Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare (1987)

... aka: Arch Angel
... aka: Edge of Hell, The
... aka: Face of Hell, The

Directed by:
John Fasano

Leather, spandex, sequins, rubber, eye shadow, highly questionable music sensibilities, terrible acting, several gallons of hairspray and one astronomically high ego; just a few of the ingredients that went into making Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, Canada's most famous entry in the 80s 'heavy metal horror' subgenre. This seven-day-wonder was produced by, written by and stars Jon Mikl Thor aka "The Legendary Rock Warrior" aka “Thunderhawk” aka "The Man with the World's Most Protruding Rib Cage." Thor started out as a bodybuilder who earned the titles of both "Mr. Canada" and "Mr. USA" before moving on to a career in glam / hair metal with releases like "Muscle Rock" and "Devastation of Musculation." See a recurring themes there? He also wrote, produced and starred in a couple of 80s horror flicks (the other was the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 favorite Zombie Nightmare) clearly meant to showcase his musical abilities as well as his writing skills and his, a-hem, sex appeal as an actor. The good thing is that he fails so hard on all counts that the movie itself is pretty hilarious and only gets more and more laughably absurd the longer it goes on. So will you be able to endure sitting through 83 minutes of poorly-made vanity project hair band cheese overload? I don't know, but you should still aaac-cept the challlllennnnnge!

Thor plays John Triton, the bleached-out lead singer of the band Tritonz. Having accepted an advance for an upcoming album, he and his band mates (two guitar players, a drummer and a female keyboard player), plus a few of their girlfriends and their manager, retreat to a secluded farm house for five weeks to work on their music. There's no telephone, but there is a recording studio in the barn where the likes of Alice Cooper and Rod Stewart supposedly performed where they can fine tune their awful hair metal anthems like "We Live to Rock" and "You Give Me Energy." What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters the place is infested by an evil master demon and a bunch of its hand puppet rubber mini-minions, which possess, impersonate and kill. The first to go is the band manager, who's seduced, possessed and then disappears, prompting one of the ladies to comment "I'm sure Phil's not dead or anything or he would have called" (?!) Phil appears one more time to intercept four female members of the Tritonz fan club, demanding they show him their "bazooms" before luring them down into the basement where they're presumably killed.

Everyone else - save for our hero - eventually dies but the filmmakers refuse to show us any of it and the murders all take place off-screen. There are just two lame gore effects here; a guy getting a chunk bitten out of his shoulder by a demon and a giant clawed hand popping out of a guy's chest, and that's it. I don't even remember so much as a drop of blood anywhere. Receiving much more screen time are a slew of truly awful-looking little rubber critters that look plucked right from a child's toy box. The main one has one eyeball, smokes a cigarette and drools in a guy's drink, another looks like a cross between a snake and a Pterodactyl and a few more finally show up with Troll Doll hair. All of this leads up to a truly laughable finale where Jon Mikl battles against a plastic demon he keeps calling "bub" while wearing an outfit consisting of a cape, a jewel-encrusted speedo, knee-high boots and arm bands, heavy eye makeup and teased out hair.

Sadly, the above ensemble outfit isn't even the worst thing Thor wears. That honor goes to either the unbuttoned silver tuxedo jacket with black spandex pants or the pink polka dotted silk blouse that looks like something Blanche Devereaux would wear on a date. Thor also makes sure to write himself a shower sex scene where he awkwardly paws and tongues the poor actress playing his girlfriend, but the less said about that the better. There's not much else to say about this one. It's truly terrible in every way but with lots of that bad movie charm fans of this kind of stuff look for. If you want to see something along the same lines that's similarly cheesy but more competently-made make sure to give Trick or Treat (1986) or Shock 'em Dead (1991) a gander.

Director Fasano went on to contribute the better-made but perhaps less-memorable BLACK ROSES (1988) to the metal horror cycle. He also made The Jitters (1988), which hoped to introduce Western audiences to “hopping vampires,” which were huge in Hong Kong at the time. Thor returned to star in and produce the belated sequel Intercessor: Another Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare, which was released in 2005 to little attention and apparently no audience considering almost nobody has seen it. Thor will also be the subject of an upcoming documentary / biopic titled I Am Thor.

SBIG

Hack-O-Lantern (1988)

... aka: Damning, The
... aka: Death Mask
... aka: Hack-O'Lantern
... aka: Halloween Night
... aka: La maschera della morte (The Mask of Death)
... aka: La nuit d'Halloween (Halloween Night)

Directed by:
Jag Mundhra

Amanda (Katina Garner) and Bill (Michael Potts) Drindle, farmers in a small rural town, have their hands full raising their three children. Little Vera is a whiny tattletale. Little Roger is showing a strange affinity for firearms and shouts "Trick or treat! Give me all your candy of I'll blow your head off!" while blasting his mom with his toy gun. As for Little Tommy, well, he's grandpa's special little boy and when you're grandpa's favorite in this family it means you also have to be chummy with Satan himself as Gramps (Hy Pyke, who sounds almost identical to late John Waters star Divine) just so happens to be high priest in a Satanic cult. Concerned that his father-in-law is corrupting his son after Tommy blurts out "I like the taste of blood. Grandpa says it's good for me!," Bill decides to confront the cult, only to end up getting killed with a hammer. The cult then burn his body up in a barn fire to conceal what happened and go on their merry way.

Thirteen years pass. Mom is now depressed and miserable because she's been forced to run the family orchard all on her own with little help from her now-grown kids, who are all busy doing their own thing. Vera (Carla Baron, who went on to become a "psychic investigator" and later accused Arnold Schwarzenegger of sexually assaulting her on the set of Twins) is your typical boy-crazy teen girl who's considering losing her virginity to her new boyfriend (Larry Coven). Roger (Jeff Brown) has become a cop and Tommy (Gregory Scott Cummins) still lives at home, where his obsessively lifts weights in the basement and has weird dreams featuring a six-armed black woman shooting green laser beams out of her eyes to dissolve a metal band (!) before decapitating him with a pitchfork. Tommy is still hanging out with his evil grandfather and is still involved in the Satanic cult, but is he also the same person donning a Devil mask and red cloak who's been running around killing people?

This is typical direct-to-video product of its day, with really bad acting, a thin plot in need of serious padding and the requisite nudity and blood. What makes it slightly more entertaining than usual is how it goes about buffering its running time by including everything under the sun. Hair metal bands D.C. La Croix (singing the catchy "The Devil's Son") and Mercenaries both appear and each perform a full song and there's even a long stand up comedy routine about strippers and turkeys (?) The film also "boasts" extremely perverted and sex-obsessed characters. Tommy seems in love with his sister and beats up her boyfriend when he catches them in bed together. Vera seems obsessed with, and wants to know details about, her other brother's sex life (yuck). Even Roger the cop, the supposed "normal one," takes his sister's friend Beth (Patricia Christie) to a cemetery and has sex with her on top of a freshly-dug grave mound containing the corpse of his sister's boyfriend! It's also revealed that the grandfather hypnotized and then raped his own daughter on her wedding night so he may actually be both Tommy's grandfather and his real father. But Gramps has since moved on and now appears to have sexual designs on his granddaughter, whom he leers at and refers to as "a very temping young lady." Yikes.

There's some mild gore and violence (stabbings, a shovel to the head, a hanging, etc.) but just as much time is spent trying to get the female cast members out of their clothes. The sister is naked in the bathtub and later in bed, a woman strips completely naked at a Halloween party, a female Satanist takes it all off so she can get a pentagram branded on her ass, a victim's breasts almost pop out of her top when the killer grabs her and starts violently tightening her corset (!) and even the mom character (or her body double) gets in on the action during a flashback. The best known of the nude chicks is porno actress Jeanna Fine (credited here as "Angel Rush") who's around long enough to get naked twice before getting stabbed through the head with a claw.

The director also made the slashers Open House (1987) and The Jigsaw Murders (1989), but is best known for the numerous soft-core movies he made through the 1990s starring the likes of Tanya Roberts, Shannon Tweed and Kathy Shower. I visited the website of one of this film's female stars and she claims the budget was a million dollars (not likely) and that it "has returned over one hundred million dollars in foreign and domestic distribution" (also not likely). There were several late 80s video releases here in America, on the Atlas and Legacy labels, but no official DVD as of this writing. If you do happen to stumble upon this for sale on DVD it's a bootleg VHS transfer.

★★