SUPPORTER WEEK: Brotherhood of the Bell (1970)

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Director Paul Wendkos (The Mephisto Waltz) was nominated by the Directors Guild of America for “outstanding directorial achievement in television” because of this film. It was written by David Karp, who also wrote the original novel. It had been made once before as an episode of Studio One in 1958.

A world premiere CBS Thursday Night Movie on September 17, 1970, this arrived just as the seventies began, a decade packed with conspiracy. Professor Andrew Patterson (Glenn Ford) is back at the College of St. George in San Francisco to watch a young man be initiated into the secret society that he joined there, the Brotherhood of the Bell.

After the ritual, one of the leaders — Chad Harmon (Dean Jagger) — gives Patterson an assignment. Stop Dr. Konstantin Horvathy (Eduard Franz) from accepting a deanship at a college of linguistics so that a brother can take that position. Harmon is to blackmail Horvathy with the names of the people who helped him defect. Patterson wonders if this is legal. He’s told that he should be happy this is all they’re asking of him.

The professor does what he is supposed to do and it caused Horvathy to kill himself. Patterson then does exactly what no brother should do and reveals the truth to his wife Vivian (Rosemary Forsyth) and his father-in-law Harry Masters (Maurice Evans). This causes the Federal Security Services (as conspiracy-filled as this movie is, it doesn’t named the FBI; the agent is played by Dabney Coleman) to get involves and his father-in-law to turn him into the Brotherhood and Patterson’s father Mike (Will Geer) gets ruined in the process, then has a stroke and dies. Patterson also loses his job, gets humiliated on a talk show by Bart Harris (William Conrad) and is at rock bottom when his former boss Dr. Jerry Fielder (William Smithers) and the man he saw initiated Philip Dunning (Robert Pine) both stand up for him.

Obviously, the makers of The Skulls watched this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

LIONSGATE UHD RELEASE: Young Guns (1988)

Believe it or not, historian Paul Hutton called Young Guns the most historically accurate of all Billy the Kid films. I mean, John Tunstall is depicted as an older  man while he was only 24 when he was murdered and younger than the Regulators. But still, despite combining some people, it’s close, or so they say.

Directed by Christopher Cain (The Principal and Dean Cain’s dad) and written by John Fusco (Crossroads), this film number one at the US box office and eventually grossed $56 million against an $11 million budget. It and it’s sequel were big deals — I mean, Bon Jovi did the theme song “Blaze of Glory” — but somehow, I never saw either.

Lincoln County, New Mexico. Cattleman John Tunstall (Terence Stamp) is trying to civilize the young wayward men in his employ who he calls the Regulators. They are Josiah Gordon “Doc” Scurlock (Kiefer Sutherland), Jose Chavez y Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips), Richard “Dick” Brewer (Charlie Sheen), Dirty” Steve Stephens (Dermot Mulroney), Charlie Bowdre (Casey Siemaszko) and William H. “Billy the Kid” Bonney (Emilio Estevez). He’s in a land war with another rancher, Lawrence Murphy (Jack Palance) and makes the mistakes of hiring one of his men, J. McCloskey (Geoffrey Blake), who sets up a trap to kill him. Lawyer Terry O’Quinn (Alexander McSween) deputizes them, except that Billy is too brutal and hot headed, leading them all to be called outlaws for killing plenty of Murphy’s hired guns.

He sends Buckshot Roberts (Brian Keith) after them and he succeeds in killing Doc and splintering the group, as Jose warns them all not to become lost in revenge, which is exactly what Billy goes on to do. It all leads to a huge battle where nearly everyone dies except Chavez, who makes it to California, Doc who marries Murphy’s mistress Yen Sun (Alice Carter), Alex’s widow Susan McSween (Susan Thomas) becomes a famous cattlewoman, Murphy gets arrested and Billy rides away, only to eventually be killed by Pat Garrett (Patrick Wayne, yes, John’s son) years later and buried next to Charlie.

You can see Tom Cruise get shot by Siemaszko at one point as well as Randy Travis shooting a Gatling gun. One of the guys who gets knifed is Jack Palance’s son Cody.

Somehow, Siemaszko never knew that Warren G and Nate Dogg sampled his dialogue for “Regulate.” “Regulators, We regulate any stealin’ of his property. We’re damn good too. But you can’t be any geek off the street. You gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean. Earn your keep. Regulators, mount up.”

The Lionsgate UHD of Wild Guns has audio commentary with Dermot Mulroney, Lou Diamond Phillips and Casey Siemaszko, a making of, a feature on Billy the Kid and trailers. You can get it from Diabolik DVD.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970)

In The Andy Warhol Diaries, Warhol wrote that the producer of this movie, Martin Poll, approached him about doing making his life story into a movie.Warhol responded that “a wonderful movie had already been made on the sixties, and he should just remake it — The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart.” He also said that it was “the quintessential, most truthful studio-made film about the ’60s counterculture.”

Directed by Leonard Horn (who sadly died young while shooting the pilot for Wonder Woman) and written by Robert T. Westbrook (he also wrote the book this was based on; his novels The Mexican, Insomnia and The Final Cut were also adapted into movies), this is the story of Stanley Sweetheart (Don Johnson), an aspiring filmmaker and college student at Columbia University. After the death of his father, he’s moved from Beverly Hills to New York City and is going from being a rich kid to one from a family slowly losing its money. He has no real friends, he’s bored with life and he lives in a dump.

The film goes into his many romances, like a hippie friend Barbara (Linda Gillen) who changes her name to Shayne. He has a one night stand with her, but really wants her roommate Andrea (Victoria Racimo). This is a major issue with Stanley, as whatever he has never seems good enough. Even when he scores with the virginal girl of his dreams, Cathy (Dianne Hull), he can’t help but either seduce or be seduced by her roommate Fran (Holly Near).

He also meets Danny (Michael Greer), an underground musician who once went to Julliard and who seems to have a worldly bit of advice to give. Or at least lead Stanley to the best parties. And taking his girl, who didn’t really want in the first place until she’s gone.

Stanley finds happiness with Andrea and Shayne as a triad family of sorts, but even that eventually can’t make him happy. Cathy sees him at a happening but he’s so high that he barely makes sense. The film ends with him leaving and Andrea telling him she needs him. The film leaves it up to you where he ends up, but it does show you that Danny shot himself behind his mother’s house right in front of her.

Speaking of Warhol, The New York Times reported that this movie would have Ultra Violet, Candy Darling (who actually does appear in a wordless cameo), Gerard Malanga, and Warhol as a “freaked-out psychiatrist” in its cast. One Warhol superstar did make it — almost — as Joe Dallesandro was originally cast as Danny. However, he was fired when for being late and causing trouble with the cast and crew.

This film is an interesting document of another time and not just because you can see the World Trade Center get built. It’s made at a time when Hollywood was trying to figure out how to get movies made for the counterculture and maybe not always understanding. The era of films avoiding sex and drugs was, obviously, over. It was a brief moment before blockbusters took over and films like this are vital moments out of a past that didn’t last long enough.

You can watch this on YouTube.

TUBI ORIGINAL: Killer Body Count (2024)

I usually say things like, “This was good for a Tubi Original,” but Killer Body Count is damn good for a slasher, much less one made in 2024.

Cami George (Cassiel Eatock-Winnik) gets caught making out — beyond that, engaging in mutual masturbation, which she initiates — with a boy in the storage room of her church. Her father blames the suicide death of her mother (Kira Wilkerson) for how she acts and Father Tim tells him that they will send her to the Beautiful Savior Treatment Center.

This place used to be a retreat for priests and a sleepaway camp where either mushrooms — or a young priest who went insane and decided to kill young fornicators — wiped out everyone staying there other than brother and sister Eugene (Bjorn Steinbach) and Tawny (Alex McGregor).  They’ve started this camp to help Catholic boys and girls to grow up with less sin in their heart and that means isolating the sexes, locking them in, throwing away their phones and teaching them Jehoga, which gets rid of all that weird Eastern psychology in yoga.

Cami is now pretty much a captive, living along with Chris, Rob (Ethan Sanders), Bree, Ali (Khosi Ngema), Wyatt (Savana Tardieu), Mia (N’kone Mametja), Bree (Jessie Diepeveen), Riley (Atara Leigh) ,Dan — who looks like Jesus if he drank kombucha — and Kevin (Adam Lennox) as they breathe, worship and commit to protecting themselves from their sexual urges.

Except that these are teenagers and they all just want to get laid, so they just keep on doing it, even if whoever orgasms seems to get killed by a devil-masked slasher who lives in the woods. Or a ghost. Or the priest, who has remained there ever since he massacred everyone so long ago.

This is a movie filled with great dialogue, such as “I saw a guy you fucked get murdered by a guy in a devil mask. I’m far from OK.” and “He was crushed to death. How is that an accident? God works in mysterious ways.” It also doesn’t forget that young people today are no longer constrained by heterosexual relationships and never shames them for having urges, even if that’s all that Tawny seems to do, including making Cami kneel on rocks or slicing a crucifix into Wyatt’s hand.

It’s hard to make a slasher in the post-Scream era yet this gets so much right. The kills look incredible, the villains have a great modus operandi even if it’s taken from so many giallo movies (no complaints) and the cast is uniformly attractive.

Director Danishka Esterhazy also made the remake of Slumber Party Massacre and The Banana Splits Movie. I enjoyed both of those, but I loved this. It was written by Jessica Landry, who also wrote the Tubi Original Obsessed to Death.

Slasher fans — don’t miss this one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TUBI ORIGINAL: A Stranger’s Child (2024)

Donna Fendyr (Jessica Lowndes, the newer version of 90210) wakes up in the hospital after a deadly car crash with amnesia, her husband Scott (Justin Lacey) dead and a baby named Cleo. Her brother Mason (Brad Harder) is helping her to adjust, but could she have kidnapped the child of Leon (Clayton James) and Amira (Zibby Allen)? Or is something even weirder happening?

This movie boasts a great villain in Leon, who switches back and forth from someone who seems to be looking for answers, just like Donna, to someone using her to kill his unfaithful wife.

Directed by Monika Mitchell and writer Helen Marsh also worked on Deadly Midwife and Deadly Invitations together. Here, they pretty much take a mystery — even to its lead — and make her wonder if the child belongs to her husband, making her deal with not just her grief but now anger that he was cheating on her.

So yes, some of this, you can see coming. Other parts of it surprised me. It’s very Lifetime — Tubi feels like the streaming heir to that network, even as I pay for the Lifetime Movie digital channel — but has that ever been something I didn’t want to watch? Lowndes is also quite good as the heroine.

The end of this movie, however, is ridiculous and makes me like it even more. We end up at a party at Donna’s house, the real parents of Cleo have been revealed and everyone is happy. Donna is excited because a man has agreed to fix her car in exchange for dating her and she opens the door to a POV shot, making us the man she has gotten to go along with this deal. Huh?

You can watch this on Tubi.

ARROW VIDEO UHD RELEASE: Dark Water (2002)

Honogurai mizu no soko kara (From the Depths of Dark Water) was directed by Hideo Nakata and written by Yoshihiro Nakamura and Kenichi Suzuki, based on the short story collection by Koji Suzuki. The actual story is Floating Water but they used the name of the book for the movie.

Yoshimi Matsubara (Hitomi Kuroki) is a single mother trying to see where life takes her next after her divorce. She gets a job as a proofreader and rents a cheap apartment where the roof always leaks. Meanwhile, her daughter Ikuko (Rio Kanno) has to start over again as well, attending a kindergarten close to their new apartment. A young girl named Mitsuko Kawai (Mirei Oguchi) disappeared from their building a year ago and in between keeping her ex-husband from kidnapping their daughter, Yoshimi starts seeing that girl, wearing a yellow raincoat and carrying a red bag.

She believes that the girl died in the water tower above their building and is the reason why everything floods. Yet when Mitsuko comes after her daughter, she has to make a choice to give up everything to save her.

This was the second movie by Sakata to be based on a novel by Suzuki. He previously directed Ring and the sequel Ring 2. As with most Japanese horror, there was an American remake directed by Walter Salles that had Jennifer Connelly in it. At least it has the same doomed ending.

The Arrow Video release of Dark Water has a 4K Ultra HD blu ray presentation in Dolby Vision, along with extras like interviews with director Hideo Nakata, author Koji Suzuki, cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi, actresses Hitomi Kuroki and Asami Mizukawa, and theme song artist Shikao Suga. There’s also a making of, trailers and TV commercials. All inside a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain with an illustrated collector’s booklet with writing on the film by David Kalat and Michael Gingold.

You can get Dark Water from MVD.

Tales from the Crypt S3 E9: Undertaking Palor (1991)

Directed by Michael Thou (who edited the Donner cut of Superman II, another EC adaption Two-Fisted Tales and Small Soldiers) and written by Ron Finley, this episode finds four boys — Aaron (Aron Eisenberg), Norm (Scott Fults), Jess (Jason Marsden) and Josh (Ke Huy Quan) — discover that the town’s pharmacist Nate Grundy (Graham Jarvis) and undertaker Sebastian Esbrook (John Glover) are murdering people and making money off their funerals.

“Quiet on the set! Deathly quiet. Fond felicitations, fiends and welcome to the Crypt. Tonight’s sordid saga is about a couple of kids with time to kill. See, they’re just dying to get into the horror movie business. And if they’re lucky, that’s exactly what’ll happen to ’em. Lights! Camera! Action!”

This episode is filled with Richard Donner moments, like the boys leaving a theater showing Radio Flyer and a poster for Lethal Weapon being up. It’s also quite like another of his films, The Goonies. There’s also an element of found footage in this as the kids try to capture the crimes on a video camera after Josh’s father is one of the victims of the scheme.

It’s based on the story “Undertaking Palor” from Tales From the Crypt #39. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Jack Davis.

You can also watch this narrated version of the original comic book.

B&S About Movies podcast episode 30: The Astrologer

We lived in a world where every movie is now easy to find. Except one. The Astrologer.

This is the story of that movie.

Download this movie from the Internet Archive.

Cited references:

https://matchboxcineclub.com/2018/04/17/who-is-the-astrologer/

https://younghollywood.com/scene/cinema-second-chances-the-astrologer-1975.html

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/the-astrologer/1975s-the-astrologer-is-the-greatest-cult-classic

You can listen to the show on Spotify.

The show is also available on Apple Podcasts, I Heart Radio, Amazon Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Evil Spirits (1991)

A shot in ten day film — in a falling to pieces old house that was also a home for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics and was also the setting for Haunting Fear, Spirits, Mind Twister and Witch Academy— this was directed by Gary Graver and written by Mikel Angel, who played Snake in The Black Six and also wrote Lady Cocoa, Psychic Killer, Grotesque and The Candy Tangerine Man. He’s also Willie in this.

It’s based on the real-life story of Dorthea Puente, a woman who ran a boarding house in Sacramento, CA when she wasn’t killing nine of her residents. In this film, Puente is Ella Purdy and she’s played by Karen Black, who I seemingly spend days in a row obsessing about as I watch her in direct to video and made for TV movies.

Ella speaks to her dead husband more than most people speak with their living spouses. She’s also taking social security checks in exchange for rent and when her boarders die — or get killed — she makes it seem as if they are still alive so she can keep the money rolling in.

A government agent named Potts (Arte Johnson in a role meant for Buck Henry) starts to see through her plan and wonders why these senior citizens are never seen in person. Those elders are made up of some pretty great actors: Martine Beswick as the medium Vanya, Virginia Mayo and Bert Remsen as society types the Wilsons , Deborah Lamb as Ella’s mute and always dancing daughter Tina, Michael Berryman as a writer who goes by Balzac and Angel as the drunken Wille. Even Hoke Howell, Robert Quarry and Yvette Vickers, who was the town tramp — I say that in the nicest of ways — in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and whose July 1959 Playboy Playmate of the Month centerfold was shot by Russ Meyer, show up.

Thanks to the incredible Schlock Pit, I learned that it was produced by Sidney Niekerk, who owned the adult video company Cal Vista.

This starts like a haunted house movie, has plenty of Psycho in it and then has a twist ending that I never saw coming. That’s success on a very low budget, something Graver always seemed able to perform admirably.

You can watch this on Tubi.

TWO NIGHTMARE THEATER MOVIES ON THE DIA DOUBLE FEATURE

This Saturday at 8 PM EST, join us on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube pages for two of the movies in the Nightmare Theater package (along with Marta, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch)

Up first is Klaus Kinski in Death Smiles On a Murderer, which was directed by Aristide Massaccesi, otherwise known by the name Joe D’Amato. You can watch it on Tubi.

Every week, we watch movies, discuss them and show their ad campaign. We also have a drink that goes with each film. Here’s the first one!

Cat Scratch Kinski

• 1.5 oz. vodka
• 1 oz. Jack Daniels
• 1 oz. Amaretto
• 4 oz. pineapple juice

1. Mix everything together in a glass with ice.
2. Make your eyes look crazy like Klaus and drink.

Our second movie is the Spanish giallo-esque film Murder Mansion. You can watch it on Tubi.

Here’s the recipe.

Mansión en la niebla (Mansion In the Fog) 

This drink takes some homework.

3 to 8 hours before you make the drink, take 2 lemons and 2 limes. Peel as much of the skin off as you can and save it in a sealable container. Add 3 tbsp. of sugar and let it sit.

• 2 oz. tequila
• 1.5 oz. cream of coconut
• 1 oz. half and half
• 1 oz. lime juice (you can use the limes you just peeled)
• Nutmeg
• Peel mix

1. Open your peel mix and pour in tequila. Shake until sugar dissolves and pour through a strainer into your blender.
2. Add cream of coconut, lime juice and ice (2 cups or so) into your blender and mix until it reaches a consistency you like. Top with nutmeg.

See you on Saturday!