THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES 4: THE FINAL OUTRAGE (1986) ***

Devil in Miss Jones 4 was shot back-to-back with Part 3, and without the credits and filler scenes from Part 3, it’s only an hour long.  They honestly would’ve worked just fine as one film as it picks up exactly where the last one left off.  I guess the world wasn’t ready for a two-and-a-half-hour porno in 1986.  I guess you can’t exactly blame the Dark Brothers for splitting it up.  Besides, why make money off one Devil in Miss Jones sequel when you can make it off two?

Before she can go any further in Hell, Miss Jones (once again played by Lois Ayres) has to give a blowjob to a weird dude who keeps repeating, “Suck me!” over and over.  She then proceeds room to room, watching various forms of taboo fucking, accompanied once again by her jive-talking tour guide (Jack Baker) who keeps trying to remind her she’s dead and this is indeed Hell.  Surely, this has to be just a dream.  Right?

There’s less plot than ever in this one.  Basically, Miss Jones just keeps stumbling upon more and more people balling while she looks on incredulously.  The talking head interviews are kept to a minimum this time out (there’s a literal talking head that pops up at one point, but never mind), which is much appreciated, so there’s less bullshit to get in the way of the fucking.  

The sex scenes are wilder too.  There’s a scene with Ron Jeremy (who was also in Part 2 playing a different role) in a diaper that has to be seen to be believed.  There’s also a “Taboo Room” where racists are forced to fuck minorities till the end of time.  It all leads up to a big incest scene with Miss Jones banging her father.  (“Can we play the naked fun game again, daddy?”)

Once again, the Dark Brothers up the ante on the bizarre lunacy.  While it functions just fine on the basest level of a down and dirty porno, they bring an anything goes vibe to the picture that makes it well worth watching on its own merits.  Sure, it’s not quite in the same league as the original, but there’s enough WTF moments here to make it a classic in its own right.   

BLACK BUTTERFLY (2017) *

Antonio Banderas stars as an author with a severe case of writer’s block who secludes himself in his remote cabin in the woods to work on his next book.  Through sheer boredom (I guess), he picks up a drifter (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and lets him stay at the cabin in exchange for some handyman type duties.  The drifter tries to help him work on the book and Antonio is perturbed when he suggests, “You should tell OUR story!”  Eventually, the dude goes nuts and holds Banderas and his realtor/girlfriend (Piper Perabo) hostage in the cabin.  

Black Butterfly features less movie in it than most movies I’ve seen in a long time.  If it was packed in a shipping facility, it would be 95% Styrofoam peanuts.  In fact, watching a box full of Styrofoam peanuts might be preferable to this stupefying, dawdling mess.  Heck, even the 5% of actual movie you do get is pretty crappy.  

No one acts like a real human being, which is the big problem.  Who would allow a total stranger (and a creepy one at that) that already displays a flair for having a hot temper to stay with you?  Even when he starts brandishing a shotgun, Banderas just kind of goes with it.  I mean, you find out the reason EVENTUALLY, but when you do, it’s just plain contrived.  Not to mention stupid.

You know, for a while I thought Black Butterfly was going for one of those Fight Club endings.  That was giving it too much credit though as the movie isn’t nearly that clever.  Wait till you see the ending they DID come up with.  Just when you think it can’t get any worse along comes the final twist that’s so infuriating, you’ll want to make like Rhys-Meyers and hold the writer of the film at gunpoint.  

IT CHAPTER 2 (2019) ** ½

It remains my favorite Stephen King book.  Because of that, the “half the story” bullshit It Chapter 1 pulled kind of stuck in my craw.  I mean if they were going to only go halfsies on the book, they could’ve at least kept the original structure, going back and forth between the young Losers and the middle-aged Losers as they do battle with the evil Pennywise the clown (Bill Skarsgard).  Now along comes It Chapter 2, which retains the structure of the book, keeping the young Losers around for flashbacks and/or repressed memories.  This is even more frustrating because… well… it works.  Why couldn’t they have just done this right from the get-go?  Maybe somewhere down the road director Andy Muschietti will re-edit both films to fit the book’s framework a la Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather.  Till that day, both Chapters of It will be a near-miss for me.

The movie works up to a point, thanks to the expertly cast players, who do just as good of a job (if not better) playing the Losers as the young cast did in the first film.  James McAvoy makes for an ideal leader (thanks to his day job playing Professor X in the X-Men franchise), Jessica Chastain (who was also in Dark Phoenix with McAvoy) brings the same winning vibrance her younger counterpart (Sophia Lillis) brought to Chapter 1, and Bill Hader is the perfect match for Finn Wolfhard’s hilarious, foulmouthed Richie.  The only Loser who didn’t quite click for me was Isaiah Mustafa, mostly because I kept expecting him to jump into his role of the Old Spice guy at the most inopportune time.

The acting is top-notch, and Muschietti does a fine job making the town of Derry have a life of its own, but the overreliance shitty CGI monsters pretty much sinks every opportunity for genuine scares.  It doesn’t help that the monsters themselves (naked old women, eyeball bugs, clown spiders, etc.) are uniformly terrible.  Scenes that call more for atmosphere than computer trickery (like the bleachers scene or the mirror maze sequence) are far more effective.  The build-up to these moments is handled just fine.  It’s when the obviously phony monsters come lurching about, you just kind of shrug in indifference than recoil in horror.  Skarsgard’s performance is a bit of an improvement over the last movie (either he toned down the annoying clown voice or I’m just slowly becoming accustomed to it), although he’s far from what you would call scary. 

The worst bit comes during a blatant rip-off of one of the most iconic scenes from John Carpenter’s The Thing.  Except instead of the awesome practical effects of The Thing, they just use some more shitty CGI.  If you’re going to do a Thing homage, at least have the common decency to use practical effects.  Using CGI to recreate The Thing is downright blasphemous.  

The best scare comes early in the movie.  Usually in these films, they use a cat jumping into frame to give the audience a cheap jump scare.  In It Chapter 2, Muschietti trades the cat for… Peter Bogdanovich!?!  Let me tell you, purple ascots are scarier than red balloons any day.  

Speaking of cameos that immediately take you out of the movie, we also get a completely gratuitous cameo by the man himself, Stephen King.  This is King’s biggest role since Creepshow and while it’s kind of fitting, I guess, he’s not particularly good.  It’s not a patch on his fine performance in Maximum Overdrive, that’s for damn sure.  

There’s also a lot of meta commentary about how the endings of McAvoy’s stories always suck, which is a thinly veiled allusion to King’s endings.  It’s not so much as commentary now that I think about it. It’s more like the screenwriters were preparing you for the sucky ending they cooked up.  There are also more false endings here than in Return of the King.  To avoid that same mistake, I’ll quit this review while I’m ahead.

SARTANA IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH (1970) **

William Berger stars as Lee Calloway (who is definitely NOT Sartana, although they dress similarly), a rugged bank robber who accepts a job busting some tough hombres out of prison.  He only asks for half of the gold they have squirreled away in Death Valley from a previous heist.  Naturally, his partners double cross Lee, leave him for dead, and take off across the desert.  After Lee gets back on his feet, he follows the bad guys in hot pursuit, waiting for the precise moment to exact his revenge.

Berger gets a memorable scene early on where he notices his wanted poster and crosses out the reward and writes in a higher number.  It’s a nice way to establish his antihero character.  So does the opening shootout, which uses simple, but effective editing techniques to maximize the suspense. Too bad the theme song sounds less like a Spaghetti Western tune and more like something you’d hear a below average lounge lizard belt out on an off night.  

Like most Spaghetti Westerns, Sartana in the Valley of Death uses one of my favorite genre clichés where the villains rough up our hero and he has to think fast and heal quickly before he can make his comeback.  Once Berger (who was also in the official Sartana movie, If You Meet Sartana… Pray for Your Death) follows his quarry into the desert, the movie practically stops on a dime.  The endless scenes of him stumbling through the desert gets dull awful fast and help negate the admittedly fun set-up.  In fact, the further the film strays from its central plot, the better it is.  The subplot with a horny frontier lady luring Berger with sex in order to get the reward is more amusing than anything the main plot line has to offer. 

Berger gets the best line of the movie when he guns a bad guy down and says, “He looked for gold, but only found lead!” 

AKA:  Ballad of Death Valley.  AKA:  Sartana in the Valley of Vultures.

THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES 3: A NEW BEGINNING (1986) ***

The Dark Brothers made some of the most outrageous porn movies of the ‘80s, so they were a perfect fit to pick up the torch of the Devil in Miss Jones series.  Lois Ayres takes over the role of Miss Jones from Georgina Spelvin and instantly makes it her own.  Gone is the mousy housewife of the ‘70s.  This Miss Jones is a tough-talking, spunky, and no-nonsense sexpot with a punk rock hairdo and an attitude to match.  

Miss Jones gets picked up by a man (Paul Thomas) at a singles bar one night.  He bangs her so hard that when she hits her head on the headboard of her bed, she dies and goes to Hell.  Once there, her jive-talking pimp guide (Jack Baker) escorts her through the many rooms of hellish sexual delight as she searches for a way out.  

Ayers is excellent, and she and Baker (who got his start in real movies like The Kentucky Fried Movie) have a lot of chemistry together.  Baker is very funny and practically steals the film, despite being a non-sex performer.  The rest of the cast, including Amber Lynn (who does “the dance of the double dong”), Tom Byron (as Miss Jones’ cheating boyfriend), and Vanessa Del Rio (who gets gangbanged) are also enjoyable and make the most of their brief screen time. 

Director Gregory Dark delivers on the bizarre, outrageous sex scenes.  The weirdest scene features two people fucking while dressed like horses as sounds of hooves pounding play in the background.  The “plot” stuff is really thin (the on-camera interviews with people talking about Miss Jones feel more like filler than anything else), and the non-ending (“cliffhanger” is the wrong word) is frustrating as it merely sets up Part 4.  (Scenes of the next installment help to further pad out the running time).  Despite these debits, as a madcap slice of ‘80s WTF XXX, it remains highly entertaining.  

The fun music was stolen from other Dark Brothers productions, such as New Wave Hookers and Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout White Chicks.

DJANGO DEFIES SARTANA (1970) **

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “Mitch, didn’t you just watch and review a crappy Django/Sartana team-up/rip-off?  Why would you put yourself through that again?”  Well, I have always had a weakness for Spaghetti Westerns, and my fondness for them (even the bad ones, of which there are many) has only ripened in my old age.  You know the experiment with the mouse that gets an electric shock every time he tries to take a bite of cheese, but he keeps goes back for another bite of cheese, even if it causes him great pain?  That’s kind of like me and Spaghetti Westerns—and the cheesier the Spaghetti, the better.

Django (Tony Kendall) thinks Sartana (George Ardisson) killed his brother and tries to get revenge.  He eventually learns Sartana had nothing to do with it and the pair earns each other’s respect.  They then agree to team up and go after the real killer. 

If that’s a sparse plot rundown, I apologize.  There’s really not a whole lot to this one.  In fact, it’s kind of slow moving, and frankly, a bit boring in spots. 

At least the cinematography is lush, which helps to keep you from completely nodding off.  First-time director Pasquale Squitieri gives us lots of deep reds and eye-popping yellows (some parts look like a giallo), not to mention a couple handsome desert vistas.  Ardisson and Kendall don’t have much chemistry to speak of, but it’s Jose Torres who steals the movie as their machete wielding mute sidekick (appropriately named “Mute”).  Django and Sartana got dozens of cheap rip-offs and spin-offs throughout the years, so I’m not sure why Mute didn’t get one of his own.  He certainly deserved it.

AKA:  Django Against Sartana.  AKA:  Django Challenges Sartana.

CORPSE GRINDERS 2 (2000) *

A dying race of cat people leave their home planet of Ceta to live life anew on Earth.  Meanwhile, a pair of knuckleheads try to get their uncles’ old cat food plant up and running again.  To turn their sagging business around, they take to using the old family recipe, which if you saw the first Corpse Grinders, involves stealing dead bodies, grinding them up, and putting them in the cat food. 

Corpse Grinders 2 is the film that gave exploitation director Ted V. Mikels a second wind.  At the ripe age of 71, he set out sequelizing his back catalogue of films, which allowed him to work till his dying day.  As far as his twenty-first century movies go, it’s probably the worst one I’ve seen.  

That doesn’t mean I don’t admire the spirit Mikels put into these pictures.  I like the fact that Planet Ceta is nothing more than Mikels’ house (which will be familiar to you if you’ve seen his other films).  And if you’ve seen Mikels’ house, you know it looks like it’s on another planet to begin with, which makes it perfect. 

The original was a minor classic that at least had an off-kilter plot and a touch of WTF charm about it. This twenty-nine years later sequel has little of that old time Mikels magic to go around, I’m afraid.  Like his latter-day Astro-Zombies sequels, it’s too long (102 minutes) and has way too many characters and subplots.  The whole alien subplot is particularly useless, and the opening CGI alien dogfight looks like something out of a PlayStation game. 

It also takes a long time before the cats start going crazy and turning on their owners.  The scenes of bodies being sent through the grinder still work (love the close-ups of the meat coming out of the machine), but these highlights are few and far between.  Mostly, it’s just a long, dull slog.

Another debit is the amateurish cast.  Some are clearly reading right off their script (and not even going through the trouble to hide it), and none of them can keep your attention during their long, painful dialogue scenes.  Cult legends Dolores (Glen or Glenda?) Fuller and Liz (Desperate Living) Renay show up briefly, but they’re not given a whole lot to do.  Mikels himself plays a professor and easily gives the best performance of the movie.

The thing that really sends Corpse Grinders 2 into the shitter is the ending.  All the plotlines threaten to come together, as if the film is leading up to a big reveal… and then it… doesn’t.  Oh well.  Maybe the answers I seek will come to pass in Corpse Grinders 3.