LET’S GET PHYSICAL: HAUNTING FEAR (1991) ****

FORMAT:  VHS

Loosely based on The Premature Burial, Haunting Fear is writer/director Fred Olen Ray’s love letter to Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies. 

Brinke Stevens stars as a woman who can’t sleep because she keeps having waking nightmares about being buried alive.  Jay Richardson is her philandering husband who owes a bunch of money and wants to bump her off.  He schemes with his lover (Delia Sheppard) to drive her insane to cash in on her inheritance, but things go sour.  Fast. 

Picked up by Troma (of all people) and distributed on home video by Rhino, Haunting Fear has to go down as one of Ray’s best.  In fact, I’m not sure why it took me this long to check it out.  In addition to Corman and Poe, Rays seems to take inspiration from A Nightmare on Elm Street for the dream sequences.  (Fortunately, only one of the dream-within-a-dream scenes threatens to test the audience’s patience.)  There’s plenty of gruesome stuff here too, like a cool oozing skull, a Fulci-influenced knife through the head and out the mouth, and a decapitated head.  The score by Chuck (Not of This Earth) Cirino is excellent too. 

Brinke is terrific in this (this is supposedly her favorite performance, and it’s easy to see why), especially when she’s flipped her lid.  She also has some fine bathtub and nude scenes.  Sheppard has some hot sex scenes too.  (“Nobody fucks you like I do!”)  Fans of Ray’s work will no doubt enjoy seeing his regular cast of supporting players like Richardson (who’s great as always), Robert Quarry (as a loan shark), Michael Berryman (as a creepy morgue attendant), and Hoke Howell (Brinke’s dead father) popping up.  Karen Black is second-billed as a hypnotist but doesn’t show up until the movie is halfway over.  Jan-Michael Vincent is top-billed, but he spends most of the movie in his car and looks pretty out of it a lot of the time.  

Much of the same cast appeared in Ray’s Teenage Exorcist. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SERIAL KILLER IN TRAINING! (2023) ***

FORMAT:  DVD

Laura Giglio and Stacie Kaye go out camping in the woods.  Their holiday is ruined when a killer in a black mask (Jason Pollack) sneaks up on them, knocks them out with chloroform, and ties them up with duct tape.  Before he can kill them, his father, who is none other than “The Necktie Strangler” himself (director Gary Whitson under his usual GW Lawrence non de plume) shows up and chastises him for being so sloppy.  Luckily, the killer is dumber than a bag of hammers, so the girls are able to easily escape.  However, he follows them home where he makes them play a game that neither of them may survive. 

Serial Killer in Training! is one of the latest offerings from W.A.V.E. Productions and it’s refreshing just how unrefreshing it is.  Here we are in 2024, and Whitson is still making them the same way he did back in the ‘90s.  Sure, the digital cinematography looks much better now than it did in the old videotape days, but it’s still all wonderfully amateurish.  (There are flubbed lines and jump cuts aplenty.)  Sure, it may lack the kick of some of Whitson’s best stuff, but in terms of plot (which is a fancy way of saying “nonstop chloroforming and bondage”), it gives you everything you could more or less ask for from a W.A.V.E. movie. 

Plus, it’s only thirty-five minutes long.  There is zero fat on this thing, and it moves like a freight train.  It’s like watching a regular movie, but with the boring parts cut out.  Or maybe a regular movie played at 2x speed, except everybody doesn’t run around like Charlie Chaplin and talk like an overcaffeinated auctioneer.  The highlight comes during a surprisingly effective scene where the killer throws darts at his victims.  It also helps that Giglio (who has always been one of my favorite W.A.V.E. actresses) and Kaye are both game for anything. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: PSYCHO SISTERS (1998) *** ½

FORMAT:  DVD

Four years after making Psycho Sisters for W.A.V.E. Productions, writer/director Peter Jacelone took the concept to Seduction Cinema’s Michael L. Raso and remade it under his Shock-O-Rama banner.  It has a higher budget, better production values, and a more polished style.  It is also reminiscent in some ways of Evil Dead 2 as the first film’s narrative is streamlined into the first act before the plot spins off in its own directions. 

The story is essentially the same.  Theresa Lynn and J.J. North are sisters who are released from a psychiatric hospital after witnessing the brutal rape and murder of their sister.  They then deal with their trauma the only way they know how:  Killing men and cutting off their penises.  New plot wrinkles involve a nosy tabloid reporter/dominatrix, a run-in with a gang of bikers, and North defying her sister and trying to have a “normal” life with her new boyfriend. 

Jacelone learned a lot in the four years between films.  He attacks the material with a lot of confidence and some of the swings in tone work surprisingly well.  The humorous bits are often very funny too.  (Like the scenes with the tabloid reporter.)  On the downside it runs on a bit too long and has maybe too many supporting characters.  There’s also probably not as much gore and nudity as I was expecting, but there’s at least one over the top kill scene. 

The reason it works so well is no doubt due to the chemistry between the two leads.   North in particular is great as the bubbly psycho sister and Lynn has many fine moments as the no-nonsense member of the duo.  It’s also fun seeing W.A.V.E. starlets Tina Krause and Deana Demko popping up in a cameo. 

Sadly, this was North’s final movie before quitting the movie business.  I don’t know where she got to but all I can say is that J.J., if you’re reading this:  Come back!  We miss you!

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: TITANIC 2000: VAMPIRE OF THE TITANIC (1999) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD

Tammy Parks is in desperate search of her lesbian vampire queen.  (Hey, aren’t we all?)  Meanwhile, some investors decide to create another Titanic and learning nothing from history (or the James Cameron movie), cut corners every chance they get.  (This being a Seduction Cinema movie, everyone pronounces it “TITantic”.)  Little do they know Tammy has snuck her coffin aboard the ship for its maiden voyage.  TITanic passenger Tina Krause is unhappy in her love life and meets Tammy on the ship.  Naturally, they are destined to be together, but will the sinking ship ruin their chance at bliss? 

TITanic 2000:  Vampire of the TITanic is more or less the ultimate Seduction Cinema movie as it features many of their in-house starlets and directors appearing in small roles.  Unfortunately, “ultimate” doesn’t necessarily translate into “best”.   I can understand trying to parody what was then the biggest movie of all time, but adding lesbian vampires to the mix was a… choice.  I’m not complaining mind you.  More movies should have lesbian vampires in them if you ask me.  It’s just lesbian vampires and a Titanic spoof go together like oil and water. 

The scenes that poke fun at Titanic aren’t exactly clever or funny.  In fact, the comedy that has nothing to do with Titanic (or lesbian vampires) is often excruciating and elicit more groans than laughs.  At least it has more boobs than that James Cameron flick. 

The greenscreen and CGI effects are pretty lousy.  I mean, the boat itself looks like something out of the “Money for Nothing” music video.  You probably won’t care though, mostly because of all the boobs. 

Tammy really steals the movie.  She also has a great scene where she emerges from her coffin to perform a sexy striptease.  Tina looks fantastic too and has plenty of opportunities to disrobe (including a spoof of the nude painting scene from Titanic).  Misty Mundae has a cameo as a guitar player, but sadly she doesn’t get naked, which is a bigger bummer than any Titanic-related tragedy.

AKA:  TITanic 2000.  AKA:  Scary Sexy Disaster Movie.  AKA:  TITanic Double-D.  AKA:  Vampire of the TITanic. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: NIGHTBLADE (2016) **

FORMAT:  DVD

Andy (Scott Tepperman) is a cop who gets kicked off the force after he assaults the man who murdered his family.  His fuck-up childhood friend Nicky (Jim O’Rear) offers him a chance to start anew, so they open a strip club together.  Things go great for a while until a psycho in a hoodie starts cutting up the dancers who work at the club.  It’s then up to the budding business partners to find the killer before he sets his sights on the sexy Jade (Betsy Rue).

My Bloody Valentine 3-D’s Betsy Rue, Diff’rent Strokes’ Todd Bridges, and perennial tough guy Robert Lasardo are the only real stars of this low budget thriller.  Written and directed by Tepperman and O’Rear, this is a fairly straightforward stripper whodunit.  It’s the kind of thing that Roger Corman used to make in the ‘90s.  Except that it looks way cheaper.  And the ending sucks. 

The big problem is that the flick spends too much time on the cop’s backstory.  They should’ve just cut the first fifteen minutes and got right to the stripping.  While there is a decent amount of nudity on display, unfortunately, Rue only has one brief sex scene.  She gives what is easily the best performance of the film and it’s a shame she is stuck making movies like this because she should’ve become a household name after her work in My Bloody Valentine 3-D.  (Although she is a household name in the Lovell household.)

The writing/directing/acting duo of Tepperman and O’Rear don’t have much in the way of screen presence or chemistry.  That really stings because they’re in nearly every scene.  Still, kudos to O’Rear for somehow managing to convince Rue to have a sex scene with him.  It’s proof that anything is possible in Hollywood.  I wonder if Betsy would star in a movie with me… 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: WHEN DEATH CALLS (2012) ***

FORMAT:  DVD

When Death Calls is a spotty, but amusing horror anthology punctuated with a healthy doses of T & A.  Suzi Lorraine stars in the wraparound scenes (***) as a radio hostess who tells scary stories over the airwaves on Halloween night.  During the show, a serial killer calls in with a few stories of his own.  Sooner or later, it seems like everyone has a scary story to tell. 

The first story (**) is about a cheating husband who won’t let his side piece leave.  The second involves a woman who slowly realizes her boyfriend is a killer (**).  That’s followed by a tale about a woman babysitting her fiancé’s dog that just so happens to have an insatiable appetite (***).  The final story (***) is the longest.  It’s about a man who murders his wife to please his mistress. Problems arise when she absolutely refuses to die.  Tina Krause also appears in the opening scene (***) as a sexy teacher who gets menacing phone calls before being stabbed to death. 

Essentially, the stuff with Suzi Lorriane’s DJ character is just a loose framework to showcase scenes of women disrobing before being killed.  Frankly, I have no problem with that.  The best scenes are Krause’s bit, the story about the dog (although it runs on too long), and the scene with the wife who can’t die.  (The part with the cable guy who hooks them up with the “Judd Nelson Channel” is pretty funny too.)

Most horror anthologies contain stories that have a twist.  The ones in When Death Calls are so loosey goosey that they could hardly be called twists, but they all at least take a turn near the end.  The dream-within-a-dream scenes add to the running time, but for the most part, it moves at a brisk pace. 

The best part (aside from the T & A, of course) is seeing framed posters of Lady Terminator, Dracula Blows His Cool, and The Groove Tube on the walls of one of the houses. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: CRITTERS ATTACK! (2019) ***

FORMAT:  DVD

They say necessity is the mother of invention.  I guess it goes without saying that an unnecessary Critters sequel made twenty-seven years after the last one isn’t going to be inventive.  Then again, it doesn’t need to be.  You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with something like this.  (Or reinvent the giant Critter ball as is the case here.)  You just need to make it fun.  Surprisingly enough, that’s exactly what Critters Attack! is:  Fun. 

The Krites, the deadly porcupine bowling ball aliens, land back on Earth and begin incubating their young inside of their victims.  Also touching down is their albino alien queen who gets picked up by a sushi delivery driver and some brats she’s babysitting.  Together, they must protect the queen and stop the rampaging Critters from destroying the town. 

It was refreshing to see just how old school this was as the Critters are still just hand puppets.  In fact, they may look a little cheaper than they did in the ‘80s, but that’s part of the appeal.  It’s also a lot gorier than I was expecting (it’s the first entry to be rated R), even though it really didn’t need to be.  Then again, why would I ever complain about gore in a horror movie?  (The shower attack scene is especially memorable.)

The B plotline with Dee Wallace returning (although her character has a different name, apparently to avoid a lawsuit) as the space gun-packing mama who tracks the Krites down is more fan service than a fleshed-out plot development.  (It still works better than the Laurie Strode stuff in the new Halloween movies.)  I also missed the face-melting alien bounty hunters of the original films.  Still, this was a lot more fun than I was expecting.  Overall, Critters Attack! is an unnecessary, but highly entertaining addition to the franchise. 

Mike Mendez, director of the minor cult classic The Convent, was the editor (and he also edited Slotherhouse, which I didn’t realize till I looked at his IMDb page).