TUBI CONTINUED… CALL ME EMANUELLE (2022) * ½

Here’s another crappy Fake Emmanuelle movie from the makers of The Awakening of Emanuelle.  This time, Shoko Rice, who had a small role as Lilly in the first movie, stars as “Emmy”.  That’s right.  Emmy.  Not Emanuelle.  If The Awakening of Emanuelle was the world’s first fake Fake Emmanuelle movie, this has got to be the world’s first fake Fake Fake Emmanuelle movie.  (To be fair, she does say, “Call me Emanuelle”, but it’s at the very last second of the movie, which is a rip-off if you ask me.)

Remember in The Awakening of Emanuelle how Emanuelle had a bunch of mind-numbing narration?  Well, in this one they eschew the narration for an opening scene where Rice delivers a longwinded monologue directly into her mirror.  When her husband (Chris Spinelli, playing a different character than he did in the first movie) catches her spouting off about God knows what, he asks out loud what the audience has been silently wondering, “Are you high?”  

Anyway, Emmy looks into her husband’s phone, and finds evidence her man has been cheating.  She drops him like a bad habit and shacks up with a dorky bartender (Shane Ryan-Reid).  Since he’s a religious nerd, he isn’t ready when she introduces blindfolds and rope bondage into their sex life.  Naturally, it all ends in heartbreak.

Call Me Emanuelle is less linear than Awakening, which makes it a little more frustrating.  However, it does have a bunch of multi-colored S & M fantasies/dreams/flashbacks (one set to an electronic remix of “Happy Birthday to You”?!?), so it has that going for it.  Too bad, like its predecessor, there’s no actual nudity.  

Emmy’s relationship with the bartender holds promise.  At first, it feels like it’s leading up to be sort of a reverse 50 Shades of Grey situation.  Unfortunately, the dude is so cluelessly inept that the bondage scenes (which are short and tame) never build up any steam.

Emmy’s boss gets the best line of the movie when he tells her to “Stroke the teat of possibility!”

And so ends the first month of my daily Tubi watching project.  So far, I have watched 31 movies in 31 days.  One month down.  Eleven more to go.  

At the start of the month, I had 365 movies in my Tubi watchlist.  At the end of the month, I have 441.  How can that be, you ask?  Well, because I keep adding more and more stupid shit to my watchlist, that’s why.  What other weird, dumb, or just plain bad movies does February have in store?  

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AWAKENING OF EMANUELLE (2021) *

When Tubi recommended this to me I was ecstatic.  The fact that they were still making Fake Emmanuelle movies this deep into the 21st century warmed the cockles of my heart.  The fact that it was a little over an hour was also enticing.  However, it’s pretty much a trainwreck from the word go.  

Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, who also co-directed) is an out of work fashion model who comes crawling back to her asshole photographer boyfriend (Chris Spinelli).  It doesn’t take long for him to fall back into his pattern of abuse and Emanuelle is left with no choice but to stab him with a pair of scissors.  She then gravitates to another photographer (Lynn Ellison).  This one a creepy dude who likes to videotape his models before he photographs them.  Needless to say, Emanuelle is not one of stabile relationships.

I have seen a lot of Fake Emmanuelle movies in my time, but this might be the silver screen’s first fake Fake Emmanuelle movie.  Despite the fact that Emanuelle is a fashion model, goes on photo shoots, takes showers, and has sex many times, she is never once shown in the nude.  What the hell kind of shit is this Fake Emmanuelle movie trying to pull?

I love the fact that there are new Fake Emmanuelle movies being made.  In fact, everybody with a video camera and a hot actress at their disposal should be making Fake Emmanuelle movies.  There should be as many of these things as there are “Amityville” movies.  While I’m happy The Awakening of Emanuelle exists, it’s just not good.  Like at all.    

Turning Emanuelle into a serial killer/fashion model wasn’t the worst idea in the world, but the movie never fully commits to the premise.  The worst part is all of Emanuelle’s mind-numbingly bad, pseudo-intellectual, amateurishly existential narration.  It’s like they’re trying to make Emanuelle out to be more than a pretty face, but they make her sound even dumber as her narration feels like she’s just repeating stuff she heard on an ASMR YouTube video.

D'Angelo isn’t bad in the lead role.  It’s not her fault she has to deliver so much bad narration.  I’d even venture to guess that the narration would’ve been tolerable had she gotten naked like the Fake Emmanuelles that preceded her.  The best moment comes from Jim Wynorski regular Lisa London as a former model-turned-CEO who has a nice monologue about aging.  Too bad that kind of gravitas is missing elsewhere in the picture.

JANUA-RAY: ONE MORE TIME (2009) **

After Summer Fun, the next film on Severin’s Ray Dennis Steckler box set was Reading, PA, a four-part, four-hour (FOUR) shot-on-video documentary (cough, cough, home movie) in which Ray took his video camera, tooled around his hometown and attended his high school reunion.  Sigh.  Friends, I love Ray as much as the rest of you.  However, I just did not have the fortitude to sit through it.  Maybe there will come a day when I revisit it.  That day ain’t here yet.  

So, let’s just move right on to the final film in the Steckler collection, which also happens to be the final film in his filmography, One More Time.  I had never heard of this one before, but as it turns out, it’s a shot-on-video sequel to his magnum opus, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies.  As far as forty-five years later shot-on-video sequels to horror-musical cult classics go, I’m sure there are worse ones out there.

Steckler returns as Jerry, now an old man who spends his days wandering around the Santa Cruz pier while a narrator pontificates about God knows what.  When he does sleep, he dreams of footage of The Incredibly Strange Creatures.  He goes to his shrink and tells him about his dreams, but he isn’t a big help.  Jerry then goes to the amusement park in his dreams and visits a fortune teller who is amassing her own army of zombies.

It's nice to see Steckler, wearing a hoodie just like he did all those years ago, playing Jerry once again.  As a fan of The Incredibly Strange Creatures, it was a treat to see that some of the locations from the original are still standing (like the rollercoaster).  However, most of the new footage amounts to Steckler wandering around and/or setting up scenes from the first movie.  If you hang in there, you’ll be treated to a fun meta ending (it was probably the only way for it all to make sense anyway).  I won’t spoil the twist, but I think it ends Steckler’s filmography on an appropriate note.  The final results may be a tad underwhelming, but I’m glad he was able to dip his toe into the world of The Incredibly Strange Creatures one last time before his death.

In keeping with the meta spirit of the film, there are a lot of instances of Steckler’s shameless self-promotion.  Steckler wears a Reading, Pennsylvania hat (as well as a Steckler Films hat), Johnny Legend sings the theme song from Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (and “The South’s Gonna Rise Again” from Two Thousand Maniacs), a cover of “The World’s Greatest Sinner” (in which Steckler served as a cinematographer) is heard, people are seen wearing Incredibly Strange Creatures T-shirts, and the film ends in Steckler’s video store, Mascot Video.  There are also plenty of Steckler signatures on hand, including, lots of narration, recycled footage (in addition to The Incredibly Strange Creatures, scenes from The Las Vegas Serial Killer are used), scenic shots of Las Vegas, and the pizza motif from The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher crops up again.

Well, now that I have finished all the Steckler films on the box set (except for Reading, PA), here is my official Ray Dennis Steckler ranking: 

1) Rat Pfink a Boo Boo

2) The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies

3) The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher

4) Nazi Brothel

5) The Sexorcist’s Devil

6) Wild Guitar

7) Body Fever

8) The Thrill Killers

9) The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire

10) The Lemon Grove Kids

11) Red Heat

12) One More Time

13) Face of Evil

14) The Las Vegas Serial Killer

15) Count Al-Kum

16) The Strange Sex Life of Hitler’s Nazis

17) Dr. Cock-Luv

18) Sinthia:  The Devil’s Doll

19) Summer Fun

20) Slashed…

21) Blood Shack (The Chooper cut)

22) Blood Shack (Director’s cut)

Join me next month when we will take a month-long dive into the wild, weird world of Jess Franco for a column called Franco February!  See you then!

TUBI CONTINUED… BLOOD LAKE (1987) *

A bunch of the most annoying chuckleheads you ever saw in a no-budget shot-on-video horror movie go on vacation to their summer home by the lake.  There, they talk (and talk and talk) about sex, drink beer, smoke pot, and waterski.  Little do they know there’s a killer in a big-brimmed hat lurking around the lake with a hunting knife looking to make mincemeat out of them.  

I watched Blood Lake right after Ray Dennis Steckler’s Summer Fun, and it almost feels like a slasher remake of that film.  Both were shot using crummy camcorders on a low budget at a lakeside resort.  (There are instances in both pictures where you could swear the directors are trying to pass off home movies of someone’s vacation as a scene for their movie.)  This one had actual dialogue, but the sound and acting was so poor it made me wish I was watching a silent movie instead.

It doesn’t help that all the characters are raging buttholes.  They almost seem like they came out of a live-action version of Beavis and Butt-Head.  Minus the laughs, of course.  The constant use of waterskiing as padding is also a bit much and the hair metal song that accompanies these sequences (“Feelin’ Free”) gets annoying quickly.  

None of this would matter if there had been some gore or nudity to take the sting out of it.  There is a little blood, although not enough to live up to its title.  Besides, the nighttime scenes are so dark that you can hardly make out the blood anyway, and the red-tinted POV killer stalking sequences are irritating as well.  All the sexual innuendo involving a couple of preteens is a little creepy too.  To make matters worse, just when the movie should be over, it continues on uselessly for another ten minutes.

In short, all involved should go jump in a lake.  

JANUA-RAY: SUMMER FUN (1997) *

Summer Fun is Ray Dennis Steckler’s tribute to silent movies of yesteryear.  Nobody was making silent movies in the ‘90s.  Heck, even when Ray made his silent films in the ‘70s, it was out of necessity because he couldn’t afford sound.  Now, in 1997, he’s shooting on video and STILL chooses to make a silent movie.  I guess you have to give it to Ray for continuing to blaze his own distinct path.  

Not only is it a throwback to the silent movies of yore, but it’s a reminder of the films Steckler used to make early in his career.  The music and dance scenes look like they came out of Wild Guitar.  That doesn’t change the fact that this is one of his all-time worst.  

Dirty Barry is a sleazy Vegas real estate mogul who wants to buy Uncle Charlie’s camp.  When he refuses, Dirty Barry sends his goons out to kidnap his niece, Zoe (played by Ray’s daughter, Bailey Steckler).  Meanwhile, the camp’s annual Olympic games are taking place, which eats up most of the screen time.

Part of the fun of watching a silent movie comedy is the black and white photography and the sped-up antics of the stars.  Watching a silent movie shot in the ‘90s on a grainy camcorder is an odd experience to say the least.  It’s as if Steckler is replicating a silent movie without any of its charms.  For example, instead of traditional silent movie cards, Ray uses crappy computer-generated text that looks like it was made on a Tandy.  The music is often terrible and sounds like it was stolen from TV newscast.  

Steckler obviously shot this with friends and family and limited resources.  It must’ve been nice for him to get back to his Lemon Grove Kids-style roots.  That doesn’t mean it’s a rewarding viewing experience.  It’s almost like watching an hour-long campground commercial on public access television.  In short, Summer Fun is no fun at all.

This is the first time we’ve seen some of Steckler’s Shameless Self-Promotion in a while.  The “bad” Olympic team is named “The Strange Creatures” and they wear The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies T-shirts.  I kind of wish I had one of those.  As far as Steckler’s directorial signatures go, we have musical numbers, scenic shots of the Vegas Strip, long driving scenes, and a dash of Batman influence (the villain’s henchmen are referred to as “the undynamic duo”).  Steckler Stock Players are limited to Herb Robins (who hadn’t appeared in a Steckler film since Sinthia:  The Devil’s Doll) as Uncle Charlie and his daughter, Bailey, who later turned up in Steckler’s final film, One More Time.

AKA:  Summer of Fun.

JANUA-RAY: SLASHED… (2003) *

Slashed… is the second of Ray Dennis Steckler’s cut-and-paste mini-features (okay, shorts) that were self-distributed by Steckler as a “Lost Films Production” in 2003 (but shot much earlier).

As far as the “plot” goes?  It’s just a bunch of scenes from Red Heat shown in no particular order.  When that gets dull, Steckler tosses in scenes from Las Vegas Serial Killer in there to liven things up.  (At least he used that film’s best scene, the extended burlesque number.)  All this reminded me of those old Castle Films 8mm condensed versions of old horror movies you could order off the back of Famous Monsters.

Face of Evil was a cobbled together mess, but at least it had enough new footage to semi-warrant calling it a “new” movie.  As far as Slashed… goes, I think there may (MAY) have been about a minute of new footage of Lovie Goldmine (and that’s being generous).  I will say the music fits the action here a bit better than it did in Face of Evil.  

I guess if you don’t have eighty minutes to spend watching Red Heat, you could just watch this half-hour Reader’s Digest version (minus all the hardcore action).  I mean if you’re going to do that, you might as well watch Face of Evil.  It’s only a few minutes longer and it’s a lot more coherent.  

As far as Steckler’s signatures, it’s about the same as Red Heat and Face of Evil.  It was shot silently, there’s lots of footage of the Vegas Strip, and Steckler shamelessly reuses scenes from his older films.  Steckler Stock Players are basically the same actors who appeared in both Red Heat and Las Vegas Serial Killer; namely:  Pierre Agostino, Chuck Alford, and Lovie Goldmine.    

JANUA-RAY: FACE OF EVIL (2003) **

I didn’t realize that Severin’s Ray Dennis Steckler box set had two of his (never finished?) cobbled together short films, Face of Evil and Slashed… hiding in the Bonus Features section.  I wasn’t going to review them initially because they’re only a half-hour long, so they aren't really a feature-length movie.  I eventually changed my mind due to the fact that so many of his pornos were only in the forty-to-fifty-minute range and I counted them as “real” movies.  (Never mind that I just watched Scream of the Blind Dead, which was only thirty-nine minutes long.)  After all, the purpose of this month-long salute to Steckler was to be as much of a completist as I possibly could (which is why I subjected myself to both Blood Shack AND The Chooper).  So, why the Hell not?

A greasy guy (Will Long) drives around LA and watches Carolyn Brandt water her lawn.  Meanwhile, long scenes from Steckler’s Red Heat play out and the editing (unconvincingly) tries to make it look like Long is peeping in on the characters from the film.  He then goes off and strangles a few women until, in true Steckler fashion, his fate is sealed in the most inane way imaginable.

Face of Evil was presented under the “Lost Films Productions” banner, which I think means Steckler released a handful of copies of it on video.  The quality is like fourth generation video, which makes everything grungy, almost like a snuff movie, which is a positive.  It’s all shot silently, and the music, which sounds alternately like incidental music from a porno, a New Age meditation CD, and a sitcom, never once fits the action, which is amusing.  

Apparently, Steckler started filming scenes of Long for a movie, but when he unexpectedly died, Ray was stuck with about ten minutes of footage he had no real use for.  Ever the thriftster, he cobbled it together with some (non-porno) scenes from his XXX flicks Red Heat and Sex Rink.  If you’ve seen Red Heat (or Sex Rink, I suppose), there’s really no reason to watch this as much of the best footage comes from that flick.  However, if you’re a big Steckler nerd and you have a half-hour to kill, there are worse ways to spend your time.  

There are a few Steckler signatures to speak of.  It was shot silently, there’s plenty of scenes of Hollywood, the completely random ending, and of course, the strangling women motif.  Of Steckler’s Stock Players, we have Long from Nazi Brothel (among others), and of course, Carolyn Brandt.  Lovie Goldmine and numerous others who are visible in the footage from Red Heat and Sex Rink also appear.