Dead Heat

Dead Heat

United States - 1988

Director - Mark Goldblatt

New World Video, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Among the more bizarre buddy cop films, Dead Heat ranks pretty high up there. Although the plot itself, with a mad-scientist transplanting old people-souls into young people bodies, isn't all that exciting, the execution is pretty damned fun. Joe Piscopo and Treat Williams are at their knuckle chewing best as endlessly annoying and whiny buddy cops respectively. Who would have them any other way? Quite possibly one-upping the medical supply warehouse scene from Return of the Living Dead in which the butterflies and split-dogs are zombified, Dead Heat features a similar scene in a Chinese butcher shop
They don't make 'em like this any more.

Reform School Girls

Reform School Girls

United States - 1986

Director - Tom DeSimone

New World Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

You'll have to get you ass over to Paracinema if you wanna read my review of this puzzlingly popular 80's cult-favorite. If you're too lazy to read, I'm not sure what you're doing here, but I'll give you some posters as a consolation prize.

These posters are on loan from the fantastic Wrong Side of the Art

In 'N Out

In ‘N Out

United States/Mexico – 1984

Director – Ricardo Franco

New World Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 30 minutes

In 'N Out first came up here when I discovered a number of Mexican films about border crossing. The Spanish title, Gringo Mojado means more or less literally “white wetback”, and I got excited for something that contradicted “our” narrative of the border and gave some insight into that of our southern neighbors. The director’s Spanish surname further encourages this line of thought and I had high hopes.

It is honestly hard for me to say how much of the Mexican sentiment came through in this film because I haven’t seen many purely Mexican films. I would be willing to guess very little. For one thing it’s filmed in English indicating its intended audience. And secondly all the supporting characters (and at times the stars) conform to expected stereotypes. Despite the obvious assumption, it turns out the director is a Spaniard (a nephew of Jess Franco), and only one of the four producers is not United Statesian. Despite being outnumbered and facing an uphill battle this small Raza element does manage to ripple some otherwise placid waters.

The script itself is a thoroughly uninspired and confusing attempt at comedy but it has it’s moments. Rafael Inclan plays Nieves Blanco (“Snow White”), a mariachi who longs to immigrate to the U.S. in order to be a lounge singer, “the Mexican Dean Martin.” He lives in a small house with his sister Lupita (Mexican TV actress Rebecca Jones) a domestic worker who hates the U.S. and wants nothing to do with it. When Murray Lewis (Sam Bottoms, Apocalypse Now) goes to Mexico to track down a mysterious inheritance, he becomes friends with the Blanco siblings who mock his “woman’s” name, “Maria Luisa”. Throughout the rest of the film, Murray is accosted and harassed by Mexicans who make it abundantly clear that he is not welcome in their country.  At one point, he and Nieves get drunk marveling at the irony of their situation, and Murray suddenly realizes that Mexicans are Americans too. “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States, “ Nieves replies. Murray has to sneak back into Mexico a number of times and in the films greatest moment he and Lupita fall for each other and remain in Mexico, while Nieves, with a new passport and a new name, heads North to croon.


Many of these moments, couched as they are within an unchallenging narrative, simply pass by without comment or emphasis, as if they were accidental. Comedies rely on a large element of expectation and its fulfillment or un-fulfillment to exploit their humor, but In ‘N Out oftentimes fights against itself. If the script had stuck to either a comedic formula, or fully rejected it, it would have been less confused by its own meanderings, both literal and metaphorical. Still, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been both, but the moments of transgression are not played for their comedic potential, and the attempts at comedy thus have little to anchor them. My conclusion, is that despite its moments of transgression, In ‘N Out couldn’t be too challenging otherwise it might have been a message film, and lord knows there's no audience for that.

Deodato's Cut and Run and The Barbarians

Cut and Run

Italy - 1985

Director - Ruggero Deodato

New World Video, 1986, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 27 minutes

Director Ruggero Deodato is most famous of course for Cannibal Holocaust, his contribution to cannibal cinema and the fake documentary which many, including The Blair Witch Project copied to such success. But like many Italian exploitation directors of his time he was willing to do just about anything, including coat-tailing popular themes. His House At The Edge of The Park is a direct spin-off of Wes Craven's Last House On The Left, though more viscerally brutal, and Camping Terror AKA Body Count was a sad attempt to cash in on the slasher genre already waning by the time it came out..

But that's one of the things we should love about exploitation film, its attempts to replicate success. Here we have Cut and Run (aka Inferno in diretta) another cannibal film, this time stacked with exploitation workhorses Michael Berryman and Richard Lynch. The theme here attempts to deepen the intrigue of Deodato's prior cannibal films by drawing the jungle and the modern world together more closely, namely via some strange things called sympathetic characters, plot and narcotics. Much of Cut and Run is standard 80's intrigue, but nevertheless quite entertaining. This VHS tape unfortunately takes after its namesake and has at least three minutes cut. One nice thing about it however is the cover art by Chris Consani. I have been unable to find any sources that explicitly credit him with this art, but the signatures match, so I'm satisfied. Nor does Consani have website, Googling his name results in page after page of paintings of Humphrey Bogart, Elvis, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe playing pool. Well rendered, but, I just don't get the appeal. In any case, this is the only movie related artwork I can atribute to Consani, but there are several different versions.
The following two are UK sleeves from It's Only a Movie.co.uk and feature what appear to be alternate versions of the Consani artwork:

 

 The above version, while not quite as intimidating as the following, does feature the suspended Fran character (Lisa Blount) which ads a different sort of menace to the whole thing.

 

Furthermore, according to the book Cannibal Holocaust: The Savage Cinema of Ruggero Deodato, Cut and Run was originally titled Marimba and slated to be directed by Wes Craven. Obviously it didn't end up that way but as you can see above it does prominently star the unforgettable Michael Berryman who also glared out from the screen, posters and VHS boxes of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes parts 1 and 2 (1977 and 1985 respectively.) Deodato really has a thing for Wes Craven.

Deodato also re-hired both Berryman and Lynch for Barbarians, his entertaining last minute entry in the barbarian/fantasy craze that briefly swept the post-Conan 1980's.

 

Barbarians

Italy - 1987

Director - Ruggero Deodato

Media Home Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 28 minutes

Strangely this post began as a short write-up of this amazing VHS tape, but upon remembering my Cut and Run tape, I got sidetracked, so this is what you get. Suffice to say that Barbarians is pretty tongue-in-cheek funtastic as well, despite what should just be skull mashing stupidity. No matter what, ol' Ruggero hits his mark.

Cellar Dweller

Cellar Dweller

United States - 1987

Director- John Carl Beuchler

New World Video, 1988, VHS

Run time – 1 hour, 18 minutes

In the wake of the fairly successful film Creepshow written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, the 80’s hosted a short revival of interest in the horror comics of the 50’s and 60’s like Tales From the Crypt and Eerie. The idea of horror comics in film cropped up a few more times with varying success, but at the moment all I can think of are the Creepshow sequels, Cellar Dweller and Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (I think, whichever one had a comic artist character who dies right away). Anyway, the long sad death of horror film in the following decade put an end to that, and the reason I picked up this film is because I was flipping through an old issue of Fangoria which features the Cellar demon on the cover.

Jeffery Combs, star of Re-Animator shows up for a few minutes at the beginning of this one, enough time to doodle incomprehensibly over what looks like a Bernie Wrightson drawing and read some lines from a big dusty book. Behind him his own comic book monster materializes. Grabbing the axe which he drew on the wall, he battles the demon he has brought to life, and eventually sets it ablaze, leading to a very Re-animator knockoff title sequence with comic panels spinning across the screen in multi colored attempt to associate this low budget cheapie with respectable predecessors.

30 years later female cartoonist Whitney (Debrah Farentino) arrives at the same building now converted into the “Throckmorton Institute For the Arts”. As a child Whitney collected "Cellar Dweller” comics and idolizes their creator and artist Colin Childress (Combs character.) The covers of Cellar Dweller comic books are an obvious homage to those real horror comics. Unfortunately, the Institute is attended not by artists, but by really shitty fake artist stereotypes. An actor, abstract painter, performance artist and finally, “video” artist Amanda, (Whitney’s nemesis from a pre-film encounter) who all wander about without guidance ostensibly “doing” something off screen when they're not onscreen making fun of comic books. We assume anyway, lord knows there’s enough of Phillips crappy abstracts carefully positioned in each scene, he’s obviously got some free time when he’s not pawing Whitney’s smock. (see his amazing "Mullet Titty Chicken" to the right in the picture above)

Despite the house mothers warning Whitney moves into the basement, Childress’ old studio which after 30 years and the restoration and installation of a full fledged private art college upstairs (admittedly only 5 students), remains entirely untouched, undisturbed and, unlocked. Including Childress’ satanic tomes, which still lie right next to the drawing table. It’s amazing how all that evil toil was poured into making a big heavy book with a nice leather-bound cover and all those crinkly parchment pages when all anyone ever needs is the first two lines of page one to summon a host of demons. Reading that line, Whitney marvels at how interesting her idol was, what with all the Satanism and stuff, and isn’t it just so, I don’t know, interesting?

I suppose it's meant to let us know from the start that Whitney is not to be regarded as the “hot chick” of the movie, but decked out in her stiff grey linen, floor length dress she looks more like an escapee from a Spanish women in prison film. Though the performance artist (Miranda Wilson) does lather up before her pending demise, the first assumption was correct; don’t expect any soapy group fights.
For mocking her preferred media Whitney draws her fellow students (with the exception of Phillip) being eaten by a demon, or does she? Do the comic pages just draw themselves? As before, the fantasies come to life and are played out with minimal, if decent gore. Whitney discovers the mystery pages on her drawing table, and realizing she has caused the problem, splashes a little white-out on the drawings and then decides to draw all the other students back to life, which suddenly ends with a bunch of fire and screaming. So, I guess that didn’t work so well.

One gets the impression there was supposed to be a sequel, but unless you're counting the porn series I unwittingly discovered doing an image search of the title, that pretty much didn't work out well either.