THE CRAVING aka NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF (EL RETORNO DEL HOMBRE LOBO) (1981) U.S. Release (1986)


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`The Craving' leaves you hungry for ticket refund - Movie Review

The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - May 28, 1986

Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF

Eleanor Ringel reviews "The Craving."

The scariest thing I saw during the couple of hours I wasted at a supposed horror movie called "The Craving" was a young mother brow-beating an elderly ticket-taker into disobeying the law and letting her underage children into this R-rated movie while she wandered the mall. The sheer ferocity with which she insisted that the gentleman allow her kids' psyches be exposed to this picture's sub-level blood-letting was a chilling reminder that all moms are not created equal.

"The Craving" itself is actually not all that terrifying. Rather it's an exceedingly cheap (the first movie I can remember without any credits), poorly-dubbed monster mash about three women who go vampire hunting and end up creatures of the night themselves. The object of their quest is an 18th-century vampiress who can be brought back to life by having the blood of a maiden dripped on her ashes. The least scrupulous of our heroines, having already strangled a wheelchair-bound professor, cheerfully sacrifices one of her roomies.

Meanwhile, the most virtuous of the three has fallen for a werewolf (also 18th-century vintage) who tries to be good between full moons and does his best to help destroy the vampiress.

Since all three leading ladies are long-limbed, well-built brunettes, it's often difficult to tell who's doing what to whom. What you can see is more women nibbling women than on an average night at a gay bar and more false blood than in an archival tape of an Alice Copper concert.

The tradition of the vampire-lesbian film is a long and semi-honorable one (a recent addition was "The Hunger," with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon), but this poor excuse for a picture doesn't even count as a fatuous footnote. The only thing right about "The Craving" is its title; you leave the theater hungry to see a real movie.

"The Craving." Rated R for sex, nudity and violence.

CRAWLSPACE (1986)





'CRAWLSPACE': A CHIP OFF THE CRUEL BLOCK

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - June 9, 1986

Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic

"Crawlspace." A thriller starring Klaus Kinski. Written and directed by David Schmoeller. Photographed by Sergio Salvato. Edited by Bert Glastein. Music by Pino Donaggio. Running time: 77 minutes. An Empire release. In area theaters.

'You have to learn how to laugh, Martha," mad Dr. Karl Gunther tells his cowering caged prisoner, whose tongue he has extracted. "It makes getting through life a lot easier."

If only Dr. Gunther's methods of treatment were as comforting as his
bedside manner. Once attracted to pain and the cure of it, Gunther now delights in creating it. "I am addicted to killing," he writes in his daily journal. These words are spoken in voiceover in English but are actually written - in German!

The son of a Nazi, Gunther studied and practiced medicine in Argentina, where his parents took refuge and where Gunther obviously picked up his father's penchant for inflicting pain and suffering on others.

Now, he spends most of his time, alone, thinking up assorted tortures - er, treatments - for the nymphomaniacs who live in the apartment building that he owns. For diversion - and perhaps incentive - he regularly slithers through the building's crawlspace, spying on his tenants and their various sexmates.

I don't know about you, but there's something about a horror -comedy about the activities of a Neo-Nazi that makes me quite ill. Enough already.

Poor Klaus Kinski. As the mad doctor, he's perfect, afflicted with the kind of face that makes him suitable only for horror comedies or Werner Herzog movies - which, more often than not, are one and the same.

Parental guide: Rated R for gore.

IN THE SHADOW OF KILIMANJARO (1986)


'SHADOW OF KILIMANJARO': A SCARY KIND OF HOKUM

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - June 30, 1986

Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic

"In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro." A thriller starring John Rhys-Davies and Timothy Bottoms. Directed by Raju Patel from a screenplay by Jeffrey M. Sneller and T. Michael Harry. Photographed by Jesus Elizondo. Edited by Paul Rubell. Running time: 97 minutes. A Scotti brothers release.

Who says they don't make movies like they used to?

More than 30 years ago, "The Naked Jungle" had Charlton Heston as a South American plantation owner fighting off an army of man-eating red ants. That was in 1954. And in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock trained a flock of crows to feast on Rod Taylor and Tippi Hendren in "The Birds."

Now, here we are in 1986, watching Timothy Bottoms as an African game warden contending with a band of bloodthirsty, marauding baboons.

In "In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro," an exotic new horror film, a recurring real-life situation is exploited with lip-smacking enthusiasm. It's a problem that has starving wild animals periodically attacking Kenya's national parks and eating people.

The site of the attacks in this movie is the Amboselli National Park and the culprits are primates that are not only three times stronger than man, but also as intelligent. That makes for a nasty combination - and a lot of bloodletting.

Bottoms is the senstive voice of reason, a ranger who wants to protect man and beast alike, and John Rhys-Davies is the trigger-happy macho miner who is beefy enough to keep a family of baboons fed for a full year. (I don't know. There's something about a big, burly man with a gun that makes one want to urge on the beasts.)

The movie surrounding them, about something we all fear, is old-fashioned hokum, predictable, funny, more than a little frightening.

Parental guide: Rated R for violence.
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`KILIMANJARO` FILM APES REAL THRILLERS

Sun-Sentinel - June 11, 1986

Author: Roger Hurlburt, Entertainment Writer

Move over Stallone, Bronson and Eastwood -- when it comes to revenge in the movies, nobody does it better than Mother Nature.

In the past, moviegoers have braved the effects of killer bees, chomping sharks, voracious grasshoppers, spiteful killer whales, angry birds, ravenous frogs, squadrons of bats and even hordes of killer tomatoes. All have had a bone to pick with mankind at one time or another.

But compared to the hirsute horrors prowling about In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro, any other marauding managerie becomes child`s play.

How about an army of 90,000 man-eating baboons?

It seems that a severe drought on the African plain has made food scarce. So armies of baboons come out of the foothills to turn the natives and a group of mine developers into the breakfast of chimps.

Supposedly based on a true story, In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro is a film that makes a monkey out of the viewer.

Disjointed and contrived, the film is nothing more than an overblown, fictionalized account of what actually happened in Kenya a few years ago when starving baboons attacked and killed a few people. The events were indeed tragic, but not the fodder films are made of.

"Anything can happen when an animal is starving," comments game warden Timothy Bottoms. And sure enough -- just about everything does in this shoddy film.

Bottoms wants to evacuate the area. He knows the dangers of dealing with a "thinking, intelligent primate." Baboons, we learn, like to hunt in packs and are three times stronger than a human.

Unfortunately, we also learn that humans like to walk around in the bush at night alone -- proving they are three times dumber than an ape.

John Rhys-Davies, who gives a fine performance despite the story, isn`t scared. He has a mining operation to run. So what if bands of hungry baboons are looking for dinner? Time is money and he`s in a hurry.

As if there aren`t enough problems, enter Bottoms` nagging Beverly Hills girlfriend Michele Carey. Garbed in designer fashions, she arrives at the game preserve to get him to stop all the conservation nonsense and come back to California. Bottoms has too much at stake to leave -- namely, a sick cheetah and a neurotic water buffalo.

Though filmed on location in Africa, In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro rapidly reveals its threadbare story about a bizarre, singular incident. The screenplay barely supports the drama, so director Raju Patel goes out of his way to spice up the sequence of events.

Top honors must go to the bit where a crazed baboon, unknowingly placed in a crate inside a plane, climbs out at 20,000 feet and decides to have the pilot and passenger for lunch. Come on.

While one or two shots of the throng of baboons racing across the plain are visually disarming, the characters are not. Bottoms sleepwalks through his role and at one point is upstaged by a rhinoceros. Rhys-Davies bellows and stomps around in enjoyable fashion, but even he labors to keep a straight face.

Mostly, it`s the choppy editing, myriad of distracting subplots and a wealth of dialogue padding that makes time spent In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro a decidedly dark and dank experience.

FRIDAY THE 13th PART VI: JASON LIVES (1986)






FRIDAY 13TH CHANGES FOR 'BETTER'

Times Union, The (Albany, NY) - August 8, 1986

Author: Martin Moynihan, Staff writer

Appropriately enough, it is a gravedigger who provides the mot juste for "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives."

Drunk and clearly not a part of what's happening now, the old man looks straight into the camera and says "Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment!"

Then - sploosh! - the undead machete-wielding maniac Jason Voorhees strikes again, adding the gravedigger to the pile of corpses for the entertainment of gore fans.

Violent horror movies have pretty much lost their popularity, except for the deadening butchery of the hugely lucrative "Friday the 13th" series. But the gravedigger's dying words do mark something of a change in the series. Actually, it's a change for the better, although it doesn't take much to be better than the morbid movies that presented strings of graphic killings and little else.

The gravedigger represents all those - including critics, parents and most adults in general - who have decried the movies in the past. Bumping him off is one of several inside jokes aimed at the fans, jokes that occasionally work.

Credit must go to director-screenwriter Tom McLoughlin, directing his first feature and showing some real promise. Suspense and humor were almost absent from these geek show movies, but McLoughlin manages to squeeze in some of both. He has characters who are more than cardboard targets, moves the series in the direction of gothic horror movies and de-emphasizes grisly killings somewhat, alhtough there are buckets of blood. At the end, however, it collapses back into form.

But it's all relative. McLoughlin's work is derivative, but at least it's not entirely derived from "Friday the 13th" Parts I through V.

Still, the formula absolutely requires an opening in which it is learned that - gasp - Jason isn't dead. He's the worse for wear, though, dripping maggots when Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) pries open his coffin. Tommy, the character who as a boy "killed" Jason in an earlier episode intends to completely destroy the corpse to end his nightmares. Instead, Jason springs back to life, dons his hockey mask and sets out to kill a new generation of young campers.

The local Chamber of Commerce, tired of being associated with endless slaughter and sequels, has changed the name of the town from Crystal Lake to Forest Green, but Jason finds it anyway.

Tommy runs afoul of the local sheriff, who can't believe the killer is back. Tommy has more luck convincing his beautiful daughter (Jennifer Cooke) who - as coincidence would have it - is also a counselor at the fatal camp. The movie has moments as a middling horror thriller before it changes into mostly the same old chop.

"Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" is rated R for violence and vulgar language. * 1/2
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JASON UP TO OLD TRICKS IN LATEST "FRIDAY 13TH'BY CARYN JAMES
NEW YORK TIMES

Fresno Bee, The (CA) - August 5, 1986

It is a dark and stormy night. Tommy Jarvis escapes from the mental institution where he has been since he killed Jason, the town terror who hacked his way through dozens of bodies in five previous "Friday the 13th" movies. Tommy is a driven man, compelled by a logic known only to scriptwriters of sequels. He is determined to dig up and destroy Jason's corpse, just to make sure he's dead, like going back to make sure you've turned off the stove after you've left the house. Tommy digs up the decomposing body, the music swells, lightning strikes Jason through the heart and . . . well, you know the rest. This movie, after all, is called "Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives." Why Tommy couldn't let dead enough alone is just one of the trifling questions you can amuse yourself with while watching the film. You might also wonder why Tommy was thoughtful enough to bring along Jason's hockey mask, so the reborn monstrosity can pick up right where he left off, without even a change of apparel.

And why do the sheriff's daughter and her friends become counselors at the camp that was the site of most of Jason's murders? How did their parents convince them Jason was not real, when the series has only been around for six years and these kids are old enough to drive?

Teen-agers with no sense of history, they seem doomed to repeat the victims' roles in Jason's cut-'em-up rampage, because repeating history is what the "Friday the 13th" series is all about. It has fans who admit it's trash but watch just because it's there and don't expect any surprises.

Jason's new director and screenwriter, Tom McLoughlin, tries to liven up the formula with traces of humor and acknowledges the film's cult status with some self-directed irony. "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly," says one of Jason's first victims, when she and her husband encounter the killer on a lonely road.

But despite a few lighter touches, the film is still a gory waste of time that plays its murders for all the blood and guts they're worth.

There are plenty of cliched reaction shots of faces in terror, more than enough frames filled with bloody knives and severed heads. There is not, however, any suspense about Jason or his victims. He stalks, they scream, he kills. None of it is enough to make you jump out of your seat, though it may be enough to make your stomach churn.
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Bolt brings Jason back in `VI'

Houston Chronicle - August 5, 1986

Author: BRUCE WESTBROOK, Staff

"Nothing this evil ever dies," the ads proclaim.

And nothing this profitable.

After five box-office hits, the R-rated "Friday the 13th" films have reached a half-dozen Roman numerals - the first series since James Bond to last that long. The latest incarnation has the unwieldy title of "Friday the 13th", Part VI: Jason Lives (try remembering that at the box office).

Like the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" series, the "Friday the 13th" films have a conveniently indestructible bogyman - in this case, Jason Voorhees, the mute, crazed survivor of a legendary summer camp tragedy who wears a hockey goalie's mask as he runs murderously amok amid nubile camp counselors and terrified kiddies.

The new film opens with Jason in his grave, buried by "Part V." But a tormented survivor of Jason's crimes is compelled by his worst nightmares to unearth the fiend, thus assuring himself that Jason is nothing more than a moldering, maggot-ridden and far from ambulatory corpse.

He needn't have worried. The only activity in Jason's casket is that which inspires the ditty "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. . ." But our anguished hero isn't satisfied, and he thrusts a spearlike pole from the cemetery fence into Jason's gooshy gut. Naturally, all this occurs in an ominous thunderstorm. And, naturally, lightning strikes the pole and brings Jason to Frankensteinian life.

From then on, the film could be called a remake as much as a sequel. Jason returns to his old stalking grounds, and the body count mounts (it's 17 at the end, plus one squashed bug) until a final confrontation "seems" to put Jason down at last.

Ah, but we know better, don't we?

Fortunately, director-writer Tom McLoughlin spikes the punch this time. His basic plot may be slavishly imitative of his predecessors, but he paces the film well and adds some stylish visual flourishes and wry humor, including the obligatory in-jokes ("Cunningham Road" is clearly named after the first "Friday the 13th" film's director).

The acting isn't much, but that can be part of a low-budget horror film's charm. David Kagen, in particular, chews the scenery with relish as the skeptical, tough-talking sheriff whose daughter is a typical "Friday the 13th" heroine - a camp counselor who looks like a fashion model for Seventeen.

The film was shot almost entirely at night on locations just outside Atlanta, where the scenery is handsomely verdant but oddly autumnal for summer camp, with lots of fall leaves blowing across Jason's path of carnage.

McLoughlin, who has written two episodes for Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories", shows a fine hand with the young kids who populate the luckless camp. The sweet little girls are properly terrified and disarming; the slightly older little boys - one of whom is reading Sartre's "No Exit" - ruefully speculate that they're all "dead meat." Not to worry - none of the children are victims. Bloody this series may be, but it's not "perverse."

Some would argue that any violent film is perverse. Fine. Don't go. There probably are three minutes of violence in this entire 90-minute production. The violence is swift, it's sudden and it isn't always bloody. No one agonizes slowly.

Jason may be insane, but as a murderer he is cooly efficient, quickly dispatching victims with a wrench of their necks or a thrust of his machete.

That's entertainment? No, that's horror fantasy, a genre that makes no more pretense of echoing reality than a thrill ride at the amusement park. Neither should be taken seriously, and you're a lot more likely to grow queasy from the latter.
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'JASON': YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MADMAN DOWN

Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - August 4, 1986

Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic

"Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives." A thriller starring Thom Mathews and Jennifer Cooke. Written and directed by Tom McLaughlin. Photographed by Jon R. Kranhouse. Music by Harry Manfredini. Running time: 85 minutes. A Paramount release. In area theaters.

As I approached the box office of the Eric Route 38 Twin (in South Jersey), it seemed to pull away from me, just like one of those elongated corridors in horror movies.

What I was experiencing was the feeling of dread - and more than a little embarrassment.

"I-I-I'm ashamed to say this," I stuttered, "but I want to see 'Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives."'

"What?" the cashier asked.

"'Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives,"' I repeated.

Her piercing eyes seemed to look right through me. "That'll be $2.50," she snapped, without any humor in her voice. My blood ran cold.

I stood there in a catatonic state for a few seconds, prompting her to point me towards the entrance. Inside the theater, I bought a small popcorn and a small coke.

"What movie are you seeing?," the salesperson inquired.

"' Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives,"' I repeated.

She smiled. It gave me the creeps.

As I walked into the auditorium, all eyes seemed to be on me - deadly, lifeless eyes. Who are these people? - I thought - what do they want?

The answer was fairly obvious: blood. They were there to see some bloodletting. But would the film be enough? Would they want mine?

The theater darkened and the movie was preceded by a trailer for ''Extremities," with scenes of Farrah Fawcett slicing and dicing some guy who apparently had broken into her home. It was the nastiest preview that I think I've ever sene, but the audience seemed to enjoy it - and wanted more. Their appetites were successfully whetted. Mine was ruined: My popcorn container seemed to stumble off my lap.

The movie opened with the usual Paramount logo, followed by a maggoty grave-digging sequence during which the infamous Jason Vorhees is resurrected for the fifth straight time. Then the title comes on the screen, not "Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives," but "Jason Lives: Friday the 13th, Part VI."

I missed the next five mintues or so of the movie because I was trying to figure out why the film has an on-screen title that differs from the one in its print ads.

I tuned back in to catch the moment when the now completely revived Jason stops a VW bug and kills the two kids inside. As the woman fearfully squirms away from our killer's bloody blade, she offers him money to spare her. She even takes out her credit cards. As she dies clutching her American Express card, the camera lingers on her as if to remind us that, well, at least she didn't leave home without it.

Farther down the road, Jason bumps into a trio of people indulging in war games and makes meat out of all three. In the meantime, the kid (Thom Mathews) who dug up Jason is trying to explain what happened, but the local sherriff (David Kagen) thinks Tommy - that's the kid's name - is a psychopath and is responsible for all the murders. The sheriff's daughter (Jennifer Cooke), who has developed the hots for Tommy, thinks otherwise.

By this time, Jason, wearing his usual goalie's mask, has made his way to Crystal Lake, the camping site where he originally made his name. Only now, it's called Forrest Green.

At the camp, Jason kills an assortment of young camp counselors in the throes of sex. There's something about sex that bothers him, particularly if the young woman of the duo is especially hot for it.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that this is serious stuff. Not only have the makers of this series made the same exact film six times (and that ain't easy) but they've conveyed the same point six times - namely, that sexually free young women have robbed insecure men of their sexual identity. Hence, Jason's mask.

The people around me had no idea that these movies appeal to their most puritanical attitudes toward sex. They seemed to enjoy Jason's purgative violence as he hacked away at couples enjoying sex.

Now, that's really scary.

Parental Guide: Rated R for the usual (i.e., violence and sexuality).
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FILM: THE SIXTH 'FRIDAY THE 13TH'

Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 2, 1986

Author: Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic

Calling all counselors, calling all counselors. Friday the 13th, the slice- and-dice series about Jason, the vengeful camper who put the splat in splatter movies, has added yet another chapter to its bloody saga.

How can this be? When last we saw the remains of the lumbering zombie in the hockey mask, Jason Voorhees was dead and buried, right?

Well, let me tell you, Jason's alive. Which means everyone in the vicinity of Forest Green (also known as Crystal Lake) is dead meat. And that includes this movie.

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, like the previous five installments, is a real crowd-sleazer. You've got your cemetery on a thunderstormy night. You've got your bodysnatchers trying to make sure Jason's really dead. (To the honchos at Paramount Pictures, Jason is unkillable. This series is such a cash cow that they'll raise the dead just to make more bucks.) You've got the maggoty corpse of Jason reanimated by a lightning bolt.

At one point during this picture - after Jason kills a survivalist by pulling his arm out of its socket, but before he decapitates a pretty counselor by twisting her head off - I was reminded of kindergarten sadism.

I went to a pretty tough grade school in East Los Angeles where Dion, a male classmate, liked plucking out strands of my hair. He tied one end of a follicle to a scrap of construction paper. With the other end, he made a slipknot and tied it around the body of a fly he had trapped. The fly would struggle with this excess weight, trailing its confetti-sized sign, then collapse. I felt like an unwitting accomplice in Dion's sadism. Jason Lives provokes the same sensation.

As one of Jason's soon-to-be victims says when she sees the indelible hulk in the middle of the road on a rainy night: "I've seen enough horror movies to know well enough that any weirdo wearing a hockey mask isn't friendly."

Neither is Jason Lives. Oh, Jason, go take a spike.

JASON LIVES: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI *

Produced by Don Behrns, written and directed by Tom McLoughlin, photography by Jon R. Kranhouse, music by Harry Manfredini, distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 25 mins.

Tommy - Thom Mathews

Megan - Jennifer Cooke

Sheriff - David Kagen

Sissy - Renee Jones

Paula - Kerry Noonan

Parent's guide: R (extreme violence, language).

Showing: At area theaters.