Red Heat

Red Heat

United States - 1988

Director - Walter Hill

International Video Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 46 minutes

Oh what a classic. Walter Hill, the man and master director behind such exploitation classics as The Driver, Hard Times (BEST), The Warriors and Streets of Fire went even more culturally specific with this little buddy-cop gem which I wish to Thanatos I hadn't gotten rid of. Sure, sure, it's out there, I can buy a new one but I damned sure wish I could just pop this fucker in the player and watch Schwartzy wrestle mostly naked in the snow.
Doesn't that one-liner, nay one worder, when Schwarty's Ivan Danko stumbles across the porno channel in his hotel room in the US just say it all? Shaking his head in expected disappointment;
"Capitalism."

Playroom

Playroom

United States - 1989

Director - Manny Coto

Republic Pictures Home Video, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

The Communist Bloc is the perfect place to set a psychological horror movie. Not only are the lush mountain landscapes of Yugoslavia wonderfully enchanting, but socially in the late 80's, it began to exhibit more and more the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.  It is after all a land brimming with conflicting versions of history, and history is sortof like repressed memories right? In that case, archaeologists are basically psychologists who prefer pickaxes to fountain pens. Hey, a phallic symbol is a phallic symbol okay?

When Chris was a boy his father was an archaeologist working at an old monastery in the Western Balkans. In the midst of the dig, Chris's whole family was slaughtered, leaving only him alive to grow up as a repressed and neurotic adult. Having become a whiny, irritating man-child, Chris (Christopher McDonald) has followed in his fathers footsteps and become an archeologist in his own right. Seeking to pick up where his father's work was cut short, he returns to the monastery in Croatia. To keep things interesting, for this movie relies heavily on excessive display of "personality," he brings along his girlfriend/publisher, as well as an alcoholic photographer and a spoiled society brat. Each is more grating than the last, but this is a character driven horror film, and as we shall soon discover, our satisfaction is largely to be derived from the elimination of various sensory irritants, paramount among them our protagonist!

As the digging progresses through the brain-like labyrinth of the monastery to it's deepest hidden core, Chris's sanity also begins to deteriorate. Ranting sweatily and approvingly about the delight children take in torturing animals, Chris waxes nostalgic about the time he spent wandering the monastery's halls with his surly imaginary friend. Just as it becomes increasingly clear that his flashbacky visions of his family's demise are more first-person-narrative than we had thought, Chris breaks through the physical and metaphorical walls into the "playroom." In this secret torture-chamber Chris (re)discovers himself/his old friend; an animatronic mummy prince and a bunch of repressed childhood memories recreated in a deluge of implied violence.

Staffed by ample hyperbole and a former Miss Virginia, Playroom delivers a satisfying, moderately surprising conclusion, yet with few of the hoped-for thrills incumbent in psychological horror. The awesome sets and torture devices alluded to in the dialogue remain mostly unused, and the jerky mummy puppet is an entertaining disappointment. Nevertheless, Playroom is still a delightfully simple Freudian metaphor.

Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas

 Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas

United States – 1989

Director – Tina Young & David Van Hooser

Brentwood Music Inc, 1989, VHS

Run Time – 30 minutes

It should be clear now after a forty-five year Cold War that communism is an ideology that seeks to subject us all to the withering self-doubt of constant deprivation and loneliness. Christmas is exactly what communists hate, for it embodies all the things that make the world a wonderful place. In short, Christmas is the uranium core within the reactor of America.

Any attempt to undermine the spirit of Christmas is clearly a communist plot to destroy the very fabric of America. It can be forgiven if the fear of just such a scenario might drive godfearing Americans to the heights of paranoia, afterall we did spend over two decades in a tiny Southeast Asian country trying to keep some dominoes from falling over.

The social upheavals of that very era sent shockwaves through the country. Never more so than in the South where even in the late 80’s the youth culture of the 60’s could still be conjured as a counterrevolutionary boogeyman, albeit in a tattered and proscribed version. Just such a scenario occurs in Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas when aging hippy Kredge seeks to realize the crumbling utopian monocultural dreams of his youth and kidnaps Snowbird from his annual celebration of Christmas.


Kredge intends to harvest Snowbird’s own Christmas memories to create an atheist brainwashing gas which, unleashed upon the unsuspecting community like a cloud of radioactivity, will wipe their minds clean of any recollection of the holiday, including the identity of the infant in the manger scene at church.

But Kredge's own mind is teetering on the edge, haunted by the spectre of the failed revolution of ’68. They tried so hard to fill the world with love and equality and now to be surrounded by the revelry of American consumption and decadence. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, enough to plunge even a free wheeling hippy into the depths of bitterness and depression and Kredge almost didn’t make it. His epic plan to subject the free world to godless communist uniformity is foiled only at the last minute by a simple Christmas gift from Snowbird. This unexpected act of compassion brings Kredge’s meticulously constructed factory of pain crashing down around his beard. He slinks off into the night to contemplate his own emptiness, and perhaps plan a new machine to wash away his own tortured memories.

Overwhelmed by the lonliness of a commune of one, Kredge contemplates what he has become.

Another Brentwood version of the VHS box art.

Invasion U.S.A. (1952)

Invasion U.S.A.

United States - 1952

Director - Alfred E. Green

Although it should not be confused with the Chuck Norris film of the same name, this Invasion U.S.A. does have roughly the same plot. I haven't seen it, but I suspect that there are somewhat fewer uzis and karate kicks to the face. I love this poster by Italian illustrator Anselmo Ballester. It makes it look as if the red menace is in fact zombie communists.

It Happened At the World's Fair

It Happened at the World’s Fair

United States - 1962

Director – Norman Taurog

Warner Home Video, 2004, DVD

Of all the many Elvis films out there for consideration, this one caught my eye because it's set at the Seattle World's Fair of 1962. This holds the promise of many unintended contextual amusements when viewed across the yawning expanse of 47 years. The first of these is the Seattle Center setting. Although the majority of the film does not actually take place at the fair itself, it features many shots of the same crumbling architecture we still enjoy today and which intermittently catches fire and shoots sparks into the streets below. Keep in mind, 5 years previous Sputnik had rocketed into space and the interstellar nuclear slapstick was fully underway. Because it was the early 60's, America was hitting the peak of space-race hysteria and if we didn’t get there first and fiercest, the Commies would be delivering a payload of beets and vodka straight into the foyer of every suburban split-level ranch-style bungalow by Friday.

Space car equals 100% awesome.

Our buddy Elvis, or Mike Edwards if you will, is a low-rent crop-duster pilot, out one plane because of his partner Danny's gambling problem. Headed to Seattle to find work, Mike and Danny hit up the World's Fair where they meet a little girl, Sue Lin, and a big girl, a nurse named Diane. Mike falls for both, trying to smooth talk Diane (with the help of 11-year-old Kurt Russel who one year later would star in Guns of Diablo with Charles Bronson) while he feeds Sue Lin cotton candy.

Mike strikes out on the grown one, but when Sue Lin's uncle disappears, he takes it upon himself to care for her until he is found. Already seemingly aware of the clueless idiocy of horny males at the age of 6, Sue Lin fakes an illness so that Diane will see how "tender" Mike really is. We of course already know the truth of this because of the cloyingly saccharine kiddie-Rock-and-Roll songs he keeps warbling.

Danny meanwhile has cooked up a shady deal for the guys to get their plane back for flying some "cargo" to Canada, and calls Child Protective Services to free up Mike for the job. (In my mind, this move really seals the deal on Danny who’s been threatening to go full frat-boy the whole movie, and right now, all I want is for him to break his back and be paralyzed for life from the neck down.) That kooky Sue Lin, she's cooked up a deal too, a sexy deal to get Diane and Mike together after all. In the end they go off and apply for jobs as "space nurse and space pilot". I'm guessing that that works out about as much as the plot: paper-thin and laughably naive. Oh how the past reeks of desperate and heady optimism.

Visit Seattle Center and you too can smell the burning electrical wires in the same luxurious monorail car that once carried the late King.

There is little more point to this than to legitimize the batter-dipped pan-fried hearty-ness of Mike's personality and his inevitable high-fructose, sing-song crystallization of the girl's and audiences sensibility. (Not to mention the socially distractive qualities of such flashy garbage). So thick, so incredibly thick that it cloys at the throat. All I needed to watch was one Elvis film to understand the decay and degradation of a public persona and the fickle, scummy, and fleeting surface fascination of the public.

Want my honest opinion? I can screech a love song or two myself, and if singing them to girls worked as fundamentally as it does for Elvis...well, that would be bad news for lots of people, least of all me.

Invasion U.S.A. (1985)

Invasion USA

United States – 1985

Director – Joseph Zito

MGM/UA Home Video, 1985, VHS (Oversize Box!)

Clogged with a veritable host of 80’s action standbys like Billy Drago (who returned to meance Norris at least 3 other times), Invasion USA is one of the first Norris Brothers team-up films with Aaron scripting. (soon he would direct too, and oh boy, watch out) But here, hot on the heels of Norris breakthrough film Missing In Action, director Zito (also director of Friday the 13th: The Final Nighmare) has returned to grace another film with extremely senseless violence and glossy hyperbolic Americana. If you were a young boy in the 80’s you probably have fond memories of this film. I don’t, my parents were hippies and I didn’t get to watch violent movies until I was an adult. My fond Invasion USA memories are freshly fucking minted.

Some Cuban refugees in a set-dressed “shabby” boat drift about on the sea while a small child whines in Spanish. (thankfully this plot-critical dialogue is subtitled or I would have been totally fucking lost) Spotted by some American Coast Guard sailor-boys led by Richard Lynch, who no sooner greet them and welcome them to freedom than cut loose with a barrage of automatic weapons mowing them all down. Turns out the sailors are actually Soviet commandos after some drugs under the deck of the boat - and Bang! I get the feeling that’s how the entirety of this movie is going to play out, no fluff, all snuff.

Cut to a shot of quasi shirtless Chuck effin’ Norris driving a speeding air-boat through the Everglades, hair streaming back. Rostov, the clammy, skin crawlingly creepy Lynch, is as ruthless and self serving as backswamp macho man Matt Hunter (Norris) is helpful, assisting his hillbilly neighbor John Eagle with gator wrasslin’ and accepting Eagle’s offer of a freshly boiled frog dinner with a grumbled “I’m getting sick of frogs.”
“The Company” (we’ll leave that one up to you to figure out) comes to recruit Hunter for another mission, to take out Rostov, Hunter’s old Cold War opposite, but Hunter bitterly refuses and cuts logs with a chainsaw at his swampy retreat instead. Shortly after he smashes a bunch of faces in, that’s exactly where an equally bitter Rostov finds him. Explosions erupt killing John Eagle, but sparing Hunter himself of course, and reopening a festering grudge that he must obey.

Moments later, Rostov’s Soviet terrorist legions are storming up the beaches of Florida armed almost exclusively with American equipment and weapons. Wasting no time they instantly begin arbitrarily rocketing the homes of pasty American nuclear-families and attacking all the symbols of American freedom; churches and shopping malls. After charging like predatory insects into a fleet of waiting trucks, the Red Horde instantly distributes cells of perfectly coordinated guerillas across the continental 48, and a little later that night a nationwide wave of unfettered chaos and unrest erupts, leaving the civil authorities to bumble around and look confused. Hunter meanwhile (and I have to say I love the subtle irony in that name) is working his own brand of subtle tactics, bashing heads at the local biker bars and trading base insults and measured and blunt one-liners with fellow jaded ex-mercenaries.
“Where’s Rostov?”
-SMASH!
“Where’s Rostov?
-SMASH!
Ad nauseum, ad infinitum.


Luckily for Hunter, even though the entire United States is under siege, Rostov has cleverly decided to keep his dirty Commie headquarters right down the street, and every time the filthy reds pop up with a clever scheme to overthrow capitalist social order, like putting a magnet bomb on the side of a school bus, Matt Hunter is there in his big truck to deter them at top speed and full auto and with equally reckless disregard for human life. (except that he’s a god fearing Christian so in his case they’re just collateral damage.) Hunter just doesn’t quit, but even all of his impeccable timing, perfect aim, and creepily rigid coppery cascading mullet-mane can’t keep him safe from the Feds who finally bust his muscly vigilante ass.

At last, Rostov has his chance and orders his army to storm the jail and eliminate Hunter once and for all. Leave it to those dumb subhuman Commies to fall for an old trick like that. And Rostov? Well that guy’s no smarter than his towheaded lackeys, a dude like Hunter, and I do mean dude, isn’t going to walk away without administering a little personal bearded bayou bad-boy beating, the long drawn out all American way.
John Eagle boiled the tastiest frogs in the swamp you ungracious Communistical savage, and somebodys gots’ta pay! Throw the fuggin’ truck in 4-wheel-drive and lets go meat-and-potatoes Commie stompin’. The thoroughly gnawed bone of action genre meat, roasted, boiled down to its basest potent essence and glazed with the rustic golden sauce that is Chuck Norris.

Watch the Invasion USA trailer at CultTrailers.

It might be easy since they have the same plot, but don't confuse this with the 1952 film with the same name.

Some alternate covers, the first for the novelization (!), the second, Hungarian VHS, and the third, the poster that later remained the VHS art and also in modified version the DVD cover art.

Godmonster of Indian Flats

Godmonster of Indian Flats
1973 – United States
Director – Frederic Hobbs
Something Weird Video, 2001, DVD

Tracked this one down based on an encouraging review in an old issue of Cinema Sewer magazine, and if it’s released by Something Weird, it’s guaranteed to be either, creative, informative or sexy on some level. Godmonster promises a lot and my expectations are appropriately ratcheted up for the type of absurd z-grade monsterama I’ve come to love from the creative and DIY 1970’s.

At a casino in Reno Nevada, loudmouth cocksure jerk Elbow Johnson offers to take the whole gang of drunken strangers clustered around his generous wallet-hole up to a nearby historical old-west town called Silverdale for a night of drinkination and banjo mania. On the way they pass through the hills of crude early exposition and foreshadowing where some abandoned phosphorus mines lie waiting for their important upcoming role in the plot.

Elbow’s main drinking pal is Eddie a shitfaced shepherd who gets his face smashed in by Silverdale’s ignorant masses before even tasting the rim of his glass. Pitched bleeding out into the street, he is driven home by local Bourgeoisie Intellectual Anthropology Professor. In a sloppy drunken catatonia, Eddie goes into hallucinatory convulsive fits and the next morning Athroprof and his Assistant find him in his barn caressing a giant blood covered wooly meat-bolus which they whisk into the laboratory where Anthroprof fills Eddies simple peasant brain with crazy secret communistical ideas organized around his revolutionary mutant sheep creature.

Later at the cemetery, Eddie seduces the innocent impressionable Assistant with a groping hand and tales of his idyllic agrarian life close to the earth, and extra close to his animals. She returns to the lab filled with romanticized visions of a simple worker run society which her mentor Anthroprof fosters with his revolutionary sheep experiment talk. Invigorated with thoughts of their utopia they head to the mines to conjure up some flimsy support for class struggle where they discover noxious Phosphorous fumes.

The godless red conspiracy (which makes you wonder why it's a "God"monster), with our comrade in it's holding tank.

During “Bonanza Days”, Silverdale’s annual celebration of capitalist progress, the normally tranquil white community is kept distracted from the looming threat of the Red Sheep by violent social upheaval caused by the appearance of a black person. In order to keep the facade of equal opportunity so important to Capitalist Imperialism, the white citizens of Silverdale stage a dog assassination for which the black man is framed and sent to jail. Just as he’s about to be executed, he escapes and the village lynch mob gives chase, following his flight to the laboratory where their hollering and gunfire awaken the Red Sheep Menace which smashes it’s stiff top-heavy way out of the lab and attacks them.

After fleeing persecution by an unreceptive middle class Red Sheep flees to the hills, where it meets our enthralled Assistant eager to shed the stuffy traditionalism of her parents generation. They dance together in a touching scene of solidarity, fickle corruptible youth embracing the leftist revolutionary Comrade Red Sheep. Just wait until she has to get a job and pay her own rent.


Showing up just in time with a far superior weapons stockpile, the Capitalist lynch mob wrangles the beast and places it in a rickety cage like a museum piece in the gallery of defunct ideologies (or will it rear it’s head again somewhere?). The mayor it turns out has sold the commonwealth out from under the village anyway and in a paroxysm of misguided rage the population of Silverdale showers the beast with stones, nevertheless leaving the exploiter in power and babbling more hollow rhetoric from his flimsy lectern.

The atmosphere of Godmonster reminded me a various times of Russ Meyer’s Wild Gals of the Naked West, without the copious chest flesh. In fact it does deliver -albeit with less vigor than I had hoped- the homemade monster action I was looking for, and the Cold War metaphor only heightens the level of z-grade enjoyment.

Basic Training

Basic Training

United States - 1984

Director - Andrew Sugerman

Vestron Video, 1986(?), VHS

A naïve young lady, Melinda, from Ashtabulah Ohio moves to Washington D.C. with grandiose ideas about doing important things for her government and country. She arrives at her new home to find her old friend noisily screwing some military guy. Add one more brain dead blonde nymphomaniac roommate and you have a star team of Pentagon secretaries.

Despite all her good intentions Melinda quickly discovers the sweaty underbelly of DC politics. The lieutenant for whom she works expects very little actual secretarial effort from her, but instead continuously attempts to ambush her pants for short-arm inspection.

While her roommates slut around with just about every other male in the cast, a cleaning lady (at the Pentagon? Oh wait, realism went out the window with the pre credit strip and song routine) accidentally erases the entire Soviet Defense file from the Pentagon mainframe computer.
Melinda gets fired from her job for refusing to put out, but aggressively seduces the thick-headed Lieutenant into re-hiring her. It works for a time, and Melinda uses her new powers of manipulation to move up the secretarial ladder and induce several flat scenes of crass physical humor. Finally while at a high-class party she is introduced to Boris, the Soviet diplomat who takes a slavering decrepit interest in her top secrets. Melinda is kidnapped by the rebuffed Red, and taken to his room at the Soviet Embassy where she extracts the lost top-secret Soviet defense plans by exposing her own secrets.
Melinda is out of place as the uptight good girl in the middle of a debauched decade of military overspending and sexual liberty. The film seems to half-heartedly extol her as a virtue of chastity and patriotic idealism but completely undermines that by simultaneously reinforcing the theme that sexuality is the only reliable way women can advance in our society. Am I over analyzing?
No-one in this movie has a problem taking their clothes off, hey there’s even a 50+ person all-nude pool party scene. But Melinda spends so much energy and time keeping hers on that you can't help but feel relieved when she finally gives in.

This early Playboy production feels a lot like a National Lampoon movie with more boobs, and fewer jokes that work.

Apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to put this out on DVD, once again scrapping the great painted cover art you saw at the top:

It Conquered the World

It Conquered the World

United States -1956

Director – Roger Corman

RCA Columbia Pictures Home Video 1991

I used to hate this crap. Because I was such a splatter fan, with the exception of The Creature, these old black and white monster movies bored the piss out of me until about 2 years ago. I don't know what it was that changed, but I'm glad it did. And It Conquered the World has all the best things I could ask for from a Cold War classic.

The first scene says it all. A bunch of scientists in a lab discuss grandiose space-experiments in all seriousness while turning big knobs on the wall. A meeting between several military men and a sinister looking Dr. Tom Anderson played by Lee Van Cleef ends in hostility and dark prediction. Returning home to his hot wife Claire (Beverly Garland) he pours a drink and talks via ham radio to a otherworldly electronical voice. Later he shows it to his buddy Nelson (Peter Graves), who doesn't believe a word. Anderson becomes more recalcitrant and speaks more bitterly with his electro-voice buddy.

Claire is despondent, she's starting to think that Tom is going off the deep end. The way he glares out from under a dark furrowed brow making stark threatening predictions about the human race, and sleeping next to the radio, one can't blame her for stalking the room in frustration. 

Shortly enough, the voice, attributed to a Venutian alien, comes to earth and magically shuts down the power of everything, a la The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now even less convinced of the creatures benevolence, Nelson tells Anderson as much over a drink.

Soon rubber alien larva are winging through the sky and zombifying the population. With little else to do while the power is out, Nelson argues with Anderson some more, and neither make any headway. Nelson's Hausfrau is zombified and in a rage of patriotic scientificality he guns her down. Returning again to Anderson's castle of aloofity, they argue again, but shortly realize that Claire is missing. Showing her true colors, she's taken a shotgun and gone in search of the Venutian, a giant rubber cone with crab claws and fangs.
Alas, she fails, but her death has finally convinced Anderson that he's an asshole, and he bravely gives his life to redeem his soul.

The point is thereby proven that isolationism and suspicion are the cornerstones of scientifical and social success in the face of Communistical alien ideology. Nelson has this shit-cold, deadpan, earnest grimace as he recites bland social "truths" about mankind. But really, the Andersons were the ones who shook it up, kept things on the edge, and made life a little more interesting for all of us.
Old poster: