VOODOO DOLLS (1991) *

A girl suffering from the loss of her father goes to an all-girls boarding school and enrolls in the drama club.  Her teacher selects a weird play from an anonymous author that focuses heavily on voodoo.  As the play edges closer towards opening night, people at the school begin dying off in mysterious ways.

Voodoo Dolls had a solid premise, but other than a cool black and white flashback in the beginning, it takes way too long to unfurl its obvious and predictable premise.  You’ve got to wait a while before anything remotely horrific happens, and when it does, it’s rather tame.  The sluggish pacing, especially early on doesn’t help matters as the film is one long, dull slog.

There is at least one memorable subplot involving the main bitchy trollop’s relationship with her lesbian roommate.  When she rebuffs her roommate’s clumsy pass, the devastated girl runs off and commits suicide.  I guess it was progressive at the time to have this sort of undercurrent in the film, but unfortunately, not a whole lot is done with it.

If you’re wondering why the movie is called Voodoo Dolls, it’s because in one scene, the titular dolls attack a Peeping Tom janitor after he spies on some college girls showering a la Porky’s.  This scene is pitiful.  The dolls are basically pinned onto the actor while he flails around.  It makes Puppet Master look like Psycho by comparison.   After that, it’s back to more insufferable interminable boredom.

CREEP (2015) **

Mark Duplass stars as a guy dying of cancer.  He hires a cameraman (Patrick Brice, who also directed) online to document a day in his life so that his unborn son can spend some time with the father he never knew.  Slowly but surely, the cameraman learns Duplass is a real weirdo.

Basically, it’s My Life done as a mumblegore movie.  

This is pretty much the Mark Duplass Show through and through.  Your enjoyment of the film will probably hinge on how much you can tolerate Duplass’ mugging.  I didn’t mind him so much, it’s just that the scenes of him purposefully freaking Brice out quickly got repetitive.

Although sold as a Found Footage horror film, Creep revolves more on social awkwardness than out-and-out horror.  If Brice’s character was more of an asshole, he would’ve pushed Duplass aside and walked out the door ten minutes in.  Then again, if he did that, we wouldn’t have a movie.  Even when he receives an ominous phone demanding that he leaves the house right away, he can’t bring himself to do so.

That pretty much summed up my frustrations with the film.  The fact that Brice keeps filming once Duplass starts acting bizarre (even though he’s been paid) defies logic.  (Even when he FINALLY leaves the house, he waits FOREVER to notify the authorities after Duplass starts leaving him weird videotaped messages and odd trinkets on his doorstep.)  Of course, that’s one of the conceits we’re forced to make while watching a Found Footage flick.  As far as these things go, it must be said that the shaky-cam footage is far from the worst I’ve seen.  

Another genre pitfall is that we already know that nothing really happens in a Found Footage horror movie until the last few minutes.  The same goes for Creep.  The payoff is OK I guess, but it’s not exactly worth waiting 75 minutes for.  

Ultimately, this might’ve worked better as a short.  I might’ve been able to go along with it if it was part of a V/H/S anthology.  As it is, Creep just never clicked for me.

AKA:  Peachfuzz.  

BLOOD (1973) ** ½

Blood is one of Andy Milligan’s best movies, which is telling.  It’s a slapdash, low budget horror flick set primarily in one location that features crummy effects and inconsistent acting.  Some parts are out of focus.  Others are too dark to see.  Sometimes the actors flub their lines.  Other times their dialogue doesn’t match their lip movements.  All this makes the film more enjoyable, not less.  If you’ve ever sat through Milligan’s atrocious The Rats are Coming!  The Werewolves are Here!, this will seem like Citizen Kane by comparison.

Lawrence Orlofsky (Allen Berendt) moves his wife Regina (Hope Stansbury) and his gaggle of assistants into his ancestral home.  Almost immediately, they begin performing experiments on bloodthirsty plants to keep Regina looking youthful and vibrant.  When Lawrence starts making eyes at a pretty secretary (Pamela Adams), it sends Regina into a jealous rage.

Milligan’s Everything but the Kitchen Sink method is admirable.  Just when you start to get restless, he’ll toss in another improbable (but amusing) plot wrinkle.  (I wouldn’t dream of revealing why Orlofsky had to change his name.)  No matter how shoddy the production looks, I can’t in good conscience dismiss a movie that features mad scientists, vampires, AND man-eating plants.

Even at a relatively scant 69 minutes, the pacing starts to sag about halfway through.  The claustrophobic location doesn’t help matters either.  That said, there’s at least one memorable moment involving a mouse that will make your jaw drop.  While most of the performers are wooden and/or stilted, Stansbury is rather charming as the vampiric lady of the house.  The ending, though brief and anticlimactic makes me wish it had been on a double feature with Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein instead of the crappy Legacy of Satan.

AKA:  Black Nightmare in Blood.

STONEY (1975) *

The luscious Barbara Bouchet stars in the brain-dead lensed-in-the-Philippines stinker.  She plays the mistress of a smuggler (Michael Rennie) who gets a line on a valuable cache of jewels.  He sends Barbara to retrieve them, and naturally a lot of people come crawling out of the woodwork to get their hands on the loot. 

The promise of Bouchet naked will be the only thing to keep you watching this boring heist picture.  Even then, her nude scenes are brief and not all that titillating.  The presence of one of my all-time favorite character actors, Vic Diaz couldn’t even brighten things up.  That’s mostly because his role is minor, and his character is underwritten.  If only the filmmakers allowed Diaz to go full-tilt boogie on Bouchet.  What a treat that would’ve been.

Another problem is that the movie never tries to make Bouchet a credible action star.  Sure, she looks great while wearing a variety of vintage garments, but I bet she would’ve looked even sexier brandishing a machine gun.  Unfortunately, we’re forced to settle for a dull, British, way-past-his-prime matinee idol type to do that sort of stuff while Barbara cowers in a corner somewhere.

Most of the blame must be placed on director Wray Davis.  He never directed another movie and it’s easy to see why.  The film is painfully low on action and what action we do get is badly shot, poorly lit, and incompetently staged.  (The strobe light effect during the final double-cross is annoying as hell.)  Since most of the running time is devoted to long, boring scenes of people sitting around plotting and scheming, enjoying Stoney is a rocky proposition at best.  

AKA:  Surabaya Conspiracy.  AKA:  The Gold Seekers.

LEGACY OF SATAN (1974) * ½

Legacy of Satan was directed by Gerard Damiano, who’s probably most famous for directing The Devil in Miss Jones.  It would only follow that he would helm this horror movie about a lonely housewife (Lisa Christian) who is under the spell of a Satanist cult.  From the looks of things, it seems that this started life as a porno, but all the explicit footage was excised so it could play on the legitimate circuit.  (The frequent jump cuts and awkward edits are a dead giveaway.)  However, without any hardcore sex, the movie is a slow-moving and boring affair.  I can’t say if the presence of hardcore footage would’ve saved it.  All I know is that in its present state, Legacy of Satan ain’t much.

Legacy of Satan is reminiscent in many ways to the equally inane Lucifer’s Women.  At least that movie had some (not much) nudity.  If the synth-heavy musical score doesn’t get on your nerves, it’ll probably give you a headache.  

There’s a nugget of a good idea here, but Damiano is unable to make it work.  He films the black masses in such a shoddy manner than even the cool costumes and creative set dressing get lost in the shuffle. It’s mostly a chore to sit through and the sixty-nine-minute running time feels much longer.  

If you stick with it long enough, you’ll be treated to some OK moments.  I liked the scene where Christian is having a dream where she is lying on an altar and has a candle placed between her legs.  When she awakes, she notices she’s considerably warmer “down there”.  It starts to turn into a slasher movie near the end when Christian starts stabbing people to provide fresh blood for her master.  The ending is kind of fun, especially when her husband showed up brandishing a legit lightsaber, three full years before Star Wars.  It makes you wonder if George Lucas saw this.

HELP ME… I’M POSSESSED! (1976) ****

A doctor runs an insane asylum where he keeps a lot of women in cages and occasionally lets his hunchback assistant whip them.  His wife comes to stay with him in his mansion and is rightfully freaked out by the loonies running about.  When townsfolk start being found murdered in the nearby woods, a sheriff comes to investigate.  Gee… do you think the doctor’s crazy sister could be the cause of all this?

Help Me… I’m Possessed! would make a great double bill with Bloodsucking Freaks.  I’m not saying that because there’s an awesome scene involving a guillotine either.  It’s not quite as explicit as that flick, but it has the same anything-goes lunacy.  In some ways, it’s so reminiscent of a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie with touches of Ed Wood along the way.  Heck, there are some moments that might remind you of Manos, the Hands of Fate.

What I’m trying to say is that this is a great fucking bad movie.

The dungeon sets are cheap looking, but I wouldn’t want them to look any other way.  They’re absolutely perfect.  The scenes of women in their underwear being strung up while crazed lunatics rattle their cages will sear themselves into your brain long after you watch it. 

The POV stalking shots are a thing of beauty too.  An unseen killer slowly creeps up on unsuspecting (and sometimes suspecting) victims.  All they can do is just raise their hands and allow the red tentacled monster (or whatever the Hell it is) kill them while being splattered with the most ‘70s looking blood you’ve ever seen.

The low budget craftsmanship (or lack thereof) is endearing.  The dated costumes, groovy music, stilted acting, and awful wigs are guaranteed to put a smile on any bad movie lovers’ faces.  The surprise is, the monster effects are startlingly effective.  The writhing tentacles are similar in many ways to Rob Bottin’s effects in John Carpenter’s The Thing, even if they do resemble sentient Red Vines.

Also, no one gets possessed, says, “Help me”, or says, “Help me… I’m possessed!”, which somehow makes it all even better.

AKA:  The Possessed.

A GRIL NAMED IRON PHOENIX (1973) **

I've never known a gril named Iron Phoenix, but I did have a grill named George Foreman once.  I know, I know, the title should be A Girl Named Iron Phoenix, but I'm a stickler for calling a movie by what it says in the title credits, even if it is misspelled.  Unfortunately, the misspelled title is the most memorable thing about it.

Dock workers have been dying on the job while the company collects on the insurance money.  Iron Phoenix is sent in to investigate and uncovers a dastardly plot by the local Mob.  The big-time gangster behind it all then sends in The Four Tigers to silence her once and for all.

Things get off to a groovy start with lots of funky music, bad dubbing, and a handful of energetic fight scenes.  We also get a funny moment when Iron Phoenix catches a thief who uses chopsticks to steal money from people’s wallets.  However, once she follows him back to his “master” (a homeless Kung Fu beggar), the movie starts to fall apart.  

Look, if you’re going to call your film A Gril Named Iron Phoenix, make sure it’s going to be about the girl named Iron Phoenix.  Don’t all of a sudden make it a buddy comedy about a homeless Kung Fu master and his annoying pupil.  Let your feisty and likeable heroine fight her own battles instead of the painfully unfunny comic relief.  Don’t keep her on the sidelines watching the action.  Allow her to participate.  Even if Iron Phoenix’s role wasn’t marginalized, I’m not sure it would’ve saved the movie.  One thing is for sure, the short running time (77 minutes) doesn’t hurt.

AKA:  A Girl Named Iron Phoenix.  AKA:  A Girl Called Iron Phoenix.