All posts by Louis Fowler

Reading Material

Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s

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Here I was, for all these years, thinking I was the only dumb kid who clipped movie ads out of the newspaper.

Whenever my dad was through with The Dallas Morning News or The Dallas Times Herald, whichever he picked up that day, I scoured through their massive entertainment sections, cutting out the advertisements for movies that I knew would never come to my small town of Blooming Grove, Texas, but maybe someday I’d catch them on TV or, even better, VHS.

I think my mother threw that collection of yellowing pulp out sometime ago, sadly, but here’s Ad Nauseam, which is definitely the next best thing. A collection of 10 years’ worth of newspaper advertisements — apparently printed straight from the dailies themselves — by former Fangoria honcho Michael Gingold, the memories this book will resurrect from the dead is a beautifully scary thing.

From the classics like first runs of Poltergeist and reissues of Halloween to — and the most interesting, in my opinion — trashy works like Death Valley and Madman, as well as the horror comedies of Once Bitten and Transylvania 6-5000 and, let’s not forget, the Italian imports such as The Gates of Hell and Demons, everything your adolescent mind could have dreamed up from such imaginative slicks — and, let’s be honest, were often better than the actual film — is right there, all in screaming black and white ink.

For the actual readers, however, there are even a few quotes from Oklahoma City film critics along the pages, most notably The Daily Oklahoman’s burly Gene Triplett, who calls Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D a “snuff movie” — which goes to show that there’s a reason people have called his paper “the Daily Disappointment” for 50 or so years.

But Ad Nauseam is far from any kind of disappointment. While yes, many people won’t get it — especially fathers who ask “Why do you waste your time with these stupid horror movies?” — for those of us who remember the grotesque excitement of the movies, the ads — hell, even the newspaper in general — this is a grue-soaked return to the glory days of gory cinema.

Or, as they’re known in Oklahoma, “snuff movies.” —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Upon its dismal original release, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin was positioned to be a Star Wars for the next generation, which, of course, it wasn’t. But, for cartoon nerds whose first love was weirdly cheap French animation — think Fantastic Planet — but needed a wholly North American story they could glom on to, I guess this flick will do just fine.

Orin is a slave working in the coal crystal mines and before he can say “Lord, I am so tired … how long can this go on?” he finds a glowing laser-sword — a light-saber, if you will — in the dirt. Before he can toss it out, a little wizard pops out of the handle and tells him he’s his people’s only hope. This all sound somewhat familiar yet?

Filled with plenty of misplaced promise, he takes on a couple of robots and their laser-whips, escaping his nightmarish hellhole to the mildly bad-dreamish surface world filled with swamp-monsters, man-droids and a supposedly cool Han Solo-type that suggestively calls Orin “my little water-snake” in between making out with a sex robot that I’m pretty sure was on the cover of Aerosmith’s Just Push Play.

They go on various adventures, visiting dumb planets and fighting stupid aliens, all in an effort to take down the dastardly overlord Zygon. I’m not giving anything away to say that they do, but it’s all still nowhere near as pseudo-exciting at George Lucas’ sci-fi spree; with the further adventures of Anakin Skywalker — whizzer! — and gang still a good 15 or so years away, I guess Starchaser was the best you could do for swashbuckling adventure in 1985.

Directed by Steven Hahn, this film is probably more famous for spending about 17 days in the theaters, when it was quickly pulled by distributor Atlantic Releasing after making only $3.3 million. But, somewhere out there, the dream for a live-action Starchaser is alive, when Rilean Picture announced one is coming in March.

Of 2012, that is. —Louis Fowler

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Comedy

Blame It on Rio (1984)

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Blame It on Rio is the Celebrity Skin-ready tale of the woefully middle-aged Matthew (Michael Caine, The Island) and his painfully farce-ready love affair with his best friend’s teenage daughter, Jennifer (Michelle Johnson, Beaks: The Movie). His excuse? Blame it on Rio!

Rio is one of the lustiest cities on this side of the planet, a brown-skinned Bacchanalia filled with an infinite amount of bare breasts bringing to life all your damnable desires, flaunted about in the streets 365 days a year. It’s seemingly the perfect setting for Stanley Donen’s directorial swan song, if it wasn’t such a bleak, horrific view into the mindset of a dying man wishing for one last view of pert teen bosoms. The easiest way to get them? Blame it on Rio!

Matthew and his wife (Valerie Harper, TV’s Rhoda) are seemingly in a loving relationship, but, in this film, love is a selfish emotion that gets more grotesque as the movie goes on. When the spirit of a crazy night in Rio gets into him, he gets even deeper into Jennifer, giving fully into the sudden sexual aplomb of the city. He expects to have one torrid night to forget with her, as most middle-aged men would, but, of course, she obsessively falls in love with him. He totally blames it on Rio.

After their initial sexual encounter, Matthew gets tries admirably to cut things off with Jennifer, not out of the dark shame of bedding a willing teenage girl, but completely out of fear of getting caught by her equally sleazy dad (Joseph Bologna, Transylvania 6-5000). When he tries to gently let her down, she goes a tad overboard and tries to off herself. We’ve all been there, but we probably weren’t able to blame it on Rio.

Donen, who directed films such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Singin’ in the Rain, sadly, seems to forgotten all he knew about being a filmmaker, his master’s touch now a pervert’s sticky glove, with his leering view coating the film in a gooey veneer of manmade despicableness. He made an ugly film of people doing rather ugly things, but it was the ’80s, and anything went, usually with the help of cocaine and an Animotion album. Especially if you going to blame it on Rio.

But no one really comes off worse than Caine; now considered a great actor because, well, he’s old and British, here he’s a combination of visibly embarrassed and audibly horny as Jennifer writhes and grinds on him every chance she gets. But, if the authorities asked him what he was doing with a 17-year-old-girl in his bed, he could always wink at the camera and blame it on Rio. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

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An alcohol-bloated Richard Burton (The Medusa Touch) is Father Lamont, who leaves his father’s junk empire in Watts to perform meandering exorcisms in Latin America. When his latest dispossession goes up in smoke, quite literally, he’s summoned to the Vatican not for a swift punishment — probably a transfer to a boys’ home in Wisconsin — but instead to find out the truth about a disgraced Father Merrin (Max von Sydow, Never Say Never Again) from the first film.

Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair, Airport 1975), who’s bloated as well — possibly from cocaine — is back also, of course. We learn that since her exorcism she now loves to tap-dance in a shirt that showcases the underside of her breasts, usually before her sessions at Dr. Gene Tuskin’s (Louise Fletcher, 1987’s Flowers in the Attic) very John Boorman-esque — i.e., lots of sharp glass and curved mirrors — research clinic. There, even though she’s buried the events of her brutal exorcism deep in the past, the damn scientific curiosity of Tuskin brings ol’ Pazuzu back to the forefront once again.

While all that is going on, Lamont goes to Africa to hang out with James Earl Jones (Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold), who sits lonesomely in a throne, fully clad in a hilarious life-sized locust costume, complete with a big bug-eyed mask.

Director John Boorman’s clunker of a continuation — hot on the well-booted Exterminator heels of 1974’s Zardoz — is something people mostly watch either out of sick curiosity or general masochism. There are a few Exorcist II: The Heretic apologists out there, and every single one I’ve met is a chunky dude in a fake Tommy Bahama shirt who’ll corner you at a party, explaining with frothing reasoning why you — and most of cinematic academia in general — are morally wrong in your tepid dislike of the sequel.

But, for once, most people are right: With the exception of Ennio Morricone’s typically gorgeous score, there’s not much to recommend here. Each progressive scene sillier than the last, Exorcist II manages to turn Satan from a monstrous representation that is Legion to a confusing swarm of African locusts with a taste for yummy psychic powers and tasty fields of grain. Obviously, whatever “good film” that was supposedly here got lost in a parade of big egos and bad ideas.

In the special features, even Linda Blair vehemently admits that this isn’t the film she signed up to do, but, then again, she starred in Roller Boogie. That ought to tell you something right there.  —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Brainscan (1994)

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While minding his own business, peeping on the mostly willing girl across the street, young Mike (Edward Furlong) gets a call from his generic horndog buddy — probably named Doozer or something equally dumb — telling him about this great new video game he’s reading about in the latest issue of Fangoria, because every little bit helps, right guys?

The video game is called Brainscan and it promises to be the most immersive experience in horror gaming on your 16 32 64-bit system and, at the very least, it’ll let Frank Langella enter your subconscious, as he is wont to do. Mike plays the game and finds himself in a first-person world of murder and madness as whomever he kills in the game, is found dead in real life. Bummer, dude.

Beyond the silliness of the game itself, the movie Brainscan goes one better by introducing the wholly grating boogeyman known as the Trickster, a horrific sprite from the video game world (?) here to convince Mike to kill himself while eating all of his well-stocked stash of junk food. With a stretched-out face and a shocking-red faux-hawk, it’s very easy to see why T. Ryder Smith isn’t at very many horror conventions signing copies of the movie poster handed to him by pudgy Trickster clones.

Although many of you younglings might not remember it, Brainscan comes from a time long ago and far away when Furlong was the affable-enough boy-king of the first-run genre picture, riding somewhat high after Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But, sadly, too many silly scripts like Pet Sematary Two and this techno-trash caused his star to extinguish faster than a cigarette under Furlong’s well-worn Doc Martens boot heel.

Even worse, by the time this picture was out in theaters, the technology was already practically outdated, no matter how many cool-ish gadgets and Aerosmith posters director John Flynn (Rolling Thunder) threw on the screen. And even though the CGI was getting technically better, the actualized concept of virtual reality and cyberspace were still the thing of badly rendered William Gibson novels and horribly cartoonish Thomas Dolby screensavers.

Despite those winning attributes, realistically Brainscan isn’t even nostalgically good for the time, leading most viewers to check their futuristic Apple Watches and Fitbits to see how much time is left on the thing. To be fair, however, this flick does make a rather unwatchable double feature with Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe’s War if you truly hate yourself.

Or you can just take a nap. Whatever.   —Louis Fowler

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