"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."

"Schizoid" (1980) d/David Paulsen

Sorry about the delay between reviews lately, I'm sure you probably feel like that forgotten anole lizard in the barren aquarium in the corner of some irresponsible little bastard's bedroom by now, your sunken eyes frantically scanning the dirty glass for a mere wax worm or micro cricket worth of sustenance. Hang tight, my woprophiles, I've got an impressively opulent stack of genre movies we'll be looking at this month, and leading it all off, is a surprisingly engaging American pseudo-giallo disguised as typical slasher fare of the era (the one sheet is a dead giveaway, I dunno), that you might otherwise slag off if you're searching for the blade-generated tomato paste so often promised in knifer flicks. If you did that, you'd be missing out on a rare subdued Kinski (save for some creepy incestual tension in one spot), Marianna Hill, who you might remember in "High Plains Drifter" as Ghost Eastwood's objet d'viol, Donna (Jaws 2) Wilkes, Craig (Body Double) Wasson, and hell, throw Jim from Taxi in there, and slap a silly mustache on him, to boot. Let's roll...


"Uv corss I'm not vatching you get undresst. Don't be silly."
When Julie (Hill), a newspaper advice columnist who's going through a sensitive divorce with her sweaty husband (Wasson), starts receiving increasingly unnerving anonymous cut-n-paste letters with murder as the subject, it just so happens to coincide with a mounting body count; comprised mostly of her fellow therapy group members, all of whom seemingly had been secretly lovers of Pieter (Kinski), the therapist himself, before learning the fatal mistake of playing with a big-assed pair of scissors, or more importantly, playing with a shadowy figure in foppish hat and leather gloves that happens to be wielding said sizeable, sharpened snips.Whether Pieter is the culprit or not, he still manages to peep-tom his own daughter Alizzin,errr..Alison (Wilkes) in the buff to score magnificently on the creep-o-meter, regardless. But the creeps to choose from in this lousy burg are many, as we soon find out.


The Chooper got her, and we knew it.
Besides the polyamorous shrink (who's also taken to having his sexual way wiss,errr...with Julie by now) and Julie's clammy ex, there's Gilbert the lonely maintenance man (Lloyd), there's the boys in blue who treat the psychotic letters like a big joke(, and little Alizzin, err...Allison's not without suspicion herself, with that incendiary jealousy of Julie, and the drawer full of cut-out letters, and all. When Julie finds out it's Pieter's daughter behind the letters, she draws her out into a gun-frontation with her husband and the therapist, who's soon on the scene. It was the sweat-drenched Doug, afterall, who kidnaps Allison and Julie (who hates hairbrushes, apparently) and duels with Pieter in the dark (you haven't lived until you've seen a hammer-wielding Kinski square off against Wasson) until an untied Allie plunges his own trademark scissors into his back as he's beating the therapist and accusing him of stealing his wife, and, of being a nazi, as well. You're thinking of Eroi all'inferno (1974), Craig...err, Doug. As Doug slumps lifelessly over a piece of overturned furniture, the cops finally come in.


"Zose frozen peas in zere are turnink me on, baby..."
After completing Savage Weekend(1979) and tonight's review, Paulsen went on to direct episodes of Dallas, Dynasty, and even Knots Landing, ferchrissakes. Though Schizoid might be a little too dry for the modern slasher crowd, especially those of the 80's camp, fans of Kinski will do well to add this one to their "to see" queue's in the near future. It's nothing too exceptional, but highly watchable, anyway. Two big ones.


"Playing Twister at her age, she shoulda known better..."

"Bronson" (2008) d/ Nicolas Winding Refn

My introduction to the film work of Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn came a few short weeks ago at the suggestion of one of my more cinema-minded affiliates in the form of his 2011 film, Drive, which I enjoyed greatly, but didn't cover here, as it doesn't really fit the qualifying genre conditions to merit an entry. His 2008 effort, on the other hand, documenting the life story of the most violent prisoner in the history of her Majesty's nick, Michael Peterson aka/ "Charlie Bronson", as portrayed by Tom "Bane" Hardy, fits our cult criteria consummately enough, alright. By the time the end credits rolled, I'd noticed both of my hands had naturally balled into fists from all the pugilistic commotion on the screen I'd just bore witness to. Refn masterfully frames each shot of this bare-knuckle, blood-spattered tough guy bonanza with delicate precision, lending arthouse insight into the complexities of the mind of our mustachioed anti-hero, peppered with punches to the face, and plenty of them.


"Straitjacket? Fuck. I got into the strawberry preserves anyway, didn't I."
That Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy) is not a singer or actor, is irrelevant to his desire for greatness, as we first see him in a naked scrap with prison guards. From an early age, Peterson shows a propensity to mix it up with all comers, from schoolmates to teachers, who's he's not opposed to smashing with school desks. He blags some cash from a chip shop he works at, in an attempt to impress one of his female co-workers, who ends up becoming his wife and bearing him a child. When domestic life proves too burdensome for him, he robs a post office, earning a seven year prison sentence for himself in the process. Here, he flourishes, a star to the other inmates, for his unpredictably violent episodes that no prison seems capable of quelling. He's eventually sent to Rampton, a mental hospital where his brutal outbursts are met with heavy sedation, but after a seemingly sympathetic paedo suggests that the two men rape a nine year old girl together sometime, he feigns compliance long enough to nearly strangle the fellow patient to death, earning him a trip to Broadmoor, another mental hospital where he instigates a full-scale riot and is seen atop the establishment's smoldering rooftop flashing his trademark double peace signs on the evening news.


"Ohhhh, my sciatica. Attica! Attica!"
On parole(!) in Luton, he reconnects with an uncle, who gets his feet wet in unlicensed bare-knucle boxing and human-baiting (man vs. vicious dogs, in case you were wondering) and adopts the nickname "Charlie Bronson", before robbing a jeweler to impress another more disinterested young woman this time, earning him a return trip to prison just sixty-nine days after his initial release. Back in the nick, he returns to his greased up, prison guard-throttling, ultra-violent ways and gets his sentence extended. The governor tells Charlie that he can foresee the inmate's death inside if no changes are made, leading him to take up art as a prison hobby, but when his efforts are met with indifference from the officials, he takes it upon himself to kidnap his art teacher, tying him to a post, painting him up like a sculpture complete with an apple in his mouth(!!), before greasing up for the familiar throwdown with the guards once he's had his bit of fun. Finally, we see Bronson, forced to stand bloody and naked in a coffin-shaped cage in solitary, as we're told the inmate hasn't been granted a release date. He seems okay with that...


"If you continue this...you will die here."
The real life Bronson got over the initial reservation he had towards Hardy in the lead role, meeting with him in prison, even shaving off his trademark handlebar for the actor to use on his own face in the film, and eventually calling him "Britain's number one actor" after finally getting to see the film for himself some three years later. Would you argue with this guy?? Me, neither. The critics were similarly fond of this one, which won Best Film at the 2009 Sydney Film Festival, and was also nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance the same year. I'm not sure one director has ever made it to my list of current favorites any faster than Refn. If this sort of thing is your speed, too, you'll do well to hunt down a copy and check it out immediately. Three wops on the rating scale and a recommendation. See it!


"You mind closely examining this deep transverse metacarpal ligament for me, gov?"