The Secret Life Of Jeffrey Dahmer

Secret Life Of Jeffrey Dahmer Directed By David Bowen, Starring Carl Crew (1993).

Now that the infamous Wisconsin necrophile or Ed Gein of the 90's is long dead, bludgeoned to death in prison, we now know every piece of ghastly info about these horrific crimes--maybe too much. There's at least 10 different fictionalized renditions of the Dahmer story, a bounty of repulsive gratuity preserved for the masses to pick over like vultures.

But in 1993, hardly any biopics were available, considering that the cannibal deviant had just been apprehended and this movie came out moments before all the severed body parts had yet to be removed from the icebox! Someone had to take the bullet (or sip the drug induced can of Bud) before anyone so that's what David Bowen and Carl Crew decided to do. In my estimation there hasn't been a more effective or realistic accounting of what actually went on. Yes, the editing is totally shitty and the film is clunky and cheap but it's all handled in a revolting stomach charmingly accurate way that doesn't gloss over any of the details. The film makers even go out of their way to dedicate the film to the victims and their families. Which is kind of funny to think they'd believe those that survived would want to watch an exploitation film showing their lost relatives being eaten and or dismembered.

not that many topping options for an on the go cannibal like me at Little Caesars 

In high school I was pretty obsessed with all the weird details about this case that kept surfacing each week. I even audiotaped a tabloid interview with him that wound up in my guidance counselor's desk, it's kind of embarrassing and got me in a lot of psychiatric trouble (as if I needed more of an excuse for the moronic school board authority to think I was mentally unstable). Hey I guess you could say it was the 90's, whatever that means!

By all means finish that stupid Lena Dunham New Yorker article

One aspect that almost all versions of the story leave out is how Dahmer kept a VHS copy of The Exorcist 3 playing repeatedly and wanted to emulate Brad Douriff's possessed character while drilling holes into his victims heads. This film does show him baiting different dudes with promises of 150 bucks if they'd just take some Polaroids and hangout at his apartment and pouring acid into their earholes.

If you watch the Jeremy Renner version from 2002, it makes him seem like a lonely misunderstood gay man who's never shown eating human flesh, dissolving carcasses or doing anything remotely like the serial killer he's portraying. It's offensive because it seems to deliberately skip over all the facts and wants you to have sympathy for Dahmer, it's a real slap in the face. In the early 2000's there were tons of those cheapie serial killer fictional account movies cluttering up the shelves. They were annoying to see and I never really gave any of them a chance, mainly because I'm not a serial killer fanatic (obviously, otherwise you'd see more films of that type reviewed here). 

two guys can't sit here and enjoy champagne coolies, I thought this was America?

I'd been meaning to check this one out ever since I read the review in Psychotronic and saw the director and actor of this film on Geraldo, which there's zero evidence online that this interview ever occurred, I'd really like to watch it again.  

Secret Life, which is currently streaming on Fandor, shows how Dahmer as a youngster always had the overwhelming compulsion to murder and would constantly drink to suppress the urge.

In the beginning, he seems to have remorse after bashing in a workout buddy's skull with a weight and dumping the body. It's kind of funny how he does all this stuff under his Grandmother's nose, who even mentions she smells something rotten. Later on in his ghetto apartment he gets into a shouting fight with a neighbor who also mentions that the smell is driving her up the wall. You'd think he'd invest in some incense or a yankee candle! 

I'm totally down with Yo MTV raps!

Carl Crew's version of Jeffrey Dahmer is constantly plagued by contrition but I never felt sympathy for him and he obviously enjoys committing these crimes on a warped sexual level. It's pretty funny how he's seen wearing a She Devils On Wheels shirt, which I'm pretty sure came from this one catalog that Skunkape and I used to order from which also sold a poster of a man with elephantiasis of the balls.

Yeah that's right Skunkape totally had that giant balled freak poster in his closet

There's a lot of scenes with Jeff feeling guilty and regretting these murders but he still goes through with the ritual and at one point drills a hole in a victim's head and pours acid into his brain to try and create zombies. He also cuddles with human skulls (which he paints and adds glitter) and other rotten appendages. All of this disturbing shit stems from the insecurity that his captive will try to leave the apartment and they all end up in his collection or in his stomach.

I'm working on my bowling stance 

Most of his victims are taken away from various gay bars to his creepy apartment, but one dude that follows him home is not interested in beer. There are not that many intentionally funny scenes, most of it is played off in a grim manner but one scene cracked me up. This one guy just won't fall for the old drug laced brew that works to over power each victim. Instead he snacks on human meatloaf that Dahmer says is just "gamey venacin" and finally drinks a soda that gets the job done.

No thanks man, too young, I only eat beefy black dudes

He starts to get increasingly more sloppy and is begging to get caught, the narration talks about how he just wants it all to end. I liked how after awhile he goes from guilt to enjoying his bloodlust with examples of him sneaking up on a deaf victim with a powersaw and giggling or shoving a still awake guy into a barrel of acid that makes him scream "My feet are on fire"! 

I told you grandma that yucky smell is my steak-um sandwich

For a cheapie Intervision release this one has got some quality but I think it's due to the source material, if SledgeHammer had been a true story maybe that would've elevated it. Actually that aforementioned flick is pretty incredible, I got pretty wasted and live tweeted about it. The Severin DVD has commentary, which I'd be interested in listening to. This one is probably the greatest version of that other Wisconsin cannibal's story.

WATCH OR BUY

X-Ray

Directed by Boaz Davidson. Starring Barbi Benton (1981).

Reviewed by Michael Hauss

I purchased this film for one reason and one reason alone. That being the woman who helped get my young nuts into gear is in it. Barbi Benton, was one of those in a long line of former Playboy playmates who tried to take their naked talents and transform them into a career in entertainment. Benton tried to succeed both as a singer and an actress, but never achieved any fame in either, but she did stay relevant for years manly of course because she was Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend and it was his millions paying for those no talent career attempts which kept her pathetically relevant for way too long.  

You're just jealous Mike because you weren't invited to our rapey shindigs  

In this film, also called HOSPITAL MASSACRE she can’t change her facial reactions, either her acting talents were less than ever imagined, or maybe her face was so tightly stretched from plastic surgery that it did not respond anymore. Well regardless she’s surrounded by a cast of actors who ummm, well one guy (Bill Errigo) who plays a janitor does look a lot like the dude Kramer from Seinfeld and another who looks like Dr. Phil (Den Surles). 

Boaz almost put me in Lemon Popsicle as Huey's wingman

So Barbi plays a character named Susan Jeremy who as a kid on Valentine’s day finds her friend David hanging dead from a coat rack and some snotty ass twerp named Harold looking in the window grinning. You see Harold had delivered a Valentine’s day card to Susan’s door and ran after knocking and looked in the window to see David and Susan laughing and David wadding the Valentine’s card up and next thing you know poor little David is hanging from a fucking coat rack. 

Don't get up, I'm totally fine

The film moves ahead nineteen years and Susan is all grown up with a daughter of her own, a nasty ex-husband, a new boyfriend, and she’s rocking out those classic polyester suit ensembles from the eighties and large hair. She has to go to the hospital to pick up some test results and as she makes her way, the film throws a bunch of lame scares at the audience, but does not build any tension or suspense and the scares just come across as feeble attempts.

As poor Susan goes up to her appointment on the 8^th floor on the elevator she notices a man with what looks like blood on his face and something red starts dripping on her shoe, the man awakens and is shown taking a bite out of a hamburger with too much ketchup and looks over at Susan and says Happy Valentines day, and then when she goes to the ninth floor instead of the eighth, which is being fumigated, she's met by three men in gas masks and one tells her to get out before she's deloused. Then suddenly the power cuts off on the elevator and with the looks of someone mustering up a major large bowel movement passage, her plastic looking face grimaces up and you can tell she is acting her ass of. 

Keep those botox injections comin, I can handle it

So some deranged killer is killing off doctors, nurses and even the dude who looks like Kramer, (he gets his face eaten off with acid) he’s changing X-rays (hence the title) and medical reports to make it look like she has a terminal illness and to assure that Susan is kept in that hospital. Eventually Susan must undress and be examined by some random doctor after her doctor disappeared and what she lacks in acting ability, she makes up for in her abundant breast and as the editor of this blog noted, her rather large nipples. 

I need that Chinese Balm that Jackie Chiles told me not to use for these coffee burns

Susan is put into a ward with three old women that includes an obvious man dressed as an old lady and another bitter ass hag who plays the spoons and tells the other two that she (Susan) maybe "young and lovely on the outside maybe, but old and rotten on the inside. All her bones are decaying and her organs are all rancid and her blood is malignant as slime." Well, so we have a whole list of suspects including her psychotic ex-husband, Harold from her childhood, various doctors, the cheeseburger eating wine swilling wino who follows along after Susan or possibly the kind handsome doctor named Harry (Charles Lucia), whose name is a shortened form of Harold. So you figure it out...

You've heard of Dr. Giggles, let me introduce you to Dr. Fribble because that's my fav Friendly's shake

The film never builds any tension or momentum. Some of the scenes are illogical and make you ask yourself are these people fucking stupid or what. The acting is atrocious and the music sounds like something lifted from some 1970’s movie of the week. The continued use of cheap scares is absolutely annoying and are really used in the place of proper tension building. A truly amateur affair all around, but I must say that when Barbi Benton went into full out scream queen mode, she wasn’t half bad and her fun bags must have helped to amplify that most impressive scream of hers. The Shout Factory release boasts a beautiful print, that looks wonderful despite its obvious low budget origins.

Few notes of interest, Elizabeth Hoy who plays the young Susan in the film and Billy Jacoby (Billy Jayne) who plays weird young Harold both appear in the far superior BLOODY BIRTHDAY (USA, 1981) as two of the three children who go on a killing spree. The director Boaz Davidson has a whole mess of executive producing credits and twenty-six directing credits on his resume including a directorial credit on the famously inept comedy GOING BANANAS (USA, 1987) and the legendary LEMON POPSICLE Series. Benton's only other exploitation film appearance is in the fun fantasy romp DEATHSTALKER (USA,1983), where she plays the character Codille and fares much better acting wise than she did in X-RAY. This film was of course most noteworthy for being a Golan-Globus production for their famous or infamous film company Cannon Films. The film was based around a holiday, this one being Valentine's day as was the vastly superior MY BLOODY VALENTINE (Canada, 1981). The year before Cannon had distributed the holiday themed slasher film NEW YEAR'S EVIL (USA, 1980).

BUY HERE THE BLU-RAY INCLUDES SCHIZOID

Peak Of Putrefaction By Graham Rae

PEAK OF PUTREFACTION

By Graham Rae

In July 1988, the first album by English hardgore death metal band Carcass was released, Reek of Putrefaction. I loved it the minute it came out, and listened to it constantly. A messy, psychotic, riotous death-vomit of an album, it had a cover with photos of real dead people on it, which is pretty tacky and horrible, really, but when I was 18 I was much more accepting of such stuff. Subterranean woundsounds and screaming, sludgy vocals; magic. And as for song titles like Psychopathologist, Manifestation of Verrucose Urethra, Oxidised Razor Masticator, Genital Grinder, Vomited Anal Tract, and Excreted Alive…ah, poignant lifesick teenage poetry! I sneaked a wee ref to their second album, Symphonies of Sickness (the original cover of which is a photo somebody with their head split in half with an axe upside down; had to ask the band what it was), into my released-next-month novel Soundproof Future Scotland, just as a…salute.

Their first extreme mutilation sonic splatter platter fit right in with my teenage love of extreme music and movies and books (the month after this album came out I would discover Nekromantik; I was reading early Clive Barker and splatterpunk stuff at the time), and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I met one of the band, Bill Steer, in Edinburgh at The Venue, after a Napalm Death gig, and remember him as being a shy teen (he’d be around 19 at the time; he’s 3 months younger than me) who stood looking at the floor as he talked with his long fair hair covering his face. The band knew my work from Deep Red, and I gave Shane Embury (whom I recall supplying with bootleg splatter videos back in the day) an encyclopedia of serial killers to get into the Grindcrusher Tour when it was in Edinburgh on November 11th, 1989.

Lee Dorian, Bill Steer, Shane Embury, Mick Harris

Lee Dorian, Bill Steer, Shane Embury, Mick Harris

This tour was run by the record label Earache, and featured the bands Morbid Angel (Shane gleefully telling me to watch out for their guitarist’s spot of self-mutilation at the start of every gig “to get himself going”), Bolt Thrower (who always seemed to be playing every other week in the late 80s at The Venue, a now-sadly-defunct great wee, well, venue, by Waverley Station in Edinburgh), Napalm Death and, of course, Carcass. They showed a huge screen with real dead bodies on it behind them as they played. Subtle. Who said theatre was dead, eh? Steer told me at the time that Psychopathologist was one of his fave Carcass songs, after I casually mentioned that it was one of mine.

Bill Steer Bill Steer

I recently sat down and listened to Reek of Putrefaction on headphones, and started to write about it as a Facebook post after it had been on for about 10 minutes. All of a sudden I found myself writing a transcription of what the album sounded like to me, finishing when it did. I just love sitting writing fast and automatic and without thinking or editing, one take straight through, gutterly stunconscious, and the wordspurt below is what came out. So, enjoy. Must admit, I’d love to hear the band re-record this with today’s technology. And do listen to the album if you like old school sonic mayhem. At the time this came out, there had been nothing like it in the history of music, and it was cutting fucking edge. At that cutting edge still cuts today.

jeff walker, bill steer and ken owen

PUTREFACTION ACTION

You know the GREAT thing about this album? The engineer totally messed it up when it was being recorded, so it sounds, apparently, completely wrong. But I think the poor recording actually ENHANCES it. It's a lumbering, shambolic sludgy noise puddle just splashing and slashing in all directions at one, barely staying together tunewise, with beautifully horrible strange adipoceric oases of music bursting through the skanky prurient filth, precise carved gutter-guitar and bass and drum-beaten howling islands of comprehensible sound, split seconds of linearity, moments of clarity, pterodactyl screeches of too-high earache guitar, wallowing in insane unprecedented death-blood-horror-gorged baths of guts and psychosis-purebred sonic madness, gleefully revelling in vile human misery, unstoppable death train on greased tracks, modern band cannibals round a campfire neon-illuminated by guttering windblown flesh-smelling flames with blood and gore dripping dementedly down their human-masticating chins, empty split carcasses of dreamy bellyful food comas, charges of the tired-of-light brigade, two-sec guitar so-low solos firecrackers of vague competency screaming up from the hollow caustic depths of maggot-ridden despair to disappear, horrific serial killer grunts and groans of curious volition murdering notes and tunes and civilised grace and sanity and dignity and elegance, replacing them with a long-lost primal earthy banter fury, skinsoundpounding thunderground breakbeats, broadcasts from an advance snarling musical camp of slaughterhouse laughter, manic depressing maniac skilling sprees, howling and licking the headphone-covered ears with malicious seditious hatefueled glee, bloodburps of absolute pure fury purity, running running running towards some ruinous glutted end point of terminal anthropophagous velocity, chewing up and spitting out all olde-worlde music and tunes and notes and stanzas and swansongs, the certain death of the old and rebirth in a fiery sanguinary bloodflood of placenta and amniotic songstorm to fly new and bruising and disturbing round the confused-listener room, semi-coagulated half-hard symphonies of sickness slipslapsplatdripdropping off the inhospitable hospital table to pool in advanced-brilliance-glittering depthless shallow mudblood puddles of band guignol, temples of doom and despair and decay and disease and dis-ease and dementia 13 ways until a never-coming next Tuesday, always winding up new blinding modes of wreckspression, sanity suppression, inexactly tabulated recordings of a tense dense terse new expressive chaos and murder of thousands of years of senseless consensus morality and reality, intimate intimations of reality, threats of sensitive violence, soft sibilant blood-hisses in the wailing despairing ear, inexorable push-and-shove-to-the-front of the terminus line, lemmings over the cliff of permanent extinction, extinguishing anguish in one swift knifestab of killing joke trajectory, rollercoasters of death crashing and gushing guts and graphic gore all over a once-funhouse-rejoicing theme park of now-contaminated atmosfear, random instrumentals muscling to the front of the aural house to be bleeder of the pack rats hoarding nothing but holocausts of infinite destruction, deathpurr shockrockability crashing and burning all over eighteen tons of superhighways of album-and-crashing sex deaths, final deep death metal breath and fade...to...blackout.

DEAD END

Listen Here Demo

Original Album

Tanya's Island

Tanya's Island (Beast of Love, The Pristine Island). Directed By Alfred Sole, starring D.D. Winters aka Vanity (1980).

For some reason this very scandalous film never shows up online, but since it's here, I figured I'd capture the elusive bastard before it disappears into the void. I never cared to order it back in the bootleg days, because I already had a copy of that Vanity Playboy. Tanya doesn't have much going for it, unless you really like Prince protege Vanity or apes. It's kind of a downer that both of them are current drug casualties, 6 feet below taking dirt naps.

In my review for Mistress of the Apes, another monkey love tale, I said Rob Bottin and Rick Baker returned a year later for this outing. In that decade they were the go-to chimp experts until Joe Dante had them sluicing around in werewolf spittle. You may think "this one can't be worse than a Larry Buchanan movie" I'm not sure myself, but I'm going to dive head first into this pit of Cro-Magnon feces and banana peels and see what happens--join me won't you?

Vanity bares it all, maybe a little too much--I mean the credits float by over her hairy vagina ("Vagina", which according to Les Fabian Brathwaite of out.com was Prince's dubbed pseudonym for her before she dropped that misogynistic bullshit and went with her famous nom de plume).

Sorry Charlie only grade A Tuna, I'm the catch of the day

The Deep Red catalog is such a rich tapestry of fascinating titles, as far as I can tell the only reason this "erotic" bestiality tale is included is because of the Alfred "Alice Sweet Alice" Sole connection or the aforementioned Rob Bottin. There were a lot of D'Amato "adults only" titles that pervs would order who couldn't be bothered to throw on their raincoats and masturbate in public at a dingy theater or rent them at their local porn video shack. I was just mentioning to Goat how Joey D is one of the most creative and original porn directors out there, I mean there's gore, a decent storyline the most offensive part is the actual sex (well lets strike that and say the snuff is more vile, since we're not dealing with an ordinary filmmaker).

mustache rides by appointment only

So already here we've got an abusive boyfriend named Lobo played by Richard not Dick Sargent, I was dying when I saw that! They establish all this taboo beast assaulting ladies kind of racist bullshit early on by showing clips of Mighty Joe Young. Also Vanity strutting around half naked in a daze by spear holding savages. 8 minutes in, I'm already scratching my head in confusion (don't worry I'm not transforming into an orangutan).

Oh shit, I need to come down, hand me a bunch of Vs and a cold orange

I gotta say the cinematography by Mark Irwin is pretty sweet, if only it wasn't wasted on a dopey flick like this! This is a Canadian production and Irwin worked for Cronenberg a few times so its not too outlandish.We see Tanya's hershey chocolate areola's and merkin so much you might think she's a poor man's Laura Gemser (just check out the poster above for more clues). I'm just getting a Blue Lagoon vibe as opposed to a jungle misadventure vibe from this flick for some reason. I kind of hope they run into Mark "Warty Balls" Shannon--you know a movie sucks when you wish you turned on a Joey D "Cat Island" flick instead.

I sure hope they have topical ball rash cream on the mainland

So Lobo (Sargent) and Tanya (Vanity) miraculously appear on a tropical island, nope no set up or reason--why would you need one? The boyfriend character is a major dick (or a total Richard)! He's abusive and just plain weird, his idea of a funny joke is stuffing his ears and nose with toilet paper and then popping up out of the sand at the precise moment to piss her off.

The only Corona commercial that causes STDs

She ventures down into a cave where the humongous baboon emerges from and even later on gets all dolled up for him. She looks like one of those babes on a 60's lounge record and calls her new animal pal Blue because of his sparkling peepers. Don McLeod who wore the costume was also the ape who raped Clarence Beeks from Trading Places while Al Franken and Tom Davis encouraged that vicious assault. To be fair, they didn't know it was a human in a gorilla costume.

This isn't working out, you're too clingy

There's an underlying message of white male inadequacy against a powerful sexual beast that makes this more of a fetish film. If this flick wasn't so moronic I would say it's trying to be racist or hateful. Lobo is obviously jealous of the creature because he can't satisfy Tanya and locks him in a bamboo cage. Be warned, this movie might cause you to become stupider and lower your sperm count. 
I feel as if my brain is . . . Yuck I need to lie down. Tune in next time, I have to recuperate now.


DON'T BOTHER! CAUSES BRAIN HEMORAGES

The Corpse Grinders

The Corpse Grinders Directed By T.V. Mikels, starring hobbled puppets and feral cats (1971).

T.V. Mikels is that low level shitty kind of endearing director like R.D. Steckler, Andy Milligan or even Don Dohler who all have that schlocky goodness quality. By coincidence, Arch Hall Sr. wrote the script, him and his son are a familiar presence in Steckler's work). The only T.V. Mikels films I'd seen before were The Doll Squad and MST3K shit all over Girl In Gold Boots, which made it an insanely fun viewing! For some reason I've neglected to watch this but it showed up on Fandor (who I'm a total shill for even though they don't pay me, they are thee cult movie Netflix that skip the chatter and get to the platter, or some other DJ terminology)!

I remember reading Grindhouse king Bill Landis's interview with Mikels in an early 80's Fangoria. He commended him for the comic book style lighting that he believes Creepshow stole in an inferior way, which is like saying Return of the Jedi copied Space Hunter Adventures in the Forbidden Zone--totally off base! 

I killed Fluffy from Creepshow and made him into a pile of deli meat for the craft service table

In the first minute, we get a vicious house cat attack and  Caleb and Cleo, two unwashed googly-eyed unlikeable slobs out in a graveyard bitching at each other. I love how scummy and soiled looking these two are, one has a clowny orange bowl haircut the other has a matted fro, stained pajamas and beard combo I mean these two should've had their own Norman Lear sitcom.

those were the days . . .

Actually, all the actors here look like those Penny Arcade drunk unkempt puppets with bugged out eyeballs and bulging exaggerated cheek bones. The redhead looks a lot like Laughin' Sal, the famous croaking slowed down cackling ginormous marionette--man she gives me the heebie jeebies! Even if nothing happens I'm sold that this is gonna be great! 

photo taken by me from Playland not at the beach of Laughin Sal.

I can already tell what's gonna happen, sort of, because I've watched the trailer on Mad Ron's Prevues From Hell at least a 1000 times. A cute blonde nurse who looks like Ellie Mae's stunt double shows up. Howard her mental patient boyfriend gets attacked by another one of those awful house cats but survives! Call the Humane Society already! 

Marriage counselor, I'm sorry but he just can't satisfy me sexually like Jethro can

I forgot to mention the orange haired lady carries a doll around and sings to it. Caleb sells the bodies from the graveyard to a guy named Landau who looks like a homeless Andy Kim and according to Mikels was Dustin Hoffman's cousin. Caleb seems to have a bottomless pocket of tough looking beef jerky that he gnaws on. The primary lighting is very creative when they show the grinder, which is an industrial sized box with flashing lights and a stop motion thresher that barfs out Bologna paste when a dead body is fed to it by conveyor!

Landau is all over town paying various doctors to keep quiet. For a rich guy, his office looks like it was in a fire and they plastered vomit colored wallpaper up in a horrendous way to salvage the place. I think they spent all the budget on the grinding machine and had zero money left over for incidentals.

You mean you actually wrote that queer bubblegum shit for The Archies (obscure music nerd joke alert).

Later on, a grizzled hobo's wife gets her throat ripped out by another evil feline, you'd think an animal catcher would be out nabbing cats off the street but no such luck. The dead ground up flesh is being sold as cat food and driving these yowling critters bananas. The blonde nurse and her goofy husband go on an investigation and find the extremely annoying Mrs. Babcock. Thankfully she only makes a brief appearance. Her husband runs Lotus, the cat food company that Dustin Hoffman's fugly cousin and his crony are fronting. An oily character named Maltby seems like a potential necrophilliac or just generic rapist and when he comes onto Angie, it's pretty disgusting. 

FUCK this feline acupuncture is amazing!

The music at one point gets really good with some fuzz guitar stings then goes back to the usual jazzy stock music pap. In the Headpress issue with Last House on Dead End Street, Roger Watkins talks about being on the set of Mikels Blood Orgy of the She Devils and he kind of trashes him. Don't ever compare the two, but I do enjoy TV's style and brand of demented surreal-ness, they're not even on the same planet. The first time I ever heard about him was after listening to the misfits tribute with their song Astro Zombies, another one that I need to check out. The whole shebang kind of runs itself ragged and ends with everyone at each others throats with no solution to remedy the human flesh eating cat plague. I really dug it though, lots of fun and dopey as hell.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

WATCH ON FANDOR  

Lolly Madonna XXX

Lolly Madonna XXX Directed By Richard Sarafian, Starring Season Hubley (1973).

Review By Kris Gilpin

Additional notes by Crank in Blue

In 1973 Richard (Vanishing Point, Fragment of Fear) Sarafian directed Lolly Madonna XXX (aka The Lolly Madonna War), a backwoods drama about two feuding hick families, the Feathers (headed by Rod Steiger) and the Gutshalls (cool name), whose patriarch is Robert Ryan. The X's mean hugs and kisses not what you'd think, I bet alot of suckers tried to download this thinking Rod Steiger was gonna get down to some corn holing with Season Hubley and were sorely disappointed. The porn rating didn't exist yet, but my perverted mind immediately went there.

Their kids are an amazing group of young character actors: Jeff Bridges, Scott Wilson, Timothy Scott (who gave one of my fave sleaze performances in the lost revenge flick, The Farmer), Ed Lauter, Randy Quaid, Paul Koslo & Gary Busey (!). (I gotta check out The Farmer, sounds really scuzzy. It features a little known but memorable character actor named George Memmoli who was in a horrific on set accident that led to his death and him bowing out of Taxi Driver, as the psychotic passenger who was played by Scorcese. I loved his role as Swan's henchman in Phantom of The Paradise-Ed).  

Deliverance roleplay 

It was written by Sue Grafton, from her own novel. She's also famous for writing tons of her alphabetical detective novels (A is for Alibi, etc.).

Season Hubley arrives in this one-pig town and, via a mistaken-identity prank, is kidnapped by scumbags Lauter and Wilson. This slowly begins another feud which eventually escalates into almost everyone getting killed. (I always think of Season as the hooker that George C. Scott abandons and uses after he finds his daughter who despises him and thought she did an excellent job in Vice Squad, she also has a similar short haircut in this too-Ed).

stop type casting me crank, I'm more than just some street hussy!

Bridges is a good son who connects with Hubley, and Carey is his good brother. Lauter (who has fantasies of being a huge mouth harp star--!) and Wilson rape Gutshall girl Joan Goodfellow, who I remember from the B-rape/revenge movie Buster and Billie, with Jan-Michael Vincent. And Quaid is the youngest sibling, who has mental problems. (The boys are constantly getting haircuts or having their stitches sewn up by the Granny. Ed Lauter does a pretty good job as a cross dressing hillbilly and I loved the interview he did for Shock Cinema where he mentions that Hitchcock was so enamored by him that he had all these roles specifically planned out for the Long Island born character actor who sadly passed away a few years ago-Ed).

who did you say sexually assaulted you, George Glass?

And meanwhile, as things get batshit outside, Steiger eventually goes crazy and makes a big sammich ("Tell im I'm busy!"). Folks get shot, beaten to death and have their brains blown out...

(There's an amazing super slo-mo death scene with Steiger gunning down a few dozen horses, it looks uncomfortably real and Gary Busey's noggin gets an exit wound for his brain to escape).

would you happen to have any chow-chow for my possum sammich

This was just seen uncut on Turner Classic Movies, and is definitely worth you checking it out ;-). Warner Archives offers a DVD.

BUY HERE

Oops I slid into first and felt something burst!

PIGS!

PIGS! (Blood Pen, Daddy's Deadly Darling, Roadside Torture Chamber,Horror Farm) Directed By Marc Lawrence, Starring animals soon to be bacon. (1972). 

In the Deep Red catalog this pick, which was also on the Video Nasty list (but was not prosecuted), was described as breathtaking sleaze from the Heartland of America--not so much. Maybe they meant to attach that onto Poor Pretty Eddie or Prime Cut because this chore is a total snoozer. Everything about it comes off like a misfire and a wasted opportunity, but then what do I know, I was bored to smithereens during Barn of the Naked Dead and that movie has its devoted flock (Heh, get it like a flock of geese, whatever I'll be here all week).

SHUT UP! I'M NOT LAUGHIN

This flick for a long while was owned by Troma and recently has been restored by Vinegar Syndrome, who've been churning out some decent stuff beyond the SWV leftover dreck. And yeah, there are just some movies in the catalog that are pure torture (see Long Island Cannibal Massacre, which was ridiculed as a total bow-wow and then peddled off for 25$ to those that just had to check it out anyway). 

I've tried to watch Pigs a couple of times but gave up, it's the cinematic equivalent to chugging a gallon of that Orange poison liquid Sunny D while wearing a paper bag over your head. It's very dark, gives you a disgusting taste in your mouth and has zero health benefits. So why am I doing this to myself? I dunno but anything mentioned or sold in the Deep Red catalog I must review and document, it's a noose I fastened around my own neck and I deserve all the punishment it delves my way. 

Troma put it out, so you know it could go either way as a fun retarded Terror Firmer scenario or a Dumpster Baby experience where 2 mins feel like 2 days. How did Marc Lawrence, who's played gangster heavies since the 50s fuck up an easy concept like this, "pigs eat people and get rid of all the criminal evidence". He didn't have to do much to make this scary. I was mortified when I read Clive Barker's "Pig Blood Blues" in middle school, about an evil talking pig who devours kids in a reform school. If this movie was a half as warped as that short story, it would've been a winner.

Bacon burps are the best!

 Let me break down why Pigs fails in every way. First off, they added some of the worst actors in dimly lit settings that get darker by the minute. There's tons of overly loud pig shrieks and just when you think you will see a scary scene of pig gnawing at a human body, it looks so dark you might as well be starring at nothing. Ok, I guess that's not all true we do see a chopped up appendage doused in ketchup get chomped on by a porker but it just leaves you cold. No real action to speak of, they really botched what could've been a demented film into a dull waste. The only ones responsible are Lawrence and his daughter who seemed to have total control over the production.

Jesse Vint (who am vaguely familiar with from Silent Running with Bruce Dern and card playing robots) is the most famous. Marc Lawrence, who looks like a creepy skull faced child molester acts opposite his real life daughter Toni. Marc has a lot of a acting credits but only directed a handful of films, this one which by today's standards would get maybe a PG-13 rating has only snippets of blood. My favorite aspect of the film is the hippy dippy-bing-bongy rockin' title track by Charles Bernstein. 

Is this movie watchable, in a pig's eye!

I'm so glad they later improved on this idea with Evilspeak and even with the half good Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal. The funniest part to me is how Zambrini (Marc Lawrence) who harbors a girl that stabbed her father after she was raped by him is asked by a cop looking for her. He's goes "Yeah she's got mental problems" and he looks at him repeatedly saying "Hmm... what does that mean, I don't understand", OF COURSE YOU DON'T CAUSE YOU'RE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH!

makes sense to me!

I feel the same way about this movie I don't get how anyone can get any sort of enjoyment out of it. I just didn't get it, but like many horrific experiences they eventually end and I can move on.

ABOUT AS ENJOYABLE AS A ROOT CANAL!