99 Cent Rental returns after our October break with a listener request. Since we just did Don Coscarelli's 1979 debut, Phantasm, a movie made on tiny, sub-500k budget, we thought it made a lot of sense to see what happens when you break through and Hollywood heaps cash on you to make a proper movie. The result is... very Coscarelli-ish. There's no question whatsoever that Don is well-read on matters of fantasy and science fiction and these being the days before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies mandated that all fantasy features be epic, high-fantasy blow-outs, Coscarelli reaches back into the pool of gritty sword and sorcery for something as characteristically weird as you'd expect from authors like Poul Anderson, Fritz Lieber, and Robert E. Howard. Is it good, though? Well...
The story concerns the hunky, flaxen-haired Dar, the last of his people, who sets out across a dusty landscape seeking vengeance on Maax, the head of a wicked cult in the city of Aruk who will be killed by the son of King Zed. By some unexplainable power, Dar can speak to animals and forms a party of two ferrets, a tiger, and a hawk to have his revenge. Starring Marc Singer, Tanya Roberts, and Rip Torn, The Beastmaster lands heavily in the middle of the 1982 surge of fantasy movies that brought us Conan The Barbarian and managed to carve out a sweet cult of fans in spite of its tepid box office performance.
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This week we take a trip back to 1991 for a real video store oddity. It's a rape/revenge movie that also capitalizes on the popularity of Robocop. Written by an Emmy-award winning TV writer, starring a two-time Tony winner as the villain and chock full of kill scenes that are so creative and strange that they could only have been produced for a straight to video exploitation movie. And so deeply committed to its video tape format was it that this movie's preferred aspect ratio is 4:3.
Starring Stacy Haiduk as the meddling courtroom sketch artist who is obsessed with solving a series of murders that she has no business investigating in the first place, as well as Bruce Davidson who is horny for revenge. They're both going up against Broadway sensation Michael Cerveris who chews so much scenery that there's not much left for his co-stars. This bizarre revenge plot is aided by a series of extremely ambitious special effects and one scene that blew our minds by how incredibly weird and unique it is.
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Aileen Clark of Uy Que Horror is back to join us for a look at two truly unhinged scare films. In the 1960s and 70s churches occasionally produced low budget morality tales and scare movies to frighten their congregations into going back to church if they feel like they're slacking off. The problem is that they were made by people who didn't know how to make movies with casts of non-actors and extremely low budgets. They were cheap and terrible and everyone hated watching them. Along came Ron and June Ormond and their son Tim, the first family of exploitation, teamed up with Reverend Estus W. Pirkle, a charismatic fundamentalist preacher from Mississippi to adapt Pirkle's fire and brimstone sermon If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do that threatened easily frightened Christians with seeking out draconian churches that shunned anything looking like empathy and service in favor of a hard line position against all things communism.
In the sequel, The Burning Hell, Estus Pirkle has decided that his last sermon didn't put enough terror in the hearts of Christians over going to hell so here's one that's literally all about how much hell sucks and how you definitely want to accept Jesus Christ into your heart so you don't go there.
These fiery sermons are illustrated with scenes of trashy, gory violence that you definitely don't expect to find in movies meant for fragile, easily offended Christian people. They are completely weird and hilarious.
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This week we dive headlong into one of the most baffling 80's video store hits, The Wraith, in which Charlie Sheen is a ghost or an alien or a ghost alien who gets revenge on the wily gang of Arizona cretins that murdered him by running them over with his magic ghost alien car.
The Wraith is a lot of things. Good is not one of them but it has a certain ineffable charm that makes it tremendously fun to watch in spite of its story being positively incidental to the rest of the movie. It casts the widest possible net to remind you of movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Death Wish 3, and The Road Warrior. Do you like cool cars? Do you like explosions? Do you like aliens, ghosts, or ghost aliens? Are you willing to let slide about a dozen totally unresolved plot points and completely ignore the fact that this movie leaves you with more questions than answers? You will probably love The Wraith.
The soundtrack rules. Sheen seems completely unaware of the movie he's in. A pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn is doing her best with what she has. Clint Howard gloriously answers our question: is it a wig? All this and more in our exhaustive breakdown of The Wraith from director Mike Marvin.
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This week we're shaking off the despair of a nuclear war one-two punch and staying in the made-for-tv mode for something incredibly dumb. Where Threads and The Day After are significant television events, this week's movie is anything but. It's a baffling riff on both popular haunted house movies of the era and classic gothic horror but that's about as coherent as the vision gets. Everything that follows is an exhausting exercise in early 80's made-for-tv drivel.
Parker Stevenson, fresh off his run as Frank Hardy in the Hardy Boys Mysteries is joined by Lisa Eilbacher, Joan Bennet, and Slim Pickens for a stay at a far-too-modern for gothic horror house in southern California. Either the house itself, or the extremely sophisticated security system is in love with Eilbacher's character. We can't really figure it out. Ultimately it doesn't matter because the charm lies in precisely how artless and strange this movie is. Also, you get a few musical numbers.
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Tonight! On a very special 99 Cent Rental we take a trip back to 1983 to take in the movie that shocked the 100 million Americans that watched in horror as the world ended in a nuclear fireball before their very eyes. As the 80's ground on and The United States and The Soviet Union were running out of puppet governments and proxy wars to fight the status of nuclear war became less a matter of if and more a matter of when. The ABC network sought to send a sobering message to the people of America who had been convinced that we could win a nuclear war by delivering an uncompromising made-for-TV epic that detailed what would happen after everything had been obliterated.
A stacked cast of excellence paint a picture of a shattered America in the last days of humanity. The sheer scope of our nuclear weapons are put on the screen. We see an entire city in middle America blasted off the face of the Earth forever. We see the survivors of the blast struggling to stay alive in the face of hunger, sickness, and radiation poisoning. Dave is less than impressed with the movie and struggles with the political struggle that informed the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Bryan's feelings on the movie are much more complicated, having grown up within a few miles of two high priority nuclear targets as all this was going down.
It's our longest episode yet and we have thoughts. There will be no survivors.
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This week Bryan and Dave take you back to the New York City of 1990 with a look at what might be Abel Ferrara's most focused movie, King of New York. With a dynamite cast of killers, including Christopher Walken at his best, Laurence Fishburne carrying practically the entire movie on his shoulders, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes, and Giancarlo Esposito, King of New York presents a morally gray crime movie where everyone, even the cops, are just the worst. Crime is the blood that keeps the city alive in this movie and an unreliable narrator is going to do his best to convince you that his crusade to run the criminal underground and thereby the entire city is just, good, and right.
Stylish, slick, and kinetic, King of New York is like a Pixies song with loud, outrageous, and violent scenes of criminal carnage punctuated by quiet meditations on morality. It's bleak, nihilistic, and the brothers can't help but notice that this very-much American cops and robbers movie feels much, much more like the Italian Polizziotteschi reflections which makes the film's subtle social and political undertones feel that much more pronounced.
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This week we're hanging by a thread as we take a look at one of the strangest, sleaziest movies we've done yet, Mad Foxes. A few movies in our past have driven us to the brink of madness but none so powerfully as this Swiss/German/Spanish co-production that was intended to be a sequel-in-name-only of the American action movie, Stingray.
Music video director Paul Grau approached his producer friend Erwin Dietrich with an idea to produce a comedy and ended up with the assignment to instead produce a violent action movie and since the producer was also a big name in the world of European sexploitation the movie had a mandate to also be full of sex and nudity and man alive, did Paul Grau miss the mark. Starring Jose Gras, credited as Robert O'Neil, it tells the story of a man, his car, and the high cost of being so cool when Nazi bikers assault his lady and kill his parents. Again, because his car is just too cool.
Somehow having four writer credits, this movie comes off like it was written by one twelve year old boy. Very little of it makes sense. A lot of it is maddening to behold and if you're not ready for it you're going to be surprised by precisely how many penises are in this movie.
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This week Dave surprises Bryan with a movie with a title that is at once a good description and a terrible misrepresentation. They're going to Germany for a look at Martin Walz's very gay 1996 horror comedy, Killer Condom. Based on the comic of the same name (and the follow-up, Down To The Bone) by German cartoonist, Ralf Konig, Killer Condom (Kondom des Grauens) tells the story of New York City in the grips of terror as carnivorous condoms bite the penis off of the city's men left and right. It's also a touching love story as Detective Luigi Macaroni shakes his jaded feelings on love and comes to terms with feelings for the rentboy who keeps distracting him from his job.
Distributed by Troma, Killer Condom was thrust out into the English-speaking world on the vague promise of the outrageous, politically incorrect comedy you've come to expect from the house that Toxie built but this sells the movie short as it's actually a very human love story and a not-so-subtle meditation on the AIDS crisis. Now, it IS a movie made in the 90's and hasn't exactly aged well but reckon with a little transphobia and racism and you find a terribly unique movie that was way ahead of its time.
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As our Pride series continues we drop the first 99 Cent Rental episode looking at the extremely complicated history of William Friedkin's gay leather giallo Americano, Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino. Dave's research and history expertise about this period of urban gay culture comes in handy as we contrast Friedkin's attempt to provoke and shock against the reality of gay night life at leather bars, BDSM bars, and the cruising scene in the days before apps and the internet made casual encounters in the park obsolete.
We also look at the organized movements to protest Cruising and convince theaters not to show the movie, explore whether or not Friedkin was exploiting the gay BDSM scene for cheap shocks, and whether or not this is a good movie. Did Cruising do more harm than good? Does it get anything right? The answer, as always, is: it's complicated.
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This week we're going down under for a look at the 1989 post-apocalypse sports movie, Blood of Heroes starring Rutger Hauer and Joan Chen. Also known as Salute of the Jugger, it's a late entry into the Maxploitation wave of the 80's but rather than being the usual quest for water or women, it's an underdog story about a team of misfits who play a violent future sport involving a dog's skull instead of a ball. What's a jugger? Don't worry about it, baby! Will they climb the ranks out of their place beating up on village and peasant teams? Will they make it to the big city and win it all when they face the pros? Probably. I mean, it's a sports movie at heart and that's what usually happens in those movies.
Blood of Heroes sports a significantly better cast than you're probably expecting with Hauer, Chen, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Delroy Lindo all slumming it. The production is also executed by a surprising cohort of filmmakers who we have to thank for the original Mad Max movies which explains why it's so competently made and looks so authentically post-apocalyptic from the people who brought us the subgenre in the first place.
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This week Bryan and Dave take a trip down south to Orlando, Florida for a look at the utterly baffling but thoroughly charming martial arts movie from Grandmaster YK Kim, Miami Connection. This one's got it all. You get a rock and roll band that's also a bunch of taekwondo black belt vigilantes, a scummy gang of coke dealin' rednecks, ninjas on motorcycles, and a battle of the band that is a little more literal than you might be expecting. Along the way you'll learn a thing or two about how great taekwondo is and the power of friendship and family.
Utterly trashed upon release and rejected by nearly every distributor that saw it, Miami Connection nearly ruined YK Kim but his sheer force of personality saw it through and the good folks at AGFA and The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin saw a sincerity in it that its contemporaries utterly lacked. It's because of this that Miami Connection roared back into life and lives comfortably in the hearts of all who see it. We love it so much that Grandmaster Kim graces our own podcast art.
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Heeeeeeeere we are! Born to be kings! We're talking immortals, sword fighting, decapitations, Queen! It's 1986's cult classic, Highlander, an absolute mess of a movie that somehow, against all odds, has amassed a worldwide following of super fans. It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B, just a mishmash of nerdy tropes thrown together and somehow working together in a way that made every twelve year old boy a megafan.
Christopher Lambert plays a brooding Scottish guy who must fight a crazy evil heavy metal black knight while Sean Connery chews scenery. It's all sword fighting all the time and a soundtrack provided by Queen that is easily as memorable as the entire movie. Russell Mulcahy is out here putting his music video filmmaking skills to work on a stylish action adventure that endures as an unstoppable cult movie item that Bryan and Dave are at a loss to explain.
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This week we're getting real stupid with it and looking at Cannon Film's ultimate ninja festival, American Ninja from 1985. This one hits all the high notes for the 80's. Michael Dudikoff makes his starring debut playing an American soldier with a mysterious past who must fight evil ninjas to stop an arms dealer from selling missiles to communists in Central America or maybe it's Angola. Who can say? We also break down the dubious political conditions of The Philippines and the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos that made so many cheesy low budget action movies, the intense, apocalyptic conditions of the late Cold War, and the wild abandon with which Cannon made jingoistic action movies for the American market.
This absolutely ridiculous movie is one of the dumbest movies we've watched so far and we cannot resist its stupid allure. It's got just about everything a twelve year old boy could want in an action movie. They're ninjas! And they're freaking out!
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Grease up your pompadours and get your switchblades ready. This week we're taking a look at Walter Hill's 1984 rock and roll fable, Streets of Fire. Coming in hot off the back of the 1982 smash hit buddy cop picture, 48 Hours, Hill and co-writer Larry Gross could write their own checks and dictate their own destinies and sold Hill's dream project, a retro nostalgia vehicle about tough guys, femme fatales, bad guys, and pop music but when the movie landed in the screening rooms at Universal they knew they had a problem. Streets of Fire is weird as hell and out of step with what movie-going teens of the summer of 1984 were looking for. So dire was the outcome that Streets of Fire ended up getting killed in its opening weekend against one of the weakest Star Trek movies and then the following week Ghostbusters dropped and until Beverly Hills Cop came out it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about.
In the years that followed Streets of Fire gained a cult following that appreciates what Hill was trying to do. It's an upgrade from The Warriors in many ways and the sound track, paired with powerhouse performances from Diane Lane and Willem Dafoe in early roles, delivers a wildly entertaining, deeply silly action movie with an enduring legacy. Let us tell you all about it.
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We're joined this week by Eli Bosnick of the God Awful Movies podcast to talk about the infamous Hong Kong Category III exploitation movie, Story of Ricky. One man enters a corrupt private prison in near-future China and faces down the evil warden, his assistant, and four villains with terrible strength and magical martial arts prowess. Along the way just about everybody gets their guts kicked out or their head punched off in this extremely gory spectacle.
We also discuss the dawn of the Category III rating in Hong Kong, how great it was to trade video tapes in the mail with total strangers in the 90's, and Eli tries to get Bryan to cop to trading horror movies for weird porno movies in what is easily one of our most inappropriate episodes yet.
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We're getting really bloody this week as we take a trip to feudal Japan for the 1972 samurai movie that set the pace for violent sword fighting movies to follow. This is not your father's samurai movie. This is not Akira Kurosawa. This is Kenji Misumi's epic starring Tomisaburo Wakyama and his wonderful, weapon-laden baby cart.
Adapted from the extremely popular manga by Kazuo Koike, Lone Wolf and Cub tells the story of wandering assassin, Ogami Itto and his son, Daigoro as they walk the demon way in hell. The evil daimyo, Yagyu Retsudo wants them dead but it's going to take an army if they intend to get the job done.
Utterly ridiculous and bloody, Sword of Vengeance sets the tone for the five movies that follow and is a tremendously enjoyable movie. Let us tell you all about it.
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This week we take a look at Bryan's favorite movie of all time, John Carpenter's tough guy action dystopia that definitely shook the Disney off of Kurt Russell and reintroduced him as a premier action movie star for the 1980's. We track the entire trajectory of this movie's production, we'll tell you why everyone thinks Snake Plissken is dead, you'll find out about all the other guys that the production company wanted over Kurt Russell, how director of photography, Dean Cundey engineered an entirely new anamorphic lens just to see the movie at night without sacrificing all the awesome lighting. It's a once-in-a-lifetime action movie that set the pace for the decade and inspired everyone to try their hand (and mostly fail) at making their own version of the movie.
Carpenter had access to more money than he'd work with before and still had to stretch a dollar to make the movie and he managed to knock it out of the park on every front. The cast is stacked. The production design is second-to-none, and the soundtrack is just perfect. Listen in and learn all about it.
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This week Bryan and Dave take a trip back to Rome to check in with Enzo G. Castellari and Mark Gregory on their sequel to the 1982 action movie that exploited the popularity of The Warriors. This time they're exploiting the popularity of John Carpenter's outstanding, Escape From New York. We get more Trash and more Bronx gangs but this time we're joined by the absolute massive screen presence of Antonio Sabato and the movie's appeal rests entirely on the outrageous shoot-y, burn-y, explode-y violence that ups the ante and cranks the volume.
Escape From The Bronx has practically zero plot to speak of and is an incredibly dumb movie at heart but it's a lot of fun and some of the best action that Italy had to offer in the twilight of their once-great exploitation movie industry. Let us break it all down for you.
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Hey! Hey! Hey! BIM's on the way! This week Bryan and Dave take a good long look at the abyss and the abyss stares back when they watch the movie that launched The Cannon Group into the American imagination, a movie musical so poorly received that it nearly drove its director to leap from his hotel balcony at the premier. The Apple is what happens when a producer knows that he wants to make a big musical that's sure to capture some of the excitement that Grease generated but without really knowing what makes a musical work. It's a movie so profoundly bad, with bad acting, bad characters, and the worst thing a musical can have: bad music. Nothing about this baffling movie works and it is plainly obvious for anyone to see. It's simply amazing that the director, Menahem Golan was so caught off guard by its failure.
Some movies are so bad that they end entire careers. This one almost ended Golan's life.
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