Thanks to Something Weird Video, all but 25 minutes of the once-lost Six She’s and a He exists, under its original title of Love Goddesses of Blood Island. While the aimless film bears no connection to the Blood Island trilogy, it certainly revels in that gorgeous, gory spirit.
Bill Rogers (A Taste of Blood) plays Fred Rogers (!), a B-26 bomber pilot whose plane goes down around Okinawa. Passed out in a raft in the middle of the ocean, he’s pulled to shore by some lovely loinclothed ladies led by Aphrodite (Launa Hodges), who says, “You will get to know this stick intimately.” (Trust me: It’s a warning, not a come-on, because these half-dozen honeys are not in that kind of movie.)
Surrounded by live exotica tunes, tiki torches aplenty and a pig roasting on a mouth-to-anus spit, the all-female tribe of six sexpots live and love on a set that looks borrowed either from a school play adaptation of Fantasy Island or from a scrapped Price Is Right Showcase Showdown. While the women do have offscreen sex with Fred, they also deprive him of sleep, subject him to hard labor and harder bamboo swats, and flaunt their all-around superiority to the Aqua Velva man.
Just ask the Nazi (Joe Capriano) who gets his guts torn out by the gals during a torture ritual. On the movie’s meager resources, the German soldier’s intestines resemble wet balloon animals. In other words, Six She’s and a He — directed by Richard S. Flink (producer of William Grefé’s Sting of Death) and written by actor William Kerwin (God’s Bloody Acre) — is something of a wet dream as scripted by Herschell Gordon Lewis and/or a nightmare of the incel set. Neither is a bad thing. —Rod Lott
Fresh from Exorcist II: The Heretic, Linda Blair stars as Rachel Bryant, just your average apple-cheeked, small-town girl who loves two things: her boyfriend, Mike (Jeff McCracken, One Man Jury), and her horse, Sundance. To that list, she’d like to add her cousin, Julia (Lee Purcell, Mr. Majestyk), who comes to live with the Bryants after the girl’s parents are killed in an auto accident, depicted through stock footage under the opening credits. According to Rachel, Julia is “kinda pretty.” Julia also kinda collects teeth.
That’s because she’s a witch, which Rachel is able to surmise through the help of their rural town’s local occult expert (Macdonald Carey, Shadow of a Doubt), not to mention all the weird shit that goes down involving Julia. For starters, Sundance flips out in her presence. And she undergoes a massive makeover from drab to dazzling — all the better to steal Mike when Rachel mysteriously awakens with gnarly blotches all over her face the morning of the big dance, not to mention a gradual seduction of her uncle (Jeremy Slate, The Centerfold Girls). And she doesn’t appear in mirrors. And hey, did I mention the teeth?
Summer of Fear is based on Lois Duncan’s young-adult novel of the same name, which may account for why the telefilm feels so watered down. It’s not as if the networks didn’t allow their features to get mean, as prime-time classics like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark and Trilogy of Terror already had attested. This work’s attempts at terror are paltry at best and hysterical at worst, such as when Sundance goes bonkers during a horse show, pulling Rachel — or a stuntman in a curly wig — through so many fences and tarps that the scene wouldn’t be out of place in a Naked Gun sequel.
Although Blair is Summer’s above-the-title talent, the pic belongs to Purcell, who gives a pretty committed performance as the relative from hell. While not quite a saving grace, she impresses — and no one else does, not even Fran Drescher in a start-of-career role. How Craven got roped in to such a half-baked supernatural soufflé would be an excellent question if the answer weren’t so obvious: money. —Rod Lott
By all accounts, Blood Lake appears to be a movie. A camera is present, and people pretending to be someone else do things in front of it. They also say things in front of it, although not always in its general direction. Somebody then assembled those things into a chronological fashion. Another somebody made music for it; yet another slapped credits on both ends. The result was duplicated onto VHS cassettes that members of the public rented for a set period of time and inserted into their VCRs, presumably for purposes of entertainment.
And yet, even after lowering expectations to the substandards of shot-on-video, straight-to-tape projects, I’m hesitant to call Blood Lake a movie. The story lacks story beats. Dialogue seems to be improvised; lighting, an afterthought. With one exception, its actors were not and are not actors. But at least it is in focus, question mark?
Although one Tim Boggs is credited as director (and never to be again), the driving creative force is writer, producer and leading man Doug Barry. As the mulleted, muscled Mike, he’s one-half of the dude bros (the other being Mike Kaufman’s Bryan) who have Trans Am’d their respective girlfriends (Angela Darter and The Ripper’s Andrea Adams) to a weekend at Cedar Lake, a real spot in southeast Oklahoma, where this thing was filmed — er, recorded. Also in tow are Mike’s tween brother, Tony (Travis Krasser), and Tony’s girl friend and hopeful “sex partner,” Susan (Christie Willoughby).
They drink beer. They waterski. They drink more beer. They waterski again. They urge little Tony to nail Susan, which sounds incredibly uncomfortable because it totally is. They drink more beer. People are killed by a fat guy in overalls who looks like Billy Jack ate Jenny Craig. (He’s played by the ironically named Tiny Frazier, whose car-sales business is thanked in the closing credits — and that’s only the second strangest thing you’ll read there, thanks to a special-effects shout-out to “An Act of God.”)
My heart should belong to Blood Lake, for three primary reasons:
• SOV ’80s horror is “my jam,” as the kids say.
• Ditto for the era’s slashers shot in my home state of Oklahoma: Blood Cult, Terror at Tenkiller, Offerings, et al.
• Throughout grade school, Krasser and Willoughby were among my brother’s best friends.
And yet, I don’t. Blood Lake not only tried my patience, but actively grated on my nerves. It’s hard not to feel that way when nearly every scene agonizingly unfolds in real time, whether the characters are shootin’ the shit on the dock (three minutes), playing quarters (five minutes) or engaging in the aforementioned waterskiing (10 minutes). What should be the simplest conversations would flummox even Robert Altman’s sound editors; take for example, this exchange of Mike and his lady bidding two lake rats adieu after a night of drinkin’, tokin’ and jokin’:
“Hey, thanks a lot for tonight, it was fun.”
“All right.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Thanks for coming by. Y’all be careful.”
“Okay, buh-bye.”
“Take it easy.”
“Yeah, we’ll see you all tomorrow.”
“Be careful.”
“All right.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Bye-bye.”
“See you later.”
“Bye.”
And I’m sure I missed a couple.
The most entertaining made-for-VHS horrors come chock-full of accidentally ridiculous and hilarious lines. Because Krasser’s aggressively rapey act is neither, Blood Lake has one scene that made me laugh aloud. The rest of the movie is like being the fly on the wall of a lake house, and everyone in the kitchen is too lazy to grab a swatter to put you out of your misery.
As detailed in Richard Mogg’s wonderful book, Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995, the story behind Blood Lake is far more compelling than watching Blood Lake. If Barry thought he was crafting the country’s next hit slasher, he was delusional and yet missed a target so easy to hit that the result is too misguided to deserve the label of “derivative.” Flick Attack contributor Richard York put it best: “Not enough blood. Too much lake.” —Rod Lott
One of the more frequent robocalls I receive promises a “free” fabulous vacation as a thank-you for recently “staying at one of our resorts! Press ‘1’ to be connected to an operator …”
Even if I had stayed at any resorts of late, which I have not, I’m smart enough not to fall for this scam. My teenage daughter, on the other hand? She fell for it. She pressed “1.”
I tell you this because, God love her, my daughter is basically Regina, the main character of Terror at Red Wolf Inn. As played with total golly-gee-whiziness by Linda Gillen (Black Rain), Regina is a college student majoring in advanced gullibility. In her dormitory mail slot lands a letter informing her she’s won a trip to the site of this film’s title. Despite having entered no sweepstakes, she gleefully accepts the sketchy invitation — made even more suspect by its must-leave-today catch — and celebrates her good fortune by exclaiming to all fellow dorm residents within earshot, “I’m a winner, everybody! I won something!” (Alas, if only the prize were a brain-to-mouth filter.)
The Red Wolf Inn is a quaint bed-and-breakfast establishment run by the kind, doddering old couple Henry (Arthur Space, The Bat People) and Evelyn Smith (Mary Jacobson, Audrey Rose). Per the inn’s guests already there, Evelyn is “the world’s greatest cook,” to which Regina replies, absent of irony or sarcasm, “I’m the world’s greatest eater!” (Stupidity loves company, as a guest played by The Centerfold Girls’ Janet Wood introduces herself to Regina with a smile and these three words: “I’m a model!”)
Evelyn’s secret recipe? Well, it’s hardly a secret when the poster gives it away, not that a delicate touch ever was listed on the film’s call sheet. The surprise of Terror at Red Wolf Inn is not its cannibalistic theme, but how much of this B-grade obscurity will remind you of a certain drive-in classic that arrived two years later: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Like Tobe Hooper did on that terrifying touchstone, director Bud Townsend (Nightmare in Wax) milks his movie’s most unsettling moments out of its dinner scenes, with rib-chewing, soup-slurping, lip-licking, corn-on-the-cob-smacking mastication depicted in revolting close-ups.
Fish is also on the menu, albeit when the Smiths’ weirdo grandson, Baby John (John Neilson, Sharks’ Treasure) unleashes some serious rage on a baby shark he’s reeled in. After hitting the life out of it on the beach, he turns to Regina and offers the only logical explanation for such a bonkers display of unjustified animal cruelty: “I think I love you.” Being as dumb as the piece of wood Baby John beat Baby Shark against, yes, of course she’s smitten.
The events within The Terror at Red Wolf Inn may not exist on our plane of reality, but I’m glad the film does; it’s a bit different from the horror norm, including by having its token black character (future Oscar nominee Margaret Avery, The Color Purple) be the smartest character. Although it possesses a devilish sense of humor, it is not a comedy, much less a parody as some critics have claimed. Now, if its innards contained the literal wink at the audience that closes the credits, that’d be a different story. As is, Townsend’s spookhouse of a picture straddles the Hollywood hagsploitation efforts that had been in vogue and the teen slashers that were about to be, and gives you a hearty slap on the back to let you know it’s all in good fun. And to quote Regina, “I love parties!” —Rod Lott
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
Thanks to Something Weird Video, all but 25 minutes of the once-lost Six She’s and a He exists, under its original title of Love Goddesses of Blood Island. While the aimless film bears no connection to the Blood Island trilogy, it certainly revels in that gorgeous, gory spirit. 
Surrounded by live exotica tunes, tiki torches aplenty and a pig roasting on a mouth-to-anus spit, the all-female tribe of six sexpots live and love on a set that looks borrowed either from a school play adaptation of Fantasy Island or from a scrapped Price Is Right Showcase Showdown. While the women do have offscreen sex with Fred, they also deprive him of sleep, subject him to hard labor and harder bamboo swats, and flaunt their all-around superiority to the Aqua Velva man. 
