Meanwhile, over at Penguin Comics...

Check this out!

http://penguincomicsnet.blogspot.com/2011/07/dvd-round-up_25.html

Ruby LaRocca

I had this genius idea to write an article about Ruby LaRocca. Don;t know who she is? Tough! I was going to scan pictures from my collection of films with her in them. I was going to put up all this titillation concerning Ms. LaRocca. It would be a great article.
Then I asked myself a question.
Why?
Why are you doing this article?
Well, see there was an event in November. An incident where Ms. LaRocca was injured and suffered brain damage. She is relearning to walk and talk and stuff. Having met her at Cinema Wasteland once it was heartbreaking to me that something like this would happen.
She is going to chronicle the event on her own blog to explain what went down. What? You want a link to her blog? Stop being so lazy and find it already. If the Internet made it any easier the human race would be extinct in a week.
So, I decided that this needed to be something...different.
So, ladies and gentlemen, without any further ado, this is what Ruby LaRocca means to me.
Deal with it.
I started my career as a film reviewer with Cult Cuts. I will always be with Cult Cuts. They understand that I will watch anything and probably give it more of a fair shake than anyone else.
I became an expert in sexploitation films.
Around the same time Seduction Cinema came into being. Seduction Cinema did softcore spoofs of Hollywood flicks. Things like Playmate of The Apes, Spider Babe, Lord of the G-Strings...you get the idea.
Ruby LaRocca was in a lot of these films, but I was more interested in Misty Mundae. Not really all that interested in Ruby.
Then came Dr. Jekyll and Mistress Hyde.
This film means a lot to me for three reasons.
One, it showed me that Tony Marsiglia was a director to be reckoned with. I have been proven correct on that more than once since seeing this film. Anyone interested in true exploitation cinema needs to watch everything that he has made.
Two, it showed me that Misty Mundae was more than a pretty girl with little boobs. She could act.
Three, that Ruby LaRocca was suddenly on my radar.
Here was this beautiful girl, full of life, vibrant and with that little smirk that showed the devil inside of her. At the end of the film where she is dressed to the nines and the only sane person left after Jekyll's experiments, Ruby is a force to be reckoned with.
But that wasn't what did it.
Seduction Cinema is famous for the sheer amount of extras they put on a DVD. For Dr. Jekyll and Mistress Hyde it was a behind the scenes thing where Ruby and Misty just hung out and did stuff when they weren't making the movie.
It was fascinating to watch.
That was all I needed. Then came the list of movies;
THE DEVIL'S BLOODY PLAYTHINGS proved she could play sheer evil.
BIKINI GIRLS ON DINOSAUR PLANET showed she could do old school slapstick.
SHADOW: DEAD RIOT put her with some B movie heavy hitters and she held her own.
ZOMBIE CHRIST she put some class in Bill Zebub's epic.
A lot of people watch these videos to fixate on a particular actress and the whole lust thing rears it's ugly head.
Ruby was never like that.
I saw a bright, funny, intelligent woman who knew what she was doing and took it in directions that no one would have conceived of.
Do you know of anyone else who would be in ORGASM TORTURE IN SATAN'S RAPE CLINIC?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
So, anyway, Ruby's brain got hurt. I saw a YouTube video interview she did and it broke my heart.
Sort of.
Because she's still here with us and she's still Ruby.
That's a good thing.
Monica Puller should be given a sainthood and a medal for making sure that the sheer delight of Ruby LaRocca is still here with us.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Sometimes us film reviewer folk need to vent and tell you what is going on in the real world.
So, speaking of the real world...
Ruby has huge medical bills and needs to be able to continue with all of her therapy and whatnot. They have an online auction of art and cool stuff.
Go HERE to check out the cool stuff. Buy something or donate. Your choice.
So, no pictures, no video, nothing but this uber geek telling you what is up. What is going on in the world and what you need to do to help someone who deserves so much more than that.
Get out of here already.

  

NIGHTMARES (1980)

Also known as Stagefright and, no, not the Soavi film. This tells the tale of a little girl who watches her mother die in a horrible car accident and she is scarred forever. Flash forward to her twenties and she is psychotic. Acting in a play she decides to whack everyone in the play. She uses shards of broken glass to do the deed and is very fond of stabbing people while they are naked.
The film is shot like a giallo, but one where there is no doubt as to who the killer is. It makes the big reveal at the end seem kind of humorous.
Also, I don't care how crazy you are, there is no way to shove a piece of broken glass through a theater seat into someone nd kill them. Even wearing gloves, that glass would shred your hand.  The film is filled with nudity and blood. Not a lot of gore.
This is one of those films that would have done better with a different title and waited a couple of years. Mindless slasher films filled the mid 80's and this would have done really well in that environment.
Probably the best aspect of this Severin release would have to be the commentary with director John D. Lamond and Not Quite Hollywood director, Mark Hartley. When Lamond was first approached by backers for a film he told them he had a script ready and gave them a brief synopsis. He was making it up as he went. On his next meeting he brought a script which was a script for The Exorcist with the title page torn off and replaced with one with Nightmares on the cover.
Listening to Lamond tell of his exploits in making Nightmares is infinitely preferable to watching the film without the commentary tends to be dull and predictable viewing.
Just the commentary makes this a film worth watching.

And at Penguin Comics...

http://penguincomicsnet.blogspot.com/2011/07/dvd-round-up.html

BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981)

Ah, thank you Severin. I can remember when this was released and it's good to see it get the awesome treatment that Severin gives its releases.
Bloody Birthday gives us the concept that three children that were born in 1970 under an eclipse would be heartless killers becuase of some sort of astral configuration.
Now, eleven years later, it's their birthdays and all Hell is breaking loose. Joyce (Lori Lethin) starts to realize that things aren't right when people start dropping like flies. When someone gets too close to what is going on they are killed. The little girl sets up her father, the town sheriff, to slip and fall on a skateboard, but whne he steps over it, she lures him into the yard and one of her demonic accomplices bashes his head in with a baseball bat.
This is a classic slasher flick that I really do not like the ending of. These are children that will always be like this and the things they did required a much more violent retribution. They so did not get what was coming to them and that bothered me a little.

The film looks great. Lori Lethin looks great and she gives a great interview as one of the bonuses on the DVD.
There is also a featurette on slasher flicks as well as an audio interview with director, Ed Hunt.
And, finally, Julie Brown does like three strip teases topless in the flick and this is back in the day when she was young, cute and just really freaking stacked. That alone is worth the price of the DVD.

Double Feature at The Waltz Compound

Double Feature at The Waltz Compound has taken a new twist with Netflix through our Wii. We have thousands of movies at our fingertips.
This is what we settled on last night.

MEGA PYTHON VS GATOROID

I'll admit that I watched this for no other reason than Debbie Gibson and Tiffany's catfight. Sure, the CGI is horrid, but being raised on Corman flicks with a cavalcade of horrid special effects, this wasn't all that bad. The Asylum did a good job with this flick. I loved how Tiffany's second in  command, Angie (Kathryn Joosten) did such a great job as a hard boiled park ranger.
Also, when the creatures attack an event at the everglades, Angie tells everyone with a gun to start shooting and more than half the people whip out guns.
This is fun, pure and simple. I watched it with Dan The Man and we laughed a lot.



Next up was...

RUBBER

I saw a trailer for this a while back and thought it looked good.

Yeah, then we watched it.

Seems there is this homicidal tire that rolls around and uses psycho kinetic powers to blow people's heads off.
During all of this there is a group of people are watching and commenting on the action using high powered binoculars.
The movie tries to blur the lines between reality and fantasy and in the long run just fails horribly.

At the beginning one of the characters who is aware that he is in a film tries to explain to people watching that it is one of those 'no reason' movies. We are told that there is no reason for a tire to animate, roll around and kill people.
Yeah, there is really also 'no reason' to watch this thing.
Too bad I thought it looked pretty cool.
In the end it seemed more like they were just trying to manufacture a cult film. Yeah, that never works.