YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983)

’YOR’: CAVEMAN HUNTERS ACT SILLY

Miami Herald, The (FL) - August 20, 1983

Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic



In Yor, The Hunter From the Future, a bunch of spindly looking cavemen, dark-haired and dark-bearded and cloaked in scraggly dark furs, are doing battle with an even more swarthy band when Yor strides in to set things right. Yor is from another tribe, he’s blonde and clean-shaven, wears an itsy-bitsy loincloth and carries a big ax, and he’s a foot taller than everyone else. The frizzy-haired heroine named Ka-Laa takes this all in and approaches boldly: "Yor, you’re different from the other men I’ve seen." Ah, the Dawn of Enlightenment.

Yor, as it turns out, is not from prehistoric times at all, but as the title suggests, from the future. For that matter, so is everyone else, which may explain that while they are grunting, seizing, looting and pillaging, the cave characters are also exchanging such bons mots as "It’s like fire burning inside me, a question without an answer" and "Hurry, the gods must be appeased with fresh blood." and "My life has taken on new meaning."

They’re not always so sage, however. In one scene, Yor is warned by the only other blonde in the cave, the shapely Roa, that the Diseased Ones are about to put him to the knife. "They are convinced that sacrificing every stranger they capture is the only way to placate the gods," she says. Yor, none too quick in dealing with abstractions, replies: "What’s your name?"

Yor is meant to be another of the great-and-timeless quest pictures, of course, with the mighty Yor out to save his "civilization, " but its absurd dialogue lends it that extra dimension, and a recent preview audience chortled happily for the whole 90 minutes. Yes, it’s one of those films stupid enough to laugh at, which goes a good way toward excusing the bronze-age performances (Reb Brown plays the title hunk, Corinne Clery the smirking Ka-Laa) and chem-set special effects. The director was Anthony M. Dawson, billed as "a key figure in the Italian horror -film renaissance," which may explain why that renaissance has yet to reach these shores.

Movie Review

Yor, the Hunter From the Future (PG) *

....

CAST

Reb Brown, Corinne Clery, John Steiner, Alan Collins, Ayshe Gul

CREDITS

Director: Anthony M. Dawson

Producer: Michele Marsala

Screenwriters: Robert Bailey, Anthony M. Dawson

Based on the novel by Juan Zanotto and Ray Collins

Cinematographer: Marcello Masciocchi

Music: John Scott

....

A Columbia Pictures release

....

Brief vulgar language, considerable violence

....

At (DADE) Omni, Hialeah Cinema, Riviera, Marina, Cutler Ridge, Kendall Mall, Westchester; (BROWARD) Movie City, Movies of Pompano, Cinema, Diplomat Mall, Sheridan, Broward Mall, Coral Springs, Lakeshore Drive-In, Thunderbird Drive-In; (PALM BEACH) Cinema 70, Jupiter, PGA, Boca Mall, Delray Drive-In.

BOARDING HOUSE (1982)

code_red_dvd_vers6_webpage015001

THE WORST MOVIE EVER

SACRAMENTO BEE - November 12, 1984
Author: George Williams

JUST WHEN I thought I had seen the very worst movie ever made - that was last week - along comes The Boarding House.

This pail of garbage boasts a supposedly new film process called Horror Vision. What apparently happened was that these filmmakers were so embarrassed when they saw what they had wrought, so bewildered about what they were going to do with it aside from mercifully stuffing it down some deep, lead-lined hole, one of them must have come up with the idea of calling it Horror Vision, implying this was an experimental journey into a new process. Who'll know the difference? he probably exclaimed. I f anyone asks questions, we'll just say the special glasses required didn't show up in time.

But such ploys cannot hide the truth. The Boarding House has glaringly bad photography, so bad at times you're sure someone was splashing gallons of Dr. Pepper and orange juice up on the screen. The editing is atrocious. The actors% show all of the skill and discipline of 12 people pulled in off the street to fill the roles. The dialogue is beyond comprehension.

The plot generally has to do with a group of numbskulls living in a house where evil dwells, waiting around to be chainsawed or poleaxed.

Never do you get the idea anyone involved had ever seen a movie camera before or knew which end was which. That they should be allowed anywhere near a camera again is a possibility too awful to contemplate.

THE BOARDING HOUSE

(No stars)

Cast: Hank Adly, Kalassu, Alexandra Day, Joel Riordan, Brian Bruderlin, Tracy O'Brian. The names of the technical crew, so-called, were not available. Horror Vision trademark: Howard Willette. A Coast Films release.

State, Madison Square, and Sacramento and Forty Niner drive-ins.

Rating: R, for nakedness and violence.







I don't know who this kid is but I love the line "This DVD does actually has some features..."

BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (1980)

>





"Stars’: A Space Shuffle

Washington Post, The (DC) - August 26, 1980
Author: Tom Shales

Unfortunately for "Battle Beyond the Stars," a new low-budget space Western, at least one area theater at which it’s now showing precedes it with the trailer for "The Empire Strikes Back," one of the most sensational and inviting pieces of "coming attraction" art ever. "Battle" is bound to look seedy and tatty after that, and does.

But it probably would anyway, since the level of fantasy maintained in this Roger Corman production isn’t very rich or zesty. Children at a Saturday matinee indicated they found the action sequences amusing but took to ridiculing and mimicking the deadly dialogue that tied them together. A smutty innuendo or two -- such as a double-entendre reference to a "torque bar" -- and the arrestingly undraped and mythologically constructed actress Sybil Danning are probably not enough to keep adults engrossed while the kids squirm.

The John Sayles screenplay puts the plot of the Japanese film classic "The Seven Samurai," later Hollywoodized into "The Magnificent Seven," in an outer-space setting. The timid and tidy little planet of Akir -- where everything is solar-powered (though the sun never seems to be shining) and the people get to stay in their pajamas all day long -- is menaced from beyond by the vile megalomaniac Sador. He hovers over Akir one day to announce from his spaceship, "I possess a stellar converter, the most powerful weapon in the universe. You cannot resist me."

It would seem a trifling conquest, since the entire population of the planet isn’t much larger than the cast of "Barney Miller." But the Akira, in self-defense, send one of their young men out in a spaceship to round up some mercenaries as bodyguards for their planet. All the moral implications of the original fable are resoundingly ignored and the story becomes simply a matter of finding the vigilantes and fighting the big battle.

Among other maladies, the picture suffers from chronic miscasting. Richard Thomas is at his neurotic wimpiest as the young hero, so ineffectual and limp on camera that it’s impossible to root for him. Mistaken for an android at one of his stops and told by an alarmed captor that he’s "warm," Thomas replies, "Of course I’m warm, I’m organic," but it sounds fishy to us.

George Peppard, very long in every tooth, especially for a beach-boy-blond haircut, slumbers around the screen as Cowboy, a tiresome cliche from, and an affront to the dignity of the planet Earth. Robert Vaughn, clearly aware he is above this sort of thing, looks peeved and weary as an outlaw called Gelt; you can practically see his actor’s paycheck sticking out of his pocket. John Saxon makes Sador a purely perfunctory raving maniac.

Everyone else is pretty terrible, too, except for Danning as the hilariously voluptuous St. Exmin, pride of the Valkyries. She is a creation worthy of Frank Frazetta at this most lustily fanciful.

Other more exotic life forms enlisted for the crusades include a tribe of clones who speak in the collective "we" and can all taste the hot dog one of them eats (the kind of touch the movie should have more of), and a sort of fish-face humanoid called Cayman. Cutesiest of all is a computer on board the hero’s spaceship who has been given the voice of a sassy female but sometimes sounds merely like the all-too-proverbial Jewish mother.

The model and miniature work, considering the economy with which the film was undoubtedly made, is pretty good -- except that in the climactic battle it is not easy, and perhap impossible, to tell who is blowing whom into atoms. For some peculiar reason, the hero’s saggy-baggy spaceship looks mammarial from some shots and scrotal in others. And the deathstar of the picture, Saxon’s moon buggy, resembles a very large Midas muffler.

Nothing in the film appears capable of seriously freightening even the youngest of children, and the picture aspires to the sophisticated innocence of "Star Wars," though never achieves it. Director Jimmy T. Murakami was not very resourceful at hiding the seams, especially in the studio interior shots, where the effect is of a bunch of actors standing round in silly outfits. He also has no clear idea of how to animate a scene and thinks the picture will appear speedy if he just flees from each piece of deadwood like a hit-and-run driver.

Any movie with characters named "Zed," "Mol," "Feh," "Lux," "Pok," "Dab," "Gar," "Cush" "Pez" and "Wok" can’t, as the saying goes, be all bad, but "Battle Beyond the Stars" bravely goes only where lots of men have already gone before, proving you can blow up all the planets you want and still not be a world-beater.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

REVIEW / MOVIE\ A STAR-CROSSED SCI-FI STORY

Boston Globe - November 13, 1980

Author: Michael Blowen Globe Correspondent

BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS - Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami. Screenplay by John Sayles. Produced by Roger Corman . Starring Richard Thomas, Robert Vaughn, John Saxon and George Peppard. At the Chestnut Hill and other suburban cinemas. Rated PG.

Outer space has become a refugee camp for actors in search of born-again careers. "Star Trek" lured William Shatner from his margarine commercials and "Battlestar Galactica" engaged the paternal charm of Pa Cartwright, Lorne Greene. But "Battle Beyond the Stars" is a virtual time capsule of washed-up, washed-out actors.

John Saxon, Robert Vaughn and George Peppard - a trio of fading stars - all attempt to revive their erratic careers by hopping onto the space bandwagon. It's too late.

The story is as elementary as the first Sputnik. The war lovers, led by John Saxon, threaten to demolish the peace lovers, lead by Richard Thomas. Naturally, the evil forces have a machine that can destroy Thomas' entire planet. Will they use it? Will the good guys be destroyed forever? How can Thomas prevent it?

These elementary questions were raised when Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers were still Saturday serials during the '30s. They are simple-minded queries with simple-minded answers. Aside from a few films such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," the science fiction genre is composed of similar space garbage.

"Battle Beyond the Stars" is in the tradition of "Message From Space" and "The Black Hole." The script is hackneyed; the acting ludicrous; the pacing languid and, most of all, the special effects aren't very special.

In one scene, when Thomas lands his spaceship, the background drawings look as if they were last seen on the "Superman" television show. They're flat, unconvincing portraits of a landscape that's nearly as barren as this movie.

John ("The Unforgiven") Saxon, Robert ("The Man From Uncle") Vaughn and George ("The Blue Max") Peppard all play second fiddle to the spaceships. Saxon and Vaughn are stiff. Peppard, as a space cowboy who smokes, drinks and plays the harmonica, gives a pleasantly camp performance.

But they've all fought this battle of stardom before - and it's beyond them.

C.H.U.D. (1984)







How do you spell yuck? 'C.H.U.D.'

San Diego Union, The (CA) - August 31, 1984
Author: David Elliott, Movie Critic

"They're not staying down there anymore!" shout the ads for "C.H.U.D.", which stands for "Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers." That's fine by me, but did they have to come up in theaters?

"C.H.U.D" has some rank promise, and for a while I thought it would be more than late-summer filler slop. It has that special feeling of hot Manhattan days when the street gunk sticks to your shoes, slips of steam rise hellishly from manholes, and the vent men and bag ladies are at their most pungently seasoned. On such days New York, the great upward city, seems to be sinking on its grungy piles.

The film might have been grown in a petri dish, and long before the vicious, slimy Chuds appear, we have an icky feeling. Above ground a bright cop (Chris Curry) starts to sleuth the danger, and in the subway approaches to the underworld there's a soup kitchen hippie-saint (Daniel Stern) who knows his smelly customers are in more than usual peril.

There's also a fashion photographer (John Heard) who, shades of "Blow-Up," also photographs bums. Even when his grisly pictures of Chud victims are presented to the Midtown big shots, they try to cover up the truth. And the truth is the ultimate Village Voice story: the Chuds are bums, made radiaoctive and real mean by secret stashes of nuclear waste material.

This could have been a rich mix of horror glop and anti-nuke anxiety. But director Douglas Cheek, a novice at commercial features, lets it down. There are long, trite stretches of talk, the shockers are laughable, and when Cheek gets some action going, he kills it by cutting to other scenes. As a tension strategy that isn't dialectical, it's just dumb.

In the unusually strong cast -- there must be a lot of mortgages to meet -- Stern has the best fun. The young star of "Diner" and "Blue Thunder" dresses in dirt, flashes a gold tooth, and shrieks like the last of the great '60s flake-outs. And George Martin, a veteran at playing arrogant, harrumphing stuffshirts, tops off his specialty as the amazingly obtuse rogue who's dumping the waste.

The basic reward here is watching silliness curdle. A ripe moment comes when Heard's fashion model (Kim Greist) finds an eviscerated dog in her basement. While a Chud adorned in entrails, SoHo Septic style, prowls the building, she calls the cops and then -- takes a shower! As she soaps up, director Cheek makes his dinky bow to Hitchcock's "Psycho."

About the time I learned that "C.H.U.D" also stands for "Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal," I drifted into acronym games myself. This movie is S.C.U.Z. -- a Sluggish Cliched Upchuck Zero.













DEATH IN THE STREETS ... & SEWERS

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - September 25, 1984
Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Movie Reviewer

"The Evil That Men Do." An action film starring Charles Bronson, Theresa Saldana and Joseph Maher. Directed by J. Lee Thompson from a screenplay by David Lee Henry and John Crowther. Based on a novel by R. Lance Hill. Music by Ken Thorne. Running Time: 90 minutes. A Tri-Star release. In area theaters.

* "C.H.U.D." A thriller starring John Heard and Daniel Stern. Directed by Douglas Cheek from a screenplay by Parnell Hall. Photographed by Peter Stein. Edited by Clair Simpson. Music by Cooper Hughes. Running Time: 110 minutes. A New World release. In area theaters.

You'll have to bear with me. I only review these movies; I don't make them.

The fall movie season may be in full swing now, with quality films like ''Amadeus," "All of Me" and "Places in the Heart" on hand, but that doesn't mean we'll be spared the cheapjack - movies such as "The Evil That Men Do" and "C.H.U.D."

Actually, J. Lee Thompson's "The Evil That Men Do" isn't half bad. It amounts to equal parts of slick and sick, dealing with a professional killer (Charles Bronson) assigned to track down and exterminate a master sadist (Joseph Maher) who works out of Central America, torturing dissidents and those thought to be a threat to a government there.

This material is perhaps too serious to be the basis of a Charles Bronson splatter film, but there's also little doubt that it makes for an explosive and absorbing movie. Which you can't say about most films today.

I didn't expect much and was pleasantly surprised. You'd be advised to go in with the same attitude. Star Bronson and director Thompson do their usual professional jobs, and there's good support from that wonderful character actor, Maher, and from Theresa Saldana, as the token-woman-tagging-along.

One doesn't expect much from a genre film with a title like "C.H.U.D." - Cannibalistic. Humanoid. Underground. Dwellers. The least one expects is a few sick jokes and, perhaps, some totally awful, laugh-provoking effects.

But there isn't much fun to be found in "C.H.U.D." This is one of those pathetic New York horror productions, made by slumming stage personalities who are between plays and have nothing better to do. C'mon, if stars John Heard and Daniel Stern were getting other movie offers, do you think they'd be wasting their time on this stinker?

It is pure exploitation and purely routine. Director Douglas Cheek's plot is about underground monsters that are the result of the the federal government's dumping tons of toxic chemicals into the sewer system - in this case, the sewers of SOHO (an inside joke I guess, among the film's New York cast and crew).

Anyway, in addition to the usual vagrants, street people and bag ladies, the Soho sewer system now contains a race that resembles the Creature from the Black Lagoon (a movie that this film half-heartedly apes) and that have a penchant for grabbing their unsuspecting victims by the ankles and wolfing them down, leaving bits behind.

Heard plays a fashion photographer who is inexplicably (and incredibly) involved, and Stern is the crummy owner of a soup kitchen whose patrons are slowly dwindling. These two talented actors, who are never on screen together (except for one brief bit near the end), apparently shot their respective footage independently of one another - sort of like what Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy did in "Best Defense."

**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Both are rated R, largely for language and gore.

THE STATE OF HORROR: 1980 by Christian Williams

HORROR

Washington Post, The (DC) - November 2, 1980
Author: Christian Williams

This Autumn of 1980 will be remembered in Hollywood as the season when horror movies, those unspeakable celluloid things, cracked out of their pods en mase to gorge anew on the wallets of American filmgoers.

"The Awakening," "Motel Hell", "He Knows You're Alone," "Schizoid," "Prom Night," "Fade to Black," "The Howling," "The Shining," "Terror Train," "Halloween," "When a Stranger Calls," "Dressed to Kill," "The Boogeyman," "Mother's Day," "Don't Answer the Phone," "The Changeling," "The Fog," "Death Ship," "When the Screaming Stops," "Phantasm," "Zombie," "The Exterminator," "Silent Scream," "Friday the 13th" -- all of them throbbing like abscessed teeth in the gaping maws of the nation's multiplex theaters.

Soon, however, like the predestined perpetrators of their own fevered tales, they too will return to restless graves, there to spawn a new cycle of cinemagraphical excess. So it's a hello-goodbye to the biggest glut of nightmare movies in film history.

"Yes, I've just canceled production on a horror film," said Roger Corman , the legendary king of the quickies, with more than 170 low-budget movies to his credit. "The cycle is peaking and by spring the market will be oversaturated. No harm done. I'll just put that particular property on the shelf for two or three years. Horror films will be back -- but for the cycle to begin again, it first has to end."

At Filmways studios, however, a third of the 150 scripts that come in every month are still for horror pictures -- though nearly all go unmade. At Avco-Embassy, "uncountable" similar proposals continue to arrive. "Too many," according to Mick Garris, who says his title is vice president in charge of horror films. Garris believes there is a glut of "psycho-knife-killer movies," but that there's still plenty of interest in fright movies in general.

"The money is pretty amazing," said Tom Phillips, a publicist for Paramount pictures. "We've got 'Friday the 13th,' which cost almost nothing to make and has grossed $41 million so far. And we're going ahead with 'The Fright,' starring Lee Grant and William Shatner." According to Phillips, horror movies will "always succeed if they deliver -- blood, decapitation, stuff like that. Some of them, like 'Prom Night,' just don't deliver."

"Horror films have always been a way to break into moviemaking, and there are a lot of talented young people now," said Marvin Goldman, proprietor of Washington's KB theater chain and twice president of the National Association of Theater Owners. To him, the proliferation of horror films has a financial, rather than preternatural, explanation.

"It's just like Procter and Gamble," Goldman said. "One soap sells, pretty soon there are lots of similar soaps.But since the people who make horror movies are independents, they can't break into high-visibility movie periods like Christmas, Washington's Birthday or mid-June-to-Labor Day. That's why you usually see a flurry of independent films in September and October. This year, they're horror pictures."

Part fairy tale, nightmare and morality play, scare films have been alive -- in their fashion -- since the dawn of movies. Early examples, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1917), "Nosferatu" (1922) and Lon Chaney's "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925) are now classics. Frankenstein and Dracula have been made and remade; and when audiences hungered for more, they were given mushroom people, crab monsters and various varieties of irradiated insects, lizards, worms, men, women and children. A single scene -- Janet Leigh's doomed shower in "Psycho" -- excited generations of bright-eyed student directors to greater heights, and by 1974, with "Texas Chain Saw Massacre," the knife had become gasoline-powered.

The main stocks on the horror shelf, however, have always had low budgets and looked it. They once were routinely completed for $60,000 ("Not of This Earth") or less ("The Wasp Woman" cost $45,000). Now a film like "Schizoid," a drama about five women in a hot tub who share the same scissors-weilding group therapist, requires $1 million. A movie with that kind of budget is very likely to be made very close to Los Angeles, in four weeks of shooting. With many similar movies playing across the nation in hundreds of theaters simulaneously, not all of them break even. But "Halloween," made in 1978 for $30,000 and re-released this season, has so far grossed will over $24 million.

Merely repeating past stories is not enough to guarantee success, however. Earlier cycles already did that, anyhow, perhaps the most memorable being the 20 or so that Roger Corman turned out for American International Pictures in the early 1960s. They had fright scenes and copious blood and gore, and often a sense of humor of one sort or another. The personnel were unlikely but enthusiastic: Basil Rathbone (a student of poetry); Peter Lorre (a specialist on German expressionism); Boris Karloff (connoisseur of orchids) and Vincent Price, collector of paintings and sculpture.

When the budgets rise, however, comedy seems to be the first to fall. The big-hitters of recent years -- "The Exorcist," "Rosemary's Baby," "Carrie," "The Omen," "Alien" and "Dressed to Kill" -- have played their stories straight. They seem to have succeeded with audiences in direct proportion to their ability to "deliver the goods." A less friendly observer might also say that a certain humanistic quality has been sacrificed to the gods of contemporary gore. Frankenstein, King Kong, and Godzilla were themselves cpable of suffering, and even Dracula sometimes wished he were somebody else; today's monsters are psychotic, and simply kill until killed. A current horror film sympathetic to its monster doesn't even dare call itself a horror film. (It calls itself "The Elephant Man.")

The horror movie cycle seemed to be ending right on cue two weeks ago, when United Artists unveiled "Motel Hell," which it declared to be a "takeoff of every horror film ever made." Unfortunately, "Motel Hell" -- in which Rory Calhoun makes sausage out of visitors to his lonely farmhouse -- is neither a send-up nor a take-off, just another horror pic that never gets up to taxiing speed.

Meanwhile, the hearty of spirit are going right ahead in an attempt to twist the knife profitably before the cyclical goose is totally cooked.

Pearce, for example, is now associate producer of a movie called "New Year's Evil," pegged naturally to open on or about Jan. 1. It's the tale of a man compelled to kill when the clock strikes midnight of the New Year, and he works his way West time-zone-to-time-zone as New Year's Eve progresses.

"These pictures aren't too different from those that have gone before, and what makes them work is more craft than art," Pearce said. "It's all a game -- a group of coeds are endangered. Who is it? What is it? Sure the cycle is going to end soon, but there are twice as many films this time as ever before. One of the reasons is that you can get financing for a horror picture right now. We get a lot of proposals, because Cannon has a line of credit out of a foreign bank."

"Here's one that just came in," Pearce said. "Somebody wants to make a picture called 'In Broad Daylight.' They want a million and a half dollars. They've got a script, a production company, a budget. Obviously these guys are young and ambitious."

The name on the proposal was Tom Green, and his film organization was listed as The Runamuck Co. "Every other film has a knife in it," Green explained on the telephone from Los Angeles. "But the actual villain of 'In Broad Daylight' is sunlight! That, plus ordinary objects like a deep freeze, a piano, a flying blender. We're turning the whole thing around: 'In Broad Daylight, Pray for the Night to Come!'"

Green says his picture is about "necropsychokinesis. See, there's a Menonnite graveyard in Utah, and somebody wants to disturb the graves. But the dead don't want to move, so they start moving things themselves. By necropsychokinesis. But all this happens in daylight -- and we're working on ways to get a special chrome glare. Nobody realizes how frightening the sun can be. But it is. You know, maybe a woman looks terrific at night. Then you wake up the next morning and look at her. Agh!"

To make a horror movie, Green said, all you have to do is "Swallow six tons of concrete for your stomach lining, and give up 10 years of your life. You have to have integrity, and have to have an office. You have to keep plugging. On this picture, I'm the director and my partner, Jon Torp, wrote it, and we put everything together -- we've got our own music, our own gaffers and the four leads signed up. Then sell it. Love me, love my dog."

Horror movies have been a kicking-off place for filmmakers -- and sometimes actors, too: James Arness in "The Thing," Steve McQueen in "The Blob." (Writers, on the other hand, usually are happier to be forgotten: as James Clavell, author of "Shogun" and also of "The Fly.")

The current horror movies even have a queen: Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Tony Curtis and, appropriately, Janet Leigh. Curtis stars in four of the current crop, "The Fog," "Prom Night," "Terror Train" and "Halloween."

She isn't happy with the "queen" title, but "it'll have to do until something else comes along," she said the other day. "Horror pictures are okay, as long as they send you somewhere else. I got paid scale for 'Halloween,' and the others weren't that lucrative for me, although it's getting better."

Curtis said she is asked often about the traditional role of threatened, half-clothed victims in horror pictures. "There's usually a sexual factor, yes. They kill the loose girls and save the virgins in most of these movies. I don't get excited about it. Women in jeopardy is just a standard ploy, nobody thinks about it. It's better than dismembering babies, like in 'When A Stranger Calls.'"

Curtis agreed that the horror cycle is "fizzling out," but said she doesn't go to many of them herself anyway. "I'm petrified," she said."I sat through 'Death Ship' with a coat over my head."

If so, wither the next cycle?

"Probably science fiction," Corman said. "We put out 'Battle Beyond the Stars' last summer, and it's done well. Now we've got 'Journey Beyond the Galaxy,' at $7 million, and 'Planet of Horrors,' which is budgeted at $5 million. You can't make them as cheap, because audiences want good special effects. But we've just built our special-effects studio, to keep costs down and meet our own deadlines. Everybody else is totally backed up. People want sci-fi, and they're going to get it."

But before horror films slink back to where ever they go between cycles, there are a few more screams in the theatrical dark yet to be heard: "Space Vampires," "X-Ray," "Harvest of Fear," "Lover's Lane" (starring none other than Wayne Newton), "The Boogens" ("There is no escape . . . "), "Maniac," "Never Pick Up Stranger," "Teddy" ("Jamie Wouldn't Kill Anyone . . . Unless Teddy Told Him To"), "The Attic" ("13 Steps to Terror"), "Scream for Vengeance," "The Vengeance," "Scanners" ("10 seconds: The Pain Begins. 15 seconds: You Can't Breathe. 20 Seconds: Your Head Explodes."), "Evilspeak" "Delusion" ("The Nightmare is real."), "Albino" ("From the White evil, There is no Escape"), "Frozen Scream," "Don't Go in the Woods," "Nightkill" ("How Do You Hide From a Killer Who's Already Dead!"), "Night Mares," "Macabra,", "Alligator," "Inseminoid," and more, and that's not even cracking the lid of the foreign language markets, with "Zombies Atomicos," "Apocalipsis Canibal," "La Isla de los Monstruos" and "El Gendarme y la Revancha de los Extraterrestres."

Sleep well. But remember, the ones that don't escape this time live on in the studio vaults, biding time to strike again.