"Lemora:A Child's Tale of the Supernatural"(1973)d/Richard Blackburn

Before the dynamic dvd release by the folks over at Synapse a few years back, tonight's review was a long standing lost vampiric cult classic of the early seventies that many hadn't seen nary a frame of since the late night television circuit of the same era(that was my experience, anyway!).It enjoyed regular truncated screenings under various re-titlings(Lemora-The Lady Dracula was one I remember distinctly) on the platform of a highly popular local horror host,WNEP's Uncle Ted's Ghoul School, where the late Ted Raub in a signature red fez told corny jokes and did magic tricks on a threadbare dungeon set and showed B horror movies every Friday night for years(1974-1982 to be exact).He was no Dr. Shock or Zacherle by anybody's standards, but I got to enjoy those two hosts growing up as well(Shock on WPHL and Zach on WWOR and WPIX),so it all worked out in the end.Now, about the movie itself...
To say Lemora was a low budget feature is like saying that snorting bath salts for kicks might make you hallucinate about multiple strangers living in your walls and conspiring to kill you(or so I hear on the local news, anyway) .With it's visible dimestore fangs and ghoul makeups(reminiscent of Ormsby's work in CSPWDT,I've gotta say), it's practically budgetless.Lead actress Lesley Gilb graces the screen for most of the running time like Sigourney Weaver's blink-resistant older sister who would have done well to get some acting lessons under her belt(one brutally embarrassing and amateurish line delivery that me and the boys are still quoting between laughs comes to mind),and no one could accuse exploitation vet Hy Pike(in his first major role,howabboudat!) of being much more than a budget hunk of ham, but the entire cast seems pretty game with the material they're given.Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith is appropriately innocent and adorable as always, though her eighteen year old curves must have been pretty hard to cover up while portraying a thirteen year old character(she has more than one nipple slip in this production, originally rated PG!Those were the days.) With that obviousness out of the way, let me go on to say that Blackburn's period vampire fairy tale oozes heavy duty atmosphere in every color-drenched frame, in the same way a movie like Suspiria does, rising above its budgetary constrictions on more than one occasion, ultimately making for a decent seventies horror-exploitative experience.

"Would you like a chocolate...or some inappropriate sexual innuendo with that bus ticket?"
Career do-badder Alvin Lee(who's just blasted his adulterous wife and her latest bedroom conquest to high heaven), while on the run from the authorities haphazardly finds himself a prisoner to Lemora(Lesley Gilb),a vampire who surrounds herself with a posse of hooded confederates and several gleeful dead children, ultimately ending up on the silk-clad nosferatu's personal wine list.Lemora glimpses a picture of Alvin's angelic teenaged daughter,Lila(Cheryl Smith), a sweetheart who's been living with the local reverend(director Blackburn himself) and singing hymns during his religious services, as distanced from her father's life of evil criminality as she could be.Lemora writes a letter to Lila urging that she come right away to hear her dying father's confessions and apologies as per his wishes.The irreproachable child stows away in the car of a couple for a ride to the bus station,with the driver making offcolor remarks about the girl's upright nature and joking about her ostensible sexual relations with the reverend.At the station, the ticket vendor comes on to her before offering her candy with sexual connotations attached.She boards a rickety antique bus,the only one of the night bound for Astaroth(nice name),when the capricious driver(Hy Pike)warns her of the surrounding countryside during the midnight hours;roamed by multitudes of beastmen overcome by an inborn need to shed human blood, who drag him off screaming in front of the girl's very eyes when the bus breaks down.

"Astaroth...that's gotta be six or seven branch shadows past the windows away from here."
Lila gets herself locked in a small room, and harrassed by a cackling,toothless old hag who preys on her fears until Lemora is content to let the young abductee into her home.Lemora offers her a change of clothes,an endless flow of obsequious banter, and finally presses her to join the vampire and her merry band of cherubic corpses in a chalice full o' blood.When Lila gets dizzy from the plasma cocktail, Lemora spins her wildly in a maypole dance to a victrola recording, bathes her in a copper pot, then tickles her.Maybe Lila would have been better off with some of the perverts from earlier in the movie.Just sayin'.The reverend, lost without his delicate, young flower, sets out in his car to find her, just as she attempts a daring midnight escape from her pale captor in purple nailpolish, whose eyes rarely nictitate.There's a beastman v. vampire rowdydow that momentarily aids the pubescent church singer in her skedaddle, with her own escaped father fighting for the beastie cause, but Lemora ends up on top, as she always has.Lila takes part in a weird silk-based(where are these dust bowl bloodsuckers getting these elaborate silk outfits anyway?) vampire ritual according to Lemora's wishes as the reverend appears on the scene.Lila(wearing silk,natch)jumps into the holy man's arms and smothers him with kisses to his initial dissapproval, but he soon gives in and starts making out with the child(!), who rears back and displays her nifty new pointy eye teeth, just before she goes in for a drink.Credits,anyone?

Lilah(Rainbeaux Smith),naked and crammed into an uncomfortable tub,and still looking less uncomfortable than Lemora(Lesley Gilb) does.
The late cult goddess Cheryl Smith appeared in countless horror and exploitation flicks in the seventies and eighties:Caged Heat,Swinging Cheerleaders,Massacre at Central High,Incredible Melting Man,Laserblast,Cinderella,Up in Smoke,and Vice Squad,to name just a few, before succumbing at 47 to complications from her long battle with heroin addiction in 2002.She's still one of my very favorite actresses,and will probably always be.Sadly, Lesley Gilb herself was killed in a car accident two years ago.Director Blackburn only ever directed an episode of tv's Tales From the Darkside apart from tonight's review, but to his credit, co-wrote and produced the Paul Bartel cult classic "Eating Raoul",as well as scoring a cameo within.The venerable Pike appeared in cult favorites such as Dolemite,Spawn of the Slithis,Vamp,Hack O'Lantern,and even Blade Runner before he passed away in 2006.Wow, this update paragraph is turning out to be a real drag with all this death already, isn't it?Let's wrap it up before I do a screaming header out the bedroom window myself.Seek this out and give it a look, I think you'll find a lot to like about it, despite its visible flaws.Two wops.

I suppose those could pass as fangs.Yeah, I'm feeling charitable.

"Spawn of the Slithis"(1978)d/Stephen Traxler

Happily all sorts of messed up tonight,droogs,cruising on a sottofasciasemplice playlist on my WMP,and enjoying smokes in the rocker in the cool night air.Self-medication is a necessary evil in these times of great collective apathy amongst otherwise stand up motherfuckers.I'm new to such a concept,always priding myself as a stand up and be counted kind of rascal over here,but I must say,I'm growing more and more used to the "Who gives a fuck?" mantra so prevalent in today's society.Luckily for you bastards,one of the things I still give a good,earth-shattering fuck about is serving you up regularly with the best and worst of the cult,horror,and exploitation genres of film.I may come off as a hardcore snob at times,or a caveman at others,and maybe I am both of those things,come to think of it,but I'd never steer you in the direction of a rancid ass-pie movie unless I forewarned you.If you were interested in seeing pics of Freddy Krueger's new fedora before anybody else,or hearing somebody blow smoke up the asses of the big studios over their recycled,unoriginal pap that they constantly camoflage as beluga caviar then expect you to clean your plate with a smile on your face,you're probably on the wrong blog.I love real horror fans far too much to ever sell out.
Thankfully we're raising the bar on the rubber sea monster sweepstakes here at Castle Wop tonight,if only slightly.Progress is progress.I should probably explain that the titular Slithis suit is pretty damned choice for the time period,and my beef with this whole production is how little screen-time it clocks,when it should have been a lot more visible a lot earlier in the film.It's the rad monster suit,the original premise,and the insane performance of seventies genre film staple,Hy Pike,of "Dolemite","Lemora:The Lady Dracula",and of course,"Hack O Lantern",that saves the movie from the brink of total banality here.Otherwise,the action drags like the back half of the run-over squirrel in Ivan Marx's "Legend of Bigfoot",and it may take you two or three sittings to get through the whole thing without passing the fuck out like Grandpa at 5:30pm bedtime with a belly full of phenobarbital.And awaaaaay we go...

Dead...puppies...aren't...much...fun.
While two boys play frisbee along a canal in Venice,California,one of the lads discovers a pair of mangled dogs while chasing after a frisbee overthrow,which is a growing problem locally according to the radio news broadcasts(the dead dogs and the bad frisbeeing).That night another family mutt goes to that big fire hydrant in the sky,and when his family goes to check on him,they end up on the ethereal escalator themselves.The local police suffer from H.U.A.(heads up our asses) syndrome,banking on a murderous cult being responsible for the awful offings,thus leaving responsibility for saving mankind upon the shoulders of a high school journalism teacher(Alan Blanchard),of course.All the news reporters must've been picketing for shorter hours or something.Somehow the educator manages to tamper with a crime scene and visit the homes of the most recent victims,scoring himself a choice piece of evidence for examination.Mud,slime-covered,and tracked all over the house,which after analysis by the teacher's biologist buddy,Dr.John(Dennis Lee Falt),turns out to be an unusual mixture of radioactive inorganic and organic matter,the likes the doctor has never seen before,harkening him back to a story about a radiation leak twenty years earlier in Wisconsin causing irradiated lake mud to take on all the living microorganisms and form something completely different,which scientists of the day dubbed "Slithis".He surmises that the substance his friend has brought him,is somehow also Slithis,but unlike the earlier Wisconsin version which was immobile and harmless,this version must have blended with a higher organism,creating some sort of...homicidal monster.Makes sense.

The spaghettios go in the mouth,buddy.
Our two unlikely protagonists seek out one of the original scientists to discover Slithis,and pose the eternal question:Could Slithis join with a higher life form and mutate into a kill-crazy amphibious creature of some considerable-assed size?After the yes they knew they were gonna get,Connor hires a boat captain and a fakin' Jamaican diver(Mello Alexandria) to collect mud samples from the sea bottom around the power plant,to prove their Slithis theory once and for all.Meanwhile,the Slithis monster has upped his diet from domestic animals to human beings,and once Connors finally(really,finally.)has his scientific proof and corroborative stumblebum eyewitness testimony,he goes to the police,where the lieutenant(Pike) after much outrageous eyebrow-lifting,painful grimacing,and vocal inflections,(and cross-examination by a ..."police scientist".Yup.)tells the prof to hit the fucking bricks.What follows is a sequence that might remind some woprophiles of a 1975 Spielberg production,if Jaws actually sucked balls and Hooper was a black dude who affects the worst patois you've ever heard,and nothing much fucking happens for a long,drawn out periods of time.After slightly less time than it would take to sit through 1987's The Cure for Insomnia(which averages 5 out of 10 stars over at the imdb,have that many people actually sat through an 87 hour long movie?),the Slithis finally boards the vessel and dispatches two of the seafarers,leaving the high school teacher and the Jamaican to fend off the muck monster's slow-motion attack(which is twice as slow here than say,Gargoyles(1972)for some unknown reason).Screwdrivers,ship chains,shotguns,all prove futile as the Slithis tears open the negro to reveal what looks like strawberry marmalade.So that's what's inside those guys.After it pulls a dying-rasta-driven axe from itself,the teacher slams an anchor's fluke into its shoulder,which inexplicably scores fatality points,and kills the thing.Connors kicks the dead monster overboard,claiming it belongs in the sea,and as he's about to walk off into the cinematic sunset,our hero is grabbed by...yup,it wasn't dead,afterall.Windbag Californians-0,Slithis-1.

"You're better looking than Farrah,baby." was heard a lot in 1978.
In a hat tip to master showman William Castle,Slithis "survival kits" were handed out as part of the film's publicity campaign,which included vomit bags and 8" x 10"s.Another positive is the surprising amount of carnage and nudity showcased herein,especially for a movie that was released with a PG rating.Code Red recently released the film on dvd,after years of bootlegs floated around,and did a bang up job,indeed,cleaning up the $100,000 dollar monster movie shot in 16mm then blown up to 35mm,also including the memorable trailer.It's definitely worth a viewing or two if you can get past the gaping stretches of boredom within.On the scale,Slithis sees two wops from a vaselined up coke bottle lensed viewpoint,for effect,of course.

Whutchoo tawkin 'bout,Slithis?!!

"Hack O'Lantern"(1988)d/Jag Mundhra

Whatever you wanna call it,it still sucks balls.
Embarrassing.If a wino with ass cancer on a beans and franks diet took a shit into a month old vat full of dead skunks under a sunlamp on a Texas highway in the middle of June,it wouldn't smell half as bad as this whole production.Some bad horror movies are a delight to sit through,some require superhuman endurance skills to stay awake until the end credits roll.I haven't screened any of the softcore porn director Jag Mundhra has moved onto since farting out this cinematic skidmark back in 1988,but for his sake,I hope he's honed his craft a little.Andy Milligan and Ed Wood Jr. look like Godard and Scorsese compared to this guy.Before you sacrifice an hour and a half of your precious life(which you'll NEVER get back,mind you)viewing this piece of dogshit,get a load of what Mundhra tries to pass off as a storyline,then decide for yourself.

"I like the taste of blood.Grandpa says it's good for me." says young Tommy in eyeshadow.Tomorrow's forecast:Heavy metal.
It's nearing Halloween as Tommy,a sickly pre-pubescent David Bowie lookalike in eye makeup(?), gets a visit from his effeminate Satanist Grandpa(Hy Pike,slumming BIG time after "Lemora;A Child's Tale of the Supernatural" and "Dolemite"...and that's no exaggeration,believe you me.)who gives him a dimestore rubber skeleton,a pumpkin,and a dimestore Satanic pentagram amulet before offing his father,who bursts in on Gramps' sinister barn hoedown for the dark lord and master(Satan apparently likes his bitches with branded pentagram buttcheeks,to each his own),by knocking him out and setting his car on fire with him unconscious in it.As the ultimate insult,he insinuates that Tommy was the product of an incestuous union between he and mom."Burn in Hell,Bill!"he minces as his son-in-law burns to death.I think the guy sold his soul the second he signed on for this movie,but hey,that's my personal opinion.

Tommy and Grandpa both agree: Manowar rules.
We fastforward several years later and find that Mom still has all three of her brood in the nest;Roger is a cop,Vera is dating some Jewish-looking goon reminiscent of a young Jerry Lewis in a Kmart jogging suit,and Tommy...well,he looks to be about thirty years old,working out with a headband on and rocking out to crappy heavy metal like D.C. LaCroix in his mother's basement.Ol' Scratch would be proud.Tommy ignores his poor widowed mother's cries for family unity,puts on some dimestore headphones and imagines himself in an extremely low budget La Croix music video where some junior college ethnic dance major dressed like a voodoo whatchamacallit has an impossibly long tongue,multiple arms,and laserbeam eyes that make shrunken heads appear on the drum cymbals,and ultimately,disintegrates the entire band,before turning a metal trident on Tommy himself,holding up his bloody papier mache' head in triumph, before our up-and-coming Satanist snaps out of it.Brrrrrrrr.Oh those crazy Hindu filmmakers.

Hy Pike,feeling sexy in his flashback toupee,lurches in for a closeup smooch.
Somewhere in here,there are some lackluster murders.Tommy's girlfriend(who looks like 80's porn afterthought Lois Ayres with a fatter ass,obligatorily branded)mistakes a hooded killer dressed in a Party City demon mask for Tommy and pays for her mistake with her life at the end of the previously mentioned trident.Vera's dork/love interest storms off through the cemetary after being manhandled at the house by Tommy,who breaks in just as he's about to enjoy some carnal pleasure,when he falls into an open grave and gets his head split open with a shovel by the same madman in a nine dollar latex demon mask.Is it Tommy,about to enjoy his full black magical/heavy metal power,at Gramps' next ghoulish gathering?Or is it Grandpa doing what comes naturally for an evil old pot-bellied warlock with a bit of a lisp?What the filmmakers try and pass off as a plot has surely thickened,droogies.

Black voodoo chicks with laserbeam eyes and shoddy gore effects:This is what metal is made of.
The muddled mess comes to a head at the annual Halloween dance.The townsfolk boogie to the sounds of an even worse band than D.C. LaCroix(if that's possible),thrill to the charms of an overweight has-been burlesque dancer with a snake,and just when everyone thought the get-together couldn't possibly rock any harder,those partygoers who duck outside for a smoke are treated to five minutes of some anonymous stand-up comedian's routine.Unfortunately,he isn't on the masked killer's death list,so we're forced to watch him imitate a centerfold girl AND a turkey.Piped-in laughter ensues.Meanwhile back at the barn,Tommy's sister Vera is the main course at the Satanic smorgasbord,but Tommy has a change of heart(possibly the gayest mealymouthed scream in cinema history),then there's a climactic battle between TWO cloaked baddies in the same rubber demon mask.One is Grandpa,and the other is...mom trying to keep her family unified and safe from Grandpa's evil bidding?They both eat it,but not before Gramps can put a Satanic whammy on his law-enforcing grandson,Roger.During the devilish denouement at the barn we see another black arts jamboree going on,only Roger is the coven leader now.Moral of the Story:If you eliminate a weeks worth of take-out curry dinners from your budget,you too can finance a horribly forgettable and thoroughly unsatisfying genre movie that may get rented out by a soccer mom in a rush on a Wednesday night at the Mom and Pop video store in 1989.

The obligatory standup comedian at the Halloween dance.That's why I never go anymore.
Unintentional laughs abound in this mess,as you might have expected.I've read a handful of positive reviews on it around the web which have me scratching my head.Did they see the same movie?Were they DC LaCroix fans?Did such people ever exist?Then the other day while tooling around at Blockbuster,looking for some movies to occupy some time on my days off,I saw more than one copy of Uwe Boll's "House of the Dead" missing from the shelf.And I understood clearly.Life goes in cycles,and though we may never have to endure another Jag Mundhra horror film,Uwe Boll took his place,just like Roger did,when Tommy backed out of his diabolical responsibilities.Scary stuff.

Goofy Jew in Kmart warmup suit-0,Shovel-1