DEATH WEEKEND (1977) *** ½

Brenda Vaccaro stars as a fashion model spending the weekend with her dentist boyfriend (Death Wish V’s Chuck Shamata).  While on their way to his lakeside retreat, they are terrorized by a gang of hooligans in a hot rod.  Little do they know Vaccaro can really drive and she manages to run the creeps off the road.  Eventually, the goons find out where they are staying and set out to get revenge.  

Produced by Ivan Reitman and written and directed by William (Funeral Home) Fruet, this Canadian-lensed thriller is anchored by a fine performance by Vaccaro.  She’s allowed to be stronger and more capable than many of the women in jeopardy you usually see in these kinds of films.  She certainly shows more backbone than her boyfriend and puts up a heck of a lot more of a fight.  It’s Don Stroud who steals the movie as the psycho ringleader of the gang of crazies.  Stroud always excelled at playing unhinged characters, but this is one of his best performances.  

Death Weekend proves to be a little better than you’d expect at just about every turn.  Just when the film looks like it’s going to settle down into a lull, Fruet will introduce a nasty little touch to keep it interesting.  Take for instance the scene where Vacarro is getting settled in her room and the camera cuts back to show that maybe Shamata isn’t such a nice guy after all.  Another little touch I liked was when the camera shows a “No Trespassing” sign and then slowly pans down to show that someone is indeed trespassing.  Fruet’s handling of the opening chase sequence is even much better than you’d expect.

There’s also a bit of a class warfare element here.  The blue-collar thugs are having way too much fun dressing down the well-to-do dentist and his interior design choices.  They also relish taking advantage of the classy fashion model that is clearly out of their league.

While Death Weekend is technically a rape n’ revenge movie, they don’t spend as much time on the rape as you might think, and it’s not done in an overly gratuitous manner.  It was made in between Straw Dogs and I Spit on Your Grave and contains elements of both of those films.  While not on the same level, it remains a crackling and effective thriller in its own right.

The revenge sequences are pretty sweet too.  They involve stabbing, explosions, vehicular manslaughter, and my favorite, quicksand.  When I was a kid, I had a fear of quicksand, so every time, I see someone die via quicksand in a movie, it gets to me.  As a connoisseur of quicksand scenes in cinema, it delights me to say, Death Weekend has one of the best.

AKA:  The House by the Lake.  

MIDNIGHT INTRUDERS (1973) **

Midnight Intruders kicks off with a long scene of the Husband (Alain Mayniel) and the Wife (Francoise Darc) making love intercut randomly with footage of planes taking off and landing.  It’s hard to tell if the shots of the planes are supposed to be important to the plot or symbolic of the couple’s lovemaking.  Turns out it’s both.  You see, after the achieving lift-off in the bedroom, the Husband catches a flight to go on a business trip.  

While he’s away, the Wife has an affair with the Lover (Alexander Chapuies).  Predictably, the Husband comes home early, catches them in the act, and bludgeons the dude to death.  That’s just a taste of the terror the night has in store for the Wife.

Written and directed by Gary (Amanda by Night) Graver, Midnight Intruders suffers from some inconsistent sex scenes.  While Graver manages to make a few look kinda arty (like the red-tinted three-way), others are either boring or laughable.  Even then, some of the arty looking ones fall flat, like the cool looking sauna sequence that is undone by some awful fake Bob Dylan music on the soundtrack.  Other odd scenes, like the extended foot massage and the part where the Wife and the Lover fuck fully clothed in the shower just plain don’t work.  

The first half is basically a skin flick.  (The Wife must do it like six times straight with the Lover.  How can the Husband ever expect to compete with THAT?)  Things switch over to horror at the halfway point with the Wife having to deal with not only her murderous husband, but also a pair of scummy thieves who literally drop in on her.  After dabbling in home invasion horror, it then turns into a crime flick in the closing minutes, wrapping things up with a completely unsatisfying and abrupt ending.  

Midnight Intruders is only an hour long, but despite the brief running time, there are long scenes that ramble on needlessly.  (I’m thinking specifically of the shooting up scene accompanied by annoying distorted fuzztone guitar.)  The awfully dubbed dialogue is sometimes good for a laugh, and the title sequence is kinda freaky too, so it’s not all bad.

AKA:  The Wife.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #7: THE LAST SECT (2006) **

(Streamed via Cinehouse)

Tone (Jordan Van Dyck) finds video evidence on the “Vampire Web” that vampires still exist.  He shows it to his boss, Van Helsing (David Carradine), and they make plans to stake the vampire vixens responsible.  Meanwhile, a reporter named Sydney (Natalie Brown) is working on a story about an online dating service called “Artemis”.  Lonely and looking for love, she becomes a member, unaware the website is owned by the queen of the vampires (Deborah Odell), who happens to have her sights set on the mousy Sydney.  

The constant use of on-screen titles to establish the locations get annoying really fast.  It doesn’t help that the font is similar to that garish grungy white lettering that was used for those anti-piracy “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car, So Don’t Pirate Movies” PSAs that appeared on DVDs in the early 2000s.  What’s worse is that the lettering is jittery and hops around at the bottom of the screen, which is really unnecessary.  

The Last Sect could’ve worked, but it almost seems as repressed as its heroine.  Just when it looks like it’s going to loosen up a little bit and allow the characters to engage in romantic lesbian vampire sex and/or softcore bondage, the camera coyly pans away and/or cuts to another scene entirely.

Carradine hams it up nicely, which is appreciated.  His offbeat energy helps to makes his scenes worthwhile, even when all he gets to do is rattle off a bunch of exposition.  Too bad he’s confined to his apartment for the nearly the entire running time and delegates a morose mortician looking motherfucker to kill most of the vampires for him.  The stuff with Brown falling under Odell’s spell isn’t nearly as involving, although it isn’t out and out bad or anything.  I just wish the movie allowed them to get past first base.  Even if the film had the benefit of some lesbian vampire T & A, The Last Sect still wouldn’t have been a winner, but it would’ve at least had a reason to exist.

AKA:  Van Helsing 2.

TORTURE ME, KISS ME (1970) ** ½

Torture Me, Kiss Me, is an early example of a Naziploitation movie, in black and white no less (a rarity for these sorts of things).  It starts off with a Frenchman nobleman (Frank MacIntosh) recounting his experience in WWII and we flashback to two Nazis banging some sexy babes in an office.  A new Commandant (Blaine Quincy) shows up at a Nazi stronghold.  He thinks the soldiers have all grown soft, and he sets out to whip everybody into shape, sometimes literally.  The first order of business is to rape a girl picking flowers in a field.  Then, he starts ordering executions for anyone who disrespects him.  His buddy, the Frenchman shows up to try to talk some sense in him, but to little avail.  Meanwhile, a Nazi trollop named Ilsa (Christine Cybelle) is revealed to be a spy for the Resistance who are desperate to have the Commandant removed at all costs.  She shacks up with him to keep tabs on him and is of course, outraged by his brutality.  

Torture Me, Kiss Me is an agreeable title for this flick as the split of torture and kissing is about 50/50.  The opening sex scene runs on so long that the music runs out for a good chunk of it.  There’s also rape, outdoor baths, death by firing squad, more rape, a lesbian scene involving a banana, and lots of whipping.  There’s also a fairly heavy concentration on outdoor sex scenes, if that’s your sort of thing.  All this is pretty tame as far as the standards of the subgenre go, but it moves at a steady clip, even with all the stock footage from WWII that helps to pad out the running time.  

The overacting by Quincy is amusing as he’s always shouting and getting on people’s nerves.  In fact, you kind of feel bad for the goose steppers in this movie.  I mean we’ve all had that experience where things are going along just fine at our job.  Then, all of a sudden, we get a new manager who thinks that running a tight ship and barking orders at people instead of talking to them like a human being is the way to run a successful business.  We usually joke around and say, “Man, our new boss is a real Nazi”, but when the characters in this movie say it, it’s like LITERALLY.  

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: MOVIE #6: GHOST CRAZY (1944) * ½

(Streamed via Beta Max TV)

In 1946, Curly Howard suffered a stroke and had to step down as a member of The Three Stooges.  He was replaced by his brother, Shemp, who had already been with the team in their early days.  During his solo career, Shemp appeared in bit parts and minor roles (notably alongside Abbott and Costello a few times).  Ghost Crazy was the second of third movies in which he was teamed up with Billy Gilbert and Maxie Rosenbloom as sort of a poverty row version of the Stooges.

Howard and Gilbert star as a pair of carnival workers in desperate need of a vacation.  On their way to another town, they happen upon a carload of hitchhikers (including a lummox of a chauffeur, played by Rosenbloom) and give them a lift.  Their destination:  A house that is possibly haunted.

I’ve sat through a lot of lame ghost-themed comedies from the ‘40s directed by William “One Shot” Beaudine, but this one might be the all-time worst.  Although it sports a brief sixty-two-minute running time, I’m sure you’ll be drifting off to dreamland long before the end credits appear.  Much of the problem has to do with the subpar material Gilbert, Howard, and Rosenbloom have to work with.  Even then, I’m not sure they could’ve made audiences roar with laughter as there isn’t any chemistry between them.  Their shenanigans aren’t funny in the least and only become more tired as the film wears on.

It’s a shame because the opening carnival scene (which contains the only laugh in the film) holds promise.  The ghost scene is kind of decent too, although it’s a long wait for very little.  Even the time-honored scene of a man in a gorilla costume running into a real gorilla falls flat this time out.  Luckily for Shemp, he only had to make one more of these things before heading off to better pastures with the Stooges. 

AKA:  Crazy Knights.  AKA:  Murder in the Family. 

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.