Before 2020, science-fiction films about apocalyptic pandemics and other deadly diseases felt fantastically on par with speculative stories featuring invading aliens or murderous cyborgs. But now, it seems as though they’ve become the scariest of science fact.
While the beginning of Before the Fire hasn’t happened — yet — it’s easy to watch what’s going on and picture yourself in middle of trying to escape a large city under martial law and with all air travel shut down, only to escape to a small town where a group of right-wing hicks have taken over, shooting everyone not on their side.
That’s the basic idea of Fire and it mostly works, except for the characters and the actors playing them, all seemingly fresh from a CW casting call. Jenna Lyng Adams stars as Ava, an actress on a show about werewolf strippers. She, her blogger significant other (Jackson Davis) and his hunky brother (Ryan Vigilant) are all so pretty, it kind of sucks all power out of the well-coiffed proceedings.
Much like a vaccine for COVID, there needs to be a good movie made about a pandemic, but, sadly, Before the Fire just isn’t it. However, if we all survive this, it might make a good series to air after Riverdale. —Louis Fowler
When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, Silver Bullet.
Not exactly a novel, Cycle depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.
That’s not a criticism of Cycle, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for Silver Bullet. We get the attack on the lonely fat woman, the mauling of the cop in his car, the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.
A tween Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two working legs, the kid in the wheelchair outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows, The Nutcracker Prince) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey (Surviving the Game).
Busey is incredible in this flick, and by that I mean semi-lucid — and this was a few years before the motorcycle accident that caused his head injury and what we now know as the acronym-spouting “Gary Busey.” At the end is an amazing reaction shot where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and going through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.
Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who pleads with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) has a small role as the sheriff, and Reservoir Dogs’ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.
As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from King Kong ’76 producer Dino De Laurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy — enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and with its share of solid horror moments well-timed by first-time feature director Daniel Attias (who went directly to series TV and never looked back). Plus, in these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.
Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster — as well as the entire film — but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I appreciate it more today than the several times I saw it several decades ago. Cycle of the Werewolf is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella — but Silver Bullet brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott
In the realm of Christploitation flicks, David A.R. White is, arguably, the cinematic king of kings in this straight-to-video subgenre. From racial comedies to post-apocalyptic road movies — and let’s not forget the immortal God’s Not Dead trilogy — White manages to take a popular film of the day, give it a Christian message and, believe it or not, make it incredibly entertaining.
And now, with John Wick being so well-liked among the secular tribes of America, in Beckman, he crafts quite possibly the world’s first Christian action flick two-fisting audiences with well-choreographed martial arts, downright bloody head shots and a whole lot of the Word of God.
A hitman is looking for a way out of his murderous life after an explosive opening. The contract killer is the titular Beckman (White), who wanders into a church run by former Vietnam doc Phillip (Jeff Fahey). Given grace by the embittered preacher, Beckman apparently earns a pastoral degree in a year’s time and becomes the rightful heir to the house of worship when Phillip dies.
As Beckman faces a crisis of conscience and a failing of faith, in comes Phillip’s teenage niece, Tabitha (Brighton Sharbino), looking for a port in the storm herself. Almost immediately, he starts calling her his “daughter” and asks nothing about her shady past until a gang of thugs bust into the church and kidnaps her, taking her to be sacrificed by cult leader William Baldwin.
Rightfully so, Beckman goes on a rage-fueled rampage across L.A. to find her, with some of the city’s hottest killers going on a tear to find him.
Beckman is, praise be, loaded with biblical messages and other righteous truths, but a devilish amount of it is gunplay and blood spray that, I’m presuming, might have some sort of spiritual credence to it as well. While your grandmother may not approve of it, it’s an inventive way to spread the message, with White never turning Beckman in a religious parody to be nailed to any cross.
Baldwin, on the other hand, is written as such a devious tool of Satan — mostly in a NXIVM mode, mind you — that, it might be somewhat unholy to say, you just can’t wait to see him get his in the end and, boy, does he. No cheek is left unturned and unkicked-in here, with every moment a ballistic blessing to watch. Amen. —Louis Fowler
Everyone’s favorite husky Mexican wrestler with a mask, a cape and the ability to put wolfmen in headlocks like no other — El Santo, in case I didn’t narrow it down enough for you — is celebrated with this bone-crunchin’ compilation of his greatest triumphs, both in and out of the ring.
Honest talk: I started to find the in-ring footage tedious, as there’s only so much wrestling my brain can take before shuttering operations.
The out-of-ring stuff, however, gives this Something Weird Video assemblage its delirious kick: Santo fights fanged babes; Santo tackles zombies; Santo packs a wallop to a slow-moving, human-eating blob — all in scenes from such south-of-the-border exploits as Santo vs. the Vampire Women, Santo vs. the TV Killer and Santo vs. the Diabolical Hatchet.
If the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ever see it fit to award Santo a Lifetime Achievement Oscar (and they won’t), the clips have already been selected, and they’re all here in this two-hour collection. —Rod Lott
That a good chunk of A Night to Dismember’s climax takes place in daylight should surprise nobody fluent in the slasher film’s director, Doris Wishman.
Years ago, Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox — the porn one, not the music/model one) axed a couple of neighborhood boys to death. The act earned her a lengthy stay at a sanitarium. As she’s released into the real world — or as real as living with one’s parents can be — Vicki attempts readjustment to “normal” life. However, her brother (South Bronx Heroes director William Szarka) would rather she not be free to murder again, so he attempts to scare her back into hospitalization by going to the store to buy “a hideous mask.”
Also, the crudely depicted killings begin anew, which private detective Tim O’Malley (William Longo Jr.) investigates and narrates … and narrates … and narrates. The events constituting Dismember — including one death by car rollover — are told to us this way because Wishman didn’t film with live sound; even if she hadn’t dubbed everything in post, viewers still would require narration for a base level of comprehension, especially with an untold number of family tree branches thrown at us in the opening minutes. God bless her, Wishman held a unique approach to filmmaking — one in which the written word was never secondary, because it was always tertiary.
Further throwing your grasp on lucidity are shots that look to come from different stock, if not entire decades. With the occasional photograph or negative image spliced in, A Night to Dismember resembles the result of a particularly tricky filmmaking challenge — one in which Wishman either compiled the entire movie from existing footage to fit Judith J. Kushner’s script, or edited an entire movie and then asked Kushner to fashion a script around that. Honestly, the movie is so disorienting, disorganized and discombobulated, neither is out of the realm of possibility. It could use a couple of Deadly Weapons. —Rod Lott
Before 2020, science-fiction films about apocalyptic pandemics and other deadly diseases felt fantastically on par with speculative stories featuring invading aliens or murderous cyborgs. But now, it seems as though they’ve become the scariest of science fact.
When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s 
In the realm of Christploitation flicks, David A.R. White is, arguably, the cinematic king of kings in this straight-to-video subgenre. From racial comedies to post-apocalyptic road movies — and let’s not forget the immortal 
