Category Archives: Low Budget

Hard Rock Zombies (1985)

Posted on October 25, 2015 | 1 comment

hard rock zombies

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Rock band becomes zombified.

An up-and-coming rock band travels to a small town for their next gig. There the lead singer falls for a young girl named Cassie (Jennifer Coe) while also catching the wrath of the town’s conservative residents who still feel that rock n’ roll is the ‘devil’s music’. The place also harbors Adolph Hitler (Jack Bliesener) who has been secretly hiding out there under a disguise while plotting his next world takeover. After the band members are killed by the evil Nazis they come back to life in the form of zombies killing everyone else and turning the whole town into one big zombie fest.

I have to admit the zombie popularity that has entranced so many people and formed its own special niche escapes me as I find the whole concept to be rather boring. However, certain films like Shaun of the Dead have managed to reinvent the formula by mixing hip humor with a good amount of realistic gore and thus satisfying both the gore hounds and those looking for a laugh. This film tries to do the same, but fails miserable as the humor is corny and the special effects are poor to pathetic.

In fact I was stunned that a well-known director who did some other successful projects was involved with this or even willing to have his name listed on the credits as it’s extraordinarily amateurish and looking like it was put together by novices while drunk. Had it been even remotely more polished, or written by someone who had actually watched zombie movies and appreciated them, it might have worked.

The members who make up the band show no acting ability and having to listen to their generic sounding songs that seem to go forever is another problem and one that almost turns this mess into an annoying music video instead. The second half in which they come back as zombies doesn’t improve things as they still continue to play their songs and worse yet begin to resemble the rock group KISS with their makeup and in fact the similarity is so extreme that I was surprised they weren’t sued.

The zombie parodies are numerous and seemingly never-ending. The majority of them aren’t very good, but this one may very well take the prize as being the worst.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: August 28, 1985

Runtime: 1Hour 38Minutes

Rated R

Director: Krishna Shah

Studio: Cannon Film Distributors

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Parody, Slasher/Gore, Zombie Movies

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Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)

Posted on October 17, 2015 | Leave a comment

don't torture a duckling 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Who’s killing the children?

The setting in this Italian giallo is a small, rural village where the children of the townspeople are being murdered. At first the police suspect and arrest a mentally handicapped man (Vito Passeri), but the killings continue. Soon even more suspects turn up including Maciara (Florinda Bolkan) the mother of a dead child herself who secretly practices voodoo using dolls made by her father and yet every time the authorities believe they’ve found the culprit more clues arise that leads them to someone else creating panic in a town already steeped in fear, suspicion and the superstitious.

As a story detailing a police investigation it’s not too bad. The plot works in a linear fashion that’s easy to follow without entering in too many subplots or red herrings although it’s still no better than your average episode of ‘Murder She Wrote’. I did enjoy the rural Italian landscape and the bird’s eye shot of the village whose decrepit, rundown buildings visually hit home the stifled, bleak nature of the residents and why they would turn so heavily to the spiritual world as their sole escape.

Balkan’s performance as the nutty lady is effective particularly when she has a seizure during her interrogation and the scene where she gets surrounded by men who belt her with chains is quite graphic and realistic.

The film though, like with a lot of Italian productions from that era, does have dubbing issues particularly director Lucio Fulci’s use of adding in all the sound effects giving it a certain over-the-top cartoon quality. For instance when a victim is being slapped by a man’s hand it sounds more like the lashing of a whip and even simple stuff like the shoveling of dirt comes off wrong because the sound effect is not in sync with the action on the screen.

The film also has a uncomfortable moment where an adult character (Barbara Bouchet), who is one of the protagonists, walks around naked in front of a 12-year-old boy and even asks him how many women ‘he’s done it with’.

Spoiler Alert!

Guessing who the real killer is was easy and I had the whole thing figured out after about 30 minutes making the rest of the mystery predictable and boring. The idea of a priest killing children might’ve been considered shocking at the time, but now as with Fulci’s criticism of the Catholic Church it comes off as heavy-handed and redundant.

The close-up, slow motion shot of the priest falling down a cliff at the end is the film’s most controversial moment as it is clearly a dummy whose blank eyes and unnaturally agape mouth looks incredibly fake. Some have argued that this was Fulci’s attempt at revealing the ‘inner ugliness’ of the character by showing something with such a distorted face, but since a similar looking mannequin is also used to portray one of the boy victim’s submerged in a tub of water earlier I think it can safely be said that it was more just the cheapness of the production than anything else.

End of Spoiler Alert!

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My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: September 29, 1972

Runtime: 1Hour 42Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Lucio Fulci

Studio: Medusa Distribuzione

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Horror, Italian Films, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Mystery

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Poor Pretty Eddie (1975)

Posted on October 16, 2015 | 1 comment

poor pretty eddie 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 6 out of 10

4-Word Review: Wrong turn to hickville.

Liz Weatherly (Leslie Uggams) was simply looking for a break from her hectic touring schedule and a chance to take some nature photos when her car breaks down on a lonely southern dirt road near an isolated lodge run by an aging, overweight lush (Shelley Winters) and her much younger boyfriend Eddie (Michael Christian). Eddie recognizes Liz as being a famous singer and since he has dreams of that nature as well tries to convince her to help him get his foot-in-the-door, but his talents do not match his ambitions and he fails to impress her. He then delays the repairing of her car hoping to wear her down and work things into a sexual relationship. When she resists this he rapes her and traps her at the remote hotel with no vehicle for escape. When she goes to the police the backwoods sheriff (Slim Pickens) humiliates her further, which crumbles her inner strength and makes her feel like a droid to the perversion around her that ultimately has her forced into a shotgun wedding.

This turgid drama is full of provocative southern gothic elements and wallows in areas that others fear to tread. The creative camerawork and backdrop sounds are impressive especially for a low budget film and the slow motion violence adds an evocative touch that stays with you long after it’s over. The character’s sexual repression gets relayed in an equally interesting way by showing scenes of them sucking and slurping their food like it’s a sexual substitute.

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Prolific character actor Pickens gets one of his best roles as the slimy hick sheriff in a part he seems almost born to play and Dub Taylor is spot-on as a self-imposed backwoods judge who creates a makeshift trial in the middle of his ragtag bar while also amusingly comparing Yankees to hemorrhoids. Ted Cassidy is good as well and makes a strong impression despite having limited lines.

I was not as impressed with the female performances as star Uggams comes off as too cold and one-dimensionally rigid without showing any type of preliminary vulnerability. Winters is competent as always, but playing a lonely, aging, pathetic woman begging for love is too similar to the character that she played in Lolita and making it seem more like typecasting.

The climactic bloody shootout is fun, but ends up being more of a spectacle than anything.  B.W. Sandefur’s script lacks any type of twist, introduces psychological elements that it fails to follow through on and wades in tired southern stereotypes making this a warped piece of ‘70s cinema that falls just short of being a cult classic.

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My Rating: 6 out of 10

Alternate Titles: Redneck County, Heartbreak Hotel, Black Vengeance

Released: June 16, 1975

Runtime: 1Hour 22Minutes

Rated R

Director: Richard Robinson, David Worth

Studio: WestAmerican Films

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Moody/Stylish, Movies that take place in the South, Movies with a rural setting, Rape/Revenge

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Shock Waves (1977)

Posted on October 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

shock waves 3

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Zombie soldiers inhabit island.

During WWII a Nazi commandment experimented with the supernatural by taking dead soldiers and turning them into zombies who would become killing machines that could not be taken down and impossible to destroy. When the war ended a lone SS Commander (Peter Cushing) took these zombies to an isolated island where he hoped to destroy them, but instead they became more powerful. When some castaways from a waterlogged boat arrive at the island they are greeted by these zombies who waste no time in returning to their killing ways.

The film starts out with promise and the idea has potential, but the film reverts too much to a pedestrian narrative that bogs down the action and turns it into a bore. The dialogue is banal and the characters annoying. The film would’ve worked much better had it taken a Dario Argento approach where the focus stayed solely on mood, imagery and a pounding music score while completely scrapping the dull characterizations altogether. In fact having only one or two people make it to the island would’ve been perfect as the rest of the supporting cast seem better suited for a pathetic B-comedy.

shock waves

The zombies aren’t all that interesting either. The shot showing one of them walking on the ocean bottom without any breathing apparatus was impressive, but otherwise they spend the majority of time simply lurking around in the backdrop. They can also easily be killed by having the shaded goggles that they wear taken off, which isn’t too exciting. Having the Cushing character describe their origin even though it had already been explained at the beginning by a narrator was unnecessary and in many ways no explanation or only supplying one at the very end would’ve made it creepier.

Veteran character actors John Carradine and Cushing both made $5,000 for their efforts, but their presence in both cases was not needed. Brooke Adams is good in her first credited speaking role in a film, but the rest of the cast came off like amateurs and Buck Henry lookalike Jack Davidson seemed like he had walked onto the wrong movie altogether.

Shot in 1975 the abandoned hotel on an island setting adds a bit of ambience, but overall it’s a wasted effort. The scares, tension and special effects are all quite minimal and the story’s original elements become overshadowed by a flat and unimaginative script.

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My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: July 15, 1977

Runtime: 1Hour 24Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Ken Weiderhorn

Studio: Zopix Company

Available: VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Horror, Low Budget, Movies that take place in Florida, Movies with a rural setting, Zombie Movies

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Homebodies (1974)

Posted on October 7, 2015 | 3 comments

homebodies 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Old people become killers.

Senior citizens living in a rundown apartment building are shocked to learn that they will be evicted so that their place can be torn down and turned into an office complex. They resist the move and devise a scheme in which they will create ‘accidents’ at the construction site that will cause fatalities and hopefully impede the building process. They even do away with the project developer (Douglas Fowley) by drowning him in hardening cement, but then one of them, Mrs. Loomis, (Ruth McDevitt) begins to suffer from a guilty conscience. She considers going to the authorities, but the others try to stop her, which soon creates deceit and murder from within the group.

Shot on-location in Cincinnati the film has a neat offbeat concept, but it’s unable to execute it to its full potential. It tries too hard to mix in too many different story elements and shifts awkwardly between drama, dark comedy, horror and even social commentary. The result is a mixed bag that never gets off the ground. There are a few interesting moments, but the first half is slow and barely seems like a horror movie at all.

Part of the problem is that the deaths aren’t novel. Outside of the one where Fowley gets submerged in cement the rest are run-of-the-mill. We never see how the seniors are able to create the ‘accidents’ at the construction site and it seemed hard to believe that they would’ve been agile enough to get around inside a dark building, late at night to set up the booby traps to begin with. It would’ve been fun had the killings been caused by using items connected with old age like bashing the victims over the head with a cane, running them down with a walker, or forcing them to swallow a bottle of Geritol. The filmmakers work hard to create sympathy for the seniors, but portraying them as creepy, scary and threatening would’ve made it more edgy.

Paula Truman is good in the lead as well as Ruth McDevitt as the granny with mixed emotions. Fowley though is a bore as the heavy as his caricature of a brash, ego-driven developer is too one-dimensional and he looks just as elderly as the rest of the cast. Hiring a much younger actor to play the part would’ve created more of an interesting contrast.

Larry Yust’s direction is competent and helps keep the proceedings palatable, but as a whole it’s undercooked and undeserving of the cult classic status that they were clearly hoping for.

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My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: September 29, 1974

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated PG

Director: Larry Yust

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: VHS

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Posted in 70's Movies, Black Comedy, Horror, Low Budget, Obscure Movies, Offbeat

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A Bell from Hell (1973)

Posted on October 3, 2015 | 1 comment

bell from hell

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: A psycho returns home.

After being locked up for years in an insane asylum Juan (Renaud Verley) is released and allowed to return home to his wheelchair bound mother Marta (Viveca Lindfors) and three sisters who had him put away in an attempt to get at his inheritance. Now Juan wants revenge and does so by trying to have his mother stung to death by a horde of angry bees and his sisters cut up at a meat processing plant, but both of his attempts fail. They survive and turn-the-tables by having him encased alive at the local church’s bell tower that is being erected, but just when they think he’s dead they find that he may not be.

This film’s most notorious claim to fame is that its young director Claudio Guerin fell to his death from the very bell tower he had constructed for the movie on the last day of shooting, which is a shame since he showed strong potential for being a gifted filmmaker. If there is one thing that holds it all together and keeps it captivating it’s with its visual quality. Despite the limited budget Guerin shows a keen eye for an array of interesting camera angles and shots. The atmosphere is thick and remains creepy throughout even though it doesn’t have any actual scares.

Unfortunately the script by Santiago Moncada lacks the same type of creativity with a cliché-ridden storyline that meanders and at times feels like it’s going nowhere. The muffled English dubbing makes it hard to hear all of the words that the characters are saying and the ending plays like a tired rehashing of an Edgar Allan Poe story that provides no surprises.

The film’s most provocative moment is when Juan kidnaps his sisters and hangs them naked on meat hooks at the processing plant, which is filled with imaginative close-ups and edits and a major precursor to the so-called ‘horror porn’ that we’ve become used to today. However, the film doesn’t go far enough with it and pulls back after an interesting set-up, which becomes a testament to the production as a whole that has great potential, but only mediocre results.

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My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: October 1, 1973

Runtime: 1Hour 33Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Claudio Guerin

Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 70's Movies, Cult, Foreign Films, Horror, Low Budget, Moody/Stylish, Movies with Nudity

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Disco Godfather (1979)

Posted on September 8, 2015 | Leave a comment

disco godfather

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Don’t try angel dust.

Tucker (Rudy Ray Moore) is the DJ at a local discotic known as Blueberry Hill who becomes concerned when his nephew takes a new drug called angel dust that causes him to have weird hallucinations and forces him into the hospital. Since Tucker is also a former cop he decides to use his connections with the police force to take down the drug dealers and clean up the streets before they can corrupt any more of the youth, but the dealers have other ideas including kidnapping Tucker and forcing him to ingest the drug via a gas mask.

This was the fifth feature for Moore and the last one where he was credited as the star. The former comedian created a character for his stage act called Dolemite that proved so popular that in 1975 it was turned into a movie and Moore became a star at the age of 48. Yet by this time the act was starting to get old. He still had the energy, but seeing a man who was clearly in his 50’s somehow able to beat up guys who were much younger and bigger than him didn’t make a lot of sense.

The story itself is run-of-the-mill and splicing in disco dance numbers where the camera conspicuously focuses in on the scantily-clad gyrating bodies of the females doesn’t help and if anything makes it even more boring. The fight sequences looked quite staged and it’s obvious that the actors are pulling their punches and kicks.

The only thing that makes this otherwise uninspired low budget mess slightly diverting are the drug sequences in which the characters start tripping out on all sorts of weird hallucinations as well as a segment dealing with a religious group trying to ‘cure’ one of the victims through an exorcism. The final segment in which Moore sees his mother turning into a devil is goofy enough to give this thing 2 points and had this movie cut out the derivative drama and emphasized more of a surreal quality it would’ve done better.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: September 3, 1979

Runtime: 1Hour 33Minutes

Rated R

Director: J. Robert Wagoner

Studio: Transvue Pictures Corporation

Available: DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Action/Adventure, Blaxploitation, Cult, Low Budget, Martial Arts, Police Drama

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Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

Posted on August 2, 2015 | 1 comment

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By Richard Winters

My Rating: 1 out of 10

4-Word Review: Worst movie ever made.

Husband and father Michael (played by the film’s writer/director Harold P. Warren) takes his wife Margaret (Diane Adelson) and their young daughter Debbie (Jackey Neyman) on a trip. Along the way they become lost in the middle of the west Texas desert and after driving around for hours finally come upon an isolated building in the middle of nowhere. Standing guard outside is a strange man named Torgo (John Reynolds) who invites them inside. Feeling they have no choice the family agrees to go in unbeknownst that the place is managed by an evil devil worshipping man known as The Master (Tom Neyman) who is already married to six wives and looking to add another to his ‘flock’.

This film came about as a bet between insurance salesman Warren and award winning screenwriter Stirling Silliphant who was in the El Paso, Texas area scouting locations for his next movie. Warren met him by chance at a local café and then proceeded to tell him that ‘anyone’ could make a movie and bet him that he could successfully do one without having any prior experience or budget. Warren even wrote the majority of the film’s screenplay on his napkin at the restaurant before the two had even left. He was then able to secure $19,000, which even for the time period wasn’t very much as well as a hand-held camera that could only shoot 32 seconds worth of film at a time. He rounded up some actors from a local theater for the cast and unable to pay them upfront promised that they would receive reimbursement for their efforts once the film was released and made a profit, which never happened.

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The result of all of this is a film that many critics and viewers consider to be the worst ever made. The film’s biggest problem is that there was no sound recorded during the filming and it all had to be dubbed in later causing it to come off like a silent movie with music used throughout the whole thing in order to help ‘narrate’ the mood and scene much of which is jazz sounding that doesn’t really connect with the horror genre to begin with. The takes go on waaaay longer than they should including a long stretch at the beginning where we see nothing but passing scenery of a barren Texas landscape that goes on endlessly.

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The filmed bombed upon its initial release and was only seen at a few theaters in the El Paso area before being forgotten completely. When Jackey Neyman attended collage during the early 80’s and told friends that she had at one point been in a film as a child her friends set out to find a copy and were unable to. It wasn’t until 1993 when this film was shown on an episode of ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ that it garnered the cult following that is has now including a Blu-ray release that is set to come out on October 13th of the this year that will have as a bonus not one, but three featurettes included, which I guess proves that these days bad is now the new good.

For my part I liked the general premise, which if put in more competent hands and with a better budget might’ve been interesting. I also enjoyed Adelson as the wife who is beautiful and went on to have a career as a model. The twist ending is also kind of neat, but without some sort of rifftax attached this otherwise boring thing is not worth catching.

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My Rating: 1 out of 10

Released: November 5, 1966

Runtime: 1Hour 14Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Harold P. Warren

Studio: Emerson Film Enterprises

Available: DVD, Blu-ray (Release date October 13, 2015)

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Posted in 60's Movies, Cult, Horror, Low Budget, Movies that take place in Texas, Movies with a rural setting

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Goldstein (1964)

Posted on July 22, 2015 | Leave a comment

goldstein2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Prophet emerges from lake.

An old man (Lou Gilbert) emerges from Lake Michigan and wanders the streets of Chicago making friends and enemies along the way. His aurora captures the imagination of a local artist (Tom Earhart) and he seeks the old man out for advice and inspiration, but then loses sight of him and spends the rest of the movie trying to chase him down, but becoming more lost in the process.

This film’s biggest claim to fame is that it is the directorial debut of Philip Kaufman who along with co-director Benjamin Manaster penned this tale that is supposedly a loose, modern-day interpretation of the prophet Elijah. The film has an engaging cinema verite style that is enough to hold some interest, but story wise it is vague and confusing. Too much is thrown in that seems to having nothing to do with the central character or theme. Much of it was clearly ad-libbed, which creates a certain freshness, but also allows it to go even more on a tangent that it ultimately cannot recover from.

The best moments come from the scenes involving Gilbert’s character who surprisingly doesn’t have as much screen time as you’d expect despite being supposedly the central point of the story. The scenes where he comes out of the water and then befriends a homeless man and wheels him down a busy street while holding up traffic is funny I also loved the part where he takes a bath in an apartment and is unable to work the faucet knobs or even know what they are for. His foot chase through a meat plant is nicely captured and edited as is his shadow dancing along the shores of Lake Michigan, but he disappears too quickly and the movie is weak and directionless without him.

This movie also marks the acting debuts of several famous comic character actors including Jack Burns who was part of a comic team with George Carlin for a while and then later with Avery Schrieber before becoming famous as the voice for the crash test dummies. Here he has an amusing bit as an ambivalent desk sergeant. Severn Darden and Anthony Holland are both seen on the screen for the first time playing a sort-of Laurel and Hardy-like traveling abortionists who perform the operation on one woman (Ellen Madison) inside an empty apartment that is quite edgy, explicit and darkly humored for its time period.

The on-location shooting in Chicago is great especially with the way it captures the Marina Towers, which are two residential buildings resembling corncobs that sit in the downtown and had just been completed when filming took place. The flimsy, wide-eyed story though cannot equal its creative execution making this interesting as a curio only.

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My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: May 4, 1964

Runtime: 1Hour 25Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Philip Kaufman, Benjamin Manaster

Studio: Altura Films International

Available: DVD

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Posted in 60's Movies, Black & White, Comedy, Low Budget, Movies that take place in Chicago, Quirky

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Wild Beasts (1984)

Posted on July 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

wild beasts 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Animals attack innocent people.

The water of a major metropolitan area becomes contaminated from all the garbage littered along the beaches. The animals of a local zoo drink it and soon go on a rampage. When the zoo’s security system fails the animals get out and start to attack the local citizens. Animal expert Laura Schwartz (Lorraine De Selle) and zookeeper Rupert (John Aldrich) work together to stop the carnage by tracking the animals down and corralling them back to safety.

The film was directed by Franco Prosperi who along with Gualtiero Jacopetti where noted for their quasi shockumentaries of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s that emphasized a lot of violence and nudity and this production works along the same vein. In fact it’s the graphic gore and a camera that lingers on the carnage that helps the film stand out from the rest of the tacky, low budget horror films from the ‘80’s. However, the film also shows a lot of animal cruelty including a mother tiger going into violent convulsions after being put to sleep and rats screaming in pain after being set on fire.

The attacks themselves become quite mechanical and monotonous. The main characters are wooden and seen only in brief intervals, so the viewer never becomes emotionally attached to anyone on screen, which seriously lowers the tension. The film actually only becomes interesting at the end when some children staying at a school drink the water and then become violent towards the adults, which has a nice creepy quality to it and the movie would’ve been better had it chosen this story thread over the other one.

The idea that showing all these discarded heroin needles along the beach and implying that this would be enough to contaminate the city’s water supply is lame and the film’s ‘important’ message about pollution is silly as well. There is also no explanation why none of the adults go crazy like the animals and some of the children do as they would presumably be drinking the same water. The opening sequence shows shots of Seattle where this story supposedly takes place, but the rest of the film was clearly shot in a European city. The production suffers from being convoluted and overblown and lacking any singular vision, which is due in large part to being financed by backers from several different countries.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: February 15, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 32Minutes

Not Rated

Director: Franco Prosperi

Studio: Shumba International Corporation

Available: VHS, DVD (Region 2)

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Posted in 80's Movies, Exploitation, Foreign Films, Horror, Italian Films, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies, Slasher/Gore

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