"Curse II: The Bite" (1989) d/ Federico Prosperi

More snakes tonight, sort of. If by "snakes" we instead mean "eighties soap opera guy bitten by a radioactive snake after which his hand transforms into a giant, murderous snake head." As hard as it is to follow up a sentence of that reverse momentousness, I'm still gonna try, damn it. As you'd expect, tonight's review has fuck all to do with The Curse (1987), and is a sequel in name only. You still might want to endure the farcical plot, unremarkable acting, and uninspired direction, though, just to get a look at the vintage prosthetic effects action, as provided by the one and only Screaming Mad George.


"Those strawberry preserves...I wished lunch would never end!", exclaims Doc Marder (Sandy Sexton).
Clark and Lisa (J Eddie Peck, Jill Schoelen) are young lovers taking a desert shortcut to Bakersfield, California, against the cautionary advice of a local gas station attendant. You should always listen to these guys, they know more than washing your windshield and checking your oil, it would seem. After haphazardly barreling over a roadblock of live snakes near a nuclear test site, they take on a poisonous hitchhiker in the form of a mutated Bushmaster, who stows away in Lisa's acoustic guitar, later chomping down on Clark's inquisitive mitt. Harry Morton (Jamie Farr), a travelling salesman with a penchant for CB radios and the mouth-breathing goobers that utilize them, administers an antidote, which soon turns out to be the wrong one, of course, sending the amateur herpetophile chasing after the couple, whose road trip takes a turn for the even worse when he develops a palate for flies in his beer, and his girlfriend's caged love birds. He's also taken to relate the conversation between the five fingers and the face to her, but she sticks around anyway. And what's going on under that neatly wrapped gauze?


Jill Schoelen is beaucoup hot, even when juxtaposed against a backdrop of goopy drawers.
After Clark's mystery mitt proves to work independently from the rest of his body in pulling a yappy doctor's mandible from her face, and yanking a fellow's blood pumper from his chest through his mouth, he decides to isolate himself from the public and forego any further medical assistance by exorcising it from his body via amputation, all by himself. Meanwhile, Morton's driving around with his ears on, in fear of impending lawsuits to his company, and comically tumbling into the sack with a linebacker-sized CB trucker woman, for good measure. Clark's also set upon by a particularly mean-spirited sheriff (Bo Svenson) who offsets the normally level-headed constabulary we all know and love, and arrests him on suspicion that he's a tar addict. Reasonable. Eventually, we reach a bananas climax where we find Clark's mitt has miraculously grown back into a giant snake head, which causes his eye to fall out, and also makes him regurgitate live snakes. Will Lisa's rotten taste in men come back to lay fangs into that choice late eighties piece of celluloid tail or will it all turn out ambiguously with hopes of another uninspired, unrelated sequel on the horizon? I'll let you find out for yourselves.


Sesame Street should have gone in this direction, and envenomated Elmo. Not Mr. Hooper though.
Besides stints on Young and the Restless and Days of our Lives, and numerous television roles over the years, J Eddie also has 1990's Lambada under his cinematic belt. How many of us can say that? How many of us would. Jill Schoelen has scored genre credits in movies like The Stepfather (1987), Cutting Class (1989), Phantom of the Opera (1989), and Popcorn (1991). Besides his turn as the crossdressing Corporal Klinger on M.A.S.H., Jamie Farr has appeared in things like The Gong Show Movie (1980), Arnold (1973), Heavy Traffic (1973), and Blackboard Jungle (1955). Sydney Lassick you'll remember from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Alligator (1980), The Unseen (1981), and Carrie (1976). Bo Svenson can be seen in things like Snowbeast (1976), Inglorious Bastards (1978), and Armour of God (1986). As I said before, if you go in on this one with floor-scraping expectations, looking for eye-popping special effects typical of the era, if not often coherently explained away, then you'll get a kick out if it. On a technical level, though,  it manages but a single Wop. Approach with caution.


Somebody's doing some good blotter on the set.

"Long Weekend" (1978) d/ Colin Eggleston

Despite the blatant "Last House"-ishness of the release poster for tonight's review, there are no unhinged sexual psychos prowling the Australian outback for victims here, no gang of grimy fuck-starved thugs terrorizing helpless innocents, leading to excruciating torture or premature violent death. It's more of a "Nature wants you to cool it, baby" movie, an ambiguous entry in the seventies eco-horror genre warning mankind to halt its transgressions against the creatures of earth, or it'll be sorry, indeed. And despite all of these things, we've got a pretty cool little movie on our hands.


"I shot that tree all by myself. Let's get some of that bark on the barby."
Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets) are a couple going through a rough patch, when they decide to spend a weekend together camping out by a remote beach. Despite her protests, Peter stows away their mangy mutt in the back, and chain smokes and bickers throughout the all day and night drive to their destination, running over a kangaroo, in the process. Normally, that's ten points, but in this alternate universe, using a marsupial as a speed bump sets off all sorts of vague karmic implications upon the troubled duo. To further complicate matters, we find that Marcia's recently undergone an abortion, the botched result of Peter's attempted spicing up of things with another couple(it was the other fellow's baby), and she's yet to lie down again with her horny, frustrated mate. Eagle eggs, she's got no problem fiddling around with. Spraying invading ants with pesticide is another task she can accomplish with ease.


"Yer headlightin' norks have me wantin' a look at yer mappa Tassie."
Marcia's frigidity leads Peter to venture off with his dog, swimming and surfing the shore until his gal alerts him to a hulking dark shape behind him in the water. Once he's safely ashore, he fills the ominous shadow with lead from his rifle, only it's no shark, it's a dugong that he's just turned into a blubbery beach pizza. Things only get weirder from here, as he's attacked by a swooping eagle, then bitten by a possum, leading Marcia to strongly suggest that they vacate the premises, so strongly, in fact, that she pulverizes the eagle's egg she's been monkeying around with, to illustrate her point. Peter uses this incident as an opportunity to drop a sick burn about baby-killing on his partner, who now demands an immediate divorce. When Peter continues to drag his feet about leaving, wanting to investigate some people on the other end of the beach, Marcia splits on him, leaving him to face off against this recently ultra-aggressive fauna with only his mangy pooch by his side. What happens in the end? Get a copy and find out for yourselves.


You've got a hubcap diamond star halo...dead dugong, dead dugong, dugong's gone...
If you go into tonight's review with an open mind, without meditating too much about the karmic lesson the film's producers wanted to teach our two protagonists, you'll have a good time with it. Personally, I couldn't wrap my mind around the goofy concept of nature rising collectively against them, when their sins seemed mostly accidental, or at the least evitable, had they not been at such preoccupied odds with each other throughout the movie, and never cruel or sadistic in nature. It just doesn't work that way, unless you're a smelly, tree-hugging eco-hippie screenwriter with a laughable agenda, in which case, your hokey story will only seem plausible to other smelly, tree-hugging eco-hippies, which I am not, as anybody will tell you. Still, I liked this one a lot, probably due to the filmmakers' inability to purvey their message clearly. Three Wops, and a recommendation, for sure. See it.


Throat lozenge, perhaps?

"Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby" (1976) d/ Sam O'Steen

Few productions can boast of being worse than Paul Lynde in a musical trucker sketch with Tim Conway and Roz Kelly, but this nobody-asked-for-but-still-made-for-tv sequel to Polanski's 1969 shocker surely can. In fact, two days before Halloween in 1976, ABC Network rolled out both, as a seasonal double bill. At least Lynde's special had KISS. This scareless, boring mutt had Patty Duke Astin, Ray Milland, Ruth Gordon, Donna Mills, and Tina Louise, all trying to unsuccessfully conjure up safe-for-television holiday scares in successively less and less ominous chapters that start out like this...


"I only enjoy the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights."
In "The Book of Rosemary", the titular Rosemary (now Patty Duke, not Mia Farrow) tries to flee the reach of the coven with her young son Andrew (the Satanists call him Adrian), taking refuge from their black magic in a synagogue, only to lose him to them after he pulls the red eye visuals Satan card on some bullies, forcing them to snap two of the boys' necks in psychokinetic fury. A nearby bewitched mesquite-flavored whore (Tina Louise) snatches the boy after luring Ro' onto a driverless phantom bus to eternity, where she can scream her fool head off in grease paint against the back window forever now, man. "The Book of Adrian" follows, and we see that the boy has grown into an adult (Stephen McHattie) that has yet to realize very much of his dark power, to the chagrin of Minnie and Roman Castevet (Ray Milland and Ruth Gordon), who've done all they can to turn the boy into a devil, Satan knows, why, they keep him in black robed hails, black sports cars, and  electric guitars. They've also influenced Guy (now George Maharis, not John Cassavetes) to do their evil bidding, like matter-of-factly electrocuting Adrian's do-goodnik buddy as he tries to interfere with their coming-of-age ceremony, which looks like this...


You need bigger goggles, Granny, I need more phantom-Patty Duke reflection to offset mime rocker-Stephen McHattie in the foreground.
Adrian gets a pancake makeup mime face, and writhes around awkwardly on a slab, before venturing down into the club and grooving on the dance floor with the other patrons, when his surrogate father jolts his pal to death and spoils the Satanic event. "The Book of Andrew" finds Adrian (now Andrew) locked up in a mental institution for killing his friend, since everyone who participated in the party has disappeared and are believed dead, although a sympathetic nurse (Donna Mills) hears his mixed up plight and decides to help him escape. Ray Milland blathers on about new coven (now "tribe"?) plans since Adrian hasn't exactly lived up to sinister expectations, and leaves Guy hanging when Adrian vows to seek him out over the strange events that occurred that fateful night. Andrew lays down with his nurse, who gets hit by a car driven by Guy and meant for Andrew, but survives to give birth to a daughter, who'll clearly be more Satanically-inclined than her father. Roll credits.


"Like it? Ray Milland did it for me while on S.T.P. at the last Satanic orgy..."
An incoherent phoned in tele-mess that matches it's variety/comedy pairing on number of laughs with scares (both are zero), combining for one of the weaker Halloween entertainment servings in my long, often photographic memory. I was a lot easier to please back then, too,  seeing how I was eight at the time and hadn't even seen the original yet, and probably had to manage a huge candy haul in my Ben Cooper Batman costume through two or three neighborhoods to effectively negate it a couple of nights later. Scary as a brushburned elbow and evil as a Sonny and Cher episode. One woppo.


That's a rather perky-looking end credits devil-baby.