JANUA-RAY: COUNT AL-KUM (1971) * ½

Count Dracula’s nephew, Count Al-Kum (Jerry Delony from Invitation to Ruin and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks) is awakened from his coffin and interviewed.  He tells two offscreen reporters about his attempts (and failures) to pick up women.  They then give him a book called “1001 Ways to Seduce Women” and he goes out and looks for more babes.  Time and again, he fails miserably to woo the ladies and is forced to watch as his Uncle Dracula repeatedly cockblocks him with trollop after trollop.   

This is another one of Ray Dennis Steckler’s vampire pornos.  Even though it’s only forty-nine minutes long, it’s still something of a chore to watch.  That’s mostly because of Steckler’s slipshod handling of the sex scenes.  He basically sits the camera across the room from the action and only occasionally zooms in for a close-up.  The one time he does manage a decent close-up, the lighting is so poor that it’s hard to tell what’s going on.  He also overdoes it on the kaleidoscope effects, which do nothing to enhance the sex scenes.  At least Dracula doesn’t have a problem getting hard, which is more than I can say for most of the male leads in these Steckler pornos.

Delony is amusing as the titular vampire, but he isn’t exactly funny as the lines he’s been given wouldn’t cut it at an open mic amateur night.  The scenes of Al-Kum stalking potential victims (sometimes in broad daylight) play almost like a silent movie routine, although they fail to garner any laughs.  The only genuinely laugh-out-loud scene occurs when Dracula bangs a chick outdoors and puts his cape down on the ground, so they don’t get dirty when they screw.  

As far as Steckler’s signature touches, he does give us quite a few nice scenic shots of the Las Vegas Strip (where actors and unaware extras look directly at the camera).  Like The Mad Love Life of a Red Hot Vampire, this is another vampire themed XXX film from Steckler, although it can’t even clear the admittedly low bar that movie set.  And the only members of Steckler’s Stock Player Company this time around seems to be Delony, who later appeared in Steckler’s Dr. Cock Luv.  

AKA:  Count All-Cum.  AKA:  Count Alcom.  AKA:  Count Alkum.  AKA:  The Horny Vampire.  

TUBI CONTINUED… SHOCK CINEMA VOLUME 4: MAKEUP EFFECTS BEHIND THE SCENES (1991) ** ½

Brinke Stevens once again produced and narrates this fourth installment in the Shock Cinema video magazine series devoted to the world of low budget filmmaking.  Since it focuses on the same crop of movies that were featured in Volume 3, there’s little here in the way of variety.  Still, it’s a solid look at the ingenuity that goes into low budget productions and should be a treat for fans of old school special effects and make-up.  

Most of the running time is devoted to behind-the-scenes footage of Murder Weapon and Robot Ninja.  The Murder Weapon sequences are the best as we get to see how the special effects (including a head crushing, throat slashing, face blasting, and a heart ripping) were created.  The coolest segment is a fast-motion scene of burn make-up being applied to Linnea Quigley.  The segment on Robot Ninja is the longest and focuses on fight choreography just as much as it does special effects.  Unfortunately, the segments on Skinned Alive and Ghoul School seem to be tossed in there just to pad things out.  Both these sequences are little more than a “greatest hits” package of gore scenes with very little behind the scenes footage.  If these scenes had been excised and the film only focused on the first two movies, it probably would’ve skated by with ***.  

Even then, Shock Cinema Volume 4:  Makeup Effects and Behind the Scenes ultimately suffers from a repetitive set-up.  First, we are shown a select scene from the movie before we see how the effect was done, and finally the scene is shown once again.  Because of that, it isn’t quite as much fun as the other volumes in the series.  However, the fact that it contains so much quality behind the scenes footage for such low budget productions in and of itself is heartening.  

TUBI CONTINUED... SIDESHOW (2000) ** ½

As someone who enjoyed the Fred Olen Ray/Charles Band production of Piranha Women, I thought I would check out their first collaboration, Sideshow.  It’s closer to Band’s sensibilities than Ray’s, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  While it’s not quite up to the level of Piranha Women, it’s a decent way to spend seventy-five minutes.

Five friends go to the carnival.  Most of them are there to gawk at the sideshow freaks.  Naturally, they overstay their welcome and eventually become part of the show.  

Sideshow has kind of a Funhouse Meets Ghoulies 2 vibe about it.  The opening scene in which Ray virtually remakes the finale of Tod Browning’s Freaks is a lot of fun, and the first act or so holds promise.  Things start to slide downhill once the characters are turned into freaks though.  The idea that they are transformed into sideshow attractions because they make wishes that backfire on them is kind of lame and feels like something out of a Wishmaster movie.  (One girl wants a perfect body and winds up having no face, another girl never wants to be touched and is transformed into a living doll under glass, etc.)  The complete non-ending doesn’t help matters either.  

The special effects for the freaks were designed by Gabe (Leprechaun) Bartalos.  They are rather inventive and certainly help keep you watching once the movie begins spinning its wheels.   A face-ripping freak, a conjoined twin, and a “Bug Boy” are among the highlights.  

Although the freak gimmicks make it feel more like a Full Moon movie than a Ray picture, Fred still manages to inject some of his touches in there.  That’s really just a fancy way of saying there’s some gratuitous T & A.  His usual cast of characters, such as Brinke Stevens (who plays a sexy fortune teller), Peter Spellos, Richard Gabai, and Ross Hagen make welcome appearances too.  It’s Full Moon mainstay Phil Fondacaro who steals the (side)show as the ringmaster of the freaks.  

TUBI CONTINUED… ZOMBI VIII: URBAN DECAY (2021) * ½

It’s been a long time since we’ve had an unrelated sequel to Lucio Fulci’s Zombi.  In fact, I think this might be the first unrelated sequel to Zombi that’s (supposed to be) related to Zombi!  As far as these things go, you can do worse, but not much.

Hannah (Jennifer Nangle from Amityville Karen) does one of those 23 and Me deals and finds her long-lost father (Noel Scott Jason) is living on an island in the Caribbean.  You know, that island where there was that mysterious outbreak that the government covered up forty years ago?  Anyway, she and her friends go down to the island only to discover her father has been infected with some sort of virus.  They get him back home (“We barely got through security with him!”) and naturally, they discover the virus he’s carrying is a zombie virus.  It doesn’t take long for him to bite someone, which eventually leads to a global zombie plague.  

Even though Zombi VIII:  Urban Decay is only fifty-seven minutes long, there is a shit ton of padding to be found.  The opening and closing credits sequences go on forever, there are annoying YouTube videos and news reports that act as exposition, and lots of screen time is taken up by characters walking through the jungle and/or taking pictures.  (The shots of animals look like vacation footage from a zoo.)  We also have a long scene where a character watches Night of the Living Dead on TV and the camera just lingers on it for minutes at a time.  I guess this is supposed to be an in-joke since Zombi was a sequel/rip-off to Dawn of the Dead, but there was no reason to show whole scenes from the movie.  

Like most Shot-on-Video productions, the sound is really bad.  There’s a long car ride where the sound of the engine drowns out nearly all the dialogue, and it’s hard to hear the actors during the outdoor scenes too.  The videography is also rather poor as the screen periodically flashes red for no apparent reason.  (It may have been an encoding error, I’m not sure.)  

It's not all bad though.  The music, which is a homage to the score from the original Zombi is quite good.  I also enjoyed the Return of the Living Dead-inspired scene where Samantha McCullough gets high and does a striptease just before a zombie attack.  We also get a variation on the original’s iconic splinter-to-the-eye scene, although it feels kind of rushed.  The complete non-ending is rather infuriating though and probably cost the flick at least a ½ *.

AKA:  Zombie Flesh Eaters 5.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE DOLL HOUSE (2004) ** ½

Three weeks into the new year and I’m already starting to fall behind on my watch-one-movie-on-Tubi-a-day-for-an-entire-year project.  It’s times like these I am grateful that Tubi has a bunch of these Japanese erotic thrillers that clock in under one hour.  Tubi’s plot synopsis for this one described it as “an erotic retelling of The Grudge”.  That’s not exactly the worst way to spend forty-six minutes, I guess.  

A doctor and his new bride move into their dream home.  They find a creepy doll in the house, and right away the doc starts having a weird obsession with it.  Pretty soon, people start dying in the house, and anyone with half a brain could ascertain the doll is responsible.  

I know that plot description doesn’t make it sound like an erotic retelling of The Grudge.  However, the doll is possessed by one of those creepy Japanese girls on a bad hair day that are the hallmark of these J-Horror flicks.  Also, the ghost attacks with her hair, and her scraggily locks turn up in odd places to portend her next attack.  So, basically, it’s The Grudge with a little bit of the killer doll genre thrown in there for good measure.

As far as the “erotic” scenes go, they aren’t bad.  In fact, when the ghost girl attacks someone, it’s usually a hooker or a naked chick, which at the very least makes it a lot more tolerable than many of the “official” entries in the franchise.  The attack sequences aren’t too shabby either.  I particularly liked the way the ghost is deliberately shown out of focus, which certainly makes it look cooler than the CGI-ed ghost gals found in the American remakes of The Grudge.  

On the downside, this is another one of those edited erotic flicks that populate so much of Tubi.  I already knew going in that’s how it was going to be.  (The forty-six-minute running time was the dead giveaway.)  Like many of these films, the sex scenes are cropped and/or abruptly edited so you can’t see any nudity.  Fortunately, the shower and ghost attack scenes appear to be uncut.  Despite having some obvious edits along the way, The Doll House is briskly paced and moderately effective, so it’s hard to hold a grudge against it.

AKA:  The Dollhouse.  AKA:  Mansion of the Senses:  Wife’s Ascension.  

TUBI CONTINUED… THE NECRO FILES (1997) ****

Detectives Manners (Steve Sheppard) and Sloane (Gary Browning) kill a serial killer named Logan (Isaac Cooper) who murdered and raped over “two hundred women”.  Nine months later, some Satanists sacrifice Logan’s illegitimate baby over his grave and bring him back to life.  You may think a scene where a baby is sacrificed is in poor taste, and it would be if director Matt Jaissle didn’t use such an obvious baby doll.  By not hiding the fact they are using a dime store doll, this scene achieves a kind of weird, blissful, surreal aura. 

But you haven’t seen anything yet.  To complete the incantation, one of the Satanists has to pee on Logan’s grave.  That successfully brings him back to life, and the first thing he does once he is resurrected is rip the guy’s dick off and stab someone with it.  Now, we’ve seen a lot of movies where a guy gets stabbed IN the dick.  I think The Necro Files is the first movie in history where someone gets stabbed WITH a dick.  

Anyway, two of the Satanists survive the attack.  They feel bad about bringing Logan back to life, especially now that he is a zombie, he eats his victims after raping and killing them.  They attempt to reverse the spell, and in doing so they… ah shit, man.  I won’t spoil it for you.  That scene made me laugh harder than anything in recent memory.  The scene where the zombie rapist finds true love is pretty damned funny too. 

I will say that the final confrontation between the cops and the zombie isn’t quite as good as the stuff that preceded it.  That’s okay.  When the first hour of your Shot-on-Video horror movie is this riotously gross and hilarious, I can forgive a finale that’s only “pretty decent”.  

The Necro Files has many legitimately great moments blended together with scenes of Ed Woodian levels of WTF weirdness.  Even with its low budget and Shot-on-Video aesthetic, it manages to impress with some inventive camerawork and editing, while simultaneously reveling in its bad taste, no-budget grunginess.  It’s a special movie and one of the best SOV horror flicks ever made.  

It also contains some of the best bad acting I’ve ever seen.  Especially by Browning, who is the standout among the cast.  His hateful monologues, slurred delivery, and awkward phrasing is a bad movie fan’s dream come true.  I had a big stupid grin on my face every time he was on screen.  Also, be on the lookout for porn star Dru Barrymore (the only “star” in the film) as a victim in a tent.

JANUA-RAY: THE STRANGE SEX LIFE OF HITLER’S NAZIS (1971) * ½

The Strange Sex Life of Hitler’s Nazis is Ray Dennis Steckler’s limp sequel to his sporadically amusing Nazi Brothel.  It begins with a bunch of recycled footage from that film, then the “plot” begins.  Hitler shows up at the brothel demanding the capture of American secret agent, Jane Bond (Carolyn Brandt), who is now dubbed, “The Nazi Buster”.  Meanwhile, orgies and various sex acts occur at the brothel.  Eventually, Jane’s sidekick is captured, and she has to bust some Nazis to save her trusted compatriot. 

The streak of sly, sardonic, subversive humor that was so prevalent in Nazi Brothel is sorely missing this time out.  There’s less of a “sticking it to the Nazis” vibe here (although Hitler is portrayed as a whiny nincompoop) as it’s more of a straight-up skin flick.  The problem with that is, yet again, the sex scenes aren’t sexy in the least.  

The orgy scenes are the biggest problem.  Steckler seems to just let the camera hang back while all the action goes on.  Because of that, it’s hard to tell who’s doing what to whom, especially since all the participants have the same sallow skin tone.  The sex scenes featuring three or four partners are only slightly better, but they’re nothing close to approximating “erotic”.  There are one or two odd moments (like a hooker powdering a Nazi’s butt), although not enough to make it as much fun as the first one. 

While the film is kind of a letdown next to Nazi Brothel, there are plenty of Ray Dennis Steckler’s signatures to be seen.  As with that flick, the title sequence is written on a chalkboard, and the actors have trouble maintaining their erections.  The Batman influence is once again present as this time Jane Bond has a younger crimefighting sidekick a la Rat Pfink a Boo Boo.  The movie also ends with a woman with bad teeth biting a guy’s dick, which makes it similar to The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire.  And as with many of Steckler’s productions, it climaxes with an elongated chase scene.  As far as Steckler’s Stock Players go, this has virtually the same cast from Nazi Brothel, most notably Carolyn Brandt (who sadly, doesn’t show up until the last four minutes).  

AKA:  Love Life of Hitler’s Nazis.