"Craze" (1974) d/Freddie Francis

Hearing  Jack Palance repeatedly say "Chuku", the name of the African idol he worships and murders for in tonight's review, in his inimitable breathy Anthracite coal country whisper through nicotine-stained teeth, is probably reason enough to give this, director Freddie Francis' second 1974 effort (the other being a comedy called Son of Dracula, with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr), a viddy, for any fans of the late actor's work. For those that do seek out this groovy British tale of witchery and human sacrifice, there's a mixed bag of actresses/victims that ranges from Miss Nroway 1962, Julie Ege and Italian genre favorite, Suzy Kendall, to former British sex symbol and femme fatale, Diana Dors, as well as cameos from Trevor Howard and Hugh Griffith. There's also a wooden fork-holdin' bruh in the basement you're gonna wanna check out for yourselves...


"After you finish your zany interpretive nude dance for Chuku, we could go out...for pierogies..."
Neal Mottram (Jack Palance) runs a quaint little curio shop in London, with the help of his young protege', a former rent boy,  named Ronnie (Martin Potter). He's also the head of a groovy coven of witches who worship a wooden statue of an African god named Chuku in the shop's basement. When an ousted spellcaster shows up claiming ownership of the idol, Neal goes loud and aggro, shoving her onto the large sharpened fork the yellow-eyed statue holds. After dumping the corpse in a nearby river, he finds a hidden drawer full of gold coins in an old desk he's about to sell off, and naturally attributes the sudden good fortune to Chuku and his impromptu sacrifice to the wooden brother. He burns a bit of sacrificial crumpet (Julie Ege) that he picks up in a club,  in the furnace downstairs,  after she refuses to dance for Chuku, and sells a pair of Ming vases he previously couldn't give away, prompting more weird alone time in front of the statue. Empowered with the belief that the god is protecting him and making him wealthy, he concocts an elaborate alibi involving broken down vehicles, drugging an old flame named Dolly (Diana Dors), throwing on tennis sneakers, and tube hopping, all to provide his idol with another sacrifice, this time, his elderly aunt, who he stakes in the neck in her front lawn after scaring the shit out of her with a rubber Halloween mask.


"Nevahmind dese boolshit-ass sacrifices...put some honey barbecued pig ribs on dis fork heah!"
With the Bill convinced that the antiques dealer is the main suspect in the growing list of ritualistic murders, but unable to make the collar, due to Neal's attention to intricate detail, the detectives lean on Dolly and Ronnie for information, resorting to gay bashing the young associate, who descends into a mire of double scotches at the pub while being tailed. Meanwhile, Neal's set up another sacrifice to Chuku (take a dramatic pause...then whisper along...Chuku) in the form of a call girl named Sally (Suzy Kendall), who he pays twenty quid to choke the fuck out. With the cops closing in, Ronnie tries to take an axe to the idol, earning himself a bloody grill from a furious Neal, who promptly lifts him over his head and chucks him out the shop window in broad daylight (!). If you thought Palance was unhinged before, wait 'til you catch him in the film's finale, spinning around like an axe-wielding top, screaming at the top of his lungs at oncoming policemen, before finally offering Chuku (...Chuku...) one last sacrifice. Roll 'em...


Off to Bedfordshire wiv 'yer: "I choke you for Chuku...he's cuckoo for cheeky muff..."
Francis would follow this one up with things like 1975's Legend of the Werewolf and The Ghoul, while Kendall appeared in such genre fare of the day as Psycho-Circus (1966), The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), Torso (1973),  and Spasmo (1974), among others. Venicia Day was an actress whose roles ascended from "2nd African girl", to "2nd Black girl", to "African Girl", to "Dancer",  here. Former Bond girl Ege would also appear in Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and The Mutations,  the same year. Diana Dors had to be one of the most beautiful blondes of the 40's and early 50's in my estimation, but she'd come a long way from that era by the time of this movie. Still always great to see. Craze is packed with Palance, pretty girls, painful seventies gear, and bright red stage blood and makes for a pretty good time if you're into it. Three wops.


"I couldn't find your... ribs... a slab of Ukranian ham, seasoned in Lattimer Mines...will have to do..."

"Alone in the Dark" (1982) d/ Jack Shoulder

The pioneer release from New Line Cinema, director Jack Shoulder's first effort, is this tidy little slasher that features no less than three mammoth genre names among its cast members, with Donald Pleasence, Jack Palance, and Martin Landau all doing their respective part in raising this one above the standard stalk n' slash fare that permeated theaters of the day, despite the familiar "psychos are loose!" vein, as heavily mined as it had already been, to that point.


"Was that 'two Charlies, two Bunnies, and a Black and White'? Or 'a Charlie, no Bunnies, and two Black and Whites'?"
Dr. Potter (Dwight "Murdock" Schultz) lands a gig replacing Dr. Merton on the staff of  Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), a reefer-toking, left field psychiatrist with an unorthodox approach to his patients at the Haven mental hospital, with only electrically locked third floor windows and doors keeping the most psychopathic, homicidal cases from escaping into the general populace. It's a good thing, too, with the likes of  Hawkes (Jack Palance) the paranoiac, Preacher (Martin Landau) the pyromaniac, Fatty (Erland van Lidth) the child molester, and Bleeder (Phil Clark) the sociopath in there, and all under the impression that Potter killed Merton, one of their favorites...At home, Potter's got his hands full with his wife, Nell (Deborah Hedwall), young daughter, Lyla, and sister, Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan), fresh from a mental breakdown, herself, all occupying space in his pad. Toni drags her unreceptive brother out to a local club, where a punk band's set is interrupted by a state-wide power outage. The next morning at the institution, there's a dead security guard, and four inmates missing. Hmmm, I wonder which ones...


"...and I once saw a bee on a butterfly bush, while pounding Stegmaiers outside the Tomhicken recreational building..."
Pretty soon, Toni's meeting strange men while getting arrested at anti-nuke protests,  Lyla's learning how to make origami shapes from giant strangers, and when the teenage babysitter shows up to check on her, she and her horny beau end up getting added to the film's minimal body count. After a tense dinner, a visiting detective finds himself pinned to a tree by arrows, while the escaped lunatics have surrounded Potter's home. Dr. Bain makes the frantic scene, but his attempt at reasoning with the men leaves him one ear short, and but a bloody notch on Preacher's righteous axe in the end. After Preacher manages to set the basement ablaze and Fatty gets a back rub with a massive meat cleaver, Toni's new love interest turns out to be Bleeder, whose pesky nosebleed gives him away as he tries to strangle the young woman, eating  knife blade-inflicted death, himself, instead. Hawkes shows up in time to see Dr. Merton alive on television, storming out angrily after waxing poetic upon murder, and ending up at the punk rock club,  fitting in perfectly amid the regulars. Ba dum bump.


"Love lifts you up where you belooooong," sings Fatty (Erland van Lidth).
Interestingly, the two singers from "The Sic Fucks", opened the first punk rock boutique in America back in 1977, called Manic Panic, located on St. Mark's Place in the East Village; also providing the boldly hued hair dye of the same name that would decorate the heads of young top heavy playthings that often found themselves on all fours in front of me, in the throes of tantric multi-O's, for decades to come. You'll remember mountainous Dutch noble, van Lidth, as "Terror", the head of the Fordham Baldies in 1979's The Wanderers. Lin Shaye has a brief cameo towards the beginning here, and her older brother, Robert, who snagged a co-producer credit, also provided the story behind tonight's review. Also worth noting,  the era's Gore God, Tom Savini himself, serves up a practical FX nightmare along the way. On the scale, Alone earns two Wops, a highly watchable slasher in a genre already ripe with brainless carbon copies as early as 1982. Check it out.


A fine example of Camel(toe), domestic blend.

"Justine"(1968)d/Jesus Franco

Tonight we examine the screen adaption of a book once called "the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination"(that's a tall order,shorty) by no less than Napoleon Bonaparte, resulting in the thirteen year imprisonment of its author;a man known the world over as the father of Sadism, the Marquis DeSade.An ambitious undertaking for any director, granted, and somewhat ironic that none other than Jesus Franco would helm the project during one of his more prolific and respectable periods of work.Perhaps the true irony here is that Franco doesn't bung the whole production down the lavvy, despite his signature eternity-long zooming hand held shots that often end up blurred and out-of-focus, or more often, on some broad's hairy gravy boat, on display for all to see.In this film, the bush just happens to belong to the daughter of silver screen swashbuckler,Tyrone Power,whose fatal heart attack came ten years earlier in 1958, and not directly after screening Romina in her birthday suit here as one might deduce.Also lending credibility to the Italian production are performances by Franco regular Maria Rohm, the one and only Klaus Kinski(who's kind of wasted here, only bagging silent screen time as DeSade himself), the actress behind the husky screen voice of Pazuzu in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge, and even local great Jack Palance, who's not only appropriately off-the-chain as a sexually deviant libertine here, he also levitates for anybody interested in seeing that sort of thing.Nothing would surprise me at this point after checking out some of the search topics that bring readers to the Wop every day.Y'never know.So does Franco do the literary pornography of DeSade any justice?Read on for my verdict.

DeSade(Klaus Kinski)lets his quill do all the talking.
As we begin,the Marquis DeSade(Kinski)relates the sad tale to the viewer from the confines of prison, tortured by hallucinogenic images of, well...bare-assed women being tortured(I'm pretty sure he grooved on this sort of thing IRL).Juliette and Justine(Maria Rohm, Romina Power)get thrown out of a nunnery when their father unexpectedly dies.When Juliette's friend, Madame de Buission, turns out to be a brothel madam, the more virtuous and pure sister, Justine, bows out gracefully, while her nasty whorish sister Juliette willingly sets up camp in the whorehouse, learning all the carnal skills to make herself the apex prostitute.Meanwhile, things for Justine go from bad to progressively worse.A passing priest jacks her up for her gold doubloons and passes her on to a fat old scumbag named Du Harpin, who frames her with a gold amulet stolen from his master, Monsieur Derroches, ultimately landing her in prison.There she is befriended by Dusbois(Mercedes McCambridge),a gravelly-voiced she-assassin who takes pity on her for her innocent looks, and incorporates the young girl in a daring escape plan involving a set fire.Her sister, meanwhile, has honed her treachery to a fine point, adding murder to her growing list of unscrupulous talents; killing her madam and a rich client to boost her own pile of duckats.When Dusbois' henchman vie for dibs on deflowering their new young accomplice in the forest, she makes her escape, finding shelter and love for a short time in the home of a painter named Raymond.

Dusbois(Mercedes McCambridge),a condemned virago, still manages to set aside some quality gypo dancing time.
Her happiness with Raymond is short-lived though, as the police inquire as to her whereabouts, forcing her to flee into the woods, coming upon the shrewd and loafer-light Marquis de Bressac, who hires her as an attendant to his wife, the Marquise(genre fave Sylvia Koscina), that he's been planning to eighty-six all along.When she refuses to kill the woman for him, he kills her himself with poison and frames Justine anyway, branding a huge M(for murderer) between her smallish(but appetizing just the same!) busom.At the same time, her sister Juliette has amassed a small fortune from her wicked ways that she no longer fancies sharing with fellow prostitute Claudine, so she sinks her in the drink while bathing in a river.Just when things seem to be looking up for Justine as she finds herself in a chateau occupied by a monastic brotherhood led by Father Antonin(Jack Palance), she discovers in horror that the men are perverted hedonists in search of the highest forms of physical pleasure, torturing women that they keep as sex slaves.During a ceremony where Antonin plans to reward Justine for rapidly learning their philosophy by releasing her through torture-killing her(Englebert Humperdinck would not be amused), things go wrong and she escapes once again.Her brief lover Raymond rescues her again only to have Dusbois abduct her again, forcing her to appear nude in a stage show where the crowd notices her murderess brand, causing her to be dragged off by the police again(Phew!).Before the King's men can enforce their justice though, she is noticed by a minister's mistress who saves her life.The woman of position turns out to be Juliette herself, confessing that her life of big black evil badness turned out be less fulfilling than she thought, and her sister Justine would finally be rewarded despite her long-standing misery.Justine takes up at the palace with her sibling, and is reunited with her lover, Raymond.Awwww, that's nice.

The sweet and virtuous Justine(Romina Power), willing to break it all out for love and art.
Surprisingly, the movie is as reasonably close to the book as one could expect here, sparing audiences Justine's death at an untimely lightning bolt after confessing her sins to her sister(!).I dunno, I woulda dug seeing that, to be truthful.Franco sandwiched this release between 99 Women and Eugenie, The Story of Her Journey into Perversion, before moving on to Venus in Furs, and two Christopher Lee vehicles, The Bloody Judge and Count Dracula, the following year.The oft-nude Power would continue on in Italian film for decades, adding singing, writing, and painting to her already impressive repertoir.She does an adequate job here(though she's at least five years older than the literary model fyi), always looking the right mixture of innocence and untapped sex appeal.McCambridge, who also landed a part in 99 Women as Franco-philes will already know, bagged herself a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1949 and was once called the greatest living radio actress by none other than Orson Welles himself.Tonight's review will finally break the string of three wop movies we've had here recently, though it should be noted that a two wop Franco movie is like a three wopper for other directors, in most cases.Worth a look!

Jack Palance's portrayal of Father Antonin is based entirely on a chunk of Prosciutto di Praga...believe it....or not.

It Came...Without Warning(1980)d/Greydon Clark

An alien has descended from the heavens unto Earth to hunt man with the help of small,living,flying toothy discs that suction to their victims and eat their flesh.The film is loaded with B talent(Martin Landau,Jack Palance,Neville Brand,Cameron Mitchell,Larry Storch,and an early David Caruso appearance) and features creature and make up effects by Greg Cannon.Sound cool?It isn't.The single glaring reason I can drum up on why this film reeks like dog shit,is the all-too familiar director.Greydon Clark,the hack who brought us "Skinheads:Second Coming of Hate" and "Greystoke:The Legend of Tarzan",is the man responsible for this film's total failure.The one sheet for this waste of 89 minutes hung for years in my bedroom,and is probably the only good thing about it.The story,what little there is,goes like this:

You think CSI:Miami's David Caruso(middle)ever mentions this film? Me neither.
A hunter(Cameron Mitchell) takes his liberal namby pamby son out into the wilderness to prove his manhood by shooting wildlife.He never gets the chance to do his old man proud,as he and his father are overtaken by wobbly hairy discs with teeth that fly awkwardly out of the dense underbrush.A troop leader(F Troop's Larry Storch)is lost in the same woods with his scouts,when the same discs wobble out of nowhere and dispatch the man in front of his terrified troop,who run screaming towards the river.A pair of couples(Caruso is one of them)planning a lake date,stop for gas at what seems to be a deserted station,when they are surprised by a kooky old man(Palance) who warns them to steer clear of the lake during "hunting season".They don't.Two get disc-sucked.Two escape.

Newsflash!B movie actors terrorized by hairy tentacled flying personal pan pizzas with teeth.Story at eleven.
In the midst of the couple's escape,they stumble upon a shack in the woods,chock full of dead bodies.This is where the alien stores his "kills".They flee to a diner,inhabited by a bonkers Vietnam vet(Landau),Leo(Brand),and Joe Taylor(Palance),among others.The sarge still thinks he's knee deep in rice paddies,but Taylor demands that the terrified couple lead him to the alien's shack.Nothing happens for about forty minutes.The young girl's boyfriend eats it.She comes face to face with the alien,who stalks her back to Palance,who's set up explosives outside the shack.Landau,who shot the sheriff Bob Marley-style during a flashback,confronts the two and accuses them both of being aliens(!)before the real alien covers him with frisbees.Palance runs screaming at the alien,shouting,"ALIEN!ALIEEEEN!ALIIIIEN!"and the girl blows up the shack with the alien and Palance both in the scope of the blast.That's it.

What's that on Christopher S. Nelson's face? An acting-sucker. What's it doing? Starving.
I'm thoroughly convinced that NOTHING Greydon Clark ever directed was any good,this sci fi/horror(?)cheapie being no exception.Clark builds zero tension,paces the film terribly,utilizes piss-poor lighting throughout most of the scenes,wastes a cast of able actors on awful dialogue,scrimps on effects shots,the list of fuck ups here is dismal and long(sort of like this movie).Thankfully unavailable on DVD as of this writing,let's hope it stays buried for another 28 years.Boots are highly sought after,but I can't recommend paying up to thirty dollars for a copy of this to even my worst enemy.Sandy!Push the plunger!ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH!Yeah.This gets:

Kevin "Predator" Hall earns his paycheck in the last fifteen minutes of the movie.Sort of.