THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #5: SATANIC SECT: THE LORD’S ENVOY (1989) ** ½

(Streamed via Azteca Mas)

A priest (Joaquin Cordero) seems to be losing his grip on his flock.  Things grow even more desperate when a smooth-talking Satanic priest (German Robles from the Nostradamus movies) comes into town and begins luring his parishioners away.  I mean, how can a priest expect to compete when the Satanist is performing miracles in the street?  As he begins to amass a larger following, the Satanic seducer takes to ravaging the local girls and sacrificing them.  Not only that, but his presence seems to be causing a rash of murders and suicides throughout the town.  Can the heroic man of the cloth stop the slimy Satanic priest before it’s too late?

Satanic Sect:  The Lord’s Envoy is buoyed by a great performance by Robles (would you expect anything less?) as the evil priest.  With his solemn eyes, sinister smile, and impeccably groomed beard, he sorta resembles F. Murray Abraham.  The movie overall can be kind of slow at times, but his performance keeps it from slipping away.  

Director Arturo (The Macabre Legends of the Colonies) Martinez does a good job contrasting the main characters’ preaching styles by cutting back and forth during their sermons.  He also delivers a great gory ritual scene that would make Herschell Gordon Lewis proud.  Robles rips a girl’s heart out, cuts it up into tiny pieces, and then gives his followers blood-drenched hosts.  I wish there were more of these kinds of gory set pieces throughout the film, but I’ll take what I can get.

Satanic Sect:  The Lord’s Envoy doesn’t always work, but I had fun picking apart how Mexican horror movies (or at least this one) of the era compared to their American counterparts.  The young ladies in the cast play mostly the same kind of cliched characters you’d find in American horror films at the time.  However, their courtship practices are uniquely Mexican.  I’m thinking specifically of the scene where a young girl’s boyfriend surprises her at her window with a Mariachi band in tow.  Scenes like this also harken back to the golden age of Mexican horror when the plot would stop cold for an all-out musical number.  You wouldn’t see that shit in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, that’s for sure! 

THE BIG BUST-OUT (1973) ***

Convicts in a hellhole women’s prison (are there any other kind?) are subjected to abuse by horny, lecherous matrons who punish them, strip them bare, and give them body cavity searches.  The prisoners are given work release at a nearby convent where the nuns look over the “poor lost souls”.  The convent also has sheiks as armed guards (?) who the girls seduce and knock unconscious in order to perform their big bust-out.  Sister Maria (Monica Teuber) feels like they’ll need some guidance during their prison break, so she tags along with the prisoners who flee the convent disguised as nuns!  They shack up with a badass (Vonetta McGee) for a time, but her boyfriend sells the whole lot to a white slaver (Gordon Mitchell)!  When the boat captain (Tony Kendall) refuses to run girls on his boat, he blows up the dock and takes off with the convicts in tow.  

(All of this takes place in the first twenty minutes, by the way.)

This Italian-German co-production is a mix of Women in Prison, Nunsploitation, and drive-in action.  It opens up like your typical sleazy WIP movie before turning into a sort of ‘70s sexploitation version of Girls Town.  I guess you could say the plot is choppy, but it moves like lightning, so who cares, especially when it’s full of women taking showers, skinny-dipping, getting into fistfights and shootouts, and being stripped down and whipped by little people.  Because it’s all over the place, it often feels like a smorgasbord of exploitation cliches in search of a plot.  However, it never stays on one subgenre too long, which makes it perfect for late-night viewing.  

Director Ernst Ritter (Jungle Warriors) von Theumer doesn’t have much in the way of style, but he knows how to keep the movie going.  It certainly isn’t boring and von Theumer is never shy about pouring on the sleazy cliches.   In fact, it’s probably less successful once it settles down from all the genre-hopping and becomes a desert action movie in the third act.  Still, the scant seventy-minute running time coupled with the breakneck pace of the first forty-five minutes or so makes this well worth a watch for connoisseurs of Women in Prison flicks.

AKA:  Crucified Girls of San Ramon.  AKA:  3 Bastards and 7 Sins.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #4: ONE MISSED CALL 2 (2005) **

(Streamed via AsianCrush)

Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call was an OK variation on The Ring.  Instead of a ghostly girl bumping off people who watched a haunted videotape, it featured a ghostly girl killing people who answered a cursed phone call.  This sequel (directed by Renpei Tsukamoto, who primarily works in television) picks up one year later with another circle of friends receiving mysterious phone calls.  Shortly after answering them, they die in gruesome ways.  A detective (Renji Ishibashi) teams up with a journalist (Asaka Seto) to investigate the deaths.  

Like its predecessor, One Missed Call starts off on the right foot.  The opening death scene works rather well, and the revelation of the body is well done.  Again, as with the first movie, it bogs down once the characters start snooping into the ghostly girl’s past.  That’s okay though, because some of the other horrific sequences aren’t too shabby.  There’s a nifty scene where the spectral sister shows up during a video chat, as well as a low-tech, but effective shower sequence.  Coming from someone who isn’t typically a fan of J-Horror, I have to say these moments work.  

While the first act is a solid piece of J-Horror, the flick kind of hits a wall as it enters the middle section.  It’s here where the characters team up to take a field trip to Taiwan to search for the source of the diabolical phone call.  It’s also here where my interest started to wane as this stretch of the film was devoid of creepy murder set pieces and had a heavy concentration of dull police work/journalism investigation scenes.

Once the horror finally begins ramping up again, it hews a bit too close to its inspirations to be all that effective.  The scene involving the well suffers from major déjà vu from The Ring and the scene where a dead girl crawls down a flight of stairs is an awful lot like The Grudge.  Maybe if One Missed Call 2 had found something original to do with the genre, it might’ve been worthwhile.  Despite the promising beginning, you might find yourself wanting to hang up on this one.

AKA:  The Call 2.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #3: DEADLY INSTINCTS (1997) **

(Streamed via The Archive)

A meteor crash lands at a small college.  Aboard the meteor are two passengers:  One, a slimy Giger-inspired extraterrestrial monster.  The other, a scarred (but still sexy) space babe (Kadamba Simmons) who dresses like a fetish model in a cheap bondage video.  When a professor (Todd Jensen) and his teacher’s pet, Louise (Samantha Womack) are attacked by the creature, they call the cops, who of course, don’t believe their story.  Meanwhile, the alien puts a bunch of coeds in a trance and leads them down into his lair down in the sewer where it turns them into mind-controlled zombies.  It’s then up to the professor and his arm candy to head into the sewer to save humanity.

Deadly Instincts is sort of a loose remake of Tim Kincaid’s Breeders.  (It was even released in some markets with that title.)  Unfortunately, it never comes close to matching that classic’s knack for sheer trashiness.  While it occasionally flirts with Skinamax territory (like the lengthy girls’ locker room scene), it often comes up short when the chips are down.  By suggesting more than it delivers (something the original Breeders can’t be accused of), it’s ultimately a letdown.  The elongated sequence where a bunch of dimwitted cops go into the sewer to hunt the monster also gets in the way of the fun as it seemingly goes on forever and offers very little in the way of gore or suspense.  

The cast is just meh.  Although Simmons looks hot, she is given very little to do.  Womack on the other hand is given too much to do as her transformation from sexpot coed to mind-controlled zombie to Ripley-inspired gun-toting badass is laughable.  Jensen makes for a dull and forgettable leading man.  

The inept CGI meteor special effects in the opening scenes had me fearing the worst as they resemble a screen saver for Windows 98.  Thankfully, the monster suit isn’t too bad, although it’s a bit clunky.  The gooey slop he covers his lady friends in is kinda gross too.  In the end, the derivative beastie is the most memorable thing about the movie.  

AKA:  Breeders.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #2: CITY OF BLOOD (1987) **

(Streamed via B-Movie TV)

I have fond memories of seeing the video box for City of Blood at our local mom and pop video store back in the ‘80s.  Despite the memorable image of the screaming skull superimposed over the skyline of the city, I somehow never wound up renting it.  That might be for the best because if I watched it as a ten-year-old, I may have written it off as “boring”.  As an adult, I still think it’s pretty dull, but I can at the very least appreciate the fact that it was trying to do something a little different.

A medical examiner (Joe Stewardson) is investigating a rash of grisly prostitute murders in South Africa.  The culprit seems to be the ghost of a two-thousand-year-old witch doctor who is using the ladies of the night as human sacrifices.  Another decidedly less supernatural possibility:  Corrupt officials are using the killings to cover up murders committed by the local dirty cops.

Say what you will about City of Blood, but it has more on its mind than just your average slasher.  There’s a layer of local subtext here that I’m sure went over American audiences’ heads.  The fact the hero is an old guilt-ridden white man is supposed to be symbolic of the South African people’s changing feelings of apartheid.  Although that aspect might not quite seem apparent to some Yanks, at least it gives it a unique identity that helps separate it from the glut of late ‘80s slashers that populated video store shelves.  

Director Darrell Roodt gives the film an odd atmosphere that keeps things interesting from a visual standpoint, even when the pacing drags.  The occasional moody moment works as standalone set pieces.  One such scene finds our hero waking up screaming from a nightmare.  He then recounts his dream to his wife, and when the camera later pulls back, we see she was just a figment of his imagination.  

Unfortunately, the movie bogs down when the plot veers away from the hooker murders and begins focusing on politics.  Because of that, it feels like a bit of a bait and switch.  Those expecting a horror movie will probably be let down, but then again, the scene where the old fogey Stewardson goes to bed with a hooker a third his age is pretty terrifying.  

Roodt went on to have a wildly varied career directing a little bit of everything including Hollywood fare (Father Hood), politically minded movies (Cry the Beloved Country), DTV action (Witness to a Kill), and eventually SYFY sequels (Lake Placid:  Legacy).  

BOIN-N-G (1963) **

William R. Johnson and William Kerwin star as two aspiring porn producers (based on Herschell Gordon Lewis and David. F. Friedman, the director and producer of the film) who walk out of a skin flick (Lewis and Friedman’s The Adventures of Lucky Pierre) thinking they could do it better.  Together they decide to quit their jobs, strike out on their own, and make a nudie movie (Nature’s Nudniks).  They soon learn making an adults-only feature is tougher than it looks.  

The comedy is pretty inane, as is usually the case with these sorts of things.  Kerwin and Johnson ham it up way too much and their antics fail to generate any laughs.  What’s worse, their silent movie-style mugging gets in the way of the nudity.  Lewis also overdoes it with the comedic musical score that overscores the already unfunny material.  I admire the fact that Lewis and Friedman were poking fun at themselves, but ultimately, they’re probably the only ones who found any of the behind-the-scenes humor funny.  It doesn’t help that many of the sequences end on a predictable note.  (There’s no film in the camera, the lens cap is still on, etc.)    

The nudie scenes are OK.  They’re mostly your typical cheesecake stuff.  The models sunbathe, slowly undress for the camera, rub their butt cheeks so they make squeaky balloon noises, that sort of thing.  None of it is exactly titillating since it’s all sandwiched between the meta scenes of the frantic filmmakers trying to capture the action for the camera.  However, once the film gains a little momentum about halfway through, the nudity becomes more plentiful, which at the very least makes it watchable.  The only real standout in the cast is Christina Castel, who plays Audrey, the starlet who gets naked at the drop of a hat.  Whenever she’s on screen going au natural, Boin-n-g might make you schwing. 

AKA:  Untamed Women in Nature in the Raw.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #1: OUT OF THE DARKNESS (1978) **

(Streamed via American Horrors)

Donald Pleasence stars as a famous big game hunter on the prowl for a deadly panther.  When the badass cat wounds him during the hunt, he puts a bounty on the beast’s hide.  Some local hunters trap it and deliver it to Pleasence’s private island so he can finally hunt it mano y mano.  Problems arise when his daughters Nancy Kwan and Jennifer Rhodes come to the island to visit him with sleazy tour guide Ross Hagen (who also produced) in tow.  

Basically, it’s The Most Dangerous Game, but with a panther.

Director Lee (The Night God Screamed) Madden kind of goes overboard when it comes to the slow-motion shots of the panther tracking Pleasence.  Of course, if he didn’t put every other hunting scene in slow-motion, the eighty-three-minute film would’ve only been an hour or so long.  (The attack scenes that occur later in the picture also suffer from too much slow-mo.)  Some of the POV shots of the cat’s perspective are good for a laugh, especially when the wild-eyed Pleasence is wallowing in fright.  

There are a few off-kilter moments that keep Out of the Darkness from fizzling out completely.  My favorite bits were the scenes of Pleasence staring down the caged cat and trying to intimidate it while delivering a crazed internal monologue.  The scenes of Pleasence playing mind games with the cat are amusing, but the whole thing hits a brick wall whenever the action switches over to his daughters having sisterly bonding time.  I’m a big Ross Hagen fan, so for me, his unique energy made the love triangle stuff between him and the two sisters bearable.  Even then, his moments pale in comparison to the oddball shit with Pleasence.  If the filmmakers had dropped the extraneous characters in favor of more scenes with Donald and the panther, it might’ve worked.

As it is, Out of the Darkness doesn’t have enough of a body count to work as a When Animal Attack movie.  It’s also too weird to succeed as a straight-up hunting expedition drama.  I guess it’s just odd enough to function as a metaphor for man vs. animal, but even then, that’s kind of a reach.  Still, it’s almost worth a look just for Pleasence’s hammy turn.  

AKA:  Night Creature.  AKA:  Devil’s Beast.