Friday, April 29, 2011

Demon Queen (1986 54 minutes) / Scream Dream (1989 69 minutes)

In Demon Queen, a woman who was probably third runner up in the local Pat Benatar lookalike contest is some sort of demon vampire who likes to take guys to hotel rooms,  rip their hearts out, and smear the blood all over herself.  She hooks up with lowly drug dealer Jesse and chaos ensues. This is all full of crazy jump cuts and music edits, a seriously long dream sequence with the synthesizer left on autopilot, a deformed midget drug dealer in a tie and blue jeans, a completely out of place visit to a video store to discuss the merits of Make Them Die Slowly, sound effects from a ping pong battle in an outer space vacuum chamber, a mall food court hookup  montage, the hit song 'let me be your angelfire' a bunch of nasty throat rippings, and yet another visit to that video store - all of this happens in less than a hour and if you take away the opening and closing credits and that dream sequence it happens in about 25 minutes. Genius.
The band Rikk-O-Shay had it made. They had a hit in 'Scream Dream', a burly ex-football player type guitarist with a cool white striped Explorer, not one but two fancy dancing backup singers, fans who 'think Van Halen is elevator music' and a big tour lined up. Too bad their lead singer, Michelle Shock, is a devil worshipper who's into human sacrifice. Her number one fan steals his girlfriend's car payment money to go see the concert and she repays him by sprouting demon hands and then biting his johnson off. The she gets fired from the gig for being so crazy so she goes to the county fair to pick up some more studs to sacrifice. The one backup singer with the fringed leather jacket and white turtleneck (he looks like the one armed guy from Def Leppard - but with both arms) has to kill her, but her one hand crawls away and a rubbery demon puppet mouth chews on stuff. Meanwhile, the band is still sweating it out making background music like an endless doom metal / sabbath riff and then their manager hires a new singer who promptly gets possessed by the Michelle Shock demon. At their next gig they perform their new hit 'Ballbuster for your love' before the new singer commits groupie-cide on a couple of faces. Can she be stopped so the tour can continue? This is so great that the 'angelfire' song even makes a cameo. I declare director Donald Farmer to be the master of white trash vampire fantasy metal videos.



Wednesday, April 27, 2011

R.O.T.O.R (1988 89 minutes)

Back when gas was 69 cents a gallon, director Cullen Blaine had a vision of a Texas sized combination or Robocop and Terminator. Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research is the brainchild of Coldyron, a no nonsense Dallas police captain who just wants to get the scum off the streets. His cyborg cop is outfitted with a combat chassis made of an 'unknown' alloy, has a standard cop mustache, and  the ability to see backwards through time. He is also rendered helpless by honking your car horn repeatedly. After Coldyron has an argument with some politican over funding, ROTOR gets prematurely released in an accident and proceeds to wreak havoc on a couple caught speeding. He shoots the guy and spends the rest of the movie chasing the woman all over Texas. It's up to Coldyron to put an end to the robotic killing spree.
  
This has the best dialog west of a David Mamet play:
"I'll make more noise than 2 skeletons making love in a tin coffin, BROTHER"
"The only difference between heroes and villains is is the amount of compensation they receive for  their services"
"I got more than a newspaper, and you get to guess what it is"
"You look like you got both eyes comin' out of the same whole"
"ROTOR will walk through a busload of nuns to get to a jaywalker"
Plus there's so much more: the suave janitor Shooboogie (whose Native American anecdote is referenced at the climax), a comic relief robot that reads Creepy magazine, a guy with giant fake buck teeth, a nice 'going out to lunch' music montage, and Coldyron's scientist partner who looks like a cross between Bride of Frankenstein and a wrestler from GLOW.
I would say Mr. Blaine got it just right


 





Friday, April 15, 2011

Project Shadowchaser (1992 92 minutes)

Romulus the cyborg (who looks like the old wrestler Sting or Guile from the Streetfighter game) gets mad at his creators and puts a scientist's head through a computer monitor. Then he is somehow able to recruit a gang of mercenaries to go all Die Hard at a Hospital where the President's daughter (played by Meg Foster - the woman with the creepy eyes from They Live) just so  happens to work. The best idea the police can come up with is to revive the hospital's architect, who's been frozen in a cryogenic prison, except they can't even do that right and accidentally wake up an ex-football hero (played by Martin Kove - the bad sensei in Karate Kid) instead.  Even after the feds figure out the mistake they still go through with their fool plan of infiltrating with hospital which gets all of the SWAT guys killed and leaves the football hero alone against the cyborg - so you know the final battle is going to involve throwing some kind of 'touchdown pass' while the building explodes. Along the way we get a bunch of crawling around in air vents, some cyber Blade Runner-isms, a couple of double crosses, and even a robotic surprise or 2 + Martin Kove has this sweet beard after waking up from his cryogenic sleep.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Demonoid (1981 78 minutes)

  
Some hooded cult worshipper steals the Devil Hand and gets attacked by some other cultists, who then chop off her hand and put it in a metal coffin. Cut to modern times and a rich couple who own a mine accidentally stumble upon the cultists temple buried within the mine. They come out with the metal hand coffin and scare the miners. The idiots take the thing home the evil hand promptly possesses the guy who then decides to blow up the mine (with all of the miners inside) and then goes to Vegas to shoot some craps with his new evil hand. Y'see, the hand makes you do BAD things. He makes so much money shooting craps some grifters kidnap him and take him out to a shack to beat the secret out of him. The hand turns the tables by doing some face crushing and then burns  the shack down, killing the guy in the process. But the hand doesn't care 'cuz it has a plan. The burned body gets sent back to L.A. to get buried where the hand possesses a cop. All this time the wife is trying to track her now dead husband down. Ironically, the hand is trying to get back to her to fulfill some sort of curse or something,. She enlists the aid of a priest who changes his accent every few minutes to help her. In the world's best scene, the possessed cop kidnaps the wife and goes to a plastic surgeon and demands 'Cut off my hand or I'll kill you!'. The disembodied hand then grabs the cops gun, shoots the nurse and then crushes the cop's face. Ha, take that you dumb cop! They even find time for a car chase and then the hand hitches a ride on a train. You can't outsmart it. If you try to hide out a hotel, it will find you. If you think you've destroyed it, it will friggin' mail itself back to you. The only thing you can do is praise it's face crushing genius.