WITCHFINDER (1989) *** ½

Witchfinder is one of the best W.A.V.E. movies I’ve seen so far.  It’s in films like these where you can tell that had he been given a bigger budget, director Gary Whitson could’ve had a decent career working for “The Man”.  Luckily for us, Gary remained fiercely independent and kept making stuff like this in his backyard. 

Pamela Sutch asks Laura Giglio, “Are you aware of the cult murders that occurred over the last decade and a half?”, which prompts a flashback.  Clancey McCauley presides over a Satanic ritual.  One of her frightened followers says, “She’s gonna kill a man!  It was different when it was a chicken or a goat, but this is a real human being!”

Soon after, a killer goes around offing cult members (who proudly wear their “Satan Lives” T-shirts) in the manner befitting a witch.  Women are drowned in a swimming pool, burned at the stake, hung in a barn, and … uh… electrocuted.  Well, I know electricity hadn’t been invented during the time of the Salem Witch Trials, but if it was, you can bet your ass they would’ve used it on witches. 

An interesting wrinkle is that it is the cult members who are the ones being killed.  Usually in these types of things, they are the ones perpetrating the violence.  In Witchfinder, it's the Satanists who are the victims, which I thought was kind of inspired.  The film also has a good twist or two up its sleeve. 

All this adds up to one of W.A.V.E.’s best both in terms of WTF entertainment and as a solid slice of low budget filmmaking.  If you’ve ever been skittish to watch a W.A.V.E. movie because of their reputation, I’d say start with this one.  It’s only an hour long and it zips along at a steady pace.  It also shows that Whitson, who also has a sizable role (and gloriously overacts) had a bit more craftsmanship in him than most people give him credit for.  Don’t worry, there’s still all the chloroforming and bondage scenes you’d expect and/or hope for in a W.A.V.E. movie.  It’s just nice to see him delivering a flick that checks all the boxes. 

HOUSEBOAT HORROR (1989) **

A film crew descends on a small Australian resort town to shoot a rock video at a lake.  They rent a couple of houseboats, dock them at the shore, and begin rocking out.  Little do they know there’s a hideously burned killer lurking in the woods who’s just itching to hack them up. 

Houseboat Horror is a no-budget Australian shot on video slasher flick.  Aussies has been cranking out Ozploitation movies for years, so it’s no surprise they would wet their beak in this sort of thing.  It’s uneven as hell, but it’s really no better or worse than countless similar slashers found on stateside video store shelves at the time.  At least the shot-on-video cinematography is a lot better than most of the stuff you’d see in America. 

The thick accents and poor sound make it hard to hear/understand some of the dialogue and the scenes of the crew members and bandmates dicking around on the boat are kind of hard to sit through.  Also, the shots of the various houseboats out on the water feel like padding.  A lot of screen time is devoted to shots of the killer’s boots as he traipses around the woods too.  All this makes for an awfully sluggish start. 

On the plus side, the skin quotient is decent, and the body count is relatively high, which makes up for some of the film’s more irritating aspects.  Although there are a lot of offscreen kills, the gore still manages to be kind of fun.  We get a stake through the neck, an axe to the head, throat slashing, a horseshoe to the face, a speargun to the stomach, and a pipe through the chest, along with some other assorted stabbings and hackings.  The highlight is a cool scene where a head is split down the middle with a machete. 

The centerpiece music video is appropriately cheesy.   It just falls short of being one of those “so bad it’s good” deals.  The same can be said for the movie.  It is pretty random though.  I mean nothing quite captures the excess of the rock n’ roll lifestyle like… (checks notes) a houseboat. 

AMITYVILLE TURKEY DAY (2024) *

The world needs more Thanksgiving-themed horror movies.  It doesn’t necessarily need more fake Amityville movies.  So, I guess it’s like a monkey’s paw kind of thing to find something like Amityville Turkey Day wallowing in the depths of Tubi.   

A group of filmmakers arrive at a house in Amityville to shoot a movie about a cannibal therapist who lived in the actual home.  During filming, a killer turkey with a foul mouth (see what I did there?) arrives on the scene and begins bumping off members of the cast and crew. 

Amityville Turkey Day starts off with a shit load of backstory and testimonials filmed by people on their phones.  It took me a while to realize this was actually a sequel to something.  I did some digging and learned it follows a film called Amityville Thanksgiving.  I haven’t seen that one but judging from Amityville Turkey Day I’m surprised anyone was asking for seconds.

You know, it’s funny.  At the start of this review I thought there was only one Thanksgiving related Amityville movie.  Now I know there are two.  I’m sure they will probably have another one in production by the time I finish writing this. 

Anyway, those opening scenes are tedious and get the movie off to a rough start.  The only moments where it threatens to come to life is during the scenes with the turkey.  Of course, it’s a blatant rip-off of Thankskilling, but it’s like I always say, if you’ve got to steal from somewhere, steal from the best.  I guess it was just too much to ask that the turkey’s kills be memorable or that its wisecracks be funny.  (Sometimes they don’t even make sense.) 

The film-within-a-film scenes are pretty painful, but not as painful as the shit with the crew members bitching and arguing with each other.  The unintentional humor isn’t funny, and the intentional shit is even worse (there’s a Harvey Weinstein joke).  All in all, Amityville Turkey Day is truly a turkey, and that’s no jive.   

AKA:  Amityville Thanksgiving 2.

PLAY DIRTY (2025) ***

When I heard Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s Shane Black and Robert Downey, Jr. were reuniting to make a Parker movie, I was overjoyed.  Black’s The Nice Guys is one of the best movies of the last decade, and the Parker books is one of my all-time favorite crime series.  Then, I didn’t hear anything about the project for a while.  When I heard RDJ was replaced by Mark Wahlberg, I was a bit dismayed.  (Downey still hung around and served as producer.)  Not that he’s terrible or anything.   I just couldn’t really see him as Parker.  (To be fair, Downey wasn’t exactly perfect casting either, but I think he could’ve made it work if he dialed down his schtick.)  The good news is Wahlberg fares well enough in the role.  If you go in hoping for a better than average Marky Mark movie, I’d say you’d get your money’s worth. 

The opening robbery scene is a perfect amalgamation of author Donald E. Westlake’s hardboiled style and Black’s brand of humorous violence.  The heist goes off the rails in record time and sometimes in jaw-dropping manner.  This sequence was so much fun that I was pretty much with it from then on.  Heck, I could even admit Marky Mark was OK in the lead. 

In true Parker fashion, our antihero gets ripped off after the score and goes out for revenge.  He hesitates to pull the trigger when the thief who betrayed him (Rosa Salazar from Alita:  Battle Angel) offers to cut him in on an even bigger caper:  Stealing a billion in gold from a small South American country. 

Black surrounds Wahlberg with a top-notch crew of supporting characters.  He gives them the majority of the comic dialogue so Wahlberg can still (more or less) be the stoic leading man.  Lakeith Stanfield is funny as his partner in crime who only steals to support his independent theater productions.  Black’s co-stars from The Predator, Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane are also fun as members of the crew, and Tony Shaloub is amusingly cranky as the head of “The Outfit”. 

Oh, and if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Black like me, you may or may not fist-pump just at the sight of Christmas decorations.  

Do I wish Play Dirty was more faithful to the character?  Sure.  Did I absolutely enjoy myself? Yup.  Ultimately, Play Dirty is breezy, funny, and violent fun.  It’s rough when it needs to be.  It’s funny when it wants to be.  

I mean, it’s not perfect.  The CGI during the big train derailment scene is a bit wonky.  That said, I enjoyed myself.  Overall, I liked it about as much as Wahlberg’s underrated Spenser reboot. 

I think most fans of the literary Parker have come to terms with the fact we may never get a film adaptation that accurately captures the character’s ruthlessness.  (Mel Gibson probably came the closest in Payback.)  We just hope they are good enough on their own merits until someone else gets a chance to do it right. 

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR (1973) *** ½

Ana (Emma Cohen) is devastated when she finds her overprotective father (Howard Vernon) has committed suicide.  She immediately calls off her wedding and begins playing piano in jazz clubs.  Soon, the voice of her father calls to her from an antique mirror urging her to kill any man who shows interest in her. 

Slow, moody, and sometimes beautiful, The Other Side of the Mirror is a reminder what Jess Franco could do with a little time on his side, a little money in his pocket, and a sturdy script to work with (or at least an intriguing idea).  It’s much more arty than it is exploitative.  (There is some nudity, but nothing approaching the sleaziness the man is known for.)  Like the music the heroine plays, the plot moves like jazz.  It’s loose, freeform, and takes some unexpected detours here and there.  Nevertheless, it has a groovy rhythm, and it’s quite rewarding if you’re patient.  It contains some dreamlike passages and a few haunting moments, which is indicative of what Franco was capable of when he was firing on all cylinders. 

Cohen is quite good as the heroine who seems to spiral whenever a man begins making advances toward her.  Vernon also makes a memorable impression in a small amount of screen time.  The weight of his few scenes in the early going cast a shadow over Cohen’s character.  He remains a striking presence throughout the film long after he's kicked the bucket. 

Sure, The Other Side of the Mirror has some pacing problems.  I mean, we didn’t need to see Cohen’s jazz numbers in their entirety.  That’s a small quibble because when the movie cooks, it’s some gourmet shit.  This is one of Jess Franco’s best.  It’s one that film scholars and Franco aficionados alike can probably agree on. 

Franco also has a cameo as a musician in the jazz club. 

AKA:  The Obscene Mirror.  AKA:  Inside a Dark Mirror.

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE II (1996) *

I don’t know why they waited forty-three years to make a sequel to It Came from Outer Space.  They should’ve waited longer.  It Came from Outer Space?  It should go back there. 

I guess it’s not really a sequel since it doesn’t feature any of the same characters.  (In an incredible cost-cutting move, it reuses the same opening titles from the 1953 original movie, just with a superimposed red Roman numeral II.)  That’s the first red flag.  The second red flag is that it was written by Jim and Ken Wheat, who also wrote another years later sequel, The Birds II:  Land’s End, which like this turd also went straight to cable.  This one is better than The Birds 2, but that’s like saying meteor shit is better than bird shit. 

Oh, and it was produced by Tony Dow.  Yes, as in Wally from Leave It to Beaver!  What the fuck?

Brian (King Kong Lives) Kerwin stars as a photographer who returns to his small desert hometown to take some pictures.  One day, he and his young dirt-bike-riding sidekick photograph a strange object that landed out in the desert.  While he tries to figure out what the heck it is, the blue rock lures people inside of it and swaps them out for evil alien doubles. 

It’s funny they reuse the opening meteor crash from the original since that’s probably the best effect in the movie.  I mean, wait until you see the shitty looking CGI storms and cheesy morphing effects.  I know it was the mid-‘90s and all, but… sheesh. 

It’s also hopelessly tame, even for cable TV.  Heck, it could probably run on network television with no edits.  Not only is it weak sauce up and down, it takes forever before anything even happens.  Even then, it’s painfully anticlimactic. 

The cast tried, but the deck was stacked against them from the start.  Kerwin makes for a bland but serviceable hero.   Elizabeth Pena (who deserves better) is good as the single mom to the dirt bike kid.  We also have Bill McKinney, Dean Norris, and The Love Boat’s Lauren Tewes, who is seen watching pornos in one scene.  (They sure couldn’t have shown John Agar doing THAT in the original!)

HARD ‘N HEAVY BABES 1991 VIDEO CALENDAR (1990) ** ½

Hard ‘n Heavy Babes 1991 Video Calendar was a companion tape to the Hard ‘n Heavy series of heavy metal and hard rock VHS compilation tapes.  There are twelve models (one per month) who are interviewed while posing in swimsuits and/or revealing outfits.  Some of the activities they participate in include waking on the beach, relaxing in hot tubs, doing Kung Fu, and waterskiing.  The interview segments are more in-depth than you might expect.  Of course, there’s the typical “what’s your ideal man” kind of chit-chat, but we get to learn what makes some of these girls tick in a relatively short amount of time.  Other models are into motorcycle racing, Rock ‘n Roll, riding horses, fishing, and shooting guns.  Unfortunately, the ratio of “getting to know you” stuff and the modeling scenes is about 50/50, which is kind of bad news if you just want some gratuitous bikini footage. 

Most of the modeling segments are backed by bland “Monster Ballad” style of rock songs.  Because of that, the whole “Hard ‘n Heavy” title is a bit of a misnomer.  It really should’ve been called “Softcore and Lightweight”.  I’m not only speaking from the music standpoint, but from the modeling stuff as this is more of a bikini and cheesecake tape than anything else.  While shots of models rubbing suntan lotion on themselves and skinny dipping are kind of sexy, nothing is shown.  (Unless you count the one segment that features a model doing yoga in a see-thru wet T-shirt.)

So, if you’re hoping for something along the line of a Playboy video, you’re probably going to be disappointed.  However, if you enjoy bikini babe calendar videos like this, you’ll probably dig it.  The best segment is with Miss October, former Penthouse Pet of the Year, Shelia Kennedy.  She also gets the best line in the entire tape:  “I’m an extremely oral person!”