Category Archives: Low Budget

Pigs! (1973)

Posted on October 23, 2026 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Humans fed to pigs.

Lynn (Toni Lawrence) arrives at a remote roadside diner that is run by Zambrini (Marc Lawrence). No one knows her past and she’s highly evasive about it when asked. She gets a job there and sleeps in a back room unaware that the pigs that Zambrini keeps out back are into human meat and anyone that crosses him gets fed to them. Will Lynn be their next meal, or does she harbor a few dark plans of her own?

The film was a family project of noted character actor Marc Lawrence who had been acting in films in supporting roles since the early 1030’s.  He wrote the script along with his wife, Fanya Foss, and it was meant to help their daughter Toni break into the acting business by showcasing her talents. When no studio was willing to produce it, he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to get it financed and then directed it himself.

I remember first watching this way back when I was in college and it was shown on cable TV as a late Saturday night entry of a bad movie night where panned films would get broadcast that would otherwise have little or no interest. At the time it came off as having no plot just a lot of meandering scenes that went nowhere. Watching it now uncut via streaming it works a bit better, but only slightly. There’s still a lot of moments that have no connection to the main story.  One in particular has Marc entering a home lived in by two old ladies (Catherine Ross, Iris Korn) and talking to them in a creepy manner while wearing clown make-up, but nothing ever comes of it. They go on living there and he goes on caring of his pigs, so why was this moment even put in. Was it supposed to be a dream sequence and if so, what was the point of it?

I did like the remote location, which was filmed in Ventura County, California near the Los Padres National Forest. There’s just something about being in the middle of nowhere that helps accentuate the fear. These people have only themselves and their wits to count on, but then it also begs the question; if they are truly cut off where do these customers that frequent the diner come from?

The main problem is more with the script that gives too much away. I don’t know if the tension is really helped by us seeing an unnamed victim being fed to the pigs during the opening scene. Constantly alluding to Lynn’s mysterious past hurts it too. It becomes obvious that she’s not stable and thus no surprise later on when her dark side fully comes out where if this had been better disguised it could’ve been mor of a jolt.

The special effects are subpar. The blood looks like paste and whenever someone gets stabbed there’s never any rip in their clothing. A person can’t bleed unless there’s an actual cut in the skin for it to ooze out. The loud noise that the pigs make, which sounds more like a train horn, is annoying and overplayed.

I also found Jesse Vint, who plays the sheriff, to be too inept. With dumb cops like him where all the clues have to be spoon fed into him before he can figure it out, just makes the story weaker because there’s no true adversary for the bad guys who can freely get away with their crimes without much worry of being caught.

Spoiler Alert!

The ‘twist’ ending has an extra pig getting ‘created’ every time a victim is eaten, but how does this happen? Are these pigs’ demons from hell and does evil magic doing the ‘creating’? This needed to be better explained and leaving it wide-open is not much of a payoff.

End of Spoiler Alert!

I will give credit to Marc Lawrence as his acting is engaging. His character doesn’t have that much to do other than standing around looking old and paranoid. The fun though comes with his over-the-top reactions to anyone who gets near his precious pigs and his extreme nervousness which he makes no attempt to cover up. On the flip side his character also becomes sexually attracted to Lynn and there are shots of him gazing at her longingly, which when you factor in that he was her real-life father is kind of creepy and in fact the creepiness thing about the whole movie.

Alternate Title: Daddy’s Deadly Darling

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 23, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 20 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Marc Lawrence

Studio: Ursus Productions

Available: DVD (Out-of-Print), Amazon Video, Screambox, Fawesome, Philo, YouTube

 

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting

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Scream Bloody Murder (1973)

Posted on October 20, 2026 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Child kills his parents.

As a young boy Matthew (Fred Holbert) kills his father by running him over with a tractor, but also losses his arm in the process. He gets sent to a Mental Hospital until he’s 18 when he gets released and with a metal hook replacing the arm he lost moves back in with his mother who has now remarried. He becomes upset at this due to having unhealthy feelings for his mom, so he kills her new husband as well as her. He then hithes a ride with a young couple and kills them before coming upon a woman artist named Vera (Leigh Mitchell). While she does paintings in her spare time she also works as a prostitute in order to pay the bills. Matthew does not approve of this and kidnaps her and holds her hostage inside a mansion, whose owners he has already killed, in an attempt to get her to change her ways.

This film, which was written by Marc B Ray and Larry Alexander, who also penned The Severed Arm that also dealt with a one-armed killer, could easily be considered the very first precursor to the slasher film genre. There are other more famous ones, but this one, shot in the spring of 1971, was the earliest to be filmed and it’s a surprise it isn’t better known, or achieved cult status. The color is faded and the film stock grainy as its never gotten a quality remaster, but in a lot of ways that works to the film’s advantage. Makes it seem more of an ‘underground’ flick and helps accentuate the grimy, seedy nature of the story.

The killings are effective and explicit for its time period; one segment even has him cutting the head off of a pet dog and the pace is good too. Most horror films from the 70’s suffered from too much talk and not adequate buildup, but this one jumps into the murders quickly and also frames them through a fish-eye lens, which helps add to the creepiness. It’s unusual that the psycho is the main character as most films like to revolve around the victim, but it manages to be compelling despite this and Holbert, who never appeared in any other movie, does a good job as he walks the line of being both scary and vulnerable.

The defect comes more with the unexplained motives of the character. Why would a young child want to kill his dad? Was his dad abusive? The story teases the subject of the son having an incestuous feeling towards his mother, but what brought that on? Was she coming on to him? There needs to be some starting point to what created the child’s thoughts for him to commit such a drastic act, and the film fails to show this.

Why was he sent away to the mental hospital? How did the authorities ascertain what happened? Was it considered an accident and the kid put there for having witnessed such a traumatic event, or was it deemed intentional and thus committed there for being a danger to society? Why is the mother so open to having him move back in with her? Shouldn’t she be a bit concerned and afraid? None of these questions even get touched on, but for the movie and characters to be fully effective and understandable these things really needed to be answered.

The actions of the supporting cast are equally confusing. Why would a young couple ever want to invite a strange kid into their car? I know it was the early 70’s, and people were a little naiver to things, but this guy should be sending out bad vibes to anyone with an ounce of common sense. Plus, since he’s 18 and reasonably good looking, he could make a potential play for the girlfriend, and no guy is ever going to invite someone into his car who could be competition.

The prostitute/artist lady is even more confounding. This guy behaves menacingly towards her right from the start, but she blows past the red flags like they aren’t even there. However, if a woman is in the habit of inviting strangers into her home to have sex with then for own protection, she should have a heightened sense of awareness and tap into every little troubling sign she sees and thus have this guy pegged as a bad apple almost immediately. Virtually anyone could see this guy was troubled, so the fact that he’s able to ‘fool her’ and she lets down her guard until it’s too late, is so preposterous it’s laughable.

Watching her try to escape and find help as she hops through the home with both her arms and legs tied up is moderately compelling. This film’s ending, in which he runs into a church and has the ghostly images of his victims attack him isn’t bad either. I also really enjoyed Angus Scrimm, billed as Rory Guy, who is better known for playing the Tall Man in the Phantasm film series. He’s terrific here in one of his early roles, most viewers probably won’t even recognize him, as a doctor who comes to the mansion to see the owner, whom Matthew has killed. The part is not significant, but he uses a wonderful inflection that makes the role, as small as it is, quite fun to watch and thus helps the film considerably.

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: December 28, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 26 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Marc B. Ray

Studio: Indepix Releasing

Available: Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Fawesome, Plex, Tubi

 

 

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Kidnapping Movies, Low Budget, Slasher/Gore

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The Severed Arm (1973)

Posted on October 15, 2026 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: A one-armed killer.

Five men (David G. Cannon, John Crawford, Marvin Kaplan, Paul Carr, Ray Dannis) go cave exploring only to find themselves trapped during an unexpected cave-in. After 7 days and with no other food around, they begin to discuss cannibalism. No one is keen on the idea, but realize that if they want to survive, they have no other choice. They decide to draw straws, and Ted picks the longest one meaning his arm gets cut-off by the others, who will then eat it. However, once this is done and much to their surprise, they’re immediately rescued. Ted is still alive and taken to the hospital. The other men come up with the alibi that Ted’s arm was already injured during the cave-in, and they amputated it in order to save his life and the authorities believe them. Now 5 years later some mysterious stalker is attacking these same men one-by-one and cutting-off one of their arms.

This compact horror film, that was a pre-cursor to the slasher flicks that became popular in the 80’s, is surprisingly effective with an original music score and dark, shadowy lighting that helps to keep things murky and intense. The beginning though looks almost like someone’s home movie. The faded color and grainy stock are one thing, but the scene inside a morgue where the arm of a cadaver is cut-off and falls to the ground looks like it came directly off a mannequin and is tacky. It also ruins the suspense as you see the faceless assailant packaging it into a box and then mailing it. Instead, it would’ve been more suspenseful had the viewer not known the contents and then shared the same shock as the victim when he opens it.

The scenes inside the cave could’ve been improved too by having close-ups of the men’s faces with sweat glistening down their foreheads as they nervously draw the straws versus the mid shots which aren’t as emotionally impactful. The idea that a man could have his entire arm cut-off and not go into shock or suffer severe blood loss that would kill him is hard to believe but for the story to be intriguing I get why it was important that he survive so I was willing to overlook that issue.

The killings, which take up the bulk of the film, is what really sets it apart. While not gory they still have a riveting effect. Crawford’s death in which he collapses towards the camera is probably the best. I did like Kaplan’s too, which is shot inside a radio studio and features the killer smashing through a plate of glass in slow motion. My only caveat was the size of the ax which is small and appears almost like a toy. For proper visual affect it should’ve been a large one even bigger than normal.

The acting is good. Walley, who gained fame in the 60’s for playing sweet, all-American types like Gidget, is given an interesting change of pace. She’s a bit sterile at first but comes on strong later. I did though have reservations with David G. Cannon as the lead who also served the co-producer and apparently used that leverage to give himself a plum role, but his delivery and inflection are weak, and the part better suited to a more experienced professional.

Spoiler Alert!

The surprise ending succeeds even though I had started to guess that the daughter and son were the actual culprits and not the father who turns out to be stuck in a wheelchair. While I liked that they trap Cannon, the last of the men whose arm they have yet to cut-off, inside a make-shift prison there is unfortunately no sufficient conclusion. They give him a choice; either severe his arm or starve to death but then it cuts to the closing credits.

In retrospect I think after going so many days without food that he’d be too weak to cut off his arm even if he had wanted to. It would’ve been better had the sister offered him food if the brother, with ax in hand, was allowed to do the chopping. The final shot could’ve had him being tricked by begrudgingly allowing the brother to hack off his limb only to then be told that the ‘food’ would be the arm itself.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: November 18, 1973

Runtime: 1 Hour 31 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Tom Alderman

Studio: Media Cinema Group

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video. Fawesome, Plex, Tubi, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget

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The Return of Swamp Thing (1988)

Posted on January 18, 2026 | 1 comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Doctor creates genetic mutations.

Dr. Anton Arcane (Louis Jourdan) continues in his quest to fight aging by doing, with the help of his assistant Lana (Sarah Douglas) many experiments that combines genes from swamp creatures and people that creates many monstrous mutations, some of whom escape the lab and go out and terrorize the swamp lands including any human victims that they may come upon. Abby (Heather Locklear) travels to visit Arcane, her stepfather, at his lab to find out what really happened to her dead mother. Arcane uses this as an opportunity to have Abby be his next victim to his newest experiment where he hopes to transfer her youthful essence to his body, so he can be young again, but Swamp Thing (Dick Durock) returns to fight off Arcane and all of his henchmen in order to save Abby and the two fall in love in the process.

This ill-advised sequel could of been so much better had, or at least had some potential, had it been put in the hands of a talented director, but instead the project was handed over to Jim Wynorski, who’s pretty much the Ed Wood of his era. He not surprisingly flunked out of film school back in the 70’s, but was so desperate to get into the business that he traveled out to Hollywood anyways and managed to get a job as an on-location manager to the short lived TV-show ‘Breaking Away’, but soon got fired from that and feeling demoralized and out of money he humbly took the next flight home thinking that was the end of his Hollywood dreams, and most likely it would’ve been, had he not met someone on the airplane who knew Roger Corman and he set-up a meeting with him, which got him a job writing screenplays for his production company that ultimately lead to him directing. To date he’s helmed over 110 movies, but virtually all of them have been critically panned and many are of the direct-to-video variety making you wonder if it’s really worth making all those movies if nobody ever sees them.

This film is typically of his campy approach where everything is done for cheap laughs, which quickly become tiresome. I don’t mind some humor in horror films and during the 80’s it became common for killers to make jokey one-liners after they killed their victims, which became kind of kitschy, but those at least had some bona fide scares and gore. This one though has no fright or tension and just the tackiest of effects making it all just a cheap, silly mess.

Locklear is certainly easy on the eyes, but her character is written in a way that makes her seem like it’s just some sort of walk-on role where she steps in to make a few snarky comments and then leaves. She seems to have no emotional connection to anything going on around her and she has no discernable arc making her presence overall quite sterile. She also rushes to judgement about things and lets her motivations be known too quickly. For instance, when she first arrives at Arcane’s residence she immediately gets into a bickering match with Lana, but wouldn’t it make more sense since she’s just gotten there to hide her animosity until she’s figured out how to maneuver her way around and see whom she can trust? She also instantaneously falls for Swamp Thing, but it would’ve been more interesting transition had she been reserved around him, or even disgusted by his appearance, as most people probably would be.

Jourdan, in his second to last film, is fun though looking frailer than he did in the same role eight years earlier. However, in the last outing it ended with him turned into a monster and no explanation for how he was able to turn back into his original form, which makes this seem less like a sequel and more like a separate movie altogether.

The only one that I really did like was Daniel Emery Taylor who plays this fat redhead kid that says a lot of amusing lines. His acting his actually terrible, but it jives with his goofy, clumsy character and thus becomes amusing. In fact, I think had he and his friend Oman, played by RonReaco Lee, been the sole protagonists this thing could’ve done a lot better. I also felt that turning it into a live action was a mistake as the comic book visuals that get shown over the opening credits look rather cool making me believe the entire thing should’ve been animated.

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: May 12, 1989

Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Director: Jim Wynorski

Studio: Millimeter Films

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, PlutoTV, Tubi

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Posted in 80's Movies, Campy Comedy, Low Budget, Movies based on Comic Books, Movies that take place in the South, Sci-Fi, Sequels

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The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

Posted on December 13, 2025 | Leave a comment

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Zucker brother’s first movie.

In 1974 there was the release of The Groove Tube which had a format of comical skits, much like a variety show, that managed to be a big hit and thus ushered in several imitators causing a whole new genre to surface. Unfortunately, those copycats didn’t fare as well and many of them were downright lame. By 1977 the trend had died off and yet brothers David and Jerry Zucker along with their friend Jim Abrahams were motivated to make another one revolving around funny sketches that had gotten a good response from audiences during their improvisational shows done on stage. The studios though weren’t impressed citing the decline in box office receipts towards sketch movies and thus refused their request for financing. They were then able to get a verbal deal from a wealthy real estate developer who agreed to fund the project as long as they made a 10-minute short that he could use to shop around to attract other investors, but when he found out how much it would cost just to produce the short he pulled out forcing the Zuckers to put up their own money, which amounted to $35,000, to get the short made.

This though proved to be beneficial as it attracted the attention of a young up-and-coming filmmaker John Landis, who had just gotten done directing Schlock on a minuscule budget and felt he could do the same here. It also got shown to Kim Jorgenson a theater owner who found it so funny he got other owners to play it before the main feature, and this was enough to get them to pool their money into a $650,000 budget that when completed made a whopping $7.1 million at the box office. This then directly lead to them getting studio backing for their most well-known hit Airplane which was a script that they had written before doing this one but had been previously unable to get any backing for.

Like with most films made during the brief period when this genre was ‘hot’ the jokes and skits are hit-or-miss. The opening sequences dealing with a TV news show are the weakest. Watching a reporter pick his nose because he doesn’t realize that he’s on the air isn’t really all that outrageous when today YouTube has actual news bloopers showing essentially the same thing. Having an ape go berserk in the studio during a live broadcast was too obvious and telegraphs the punchline to the viewer right from the beginning and thus making the outcome quite predictable.

The parody of Bruce Lee movies entitled ‘A Fistful of Yen’ definitely has its share of amusing moments though it goes on a bit too long and the special effects look cheap. My favorite segments came after this one and take up most of the final 20-minutes. These include Hare Krishna monks going to the bar after a ‘hard day of work’ harassing people on the street. There’s also ‘The Courtroom’ skit that’s a parody of Perry Mason-style TV-shows from the 50’s. The Zinc Oxide bit involving a housewife, played by Nancy Steen, who’s forced to face the reality of what life would be like if all the items in her house that was made from Zinc Oxide suddenly disappeared.

The film also features well-known actors who volunteered their time with little pay and appear in brief cameos. These include Bill Bixby as a spokesperson for a send-up of aspirin commercials. There’s also Donald Sutherland who plays a klutzy waiter during a parody of disaster flicks, Tony Dow playing his most famous role of Wally from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ as a jury in the Courtroom and Henry Gibson, in what I found to be both the funniest and darkest skit, where he essentially plays himself in a mock add showing how parents (Reberta Kent, Christopher Hanks) can still keep their deceased son as a ‘a part of their family’ by bringing along his increasingly decomposed corpse with them wherever they go.

My Rating: 6 out of 10

Released: August 10, 1977

Runtime: 1 Hour 23 Minutes

Rated R

Director: John Landis

Studio: United Film Distribution Company

Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Plex, Pluto TV, Roku, Tubi, YouTube

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Crude Comedy, Low Budget, Martial Arts, Movies with Nudity, Parody

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Wedding Trough (1975)

Posted on October 27, 2024 | 3 comments

wedding

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Man fucks his pig.

Bizarre, controversial film that was first shown at the Perth International Film Festival in Australia where it was immediately met with outrage and walkouts that quickly got it banned from being shown again by the government, a ban of which still stands today. Since then it’s turned-up sporadically a various film festivals throughout the decades, with the last one being in 2008 in Switzerland, but was never released theatrically and was considered an obscurity before finally getting a DVD issue in 2018. The film has no dialogue and shot in black-and-white at an abandoned farm in the outskirts of Belgium. It was directed by Thierry Zeno who had a noted fascination with all things morbid and followed this one up with a documentary on death and decay called Des Morts. This one deals with taboo subjects of zoophilia and coprophagia, which gets shown graphically. Many label this a horror movie for its grim and unrelenting subject matter, and some have even considered it a forerunner to Eraserhead. 

The plot description, which will contain SPOILERS, though in this case I feel is a good thing, so you know exactly what you’re getting into if you attempt to watch it, deals with a lonely farmer, played by Dominique Garny, who also co-wrote the screenplay, who begins to have amorous feelings towards his pet pig. One day he gets naked and has sex with it. Later on, the pig gives birth to three piglets. The man tries to bond with his brood by sleeping with them inside a giant basket, but the piglets prefer the comfort of their mother over him. Feeling that he’s now been ‘abandoned by his children’ it sends him into a rage causing him to kill the piglets by hanging them. This causes a great deal of stress for the mother pig who drowns herself in a nearby pond. The farmer now feels guilty about what he’s done, so he ‘punishes himself’ by concocting a drink made of his feces and urine and warms it inside a black pot before then forcing himself to swallow it.

While the sex scenes are simulated, though still graphic enough, the pooping and eating of it isn’t, which many will find gross enough. The hanging of the piglets though is quite unsettling. I’d like to feel that the ones that are hung were stillborn, since they do appear a bit smaller in size from the ones seen running around, but I’m not completely sure. However, the mother pig does become quite stressed in a very real way when she sees the dead piglets and runs around squealing in a high and frantic pitch, which is very disturbing.

Some have for decades sought this movie out as evidenced by the IMDb comments simply their love of shock cinema and this film’s notorious reputation for being at the top of the list. While it is unequivocally gross it’s also boring and disgusting with the abuse of the animals being the worst thing you’ll take from it. Not recommended.

Alternate Titles: Vase de Noces, The Pig Fucking Movie.

Released: April 11, 1975

Runtime: 1 Hour 19 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Theirry Zeno

Studio: Zeno Films

Available: DVD-R

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black & White, Exploitation, Foreign Films, Horror, Low Budget, Moody/Stylish, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies

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Terror at Red Wolf Inn (1972)

Posted on October 14, 2023 | 1 comment

terror1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: An appetite for humans.

Regina (Linda Gillen) is a shy college student living in a dorm by herself who doesn’t have enough money to go to Spring break with the rest of her friends, so she’s forced to stay on the campus all alone while the others go. Then she receives a letter telling her that she’s won a free trip to a bed and breakfast resort called the Red Wolf Inn. She’s offered a private plane ride to get there and once she arrives she’s greeted by a kindly elderly couple (Arthur Space, Mary Jackson) who own the place and two other women, Pamela (Janet Wood) and Edwina (Margaret Avery), who are also staying there, as well as the couple’s adult grandson Baby John (John Neilson). While things start out well Regina soon grows uncomfortable and convinced that the couple has ulterior motives. When both Pamela and Edwina disappear Regina fears she’ll be next, but her efforts to escape are thwarted trapping her in the home to become the next meal item unless she can convince Baby John, who has fallen for her, to help her find a way out.

This very odd piece of 70’s horror that seems to want to combine a grisly theme with offbeat humor definitely has a few keen moments. My favorite was the way Regina finds out that she’s ‘won something’ and excitedly shouts it out to her otherwise empty dorm building. Some may consider this exaggerated as most people today would be highly cynical of such a letter, but back in the 70’s, (and I was around then), the teens were more trusting and had a propensity to be experimental and act as if life was just one big adventure, so in that respect the movie gets it right and this became for me one of the funnier moments The only caveat is how did the couple find out about Regina to send her the letter? Why was she chosen and how often and how many of these letters did they mail and how many of them got answered, which never gets addressed, but should’ve.

On the horror end its not very scarry and only borderline creepy. There is a dream sequence that had the potential of being cool, but doesn’t go on long enough. Regina’s attempt at escape I did like, but it does leave open plenty of loopholes like why was a motorboat, that wasn’t tied to any dock, conveniently left out in the bay for her to swim to? Initially I though it was an intended trap and she’d get into it and see dead bodies lying there, but that’s not the case as she uses it to get over to a neighbor’s house, but no ones inside and all the other buildings in the area are eerily empty, but why? The dinner scene in which everyone chomps at their food like pigs could’ve been considered revolting and upsetting had it been confirmed that it was people they were eating, but this wasn’t yet established, so the shock effect is lost.

Some have labeled this as a comedy-horror and one of the first films to use this sub-genre, but outside of the opening bit there really isn’t anything all that amusing. There are some moments of extreme awkwardness like when Baby John smashes the head of a baby shark repeatedly against a rock while a shocked Regina looks on in horror before he turns to her and confesses how much he loves her, which is darkly humorous in a distorted type of way, but outside of that the chuckles are as infrequent as the scares.

Spoiler Alert!

I did enjoy Mary Jackson’s performance who goes from nice old lady to threatening matron effectively, but the wrap-up leaves much to be desired. Initially it’s sort-of exciting as Regina and Baby John make a daring run for it only to be chased down by the older couple’s dog and then viciously attacked by both the pet and the old man. The film then cuts to show Regina and Baby John back inside the kitchen of the grandparent’s home having supposedly gotten the upper hand, but this is a struggle that needed to be played-out, the film lacks action anyways and this would’ve offered much needed excitement and tension. Showing the old couple’s decapitated heads inside the freezer had a gory appeal, but then having the old guy look up and wink ruins it and turns the whole movie into one big stupid joke.

Some viewers insist that the 77 minute version, which is what’s available on DVD despite the cover saying it’s 90 minutes, is the edited version with certain scenes of ‘horror’, or other ‘dark’ moments left out and this is based mainly on the fact that IMDb lists the original runtime as 90 minutes and Leonard Maltin’s review book says it’s 98 minutes, but I’m not so sure. As short as the 77 minute runtime is it still came off as draggy. This was also made in an era where implying the violence and gore was considered shocking enough making me believe that the DVD cut is pretty much the whole thing. Even if a longer version may exist it’s doubtful that it would be filled with more carnage as it’s clear that the filmmakers were going for a soft tongue-and-cheek approach making me believe the supposed lost scenes would’ve amounted to being talky bits that wouldn’t have added much.

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Alternate Title: Terror House

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 27, 1972

Runtime: 1 Hour 17 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Bud Townsend

Studio: Red Wolf Productions

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, College Life, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a Hotel setting, Offbeat

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Blood Lake (1987)

Posted on October 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

blood1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer stalks 6 teens.

Filmed on-location in Cedar Lake, Oklahoma by a bunch of young amateurs convinced they could make a horror movie just as good as the studios. Mike Berry, who stars as Mike, wrote the screenplay and then shopped around his script, but could find no takers until he bumped into Tim Boggs at a local retail store who agreed to take on the task of directing and even quit both of his jobs to do it. The shooting took place over a course of 10 days with the storyline revolving around 6 teens who go to the house of Becky (Angela Darter) whose parents are away, which will allow them to party for the whole weekend only to have it interrupted by a deranged killer (Tiny Frazier) upset because the house they’re in used to be owned by him.

When I hear about films like this I harken back to Harold P. Warren, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Manos: The Hands of Fate, which has become quite infamous as one of the worst movies ever made, but also started as a bet where Warren, being a local salesmen, bet famous screenwriter Stirling Stilliphant, who was in the El Paso, Texas area scouting for locations for an upcoming film, that he could direct a horror movie that could be just as good as anything Hollywood could churn out. Of course the results where abysmal, but you can’t help but feel that the cast and crew here were equally in over their heads.

On the positive side it starts out a heck of a lot better than the Warren film, which had extended shots focusing on the passing Texas countryside for no apparent reason and got visually boring quite fast. The excuse for this was that Warren had expected to shoot the opening credits over this, but for whatever reason it got botched leaving a lot extraneous and pointless footage. Here though they get it right with a nicely edited bit showing the kids driving in a car while the credits and music play over it. In fact the editing is quite good and helps equalize the cheap video look that was done via a VCR camera. The dialogue is also well done as director Boggs was smart enough to allow the teens to paraphrase their own lines to make it sound natural and thus the characters come-off as more believable than in most other bigger budgeted horror flicks, so we’ll score one for the Okies on that.

Unfortunately everything else is pretty bad. The big problem is that not enough happens. For a film with Blood in its title you end up seeing very little of it. There’s a quick killing at the beginning, which doesn’t show much gore, and then another 48 minutes before you see another one. There’s a teaser death where you see a body floating in a lake, but it turns out to being just a prank. I realize other 80’s slasher flicks would sometimes employ this, but when you’re a cheap production you can’t play with the audiences expectations like that and you got to get to the gore and violence pretty quick to hold their interest. Spending almost 20-minutes watching the kids go water skiing turns the whole thing into a snooze feast and it’s very unlikely anyone is going to want to stick with it after that.

Spoiler Alert!

The killings, once they finally get going, aren’t impressive and all done by a guy who doesn’t look frightening at all and has no distinguishing features to make him interesting. The knife he uses is quite small and having him use a sword, or ax, or something big and sharp would’ve elicited more terror. The reason for why he goes on a killing spree is that apparently he sold the house to the new owners, but they ended up ‘not paying for it’, but how does someone take possession of the home if no money transaction takes place? You can’t really ‘sell a home’ if no actual sale happens.

The ending is confusing too as the killer’s body disappears and then it gets intimated that he reappears inside the ambulance that’s taking the injured teens to the hospital though we don’t really see this as all that gets shown is the ambulance driving away with laughter in the background. The final sequence becomes almost surreal as the killer magically reappears at the home site only for him to see all the water in the lake drained out. Apparently this was, as the closing credits intimate, an ‘act of God’, but what does it have to do with the story?

My Rating: 1 out of 10

Runtime: 1 Hour 22 Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Tim Boggs

Distributor: United Home Video

Available: DVD, Fandor, Plex, Tubi, Amazon Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Slasher/Gore

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My Friends Need Killing (1976)

Posted on October 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Vet. stalks war buddies.

Gene (Greg Mullavey) is a Vietnam Vet. who’s come home after the war, but finding it hard to readjust to civilian life. He’s plagued by memories of not only the war, but some of the crimes that he and his comrades did while over there including the annihilation of a village and gang rape of a woman. He decides that the only answer is to seek out dark justice by visiting with his old buddies one-by-one in their homes and then using the opportunity to kill them when the time is right. Gene’s wife Laura (Meredith McRae) is aware of her husband’s tormented dreams, but not his homicidal plans. She works with Dr. MacLaine (Greg Morris), a psychiatrist, to track Gene down in order to stop his madness and get him the mental help that he needs.

In 1969, Paul Leder, whose attempt at an acting career had stalled, decided to take a stab at directing, which initially didn’t fare any better. His first feature, where he had Mullavey also star, was the absurdist comedy Marigold Man, about a guy named Harry who dreams of planting marigolds from coast to coast, which quickly fell into obscurity. He then hit on the idea of doing a horror film, which he felt, if done right, could do well under the low budget constraints. His first feature, which also had Mullavey in a supporting part, was I Dismember Mama, that fared a bit better than the comedy and enough to gain a cult following. Leder then reverted back to doing two comedies including the notorious Ape, an attempted parody of King Kong, that became a big embarrassment before eventually returning back to horror with this film.

On the surface it’s not bad given the limitations. It’s obviously inspired by Bob Clark’s Dead of Night, that had come out 5 years earlier and had a similar theme of a war vet. unable to get the horrors of what he went through out his mind. That one won some critical acclaim and a cult audience while this one fell through the cracks. For Paul Leder standards though it’s surprisingly watchable. Mullavey gives an effective performance where you sympathize with the man and his torment even as he goes through with his killings. The flashback sequences have a haunting quality and the film is, if anything, adequately gritty.

The killings though are where things get off-kilter. A few of them are disturbing like when he ties up one of his old buddies, while also shooting him in the arm, and then forces him to watch the rape of his wife before killing them both. Some of the others though fail to have the same dark punch. In one instance all he does his hand his old war friend a bottle of pills and tells him to swallow them, which isn’t exactly tense, while another moment has him helping to deliver a woman’s baby. There’s also a scene where Mullavey ties up his victim and then has the man’s arm poked with a syringe where he slowly bleeds to death, but horror movies work better when we see the action of him attacking the other man and just cutting away to him already tied-up misses the potential for excitement.

McRae, who at the time was Mullavey’s real-life wife, gives a poor performance particularly her anemic sounding crying. The use of music is bad too. During the killings it reflects the pounding score you’d expect in a horror flick, but in-between it has a melodic quality that you’d hear in a breezy comedy. The editing, which was also done by Leder, is choppy and too many slow parts in-between the violence. The film, which has a few interesting moments, fails to hold interest all the way through. It’s too talky with a lot of extraneous dialogue that could’ve been cut out. Having the only sound being the voices that Mullavey hears inside his head would’ve worked better.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: December 10, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 13 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Paul Leder

Studio: Cinema Producers Center

Available: DVD-R (dvdlady.com)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Obscure Movies

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The Money (1976)

Posted on November 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Kidnapping kids for ransom.

Roland (Graham Beckel) is an out-of-work slacker who’s always looking for the easy-way-out. He’s dating Lucy (Regina Baff) who babysits for Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) and his wife Ellen (Elizabeth Richards). Despite living in a posh neighborhood Richard is having problems of his own. His business isn’t doing well and he needs a loan, but his wife, who does have a large sum stashed away, refuses to give him any financial assistance. When Roland goes with Lucy to look after Richard’s kids (played by the real-life children of the director) he comes up with the idea of kidnapping them for ransom as he mistakenly presumes Richard must be ‘loaded’. Once Richard realizes that his kids have been taken he instructs his wife not to call the police and instead convinces her to take out the money she has in savings to pay for the ransom. Richard though uses this money for the loan while offering Roland only a small portion of it. Roland refuses the offer and the two bicker while the kids remain locked inside a car outside in a parking lot with the temperature nearing a 100 degrees.

The mark of a talented director isn’t how good they are when given a big studio contract and all the money they need, but instead what they can do when on a shoestring budget. Make no mistake this thing on a technical level struggles, but much can be blamed on the extremely poor transfer that’s streaming on Amazon Prime where they apparently found a very grainy video print and made no attempt to clean it up. The result is faded, scratchy, and at certain points even shaky similar to back in the 70’s (if you’re old enough to remember) when a teacher would show a movie in school and film would begin to jump and the image onscreen would get blurry. Fortunately the shaking bit here is only temporary, but Amazon should’ve had better standards before they offer a film up for streaming. Granted it’s nice to see a hard-to-find obscure flick, but at least some effort should’ve been given to restoring it.

Anyways, if you can get past all of this, it does have its share of intriguing elements. I loved the way it captures the Jersey boardwalk scene of the era and juxtaposes between the rich and poor and how both sides seem to be desperate in their own unique ways. There’s no ‘good guy’ here. Everyone is screwed-up and filled with human foibles.  The amusement comes with seeing just how corrupt they can become without totally falling over-the-edge.

Beckel is excellent. This was only is third feature film appearance after debuting in The Paper Chase yet he comes into his own here and exudes the perfect caricature of a down-and-out, irritable young man who wants no part of the system and only looking for ways to cheat it. Luckinbill isn’t as strong and the ultimate confrontation between the two doesn’t work though you do get to see Danny DeVito in an early role as a bartender as well as George Hearn, who later became a big Broadway star in the play ‘Sweeney Todd’, as a bank manager. A young Josh Mostel, who later reunited with the director in the film Stoogemania, has a really amusing bit as a wheel-of-fortune arcade operator who inadvertently lets down his guard and gets taken advantage of by Beckel.

Spoiler Alert!

What I didn’t like was the ending. The whole film, up until that point, was filled with a lot of delicious twists, but once it gets to the finale it had no idea where to go and falls completely flat. Granted having the kids die in a car from heat stroke would be way too severe for a playful dark comedy, but ultimately there’s no cause and effect. Intriguing ideas get entered in, but then quickly forgotten. At the end everything goes back to normal like everything we watched didn’t have an impact on any of the characters. In a good story the characters are expected to grow and change during the course of a movie and I really didn’t see that here especially with Richard.

Having Beckel act like he had now ‘made it’ simply because he’s got $10,000 in his pocket from the kidnapping was unrealistic. Even if you add in the gold watch and fancy car, which Richard also gives him, it would still not be enough to retire on especially with the way Beckel spends it. I was expecting to see him back in a desperate situation as he was clearly not going to be living high-on-the-hog for that long and having the movie stop while he’s ‘living-it-up’ is a cop-out. It’s also not clear if his girlfriend Lucy was in on the kidnapping plot, or not. During the movie it’s made to seem like she was a victim too as she’s found in the home tied-up, but then at the end she meets Beckel at the fancy hotel he’s staying-at. If she was in cahoots with him the whole time that should’ve, at the conclusion, been better confirmed as just having her show up at the hotel doesn’t mean she was a part of the plan and may have just went there because he told her that’s where he was staying.

Alternate Title: Atlantic City Jackpot

Released: June 10, 1976

Runtime: 1 Hour 28 Minutes

Rated R

Director: Chuck Workman

Studio: Independent-International Pictures

Available: Epix, Amazon Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Kidnapping Movies, Low Budget, Obscure Movies, Offbeat

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