RAD (1986) ** ½

Rad is a boilerplate sports movie with the novelty of the sport in question being BMX racing.  It was directed by Hal (Smokey and the Bandit) Needham, who might not be the first guy you think of for something like this.  However, he always had a knack for filming stunts, and he fills the flick with lots of scenes of bike riders doing tricks and flying in the air in slow motion.

Cru (Bill Allen) is a great BMX rider trapped in a small town.  When the big BMX race, “Helltrack” comes to town, he must decide whether or not to ditch the SATs for the big race.  With the help of his new gal (Lori Loughlin), he signs up for the race, defying his mother (Talia Shire, whose husband, Jack Schwartzman produced this) who wants him to go to college.  Naturally, everyone in town starts rooting for him and comes to his rescue when the greedy sponsor (Jack Weston) tries to stonewall him out of the race.

Rad probably has too much plot for something like this, but it does contain some odd touches that help to elevate it above the typical sports movie cliches.  There’s a funny scene where Allen courts Loughlin while riding bikes together at a school dance that feels sort of like a BMX version of Roller Boogie or something.  Then, there’s the “ass sliding” scene, which is just a naughty sounding way to describe… uh… sliding down a water slide… on… uh… your ass.  (I mean, how else are you going to slide down it?)  

The ’80s time capsule aspect works in its favor though, and some of the rampant product placement is also good for a laugh.  It nearly tops Mac and Me in that regard.  The big race is sponsored by 7-11 and Kix cereal, and there’s even a giant Kix cereal bowl the racers have to go through during the race!

The cast is pretty good too.  Allen is solid in the lead, and Loughlin is great as the sexy tomboy with a heart of gold.  Weston chews the scenery gamely as the villain, and Ray Walston is fun as the old fuddy-duddy who might not be so bad after all.  Shire is kinda wasted though.  After all those Rocky movies, she can do the whole “cheering from the sidelines” thing in her sleep by now.

AKA:  Hell Track.  AKA:  BMX Hellriders.  AKA:  BMX Hellraiders.

TUBI CONTINUED… IMAGE OF THE BEAST (1981) * ½

A Thief in the Night Part 3 picks up where A Distant Thunder left off, with Patty (Patty Dunning) set to be executed for not accepting the mark of the beast during the Tribulation.

It must be said that this opening sequence is something else.  Patty is led to the guillotine for her crimes and is given a heavenly stay of execution when God causes an earthquake to bring her sentencing to a halt.  You would think that alone would make her profess her belief in God, but when she fails to renounce the devil in a timely manner… well…  Let’s just say it doesn’t end well.  

I guess I’m kind of spoiling things when I say this is easily the best part of the movie.  Heck, this is probably the best scene in the whole series.  It’s well worth watching this scene based on its own merits and shows that director Donald W. Thompson had a flair for the dramatic.  It’s just a shame that it all goes into the toilet after that.

The focus then shifts to David (William Wellman, Jr.), a freedom fighter who’s infiltrated “Unite”, the foundation of evil.  His big plan is to… uh… make a fake hand stamp so everybody thinks he has “the mark of the beast”.  However, he spends most of his time in a barn hanging out with the preacher from other movies.  This guy has a big mural of the timeline of the Tribulation and overexplains Biblical prophecies to David (and the audience) and says things like, “This is not God’s temper tantrum!”  Eventually, God rains plague after plague upon man.

After the cool opening guillotine scene, the film slows to a freaking crawl.  Other attempts at suspense are downright laughable.  The grocery store sequence is particularly cheesy, and the attack of the giant locust (although all we see is its stinger) is lame.  These goofy moments unfortunately are not enough to carry it over the many dull patches.

AKA:  A Thief in the Night 3:  Image of the Beast.

TUBI CONTINUED… A DISTANT THUNDER (1978) * ½

A Distant Thunder is the sequel to Donald W. Thompson’s entertaining Christploitation flick, A Thief in the Night, and it picks up right where that film left off.  Patty (Patty Dunning) wakes up in an internment camp awaiting execution from the evil “Unite” group that’s taken control of the world after the Rapture caused all the good Christians to ascend to Heaven.  She’s naturally hysterical, so her friends think that letting her explain to the audience how she wound up in this predicament is the best cure for what ails her.

It's somewhat noteworthy that Thompson doesn’t rely on flashbacks to the first film.  (Aside from some split-second shots that act as half-assed premonitions.)  He could’ve easily slapped and pasted them in there to save time and money.  Instead, what we have is an interesting, if awkward way to do a sequel.  You see, the first movie was Patty’s “dream” and this is the actual Tribulation.  While I kind of admire that unique angle, the fact is A Distant Thunder just doesn’t work nearly as well as A Thief in the Night. 

Likewise, Dunning isn’t half as good here as she was in the first movie.  In that film, had a wide-eyed Candace Hilligoss quality about her.  Here, she seems to think hysterically screaming and screeching equals “acting”.  The constant scenes of characters preaching to the audience fall short of the heights of the first one, too.

I guess it wouldn’t have been so bad if the original wasn’t a surprisingly effective thriller.  However, A Distant Thunder is basically the film I expected A Thief in the Night was going to be.  It’s pretty bad from start to finish, and not exactly in an entertaining way.  Sure, there are some semi-amusing bits like equating the mark of the beast (which all people need in order to buy things during the Tribulation) with having a credit card, and the low-fi special effects for the “earthquake” scene are good for a chuckle.  Other than that, this is mostly a dud.

Like A Thief in the Night, the aim was to scare people into joining Christianity.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they gained a lot of converts from that film.  However, I’m not sure anybody would’ve signed up after watching this this one.  I guess maybe they were trying to bore people into Heaven this time around.

AKA:  A Thief in the Night 2:  A Distant Thunder.

TUBI CONTINUED… A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1972) ***

Decades before Left Behind was all the rage, this low budget Christian flick packed them in on the religious roadshow circuit.

Patty (Patty Dunning) finds herself on her own after her husband is taken to the promised land after the Rapture.  Flashbacks reveal how she met him and how her poor unchristian-like choices led her to being left behind.  It seems as though she had every opportunity to accept Jesus Christ as her Lord and personal savior but failed to do so again and again.  Meanwhile, nations around the globe combine to form a singular world government called “Unite” and urges all “Citizens” to be tattooed.  Patty refuses, and soon finds herself to be an enemy of the state.

The opening where Patty awakens to find her husband has been raptured up to Heaven while she is now stuck on Earth works surprisingly well.  The title sequence featuring a weirdo Christian band also has an odd, eerie quality to it.  In fact, the whole thing kinda feels like a Ron Ormond-directed version of Billy Jack or something.  (And I don’t mean that as in, “There’s a guy in a funny hat who Kung Fus people”, but that “There’s a lot of hippie-dippy sermonizing” and the film has a scrappy low budget DIY appeal.)  

Heck, even the more cliche aspects of the film kind of work better than they should.  The effective montage scene of Patty and her husband in happier days plays out as a series of still photographs.  This has more of an emotional impact than your typical romantic interlude since often, when you look back and think of a loved one, it’s usually through pictures and/or snapshots of a particular moment in time.  The scenes of radio broadcasts detailing the widescale disappearances kind of have a Night of the Living Dead feel to them too.

The final act is perhaps the least effective, but that’s mostly because the film’s budget is so low that it can’t quite pull off its ambitious aims.  Still, it’s a nice try, and some of the Dutch angles during the final chase are pretty cool looking.  Sure, A Thief in the Night is little more than a religious scare film, but hey, when it works it works.

Three sequels followed.

TUBI CONTINUED… SUMMERHOUSE SLAUGHTER (2023) ** ½

Director Dustin (Cocaine Cougar) Ferguson originally filmed this in 2014 as a homage/sequel to Cheerleader Camp.  It finally came out this year with a new title, Summerhouse Slaughter.  Of course, that makes no sense since there isn’t a summerhouse in sight.  I mean “Summer Camp Slaughter” would’ve been closer to the mark.  Oh well.

Ferguson also added horror host bumpers of “Malvolia’s Movie Matinee” where an Elvira inspired hostess intros the film and occasionally pops up mid-movie.  It’s a neat idea for a gimmick, even if Ferguson doesn’t do a whole lot with it.  I guess it beats his usual form of padding (long scenes of people walking through the woods).  

Things kick off with a great scene where cheerleader practice is cut short when someone puts acid in the football field’s sprinkler and causes the cheerleaders’ faces to melt off.  One year later, a new cheer squad shows up for cheerleader camp.  Naturally, it doesn’t take long for a killer to bump them off one by one.

Sure, Summerhouse Slaughter is a homage to Cheerleader Camp, but there’s also a bit of Girls Nite Out’s DNA as well as the killer dresses up as a bear mascot.  Honestly, this is one of the better Ferguson joints I have seen, mostly because he’s working with a sturdy blueprint instead of just cobbling something together on the fly.  The kill scenes are solid too.  The highlight is a Phantom of the Paradise-inspired death by plunger.  While it’s not great by any means, it does contain enough scenes of cheerleaders shaking their pom poms to make it watchable.

The original Jason, Ari Lehman is the lone “star” in the cast as the camp’s creepy groundskeeper.  It’s Jazmyne Van Houten who steals the movie though as Courtney, the bitch of the group.  She also gets all the best lines like “If I’m gonna be killed, I wanna be killed by someone hot!”

AKA:  Cheerleader Camp 2 the Death.  AKA:  Cheerleader Camp:  To the Death.

TUBI CONTINUED: THE PHOTOGRAPHER: INSIDE THE DARK ROOM (2016) ***

Tubi recommended this to me immediately after I watched Fright:  Night of Fear, so I figured, what the hell?  As it turns out, it made for a perfect double feature.  For one, both movie titles are incorrect on Tubi.  Secondly, both are less than an hour long.  Third, both films have similar plots.  And finally (and most interestingly), both have little to no dialogue.  I was hopeful that this too was going to be a silent movie, but as it turns out, people started talking about fifteen minutes into the flick.  Oh well.  That’s certainly longer than most films can go without dialogue. 

Although Tubi has this listed as 2011’s The Photographer:  Inside the Mind of a Psycho, it’s actually the sequel, The Photographer:  Inside the Dark Room, which was released five years later.  Now, I haven’t seen the original, so I can’t comment on it, but I’ll be sure to track it down based solely on the strength of the sequel. 

Models receive invitations to pose for a mysterious photographer.  They all wind up imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.  The cops are eventually called in to investigate. 

That might not sound like a lot of plot, but trust me, it’s all the plot you need for something like this.  The photo sessions are the real reason this thing exists.  They contain a mix of bondage, glamor, and cheesecake photo spreads.  There’s also a random music video sequence in there to help pad out the running time.  I will say that the police procedural scenes are really the only thing that slows things down.  Heck, even with the abbreviated running time, it feels a little long in places.  Despite those qualms, it’s a surprisingly solid thriller. 

The slashing scenes really work too.  One model is imprisoned in an oversized Guinea pig cage and forced to drink from an oversized pet bottle.  In another scene, a model is tied up while another woman is forced to… shall we say… entertain her.  Heck, even the reveal of the photographer’s identity is surprisingly well done. It might sound weird, but The Photographer:  Inside the Dark Room almost plays like a (slightly) classier English version of a W.A.V.E. Production (but with better production values).  Even with that comparison, it manages to be more effective than not.   

AKA:  The Photographer 2:  Inside the Dark Room.

TUBI CONTINUED… FRIGHT: NIGHT OF FEAR (1973) *** ½

Usually when I see a movie that’s only fifty-three minutes long on Tubi, it means it’s either a skin flick that’s had all the skin cut out of it, or a low budget Shot on Video horror movie.  As it turns out, Fright:  Night of Fear is actually a pilot for an Australian horror anthology TV show that was deemed too violent by the censors.  It was then released to theaters where it became a big hit, inadvertently kicking off the Australian “Ozploitation” craze.

Most times when a failed pilot is turned into a movie, they pad it out to a feature-length running time.  That’s not the case with Fright:  Night of Fear.  They kept the hour-long time slot format, which is a blessing.  Not only does the shortened running time make for a lean, mean little horror flick, but when you’re trying to watch 365 movies on Tubi in 365 days and you’re a few weeks behind with posting your reviews, you appreciate these short and sweet movies.

A woman is out riding her horse when she gets kidnapped by a greasy degenerate.  Later, another woman has a car accident and is stranded on the side of the road when the same madman chases after her with his pet rat in tow.  Make that pet RATS.

You know, I wasn’t even gonna bring up the gimmick because I wanted you to discover it for yourself, but it’s definitely worth mentioning.  So, if you don’t want the flick spoiled for you, stop reading this and go watch the movie.  OK?  Can I continue?  The cool thing about Fright:  Night of Fear is that there is NO dialogue!  Other than a brief snippet from a radio announcer, nobody talks throughout the whole thing!  That is, if you don’t count whimpering, screaming, and blubbering as “dialogue”.  Not only that, but it’s also effective as hell too.  In fact, I’d think it’s safe to say that this is the best no-dialogue horror movie since Daughter of Horror.

What makes it all work so well is that it never once looks like a TV movie that’s been released to theaters.  (Except for the short running time and maybe the opening credit that says, “Created By”, you’d be hard pressed to say this was supposed to be an episode of a TV show.)  There are lots of unique camera angles (including inside a rotary phone) and interesting editing (like during a tennis match that turns into a game of hanky-panky) that are hella cinematic.  Although there’s nothing exactly explicit on display, the flick is definitely more hardcore than the shit you’d see on American TV at the time, that’s for damned sure.

In fact, it’s almost a shame this didn’t become a series (either on the big screen or small).  Then again, this installment would be hard to top.  So, if you’re on Tubi and have (less than) an hour to kill, check out Fright:  Night of Fear.  It packs more shocks into one hour than most horror TV shows do in their entire series run.

AKA:  Night of Fear.