TUBI CONTINUED… THE SCREAMING DEAD (2003) ** ½

A kinky photographer (Joseph Farrell) makes his sexy subjects pose for controversial pictures.  He brings his latest batch of models to a supposedly haunted mansion/former insane asylum for his next shoot.  Once on the grounds, the frantic photog sets about playing mind games with the models to mentally torture then so he can capture them in the appropriately frightened state of mind he wishes them to convey.  Unfortunately, the models’ fear awakens the malevolent spirit of the sadistic former owner of the house who sets out to torture and kill everyone unlucky enough to be trespassing on his property.  

Written and directed by Brett (A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell) Piper, The Screaming Dead boasts a solid set-up, and the haunted sanitarium makes for an atmospheric location.  The inclusion of Seduction Cinema starlets like Misty Mundae and A.J. Khan help add to the fun.  However, once the models begin being subjected to the photographer’s mental degradation, things sort of stall.  It also takes an inordinate amount of time before the supernatural elements start falling into place.  The scenes of the beefy security guard (Rob Monkiewicz) butting heads with the freaky photographer have a tendency to get repetitive too.  While there are still a number of neat moments (like when a face gets pushed through a wall), and some of the torture sequences are reminiscent of the old Corman/Poe movies from the ‘60s, the finale ultimately feels rushed and a little unsatisfying.  

Monkiewicz makes for a good upstanding square jaw hero.  Rachel Robbins is also quite strong as the secretary who puts up with Farrell’s increasingly cruel demands and manipulations.  Farrell is a bit grating as the human villain, although I guess that’s kind of the point.  Still, a little of his performance goes a long way.  Misty is the reason to watch it (of course) as she delivers yet another solid performance and looks great during her various nude scenes.

MILLIGAN MARCH: CARNAGE (1984) **

Here’s my original review of Carnage as it first appeared on November 12th, 2008, followed by some additional notes I made as I watched the film as part of Milligan March:  

CARNAGE  (1984)  **

A couple commits suicide while dressed in their wedding clothes in their new house.  Years later another pair of newlyweds moves in and almost right away, the house starts exhibiting some peculiarities.  Doors don’t stay closed, teacups move around by themselves, and the phonograph ominously plays “Here Comes the Bride”.  Eventually we learn that the deceased couple is haunting the place and they want the latest tenants to die so they can become ghostified and live with them forever.

Low budget horror director Andy (The Rats are Coming-The Werewolves are Here) Milligan was actually working with something of a budget on this film and the results really aren’t too bad at all.  The biggest gripe I had was with the sluggish pacing and the fact that the actors were all amateurish and extremely unphotogenic.  That’s okay though because Carnage had enough (unintentional) laughs to keep me semi-entertained for 90 minutes.

The funniest part comes when the spirits toss a radio into the bathtub on some poor unsuspecting dope.  The fact that he is clearly wearing underwear during this scene is funny enough but the fact that the radio is playing an all-accordion version of Elvis’ “Now or Never” makes it that much more bizarre.  I also highly enjoyed the scene where the cleaning woman gets pelted with a whole bunch of supernatural Silly String for no good reason whatsoever.  

The main “scary” thing the ghosts do is make things move around by themselves.  It looks as stupid as it sounds, but at least when the ghosts starts levitating axes, pitchforks and meat cleavers, people end up losing body parts left and right.  (The decapitation scene is particularly shitdiculous).  There’s also a juicy self-induced throat slashing in there too for good measure as well.

Yeah the effects are terrible (the ghosts appear via jump cuts and the levitating objects are obviously being held up by strings), but that doesn’t make the flick altogether unwatchable.  While parts of the film WERE a chore to sit through, it did feature enough gore to justify its title.  It’s far from the worst Milligan movie I’ve seen, that’s damn skippy.  

MILLIGAN MARCH NOTES:  

1) The opening murder/suicide scene is semi-effective and feels much more like a “real” movie than many of Milligan’s homegrown productions.

2) The scenes where the everyday household objects move around on the new homeowners to mildly inconvenience them are kind of funny.  I feel like this is the kind of shit real ghosts would do.  You know, like hide the new tenant’s car keys just long enough to make them late for the dentist and force them to reschedule.  Got to love petty poltergeists.  

3) The scene where the bloody bride randomly appears and sprays the housekeeper in the face with cobwebs (it looks like Silly String) are semi-amusing, but not quite laugh-out-loud funny.

4) The gore is decent, but the transfer on the Blu-ray is so good that you can see the seams of the make-up during the throat slashing and the visible wires when the guy’s guts are being ripped out by the “invisible” ghost.  

5) While the stuff that takes place inside the house is semi-entertaining, whenever it cuts away to other family members squabbling about their own problems, the pace slows down to a crawl.

6) So far, I’ve referred to Carnage as “semi-effective”, “semi-amusing”, and “semi-entertaining”.  That about sums it up.  Close, but no cigar.  However, when Andy Milligan is making horror movies, close, but no cigar is about nearest he can get to a bull’s eye.  

Milligan Motifs:  Carnage is yet another Andy Milligan production that was filmed in Staten Island that's filled with library music on the soundtrack.  The gore is consistent with other Milligan films as it features all the pitchforking, hacked off hands, and meat cleavers to the skull you’ve come to expect from the man.  The concept of three married couples staying in a spooky old house is a theme that constantly recycles throughout Milligan’s work and the death in the bathtub owes a debt to the one in Seeds.

Milligan Stock Players:  Leslie Den Dooven was later in Milligan’s short, Adventures of Red Rooster.  

TUBI CONTINUED… CHANTAL (2007) *** ½

Would-be starlet Chantal (Misty Mundae) arrives in Hollywood with stars in her eyes, ready to make her big break in the movies.  Immediately, she encounters various scumbags and sleazoids who trick her into attending fake auditions.  She then falls in with a nest of lesbian photographers (Andrea Davis, Darian Caine, and Julie Strain) who wind up exploiting her just as much, if not more than the creepy men.  Chantal eventually shacks up with a call girl (Julian Wells) who promises to help her out, but she predictably uses her too.  

Sure, Chantal is little more than a cliched expose on the sordid world of starlets trying to make it in Hollywood, but when it’s Misty Mundae playing the starlet, it just hits different.  Now, we all know Misty is beautiful and sexy and fun in her B movies.  With Chantal, she gets to prove she is a fine actress as well.  She hits the sweet spot between naïve and stupid, and makes you care about her character even when she’s making increasingly bad (and dumb) choices.  Misty’s really put through the wringer in this one as she’s forced to strip, gets pissed on, and resorts to eating trash.  Misty also has a lot of chemistry with Wells, who plays the hooker with a heart of tarnished gold.  Their scenes together really work, even if it’s a foregone conclusion that she’s going to break Misty’s heart.  

Caine, Davis, and Strain are equally good as the evil lesbians who corrupt Misty.  We’re all used to seeing Mundae, Caine, and Wells appearing in these Alternative Cinema films, but Strain is a welcome addition to the formula.  She really commands the screen, especially during her scenes where she demeans the struggling starlets.  

It's Misty who gets the best line of the movie when she says, “Why does everything get reduced to sucking and fucking in this town?”

TUBI CONTINUED… CURSE OF THE SNAKE WOMAN (2013) ** ½

After loving Veronica Ricci’s performance in Ouija Nazi, I decided to check out another one of her films.  Tubi’s algorithm has been recommending this one to me a lot, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to pull the trigger.  While it’s missing the all-out fun and campy atmosphere of something like Ouija Nazi, Ricci’s presence makes it a sporadically amusing good time.

A thief steals a sacred snake statue and is shot by the cops while fleeing the museum.  While hiding out in a strip club (called “Eden”), his blood mixes with the statue, which brings the snake to life.  The snake bites a dancer named Trinity (Ricci), turning her into a bloodsucking snake woman.  She then goes around sinking her fangs into the customers and turns her fellow strippers into her bootlicking minions.  

Curse of the Snake Woman is an interesting if not entirely successful variation on the vampire genre.  (It certainly mixes snake and vampire mythologies better than the awful Lady of the Dark:  Genesis of the Serpent Vampire.)  I will say that the cheap strip club set kind of takes some of the fun out of the whole thing.  (It looks more like an Arby’s employee break room with a stripper pole set up in the middle of the room than an actual strip club.)  It also doesn’t help that this is one of those edited-for-Tubi movies that have all the nudity scissored out.  (Although according to the IMDb Parents Guide, it doesn’t look like I missed a whole lot.)  Even then, the Tubi censors must’ve been asleep at the wheel because there are a few glimpses of skin here and there.

The subplot with the two brothers trying to get their hands on the statue eats up a lot of screen time too.  They spout off a lot of exposition about the myth of the snake woman and the history of the statue, and it bogs things down after a while.  The make-up on the snake woman in the end is pretty good though and is reminiscent of Salma Hayek in From Dusk Till Dawn.

The film benefits from yet another fun performance by Ricci.  She’s not nearly as over the top as she was in Ouija Nazi, but she breathes a little life into her snake woman role.  I wish the movie itself was worthy of her talents, but I enjoyed watching it just to see her strut her stuff.  She gets some pretty good lines too, like when she rips out a guy’s guts while going down on him and quips, “I love it when a guy sprays all over my face!”  Or when she tears out a customer’s tongue and says, “Keep your tongue to yourself!”  She’s so hot in this that you can’t blame the dudes for falling under her spell.  I know I would be helpless if she told me things like, “Can you take a shower with me?  I am like, soooo dirty!”

AKA:  Snake Club:  Revenge of the Snake Woman.  AKA:  Snake Club.

MILLIGAN MARCH: VAPORS (1965) **

Vapors is Andy Milligan’s first film.  It’s a gay-themed short set in a New York bath house populated by men who are on the make.  A lonely man named Thomas (Gerald Jacuzzo) hangs out in one of the rooms where he meets the married Mr. Jaffee (Robert Dahdah).  Together, they sit and talk about their lives and occasionally are interrupted by the customers who are looking for a quick place to hook up.

Although the customers who roam the halls are portrayed rather broadly, the interactions between Thomas and Mr. Jaffee seem genuine and well-intentioned for the most part.  I’m sure this felt revelatory at the time just for because it showed gay men being gay men.  Despite there being a nice moment or two, the whole thing just never quite gels.  

The film was based on a play by Hope Stansbury (who also appeared in Milligan’s The Rats are Coming-The Werewolves are Here), and it feels very stage bound and talky at times.  What might’ve worked on stage for an act, just isn’t compelling as a short.  While Jacuzzo and Dahdah have chemistry together, Stansbury’s dialogue often lets them down.  Jacuzzo is strong, but Dahdah is merely adequate, and he doesn’t quite sell his longwinded story about the death of his son, which robs the ending of its potential impact.  The scene where they play “This Little Piggy” is rather awkward too.  I don’t know if Milligan was trying to make this scene flirtatious or what, but it just comes off as a cringey interaction.  Maybe that was the intention all along.  I’m not sure.  

Milligan does capture the atmosphere rather well.  The performers seemed game enough too.  Maybe if the material had been better fleshed out, it would’ve stuck the landing.  As it is, it remains an interesting, if only fitfully successful curiosity.   

Milligan Motifs:  Milligan would make movies with gay themes on and off for the entirety of his career.  

Milligan Stock Players:  Dahdah had a small role in The Body Beneath, Jacuzzo was in several Milligan productions (most notably Torture Dungeon), Hal Sherwood also turned up in The Ghastly Ones, and Hal Borske appeared in a bunch of Andy’s stuff.

MILLIGAN MARCH: SEEDS (1968) ** ½

The old, horrible, alcoholic, wheelchair bound matriarch (Maggie Rogers) of a family of no-good louts goes ballistic when she learns her scheming children (whom she calls “bad seeds”) will be visiting her for Christmas.  After a thoroughly unpleasant dinner, the children retire to their rooms where we see that their mother has good reason to be upset as they basically act like sex-mad degenerates.  Before long, family members wind up being bumped off by an unseen killer, adding to the familial strife.   

Seeds is essentially the prototypical Andy Milligan movie.  It has a lot of the themes that would permeate his work, namely domineering mothers, incest, and a family with a checkered history gathering under one roof, only to be stalked by a killer.  When Milligan worked through those themes later in his career, it was usually in films full of garish color, cheesy costumes, and cheap gore.  What makes this one work slightly better than his later stuff is that the gritty, handheld, black and white aesthetic of Seeds feels better suited to the themes Milligan is exploring.  Whereas his later pictures felt like amateurish home movies parading around as horror, this feels like underground cinema that was mis-marketed as sexploitation. 

For example, the scenes of Candy Hammond (Milligan’s wife) taking a bath, reading muscleman magazines in the nude, and seducing her own siblings is the sort of thing you would expect to see in a New York skin flick at the time.  However, the fringy touches Milligan lends to these sequences sometimes makes it feel closer to Andy Warhol than Michael Findlay.  The acting is better too (for the most part), even if most of the cast is prone to over-the-top histrionics.  

Seeds still suffers from many of the same flaws that mar many of Milligan’s pictures.  Namely, the pacing drags considerably thanks to the overly talky nature of the film.  While it might not be up to snuff with his sexploitation work like Nightbirds or Fleshpot on 42nd Street, it’s a little bit more offbeat, interesting, and better than his straight-up horror films like Torture Dungeon and The Ghastly Ones.  

Milligan Motifs:  As far as the story goes, we have a domineering mother figure, incest, a family gathering where a killer begins picking them off one by one, and servants who are secretly scheming against their employer.  On the technical side of things, it was yet another one of the films that Milligan made in Staten Island.  Also, his knack for using library music, allowing his actors to give overly theatrical performances, awkwardly adding in “hot” inserts into the lovemaking scenes, and odd camera placement (sometimes it feels like you’re looking directly up at the actors) crop up again.

Milligan Stock Company:  Hammond was also in Milligan’s Gutter Trash, The Promiscuous Sex, and Compass Rose.  Rogers was also in Tricks of the Trade, The Ghaslty Ones, and most memorably, Torture Dungeon.  Neil Flanagan appeared in a slew of his movies including Guru the Mad Monk, Torture Dungeon, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street.  

AKA:  Seeds of Sin.

TUBI CONTINUED… OUIJA NAZI (2014) ***

A group of sorority sisters throw a party at a supposedly cursed house belonging to their new pledge, Dawn (Kristen Casner).  Before long, the evil spirit of her Nazi ancestor possesses the town idiot and makes him run around hacking up people with a machete.  The sorority sisters fight back and kill him, but the spirit hops into Dawn and she transforms into a sexy psycho Nazi.  (The original title was actually Nazi Dawn… as in Dawn is a Nazi and not like, The Rise of the Nazis or something like that.)

Ouija Nazi is proof that in the world of low budget horror filmmaking, the spirit of Jim Wynorski, Fred Olen Ray, and Kevin S. Tenney is still alive and well.  This movie has just about everything you could want in a movie:  Sorority babes running around scantily clad, sorority babes running around topless, sorority babes being kept on leashes, sorority babes in Little Bo Peep costumes, and sorority babes looking and acting just plain hot.  

In addition to all that, it was quite refreshing to see the actresses being allowed to look and act nerdy.  I’m specifically talking about Veronica Ricci as the geeky gal, Agnes.  She has to be one of the hottest nerdy girls in screen history and her comedic timing is a joy to behold.  I haven’t crushed this hard on an actress in a long time.  I’ll have to check out more of her work in the near future.  Missy Martinez also makes a memorable impression as the bosomy Misty.

When it comes to the horror aspect of the film, things are more than a little uneven.  While Ouija Dawn does contain the best boob chopping scene since Head Cheerleader Dead Cheerleader, the bulk of the kills end abruptly and/or feel watered down.  In fact, the girls don’t even bring the Ouija board out until the last twenty minutes or so of the movie.  The scenes leading up to the finale in particular feel choppy and rushed.  So, if you tune in expecting to see what the title promises, you may feel a little shortchanged.  However, since 75% of the running time is devoted to sexy sorority sister shenanigans, it’s hard to get too upset.

AKA:  Nazi Dawn.