics.

The film opens as a seemingly unoccupied little boat washes into New York Harbor. When a couple of police officers go to investigate, they're promptly attacked by a zombie, who rips one of their throats open before being shot and falling into the water. Anne (Tisa Farrow) becomes concerned because the boat came from the same desolate tropical island her scientist father (whom she's lost contact with) is doing research. She, along with reporter Peter (Ian McCulloch) decide to head to the island to investigate. They charter a boat from Brian (Al Cliver) and his girlfriend Susan (Auretta Gay) and before the four even arrive at their destination, they're already being attacked by zombies. During one of the film's most memorable scenes, while Susan's deep underwater scuba diving, she comes face to face with a flesh-eater. Thankfully, the attack is thwarted by a shark that rips the zombie's arm off! Our heroes finally arrive at the island and act like complete dunderheads while the living dead start popping up all over the place. We're also introduced to some more thinly-defined fodder along the way, including Richard Johnson as the mad doctor type responsible for creating the zombie plague, Olga Karlatos (who'd star in Fulci's MURDEROCK a few years later) as his hysterical wife, Stefania D'Amario (NIGHTMARE CITY) as a nurse and Dakar (ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST) as an island native.

Though no match for the Romero zombie film responsible for its very existence, this isn't without its own redeeming qualities. For starters, some of the zombie designs are really good, including the maggot-faced chap who winded up on the poster. The film is also filled with gore, including a now-famous bit where Karlatos gets her eyeball skewered in close-up by a jagged piece of wood. Flesh chewed out of necks, arms and legs spray blood all over the place, and there are heads being shot, a dismemberment, guts and more. The island is a nice setting for one of these things, the low-budget look of the film is also something of an accidental plus that contributes to the film's grimy atmosphere and there's an excellent score from Goblin. On the down side, the script is pretty awful; there's next to no plot, the dialogue is terrible and there are no characters to root for or care about. In fact, they all pretty much behave like morons the entire time, including standing around for minutes at a time watching zombie accumulate around them.

The film was co-written by the prolific Dardano Sacchetti, who had his name removed from the credits after his father passed away (he found it a little distasteful to have his name attached to a living dead flick at the time).

Because of Zombie's success in theaters, Fulci would continue mining the zombie well for the rest of his career (sometimes adding supernatural slants to the stories) with such releases as THE GATES OF HELL (1980), THE BEYOND (1981) and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981). Just as Zombie had been re-tited Zombi 2 in Europe, other unrelated films were re-titled for home video to create a bogus "zombie" series. The title ZOMBIE 3 was used for a troubled production partially directed by Fulci in 1987 (Review RIGHT HERE), the sleazy BURIAL GROUND (1980) and at least three (!) other films. There are at least three different movies which have used the title ZOMBIE 4 (including THIS ONE). Jess Franco's REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER (1979 aka Nervosus) was released as ZOMBIE 5 (but so was a 1987 film originally called THE KILLING BIRDS) and Joe D'Amato's MONSTER HUNTER (a follow up to his ANTHROPOPHAGOUS aka THE GRIM REAPER) was issued on VHS as ZOMBIE 6 at one point. It's just as confusing as the "Demons" series.

★★1/2

Cape Canaveral Monsters, The (1960)

Directed by:
Phil Tucker

Phil Tucker, mastermind behind the notorious stinker ROBOT MONSTER (1953), strikes again! A couple leaving the beach are possessed by a pair of alien beings (represented by tiny specks of "green" light), who cause them to wreck their car and one of them to lose a limb. The aliens - Hauron (Jason Johnson) and Nadja (Katherine Victor) - hide out in a secret cave laboratory and have several chief objectives while on Earth. For starters, Hauron needs a new arm after the car wreck and a failed attempt to just sew it on (a dog ends up ripping if off), which gives them an opportunity to experiment with limb, bone and skin transplants; using unwilling victims as their guinea pigs, of course. Second, they've been given orders to sabotage NASA and prevent any rockets from leaving the planet, which means Hauron gets to frequently blast them out of the sky with his huge (looks like a rocket launcher) photon gun. And finally, the aliens are plotting to eventually invade the Earth and take over, so they'd first like to get to know and understand humans just a little bit better. They achieve this through observation, drilling captives with questions and then sticking them in their cryogenic capsule, freezing them and sending them back to their home planet for research.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists can't seen to figure out why their rockets keep exploding soon after take-off. Student and brilliant young mathematician Tom Wright (Scott Peters) decides to try to get to the bottom of things. But first, he'd like to have coffee with cute co-worker Sally (Linda Connell), the daughter of one of his superiors, German scientist Dr. Heinrich Von Hoften (Billy Greene), who objects to the union and mixing business with pleasure. Nevertheless, the two lovebirds, along with their pals Bob (Gary Travis) and Shirley (Thelaine Williams) start sneaking off to Lover's Lane for some late night romance. Shirley and Bob get kidnapped and taken back to the cave, where Bob becomes an unwilling arm and chin donor to help repair Hauron and Shirley is injected with sedative, dressed in a metallic sheet, given the alien equivalent of electro convulsive shock therapy and is frozen alive in preparation for being shipped off to the alien's planet. It isn't long before Tom and Sally also find themselves being held against their will, as their colleagues and some police officers scour the beaches and hills trying to locate them.

It's low-budget, some of the dialogue is silly (ditto for the 'science'), there's a really bad attempt at a foreign accent and the ending is weak (I'll get to that here in a sec), but this is still a pretty fun little diversion. I particularly liked the fact that the male alien is the slightly more compassionate of the two and wants to have pleasant conversations with humans while the female alien is colder, more evil and just wants to get down to business. The movie is also jam-packed with alien gadgets. In addition to the aforementioned photon gun and the cryogenics tube, the aliens use a device with a spinning translucent plate to communicate with their planet and a radium light to pin people to the wall. They also booby trap the cave with some kind of device that suspends people in their tracks, blast the cops with a "paralysis ray" and have a vat of bubbling goo nearby that's a portal back home.

Canadian-born Scott Peters (born Peter Sikorski) had already appeared in such Z-movie classics as THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957), INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN (1957) and ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE (1958) when he appeared in this one. Though he's about ten years too old for the role of a young science prodigy, he's likable and amiable enough. Plus he gets the film's best line: "I think with a little help we can lick these freaks!" Johnson and Victor are pretty amusing as the stone-faced aliens. Ms. Victor (born Katena Ktenavea) was a decent actress adept at playing villainess' and fairly well-known to cult cinema fans for her appearances in MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1952), TEENAGE ZOMBIES (1957) and a half-dozen films for Jerry Warren. In her later years, she kept steadily employed with Disney, doing continuity coordinator for such animated TV shows as Tail Spin, Darkwing Duck, Quack Pack, Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and many others. Most of the other cast members' film careers began and ended right here, though there's a long-standing (and incorrect) rumor that director Al Adamson is also in it.

Now back to that ending... I suppose you might want to skip this paragraph if you don't want it spoiled. Our heroes manage to escape the cave before it explodes. The aliens on the other hand had already transformed back into light specks and returned to their planet minutes earlier. Since the alien duo had already mentioned they're planning to takeover the Earth, it felt kind of half-assed and incomplete for the leads and their rescuers to just walk off into the sunset acting carefree. Especially with the knowledge that they're going to have to face more of these alien fiends sometime in the near future. I don't mind it having an open ending per se, but I thought it would awesome if after exiting the cave our heroes looked up into the sky and it was filled with light specks. That would have been an awesome and affordable apocalyptic ending instead of just completely leaving us hanging!

I might be overrating this by some people's standards, as it's usually written off as laughable schlock of par with the director's other, more-famous sci-fi turkey. I simply don't agree at all with that assessment. It's enjoyable, entertaining and with a run time of just 69 minutes, it moves at a good pace without the need for too much filler.

★★1/2

Death Nurse 2 (1988)

Directed by:
"Nick Philips" (Nick Millard)

Picking up right where DEATH NURSE (1987) left off, a detective discovers the corpse of elderly social worker Faith Chandler (Frances Millard, methinks) in the garage of the Shady Palms Clinic. As he attempts to enter the home, he's immediately greeted by hefty nurse Edith Mortley's (Priscilla Alden) butcher knife. Despite recent attention from police officers investigating multiple disappearances and health inspectors wanting to shut them down because of a rat infestation and strange odors emanating from the basement, Edith and her murderous doctor brother Gordon (Albert Eskinazi) decide to keep their usual routine going. And by usual routine, I mean killing their patients for the insurance money and then feeding them to the rats. Or as Edith puts it, "It's good business Gordon. The patients eat the rats and the rats eat the patients." Yes, the deadly duo also save money on food by feeding their patients either rats or human remain "stew." Meanwhile, a cop decides to start utilizing the Shady Palms facility to get some scum off of the streets.

First up is knife-wielding, dumpster-diving indigent "alky" Brownie (Irmgard Millard). She doesn't last too long after she pulls a knife on Edith for threatening to take away her beloved brown bag o' hooch. Edith stabs her a bunch of times and sticks her in the basement, but Brownie isn't quite dead yet. She sneaks back upstairs, stabs Gordon and then is finally taken out with about a dozen blows to the back with a meat cleaver. Edith puts Gordon on bed rest, and goes about her business while he sits in bed acting depressed for the rest of the film. Their next patient is a mentally-ill, "self-stylized philosopher" named Mischa Brudinsky (played by the same actor who played the "Polish poet" in the same team's DOCTOR BLOODBATH). Mischa constantly screams out his long, ultra-conservative and incomprehensible political rants, thinks the income tax should be abolished and lives in fear that this country will turn into a socialist nation. What the hell? Is this suddenly turning into some kind of political statement? Who knows, but I must admit that I laughed when Edith pulled out her freshly-sharpened cleaver and started chopping him up after he yelled "Capitalism is good!" at her.

We discover that the siblings aren't even actually what they claim to be. Edith was thrown out of nursing school before graduation because of her bad behavior and is thus not even officially a nurse, and Gordon is just a veterinarian who would have preferred to have been a surgeon. Faith's twin sister Charity (also played by Frances Millard, who talks kind of like Edith Massey) pops in looking for her missing sister and promptly files a police report because of Edith's suspicious behavior. When the fuzz start breathing down her neck, our beloved death nurse attempts to cover the smell by throwing lime on the corpses, but it's all for naught. Rats have carried human tissue samples out onto their front lawn and the police have already discovered them and had them analyzed. Director Millard shows up at the very end as copper Sgt. Dave Gallagher to reveal the bad news and put the kibosh on Edith and Gordon's future activities.

Possibly behind only Jerry Warren, Millard may actually be one of horror cinema's thriftiest filmmakers, seeing as how he managed to slap together a half dozen 80s horror features using next to no money, a consumer grade camcorder, his friends and family as 'actors' and a bare minimum of new footage. Here, he again liberally recycles scenes from both CRIMINALLY INSANE (1973) and SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING (1974); passing them off as Edith's nightmares. Since this is a follow-up, he's also able to pad things out even further by including clips from the first Death Nurse to help push the run-time up to a paltry 60 minutes. Again, there's a new title card for the film, but the same credits from Criminally Insane are re-run. The music from that film is also reused. It's set in the same exact Pepto Bismol-colored San Francisco house the other movies are set in, features most of the same 'actors' from the other movies and features the same aluminum-foil-covered weapons for the close-up hacking / stabbing scenes. There are countless zoom shots, many close-ups of Edith's scowling face and numerous scenes of people sitting, sleeping, lounging on a couch or walking through the house that never seem to end.

Criminally Insane, Satan's Black Wedding and CRAZY FAT ETHEL II (1987) were all released together on one DVD, but none of Millard's other 80s genre efforts have been. Both Death Nurse films were released on VHS by the obscure company The Incredibly Strange Filmworks.

★

Doctor Bloodbath (1987)

... aka: Butcher Knife

Directed by:
"Nick Philips" (Nick Millard)

A doctor shows up to a female patient's house, informs her she has an infection from an abortion he gave her, gives her a "vitamin shot" that turns out to be a sedative, carries her into the bathroom, places her in the tub and then stabs her to death with a butcher knife. The killer turns out to be Dr. Roger Thorne (Albert Eskinazi), who runs "Thorne's Pregnancy Counseling Center" (which must be down the road from "Shady Palms Clinic") and seems to have been driven crazy by spending his days terminating pregnancies. His cold, unaffectionate wife Claire (Irmgard Millard) certainly isn't helping matters. While her husband is off at work, Claire is out having an affair with an unemployed Polish poet (!!) who's constantly bumming money off of her. Roger has his nurse / secretary, Mrs. Carmichael (Frances Millard), give him a list of all of the women he's given abortions to in the last month, and sets out to kill them all. He chops the neck of one patient with a cleaver while yelling "Murderer!" at her, stabs one repeatedly with a screwdriver and bashes in the skull of another with a hammer. Detective Lt. David Chandler investigates as the body count increases, but isn't able to trace the killings back to anyone in particular.

Director / writer Millard (billed as "Nick Philips") churned out quite a few porn movies - both softcore and hardcore - in the 60s and 1970s, but also dabbled in several other genres, which resulted in a pair of cheap horror films; the minor camp classic CRIMINALLY INSANE (1973), and the lesser-watched SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING (1974). His career stagnated for around ten years, but then he made a comeback of sorts during the video boom era of the late 80, with a sequel to Criminally Insane (featuring the same star and titled either CRIMINALLY INSANE 2 or CRAZY FAT ETHEL II on video), as well as the spin-off DEATH NURSE, which was followed by its own sequel; DEATH NURSE 2. Despite the fact that all of those films are little more than inept home movies shot with a camcorder, they were amazingly well-distributed. The same cannot be said for Doctor Bloodbath, which was sold via mail order by Incredibly Strange Filmworks and didn't make it out to many video stores. Same goes for the director's CEMETERY SISTERS (1987), which I still haven't been able to find a copy of.

Bloodbath (aka Butcher Knife) features all of the director's trademarks of ineptitude. It's poorly made, full of astoundingly wooden acting and (like every other one of Millard's 80s cheapies) runs less than one hour (57 minutes to be exact), reuses the opening credits from Criminally Insane regardless of the fact none of the actors listed are even in the film and is padded out with footage from several of his earlier films. Since the 70s footage was shot on film and the 80s footage is shot on video, it's hardly a seemless fit. Horribly spliced-in scenes or shots include a close-up of a needle going into an arm, trolleys, cars driving, a few peripheral characters (a maid, detectives, etc.) standing around, graveyard scenes and more. The film reuses many of the same actors and was primarily shot at the same red house as the other 80s movies, as well.

That said, and despite the fact this one doesn't have Priscilla Alden's campy line-delivery to fall back on, dare I say it, but this is actually better than Crazy Fat 2 and Death Nurse. Well, maybe not exactly better, but definitely far more interesting and entertaining. Don't get me wrong, this is still a terrible movie, but it's a little more tasteless, a little bloodier and slightly better made than the others. More care was taken with the videography and Millard seems to have actually paid some attention to the lighting and sound this time out. It also has something of a plot (silly as it may be), a larger cast and not just the same five-six people that are in all of these other movies, and even a few hilariously 'arty' shots of the killer sitting around brooding.

Certain aspects of this film are also just plain bizarre, such as dozens of close-ups of eyeballs blankly staring off into space and the killer twiddling his thumbs over and over again. There are also several abortion sequences that involve a water-filled turkey baster (!) and the doctor fantasizing that he's stabbing a bloody baby doll that must be seen to be believed. The bitchy wife character also has a few memorable moments. When she gets knocked up and abandoned by her lover ("Dirty rotten no good Pollock!"), she turns to her husband to give her an abortion, telling him she cheated because he's inadequate in the sack and that she wants him to "...kill the little bastard before he gets any bigger!"

It's strange. It's crude. It's incompetent. And it accomplishes what Millard's other 80s films do not - breaking past that barrier of brainless and boring into a parallel universe of enjoyable bad movie oddness. Now someone get this hot mess out on DVD pronto!

★ SBIG

La settima tomba (1965)

... aka: Seventh Grave, The

Directed by:
"Finney Cliff" (Garibaldi Serra Caracciolo)

Extremely-rare and long-forgotten; this Italian horror / mystery (with a very old-fashioned 'old dark house' plot) has never been officially released to DVD or VHS. A murky bootleg copy which appears to have been videotaped off a TV screen some time during the 80s is sadly all that's available at the moment (though some custom English subtitles [thanks "NIKKO!"] are at least attached). Though I wish I could say that this is some kind of unjustly neglected gem that doesn't deserve its obscurity, it really isn't. Plot-wise, the film is dull and highly predictable, it's stagy and talky, it's very tame even for its era, the cast is pretty forgettable and there's next to nothing in the way of visual style or atmosphere (one aspect known to at least partially redeem some of these older, poorly-written [or poorly-dubbed] b/w European cheapies). Also somewhat disappointing is that much of the horror content is either a smokescreen for other goings-on or, as in the case of a woman temporarily speaking in a dead man's voice, not even followed up on.

Things begins as three Americans; brothers Robert ("John Anderson") and Fred ("John Day" / Gianni Dei) Jenkins, and Robert's lover Mary ("Kateryn Schous"), show up via stagecoach in 'Old Scotland.' They stop by the Rooster Inn for dinner, agree to give a ride to a young barmaid ("Germaine Gesny") who works there (she's the owner's daughter and headed to the same destination) and go to Nofis Castle for the reading of a will. The castle's former owner, scientist Sir Reginald Thorne, had passed away three years earlier, and his assistant, Dr. Quick, apparently went mad with leprosy and has been institutionalized ever since. But hey, the place used to belong to Sir Francis Drake and rumor has it there's a treasure hidden somewhere on the premises. Worth risking your life for, eh?

Upon arriving, the three Americans meet up with three other heirs; Colonel Percival ("Gordon Mac Winter"), his psychic daughter Katryn ("Stephany Nelly" / Stefania Nelli) and clergyman Parson Krabb ("Richard Gillies"), as well as notary Bill Elliot ("Fernand Angels" / Nando Angelini), who's in charge of reading the will, and groundskeeper Patrick ("Edward Barret"). As they await the arrival of yet another heir (who never shows up because she's been dead for several months), everyone decides to have a séance. This sequence, with everyone seated in a circle around a table linking hands, is easily the best-directed scene in the entire film and utilizes both different camera angles and (gasp!) actual camera movement.

Soon after the séance, a killer dressed in a cloak and top hat, who may or may not have been resurrected from the dead, shows up and starts bumping people off. We learn that Sir Reginald was a murderous mad scientist type who needed blood for his experiments (and whose corpse has strangely disappeared from its tomb), and it's also revealed that a now-possibly-disfigured Dr. Quick has managed to escape from the asylum and is probably lurking the grounds. Police detective Martin Wright ("Armand Warner") shows up to investigate after several people turn up dead. The title refers to the fact that Reginald's body occupies the seventh spot in the family crypt.

If you're not expecting too much, this is all mildly watchable, I suppose. It's short (clocking in at just 73 minutes) and the film has a pretty haunting music score with usage of Theremin and organ. The sets (including crypts, secret passageways and a laboratory) are sufficient, though unimpressive, and because of the horrible quality of the print I watched, the film has lots of overly bright or overly dark sequences. Not that I hold that against the film or anything, but even in pristine condition, this wouldn't rise above mediocrity. It's certainly not up to par with other Italian productions from the same era.

I'm not familiar with anyone in the cast aside from a young Gianni Dei (who'd later appear in GIALLO IN VENICE, PATRICK STILL LIVES and other sleazy genre flicks) and since the names in the credits have all been Anglicized, it's impossible to track down their true identities. Ditto for much of the crew, and the director doesn't seem to have made anything else.

★★

Video Dead, The (1987)

... aka: Zombie - Bloody Demons

Directed by:
Robert Scott

A reclusive, alcoholic writer (Michael St. Michaels) mistakenly receives a wooden crate that was supposed to go to "The Institute for the Studies of the Occult." Inside the box is a TV set, which he plugs in and turns on. Some old black-and-white horror movie called "Zombie Blood Nightmare" is playing. He tries to turn it off, but the TV keeps popping back on by itself... even when it's unplugged. That's because it's much more than just a TV set, but a portal to another dimension (or maybe even hell)! Eventually, smoke rolls out, the zombies in the film emerge into the 'real world' and the writer is killed. The house is put up for sale and, three months later, it's purchased by the Blair family. College-aged Zoe (Roxanna Augesen), who says she's majoring in aerobics (?), and her younger, pot-smoking brother Jeff (Rocky Duvall), arrive to get the home in order before their parents (who are away in Saudia Arabia) show up.

Naturally, Jeff finds the TV upstairs in the attic, plugs it in and some zombies show up in the woods behind their home, popping in on occasion to kill off people in the neighborhood (and a poodle). One victim is even stuffed in her washing machine. Jeff is also visited by an evil seductress (Jennifer Miro) from the TV, as well as a man named "The Garbageman" (Cliff Watts), who tells him to stock up on mirrors because these zombies can't stand being reminded of, well, the fact they're dead. A cowboy-hat-sporting Texas bounty hunter (Sam David McClelland) shows up looking for the cursed television and adds to the mythology by letting us know that the dead only kill people who show signs of fear. He and Jeff eventually set out into the woods with a bow-and-arrow and chainsaw to hunt down zombies and try to rescue April (Victoria Bastell), a neighborhood girl Jeff's taken a shining to.

The Video Dead has a minor cult following, did well on video and was frequently shown on late night cable TV in the 80s and 90s (I first recall seeing it on USA Up All Night as a kid). It seems to divide people into love it or hate it camps, though upon this revisit, I've decided I'm squarely in the middle. The movie is fairly upbeat, fast-paced and sometimes fun; even enjoyably quirky at times. Some of the dialogue is random and just strange. Where this movie really shines though in in the fx department. There's plenty of blood and gore, a couple of inventive kills (including an iron smashed into a head) and the make-up designs on the zombies (each of whom is given a unique look) are actually really good. It's also interesting to see evil things emerging from a TV ten+ years before the hit RINGU (1998). On the down side, most of the acting is terrible, there's no real explanation behind the haunted TV set, the tone often uneasily fluctuates between serious and tongue-in-cheek and the living dead (and really the film itself) are often just played for laughs. It's generally watchable, but it's not definitely going to appeal to everyone out there.

Lory-Michael Ringuette (who'd go to make the slasher BLOOD REAPER and the horror-comedy TELE-ZOMBIE) and Anthony C. Ferrante (a director, writer and make-up fx artist who had worked on such films as THE DENTIST and BOO) play zombies. Director Scott went on to a prolific career as an assistant director on such hit TV shows as JAG, Heroes and House M.D.

It was issued on VHS several times (by MGM and Embassy), but the film has yet to receive an official DVD release.

★★

Victims! (1985)

Directed by:
Jeff Hathcock

A woman heading toward her apartment gets a hatchet planted in her skull and takes an awkward tumble down the stairs. Another (nekkid) one with feathered hair and a tan line so bad her naughty bits almost blend in with her pristine bed sheets gets hacked up with a meat cleaver. And then a third woman gets stabbed repeatedly in broad daylight by a psycho dressed in some hilariously unconvincing drag. A witness to the last crime manages to chase down the psycho and wrestle him to the ground, he's shipped off to a nuthouse where the first sentence of a voice-over begins and then suddenly ends mid-sentence and then, strangely enough, this man, his victims and his crimes are never mentioned again. In fact, these scenes have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the film we're about to watch and were probably tacked on to: 1. Pad out the running time. 2. Provide a moment of frontal nudity. And 3. So this could be released on home video as a slasher flick.

After the utterly senseless opening, we get to the real meat of the tale as two robbers (Robert Axelrod and Lonny Withers) shoot a man and steal a car. They encounter a couple messing around in the woods, kill the guy, beat the girl up, gag her, strip her naked and take turns raping her. Meanwhile, our four unlucky heroines are getting ready for a trip to the desert to "study rock formations." Susan's overbearing mother doesn't understand why she doesn't like wearing bras and is afraid she's going to get knocked up. Janet works up a sweat exercizing and takes a shower. Debbie is just kind of there. And Lisa's boyfriend doesn't like the fact she's going camping without a M-A-N around to protect them. Lisa snaps: "Just because we're women, you don't think we can take care of ourselves?!" Apparently not well enough sister or you wouldn't find yourself having forced lesbian relations at gunpoint with your daisy-duke-sporting amiga.

After stopping at a gas station (where they're oggled by every guy there... probably because they are all dressed like hookers) and getting chased by two horny guys riding a dune buggy, the ladies finally reach their destination, which is ten miles from the nearest highway. They "study rock formations" by sitting around drinking and going skinny dipping. Having a feeling they're being watched and discovering someone has destroyed their campsite, they attempt to leave but whoever's watching them has already fucked up their car. Eventually they come face-to-face with the sadistic robbers. They're all smacked around, threatened with a gun, made to strip and get raped. In the most tasteless scene, one of the psychos forces one of the girls to go downtown on the other. Naturally, the women eventually get fed up with all this and manage to turn the tables on their attackers.

The only gore is the stuff tacked on at the beginning, but there's lots of nudity, a strange 'Nam flashback where one of the rapists kill a "gook bitch" and a sort-of castration scene (which oddly enough is pretty similar to what Ellen Page did in Hard Candy). The film seems to be striving for a feminist message (including some of the idiotic male characters equating how women dress with how they 'deserve' to get raped), but it's so exploitative and badly made that it's impossible to take seriously. The editing, lighting, sound recording and photography are all bloody awful.

Not surprisingly, none of the lead females (Ava Kauffman, Ann Richardson, Geri Schlessel and Pam Richards) appear to have acted in anything else. However, one of the rapists, Mr. Axelrod, did. He can be seen in the slasher SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE (1986), Alien Private Eye (1987), the terrible TV movie Bates Motel (1987), the remake of The Blob (1988) and many other films and television shows, but is probably best known for playing Lord Zedd on the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers TV series.

This appears to have been filmed well before 1985; probably around 1980-81 going by the makes of the cars seen in the film. Director Hathcock went on to make three other horror flicks; the shot-on video, psycho-kills-models slasher NIGHT RIPPER! (1986), the shot-on-video, snuff-filmmakers-kill-hookers exploiter Streets of Death (1987) and the awful Satanism tale Mark of the Beast (1990), which was later acquired by Troma and re-titled FERTILIZE THE BLASPHEMING BOMBSHELL so that someone would want to watch it. Mark / Fertizile has a lot in common with this one, including the dune buggies, the scantily-clad ladies and the desert location.

VHS from Simitar. No DVD.

★1/2