La Casa 4 (1988) d/ Fabrizio Laurenti

It's been a minute, but we have returned with genre goofiness from the Boot just for you, as promised. Does this mean we won't be doing an Italian-themed month of reviews in Wop-tober? Hardly the case. This mutt, a Joe D'Amato produced sequel to Umberto Lenzi's La Casa 3 aka/ Ghosthouse (1988), unrelated genre fare rebranded as "House" movies to coincide with Sam Raimi's legendary Evil Dead movies, which just so happen to have been distributed as La Casa and La Casa 2, respectively, in Italy, at the time. Laugh all you want, there were several more to come after this one. Vidmark unleashed it upon unsuspecting American home video enthusiasts as "Witchery" in 1988. I'm pleased to report that nothing works in this movie, from the direction, to the pacing, to the special effects, right on down to the acting. Buckle up...
  

"T' ain't a finer stewing onion in all of London than this!"
In my best estimation, it would seem that Gary (David Hasselhoff) is a horny, young photographer who's taken his writer/girlfriend Leslie (Leslie Cumming) to a remote Massachusetts island and a run-down resort hotel where she can research famous witch lights...or gates to Hell...or something paranormal or other, as it's incredibly difficult to anybody to understand most of her dialog. Hard to tell if she's drunk, handicapped, or just affecting the most puzzling portrayal ever committed to celluloid, on purpose. Either way, when she's not emotionlessly mumbling her lines and pacing the hallways, she's denying Gary access to the poontang like some kind of virgin. The hotel formerly belonged to an old German woman (Hildegard Knef) with an all-black wardrobe who may have turned her toes up decades earlier as the result of a potent witch hunt, as she was tragically pregnant with child (cue: slo-mo flopper out upstairs window). Only she seems to be still flitting mysteriously about the old place, and she's likely plotting a course for gruesome, bloody retribution, as these witch-types usually are.


"Dis is a message from Aquaman to yer pal Jeremy Wade. 'E sez knock it off or else."
Meanwhile,  with Mater Rose (Annie Ross) having designs on buying the property,  her Brooks clan is arriving with a pair of horny realtors (including Hasselhoff's then wife, sultry blonde soap opera star, Catherine Hickland) via boat to assess the purchase, restoration costs, etc. There's her husband Freddie (Bobby Chanpagne), and their two children, the adult Jane (Linda Blair), who's very pregnant and having weird visions, and bashful young Tommy (Michael Manchester), who looks authentically petrified to be in front of the camera. Naturally, things go sour in a hurry, and in a most graphically violent and innovative manner, if not always (okay, ever) a coherent one. The lady in black and her spinning jeweled pin unlock a very seventies tele-visual effect-laden doorway to another dimension, where taunting witch-bullies eat still-born fetus parts, old women get hung upside down in a roaring fireplace, unable to scream with their lips sewn shut, and puffy nippled virgins lose their hymen to a yuck mouthed, leering Satan. You can assuredly bet that Linda Blair's character will be possessed and lip syncing gibberish with a cock metal hair do before the end credits roll, as well. That's a given...


Bert was the last Cockney chimney sweep she'd ever cross...
With confusing and inept fare such as this being exported from Italy in the late eighties, it isn't hard to see that the earlier Golden Era for the genre was shrinking rapidly in the rear view mirror, and an inevitable flat line was on the horizon. Claudio Fragasso's La Casa 5 aka/ Beyond Darkness (1990), also produced by D'Amato, would come next. Nobody's any good in this one, with Leslie Cumming of Zombie 5: Killing Birds (1987) fame cementing her position as the worst on screen, scene after laughable scene, and perhaps Hasselhoff delivering the only cringe-less performance, albeit a pedestrian one. Despite the constant flow of negativity that's just been bellowing out of me concerning Witchery, and the inevitable single Wop I've got to lay upon it, you might just have a blast taking this one in with your buddies, if rotten fun is occasionally your fancy. You know what I'm saying. Scream Factory will be releasing it as a Blu-ray on a double bill with it's predecessor, Ghosthouse, in June, so look out for that.


"Rock and roll crazy naaaaaaaaht! You are the hero toniiiiiiiiiiiight!"

"Piranha 3DD" (2012) d/ John Gulager

As David Hasselhoff arrives at the "Big Wet" waterpark for a grand opening promotion in tonight's review, the sequel to Alexandre Aja's remake of a 1978 Joe Dante cult classic as handled by the guy who gave you Feast (2005), its two direct-to-video sequels, and a tv-movie about zombies, he proclaims to himself, "Welcome to rock bottom." We as viewers were aware of this certainty as early as the pre-credits sequence that features Clu Gulager, Gary Busey, and a waterlogged bovine corpse farting out giant pool ball-sized prehistoric piranha eggs. Not very high brow stuff we're covering here this time around, huh...


Move over, Casablanca :"Josh cut off his penis because something came out of my vagina."
Judging by the aforementioned intro, it would seem that the bass-sized meat eaters have survived the humans previous onslaught at Lake Victoria and have set their fish-eyed sights on Big Wet, an adult-themed water park on Cross Lake run by an unscrupulous money-hoarding, boob-ogling, light bulb head named Chet (David Koechner), who's got the local deputy, Kyle (Chris Zylka), in his pocket, and his visiting step daughter, Maddy (Danielle Panabaker) on his case, for replacing the lifeguards with water-certified strippers. Lots of topless bobblers bounce to and fro in slo-mo to fully beat this point into submission. Meanwhile, Maddy is a hot commodity to both Deputy Kyle, who she's hooked up with in the past, and lowly water park employee, Barry (Matt Bush), who spears trash with a trident and shuffles along in a shark costume. Her friends Ashley and Travis meet a watery end in a dated-looking party van, and her virgin pal Shelby has her genitals infiltrated by an embryonic piranha. After Maddy and Shelby are nearly snacked upon by the invading predators, the kids set out to visit Mr. Goodman (Christopher Lloyd), who's been locked away, studying the fish and gleefully stealing You Tube hits from "Laughing Diarrhea Baby".


Hasselhoff daydreams of simpler times and more challenging roles, like "Boner" in Revenge of the Cheerleaders (1976).
Stressed out by the coming catastrophe, Shelby demands that Josh fuck her, right there, only to have the baby piranha that's been living inside her wriggle downstream and bite the poor kid's prick tip off, mid-coitus. Meanwhile, Maddy is haunted by nightmares of being attacked by piranhas who rudely interrupt her tubby time and Chet is hearing zero piranha warnings from anybody with the park's lucrative grand opening upon them, with aging celebrity, David Hasselhoff (himself, naturally), on board overseeing the event as a faux lifeguard, in between drunken hotel menage a trois with young groupies while writing future pop hits for Germany like "Love Hunter", that is. Opening day brings more quivering slo-mo boobs on the water slides, and splish-splashy teen male chauvinist fun, even drawing a hilariously aquaphobic Ving Rhames back to reprise his role as the heroic Deputy Fallon from the original remake, now legless, and pushed around by that gap-toothed comedian, Paul Scheer, for more cheap laughs. Without further elaboration, you already know how this is all going to end up...


She's just upset that the head is bigger than her blood-soaked breasts. Somehow.
Danielle Panabaker has scored herself countless television appearances, as well as roles in the Friday the 13th (2009) and Crazies (2010) remakes. Adrian Martinez is probably best known for following Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers around with a foam cheese wedge on his head and shouting "Heeeey Radjahs! Discount double check!" in those asinine, witless commercials. It's only fitting he's here fucking a pool filter and getting bitten up the ass by piranhas. Three people (!) wrote the screenplay, rife with dialog gems like : "She's afraid to have sex 'cause her slutty cousin gave birth to a flipper baby." Yeah, it's a glorified SyFy original with a five million dollar budget and jiggling juggies in 3D, and nobody's going into it expecting Don't Look Now (1973) or Daughters of Darkness (1971). I think it wears a single Wop like an Intercontinental Wrestling Championship belt. You might even be inclined to agree with me.


"What did I tell you about going into the water less than twenty minutes after eating, young man ?!!?"

"Revenge of the Cheerleaders" (1976) d/Richard Lerner

Anybody that can't get a few cheap kicks out of a good vintage teenage sex comedy from the seventies is either dead inside or harbors some deep-seated resentment towards young people having a blast a la Dennis the Menace's drape neighbor, Mr. Wilson, that old fuddy-duddy. High school serves as a good diving board towards embarking on a lifetime tour as a partying wildman from Borneo if you play it the right way; my only regrets are that I didn't pull more shit back then than I did. Had dimepiece genre chicks like Rainbeaux Smith, Penthouse Pet Helen Lang, Jerii Woods, Patricia Rohmer, and Susie Elene gone to my school, I probably would have thought about dosing the coffee pot in the teacher's lounge to score some pom-pom poonany, but at my school, it wouldn't have affected most of the drug addict bastards one bit! Or so I heard...


You German readers see anything in this screen cap you like?
 At Aloha High (Cali, Hawaii, what's the difference), you can pretty much do whatever you want, maaaan. The school maintains a constant anarchy and healthy buzz thanks to it's cheerleading squad (Lang, Woods, Pohmer, Elene, and Smith in the latest stages of pregnancy possible), who spend their days getting high, fucking, and lazily executing corny choreographed disco dance numbers with the rhythmically-challenged "Boner" (Hasselhoff) and the basketball team, when they aren't infiltrating rival school Lincoln Tech, holding the students hostage with a fire extinguisher while robbing them of their narcotics and booze, leading to the inevitable altered states cafeteria food fight (I was never a big 'food fight' guy, always found that kinda gross)/ mid-day bubble bath gym shower orgy with state inspectors in attendance, no less.


So that's where the peanuts in a CMP sundae come from...
Now that you've stopped pissing yourself laughing at the care-free hijinks that would get you expelled/prosecuted/jailed (in that order) in today's era of fake tolerance, let's get to the meat of the story. Except, it's more like a pink meat paste substitute, in this case. A greedy land baron by the name of Hartlander (William Bramley) has his beady eye set on Aloha, with plans to bulldoze it and turn it into one of those awful shopping malls, and worse, his ambitions will force a school merger with the rival gearheads from Lincoln. To speed up the process, he even contracts out Aloha's evil nurse (Eddra Gale) as a spy/ kidnapper, who abducts their beloved principal, leading to the inescapable chase sequence in and out of the massive dinosaur sculpture in the Cali desert that you last saw in Pee Wee's Big Adventure (1985) and some ambitious spatial reasoning leads to the consequential Bronson Caves, which just so happen to lead to Hartlander's mall HQ. Of course, they save the day in the end, and a parting shot reveals Heather is no longer pregnant, proudly holding her newborn son for the cameras (Smith's real-life son, Justin). Awwww...


"Heaven smells kinda salmon-y..."
It's become pretty trendy for everyone to get their cheap jollies by shitting on Hasselhoff for his early "work" (I say work, because his scenes are pretty much an endurance test for anyone who happens to be watching) here, as though "Knight Rider" and "Baywatch" were the equivalent of Master-fuckin'-piece Theater, ferchrissakes..."Drunk Floor-burger" is the best thing the guy's done, IMHO. Let's not forget a memorable appearance from Carl "McHale's Navy" Ballantine as the most easy going school principal ever committed to celluloid. Still, all the softcore-level promiscuity (there's a sequence between a pair of cheerleaders and a boy scout in the woods that pushes the envelope on that assessment, if you're wondering) and wanton full-frontal nudity in the world can hardly mask the technical ineptitude of tonight's cheapie, a one Wop flick if there ever was one, but then again, nobody's sitting down to this one and expecting Casablanca.


My favorite Rainbeaux in the spectrum, obviously.