Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Was it All the Colors of Giallo? I've been meaning to watch that one.


I also saw Astro Zombies recently and don't remember much about it. When you see John Carradine in a movie after 1960 or so, you know you're probably in for a rough time. From the trailers to the sequels Ted V. Mikels made in the 2000s, it looks like he really honed his craft as a director after 40 years.

I sadly could not find an Astro Zombies porn parody in my five seconds of googling.

I think this means I need to keep looking.

The doc was a special feature on some Bluray. I’ll need to dig through my collection to confirm the title.

I see some of Mikels’ other movies have their fans, so perhaps I shouldn’t write him off yet, but I will likely wait until after this month to delve further.

The Doll Squad is the best I've seen. I also like The Corpse Grinders, but I think a lot of people would think that one was boring too

Guys, stop making me want to watch the work of Ted Mikels. I have actual good movies I need to get through this month.

Autocorrect tried to change his name to Aged Milk.

Well, I was joking about the Astro Zombies sequels at least. The trailer for the second one looks like it was made by kids in their basement with old Halloween masks.

You know this just makes me want to watch them more, right?

You guys all love the part in a Friday the 13th movie where Jason puts on a hockey mask and kills people? What about the part in a Friday the 13th movie where Jason puts on a hockey mask and...sits around cutting up pictures from a magazine? I guess that’s implied violence? You know, giving us some insight into his psychology? Now what about the part where he takes off the mask, and it turns out he’s a demon in hell played by Paul Thomas, and he bickers with Justine, another demon played by Amber Lynn, about who’s better at corrupting mankind? And the part where Jason and Justine go to earth and proceed to orchestrate a series of sex scenes involving a bunch of completely unrelated characters in an effort to prove who’s the most devious of them all? Yeah, that’s usually a fun part of any Friday the 13th movie, right?

Well, that’s what happens in Friday the 13th: A Nude Beginning, a porn “parody” directed by Fred J. Lincoln, who most people know as one of the villains in Last House on the Left, which was a Sean S. Cunningham production, like the original Friday the 13th, which starred Kevin Bacon, and that’s within six degrees. Really, aside from the fact that one of the characters is named Jason and briefly wears a hockey mask, there is no attempt to evoke the series. Like, there are no scenes where Jason runs around and, instead of sticking machetes into people, he inserts marital aids. Which is something you’d hope would happen in a porn parody of a slasher, but the movie disappoints on that level. The only attempt at any horror aesthetics is the discount hell that the introductory scene and interludes take place in, a mix of lo fi set design, and overactive fog machine, and lots of red, that captured on video take on an endearing quality not unlike heavy metal music videos of the era. Otherwise, this is aesthetically in line with the average SOV production of the era, where the camera doesn’t do anything too fancy and usually points at the places you’d want it to point in a porno.

It probably sounds like I’m being dismissive here, but I actually had a really good time with this. I knew going in this wasn’t going to be a very good parody of the series, but I wasn’t expecting a script with this much great dialogue, which I will naturally provide samplings of. If there is a satirical target here, it’s at the usual establishment figures of the ‘80s: the US government, televangelists, and an anti-porn feminist activist modeled after Andrea Dworkin. There’s also a scene where Thomas persuades a character to violate the sanctity of marriage by making up an old tradition that “dates back to the Celtics, or is it the Lakers?” I’m not sure how exactly this is satirical, but when she says what they’re doing is “evil”, I’m not sure I buy it. I mean, it’s not good for her relationship, but evil seems like a strong word here.

There’s a scene between the President and a Colombian guerilla, where the latter pleads for military aid to overthrow her country’s government. Now, my guess is that she would be from FARC, who I understand are Marxist-Leninist, so I’m not sure how likely they would be in real life to ask for help for the Reagan administration. I did like this exchange, where the President speaks of the importance of coffee to Colombia’s economy.

Of course, this scene proceeds as one would expect, arguably rendering the figurative ****ing over of Latin America by the US in more literal terms. In that sense, it’s about as astute a satire as Alex Cox’s Walker, replacing the explosions of blood and gunpowder with explosions of...something else. Now, Lynn takes credit for orchestrating this scene, but aside from briefly appearing at the beginning and leaving the room, it’s not clear what her contribution is. And as Thomas points out, "You picked a politician. He didn't have a soul to begin with."

The scenes with the televangelist are more broader but funnier. First Lynn appears as a nun, surprising the televangelist played by Joey Silvera, who is very shouty and very animated. ("Today's the 12th, sister, and Mother Teresa wasn't supposed to come until the 13th. You're supposed to be a Japanese schoolgirl.") Naturally they get it on, but then there’s a second scene where he ends up having a threesome on live TV. Lynn’s role again isn’t apparent at first glance, but when Thomas knocks her efforts, she takes umbrage.

As they say, great art can often seem effortless.

The final stretch of the movie has the Dworkin stand-in, played by Nina Hartley, being seduced by Thomas and giving up her militant ways. And then out of concern for his fate, Lynn intervenes to seduce her as well, only to hand her off to a pimp played by Billy Dee (who unlike the King of the Pimps played by Jack Baker in Let Me Tell Ya ‘Bout White Chicks, does some actual pimping at the end). If there’s an issue with this section, it’s the suggestion that dolled up hairspray Hartley is somehow more attractive than glasses Hartley, but the scene between Lynn and Hartley is a clash of the titans, like between King Kong and Godzilla, but the new one where they’re actually friends. Whether or not the results are sexier will depend on the viewer, but I can report most of the performers here are in fine form, if you’re watching it for those reasons.

So there’s plenty of great dialogue, and some very funny supporting performances by Silvera and Hartley, but as you can guess from the poster, what really makes the movie work is Amber Lynn herself. She’s great. Aside from a few minor roles (scenes in 52 Pick-Up and The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning) I’d previously seen her in Things, where she managed to project some degree of glamour despite the fact that she was reading off the cue cards and was in ****ing Things. And here, you get some of that same quality. As her character says, she does things with “style” and “pizazz”, and the results are evident onscreen, as she struts around hell, radiating star power. (I should note that while she carries a trident on the cover, she never actually pokes anyone with it, which is one disappointing thing about the movie.) She and Thomas have lots of great banter and both hold their own pretty ably. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t really considered diving further into her filmography, as I got the sense there wasn’t much artistry in there, but now I think I’ll have to do some further investigation.

Anyway, a few more good lines, because why not:

Not the Friday the 13th parody we wanted, but the one we needed.

For example:

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I watched Umberto Lenzi’s Knife of Ice a few days ago, partially inspired by a half-remembered memory of Lenzi taking shots at Dario Argento during an interview. (For better or worse, these shots were not literal.) I had a few takeaways. Among them were that Lenzi actually could be a decent director if he applied himself, and that I liked stepping into the world of giallos enough that there’s a limit to how meaningfully I can really assess them, and that the strains of influence in that movie were pretty pronounced. Now, one of the claims Lenzi made in that interview is that even though Argento gets all the credit, it was really Lenzi who came up with the genre. So to test his claim, and inspired by an internet compatriot’s own exploration into Lenzi’s work, I decided to watch one of his movies that preceded Argento’s directorial efforts, and chose this.

What’s interesting that this isn’t really a giallo, or at least not in the fully formed state that one could associate with The Bird With the Crystal Plumage only a year later. For the record, I’m not saying that the genre materialized out of thin air with that movie, but merely noting that this has a transitory quality that makes it worthwhile in its own right. You take this movie, and you put beside it a Claude Chabrol thriller from the same era, and you drop in maybe The Lickerish Quartet and Camille 2000 by Radley Metzger, and you grab a Franco from the shelf, maybe Succubus, and while you have that one handy, why not also throw in some of Godard’s more colourful ‘60s efforts, or maybe even a Bond movie from the far cabinet? You place these movies close together, and realize that, even though these are movies we often look back on as being a part of different genres or movements, they are maybe not so far apart in how they look and sound. For a few years there, there was something of an overarching atmosphere of sexy, swingin’ European vibes hanging over the movies.

And I think that should give you a sense of what this movie’s like. Lots of handsome widescreen cinematography, lots of stylish, modish decor, and a cast of gorgeous women (Carroll Baker, Erika Blanc and Helga Line, who does not have the weird root vegetable makeup she sported in Nightmare Castle) and men who probably can’t be trusted or at least have too many secrets. In that sense, casting Jean-Louis Trintignant as the lead is an astute choice, despite not registering as remotely sexy (at least to this straight male viewer) but good at playing almost pathologically buttoned down. Where the movie goes won’t be a huge surprise if you read anything about this movie, but the sense of shock is further suppressed, as Lenzi directs the whole thing with an air of upper class detachment. These characters are so comfortable and complacent that they’ll do anything to alleviate their boredom, even if it involves a little murder.

In that sense, I think it’s sort of interesting to examine the presence of animal deaths in his work. Quite frankly, it’s an aspect that I could very much do without, but it’s very much present in the cannibal movies he’s best known for, and popped up in Knife of Ice as well. But here, it seems to click as an actual element of his world view. There are a number of scenes where characters nonchalantly hunt birds (which is probably less off putting to most than the more gruesome scenes in the other movies), sometimes not even paying attention where their guns are pointed. These characters seem so dulled by their wealth that their killing of these animals barely raises their pulse. There’s maybe some kind of class critique here (Lenzi also gives some of the men ascots, which is universally recognized shorthand for “rich asshole”), although given Lenzi’s willingness to indulge in this trope in his other work, it might have been worth turning the camera at himself.

He only sporadically interrupts this atmosphere with bursts of style (one scene has a camera swirling as if going down the drain, followed by slow motion in red), meaning that it never dissolves the barrier between the literal and the subconscious and psychological the way more defined giallos can do, even as the characters’ psyches deteriorate. And the movie’s relative bloodlessness means that it rarely offers the kind of thrills one might seek from a horror movie. But as an attractive, low energy suspense piece, this is relatively diverting.

Encounters of the Spooky Kind is the deeply relatable story of a secretly cowardly man played by Sammo Hung who is being cheated on by his wife, so her lover decides that the best way to resolve the situation is to have him killed and goes to a magician, whose plan involves having Sammo stay at a scary old house where he’s supposed to get killed by a hopping vampire, but Sammo gets some nice tips from a good magician and manages to mostly avoid and then eventually kung fu fight the hopping vampire, so the lover decides to frame Sammo for the murder of the wife, and the one guy who can speak in Sammo’s defense had a stroke while everybody else testifies against him, so Sammo gets arrested by by Lam Ching-Ying ends up having to break out prison and ends up kung fu fighting a maggoty zombie right after, and then Sammo gets saved again from Lam by the good magician and then becomes his disciple, and the two of them go to fight the lover and the evil magician, and the two magicians argue over who has the bigger altar, and then there’s surprisingly bloody kung fu fight and then a really tasteless conclusion. What I’m saying is, it could happen to anybody.

This is a movie directed by and starring Sammo Hung. As an actor, here and elsewhere he brings a likable, dopey and self-deprecating presence that perhaps counters some of the less tasteful elements in the movie. To take a few examples, think of how hard it is to hate Sammo in Skinny Tiger, Fatty Dragon despite the scenes of him groping suspects, or how hard it is to hate Sammo in My Lucky Stars despite the agonizingly long scene where he and the other Lucky Stars scheme to grope the only major female character... jeez, there’s a lot of groping in these movies. Good thing Sammo is supernaturally likable. He’s also, despite the numerous jokes at the expense of his girth (his character is named “Big Guts”, although characters claim not very convincingly that it refers to his bravery), supernaturally gifted as a physical performer. Although if you compare him to Jackie Chan, another supernaturally gifted physical performer with whom he collaborated frequently, you can distinguish their particular comic presences. Jackie in Sammo’s movies is allowed to be cool, and in his own movies is hapless but somewhat dignified, like Buster Keaton. Sammo never gets to be cool in Chan’s movies, and here, he actually brings to mind Lou Costello with his over-the-top fearful reactions.

Which means that as a horror comedy, this invites comparison to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, in that it treats the horror elements with some degree of straightfacedness despite situating a comedy within these elements. Supposedly spooky stuff happens, but the joke isn’t that the spooky stuff itself is funny, it’s how Sammo reacts to it. This is an early hopping vampire movie and precedes the one I’m most familiar with, Mr. Vampire. Now, my memory of that is a little hazy, but while the latter movie is certainly packed with action and comedy, this one seems more interested in the aesthetics of horror movies. You can see this from the opening sequence, which takes the usually heavily stylized training sequences that usually open these movies and drapes it in dark colours and throws in spooky monsters instead of the usual poor bastards who get their asses kicked in these scenes. And then all the scenes where Sammo encounters hopping vampires, zombies and other supernatural forces, shot in atmospheric blue lighting.

So you get all this spooky stuff and all this funny stuff, but because this is a Hong Kong action movie from the ‘80s directed by Hung, you also get one great set piece after another. There’s a certain frisson you get from the dissonance between the meticulousness of the direction and choreography and the sheer silliness of what’s being depicted, that seems so bountiful in Hong Kong action comedies but seems so rare elsewhere. Any weekend where I put on a movie with Sammo or his friends is a good one. If anything, these scenes are so frequent and consistent that the effect becomes a little numbing, but as I alluded to earlier, the final confrontation ramps up the brutality and chases it with a shockingly tasteless punchline. Meaning that the movie ends on...maybe not a high note, but certainly an exclamation mark.

I'm glad somebody watched this so I don't have to. I've almost done it a dozen times. I will rest easy now.

lol

Glad to be of service.

It's depressing how frequently this has happened to people I've known.
You also left off the part of being reminded where your plate of chicken comes from.

There was a lot happening, it was hard to keep track. 😄

But yeah, the chicken scene. Yikes!

R.I.P. Kay Parker

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

Damn.

Taboo is probably her most notable role. The movie on the whole is often pretty goofy, but you have to respect her sensitive and committed performance. I'd like to single out a few other films: Dracula Sucks (if you're looking for spooky season viewing), Private Teacher (where she pays tribute to Shakespeare) and The Young Like it Hot (where she shows off her comedic chops pretty nicely). Someone who always brought the goods (in more ways than one... )

R.I.P. to the OG MILF.

Let me dig up my review of Taboo from when I watched it last year.

Taboo opens with a marriage having fallen apart. The husband finally reaches his breaking point with their sexual incompatibility (she doesn't like doing it with the light on) and decides to leave his wife for his secretary. The wife is devastated but tries to put on a strong face for their son, telling him that he should consider moving in with his father, to which he responds "Hell no." He offers to drop out of school and find a job, but she tells him she'll try to find one herself.

If that exchange sounds a little unusual to you, it definitely plays that way, with a pan from her son's perspective down to her cleavage. This being a porno, you can guess where this eventually leads, but what distinguishes Taboo is the way it gets there.

The son spends his days studying with his girlfriend, although they quickly move on to other things when it turns out he knows the material a bit too well and their other friend shows up. ("Are we studying history or sex education?") But his mind is elsewhere, which we can sense when he kisses his mother for just a little too long. He comes home with his girlfriend but sneaks to spy on his mother as she showers and gets dressed. After she leaves for a date, he ****s his girlfriend, having been all riled up by what he just saw.

Things don't go as well for the mother. She struggles to find a job at first because of her age, and then has to deal with a handsy boss who doesn't respect her boundaries. She seems comfort and advice from her libertine friend (first spotted in bed with her two lovers), who doesn't seem all that helpful. For one thing, she seems a tad thirsty when she asks about the son. For another, when she overhears the fight between the heroine and her boss, she seems a little too excited by the notion that her friend might have been sexually assaulted. Third, she misleadingly sets her up on a date with a complete jerk who ends up taking her to a swingers party. She spends the entire party sitting alone, brushing off potentially interested men and hesitant to join in on the fun. But when she gets home, she can't stop thinking about it. She sees her son lying in bed naked, and well....

Taboo is a porno about a sexual relationship between a mother and her son. Without betraying too much about my viewing habits, when you see this dynamic in modern mainstream porn, it's always carefully presented as being between a stepmother and her stepson (or whatever variation of step-relatives you can come up with), whose relationship usually isn't sold all that convincingly. It is a bit startling to see a movie feature straight up incest, and while this is not exactly my thing, when the climactic act happens, it carries an undeniable charge. (I must confess I don't know if the reason for the current coyness around this subject matter is due to obscenity law or social mores. My suspicion is the latter given that this film is readily available, but I'm not itching to follow through on the end credits stinger from the "Wedding Videography" episode of Community.)

Much of the credit goes to Kay Parker as the mother, who brings a lived in quality and vulnerability to her performance. We can buy her as a real person with doubts and insecurities who is hesitant to follow through on her desires, rather than a porn queen eager to jump into the act. This gives the proceedings a certain dramatic weight, and there are moments, like Parker trying to put on a brave face after her husband walks out, or struggling in her job hunt, or not having her boundaries respected, or sitting alone having a bad time at a party, that feel too real. It's worth noting that the film was written by a woman, Helene Terrie, who gives Parker's character a welcome dose of psychological realism. It's also worth noting that Parker came to acting fairly late, and I suspect might have been drawing a bit from her own experience in some of these moments. (Also of interest is that Parker is British, so her inconsistent attempt to do an American accent results in something like the Mid-Atlantic accent from classic Hollywood movies. Not a bad thing, in my humble opinion, but those less appreciative of Katharine Hepburn may not dig it.) The movie tries to resolve its central tension at the end by selling its story as one of self actualization for Parker's character, but the dialogue in these closing scenes is clumsier.

This is a movie that I'm glad I didn't see too early in my exploration of the genre, as its best qualities, Parker's character and performance, seem to mesh a bit uneasily with the surrounding film. For what it's worth, the movie is well shot and features an attractive and game cast, so those who are into the premise or watching this for prurient reasons should have a good time with it. The soundtrack is pretty nice as well, featuring hints of Bossa Nova, country, funk and the like. I also particularly enjoyed one scene where Parker and a suitor walk the streets of San Francisco, taking in the sights and enjoying street food, that played as a nice bit of escapism when I've been stuck inside for over a year thanks to a raging pandemic.

The dissonance between Parker's insecurities and loneliness and Juliet Anderson's raging lady boner, as in a ridiculous scene where Anderson masturbates while Parker confesses her actions, or with the macho stud acting of Mike Ranger as her son, who keeps telling his mom how hot she is, can be pretty jarring. Anderson is effective in a comic role, but seems to be acting in a completely different movie than Parker. Ranger is less strong, so we rely on Parker to bring the tension to the premise. If this was one of the first golden age pornos I'd seen, I suspect I'd be a bit put off, but having seen a bunch at this point, I can respect that the movie is trying to hit the genre marks and compartmentalize accordingly. This is not the first vintage porno I'd recommend, but I do think it's worth seeking out eventually for the Kay Parker performance. She's very good.