All posts by Louis Fowler

Horror

Satan’s Slave (1982)

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Lonely teen Tomi (Fachrul Rozy) may live in a wealthy-ish home, but his stern father is always working; his good-time sister is always at the discotheque; and his recently deceased mom has just come back from the dead as an unholy apparition of pure evil. While most kids would experiment with sex or drugs to cope, he instead reads horror movie magazines, a direct path to the Unholy One.

The family, having lost their faith in God, becomes bewitched under housekeeper Darminah (Ruth Pelupessy), a diabolical agent of the devil who will inadvertently kill anyone who dares interfere with her plans to turn the children into slaves, presumably of Satan; this includes gruesomely resurrecting the woefully asthmatic groundkeeper and the daughter’s cracked-skull boyfriend.

These demonic forces of absolute malevolence are spooky as hell, with their pale white skin, pinhole-pupiled eyes and newly formed pair of vampire teeth ready to bites the blasphemous necks of the scared family. And even though this clan is offered chance after chance to get in good with God, they constantly turn it down, right up to the very end when a holy man shows up at their door with an army of spiritual warriors.

While not as downright bizarre as other Indonesian flicks — have you seen The Queen of Black Magic? — Satan’s Slave is far more atmospheric, with genuinely creepy moments that almost feels like it should be viewed on a 10th-generation VHS dub at 3 in the morning. It’s a personal style that has me believing director Sisworo Gautama Putra was an unheralded master of horror, in Indonesia and beyond. —Louis Fowler

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Martial Arts

Dynamo (1978)

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With Bruce Lee dead and buried, the world needs a new action star and they find one in Lee-alike Bruce Li! He’s just an everyday dude who becomes just as good as Lee — possibly better — with just a few days of training. And he’s going to need it to, because an area advertising agency has put a hit out on him, which seems a bit drastic.

Once a horny cab driver with a passing resemblance to Lee, Li is hired by an unscrupulous producer to become the new face of international kung fu; clad in a Game of Death workout suit, he uses his Yuen Woo Ping-choreographed martial arts to lay waste to a team of sparring partners, including one sent to kill him. He also uses it to make love to a French actress. Ooh-la-la!

The Cosmo Company, by the way, wants to assassinate Li because he won’t fall in line with their advertising wants and needs, forcing them to send world-class skiers, room-service attendants and a guy who resembles a fit Rudy Ray Moore to crack his dragon-looking ass in half, often spectacularly failing.

Li is pitted in one fight after another in the 96-minute runtime, often soundtracked by songs such as “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me. With a Rocky-lite finale and a quickie ending, Dynamo might as well have been the Bruceploitation masterpiece of the era, showcasing the nimble Li as a worthy successor with an actual personality to match. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Fighting Mad (1976)

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Though usually pretty laid-back, easy rider Peter Fonda jumps into the role of a two-fisted action hero, surprisingly ready to take on a quartet of small-town goons when they try to run from a fender bender in the first few minutes of Fighting Mad.

Directed by future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme for, of course, Roger Corman, here Fonda is farm boy Tom Hunter, returning from the city with his bratty kid after a relatively painful divorce; within minutes of a happy reunion, his brother Charlie (Scott Glenn) is murdered by the aforementioned goons who work for a local land developer.

Taking a page from the book of Brad Wesley, this developer Crabtree (Philip Carey) thinks he owns the town, disinterring an old lady’s makeshift cemetery, causing a rockslide that destroys a family’s home, beating up Hunter’s dear old pop and setting his barn on fire.

At first, Hunter was merely mad — but now he’s fighting mad, hence the title.

Shot and edited in that atmospheric style many of Corman’s New World pics had, Fonda is at his most energetic here, whether he’s running from killers on a dirt bike with his son on his lap or shooting various guards outside of Crabtree’s dwelling with a bow and arrow, delivering a country-fied revenge flick that actually gives us a happy, if mostly nonsensical, ending. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

Race with the Devil (1975)

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After years of viewing constant cinematic monsters, Race with the Devil is the first film in a long time to give me not only chills, but thrills and spills. A classic of ’70s satanic film starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as a pair of motorcycle enthusiasts who run afoul of demon cultists on vacation, it awoke those sleeping memories of farm-boy fears growing up in rural Texas.

Sure, nothing like this ever happened to me but, possibly due to numerous episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that said it would, I was always terrified of robed devil worshippers in our old pasture during the dark ages of the satanic panic; Race really does play into those night terrors the only way a flick written by exploitation engineer Lee Frost possibly could.

Taking their (then) state-of-the-art RV off-road for a drunken night with their wives near a familiar Texas river, in the distance a group of Luciferians not only hold a typical nude ritual, but sacrifice a woman to whatever gods they choose to worship. When Fonda and Oates get spotted, they take off in a pulse-pounding race where, it turns out, everyone in Texas is a damn satanist.

From local swimming pools to area bus accidents, the sweet RV gets torn to shreds as devilish evildoers jump from trucks to smash out the windows, douse with gasoline and, saddest of all, to hang whatever random animal is just hanging out. With nowhere to escape to, you can bet this’ll have a completely downbeat Fonda-era conclusion, though it is creepily earned.

Both Fonda and Oates are, of course, always watchable, but it’s the killer script by the aforementioned Frost — of Love Camp 7 and The Thing with Two Heads fame — and his usual collaborator, Wes Bishop, that is a true test of suspenseful fear and unabashed terror that, like an unearthed memory, has unwillingly taken me back to a freaky time when followers of the cloven hoof were around every corner and there was nothing I could do about it. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974)

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Since the fatalistic conclusion of Easy Rider, few actors had as many downbeat cinematic endings as Peter Fonda did, with the explosive train collision in Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry one of his depressive best that, at least, would go on to be anonymously immortalized in the intro to TV’s The Fall Guy.

Here, Fonda is the titular insane Larry who, along with a reptilian Adam Roarke, is part of a pair of groovy grocery store robbers who specialize in highly intricate — almost too intricate — capers that almost include the murder of a little girl, all to pay for their future NASCAR needs.

On this particular getaway, they’re additionally saddled with the filthy Mary (Susan George), a sexual conquest from the night before. As the trio speeds off in their incredibly impressive Dodge Charger with eccentric police tactics constantly trying to chase them down, including one dude in a high-performance interceptor and the quirky sheriff himself trying to run them over in a helicopter.

With Fonda at his coked-out best and George at her wide-eyed worst, they’re a couple with nothing but softball barbs to sling between them, with the saving grace of sorts being Roarke as a lizard with something of a heart-on for the stowaway.

But that out-of-nowhere ending, man … even for a Fonda flick, it’ll still shake the entire room. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.