⭐️⭐️
Sister Sarah Jane is a traveling evangelist with a bone to pick with fornication and the sinful men who love it. The lustful scumbags are a stain (any body fluid, really) on the earth and this psycho woman of God is setting out to rid the land of this particular scourge. The horny males populating the grimier patches of Los Angeles are soon coming to nasty ends at the maniacal hands of the Lordly lady. When she weaves her hellfire and brimstone spell on a young lesbian, she gets herself some bait to lure the dopey dinks to an early, much-deserved grave. Imagine how many sweet and innocent young girls have been saved thanks to Sister Jane’s holy work! Red paint and butcher shop splatter are left behind in pathetic bedrooms but more importantly we get a wonderfully folksy title song composed and sung by Jim Wingert. Its dark subject matter clashes with the sweet, sweet angelic vocals of Mr. Wingert and I fell deeply in love almost immediately. I guess title songs are a kink of mine and hey, it’s a great way to explain the plot without those tricky things like dialogue and character work. I wouldn’t expect them in a sex flick. A misogynistic guy complains about Sarah Jane humming hymns as he’s trying to give her head and then confesses to having multiple wives, several estranged children, even more one night stands and very little patience for women with opinions. This pillow talk leads to an unconvincing blowjob, somehow even less convincing sex and a fatal switchblade before ejaculation. Sara leaves the message “God is “Love” Not SEX” in lipstick on the mirror of the sad hotel room. Sister Sarah takes to the streets to preach, play the accordion and collect donations. She also spreads her message of sexual repression to a hotdog stand and attempts to con a free meal after yelling at a smooching couple. This is where she meets Penny, who she recognizes as someone who actually donated to her on the street, and they get to talking about their anti-sex beliefs. Penny offers to let her stay with her while she’s in town. Sister Sarah immediately initiates her to the cause, swearing her into servitude and also pocketing valuables around her house. She’s a real shit, much like most of those religious nuts that claim moral superiority and fully embrace their delusions of grandeur. I’m pretty sure that’s the point. A movie with a message and also unappealing flesh, limp dongs, sex via rubbing and bush! Low-effort gore pops up from time to time but the almost-graphic sex is way more stomach churning… but that’s all to be expected. If you’re into the kind of “hardcore films” that consist of an enflamed ballsack rubbing against a vagina, well, that’s a new one to me but this movie is definitely for you. A bunch of rambling filler, a bunch of actors who look like they’re running a low-grade fever and a bunch of clothing choices that would make a clown throw up make this a boring yet bizarre enough adventure in scummy waters.
aka Don’t Peek/The Ghost of Matilda Dixon/Tooth Fairy
⭐️⭐️1/2
A supernatural fiend takes out townsfolk unfortunate enough to live in the place where she was lynched by an angry mob more than one hundred years earlier. Matilda Dixon was falsely accused of murdering two kids thanks to a horrible disfigurement by fire causing her to stick to the dark due to the light bringing nothing but pain and forcing her to don a porcelain mask, making her an easy target of blame. Now she takes the form of a creepy-ass tooth fairy (she used to trade kids money for their teeth... yeah... I know, completely not weird at all) who pays a visit to anyone losing their last baby tooth and you better pray ya don’t catch a glimpse of the creepy-ass creeper. A child who survived an encounter with the pissed-off ghost comes back to the town that accused him of murdering his mother (they don’t buy his story of a porcelain-masked specter) to help out his old girlfriend when her little brother claims the spirit is back. It won’t take long for a few unlucky schmucks to realize there is definitely a reason to be afraid of the dark. Bodies start dropping and the cops suspect the returning Kyle is taking out folks in their quiet and creepy neighborhood. Light on splatter and memorable protagonists, the film banks everything on its cool-as-hell killer and there’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t hit classic territory but Matilda Dixon leaves enough of an impact to justify a few rewatches. Angus Sampson shows up as a local shithead and Emily Browning out acts everyone during her brief appearance.
aka Horror of the Werewolf/The Werewolf and the Yeti/The Hall of the Mountain King/The Curse of the Beast
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Our boy Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy, of course) heads to the Himalayas with an expedition as they search for the fabled Yeti, following in the footsteps of a doomed prior expedition. Yes. That very idea has me salivating as well. We get a quick pre-credits Yeti attack to let us know just what went down. The dead explorer leading the trip managed to send out a Yeti scalp and photographic proof to his elderly colleague who invites Daninsky to join him (along with the old man’s smoke-show daughter and obvious doomed lycanthrope love interest Sylvia). Bad weather halts their plans to journey into the mountains but a guide claims he knows a path through and our man of action decides to take him up on his offer while the rest of the team waits out the dangerous weather conditions. The famed adventurer and anthropologist Daninsky gets abandoned by his skittish guide and winds up in the clutches of two demonic nymphs who inhabit a cave our man is drawn into while braving the elements and noticing a light. It seems to be some sort of makeshift temple due to its standing as sacred ground. These sultry vampire-demon-ladies nurse him back to health and keep Waldemar as their sex slave for nefarious purposes. Some guys have all the luck. Not so lucky is their cannibalistic tastes which Daninsky stumbles upon once he can finally get out of bed thanks to a break from bumping uglies. He manages to slay both women with an arrow pulled from a toothy corpse they’re worshiping but he gets bit before dropping the last demon lady. You know what that means… we got a werewolf curse running through the veins! It’s exactly what happened on my second trip to Everest. While this nonsense is going on, the rest of the expedition begin looking for their missing member. A clan of bandits (remember, there’s always bandits in a Paul Naschy flick) stalking the expedition get taken out by the newly fanged and hairy Daninsky and then one of the expedition members gets his ass mauled. It’s ok, he was a rapist. Somehow, things get worse because a dangerous group of Mongols under the leadership of Sekkar Khan and his even more dangerous and scheming second in command Wandesa (the captivating Silvia Solar) capture the team and get to some shockingly gruesome (but not that convincing) torturing. Luckily, there’s a werewolf wandering around and his darker-than-usual ass (elevation?) has no problem tearing apart torture-happy jerks… but also innocent folks. Ya take what ya can get. He does get captured pretty quick and Wandesa has some sinister plans for the monster to help her gain a shit-ton of power. Yeah. I’m sure that will work out fine for the baddies. A yeti shows up near the end and tussles with the werewolf because eventually they remembered there was a yeti roaming the mountains. The plot may be built completely on convenience and Spain is about as convincing as stand-in for the Himalayas as wintertime in Illinois but that just adds to the charm. Boobs, beasts, beauties, blood and, of course, his barrel-chested majesty Paul Naschy check all the boxes for my Spanish horror shopping list. The usual doomed romance angle gets a happy ending this time out… I feel like Waldemar deserved the break.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Skid row A Nightmare on Elm Street from Indonesia delivers the goods... in between stretches of tedium. A family is shotgunned to death on Christmas Eve (dad manages to hold onto his cigarette like a champ) back in 1941. We jump ahead to what I assume is the 80s and follow a group of friends. Said friends goof around while traveling in a Jeep, their tomfoolery almost leads to them running over a man on a bike and our leading lady Maria sees a vision of three little girls in white, jumping rope. Bad dreams turn dangerous and a vague familiarity haunts the runtime when scenes aren’t directly ripping off its American predecessor. Of course, here, Freddy turns out to be the devil himself and is assisted by a succubus and there’s also a mentally challenged caretaker who resembles Steve Buscemi and creeps around the place. This time around Fred Krueger dresses in messy white clothes, looks like someone threw up on his face and rocks a razor-tipped monster hand instead of a glove, he also removes his head quite a bit. I dig him. A girl is murdered in a shirt that reads “This Is My SEXY T-Shirt” and her boyfriend is blamed for the crime... just like in that other movie only instead of dying in his jail cell he is lured to an empty house by a succubus and has his throat slashed by Fred’s monster hand. He’s then found hanging outside of Maria’s house. A shaman stops by to battle with Fred and his gal pal, he ends up getting bit in the crotch by the severed head of the succubus. Another shaman is called in and fares no better. Eventually, that dude they almost ran over with their car shows up sporting a giant crucifix and saves the day. There’s an abundance of dullness to wade through but everything is ten times better when our dollar-store Fred Crooger is on the screen. The dream angle is kind of brushed over and the film mines Poltergeist for its climax. My copy was in French, I don’t speak French but I know more French than Indonesian so I would have been lost either way. It’s a damn shame we didn’t get a franchise.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
In 1500s England, Lord Edward Whitman (Vincent Price, perfect as usual) is a cruel magistrate who gets his sick kicks torturing “witches” under the guise of doing the Lord’s work along with his group of loyal ass-hats. Upon gleefully massacring a coven, the coven’s leader Oona calls upon the titular supernatural horror to get some much-deserved revenge on the man and his clan of scumbags. The upper class gets what’s coming to them as a curse tears through the house of Whitman in the form of a very goofy creature (sadly kept off screen for far too much of the runtime). There’s a level of sleaze vibrating through the whole thing as sexual perversion and assault seems to be the focal point of the witch hunting and just the personal tastes of most of the Whitman clan. Which, yeah, most of the church-sanctioned atrocities definitely had their hands soaked in sexual deviancy. Harry Whitman returns home from college along with the new perish priest and both are expected to join the Lord in stamping out the imagined evil running rampant in the village up until an actual evil force arrives to take care of a much worse evil power. Sadly, supernatural revenge takes a bit of a backseat to family melodrama and the growing awfulness of the rapists who really need a good killin’. Like a period piece werewolf drama with a more spectral slant and Vincent Price. So, it’s impossible to dislike but admittedly a bit stuffy and overdramatic.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Final entry in Hugh Gallagher’s unrivaled shot-on-analog-video gore trilogy is the lo-fi masterpiece of the whole “American Nekromantik”. Taking nothing away from the prior outings (1993’s spellbinding trash odyssey and Ghetty Chasun powerhouse showpiece Gorotica and 1990’s Gorgasm which is equally magical but lacking the intensity that Ghetty Chasun brought to everything), Gore Whore adds a level of otherworldliness-on-shoestring-budget that I just adore. Sadly, we had to trade Ghetty Chasun in the deal but I’ll try to look past it. Luckily, Audrey Street is another fearless female lead and makes the transition much easier. Dr. Whitman has been robbed of his breakthrough formula and pertinent documents by his lab assistant. Private dick (and someone I wouldn’t trust with taking out the garbage) Chase Barr (beloved Brady Debussey who nearly stole the show in Gorotica and played Helvis himself in Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis) is hired by the doctor to get his shit back. Well, Barr gets to investigating and discovers that the assistant is actually a dead whore and the formula is a regenerating agent that this undead lady of the night needs to keep her corpse-ass alive. The formula (injected with a dildo attachment to the large syringe into… well, you know where) doesn’t work on its own, it also necessitates the consumption of human blood. Luckily, our undead hooker knows where to find plenty of dopes willing to let her into their homes for a quick bang session, so there’s more than a couple cadavers piling up. Desperate to hold onto the only thing keeping her scrambling about the earth, Dawn reanimates the dead to attack the man tracking her down. An opening erotic dance for a bored scuzzball by a pencil-thin girl ends with his penis being bitten off and blood spraying everywhere. This would be horrifying if we didn’t know it was inevitable. She manages to chew his head off too but that’s the fate of any dope dumb enough to take a mysterious woman to bed in these flicks. This is the world Gallagher has built for us and we’re stuck for as long as he decides. Audio and visual remains in the barrel where it should be, and the loosest definition of “hero” is fitted nicely to our long-haired gumshoe with a troubled past. Collateral damage, trauma to the genitals and an aimless nightmare scenario is perfectly acceptable on this forbidden journey through a world we shouldn’t be a part of. A severed head shouting orders to its headless body (brought to terrible life by green screen magic) is just one pit stop on this journey. Our hero punting the severed head into a pond is the perfect punchline. An empty club and a musical trio dishing out awful comedy before dying at Dawn’s hands and getting resurrected serves as a climax that feels more offensive than an anti-climax, it feels like a purposeful “fuck you” to the audience but I don’t see how it could have gone any other way. There’s still the “big” reveal to come but that seems more like an excuse to see the doctor’s hairy ass and to throw in an axe dismemberment. Again, I don’t think we should have expected anything different. Gallagher has a way of making all his films feel like the back page personals of a questionable porno magazine imagined to visual life by the addled brain of a sociopathic sex pest. There is nothing like it and if you can get comfortable with the diseased wavelength the whole thing operates on, you’ll find yourself in the wrong kind of paradise. In the span of time between this final outing and his first piece of the unconnected trilogy, Gallagher didn’t so much grow as a filmmaker as he did fester. There’s almost nothing like it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fucked up people collide as some fucked up situations escalate in Hugh Gallagher's nihilistic follow up to the entertaining as all hell Gorgasm. Two low-rent thieves flee into the night with a bag of stolen goods. A large jewel seems to be their main target and with the heat closing in, one of the crooks swallows the gem and ditches the rest. A cop stops them and a quick shoot out leads to a dead officer and a badly injured criminal. His buddy Neil steals a car from an extremely drunk man and loads his partner into the car, trying to come up with a plan of action. As Neil and Max flee in a stolen vehicle, the super foxy Carrie watches a continuous barrage of images of corpses and masturbates on her bed. She gets off with the help of a skull. You may say "Brennan. Why the fuck did you bring that up out of nowhere?" Trust me. It's important to know that she's into some freaky shit. Neil heads to the solitude of a cemetery to figure things out and discovers Max has passed on, Carrie is also at this cemetery for reasons I can only assume involve the recently deceased. She notices Neil but more importantly she notices the freshly deceased Max and she has an idea. Promising Neil a safe place to crash and a means of disposing the body, she offers her help. Neil agrees but we'll find out pretty damn quick that Carrie has an ulterior motive. Ya see, Carrie is a necrophiliac and she is jonesing to get to boning the fresh corpse she's just miraculously stumbled upon. When Neil heads out to make a phone call to try and sell off the jewel, Carrie has some steamy shower sex with the dead dude they've placed in her bath tub. Neil finds out he’ll be able to get some cash and when he returns he finds Carrie cutting his dead friend's hair and kissing the cold cadaver. He roles with it, knowing he's just gotta get through another day then he'll be getting the hell out of town. Of course, nothing could possibly be that easy. Carrie has other plans for Max now that he's begun to stink. She gives him a farewell fuck and then calls an acquaintance of hers. She knocks Neil out with a skull when he tries to cut open the corpse to get to the jewel and then drags Max's remains to her contact's house. Why is she bringing the body there? Well, you may want to sit down. Her contact is some cape-wearing creep who she supplies corpses to because he has AIDS. Worried about being imprisoned for spreading the horrible disease, he figures it's just easier to have his way with already decomposing partners. On top of the corpse fucking, he pays Carrie some extra cash to dress up in leather and whip him as he has his way with the dead. Tennessee is lit as fuck, yo! More cops are killed along the way and eventually Neil confronts his perverted antagonists and it all climaxes the only way it ever could: With Neil murdering an AIDS-infected-corpse-fucker, getting covered in his blood, shooting Carrie in the head and then planning his own suicide by immolation in a seedy motel room. Yay? Ghetty Chasun as Carrie throws everything into her performance and flinches from nothing. This film is anchored by her presence and bravery. The acting everywhere else is a little rocky, slipping between pure camp and boredom. It doesn't matter in the least though, thanks to the story that just spins out of control from the get-go. Hugh Gallagher continues to impress and fortunately found a powerhouse in Ghetty. A nasty but enjoyable experience.
