Night of the Beast ([a.k.a. Lukas' Child] Eric Louzil, 1993)

When trying to figure out what horror film one should select from their vast collection of genre cinema that mostly remains unseen to watch for the very first time with the fresh eyes of a newborn babe, I find that the best approach is to ask oneself "Do any of these feature a porn star trying some 'straight' acting within the genre?"  And you know, it's surprising how many times that comes back with a "yes".  My review of David DeCoteau's Creepozoids - which co-starred Ashlyn Gere - is one that springs to mind (as an M. R. James-style warning to the curious, that review can be found here).  And so it follows, quite naturally enough if you're mental, that I asked myself if I had to hand a horror movie that I had yet to view that also starred a classic '80s American porn star.  No, not Jeff Stryker - I've seen Zombie Flesh Eaters 3 more than enough (at least twice: the second time was to check that it was as bad as I thought it was [note: it definitely is]).  No, not Amber Lynn - I don't actually own a copy of Things, and judging by every review I've seen it might be awful enough to jeapardise my already fragile mental health.

Shanna McCullough it is then!  Now, obviously my appreciation for vintage 1980s pornography is retrospective - but only because the internet wasn't around then - so my coming across / discovering the lovely flame-haired Ms McCullough was comparatively recent, and I found myself quite enchanted and intrigued.  Not just because she almost has the same surname as me; I mean, same surname, alternate spelling.  Obviously her porn star name isn't her actual name.  Not that any of this matters one iota.

Probably best we move on from this.

Night of the Beast - also known under it's shooting title (shooting title?  Are you implying that actual work, thought, and the normal filmmaking process were involved in the creation of this?!?) of Lukas' Child (no, it isn't a sequel, even in name only, to the 1986 Corey Haim classic Lucas)  - opens with a gathering of a Satanic cult, the members of which dress in regulation hooded cloaks and skeleton masks and as a result look highly reminiscent of the supernatural army from Jess Franco's The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein.  Their leader, Lukas Armand (Robert May), is to be charitable a portly older gentleman who sits smoking a cigar like a bored businessman in a strip club whilst an 'exotically' dressed (breast-baring fetish wear, thigh high boots and a rather fetching diaphanous cape) dancer terpsichores for him and his minions in their neon bulb and candle-lit dungeon lair.  Neon and candlelight?  Surely a faux pas?

A nubile young scantily-dressed sacrifice is brought in, and Lukas informs her that "You have broken the Code of Conduct, and cannot be forgiven!"  I wouldn't mind if she violated my CoC.  Anyway, the young lady, dressed in some lovely lingerie, is swiftly dispatched.  Which seems a shame.  Is that what 'pantywaist' means?  Lukas cackles with his stripper henchwoman, who seems very much the Evil Lyn to his Skeletor.  This young woman isn't the first victim to have been captured by Lukas' cult, of course, and Detective Steve Anderson (Gene LeBrock, in the penultimate role of his thankfully brief career) is on the case, ably assisted by Detective Susan Wesley (Shanna McCu... oh, wait... Marcia Gray.  Because what a piece of cinema to go legit in).  Susan has discovered a medallion bearing a five pointed star in the home of the most recent missing girl.

"It's a pentacle, it's used in witchcraft... to ward off evil spirits" she helpfully informs plank of wood Steve and the thicker members of the audience, whilst proving her credentials from the Slaughtered Lamb Police Academy.  And so Steve is hot on the trail of the missing aspiring actresses who have all mysteriously vanished after auditioning for a part in a horror movie - auditions which always seem to end with the bookcase of the room sliding back to reveal Lukas sitting in his wheelchair like a Satanic cross between Ironside and Nero Wolfe, and deciding to sacrifice these nubile twentysomething clothes-allergic ladies to his 'son' - a behorned and bewinged daemonic monstrosity whose prosthetics are quite good to be fair.  If you can imagine the Unnameable's cheaper cousin, you're there.

When two more girls go missing, one whom's father is, according to Susan, "a cop in the Hill Street division" (boy, he must be feeling pretty blue) Steve gets right on the case by sleeping with two of the witnesses.  In his defence one of them if played by fetish wresting starlet Tori Sinclair, but still - unethical, right?  But by gritty determination... no, outright luck, and the assistance of two random boys straight out of either The Goonies or The Return of Swamp Thing (more the latter, really.  And Monique Gabrielle probably should have shown up in this film, too) he manages to solve the case, rescue the surviving scantily-clad captives, and defeat the bad guys.  Just like a proper hero cop on a mission who lives his life on the edge (who sleeps with every woman he meets apart from his far more attractive partner) should.

I can't in any form of honesty pretend this is a good film or recommend it to anyone.

As spurious reasons for T & A packages as horror films go, I think I preferred Burial of the Rats in all honesty.  Maria Ford's no Shanna, but at least she had the common decency to wear a sexy outfit.  Seriously, who hires a genuine porn star and AVN Award winner and she's the only actress in the entire movie to keep her clothes on throughout?  Looks like I'm going to have to get round to watching Pornogothic after all.  Don't expect a review of that one though, because Shanna + goth = I'll probably be blind by the end of it.

Slugs (Juan Piquer Simon, 1988)

 'Tis the season to be spooky, as they say (whoever 'they' are), and so I thought it might be an idea to spend the last ten days of October watching and reviewing horror movies - a deadly and deathly delight for the last decade of the month.  Ideally, of course, it would have been Thirteen Days of Halloween, but I've been ill the past few days and I never plan ahead, so ten it is.  These will probably be slightly shorter, more off the cuff reviews than I usually attempt - yes, believe it or not, I do mostly try and put effort into this stuff - and so may even be an improvement.  Mind you, when I just go with my instincts, it can lead to terrible things happening.  Not that I'm likely to spontaneously ask any of you dear readers to marry me or anything.

Probably.

True story: in recent months, the changeable weather up here in the sunny (ha!) North East of That There England has led to a surfeit of slugs (I assume that's the correct collective noun) appearing in our front and back gardens.  Real big buggers in all sorts of disgusting hues of brown, grey, sickly off-white... you name it.  The bit that really freaked me out, though, was seeing a particularly large and menacing specimen in the cat's bowl, actually eating a piece of cat food.  The thought that we were somehow breeding a species of carnivorous slugs in our garden naturally turned my mind to Shaun Hutson's schlocky '80s  horror paperback (of which my childhood self owned a few, including the extremely icky and maybe not to be read by eight year olds Spawn), but more particularly the film version,  Having not seen it since its BBFC truncated UK VHS release, it seemed as good a time as any for a revisit.

Helmed by Spain's Juan Piquer Simon - probably best known for the 1982 slasher classic Pieces, and possibly 1990s Abyss / Leviathan / Deep Star Six a like The Rift, but also tragically for the dreadful 1981 Jules Verne's Mystery on Monster Island (which not only wastes the talents of genre stars Peter Cushing, Terence Stamp and Paul Naschy, but is as Jules Verne as the horrendous Canadian movie H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come is Wells) and MST3K trash classic 1983's Pod People - the film transposes Hutson's grimy little tale from Merton. England, to Ashton, U.S.A. - doubtless the kind of summer town where the authorities won't close the sewer system during the season.

We open with Wayne (Eric Swanson) and his girlfriend (Karen Landberg) messing about in a boat on the Ashton reservoir.  The young lady wishes to go for a swim but Wayne demurs, having spotted a sewage outlet pipe (he should try living in 2023 Britain - our rivers are all made of faeces).  He does, however, dangle a foot off the boat into the water and is soon pulled in by "something slimy" and very shortly is reduced to a bubbling crimson cataract of blood.  Cue credits.

We are shortly introduced to the town's health inspector Mike Brady (Michael Garfield, in his first credit since 1979 cult classic The Warriors) who is having drinks with his lovely wife Kim (the lovely Kim Terry), the local schoolteacher known to her wretched pupils - seriously, unlikable youths were a staple of '80s horror, weren't they, but were they always this bad? - as "the wicked bitch of the North", who manifests her wicked side by donning sexy black lingerie for fun bedtimes with her husband.  If only they'd invested in some green body paint for a truly Wicked session.  Sorry, there's my Elphaba fetish poking out.  I'll just tuck that discreetly away.  Mike and Kim are out with their friends David (Emilio Linder) and Maureen (Alicia Moro) Watson and trying to politely ignore lush (in more than one sense) Maureen's alcohol-induced misbehaviour.  Excusing themselves for an early (sexytimes) night, on their way out they bump into Don Palmer (Philip MacHale) the town's sewage inspector who apparently now earns half the salary working for the civic authorities as he did as a plumber.

 Mike is working with the truculent Sheriff Reese (John Battaglia, who I could have sworn was the same guy that played Tex in Robot Jox but apparently not.  I swear I've seen him elsewhere though, despite what IMDB says) to evict local drunk Ron Bell (Stan Schwartz) from his condemned home, only to find that the unfortunate down and out gentleman has been consumed by flesh eating slugs - something that the sheriff, with his cry of "What next... demented crickets?!?" (look dude, don't give the 'when nature attacks' genre ideas.  Plus, hasn't that been done?) fails to fully believe at first.

We get a series of great gory kills, such as when Maureen doesn't notice the overgrown slug in the lettuce she's slicing for the dinner salad, leading to David being internally consumed by slug blood parasites and his face exploding during a lunch meeting with clients; one of which is played by doyenne of '70s Euro horror Patty Shepard in her penultimate role before her sad early death from cancer.  Then we have two of Kim's students: there's the brunette Donna (Kari Rose), who is enjoying some illicit sexy times with her douchebag boyfriend Bobby (Kris Mann) whilst her parents are out when the bedroom becomes rife with ravenous gastropods that strip the flesh from their naked bodies, in a scene that was cut from the '80s UK release but can now be enjoyed in all its gory glory.  Bobby had earlier been introduced taunting the unfortunate Ron before his demise, so fuck him anyway.  Then there's the blonde Pam (Tammy Reger), who has to escape the clutches of a jealous classmate-cum-skull masked attempted rapist by jumping down a sewer outlet only to be consumed by the vicious molluscs.  The rapist dude never gets held to account either.  Fucksake.

But the best bit of the film, for me, is when Brady goes to the town authorities and tells them to disconnect the water supply or he'll declare a health emergency and is told by the officious Phillips (Frank Brana) "YOU AIN'T GOT THE AUTHORITY TO DECLARE 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY'!  NOT IN THIS TOWN!"  Magnificent.  Anyway, obviously Mike and Don have to team up to rescue the town from these slugs transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop.  With some degree of sacrifice involved.  I would and do highly recommend Slugs, both book and film, to any and all connoisseurs of the exploitative and goopy.  You'll have a great time.  I did, at both eight and forty four.  I should probably grow up one of these days.