"Titan Find" (1985) d/ William Malone

Four years removed from 1981's Scared to Death (and prior to his House on Haunted Hill remake (1998), and Feardotcom (2002)...two toilet bowl sinkers that we won't rub it in too much about here at the Wop, at least, for now...), director William Malone once again reiterates his unquestionable love for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), with this low budget rip-off of said movie, starring television regular Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, who provides the voice of Francine Smith on Seth MacFarlane's animated hit, American Dad, and Ferris Bueller's dad himself, Lyman Ward. Cult icon Klaus Kinski also returns to space here, putting his stamp on the picture by delivering some archetypal Kinski tomfoolery on camera.


Ashton Kutcher gets the change done at the shop...details at eleven.
When a crew of scientists that apparently don't know each other on a first name basis lands on Titan, a moon of Saturn, to document some artifacts believed to be two thousand centuries old (that's the date they put on it, and I'm too wasted to tackle the math), their ship detects that a rival German spacecraft has already landed in the cavernous crater, forcing Davison (Stan Ivar) to touch down sneaky-like on the outer perimeter, which naturally collapses, leaving their spaceship in a state of utter and complete fuck. An inspection of the German crrraft by space suited search party sees Susan (Marie Laurin), who really does look like Ashton Kutcher in drag, get snuffed by unseen slitherer, after which Bryce (Diane Salinger) gets felt up by the lone survivor of that failed mission, Hofner (Klaus Kinski), who offers oxygen, bombs enough to blow up the elusive beast, and a space-campfire tale about how twenty-two Deutschlanders stumbled upon this ancient metaphoric collection of butterflies, but not all of the butterflies were dead, nor were they all friendly, as they were to tragically find out. He then grabs Bryce's ass and is set upon by a space-zombified Susan.


"You vill come vis me to mein crrrrraft...I promise not to suddenly grasp your breasts. Maybe your ass, yes?"
Meanwhile, with the oxygen running out back on the American ship, Davison, his tech support/ squeeze Sladen (Wendy Schaal), and Ferris Bueller's dad watch helplessly as their crew mates are whittled down, one by one, like a nice chunk of Balsa, before their very eyes. Before too long, zombies in Members Only-esque space suits and throbbing latex bladders on the sides of their headpieces are tricking unsuspecting folks into wandering into that damned engineering sector, where the prop-fiend lies in wait among cobwebbed neon and flashing lights. Zombie-Hofner terrorizes Sladen, who can't seem to draw a bead on any of her dialog marks afterwards. She suggests that they try electrocuting it, a la a sci-fi movie about a space carrot she once saw (The Thing, perhaps?), but the xenomorph-ish killer proves harder to kill than Steven Seagal, just like a hundred more impressive aliens, in a hundred more effective movies. With the selfless sacrifice of Ferris Bueller's dad, helped by Hofner's explosives, Davison and Sladen are free to escape to Earth in the German ship with Bryce, who...got lost somewhere (I didn't write it), and perhaps learn each other's first names in less-stressful surroundings...


Exploding heads were big in the eighties. Don't get any meninges on your boat shoes, dude.
I'm sure Kinski's wandering hands were a mere flash of the great artist's improvisational talents (Ha!), and not anything you'll find in the script. Kinski's not on screen for long, but still manages to deliver the most coherent acting performance in the whole movie. The already choppy pacing is slowed to a crawl by perfunctory delivery of a script, derivative as a Broadway bootleg to begin with, by most of the other actors on board, and to a screeching halt by ten minutes of inanimate rubbery alien that looks like Giger's design if it was tackled by a Chinatown knock off street vendor. One wop for Klaus. Approach with caution, if at all.


He secretly wished Jennifer Grey would have refrained from the raspberry preserves before recognizing him at the 20th Anniversary Ferris Bueller reunion.

"Scared To Death" (1981) d/ William Malone

The only science fiction element in tonight's review, the directorial debut from the man who gave you the "House on Haunted Hill" (1999) remake and "FeardotCom" (2002), is the H.R. Giger...inspired, coughcough, SynGenOr, which stands for Completely-Bloody-Fake-Looking-Alien-Rip-Off, in this case. The movie itself is otherwise pretty standard z-grade slasher fare with the fifties-style monster twist also provided by Malone himself, a special makeup/mask artist in his own right, having provided the makeup work for Dan Curtis' The Norliss Tapes (1973) and the original sculpt for the Michael Myers mask in Carpenter's Halloween five years later. Rick Springfield wasn't impressed enough, apparently, and backed out of tonight's movie, which Malone threw together for roughly seventy grand or so, claiming he'd miss too many acting lessons if he took the role. Looking back, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief at never having to live in an alternate reality where Rick Springfield couldn't act...


"...and after dinner I've got us two tickets to Sister Sledge."
When former badge-turned-pulp best seller author Ted Lonergan (John Stinson) isn't recklessly backing his car into Jennifer Stanton's(Diana Davidson) vintage Rolls-Royce, he's helping his homeboy Det. Capell (Jonathan David Moses) solve murder cases, like the current homicidal misogynist stalking the streets of Los Angeles, leaving a growing pile of female cadavers in his wake, but Ted's not interested this time. Jennifer isn't interested in Ted, either, until he flashes the cash to pay her vehicle repairs, but a new rear quarter panel later, and it's powder blue eye shadow time, big boy. Paint rollers full. One vadge-pounding later, she's his unofficial secretary off-the-books doing his leg work, investigating a lead on the current murder case in the form of leggy geneticist's assistant, Sherry Carpenter (Toni Jannotta), only instead of witness testimony she's on the receiving end of hot French/monster kisses from the SynGenOr, which leave her more than breathless, indeed...


"I don't care if you can pop n' lock on skates, if you don't wear your socks above your knees, you're outta the gang, baby."
With Ted's girlfriend in a coma just like that emo-billy Grinch used to sing back in the eighties, he turns to Sherri for the specs on the new life form in question, and though she's a little foggy on some details, it all involves a rubbery tongue that juts out between some even more rubbery teeth into the victim's mouth onto somewhere just inside the spine, where fluid is collected for the creature's neurological nourishment. Meanwhile, the Syngenor dispatches an entire rogue crew of roller skaters out on the roll for kicks inside a parking garage, and Ted discovers that the murder case has since been mysteriously closed from higher up from his soulful detective pal. Naturally, Ted and Sherri are going to have to infiltrate the creature's sewer-lair themselves, and they might just find cocooned victims there, too, stockpiled for their spinal fluid in a vaguely similar manner to that other movie we were talking about earlier. I'll leave the finale for you to experience, if you haven't nodded off, drooling on the seat cushion like a post-lobotomy R.P. McMurphy, by then, that is.


I never saw the Xenomorph lying down on the job, Syngenor. Just sayin'.
Malone would next tackle Creature (1985) with Klaus Kinski, who you'll be seeing more of here in the coming themed holiday month of reviews that I'll either be giving you a sneak peak at along the way, or just dropping on you, all sudden-like. You never know what I'm gonna do, really (and neither do I, half of the time). Stinson would turn up in Oliver Stone's The Hand the same year, and also in Malone's Creature. I'm not sure if any of the other cast members did anything of note and I'm also pretty sure nobody cares.Though there's some nostalgic eighties-style synth-based tension in some of the shots, and pretty victims a' plenty, ultimately the budgetary limitations prove too steep to uplift this one from one Wop status. Some may get a kick or two out of it, but most probably won't.


"Yeah, I've got a pretty big nose...this is also big."