Wopsploitation

Attn: Woprophiles,Buy this book,SHARPISH.

2009-08-28T00:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a direct command from your beloved Emperor himself.Instead of tossing down twenty samoleans on Rob Zombie's latest bowel movement committed to celluloid, go directly to the Convict Grade website and order yourself a copy of the first book by author Azrael Paul Damien.In today's society where true horror is a valuable and rare commodity, oftimes we as ravenous aficionados are forced to turn to other mediums to score a pure fix that leaves us sated,and more often than not,that medium is the written word.I've heard tell that anyone who'd put stock in anything that I've got to say probably lacks proper motor skills let alone the ability to read, but I shrug off such outlandish claims like dandruff flakes(which I haven't had to worry about for many moons,believe me).I know you guys love a well-crafted terror tale as much as I,and that's why I'm beseeching you to give Convict Grade a read.Besides, if you order your copy directly from the website, you'll get yours signed by the author himself, and that's always nifty when you're out-pretensing your high falooting coffeehouse chums with the latest tome in your library.Yeah,put Georges Bataille back on the shelf,we all know you have it.I'd also like to think that we as the horror community support and embrace that which is refreshing and new,as Damien's first outing certainly looks to be.

Nevermind the peepers,scary is the allergic reaction I'd have to that freaking panther Az's got in his mitts.
I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of the book over here,and I'll devour it in one sitting for sure,to be followed by a full review some time next week here at Wopsploitation,of course.So do the fright thing,and pick up yours ASAP.I've become pretty chummy with APD of late, he's certainly a good guy that deserves your support,as well as a very talented word-turner(frankly,I'm a little jealous of the former male model-turned-book authoring son of a bitch,but that's a good thing,right?)in his own right.Such is the will of the senate and the people of Rome.

"Malenka"(1969)d/Amando de Ossorio

2009-08-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

Should be returning to the regular grind here shortly,I've been busy tapping out my first screenplay,and frankly,I'm pretty excited about it.All I'm gonna say about it at this point,is that it's a modern American giallo with some really strong character studies,and loads of inventive shocking deaths.
I'm a huge fan of the late Amando de Ossorio's Blind Dead series(Tombs of the Blind Dead,Return of the Evil Dead,Ghost Galleon,Night of the Seagulls) starring the Knights Templar zombies.Now that I've gotten that out of the way,my conscience is clear to talk about Malenka,his first foray into the horror genre,released under a multitude of aliases since 1969.In fact if you watch one of his later horror ventures then follow it up with this number,you'll probably be scratching your head as to how someone with such a clear vision and grasp on cinematic atmosphere could be responsible for writing AND directing such a fucking boring movie.His campy attempts at humour peppered throughout the overly long running time are less funny than the American dub/cut of Dracula and Son(1979),and that's no easy task,friends.Anita Ekberg spends half the movie looking like a top heavy Shirley Temple,avoiding the flaccid fangery of her uncle,who has to be in the top five least threatening vampires of all time,with his mouse shoulders and turtleneck.Hell,he even gets knuckledusted by a skinny Italian guy.Strength of twenty men,my ass.

"I'll check out this bacteria culture once I've finished my Lucky Strike."
A Roman model named Sylvia(Anita Ekberg) is two weeks from marriage to her fiancee, a handsome young doctor named Pietro(Gianni Medici),when she receives word that she's inherited a castle and Countess title from her late mother."Something fantastic has happened to me!" she relates to Pietro and Max,his stereotypically goofy Italian sidekick.Funny,but I've never heard anybody use the word fantastic when receiving news that their mother just died but hey,I liked mine.Sylvia leaves her boyfriend behind to travel to the family castle,stopping to imbibe a frothy beer at the pub,and freaking out the townspeople when she announces that she's the new Countess.If only they could see the baloney curls she's gonna give herself in the next scene,then they'd know what true terror is.At the castle, she's greeted that night by Count Walbrooke(Julian Ugarte'),who shows her a younger,sexier painting of herself in a brunette wig,and informs her that it's her granny,Malenka,a woman roasted at the stake for dabbling in the black arts,forever cursing all descendants to an eternity of vampirism.He then forces her to write a "Dear Pietro" letter to her squeeze,informing her that she carries the family blood,and is doomed to drink the red stuff,too.

This vampire could use a good impaling,if you catch my drift.
Pietro and Max,apparently not hindered by a closed work schedule,set off for the castle because,well,you know,one letter from a broad telling him it's all over written in her handwriting isn't usually enough discouragement for the average guy,right?Just as they arrive in the village,they're forced to examine boob-heavy anemic grog wenches,which the local doctor slags off from behind his ever-filled stein of booze.Meanwhile,Sylvia bears witness to strange behavior from her uncle,who enjoys chaining up fellow vampire,Blinka(Adriana Ambesi),and whipping her into submission.He tries forcing his niece to drink a goblet of his blood,and in one of the more convolutedly messy finales I've seen in a long time,demands that she drinks from her fiancee who's chained barechested to a post,while two female vampires catfight with a torch.During this hair-pulling extravaganza,which the Count is so mesmerized by that he fails to notice Sylvia freeing her beau from his chains over a several minute period,allowing Pietro to sock the effeminate blooddrinker in the mush,knocking him into a chair,where he is jabbed with a burning stake in the labonza.The papier mache covered skeleton burns.The couple returns to Rome,with Max revealing that Blinka has transformed him into a vampire,happily chasing a screaming grog wench during broad daylight over the end credits.Uhhh,yeah.

"Mr. Carradine! This hardly qualifies as a script reading!"
De Ossorio's original script played out like a precursor to a Scooby Doo episode,with Sylvia's scheming uncle using the vampirism curse as an excuse to get his hands on her inheritance money(and he would have done,if it wasn't for you meddling Italians!),but the producers balked,forcing the director to shoot real vampire sequences,which probably adds to the on-screen confusion that's abound here.As for Ekberg,the former Swedish sexbomb of the 50's was forced to toil in an assload of b-movies throughout the sixties and seventies,with Killer Nun(1979) and Cicciabomba(1982)(aka/the incredibly titled Fatty Girl Goes to New York)among her later credits.There's no blood to mention here,no thrills,no shocks,not even a laugh to be found.Depressing,really.I wouldn't recommend this title to anyone save for de Ossorio or Ekberg completists,and even then,with ample pre-warnings attached.Malenka gets staked through its limp heart with a scale rating of:

A 150 year reign of terror ends in flames and papier mache.

"Frontiere(s)"(2007)d/Xavier Gens

2009-08-11T04:11:00.000-07:00

It's certainly hotter than Bob Guccione's cut of Caligola(1979) out there this past couple of days.Perfect weather to plop your ass on the nearest couch and catch up on the latest horror movies in the comfort of an air conditioner.The parlour downstairs has no such air conditioner,so the suffering I'm feeling elsewhere in the house is just as apparent in the room where I screen movies.Insert the appropriate joke about "hot,sticky,and sweaty" here if you like,but you bastards oughta know the lengths I go to get new reviews up for you on a regular basis.I'm sweatin' like John Wayne Gacy in Boys Town over here.But...I won't let the humidity hold back today's horror hit for the ghoulish gourmets out there who hunger for all things homicidal.Let's get to it.
In the resurgence of horror recently,one nation that has proved a force to be reckoned with HAS to be France.Just when you thought the French were too busy lining up to see Jerry Lewis in Hardly Working to check out Lucio Fulci or Tobe Hooper back in the eighties,the Blue Blanc Rougers have churned out some top notch horror of late,proving they were indeed paying attention.For those of you who wondered what it would be like if you took Texas Chainsaw Massacre,set it in France,and made the killers a family of nazi cannibals,ponder the thought no further.Xavier Gens has already fleshed out your idea with his nasty little film.

You won't be throwing any petrol bombs with that hand again,will you,pinko?
Yasmine(Karina Testa)has a lot of problems.She's pregnant from her ex-boyfriend Alex(Aurélien Wiik),who along with his two pals Tom and Farid have been peacefully protesting in the streets since an unnamed ultra right wing candidate has been elected president.And by peacefully protesting,I mean petrol bombing,shootouts with the riot police,and generally making a nuisance of themselves.Is it any wonder that their left wing hijinks have gotten Yas' bro Sami bleeding out from a fatal bullet to the labonza?Alex and Yas try dumping Sami off at the hospital,planning to meet up with Tom and Farid on the frontier afterwards,but Sami shuffles off his mortal coil on a gurney while alerted constabulary chase Yas out the automatic doors.Meanwhile in the other car,jibbers are rolled and passed,virginity jokes are made,and before too long, the two socialist stoners find themselves at a hostel on a desolate country road.Didn't you guys ever see the OTHER movie about hostels??It seems the place is run by a couple of broads and a creepy muscular bald guy named Goetz who combine efforts to forcefeed their invalid mother(the slop pours out of a tube jutting out of her neck!).After small talk,casual sex,and the aforementioned gross-out dinner,our anti-heroes are questioned at gunpoint by Karl,who not only doesn't seem to like the left wing rioting going on in the city or "little ragheads" like Farid,but he's also a crack shot with a rifle,blowing Tom's hand to ribbons after Goetz swings for the fences on his chin and ribcage with a lead pipe.The two escape in their car with Goetz in pursuit,who runs the boys off the road and over an embankment near a mine opening.

If I had a Deutschmark for everytime this guy says,"Meine Ehre heißt Treue!",I could fund my own eugenics program.
When Alex and Yas show up at the hostel,they're driven by the girls to a sinister looking cottage,where we're introduced to the rest of the family,led by exiled SS officer Von Geisler(Jean-Pierre Jorris),who lectures his children in racial purity when he's not dining on untermenschen or feeding them to deformed,retarded offspring of young girls he's kidnapped for the very purpose of preserving the white race.Much man-munching,head-splattering,tablesaw bissecting,jugular chomping,neck axing,carcass gutting,and heiling hijinks ensue from this point.Do the nazis enforce their iron will upon the hapless fugitives?Do the petrol-chucking pukes manage to survive the Aryan onslaught,and if so,will they ever call a law enforcement official a "fascist pig" after facing horrible death at the hands of the REAL thing,complete with a pen full of pigs(insert rimshot)?I'll let you guys check it out for yourself to answer these and other nagging questions that may arise...you know,like the new dawn over a glorious new fatherland!

Yeah. To your domepiece.
For all the mind-blowing gore and French nazi-cannibal creeps abound in this shocker,director Gens very nearly blows it from atop a decidedly leftist soapbox,the size of which you'd only expect to encounter in a Hollywood movie these days.No matter how grotesque he makes his antagonists,between their pure blood theories,human feasts,and graphic murder streaks,his protagonists are still out in the street,rioting and causing destruction,pistol whipping cops,and being domestic terrorists.I wanted to kill the lot of them myself five minutes into the movie,so sympathy was something they weren't gonna get from little ole me.For me,I'm exhausted with the whole concept of inbred cannibal families by now,and I could go a few years without seeing more diabolical nazis,too.Don't forget to demonize scumbags like Stalin,Castro,and Guevara on the big screen once in awhile.Didn't they kill enough people for filmmakers' tastes or lack thereof?Luckily for Gens,there's enough brutality,tension,and red stuff from beginning to end here to keep the finished product satisfying.Politics aside,this one is thoroughly enjoyable,and merits a scale rating of:

She's trashed after bashing the fash,but in the government Yas(Karina Testa) has met her match.

Don't get yer cazzies in an uproar....

2009-08-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

Papa's not neglecting you over here,he's simply completing a screenplay, horrifying in nature,and sending it off to interested parties forthwith.And of course,drinking,grilling,and squeezing the maximum amount of goodness out of these lazy,crazy,hazy days of summer.I'll be back at it in a few days,so check back for updates.Drop me a line and let me know how YOU'RE spending your summer,too,cuz I'd sure like to know!

Cruelly,
Wop

"Curse of Bigfoot"(1975)d/Don Fields

2009-08-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Welcome to August,bastards.Get your summer partying in while you can,'cuz fall is around the corner.I,for one,am applauding the late arrival of wifebeater weather here in the northeast.I've got no reservations over flexing the tattooed tittie muscles for you broads out there who like your men violently intelligent.As you already know,the sweltering heat isn't gonna slow down the emperor over here,I'll keep serving you up the finest cult classics that you may or may not have seen,but ought to have,and today's brings back a lot of low budgeted memories for me and my droogs,for sure.
Our first sacrifice to Augustus Caesar was a late night mainstay,playing every two months or so on WOR Channel 9 in the New York/New Jersey area back in the mid to late seventies,which made it an instant target for ridicule for the crew growing up back then.Taking a pitifully cheap hour long feature called "Teenagers Battle the Thing",allegedly made twelve years earlier in 1963,adding endless logging footage,and brushing the cobwebs off of Dennis Kottmeier who played the science teacher in the original film to segue from the newer groovy seventies classroom insert to the original cheapie,all to cash in on the crypto-craze of the day,seemed like a feasible option for the filmmakers.It all reminds me of a somewhat crass saying of late about polishing turds.Buckle up, kiddies, here comes a doozie.

"Class,this drawing in no way represents the crepe wool and papier mache paste job that we're gonna have the balls to label "Bigfoot" later on in this picture..."
Mr. Whitmore(Augie Tribach)who's been giving a groovy series of lectures to his class on the supernatural(and monsters like the "great-ah white-ah...shark")brings in a jug-eared former science teacher-turned-expert on the Bigfoot phenomena,Roger Mason(Dennis Kottmeier),to stop the hippies from snickering in their seats over the subject,and more importantly,to tie-in the awful film he took part in back in the early sixties.With scripted dialogue on the podium in front of him,he recalls the harrowing field trip that left two of the female drapes, who were along for the extra credit, to spend the rest of their days in a mental hospital.We can only ponder the fate of the other squares who tagged along to unearth Indian artifacts,but it couldn't have ended sexily for them.Also along for the archaeological picnic is Bill Wyman's less musically inclined namesake(Bill Simonsen),who opted out of a life of groupies,drugs,and rock and roll in favour of prayer sticks and eoliths.After discovering a chiseled prehistoric tool while chompin' sammitches with the squares at the picnic table,Wyman,Mason,and the boys climb a sheer rock face only to stumble upon a burial site for an early ancestor of man imbedded in the ledge.The clay-caked mummy they find inside the smoky cave draws a chorus of "Gosh!","Gee!",and "Boy,I'll say!"'s out of the flat-topped students,before being whisked off to a museum for tests and research by top men in the archaeology field.Just kidding,sensibly,he lets the high school teacher and his teenage students hoist the thing out of the cave on a gurney into the back of a pickup truck where they take it to a shed.

"Worry about your marijuana-induced orgy after class,you little hippie dirtbag!"
One square couple decides to rough it through the citrus groves to the general store for a bottle of orange pop which costs 13 cents(!!),slightly less expensive than the allotted budget for the bigfoot suit we're about to see.Norman,the pop-drinker,goes out to check on the mummified man-ape,which bursts out of its clay-prison(off-camera,of course)and shambles off into the lemon groves,echoed nasally snarling on a soundstage somewhere.The kids return from their store trip directly,not having made out or had anything remotely resembling sex(I've been calling them squares for good reason,ya know),and the reunited would-be adventure seekers set off looking for the local pot-bellied sheriff.Meanwhile,the ancient anthropoid manages to off a sixties broad,breaking into her house through the window,its menacing papier mache face snarling and moving directly into the camera.That'll teach you to gossip on the phone late at night,lady.Sadly,this would be Bigfoot's only victim,apart from roughing the fat sheriff up a bit the next day in the orange grove,as the teacher and his posse of drapes douse the beast in two buckets of gasoline and set it on fire with a flare,remembering the science class Mason gave on the flammability of crepe wool and cheap papier mache earlier in the semester.Bigfoot burns like a marathon runner's athlete's foot,and the crowd stands idly by and watches,none of which look particularly terrified or mentally distraught over the whole ordeal.I wish I could say the same for anyone viewing at home...

Bigfoot or Marty Allen after a rough weekend in Vegas? You decide.
There's been talk for years of an alleged "special edition" dvd being released,loaded with extras and featurettes on how the whole awful mess came to be in the first place,but as of this writing,it seems to be just another urban legend.You can pick up bare bones discs from a number of companies,I chose Retroflicks personally,but I seriously doubt there's much of a difference in print quality wherever you turn(and even if there was,would it even matter for a film like this?).Nobody from this carwreck went on to any semblance of a movie career that I know about,thankfully.Make no mistakes,this is a horribly made piece of shit that will have you laughing from the hokey pre-credits sequence through all the added filler right through to the dated and awful film itself.Few movies can boast of rottenness of this magnitude,making it quality entertainment for all the wrong reasons.Whether you're a Bigfoot nut,a horror buff,or a lover of bad movies,you owe it to yourself to screen a copy asap.On the scale,Curse limps off into the lemon groves with a dismal score of:

Two buckets of gasoline and a flare and the orange and lemon groves are safe once again.

"The Landlord"(2009)d/Emil Hyde

2009-07-31T20:38:00.000-07:00

With August about to dawn on us,I thought I'd say goodbye to July with a good old fashioned low budget independent horror comedy that fell into my lap courtesy of Massive Ego Productions,and wrter/editor/director,Emil Hyde,a personable gent indeed,possessing of the raw materials necessary to press ahead in filmmaking,and given the proper ingredients like a budget,some actors,skilled makeup effects technicians,I can easily see him going on to make memorable movie experiences that leave genre fans ranting long afterwards.Everybody starts somewhere,and I'm guessing this film marks Hyde's starting line to some degree,and to his credit,he has completed his first race,as it were,and the finished product is a likeable comedic romp with ample gore and surprisingly good digital visual effects contained therein.
On the negative side,the budget really shows in some places,most notably the makeup effects which for the most part look like pre-bought Woochie latex appliances and foam rubber severed body parts from the local Halloween store.The acting,which I'm guessing is supplied here by family and friends and/or walk ons,falls a little flat in moving Hyde's original and funny script along from scene to scene.All-in-all though,I can't say I wasn't entertained.

Just look at that mess. Forget about getting your deposit back now.
Enter Tyler(Derek Dziak),the titular chubby landlord of an apartment building that happens to be frequented by a demonic duo,Rabishu(Rom Barkhordar),who's addicted to Hawaiian shirts and late night infomercials,and Lamashtu(Lori Myers),his bitchy hell-queen whose face closely resembles a fox terrier.Together they've been materializing at inopportune times and eating Tyler's tenants,usually before he can even collect rent out of the poor bastards.His sister,Amy(Michelle Courvais),a beat cop who's been conducting an extramarital affair(cunnilingus in a squad car is a kick I haven't tried YET) with her partner, as well as feeding local dirtbags to a crew of vampires(!) in exchange for money and valuables,is aware of the netherworldly couple,and helps her haunted sibling out whenever she can.

"Skyyyyrockets in flight! Afternooon deliiiiight!"
Donna(Erin Myers)shows up at Tyler's door one day,running away from an abusive old man and an unwanted pregnancy,looking for a divorce,an abortion,and cheap room and board after trying her luck at a fleabag motel full of hookers,johns,and drug addicted weirdos who rub danishes on their nipples,overseen by an acid-tongued manager(Emil Hyde himself)with an itchy trigger finger.After a romantic evening of karaoke at the local dive bar,our pudgy protagonist takes a shine to the troubled girl,which only complicates matters at home,where Lamashtu hankers to eat her unborn infant(!!!).How can Tyler keep Ribishu from buying useless junk with his credit card,keep the detectives off the bloody body trail,keep his sister out of trouble with the vampiric vagabonds,AND keep his new love interest off the menu?You'll have to find out what goes down in the knock-down,drag-out brimstone-baked finale for yourself.Contact the folks behind http://thelandlordmovie.com/ and score yourself a copy of this quirky horromedy.Remember,the more you support independent,original horror, the less you'll be wasting your time with brainless Hollywood remakes.

These mirror-gashes are gonna do wonders for your eyes,sweetie!
Despite its budgetary shortcomings,Hyde's film boasts of some impressive force fields,flaming portals to Hell,supernatural witchcraft battles,baseball bat beatings,broken bottles to the labonza,brain-ladeling,and obligatory limb-munching.You could do a lot worse than this one during the week,believe you me.Barkhordar has done acting and voice work in television and videogames while Courvais acts in the Windy City.Hopefully we'll be seeing more in the future from Mr. Hyde and company.Give it a shot,droogies.

Whoa,maybe I should've stopped at four double-dipped blotters.

"Prom Night"(2008)d/Nelson McCormick

2009-07-30T01:13:00.000-07:00

We've gone from dogs to dog shit today,folks, marking a truly historic day at Wopsploitation, the very first movie to merit a zero wop rating thus far.We've reviewed some pretty bad films over the past two years, but none so completely meritless that I've had to lay the golden goose eggs upon it.Until now.Not to be confused with the superior one wop film of the same title(which we looked at in November of 2007 here),make no mistakes about it, this is no remake,nor is it a sequel,hell,it's barely a horror movie by the loosest of standards.Director McCormick,who cut his teeth directing television,broke his teeth here over-utilizing jump scares,false scares and obsessing on closets and vanity mirror shots,all used minimally to full effectiveness by quality genre directors like John Carpenter in Halloween(1978).If they took an hour and a half long episode of Gossip Girl and made it into a bloodless,scareless horror film,this would be it.And if you're a horror fan who looks for that type of movie,you're on the wrong website.Afterwards,I actually reminisced about the original Prom Night(1980), wishing this chocolate ass-bundle were at least good enough to be as bad as that.It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination.

"I'm scratching peace symbols in your tombstone, Donna!"
Donna(Brittany Snow,who actually went on to act in Gossip Girl,mind you)comes home from a sleepover weekend with her black girlfriend,Tokenita(Dana Davis) to find that one of her high school teachers,Richard Fenton(Jonathan Schaesch),a dead ringer for Charlie Manson(where the hell do you teach,Fenton,Scumbag High?),has viciously shanked every member of her family in the labonza in a vain attempt to keep her close to him(?).He goes to a nuthouse and she moves in with an aunt and uncle.A year later,the painful memories of her family's gruesome deaths are put on the backburner,and she's preparing for her senior prom with her two vainly unsympathetic friends,unaware that Fenton has already escaped the nut hatch,murdered someone else,and donned their wardrobe,looking now like a less psychopathic Billy Bob Thornton.Before you can blink your eyes,Bobby(Scott Porter),a weird-mouthed kid who looks like the male equivalent of Kirsten Dunst, is knocking at Donna's door,and they're one typical limo ride montage away from the night of their lives.Fenton arrives at the hotel,shanks a cleaning woman in the labonza,scores himself her master key,foreshadowing a handful of bloodless murders on the horizon.

I know how you feel,buddy.I had to sit all the way through this pile of shit.
At the prom,the girls dance with their unthreatening effeminate dates to song after bad song(all with an overused and annoying toy piano effect) while Tokenita plans to win the Prom Queen title over an underdeveloped bitch character named Crissy Lynn.Oh she's bitchy alright,but not much more than our female leads so nobody cares.News of Fenton's escape three days earlier finally gets to Detectives Nash and Winn,two cops who couldn't find their own assholes with bloodhounds and a search party,and they warn Donna's caretakers and head to the prom themselves.Fenton shanks Donna's friends one after the other in the labonza(only Tokenita is lucky enough to get her throat slashed)with one of those cheesy knives that rednecks buy off of the Home Shopping Network at four in the morning,until after the cops have pulled the plug on the prom festivities,he corners her in the hotel room,only to fall for the same "hiding under the bed" ploy that she used on him a year earlier.The cops realize Fenton has assumed the identity of one of the hotel workers to leave the building and follow Donna back to her uncle's place,where Bobby is alone in her room,consoling her.Not like he'd wanna have sex with her or anything,it's only prom night,ferchrissakes.Fenton kills a cop and slashes the mealy mouthed boy's throat,before being pumped full of holes by Detective Winn just as he's upon his obsession.It's finally over.I mean,the movie.

The goriest five seconds of the movie,submitted for your disapproval.
I wasn't entertained by a single thing in this movie.Literally every aspect of it sucked elephantiasis balls from beginning to end.I'd rather sit through a chick flick than endure such a heavy-handed piece of shit like this ever again,and believe me,I'm pretty shellshocked from seven and a half years worth of awful chick flicks I've been forced to endure in the name of harmonious relationships of late.I'd advise McCormick to stick to CSI and House episodes,but unfortunately he's helming The Stepfather,to be released this October.If this film is any indication of what he's bringing to the table in his current project,avoid it like the ugly wallflower with canker sores on her lips at the dance.Congratulations,Prom Night(2008).You're not worth a single wop on the rating scale.You're a dance I wouldn't even go stag to.

Billy Bob Thornton?!! What the hell are you doing here?

"The Plague Dogs"(1982)d/Martin Rosen

2009-07-30T01:09:00.000-07:00

I've deprived the sexy young grogwenches at my local watering hole the extreme pleasure of seeing my ruggedly good-looking face for one night(at least...)to bring you another installment of B.W. goes to the movies,and as it's that time of week,we'll focus our lens on another cartoon that you probably wouldn't want your kiddies to viddy.'Course I couldn't focus my glassies on much of anything after this week's bonfire of irresponsibility,which included three bars,a case of Perroni,cod on the grill at Smith-tips' estate,and passing out sideways on the bed while listening to the local constabulary,lights a' flashing,grilling a suspect who wasn't me for a change.How sweet it is!
This week's animated feature is another grim 'toon from the team responsible for Watership Down(1978),only this one is even grimmer still!The misleading poster promises adventure,but I must have missed it in between all the death,blood,and gloomy set pieces throughout.'Course I'm just the target audience the film's makers were looking for,as I enjoy a real bummer as much as anybody.If frothing war-crazed bunnies didn't grab you,director Martin Rosen and writer Richard Adams focus on two escaped test animals from a British laboratory where scientists secretly eff with bubonic plague behind closed doors!Sound like your kind of "buddy picture" too?John Hurt is on board to lend his vocal talents,as well as Patrick Stewart(as a Major near the end,if you listen carefully enough)and 70's Brit horror staple Judy Geeson as a chatty Pekingese.If Umberto Lenzi made cartoons in his heyday they'd probably look a lot like this.

They don't come when you call, they don't chase squirrels at all...
Rowf,a lab mix, is one of many dogs they experiment on at the Lake District animal research facility.Every day they throw him in a big tank of water,and every day he drowns real good.His friend Snitter,a fox terrier who's undergone experimental brain surgery,convinces him to break the fuck out like the measles before they end up on the business end of a shovel headed for the incinerator.After their daring escape amidst mobs of screaming monkeys and schitzy rats,the taste of freedom is bittersweet when they must regress to primal survival instincts in the dismal British countryside.Snitter has frequent black and white flashbacks to happier days at his master's side before he got pinballed in front of a moving car.Once the facility realizes the dogs have escaped,they attempt a cover up of the secret tests they've been carrying out using the bubonic plague virus,and set hunters upon the fugitive animals at the same time.

Blowing your own face off with a rifle,a staple nowadays in animated features.
While feasting on the local sheepherders' stock,they befriend a fox who teaches them how to get in touch with their wild roots in exchange for shared meals,but when the sheep start dropping with regularity,the authorities take notice.Off on his own,Snitter is about to befriend a hunter when his paw hits the trigger of the man's gun,effectively blowing the poor bloke's face off(!)and intensifying the pair's status as outlaws.The research center sends out their own hunter,hoping to end the negative publicity once and for all,but their secret testing involving bubonic plague leaks out,and the hunter falls off a cliff,ending up as a meal(!!) for the escaped mutts and their foxy friend.The government shuts down the facility,sending soldiers and attack dogs to sweep the countryside for the pair of pooches,and when the fox risks himself to throw the dogs off their trail,he is killed.The dogs make it to the shore,but find choppers and soldiers at every juncture, and when Snitter wades out into the ocean believing he can see an island ahead,Rowf follows soon afterwards with a flurry of bullets hitting the surf behind him.Both dogs,near exhaustion,paddle with the last of their strength against the tide,the hardships of freedom more satisfying than either one could have imagined.

Rowf and Snitter weren't best friends to this poor son of a bitch.
Rosen's screen adaption of Adams' book leaves out a lot of human interaction,choosing instead to cover the material through voiceover narration juxtaposed over the animals arduous journey.He also nixes the tome's happy ending where both dogs reach Snitter's original master,as in the film,he is killed by a car in the street,and the dogs' survival is unlikely on the screen,but makes for a much more powerful movie,in my opinion.As it stands,the director wasn't speaking out against vivisection, but was one of the first to bring the suffering of laboratory animals to light none-the-less.As for my thoughts on the subject,I feel any unneccesary pain and suffering to these creatures should be left out altogether,unless there are very definite medical advances to be gained for humanity by doing so.As a side note,one of my crazier ex-girlfriend's online nicknames was Vivesection(sp),adding to the foul taste in my mouth that I get whenever I say the word.Plague Dogs is another stellar film to add to your collection,an uncut region two disc with the disturbing gore intact plus extras is floating around,so get your hands on it.It comes highly recommended,with the highest scale rating possible:

The doggie-equivalent to the ending of Thelma and Louise.

"Day of the Animals"(1977)d/William Girdler

2009-07-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

Phew, it's a scorcher out there today, hot enough to fry up a hunk o' scrapple on an old lady's ass.Thanks to the eco-friendly, nature runs amok, b horror movies of William Girdler back in the late seventies, the worst we have to worry about thirty years on is an uneven tan or heatstroke.Back in 1977, with everyone spraying their aerosol cans of Right Guard haphazardly into their smelly armpits, we were depleting the protective ozone layer, and allowing harmful ultraviolet rays through to the earth's surface,which with a little creative license could feasibly set all animals on a kill-crazy rampage against the human beings that cohabitate the planet with them.It COULD happen, or so says the preachy sprawling introduction to our entry this afternoon.Not to mention the dated habit of chucking your garbage out the window of your car while speeding down the highway back then,which brought a tear to the eye of many a native American in groovy public service announcements.And if you think the ignorant white man could make an Indian cry in commercials during the tumultuous seventies, wait til you see what Leslie Nielsen has lined up for them in this flick.In fact,this is the Leslie Nielsen acting clinic those of you who've tired of watching him plod away in slapstick comedy the past twenty-five years have been praying to the casting gods for.Wipe the sweat off your brow,look troubledly upward at the sun,and hike forward,little droogies.

Before Leslie Nielsen was moonwalking at baseball games,he slung racial epithets at Native Americans with the best of 'em.
Steve(Christopher George),with the help of his trusty native American pal(really Syrian,mind you)Santee,leads a gaggle of tourists up a mountain trail,for an exciting weekend of camping,foraging for wild radishes,and fending off dangerous wild animals,driven pazzo by the rapidly depleting ozone layer.Along for the hike are Terry(George's real life wife,Lynda),a young couple in need of therapeutic healing of their tocky relationship,a young couple that seems to be doing just fine,a whiny Jewish matriarch and her young son,a bird-watching nerd,an ex-football star dying of cancer,and a Wall Street ad exec named Jensen(Leslie himself).At the base of the mountain,the townsfolk are experiencing all sorts of nasty attacks by animals that normally don't seek out aggro,leading the military to roll in and declare martial law,evacuating the higher elevations.You know,where our hikers are currently stranded unknowingly.The troubled couple's weekend gets progressively worse when Mandy is attacked by a wolf,and when Frank leads her back down the mountain,she's attacked by a rowdy crew of hawks and vultures,causing her to fall off a ledge onto a fatally phony blue screen effect.Back on the trail, the party is being stalked by a wide range of animals,being annoyed by Mrs. Goodwin's kvetching and Jansen's hateful nicknames for everyone involved.Pretty soon,Jansen splits the party in two,questioning Steve's ability to lead the people to safety,hiking off with the young couple,the mother and her mollycoddled son.

Don't sweat it, sister.That blue screen behind you oughta break your fall.
While Steve's half of the hiking party is being attacked by cougars and wild dogs,Jansen's half is under attack by a shirtless,rain-soaked ad exec who loses his marbles,shouting,"You lily-livered PUNK!I'M running this camping trip!I take what I want and I give ya what I wanna give ya!And right now I want THAT!(pointing to Andrew Stevens' squeeze)C'mon,baby!" throwing women and children to the ground,skewering boyfriends on tree branches,and claiming terrified young girls as his prize in the name of chauvenism, before foolishly trying to bear hug a grizzly bear(!)and eating broken back death in the mountainous mud.What a tour de force by Nielsen.Is it any wonder he's fallen back on comedy since this performance?Jaw-droppingly incredible.In the forest,only Steve,Terry,and Santee survive the ecological onslaught by drifting down river on a raft,and elsewhere,Mrs. Goodwin,her son,and the prize girlfriend weather the storm by hiding out inside a wrecked chopper.By the time the smoke finally clears,men in haz mat suits are sifting through dead animals and men in the streets,rescuing the few shellshocked survivors and scratching their collective dome pieces over how to avoid pissing off Mother Nature in the future.Moral of the story:Be cool to each other,and the planet we live on,or we'll all be sorry,maaaan.

Someone tell little Michelle it's the ozone being depleted, not Peter Pan peanut butter.
This was Girdler's follow-up to his "Jaws with claws" success,Grizzly,the year before,which utilized much of the same cast and locations to earn top independent film of 1976 awards.He directed nine genre films,which included Three on a Meathook,Abby,Asylum of Satan,and The Manitou before losing his life at the age of 30 in a helicopter crash in the Phillipines.Christopher George went on to B movie success in such genre fare as Fulci's City of the Living Dead,Graduation Day,Enter The Ninja,Pieces,and Mortuary before he died of a heart attack in 1983.Lynda Day George worked in Pieces,Beyond Evil,and Mortuary,among several television roles before retiring from acting in the late eighties.Nielsen acted in Prom Night and Creepshow before moving on to an endless series of comedic roles,which he still churns out to this day,at 83 years old!This entry is pretty standard fare,but between some of the effects and Leslie Nielsen's outrageous contributions,you'll definitely enjoy it at least once.Day of the Animals rolls out its sleeping bag with two solid Wops on the almighty rating scale.You hear that,Animals?I take what I want and I give ya what I wanna give ya,you lily-livered punk!

Simply the finest shirtless,ozone-loony Leslie Nielsen v. grizzly bear scene ever committed to celluloid.

"Death Bed:The Bed That Eats"(1977)d/George Barry

2009-07-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

Gotta hand it to George Barry.See, I'll get a ridiculous idea in my head, maybe share it with some friends so they can laugh about it, and maybe it's funny the next day too, if we're lucky.This guy spends five years and thirty grand producing a low budget movie in Michigan, based on an outrageous nightmare he had, it never sees the light of day, until someone bootlegs it from the video master in the eighties,and now over thirty years later, I can sit down in the luxury of Castle Wop and ridicule it for myself.I've had some pretty fucking stupid independent film ideas over the years; mystical viking statuettes that make people fight to the death over them, killer aborted foetuses screaming for vengeance with fleshy meathooks for hands...the list is long and embarrassing.One thing I can say,is that I've never set out to make a film about a bed that eats people.
You know,it's almost a good idea,as a five or ten minute vignette in an anthology.As it stands though,a 77 minute poorly-executed exercise in surreal absurdity, it rates right up there with The Chooper, Blood Feast,Truth or Dare,and Hydra as one of those z-grade trash heaps that you laugh your way through,more stupid for it, but glad you did,so you can relate the ordeal to everyone you know,wearing it like a medal of dishonor.As rotten as this is,you're gonna wanna see it for yourself.

"There it is!" "Where? Behind the bed?" "No,you fool! It is the bed!"
A groovy couple are out on the standard date;breaking into an abandoned mansion,with a packed lunch consisting of a few apples,a bucket of fried chicken,and a bottle of wine.Must be their anniversary or something.Problem is, the ornate antique bed they're making out on is possessed by a demon who enjoys eating people.See, somewhere in the mattress is its stomach,which looks like a tank of yellow bicarbonate of soda,and when the bed gets hungry,the mattress spouts soap suds that envelop its meal-to-be,before the hapless victim falls into the yellow liquid and is digested.Behind a painting(translation:ink drawing) on the wall,a dead ringer for Cure frontman Robert Smith,complete with makeup,poofy shirt,and painted nails,is trapped for all time,sounding like a grown up Stewie Griffin providing color commentary into a microphone that's heavy on reverb.The demon himself does a lot of snoring and chewing into the same microphone,too.Only nobody can hear them but the viewer,apparently.There's a lot of painfully unfunny backstory of the bed's historical meals,only everyone it eats pretty much wears the indelible fashion stamp of the 1970s,no matter what era the meal is supposed to be from.So this ravenous bed has been swallowing sorry sons o' bitches for years,until when no one was braindead enough to lie on it,the mansion was finally abandoned.Enter these three wallflower chicks driving to the mansion's remains,two frumpy white girls,one dumpy soul sister,for whatever reason.They've packed a lunch of pickles and a bottle of wine.A film full of gourmets,this is.

Where y'alls be goin at,baybuh! The bed scores itself some soul food.
The bed eats one of the girls when she lies down for a nap,scoring itself some Pepto Bismol(!)out of her hand bag afterwards when it gets indigestion(!!).Next it begins eating the soul sister,who wakes up mid-meal and tries to escape,only to get lassoed by phantom bedsheets(!!!)and pulled back to the bed.The third girl,who we find out the bed is "afraid of" thanks to the chatty poltergeist behind the painting,is pushed to the brink of insanity after seeing the bed chow down on her nubian girlfriend.Her brother shows up on the scene,and tries to stab his way into the bed's stomach with a knife to go in and rescue the black girl,but the bed digests his hands(!),leaving him with two skeletal mitts at the end of his bloody wrists.Other than that,though,he's okay(!!).He tells his sibling to break the hands off(!!!),which she does.When the bed falls asleep,the spirit announces he can tell the girl how to destroy the bed once and for all(the bed only sleeps and eats,you couldn't have ever pulled this off before?),through some hokey figure eights carved on the floor and in the nearby field,and a pointless magic ritual,after which the girl dies,and the first owner of the bed arises from the dead(funny,she's pretty seventies-tastic,too),and teleports the infernal thing to the field,where the bed catches fire(translation: someone can pour gasoline all over it,and not burn down the historic estate in the process),the spirit behind the drawing dies with the demon,and is released from his worldly prison,leaving the viewer scratching his head.What just happened in the last seventy-seven minutes exactly?We may never know for sure.

Even a demonic, people-eating bed turns to Pepto Bismol when faced with uncomfortable indigestion.
If this sounds like an insane viewing experience,that's because it is.There are some mind-blowingly bizarre scenarios played out in front of the camera, somewhat straight-facedly at that.There are moments you'll be convinved that your glassies have just lied to you about, and some where you're laughing so hard you may need to stock up on adult disposable diapers beforehand to safeguard against leakage over.And it's thankfully got a relatively short running time.On the other hand,this is not a good movie,and it's arguably not even a bad movie.The actors are wooden and clunky when they're allowed to deliver lines directly(most of the time they speak into that aforementioned microphone introspectively,harder to flub lines that way,ya know),no one is attractive enough to focus upon long enough to care about,the entire mess is horribly dated,though the eating effects left me chuckling on more than one occasion.Watch it once,as I'll turn the bedspread just once on the rating scale for this lost oddity this time around...

You fucked with the Death Bed, and ended up with skeleton hands, bitch.

"Vampire Circus"(1972)d/Robert Young

2009-07-25T15:24:00.000-07:00

I'd like to take a moment to thank the frequent visitors here at our wretched rectory of reviews,as you,my fiendish friends,are what keeps the haunted boat afloat in the moat!Ever gaining in popularity, and with this past week,the site enjoyed its most successful yet,and shows no signs of slowing down in the near future.Bravo.You keep reading,I'll keep writing,trying to keep the movies diverse and interesting enough along the way,and keeping the lull in entries to a bare minimum.And don't hate me 'cuz I'm beautiful,just hate me all the more.
Tonight's entry is both a rare treat,and one of the finer examples of Hammer vampire films, despite the downward spiral the studio was suffering in the 1970's.A highly enjoyable and original romp through the familiar bloodsucker fare of the day,packed full of the stuff Hammer movies are made of:red vino on tap,bountiful bare bobblers,and susperstitious peasants a' plenty,but what sends this flick acrobatically flipping over its competition is a surprisingly complex script,a fresh take that reinvents some of the nosferatu's supernatural abilities,and a menacingly good antagonist in Robert Tayman's Count Mitterhaus,who's been frequently argued,makes for a better villain than even Christopher Lee's Count Dracula himself!Strong words,indeed.Regardless of who your favorite Hammer vampire might be, Circus is a delightfully strange ride you'll want to take over and over again.

What the fuck are you laughing at,Shorty?
The people of Schettel,led by the schoolteacher,Mueller(Laurence Payne),barge into Mitterhaus Castle,to find the Count has not only sucked one of their children drier than a sandbox,but has also exchanged lust for lust with Mueller's wife who's hanging out knickerless,fangs for phallus.Kill the townspeople's kids,Mitterhouse,if you will,but never turn one of the men into a cuckold!They manage to stake the womanizing wurdulak,but not before the fiesty blooddrinker eighty-sixes several of them,in swashbuckling fashion,spitting a curse upon Schettel's children from his dying lips.The men take their belts off and teach Mrs. Mueller a lengthy leather-based lesson, burning the castle to the ground,and leaving her to drag the staked Count to the safety of the catacombs below.And all this before the credits even roll,hot damn!Fifteen years later,the sleepy little town isn't faring much better,what with the plague and all.The local doctor bravely rides off into the forest in search of medicine,past the armed men who guard against any potential carriers escaping the infected city limits,certain that the superstitions of vampires and their folklore are just that.Like any town beset with plague buboes and corpses by the wheelbarrowful,the people look for happiness that only a small travelling circus full of gypsy vampires can provide.Wouldn't you know it!

Cat Scratch Fever was never like this!
While the people marvel at erotic dance acts,and creepy midget clowns yukking it up with mute strongmen(David "Darth Vader" Prowse),never stopping to wonder how their jungle animals transform into flamboyant gypsies in pink shirts while in mid-air,or how the twin aerial acrobats change from human to bat back to human during their act(I might ponder the possibility these people are not what they seem,at least for a second!),their children are systematically targeted for blood revenge,with teen bobblers tumbling out,blood spurting every which way,and entire families torn to pieces by were-panthers in the forest!It seems the gypsy woman(Adrienne Corri) who heads the carnal carnival is really Mueller's wife(!),and her pink-shirted shapeshifting gypo partner,Emil,is blood-related to Mitterhaus!The townsfolk, enraged by the missing children, do the sensible thing:shoot the chimpanzee and tiger,and smash the creepy little midget clown's oversized head into a wall repeatedly(!!Hey,that's what I'd do,too.)!It all leads to a bloody and satisfying fight to the finish in Mitterhaus' catacombs,where Mueller unstakes the Count to stake Emil as he himself is bitten and killed,and his daughter's boyfriend uses a crossbow string to behead the awakened vampire(!!!)and save the day,amidst a floor full of bloody victims.Now that's entertainment.

"Use your imagination,Mitterhaus!Cross...crossbow...don't split hairs!"
Corri was the rape victim in A Clockwork Orange the year before,moving on to act in Madhouse(1974) and appear in a few Doctor Who episodes later on down the road.Corlan/Higgins did Flavia the Heretic,a host of movies, and a great deal of telly work for the BBC,while Tayman was last seen in The Stud(1978) opposite Joan Collins.Director Young did the excellent "Charlie Boy" episode of Hammer House of Horror,and continues to direct today.Hard to find in America for a number of years,in any format,if a copy of Circus materializes in your presence,reach for it immediately,as it'll become an instant favorite of yours.Personally,between this entry and Captain Kronos,I'm not sure which is my favorite Hammer vampire flick,as they're surely one and two,one way or the other.As the organ grinder comes to a halt and the torches are extinguished,I tip my top(Wop)hat three times for this carnival of coagulants,and bid you adieu for now.

Emil(Anthony Corlan),a flamboyant gypsy were-panther/vampire, overemoting as he feeds.

"The Deadly Breaking Sword"(1979)d/Sun Chung

2009-07-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Dust off your Tiger Fork,practice your internal breath control,and meditate upon another Saturday of wild and wooly wushu here,you pious bastards!There'll be time enough for girls later.This afternoon the high-kicking hijinks come from the superior cinematic skills of director Sun Chung,of Avenging Eagle fame,working with the legendary Shaws,and focusing his lens upon the boxing and dramatic skills of none less than the regal Ti Lung(Drunken Master 2,Five Shaolin Masters,Ten Tigers of Kwantung), and the impish favorite Fu Sheng(Heroes Shed No Tears,Heaven and Hell,Chinatown Kid),unfurling a tapestry of traditional wushu styles,long-awaited revenge,and noble martial heroes who befriend gambling vagabonds.Fix yourself a plate of sesame chicken,pour yourself a cup of tea,and read on.This one's gonna be good.

Thrust and a miss!Lian-san's throat-piercing halberd misses its mark.
Tuen Cheng-Tsin(Ti Lung)is the titular "Deadly Breaking Sword",a fighter who's honed his pugilistic skills to a level of perfection so potent,that he brings along coffins to each martial duel for his opponents,who to this point,die with an inch of famous sword broken off somewhere between their shoulder blades.His latest challenger,Lian-san(Chan-wai man) has a rep all his own,as "The Throat-Piercing Halberd"(I've pierced a few throats in my heyday with my own personal halberd,but I'll save those stories for another time)a man responsible for more than a hundred deaths.Both men injure each other,with Lian-san taking the obligatory inch of the breaking sword in the chest,but rather than dramatically slumping into the coffin that Tuen has prepared for him,he rides off,mortally injured,to call upon the skills of "The Killer Doctor"(Ku Feng),who with dazzling acupuncture technique,cheats death of another victim.Enter Xiao Dao(Fu Sheng),the "Little Dagger"(does everybody have a crazy nickname in this movie or what?)who has foolishly gambled himself away at the gambling house,in a half-baked attempt to clear his debts,now forced into living there permanently,serving the owner and his niece,who secretly has the hots for him.When Tuen majestically rides into town,a talented prostitute(aren't they all?)also appears on the scene,looking to hire the breaking sword to add the Killer Doctor to his list of vanquished opponents as revenge for letting her brother rot in a stinking cell in a neighboring town.

Xiao Dao's not lucky in dominos OR dames.
The hooker hires Xiao to try and lure Tuen to the brothel to hear her sobbiest of stories,but when Tuen proves too haughty("What a snobbish bitch!" he says),she turns to the Little Dagger to do her dirty work instead,her silver tails as a means of the young fool buying himself out of his debt.The niece does her best to keep Xiao grounded at the gambling house,eventually getting herself chucked down a well(!)when she burns his greenbacks!That'll teach ya,woman!Tuen and Xiao square off in the street with the Breaking Sword warning that the young man's martial skills aren't on par with the job he's agreed to do,and after offering to double Dagger's money if he doesn't fight the doctor,the two men become friends.Tuen breaks the call girl's brother out of the pokey,and then has the inmate finger his doublecrosser,leading the Killer Doctor to kill the poor bastard with accupuncture pins,signalling the showdown between Tuen,and newly revitalized Lian-san,whose hair has turned white and red,due to the side effects of the doctor's treatments.During their fight,the two men injure each other again,but when Tuen's sword breaks off in Lian's chest,the Doctor abruptly shoves accupuncture needles in the pugilist's back,giving him the martial power to finish the fight!Xiao Dao shows up,despite his friend's warnings,mocks Tuen AND Lian,and with his short dagger bests the zany-haired assassin until, in a moment of carelessness,is shanked in the labonza with his Throat-Piercing Halberd.Tuen takes this opportunity to bear hug the bastard from behind,pulling the needles out of his back with his teeth(!),and sending him off to meet his maker.He then takes the dead man's halberd and throws it fifty feet directly into the back of the diabolical doctor,killing him too.Xiao,mortally wounded,asks for nice clothes to wear in his coffin,and when Tuen reaches for his hand,misses,as his young friend dies on the street.

Tuen uses his martial skill to teach Xiao a lesson in money management.
All the elements of a Kung Fu classic are in place here.The breathtaking cinematography we've come to expect from Chung,the dazzling traditional fight choreography of Wong Pau Gei(not much wire fu going on here,Jet Li fans,you'll have to go elsewhere for your kung phoniness),and stalwart performances from both leads and both villains,respectively.Ti Lung was losing popularity prior to this picture,and I can't help scratching my head over that fact.The guy's fighting skills are superb,his acting is top tier,and his screen presence is undeniable,as always.Fu Sheng,on the other hand,was at the height of his own popularity,and showcases exactly why that was the case here,his slapstick and physical comedy on par with Jacky Chan,his lovable personality translating well once again on camera,and his fighting,top notch as well.All in all,if you're a proponent of the chop socky period piece,or simply a fan of great Shaw Brothers movies,you'll do well to pick up the region 3 disc and give it a chance.On the Deadly Rating Scale,this classic earns all four Wops,and is recommended viewing.

The "finger game" I know involves the back seat of a vintage muscle car,a luscious concubine,and of course, yours truly.

"Watership Down"(1978)d/Martin Rosen

2009-07-22T03:34:00.000-07:00

Animated features on Wednesdays it is then, blame my sleep schedule.The weekly "bonfire of irresponsibility/BBQ" at Casa Smith-tips drained me this week for some unknown reason,causing me to retire ridiculously early last night.Even the best of 'em have off days, I guess.Once a week we'll be examining apropos animated features,which is to say,that which is NOT Bambi,although I've always had a soft spot in my heart for characters like Maleficent.They don't make broads like that anymore,boys.Tonight's entry is the big-screen adaption of a Richard Adams book,and was a box office smash in dear old Blighty.Hard mugs:mafiosi,skinheads,bikers,gangbangers,prison inmates...add bunnies to that list.That's right.Bunnies.After this cartoon,you might wanna think twice about getting your girlfriend a fluffy,cuddly little companion as an Easter present.It could be an Owsla-officer,or worse yet,General Woundwort himself.Eegads.

Doom,blood,and death.Another cheerful prophecy from Fiver.
Fiver is a meek little bunny who has premonitions of death,so when he passes the info on to his brother Hazel,the two rabbits gather as many of their kin as will listen and flee their warren,which happens to be on land scheduled for development, in search of greener pastures.The bunnies that stay behind eat steam-powered bulldozer death.While stopped to rest in a nearby field,Violet,the only female,is killed by swooping Hawk talons of retribution.And then there were seven.After narrowly escaping motorcars on a road made by man-things,a hunting dog,and an ossuary full of pissed-off rats,they meet up with a friendly bunny named Cowslip who invites them to enjoy food and shelter in his warren,which unbeknownst to them,is kept by a farmer who occasionally snares a bunny or two out of it,for digestive purposes.Fiver senses the danger,of course,and Bigwig,the burly officer rabbit of the group(!) mocks him before getting snagged in a snare,himself,which Hazel and cohorts free him from in the nick of time,just as he bleeds,froths from the mouth,and is surrounded by buzzing flies(You might wanna hold off on letting your younger kiddies viddy,obviously).Serves you right,clever trousers.

Bigwig shows Hazel his first road pizza.
The rabbits then plot to free a hutch of female rabbits from a nearby farm,outwitting a formidable dog/cat team who also take up residence there.They nurse an injured-but-chatty seagull named Kehaar back to health,and as a reciprocated good deed,the annoying bird agrees to search for female rabbits for their warren,returning with news of a militaristic warren named Efrafa,ruled by a chief rabbit named Woundwort,a miserable,bellicose bastard of a bunny with one blind eye.Bigwig infiltrates the warren's ranks,recruiting willing escapees,and through an insidious plot and with the help of the squawking seagull,the Watership rabbits manage to escape Woundwort and hop off to a pasture called Watership Down,a veritable bunny heaven.That is,until Woundwort finds them,bringing forth a bloody,foamy,death-ridden,fur-clawing,slashing incisor,bunny vs bunny,bunny vs cat,bunny vs mad dog fight to the finish.Does Woundwort punish the rogue bunnies for mutinizing his rabbit reich? Does Fiver see him dream warren come to fruition?Will El-ahrairah,prince of rabbits,be forever punished by lord Frith for his cockiness?Or does the black bunny of doom as prophesized in the genesis of life as passed down from bunny to bunny come for his due payment?You'll have to screen this one yourself to find out the answers to all these burning questions,and never look at Bugs Bunny in quite the same way ever again...

General Woundwort,showing why he's a perennial favorite of kids everywhere.
Though it might be a bit much for younger children to take,with a surprising amount of bunny-induced violence on board,this will most definitely make it to your list of favorite animated titles,if it isn't already.The afro-half of Simon and Garfunkel scored a hit with "Bright Eyes" from the film soundtrack,and the film spurred on a moderately successful animated television series,airing 39 episodes in Canada and the UK from 1999-2001,featuring vocal work from the likes of Rik(Young Ones)Mayall,Dawn(Saunders and French)French,Stephen(Young Ones)Fry and John(Alien,I Claudius,Elephant Man)Hurt reprising his role from the film.Next week we'll be looking at bleaker territory still,The Plague Dogs,in detail.As for the Watership warren,I find it best to bestow upon these bunnies a Wopsploitation score of the highest caliber,four wops,as I plan a Woundwort tattoo for myself,sometime in the future...

When bunnies go bananas.

"The Blood on Satan's Claw"(1971)d/Piers Haggard

2009-07-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

Think of British 70's also-ran, Tigon Studios,also responsible for Doomwatch and The Blood Beast Terror, as Hammer's brattish little brother(with less of a special effects budget).This entry was the studio's high water mark, for sure.With a cast of Hammer-heads that included Barry(Dracula Has Risen From the Grave)Andrews,Linda(Taste the Blood of Dracula,Madhouse)Hayden,and the last film appearance of Patrick (Witchfinder General)Wymark,lush British exteriors,atmospheric creepiness,a slight bit of the red stuff mixed in with a few naughty bits,and a nifty release title(in America it was known as "Satan's Skin"),it can't be all bad,right?Well it isn't as bad as all that,afterall.A Region 2 DVD with a coven's worth of special features exists,so possess it if it sounds like your cup o' tea!It's an original premise for ground that was being tread by a lot of films at the time,and it has just enough bite to occupy an hour and a half of your Wednesday evening,like a lot of lesser Hammer films,really!A shout out to West Chicago tonight as well,for still producing Otter Pops,which I've been squeezing into my yap for what seems like days now.This one goes out to Sir Isaac Lime,Little Orphan Orange,and Alexander the Grape...

"Tito! Janet! Brush this dirt off of me and point me at that neighborhood full of children!".
In rural England sometime during the 17th century, Ralph (Barry Andrews) discovers the half-decomposed remains of a "fiend".I noticed some papier mache,an eyeball,and a few worms.Eh,I guess that qualifies in some circles.Ralph fetches the visiting Judge(Patrick Wymark)to bear witness to his grotesque discovery which is already double live gonzos when they get there.The young master of the manor brings his bride-to-be to the house,where she's attacked by a shaggy claw from under the floorboards in the middle of the night,which effectively drives the bitch pazzo.As the nice young Bedlam orderlies escort the looney lass off to the squirrel farm,her fiance notices that her hand has somehow transformed into a claw.Already on the edge,he decides to spend the night in the attic where the events transpired the night before.While monkeying with the loose floorboards he's grabbed by that same offending hairy mitt,breaking free of the demonic grasp long enough to push a trunk over the problem area.Instead of bailing the fuck out like D.B. Cooper,he goes back to sleep,only to be awakened in the middle of the night by the problematic shaggy dagger-like digits clawing at his throat.He reaches for his trusty dagger on the nightstand nearby(I keep mine there,too),and stabs at the monstrous mitt,waking the Judge who bursts in to find that the young man has sawed off his own right hand.Spooooky.

In the spirit of diversity,17th century England could use a Korean manicurist.
A group of the local young people led by teen Angel Blake (Linda Hayden),no doubt because of her sinister crepe wool eyebrows of evil, are serving up Satanic shennanigans in the forest,reviving a coven of cataclysmal creeps bent on bringing back the beastie that Ralph dug up.Townspeople become afflicted with "The Devil's Skin",which entails a patch of crepe wool(over a sizable piece of mortician's wax in some more extreme cases)on the body part they will eventually remove themselves,causing said part to grow back(!)on the piecemeal titular evildoer.All sorts of evildoings,rapes,murders,and even temptation of the local priest cause Peter,the one-handed rascal,to ride off to London and fetch the Judge,who previously slagged off the wanton witchcraft.At this point,Ralph discovers that one of his legs is going all hairy,and Angel remarks that the hell-beast is complete,save for...yeah, a leg.At the ruins of an old church,the coven partakes in a groovy ritual,mesmerizing Ralph with a bobbler-heavy young girl until he's compelled to cut off his hairy leg for Satan(I've seen a lot of exotic dancers in my heyday,most of which could only compel me to give 'em a buck or two,so this girl is good,goddamn!),who's in attendance,hopping around in a hood(!!).At this optimum moment,the Judge jumps out in dynamic slow motion,clutching his two handed,Satan-slaying five foot long broadsword,killing the venemous vixen and impaling the one-legged demon,pole vaulting it into their ritual bonfire,which seems to have done the trick for good,God-fearing heathens once and for all.You'd think maybe it might take a bit more to dispatch the King of Hell than that,but hey,I didn't write the screenplay.

When he's not busy damning souls for all eternity,Satan also heads the Itty Bitty Tittie Committee.
I'd have posted a screenshot of the "devil" who makes his appearance at the end of this one,but you'd only be disappointed.There's the obligatory hood,some fur,and papier mache that somewhat resembles what Mummenschantz used to do back in the 1970s.The effects are a bummer,even for England,never a nation known for its special effects by any means.Despite these obvious budgetary shortcomings,you might wanna check this one out,and you might even enjoy it for its strong points.Next up here at Castle Wop,it's our first weekly Cartoon Tuesday,and we'll be examining appropriately twisted animation to commemorate.As for Tigon's effort,to avoid any unnecessary hairy patches springing up on your humble narrator,he'll graciously give the devil his due,a Wopsploitation rating of:

Mrs. Brown's daughter makes a loverly sacrifice to the dark lord and master,thinks Herman and his Hermits.

"The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried"(1971)d/Adrian Hoven

2009-07-19T05:29:00.000-07:00

Softcore porn is a lot like a dry hump.If you're twelve or thirteen years old and you shoot shorts-syrup while grinding through your jeans on some unfortunate young sex object,it's a historic evening.Once you've experienced that first slide into the orgasm chasm though,dry humping becomes pointless kid stuff.I first saw the German sex comedy we're focusing on tonight back in the cable box days of the late seventies,so I wasn't exactly jaded by softcore fare just yet.Sybille Danninger,who would later become Sybil Danning,80's exploitation queen and catalyst for teen boners worldwide,saves what otherwise would be another penetration-free day at the orifice.Before her acting ambition led her out of the sexploitation roles she was scoring herself early on,her breathtaking beauty,remarkable figure(36-24-36),and ease with nude scenes made her one of the most striking subjects to ever appear in front of a camera lens.If the corny English overdub later added by sexploitation god David Friedman and company grates on your last nerves,and it probably will,just take solace in knowing Sybil will be appearing shortly,and chances are,she won't have any clothes on whatsoever.Splendid!

Siegfried(Raimund Harmstorf)namnams some beautiful bobblers.
I'm sure you're all well-versed in the Nordic/German national epic saga of the Nibelungs by now,right?The movie version tells the amorous adventures of the young Prince Siegfried (popular German actor Raimund Harmstorf,who passed away in 1998) who, between duels and ambushes, will conquer the heart of beautiful Kriemhild (Danning).But,in order to win the fleshy favors of curvaceous Kriemhild, Siegfried must use his incredible erectile endurance to help King Gunther win the hand of Brunhild.Simple enough?Replace the terrible dragon in the beginning of the story with a buxom cast of supporting Teutonic nymphs,and omit the end where Kriemhild seeks vengeance for Siegfried's death,throw in a Sancho Panza-esque sidekick,some tongue-in-cheek character names like "Macy" and "Gimbel,some psychedelic guitar score,orgies a-plenty,a few half-hearted fight choreographies("All this action...and these guys wanna FIGHT?"),a light sapphic tryst,some period costumes with the titties cut out,and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and that's "Siegfried und das sagenhafte Liebesleben der Nibelungen" in a nutshell.

Mein gott! Kriemhild(Sybille Danninger/Sybil Danning),very nude and very choice,as usual.
Of course now I'm gonna drone at great lengths on about Ms. Danning here.From the instant the viewer is introduced to her Kriemhild character,as she is bathed by her beautiful young servant girls,and the camera lovingly pans her wonderful wares,we're in for a rare treat.Whether she's completely nude or in full costume,she is breathtaking beyond words.I know I've made public my preference for brunettes time and again,but one exception HAS to be Sybil Danning,dammit.If she has a single flaw anywhere,I haven't found it,and trust me,my eyes have covered every cinematic inch of her for decades!She might possibly be at her very loveliest here,so endurance of the other tedious set-fodder is not only recommended but necessary to get to the pay off.She is the breathing,living embodiment of female sexuality in this entry,so make sure you have a towel handy beforehand to clear the steam coming off of your television screen or computer monitor when she's center stage.And maybe an extra towel for...well,I'll take the high road here!

With special effects like this,there'd better be plenty of sex going on to make up for it.
Director Hoven,once a German sweetheart due to roles he played in kitschfilms of the fifties and sixties,made the jump to softcore sex comedies in the seventies to drastically change his image for the sleazier.For more Sybil(could there ever be enough?),check out Bluebeard(1972),The Three Musketeers(1973),gialli like L'Occhio nel Labirinto(1972) and Dama Rossa uccide Sette Volte/The Red Queen Kills Seven Times(1972),Chained Heat(1983),Howling II(1985),and a myriad of others.Most recently she's appeared in Grindhouse(2007) in the Werewolf Women of the SS trailer(of course),and in...ecccch..Rob Zombie's pisstake on Halloween.But who could hold anything against that gorgeous face!Muah!Ich liebe dich,Sybil.Siegfried scores(pretty much on Danning alone):

Fellatio the way it oughta be, with the emphasis on slapstick comedy.

"Visiting Hours"(1982)d/Jean-Claude Lord

2009-07-18T03:47:00.000-07:00

If you made a slasher pic in the horror-saturated early eighties,chances are,you made out alright for yourself,both at the box office and with ketchup-crazed gore fans worldwide.Unless your name is Jean-Claude Lord,that is.This guy took a cast of cult favorites like William Shatner,Lee Grant,Linda Purl,and scarfaced up 'n comer Michael Ironside(I've always dug this perrenial bad guy with the Nicholson hairline and the creepy grimace),who was coming off of his Scanners(1981) success the year before,a sinister hospital locale,effective incidental soundtrack,and nearly blew it altogether.The movie gods knew I was jonesing to see it after the teaser trailer aired on television,with the movie poster cleverly playing the hospital lighting into a huge skull(skulls are very choice,btw).So when I did see it,I walked out kinda feeling like I missed something.Years later,I can relievedly say that I didn't miss anything.And if you miss this entry,you might not miss much yourselves.

The Shat takes full advantage of his sparse screen time and mananges to shat out on his squeeze,Lee Grant.
Lee Grant has a television talk show,and while crusading for the rights of a battered woman who has killed her husband in self defense,she draws the attention of a letter-crazy bigoted control freak-cum-serial killer(Michael Ironside)who just so happens to keep a shrine of black and white photographs of his victims taped to the wall in his closet.One night after leaving the set,and saying goodbye to her producer/lover,William Shatner(who some may say was criminally underused here,but the fact is,the guy just wasn't given the opportunity to ham it up like he usually does,so you barely notice him!),she is surprised at her apartment by Ironside,who wants to shut her up with his stiletto,but while naked and wearing all her costume jewelry to boot.Okay,blech.Grant manages to survive long enough to be rescued by another tenant in her building and is whisked away to the local hospital,where she is doted upon and guarded by Linda Purl(of "Bad Ronald" and "Happy Days" fame),a nurse so selfless,she works overtime shifts a the hospital,volunteers at the free clinic,all while raising her own kids and developing a cure for Bell's Palsy.Okay,I added that last part,but you get the idea.

Kodak moments like this deserve to be put in an album before they get ruined.
When Ironside sees that he's missed his target,he travels to the hospital to finish the job,after massaging his stroke-ridden father's shoulders at the old folks home and biting the ass of a hapless frizzy blonde-haired prostitute during an abusive trick.This guy is relentless.He dons the uniforms of every hospital worker imaginable,from surgeon,to orderly,to floor buffer,cutting the airlines of elderly patients and snapping photos as the life rushes out of them, while ducking out of sight of the ever-watchful Purl.But he mainly enjoys shanking people in the labonza.I don't think I've ever seen a movie that passes itself off as a "slasher flick" that has as many gutstabs as this one.At one point he stuffs a stress-relief ball into the mouth of none other than Harvey Atkin(Morty from "Meatballs"...Hi Mickey!)and dispatches him with...that's right,folks.Right in the labonza.He follows Linda Purl home that night and I bet you'll never guess what he gives her and where when he ducks out from under the couch.You guys are good.The ass-bitten trick bitch breaks into Ironside's place and trashes it in a wall-pooped evening of vengeance,stumbling upon Michael's closet wall of death,but when the authorities rush to bring him to justice,he's already loaded up on pain meds,smashed his arm into a broken beer bottle(the lone gore effect that's worth an eff!),and had himself rushed to the hospital to finish off Lee Grant once and for all.But she shanks him in the labonza.I shit you not.The end.

Colt Hawker(Michael Ironside) in a pensive-yet-sexy leather wifebeater moment.
Definitely not a top-tier slasher by anyone's standards,despite a genuinely disturbing performance by fan fave,Ironside,and game faces worn by the entire cast,even Shatner when he turns up now and again.Lord went on to direct Eddie and the Cruisers II:Eddie Lives! and a lot of television.Grant who you'll recognize in genre films like Damien:The Omen 2 and The Swarm,went on to work in Lynch's Mulholland Dr.A likeable bad guy like Ironside has historically played throughout his career,has allowed to him to find work in everything from cartoons to the latest Terminator sequel.A lot of you nerds know more about what Shatner's been up to than I would,so I'll leave it at that.Not unwatchable,but not satisfying,due to the lack of grue,and multiple script flaws,this hospital horror gets prescribed two wops on the scale,and LOTS of shelf rest in the near future.

One broken bottle of beer in my arm,one broken bottle of beer...

"Dead of Night"(1977)d/Dan Curtis

2009-07-17T01:13:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't have to tell you how rad it was being a kid in the 1970's with Dan Curtis(Dark Shadows,Night Stalker,Trilogy of Terror,Burnt Offerings,etc.) churning out ample made-for-television horror pics, but I think I just did anyway, so we've got that covered.This particular entry,sharing name only with another Curtis pilot from 1969 was a pilot for a proposed anthology series that aired in March of '77.Horror anthologies are a lot like lengths of chain,in that they're only as effective as the weakest link therein.Of course, when you've got horror author extraordinaire,Richard Matheson(who wrote the two standout stories here and penned the screenplay from a Jack Finney story for the other) sitting at the typewriter, chances are, you're gonna make out alright in the end.Though this is one of his lesser known pieces,it remains surprisingly effective for the most part,and is an enjoyable 75 minute ride of reminiscence to the days when horror was,indeed,king,even on the small screen,and Curtis was one of its biggest proponents.I vividly remember quite a few goosebumps this one sent under my footie pajamas back then.

Ed Begley Jr. plus 1926 Jordan Playboy divided by slip in the time continuum still equals not scary.
The first tale,"Second Chance",although an otherwise interesting story for sure,is the weakest of the three in knocking horri-balls outta the park.Ed Begley,Jr. restores a vintage 1926 Jordan Playboy to original showroom condition and while taking her for a leisurely spin,he drives right through a pesky slip in the time continuum and finds himself in 1926.While walking around his town some fifty years in the past,someone seemingly steals his car,forcing him to walk back to the present time.Gotta hate when that happens.His girlfriend's grandfather surprises him with the prospect of...a rusty 1926 Jordan Playboy in his garage that he can restore and have if he allows the old man one more ride in her.Are you shaking in your booties yet? Yeah,me neither. Next.
"No Such Thing as a Vampire" is an atmospheric gothic piece(Curtis' bread and butter,if ya didn't know)where we find Patrick Macnee as a wealthy nobleman whose wife is being drained nightly by an unseen bloodsucker.When he calls in a skeptical friend of the family for help,all is not as it seems in the spacious mansion,leading the viewer to an unexpectedly satisfying twist ending as only Matheson can deliver.Much,much better.

On Patrick's wife Horst set his aim,but Elisha had a different stake to claim.
The final story,"Bobby",is my favorite of the three and the one I have the fondest memories of,from watching as a wee mediterranean.Joan Hackett,who's lost her son in a drowning "accident",turns to the blackest of arts to restore life in her beloved child,whose body was never found.When she gets what she asks for,and her son appears on the doorstep,still soaking wet,she unwittingly sets a dark game of cat and mouse into play,where her son stalks her all over the house amidst a brutal thunderstorm.The lightning offsets the shadowy darkness of the huge estate,the tension building to a crescendo in unison with the violent storm outside as Bobby reveals a terrible secret.Her son killed himself rather than live with her,and not wanting to return to the land of the living,sent a demon instead!And not just any demon,we're talking the creepiest of demonic midgets here.If you're one of those people who get freaked out by little people in the first place,expect your skin to crawl right off the bone by the climax of this one.Cough,cough...Skittles.

Demonic midgets?Phew,that's just blowing the lid off the creepometer over here.
Although this pilot went the same way as Curtis' "The Norliss Tapes"(1973)(which we'll be dissecting shortly,little brothers),it packs enough thrills in the second two-thirds to merit at least a few viewings,for sure.Though we lost Curtis to a brain tumor three years ago,at the age of 78,his vast body of work for both the big and small screen remains at our disposal and will continue to terrify and entertain horror fans for decades to come.He'll always be a favorite director of mine,and this entry is a fine example of his handiwork.On the glorious scale du Wop,it merits a very satisfactory:

Ahem.You see that, Skittles?

"Combat Shock/American Nightmares"(1986)d/Buddy Giovinazzo

2009-07-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

As a much younger Wop than the one you're gazing at lovingly before you,I remember being Christmas morning-excited when Buddy G.'s symphony of shellshock was finally given its vhs baptism,after hearing so much about it in the pages of my favorite horror 'zines of the day like Chas Balun's Deep Red.I rallied the neighborhood troops that night and we screened it on the woodgrain Magnavox in the parlour,and delighted in the horrific,disturbing spectacle that played out on the screen like David Lynch meets Martin Scorsese-on-welfare and scripted by Kevin Smith.As twisted as we were,the doctor could have never written us a 'script of this magnitude,baby!Giovinazzo was on the page we were just turning over to,yet as quickly as we had discovered his venemous video visions,he all but disappeared...
The noisy whirr of the fast forward button brings us over twenty years ahead,where the classiest of the classless,Troma Inc. have once again gone above and beyond the competition in releasing this forgotten cult classic in a beautiful two disc twenty-fifth anniversary edition,stuffed full of mouth-watering extras,and boasting of two cuts of the crucial independent shocker,the original "Combat Shock" theatrical cut(which you probably missed unless you were a listless wino on the Deuce back in '86),and "American Nightmares",the never-before-seen director's cut!Fucking glorious!

The portions never look this big when I order ribs at the Vietnamese joint by my place...
Frankie Dunlan(Buddy's brother Ricky)has nightly flashbacks to the killing fields of Vietnam,where he may or may not have gone bananas,wiping out an entire village and his own platoon in a meaty bloodbath,before being taken prisoner and subjected to psychological and physical torture at the hands of the communist enemy in a muddy bamboo hell-cage.For Frankie,unfortunately,those were the salad days.Nowadays he subsists in a skeevy ghetto broom closet with his pregnant wife and one year old,brutally deformed and defected by the Agent Orange his father was exposed to while fighting for the American way,somewhere in the worst corner of Staten Island.He hasn't worked in months,the family hasn't eaten in days,the cupboards are bare,and the old lady in the shoe would have cashed her chips in ages ago.He dons his least dirty set of rags and braves the urban sprawl,desperately striving for survival.His friends mug people in broad daylight for fix money,his enemies chase him down alleys,shaking him down for money he couldn't dream of having at this point.He even contemplates wrestling a slobbery bone out of a junkyard dog's mouth.While he stands hopelessly in the unemployment line,his junkie pal Mike scores a hundred bag of skag,which he overdoses on in a dilapidated lot full of garbage,after tearing open his vein with a rusty coat hanger and dumping the stepped-on heroin into the gaping,bloody hole in his arm.Glamorous.

A vein-tapping that would make Joan Crawford's toes curl.
After striking out at the unemployment office and a phonecall to his father,who believed he was killed in duty years ago,and being slapped up by the local pimp when he tries to befriend a hussied up pre-teen prostitute,Frankie decides to take matters into his own hands,and mug a young girl for her purse.Back home,his wife Cathy is spooning stale breadcrumb/water mix into the crying mouth of their freak baby,watching the broken tv set,and washing their rags in the dirty sink.Ah,family life.Just as Frankie feeds his victim a hearty knuckle sandwich and makes off with her pocketbook,Paco and his ridiculously dressed henchmen chase down and reaquaint their luckless friend with the concrete.A half-conscious and bloodied Frankie discovers a pistol that had fallen out of the purse in the melee,that the female vic had stolen earlier from his friend's corpse(!),and exacts revenge on the three goons.He gathers up some ammunition and stumbles groggily back to his tenement building,his mind finally clear about both the events in Asia,and what he must do to end his family's perpetual suffering.The conclusion of this grim fairy tale will stay with you long after you've ejected the disc.Trust me.

The Dunlans might wanna skip that sitting at Picture People.Just saying.
I really can't say enough about the bang up job the folks at Troma(Thanks Evan!) have done with this film,and wholeheartedly endorse you running right the fuck out and adding it to your respective movie collections.It's easily the genre DVD release of the year thus far.Look for a full interview with director Buddy G. right here at Wopsploitation in the very near future,as a follow up to this entry.If you're any kind of cult/horror/exploitation enthusiast at all,this gritty little ditty has it ALL.Ample gore,impressive low-tech effects and makeup,an effective script chock full o' black humour(the best kind,eh!),and adequate performances by the cast,which was made up of Buddy's family,friends,and even ex-wife.This comes VERY highly recommended,and upon it,I bestow the highest possible number of Wops!

"It's only three swigs of curdled milk,Ricky,jeez,stop being such a diva!"

"Best Friends"(1975)d/Noel Nosseck

2009-05-04T21:08:00.000-07:00

Here sits longtime TV star Richard Hatch's first big screen venture,and though it stands as a moderately groovy drive-in drama,in which I'd guess the majority of outdoor theatergoers had already migrated to the backseat by the opening credits,there's strangely enough within to keep the viewer interested until the final reel,not least of which is a decent performance by ol' Cap'n Apollo-turned-Tom Zarek himself,gods damn it.Director Nosseck is responsible for a gaggle of forgettable made-for-television movies,and truth be told,he doesn't altogether suck here,either.Personally,I like my drive-in fare with more zombies,cannibals,big breasted sapphites,and a coked-out Giovanni Lombardo Radice doesn't hurt,but for a mid-week time waster,I wasn't too disappointed with it,despite the promise of rape-crazy injuns in the original one-sheet(spoiler:there is none.).I'll chalk it up as another example of your humble N's all too familiar obsession with all things seventies.

Why don't you just kiss him already,Jesse(Richard Hatch).
Jesse(Richard Hatch) and Pat(Doug Chapin,producer of 1979's When a Stranger Calls,hmmm...)have been best buddies a long time,as the staged photos(that appear to have been taken all in the same week,Photoshop would've helped) that accompany the main titles suggest.Though Jesse plans to change his womanizing ways and settle down with Kathy(Susanne Benton,who we last saw in "The Last Horror Film"(1982)),he decides to gather up Pat and his girlfriend Jo Ella(Ann Noland) at the airport with the promise of an outta sight trip across the southwest in a rented motor home to catch up and forge some new phony Kodak moments,as well.As they rack up miles,the buddies reminisce on old times,share some new yuks,and sleep with their respective women.So far,so good.When the two couples hit a strip bar chock full o' injuns,with a live band and an over-the-hill pasty-sporting hag flopping her saggy glad bags to and fro on the stage,Pat encourages an aniebriated Jo Ella to get up there and show the old floozy how it's done.After Cochise and Sitting Bull suckerpunch Jesse in a post-titties altercation,Pat sneaks out later that night and with a two-by-four,exacts paleface justice on the most stereotypical of the natives,with a huge feathered hat in a back alley.Best friends do that sort of thing for each other.

Now this is what I call "renting a motor home and driving carefree through the southwest with a couple of chicks".
At this point,Pat starts acting a little squirrelly.Maybe it's the scarrified mitt,maybe it's the long stretch of road,but he starts panicking at the prospect of losing his best pal to this...this WOMAN.He brings Jo Ella to tears with the announcement that he isn't really serious about her,maaaan.Then he takes Kathy to the store on the nifty new motorcycle he's bought,allowing Jo Ella the time to seduce ol' Jesse on a blanket in the grass,while informing Kathy that his buddy could NEVER settle down with ANYBODY,being a flesh-hound from way back.Even after Kathy discovers Jesse's tryst with Pat's girlfriend,she forgives him,leading Pat to more extreme tactics;trying to get her bitten by a rattlesnake among the rocks,then later trying to rape her in the motor home,leading to a punch-up between the two friends on the beach,with a bloody Pat wailing desperately,"She's had her eyes on me the whole trip,maaaan!"When Jesse refuses to allow his pal to cunt-punt his own girl,Pat rides off on his motorcycle.Jesse later finds his bruised buddy putting the moves on two high school sophomore girls in a bar(!),but refuses to partake in the underage goodness,further enfuriating his friend.That night,Jesse and the two girls are awoken by the sounds of Pat's motorcycle revving outside in the darkness,and when Jesse discovers Pat has flattened the tires and destroyed the engine,he runs out into the blackness,pistol in tow,vowing to kill him.He mistakenly shoots Jo Ella in the head instead.Oops.The next morning,both friends tearfully reminisce old times on the beach,with the girl's blanket-covered corpse to bear witness.The end.

These Indians don't wanna give you a complimentary drink with your poker chips.
Nobody involved here really went on to any semblance of a big screen career,with Hatch the most notably successful of the frakkin' lot.Ann Noland didn't even work in film after the end of 1975.I've been on a sort of drive-in drama kick as of late,and you'll be seeing that for yourself in the days to come.Despite the harsh cinematic gavel-banging I'm giving this little forgotten number,you might be inclined to search it out.Give it a screening when you have absolutely nothing better to do,and you might come away with a chuckle or two.If you're into broken bottle-wielding indians,groovy road trips,buddy movies,or A cup titties,you may just enjoy it.I sort of did,which is uncharacteristic for a guy like me.

The best groovy 70's outdoor blanket-fuck scene I've seen all week.

Beffo la morte e ghigno!

2009-05-04T19:23:00.001-07:00

Yeah,yeah,yeah.It's been a while,I know.I'm back in front of the nerdbox once again,and I've got piles of movies to examine with you,so sit back in your favorite computer chair,or on your Sybian Orgasm machine,either or,and let Uncle Wop do the driving once again,down the boulevard,dirty as it may be,of despicable and dastardly flicks of yesteryear,both your favorites and mine.Spare me the grief,pass me an AMP,and let's get right back where we started from,like Maxine Nightingale once crooned when platform shoes and bellbottoms were the talk of the discotheque.We've got a LOT of work to do over here!

Cruelly,
Wopifex

Monster Dog(1985)d/Claudio Fragasso

2009-02-26T06:43:00.000-08:00

Let the record show that I'm a huge Alice Cooper fan from waaaaay back.Some of you out there may have already gathered that from the review I did of The Nightmare last October.His legendary career spanning some forty years is overbrimming with dizzying highs and nauseating lows.Unfortunately,tonight's entry definitely falls into the latter category.After two stints in rehab nearly pulverized his musical legacy,by 1984,hard hearted Alice found himself at the bottom of the bargain bin looking up.With his albums being panned,the shock rocker turned to genre writer/director Claudio Fragasso for a film vehicle that would draw the brakes on his plummeting skid towards mediocrity.Not a good move,Coop.Luckily his collaboration with the man responsible for such non-classics as Rats:Night of Terror,Zombie 3,Hell of the Living Dead,and Troll 2,wasn't the final nail in Alice's artistic coffin,as he bounced back the following year with a successful heavy metal reinvention of his musical persona,and even scoring soundtrack work and a few cameos in some genre films,while this Spanish production thankfully sank into a quagmire of forgotten z-grade celluloid trash.Drawing positives from this mess,the two songs "Identity Crises" and "See Me in the Mirror" he provided for the soundtrack,though unavailable on any albums(save for the superior boxset "The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper"),are excellent.Sadly,the rest isn't appetizing to even a mangy,starving mutt.

Sometimes I'm...a dead ringer for Bob Cratchett?
Vince Raven is a top tier rockstar(played by rockstar-on-the-downswing,Alice Cooper,and badly dubbed by someone who is obviously NOT Alice Cooper)returning to his hometown to shoot a music video with a small crew in a conversion van,like so many of the biggest celebrity musicians were doing in the mid-eighties(cue eyeroll).Only,Raven's hometown holds few good memories for him since his father was afflicted with a rare heart disease that caused him to not only fly into a primal rage,but display characteristics of lycanthropy(!),ultimately getting him brutally eighty-sixed by the superstitious townfolk.After maneuvering the seventies vehicle through what seems like an eternity of atmospheric dry ice...err,umm...fog,Raven is stopped by the local sheriff and deputy who warn of a ravenous pack of wild dogs that have killed several times already,then break his balls about both his crazy rock n' roll,and his crazy daddy that they had to murder years ago.Further on down the soundstage...uhh,err...ominous night road,the van hits a dog,and when Raven's crew gets out to investigate,they stumble across a bloodied senile lunatic who's patterned himself a little too closely to Crazy Ralph from the Friday the 13th series.Dogs,wind,moon,death...whatever you say,claret chin.When they finally arrive at the mansion,it is barren,with no sign of Joss the caretaker to be found,save for some sandwiches he has made,and a "Welcome Home Vince" banner.Pull out all the stops for the rockstar.

"¡Le todo condenan!" says Crazy Ralph's Spanish cousin,twice removed.
After some momentary visions of Vince in werewolf makeup that makes The Werewolf(1956)look like The Howling(1980),the crew's attempt at shooting a gothic video in the mansion is interrupted by Joss's lifeless body crashing through an upstairs window and onto the terrified leading lady.Raven,still decked out in his slightly embarrassing video duds and makeup sets off to look for whatever did in his shaky handed malt-maker.While he's gone,a carload of scruffy local rabble pull up outside the mansion,looking like extras in a Leone western rip-off,and vowing to plug the rock n' roller fulla holes,and free the town we never get to see from the grip of moon-based mayhem.At this point,the pack of wild dogs lay siege to the huge house,led by what looks to be nothing more than an oversized Mardi Gras-style papier mache' head,and brutalizing both vigilantes and video crew alike.When it looks like curtains for Sandra(Victoria Vera),Raven's girlfriend/video director,who's barricaded herself in a room,Vince shows up out of nowhere,and mysteriously the dogs cease their attack,and lie at the two survivors feet as they tip toe out to safety,where Vince is clawed by the titular giant head before blasting it,and revealing through off-screen metamorphosis that the werewolf was....drumroll...the bloody geryatric whackjob.Raven,now caught up in the throes of the curse,pleads for Sandra to shoot him before he transforms into something unintentionally silly,and luckily,she does just that,as he languishes in mid-sub-par,south of the border change-o-head transformation.Bloodied and exhausted,the female survivor stumbles off,almost looking like she's been raped(she's not the only one who feels violated,believe me),before a reprise of Raven's earlier video takes us to credits.Thankfully,it's all over.

Have you seen yourself in the mirror lately,Alice?
If you can get past the fact that very little happens for long periods of time...arond ninety minutes worth,to be precise,and a hokey script full of corny speeches like:"Oh, bullshit,Vince!The year 2000 is just around the corner. I am a recognized expert in electronic videos and you are the hottest rock n' roll star... in the world! You're making records, videos, movies ... on high-tech electronic equipment of fantastic sophistication. You can get on a plane tonight and be in Australia tomorrow. And you're scared of werewolves.",you might just get a few kicks out of this.Alice Cooper treads dangerously close to wooden cigar store indian territory with this performance,and face it,if you're a rockstar in real life that can't convince people you're a rockstar on the big screen...you're pretty much effed,buddy.The effects are piss-weak,the supporting cast is relatively uninteresting,and the pacing is bound to have you yawning and looking at the clock on the wall repeatedly.I can't recommend this to anyone,save the hardest core Cooper completists.

...More like papier mache' dog.

B.W. Goes to the Movies:Friday the 13th(2009)d/Marcus Nispel

2009-02-25T02:06:00.001-08:00

"It's gonna be fuckin' stupid."I must've heard that twenty-five times since the first time I saw the teaser trailer and suggested to my roommate Doc that we should hit the theater for this new Friday the 13th remake.Well,no shit,Dr. Obvious.The whole series was never exactly renowned for any tangible integrity dating back thirty years now,and I had no notions this year's model was gonna be any different,especially after hearing Michael Bay's name was attached to it.If you've been living like the unabomber for the past ten years,Bay is the douchebag responsible for the reprehensible and unnecessary remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its even less necessary prequel,among others.What possessed this guy who once directed a Great White(the band,not the Italian Jaws rip-off)video to take an extended artistic leak all over a beloved,nearly flawless horror classic like TCM I'll never comprehend(I'll bet fellow douchebag Rob Zombie might have the answer to this one),but in this case,we're talking about a franchise that has sent its trademark hydrocephallic murderer into space,to Hell,and midtown Manhattan for twenty onscreen minutes in the worst of the series,ferchrissakes.How much worse could Michael Bay make it?

Don't look now,there's a huge,deformed,homicidal mongoloid bent on blood vengeance directly behind you.
I'll lay the good news on you first.It doesn't outstink Jason Takes Manhattan.That said,it's still not a good movie.Sure all the trendy MTV camerawork and editing is in place(which I'm completely fucking tired of by now,thanks),the obligatory attractive twenty-something nymphomaniacs searching out a ganja cashcrop(didn't we see this sort of thing in the poop TCM remake?) that happens to have been planted..drumroll..not all that far from the notorious Camp Crystal Lake,where the horrible murders took place all those years ago,culminating in the lopping off of Mrs. Voorhees' screaming domepiece,and the now-commonplace horrible redneck-neighbors-in-the-know who let the revenge-minded retard dole out disturbing death from his packrat shack(oh yeah,now it's a house).Only now,he's got an underground mine he utilizes(hey,it works in My Bloody Valentine,right?Who needs the summer camp thing,anyways!).As for the protagonists,none of them possess an inkling of what could be lightly described as likeable personality.Not since Larry Zerner's Shelly in Pt.3 in 3D has there been a victim I've hated instantaneously as much as every single body that falls by the wayside in this disaster.The murders,which I've heard ravings about all over the place,are neither original,nor particularly gory.There's also only one instance of Harry Manfredini's signature incidental score in the whole film.Seriously,it doesn't even deserve this much written about it.German-born director Nispel should have stuck to Puff Daddy and Spice Girls videos.What harm would there have been in financing a Jason movie that takes the franchise off in a new and/or original direction a la Jason X,instead of forcefeeding rabid horror fans the same old pabulum repackaged and dumbed down a thousand times over the way this one was?Now for the scary part...This scheiße-fest is already doing extremely well at the boxoffice,so expect an assinine sequel in the near future.Ki,ki,ki,ma,ma,ma.

Seriously,Sackhead Jason should hit Antique Roadshow.Look at all that junk!

Curse of Frankenstein(1957)d/Terence Fisher

2009-02-25T00:03:00.000-08:00

In the late fifties,the British gothic horror giants at Hammer set out to remake several of the Universal classics,this entry being the first.Director Fisher commits to celluloid not only an entirely different motion picture than the 1931 Universal original,but in several brilliant twists,avoids following most of Mary Shelley's classic novel in the process.Though Peter Cushing establishes himself as the quintessential baron toying with life and death in the confines of his laboratory,studio mate Christopher Lee struggles as the patchwork creature,despite brilliant makeup from the late Phil Leakey,and doesn't bring much to the role,save for swinging his arms around and snarling menacingly.He did very well for himself, attaining megastardom,revered worldwide as a great actor anyway,and did not return for the sequel the next year.This film would catapult Hammer to the forefront of British cinema,panned by some critics,but overwhelmingly received by audiences of the day,and remains a true classic and essential viewing for any horror aficionado worth two disembodied hands wrapped in a hanky!

That's right,Baron.The bowl of dry ice is firmly in place...
Baron Victor Frankenstein(Peter Cushing) awaits the punishment phase of his sentencing in a cell,when he is visited by a priest,who agrees to hear the condemned man's sordid tale.As a young man who has inherited his family fortune,he is mentored by Paul Krempe(Robert Urquhart),who later becomes the brilliant young scientist's assistant in successful experiments creatng life where there was once none.When the men reanimate a dead puppy,Paul's joy is overshadowed by Frankenstein's urge to take the experiment much further.The one time tutor reluctantly agrees to help the Baron,until after stealing a corpse from the gallows,he witnesses Victor sawing off the head,and realizes the world,science included,may not see the duo's experiments in the same positive light!When Frankenstein's first cousin,Elizabeth(Hazel Court) comes to stay at the castle,Victor neglects to inform Paul or the maid he's been sleeping with, in between their gruesome work, of the young girl's arrival or future living arrangements.Paul turns a blind eye to the Baron's nightly scavenger hunts for suitable body parts for his creation,instead trying to convince Elizabeth to find somewhere else to live,preferably someplace without a mad scientist!

Horrible makeup,even more horribly miscast;the brilliant actor casts aside the bandages.
When Victor has assembled the creature,save for the brain,he stages a convenient accident at his home for a brilliant old scientist with no immediate family,later removing the genius' brain from the cadaver to complete his makeshift man.Once brought to life,the creature(Christopher Lee)escapes from the lab,killing a young boy and an old man in the process,before a well placed bullet from Paul's rifle sends the monster from whence it came.When the maid threatens the Baron over marriage promises he had made to her during their carnal liasons,he turns her over to the creature,which he has once again given life.Naturally,the creature frees itself from the chains Victor has shackled it in,and when it attacks Elizabeth,he destroys it once and for all with the flame from an oil lamp.When Paul visits the condemned Baron in his cell,he fails to corroborate the mad story Frankenstein has shared with the priest,effectively sealing his fate,as he leaves the jail with Elizabeth in tow.Was the whole thing a figment of Frankenstein's imagination?Or did Paul purposely avoid telling the truth to eliminate his rival for the hand of the young girl?Only the guillotine knows for sure...

Elizabeth(Hazel Court)and her marvelously smashing twin corset-pedoes.
In the autumn and winter years of his career,Lee has gone on to become a sort of elder statesman of global cinema,enjoying several successful periods to this very day,though he'll always be one of my favorite on-screen baddies,and my top choice as a certain infamously undead,bloodsucking count!Cushing's career spanned nearly sixty years,up until his death in 1994,finding the actor reprising his role as Frankenstein several times,Van Helsing in Hammer's long running Dracula series,Sherlock Holmes,and even Dr. Who in the original films!Both men officially met on the set of this entry,though they had acted on earlier efforts together,and began a lifelong friendship,repeating phrases from Looney Tunes cartoons(!)in between takes.Terry Fisher continued to direct most of the major Hammer horror efforts(directing Lee twelve times!),his last being Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell(1974) before succumbing in 1980.This is a classy effort that makes for enjoyable repeat viewings,and as thus,it merits the very highest of ratings,and is highly recommended from your humble N.

That's an awfully nice pea coat,Chistopher.Really.

Slumber Party Massacre(1982)d/Amy Jones

2009-02-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

All the...ahem...drilling... I was involved in this past weekend served as inspiration for tonight's entry.The screenplay for this longtime fan favorite was originally written by local poet/novelist Rita Mae Brown as a parody of slasher films,then shot as a serious film,and ironically plays as an unintentional comedy after all is said and done.Aren't flicks like this the best kind,kiddies?Yeah,I'm joking,by the way.Formulaic?You'll find more formula here than you could on Julius Sumner Miller's PBS blackboard back in the seventies.There are some uncredited Mark Shostrom gore effects on display here,an awful lot of twenty-something female nudists masquerading as teenaged high school chicks,meatcleaver-on-snail violence,would-be heroic voyeur-nerds,blatant sexual allegory involving the killer's enormous weapon and helpless female victims,a lot of the necessary elements to make this a thoroughly entertaining slasher flick,really.It might help if half your brain shuts down beforehand from a debilitating stroke,but then again,even that might not help you get through it.

Scream Queen Brinke Stevens provides my favorite scene in the movie.
Since her parents are out of town,Trish decides it might be high time to invite all her high school friends to one of those slumber parties that you'd be lucky to find middle school aged girls at.After a painfully inept varsity girls' basketball practice,Coach Jana thankfully sends the scrubs to the showers,where they spend a lot of time catting at each other,which proved compelling viewing to your humble N,and not at all any prolonged shots of Linda(Brinke Stevens)soaping up perky on camera hammurabi's.Honest.Valerie(the late Robin Stille),the new girl in school who lives next door to Trish,is sooooooo totally not invited.Oh yeah,mass murderer Russ Thorn,an effeminate-looking hispanic in popped denim collar with a two foot long industrial cordless drill that never needs charging...ever,has escaped.From where,is simply not important.I'm just guessing he's looking for just the right slumber party to terrorize.He warms up by drilling through the bubblehead of a telephone repairwoman,just as our two heroes Neil and Jeff take a called third strike while trying to hit on her.Linda eats spinning steel drillbit death next,after an empty classroom cat and mouse game with Thorn proves tragic when an earlier drill wound's cascading claret leads the driller killer right to her.

Meatsa,Meatsa.You'd better make sure Russ Thorn gets his pizza in thirty minutes or less.
Next door,Valerie has to make do by breaking her giant Shirley Temple-sized lollipop-licking sister in hot pants, Courtney's cazzies about doling out hand jobs while in fifth grade(which for Jennifer Meyers,must have been nearly two decades previous),then scolding her for reading her copy of Playgirl.At the decadent slumber party she wasn't invited to,the girls get their tits out directly in front of a window that our socially inept heroes happen to be peering through.Thorn quickly puts a damper on the wholesome festivites,drilling the neighbor,who's out cleaver-chopping snails(!),the pizza delivery guy,the basketball coach,the two poor male bastards,and several of the bubbleheads in attendance before the snubbed siblings decide to investigate the girls' gathering for themselves,which leads to a boffo showdown finale against the drill-wielding psychopath,who exclaims,"Takes a lot of love for a person to do this"(!!),before the sisters stab him in the back,chop off his hand with a machete,slash his belly open,and then skewer him on the aforementioned weed chopper before the credits roll,making the cinematic world safe once again for horny pot-smoking chicks to get together and disrobe in front of windows to the delight of nerds who plan their nights aound such gatherings.At least until Slumber Party Massacre 2 came out five years later...

Is it the power drill or the popped collar that makes the girls scream? We may never know.
Brown achieved her success writing best-selling mysteries,the majority of which she credits her own cat as co-author(!!!),while director Jones moved on to the much scarier The Rich Man's Wife,starring Halle Berry.Robin Stille enjoyed cult favorite status due to this entry,and later,Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama,before committing suicide in 1996.Brinke remains busy,as always,between countless movie projects and convention appearances.This flick spawned three sequels,none of which I've ever bothered with,after having my intelligence insulted by the original.Besides the delightful Stevens,I really couldn't find much on either dramatic or parody level to maintain my interest beyond one or two viewings.Appropriately,this one's getting drilled on the rating scale with an unimpressive score of:

Randy Courtney(Jennifer Meyers) gave grade five handys,yet finds this machete blade dandy.

L'ultimo Squalo(1981)d/Enzo G.Castellari

2009-02-19T01:16:00.000-08:00

As the proudest of Italians,I honestly feel that we,as a people,never half-ass what we set out to do.Even when we're ripping off American blockbuster movies.So when Enzo Castellari's L'ultimo Squalo(Great White,U.S. title)was successfully sued by Universal Pictures and yanked shortly after release,Americans had little idea of what a bombastic trainwreck of a motion picture they were missing out on.With a four million dollar advertising budget,a cast of b-movie staple actors,an outta sight disco soundtrack by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis,a script that generously borrows from both Jaws(1975) and Jaws 2(1979),and a mechanical monster that looks to have cost no less than forty-six bucks to construct,Squalo is one of the finest pieces of exploitative garbage to have ever thread a movie projector.Seriously,this film is like Plan 9 From Outer Space with a dorsal fin.Steven Spielberg couldn't have topped this if Richard Dreyfuss looked directly at the camera fifty more times than he already did in the original screen adaption of Peter Benchley's(remember that name)novel.Though no region one dvd exists at this point,get your hands on a PAL format release,or a bootleg immediately.You won't believe your eyes.

"He's down therrrre...waiting to attack.That's been his patterrrn...right before he makes an attack." says sometimes Irish shark fisherman,Ron Hamer(Vic Morrow).
When one of Jenny Benton's(acting-wise think Keanu Reeves with breasts)cool windsurfing buddies disappears one morning,she enlists her father,writer Peter Benton(not Peter Benchley)to track down the wayward watersporter.Benton(James Franciscus)calls in grizzled sea captain Ron Hamer(Vic Morrow),who's stumbled across a chunk of the boy's surfboard while floating around off the coast of Port Harbor(and floating in and out of a bad Irish accent),to help in the investigation.After Hamer deducts that only a great white shark is large enough to do the kind of damage seen in the piece of surf equipment,both men deliver the bad news to Mayor Wells(Joshus Sinclair),who slags them off,as he busily prepares for a re-election campaign AND an annual regatta/windsurfing competition that will boost the sleepy town's tourism immeasurably.After discovering a local fisherman's swamped boat,his severed arm floating below,the mayor agrees to put up safeguards against this rogue menace,in the form of a metal underwater gate,which the shark abruptly busts through anyway.During the windsurfing competition,the beast surfaces and sends the townspeople and surfers into a frenzied panic,before hitting a rowboat with the mayor's assistant on it,sending him twenty feet straight up into the air(!)and back down into the water,where the shark eats him in front of tv cameras(!!).

Shark attack or dummy on a rowboat hitting a depth charge?You decide.
When the local media pressures the mayor to act,his son and friends take his father's boat out to hunt for the killer,which promptly bites off Benton's daughter's leg.Wells then takes a chopper out over the sea,hanging a rack of ribs on a towline over the water(the mere scent is all it takes,apparently),and when the shark pulls the winch directly off the helicopter,the politician falls into the surf,eventually getting both of his legs bitten off(!!!)trying to climb back into the chopper.The shark then sinks the chopper,as well.Later,Benton and Hamer,equipped with a singular dynamite belt(nothing like being prepared),take the sea captain's boat out to hunt the shark,but in the underwater melee,Hamer drowns.When the local newscrew ties off a chunk of meat to the pier as bait,the shark tears the entire dock loose,trapping a dozen or so people on it.As Benton drives Hamer's boat back into shore,he comes across what's left of the trapped citizens,and as he helps them onto the boat,he becomes trapped himself on the floating dock.As he fends off the shark's attacks with a plank of wood,Hamer's dead body comes to the surface(from miles away,mind you)and bumps into the edge of the dock.The writer pulls his lifeless buddy onto the floating deathtrap and takes the detonator from the deceased fisherman's still-intact dynamite belt,as the shark surfaces again,and promptly eats Hamer's corpse.At this point,Benton slo-mo jumps off the flotilla (for no apparent reason)and pushes the detonator,effectively blowing the 30-plus foot predator to smithereens.Back on dry land,the writer punches out a nosy television reporter and walks off with his wife,to try and pick up the pieces of his life.

Peter Benton(James Franciscus),a writer in a wetsuit,clutching a lifeless chunk of prosciutto(Vic Morrow)to use as bait.
The late Morrow,a poor man's Quint, regularly flubs his lines,talking in nonsensical circles in spots(his slideshow speech and on-boat pep talk to Franciscus are particularly heinous/hilarious),while Franciscus,a poor man's Chief Brody,is left to improv through it as the camera rolls.The impossibly fat and conical mechanical shark(constructed by Giorgio Ferrari,but too clunky and awkward to draw comparison to the automobile of the same name!),which does an awful lot of bobbing in and out of the water,is about as menacing as swimming pool cramps.Castellari,who directed everything from westerns to post-apocalyptic set pieces,generously fills in here with ample stock footage of great whites of varying sizes,tiger sharks,nurse sharks,and bull sharks.What's-ah the difference,eh?!!The gore is plentiful and passable,albeit mostly amputated legs and poor bastards bitten in half at the waist,with a severed arm or two thrown in for good measure.It's been lumped in among the worst movies ever made in some circles,and though I really couldn't argue against that distinction here,it IS highly entertaining,and uproariously funny in the most unintentional of ways.Hunt yourself down a copy,even though on the scale it bobs to the surface flaccidly with a meager score of:

Eh,squalo!Mangiate ed ingrassate!