The Straight to Video Crap Explosion Continues...

I really thought I could never watch another crappy straight to video, shot on video film.... then I sprained my ankle. I was given a prescription for magic pain pills which make these utterly retarded "films" somehow strangely watchable. These reviews are a continuation of an earlier series about this gigantic diarrhea explosion of a boxed dvd set I was stupid enough to buy...
Aided only with prescription painkillers and my natural sadomasochistic viewing tendencies, I forged ahead....

Mayhem Motel
I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was shot on film. That's about where the pleasant surprises ended. If I had known the cover art looked like this, I would probably have liked the film significantly less. Its not a horror film by a huge margin, and this artwork makes it look like one. The movie is a bunch of vaguely connected vignettes that revolve around one hotel and range from unpleasant to disgusting to strangely hilarious.
One of the first images in the film is an overweight, hairy man getting into a bathtub. He leans forward and pukes into the water. It looks completely real. Then it cuts to another scene. The movie proceeds like this, showing you something disgusting then cutting to something "hilarious" like two mimes having sex. There is tons of disgusting sex humor, and I ain't gonna lie to you, some of it made me laugh. The movie ends with some good ole necrophelia, then a guy randomly shooting himself. This movie made zero sense and was very disgusting, but it kept my attention. I gleaned some interesting information from the closing credits:
"Some characters and concepts from Matt Biancaniello's one man performance 'purge'" Wow, that must be an incredible one man show. The cheesy nu-metal end theme song was by "Pleasurecrush" which is almost as cheesy as a name for a band as "KandleKrush" from Tom Goes To The Mayor.
And, most telling of all: "Special thanks to all of the motels and thier owners... ... they had no clue." Their misspelling is thiers not mine.


Next on my brain punishing double feature was "Dead Body Man" by some dude named Ryan Cavelline who made a bunch of the crapfests in this set. This one is basically a horror comedy about a wacky serial killer named Willie who wears a Freddy Kruger sweater and kind of looks like Bam Margera. The movie opens with a retarded guy picking up a hooker. Guess what? He's not really retarded, he's Willie the serial killer! He chops up bodies and sells them as meat, and all for God, who lives in his closet and tells him to kill. The movie turns out to be a ripoff of "Basket Case", as Willie has a deformed twin brother attached to his side. Although seemingly endless and pointless, there are some things that deserve a little bit o praise. Eddie Benevich's extremely over the top performance definitely kept my attention. He has some golden dialog, like when he tells a captive victim "You've never had sex till you've had sex with a chicken!"
There is basically zero special effects and the gore is extremely lame and amateurish. I would never recommend this to anyone in a million years, I'm just trying to keep you people abreast of what I'm doing with my life so that I don't lose my mind. I was surprised to see that there are TWO sequels to this already out.

The Pink Angels

I figured out that I had a paid holiday in honor of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. today after getting up at 6 a.m. and driving a half an hour through the snow to work. There I was informed that I was not working. I would have remembered that today was a paid holiday, but I was so tired last night that I fell asleep around 9 p.m. I got home from my pointless morning cruise and went back to sleep. When I woke up, around noon, I realized that as an American, I should celebrate not only MLK day, but also the last day of George W. Bush's presidency by drinking and watching movies.


I popped in one of the discs from my recently acquired "Drive-In Cult Classics Volume 3" boxed set. The Drive In Cult Classics series is a boon for fans of overlooked cinematic swill of the late 60s and 1970s. There are 8 movies per set and they sell new for $10 in your neighborhood dvd store. I got my copy of the Volume 3 set at Bullmoose Records in Portland, Maine for $6.95. The films look great, like they have been transferred from the best source. And when you watch a film called "The Pink Angels" about a gay biker gang, you really want it to look as crisp and sharp as possible.

I drank some Rubinoff bloody maries with my homemade mix (V8, jalapeno peppers, black pepper, horseradish, hot sauce, and whatever else I feel like throwing in), and watched this truly bizarre film. It starts with a bunch of tranny bikers walking into a pool party where they are confronted by a butler. The lead cross dresser biker says "Sorry, wrong party..." and this echoes over and over again as the screen freezes. Then, we see a crazy general being led to his mansion. We then hear the surprisingly good hippie folk song "I See America" by Mike Settle as a group of bikers meet in a field of giant concrete tubes. At this point, the movie seems like it might actually be a real counterculture art film. This is mainly because the song by Mike Settle, is actually kind of moving. I don't know who Mike Settle is, but he did most of the songs in the film, and they are pretty good.

The imagery and cinematography is good throughout, but during the first few minutes, before this film revealed what it was really all about, I thought this might be some sort of out of control art film. It doesn't shoot that high, however. The bikers, even though they look like leather tough guys, are gay. This was the early 70s, so the idea of the leather biker daddy was still seen as being a hilarious contradiction in terms. Most of the movie is comprised of scenes of people being scared of the bikers because they look scary, then being surprised that they are gay. Like, really gay. Like, fancy cross-dressing gay. In fact, they are on their way to a drag ball in LA. There is a wild food-fight in an A and W. As a hitch hiker they had picked up watches them squeal and cavort while spraying condiments on each other, he yells "Jesus Christ, they're all faggots!" and runs away.

This is definitely not a PC movie, as the bikers' gayness is played up as a gag again and again. There is a scene where they get pulled over by gung-ho cops. The cops find their dresses, high heels, etc., stashed in their bikes. There is some great dialog in this scene, like where the cop asks the lead biker to unlock his storage compartment in his bike:
Cop: "What's in there?"
Biker: "A signed 8 by 10 glossy of Robert Goulet."
The cops call them queers and one of the gang, who actually looks alot like Jack Black yells "Well this is one all American red blooded faggot you can't scare!"

Getting into the plot too heavily wouldn't make alot of sense, because the movie doesn't make alot of sense. I will say that the actors are very funny and they seem to be ad-libbing here and there. The crazy ending, which took me an entire post-viewing bloody mary to figure out, is truly bizarre. The mad General that we saw in the opening, is shown again and again, being all crazy and sitting in his flag draped office. Apparently the drag ball was a fake, set up by the general so he could kill degenerates. Hence the weird "wrong party" freeze frame in the film's opening. The film ends with the general standing next to a tree with all the gay bikers hung from it. I don't know if this was supposed to be funny, or to make a point, but all it really did for me was make me say "What the fuck?" All in all, this is a bizarre, one of a kind film that is a celebration of all things wild and free in America, like cross-dressing motorcycle gangs. A fine way to spend an MLK day off with the reassuring spicy antifreeze flavor of a Rubinoff Bloody Mary. God Bless America.

Uncle Jesse and Vanity Versus Tranny Gene Simmons

Click on pic to see the entire Turkish cover.


Wow, where do I start? As the extremely lame titular theme song plays and the credits roll, I sit, my mouth agape, my eyes hollow orbs. Even the Rubinoff bloody mary I am sipping cannot bring me back to reality after this insanity. My first emotion is that I feel that I've been cheated by not knowing about this movie already. I mean, it was released in 1986. That's 23 years that I have been walking around, with no idea that this movie existed. I guess that's a good thing, however. If I had seen this when it came out, back in 86, when I was 6 years old, I can say that it definitely would have altered my development as a person. Maybe for good, but I imagine it would have severely screwed me up and I would now be a tranny nightclub performer, like Gene Simmons as "Ragnar" in "Never Too Young to Die", today's movie.
(That was a roundabout way to introduce this movie, I'm no Dana Hersey, I suppose.)

Uncle Jesse, known to some as Mr. Jon Stamos, plays Lance Stargrove, a champion gymnast that has his own theme song sung by someone named Tommie Lee Bradley that goes "Stargrove! Stargrove!" His mortal enemy is the man/woman that killed his father, Ragnar. Ragnar lives in this big Mad Max looking desert fortress and kills people with his giant Lee Press On nails. I didn't think it was possible, but this is an even stranger gymnast action movie than "Gymkata."
Vanity is some sort of secret agent who lives on a farm. We first meet her as she is being accosted by two large Mad Max biker looking bad guys. She beats them up and forces one guy's face into a pile of horse doodie. She says "Eat shit." God, that woman has so much class. To give you an idea of how bat-shit insane this movie is, let me try to list what happens next:
Vanity shoots a bad guy. He goes flying into a wall and knocks a gas can down. The gas, for some reason, starts a fire in some hay, right next to a box clearly marked "Grenades". She grabs Jon Stamos and they jump out of the barn while it explodes. All this happens in the span of maybe 8 seconds.

Vanity spends alot of time scantily clad, which is always a good thing. All I could think about while watching her was the Motley Crue band autobiography, "The Dirt". Around this time she was dating Nikki Sixx, who said she smoked more crack than anyone he had ever seen in his life. That's saying something, coming from Nikki Sixx. She looks mighty healthy, however! Vanity and Stargrove go to a gross tranny bar to see Ragnar's gross tranny nightclub act and there, when asked by a gross tranny waitereress what he wants to drink, Stargrove says "I'd like a Lube Job." Of all the things to order from a gross tranny server! His order excites the tranny. Vanity orders a Bloody Mary and a cigar. Who the hell ever smokes a cigar and drinks a Bloody Mary? Weird combo. I don't recommend eating during this scene, because Ragnar's cabaret act is so gross and creepy and weird, its liable to make you nauseous.

The whole movie seems like it was made in a cocaine blizzard, with everyone but Stamos overacting in the extreme. Then there's the fact that the movie pretty much makes zero sense and you get the idea that cocaine, or at least crack played a large roll in the making of the film. Every single frame of the movie is completely ridiculous and I really couldn't even begin to list all of the insane crap in here. If the idea of Gene Simmons as an evil tranny versus Uncle Jesse and Vanity gets your dander up, I say seek this one out. I guess its pretty rare, but they have for rent at Hollywood Express in Somerville. Oh, I should also mention that I was drinking Rubinoff bloody maries during this film on a snowy, rainy, crappy day in Somerville. Rubinoff is made in Somerville at Allan's LTD, where most fine spirits originate. Even through my spicy bloody mary mix I could taste that slight antifreeze flavor of Rubinoff. Oh yeah, and there is brief Vanity nudity in the movie!