Fool's Views (6/1 – 6/30)

As we reached the halfway point of 2015, all the good things started coming in twos. Primarily in the form of Shout! Factory’s double dose of double features (already having graced fans with the “animals attack” quartet of The Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants, Frogs, and Jaws of Satan, as well as the Carrie and Ghoulies two-fers). Not to be outdone, Arrow decided to lay the entire five-film Stray Cat Rock series on us, while a newly resuscitated Artsploitation served up Horsehead, House of 100 Eyes, and Der Samurai in one fell swoop.

In short, there was no rest for the wicked, and it was all we could do to keep up with things, considering we were then juggling Mockingbird performances and an ever-increasing class load in pursuit of my NASM personal training certification. Stamina was definitely the order of the day, with few opportunities to watch anything that wasn’t “assigned.”

The upside to this requisite reviewing is that I get to cut down on the apologizing for this particular installment (although we did finally make time to watch yet another double feature loaned to us back in November by Indy blood brother Craig J. Clark – the only two flicks that I didn’t review… because I didn’t have to).

As always, feel free to leave your two cents worth – we’ll make sure you get some change back.

Enjoy!

AC deals with laptop issues in his usual calm, discreet manner.

GHOSTHOUSE (1988) and WITCHERY (1988) Blu-ray Review

GhostHouse (1988) d. Umberto Lenzi (as Humphrey Humbert) (Italy)
Witchery (1988) d. Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin) (Italy)

When Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and Evil Dead II were released in Italy, they came out under the foreign titles of La Casa and La Casa II. Considering this is the same country that had the enterprising notion of coming up with a movie called Zombi 2 as an unofficial sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (released locally as Zombi), you can probably guess what happened next. Yep, notorious exploitation artist Joe D’Amato decided to produce a couple quick (and completely unrelated) haunted house flicks and put them out as La Casa 3 and La Casa 4 in an attempt to separate suckers from their hard-earned lira. Imagine their surprise when instead of Bruce Campbell, moviegoers found themselves face-to-face with a bunch of no-name Italian actors for the first and the comedy team of Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff (in between Knight Rider and Baywatch TV gigs at the time) for the second!