'MAUSOLEUM': A HORROR HOWLER Miami Herald, The (FL) May 25, 1983 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
My favorite part of the new film, Mausoleum, is when Marjoe Gortner, playing a worried husband who has just been told that his wife is possessed by the devil, goes home, finds her more peevish than usual and asks, "Susie, what's gotten into you this evening, anyway?" But others may have their favorites, too. Perhaps the scene in which Susie (played by Bobbie Bresee) is accosted by the gardener in her kitchen. Gardener: "We're alone at last." Susie: "What did you say?" Gardener: "Ah, the coffee. It smells good."
Or this romantic badinage involving Marjoe and Bobbie. He: "What's for dinner?" She: "Poached salmon. And me."
Mausoleum is that kind of movie, just bad enough from start to finish to be thoroughly entertaining to the connoisseur of potboilers. It's about Susie, who is a descendant of the infamous Nomed family (Nomed -- spell it backwards and it's Demon.), whose first-born girl children have long had problems with demonic possession. In the early going, a concerned caretaker tries to prevent the young Susie from mucking about in the old mausoleum, but her eyes turn green and he stumbles out into the sunlight, where his head explodes.
Similar things happen to men who cross paths with the grown-up Susie, who fills the hours when Marjoe is at work by luring a variety of menials into the mansion, where they are exploded or worse. By mid-picture, the family has no domestics left, and there's gore all over the kitchen phone, but Marjoe never does figure it out. He gets his when Susie's breasts grow teeth (this is what really happens, yes).
Mausoleum was so casually made that toward the end, when Bresee flubbed a line and then giggled about it, the filmmakers said the hell with it and kept on rolling. It has dialogue to match its shabby effects, and it is wonderfully funny. Study the names of the cast and crew below; they may work again.
Review
Mausoleum (R) no stars
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CAST
Marjoe Gortner, Bobbie Bresee, Norman Burton, La Wanda Page, Maurice Sherbanee, Laura Hippe
CREDITS
Director: Michael Dugan
Producer: Robert Madero
Screenwriter: Robert Madero
Cinematographer: Robert Barich
Music: Jamie Mendoza-Nava
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An MPM release
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Vulgar language, nudity, sexual situations, violence and gore
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At Omni, Trianon, Marina, Ambassador, Miller Square, Movies at the Falls, 27th Avenue, Movie City, Movies of Pompano, Sheridan, Coral Springs, Movies of Plantation, Lakeshore Drive-In, Thunderbird Drive-In.
XTRO,' 'XTRO,' READ ALL ABOUT THE GORE Miami Herald, The (FL) September 13, 1983 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Estimated printed pages: 2
Xtro has the year's best promotional tag line -- "Some extra-terrestrials aren't friendly" -- but as is often the case, the rest of the movie isn't so hot. Apparently the promotional effort exhausted the production team before the fact, or something.??Though Xtro offers some of the more unpleasant images in the screen history of father-son relationships, during the moments when the film is neither cheap-looking nor revolting, it does affect a rather eerie tone. Those moments are few, however. Little Tony lost his dad three years before the action begins. He literally lost him -- one moment they were playing in their back yard somewhere in Great Britain, and the next Dad was gone in a flash of otherworldly light. When Dad returns, he is not the same.
Boy, is he not the same. At first he is apparently little more than inter-galactic larva, requiring the services of a monster rapist to find him a place to be born. This is accomplished, an unsuspecting woman carries to term in less than 30 seconds, and amidst much shrieking and rending of flesh, Dad is emitted, fully grown. He cuts his own umbilical, stops to melt a pay phone and heads for home, where he sucks little Tony's shoulder until the boy is no longer what he seems, either.
Little Tony develops the ability to make his toys come alive, takes hideous revenge on the neighbor lady when she kills his snake, and puts the au pair girl in a compromising position. Soon there are larvae and E.T. eggs all over the place. It's gross.
With a little more thought and an extra dollar or two, the filmmakers might have come up with a scandalously funny spoof of E.T. They chose a festival of splatter effects instead, aiming Xtro squarely at that segment of the audience for whom The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and John Carpenter's The Thing were good stuff but too subtle.
Movie Review
Xtro (R) *
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CAST
Bernice Stegers, Philip Sayer, Danny Brainin, Simon Nash, Maryam D'Abo, David Cardy
CREDITS
Director: Harry Bromley Davenport
Producer: Mark Forstater
Screenwriters: Robert Smith, Iain Cassie
Cinematographer: John Metcalfe
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A New Line Cinema release
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Running time: 82 minutes
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Vulgar language, nudity, implicit sex, considerable violence and gore
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At DADE: Trianon, Apollo, Palm Avenue, Marina, Northside, Movies of Kendall, Regency; BROWARD: Coral Ridge, Movies of Pompano, Diplomat Mall, Coral Springs Movie Center, Movies of Plantation, Lakeshore Drive-In, Thunderbird Drive-In; PALM BEACH: Village Green, Movies at Town Center, Movies of Lake Worth, Beach Drive-In, Delray Drive-In. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCHLOCKY SCREEN SCREAMS - TWO TERROR-BLE FILMS: 'XTRO' AND 'BASKET CASE'
Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - April 4, 1983
Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Movie Reviewer
* "Xtro." A thriller starring Philip Sayer, Bernice Steges and Simon Nash. Directed by Harry Bromley Davenport from a script by Iain Casi and Robert Smith. Photographed by John Metcalfe. Music by Davenport. Creature by Francis Coates. Running Time: 85 minutes. Rated R. At the Goldman Twin, 15th St., between Chestnut and Market. (Screened at the Goldman Twin).
* "Basket Case." A comedy thriller starring Kevin Van Hentenryck and Teri Susan Smith. Written and directed by Frank Henenlotter. Photographed by Bruce Torbet. Music by Gus Russo. Running Time: 85 minutes. Not rated. Shown at Midnight every Friday and Saturday at the TLA-Roxy, 2021 Sansom St. (Screened at the TLA-Roxy)
It's no secret that movie terror has become determinedly unwholesome, what with most of the on-screen carnage being the direct result of someone's (or something's) insatiable appetite for control.
What is surprising - and perhaps even more dubious - is that most modern horror films are content with being affably terrible. They work at being funny-bad - schlocky - and in both Harry Bromley Davenport's British import, ''Xtro," and Frank Henenlotter's midnight flick, "Basket Case," we have schlock horror movies that stress their ineptitude with swaggering pride.
One only wishes that they were worse. (That way, they'd be better. Get it?) What I'm saying is that these are two oedipal horrorfests (about bloodthirsty relatives) whose tackier details and overall cheapness fail to work in their favor.
Of the two, "Xtro" is the most pathetic, a lurid movie made for people of sociopathic tastes or for junk-movie addicts looking for something a little kinky. Its ads imply that "Xtro" is a nasty put-down of Steven Spielberg's ''E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial." But its nastiness is closer to David Cronenberg's "The Brood."
Its oedipal plot is about a towheaded boy named Tony (Simon Nash) whose father is really an alien being. Three years ago, dad (Philip Sayer) got weary of being an earthbound human (obviously, a fate worse than death), regained his former scaly/-
sticky appearance and disappeared in a flash of light.
Tony has been having nightmares ever since and, lately, they've been more intense. That's because his dad is en route from his planet to claim little Tony.
To accomplish this, dad has to transform himself into a human again, and, to accomplish this, he has to be reborn. This particular sequence and the scenes detailing alien intercourse are singularly unpleasant. Sitting through them is roughly akin to having a double-barrel rifle pointed between your eyes. "Xtro" is an endurance ordeal.
In terms of special effects, "Xtro" is amusing. It's the kind of movie that would use hubcaps for flying saucers if it could get away with it.
Much more amusing - at least, diabolically funny - is "Basket Case," a self-concious black comedy that already has gained ground as a cult favorite in New York.
Its oedipal plot is about a sweet, emotionally stunted kid named Duane (Kevin Van Hentenryck) who lugs around the lardlike body of his former Siamese twin brother, Eli, in a huge basket.
Whereas "Xtro" is determined to do violence to our minds, "Basket Case" is content with merely jabbing at our thoughts. It is more concerned with being casually funny but works too hard at it to provoke anything more robust than a giggle.
Of course, depending on your priorities, you might find humor in its grotesquely untalented performers, atrocious lighting, haphazard compositions, stop-action animation and dogged avoidance of logic: Its plot is about Eli wanting to punish the three veterinarians (yes, veterinarians) who separated him from Duane - a plot that is as unenthralling as it is obviously unconvincing.
'FORBIDDEN WORLD' 'ALIEN' IN DISGUISE' Miami Herald, The (FL) June 1, 1982 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Estimated printed pages: 2
Forbidden World, one of those genre knock-offs from the Roger Corman organization, looks a lot like Alien. That's bad -- after all, a lot of us have already seen Alien -- and it's good -- for a low-budget feature to look anything like at $10- million movie is at least a moral victory for the filmmakers, and for the unwary patron.
The sad part about Forbidden World is that the part that's missing is one of the cheapest, at least in contemporary moviemaking. For another $10,000 or so Corman could have had a real-life, not-so-derivative script. And then, given that he seems to have borrowed an expensive set somewhere (on Corman's budgets, the Forbidden space station is either borrowed, or testament to a genius production designer), this might have been one of the summer's sleepers.
As it is, Forbidden World concerns a strange and ruthless parasitic life form that takes over an experimental station in deep space. It's ugly, this thing, and it grows and mutates through progressively more ugly forms, each of which seems dedicated only to making a sloppy meal of the nearest human. That's pretty much Alien. And though Forbidden World adds a few gratuitious sex scenes (so perfunctory that they could play at the Pussycat matinees), the movie is a copy, plain and simple.
As this is a Corman movie (directed by someone named Allan Holzman, but a Corman film nonetheless), there are some over- the-edge moments, and a few tributes to horror films past. Corman steps outside the mainstream when he needs to shock, so the alien in Forbidden World leaves a trail of scooped-out brain cavities and still-breathing gore wherever he goes. In one nice twist on the old horror staple of man 'communicating' with a misunderstood alien, comely geneticist June Chadwick (that's her stage name, yes.) taps a computer-screen greeting to the alien, who by this time is not only sentient but the size of a Mercedes with teeth. 'Can we coexist?' she asks, to which the new life form gives a 'Stand by' before impaling her with a tentacle. Boy, does she scream.
The effects are well-made and gruesome; the set is 'used-car tech,' a la Alien -- a space station that looks real and lived- in. Even the music is OK. But good gore only works in movies when the story is good, and this story is stolen, almost scene for scene.
Movie Review Forbidden World (R) ** (LEADER:)1..... CAST: Jesse Vint, Dawn Dunlap, June Chadwick, Linden Chiles, Fox Harris, Raymond Oliver CREDITS: Director: Allan Holzman Producer: Roger Corman Screenwriter: Tim Curnen Cinematographer: Tim Shurstedt Music: Susan Justin (LEADER:)1..... A New World release (LEADER:)1..... Nudity, implicit sex, violence and gore (LEADER:)1..... At the Trianon, Miami Gardens, Ambassador, Tropicaire Drive-In, Movie City, Mall, Movies at Plantation, Hiway Drive-In, Lakeshore Drive-In. (LEADER:)1..... **** Excellent*** 1/2 Very Good*** Good ** 1/2 Average** Fair* PoorZero: Worthless
ESCAPE 2000' MAKES 1984 SEEM PLAYFUL Miami Herald, The (FL) October 12, 1983 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
On its very eve, 1984 continues to fascinate filmmakers with visions of the city as jungle and government as hyper-fascist. Sadly, the filmmakers thus fascinated have not included many of our more prominent artists, and the resultant films have been uniformly bad. Escape 2000 is the latest -- note that the fateful year keeps getting pushed up, the real 1984 not seeming likely to fit the bill at all -- and possibly the worst.
It is 2000 (or maybe 1995 -- movie and press-kit information are at variance on the issue). Nonconformists, known officially as Deviates, are packed off to Re-Ed camps for a long stretch of behavior modification. The Deviates are the good guys, of course -- one woman's offense seems to have been the fact that she ran a shop that sold cheap crystal -- and the government folks are very, very bad.
How bad? The head of the camp plays chess with foot-high pieces, and stages an inmate-hunt to amuse visiting dignitaries. One of the VIPs is a fat rapist; another is a homicidal equestrienne. Day-to-day harassment of the inmates is conducted by a huge bald man and his associate, who limps and carries a bullwhip that he is only occasionally able to snap. A loudspeaker sets the tone: "All Deviates assemble immediately in Center Compound." On their arrival, male and female prisoners are ordered to take showers together, and one woman is forced to clean fish.
Escape 2000 is about how the new arrivals manage to stage a revolt and spill a prodigious amount of blood; limbs are severed on several occasions, and at one point a vicious mutant bites off a man's small toe.
These proceedings are badly staged, badly performed, badly filmed and badly dubbed. Those with long memories and sharp eyes will detect the presence of Olivia Hussey, once luminous in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), now appearing pinched, weathered and largely without talent as one of the Deviates. The film is otherwise of no interest.
Movie Review
Escape 2000 (R) No stars
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CAST
Steve Railsback, Olivia Hussey, Noel Ferrier, Carmen Duncan, Lynda Stoner, Michael Craig
CREDITS
Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith
Producers: Anthony I. Giannane, William Fayman
Screenwriters: Jon George, Neill Hicks
Cinematographer: John McClean
Music: Brian May
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A New World Pictures release
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Running time: 80 minutes
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Vulgar language, nudity, brief implicit sex, violence and gore.
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In DADE: Apollo, Omni, Trianon, Roxy, Marina, Movies at the Falls, America, Tropicaire Drive-In; BROWARD: Movies at Pompano, Sheridan, Coral Springs Movie Center, Lakes, Movies at Plantation, Lakeshore Drive-In, Thunderbird Drive-In; PALM BEACH: Boca Mall, Cross-County, Delray Drive-In
'SORORITY ROW': COEDS NEVER LEARN Miami Herald, The (FL) February 23, 1983 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
Every June 19, the creepy old housemother of Pi Theta closes the sorority house down, kicks out the students and disappears into the attic for a festival of strange behavior. You'd think the sisters would know when to leave ill enough alone, but slasher-movie kids, they never learn. So it is, in The House on Sorority Row, that someone sets in to coed bashing. The killer is the type of psychopath who speeds for the basement boiler room, to lie in ambush. The coeds are the type of people who find, on their last day in school and on earth, a pretext to visit the boiler room.
As is usual for this durable genre, victim and villain are well matched. Though House on Sorority Row does not have a single screeching-cat red herring, and though power tools are not employed, it does have a classic of low camp, a scene in which a girl who has just been nearly brained by a falling corpse repairs immediately and alone to her bedroom, where she changes into a baby-doll nightie and stands with her back to an open window.
It also has a scene in which the heroine, the only virtuous gal in Theta house, confronts a classmate who has staggered in with a bludgeon wound to the head. "Jeannie," says the heroine, "did somebody do this to you?"
Those SAT scores are going down, all right, and the film- school folks aren't helping the curve.
'FRIDAY THE 13TH III': 3-D GORE COMING AT YOU Miami Herald, The (FL) August 16, 1982 Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
Friday the 13th Part III--In 3-D --perhaps the most eloquent statement of theme and content for a motion picture since I Spit on Your Grave. No excuses this time, folks: Don't write us, shocked and outraged, about how you went to the movies expecting some innocent fun and found...and found...this. The title is a demographic smart bomb, and if you're in the 7-17 target audience, Friday will find you. Otherwise, you ought to know better. Beyond that, what to say? Through the miracle of refined 3-D -- not the cheesy stuff that scrambled vision across the nation during Comin' at Ya and Parasite, but a sumptuous pseudo-depth not seen here since Andy Warhol's Frankenstein several years ago -- you can now have the bloodbath in your lap.
And, to borrow from the sporting vernacular, in your face. In your face: popping popcorn, a bobbing yo-yo. A laundry-line pole, a baseball bat. A pitchfork, a knitting needle, a red-hot poker. Plus, two eyeballs, one dangling from an outstretched hand, another projected from a squeezed-in face. Someone offers a joint to your face as well, which, though not much of a 3-D effect, is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.
The only truly entertaining moment in Friday III comes in the first half-hour, after a woman in curlers is impaled on a knitting needle.
This early gore accomplished, the film jumps to a daylight scene, the Next Morning, and shows us a van-load of perky teens heading out for the notorious Crystal Lake, where so many other teens have died. There is little subtlety here, and no attempt to establish a credible circumstance for the slaughter to come -- the kids just pack up and head for the charnel house, throats vulnerable and soft bellies begging for the blade.
Implicit in the artlessness of this scene is the filmmakers' sense of the formulaic nature of their work, which requires no higher art than bartering with the butcher for spare parts; when the teen van moves out, like a fisheries truck loaded with trout for the spring re-stocking, it's a nod to the genre and a wink for the grown-ups in the crowd. The rest is in your face.
Movie Review
Friday the 13th Part III -- In 3-D (R) *
CAST
Dana Kimmell, Paul Kratka, Tracie Savage, Jeffrey Rogers, Catherine Parks, Larry Zerner, David Katims, Rachel Howard, Richard Brooker
CREDITS
Director: Steve Miner
Producer: Frank Mancuso Jr.
Screenwriters: Martin Kitrosser, Carol Watson
Cinematographer: Gerald Feil
3-D Supervisor: Martin Jay Sadoff
Music: Henry Manfredini
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A Paramount Pictures release
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Vulgar language, brief nudity, brief implicit sex, considerable violence and gore
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At the 167th Street, Coral Ridge, Atlas, Lakes, Coral Springs Movie Center, Hi-Way Drive-In, Thunderbird Drive-In
MAKING SCI-FI FILM CAN BE HORRIFIC Miami Herald, The (FL) - May 26, 1984 Author: CRAIG GILBERT Herald Staff Writer
It was Day Three in the filming of Red Ocean , an Italian- made, low-budget thriller about a mutant sea creature that terrorizes a fictional Caribbean Island.
It was also Day Crazy.
The motorized shark fin wouldn't start. A boat hired for the filming didn't show up. And the shooting on a Virginia Key beach dropped slowly behind schedule.
"The Italians have a strange way of doing things," explained Bob Warner, executive producer for the segments shot in America.
"I love them personally, but when it comes to elements of organization, I think it's the least of their priorities."
Sound man Raffaele DeLuca disagreed. "It's not a real confusion," he said. "Maybe the Italians look disorganized, but everything finishes at the right moment."
Red Ocean 's 26-member crew, employed by National Cinematografica of Rome, was in Key Biscayne and environs for two weeks of shooting. Then it would be on to Key West for two more, and back to Rome for the tricky underwater stuff.
By the end of the year, Warner hopes, the sci-fi flick will be ready for distribution in Western Europe, the Far East and South America.
But first there was work to be done Thursday on Virginia Key. And the motorboat hadn't shown up.
In a sweat, location manager Eric Moss raced next door to Jimbo's Shrimp and appealed to anyone within earshot.
"I'm in desperate shape. I'm with the movie company, and I need a boat and a captain right now," Moss blurted. "I'll pay through the nose for it."
A minute later he had his boat.
"I've worked with the French. I've worked with the Japanese. I've worked with English," said Moss, who lives in Coconut Grove.
"I can honestly tell you, the Italians are like the French. They really seem to enjoy working in an atmosphere of chaos."
Back at the beach, it was time to shoot. Michael Hicks , 11, of North Miami, waited with mother and dog for his scene to roll around. A freckled kid with braces, Michael had a bit part four years ago in an Italian movie called Superfuzz.
In Red Ocean , he and his poodle would stumble upon a mangled victim of the sea creature, which has huge teeth and tentacles and is known to crew members as the "sharktopus."
But first a shark scene had to be shot, and there was motor trouble with the dorsal fin.
"It seems to be a little more disorganized than the other Italian movie we've done," said Michael's mother, Daryl Hicks .
The scene featured two fishermen who take to the water despite Coast Guard warnings. People have already started disappearing at sea.
One of the men goes diving, and sure enough a menacing fin appears, heading straight toward him. But there's a twist: The shark turns around in terror. It has just seen the monster.
It was Troy Enriquez's job to swim underwater and guide the motorized fin through its turns. The engine trouble had been licked, but Enriguez, a 22-year-old from Leisure City, quickly found that as soon as he gained control of the fin, he had to come up for air.
"It wasn't designed for that," said Enriquez, looking back at the fin and shaking his head.
The contraption had been trouble from the start. Even filling it with gas was an adventure.
"Go get a gallon of gas with 3 percent oil," Warner had instructed one crew member. The man was off -- and back again in 30 seconds.
"What's 3 percent of a gallon?" he asked.
When it finally came time to shoot, the entire crew, it seemed, was up to its armpits in the ocean chop, hands held high over the water.
In truth, there were six: one to steady the fisherman's boat, one to direct, one to shoot, one to hold the wire drooping perilously close to the waves, one with the power supply seated firmly on his head, and one guy with the Kleenex to wipe the lens.
It was early evening before the last scene had been shot at Virginia Key, too late by then to do a sequence planned at Bill Baggs State Recreation Area.
"All things considered, it wasn't too bad (a day)," summed up Warner from his production room at the Sheraton Royal Biscayne Hotel.
After shuffling the schedule, he figured they'd lost just a quarter of a day.
Actually, "in terms of efficiency, foreign crews have it all over American crews," said Warner. "The biggest problem . . . is they don't prepare as much as American companies.
