Posts tagged Tim May

by Tim May

Weapons of Death is a great example of how to make a really fun martial arts movie without the benefit of an overwhelming presence like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Though the cover purports Eric Lee to be the lead of the film, Weapons of Death is a true ensemble. Every character gets a moment to be the star.

A San Francisco mob boss named Fong has his eyes set on the richest family in Chinatown. They’ve always refused to pay him protection money, so he hires a ragtag group of mercenaries led by the mysterious Bishop to kidnap the family’s teenage daughter Angela. Bishop works primarily with his own group, including the mysterious Carter (who’s black—it’s important), but Fong insists on sending his own henchman Chong along to make sure the job goes smoothly. When Carter seems somewhat inebriated, racist dick Chong remarks, “I wish this was an all Chinese operation.”

Throughout the early part of the film, we are also introduced to the aforementioned rich family, whose fortune seems to have been amassed through a mildly successful dojo. There’s the seemingly unnamed matriarch, swordsman extrodinaire Eric, archer David, family friend/getaway driver Josh, soon-to-be-kidnapping-victim Angela, and Angela’s 48 year old boyfriend Paul (played by director Paul Kyriazi).

When they all fail to prevent Bishop and his goons from kidnapping Angela, her mother wants to be “just as ruthless” as their enemies are going to be, so she calls Curt, a poor man’s Elliot Gould who also happens to be Angela’s deadbeat dad and Eric and David’s former stepdad. Eric’s not too pleased about this, basically giving him the whole you’re-not-my-real-dad bitch and moaning session when he arrives.

Meanwhile, Bishop’s getaway van breaks down in the dessert and Angela escapes. Bishop’s boys spread out looking for her, and before long, Fong suspects trouble and sends out his own men to find out what’s going on. Angela runs into a surprisingly skeezy and rapey biker gang, who gang up on her, clearly with dubious intentions. Thankfully, before they can violate the poor girl, she finds a surprise guardian angel in Carter, who intervenes and lays waste to the entire gang in short order. Carter, being the noble motherfucker he apparently is, lets her go and returns to Bishop to rethink his life.

While Carter is revealing himself to be a king, Angela’s family is still bickering back at the house, but at least they’re developing a good unlikely team dynamic. When they finally leave to look for Angela, Curt drops a fucking BOMB! He’s not Angela’s real father; Bishop is! Years earlier, Bishop had broken into their house and raped Angela’s mother. That fiend! With a newfound resolve, everyone marches into battle with Fong’s gang. There are so many great fight scenes throughout Weapons of Death’s climax your head will be knocked through the ceiling. Bishop VS. Carter! Eric VS. Chong! Curt VS. Fong! Everybody plays a part an get their own badass moment, even David the Archer and Josh the getaway driver, who basically steal Eric and Curt’s thunder at the end of the movie.

The VHS was released in a slipcase by Paragon Video Productions, though it was sadly missing their typical trailer reel (which generally featured Boarding House and The Witching, among others). The back cover engages in some light Brucesploitation with the tagline, “A New Decade… A New Legend” underneath a picture of a shirtless Eric, looking his most Bruce Lee-ish.

The movie was directed by Paul Kyriazi, who, aside from directing three other martial arts movies, is also known for writing a “motivational” seminar called How to Live the James Bond Lifestyle.

Weapons of Death is a wonderful martial arts movie with a simple, but effective story, some exciting twists and turns, and a cast that goes hard. This movie always surprises with its unpredictability and it surprised me by how much I enjoyed it.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)

by Tim May

At the beginning of Demon Wind, I figured I was in for a deadly combination: uninspired slasher mixed with a dreadfully boring Satanic cult movie. Thankfully, for the most part, I got a surprisingly engaging horror film which subtly subverted many of the clichés of both genres.

The film begins in 1931 with an old woman trying to defend her barn from something, presumably demons. She’s decked the place in Catholic imagery, plays a Protestant hymn, and throws down some Satanic floor decorations. The place is lined with crosses and pentagrams, but that can’t keep her husband, who seems to have turned into a demon, out of the barn. He foams from the mouth and grows fangs before killing the poor old woman. Somehow, this causes the barn to explode, and the central mystery of the film has been laid out.

We then cut of present day (1990), where a couple named Cory and Elaine are on their way to Cory’s grandparents’ barn (could it be? Obv) after the recent suicide of his father has left it in his possession. They get to a creepy gas station where a creepy old guy warns them not to go to the creepy barn. Then they meet up with a bunch of their friends in an adjacent restaurant (drink menu: beer, Coke, water, and goatsmilk). You’ve got jock douche Dell and his girlfriend Terri, dork Jack and his girlfriend Bonnie, and finally, my favorites, two goofball magicians named Stacy and Chuck (both guys, in case you were wondering) who make their grand entrance blasting “Ride of the Valkyries” and announcing their own arrival via loudspeaker. Dell is not a fan of these two. He even calls them “son of a bitchin’ idiots!” Then again, Chuck is Terri’s ex-boyfriend, so perhaps he has reason to hate.

Despite the creepy old guy’s warnings, the group heads for the barn. In a slight twist on convention, however, Cory and the gang are all well aware of and ready to face the horrors which lay in front of them. When they finally get there, all that’s left standing of the barn is the door, but stepping through the entrance still magically leads to an almost perfectly preserved interior. There’s even a fresh turkey waiting for them! When Elaine reads the Latin phrase (translating into “Now Satan Shall Walk”) scrawled across the wall, the barn begins to shake and knives begin to fly. The group runs screaming out of the house. Even though he saw it with his own eyes, Jack, of course, insists upon Scullying it up. Soon, a thick fog rolls in (could it be? A demon wind?!) and transports them into many different locations. They finally wind up at a graveyard, where three strange little girls appear out of nowhere. When Bonnie tries to find out if they’re okay, they turn her into a baby doll, then make her disappear. Her boyfriend, Jack, seems slightly irritated by this. In fact, no one seems too bothered by Bonnie’s possible passing. Chuck, in an act which illustrates a George Costanza level of self-involvement, immediately begins asking Terri if she’ll take him back, even if she’s with Dell now. Bad timing, sir.

They all decide to hide out in the barn, which has now apparently been deemed safe. The magic twins are on guard when they witness a topless woman outside attempting to lure them out. They aren’t fooled for a second by the demonic illusion, so Chuck and Stacy go outside and try to kick some demon ass. Sadly, both of them die, but not before a cool demon effect or two.

The group continues to get picked off until just Cory and Elaine are left. Just when all of the demons are ganging up on them, they get distracted by the words of Enders, a rogue preacher who devoted himself to Satan one hundred years ago. By sacrificing Bonnie’s soul, Enders opens the doors to hell and creates some sort of Mega Demon out of all of his smaller demon minions. Elaine reads some spell out of Cory’s grandmother’s diary, which somehow causes Cory to turn into one of the aliens from Alien Nation, surely the only way to defeat such an ancient evil.

The Mega Demon gives Cory a false vision which makes him believe the whole ordeal was a dream and that all of his friends are alive. When he realizes it’s bogus, Cory takes it to the next level and has Elaine read the final spell from the diary, which makes the Mega Demon burst into flame and spew animated orange splotches out of his torso.

That awesome ending is sadly amended with a nonsensical epilogue in which Cory and Elaine return to the gas station the old man was somehow revealed to be behind the whole thing. Still, Demon Wind is a fun movie with a solid cast, who engage in a surprising amount of quiet, character based scenes. The film’s primary flaw is actually its near-complete lack of sound effects. Doors are opened and guns are fired with nary a sound to be heard on the soundtrack. Its effects are particularly strong and tension is often built well. Demon Wind is a solid horror film, which, with a little tweaking, could probably have been a really good one.

The film was released in a slipcase by Prism, with an excellent cover and the only mildly clever, but still pretty funny tagline, “There’s something deadly in the air. It’ll blow you away.” It has yet to see a domestic DVD release, but it has been release, with a hideous cover, in the UK.

The whole film has been uploaded to YouTube.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)

by Tim May

There were sing-a-long tapes for almost everything in the early ’90s. I’m sure you all remember those hideous troll dolls (they still ironically litter most twentysomething ex-sorority beer sluts’ desks in offices across America), and at some point, one of the many companies who produced those dolls decided it was time to make them into puppets and do a sing-a-long tape.

Trollies Radio Show Sing-a-long takes on the format of a radio program on the cleverly named station WTROLL. The show’s DJ is literally named Rock ‘n’ Troll. He’s a doofus with the dumbest sunglasses ever who cracks lots of “jokes” or at least sentences with the cadence of jokes.

There’s also Rock ‘n’ Troll’s oafish sidekick Olaf who looks suspiciously like famed fat film critic Harry Knowles!!!!!! (!)

Much like, say, Turtle Tunes, Trollies Radio Show is mostly a series of music videos. ’80s and ’90s chidren’s entertainment did more to ravage the memory of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll than any other amount of public domain overuse, and this tape adds horrible renditions of “Wooly Bully” and “Doo Wah Diddy” to that tradition. WTROLL’s worst musical crime, however, is their performance of The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo.”

Two things piss me off about this: 1.) The Muppets already did about the best thing you could possibly do with “Kokomo” and 2.) “Kokomo” is a huge pile of shit.

Seriously, I have no idea how “Kokomo” became one of the Beach Boys’ (one of the greatest gifts to popular music) most iconic songs. Its simplistic, dopey melody and sacharrine, manufactured lyrics make me want to punch Mike Love in his smug face.

Look at him. Fuck that guy.

The tape almost commits a greater sin by making me sit through “Trollie” McFerin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” one of the few songs almost as insipid as “Kokomo.” This song grates the first time you hear it, but it reached a new level of scum when it was used as one of the songs that stupid singing trout novelty item sang. If you’re nostalgic for that piece of shit, kill yourself.

This program’s writers are happy to find as many ways to insert the word “troll” into everyday language, kind of like “smurf,” but without all the fun sexual tension between Smurfette and everyone else. One of the last songs performed on Rock ‘n’ Troll’s show is Troll Seeger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Troll,” one of the hosts “favorites,” because he’s a self-involved dick.

Trollies Radio Show Sing-a-long was released by Peter Pan Industries, who put out lots of dancing videos like Dance to Fitness and Livedancin’ USA, in addition to other Trollies tapes like Trollies Christmas Sing-a-long and Trollies All New Musical Adventure.

Sing-a-long tapes were always kind of lame, but they were especially lame when they had ugly puppets chirping bad covers of over-covered standards and tepid originals, all with the sole purpose of selling cheap toys out of the quarter machines in the K-Mart lobby.

The entire video is available on YouTube, starting above.

by Tim May

This is how you do a sex comedy/slasher! Nearly every woman in Rif Coogan’s The Invisible Maniac is naked at some point. The (admittedly dubious) anticipation which goes along with each reveal lends some fun to what could have been a relatively run-of-the-mill experience.

In a surprisingly effective opening credit sequence, a little dork named Kevin Dornwinkle is using his trusty telescope not to gaze at the boundless wonders of the universe, but rather those of the girl next door’s bosom. The scene is shot through the lens of the telescope, with the girl revealing more and more to li’l Kev during each interval between credits. When Kevin’s mother discovers her deviant of a son perving out with his 12^th birthday present, she forbids him from even thinking about girls. He’ll never become a scientist that way.

Twenty years later, and Kevin is indeed a professional scientist and is giving presentation at a conference about “molecular re-organization,” or invisibility. When he makes a failed attempt to use his invisibility serum on himself in front of the whole conference, he is laughed at and mocked by all of his colleagues (“I came all the way from Belgium for this?!” one of them offers in an American accent). This sets Kevin on a rampage. He kills four of his science friends and is sent to a prison for the criminally insane, which he quite easily breaks out of six months later.

Within a couple of weeks, Kevin secures a job at a high school teaching physics for summer school students under the alias “Dr. Kevin Smith.” After his first class, Kevin heads over to the gym to peep on the cheerleaders’ practice. Hmmm…

There’s your typical cast of high school dipshits—you’ve got dominant male monkey motherfuckers Chet and Gordon and their stupid girlfriends Bunny and Vicky, cheerleader April, uninteresting lackeys Bubba and Betty, and Miss Cello, the horny principal.

While he’s instilling young minds with the tenants of physics, Kevin is still moonlighting as a guy who creates invisibility serums. When he finally perfects the serum, the first thing he does is sneak into April’s bedroom to undress her while she’s asleep and kiss (that’s all it sounded like, anyway) her naked body. April’s a heavy sleeper, I guess.

All this time, Chet and his posse have been tormenting “Dr. Smith” by dropping their books all at once or trying to seduce him. Once a bucket of water is poured on his head, Kevin has had enough! So, he injects himself with a shitload of his serum and starts to pick off the students one by one (or two by two, as may be the case).

There are a lot of surprisingly good kills here—Bubba being force-fed a sandwich, Betty getting choked by a fire hose, Vicky’s electrocution by way of radio and shower. Kevin even pulls off a couple of decent Freddy-type lines, which could probably have slipped into a second draft of The Dream Child (my favorite: when he throws Gordon from the roof, Kevin quips, “Basic law of physics: What goes up, must come down!”).

It all comes down to Chet and Bunny. When Kevin runs out of serum and reappears to them, he cribs from everyone’s favorite wallcrawler and introduces himself saying, “’Tis I, your friendly neighborhood INVISIBLE MANIAC!” I love when the title of a movie is used contextually within the movie, especially if it’s that awesome.

The film was directed by “Rif Coogan,” or, more properly, Adam Rifkin, the director of Detroit Rock City and The Dark Backward. Rifkin has a gift for making propulsive, studio-style comedies with just enough personality to distinguish themselves. The movie features the porn star Savannah and the “scream queen” Melissa Moore, both of whom also starred in Sorority House Massacre II the same year (Moore also appears in the 1992 documentary Invasion of the Scream Queens).

The Invisible Maniac actually has a pretty great twist which I’m not gonna give away. Everyone reading this should seek this movie out. It’s a goofy, nudity-filled romp which kept me guessing until the very last shot.

The VHS was released in a slipcase by Republic Pictures Home Video, which mostly distributed library titles from the ‘30s/’40s/’50s independent film production company of the same name. It has yet to be released on DVD.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)

by Tim May

We’ve got a rare one for you today, folks! The obscure romantic dramedy Jerry Maguire is another overlooked film by generally overlooked filmmaker Cameron Crowe, whose other movies include the forgotten teen film Say Anything and the unfairly hated Almost Famous. He finally scored a massive hit last year with We Bought a Zoo, a film which will penetrate our culture for years to come.

Jerry Maguire stars Tom Cruise, the cult actor from Top Gun, as a sports agent who’s had it with all the dishonesty which comes with that seedy profession and writes a manifesto, in which he proposes a complete overhaul of the way his firm operates. This bit of hubris leads to his firing, but not before a lemonfaced single mother named Dorothy (played by Renee Zellweger) basically falls in love with him and his philosophy. When Jerry asks everyone in his office if anyone wants to come with him and form the ideal sports agency, only she accepts.

Jerry has other supporters, however. Rod (Cuba Gooding, Jr., whose career went nowhere but up after this film) is a wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals who wasn’t happy with the contract he had at Jerry’s old firm, so he decides to give Jerry’s new way of doing things a shot. He’s having trouble getting more clients, sadly, and on top of that, his fiancé Avery breaks up with him. You can see where this is going.

Jerry Maguire is ultimately a redemptive film. Jerry’s guilt over his industry’s shady dealings is healed by not only his articulation of all these problems in his manifesto, but also by his newfound love with Dorothy, his new friendship with Rod, and his new role as a father figure for Dorothy’s annoying kid.

This also a movie with a lot of would-be classic dialogue, if anybody had embraced it. Come on, America! “Show me the money!” “You complete me.” “You had me at ‘hello.’” Adopt these lines and run them into the ground in inappropriate everyday usage and hacky parody until they’re no longer effective in their original context! It’s what you do best.

There’s a lot to recommend about Jerry Maguire. It’s not as strong as Almost Famous or Say Anything, but it’s a good movie. I would recommend checking it out, but you’ll have a lot of trouble finding it. You can’t just go into any old thrift store and find thirty or forty copies all over the floor. This ain’t Tales from the Quadead Zone, bitch. Be jealous.

The VHS was released by Columbia Tri-Star Home Video, who also released many rare titles like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Men in Black.

(Source: vhshitfest.com)