Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

Okay, you can approach “No Retreat, No Surrender” in two ways. You can prepare for the kind of acting and storyline that will leave you with a sick feeling in your stomach (or, in my case, a huge grin and plenty of giggles), or go in with the mindset that there’s some cool action/fight choreography worth tolerating for such HORRIBLE performances, brainless dialogue, and putrid plot. I am making no excuses, people like me eat these jokers up, stuff like “Gymkata”, the crème de la crème of goofy, bad action movies, and “No Retreat, No Surrender” is right there beside it. I don’t know, you watch “American Ninja III” and maybe something like “No Retreat, No Surrender” is a masterpiece. These movies always look like they were made for twenty bucks with cameras that sat in hot warehouses baking for a period of time, the film stock worn and cheap. I like it just fine that way, as well as, the exhausting method of the editing and rapid fighting choreography, the way a fight has a different cam

I was writing this for the user comments of imdb, but it went overlong because I couldn't stop writing. I think I need to add photos but at this moment I have other horror films to watch on this particular Sunday. I just enjoy spending an afternoon with Dawn of the Dead. I think many consider the heavier alternate versions overlong, but I just consider them another worthwhile zombie experience. The review itself... The plot: America has fallen under an apocalyptic doom thanks to the dead eating on the living with two SWAT members, a helicopter pilot, and a news broadcasting station director “running”, hopping in a chopper, flying off for a place to get away from the threat of destruction, landing on a huge shopping mall, hermetically sealing themselves off from the world around them, until their new “home” is invaded by a traveling group of raiders who move from place to place to pillage and steal to survive. I finished watching the “extended version” and actually much prefer it to

Word of warning: I have added some nude photos so if you do not like seeing a beautiful woman naked leave this blog post now. Barbara Crampton (along with Rebecca DeMornay in Risky Business and Linnea Quigley in The Return of the Living Dead ) was one of the first women I desired sexually as a teenager introduced to nudity. A fantasy dream girl of mine, Crampton represented everything I have ever been attracted to. She could lose herself into the ‘girl next door’ or some ‘scientist’ in glasses (like From Beyond) part, roles which might hide the sex kitten underneath the disguise. I, however, have admired her willingness to “go all the way” in roles which demand a certain degree of courage. Let’s face it, naked, strapped to a gurney, with a severed head between your legs, I imagine it wasn’t easy performing in front of the camera in such a situation without a degree of reservation and reluctance. The character was violated in an absurd way unlike anything we had every seen at that time

***/**** I just had some random thoughts about Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2, and I haven’t added anything to my blog in a while. So what the fuck, might as well include them here, with some pictures. I included a nude photo of Wendy Lyon (I don’t imagine very many people stop by this blog anyway, so why not?). Well, if you are gonna rip off “Carrie”, “The Exorcist”, and “Nightmare on Elm Street” then do it right and “Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2” does just that. Wendy Lyon sure impressed me in showing that she could portray two specific characters and mimic Lisa Schrage to a tee. Speaking of Schrage, I relished her so much that I longed for her to be on screen so much longer than she actually was (so seductively sexy in a slutty way yet conveying a sense of menace if her ire is enflamed, you don’t want to cross this woman or scorn her in anyway, her wrath gets your ass killed). The film really is an effects movie, but Lyon’s locker room scene is easily the best sequence of the f

I've just hit a rut. I have lost my passion for movies it seems. I have still been churning out imdb user reviews, but mostly for television. Stuff like Tales from the Darkside, The Twilight Zone (both the 60 and 80s version), even Charlie's Angels. Doing these can be laborious, yet I have such a passion for writing, especially for entertainment, that I press on. Life has a tendency to drag us down, those who have this thriving creative energy inside that wants to express itself, and movies with television can be a sort of device to unleash such energies. I hope October produces that lost love that has been absent for a while. A return to the horror genre is what I desire, even if life has sucked away that joy I used to have.

* * * In the future, cybernetic beings are replacing humans with perfectly duplicated cyborgs which mimic human behavior and look the part. Oliver Grunner is an LA cop, Alex Raine, who is a human with cybernetic parts, who hunts terrorists for his department, under Commissioner Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson). What Alex doesn’t realize is that Farnsworth has been “replaced” with a state-of-the-art cybernetic recreation who is to lead a revolution with a plan to wipe out humankind. There are characters like Angie-liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), Max Impact (Merle Kennedy, who moves like a monkey), Jared (Marjorie Monaghan, a “good cyborg” and once Alex’s lover before he discovered she was in fact an “it”), and Julian (Deborah Shelton, Jared’s cybernetic ally whose naked body actually looks synthetic) who are trying to stop the evil cyborg’s from the planned human holocaust. The plot, with a lot of technical mumbo jumbo as dialogue to explain facets of the story play second fiddle to the non-stop

* * * * The city in Hobo with a Shotgun is a cesspool of crime and brutality because a powerful monster rules it. The citizenry of this hellhole are scared to death because “The Drake” is a crazed sadist who loves the fear his rule brings, with two sons (who dress in Starter jackets and wear ray bans mimicking 80s Tom Cruise; they also drive a car similar to the Delorean from Back to the Future, the closing song very much an 80s pop tune you might hear at the end of a song from that particular decade) who are just as ruthless as he is. These three laugh and celebrate when they destroy people and bask in the glory of their terror. The rugged pauper known as “Hobo” becomes fed up with the violence and horror that he sees on a daily basis, packs a shotgun he lifts from a store and starts ridding the streets of the vermin who have brought nothing but evil and cruelty to innocent people. Before the Hobo goes vigilante, he tries the right way. Slick, Drake’s volatile younger son, snaps a tee

* * * What I like about the Australian killer croc movie, Dark Age , is that the giant crocodile of this movie is not presented just as a dangerous animal, but as a god-like beast, the Aboriginals in the movie, always a spiritual culture with a shroud of mystery around them, further emphasizing the creature’s mythos. Numanwari is the Aboriginal name for the crocodile of Dark Age , a humongous specimen who seems to cooperate with the “blacks” while the “whites”—that is those who poach and kill crocs and are racist towards the Aboriginals—seem to irritate it quite a bit. John Jarrett is a crocodile conservationist who is at peace with the Aboriginals, good friends with the “blacks” while certain “whites”, such as a loathsome bastard named John Besser, treat his love for these animals with scorn. “No white fellow can kill Numanwari, we go now.” I did mention above that the Numanwari of this film seems to *cooperate* with Aboriginals, but this is somewhat of a misnomer, as evident in one h

* A South American scientist, experimenting on a gas capsule which will turn Americans into mindless zombies to control, has an island laboratory with test subjects. Four teenagers find the island while on a boating trip, stumbling upon zombies and the scientist, with a hulking slave named Ivan who obeys her every command and subdues the kids, imprisoning them. The teenagers’ friends and their local law enforcement will conduct a search for them. Producer/director Jerry Warren probably gathered together some actors and friends from the local Playhouse theater to star in this corny, no-budget horror/sci-fi schlock using mad science, mind-controlled human zombies, and the commie threat as themes for his movie. The “golly, gee whiz!” acting style, with all the heightened melodramatics, from the “teenagers” (they all look like they are in their twenties) can become tiresome, unless you get a kick out of these sorts of performances—instead of talking to each other, we get a lot of “loud”

* * Jade Cochran(Claire Brennan), a sexpot stuck in a dead-in job at some nondescript café in the middle of nowhere Texas, desires more out of life than her tired mama who had nine kids, didn’t graduate high school, worn out at 42, life unfulfilled, opportunities nil. Jade vows to herself in a monologue heard by her café owner slob(Claude Earl Jones, familiar to many because he was in lots of television and the made for tv horror classic, Dark Night of the Scarecrow ) that she will do whatever it takes—cheat and steal if she has to—in order to escape a mundane existence where expectations weren’t reached. “From here it’s all the way up.” Jude leaves her waitress job at the diner with designs on *higher livin’*, winding up waiting tables at the traveling carnival. Jade makes friends fast—the “ferris wheel foreman"(Lee Raymond), a stripper(Lynn Courtney), and specifically St. John(Bill McKinney, whose notoriety derives from making Ned Beatty squeal like a pig before raping him in th

* * ½ “Just remember what I said. I’m gonna kill ya..all three of ya.” “Butcher” Benton has a reason to be bitter and pissed off. Sentenced to die for his role in an armored truck heist, Benton burns to get revenge for those who framed him. While not completely innocent (he was part of a criminal gang, wanting $600,000 of the money caused the other two, including his attorney, to turn state’s evidence against him), Benton is sentenced to die, but knows where the money is and will not tell the one who orchestrated the job, Paul Lowe, swearing to get even with the three who sent him to the gas chamber, including “Squeamy” Ellis and Joe Marcelli. That money is somewhere and the police have given up on finding it, while Detective Richard, despite being reassigned, decides to continue working on the case during his off-duty hours. It was an armored car heist, Benton keeping all the money to himself, never relinquishing the whereabouts of that cache to those who were part of the gang. Eva

* * ½ Following Maniac , director William Lustig had crossed disturbing boundaries and shocked audiences with his repulsive psychopath and the human monster’s violent activities. It was violence made even more potent due to Tom Savini’s exceptional make-up which elaborated the explicit nature of the crimes. It was about smaller females caught by a real sick individual who unleashed the savage on them. How could he possibly follow up such a film whose notoriety continues to this day? Interesting enough, Vigilante has lingered in relative obscurity while Lustig’s Relentless with Judd Nelson has acquired a cult following over the years. Vigilante is a *message movie*, announcing to us that the police and other law enforcement aren’t successful in maintaining law and order; that the scum and lowlifes polluting the streets are alive, that it might take vigilantism for any sort of order to be restored. What makes this film so sickening and distasteful is what happens to Robert Forster’s w

* * * Lots of plot complications in this solid little Randolph Scott western. Sure Scott might've been considered an imitation western hero alongside John Wayne, but I haven't found a dull movie of his out of the bunch I've seen. In this film Scott portrays a charming roughneck engineer named Jeff Kincaid, hired to create a railroad system through a tough mountainous territory located near a small town named Carson City, his home town. Screen veteran Raymond Massey, as AJ Jack Davis, is the new villain Scott will have to contend with, the leader of a group of thieves known in the papers as the "Champagne Bandits", using an old mine as a front for his nefarious activities. What started out as robbing stagecoaches for loot results later in the murder of a driver carrying parts for an automatic drill to assist the railroad. Zeke(Don Beddoe), in charge of the Carson Clarion newspaper, discovers that Davis' partner in crime, Squires (James Millican), was the one re

* * To say that the Chief of Police, James A Sullivan, is intimidating would be an understatement—everyone who enters his office does so with hesitation, expecting to get their ass chewed out. He’s frustrated because of the criminal element in his city, and nobody on the force seems to know how to apprehend those responsible. The opening scene, after an edited series of events such as crime and the police pursuing suspects in the Big City are presented to us, has consecutive visits to the Sullivan’s office, almost everyone he has a bone to pick with. Whether it be an officer eyeing political office to steal his job (rubbing noses with the kind of people he despises), a policeman under his command unable to catch a murderer plaguing the streets, or his captain over the Vice squad, from Paris, who might be receiving inappropriate funds to support a lavish existence, each person poses an annoyance or aggravation which fuels his temper. Chief Sullivan understands that those under his comma

* * ½ We are introduced to a jerk-off troublemaker named Dickins who throws biology papers in the air after his exhausted teacher, Ms. Storm, asks the prick to file them once he has taken the tests from the other students. He’s part of a group of rejects, misfits who accept their unpopular reputations in school with pride and live it up much to the chagrin of the faculty and other students who find them obnoxious and burdensome. To disrupt and cause anarchy seem to be their mantra, and soon an ex-football player (who loses his girl to the star jock after quitting the team) is “commissioned” to join them. Jon-Jon has a bright future but is not exactly the kind who normally associates with Dickens kind of crowd, a bunch of loud, abrasive teens who yearn to raise hell while he has folks who expect great things out of him. Yet Jon-Jon decides to hang with them and this slasher film documents the repercussions. Dickens is obsessed with biology teacher Ms. Storm, particularly after see