(Hollywood) Scream Queen Hot Tub Party (Fred Olen Ray & Jim Wynorski, 1991)

"Had we known what we in for on that fateful day none of us would have accepted the strange invitation, but the letter I received seemed so intriguing.  It read: "My dearest Brinke Stevens, i've thrilled to you in so many frightening motion pictures such as Grandma's House, Teenage Exorcist and Bad Girls from Mars that I had to ask you to join me at my Hollywood home for an all-day seminar on how to make a good horror film.  Signed, Count Byron Orlock."

The late 1980s and early 1990s.  Fred Olen Ray.  Jim Wynorski.  Scream Queens.  The Late Show (the magazine, not the chat show).  If you understand the meaning behind these arcane words and phrases, then we understand one another.  For the uninitiated: tits.

When I was thirteen, I owned a magazine that had a full-page photograph of Brinke Stevens in vampire fangs, a thong and a cape and nothing else, and I almost destroyed my organs of generation before they had fully developed.  There's an admission.  We're all friends here, right?  I know what you're thinking: this isn't the most progressive of reviews that he could be doing in this current time of the #MeToo movement; for a progressive guy with feminist views he can sound objectifying at times... these are true.  But how else does one approach a flick like this?  I could deconstruct it and give it a slaughtering quite easily.  But where's the fun in that?  And in these trying times of trial, fun distractions are important.  Plus, nostalgia for one's early teens can be a powerful thing.

So here we have Scream Queens Hot Tub Party - or, as it was released on video on the UK, Hollywood Scream Queens Hot Tub Party (perhaps they didn't quite trust us to know precisely what a "scream queen" was) - an attempt by arch purveyors of horror smut Olen Ray and Wynorski (operating here under the aliases of 'Bill Carson' and 'Arch Stanton') to beat Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors record of making a movie in two days by gathering five top tier scream queens together at Fred's house and shooting some brief titillating linking material for what is essentially a clip show.  A peep show clip show.

Actresses Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney and Roxanne Kernohan are all mysteriously summoned to the home of one 'Byron Orlock' (a great gag for anyone who gets the reference to Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets) on the pretext of making their own individual presentations on acting in horror movies - something these gals know a lot about.  Finding the manse strangely empty, they decide to stay on nonetheless and use a Ouija board to find out the lowdown on what's going down, which leads to this piece of classic comedy dialogue:

MICHELLE: "Okay, the first thing we do is you put a finger on my diviner."
ROXANNE: "Hey, I don't do lesbian scenes!"
MICHELLE: "No, silly - this is the diviner!  We all put a finger on it."
BRINKE: "And soon we'll be in contact with that dark, festering daemon who roams the netherworld in search of obscene and perverse pleasures!"
ROXANNE: "You want to call my agent?"

Some of it is quite witty and meta, mind, such as when Brinke says that what they're doing is in accordance with page 17 of the script (which she dutifully consults) "and it burns up a minute of screen time".  The ladies then change into their regulation bikinis and enter the houses' hot tub - the ideal place to begin their seminar and present their fateful findings (Neil Breen reference!  Back away!) to each other.

Brinke begins with a masterclass on shower acting, which segues into some quite long sequences of archive footage from her screen debut in 1982's Slumber Party Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II ("Here comes the Hockstetter / Turn it up! / He's a lyrical gangster / Turn it up!"), then treats us to a demonstration of the fine art of how to 'shower act' in a horror film - the trick being to accentuate soaping the breasts and buttocks whilst remaining oblivious to anything going on around oneself, such as a knife-wielding murderer approaching.  After this, Monique Gabrielle presents some clips from Evil Toons and Transylvania Twist before giving us a rendition of the hypnotic dance of the vampiress, which involves a slow striptease in which she peels off a leather corset.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't giving this bit my full attention.

Next, Kelli Maroney shows a classic gun-wielding scene of hers from Night of the Comet and instructs us on the fact that before one can pump a shotgun, one must first pump iron.  This of course means her removing her clothes, oiling up and doing some weightlifting, ending with a wank-baiting wink to the camera and a knowing "Ready to pump boys?".  Then Michelle Bauer shows us her famous scene from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers - a film I covered here - (a scene which shows much more than the original slashed by the BBFC UK VHS release did) and then demonstrates her skills using a throbbing tool (no, not that kind: this ain't one of her Pia Snow films.  Though I will get round to Nightdreams and Cafe Flesh at some point) and the importance of not wearing clothes for safety purposes when operating heavy machinery.

As the ingenue newcomer to the scene, Roxanne Kernohan has only a great scene of hers from Critters II to offer, but the follow up scene of her being molested by a monster whilst doing her laundry troubles the trousers as well as the mind.

I mean, this is a film that sports credits such as 'Bikini Wrangler: Hans Fhule', 'Lighting: Steven Wonder' and 'Dialogue: Joe D'Amato'.  We can't ask for too much.

The truly sad thing about this film (apart from my nostalgic enjoyment in watching it) is the fact that, after being presented as the New Scream Queen this is the last thing that the lovely Ms Kernohan did, being killed shortly afterwards in a car crash at the tragically young age of 32.  Which is a bittersweet note to end a review of a bit of fluff on.

Like a tearful, sexy wank.  Like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.

The Undying Monster ([a.k.a.: The Hammond Mystery] John Brahm, 1942)

"When stars are bright on a frosty night, beware thy bane on the rocky lane"

If you ever wondered whether 'the Hammond mystery' was "Why didn't Nicholas Hammond do more Spider-Man?" then you're wrong: it's actually the title of a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish - a writer that many fans of phantasie may have forgotten but who published many a short story and novel about such diverse topics as the Holy Grail and Arabian Nights-style high adventure before she turned her hand to horror (more specifically, the subject of lycanthropy) with 1922's The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension.

Coming from Twentieth Century Fox, a studio that never joined in the Universal horror boom unlike Columbia and Paramount (in fact, as Famous Players-Lasky went on to become Paramount, they could be argued to have begun the tradition of the American horror feature film with the 1920 John Barrymore-starring Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) due to head honcho Daryl F. Zanuck's aversion to the genre - wait, does that make this a Fox werewolf?  A werefox?  ZOMG, is there a kitsune is this?  Squeee! - the 1942 film adaptation of Kerruish's novel has much of the lavish production value one might expect.

Released on a double bill with the Harry Lachman-directed Dr Renault's Secret (a J. Carroll Naish-starring remake of the 1927 silent The Wizard, itself an adaptation of the novel Balaoo by Phantom of the Opera scribe Gaston Leroux, concerning a Moreau-style mad scientist using surgery to transform a gorilla into a sentient ape man), the film opens with a great composite matte shot showing us stately Hammond Hall - "one of the oldest houses in England" - standing atop the cliffs over the dark moonlight-dappled ocean. Cutting to the interior, we get an excellently-executed shot as, from a single camera position, we slowly receive information as to the inside of the house via a forty-five second sequence of pans and zooms (windows, a suit of armour, the Hammond family crest above the roaring fireplace, the hand of a supine woman dangling in the firelight over the side of a couch, a sleeping bloodhound curled on the rug) that puts the "one shot" boasts of modern stuff like the CW's Arrow to shame in its artfulness - an opening shot that screenwriter Michael Jacoby would use again for famed Poverty Row director William "One Shot" Beaudine in 1946's The Face of Marble.

Our sleeping heroine is soon revealed to be Helga Hammond (the lovely Heather Angel, whose career spanned from playing  Beryl Stapleton in the 1939 classic Basil Rathbone rendition of The Hound of the Baskervilles to lending her dulcet tones to the eponymous character's older sister in Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland, via a number of entries in the ongoing Bulldog Drummond series).  Helga rouses herself and converses with the family butler Walton (the stalwart Halliwell Hobbes, who had played the role of Danvers Carew in the classic Rouben Mamoulian version Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ["Indecent!  It isn't done!"] and would go on to play other retainers in Universal's Sherlock Holmes Faces Death [one of the better Rathbone/Bruce entries, based on Conan Doyle's 'The Musgrave Ritual'] and The Invisible Man's Revenge), and they both begin to fret that Helga's brother Oliver is outside in the dark on such a night.  Telephoning local medic Dr Jeff Colbert (Yorkshire actor Bramwell Fletcher, who so memorably laughed hysterically as Imhotep went out for his "little walk" in 1932's The Mummy), whom Oliver had been visiting, they find that they've just missed him and that he's making his way home via the coastal path: the "rocky lane" of the baleful family legend.

Dashing out into the night in a carriage to intercept her sibling, Helga braves the terrifying howls that fill the dank air to find not only Oliver (John Howard, Heather Angel's co-star as Sapper's Bulldog Drummond himself in seven pictures about the titular adventurer), wounded and unconscious from some animal's attack, but also his dog - turn asunder and broken by the mysterious beast - and local girl Kate O' Malley similarly slain.  Back at Hammond Hall, the injured Oliver cannot remember what happened, only that he was on the lane at night when he felt all about him some monstrous presence that "came rushing in" before he blacked out.  Scotland Yard sends in the inimitable duo of investigators Robert 'Bob' Curtis (James Ellison, who would go on to play Wesley Rand in 1943's Jacques Tourneur-helmed Val Lewton spooker I Walked with a Zombie) and his eccentric comic relief sidekick Cornelia 'Christie' Christopher (played by real-life eccentric monocle-sporter Heather Thatcher).

As the pair of dogged sleuths - who really could have spun off into their own series of supernatural investigations, with their likeably quirky Holmes/Watson or even monochrome proto-Mulder/Scully relationship - investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the Hammonds and their ancient curse which dates back to their ancestor Sir Reginald Hammond (whose statue stands in the family crypt alongside the effigy of some weird lupine creature), they begin to unravel a hex dating back as far as the Crusades of Richard I and rumours of the Hammonds having sold their souls to Satan.  Aided by Christy's unerring sense of spooky intuition (or "supercalaphegalus", as Curtis calls it in almost Poppinsian style) they discover that - far from being the victim of a physical assault by the monster - Oliver is himself the victim of the Hammond's lycanthropic malediction: his feelings of darkening terror when out at night were in fact the transformation coming over him before he rent asunder his own hound and young Kate O' Malley.  When night falls once again and Oliver's animal instinct takes hold of him once again and leads the werewolf to prey upon his beloved sister in an incestuous fashion, the beast must surely die...

Okay, it isn't Universal's The Wolf Man, but The Undying Monster is a fascinating little piece that's very well directed by John Brahm and thoroughly deserves further inspection from all connoisseurs of the supernatural whether they're wisecracking monocle wearers or not.

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (David Gregory, 2019)

From prolific genre documentary maker David Gregory - the man behind the coverage of real (reel?) life madcap genius in 2014's Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau: a document of one visionary director's descent into insanity amidst the febrile conflagration of actorly egos that really must be seen and is highly recommended to anyone who has yet to see it - comes this intriguing insight into the career and subsequent murder of exploitation movie icon Al Adamson.

About a year or two ago, during one of my many nights of fitful sleep, I came across one of those American 'true crime' TV shows that air on obscure digital channels in the wee hours of the morning to fill airtime and found myself watching it.  Entitled A Stranger In My Home: Death's Final Cut, it was in the midst of detailing the lonely and gruesome murder of a man by a business associate on a ranch in the middle of the Californian desert.  My attention was gripped however when the name "Al Adamson" was mentioned.  The Dracula versus Frankenstein guy?

Featuring interviews with friends and colleagues of Adamson such as his longtime co-conspirator in Independent-International Pictures Sam Sherman, actors Russ Tamblyn, Robert Dix and the elusive Roger Engel (aka Zandor Vorkov himself!), cinematographers Gary Graver and Vilmos Zigismond and directors Worth Keeter, Greydon Clark and Fred Olen Ray the documentary paints a riveting picture of Adamson's life from his youth growing up in the film business as the son of Poverty Row Western actor Victor Adamson (alias Denver Dixon), a real life cowboy from New Zealand who travelled to the US and parlayed his roping and horse riding skills into an acting and directing career, through his early directorial efforts along with producer Sherman (his first effort Echo of Terror slowly transmuting via a long series of re-edits and reshoots through various mutations such as Psycho-a-Go Go, The Fiend with the Electronic Brain and finally Blood of Ghastly Horror as the years passed and a straight psychological thriller became a mad scientist flick starring John Carradine) and the formation of Independent-International.

We are also privy to Adamson's private life, from his obsession with actress Vicki Volante (which led Ms Volante to ask Greydon Clark to accompany her on set and pretend to be her boyfriend) to his deeply loving marriage to his muse Regina Carrol (the Lina Romay to Adamson's Jess Franco), tragically curtailed by her death from cancer in 1992 at the early age of 49 - leading to Adamson's gradual withdrawal to his desert holding where he would in turn be cut down too soon at hands of employee Fred Fulford in the summer of 1995 - though due to Fulford's concealment of the corpse and continued usage of Adamson's credit cards the crime would not be revealed until more than a month later.

A very good and intriguing release from Severin that i'd recommend to any connoisseurs of exploitation and horror films, or those interested in the life and tragic end of a man who lived to make motion pictures (even if the consensus on his output doesn't exactly put him in the same bracket as Werner Herzog).