Truly, there can be no greater anguish for a father than what his poor precious daughter (whom he hasn’t seen in 10 years due to his boozing ways) is going through. Oh, not the anguish of everything just mentioned. Blackmailers can be bought off, secrets can be self-righteously uncovered at dramatic moments, and the juvenile court of the old days wouldn’t let some murderous teen be tried as an adult. No, the real, soul crushing anguish Luke experiences is when he is told that his daughter’s medical exam revealed she wasn’t a virgin anymore!

Please God let it be due to all that horseback riding she’s been doing while living with mom in San Francisco! But all of Luke’s hopes and dreams for having a non-slut daughter are crushed once he gets his hands on a letter she wrote to her mom’s boyfriend, Lazich. Oh, sweet, sweet hymen! We hardly knew you!

While Luke mourns the devastating loss of the skin the blocks the opening of his daughter’s vagina, it is important to note that these sorts of things don’t happen in a vacuum. There’s all sorts of hand-wringing backstory to be unspooled, complete with overbearing rich mother-in-law, tramp wife, aforementioned alcoholism, and most deliciously of all, Star Trek‘s DeForest Kelley as an amoral art critic prone to dirty talk and trying to get into Luke’s wife’s very busy panties.

Where Love Has Gone flashes back 20 years or so to World War II, where all the stars look exactly the same as they did 20 years in the future. Luke is a regular Captain America, having won the Congressional Medal of Honor, while Valerie Hayden (Susan Haywood) is a rich girl who is a gifted sculptor. They meet at one of her shows and her mother, Gerald, immediately sets about trying to match the two up.

Valerie isn’t interested in Luke until she hears him telling off her mother. A quickie marriage ensues and a hilarious montage follows where World War II is rapidly finished up by about four newspaper headlines interspersed with Valerie’s hard at work on her hideous sculptures as if to show that while Luke is risking his life for freedom, Valerie is keeping the American home front strong for pampered rich girls by carving ugly doodads for other wealthy morons.

Once back in civilian life, Luke sets about having his hopes and dreams obliterated by his pushy, scheming mother-in-law. Spurning her offer of a job at her business, Luke strikes out on his own with his dream of building homes to take advantage of the post-war demand for housing. Ultimately Gerald succeeds in emasculating the war hero by secretly sabotaging his efforts and forcing him to slink back to her and accept her job offer.

This begins the slow and fitfully funny downward spiral of Luke and his marriage to Valerie. He drowns his sorrows in booze, Valerie responds by becoming a slut, and it all explodes in domestic fights that are funny where the film probably meant them to be dramatic and shocking. (“You’re not a woman! You’re a disease!” Luke shouts at Valerie provoking unintended chuckles despite his icky attempt to rape her moments before and her equally icky response!)

Valerie’s mom forces them to get a divorce, Luke moves away, doesn’t get to see his daughter, dries out and becomes a successful architect. He comes back into all their lives once he receives word that his daughter has killed a man.

The remainder of the movie details Luke trying to reach his daughter to find out exactly what happened. The daughter, played as a pouting and vaguely creepy sexpot by Joey Heatherton, refuses to tell anyone anything, but it is clear that she is jealous of her mother and that her childhood with her mother, while well provided for financially, was lacking emotionally.

The movie though doesn’t actually detail any of this because it is obsessed with showcasing the screaming melodramatics of the mother, father and mother-in-law. In fact, other than a brief mention by Luke of the “baby” early in the marriage, the child is never seen or referred to until the divorce hearing that wraps up the flashback.

Presumably inspired by the real life events surrounding movie star Lana Turner and her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, the film, from the writer and the director of the similarly salacious The Carpetbaggers, delights in throwing out its tawdry accusations and morally degenerate characters, but is hampered by its slapdash treatment of the effect such a life has on the child as well as its over-the-top histrionics that fail to resonate with modern audiences raised on afternoon talk shows, reality programming, and more generally, the immoral society we have today.

Whether it’s the garish self portrait the mother-in-law insists on hanging in the house she gave Luke and Valerie, the overbaked dialogue (“when you’re dying from thirst, you’ll drink from a mudhole!” Valerie tells her mom), the dirty letters both mother and daughter wrote their boyfriend, the smarmy art critic with the pipe, or the entirely gratuitous confrontation Luke has with Valerie in the courtroom climax that sets in motion another series of tragic events that couldn’t help but scar his daughter even worse than killing the man she shared with her mother, Where Love Has Gone is exactly the sort of outdated hypertrashy flick where you aren’t surprised that Luke threatens to spank his elderly mother-in-law played by Bette Davis, but only that it doesn’t actually happen!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

First of all, I wouldn’t staff my spaceship for the most important mission in the history of my civilization with only four aliens and a robot. That’s not near enough alien muscle to keep a bunch of surly and horny humans in line. The fact that three of the four aliens turn out to be rebels against the plan not only underlines the need to better vet the crew members, but to also perhaps illustrate why this race of morons needs some of our sweet goodies!

Another thing I probably would have given more thought to is the wisdom of choosing some of the humans that were ultimately chosen for this mission.

Sure, you might be able to justify the astronauts since they’ve presumably had training for space travel and would have an open mind to alien cultures. And you could also make a case for the two military personnel as they would be battle hardened tough guys that wouldn’t run scared from a little alien sexing up.

It’s the kickboxer and his stripper girlfriend that have me a little worried! Worried that with all that alien cross-breeding going on that we wouldn’t get a good dose of kickboxing and stripping that is!

Without question, Starquest II takes all that was bad about the original Star Quest and doubles it! The group of bickering jerks meandering around the same three spaceship sets bickers more and are jerkier!

The forgettable cast of TV actors that populated Star Quest are replaced with even more forgettable actors who have probably appeared in TV shows that we’ve all forgotten!

The story makes so little sense that Freddy Krueger himself, Robert England, has to explain everything to us in excruciating detail during his big death scene at the end of the movie! Just claw my brains out of my head and be done with it, Freddy!

Those of you who hated (quite rightfully I might add) Star Quest, will no doubt be concerned that Starquest II is just a weak rehash of a black hole-sized dog turd can take comfort in the fact that this latest installment crosses the final frontier of stink in an effort to deliver even less entertainment value for your time! And Starquest II is even shorter than the already short first one!

While the first movie padded out its running time with meaningless sessions in the virtual reality room, Starquest II goes and plays the softcore sex scene card!

With brain-damaging snyth porn music thumping in the background, various cast members would suddenly decide to start playing space grab ass with one another despite the fact that they had no idea what they were doing on the ship in the first place! “What? How did I get here? What are these aliens up to? I guess I’ll check into all that right after I get laid!”

Starquest II does have some things going for it though. For instance, it makes you appreciate director Fred Gallo’s alien-on-the-loose-on-a-shoestring-budget epic, Dead Space. That one had the Beastmaster Marc Singer in it though, whereas Adam Baldwin stars in Starquest II. This Adam guy isn’t even one of those cruddy famous Baldwin brothers! It just feels like you’re watching Stephen Baldwin!

I suppose that since this non-Baldwin brother appeared in Firefly and that Freddy Krueger is on board as an alien disguised as a preacher, they are the official stars. The only guy though worth watching is the potty-mouth kickboxer called Trit played by kickboxing movie legend Jerry Trimble!

Not Jerry “Golden Boy” Trimble, the 1986 PKA and PKC Kickboxing Champion of the World! Yes! The very same Golden Boy who hook kicked his way into the hearts and solar plexuses of obscure action movie fans everywhere with star turns in Stranglehold, Full Contact, One Man Army, and everyone’s favorite, Live By The Fist!

Golden Boy provides the only semblance of action in the movie when he kicks the crap out of that guy from Firefly and brawls with the android. He even manages to punch a hole in the side of the ship after blasting the android with some kind of large pump action gun, causing the robot to get sucked into space!

His stripper girlfriend does her part as well, giving him a dance while he’s strapped to a chair because the rest of the humans think he killed someone. Fans of all things gratuitous will be pleased to know that she also gives a dance to an alien disguised as a sexy human woman! The alien kills her for her trouble though, proving once and for all that this is an alien race that doesn’t deserve to survive!

Veterans of Dead Space and Starquest will want to know if the footage of the spaceships shooting at each other that appeared in both those movies also makes an appearance here as well. Are you stupid? Of course it does!

But there’s plenty more to keep cinematic detectives with more time than real life on their hands with all the clips that are used in this movie. Right off hand, I can say that I recognized some scenes from Crime Zone and others have already also noted scenes from Brain Dead.

Some of Roger Corman’s war and exotic dancer movies may also be represented, but I’m not well versed in either of those genres to know for sure. I’d also wager that at least some of the exterior shots of the spaceship were last seen in the first Star Quest.

I think I’m going to just start using clips of myself watching earlier movies to watch these sequels from now on.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

In one corner, you have the dark arts and all their reality-bending power to possess people, kill them, and general ability to string together unconnected scenes of bad special effects mayhem. In the other corner is David “the Hoff” Hasselhoff, lifeguard and talking-car pal.

If you think I’m about to reveal who wins out in this review, forget it! I will tell you though that in true Italian horror movie fashion, a Sesame Street brand tape recorder turns out to be more powerful than both of them combined!

Witchery also supplements the usual Italian hijinks and the Hoff with a cast that could have only appeared in an Italian movie starring the Hoff!

There’s a sweaty and pregnant Linda Blair, the Hoff’s one-time wife Catherine Hickland who also played Virgin in Robowar, but who is now playing a nympho architect, and Leslie Cumming who plays a virgin and whose only other credit was in another Italian trash epic, Zombie 5: Killing Birds!

Like all great ideas, the movie’s story is pretty simple: Eight idiots get themselves stranded at an abandoned island hotel that’s haunted by an old hag witch. In the hands of someone who didn’t direct Contamination .7 this could have been your standard stalk and slash affair where people are picked off one by one in the various deserted rooms of the hotel. To be fair, technically, that is what happens, but director Fabrizio Laurenti does it all with a certain zest for the offbeat.

For most of the movie the Hoff looks to be most upset by his repeatedly rebuffed attempts to lay his virgin friend. For her part the virgin owns every single scene she is in because of utter lack of command of the English language.

At various times she sounds drunk, sleepy, like she has marbles in her mouth, is on a obscene cocktail of prescription drugs, like she’s saying each word for the very first time in her entire life, and as if she’s mentally retarded. That she insists on referring to the Hoff by his unconvincing movie name “Gary” only adds to the audience’s delight.

The Hoff really comes alive in the second part of the film when he abandons his efforts to bust cherry and gets on with busting witches. Sometimes you just have to sacrifice for the greater good and no one knows this more than the Hoff!

The Hoff is doing everything he can to push back the forces of darkness. He’s dodging flying furniture and falling shutters, he’s getting caught in sliding doors, he’s using a flare gun AND a camera flash bulb to attract rescuers. He’s even tying off a guy’s gushing arm with a necktie tourniquet!

It’s during this scene where the Hoff pulls out all his thespian chops. While trying to help this guy out, he notices his jugular vein is pulsating and the Hoff makes a face like the dude just crapped his pants.

Both the Hoff and us knew what was coming next and just like clockwork the guy’s vein bursts open spewing a geyser of red fluid right in the Hoff’s face! Can imagine how glad the Hoff was when he found out Baywatch was going to be a regular TV series the next year?

But the valiant efforts of the Hoff, the virgin, and the sweaty, pregnant Linda Blair would be wasted if Laurenti couldn’t come through in the horror department. You needn’t worry. Remember, this is the guy who had us watching folks get their eyes poked out by tree roots in Contamination .7!

There’s a good healthy catalog of heinousness in this film to keep pace with his all-star cast. You’ve got a mouth sewn shut, a person or two gets burned alive, there’s a nice crucifixion, a fetus gets gnawed on, an impaling on a swordfish, some voodoo, people going out windows, stabbings, an old fashioned possession and even a ghost rape for good measure. You also not only get Linda Blair in a hilarious fright wig, but as a bonus, you get a stunt Linda Blair in an even funnier wig during a particularly physical scene!

This movie doesn’t even let up with the last frame of film! There’s the classic shock ending you’ve seen in 500 other movies, but once again it’s Laurenti’s execution that leaves you in convulsions of laughter. The combination of the way the final line is delivered with the freeze frame of the character’s brain damaged expression is frankly worth twice the price the DVD cost.

Let me put it this way: Francois Trauffaut’s The 400 Blows was the very best use of the ending freeze frame. Until the release of Witchery!

Please do yourself a favor and buy this movie. It is an essential in every collection. And you’ll feel extra awesome knowing that the Hoff is getting a royalty check of like three cents because of your excellent taste.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The one thing we were hoping to see in a movie called Werewolf Woman, a woman werewolf, was really nowhere to be found except in short glimpses that were just flashbacks and/or delusions.

Normally, a woman obsessed with her demented delusion that she is a murderous werewolf with sexual hangups wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but since Daniella is a survivor of a brutal rape when she was thirteen years old and expresses her repressed desires by peeping her sister and her sister’s husband during one of their conjugal visits to her villa, a short stay at the mental hospital is probably in the offing. Well, that and because she lured the husband (Fabian) out into the woods, forced herself on him, bit and clawed him, and heaved him over a cliff to his death.

Now safely ensconced at the local hospital for the frequently deluded and always denuded, Daniella doesn’t respond to treatment very well. She has episodes where she needs to be strapped down and shouts things like “whore” over and over at the top of her lungs at her sister who is still mourning Fabian’s untimely demise (conveniently blamed on the guard dogs at the villa).

She also has episodes where she hides a pair of scissors under herself just in case the resident nympho sneaks into her room, unties her and needs a good stabbing.

Daniella makes her escape from the asylum in a scene that was unintentionally funny where she hides in a doctor’s car and then smashes the driver’s head against the steering wheel repeatedly causing the horn to honk again and again.

Once the car crashes, Daniella begins roaming around the countryside and the movie becomes a series of scenes where she has encounters with people that are so tainted by their wanton ways, they need to punished by a werewolf woman.

Of course the werewolf woman is merely suggested in Daniella’s actions. She sweats, screams, and growls, but otherwise remains human at all times.

By this time, I had written this movie off as a dull slurry of sex killings with supernatural overtones, but that was before Di Silvestro reached way, way down into his bag of tricks and pulled out… the stuntman!

Forget all the mumbo jumbo about lycanthropy and the reincarnation hooey. Where this film really earns its quirky claim to fame is Daniella’s love affair with a stuntman and their stay at the old west town movie set that Stuntguy is working on.

When Stuntguy picks up Daniella and reveals himself to be not only a stuntman but also sensitive and respectful of the dames, I was only tittering to myself a little. The smart ass in me was thinking, “what are they going to do on dates? Fall off really tall buildings? Break chairs over one another? Pull their punches during domestic squabbles?” The next thing I know, Daniella is shooting at him while he’s high atop a bell tower and he immediately executes a big stunt fall! Much laughing and hugging on the big air mattress follows.

Di Silvestro then goes into “love montage” overdrive and actually has scenes of them frolicking on the beach in the sunset interspersed with scenes of him diving through saloon windows! Some may question why there was never anyone else ever on this movie set and what happened to the movie that Stuntguy was shooting, but those are obviously people who have never been in love!

But what about Daniella’s werewolf woman gimmick? Was all it took to cure it the love of a rugged and pretty cut stuntman? Had he vanquished all the ghosts of the past with his high morals and even higher falls?

Before we get a chance to answer all those questions, Daniella gets gang raped! If that seems sudden, that’s an example of Di Silvestro’s pacing and narrative work for you. Three guys we’ve never seen before show up without any explanation (I guess they just check abandoned movie sets for women to assault) and brutalize Daniella while Stuntguy is out buying a new case of breakaway liquor bottles. All of this sends Daniella back over the edge and Rino switches to Death Wish-style revenge antics for the remainder of the movie.

This was a dull journey into the one dimensional world of Daniella, who remained, as she was from the very beginning of the movie, a pale cipher capable of little beyond moving from catatonia to animalistic rage.

Nothing is explained as to why she received no help from the time of her rape at age 13 to the present or why she was allowed to fixate on this idiotic (and likewise unexplained) bit of family folklore.

Cloaking it all in this faux modern psychology did nothing beyond making things seem even hokier than they otherwise would have been. And stopping the movie dead in its tracks for several minutes about two-thirds of the way through so that Daniella’s doctor could recap in excruciating detail everything that we had just seen to the investigator while playing a game of pool was about as ill-advised as picking up a growling hitchhiking chick with froth drying at the corner of her lips.

Still, I would willingly trade lots of boring scenes, an uniteresting main character, and a decided lack of the titular monster for a peek inside the high risk love life of a stuntman any time!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Just when I thought that Fulci had turned senile and was being tricked by his producers who only wanted skin and not that peculiar brand of “art” that Fulci usually brought to the table, the guy rolls off the girl when he hears her kid squawking for her in another room. He goes down to this kid’s room and stabs him with some scissors right in his little kid gut over and over!

Right away, we can see that even though the movie will be undoubtedly quite hideous, it won’t be won’t be completely devoid of its positive aspects. Bratty kid whacked? Ten cool points. Slutty mom taught a lesson? Twenty cool points. Naked guy photographed in shadow so that I don’t have to see his wiener? Priceless!

I think this must have been a dream sequence (surely a dream sequence for any guy who’s ever had his girlfriend’s snot-nosed kid interrupt some good loving with their self-centered mewling) because this little kid was alive the rest of the movie and turned out to be the instrument in the devious plot that killed this guy.

If you’re watching a Fulci movie for its gore then you better load up on the uppers, keep the lights on and make sure you don’t blink because the only gore is a short little autopsy scene where some guy is taking out the innards of the dead rich guy (Giorgio) and gives us a play by play where he talks about stuff like the colon which is kind of scary in its own way.

And when your movie hinges on some dude talking about how he found chunks of glass in some guy’s intestine, you’re simply reminding me why I’ve never watched C.S.I.

Back at the funeral, we’re enjoying a nice mixture of memorial service and flashback. As each grieving relative or mistress approaches the casket, they remember how crappy Giorgio was to them when he was alive.

Everyone that is except his daughter Rosy who was away at college and still loves her father very much and is understandably receptive when she starts hearing her father’s voice telling her that she needs to find out who killed him.

Okay, does anyone see a problem here? This guy was a jerk, his family members are greedy and homely asses, and Rosy is an airheaded moron who listens to the voices of dead people. Tell me again why I care about any of this?

The bulk of the movie is Rosy’s clumsy investigation of her daddy’s death. Rosy accuses the mistress of being the culprit, then her own mother, then figures out that someone had tricked the little boy into grinding up light bulbs and filling the ice cube trays with them and some water. Her father then had some drinks with the tainted ice cubes and this killed him when he failed to recognize that the “crushed up light bulb” taste of his drink wasn’t normal.

Rosy has a confrontation with the rest of her family and tells them that they will have to live with what they’ve done and then she leaves and goes and visits her dad’s grave and laughs heartily about everything, finally leaving the graveyard skipping merrily down the steps to the street below!

The funniest part was that the family killed the guy because they were worried that he would cut them out of his will. It turned out that he already had!

That just goes to show you that the perfect murder isn’t just about coming up with a really far-fetched scheme involving a crazy little boy who likes to grind up light bulbs. Searching through documents for wills and deeds and trusts may not be as glamorous as getting some glass in a guy’s intestines, but just as important!

Stupid beyond words in every respect, you have to think that even Fulci realized how lacking the story was (which he came up with) since he added in a useless dream sequence where Giorgio’s stepson gets attacked by zombies at his crypt. Without question, this one goes down light a light bulb laced lemonade and will leave you with blood in your stool.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Most of the film is spent waiting for Fulci’s typically nonsensically supernatural explanation for things to kick in, or at the very least for a fog machine to get cranking. Instead, we are left with a fairly conventional serial killer tale, though it still is confusing and poorly executed enough to betray its real origins.

Lester Parson is, as we learn from the get go, a cannibal who likes to watch videos of the women he is eating while he is getting ready for dinner. He also has this mangy cat that he always gives a helping of chopped whore to and he even has a bunch of pigs he keeps somewhere in his house (maybe it’s an adjoining barn – you know how fancy these Italian villas are) that he feeds all the leftovers to.

Lester isn’t just your regular old cannibal though. He actually has a sensible reason for eating rich women. See, he needs their money to fund his love for the horses! Now, I’m not talking about the kind of love for the horses that someone like Hercules might have. I mean this guy likes to play the ponies!

He’s always betting thousands of dollars on these horse races and he’s always losing them. In fact, he’s so pathetic that his own bookie makes fun of him for his lack of talent in prognosticating the winners saying that he didn’t think Lester could win a horse race even if it was fixed. Ouch!

Another cool personality trait that Lester exhibits is that he likes to talk to himself. This may not seem so unusual for someone that has all the earmarks of a guy who’s insane, but he talks to himself via a tape recorder!

He’ll push play on his tape machine, start talking and wait for his own pre-recorded voice to answer him. This clearly is semi-Fulci territory in that it is completely ridiculous, but I’m sure all the people out there who like movies where Brett Halsey is romancing women with hairlips are going to say that he was only imagining his voice on the tape and that it was all in his head, but if so, none of the rest of what we see makes any sense.

Each time Lester does away with some ugly skank, he settles in to watch the news later only to see that some similar murder has been committed, but the killer hasn’t disposed of the body. We’ve watched in graphic detail how Lester gets rid of the bodies, so it can’t be him, can it?

Well of course it can’t be him! It’s literally his shadow! The scene at the end of the movie where he’s whining to his own shadow about how it ruined everything is a fine example of non-existent special effects combined with the insipid plotting you were secretly hoping to see in this one. But then why are we seeing him dispose of the bodies if he isn’t really doing it?

Now, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way or anything, but I do have to confess to laughing a little bit during this movie. Please don’t take this as some kind of endorsement, because I can’t emphasize enough the generic stupidity and threadbare look displayed throughout this movie, but there I was chuckling at Lester’s plight.

Brett Halsey is pretty much the whole picture here and I’ll give him credit since he seems to be in on the joke throughout things. His best moments aren’t when he’s killing broads or losing a high stakes poker game. They come whenever he’s trying to romance these nasty looking pigs that he hooks up with.

Whenever they aren’t looking at him, he’s cringing at their beards, wincing at their hairlips, and gagging at how close those hairy moles are to his face when he’s being intimate with them. Sure, he’s a cold-blooded maniac, but it all isn’t chainsaws, ovens, and running vagrants over repeatedly with his Mercedes. There’s some hard work involved here as well.

Lester’s laughable attempts to disguise himself are also something to take note of. He watches the news a lot and they keep saying how they’re closing in on the killer (he’s been given the catchy name of “The Maniac” by the press) and they have a description of him, so Lester gets contacts, shaves his beard, gets a new pair of glasses, then dyes his hair this barf-colored blonde and finally is found out by his hairlipped girlfriend who saw the news before he came over and recognized him from the police composite sketch on TV.

Lester and I had pretty much the same reaction when we saw that composite. It looked pretty much nothing like Lester. In fact, it didn’t even look like a human being so much as some facial features haphazardly put together.

A horrible, horrible effort from Fulci, who once upon a time brought a little style to pointless gore and it only solidifies his reputation as “director who made the worst horror movies of the late 1980s.” In movies like this, you can’t even tell that Fulci ever had any talent to begin with, let alone that he actually lost whatever he had. Doesn’t someone from his family care enough about his memory to buy the rights back to these bearded ladies and forever prevent them from being seen in public and held up to ridicule?

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Is it Jimmy, the kid with the troubled past? Is it Marty, the malt shop owner who doesn’t like to give credit to the kids for sodas and burgers? Is it one of Jimmy’s gang of hotrodders?

Maybe it’s Runt, the dopey-looking slug who gets picked on by Jimmy’s gang of hotrodders despite him being Jimmy’s friend (though that would have to be pure pity on Jimmy’s part).

Could it be that creepy school janitor, Mr. Wilson, who doesn’t like cleaning up after a bunch of punks?

Heck, it might even be Jimmy’s little brother, Mike. He’s a four-eyed sissy with girlish voice and a secret past of his own. Though if he did turn out to be strangler, they might have to call the film Pre-Teen Strangler.

The movie really isn’t that much of a whodunit since most of the time is spent following Jimmy around as he periodically gets put under the umbrella of suspicion by the police and grounded by his parents.

Frankly, I wasn’t going into this one looking to unravel any densely-plotted mystery. I was hoping for some gang slang, bad music, and lots of posing by whitebread guys in leather jackets. If they could mix in some murders and a drag race, that would just be so much gang gravy.

Well, they did it and they did it all in just about an hour! Teen-Age Strangler himself wasn’t terribly active until the end of things, but I was having too much fun counting all the fake sports pennants hanging up at both the malt shop and in Jimmy’s bedroom to really mind all that much.

Jimmy is sort of secretly dating Betty since Betty’s folks are against Jimmy’s type of boy, despite him looking as clean cut as Wally Cleaver. It’s Jimmy’s membership in that rowdy group of racing freaks called the Fastbacks that’s probably causing them the most consternation.

Jimmy’s status in that group though didn’t seem to lend itself to too much worrying since he’s out making time with Betty and getting himself named a prime suspect in the slaying of her friend while the rough guys in the Fastbacks are out dragging where it isn’t sanctioned. Hey, it’s like one of the Fastbacks says, “drag it or drop it.” Though I can’t quite grasp the meaning of that statement, it does sound like words to live by.

Huntington P.D. puts its best man on the case in Lt. Anderson and he wastes no time in visiting Betty’s house to get the low down on what exactly she saw when she was running away screaming while her friend was dying an agonizing death.

Following textbook police procedure to the letter, he immediately gets in a shouting match with Betty’s dad about how he should be doing his job as a parent and making sure that Betty wasn’t out at all hours so that she could end up seeing murders.

Betty reveals that she thinks she saw that the killer was wearing a leather jacket with a bulldog emblem on it! “A bulldog! I think I saw a bulldog!” she screams as she collapses into tears while I collapsed into paroxysms of laughter. You see, the bulldog is the exclusive symbol of the Fastbacks!

All five Fastbacks are now under Lt. Anderson’s microscope and he hauls them in to find out which one did it. Perhaps not surprisingly, they all deny any involvement and so they are released into the custody of their parents who presumably have to promise that none of them will be allowed to strangle any more dames.

Back at the malt shop, another horror unfolds before our disbelieving eyes. Some girl gets up on the counter, proclaims her and this guy with a guitar the Huntington Astronauts, and starts singing one of those abominations that these low budget teen pictures traffic in.

This time, it’s something called “Yipe Stripes” and is apparently about striped clothes. Accompanied by the sort of dancing that that guy in Footloose surely had in mind when he wanted it banned, you’re left to goggle in amazement as the Drew Carey-lookalike Marty, begins shimmying behind the counter! I would also complain that as soon as the guy with the guitar started playing, invisible horns and drums began to mysteriously play along with him, but I had already suspended whatever disbelief this movie caused when no one started pelting the Huntington Astronauts with half-eaten burgers and empty parfait glasses.

A meaningless drag race and a silly confrontation with the killer that sees Lt. Anderson shooting his gun at Teen-Age Strangler through a broken window despite a prospective victim being in the line of the fire close out the movie.

Funny moments, chiefly involving Jimmy’s little wuss brother Mike, give the movie whatever value it has. Between Mike simpering on about how he let Jimmy take the rap for something he really did, getting kicked in the face by Jimmy for being a sniveling pansy, and Mike riding his bike out onto the drag racing course to give Jimmy a message from Lt. Anderson, before crashing his bike into a fence, the creepy little dingus steals the show.

This is the other feature on Something Weird’s Teenage Terror Drive-In Double Feature along with the rougher more gang-ish Teenage Gang Debs. Teen-Age Strangler starring Mike is the perfect chaser to all the deb action of the first film and will leave you debating with your friends which one of them showcased the worst song: This one’s ode to pin stripes or Teenage Gang Debs’ insane attempt to start a kung fu dance fad with “Black Belt.” Regardless of where you come out on that issue, Mike will surely end up being your favorite gang deb.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

Terry has just moved with her two square folks from Manhattan to whatever scurve part of the east coast it is where guys in leather jackets carry switch blades, hang out in restaurants, and gossip endlessly about what group of goofs rumbled with what other group of goofs the Saturday night before.

Back in Manhattan, Terry was the deb of the leader of the Golden Falcons, but then her parents had to move so now she’s looking to join the Rebels. Just how cool are you if you have switch gangs like changing schools every time your parents move? And why aren’t you living with the leader of the Golden Falcons anyway? You are his deb, aren’t you Terry?

Terry wastes little time making friends with the kids in her new school, I mean gang, once she sashays into their hangout and accepts Nino’s invitation to stay awhile. Johnny, the charisma-impaired leader of the Rebels immediately takes a liking to her much to the consternation of his current deb, Pigface (I think that’s what Terry called her anyway).

Johnny fires Pigface as his broad, but gang rules state that if some new deb wants to move in on some other deb’s old man, they have to settle it Rebel-style. Okay, all together now: CATFIGHT!

What follows is a rather silly affair involving these two rolling around the pool hall floor, pulling each other’s hair, wrestling, tearing up clothes, and even biting! It’s pretty much as funny as it sounds, but also demonstrates one of the movie’s more annoying traits. During scenes like this one, it’s like the scriptwriter and the editor decided that it would be a good time to take a breather.

Like the DJ who puts on “American Pie” late at night, so that he can go take a dump, the movie almost urges its audience to go off and make a sandwich during these lengthy interludes. There’s no dialogue or plot advancement during these sequences and you’re treated to more of the same during scenes of knife fights, rumbles, and most frightening of all, at the big dance. Clearly added to pad out the minimalistic story, these bits only serve as an unwelcome interruption to classic gang dialogue and the laughable schemes that Terry cooks up in her quest to become queen of Gangland, U.S.A.

Once Terry becomes Johnny’s deb, he demands that she let him carve his initials into her because he always marks his women. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, because that way if you happen to leave your deb laying around the clubhouse, you don’t have to worry about Nino mistakenly picking her up.

In spite of all the rights and privileges that go along with being the main squeeze of the Prez (including exclusive access to Johnny’s private room where he keeps trophies like different blades, a cheesy sign on the wall saying something about how great the Rebels are, and what looks to be a pair of black lace bloomers tacked up on the wall above the bed), Terry decides that her avenue towards greater powers lies with Nino.

Johnny is Nino’s best friend and is reluctant to succumb to Terry’s advances, but all thoughts of friendship and repercussions are tossed aside once Terry plays her trump card. That would of course be her asking Nino if he wasn’t man enough to handle her and Johnny. The next thing we know, Nino is in Johnny’s private suite making time with the First Lady of the Rebels!

It doesn’t take long for Johnny to wonder just what the devil is going in his trophy room and demands that Nino come out and explain himself. He does just that with a blade that Terry hands him from the trophy room. Oh, the irony! Betrayed by not only your own deb, but by one of your own blades! Oh, and by your best friend, too. Et tu, Nino?

Nino becomes the new Prez and Terry asserts herself as the power behind the throne by demanding that Nino’s old deb be taken to a back room and lined up for the rest of the guys in the gang. That should make her popular with the male contingent of the gang if not with the remaining debs. Terry provides some great lines during all this, going on about how Nino’s old deb was dirty and that she’s just a “crud.”

But Terry isn’t going to allow her second term as First Lady to be consumed by such administrative matters as disposing of the crud in the gang. She wants Nino to make a play for more territory and power, though she never is able to provide much of a reason for it. Her attempts to orchestrate a rumble with a rival gang as well as her setting up some other Rebels eventually lead to the sort of disaster that reminded me of the biblical saying “the cruds shall inherit the Earth.”

Fans of movies containing dated hood slang and hilarious dance crazes will no doubt want to join the Rebels for this particular DVD rumble. One song in particular (the catchy “Black Belt”) provides us with the best moments of the film when you get to see the Rebels do a dance that incorporates kung fu moves into it. I think you’ll agree that that was one pointless scene that didn’t go on nearly long enough.

This is another double feature, extra-loaded DVD from Something Weird, so even if Teenage Gang Debs by itself is fairly unremarkable, the fact that it’s also served up along with Teen-Age Strangler, a couple of shorts about VD and delinquents, trailers, and other stuff means that you will have little trouble getting plenty of gang bang for your buck.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

All of those things though are merely prelude to the scene that will be seared (against your will) into your memory later on: three hundred pounds of icky guy dressed only in a pair of white briefs holding an inflatable doll in one hand and a butcher knife in the other!

The Italian giallo is the sort of genre that’s practically designed from the get go to be over-the-top what with its enthusiastic melding of sex and violence and deliberately convoluted plotting that invariably sees everyone as a suspect until such time as the real killer dispatches them. (Though in the real good ones even that doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t do it.)

In the hands of a master like Dario Argento or Umberto Lenzi, these films can be shocking, surprising, and a marvel of visual storytelling. In the hands of the guy that made the zombie movie Burial Ground, these films can make you want to call in the hazmat team to disinfect your entire home once the first scene of a guy humping a gal in a spa he just met while shouting at his girlfriend to get lost has finished.

That Strip Nude For Your Killer should unerringly live up to its less-than-subtle title, shouldn’t come as a surprise considering that director Andrea Bianchi’s work in Burial Ground is chiefly remembered not for the dodgy zombie action, but for casting a midget in the role of a little kid and then having the midget try to breast feed off his “mom” before turning into a zombie and tearing a big chunk right out of her boobie!

I can’t say that the scene of the pig in his underpants with the doll and knife comes anywhere close to that as far as being considered part of the Bianchi film legacy, but this film does allows Bianchi to demonstrate his penchant for trashiness uninterrupted by anything approaching restraint or creativity.

You see, for all its sex and violence, Strip Nude For Your Killer is maddeningly bland. It’s the most generic giallo plot you can possibly imagine. A mysterious killer is slicing his/her way through the various employees at the local modeling agency. Everyone behaves suspiciously in an effort to simultaneously generate suspects and audience interest. Usually there isn’t any real reason for these people to be lying to the police, but how else are you going to keep things moving along for an hour and half, when you have zero plot otherwise?

Look, I know it’s easy to throw out the whole “no plot” complaint like it’s the critical equivalent of “Shazam!” or something, magically dismissing a movie without further effort, but seriously, in this movie we just watch someone get knifed every ten minutes or so and have the remaining characters react to it afterwards without doing anything about it.

The best Italian slasher movies are the ones where we get to watch the mystery unraveled as the movie progresses. Usually we’re following around some character who’s trying to get to the bottom of things before the killer can get his or her mitts on him or his girlfriend. For most of this movie, Carlo is too worried about banging anything on its hind legs to get out and look for clues.

We finally do learn that Carlo has a connection to the killer, but it’s the sort of connection that should motivate him to put this person out of action ASAP. As it is, everything is just explained in a perfunctory manner at the very end of the movie, all by Carlo who knew exactly what had happened as soon as he saw who the killer was. Oh, it’s you! Of course! You were out for revenge for blah, blah, blah.

And while I’m sure Bianchi thought the killer being decked out all in black leather complete with black tinted motorcycle helmet looked cool, how was the killer supposed to see anything when he/she is running around stabbing folks in the middle of the night? The reduced visibility probably came in real handy when stalking lard asses in their tightie whities though.

Unsympathetic leads, the derivative story elements (models, photographers, apparent clues spotted with a magnifying glass in some photo Carlo took), and a poorly developed killer (when the identity was revealed, my first reaction was “who the hell is that?”) all combine to only amplify the laughable overabundance of out-of-shape European skin as the filler it clearly is.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

Then again, who could have predicted that a homicidal maniac would have interrupted all the psychological counseling that the gardener was giving the resident nymphomaniac?

And really, with bug-eyed hunk Klaus Kinski on staff, how could anyone have ever thought that things might spiral down into a scuzzy morass of nurse-patient lesbian sex scenes?

Director Fernando Di Leo (The Violent Breed) explains during the interview provided on the Shriek Show DVD that contrary to popular belief, Klaus was not only a pleasure to work with for the one week he was on the set, but was also a big tipper!

That Klaus rarely appears in the movie and then manages to mutter only a few lines, and make googly eyes at one of his patients (and if you’ve seen his eyes, you’ll know that it literally is “googly eyes” with him) can probably be chalked up to him appearing in at least seven other movies during the year (1971) that this movie came out.

Lovers of the ladies though are the chief beneficiaries of Klaus’s busy schedule because in his stead, you get a ton of really long scenes of crazy chicks doing the stuff that crazy chicks are known to do: roll around naked on their bed.

This points out the big problem with this movie. Though it is advertised as a sleazy slasher movie, it turns out to be a sleazy movie with a little slashing thrown in to break up the all-girl sponge baths and greenhouse grindings that go on in this clinic for the chronically horny.

Those of you checking this film out hoping for a giallo-style film where people get knocked off by some depraved maniac perpetrating a typically obtuse revenge scheme are going to be sorely disappointed as Slaughter Hotel barely bothers with the cursory trappings of the genre.

Some people do get bumped off, there is a black gloved killer and once the killer is revealed, so is the killer’s motive. The way it’s all handled though makes it painfully obvious that the killings are merely the backdrop for the skin flick that Di Leo obviously really wanted to make.

Initially, it’s all kind of amusing. When no one is killed in the first third of the movie, you have to laugh at the number of scenes where people are lusting after each other what with a nurse being assigned to take care of a patient and immediately assuming that this means beginning an interracial lesbian relationship, the nympho banging the gardener, and Kinski’s patient hitting on him.

Suffice it to say, nothing of any great import goes on during all of this. There are some characters that make fleeting appearances by dropping off their hot to trot insane wives/girlfriends or visiting them, but they’re barely on screen long enough to even register. You do have a person in a dark cloak who periodically skulks here and there in the clinic, but he or she doesn’t get revved up until later on in the movie.

When the killer finally starts earning his/her screen time by whacking a nurse’s head off with a scythe, shooting a gal with an arrow, dumping a guy in the iron maiden, and taking a few whacks at a patient with his/her trusty axe, you’re wondering why this killer is interrupting your sex movie.

And you’re not wondering that because you want to get back to your sex movie so much as the killer is just slowing the ending of the whole pointless affair down. You see, Di Leo has this bad habit of letting his boring bedroom scenes go on way too long. There’s one sequence where this gal is taking a bath, then her nurse shows up to help her out, then after the bath she’s dancing around to her “native music” (it sounds a little bit like that music Pee Wee Herman dances to) then the nurse joins in, then they make out, and I’m figuring that if the killer was lingering anywhere around this, he or she probably dozed off.

Perhaps the folks putting the DVD together were likewise affected by this tedious scene since the soundtrack on the movie was completely botched once the killer finally strikes. Somehow, the dialogue from a few minutes later in the movie plays during one of the death scenes, thus ruining whatever minimal impact it might have had on an already sleepy audience, bludgeoned into semi-consciousness by the elevator porn music that accompanied the marathon bath/dance scene.

Everything is wrapped up in short order once the staff discovers all the dead people lying around and once the killer is unmasked and the motive revealed, it’s clear that all of this was just an afterthought and there was never any serious intent to have this be any sort of murder mystery. (Oddly enough, the movie’s most shocking outburst of violence occurs only after the killer is unmasked and is on the run from the cops.)

Slaughter Hotel is of interest only to those who like their early 1970s soft core porn interspersed with shots of chicks getting stabbed and slashed. Certainly as sleazy as it sounds, but quite disappointing in its almost complete neglect of its “killer on the loose” story line.

© 2010 MonsterHunter