"Bloody Birthday" (1981) d/ Ed Hunt

Anybody know if there was an eclipse on October 5th, 1969? The vein of earlier killer kiddie classics like Village of the Damned is well tapped in tonight's review,  from the director who sent Christopher Lee into the far reaches of outer space long before George Lucas did, with 1977's Starship Invasions. Watching this movie is like hitching a ride in Mr. Peabody's WABAC Machine for somebody like me who's somehow matured into a reasonable adult after a similar childhood to the demonic little scapegraces on the screen. If you happen to be from my old neighborhood during this era: Eff you, I cop to nothing. If deviously remorseless ten year old's ( portrayed by Billy Jacoby/Jayne (who's older bro Scott was Bad Ronald), Elizabeth Hoy, and Andrew Freeman, respectively) hunting down the likes of Susan Strasberg and Julie Brown like game animals in eighties gear doesn't appeal to you, then you're probably on the wrong website.


Remember MTV's two Julie Brown's? I always dug this one's wubba wubba wubba's over "Downtown" Julie's.
In 1970, three babies are born synchronous to a solar eclipse in California, with Saturn's astrological blockage leaving each child void of any real emotions or remorse. After nearly a decade has passed, we revisit the children as their tenth birthdays approach only to find that they've added insidious homicide to their play habits, as a young couple trying to enjoy cemetery sex soon find. Voyeurism is also a favorite, as we see Debbie earning pocket change by allowing Curtis and Steven (Wait, one's even named Steven? Spoooky.) to peep on her older sister, Beverly (Brown), as she mirror-dances with her buhhuhbas out. Timmy, a young peer, figures out the trio's propensity for wrongdoing after they lure him into a nearby junkyard and lock him in a discarded refrigerator. Debbie's father, the sheriff, is marked for a fatal accident on the steps, but when he steps over the strategically placed skateboard, Steven brains him with a baseball bat, instead. Their teacher, Ms. Davis (Strasberg) begins to catch on to their destructive vibe, but Curtis puts a slug in the woman's back in an empty classroom, for her interference.


"No, I don't know what a skull fracture feels like, honey, why do you ask?"
Timmy's older sister Joyce (Lori Lethin) suspects the kids, but at their collective birthday bash, they fool her into thinking they've laced the party cakes with ant poison(!!), thus, making her seem like the unhinged one to the whole neighborhood. When Beverly stumbles upon her little sister's scrapbook of newspaper clippings concerning their growing list of crimes(!!!), she eats ocular arrow-driven death for her nosiness. Finally, Debbie asks Joyce and Timmy to babysit her, an elaborate trap that fails, getting Curtis and Steven subdued for the police while the devious little girl manages to escape. At home, Debbie tearfully implicates her partners-in-crime to her mother. At the crime scene, we see Curtis shoot a disturbed look at his failed last victims from the back of a police cruiser as it pulls away. Elsewhere, we see Debbie's mother rehearsing her daughter's new alias with her, unaware that she's already dropped a car on a local auto mechanic nearby, killing him...


Take it from a former little bastard: These are little bastards.
You may remember Lethin from her genre work in fare like The Prey (1984) and 1987's Return to Horror High.When Julie Brown wasn't shaking her nude melons for ten year old boys, she was making funny music videos like "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun".At least, it seemed a lot funnier before antisocial water heads started shooting up schools on a regular basis. Still, there's always Earth Girls Are Easy (1988), right? If you're plum tuckered out by the vast number of by-the-numbers 80's slasher flicks out there, this one might just provide the spark to enliven your appreciation of the sub-genre, all over again. Three wops, and a recommendation, say I.


"C'mon, Julio, this is no time to fall asleep under the rear axle with preserves on your face..."

"The Trip"(1967)d/Roger Corman

Inverse to the producers' warning that precedes tonight's review, a Hollywood flirtation with head-freakin' hallucinogenics as penned by no less than Jack Nicholson, is a short disclaimer from this guy over here:Ah, glorious lysergic acid diethylamide.Where does a guy like me begin to write about our many mind-blowing escapades together over the years.Without your entheogenic pleasures, I might not have ever mooned state troopers from a van window, shouting:"Behold! The fancy ass of the DEVIL!", I might not have been bitten by a pissed off African baboon spider that I thought I was communicating with, I might not have stopped my vehicle in courthouse traffic, worried that the front of the car, engine and all, had just dissolved into liquid metal and poured onto the asphalt.I might never have played naked hide n' seek with my girlfriend all over my apartment, culminating in a vista-revealing bathtub fuck that unlocked the secrets of the universe to me.Oh, you get the idea, already.Potent acid is tits, dudeskis.Tonight's feature focuses on some hip cats of the day and just such a journey to the center of the mind, as portrayed by genre faces Peter Fonda, Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, and Dennis Hopper, among others, and as directed by the original Motor City Madman and B-Movie Bishop, Roger Corman, in between his uncredited work in the director's chair on A Time for Killing(1967) and 1968's The Wild Racers.Semi-corny in its posi-delivery of the microgram-laden mirth; it's always a good time to viddy when you're in an altered state yourself.Diiiig...

"Yeah, I was Babalugats in 'Cool Hand Luke', maaann, I'll bogart this spleefie if I want to..."
Paul Groves(Peter Fonda) is a mild-mannered director of television commercials in the midst of a heavy divorce from his unfaithful wife, Sally(Susan Strasberg), a chick who's not opposed to rocking a salmon polyester pantsuit out in public just for kicks.Is it any wonder he's looking for some introspective on his own successes and failures in one o' them there acid trips all them youngins seem to be poppin' off on, in between their flower power and their Lothar and the Hand People records.He enlists his buddy, John(Bruce Dern), as a chaperone for his twelve hour mental vacation, as provided by Max(Dennis Hopper), a babbling, reef-tokin' white Navajo wanna-be in leather dungarees, who owns the local psychedelically painted drug spot frequented by the upper eschelon of turn-onners, tune-inners, and obligatory drop outs.A hot young blonde tells him that she thinks "acid-takers are groovy."Paul retreats upstairs with John and drops with some apple juice, while Max passes around a hog's leg downstairs and mumbles incoherently.John tells his soon-to-be-soaring associate that he probably won't wanna eff with all the recording equipment he's laid out for himself once he's on his trip.Before you can say, "Down on Phillip's Escalator", Paul's starting to see some things over there.John, guarding against a possible freakout, tells him, "I'm gonna be here, man, trust me.", as Paul starts getting into some beautiful stuff, like holding the sun in his hands, and swimming bare-assed and free.He imagines bedding the hot blonde from earlier and his soon-to-be ex-wife at the same time in a groovy ménage à trois until he's being chased on the beach by Templar-esque knights on horseback.Then he's on a merry-go-round with midgets being forced to watch his spouse share adulterous kisses with another man on a big screen, while Max appears and passes hippie judgement upon him for working for a living.John! John, where's that thorazine, maaaaaan!I wanna get off!

Would you let this man chaperone your first acid trip? Me neither.
John pulls the incoherent naked wreck out of the pool and towels him off, then does exactly what he promised he wouldn't do, in leaving Paul alone while he's gone to score some more juice.Paul imagines John is slumped dead in a chair with a paintified headwound, and slips out into the street in the middle of the night, peaking his nuts off.He lets himself into a strange household, rousing the resident little girl from her sleep, watching television with her and getting her a drink until her father wakes up and scares him off.He grooves on the washing machines at a laundromat and suggests to a spinster-in-curlers that they communicate with each other using only their minds, before running off when she calls the police as he tries to free the girl he imagines he sees spinning in a dryer full of the woman's clothes.He snags a table at a psychedelic club on Sunset Strip, but splits prematurely when the cops make the scene, somehow making his way back to Max's place to come down in the process.After he tells the drug dealer he may have led the cops to his doorstep, he's told to head back to the strip where John, who isn't dead afterall, can collect him again.This time, he bumps into the aforementioned hot blonde who speeds off with him in her convertible sports car to her place, where they have all kinds of trippy sex, while he hallucinates about the hooded knights, only they're Sally and the blonde in disguise.The next morning, she asks him whether his trip was a good one or not, and he remarks that though he found love, he may need another day to reflect upon the turn of events, as the screen freeze-frames on his face, then cracks like glass, Fulci-style.Roll credits...

Sex whilst trippin' face? L.S.D.elicious!
As you might have guessed, the flagrant use of boring jazz in the soundtrack was a big red light for me.I'm thinking Corman should have scored some genuine psych rock instead, a la Pink Floyd or the Amboy Dukes, for authenticity's sake, I dunno.You can see Henry Fonda's rebellious son, who's experienced a sort of cinematic renaissance of late, in a treasure trove of genre cult classics;The Wild Angels(1966), Spirits of the Dead(1967), Easy Rider(1969), Spasms(1983), and even the crappy remake of Escape From New York, 1996's Escape From LA.Dern, a premier psycho in television and movies dating back to 1960, was at his genre best in the late sixties/early seventies, scoring credits in everything from Bloody Mama(1970) and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant(1971) to Black Sunday(1976) and Hitchcock's Family Plot(1976).The curler-coiffed Barboura Morris dates back to early Corman, appearing in The Wasp Woman(1959) and The Haunted Palace(1960).Judy Lang, who plays Fonda's blonde sex-interest, can also be spotted in The Psycho Lovers and Count Yorga, Vampire.Curiously, LSD-25 was last completely legal in the United States in 1966, but you don't have to be a hardcore blotterhead to enjoy the cultish charm of Trip, which earns two double-dipped wops on the ratings scale.Add it to your collection.

Woooooooooow, maaaaahnnnn...

"The Manitou"(1978)d/William Girdler

Normally I wait three risings of the sun to take on a review of this magnitude,but Misquamacus will have it no other way.We ring the weekend in here at the Wop with William Girdler's ninth and final film,his personal Star Wars,if Star Wars had a topless Jewess on a hospital bed floating in space shooting laser beams out of her hands at an Indian midget in front of a blue screen in it.Huh???Oh yeah,The Manitou asks the viewer to take in a whole helluva lot before it's over.Adapted for the big screen from a novel by Graham Masterson,the film boasts of quite a cast of characters,including Girdler regulars Jon Cedar and Michael Ansara,who turns the Indian up to eleven here,free of the ethnic jabs he faced from Leslie Nielsen in Day of the Animals(1977),Burgess Meredith,Stella Stevens,50's tv sweetheart Ann Sothern,Susan Strasberg,Tony Curtis as a psychic(!!),and Felix "Twiki" Silla as a reincarnated Indian medicine man foetus(!!!).Girdler's largest budgeted picture was also a big hit in theaters,apparently.I didn't go to see it back then,I wouldn't have appreciated the monumental levels of hokum found here the way I currently do.Make no mistakes,this movie sucks,but in ways no movie has ever sucked before or eaten the big one since.

See you in the fall,Mrs. Herz!
Harry Erskine(Curtis)is a two bit psychic chiseler with a fake moustache and Merlin robe who cons gullible old ladies with his Tarot deck,fifty bucks at a time,when he's not boogieing to disco,pouring beers incorrectly,or butchering the tongue of native American tribes.An ex-flame,Karen(Strasberg),calls him with a problem she's recently developed at the base of her neck.Well,it's less of a problem and more of a malignant tumor.Actually,it's not a tumor,it's a foetus.But it ain't just your average,ordinary,everyday neck foetus,it's a four hundred year old Indian medicine man trying to be reborn into the world.Erskine finds this out after Karen whispers "Pana witchy salatu!" in her post-coital sleep,and one of Erskine's geryatric rubes repeats the same phrase before doing a makeshift raindance,levitating herself down the hallway,and doing a head first flopper down the steps,killing herself.Karen's doctor,Hughes(Cedar),finds this out when he tries to surgically remove the lump which psychokinetically forces him to slice his own hand with the scalpel in the operating room.Erskine holds a seance with his occult buddies,and an Indian head rises out of the coffee table,speaking through Mrs. Karmann(Sothern),a medium."Pana witchy salatu!" again,or panny witchy solutu,if you listen to Erskine.The psychic and gang then turn to anthropological expert Dr. Snow(Meredith) for answers,and the scatterbrained old gent points them towards hiring an authentic Indian medicine man to fight the red-skinned burden growing on his lover's neck.

After seeing rushes of the final effects sequence,Karen(Strasberg) screams her fool head off.
Erskine turns to John Singing Rock(Ansara),who normally waits three risings of the sun to do a job like this,but signs on immediately after berating the white man with the Brooklyn yiddish accent,and the promise of tobacco.After sprinkling sand around Karen's hospital bed and knocking some feathery bones together,the foetus tells Singing Rock through Karen that he is indeed Misquamacus,the most powerful medicine man ever,or Mixmaster,if you listen to Erskine.After pulling himself out of some latex on Karen's back,we see that not only is he the most powerful shaman to ever live,but he's an adorable midget with two different colored eyes,just like David Bowie!No wonder Shorty's got such an attitude.Through ancient Indian rear projection techniques,the mixmaster calls forth a giant lizard/man-in-a-lizard-suit-on-all-fours demon to bite Dr. Hughes on the hand,which he rushes to wrap in gauze,and looks moderately painful.That'll fucking show him who he's fucking with,huh.The pint-sized Pocahontas is just warming up though.He freezes the whole hospital floor(and a nurse),tears the skin off an orderly,then turns Karen's room into a sort of groovy seventies planetarium with some psychedelic throbbing plasma projected behind him.Oh yeah,that's the Devil.When Singing Rock's feathery bones prove no match for the little guy,the "Holy Fuck!" sequence of the movie kicks in.Erskine's love for Karen causes the manitous, or spirits of all the computers and man-made machines in the hospital to attack Misquamacus through Karen,who happens to be floating topless on her hospital bed.Indian magic and the Devil just don't measure up when they're up against kosher bobblers and hand-emitted laser beam effects.Titles then tell us that a boy grew a foetus on his arm somewhere in Asia back in 1969.Arm-foetus?Big fuckin' deal.

Misquamacus(Felix Silla) and his powerful Shamanic blue screen magic.
Strasberg,the daughter of theater director Lee Strasberg, enjoyed a long career in movies and television before succumbing to breast cancer at age sixty in 1999.Her genre films include the incredible Psych-Out(1968)and The Trip(1967),Rollercoaster(1977),and Bloody Birthday(1981).Curtis fathered genre Queen Jamie Lee during his marriage to Janet "Psycho" Leigh,and is still an active painter,no longer interested in movies.The soundtrack by maestro Lalo Schifrin isn't one of his more memorable works,in my honest two hundred lira worth.As always,Girdler accomplishes an entertaining creation,albeit a pretty horrendous one.Check it out,and you'll be laughing out loud during the finale,yourself.Believe me.One unintentionally funny BW on the scale for tonight's entry,but you'll have to excuse me,I've got surgery in the morning.They're removing what looks to be an Olivia Newton John foetus growing out of my armpit that gets bigger everytime I see roller skates or hear disco.The indians say it's a Xanadu manitou.Hey,at least it ain't Gene Kelly.

Seriously,I got no words for this one.