HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THE LOVING TOUCH (1970) *** ½

The Loving Touch is an early movie by the director of Angel, Robert Vincent O’Neil.  It’s a little spotty and a tad predictable, but there is some truly inspired and nutty stuff to be found here.  Warts and all, it’s a minor sleaze classic. 

The opening is strong.  Marco (Frank Cuva) puts a nylon stocking over his face and rapes and strangles a woman.  He’s later arrested and his shrink Dr. Alden (Lawrence Montaigne) deduces he’s a chronic insomniac who believes he’s dreaming when he kills.  The doc has an alcoholic wife (Jo Ann Meredith) who cuts into his time with his hot mistress (Elizabeth Plumb).  When his mistress tells him the plot of The Manchurian Candidate, Dr. Alden gets the idea to program his patient into making his wife the next victim. 

O’Neil’s handling of the attack scenes is effective.  In addition to the opening, there’s a strangling in the shower, a great nude modeling scene, and some nasty necrophilia.  The standout sequence arrives when the killer chases a topless woman while red and green neon fills the room, making it resemble a trippy grindhouse giallo.  Even the simple close-ups of the killer’s stockinged face are quite unsettling.  O’Neil also delivers some unintentionally hilarious romantic interludes that play like old-timey cigarette commercials (but with T & A). 

The Loving Touch is more commonly known as The Psycho Lover, but I’m referring to it by the onscreen title, which oddly appears not once but twice during the opening credits.  Sure, you’ll see the big twist coming from a mile away.  That doesn’t detract from the experience though.  There are just too many weird moments here that are more fun to focus on.  Like the fact that Dr. Alden drives around in a little space car that looks like something out of The Jetsons.  Then there’s the ongoing discussion about a (thankfully implied) sex act involving a ketchup bottle.  The killer’s big freak out scene is pretty wild too. 

All in all, those outlandish touches make The Loving Touch worth checking out. 

AKA:  The Psycho Lover.  AKA:  Psycho Killer.  AKA:  The Lovely Touch.

THE PSYCHIC (1968) * ½

James F. Hurley wrote and produced Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Something Weird.  The next year, he decided he’d direct his own picture but kept Lewis on as cinematographer.  When the finished product couldn’t be released, Lewis swooped in and added softcore sex scenes to salvage the production. 

And what sex scenes they are!  You know you’re in for a weird movie right off the bat with the first sex scene.  Our hero is dating a married woman who doesn’t consider it cheating if she’s unconscious, so he belts her across the chin, knocks her out, and he proceeds to bang her.  Oh, did I mention the woman’s sister sits beside them eating lollipops during the act?  I know it’s the 21st century and we’re not supposed to kink shame anymore, but goddamn. 

You don’t have to be psychic to know you’re in for a bumpy ride after that. 

Anyway, Dan (Dick Gjonola) is an advertising executive who falls off a ladder, hits his head, and boom!  He’s psychic!  His new gift ruins his marriage, but luckily, he picks up a hot blonde in a bar who convinces him they could be a dynamite nightclub act.  Success soon goes to his head, and he steps on everyone that got him where he is.  Dan’s power fails him though when his daughter is kidnapped. 

This movie’s called The Psychic, but it should’ve been called The Schizo because it keeps swinging back and forth from the drama with the psychic and his family and his oddball bedroom exploits.  If you didn’t know the film’s production history, you’d swear you were watching two different movies spliced together.  I guess in a way… you are. 

At any rate, neither movie is very good.   The skin flick scenes work slightly better since they are so odd and edited into the narrative in such an awkward manner.  The psychic drama is the awful though and the resolution to the kidnapping subplot is done in extremely poor taste.  Then things wrap up with discarded short ends and outtakes for no good reason whatsoever. 

(NOTE:  I watched this as part of Halloween Hangover, but despite the participation of The Godfather of Gore, it’s definitely not a horror flick.) 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: GODZILLA MINUS ZERO (2026) ***

Godzilla Minus One was an instant classic.  It was a futile task to try and top it.  However, writer/director Takashi Yamazaki gave it his best shot.  Don’t get me wrong.  This is still a good movie.  As a follow-up to Minus One, it just comes up short.  Heck, even as a Godzilla movie it doesn’t exactly crackle.  The best thing I can say about it is when it’s firing on all cylinders, it brings to mind the magic that was Minus One. 

I will try to keep spoilers to a minimum here.  Just know that a new monster appears in Japan and our heroes from the first movie have to try to stop it.  (If you’re at all curious who the new monster is, just know a big clue to its identity is in the title.)  After the monster mutates to incredible proportions, they decide the only way to kill it is to have it face off with the newly reemerged Godzilla. 

As with Minus One, Yamazaki is more concerned with the human drama than he is with the monster mashing.  While he found the sweet spot between the two last time around, Minus Zero gets awfully bogged down with the drama in this one.  There are far too many scenes of humans, and not enough monster battles.  I will say he continues to explore the themes from the first film in a satisfying manner.  The new characters (including a meteorologist and a scientist who may or may not be trustworthy) are fine additions.  It’s just that some of the scenes drag, or worse, become repetitive.  (I lost count of how many tearful goodbyes the little girl had.)

The biggest complaint though is much more damning.  There’s not nearly enough Godzilla.  What we do get is great.  Don’t get me wrong.  The stuff with the other monster is fun too.  (I liked the early dogfight scenes.)  The final fight is rousing to be sure.  The only complaint I have about the brawl is that it’s a long time coming. 

Overall, Minus Zero is a notch or two below Minus One.  That’s usually how it is in the sequel game.  When you already start with film as good as Minus One, a notch or two below isn’t such a bad place to be. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: AXEGRINDER 2 (2019) *

I guess we couldn’t make it through a 31 Days of Horror-Ween/Halloween Hangover marathon of horror movies without coming across a Dustin Ferguson flick.  Axegrinder 2 is one of his worst.  The first one was bad, but this is the pits. 

This was one of the longest seventy-nine minutes of my life.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the film hadn’t been comprised of 80% filler.  The credits sequences go on forever, there are dreams/flashbacks to the first movie to pad out the running time, and useless prologues and epilogues further bloats things out.

You know you’re in deep shit when things stop on a goddamn dime so that annoying YouTuber Shawn C. Phillips can go into his “DVD dojo” and pick out a movie to watch.  (No, for real.)  Thankfully he gets killed off.  Unfortunately, it occurs offscreen.  Most of the kills are like that though.  They’re all build-up and no follow-through.  You wait and wait, and the only payoff you get is an offscreen death and a little blood splatter.  It’s pathetic.  Add to that the unending red tinted killer POV shots and an infuriatingly anticlimactic ending, and you have yourself the makings of one sorry slasher sequel. 

The bulk of the movie focuses on two couples camping in the woods and being stalked by a killer in a clown mask.  Had Ferguson just concentrated on this aspect of the film, it might’ve worked.  Then again, maybe not. 

The only good scene is when two hot goth chicks (Selena D. and Julie Anne Prescott) hike in the desert.  After Julie Anne stops to take a leak, they are chased by the axe-wielding psycho in the clown mask.  This sequence also contains at least one funny line.  (“Why are you topless?”)  It’s like the peanut in a proverbial piece of poop.  (Unless you count the dream the clown has where a naked chick showers, but even that is ruined by some sort of hypno-wheel effect over the camera.)

The ensuing sequels are actually kind of decent and seem like Halloween compared to this mess. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: THRILL KILL (1994) ***

Cinnamon (Christine Cavalier) wakes up and goes to work at a strip club owned by her father “Pops” (Sal Longo).  She’s set to inherit the club when she turns twenty-one and “Pops” doesn’t want that to happen.  He hires Nick (Aven Warren) to bump her off and make it look like the work of a serial killer.  Before he can do that, he decides to have some fun with Cinnamon.  They bang, then take turns spanking each other.  But will Nick ever find time to complete the job?

This W.A.V.E. movie comes from their In Dire Straits line.  It's short (only a half-hour long), but it's rather strong as the fetish material takes a backseat to the storytelling.  Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of bondage and spanking to be had.  It’s just that it works as a seedy noir story just as well as it does a bondage video.  The twist ending, while predictable, is pulled off in rather fine fashion too.  In fact, this might work as a feature if director Gary Whitson ever decides to expand and/or remake it. 

Like in many W.A.V.E. movies, the “strip club” is just a tiny stage with a stripper pole set up in someone’s basement.  (Probably Gary’s.)  That’s okay though, because little touches like these are what make W.A.V.E. films so endearing.  Oh, and while the body count is low, the serial killer subplot makes it (barely) fit the Halloween Hangover theme. 

The small cast is aces.  Sal Longo delivers a fun turn as the owner of the strip club, “Pops”.  Even though he has his daughter working in his strip club, he kind of makes it all seem perfectly normal, which is quite a feat.  Warren also puts in a fine performance as the hitman.  It’s Cavalier who’s the reason to check it out.  She looks hot wearing nothing but suspenders, panties, nylons, and heels and plays her character’s arc in a surprisingly believable manner.  Put another way, her performance in Thrill Kill will thrill you.  

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: RETURN TO BLOODY CREEK (2022) **

Laura Giglio stars as a true crime podcaster preparing an episode on the murders of Bloody Creek.  While she does research, a copycat killer wearing a pumpkin mask begins claiming new victims.  Incensed, the original killer comes out of retirement and tries to compete with the body count.  It doesn’t take long before both killers come after Giglio. 

It took nearly thirty years for W.A.V.E. founder Gary Whitson to concoct this sequel to Bloody Creek.  While I think this is a slight improvement over the original, that doesn’t exactly make it “good”.  The big problem is that even with a relatively short seventy-five-minute running time, it drags considerably.  I mean if you ever wanted to watch a couple put up a tent in real time, then this is the movie for you.  The ending is rather laborious too as Whitson piles on twist after twist with more killers being revealed than a Scream sequel. 

If you’re a fan of the W.A.V.E. method of filmmaking, it will go down smooth enough.  W.A.V.E. starlet Giglio gamely carries the movie and Debbie D is memorable as a forest ranger who gets strangled while topless.  Jacqueline Che and John Coulter give the best performances though as a pair of religious farmers who live on the property adjacent to the creek and want to keep “fornicators” off their land. 

The deaths are decent.  One victim is stabbed with a pitchfork, another is drowned, and as with the original, one of the best death scenes winds up being a dream.  You also might get a laugh from the “corpses” that move when they’re supposed to be dead. 

The biggest laugh is reserved for the hilariously bad CGI decapitation.  You know, it’s strange.  Whitson made a similar scene in the original that used much more antiquated techniques, and it looked so much better than this.  The greenscreen effects to make it look like the cops are at the police station are pretty bad too. 

I think the most amusing part though comes when Giglio accidentally falls out of a raft and into the creek.  They obviously didn’t have time to do another take, so they just rolled with it.  Sometimes in a movie like this, it’s the happy accidents that are the most entertaining. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BLOODY CREEK (1993) **

Question time:  Would YOU go camping in a place called Bloody Creek?  That’s like the actual name of the creek too.  We’re not talking about a nickname like “Camp Blood” in Friday the 13th or something like that.  It is legit called Bloody Creek.  Anyone with any sense wouldn’t go near that place.   Fortunately for us, this is a W.A.V.E. movie and sense is in short supply. 

An author is preparing a book on a series of murders.  A cop relays flashbacks to the various victims.  A girl goes hiking alone in the woods (She tells her worried mother, “I’m just going camping at a state park!  It’s not the Amazon jungle!”) and is promptly decapitated by a psycho.  Other women fall victim to the killer.  Eventually, the writer finds herself face to face with the psycho. 

The first half hour or so of Bloody Creek is pretty good.  The decapitation scene is a lot of fun, but it’s a shame that the other big gore scene just winds up being a dream sequence.  I have a feeling that if this had just been one of the company’s half-hour shorts, it might’ve been a winner. 

It’s not until the focus switches over to the killer’s perspective that the wheels begin to fall off.  It also takes a good hour to get to the creek (it looks more like a giant mud puddle) and once we finally do, it’s not particularly all that bloody.  The pacing really drags in the back end of the picture too, and the double twist ending was also unnecessary as it eats up a lot of screen time. 

You know, for a company who makes disreputable movies by mail, this one is awfully chaste.  Any time a girl gets naked, we just see her from the back.  That’s fine and all, but if you don’t intend to show any nudity, then why make the sex scenes go on for so damned long?  (There is a brief nip slip elsewhere in the film though.)

Overall, Bloody Creek isn’t bloody awful.  It just shoots its wad way too early.  The dialogue is kinda funny though.  A beleaguered cop gets the best line when he finds a needle mark on a corpse’s butt and says, “You don’t take intravenous drugs through your ass!”