Outrageous B-Movies, Horror Movie Legends, Busty Vixens, Genius Directors and Movie Monsters.
A blog for the Kings of Mondo Bizzarro film-making David Friedman, Barry Mahon, Larry Cohen, Jack Arnold, Russ Meyer, H.G. Lewis, Harry Novak and Roger Corman. Work of those who went further into the depths: Arch Hall Jr.'s The Sadist (1963), Hiroshi Teshigahara's Face of Another (1966) and Shinya Tsukamoto's Toyko Fist (1995).
Scary Slash-Mess to all! So, you've managed to make it this far into Slash-Mess, eh, puny hu-mon? The Sleaze-A-Saurus is most impressed with your above average tolerance to exploitation cinema.
As a deviation from your ridiculous culture's pastime of watching cheap simulations of dainty fe-male hu-mons being raped and tortured The Sleaze-A-Saurus presents fe-male hu-mons kicking the asses of the males of your species in: Savage Sisters! (1974).
Emmanuel Goes To Hell - pretty much the only thing she didn't do in the movie series.
Softcore meets WIP in Women's Prison Massacre - an "Emmanuelle" movie in disguise. Women's Prison Massacre stars the sultry brunette from the Emmanuel series, Laura Gemser. Gemser is a beautiful woman of Indonesian descent who is today an Italian citizen who starred in 57 movies during her career from 1974-1994. The Emanuelle series included: Emanuelle's Daughter (1980), Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977), Emanuelle in America (1977), and Black Emanuelle (1975).
Gemser, who also was a costume designer for 12 motion pictures, retired from movies in 1994.
In the wild, wild world of WIP/Naziploitation films the first casualty is the audience's patience for lousy scripts.
One of what U.K. government film censors declared bad enough to labeled as a "Video Nasty", making it banned in Britain in the 1980's, was also considered so bad that in 2002 the British Board Of Film Classification (BBFC) refused to even rate it for a DVD re-release! All of this aside, the flick is widely regarded one as the first of the sub-genres of women-in-prison (WIP) and nazisploitation movies. It was directed by the late, great Lee Frost (writer of the Thing With Two Heads, director of Black Gestapo) and written by Wes Bishop (co-star of Chain Gang Women).
The movie is a cult classic and represents the beginning of a series of exploitation films about women in prison in the 1970's, such as Women in Cages (1971) and The Big Bird Cage (1972), both of which made Pam Grier's career in the genre. It is also the first in the Nazi exploitation (or Nazisploitation) genre of concentration camp movies, that includes Canadian Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS (1974) which was produced by David F. Friedman (Something Weird Video co-founder) and led to several sequels with Dyanne Thorne as the titular character, the Italian Nazi Love Camp 27 (1977) and Last Orgy of the Third Reich (1977).
Life sure is different on a chain gang - for one: there's a chain.
Despite the all-around awesome title this not a women-in-prison or "WIP" movie. In fact, there isn't a single women in the movie until damn near the halfway point of this awful hicksploitation film that was written by the late, great Lee Frost (writer of The Thing With Two Heads, director of Black Gestapo).
Chain Gang Women (1971) is basically Cool Hand Luke as shot by cornpone meth heads with a thing for poorly staged rape scenes. The first 30 minutes are set in a boring country prison with two hammy convicts that escape when the lone lard-ass sheriff guarding their group of dangerous convicts is attacked on said chain gang.
The two escapees are a classic odd couple with one being a model prisoner with a 6 month sentence for Marajuana named "Weed" and the other a desperate hyper-horny thug doing life for Rape and Murder, Coleman, played by Wes Bishop. The two take to the "Georgia" countryside (SoCal of course) and while on the lam they manage to stage a few awkward, but also grimy, grope fests with the only two unsuspecting hu-mon women in the entire film.
Ladies and Germs, the Sleaze-A-Saurus presents the worst blaxploitation movie - EVER.
A random mix of obscenities, dated 70's lingo and jive-ass turkeys permeate this truly awful blaxploitation gem from 1975. Chocked full of pointless nudity, poorly choreographed fight scenes, and multiple overdubs of Hitler-era Germany The Black Gestapo (aka Ghetto Warriors) was made to scare the Jesus out of middle America by cashing in on it's fears of the honorable Black Panther Party that felt like it was at war with the world but actually did not pose any serious threat to it.
Former L.A. Rams Cornerback (1976-1981) Rob Perry (S.W.A.T. The TV Series, Black Godfather) stars as General Ahmed who started an inner-city People's Army to try and relieve the misery of the citizens of Watts. And if any place on God's green Earth needed relief it was Watts. His co-star, Charles Robinson is better known as Mac Robinson from Night Court.
The Black Gestapo was made by the late great Lee Frost who also wrote The Thing With Two Heads (1972) starring Ray Miland (Lost Weekend, X The Man With X-Ray Eyes) and Rosy Grier as a pretty unlikely surgically combined murder-machine, Mondo Bizarro (1966), Chain Gang Girls (1971) and directed the cult classic The Defilers in 1965!
Dan O'Bannon (Aliens writer) directs his own version of the Night Of The Living Dead.
When a bumbling pair of employees at a medical supply warehouse accidentally release a deadly gas into the air, the vapors cause the dead to once again arise from their watery graves and go on a cannibalistic rampage through Louisville, Kentucky. Here, the re-animated hu-mons seek out seeking their most favorite of foods, KFC: Kentucky Fried Chippies.
The steady and nuanced direction by Dan O'Bannon, writer of "Alien", run through out this brilliant installment of Romero's zombie genre that revolves around counter-culture outcasts (punkers, new wavers and beady eyed morticians), maximum effects and then: even endowing some of the zombies with a limited power of speech (Send...more...paramedics...SNARF!). Dark humor, excellent undead effects, prosthetic make-up and much better casting make this 80's update a classic in it's own right.
You-Know-Who knew that Mr. Tom Savini directed his own version of the Night Of The Living Dead in the 90's. Nerds.
Special Effects guru and actor Tom Savini (Friday The 13th, Dusk 'Til Dawn (1996)) directed his own version of the Night Of The Living Dead (1990). Tony Todd (Candy Man, Final Destination) stars this time as Ben, arguably the Duane role from the original in 1968.
You gotta love Bill Moseley (Devils Rejects and House Of 1000 Corpses) cast as everybody's favorite early casualty, Johnny, who before unavoidably snuffing it delivers the classic line to his uptight, freaked-out sister: "They're coming to get you Bar-ber-ra!" from the original Romero cult classic movie.
The dead get up and KILL. The people they kill get up and KILL. Romero's original 1978 version Dawn Of The Dead.
George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead (1978) is the first sequel to his late 1960's classic and definitive survival horror movie, The Night Of The Living Dead (1968). Ten years later, the zombies have gained a much deeper hold on North America. Dawn Of The Dead finds a much smaller post-Apocalyptic country with survivor societies inside a disintegrated modern culture.
Individuals, soldiers and police personnel fare far better but are on the front lines of a crumbling society in America. The scenes opening looks like mid-70's Philadelphia or Chicago, decaying tenements raided by police.
However, too much of Romero's work is interpreted as directly political when they are simply character studies set in a crisis. Critics seem to read too much into these zombie films as "protest films" - protesting against anything from racism (Duane being shot in the original film) to anti-social behavior (what is more anti-social than munching on your neighbor's brains?) when they are dark social commentaries much closer to reality than fiction - replace the zombies with junkies or crack fiends and you could have any terrible night in New York or L.A.
This commentary does nothing to disguise the acting which is often very hammy. The real appeal is that these films are full of gore and disembowelment and often hard to find. The Sleaze-A-Saurus watches these zombie themed films because they are "effects movies" with a dark sense of humor and not "message films" as in The Piano, Woodstock, Schindler's List or Forrest Gump...
Infamous horror movie that emphasizes the sexual and feminine nature of the vampire.
Anulka Dziubinska and Yutte Stensgaard are a seductive lesbian vampire couple who sulkily waylay and abduct various passer-byes, both male and female, to hold them captive at their rural manor in the English countryside. The lovely ladies to so in order to feed on them to satisfy their insatiable thirst for hu-mon blood.
"But I doan wanna snack on Hans!". Picky vampires really prefer the big taste of Rolf.
Filmed in England by Spanish director Jose Ramon Larraz infamous for his combinatioon of the erotic and the horrifying in his films - Larraz adds a joyous celebration of steamy eroticism and vampirism. If he had failed (he doesn't), we would have been saddled with a sexless non-classic that wastes the carnal talents of the smoldering Yutte Stensgaard as the stuffy and stoic turns of some of the worst Hammer Brother films.
Larraz also directed The National Mummy (1981) featuring mummies, naked hu-mon females and very gross humor and the paper-thinly plotted erotica film, Madame Olga's Pupil's (1981).
A forgotten horror classic from the original Universal cycle of Dracula, The Wolf Man and Frankenstein.
For the 9th Day of Slash-Mess your intergalactic Overlord imposes upon you: cinematic history with actor Bela Lugosi. Lugosi was a Romanian legendary actor and was in the definitive black-and-white horror movies made in the "Universal Cycle" along with Dracula (1931), Son of Frankenstein (1937) and The Wolf Man (1941).
In White Zombie, Bela stars as the diabolical Murder Legendre one of few white men to be initiated into the diabolical voodoo religion. Legendre belongs to a nameless death cult that uses mindless zombie servants created from the Cuban or Dominican natives on an island off the coast of Florida. Unbekwnowst to the hapless group of Americans that visit the island, these zombies were once human as themselves but now toil ceaselessly for their evil master.
Creating zombies ain't that hard, pathetic hum-mon. Throw cash directly at their faces until their eyes glaze over. Duh!
Deep in the secluded island countryside a frantic American man turns to Legrande to act as a witch doctor to win a wigged out woman. Legrande agrees and lures the flighty lady that he loves away from her fiance and turns her into a zombie slave.
In fact, a good deal of the population are wandering dead-eyed zombies. Many work in the island's dense sugar fields and refineries as part of a plantation population. Some of the more decrepit zombies fall into the archaic cane crushers becoming an active ingredient in the fields major export - Legendre's Zombified Sugar.
Crites, Mother Nature's humble clown or intergalactic space menace? You make the call.
The original Critters, shot in rural Kansas for $2 million dollars in 1985 was written and directed by Mr. Stephen Herek, in his directorial debut. The movie was based on the screenplay by writer Domonic Muir to cash in on Spielberg's Gremlins from 1984.
Critters features my fellow intergalactic beings, although far inferior to the highly evolved Sleaze-A-Saurus, as the buggers hunt and consume the fleshy, unsuspecting inhabitants of a small midwestern town in Northern America. Luckless beings that the poor, hawngry Crites are - they quickly find themselves pursued by their former captors, two merciless space exterminators with identity issues.
Critters is a unique crossroads of talent. Child actor, and mostly whiny annoying kid at the time, Scott Grimes was 15 years old during the shoot. Grimes was still almost 20 years away from his major role in HBO and Stephen Spielberg's Band Of Brothers as TSgt. Malarkey and his current re-occurring role in Seth Macfarlene's American Dad as the frantically uncool "Steve". His character's mother in Critters was played by Dee Wallace who has been in 188 films and television shows to date including Alligator II: The Mutation (1991), Cujo (1983) and as the Mom in Spielberg's E.T. The sister character in the film, Nadine Van der Velde went on to feature in Munchies (1987) (another Gremlins clone) and won two Emmys for her role as a Voice Actor in Rollie Pollie Olie in 1998.
There were a total of 4 Critters movies that, in the tradition of sequels everywhere, became more and more unwatchable as they were comically misfired at the American movie-going public.
On the 11th Day of Slash-Mess my true love gave to me: one terrible blaxploitation movie.
Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde stars veteran actor Bernie Casey. Casey has a long history in both A and B films having appeared in: Black Gun (1972) w/ "Big" Jim Brown, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) w/David Bowie, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Never Say Never Again (1983), Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) and the first three Revenge of the Nerds movies.
In the middle of all these movies came the little known blaxploitation film: Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976) tag-lined: Super-strong, supernatural and Super BAD this movie oozes the cliches that were once the mainstay of all-black features up until this exact period - the mid-70's.
Dr. Henry Pride is a scientist developing a secret formula to regenerate dying liver cells. To his shock, the experimental formula has the unfortunate side-effect of turning him into an Albino Vampire with a thang for killing prostitutes by body-slamming them. And why wouldn't it really?
Today, Mr. Bernie Casey is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the internationally recognized Savannah College of Art and Design (S.C.A.D.) in Georgia where he mentors new artists and filmmakers.
On the 12th Day of Slash-Mess my true love gave to me - one mixed up movie.
Merry Slash-Mess! On this, the 12th Day of Slash-Mess, the Sleaze-A-Saurus presents: Dr. Jekyll And Sister Hyde (1971).
Oh, unwary manlings! Your so-called "Sexual Revolution" pathetically epitomized your lack of clear identity within your own confused culture. The Sleaze-A-Saurus, being it's own self-contained civilization, scoffs at your befuddled attempts to re-arrange the role of your bifurcated species loins. This self-inflicted confusion has never been more apparent then in Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll And Sister Hyde (1971).
Dr. Jekyll And Sister Hyde's director was Ray Ward Baker. Baker was something of a legend in his own right which explains his knack for turning B-movie material into a thought-provoking film. Early in his career, Baker worked as an Assistant Director for Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) before WWII turned vast areas of urban England into war torn rubble.
Baker signed up for the British Army Kinematograph Unit, a news reel production unit - the American Signal Corp being the American counterpart and documented battles against the Nazi's as well as the bombing campaigns in his home country. The experience undoubtedly shaped his future view of humanity as he went onto direct dozens of horror and suspense movies and television shows.
Selected Filmography:
The October Man (1947)
The Weaker Sex (1948)
Paper Orchid (1949)
Morning Departure (1950)
Don't Bother to Knock (1952)
Inferno (1953)
Jacqueline (1956)
Tiger in the Smoke (1956)
The Singer Not the Song (1961)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
The Anniversary (1968)
Scars of Dracula (1970)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
Asylum (1972)
The Vault of Horror (1973)
Roy Baker Ward published his memoirs Director's Cut: A Memoir of 60 Years in Filmat the age of 86 in 2002. In October of 2010, Ward reached the end of his remarkable life in London passing away of natural causes.
Christmas at the Sleaze-A-Saurus home is a truly heartfelt event.
Yes small, insignificant manling - this blog is going 18+ this month. Reset your subscription accordingly if you dare. Beginning the 13TH DECEMBER this blog will officially contain "mature" not porngraphic content. Material will be featured that is not for kids or those under the age that the MPAA rating "R" admits to a regular type movie theater.
To celebrate the upgrade to boobs, gratuitous female nudity and adult themes among consenting heterosexual adults - this horror blog announces a start to the Slash-Mess season - a horror movie fan Christmas with 12 Days of B-movies beginning December 13th 2011.
Gather together masses of pathetic hu-mons! Gather together to celebrate the warmest of Slash-Mess sentiments in the traditional Slash-Mess custom by decking the halls with dangling intestines and viewing 12 classic B-Movies! Scary Slash-Mess to all!
