"The Beast Within"(1981)d/Philippe Mora

One of the most familiar sounds of late summer is the droning mating buzz of the male cicada, sort of a bulky, ugly, winged leafhopper-on-steroids in its final phase, which, in periodical species, doesn't come for up to seventeen years.It's easy to see how one could meld the life cycle of an ugly, loud bug and a teenaged boy coming into adulthood into some sort of shlocky updated fifties-style monster movie with the proper levels of creative flair.Paris-born artist/director Philippe Mora, of "Mad Dog Morgan" fame, attempted just that during the horror heyday of the early eighties, and the finished product, though perplexingly muddled in spots, is a mostly satisfying exercise in B-movie hokum with an unhinged final reel that had audiences screaming, as your humble N(of course, in attendance) can attest to.Mora enlisted the services of FX wizard Tom Burman in bringing the were-cicada to life on the big screen, and through the aid of air bladders and puppetry, Burman transformed this into something like this.I'll let you be the judge on whether or not he succeeded.The cast included the likes of Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch, LQ Jones, Logan Ramsey, and as the lead, then-youngster Paul Clemens, whose mother just happens to be actress Eleanor "The Sound of Music" Parker.MGM released the film as part of its "Midnight Movies" series on dvd a few years back, and you should seek it out if you get the chance. Frankly, you'll probably never see as fine a "rape-crazed were-cicada terrorizes the deep south" movie as this in your lives.

Get yer tits out, get yer tits out, get yer tits out for the hemipterans!
The time is 1964, the place is Nioba, Mississippi(insert strains of 'Dixie' here), where the newlywed McClearys(Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch) have gotten their car stuck in the middle of some dark, desolate woods after husband Eli's ill-fated late night u-turn.He volunteers to walk the three plus miles back to the last filling station they had passed himself, leaving wife Caroline alone in the car.What's the worst that could happen to a young woman alone in a car on the side of a dark southern road through the forest(besides being raped to within an inch of her life by a horny cicada monster, of course)?Eli returns to find her bare-assed n' half buried in some wet leaves, and a makeshift posse puts the lead to local troublemaker Billy Connors for the crime, before the couple leave the whole harrowing experience behind them for a life in Jackson.Unfortunately, seventeen years later they're forced to return to the scene of the crime in search of answers when their teenage son, Michael(Paul Clemens), has suddenly been overtaken by an occult malignancy that has the big city specialists all baffled.Michael, who gets awfully sweaty and pale, has been having livid dreams of an empty old house with something unseen and awful in the cellar.Back in Nioba, they're met with resistance by the town's secretive senior officials: Judge Curwin(Don Gordon), his brother, Edwin(Logan Ramsey), and Dexter Ward(Luke Askew) the town mortician, all treat the McClearys inquiries with the disdain and indifference you'd expect from characters whose names were a silent nod to Howard Phillips himself.One more monster-in-the-cellar dream later, Michael rouses from a sweaty coma, jacks himself an Oldsmobile, and arrives at Edwin's doorstep in sync with a bag of groceries hastily dropped by a delivery boy put off by the old man's blatant homo-pederasty.In a wifebeater and jammies, the nonce fries up some hamburger peppered with boy-hungry innuendo until Michael takes a cue from the buzzing cicadas outside and bites a sizeable chunk out of the old perv's neck(gross),his feet flailing helplessly in some raw hamburger on the floor(more gross).

Michael(Paul Clemens)is about to slip into something more uncomfortable.
While his parents seek out answers, Michael endears himself to Amanda Platt(Katherine Moffat),the angelic teenage daughter of overprotective redneck psycho-dad, Horace(John Dennis Johnston), a man that never met a sass-ending backhander he didn't like, who also happens to be cousin to the Curwin clan.Town boozehound Tow Laws(Ron Soble) relates the story of Billy Connors and his goal of immortality-through-rebirth-every-seventeen-years-via-shapeshifting-into-a-cicada-monster(heard that one a hundred times before, huh?), in between hearty bottle swigs, leading the boy to abruptly cut off a torrid makeout session in the woods with Amanda to embalm Dexter alive at the funeral parlour.The wig-laden judge, panicked by his family's sudden rising mortality rate, admits to chaining up Billy Connors in the cellar of a house in the woods, and that Connors escaped the night the very night the McClearys had their car/rape troubles.It's now apparent that Michael is the pawn in Connors' ploy for revenge from beyond the grave against all conspiritors seventeen years earlier, and as an added bonus, he gets to painfully transform into a cicada monster himself, before the disbelieving eyes of a room full of horrified onlookers (that includes his parents), head bulging and popping before comically inflating like a full-term pregnant womb for minutes that seem to go on forever.He pulls the judge's head off through a jail wall before raping Amanda on what seems like the very same muddy stretch of road he was conceived on himself, ensuring the rape-revenge cycle will continue after he's eaten some post-rape shotgun-induced death...or would continue if enough interest generated a sequel at that point.It didn't.

Awww, ma, manburgers for dinner, again?
Besides the aforementioned Hopper vehicle Morgan, Mora also handled two Howling sequels, which apart from screen time involving Sybill Danning's magnificent bra-pups in the second, were pretty forgettable, and Communion, the Christopher Walken-gets-anally-probed alien abduction movie.Cox, as you should well know by now, has been in films like Deliverance(1972), Total Recall(1992), and everything in-between over his long, successful career.Clemens, who's done countless television roles over the years, most recently appeared in the colorfully titled, The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficent Weapon, in 2008.The feature attraction here has to be the transformation effects as imagined by Burman and company; still entertaining and eye-catching despite not having aged very well over the years.Overall, this one's a good old fashioned monster movie with some potent eighties flair that you'd do well to see for yourselves.On the scale, Within climbs out of the mud and up a tree, where its proboscis siphons out two big ones.Check it out!

"Arrgggh! Acne on the night of the Summer Social. Just my freakin' luck!"

"Halloween III:Season of the Witch"(1982)d/Tommy Lee Wallace

"It's time. It's time. Time for the big giveaway. Halloween has come. All you lucky kids with Silver Shamrock masks, gather 'round your TV set, put on your masks and watch. All witches, all skeletons, all Jack-O-Lanterns, gather 'round and watch. Watch the magic pumpkin. Watch..."And so another Halloween season comes grindingly to a halt.You're halfway to sugar shock from all the leftover trick or treaters candy you've been eating all day,you don't know how to tell the drunken sexy witch who's passed out on your bedroom floor that you have zero recollection of picking her up at the bar last night...or the massive handprints you left all over her ass shortly afterwards(does the naughty witch want daddy to raise welts this time,hmmm?),and you're probably surfing through the mixed bag of horror the idiot box has to offer on this sacred night.Step onto the drawbridge here at Castle Wop,creeps,your uncle thinks he's got one more appropox and underrated genre film for you little bastards to sink your joke teeth into,before we bid adieu to WOP-tober,one more time.
I remember all the flak this movie caught upon release from the mindless masses who felt cheated out of their folding money,forced to endure an interesting and original horror premise,instead of what they wanted to see,yet one more crap sequel where the strong,silent type in the whited out Shatner mask methodically stalks and kills more sex-crazed bimbos and their idiotic boyfriends.Curse the producers for not feeding the crybabies the pabulum they long for!I can still hear the fucking boo's as the credits rolled and we vacated our seats,and I thought to myself:Why the fuck are these morons booing a decent movie and decided anthological turn for the series by Carpenter and Hill?As I grew older,I came to the realization that waterheads like the ones yelling at the screen that night make up the vast majority of the movie-going public.Don't make 'em think.Don't throw 'em a curve ball.And most importantly,don't put the Halloween franchise tag on a film that essentially has no Michael Myers in it(apart from two clever inserts in television broadcasts).As the years have gone by,more and more people have finally given this movie a chance,and to their dismay,they actually like it!And even the sheep got their wish six years later,when Michael Myers was resurrected for the fourth movie,the imaginatively-titled hunk of bowel-bilge "Return of Michael Myers",which in comparison,makes tonight's entry look like Raging Bull.

Guttman learns the hard way:Mess with the Irish trademark,get your yap zapped.
Eight days from Halloween,Harry Grimbridge finds himself running for his life from silent assassins in business suits.At a gas station,he collapses,clutching a latex Halloween mask,and repeating "They're coming." over and over.The attendant takes him to the local hospital,where a commercial for Silver Shamrock masks spurs the exhausted new patient to grab at Dr.Challis(Atkins)and proclaim,"They're going to kill all of us."After admittance,another suited killer pays Grimbridge a visit,separating his skull and driving his nose into his brain with his bare hands before returning calmly to his car,dousing himself in gasoline and exploding before the eyes of the shocked staff.When Grimbridge's daughter Ellie(Nelkin) arrives,Challis selflessly puts his family on hold yet one more time,buys a six pack of beer and drives off with her towards Santa Mira,where the shop owner was headed before his murder,and answers.Santa Mira is the predominantly Irish(shudder!) home of Silver Shamrock Novelties,run by Conal Cochran(O'Herlihy),whose keen business sense returned prosperity to the community.The closed circuit cameras on every telephone pole,the six o'clock curfew,and the mysterious goings on at the factory,yeah,he's responsible for all of those things as well.Upon checking in to a local motel,the pair meets Buddy Kupfer and his annoying family,and Marge Guttman,shop owners from out of town who also have business at the factory.That night,while Challis does a little gynaecological exam on Ellie,free of charge,Mrs. Guttman notices a computer chip in the back of the trademark of one of the Shamrock masks,while reading in bed.She monkeys with it,and eats fatal laserbeam that fries the bottom half of her face,causing buggies to crawl out of her flame-broiled yap.

As Marge gets laserblasted,Challis,the teat-suckling bastard,shows Ellie his phallus.
After touring the factory with the Kupfers,Ellie notices her father's car being guarded by more suits,but when she and Challis return to the motel room,they discover they can't contact anyone outside of Santa Mira by telephone.Suits make the scene and kidnap Ellie,causing Challis to break into the factory for an attempted rescue.He incapacitates one of Cochran's well-dressed cronies,discovering that he's not human,in fact,but a mechanical android,when a well-placed labonza punch yields yellow goop and wires.Cochran then gives Challis the classified version of the factory tour,revealing that in an effort to return the upcoming holiday to its pagan Celtic origins(take a deep breath here,folks),he's stolen a five ton Stonehenge monolith,hidden it in the factory,where tiny pieces of the mystical stone are placed into the company trademark in the back of the Halloween masks,which,when a computer-born pattern of flashing jack o'lanterns triggers them,they cause the mask wearer's head to fry,and rattlesnakes and crickets to pour out of the smouldering faceholes,as evidenced by the test-slaying of the Kupfer family before Challis' very eyes.Challis later breaks his bindings,frees Ellie,and initiates the computer sequence in the control room while dumping a case of trademarks on the workers below,resulting in spectacular laser beam-death for all of them,and Cochran being absorbed by the energy generated between the monolith and computers.The couple flee the factory as it catches fire,but discovers that Ellie is nothing more than one of Cochran's robots,and dispatches it,piece by piece.He makes his way to the filling station from the beginning of the movie,desperately trying to get the television networks not to play the Silver Shamrock 9 o'clock giveaway spot,that would signal the deaths of millions of kids across the country.Some trick or treaters gather to watch the flashing jack o'lantern on the gas station tv set,as Challis screams "Stop it!" into the telephone receiver.Oh,those Irish and their practical jokes.

Hey kid,what part of "Store your mask in a cool,dry place" didn't you understand?
Fans know genre fave Tom Atkins(and his moustache)well,as he's put in several horror shifts under John Carpenter(The Fog,Escape From New York,etc),cult favorites like Night of the Creeps,Maniac Cop,Due occhi diabolici,as well as turning up in the My Bloody Valentine 3D remake,and is always gracious to fans at horror cons,so go get a pic of your wife kissing his moustache already.Delectable cupcake Stacey Nelkin works steadily in movies and television to this day,her most memorable roles to woprophiles out there(besides tonight's review,of course)would probably be in Mad's Up The Academy,Yellowbeard,or opposite "Dangerous" Tony Danza in Going Ape.The late O'Herlihy had a long and admirable career in movies and television,most notably appearing in Invasion USA,The Last Starfighter,and the Twin Peaks tv series.Stuntman Dick Warlock,who portrayed Michael Myers in Halloween II,is on hand here as Cochran's mechanical assassin.Nancy Loomis,another long-time favorite of Carpenter,acts under her birthname of Kyes here,as Challis' wife.Last on the list of Halloween all-stars to work in this movie,the one and only Jamie Lee Curtis lent her voice,uncredited,as the Santa Mira curfew announcer.Well,there you have it.When next we meet up,it'll be November.A different season,but the same source materials here at the Wop,as you like it(especially your mothers).As for tonight's entry,it has its share of shortcomings(the factory control room resembling an empty warehouse with six Commodore computers set up in a circle leaves a lot to be desired),and plot holes(No,really,Conal,tell us how your sixty-something year old ass,and your team of robots-in-suits managed to steal a five ton monolith from one of the most visited sites in the world,and get it into California with nobody noticing?),but overall,it's not a bad movie.Well-deserving of two wops on the scale.

Happy, happy Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. Happy, happy Halloween, Silver Shamrock.

"Happy Birthday to Me"(1981)d/J. Lee Thompson

With Hallowe'en breathing down the backs of our necks like a psychotic Andrew Stevens over Morgan Fairchild's twizzler-sized nipples in a hot tub,Wopsploitation works overtime to churn out genre reviews during this,the most glorious time of year for woprophiles and horror fanatics alike.Show your support by clicking the LAMB in the upper right hand corner of the site,vote up and/or repost your favorite entries,encourage all yer buddies to follow the site on Networked Blogs through intimidation and fear,lascivious ladies who are so inclined can stuff my gmail inbox with sexy snapshots in hopes of being named featured Wop-ette of the Month(an upcoming pro-feminist feature to look forward to,boys),up and coming filmakers can send along their work for review(e-mail me for the mailing addy,punks),and of course,torrential praise showers and cold,hard cash are also always welcome.Se non è zuppa, è pan bagnato.
Boasting of one of the most memorable one sheets of the golden slasher era,tonight's review brings me back to the ol' American Theater packed full of splatter-crazed rascals hootin' n' hollerin' for more gore and boobs(since our parents never went with us to the movies by then).The movie boasts of a cast that includes Melissa Sue "Little House on the Prairie" Anderson who once enjoyed a creepy tryst with Frank Sinatra,Jr.,Glenn Ford,who once blasted Marilyn Monroe with throat yogurt on a couch,some inventive and mean-spirited gore set-pieces,and one of the most ridonkulous and highly unlikely twist endings in cinema history.How could you not love this fuckin' thing?When the dvd was originally released with different cover art,sticklers for detail in the horror community balked until Anchor Bay silenced the hordes with a proper treatment that had the original advertising on the box,and the original soundtrack(minus the end theme),which was intact in theaters and on VHS,but not in the first disc release.Film critics like Leonard Maltin,who was probably over screening slashers in the first place, at the time weren't as rabid about the movie,panning it,and taking some potshots at Glenn Ford for participating,in the process.In defense of the subgenre,the movie,and the late Mr.Ford,I say:Maltin gave friggin' Laserblast(1978) two and a half stars and he's from Teaneck.What the hell does he know?

You undergo that brain operation,Mary Ingalls.I'll be behind the barn smoking a whole pack of cigarettes.
Crawford Academy is an elite high school,secretly run by an inner circle of snobbish,rich teens(all well into their twenties,thanks,casting)that call themselves the "Top Ten".When Bernadette goes to meet the rest of the silver spooners at "The Silent Woman",a pub more ironically named than "The Well-behaved Blacks Who Don't Shout and Scream at the Screen in Theaters" drinking establishment in East Orange,New Jersey(alright,I made that one up),she's attacked from the back seat of her car by a black gloved killer.After momentarily playing dead buys her time enough for a hasty retreat,she's the recipient of a makeshift mouth carved into her neck meat by someone she's familiar with.At the pub,the snots raucous behavior gets them an early boot,which they celebrate by playing chicken in their cars over a lifting drawbridge.Ginny(Anderson)opts out of the childish bravado display,walking home and stopping to visit her mother's grave on the way.At home she discovers Etienne has been Peep Tom-ming her through a window(Yeaaaash!),before her screams scare him off.The next day at school,she has a flashback to that brain cell regeneration operation she underwent shortly after her mother's accidental death(Hmmm,I deduct that this may prove to be important info towards a denouement later on)and tells Dr. Faraday(Ford)all about it.After showing Ginny a pair of her own drawers that he deftly snaked from her room(Hopeless romantic,this guy),Etienne works intently on his motorcycle until that same black gloved rascal makes the scene,catching the boy's scarf in the motorcycle chain,an outbreak of epic,blood spurting strangulatory suck for the resident pervie.Back at the pub,a conversation about eccentric Alfred(Jack Blum),who carries a live mouse around with him,causes Ginny and Ann(Bregman)to break into the boy's house,where they stumble upon a replica of Bernadette's head he's made,for whatever reason.Anybody normal in this crowd?Anybody??Meanwhile,Greg is being spotted while lifting weights by someone who carelessly drops an enormous plate on his crotch,causing the young meathead to drop the barbell onto his own windpipe.That's right,death by weights...

Scarf plus motorcycle spokes equals inventively rad Burman-crafted murder set piece.
Rudi pulls a fake knife on Ginny in the belltower of the academic chapel,then follows it up by diasappearing and burying a faux skull outside,proving that he's not to be outcreeped by his peers.Alfred follows Ginny,which gets him stabbed up...by Ginny(?),whose flashbacks are revealing more of the earlier operation on her domepiece.At the school dance,she invites Steve back to her place for a midnight snack,shish kebabs by the fireplace.I'll just bet one of those skewers is gonna end up rammed through somebody's skull before this rendezvous is over.It does.When Ann shows up the next morning for the (literally)gory details about the previous night with Steve,Ginny has another accident flashback where she and her mother crash the car into the river.When she snaps out of it,she finds Ann's cadaver sunk in the bathtub with an extra mouth sliced into its throatflesh.Dr. Faraday shows up on the scene and forces the disturbed girl to remember the details surrounding her mother's fatal accident.Ah yes,it's all coming back to her now.It was Ginny's birthday(ah-ha!)and when nobody showed up for her party,Mom had packed the girl into the car and angrily drove over to the other party where the kids had all gone instead,was denied entry,got drunk and drove into the drink.Ginny then bludgeons the doctor's dome for his effort.When dad arrives on the scene in time for Ginny's birthday,he's shocked after seeing all of the murder victims and his exhumed wife's corpse propped into chairs around the dining room table,while Ginny sinngs "Happy Birthday to Me"...and another Ginny in attendance!The more conscious Ginny turns out to be Ann in a latex Ginny mask!You see,Ginny's mom had a problem with pussy generosity,and got knocked up during an affair with Ann's father,and in a climax reminiscent of a James Bond villain speech,Ann reveals that she committed all the murders to frame her unwanted half-sister out of jealousy,then kills her own father!!In the ensuing struggle,the drugged Ginny ends up stabbing Ann to death in defense.A policeman arrives to find the abandoned house,filled with corpses,and Ginny standing over her brithday cake,clutching a bloody knife.Open and shut case,huh.

"I taught piano to young flibbertigibbets in a former life,how in the name of Great Caesar's nuts did I end up in this predicament?",wonders Glenn Ford.
Tracey Bregman,apart from her role in Birthday,has enjoyed a recurring role on soap opera Young and the Restless from 1983 to present,as Lauren Fenmore.What?I used to watch Y & R...occasionally.Coughcough.Two years prior to tonight's review,Anderson starred in tele-horror Midnight Offerings.You might remember Alfred(Jack Blum) in his egg-balancing,open zippered turn as Spaz in Ivan Reitman's Meatballs(1979)as well as stints in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Twilight Zone.The late director Thompson was responsible for such memorable genre fodder as Bronson stuffs:St. Ives(1976),The White Buffalo(1977),10 to Midnight(1983),and The Evil That Men Do(1984),as well as a couple of the Planet of the Apes movies and the 1962 Cape Fear original.Not a shabby resume,I'd say.Overall,Birthday isn't a bad slasher,and it delivers up the goods on a few levels,for sure,satisfying that small minority in the horror community who longed to see deaths involving weight benches,motorcycles,and shish kebabs(gloriously served up by FX wiz Tom Burman),myself included.At the very least,it gave me the opportunity to use the word "flibbertigibbets" in a review,and I've been wanting to do just that for a long,long time.On the scale it merits a solid rating of two wops.F-l-i-b-b-e-r-t-i-g-i-b-b-e-t-s.Google it.

"Shish kebab me again before she tells another Michael Landon story!",pleads one of Ginny's partygoers.

"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.

"The Boy Who Cried Werewolf"(1973)d/Nathan Juran

Released as one of Universal's last double bills with equally groovy horror,"Sssssss"(1973),Nathan Juran's "The Boy Who Cried Werewolf"(1973) is a lost treasure for those who cherish painful,flailing attempts at acting by a cast of forgettables,cookie-cutter 1970's made-for-tv movie horror plots(see:"Gargoyles"(1972)),embarrassingly bad makeup(an early queef from FX Wizard Tom Burman),day for night shots that rival even Viktors Ritellis' "The Corpse(Crucible of Horror)"(1970),and the feeling that the individuals responsible for this little ditty either had no idea what the hell they were doing,or just couldn't give a monkey's about the subject matter they were dealing with,which makes for a pleasant evening of '70s horror hijinks.
The late Kerwin Matthews is Robert Bridgestone,a divorced father trying to spend quality time with his son Richie in a little cabin out in the woods,just down the road from a gaggle of travelling hippie Jesus freaks,perpetually hopped up on the Bible and goofballs.Unbeknownst to Bridgestone,there's a laughable-looking lycanthrope prowling about his property,probably looking to bum a smoke from Michael Landon in his "I Was A Teenage Werewolf" get-up,as he certainly seems to have studied him briefly in preparation for this role.His son Richie gets accosted by our furry fiend one night,only to have Dad subdue the beast with a stake through the heart(?),but not before the wolfman manages to bite Robert on the arm.See where they're going with this one?

"Dad!Dad!DAAAAAAAAAD!Dad!Help me,Dad!"...Scott Sealey's only lines.
Robert is now a werewolf,and only Richie and Dr.Marderosian know better,and the sheriff is only interested in giving the hippies a hard time,in typical '70s cinematic fascist law enforcement fashion.Even when dad starts murdering the townsfolk,by strangling them a little and drawing less blood than a big wheel brushburn,nobody believes Richie for a minute.Bland dialogue between the separated parents doesn't help move this folkloric take on the Hollywood werewolf flick,and neither do the sparse,bloodless killings that seem to be happening each night,as opposed to the ritual monthly full moon murders in other pictures.Eventually,Robert commits a puppy faux pas by bringing a young girl's head in a sack home to the cabin to bury in the cellar like a macabre steak bone(!)and chases Richie through the local woods, just as the lawman is forming a posse to hunt him down like the mangy mutt that he has become.He gets riddled with bullets,spinning around like a slow-mo ballerina after too many appletinis,and dies,impaling himself on the gypsy hippie leader's cross.Richie and mom are reunited at the close of the picture,and she hugs him and tends to the bite that his father gave him in the melee...Sequel anybody?

"Just because you can lick yourself now,I'm out of the picture?"
All in all,I enjoyed seeing it after all these years,and I'd imagine it was an effective flick in luring that outta sight brunette to the back seat of your '70 Nova during the drive-in intermission,so long as you gave her the tapioca in time to return to the front seat for Strother Martin injecting Face from the A-Team with cobra serum in the second feature.Look for it!
Two out of four B.W.'s