"Skins" (1994) d/ Wings Hauser

Here's a rarely-seen exploitative oddity from the mid-nineties that was written, directed by, and stars one of my favorite bad guys of the eighties, 'Ramrod' himself, the one and only Wings Hauser. Of course, he also croons a tune, "Walking on the Right Side of the Devil", for the production, but it pales in comparison to his unforgettable "Neon Slime". Also singing (sort of) her way through a co-starring role is Linda Blair, of "The Exorcist"(1973) fame and "Exorcist II: The Heretic"(1977) infamy. She gets 'em out, here, too, and it's always a good time, whenever she does do just that, in my estimation.


"Fruit cocktail?? Thanks boys, but I'm watching my figure...", laughs Bentz (Cole Hauser).
A gay kid named Marjoe (!) gets fagbashed by a gang of skinheads and left to die, naked and spray painted in an alley. His mother, Maggie (Linda Blair) pollutes the air in honky tonk dive bars with something vaguely resembling singing, while his father, Joe (Wings Hauser), an alcoholic ex-cop, spends his nights knackered in Mexico, while the skins brazenly terrorize Hollywood Boulevard, kicking over trash cans, slamdancing to the house band (the singer says "Oi!" a whole lot) at their elaborately decorated clubhouse (Nazi stencils, swasti-curtains abound, and even a dramatic hulking floor-stika) and spray painting the obligatory swastikas over Walk of Fame stars, those bald-headed bastards. When Maggie travels down to Mexico to enlist her drunken sot of a husband, he calls his own son a fag(!!) before finally agreeing to dry out and get involved.


"I'll climb outta this jumpsuit if you're bringing something like this to the table..."
When Joe's first attempt at drunken payback goes miserably wrong at the clubhouse (the leader, Bentz, played by his real life son, Cole, beats him bloody then pisses on him...jeez, that must have been a fun shoot), he makes a teary-eyed vow to his wife and recovering son to turn things around, by cutting off the hooch, and repeatedly stumbling up a steep hill while dressed like Richard Simmons, being cheered on by his flamboyant son at the top, in one of several montage sequences. Meanwhile, the skins are raping the female half of an interracial couple, and later getting off the hook when the girl is too intimidated to finger the responsible eggheads. Maggie, impressed by Joe's sweaty efforts and improved relationship with Marjoe, gives her husband a piece of montage-pussy, as a reward. At the climax, Joe turns the usual Hollywood Boulevard rabble into a lynch mob, jogging down the middle of the street with bats and weapons to the clubhouse, where they take it to the bellicose bootboys, in a pro-wrasslin' style free-for-all. The reunited family walks off, arm-in-arm, while Bentz, who ducked out on the beating, and his rottweiler move on towards a whiter, brighter future...Skins 2? Never happened.


"Can I marinate both of these in neon slime?", ponders Joe (Wings Hauser).
Besides Wings and Cole, the film also features Wings' partner/wife, Cali Lili Hauser as the skinheads' punky plaything, and his daughter, Bright Hauser, as a "Young White Angel", sieg heiling in a swazzy armband, and reciting "America, the Beautiful". It's nice to see families working together like this. Interestingly, Cole would again portray a skinhead gang leader just a year later in John Singleton's lifeless imbroglio/ethno-wank, Higher Learning (1995). As far as skinhead-related movies go, this one's not as engaging as 16 Years of Alcohol (2003) or Romper Stomper (1992), but it isn't quite as mephitic as cine-turds like Pariah (1998) or Greydon Clark's legendarily laughable Skinheads (1989). Still, it's closer to the latter two than the former, with unintentional laughs galore and Linda Blair's bountiful bobblers. There's a region 2 dvd out there, should your curiosity win out. Two wops.


The one at the front, giving it the mouth, but at the end of the night, we'll all shout...

"The Wind"(1987)d/Nico Mastorakis

When last we examined one of Greek filmmaker Nico Mastorakis' movies nearly five hundred reviews ago(the very first post on Wopsploitation, some useless trivia for you there) back in ought-seven, naturally, it was his wildly controversial, widely banned 1975 pioneer effort, Island of Death that we scrutinized.Some five years later, we find another Mastorakis film to focus upon, this time, one of his low-budget American productions from the mid to late eighties, a direct-to-video cat n' mouse pot boiler set in Greece and starring a surprisingly good cast that includes Meg Foster, Robert Morley, Steve Railsback, David McCallum, and none other than Wings Hauser as the unhinged American psychopath.Sure, I just named the killer in the opening paragraph, but you're probably not gonna cast an apex antagonist like Hauser in your film as anything else but, really, are you.Besides, apart from a few moments of enveloping paranoia, Mastorakis, who wrote, produced, and directed here(as he often does), plays the whole thing decidedly straightforward and un-giallo, despite some mounting comparison of this particular work to Argento's over the years, crafting methodical suspense out of the isolation of his main character, and anthropomorphising the island's foreboding, seasonal night winds, instead.Despite the film's mostly lethargic pace and seeming aversion to the plot twists, gore, or nudity required of a slasher or giallo, Wind manages to weave some real tension and atmosphere around the lush cinematography and solid performances from it's two leads throughout.

"Would you mind terribly if I pulverized my poultry in the lavvy briefly?"
Sian Anderson(Meg Foster) is an American mystery novelist vacationing for several weeks in the remote Greek villa of Monemvassia, as rented to her by elderly-but-opinionated British chatterbox, Elias Appleby(Robert Morley), who tells her:"When I first saw this place, I nearly had an orgasm!", before warning her not to venture out in the brutal night winds, reminding her that she isn't in Chicago.While her overprotective beau, John(David McCallum), worries poolside(with a plexiglas window, no less) in America, the seasonal isolation allows for her to get to work on her latest novel, as she fleshes out an imagined argument between Appleby and his hired help, a gum-chewing American ne'er-do-well named Phil(Wings Hauser) who seems to appear and disappear with the sudden wind gusts, and who helpfully offers:"If you need to know about death, I'm right next door..."(!).Mighty neighborly of you, Phil.That night, she thinks she sees him burying a body out back, and after investigating further, discovers that the partially unearthed hand contains Elias' signature ring.While she struggles to determine whether the threat is real or imagined, and unable to maintain a phone connection long enough to relate her dilemma to her stateside lover(who can't get through to the Greek authorities on his end, either), she calls Elias' Greek wife with her suspicions, and when the woman comes looking for her husband in the blustery night, Phil feeds her sickle-fueled death, throwing her lifeless corpse into a pantry next to Elias, whose body he's moved to further complicate things.

Nevermind those limpid blue pools of hers, get a look at that delicious cigarette.
It isn't long before the peninsula's brutal winds usher in a prolonged game of cat and mouse between the homicidal handyman and the isolated writer, who barricades herself in, alternately pouring a pot of steaming hot water into his mush, stabbing his shoulder with a butcher knife, and repeatedly firing off a tactical shotgun in his general direction.John eventually gets through to the police, who send a landlocked sailor named Kesner(Steve Railsback) to check on Sian, but after much skepticism and precious little investigation, he's impaled through a door by Phil's sickle.Unwavered by his mounting injuries, Phil cracks a few poppers and harrasses the author with nursery rhymes and Humphrey Bogart impersonations over the phone, adding, matter-of-factly:"Do me a favor. Don't die quietly, okay. Talk to me." Sian boobytraps the door with some rope, and when Phil tries to break in, the door slams his sickle into his midsection, apparently killing him.As the writer tries desperately to flag down a couple of indecisive newlyweds outside the castle, Phil pops up again, chasing the hysterical girl to a lofty ledge, where he takes one of the more memorable slo-mo missteps in cinema history, and plummets, screaming, several thousand feet to the jagged rocks below, or at least an unreasonable dummy facsimile does.Roll credits.

"I don't usually terrorize women vacationing in Greece with a sickle, but when I do, I make sure I'm hopped up on Amyl Nitrite first." 
Ironically, the cover art depicted above would find itself on a Turkish poster for Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning(!), with Robert Morley's familiar face painted over with a goalie mask, but Wings Hauser chasing Meg Foster down the length of the sickle inexplicably remains.Turks are fucking weird, aren't they?
Hauser would again appear in front of Mastorakis' lens the following year in 'Nightmare at Noon', most recently scoring a credit in Rubber(2010).Foster is a Reading, Pa. native who's appeared in everything from Welcome to Arrow Beach/ aka Tender Flesh(1974), and They Live(1988), to Leviathan(1989) and 1994's Shrunken Heads, and will be appearing in Rob Zombie's latest effort, Lords of Salem.With those glow-in-the-dark blue eyes, I can't hold it against her.During his long career, McCallum has scored genre credits in television shows like Outer Limits, Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, while you'll most likely remember Morley as the rotund theater critic forced to eat his poodles by Vincent Price in 1973's Theater of Blood.After giving a critically acclaimed performance as Charlie Manson in 1976 tele-pic Helter Skelter, Steve Railsback has turned up in everything from Lifeforce(1985) to Ed Gein(2000), and even Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects(2005).On the scale, Wind merits a solid two Wops, and is well worth a look.

Now that's what I call: κολύμπι στο ποτάμι του λάσπη νέον σε Έλληνες πουλόβερ, or 'Swimming in the river of Neon Slime in a Greek sweater'.

"Vice Squad"(1982)d/Gary Sherman

"Bang! Bang! Shoot 'em up, talkin' about crime! Somebody just bought it in a neon sliiiiiime!!!" From the instant your ears wrap themselves around lead antagonist Wings Hauser's uneven voice, cracking, as it dramatically belts out the obvious lyrics of the title tune from tonight's review, you should already know you've got a minor eighties exploitation classic on your hands, and one that features one of the great deranged cinematic performances of the era.Nevermind that it was helmed by director Gary Sherman, of Raw Meat(1972) fame, or '70s supporting actress extraordinaire, Season Hubley, in the female lead, or even the appearances within by pioneer MTV vee-jay, Nina Blackwood, Fred "Rerun" Berry of "What's Happening", and a nondescript cameo by a nearly unrecognizable Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith.It's Wings Hauser you're gonna wanna get a load of in this one, trust me.After toiling on television crime dramas like Baretta and Magnum, P.I. for several years, his breakthrough role came in tonight's entry, in the form of a scumbag named Ramrod, who looks like he might be the illegitimate father of record breaking Detroit Lions' franchise quarterback, Matthew Stafford, if he was a coked-out psycho pimp that wore a turquoise cowboy shirt, drove a personalized monster truck, and terrorized his stable of money bitches with an unpredictable steak of debilitating sexual violence, that is.Hauser's Sunset Strip sociopathic slut-slinger effectively takes the cartoon stereotypical movie pimp with his ostentatious polyester evening wear and catty pimp slaps and sends him scurrying for the nearest street lamp to hide behind.Because of him, Squad is sleazy, tension-packed exploitative gold that'll leave you on the edge of your seat.Onwards...

Sorry, Nina, but the pimpstick didn't wanna see "I Ran", by A Flock of Seagulls twice last hour...
After seeing a lengthy title montage of the colorful pond life that made Sunset Boulevard after hours the sideshow it was famous for being at the outset of the eighties(no big deal these days, as any 3 am trip into WalMart will illustrate, really), we're introduced to "Princess"(Season Hubley), a single mother forced to send her tearful, young daughter off to stay with a relative while she overapplies her makeup and wears a lotta purple, pissing on strangers and getting her toes shrimped for cash as a Sunset Strip outlaw(def: sans pimp) streetwalker.She receives a distressing phone call from fellow hooker, Ginger(Nina Blackwood), who's bolted on her sugar daddy, a sociopathic hillbilly named Ramrod(Wings Hauser), who gleefully takes it upon himself to mutilate her money-making mound with a folded up wire hanger for jacking his ends (and not being as adorable as Martha Quinn), resulting in her premature death at the local hospital.Walsh(Gary Swanson), a vice cop, coerces Princess to partake in a sting operation to snare her friend's killer(by repeatedly shoving her face into Ginger's lifeless cadaver on a gurney), but Ramrod is no easy collar, headbutting the arresting officers with the whore's forehead, and generally making a nuisance of himself before being hauled off in an unmarked cruiser, where he cowboy boots one officer in the face and slaps a submission choke on the driver from the back seat with his legs(!), escaping into the night from the accident scene, unbeknownst to Princess, the target of his suicidal vengeance.Meanwhile, it's sex trade business as usual on the streets, and after wolfing down a friendly hot dog with Walsh, Princess is back at it, herself, turning tricks for amputees, attending mock funerals for rich old pervs, getting her piggies tooted on by wallflower foot fetishists, and robbed by finicky overweight convention attendee/johns, oblivious to the fact that Ramrod is on the loose, getting his handcuffs sawed off, and scoring the weapons that he plans to use in paying her back a thousand fold, from tattooed fetishistic perverts.

"Does Wings Hauser have to foot rest a bitch's head in, in front of the King, to get his point across?!! Well, DOES HE?!!!?"
From here on in, it's a race to Princess, with Walsh, laden with guilt over allowing the psycho-pimp to escape, filling the strip with a rainbow platoon vice unit to find her as she makes her nightly rounds, while Ramrod beats the snot out of one of her Asian colleagues, Coco(Lydia Lei), dumping her in the street like a bag full of discarded Burger King wrappers, and even removing her former sugar pimp's(Fred Berry) jewels with a switchblade in zeroing in on her whereabouts(I always wanted to see somebody do that to Rerun, unimpressed by his jiggly poppin' n' lockin' for laughs and silly beret on What's Happening, for the record.).There's a crowded precinct sequence, for those who expect that sort of thing in movies like this, complete with brazen white prostitutes(Cheryl Smith), sassmouthed teen smack-veins(Stacy Everly) handcuffed to benches, and giant negroid cops inquiring about the whereabouts of their missing paper clips.Then Ramrod snatches Princess up into his stolen vehicle and the film races towards it's commodious climax where Ramrod blindly fixates on laying the pimpstick treatment to the cash-for-gash thorn in his side, nonchalant to the vice cops that have him hemmed in on all sides.Will Walsh save his flat-chested new gal-pal before the monster mack can add her to the growing list of uppity bitches he's brutally iced just for kicks?How much abuse can Ramrod's turquoise cowboy shirt endure during his mad dash to final judgment before he decides to put something else on?Most importantly, once it's all been said and done, will we be graced with a reprise of Hauser belting out "Neon Slime" over the end credits?I'll leave the experience to you, the readers, this time around.Give it a look yourselves, would you, ferchrissakes...

Pimpin' Hint #117: Neuter Rerun with a stiletto to show bitches you mean business.
The gritty script was co-written by Robert Vincent O'Neill, the writer-director of the first two "Angel" movies(Angel(1984), and Avenging Angel(1985), respectively), interestingly enough.Most of you will remember Season Hubley as the Chock Full'O Nuts girl who gets pulled through the floor by the cannibalistic 'Crazies' in front of then-husband Kurt Russell's eyes in Escape From New York(1981), though she's also appeared in Hardcore(1979), the Humanoids From the Deep remake(1996), and various cash-in horror franchise sequels like Children of the Corn V:Fields of Terror(1996), and Stepfather III(1992).Wings, who supplies one of my favorite on-screen villains of all-time here, a long-time television staple, also showed up post-neon slime in John Bud Cardos' Mutant(1984), direct-to-video sleaze Bedroom Eyes II(1990) with Linda Blair, and recent horror-comedy, Rubber(2010).Sherman also directed 1981's Dead and Buried, Poltergeist III(1988), and even an episode of the Poltergeist:The Legacy tv series.For me, this one goes back to the cable box days, where I must have watched it twenty times if I saw it once.On the scale, Vice plays the lamp post three Wops worth, a ballsy effort, full of the realistic grit that fans of exploitation flicks crave.Recommended.

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboy/psycho pimps that swim in the neon slime, like Ramrod(Wings Hauser).