SORORITY SLAUGHTER (1994) ** ½

Hugo (Sal Longo) is a creepy schlub who says, “Be it zombie or vampire, the eternal urge to live forever is the dream of mankind!”  He then goes out and strangles a jogger (Dean Demko) and hacks her up.  Hugo just so happens to live next door to a bunch of sorority girls who are spending their spring break at home.  When a prank goes wrong, the girls think they’ve accidentally killed Hugo.  Little do the sorority sisters know, he’s an immortal killer who likes sacrificing women on his altar.  

Sorority Slaughter is kinda like the South Jersey version of House on Sorority Row.  Despite the low budget trappings inherent in a W.A.V.E. Production, directors Gary Whitson and Sal Longo still find ways to wring genuine suspense and even a surprise or two.  I liked the opening scene where a victim is watching a W.A.V.E. movie on TV while the killer lurks in the background.  Then, we hear a scream, and the audience thinks she’s just become a victim, but it’s really coming from the TV.  THEN the killer strikes.  Sure, it’s not John Carpenter or anything, but it’s kinda effective for a low budget, shot-on-video horror flick.  Whitson and Longo also give us a great toilet POV shot when Tina Krause blows chunks.  

Moments like that work.  Eventually, Sorority Slaughter reveals its true purpose:  Long scenes of sorority girls horseplaying in the pool, extended water fights that erupt while washing a car (complete with Keystone Kops music), and scenes of sorority girls getting slaughtered (natch).  W.A.V.E. movies are essentially bondage fetish videos parading as horror films, so it’s always amusing once they start showing their skeevier side.  They’re almost like an AI version of a snuff film.  Some of these scenes go on forever, and sometimes, you start to question what you’re watching.  However, is it really a W.A.V.E. movie if you haven’t asked yourself, “Okay, what am I watching?”

Despite the gnarly and grungy aspects of the film, it’s strangely chaste.  Nudity in the shower scenes is either strategically out of frame or obscured by the opaque shower curtain.  When the guys score with the sorority sisters, they either leave their underwear on or seem unable to get past second base.  In fact, there’s no nudity here, unless you count butt shots and wet T-shirts.  The kill scenes are kind of repetitive too, although I guess if you have a fetish for seeing women faint, being carried off like Julie Adams in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and then having her guts pulled out, you’d be inclined to give it Four Stars no matter what.

TUBI CONTINUED… HOLLYWOOD DINOSAUR CHRONICLES (1987) ***

Doug McClure hosts this lightweight and breezy trip down memory lane that shines a spotlight on the most popular dinosaur movies of all time.  The films of the silent era, such as the animated Gertie the Dinosaur, the early stop-motion effort The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, and The Lost World are covered first.  All these films eventually set the stage for the iconic King Kong in 1933.  After the creation of the atom bomb in the ‘50s, dinosaurs in movies become symbols for nuclear destruction in films such as Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster, Reptilicus, and Godzilla vs. Megalon.  The special then concludes with a look at the then-recent dinosaur flicks, Baby:  The Secret of the Lost Legend and The Land Before Time.

McClure (who looks like he’s having a hard time standing and walking) appears in a museum next to dinosaur fossils during the dry host segments.  While these sequences aren’t much to write home about, they are, at the very least, informative.  Some of the background info on the early days of paleontology and/or moviemaking is kind of interesting.  I did find it chintzy that half of the documentary is devoted to works of the silent era, which means it’s cheaper to acquire footage since it’s all in the public domain.  (The later movies are often represented in footage from trailers, which also helps to keep costs down.)  It is kind of neat though seeing the shift away from goofy, loveable dinosaurs like Gertie to more bloodthirsty variations over the years.  

The cheesy opening set to Was Not Was’ “Walk the Dinosaur” is amusing.  There’s a pretty good selection of talking head interviewees, like Jim Danforth, Forrest J. Ackerman, and Donald F. Glut (who seems preoccupied with pointing out all the inaccuracies in the movies) too.  Overall, there’s nothing particularly earthshattering here, but if you enjoy these dated clip show packages like I do, you might get a kick out of it.

TUBI CONTINUED… SHARKULA (2022) ½ *

Remember that awesome scene in Zombie where the zombie fought a shark underwater?  Well, Sharkula features Dracula fighting a shark underwater.  Trust me.  It’s not as cool as it sounds.  That’s mostly because the effects are terrible.  Not only is the shark an awful CGI creation, but the effects team can’t even disguise the fact that Dracula isn’t underwater, as he’s obviously standing in front of a greenscreen.  

Yep, if you can’t already tell, we’re knee-deep in another Mark Polonia movie.

But it gets worse.  The droning theme song where a guy repetitively moans “Sharkula” over and over again almost put me to sleep.  The same goes for the echoey opening narration.  Ditto the constant cutaways to a fire dancer twilring her flaming sticks.  It all adds up to a one-way ticket to dreamland.  

It also has a weird, blurry look and choppy feel.  Sometimes, it looks like people are moving at .75x speed as they move and talk slower than they ought.  It’s one thing to use slow motion for an important scene.  It’s another to randomly slow parts of the film down to (presumably) inflate the running time.  

The vampire/shark hybrid is kind of funny, I guess.  It looks like a shark bath toy with rubber bat wings glued on it.  That’s about the only laugh the flick has to offer though.  In some close-ups, I shit you not, it looks like a Carvel ice cream cake.  It's also obvious that the fin used for the shots of the shark swimming just below the surface of the water was just a pool toy the filmmakers purchased from 5 Below.

Oh, I forgot to talk about the plot.  My bad.  Two losers get jobs working in an old inn at a seaside resort town.  Their weird employer, Renfield forbids them from going outside at night and mingling with the locals.  It’s a good thing too because after sundown, Dracula likes to feed sacrifices to the shark vampire, Sharkula.  

Sounds like fun, right?  Unfortunately, it’s about as much fun as shoveling chum.

TUBI CONTINUED… THE AMITYVILLE CURSE (2023) **

I think this might be a first for the Tubi Continued… column.  The Amityville Curse marks the first time I have reviewed a movie that is a Tubi Original remake of a movie I’ve previously reviewed for the column.  It also marks the second time a movie from the original Amityville series has been remade (after the original).  The 1990 version of The Amityville Curse was based on a Hanz Holzer book and was the fifth film in the original Amityville franchise.  So, I guess that makes this part of the “official” series?  Maybe?  I don’t’ know.  Things get a little murky when you start talking about rip-offs that are remakes of sequels.  

The basic story of the 1990 film is the same.  A bunch of couples buy a house in Amityville hoping to renovate and flip it.  The big difference is that in the original, it was just a house in Amityville.  This time, it’s THE house.

When one of the new tenets falls to their death, the house is soon swarmed with morbid curiosity seekers and becomes subject of supernatural speculation on social media.  (“We’re trending!”)  Hoping to dispel the claims the house is haunted; the friends invite a paranormal podcaster to do a show on the house.  He naturally winds up dead too.  More people are killed by the house, and eventually, the surviving members of the friend group turn to a professor of parapsychology to save the day.  

The Amityville Curse is watchable, but it’s mostly ho-hum and forgettable.  The biggest special effect is that the lights flicker on and off.  Since the deaths are all “accidental” or suicides, they aren’t exactly creepy or effective.  They just sort of happen.  It may be a cut below the original Curse, but it’s not bad as far as these modern Amityville rip-offs go.  

The oddest thing about the flick is that when it feels like it should be over, a “Two Months Later” title card pops up and it keeps on going.  This sequence isn’t exactly bad, but it’s not really a worthy conclusion.  If anything, it feels like a sequel that’s been crammed into the last twenty minutes and is further proof the movie should’ve really packed it in two reels ago.

AKA:  The Amityville Terror.

TUBI CONTINUED… NIGHT OF THE AXE (2022) ***

A deranged axe murderer kills two orderlies and escapes from the nuthouse.  He cuts two holes in a pillowcase, drapes it over his head, and sets out to chop up a bunch of locals with his trusty axe.  The killer eventually sets his sights on a house party where a bunch of friends are holding a makeshift high school reunion. 

Night of the Axe had a retro ‘80s slasher vibe that I really dug.  From the Halloween-esque backstory of the killer to his Friday the 13th Part 2-inspired look.  From the POV stalking scenes to the bloody font used in the credits.  It all shows writer/director Shawn Wright really has the genre down pat.  This is an especially impressive feat considering this was Wright’s feature debut.  

Wright embraces the cliches of the genre at every turn.  The dumb characters smoke pot and have premarital sex, which leads to some gratuitous (and welcome) T & A (although I don’t think the actresses in the ‘80s had clit piercings).  And at a mere hour, the film never wears out its welcome.  I guess you could criticize Wright for not trying to bring anything new to the table, but that’s not such a big deal when he efficiently checks all the boxes you’d expect from an ‘80s slasher.  I mean you don’t have to hit it out of the park every time at bat.  Sometimes, a clean ground-rule double gets the job done, especially when you only have an hour to kill.  

I can’t quite tell if the gore effects were bad on purpose, or just plain bad.  (The guy who gets his arm chopped off is clearly just sticking his elbow out of his T-shirt.)  Either way, it kind of works as it ultimately adds to the film’s low-fi charm.  (Many kill scenes involve the axe resting gently on the actors’ skin, which is amusing.)  Besides, any movie that features a News Break that interrupts a television showing of The Beast of Yucca Flats is OK by me.

TUBI CONTINUED… DEMON PREDATOR (2022) *

In the future, an AI-enhanced cyborg becomes self-aware and escapes from a laboratory.  A couple on a nature hike have the misfortune of running into the rogue robot, who kills them.  Eventually, a SWAT team is sent out to take down the angry android once and for all.  

Although Demon Predator is only forty-seven minutes long, this Dustin (Amityville in the Hood) Ferguson-directed dreck still feels heavily padded.  There’s a longwinded Star Wars-inspired opening crawl, a slow-moving credits sequence, never-ending driving scenes, and some nauseating Found Footage segments of the couple traipsing through the desert.  All that just adds up to a whole lot of nothing.  

The robot is the best thing about the movie, which isn’t saying a whole lot.  Sure, the stop-motion effects that bring it to life are kind of crappy, but I’d rather watch a toy robot moving around via stop-motion animation than some shoddy CGI creation any day.  It’s a shame too, because the early scene where it skedaddles out of the lab had promise.  

However, all hope that this was going to be a good flick was shattered once things switched over to the Found Footage format.  The long scenes of the couple wandering around the middle of nowhere often feel like some YouTuber’s nature hike video that inexplicably got spliced into the movie.  It’s like someone trying to pass their vacation videos off as a sci-fi action thriller.  The picture sinks even further downhill when it stops on a dime for an extended, cheap-looking, and dull News Report segment where a reporter interviews a scientist at length about the rampaging robot.  

Ferguson himself must’ve gotten bored with all this shit as he finally switches gears in the last ten minutes and tries to make it look like an actual movie.  (Which is to say it’s a lame, no-budget Predator rip-off.)  By then, it’s too little too late.  We’ve been jerked around so much that by the time the climax comes around, we would gladly accept ANY resolution as long as it meant the flick was over.

TUBI CONTINUED… SEXUAL INADEQUACIES (1970) ** ½

The title of this “White Coater” skin flick (which is done in the style of Danish sex documentaries but is really just a crass Italian exploitation film) is a bit misleading as it’s not about impotency or erectile dysfunction.  Rather, it’s a lurid expose on sexual deviation and perversion.  In fact, “Sexual Deviation and Perversion” would’ve made for a much more accurate (and better) title.

An on-screen narrator tells us that during puberty, masturbation is perfectly normal, that is, unless it is done to excess.  Then it can lead to… dunh… dunh… DUH!  Sexual deviation and perversion!  Then, we move on to several different vignettes that focus on said deviations and perversions.

The first sequence is about a nymphomaniac who tries to curb her urges by taking a cold shower before finally succumbing to her desires.  The next section is on voyeurism.  Here, we see a series of men sneaking a peek at women getting undressed.  Conversely, we also see some exhibitionists, one of whom is a pervert who exposes himself to young girls.  It’s then suggested that sadists and masochists are a product of childhood trauma.  Oh, and the views on homosexuality are hilariously wrongheaded and outdated.  We also get a funny scene where a couple has sex under laboratory conditions.  

Naturally, nearly all the so-called clinical information that is portrayed here is hilariously outdated or just plain wrong.  That’s sort of what makes it amusing though.  Unfortunately, the film was made with a conservative attitude and looks down on its case studies with contempt.  It often portrays them in the worst possible light too and tries to make them all subjects of scorn.  I’m thinking specifically of the bizarre sequence where a high-powered lawyer keeps his fetish doll in a Dr. Phibes-style secret chamber.  Sure, Sexual Inadequacies won’t win any awards for sensitivity, but moments like these deliver their fair share of unintentional laughs.

AKA:  In the Labyrinth of Love.  AKA:  The Labyrinth of Sex.