Category Archives: Movies with Nudity

Chopping Mall (1986)

Posted on October 15, 2013 | 1 comment

chopping mall

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer robots on prowl.

A new high-tech shopping mall installs robots as their night security team. They are programmed to apprehend and subdue any intruders, or anyone not showing them their security badge. A bunch of teenagers who work at the mall during the day decide to hang out and party there at night, but find that the robots have run amuck and are now trying to kill them. Locked into the place for the whole night the teens try fighting them off while desperately looking for a way out.

This was writer/director Jim Wynorski’s second feature and the beginning of an almost assembly line string of direct-to-video/B-movie features that of this writing now equals 94 and many of them done under a pseudonym. Wynorski shows some flair by injecting comedy into the proceedings including an engaging opening sequence done over the credits that includes a lot of sight gags and a good up-tempo synthesized score that fits the mood and action. There are also some fun cameos including Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov who appear at the beginning and recreate their roles from the hilarious cult hit Eating Raoul. You can also spot Mel Welles from Little Shop of Horrors fame as well as perennial B-movie favorites Dick Miller as a janitor and Gerrit Graham as a technician.

It was filmed at an actual mall in Sherman Oaks, California, which makes for an interesting backdrop and good authenticity. I also liked how the teens, both the men and women, are very resourceful and come up with different and elaborate ways to combat the robots. The female cast is attractive with a decent amount of nudity. The special effects aren’t bad either. I was impressed with the exploding head sequence as well as the burning body moment. My only quibble in this area is that they were able to break the glass of the storefront windows, which happens several times during the course of the film, much, much too easily.

The biggest problem with the film is that it just isn’t scary or suspenseful enough. The only time there was any real tension is towards the end when the Kelli Maroney character hides underneath some shelves at a pet store and is forced to keep quiet from the lurking robot while a  snake and spiders crawl all over her. Despite some interesting directorial touches it still comes off as mechanical and formulaic and even though the running time is short I still found myself getting quite bored with it. There is also never any explanation for why the robots go haywire, which I felt was a major oversight.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: March 21, 1986

Runtime: 1Hour 17Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jim Wynorski

Studio: Concorde Pictures

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Cult, Dry Humor, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Slasher/Gore

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A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

Posted on October 14, 2013 | 1 comment

nightmare on elm street 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: More dreams more Freddy.

A new family has moved into the house on Elm Street where Nancy from the first film once lived and who is now locked away in a mental institution. The family’s son Jesse (Mark Patton) starts to have the same reoccurring nightmares dealing with child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund), but this time Freddy wants to overtake Mark’s entire body and use it as a killing machine to the other youths in the area.

As sequels go this one is okay. I liked the idea that it is a continuation from the first one and not just a reworking of it. Trying to evolve the idea to the next level by having Krueger actually possessing the kid is interesting and the scene where Kruger’s head pushes out of Jesse’s stomach is good. However, it also gets away from the whole dream element that made the first one unique and turns the thing into just another slasher formula. Freddy only appears for 13 minutes during the 84 minute runtime, which isn’t enough as the pace and tension starts to ebb towards the middle. A little too much focus is put on Jesse and his emotional quandary at knowing what this evil spirit is trying to do, which turns it into more of a drama than a horror film. The climatic sequence that takes place in the boiler room where Freddy used to work when he was still alive becomes a bit too melodramatic and not that scary.

I would have liked some flashbacks showing what Freddy was like when he was alive and before he got burned and some history showing what might have lead him into becoming a child murderer in the first place. I also couldn’t help but wonder why Freddy only seems to torment the dreams of the teen characters. Why not Jesse’s parents as well? One could argue that as a child murderer Freddy was only interested in terrorizing young people, but then why not get into the dreams of Jesse’s younger sister Christie (Angela Walsh), which he never does.

Spoiler Alert!

This film also has one of the biggest plot holes I have ever seen and far more glaring than the ones you usually see in most other films of this genre. It all has to do with a party sequence in which Jesse turns into Freddy and starts killing off the other teen attendees. This was not dream, but reality, which was witnessed by many other people including Lisa’s parents. Yet at the end when Jesse somehow returns to ‘normal’ he boards the school bus where his friends make statements to the effect that he should just ‘forget about’ the party incident and everyone is ready to move on, but how does that happen? With the amount of carnage seen by the viewer the police and media would certainly have to investigate and the parents of the victims would want answers. Just ‘forgetting about’ something like that would not be a realistic option and the filmmakers attempts to gloss over what ends up being the movie’s biggest event is patently ridiculous.

End of Spoiler Alert!

Director Jack Sholder spends a lot of time focusing in on Krueger’s glove with its finger-like blades, but the more I saw them the less scary they became. The blades look awfully thin and flimsy and have no ridges or teeth on them. They look so dull that they would barely be able to cut through butter let alone human skin.

I did like that the lead victim was a male this time and it was nice seeing a teen character with sophisticated tastes as I spotted Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ novel laying on his bedside table. The scenes inside the high school and some of his conversations with his friends seemed less cardboard than usual. I also liked that Jesse manages to make friends with Grady (Robert Rusler) who initially comes-off as a stereotypical bully, but the scene where Grady speaks with his mouth full of food during a cafeteria sequence is a bit gross.

Jesse’s dealings with his harsh baseball coach (Marshall Bell) gets a bit over-the-top and forcing the boys to do pushups for hours underneath the hot sun would most likely get him fired especially these days. However, watching him get tied up and stripped naked and then whipped by towels in a sort of S & M death sequence is a highlight.

The story and special effects is still creative enough to raise this above the average 80’s slasher film although not all of them are effective. David Chaskin’s screenplay has some intriguing elements, but ends up biting-off-more-than-it-can-chew and creates too many loopholes to be satisfying.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Released: November 1, 1985

Runtime: 1Hour 24Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jack Sholder

Studio: New Line Cinema

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

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Posted in 80's Movies, Adolescence/High School, Cult, Horror, Movies with Nudity, Sequels, Slasher/Gore

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Graduation Day (1981)

Posted on October 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

graduation day

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 2 out of 10

4-Word Review: Killer slashes track team.

When the high school’s top track star Laura (Ruth Ann Llorens) collapses mysteriously after winning a race strange things start happening to her teammates. One-by-one they get knocked-off by a killer who has a way with swords, but who could it be? Her brash, driven coach (Christopher George) who pushes his players past their breaking point or maybe it’s her strange sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) who comes back home from the military. The clues and suspects keep piling up, but can the police find the culprit before the entire team gets killed?

Writer Anne Marisse and director Herb Freed teamed up four years earlier to make the very original one-of-a-kind horror film Haunts where they created an excellent atmosphere on a nickel-and-dime budget that is completely lacking here. The scares and suspense even on a cheap level is non-existent. What is even worse is that there is no central character just a mishmash of uninteresting people and scenes that does not help to create any empathy from the viewer nor story momentum.

Freed’s direction is lively to some extent as he does inject some humor and a couple moments were he uses quick flash editing, but his other camera work is off-putting. I particularly got annoyed with a tracking shot showing a person running alongside a moving camera that seemed to make them look like they were on a treadmill, or going unnaturally slow in order to not outrun the camera. This is done several times throughout the film with different characters and the result is very artificial looking. He also features a band named Felony that sings a long seven minute song called ‘Gangster Rock’ that almost turns this thing into a music video. A scene showing a woman being chased by the killer is intercut between the band playing and this takes the viewer out of the film completely and kills what little suspense there already is.

The killings themselves are unimpressive. The scene showing a victim getting beheaded looks too much like it is a mannequin and it is highly doubtful that any sword could make that type of precise and quick cut. Another death features a pole- vaulter  being impaled by a mat full of sharp spikes, which is pretty much ruined when we can clearly seeing that the victim is still breathing even as he lays there with the spikes having gone right through him.

There is logic loopholes as well including having the killer store the Laura’s dead body inside his bedroom and pretend she is still alive, which is too reminiscent to Psycho to be effective or interesting. I also didn’t know how somebody could dig up a dead body from a cemetery and not have the victim’s family, or the cemetery workers not notice. The make-up used to try to make her appear decomposed instead made her look more like she was a member of the KISS rock group.

Michael Pataki hams it up nicely as the school’s beleaguered principal and becomes a scene stealer in the process. Christopher George is so irritable and belligerent with anyone who makes contact with him that he becomes fun as well. Linnea Quigley has a nice topless scene as the horny Delores and Virgil Frye who is the father of Soleil Moor Frye of Punky Brewster fame has a few goofy moments as the school’s incompetent security guard. The funniest though is Patrick Wright as a grungy, overweight truck driver who feels that he is entitled to take liberties with Ann who is returning home from the service simply because he is a ‘taxpayer’.

Sources list Vanna White as the character of Doris, but I didn’t spot her and I don’t feel like going all the back through this cardboard thing again just to see if I can.

My Rating: 2 out of 10

Released: May 1, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 36Minutes

Rated R

Director: Herb Freed

Studio: IFI

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube 

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

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Dixie Lanes (1988)

Posted on September 30, 2013 | Leave a comment

dixie lanes 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 3 out of 10

4-Word Review:  Karen Black is funny.

Clarence Laidlaw (Hoyt Axton) returns home from the war to find that is his son Everett (Christopher Rydell) does not want to speak to him due to certain felonies that he supposedly committed before he left. Meanwhile Everett romances Judy (Pamela Springsteen) while also agreeing to deliver a hatbox filled with secret items for his kooky Aunt Zelma (Karen Black) that may entail the transfer of stolen money.

The film moves along too slowly with a storyline that borders on being almost nonexistent. The movie seems to want to focus on the interactions of the slightly offbeat small town characters, but none of them are interesting enough and their dialogue is not funny enough to be engaging.  The recreation of the 1940’s is okay on a low budget level, but there have been so many more bigger budgeted movies that have created a much richer more vivid portrait of Americana that watching this or even the reason behind making it seems unnecessary.

The eclectic cast is interesting, but straddled with such limp material that they have nowhere to go with it. Art Hindle, Moses Gunn, Ruth Buzzi, Nina Foch, and even Tina Louise appear although it is in a very small role. Rydell as the young lead seems misplaced as his hairstyle looks more like an 80’s cut and his pouty, moody, detached behavior seems suited for a more modern era.

Black is a lot of fun and is the one good thing about the movie as she adds a lot of much needed energy. Her over-the-top screams and mannerisms even had me chuckling in a few places particularly at her attempts at bowling. She also had me convinced that she had a knack for comedy and should’ve done more of it. However, like with Rydell her character didn’t seem right for the time period especially with her bleached frizzy hair and her flirtatious and outspoken manner.

Axton’s laid-back style and smooth sounding voice is great for when he is doing one of his ballads, but as a lead actor he is almost lifeless. His graying hair made him seem more like Foch’s husband instead of her son.

There is almost no action to speak of until the very end when director Don Cato implements a forced, slapstick-like car chase that is out-of-sync with the tone of the rest of the film. This takes place during some unexplained supernatural wind storm that makes no sense and pretty much cements this thing as being a poorly realized waste of celluloid.

My Rating: 3 out of 10

Released: May 3, 1988

Runtime: 1Hour 23Minutes

Rating: PG-13

Director: Don Cato

Studio: Miramax

Available: DVD

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy/Drama, Low Budget, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity

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Orgazmo (1997)

Posted on September 25, 2013 | 4 comments

orgazmo 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Super hero porn star.

This is a funny satirical mixture of super hero movies and Boogie Nights and a definite improvement over Trey Parker’s earlier feature, the sleep inducing Cannibal the Musical though not as funny as his later ‘South Park’ TV-series. Here he plays a Mormon bible salesman who inadvertently gets involved playing a super hero named Orgazmo in porn movies.

Has a definite look and feel of a really cheap direct-to-video product. The special effects are awful, the fight scenes are fake looking, and the acting, with the exception of Michael Dean Jacobs who does a great job playing a really slimy porn director, are quite poor. Yet it is structured well enough to keep you consistently amused.

The porn scenes themselves are so over-the-top that they are an absolute riot. Yet despite its subject matter and a cast of actual porn stars there is NO FEMALE NUDITY. In fact the only nudity you will see are close-ups of hairy male rear ends.

Religious people especially Mormons are made to look so simplistic and sterile that it is sure to offend anyone involved in that area. Yet since most of them won’t bother to watch this film it probably won’t hurt. Overall it is good natured and not bad for its type.

Has a plethora of porn and cult celebrities in cameo roles. The best by far goes to Ron Jeremy who not only gets involved in a funny debate about the merits (and demerits) of porn, but is also in a big kung fu showdown. Also has Troma producer Lloyd Kaufman as a doctor with beautiful porn star Jill Kelly as a nurse who doesn’t say anything but still commands your attention. ‘South Park’ co-creator Matt Stone can be seen as a crew member. His lines aren’t particularly funny, but the way he says them is.

orgazmo

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 6, 1997

Runtime: 1Hour 34Minutes

Rated NC-17

Director: Trey Parker

Studio: Focus Features

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 90's Movies, Crude Comedy, Cult, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Sex

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Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983)

Posted on September 23, 2013 | Leave a comment

can she bake a cherry pie 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Fighting keeps them together.

An emotional and neurotic Zee (Karen Black) has just broken up with her husband. Eli (Michael Emil) is an older man who enjoys calculating odds and averages. The two meet at a restaurant and become involved in an offbeat and tumultuous relationship.

The film at times tries a bit too hard to be offbeat. Zee seems almost like a walking cliché. She sobs so much she can’t even order her food at the restaurant without breaking into tears. She chain smokes and has a plethora of hang-ups and paranoia that seems to possess every eccentric movie character and makes the whole thing fall flat before it has even begun.

Fortunately once you make past the rather clumsy beginning it actually starts to click. Writer/director Henry Jaglom instills a wonderfully free-form style to the proceedings that allows one to become engaged without even knowing it. The cinema-vertite approach turns its low budget into an asset. It’s the little things that start to grab you especially the Michael Margotta character and his trained pigeon named Eddie or the brash  way he tries to pick-up women at cafes while their boyfriends are sitting right there at the table with them.

Eli and Zee’s quirky conversations are quite amusing especially Zee contemplating on getting pregnant. These is even a segment showing old home movies done by Jaglom’s parents where you get to see Jaglom and Emil, who are brothers in real-life, whey they were little kids.

Jaglom has seemed to have gotten to the very heart of why we watch movies, which is because we are all secretly voyeurs. We like that little window that opens up and allows us to observe other people and see how they respond and react to things without being told what to look for or what to think. The European style of filmmaking is a refreshing change of pace. The actors are allowed to freely improvise and when it is all over you feel like you’ve watched real people, which makes it seem more relevant and funny.

This is very similar to John Cassavete’s Minnie and Mokowitz, but this fairs better as it is not as strained or aimless. The characters also have a bit more appeal and didn’t ingrate on my nerves as much.

Black gives another intriguing performance. She even sings, which she does quite well and does it while wearing the same wig that she wore while singing in the classic film Nashville.

The only real negative that I had with it was the soundtrack, which was performed by street musicians and sounds awful. It eventually gets so overplayed that it becomes irritating.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Released: September 10, 1983

Runtime: 1Hour 30Minutes

Rated R

Director: Henry Jaglom

Studio: Pan-Canadian Film Distributors

Available: DVD, Amazon Instant Video

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Posted in 80's Movies, Comedy, Low Budget, Movies that take place in the Big Apple, Movies with Nudity, Quirky, Romance

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Drive, He Said (1971)

Posted on September 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

drive he said 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 5 out of 10

4-Word Review: Player doesn’t like coach.

This is one of those movies that shows signs of being a really great movie trying to break out, but never does. It’s about Hector (William Tepper) a college basketball star who is being tugged at different directions by those around him and by society at-large. This creates inner turmoil that leads to outbursts, apathy, and even anti-social behavior.

Tepper as the star isn’t the best of actors. He has a constant blank look and way too much hair. The character he plays has potential. It is nice to see a portrait of an athlete that isn’t one-dimensional sports, but instead shows intelligent and sensitivity to things that go well beyond the court. Yet he is also too self- absorbed and displays a selfish behavior that in most cases would alienate him from his teammates. What is supposed to be betrayed as angst instead comes off as an obnoxious, spoiled college kid. His constant rebellion with his coach (Bruce Dern) doesn’t mesh.

The film makes some good observations and brings up great issues. Unfortunately it ends up becoming diluted. In some ways it should have just stuck with the basketball angle. The camera shots that glides with the action during the games is excellent. Some of the scenes during the practice and some of the locker room segments of Dern coaching the team gives the viewer a good taste of the college basketball experience and makes you want to see more of it. However, incorporating late sixties politics into it only makes it redundant and in this area the film offers no new insight.

The film does have its moments and some of them are even memorable. The best ones involve actor Michael Margotta’s character as a student radical wavering on insanity. His assault on the Karen Black character while inside a large, darkened house is striking both visually and emotionally. The scene where he, while naked, runs into a science lab and releases all sorts of rats, rodents, and reptiles is a sight in itself.

Dern with his glazed stare and intense acting style seems like a natural for the part of the hard-driven coach. It’s too bad the film doesn’t make the most of it, but Black is looking at her best.

Jack Nicholson as a director is not as good as Nicholson the actor although he does show potential, but it doesn’t come together as a whole. The film should best be viewed as a curio or artifact of its era. There is also a surprisingly high amount of male nudity as well as homo-erotic overtones.

drive he said 2

My Rating: 5 out of 10

Released: June 13, 1971

Runtime: 1Hour 35Minutes

Rated R

Director: Jack Nicholson

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Available: DVD (Region 1 & 2)

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Posted in 70's Movies, Basketball Movies, College Life, Drama, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with Nudity, Sports Movies

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Bad Manners (1984)

Posted on September 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

bad manners 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 4 out of 10

4-Word Review: Orphans on the loose.

Piper (Greg Olden) is the new kid inside a rough orphanage who befriends Mouse (Michael Hentz) who looks up to Piper as a sort of tough guy hero. When Mouse gets adopted by a snotty rich couple (Martin Mull, Karen Black) Piper convinces the orphans to break out of the orphanage and rescue him.

If there is one thing that can be said for this film, which is so obscure it is not even listed in Leonard Maltin’s Video Guide, is that it is lively. Director Robert Houston uses a lot of quick edits, interesting camera work and spinning tracking shots to keep things at a fast, irreverent pace. Piper’s sessions with his psychiatrist, which is played by Stephen Stucker is the funniest. Stucker is best known for playing the hyper air traffic controller in Airplane, but I felt he was more engaging and amusing here. The scene where Mouse swallows a small dinner bell and sends everyone into a panic is also a riot.

Unfortunately the film is unable to hold the balance between quirky humor and action and eventually devolves into a cartoonish, silly mess that becomes pretty much just an R-rated kiddie flick. I also didn’t care for the synthesized music score, which had a generic sound similar to ones used in 80’s porn flicks and only further cemented this as an uninspired B-movie.

The children characters are excessively crude and in some ways I prefer it a little more like this because I think it is realistic to how teens and pre-teens behave instead of as the wide-eyed sweet innocents that some other movies portray them as, but parents most likely will cringe and won’t want their own kids to watch it. A mean-spiritedness permeates throughout and although I am not sure if this was intentional or not but the two male leads and the one female are quite androgynous.

The one thing that keeps it fun is the adult performers who seem more than up to the campiness. Murphy Dunne is delightfully hammy as the orphanage warden and Anne De Salvo is quite cute despite playing an oppressive nun. Mull’s glib one-liners are a perfect balance to the zaniness. Black is also great and practically steals the film at the very end when she goes on a spastic shooting spree. This also marks the final film appearance of Richard Deacon best known for playing Mel Cooley on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ who appears here in a brief bit as a ticket agent.

My Rating: 4 out of 10

Alternate Title: Growing Pains

Released: November 4, 1984

Runtime: 1Hour 22Minutes

Rated R

Director: Robert Houston

Studio: New World Pictures

Available: VHS, YouTube

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Posted in 80's Movies, Crude Comedy, Farce, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies, Quirky

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The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

Posted on September 3, 2013 | 1 comment

the witch who came from the sea 2

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 0 out of 10

4-Word Review: She doesn’t like men.

Molly (Millie Perkins) is a middle-aged woman suffering from dormant, haunting memories of sexual abuse that she suffered at the hands of her father. To compensate she goes through periods of black outs where she murders and mutilates men that she picks up and brings home for kinky sex games.

If this movie was half as provocative and artsy as its movie poster this might have been something. Unfortunately it takes a potentially interesting idea and slams it into the ground with a talky script that goes nowhere. Matt Cimber’s direction is unfocused creating a movie that is slow and filled with endless and redundant conversations. It hardly seems like a horror movie at all and more like a drama and a rather stale one at that. The emphasis is more on the psychological workings of the character, but it is too broad and generalized to be interesting, or intriguing. The brightly lighted sets do not create any type of atmosphere and this was one film where I was looking more at the clock waiting for it to be over than at the screen.

The only time there is any action is during the killing sequences, but like everything else this gets botched. For one thing there are endless conversations during these as well. Cimber adds in an echo effect, which initially has a little pizazz, but then gets over-used and monotonous. The victims are stupid and allow themselves to be put into vulnerable positions that the average person wouldn’t so it is hard to relate to them, or care about their gruesome fates. The liquid used for blood is skimpy and resembles chocolate syrup.

It is interesting initially to see Perkins in the title role as she is most famous for playing Anne Frank in the classic 1950’s movie version. She took this part mainly because her then husband Robert Thom wrote the script and she seems game for it. She even does a few nude scenes and looks pretty good in them particularly the scene where she gets a tattoo along her stomach and chest.

The second half deals with the investigation of the murders and the slow realization by Molly’s friends that she may have a dark and dangerous side to her, which is too contrived and offers no suspense or intrigue. The scenes recreating the Molly’s sexual abuse by her father are hooky and it would have been better had it not been done at all and only implied. The worst part though is that Verkina Flowers who plays Molly as a child has brown eyes while Molly’s eyes as an adult are blue.

My Rating: 0 out of 10

Released: January 2, 1976

Runtime: 1Hour 23Minutes

Rated R

Director: Matt Cimber

Studio: Cinema Release Corp.

Available: VHS, DVD

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Posted in 70's Movies, Drama, Horror, Low Budget, Movies with Nudity, Sex, Slasher/Gore

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The Grass is Singing (1981)

Posted on September 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

the grass is singing 1

By Richard Winters

My Rating: 7 out of 10

4-Word Review: Farming isn’t her thing.

In memory of Karen Black who died on August 8th we will review on each Monday of this month an 80’s film that she starred in as well as a 70’s movie that she was in on Fridays. This film is based on the Doris Lessing novel and was filmed on-location in Zambia. The story centers on Mary a racist woman from South Africa who is bored with her job and lonely. She meets Richard (John Thaw) a simple man who becomes smitten with her. She is not as crazy about him but decides to accept his proposal of marriage simply as a way to escape her dreary existence and loneliness. He moves her to his farm where she finds the rigorous lifestyle difficult to adjust too. The isolation begins to wear on her already tightly wound temperament and eventually she begins to show erratic behaviors that become more disturbing and shocking.

The Zambia locations are captured in vivid style with a grainy film stock that makes it look like it were a documentary. The farm setting is indeed desolate and makes for great atmosphere. Director Michael Raeburn wisely refrains from using too much music and when he does he uses instrumentals from the native culture, which further elevates the film and gives it distinction.

The film stays pretty faithful to the novel and starts out in startling fashion with Mary being stabbed and bloodied on her backdoor step and then shifts back seven years where we see what lead up to it. The pace is slow, but involving and the characters are three-dimensional and believable. Mary’s breakdown happens in a deliberate and realistic fashion starting with little things that work into bigger ones. In the end you feel more sorry for her than frightened and thoroughly engulfed with her sad and pathetic circumstances.

This was Black’s last serious role before being quarantined in B-movie purgatory. This may also be one of her finest moments as she brings out the manipulative nature of the character quite well and I love the way she always seems to add quirky qualities to her parts. She also speaks with an authentic sounding South African accent.

Thaw is quite good in support and creates empathy from the viewer playing a very humble man looking for simple companionship with no idea what he was getting into.

There is some serious filmmaking going on here in a movie that makes some great points about life and human nature that is well worth checking out. The original theatrical release which is what I saw and able to obtain from a private collector runs a full 105 minutes. However, the American release which is available on DVD from Synergy Entertainment as well as Amazon Instant Video and goes under the title Killing Heat runs only 90 minutes and heavily edits out the explicit violence and nudity and has a narrative that is choppy and at times confusing.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Alternate Title: Killing Heat (U.S. version)

Released: September 18, 1981

Runtime: 1Hour 45Minutes (Original Version)

Not Rated

Director: Michael Raeburn

Studio: Chibote

Available: VHS, DVD, Amazon Instant Video (as Killing Heat)

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Posted in 80's Movies, Drama, Foreign Films, Movies Based on Novels, Movies with a rural setting, Movies with Nudity, Obscure Movies, Psychological

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