Documentary

Tulsa Terrors (2023)

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As a born-and-bred Oklahoman, I’ve long been proud, baffled and entranced by the city of Tulsa’s right-time-right-place role as ground zero of the 1980s’ made-for-home-video horror revolution. So much so, in 2014, I started interviewing players for a massive article on it.

Then overnight, I found myself facing a divorce I didn’t see coming. All creative endeavors, like the 20-year marriage, died on the vine.

That was then, this is now. John Wooley and Bryan Crain give us Tulsa Terrors, a feature-length documentary about the 918 area code’s foray into VHS frights. Wooley’s the ideal person for the job, having covered the low-budget productions from the front line as a newspaper journalist (and later, in his 2011 book Shot in Oklahoma).

Naturally, Terrors’ initial chunk focuses on Christopher Lewis’ Blood Cult, the 1985 slasher that Started It All. Taking advantage of the movie fever lingering in T-Town from Francis Ford Coppola’s one-two punch of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, Lewis turned $27,000 and a lousy script called The Sorority House Murders into a nationwide video-store smash.

Lewis quickly followed with the generically titled sequel, Revenge, as well as the Tom Savini-starring The Ripper. Crain and Wooley close their documentary with another threesome of slashers, all from Southern firecracker Darla Enlow: Toe Tags, Branded and The Stitcher.

In between, Tulsa Terrors turns its neck to gawk at others who picked up the camcorder torch — albeit to lesser returns, if any. For example, today you can find DVDs of 1986’s Mutilations (with its cattle killings charmingly rendered in stop-motion animation). On the other hand, IMDb-less pics like Bio-Kill (a sci-fi actioner with a hovercraft) and Curse from the Mummy’s Tomb (a Poverty Row tribute with a $75 price tag) remain elusive, other than the glimpses you get here. And to speak again of slaughtered livestock, Vigilante Blood disappeared immediately after premiering at a local Outback Steakhouse.

In a giant leap up from playing as background noise to patrons enjoying a Bloomin’ Onion, Tulsa Terrors debuted on a public university TV channel before hitting video. That’s not a slam, but more of a barometer for setting your expectations, as this isn’t polished or propulsive like Mark Hartley’s hard-charging retrospectives. While entertaining, the doc is nearly as lo-fi as the treasures it fetishizes. Naturally, the more affection you hold for shot-on-video cinema, the more you’ll get out of it; this is not the type of project designed to convert newcomers.

I do wish Crain and Wooley had widened their scope to the whole of the Sooner State. That way, they could include the likes of Offerings, Blood Lake and Alien Zone; because they saw the light of day, they all enjoy far larger profiles than any movie here that’s not Lewis’. Also missing is Terror at Tenkiller, despite being pictured on the poster. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Sex

Everybody Loves It (1964)

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Making a parody film is difficult when you can’t afford to record live audio. And ever more so when your actors don’t move their mouths to approximate dialogue that could be dubbed later. Nonetheless, Everybody Loves It remains undaunted.

Oh, it’s not successful — just undaunted. Its “solution” to its self-inflicted conundrum? Wall-to-wall narration from a four-leaf clover. As if that weren’t bewildering enough, the trefoil speaks in a Viennese accent, courtesy of cartoon royalty Paul Frees, aka Boris Badenov from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Not that any patron cared, this being a nudie cutie and all. (Frees sure did, wisely going uncredited.)

With a soundtrack heavy on xylophones and foghorns, Everybody Loves It plays loose and lecherous as a paltry spoof of three TV shows and — whoa there, horsey — one whole commercial. Going under the heavily dulled knife first is hospital drama Ben Casey. Dr. Sven Crazy and fellow surgeons remove a heart-shaped candy box from a patient — not to mention clothing from the bosomy bodies of scrub nurses, leaving them in panties resembling placemats.

When the respirator fails, the physicians opt for a bicycle pump. At surgery’s end, the patient is revealed as Mad magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman (via mask less terrifying than what the mag would use in its own movie. Up the Academy). Hell, this one wishes it were one-tenth as good as Mad. It’d even settle for Cracked.

Next, Naked City undergoes a dressing down, as master criminal Louie Linguini plots a heist of redemption stamps from a fur salon. This plan requires his hourglass-shaped moll to pose as a nude mannequin to fool the half-blind security guard. Frees’ near-nonsensical play-by-play includes such gags as, “They have to be as fast as butterflies doing push-ups on a lemon meringue pie.”

Finally — woefully — the hourlong pic finishes by taking aim at Combat! The humor gets not one iota better (“Is that a parachute? Looks like Sonny Liston’s nightshirt!”), but the ladies get barer. Here and elsewhere, they include cheesecake models Althea Currier (Kiss Me Quick!), Penny Bello, Michelle Swain, Paula Angelos (Dr. Sex), Karen Nichols and Cathy Crowfoot (Mondo Keyhole), not that any represents a recommendation. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Trick or Treat with Reed Richmond (2025)

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I can think of few ways more enjoyable to prep for Halloween than revisiting the 1995 cable special Trick or Treat with Reed Richmond. After all, it’s not like the cult icon from such B-horror faves as Beverly Hills Graverobber and 1-900-Frankenstein hosted many of these things for Monster Planet’s airwaves.

If you’ve seen the 2022 release of the Out There Halloween Mega Tape, you’re already in on the joke: Richmond, his cheapo movies and Monster Planet don’t exist. They live only where it counts: inside Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special universe.

LaMartina’s golden touch with faux artifacts continues. The hourlong Trick or Treat looks, sounds and feels like it could’ve, would’ve and should’ve filled a bar the Sci-Fi Channel programming grid several times a week.

In Richmond’s inimitable fashion — alliterative, pun-happy and oblivious — the aged actor (in reality, John Waters regular George Stover) dons orange sweater to take “boys and gargoyles” through mini-histories of such All Hallows’ Eve stalwarts as pumpkins, witches and werewolves (supplemented by judicious clips from horror flicks in the public domain). In between each factoid package is a “trick” or a “treat,” like a scene from Richmond’s Mooniac or a cooking segment on hot dog mummies.

And because a WNUF project would be nothing without generous commercial breaks, LaMartina fills those with more deadpan and dead-on ads of questionable (read: local) production value. They shill everything from taco joints and nursing homes to movies like Alien Seance and Moonshine Frankenstein, with a phony AIDS PSA for good measure. The only trick to this treat is how LaMartina keeps knocking them outta the park. —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF.

Thriller

Dead of Winter (2025)

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Lonely widow Barb (Emma Thompson, Dead Again) just wanted to do a little ice fishing. Instead, she’s running for her life — while trying to save a stranger’s — in the frozen forests of Minnesota (played by Finland) when she accidentally stumbles onto a kidnapping.

And that’s the gist of Dead of Winter, so simple it’s not even deceptively simple. It’s also an exemplary case of show-don’t-tell storytelling as director Brian Kirk (21 Bridges) confidently lets several stretches play without dialogue — and not just because the victim (Laurel Marsden, The Pope’s Exorcist) has her mouth duct-taped for most of the movie.

As the married kidnappers, Marc Menchaca (Companion) conveys menace with a glare, and a de-glammed Judy Greer (The Long Walk) chain-sucks fentanyl lollipops. Meanwhile, Thompson goes full Marge Gunderson in action and accent, with only the latter a bit overdone. So are decades-ago flashbacks on which the movie becomes too reliant (with Thompson’s real-life daughter, Gaia Wise, playing young Barb), needlessly belaboring a point Thompson is able to convey with not a word, all in her face and mannerisms.

Although those retrospective asides loosen a plot that could be as tightly wound as the fishing line we see spooled, the film’s cat-and-mouse machinations across a chessboard of densely packed snow and treacherous ice provide enough subzero thrills for a hunker-down. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Martial Arts

The Pit: Emergency Room (1995)

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Doctors shouting orders. Patients tired of waiting. Hospital administration being total assholes. Gratuitous intubation. Gotta be HBO’s ER-esque hit, The Pitt, right? Yes! But it’s also The Pit: Emergency Room, highly obscure DOA drivel in no danger of gracing HBO or hitting anything but an aversion to watch.

In this vanity project, writer/director/producer Jon W. Fong casts — who else? — himself as Dr. Paul Qi, “PQ” for short. Our supposed medical superstar of Ocean Coast Hospital somehow is able to check out a woman’s stubbed toe without removing her shoe. In surgery, his main concern isn’t the patient’s life, but the rib spreader tool: “Who last oiled this thing?”

His enemy is Ocean Coast’s underhanded, overweight administrator, Kramer (Lee West, 1995’s Powderburn), who looks like Kevin from
The Office. Kramer’s scheming to sell the med center for personal gain. (The place may be in serious financial trouble, judging from the break room’s dot-matrix printed signs and banners.) Kramer’s plan entails drugging PQ’s mentor (David Jean Thomas, The Crow: Salvation) into a coma, thereby quashing a dissenting vote at the upcoming board meeting. One problem: PQ holds his mentor’s proxy power, so now he, too, is marked for death.

Prescription: kicking. PQ thwarts attempt after attempt on his life through kung fu. The Pit holds one thing for sure over The Pitt: Unlike Fong, Noah Wyle never disguised himself as a custodian to infiltrate security and whoop bad guys with a mop handle. (Maybe season 2?)

Meanwhile, no one bats an eye at the professionally suited Kramer openly conversing with some rando in a Mötley Crüe tee.

Because Fong was an actual emergency physician in California until his untimely 2017 passing, PQ and company spout “doc talk” with the best of them. But with every other element … well, it’s a good thing Dr. Fong didn’t quit his day job. My prognosis is you’ll never see another medical-themed feature in which:
• hoodlums attack a doctor and then perform chest compressions on a Resusci Annie doll
• alone, a valet loudly narrates his thoughts in real time: “OK, call 911 and start CPR!”
• a comely lady doctor miraculously performs stand-up comedy at the club without a microphone
• a prologue with thieves swallowing diamond-stuffed condoms full of grace

Stem to sternum, this botched-recipe omelette of martial-arts revenger, medical thriller and corporate espionage drama is so lacking of competence, you might not believe Fong’s expertise earned him an 11-year stint as technical adviser to NBC’s venerable ER. From all accounts, he was a terrific human, but based on The Pit: Emergency Room, I just wouldn’t have trusted him to make sound creative decisions, let alone examine my stubbed toe. —Rod Lott

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