Horror

Night Killer (1990)

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Ladies of Virginia Beach are all atwitter over an unnamed serial rapist/killer terrorizing the community. (Let’s call him Night Killer, since the movie is named just that.) Luckily, he’s easy to spot: He’s the guy in the Toxic Avenger-esque rubber mask with matching rubber hand spouting spiky yellow fingernails long enough to vie for a Guinness World Record. Only if he stood under a neon arrow flashing “GET MURDERED HERE” could he be more identifiable.

His signature move? Punching clean through women’s torsos. Melanie Beck (Tara Buckman, Silent Night, Deadly Night) somehow makes it through a terrifying home-invasion encounter with him, emerging with scraps, bruises and amnesia, but nary an extra hole. After being discharged from the hospital, life for Melanie continues to be a living nightmare, thanks to Night Killer still at large, as well as being stalked — and then abducted and sexually assaulted — by a creepy guy named Axel (Peter Hooten, who donned the cape as 1978’s Dr. Strange).

As a director, Claudio Fragasso (aka Clyde Anderson) is remarkably consistent. However, as other Fragasso films like Beyond Darkness, Monster Dog, Troll 2, et al. raise their right hands and testify, that consistency is a remarkable disdain for reality and rationale — and Night Killer might be his most imbecilic. Nothing happens as it should or would, even when allowing for a moviegoers’ suspension of disbelief. For example — and this is minor, mind you — Melanie reacts to a threatening phone call by looking in the mirror and yanking out her breasts. In fact, it’s just the first of several instances that call for Buckman to bare at least one of them, which accounts for her wardrobe choice of saggy sweaters for easy access; exposure happens so often — perhaps only a single instance merited — that I felt embarrassed for her.

Elsewhere, Melanie lays out a picnic of pills on the shore. In a public bathroom, Axel is forced at gunpoint to strip to the blue banana hammock that passes for his underwear. Seemingly from another movie emerges Blind Vision’s Lee Lively as an apparent stand-in for Donald Pleasence’s signature Halloween role of Dr. Loomis. I’m more than happy to discuss the bonkers twist, but don’t get me started on the choreographer. —Rod Lott

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Action

The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (1976)

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Only in the 1970s — or at least the New World Pictures version of the 1970s — could you make absolute heroes out of a pair of cop-shooting, hostage-banging, dynamite-toting bank robbers the way that the drive-in favorite The Great Texas Dynamite Chase did, starring the breast-baring duo of Claudia Jennings and Jocelyn Jones.

Doing a good job of capturing small town Texas — or at least the California stand-in of it — complete with tumbleweeds blowing down the railroad tracks, bored Texan Ellie Jo (Jones, Tourist Trap) works in a bank that has a Confederate flag on the wall; when prison escapee Candy (Jennings, Sisters of Death) comes in, sticks of lit dynamite in hand, the two team up and head out on the road looking for money and men, not in that order.

And it’s a pretty good plan, too, taking them all across Texas’ various backroads, saloons and hotels. Eventually, they hook up with small-time thief Slim (Johnny Crawford); if you’ve ever wanted to see the co-star of The Rifleman making drunken love while a song called “Love Is Good to Me” plays over the quadraphonic stereo — and I know that fetish is out there — here’s your flick.

In a particularly downbeat ending, even though the gals make it to Mexico on horseback, just about everyone else receives massive shotgun blasts to the chest; to be honest, I was kind of hoping for some dynamite-handling gone wrong — nothing big, just a few blown off fingers here and there — but on an impossibly tight budget, I guess director Michael Pressman (Doctor Detroit) did the best he could.

However, with Jennings and Jones frequently nude — and both with a sexy look that reminds me of the white-trash moms I grew up around in Texas — it’s really not that difficult for The Great Texas Dynamite Chase to instead manifest a couple of explosions in your blue jeans. —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

Casos de ¡Alarma! 1: SIDA (1986)

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WTFThe sensational Mexican newsmagazine ¡Alarma! is legendary for the graphic violence and tremendous sex contained within in its bestselling pages, with images of severed heads and mutilated corpses right on the cover, usually in blazing full color. I’ve got a couple of old copies if you really want to take a look at one.

In 1986, the fotonovela titled Casos de ¡Alarma! made it to the big (well, big in Mexico) screen in a film subtitled SIDA or, as it’s more popularly known in America, AIDS. Of course, it’s a highly melodramatic and deeply pungent story that, even for the time, is hilariously uninformed about the disease. But, I guess if you’re watching a film from the makers of ¡Alarma!, you’re really not looking for integridad periodística.

A moody young man named Rodolfo (Servando Manzetti) comes to a small rural town, with uncomfortable flashbacks to an apparent murder as he looks out the window wistfully on the bus. Seems he’s confused about his sexualidad ever since a kid (who resembled a young John Candy) molested him at boarding school, leading to a life of being taken advantage of by old men and, for the most part, he didn’t really hate it.

However, when he meets atractiva clothes-washer Carolina (Alma Delfina), it energizes the fuerza de vida machista pura inside him, but, consequently, he gives her SIDA. Then, despite the romantic ranchera musical numbers by the mayor’s son, Ausencio (Julio Aldama), to her, he vengefully sexually assaults Carolina and that gives him SIDA, too, which apparently has a gestation period of three months before you die a horrible death on a tractor.

At two hours, the thing is surprisingly filled with dumb comedy, tired gay stereotypes and plenty of punishing filler. Regardless, it’s still very much like the death-obsessed magazine, from a bordello of breast-heaving prostitutas to the bloody gundown of Carolina from an angry padre; this first volume of Casos de ¡Alarma! is remarkably trashy and fully exploitative of the absolute temor surrounding SIDA at the time. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The New Gladiators (1984)

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In 2072, the TV networks’ biggest shows are reality competitions like Killbike and The Danger Game, both as nihilistic as they sound. (Isn’t that crazy? I don’t mean those shows, but the idea that TV networks will exist in 2072. Oh, that Lucio Fulci — such a kidder!) The webs’ ante gets upped when the floating station WBS makes plans for The Battle of the Damned!

To be played in Rome’s Colosseum, where the bread-and-circus gladiators once sparred, this surefire ratings grabber forces death-row inmates to participate in games of mortal combat that update Ben-Hur-style chariot races with motorcycles. Among the first round of The New Gladiators (to borrow the film’s title) are Drake (Jared Martin, Fulci’s Aenigma), in the clink for killing the three guys who killed his wife, and Abdul (Italian post-apocalyptic flick staple Fred Williamson, Warriors of the Wasteland), who practices kung fu under disorienting strobe lights.

It’s a terrific idea, not fully realized until the release of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man three years later. The New Gladiators gets too caught up in prepping for the games, as Drake and friends — including Doctor Butcher M.D. himself, Donald O’Brien, as a severely burned ol’ pal with fiber-optic eyes — plot to destroy the show and WBS from within.

Known alternately as Warriors of the Year 2072, the movie certainly bears appeal, yet has more ambition than director and co-writer Fulci (The New York Ripper) has means. This is evident from frame one, when a pan across the cityscape at night aims to evoke the “wow” factor of Blade Runner — unachievable when said cityscape clearly is a model in miniature, akin to a backdrop from your cousin’s Lionel tabletop train set. Fulci gets in one good effect, when a woman’s face melts like a candle. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Cruising (1980)

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Undoubtedly one of the most controversial films ever made, William Friedkin’s provocative tale of a homosexual killer on the loose in the sultry sexual playground of New York City in the 1980s is constantly being re-evaluated and reinterpreted through far more educated eyes than mine, but time has aged it well enough for me to at least admit that it’s an incomprehensible serial-killer flick that you just can’t look away from.

When a human arm is found floating in the harbor, Al Pacino — who resembles a then-current Lou Reed, oddly enough — stars as a New York City police officer that goes undercover in the extremely sensual gay leather underworld to hunt down the brutal killer who sing-songs a nursery rhyme when engaging in his deadly deeds, mostly thanks to a dead father that gave him the worst (imagined?) parental advice possible.

Becoming a well-liked regular in the highly sexual bars and clubs around town — the beautifully graphic leather-daddy scenes are still legendary for pushing the boundaries of the MPAA — Pacino quickly finds himself questioning his own heterosexuality as he gets deeper and deeper into his supposed undercover character, going out into the night, hanging around the park while dressed in leathers, shorts and a handkerchief hanging out of his back pocket.

When Pacino finally does track the killer down in said park, it’s hard to exactly say if the movie ends on a typical Hollywood ending or, as he breaks the fourth wall and stares directly at the audience, something darker has happened inside him that were not privy to just as the credits roll, blasting Willy DeVille’s “It’s So Easy”; either way, it’s an enthralling mess that I could watch again and again, possibly even questioning my own aesthetic draw to the subcultures in the film.

The Arrow Video Blu-ray has a brand-new commentary from Friedkin that explores many of the themes above, if you’re at all interested; additionally, a pair of archival featurettes document the still-relevant controversy surrounding the movie and, up until that point, its (justifiably) tarnished legacy. Cruising is a disturbing, challenging film that some will like, some will hate, and some will totally get off on — maybe even a combination of all three, if you’ve got the time. —Louis Fowler

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