Naked Vengeance (1985)

Naked Vengeance is a 1985 erotic thriller and we’re clearly in direct-to-video territory here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of 80s/90s direct-to-video movies are get fun. But then you see the dreaded words “directed by Cirio H. Santiago” in the credits and you know that this is going to be total schlock.

This is one of those movies that reeks of middle-class urbanites’ fear and loathing for working-class and rural Americans. It reflects their firm conviction that once you pass the city limits of a major burg such as L.A. everyone is an inbred low-life redneck thug. In this case it’s done in such a clumsy heavy-handed obvious way that it’s almost comical. But given that the director was a Filipino and the co-writer and producer was Indian maybe it just reflects an intense dislike for Americans.

Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli) is a former actress married to a rich L.A. businessman. He is killed trying to save a young woman who was being attacked in a parking lot.

Carla flees back to her rural home town to live with her parents. Maybe she’s seeking security but as soon as she arrives it’s obvious that she regards the town and everyone in it with a wealthy city-dweller’s contempt for small-town America, and they hate her for being from the city.

Within a day half the men in the town in the town have tried to rape her.

The sheriff is unsympathetic. He thinks she’s a snooty stuck-up city rich bitch.

Of course the men in the town get together to go to her house (or rather her parents’ house) to teach her a lesson while her parents are away for the weekend and it ends in horror and mayhem.

Carla ends up in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. Or so it appears. But maybe she’s not so catatonic. And maybe she’s out for revenge. Maybe she even has plans for getting her revenge.

Lots of mayhem ensues.

This is in many ways a very bad movie. It’s technically a bit slapdash. Santiago’s direction is fairly uninspired. Don’t expect any visual flourishes. It’s all done by the numbers.

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes. After the night of mayhem at Carla’s parents’ house we’re expected to believe that the cops could not find a single piece of forensic evidence even after half a dozen guys had run amok. And apparently it never occurred to the cops to have Carla physically examined.

When Carla starts wreaking vengeance her victims take no precautions even though they know that she intends to kill them one by one.

Deborah Tranelli isn’t too bad but apart from her the acting is breathtakingly awful. It doesn’t help that every character is no more than a standard type, with zero depth.

On the other hand the murder scenes as Carla stalks her victims are done reasonably well. Santiago wasn’t much of a director but violent action scenes were something he could do. There’s plenty of carnage and gallons of blood but there’s also some real energy here and even a certain amount of imagination. The speedboat scene and scene at the car repair shop are grisly but rather good.

There’s some nudity and the scene in which Carla is violated by the bad guys would require a whole raft of trigger warnings today. It is a confronting scene but it is necessary. We have to feel that Carla has some justification for her bloody campaign of revenge.

There’s an amusing homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie but I won’t spoil things by saying any more.

Naked Vengeance is sleazy and grimy but sleazy and grimy are not necessarily bad things. It’s a badly made movie with a very very thin script but with enough beer and popcorn you might get some fun out of it.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty good.

Santiago did manage to make one genuinely entertaining movie, the pleasingly crazed Firecracker (AKA Naked Fist, 1981).

Firing Line (1988)

Firing Line is a very cheap 1988 jungle war action movie. I’ve recently become interested in exploring Shannon Tweed’s filmography and her movies are not easy to find so when I saw this one on DVD I grabbed it. But this is definitely not a typical Shannon Tweed movie.

The setting is an unnamed Central American republic. An American Mark Hardin (Reb Brown) has been captured by government soldiers. We have no real idea who Mark Hardin is except for a brief hint that he may have been a mercenary. We know no idea why the government had him arrested and we never find out.

e don’t know anything about the government except that we seem to be expected to see them as the bad guys. There’s a tough hardbitten American guy working with the government. He might be an American military advisor ie he might be C.I.A. or he might be a mercenary. We’re never told.

He has some kind of connection with a cute blonde American girl, Sandra Spencer (Shannon Tweed). We don’t know who she is or where she came from or why she’s in Central America or how she came to know Mark Hardin. We never find out. The government is after her as well, but we never find out why.

Mark and Sandra join a rebel group in the jungle-covered hills. We never find out what cause the rebels are fighting for. We never find out why Mark Hardin joins them but we assume he was a mercenary working for the government and he had a falling out with them.

The rebels are attacked by government troops. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Mark helps the rebels to bust Montiero out of gaol. We never find out why Montiero was arrested or why it’s important to rescue him. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Then the rebels attack a military post. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Later the rebels try to capture the radio station, but the attack doesn’t seem to achieve anything apart from offering the opportunity for lots of shooting and explosions.

At one stage Mark and Sandra wander off into the woods for a bit of recreation. We get an unbelievably brief unbelievably tame totally passionless love scene.

Then there’s more action centred on a bridge, and more shooting and explosions.

I won’t tell you whether the good guys or the bad guys eventually win and to be honest you may not care very much.

There are two credited screenwriters but there’s nothing in this movie to suggest that it ever had what you might call an actual script. Or even an actual director. We don’t learn anything about the motivations of any of the characters. We don’t know why any of the events happen.

The acting is terrible. I’ve now seen four of Shannon Tweed’s movies and I think she’s quite a good actress (yes, really) but this is the weakest performance I’ve seen from her. It’s not her fault. Her part is horribly underwritten. Since Mark Hardin’s part is horribly underwritten as well it’s difficult for these two to get any chemistry going. Apart from their brief roll in the hay and a brief swimming scene we don’t have enough of an idea how they feel about each other. We don’t see any scenes of tenderness or playfulness between them. If we knew they were madly in love we’d be a bit more invested in the story.

This is a movie that desperately needed some nudity and sex not only to break the monotony but to convince us that there’s some real fire and passion between Mark and Sandra. And casting Shannon Tweed and not giving her any opportunity to be seductive and sexy is eccentric to say the least.

Another problem is that you have a cute blonde babe here but she’s never put into any real danger so Mark doesn’t get to do anything brave and heroic to rescue her. He also never seems in any real danger so we don’t get to see Sandra desperately worrying about her man’s safety.

The action scenes are lively and relentless although not terribly inspired. It’s like the same basic action scene endlessly repeated.

This really is a total zero of a movie.

But don’t let this put you off Shannon Tweed. Given a decent role she could be very effective and deliver some genuinely interesting performances. Check her out in Illicit Dreams and especially her delightfully twisted performance in the excellent A Woman Scorned.

Witchery (La casa 4, 1989)

Witchcraft (AKA La casa 4 AKA Witchery) is an Italian gothic horror movie shot in the United States in English. 

It was Fabrizio Laurenti’s first feature film as director. The producer was Joe D’Amato.

The setting is an old abandoned hotel on an island in Massachusetts, about 50 miles from Boston. Leslie (Leslie Cumming) is there to research a book on witchcraft. She is there with her photographer boyfriend Gary (David Hasselhoff). Linda is a virgin. That’s not Gary’s fault. Lord knows he’s tried his best but Linda won’t play ball.

They forget to ask permission to visit the island.

A rich middle-aged couple, Rose and Freddie Brooks, have just bought the island. They’ve hired architect Linda Sullivan (Catherine Hickland) to restore the place. They arrive on the island along with their pregnant daughter Jane (Linda Blair), Jane’s young nephew Tommy and a real estate agent. The fact that Jane is pregnant will also become important later.

What they don’t know is that living in the hotel is an ageing witch, an ageing witch known only as the Lady In Black (Hildegard Knef). She’s a super-evil witch and she has big plans.

The witch is opening portals. Jane falls through one, witnesses horrifying scenes of torture, but is then returned to reality. The witch has other plans for her. Rose Brooks falls through another portal. She is not so lucky.

Meanwhile Linda and the young estate agent have grown bored and have retired upstairs for some bedroom shenanigans.

The witch seems to be picking these people off one by one, in ways that seem appropriate to her given their sins.

Of course you won’t be surprised to learn that these unlucky people are stranded on the island. Yes, the telephones lines are down and their boat has vanished.

This is a gruesome movie with some definite gross-out moments and some nasty torture scenes. It doesn’t really need to rely on these since it has an unoriginal but perfectly serviceable premise, a superb location, some very fine creepy atmosphere and some good suspense.

The cast is quite OK. I’ve always liked Linda Blair. David Hasselhoff as always has plenty of charm. They’re by far the most effective members of the cast.

One amusing touch is that we’re told that the locals are a superstitious lot. They’re simple fisher-folk. Typical gothic horror movie ignorant peasants in fact. But this is Massachusetts in the late 80s.

The hotel is truly wonderful. This is not a typical gothic horror crumbling medieval castle but the hotel is very spooky and very gothic in a distinctively American Gothic way. And while Laurenti may not be a great director he knows how to use this location to best effect.

This is, to be brutally honest, a pretty bad movie. But it does have some interestingly oddball touches and a fine sense of evil and menace. The pacing is brisk enough.

The whole opening of the portal thing is a bit hard to follow but it’s one of the oddball touches that I like about this movie. The supernatural is not supposed to be rational!

The bathtub and fireplace scenes are memorable.

This movie is obviously in the witchcraft and devil-worship in the modern world mould. It has some slight affinities to the 70s/70s folk horror moves such as The Wicker Man and the excellent 1966 Eye of the Devil but it can also been seen as a kind of Exorcist rip-off, with hints of an Omen rip-off. It’s weird in ways that are unnecessary and make no sense and that makes it fun in spite of its faults. Recommended.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray looks very nice. I believe that there’s a US Blu-Ray release from Shout! Factory.

The Howling (1981)

Joe Dante’s The Howling was released in 1981.

The 80s was a mini-golden age of werewolf movies. It’s not hard to see why. There had been great werewolf movies in the past (The Wolf Man, Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf) but the problem had aways been that the look of the werewolves was so disappointing. They looked like guys who were just badly in need of a haircut and a shave. During the gothic horror boom of the 60s and early 70s werewolves were largely ignored. They would have looked too lame.

But by the 80s practical effects and makeup effects had become incredibly sophisticated. This was before CGI. CGI wasn’t needed. By the 80s old school effects could produce a genuinely convincing and terrifying werewolf. The result was movies like An American Werewolf in London (1980), The Company of Wolves (1984) and later, in the 90s, Wolf. And The Howling.

Interestingly enough werewolf movies would soon once more disappear into oblivion. Werewolves are the kinds of creatures that are always going to look lame done with CGI. CGI cannot capture that visceral feel that 80s special effects achieved so well. In The Howling you can almost smell the musky wild animal scent of the werewolves.

The Howling starts off as a scuzzy crime thriller. Newsreader Karen White (Dee Wallace) is helping the police to catch a psycho killer. He’s a media-obsessed psycho killer so he’s made contact with her. They arrange a meeting. Karen will be safe. The cops will be watching. Of course the cops, being cops, make an unholy mess of things. Karen finds herself trapped in an adult bookstore with a crazed killer. She is lucky to escape alive. The killer is gunned down by the cops.

The police have been getting advice from renowned psychiatrist Dr George Waggner (Patrick Macnee). You have to remember that this was the 80s, when people still took psychiatrists and the media seriously.

Karen is badly shaken up. Dr Waggner advises her to go his therapeutic retreat, The Colony. Her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) can accompany her. It’s in the middle of the wilderness. Karen is sceptical. Like any sane person she knows that the countryside is much more dangerous than the city.

The Colony is full of weirdos, perverts, burned-out hippies, drunks, druggies and assorted losers. Karen is not very happy. She’s even less happy when she sets eyes on Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks) and we can’t blame her. One look at Marsha and you know she’s a sexy dangerous bad girl who’s probably a firecracker in bed. Karen is not reassured when she’s told that Marsha is being treated by Dr Waggner for nymphomania.

And Marsha is already casting lustful glances at Karen’s husband. Karen suspects that Marsha will soon be tearing BiIl’s trousers off and that he probably won’t put up much resistance.

Meanwhile Karen’s media friends Chris and Terry have been finding out some disturbing things relating to that now deceased psycho killer.

And that’s before Karen finds out that the woods around The Colony are crawling with werewolves.

This was a fairly low-budget movie (made for $1.1 million dollars). When it was completed Dante realised that the special effects were hopelessly inadequate but luckily was able to pry some more money out of the backers and do some reshoots. The final results are quite impressive.

It’s an example of good low-budget filmmaking. If you only have one werewolf suit but you know what you’re doing you can convince the audience that there are lots of werewolves.

The gore level is moderate.

There’s only one sex scene and it’s great - it convinces us that this man and woman are no longer bound by civilised restraints. They’re werewolves and they’re coupling like wild animals.

The acting is mostly good. I liked Patrick Macnee. He’s playing a psychiatrist so he’s supposed to be weird and creepy, and he leaves us guessing as to whether this is just a regular creepy psychiatrist or a totally evil one.

Elisabeth Brooks as Marsha is not just mysterious, dangerous and sexy but also gives off some seriously wild vibes. She’s like a she-cat on heat. And she looks terrific.

The most interesting thing about his movie is how long it take for the werewolf elements to kick in. First it makes us think it’s a gritty sleazy urban crime drama, then it makes us think it’s a psychos in the woods movie. Don’t worry. Once the werewolf thing gets going there’s plenty of it.

The best thing is that this really feels like a drive-movie. In the best possible way. The Howling is highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

The first of the sequels, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, has little connection to the first film but it’s great cinema trash.

Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

Runaway (1984)

Runaway is a 1984 science fiction film written and directed by Michael Crichton and, as he did in his classic Westworld, he’s once again dealing with robots running amok.

The setting is a world in which robots are everywhere. They do everything for us. They have not only taken over many jobs they also run our homes, cook dinner for us, look after our kids. What’s interesting is that there’s no attempt to give the movie a futuristic look. This is just the world of the 80s, but with lots of robots.

It’s quite possible that this movie would have had a bigger commercial impact if Crichton had had the kind of budget Ridley Scott had on Blade Runner and could have given us an uber-cool cyberpunk world. But perhaps that’s not what Crichton would have wanted. He’s more interested in the ideas than the visuals. He thought of himself as a writer of techno-thrillers rather than science fiction.

And this really is essentially a techno-thriller. The robots are not hyper-futuristic. They’re the sorts of industrial and domestic robots that seemed likely to be available in the very near future. They’re not humanoid. They look like mobile fax machines or advanced vacuum cleaners. They either look boring and innocuous or they look cute. That’s what makes them creepy and scary. They look harmless until they start trying to kill you.

But moviegoers want science fiction movies that look like science fiction movies. They want either spaceships or futuristic cityscapes (as in Logan’s Run and Blade Runner). They want uber-cool robots, like the Terminator ones. They want sci-fi coolness. Runaway doesn’t offer that. It’s a cop thriller with robots.

I like the lack of the obvious sci-fi trappings but audiences didn’t. Runaway flopped at the box office.

Sergeant Ramsey (Tom Selleck) is a cop and he’s on the squad that deals with malfunctioning robots. The Runaway Squad. This is a world in which robots are ubiquitous and everybody relies on them but the damned things just don’t work properly. Sometimes when they malfunction it’s inconvenient. Sometimes when they malfunction they kill people. And it’s a world in which people just seem to take all this for granted.

In other words it’s like today’s world. Total reliance on very cool technology that works some of the time. And can at any time decide to kill you.

Ramsey has one small problem - he suffers badly from vertigo. As you might expect the plot keeps requiring him to be in scary high places.

Ramsey has a new partner, Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes). She has a crush on him almost from the start.

A very ordinary domestic robot has just started chopping people up. The owner assures Ramsey that the robot has not been modified in any way (robots tend to turn dangerous when people try to modify them). But someone had definitely modified this robot. There’s a chip there that shouldn’t be there and the police experts don’t know what it does. But whatever it does is probably bad.

It becomes obvious that there’s a super-villain involved. His name is Luther and he’s played by Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Frontman for the band KISS. He may not be the world’s greatest actor but he knows how to ooze crazed evilness.

Ramsey gets a break. He has Luther’s girl in custody. Her name is Jackie (Kirstie Alley). She knows something. She’s definitely a femme fatale type, she knows something important and Luther wants her back and not just because she’s a doll. She has something he needs. If Ramsey can find out what it is he’ll be ahead of the game but his problem is that Luther is a tech genius, he can hack into any system and he knows everything that Ramsey is doing.

Selleck is very good. It’s a much more low-key than in Magnum, P.I. - he’s a nice guy but a bit on the serious side. Kirstie Alley is fun as the sexy bad girl. Cynthia Rhodes is likeable. Gene Simmons is good but Luther’s limitation as a super-villain is that his plans are not particularly grandiose.

This was 1984 so the special effects are old school. Despite the robots this is not a movie that relies heavily on effects.

I like Runaway quite a bit for what it is - a low-key techno-thriller. Recommended.

The 101 Films Blu-Ray looks very good. There’s an audio commentary but it’s probably best to skip it.

Dune (1984)

Several attempts have been made to adapt Frank Herbert’s novel Dune to both the big and small screen. David Lynch’s 1984 version remains the most controversial, and the most interesting. Critics hated it and it tanked at the box office.

In my experience it seems that people who loved Frank Herbert’s original novel tend to hate the David Lynch movie, and people who disliked the novel tend to enjoy Lynch’s movie. I personally disliked the novel so I guess it was always likely that I’d enjoy the movie. The novel is a hodge-podge of all the craziest and silliest ideas of the 1960s. Only a madman could turn it into a movie. Luckily David Lynch is indeed a madman.

This is of course High Fantasy, not science fiction. It has antigravity, which is magic. The Bene Gesserit sisterhood are witches. The guild navigators use magic to travel through space. Spice is a magical substance.This far future society is a feudal society. The epic power struggle at the centre of the plot is the kind of power struggle between powerful aristocratic families that is straight out of the Middle Ages. All of the science fiction elements are pure magic.

The futuristic setting is mostly an excuse for the production designers and costume designers to go totally nuts and create a bizarre insane aesthetic. That aesthetic works for me. Maybe Blade Runner is the most visually impressive science fiction movie ever made but in its own deranged way Dune is just as extraordinary. There are hints of ancient Egypt and Minoan Crete but also some Buck Rogers influence. It’s an aesthetic drawn from multiple times and sources but it forms a coherent whole. It’s futuristic and it’s retro.

It’s important to remember that Frank Herbert’s novel was written in 1965. It was heavily influenced by the emerging drug culture, and by the growing interest in the occult, esoteric philosophy, alternative religions and hippie-dippie mysticism. Herbert threw huge amounts of this kind of nonsense into the novel. Lynch at least makes those elements fun.

I don’t think Lynch was particularly interested in finding good actors. He wanted actors with the right vibe. Kyle MacLachlan is not exactly a great actor but playing a young man who doesn’t really understand what is going on is the sort of thing he did well.

Siân Phillips really was a great actress and her specialty was playing dangerous powerful scheming women. As the head Bene Gesserit witch, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, she’s an absolute joy. Sting has only a bit part. He was presumably given this part so that he could be featured on the posters. He certainly wasn’t cast for his acting ability.

The plot involves a power struggle between House Atreides and House Harkonnen, with the Emperor pulling strings in the background and with the Bene Gesserit pursuing their own agenda.

Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) has a Destiny. He is some sort of Chosen One. Again, this is pure High Fantasy stuff.

The key to absolute power is control of the spice, found only on a single planet. House Atreides has wrested control of this planet from House Harkonnen. The Baron Harkonnen wants revenge, and wants control of the spice. The Harkonnen will fight to regain control of the planet. The odds seem to be stacked against House Atreides, they have a traitor in their midst, they suffer disaster. Paul can retrieve the situation only by accessing the powers he has as the chosen one. Accessing those powers may kill him but he has no choice. The power struggle is important but the real story is Paul’s attempt to achieve his Destiny.

The Harkonnen are obvious bad guys. That makes the Atreides the good guys. In theory anyway. It is worth pointing out however that Paul is also seeking absolute power. And he’s pretty ruthless. He’s not just a charismatic leader. He is a kind of messiah, foretold by prophecy. If Paul comes out on top that will be a good thing, as long as you accept that it’s a good thing for one man to have absolute power.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration but without it the movie would have needed lengthy expository dialogue scenes. That would have made it more like a straightforward science fiction movie. On balance the voiceover narration is a better fit for this movie. It also gives us more of a sense of characters driven by Destiny.

Lynch seems to have been attracted by the idea of filming Dune specifically because it’s not science fiction. He was not trying to make a science fiction film. The fact that all the pseudoscience is in practice nothing more than magic didn’t bother him at all.

One thing that distinguishes Dune from the average space opera is that it does not deal with a fictional futuristic culture. It deals with four totally separate fictional futuristic cultures. Each of the four planets involved in the story has its own entirely distinctive culture. Which requires an entirely distinctive aesthetic. And each of these cultures really does feel like a coherent culture.

It’s the visuals that stand out. They’re stunning. The production design and the costumes are extraordinary. And this is pre-CGI so the effects really do look cool.

And this a David Lynch movie. If you’re desperately trying to figure out what it actually means then you’re missing the point. That’s like trying to figure out what a dream means, or what an acid trip means, or what it means when you have a high fever and you’re delirious. You just sit back and experience this movie.

This was a Dino De Laurentiis production and one thing you have to say about Dino is that he was willing to back wild crazy projects. Without him there would have been no Barbarella, no Conan the Barbarian, no Flash Gordon. It’s unlikely that anyone else would have let David Lynch loose on a project like Dune, with a huge budget to play with.

Dune is a wild crazy ride but I enjoyed every minute of it. I love this movie. Very highly recommended. And it looks wonderful on Blu-Ray.

Blue Velvet (1986)

I didn’t like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet the first time I saw it. That was a long time ago, I’m now more accustomed to his work and I’m now much more open to unconventional filmmaking. Also, the first time you watch a movie you focus on the story. When you watch it again you focus on how the story is told. And on the style.

So I figured it was time to give Blue Velvet another shot.

I can now see so many things to admire in this movie. I’m still not entirely sure about it, but that’s the way David Lynch’s movies are. If you think you understand one of his movies that’s a sure sign that you don’t understand it.

I do love that opening sequence. It tells us what we need to know. We have left the real world. We are now in David Lynch’s world. And it does this cleverly and subtly. Everything about the town of Lumberton is wrong. Just slightly wrong, but still wrong. This is like reality, but shifted off-kilter. At first you think Lynch is aiming at satire but that is not his agenda. He’s pulling the ground from underneath us. From now on we cannot assume that anything we see is to be taken at face value.

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a normal high school kid. Like everything else in Lumberton he’s so normal as to be disturbingly abnormal.

He finds an ear. A human ear. In a field. He takes it to the cops, to Detective Williams (George Dickerson). Jeffrey figures he’s stumbled upon a murder.

He meets a sweet girl, Sandy (Laura Dern). She’s so sweet as to be pathological. She’s the daughter of Detective Williams. She has overheard something that suggests that this case has something to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey and Sandy decide to play amateur detective.

The fact that this clue was something Sandy overheard is significant. Jeffrey is playing detective but he’s like someone trying to make sense of a play but he’s only seen a brief brief scenes, and who then ends up becoming part of the play. But he doesn’t know what the play is about, he doesn’t know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy or a romance or a murder mystery. And he doesn’t know if he has walked in in the middle of the first act or the middle of the third act. He doesn’t know if the other characters are heroes or villains.

The audience of course is in the same boat. We don’t know at first what kind of movie this. When we get to the end, we still don’t know. But we’ve had a wild ride.

There’s a definite interest in voyeurism here, but to an even greater extent than in other notable movies about voyeurism this is voyeurism in which everything seen or heard may be totally misinterpreted. To gather evidence he breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and hides in a wardrobe. Sandy is perhaps not quite as innocent as Jeffrey. She wonders if Jeffrey just wants to spy on Dorothy in hopes of seeing her naked. It’s possible that Jeffrey isn’t quite sure of his own motives. We have to suspect that Sandy might be right.

Jeffrey really isn’t prepared for what he sees. He witnesses a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between Dorothy and a very very scary man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey is naïve, good-natured and not too bright and he’s sure he knows what’s going on. Jeffrey thinks Frank is an evil man and Dorothy is being brutalised and abused. He just can’t figure out why Dorothy seems to enjoy it.

Jeffrey is both right and wrong. Frank is a monster. But Dorothy does get off on playing the submissive role in sadomasochistic sex. Jeffrey will discover that when he later has sex with Dorothy. She wants Jeffrey to hurt her. He does hurt her. Now Jeffrey is really disturbed. Jeffrey isn’t equipped to deal with any of this.

The twist is that Dorothy seems to get aroused by the sex but she’s not an entirely willing partner. Maybe Dorothy doesn’t understand her own motivations. Maybe people in general don’t understand their own motivations.

What is really going on in this movie is open to debate. It does seem like Jeffrey has found himself in a different realty, or a different non-reality. It’s as if he’s left Lumberton and now he’s in Frank Booth’s world. But the opening sequence has alerted us to the fact that we, the audience, are already in a different realty, or a different non-reality - the hyper-real shifted reality world of Lumberton. There would seem to be several layers of non-reality happening. It is of course also possible that each of the major characters inhabits his or her own world. Even after he has slept with her Jeffrey cannot comprehend Dorothy’s world. Perhaps he simply cannot enter her world.

Initially I had serious reservations about Dennis Hopper’s performance which veers perilously close to self-parody. This is however a movie you have to think about. If you see Frank as not really a human villain but a monster out of a nightmare (or even a fairy-tale monster) his performance makes more sense. And some of the other bizarre performances start to make sense. Characters in a dream behave according to dream logic.

In fact this movie makes more sense when you stop trying to make sense of it. Surrealism doesn’t obey the conventional rules of storytelling or of characterisation.

There’s quite a bit of black comedy which serves to undercut even further any illusions we have that this is the normal everyday world. Of course it’s also possible that Lynch is suggesting that the everyday world which we believe to be ordered and logical and rational is in fact chaotic, illogical and irrational. We are already in a dream world. All of which helps to explain one of the central mysteries, which is Dorothy’s tendency to behave in such odd unexpected ways.

Blue Velvet impressed me much much more this time around. It’s a perplexing provocative but fascinating movie. David Lynch really found his voice with this film. He found the style and the techniques which he would exploit with such success over the next fifteen year. Blue Velvet is like a dry run for Twin Peaks. Very highly recommended.

Savage Beach (1989)

Savage Beach is the fourth of Andy Sidaris’s twelve Triple B (Bullets, Bombs, and Babes) movies. Like the previous two movies in the series it focuses on blonde bombshell DEA agents Donna (Dona Speir) and Taryn (Hope Marie Carlton).

It was shot mostly on location on Molokai.

Donna and Taryn operate an air cargo business as a cover. They have to fly urgently needed medical supplies to a remote island. They run into a storm and their Cessna is forced down. They’re lucky enough to make a crash landing on a tiny uninhabited possibly uncharted island. They were hundreds of miles off course so it could be quite a wait for a rescue plane.

They have the uneasy feeling that they are not alone on the island. Their suspicion is well-founded. And soon there are lots of people on the island, all of them almost certainly bad guys.

What our two heroines don’t know is that they have stumbled onto something very big and very secret. Something official, but now it’s been complicated by a criminal conspiracy. During the Second World the Japanese military hid a hoard of gold looted from the Philippines on a remote island (yes the same island where the girls’ plane crash-landed). The government of the Philippines wants the gold back. The US Government wants to help them to find the gold but there is at least one criminal gang after that gold as well.

And possibly more than one criminal gang.

Donna and Taryn have no idea what is going on but there are unpleasant men with guns running about the island, they’ve been captured and tied up more than once and shot at and they’re getting quite annoyed about it. One of the bad guys even calls Donna a bimbo. She can handle being tied up and having guns pointed at her but when you call her a bimbo you have crossed a line you should never cross.

This is a pretty good script by Sidaris. It sets up endless opportunities for mayhem and double-crosses. On the island we have our two blonde heroines, there are two gangs of murderous cut-throat bad guys and then there’s the strange old guy who might be a good guy or a bad guy. And there’s the beautiful dark-haired bad girl. We’re not sure which of the gangs she belongs to.

Some of the bad guys might be good guys and some of the guys who claim to be good guys might be bad guys.

Luckily the girls are well-armed. They have an automatic rifle and several pistols and Taryn has a crossbow that fires explosive crossbow bolts. Which of course means we’re going to get some explosions. But then this is an Andy Sidaris movie so you knew there were going to be explosions.

There is also, naturally, some martial arts action because why would you not add some of that to the mix?

It goes without saying that as well as lots of action this movie includes lots and lots of bare breasts (and some brief frontal nudity). How could you possibly add a nude scene to a scene with two girls in the cockpit of a Cessna in flight? Andy Sidaris manages it. He likes those kinds of challenges.

It doesn’t hurt that all of the women are extraordinarily attractive.

What really makes these Andy Sidaris movies so great is that Andy and his wife Arleen (who acted as producer) knew all the tricks of low-budget filmmaking. They knew how to get high production values and a very polished professional look without spending big bucks. They had their operation running like a well-oiled machine. Andy’s Triple B movies look a whole lot more expensive than they were.

For a low-budget movie Savage Beach really is beautifully shot.

They were also pretty good at casting. No-one would suggest that Dona Speir and Hope Marie Carlton were great actresses but they gave performances that were just perfect for this type of movie. And that applies to most of the cast members. They’re not angling for Oscar nominations but they’re entertaining.

All of the Triple B movies are available in a terrific DVD boxed set from Mill Creek, with excellent transfers. Most have now been released by Mill Creek on Blu-Ray. It’s the Blu-Ray release that is being reviewed here. Both the DVD and Blu-Ray releases include an audio commentary by Andy and Arleen Sidaris and they provide an astonishing amount of fascinating information on the shooting of the movie.

Savage Beach is absolutely top-notch entertainment. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed lots of Andy Sidaris’s earlier movies - Seven (1979), Malibu Express (1985), Hard Ticket to Hawaii (1987) and Picasso Trigger (1988). They’re all fun with Hard Ticket to Hawaii being the best.

Crimes of Passion (1984)

Crimes of Passion is a 1984 Ken Russell movie and as such it is impossible to assign it to a genre. New World Pictures probably thought they were going to get a straightforward erotic thriller. That is certainly what a brief synopsis of the plot might have suggested. One can only assume that they had never seen any of Ken Russell’s pictures and had no idea what they were actually going to get.

It’s really more a black comedy.

Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) is around 30. He lives the American Dream. He has a security business. He has a perfect wife, Amy (Annie Potts), and two great little kids. They live in a nice suburban house. Bobby has always been a straight arrow and it’s paid off. He played football in college. He married his high school sweetheart.

So why is he attending a group therapy session? He’s just there to support a buddy. Bobby doesn’t have any problems. And then he lets the mask skip. He and his perfect suburban wife no longer have perfect suburban sex. They no longer have sex at all.

Bobby has never been aware of it but he has been living a lie. He’s been wearing a mask of perfect middle-class happiness to cover up the fact that all the passion has long since departed from the marriage. He and Amy have been wearing masks. They have been playing a game of make-believe.

Then he takes a security assignment, to check out a woman named Joanna Crane (Kathleen Turner) suspected of industrial espionage. That’s how Bobby meets China Blue. China Blue is Joanna Crane. China Blue is her secret identity. Her mask. Or perhaps Joanna Crane is China Blue’s mask.

China Blue gives Bobby the best sex he has ever had in his life. That’s when Bobby realises how empty his life had become.

Bobby is not the only man obsessed with China Blue. There’s also the Reverend Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins), a crazed preacher. Or perhaps just a crazy man who has convinced himself that he is a preacher. The Reverend’s mission is to save China Blue. He is a saviour, and possibly sees himself as an avenging angel. The Reverend is tortured by his sexual desires.

As I said, it’s a setup for a conventional erotic thriller but Ken Russell takes it in wild crazy directions.

Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins share top billing. Kathleen Turner is simply amazing.

China Blue is not just a mask won by Joanna. China Blue then plays various parts for various clients, depending on what she thinks will excite them. Sometimes she tells them stories of her past traumas that led her into a life of prostitution but her stories are pure invention.

All the characters are sheltering behind a mask of some kind, playing roles, and often there are masks on top of masks. When he takes the surveillance job Bobby dons another mask - the hardboiled private eye. He doesn’t do it convincingly (because he’s not a tough guy) but it’s telling that at a time when he feels powerless in his relationship he resorts to play-acting as a cynical tough guy. What he needs in his life is honesty, but that’s too scary.

My initial impression was that the Reverend was a character that just didn’t work and that the performance of Tony Perkins was more parody than anything else. In fact, had this been a straightforward erotic thriller this performance would have been enough to sink the movie. But this is a different kind of movie and in a way the character does work. We don’t have to believe in him.

We don’t have to believe that anything in this movie corresponds to real life. The look and tone of the movie suggest a fever dream, or even a twisted fairy tale. The Reverend is perhaps a fairy tale monster, or perhaps a nightmare conjured from the unconscious. There is even a slight hint of a comic-book feel (and the Reverend could certainly have been a comic-book villain).

It’s significant that Joanne’s house looks like a fairy-tale castle. She has constructed for herself a world of fantasies and make-believe. Perhaps her China Blue persona is her eroticised fantasy of being a fairy-tale princess.

And the suburban life of Bobby and his wife is their version of a perfect fairy-tale world but they’re miserable because they’re not really living happily ever after. The perfect love needed to sustain their fantasy has vanished. Their sex life has been built on lies because without the love they’ve just been going through the motions.

Like so many of Ken Russell’s movies it’s impossible to fully appreciate this film without taking into account that Russell was raised a Catholic. The movie is not just littered with religious iconography. Religious themes are all-pervasive. Russell belongs to the rich tradition of Catholic film-makers, a tradition that includes Lang and Hitchcock. It’s a tradition that is now a thing of the past, and cinema has as a result lost much of its power and magic.

The use of colour is absolutely extraordinary. On a limited budget Russell still manages to deliver a visual extravaganza. Dick Bush’s cinematography is superb.

Crimes of Passion has a quality I really really love in a movie - a sense that the story takes place in a world very much like the real world but there’s just something slightly off-kilter. This is hyper-reality or exaggerated or heightened reality. It’s almost, dare I say it, an anticipation of the David Lynch approach.

This is certainly not a movie that is anti-sex. There’s nothing wrong with Joanne’s taste for kinky sex, but it doesn’t satisfy her because she needs passion and love as well.

Crimes of Passion is one of Ken Russell’s best movies. Very highly recommended.

Arrow’s Blu-Ray offers both the unrated cut and the slightly raunchier director’s cut, with an audio commentary by scriptwriter Barry Sandler and the man himself, Ken Russell.