...aka: MoontrapDirected by:
Robert Dyke
Review coming soon.
★1/2
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Mother's Day (1980)
Directed by:Charles Kaufman
Three former college roommates (Nancy Hendrickson, Tiana Pierce and Deborah Luce) reunite for an annual camping trip out in the sticks and reminisce about their long-gone college days, which are shown in comic flashbacks. Then, two mother-obsessed, deranged brothers; Ike ("Holden McGuire"/ Frederick Coffin) and Addley ("Billy Ray McQuade"/ Michael McCleery) attack them, drag them back to their isolated house in their sleeping bags, beat them and tie them up. One of the girls is taken outside, dressed like Shirley Temple, raped and beaten unconscious while the other brother takes pictures and the equally disturbed mother ("Rose Ross"/ Beatrice Pons) encourages them and laughs with glee. The next day, the three girls manage to escape into the woods, but the injured one dies and the two survivors vow to get revenge on their attackers and head back to the house for a blood-soaked finale. The colorful, over-the-top and somewhat inventive gore effects include a hammer to the crotch, a decapitation (complete with a blood squirting torso), a TV-to-the-head electrocution, electric carving knife attack and Drano poured down the throat.
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Just like the majority of Troma's output, it's pretty tasteless (which can certainly be a plus depending on the viewer) and often annoying, but entertaining and creative enough to merit a view, with some successful attempts at satire and jabs at our commercialized world that, naturally, most well-touted critics seemed to overlook in their scathing reviews. The female leads are also a bit more fleshed out than usual for this type of film. The director is the brother of Troma head honcho Lloyd Kaufman, who was the associate producer of the film. Their sister Susan was the production designer and their father Stanley even gets in on the action, appearing in a small role during a pool party scene. Some of the locations were the same ones used in the original FRIDAY THE 13TH. In fact, the films were being made at the exact same time, just on opposite ends of the New Jersey lake.
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Darren Lynn Bousman (the guy behind the SAW sequels and REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA - which I hated, by the way) is working on a remake as we speak.
★★1/2
La settima donna (1978)
... aka: Seventh Woman, The
... aka: Terror
Directed by:
Franco Prosperi
The 1972 shocker The Last House on the Left (itself "inspired" by Bergman's 1960 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner The Virgin Spring) was such a popular and notorious film during its day that it spawned a whole slew of wannabes, impostors and imitators, particularly in Europe. Some of these movies were actually rip-offs, while others merely tried to cash in on the familiar title but actually had little else in common with Craven's film. At one point, distributors even tried to pass off Bava's Reazione a catena (aka Bay of Blood), filmed a year before Craven's film, as a sequel! There was also the psycho road thriller "Hitch Hike: Last House on the Left" (better known as simply HITCH HIKE), "The New House on the Left" (aka Night Train Murders), House on the Edge of the Park (1980), LAST HOUSE ON DEAD END STREET (1977), TERROR EXPRESS (1979) and many others. The formula was pretty simple - have a group of criminals / thugs / killers / psychos take a random group of people (normally women) hostage and proceed to humiliate, abuse, terrorize, rape and / or kill some of them off before allowing the survivors to turn the tables on their attackers and get revenge... or let someone else do it for them. And that brings us to director Franco Prosperi's 1978 cash-in Last House on the Beach, which was originally filmed as La settima donna ("The Seventh Woman") and was also released under the more generic title Terror. It follows the above formula pace-for-pace, plot-point-for-plot-point and though it's watchable for the most part, it brings absolutely nothing new or all that interesting to this subgenre.
Florinda Bolkan (who is too talented to be appearing in rip-offs such as this one) stars as Cristina, a teacher and sister-of-the-cloth who is spending an extended weekend at a remote beach house preparing for a Shakespeare performance with five female students. Elsewhere, three thugs; Aldo (Ray Lovelock), Walter (Flavio Andreini) and Nino (Stefano Cedrati), have just robbed a bank and left several dead bodies in their wake. They end up needing a place to hide out for a few days and stumble upon the beach house, where they quickly murder the maid (with an iron to the head) and take Cristina and her nubile students hostage. From then on out, the films plays out basically as a series of sexual humiliations, gropings, beatings, attempted rapes and actual rapes. The captors do such nice things as making Cristina strip and change into her nun's habit in front of her students, sticking their hands down the girls panties to see if they're still virgins and forcing Cristina to watch one of her students get bent over and raped (in slow motion, no less). The guys finally send Cristina over the edge when they rape one of the more "troublesome" - though still virginal - girls, Eliza (Sherry Buchanan), to death with a cane. The final revenge exacted by the surviving women is almost as bland as it is predictable.
Though numerous scenarios play out in an unpleasant way, the film isn't nearly as harrowing or impactful as it should have been. One reason is the stereotypical obnoxious portrayal of the three bad guys, which is so frequently over-the-top and one-dimensionally sleazy that it detracts from the overall realism of the film. Another is the portrayal of the anonymous wide-eyed schoolgirls, who aren't allowed even a glimpse of individual personality. These are simply evil oversexed bad guys versus virginal cowering good girls of the cardboard cut-out variety that don't make one care much either way about what's going on to whom at any given time. Bolkan helps out the best she can. She's the type of actress who is able to convey a lot in a subtle, quiet way - minus the hysterics - and she did a fair job contrasting the obnoxious male attackers.
So while this film is basically a lesser copy of something better (and even sits in the shadow of some of the other lesser imitations), it's still fairly well-scored and photographed for what it is. The beach house itself is a pretty good setting, and there's enough nudity, sleaze and sexual violence directed toward underage-looking teenage girls for those wanting to see that. Personally though, I can't say that I was all that impressed. There aren't very many suspenseful or thrilling moments, just lots of tedious attacks scenes leading to a predictable and ho-hum finale.
Florinda Bolkan (who is too talented to be appearing in rip-offs such as this one) stars as Cristina, a teacher and sister-of-the-cloth who is spending an extended weekend at a remote beach house preparing for a Shakespeare performance with five female students. Elsewhere, three thugs; Aldo (Ray Lovelock), Walter (Flavio Andreini) and Nino (Stefano Cedrati), have just robbed a bank and left several dead bodies in their wake. They end up needing a place to hide out for a few days and stumble upon the beach house, where they quickly murder the maid (with an iron to the head) and take Cristina and her nubile students hostage. From then on out, the films plays out basically as a series of sexual humiliations, gropings, beatings, attempted rapes and actual rapes. The captors do such nice things as making Cristina strip and change into her nun's habit in front of her students, sticking their hands down the girls panties to see if they're still virgins and forcing Cristina to watch one of her students get bent over and raped (in slow motion, no less). The guys finally send Cristina over the edge when they rape one of the more "troublesome" - though still virginal - girls, Eliza (Sherry Buchanan), to death with a cane. The final revenge exacted by the surviving women is almost as bland as it is predictable.
Though numerous scenarios play out in an unpleasant way, the film isn't nearly as harrowing or impactful as it should have been. One reason is the stereotypical obnoxious portrayal of the three bad guys, which is so frequently over-the-top and one-dimensionally sleazy that it detracts from the overall realism of the film. Another is the portrayal of the anonymous wide-eyed schoolgirls, who aren't allowed even a glimpse of individual personality. These are simply evil oversexed bad guys versus virginal cowering good girls of the cardboard cut-out variety that don't make one care much either way about what's going on to whom at any given time. Bolkan helps out the best she can. She's the type of actress who is able to convey a lot in a subtle, quiet way - minus the hysterics - and she did a fair job contrasting the obnoxious male attackers.
So while this film is basically a lesser copy of something better (and even sits in the shadow of some of the other lesser imitations), it's still fairly well-scored and photographed for what it is. The beach house itself is a pretty good setting, and there's enough nudity, sleaze and sexual violence directed toward underage-looking teenage girls for those wanting to see that. Personally though, I can't say that I was all that impressed. There aren't very many suspenseful or thrilling moments, just lots of tedious attacks scenes leading to a predictable and ho-hum finale.
Laura Trotter (Nightmare City), "Annaluisa Pesce" / Luisa Maneri (Body Count) and Isabel Pisano (Trauma) co-star. Lovelock also contributed a song to the soundtrack.
★★
Terror, The (1963)
...aka: Castle of Terror, The...aka: Haunting, The
...aka: Lady of the Shadows
Directed by:
Roger Corman
Francis Ford Coppola (uncredited)
Monte Hellman (uncredited)
Jack Hill (uncredited)
Dennis Jakob (uncredited)
Jack Nicholson (uncredited)
Yes, it's the legendary film shot in just a couple of days (either 2 1/2 to 4 depending on your source) on leftover sets from THE RAVEN and THE HAUNTED PALACE and with Boris Karloff still under contract for two days work for director/producer Roger Corman. The so-called "plot" (devised by writers Jack Hill and Leo Gordon, which I strongly suspect was made up as they went along) involve one of Napoleon's lost soldiers, Lt. Andre Duvalier (a badly miscast Jack Nicholson, giving a performance nothing short of terrible) chasing down a beautiful, ghostly woman he sees on a beach (played by Jack's then-pregnant former wife Sandra Knight) to the castle home an insane Baron von Leppe (Karloff); the mysterious woman's supposed husband. Corman regulars Dick Miller (as Leppe's manservant Stephan) and Jonathan Haze (as Gustan the hermit) show up to contribute to the confusion. Legend has it that up to five other directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Hill, Dennis Jacob and even Nicholson himself) worked uncredited and shot separate scenes for this extremely disjointed but somewhat interesting little film. That it is able to muster up some genuine atmosphere (especially scenes shot along the California coastline) is a testament to the Corman stable’s underrated talent, though the film is mostly enjoyed now as a curio item for film buffs.
That same year, Corman employed Coppola to write and direct a PSYCHO derivation in Ireland (DEMENTIA 13), which became a cult item itself. Scenes (and outtakes) from THE TERROR have been reused many times in other Corman productions, most notably as the film screened at the drive-in in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature TARGETS (1968), also with Boris in a starring role. Director Jim Wynorski also cleverly inserted a scene of Karloff into his amusing 1989 horror spoof TRANSYLVANIA TWIST.
That same year, Corman employed Coppola to write and direct a PSYCHO derivation in Ireland (DEMENTIA 13), which became a cult item itself. Scenes (and outtakes) from THE TERROR have been reused many times in other Corman productions, most notably as the film screened at the drive-in in Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature TARGETS (1968), also with Boris in a starring role. Director Jim Wynorski also cleverly inserted a scene of Karloff into his amusing 1989 horror spoof TRANSYLVANIA TWIST.
★★
10 to Midnight (1983)
...aka: Ten to MidnightDirected by:
J. Lee Thompson
We’ve all seen numerous 80s teen sex comedies featuring streaking. Here’s an 80s psycho-horror-thriller about streaking sex killer. He (Gene Davis) is stalking, raping and murdering young ladies on a California college campus. The culprit is evident to L.A. cops, but the psycho is intelligent enough to avoid leaving behind any evidence, so tough police lieutenant Leo Kessler (Charles Bronson) helps in planting evidence so he’ll be arrested. At trial, the case is thrown out, the nut is set free and Bronson is kicked off the force. But when his coed daughter (Lisa Eilbacher) becomes a target, Bronson must step back into action, go the DEATH WISH route and track down and eliminate the killer on his own. Despite the content (which was influenced by both American serial killer Richard Speck and the Thames River Killer investigation in the UK), it’s only a very slight deviation from the norm for the star (by genre, not character). Livened up a tad by a pretty good cast and a larger-than-usual amount of nudity (both male and female).
With Andrew Stevens (a long-time exploitation actor who went on to a successful career as a producer) as the daughter's boyfriend, Geoffrey Lewis, Wilford Brimley as a police captain, Robert F. Lyons (who played a psycho in 1971's THE TODD KILLINGS) , Ola Ray (a former Playboy Playmate who is best known as the girl in Michael Jackson's Thriller video), Kelly Preston (aka Mrs. John Travolta), Jeana Tomasina (another Playboy model who'd later show up with a few extra pounds on the reality show The Real Housewives of Orange County), Jeane Manson (the third featured Playmate who went on to a huge singing career, selling over 20 million albums worldwide), future director Deran Sarafian (ALIEN PREDATORS, TO DIE FOR), Anne Lockhart (daughter of June) as a victim and some other familiar faces.
★★
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