Satan's Slave (1976)

A Norman J. Warren movie that is considerably more coherent, if a bit less loopy than Terror, Satan's Slave (a.k.a. "Evil Heritage") tells the mildly horrifying story of an old English estate where there are Satanic shenanigans going on.

We begin with a Satanic ritual going on, complete with a nude girl on an altar, a dude in a goat's head mask, and the promise of reincarnating a dead witch. Then, we're suddenly taken to a country estate, where an American cutie is being wooed by an English-type fellow, who suddenly turns into the Second Earl of Rapesbury and tries to have his way with her before smashing her head in a door. Yipes!

And now we're in a flat with the lovely Catherine (Candace Glendenning) and her boyfriend lying in bed. For the count, we've now seen three nude women in less than ten minutes. Not that I'm counting, of course. But she's cute. And young Catherine is leaving with her mum and dad to go visit her Uncle and cousin who she's never met, right around the same time as her birthday, and she's having weird premonitions about it- none of this should be seen as foreshadowing!

We expect the trip to go poorly and indeed it does as dad gets a sudden pain in the head that causes him to drive the car into a tree. As Catherine runs for help, the car explodes and she basically sees her parents burn to death. The Uncle Alexander (played with real aplomb by Michael Gough, who was Alfred in the Tim Burton Batman films) and her cousin Stephen (Martin Potter), who we've already seen smash the noodle of a bird he was trying to rape, along with Stephen's long-suffering wife (Barbara Kellerman), take Catherine in and try to get her to relax. Of course, seeing your parents burn to death before your eyes can be troubling, but no harm, no foul after all.

Unfortunately, our little drama queen starts having nightmares about naked witches being whipped by priests and naked girls on altars being fucked with crucifixes (okay, sexy nightmares), and starts thinking that all of this might have something to do with the deceased witch Camilla, to whom she is related. Some of this might sound familiar from Vertigo and the Blood Splattered Bride.

At any rate, the plot thickens as Catherine and Stephen, the Lord Douchemere, start doing the old rumpy pumpy and she develops feelings for him. She wants him to leave for London with her, in spite of there being no obvious chemistry between them, or between him and human beings. Also, there's her boyfriend back home, but luckily he's walked off a roof and gone splat unbeknownst to Catherine. Nevertheless, this is all clearly leading to a Satanic ritual climax of some sort, and it's not clear that she will realize this before it's all too late.

Warren does a good job of holding this all together, whilst indulging in his taste for graphic bloodletting and female nudity. It's not a particularly fast-paced movie and the midsection drags considerably, but there are a few creepy scenes and a nice twist ending. Since it's available in a Crown International boxset containing twelve movies for about six dollars, it's well worth picking up.

Sugar Hill (1974)

Holy shit! This is the 100th review on Rufus's House of Horrors!

Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, Sugar Hill is a highly memorable soul cinema take on the zombie genre with a pretty unbeatable premise: the mob killed her man, so she sent zombie hitmen after them! I'd been waiting to see this one for years, having owned the poster for over a decade. Finally, I got my dirty little hands on a bootleg edition (I know, I know, but I've yet to come across an official DVD release) and it did not disappoint, much.

The film begins with a fairly authentic-looking voodoo ceremony scored to a decent soul number entitled "Supernatural Voodoo Woman" with the haunting refrain, "She do voodoo on you!" The dance is being performed at a bar down somewhere in the Bayou. It's not exactly the Copacabana, but for some reason a bigwig named Mr. Morgan wants to buy it and has sent his goons in fairly outrageous suits to rough up the owner Langston. We can tell that Langston is a tough customer, in spite of his glitter tuxedo, and we can also tell he's in love with his woman Diana "Sugar" Hill (Marki Bey), who is pretty much from the Pam Grier school of Blacksploitation foxy mamas.

Sadly, she's not great at conveying sorrow as we soon discover when Langston runs afoul of the goons. Proving that their violence extends past the color schemes of their suits, they jump Langston in the parking lot and beat him to death. Sugar finds her man and emotes terribly. But, she's got more than bad emoting in mind- she wants revenge, which she gives away through foreshadowing dialogue to her ex-lover and current detective Valentine stating her desire to "watch them each die one by one, slowly."

What sort of revenge? you ask. Shit, you should have listened to the theme song! Sugar goes to the old voodoo woman Mama Maitresse, who conveniently lives in her family's run down mansion and calls for some voodoo helping. Mama asks Sugar the pertinent question, "How strong is your hate?" to which she replies, "As strong as my love was, my hate is stronger" and we're ready to go. Before you can say, "she do voodoo on you," Mama's conjured up the voodoo god (yeah, I don't know) Baron Samedi (which sounds an awful lot like... oh, crap!) and his zombie army, who all have grey skin and cool silver eyes and look like badass robots. Naturally, Sugar promises her soul in exchange for the zombies killing her enemies.

The Baron is played by Don Pedro Colley in top hat and tails and with a scenery-chewing sense of delight. The silver zombies are a cool bit of design, although they seem to be constantly covered in cobwebs, which is a bit distracting. Bey does a fairly good job in the title role; she's better at playing angry and badass than howling in despair. As is the norm in these movies, she sets about administering vengeance to the honkey jive ass crackers.

Morgan, the head cracker, drinks liquor and calls his underlings horrible things like "pigeon head". His racist trophy wife Celeste (Betty Ann Rees) hates Sugar and takes part in a hot girl fight with her that seems to have no bearing on the rest of the plot. I've never entirely understood why karate was so central to the blacksploitation genre, but, hey, who's complaining? The storyline is pretty much summed up by the poster- the mob took her man and now she's getting revenge with her zombie hitmen. Trust me- you know what you're getting with this one and Paul Maslansky's direction is fairly unobtrusive. There's little gore and no nudity, which is a pisser. It's one of the few 70s PG movies where the rating doesn't seem too far off.

But, you know, that's not much of a gripe. It's really hard to really dislike a movie with soul music, at least three actors taking part in a scenery-chewing competition, and a scene in which a mobster is menaced by a floating severed chicken foot. I'll keep the poster.

Prime Evil (1988)

My stomach dropped a bit when I saw this one was directed by Roberta Findlay; an exploitation old hand who went from making porn with her husband to horror with her husband to losing her husband in a tragic helicopter accident and then back to making porn and horror on her own until her death, Findlay has maybe one decent film to my mind: Tenement, which isn't exactly that decent. Admittedly, though, I haven't seen her entire body of work, so maybe there's a Juliet of the Spirits in there somewhere.

This aint it. This one has to do with some monks in the 1400s who decided to play for the other team and started worshiping Satan with the pretty lame promise that, for each relative they sacrificed, he'd give them 13 years of immortality- maybe nobody explained to them that "immortality" is supposed to last more than 13 years- anyway, they're still around and serving the Church, which must be really behind in its records not to notice. The leader of the Satanic Priest pack is Father Seatan (hammed up like crazy by William Beckwith) the sort of Priest who seriously would arouse suspicion, even if he weren't 600 years old. In a surprising plot twist, however, he seduces women who are neither prepubescent or male- the Church might look at this as progress.

Luckily, a few Catholics are on to him and they send a nun to infiltrate the devil cult, which is really, really easy- she just has to burn her habit, smash a porcelain Jesus with a hammer, and voila! it's smooth Satanic sailing! Then the question is whether she'll get the cops to stop the sacrifice in time or get pulled out of the cult too early- nuns being inexperienced at pulling out. The cops are idiots, frankly, one of whom uses sophisticated insults like "fart breath" to show he's been on the streets too long. As we know from many a hip hop song, the cold, hard, dirty city can turn anyone into a poopy head.

There's also this girl Alexa, who is the descendant of the cult and being seduced by Father Seatan. Played by Christine Moore, she does a decent job, which isn't easy with dialogue like a scene in which she explains that she doesn't like sex because her father's buddies used to take pictures of her in fake-sex poses with a little boy. Ewwww! She's unfortunately got a friend who's horny all the time and who has the best line of the film: "Don't cha wanna get poked?!?"

There's also a hulking moron stalking around and kidnapping women, and Satan himself, who is naturally a rubber puppet that looks cool enough that one assumes it was the entire justification for making the movie. Is there a justification for watching the movie? Well, the direction is workmanlike, Beckwith is fantastic in a Shatner sort of way, and the whole movie is funnier than it's intended to be, so yes!

Terror (1978)

Yeah, I know- I suck at blogging regularly. This is because I am lazy and booze makes me lazier.

Okay, 1978's Suspiria homage Terror is good bloody fun in a totally daft and illogical sort of way. But, let's be honest, Suspiria is also good bloody fun that's totally daft and illogical.

The film begins with an effective credit sequence featuring creepy pictures of people in pain and somewhat prog rock organ music. Then, bam, we get a mob of angry villagers with torches hunting down a woman and preparing to burn her as a witch. Before they can get that done, though, she screams, "Master, help thy servant!" and the lot of them get lit up instead. They finally get her burned up, but she shows up in a noblewoman's house, vows to curse her bloodline, and lops off her head!

And then we discover it was all a movie made by some 70s hip young people in the old house where it really happened. They're all English, so they call each other "dear" and "love" constantly, but otherwise they're the usual drug-taking, sexually promiscuous, ready-made victims. However, two of them were actually related to the cursed bloodline and the story was true. And the curse is real!

Before too long, Ann, a cute bird from that cursed line who's been hypnotized for a party trick picks up the sword and tries to carve up a fellow- sorry about that, love! And then another bird wandering in the woods gets a bit of the old stabby stabby and is left pinned to a tree. I suck at British slang as well as blogging.

What follows is a mild parody of the world of 70s filmmaking with a good amount of stalking and slashing. The slashing part is surprisingly gruesome and lovingly detailed; director Norman J. Warren was somewhat known for his love of the red stuff. And he uses it well here. The film is rather light on sex, but there is a nice bit with a "punk rock" stripper that sets the film firmly in 1978. There's also a mystery afoot because we don't know if Ann's bonkers and killing people, there's someone else doing so, or it really is the witch's curse.

Actually, I'm not entirely sure what was going on with all the bits in the movie. The film goes from supernatural mumbo jumbo to typical slasher film and then, suddenly, back to supernatural mumbo jumbo with everything in a sound-stage coming alive and attacking a character. There's also a woman stalked by a levitating car- seriously. All of this is great, but who was doing the stabbing? Why is the witch who shows up the same woman as the fictional movie-within-a-movie? What the fuck was going on with that levitating car? And, seriously, if this is a bloodline curse, why do all those people not related to the family get killed?

Dear God, No! (2011)

I guess we're stuck with these faux-grindhouse movies for a while- at least until someone figures out the formula for making a real exploitation movie that doesn't verge on homage/parody. I don't really know why it is, but these recent films never quite seem "real" to me. So far, Dear God No! is near the top of the heap- I enjoyed it quite a bit and almost as much as the (often unrecognized) originator of this sub-genre, Jim Van Bebber's The Manson Family. Exactly why I enjoyed it more than something like, say, Machete I couldn't say.

Basically, the film is about a biker gang that follows up the massacre of a bunch of nuns and a rival gang in a strip club with a home invasion that goes horribly wrong. It seems the homeowner is a mad scientist of some sort (former Nazi, of course) and has his horny, demonic wife locked up in the basement, whilst a bloodthirsty bigfoot is stalking the woods outside. One thing you've got to say about these faux-grindhousers: they tend to have great synopses!

One really nice thing about the film is that we can actually call it a film accurately; it was shot on 16 mm, which sure looks a hell of a lot more like a 70s movie than digital video. I also liked the There's also a refreshing lack of CGI and a nice healthy amount of nudity, which was weirdly lacking from the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature; back in the 70s seemingly everyone did a nude scene in film. There's also a nice lack of winks at the audience and genre in-jokes; god, I couldn't take another homage where the characters have names like "Savini" and "Carpenter"! Finally, there's a sort of gonzo, let's-throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks tone that reminds me much more of old John Waters than Troma, which is a big advantage over Hobo with a Shotgun.

Oddly enough, Dear God, No! also works better because it's meaner than cat dirt. There's something really vicious and anti-social about the film, from its disemboweled nuns to its used tampon alcoholic drinks. The filmmakers want to make us squirm, which undercuts the pleasant nostalgia that usually comes with these flicks. Admittedly, I probably could have done without the extended rape scene or the set piece with the pregnant woman getting her fetus cut out; and, yeah, there is a sort of laziness to how often the "shocks" involve a random woman getting brutalized for no apparent reason.

But, again, there's something refreshing about how mean-spirited the film is. Most of these faux grindhouse flicks come off as polite young men having a few yuks at how "politically incorrect" the old 70s movies were. This one seems like it was actually made by dementoids, and that makes a big difference.

The Delta Force (1986)

Conservatives who complain about “liberal Hollywood” and it’s “propaganda” tend to forget one big exception: every friggin action movie ever made takes a right wing position. It’s really hard to imagine Rambo fighting polluters or animal poachers or taking on sexism. Generally, the heroes are stymied by liberal politicians and finally get to solve problems the only way that works: blowing shit up.

The Delta Force is Golan-Globus’s contribution to the neoconservative cause from the Israeli point of view. Luckily, this doesn’t mean there are too many didactic speeches in the film. We’re here to see Chuck Norris kick ass and the Chucker doesn’t do big speeches.

Basically, it’s one of those airplane disaster movies from the 70s with 80s militarism. A plane flying from Greece and stocked with B-movie stars like George Kennedy and Shelley Winters gets hijacked by Beirut’s swarthiest terrorists, all of whom look like they came from the central casting for angry Arabs. At the head is scenery-chewer Robert Forster and the jist of their politics is that they really don’t like Jews. This leads to a fairly dramatic bit in which the German stewardess is forced to single out the Jewish passengers and Shelley Winters makes the message of the film clear by screaming that it’s the Holocaust all over again.

Won’t anybody do something to save them? Of course. The Delta Force is sent in to Beirut to get the hostages out. The leader of the squadron is the classic leader-of-the-squadron actor Lee Marvin and the real muscle of the group is the Chucker, who has come out of an early retirement caused by those damned politicians who screw everything up. Luckily, this time, they’re letting the heroes kick some ass and there are some great car chases, gun battles, and shit being blown up real good.

Unfortunately, the Delta Force is somewhat hamstrung by the plot necessities, which lead the first half to be the tense hostage-taking scenes that build up our resentment towards the terrorists. At least half the movie is a trouble-on-a-plane story and, while it’s all good and well, we’re here to see Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin kill people. The last hour, which involves a bunker siege and has some high-tech super motorcyles finally delivers the brainless goods, thank Chuck.

The Bronx Exterminator (1984)

What the fuck is this movie? The version I saw, The Bronx Exterminator, has totally different voiced-over dialogue and some quite different scenes than The Final Exterminator, as well as an entirely different plot, but damned if it doesn't have all the same actors and only gets credited as The Final Exterminator on imdb. So, who knows what this thing is! Here goes:

Now available in many a cheap DVD for sale at the finest gas stations, Bronx Executioner is yet another of those ridiculous Italian exploitation knock offs that we love so much here. In this case, it’s your basic post-apocalyptic crapola with a large dollop of Terminator on top.

As with so many Italian exploitation flicks of the era, the movie inexplicably starts in New York City where a new rookie cop Tremes is about to head into the wasteland of the Bronx to try and keep the humans and cyborgs from killing each other. His supervisor, played by exploitationer stalwart Woody Strode, explains that the cyborgs were defective models that have been left alive thanks to those damned politicians that screw things up in nearly every action flick. Left alive, the Bronx is now a cyborg reservation and the humans who live there fight the cyborgs regularly. The Bronx also, inexplicably, resembles the Italian countryside.

The head of the androids is Margie, a stock hot chick who wears revealing red leather outfits and says things like: “I only love death. Other people’s death, naturally”. Try putting that on a Hallmark card! There’s a big android dummy named Shark who is in love with her. And the humanoids are led by Dakar, another big dummy who emotes through Shakespearean lines like: “I’m gonna kill Margie. All my people are going to be killed. She’s a murderer. And she just hates us so damn much. Why?” The eternal question.

After a training montage in which Woody Strode basically beats up the kid and acts like a dick, he’s made the new sheriff in town. After this, Strode is out of the movie to bask in the glow of a job well done over probably two days of shooting. Dakar is searching for a girl who may or may not have died in the White Cliffs Massacre, a battle in which a bunch of Italians threw themselves down a hill while pretending to be shot. This gives Dakar some depth, or something, but she’s soon caught by the androids and suffers one of those exploitation flick rapes in which her shirt is ripped open and her tits exposed, but nobody’s pants come off before being shot.

After fighting in an old factory- because the Bronx before the apocalypse was full of factories, our heroes have to storm the android base- which looks exactly like an Italian villa- seriously, did the Italians just not know that the Bronx after the apocalypse would likely not come out looking exactly like southern Italy? Here, Margie hangs out watching the video of the girl getting raped and wanders around naked or in a sheer negligee, so there's a dollop of pointless sleaze to keep us from falling asleep.

Finally, at the end, we see a cyborg get his head knocked off, which is the only time that the cyborg plot makes any difference. In general, there is a shitload of amateur stunt scenes, not a lot of gore, and a tiny bit of sleaze. Probably best viewed drunk.