Halloween month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog! In previous years I’ve run my list of The Top Eleven Neglected Bad Movie Classics for Halloween and even a followup list of eleven more. The links to those lists are below. Right now here’s a look at three more classically bad horror flicks for the season.

BLOOD SONG (1982) – Singer Frankie Avalon as a 1980’s- style slasher villain! The godfather’s Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana) as a co-star and co-producer! Who could possibly resist that? Frankie plays a homicidal maniac who escapes from an insane asylum with his beloved flute/recorder type thingee.

Turns out years earlier a girl played by Donna Wilkes – soon to star as Angel herself – got a blood transfusion from Psycho Frankie. In this movie’s logic-free universe that means that she has a mental link with our mad slasher. This link is causing him to track her down to kill her with the single-minded fury that Mike Myers showed toward Jaime Lee Curtis in the Halloween movies.

The psychological link with Donna is also causing her to have nightmares about the savage slayings that Avalon commits wherever he goes. Paul Foley (Avalon’s character) tends to kill people who get irritated with the “Blood Song” he plays on his flute/recorder thingee and tell him to knock it off. My favorite killing: the one with the trucker taking a leak. Hey, it’s no “Santa at the urinal” scene from Don’t Open Til Christmas, but then what is? 

CATHY’S CURSE (1977) – The four words that make lovers of bad movies smile even more than “directed by Ed Wood” are “Canadian Tax Shelter Movies”! Cathy’s Curse is another one of those north-of-the- border gems. This little honey stars nobody and features a little girl named Cathy being possessed by her late aunt when she, her father and step-mother move into the aunt’s old house.

Cathy gets supernatural powers from her dead relative and those powers manifest themselves in hilariously cheap and lame special effects scenes that are like stop-motion student films, only worse. Even for a horror film all the characters behave in stupid ways that will have you laughing your ass off through most of the running time.

Inane supporting characters provide lots of fodder for Cathy’s killing spree and the original dialogue was in French so viewers get the Old School bad movie fun of the actors’ lips NEVER matching up with what they’re saying. Even better is the fact that they apparently did NO retakes. Muffed blocking and uncooperative props co-star with our cast of unknowns.  

Watch for the scene with the man trying to break down a bedroom door to get at Cathy. The filmmakers failed to lock it so our hero unintentionally succeeds in bursting the door open even though the scene clearly called for him to be unable to. To compensate our Master Thespian simply PULLS THE DOOR CLOSED AGAIN, hopes the audience didn’t notice and  continues pretending to throw his shoulder against it over and over to try to open it. AND IT’S ALL LEFT IN THE FILM! Cathy’s Curse is the BEST bad movie on this list, trust me.

MONGREL (1982) – Buy this horror film for the X-Files fan in your life! It’s A.D. Skinner as you’ve never seen him before! Mitch Pileggi plays Woody, a redneck whose behavior is so hickish he makes the stars of Duck Dynasty look like the members of the Algonquin Roundtable. When he’s not acting like a general jackass Woody is cupping his girlfriend’s boobs from behind and calling them “my tomatoes”.

Woody is the maintenance man at a boardinghouse full of the biggest pack of losers and misfits this side of films like Boardinghouse and The Dead Talk Back. The other weenies at the boardinghouse include a shy recluse, a would-be stud, a “normal” woman the men lust after, a retired military man, a psychophant called Toad and Woody’s aforementioned girlfriend Turquoise (played by Rachel Winfree, who would appear with Pileggi years later on an X-Files episode). 

Aldo Ray of all people also appears as the owner of the boardinghouse where all the horror takes place. The military man’s aggressive and huge mongrel dog gets loose and mauls one of the tennants, following which the animal is killed. The other tennants start to turn up dead, too, all victims of apparent dog attacks.

Is the dead mongrel back from the dead? Is the attacked tennant turning into a were-dog? Is the military man killing the others to avenge his slain dog? Is there another deadly mutt in the vicinity? You’ll figure it all out long before the cast members do but that won’t stop you from laughing all the way to the “out of nowhere” ending.  

FOR MY ORIGINAL LIST OF NEGLECTED BAD MOVIE CLASSICS FOR HALLOWEEN – http://glitternight.com/2011/10/24/the-eleven-most-neglected-bad-movie-classics-for-halloween/

FOR ELEVEN MORE BAD MOVIE CLASSICS FOR HALLOWEEN – http://glitternight.com/2012/10/31/eleven-more-neglected-bad-movies-for-halloween/

FOR MORE HALLOWEEN ITEMS CLICK HERE:http://glitternight.com/category/halloween-season/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

Special thanks once again to the extraordinarily lovely Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess! This time around Casey is helping present the first of my reviews of bad and weird superhero movies.

The Golden Bat: the ugliest superhero in the world.

THE GOLDEN BAT (1966) – Ogon Batto is the name of this film in its native Japan. The movie was based on the title character, Japan’s very first comic book superhero who debuted in 1930. That 1930 date puts him years before Superman and Batman in the west!  

At any rate for the 1966 movie Japan’s perennial action star Sonny Chiba played the leader of a group of science-oriented commandos in what looked like aluminum foil suits. Chiba and his gang have fancy aircraft like England’s Thunderbirds and their debut mission finds them trying to save the Earth from collision with a rogue planet called Icarus.

Chiba’s outfit has constructed a giant laser cannon to destroy Icarus before it can reach our planet. Trouble is it needs a final component to be found only on a lost island. When Sonny Chiba’s Mighty Aluminum Foil Power Rangers explore the ancient city on that island they uncover the tomb of … the Golden Bat!

Ogon Batto/Golden Bat is one weirdass superhero. He rises from his coffin like a vampire and looks like a monstrous hybrid of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera and Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor. He’s apparently all good-guy though and he helps Chiba’s team battle an evil alien named Nazu and his gang of interstellar criminals.

The extraordinarily lovely Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess

Nazu wants to let the Earth and Icarus collide because, well, he’s simply that evil. His fellow E.T.’s include a four-eyed claw man, a wolf-man and a hot looking woman. The aliens can shoot energy beams just like the ones that the Golden Bat shoots from his cane, setting up some deliriously weird-looking fight scenes.  

Throw in evil super-ninjas, a flock of big-ass bats and the maniacal laugh of our hero and just let it all soak in. The Golden Bat’s adventures make Ultra-Man’s look down to Earth and inspired a 1967 Japanese television series plus a sequel movie in 1972.  

If you enjoy laughing at Japanese superheroes like Starman and Prince of Space then you will definitely get a huge kick out of this neglected little honey. 

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Balladeer’s Blog takes a look at four more neglected bad movies. 

THE SECRET OF DORIAN GRAY (1970) – A terrific idea was blown in this hilariously flawed attempt to adapt Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray to swinging 60′s London. Helmut Berger, who was sort of a Nordic Michael York back when this movie was made stars as our title hero whose portrait begins to reflect all the physical and spiritual wear and tear of Dorian’s hedonistic lifestyle, thus preserving his young, beautiful physical form.

It also prevents Dorian’s body from aging, which has always made me think this adaptation might have worked better as a musical comedy in the 1980′s with Dorian a Mick Jagger-type rocker starting out in the 60′s but retaining his appeal two decades later. The contrast between the 60′s and 80′s cultural mindset would have provided plenty of comic and not-so-comic material.

Every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man! Dorian shows off some of his “chick magnet” wardrobe

But that’s nothing but “what might have been” I’m afraid. The movie we’re stuck with tries to be serious but plays like Jesus Franco is directing an unfocused hybrid of Austin Powers (but without the charm), Absolutely Fabulous (but without the laughs) and the Emmanuelle movies (but with very clumsy attempts at eroticism). A nice 60′s touch is the way in which the portrait painter, played by Richard Todd, is an Andy Warhol pastiche and his rendition of Dorian looks like Warhol’s paintings of pop artists of the time. 

Given the time period in which it was made this movie has more freedom to deal with bisexuality than the 1940′s version so if you’ve ever wanted to see Herbert Lom sneak up on a showering Helmut Berger in the proverbial “don’t bend down to pick up the soap” situation this is the movie of your dreams!

As I noted above the premise had promise but when you consider the creative team behind this mess – Samuel Z Arkoff and Harry Alan Towers (as Peter Welbeck) – bad movie lovers can understand why this baby gets funnier and funnier the more serious it tries to be. The supposedly avant-garde clothing worn by the characters in the movie will have you rolling in the aisles all by itself! The Secret of Dorian Gray is a neglected camp classic just waiting for its cult! If you have any gay friends share it with them. They’ll love it even more than you do!  

BOARDINGHOUSE (1982) – Though this is listed as both comedy and horror at the IMDb this was released as a genuine attempt at a horror film. Some of the trailers can be found on youtube and this was being sold as a straight fright film, even though it’s so badly done it leaves you laughing even harder than most intentional comedies do. Boardinghouse was the first mainstream film attempted by former porn producers and far too many scenes have that soap opera/shot on video look.

Hoffman House is the title establishment and has been reopened years after the horrific deaths of most of the wealthy family who lived there. A hot young stud is running the place as a boardinghouse and he caters to shapely female boarders, all of whom are played by the type of women who starred in porno films at the time, so their acting leaves A LOT to be desired.

The last member of the Hoffman family escapes from the mental institution where they’ve been kept since wiping out their relatives and that prodigal Hoffman uses their Carrie-like powers to turn the mansion-turned- boardinghouse into a blood-soaked nightmare. (That’s not technically a spoiler since you wouldn’t be able to understand what was happening in the movie if I didn’t tell you that – yes, this movie is THAT ineptly put-together)

That description makes the movie sound MUCH better than it actually is, unfortunately. Like Black Devil Doll From Hell, The Girl and the Geek, Hellroller and other horror films that devote a huge amount of their running time to titillating padding this flick wastes far too much time on the hunky star and his male friends swimming, hot-tubbing and otherwise partying with the lustful nymphettes who rent rooms at Hoffman House.

A bizarre magic act during the film’s climactic party scene is so pointless you’ll wish the filmmakers would go back to flashing beefcake and cheesecake as padding. That magic act makes Boardinghouse one of the Big Four horror turkeys to feature pointless magic acts as filler, with the others being The Body Shop, Terror Train and Funhouse. The movie also throws in a rock band during the Carrie-esque finale, with one of the starlets belting out a tune in that inimitable 1980′s MTV way that will provoke a lot of laughter all by itself.

REVENGE OF BILLY THE KID (1992) – It ain’t a western, that’s for sure. Old McDonald had a farm … And on that farm he and his inbred, semi-mutant family of hicks lived in mud, squalor and even more mud. After McDonald has sex with a particularly attractive female goat (yes, I just typed the words “After McDonald has sex with a particularly attractive female goat”) that goat gets pregnant and goes on to spawn Billy, the man/goat hybrid who is the “kid” of the title.  

Billy faces the kind of problems that all hideous mutants face in horror films and one day just snaps and goes on a killing spree, featuring some of the most over-the- top bloodletting seen outside of films like Dead Alive or Category 3 Hong Kong horror films. This movie is more weird than bad and flaunts a deliriously demented sense of humor along with a certain perverse vision, the former of which can be gleaned by one of the lead characters having a movie poster for the original Evil Dead hanging in his room.

THE TERRORNAUTS (1967) – Simon Oates of Doomwatch fame stars as yet another maverick scientist in this effort from earlier in his career. Oates is running a British version of the SETI project and is forever trying to intercept signals from space … signals that might indicate intelligent life forms. Conveniently, just when their funding is about to be cut Oates and his team at last receive a broadcast from actual alien life forms. And not just any alien life forms but the exact race that use a cave in France excavated by Oates’ father as a teleportation point from their orbiting space station.

Wild coincidences like that are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of this ridiculous movie’s plot holes, inconsistencies and lack of logic. At any rate when Oates and company broadcast a reply of their own the extraterrestrials fly to England and snatch the entire building that the scientists’ project is housed in. The Earthlings, including a cockney female janitor along for excruciatingly bad comic relief, find themselves at the mercy of the space station’s Doctor Who (original series) level special effects renditions of androids, monsters and interstellar cooking devices.

Eventually our pal Simon and his cohorts learn that they’ve been recruited to crew the large space station and use its weaponry to defeat the invasion fleet of a race of evil aliens. With ridiculous wired beanies strapped to their heads the ragtag band of Brits are telepathically tied-in with the space station’s systems and save the Earth from the oncoming armada of enemy spaceships and manage to teleport off the space station mere moments before it explodes from damages sustained in the battle. Our heroes pop up at the French cave, which sports what look like Evil Clown versions of the Easter Island heads. A gendarme catches the Brits and demands to see their passports in the very, very, wry, dry and British ending.  

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/ 

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Blood Freak (1972)

For the Thanksgiving holiday Balladeer’s Blog is focusing on bad movies and hilariously lame educational shorts that have a specific Thanksgiving theme. As always my Bad Movie page contains full-length reviews of the films I’m offering a brief synopsis of here.

BLOOD FREAK (1972) – This movie is about a man who turns into a murderous monster with the head of a turkey after he eats a chemically treated gobbler at the turkey farm where he works. Blood Freak has been a cult classic for Thanksgiving for decades now, with many Movie Host shows of the late 70’s onward making a point of screening it at this time of year (including The Texas 27 Film Vault). The biker who turns into the blood-crazed turkey monster is an Elvis look-alike which adds to the fun. So does the desk-bound, chain-smoking, script-reading narrator who sermonizes about the evils of drug abuse while the movie plays. FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/2011/11/23/thanksgiving-eve-bad-movie-treat-the-turkey-monster-movie-blood-freak/

A DAY OF THANKSGIVING (1951) – This 12 minute educational short would make a nice dessert after a Turkey Day screening of Blood Freak. The Johnson family – composed of Mom, Dad, Dick, Susan, Tommy and the toddler Janet – can’t afford a turkey for Thanksgiving. The children are at first callously (and comically) bratty about it, but relent after Dad – in his sexiest voice for some reason – gives the kids a lecture about being grateful for what you have instead of obsessing over the things you don’t have.

The children’s attitude does a 180 from “Even the pilgrims had a feast” (with an implied “dammit” after it) to cheerfully throwing off the shackles of eating turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Free from their bourgeois preoccupation with fowl the Johnson family says a mealtime prayer expressing gratitude for “washing machines and hot water out of the tap” for “public libraries and cookies and milk after school” and other things. The whole scene is accompanied by angelic choral music composed by the producer Art Wolf.

Slasher in the House

SLASHER IN THE HOUSE (1981) – The Thanksgiving entry in the 1980’s trend toward slasher films to fit every holiday on the calendar. Jake “Body by Jake” Steinfeld plays a psychotic killer who escapes from an insane asylum on Thanksgiving and begins racking up a body count by preying on a large and hilariously dysfunctional California family celebrating the holiday. Every victim of Steinfeld’s rage – which is enhanced by the PCP he injects under his tongue – could win a Darwin Award for their sheer stupidity, which is monumental even for people in a horror film. This one is not as comically bad as Blood Freak, but provides a wealth of fun for people who love dissecting all the groan-inducing cliches of 1980’s slasher flicks. FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/2011/11/24/thanksgiving-day-bad-movie-slasher-in-the-house/

DINING TOGETHER (1947) – This 10 minute short is from an outfit called Children’s Productions and it plays like children were on BOTH sides of the camera. Two robotic little boys prepare for Thanksgiving Dinner by polishing candle holders, setting the table and dressing up for job interviews from the looks of the suits they put on. In addition they hold chairs for the female guests as they sit down to dinner (their parents obviously don’t want children – they want maitre’d’s), praise their mother’s cooking with the insincere air of the brainwashed soldiers praising Lawrence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate and otherwise behave like automatons.

The syrupy narration praises them for eating their soup course ( at Thanksgiving Dinner?) without making noise. “We are glad we have good table manners”, the narration continues, “Good manners make people happy, and good table manners make eating together a happy time.” Enjoyably enough, the narration is often drowned out by the overwhelming piano music on the soundtrack. Typical of these educational shorts the entire enterprise plays like it was produced by emotionless aliens trying to approximate human behavior. 

Just keep telling yourself .. it’s only a tv special.”

THE STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL (1978) – This infamous special was disowned by George Lucas who has claimed he’d like to track down and burn every bootleg copy. You’ll be longing for a character as complex as Jar Jar Binks as you watch this hilariously bad special that aired Thanksgiving week of 1978. Life Day is apparently the equivalent of Thanksgiving in the Star Wars universe, and Han Solo is trying to elude Imperial forces to get his pal Chewbacca home in time for the holiday festivities.

No brief description can do justice to this cosmic bomb so you may want to seek out my full-length review on my Bad Movie page. Suffice it to say Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill seem ready to die of embarrassment as they force their way through this incomprehensible mess, a condition avoided by Carrie Fisher because she supposedly claimed she was coked out of her mind during the filming. You’ll feel like you’re on something, too, as you watch this travesty featuring Wookie Porn, music videos, cartoons, cooking shows and much, much more. You’ll also learn that Bea Freaking Arthur is the owner of the Mos Eisley Cantina and that the Star Wars theme has LYRICS! FOR MY FULL-LENGTH REVIEW CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/2011/09/05/special-guest-commentator-kara-laird-reviews-the-star-wars-holiday-special-1978/

From the people who brought you The Titmouse on the Titanic

THE MOUSE ON THE MAYFLOWER (1968) – Country western star Tennessee Ernie Ford narrates and supplies the voice of the title character – a Puritan mouse named Willum – who stows away on the Mayflower during its trip to America. The little rodent (and coincidentally enough “little rodent” is also Michelle Obama’s pet name for Barack) also gets to participate in the first Thanksgiving celebration with a Native American mouse. Their same-sex relationship is a moving plea for tolerance set against the backdrop of the Pilgrims and the Native Americans coming together to share a feast and give thanks. Okay, the same-sex relationship element is purely an assumption on my part, but still …

At any rate this cartoon, which COULD have been a holiday classic, is horrendously boring and I doubt 21st Century children will even sit through it. If the tale had been set in a half-hour timeslot instead of an hour it might have been more watchable. As it is it’s a challenge to endure even if you’re desperate for a Thanksgiving cartoon version of the Grinch and all the other Christmas cartoons.

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/category/bad-and-weird-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Blood Freak (1972)

In the middle 1980′s/ Way down on Level 31 …

Before MST3K there was The Texas 27 Film Vault! Balladeer’s Blog continues its examination of this neglected cult show from the 1980′s with another review of an episode where an original air date can be determined. This time around I’m taking a look at the show’s Thanksgiving episode from the Saturday night before Thanksgiving in 1985.

Randy and Richard showed and mocked Blood Freak, the notorious “Turkey Monster” movie that has been featured by virtually every Movie Host show except MST3K over the years. The Turkey Monster and the main character’s job at a turkey farm have made this a Thanksgiving Season favorite for lovers of bad movies. 

EPISODE ORIGINALLY BROADCAST: Saturday November 23rd, 1985 from 10:30pm to 1:00am.

FILM VAULT LORE: Our machine-gun toting members of the fictional Film Vault Corps Randy Clower and Richard Malmos used to joke about how The Texas 27 Film Vault seemed to show every movie that had the word “blood” in the title. Previously I’ve reviewed the T27FV episodes featuring the movies Queen of Blood and Blood Beach but there are plenty more coming with sanguinous titles.

Thank you to my fellow T27FV fan Dolores for this quote about Ken Miller, who played “Tex” on the show and who, tragically, committed suicide in 1988: “I loved the random bits of madness added by the gung ho Tex each episode! He always reminded me of Robert Duvall’s character Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. My favorite catch-phrase from Tex was when he would say “Commies don’t watch bad movies!” the way Duvall said “Charley don’t surf!” in Apocalypse Now.”  

SERIAL: Before showing and mocking the movie our Film Vault Technicians First Class showed and mocked a chapter of the 1940 serial Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe. Special thanks to my fellow Vaultie Channing for her providing the date and serial for this episode.  

THE FILM: BLOOD FREAK (1972) – This movie is about a man who turns into a murderous monster with the head of a turkey after he eats a chemically treated gobbler at the turkey farm where he works. No, I’m not kidding – the head of a turkey. The man-turkey seeks out the blood of junkies to sate its thirst for blood and its hunger for drugs.

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

Blood Freak has been a cult classic for Thanksgiving for decades now, with many Movie Host shows of the late 70′s onward making a point of screening it at that time of year. The biker who turns into the blood-crazed turkey monster is an Elvis look-alike which adds to the fun. So does the desk-bound, chain-smoking, script-reading narrator who sermonizes about the evils of drug abuse while the movie plays. For my full-length review of this film click here: http://glitternight.com/2010/08/28/bad-movie-blood-freak/

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES. Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW – http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Randy Clower (right) with co-host Richard Malmos as “Film Vault Technicians First Class” on The Texas 27 Film Vault. They’re way down on Level 31. No, not Deep 13 – Level 31.

Randy Clower and Richard Malmos of The Texas 27 Film Vault (both lower right) featured in a Movie Host article with Stella from Saturday Night Dead and Elvira.

The Texas 27 Film Vault was a great pre-MST3K bad movie show from the mid-1980’s. The hosts Randy Clower and Richard Malmos (also the co-creators of the program) were members of the fictional quasi-military outfit called the Film Vault Corps – “the few, the proud, the sarcastic”. Ken Miller, who played the gung-ho Kilgore-esque Tex on the show was also a co-creator. Tragically Miller commited suicide in 1988.   

The Texas 27 Film Vault aired for 2 and 1/2 hours every Saturday night from 10:30pm to 1:00 am with Randy, Richard, Tex, Joe The Hypnotic Eye Riley and Laurie Savino the Film Clip Technician showing and mocking episodes of old Republic and Columbia serials before showing and mocking the night’s bad or campy movie.

Texas and Oklahoma loved this cult show and it’s rare for Sooners and Longhorns to agree on anything! Here’s a look at some of the more memorable episodes from The Texas 27 Film Vault history.  

IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958)

Original Broadcast Date: July 12th, 1986

Serial: Atom Man vs Superman (1950) 

Host Segments: Most of the Host Segments in this episode centered around a touring troupe from the Film Vault Corps Academy in Leadville, Co. That troupe – the FVC Academy’s Little Theatre Group – was performing for Randy, Richard, Tex and the others. Joe Riley’s gore effects took center stage as the touring thespians presented comedic reenactments of classic scenes from movies about aliens, including the infamous chest-burster moment from Alien.  

Movie: It! The Terror From Beyond Space was a joyously bad black & white space travel film from the 1950’s. A Martian monster has already wiped out all but one member of the first expedition to the Red Planet. Next up on the menu for this ET who sucks all moisture from his victims: the rescue expedition who belatedly arrive to save the crew of the preceding mission to Mars.   

Full-Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/08/29/it-the-terror-from-beyond-space-1958-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-july-12th-1986/

THE GIANT CLAW (1957)

Original Broadcast Date: April 6th, 1985

Serial: The Lost City (1935)

Host Segments: One of the Host Segments ridiculed the “black person into white person” machine used by the mad scientist in The Lost City. 

Movie: This legendary turkey features the giant, Kaiju-sized buzzard from outer space beloved by generations of bad movie buffs. The beast gobbles up parachuting pilots and attacks various landmarks including the U.N. Building. The typical Bland White Guy and Bland White Woman from films back then save the world from the rampaging beast. 

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/06/08/the-giant-claw-1957-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-april-of-1985/ 

THE PARTY CRASHERS (1958)

Original Broadcast Date: September 13th, 1986

Serial: Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940)

Host Segments: One of the segments featured Randy and Richard’s interview with Denver Pyle, who was one of the stars of the night’s movie.

Movie: The Party Crashers is one of the most enjoyably campy Juvenile Delinquent films of the 1950’s. The title gang are J.D.’s who crash parties at the homes of the wealthy, help themselves to food, booze and women then trash the place. A “good girl” is torn between her bland boyfriend and the repulsive leader of The Party Crashers. All the teens are spoiled and annoying – all the adults are alcoholics and bloated rich pigs. Lots of fun!

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2014/04/16/the-party-crashers-1958-on-the-texas-27-film-vault/ 

RETURN OF THE FLY (1959)

Original Broadcast Date: August 9th, 1986

Serial: Atom Man vs Superman (1950)  

Host Segments: Randy and Richard interviewed Vincent Price in this episode. They also plugged their upcoming appearance at the premier of David Cronenberg’s remake of the original movie The Fly. At that appearance, it turned out, Randy and Richard were deluged by an enormous turnout of Texas 27 Film Vault fans.

Movie: This was the cheaper and hilariously lamer sequel to  The Fly. Vincent Price reprised his role from the original and Brett Halsey portrayed the troubled son of the original man-fly. Through an act of industrial sabotage Halsey’s character becomes part fly just like dear old dad.

FULL LENGTH REVIEW: http://glitternight.com/2013/04/25/return-of-the-fly-1959-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-august-9th-1986/

BLOOD FREAK (1972)

Original Broadcast Date: November 23rd, 1985

Serial: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940)

Host Segments: A look at the goofiest monsters in horror film history.

Movie: The ULTIMATE Thanksgiving Season turkey. Randy and Richard presented it the Saturday before Thanksgiving in 1985. This movie features a biker who gets a job on a turkey farm and, after eating fowl ingested with experimental chemicals by two mad scientists he turns into a turkey monster who needs to feast on the blood of junkies to satisfy his appetite and his drug addiction.

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2014/11/26/the-texas-27-film-vault-thanksgiving-episode-from-1985/

KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK (1978)

Original Broadcast Date: May 16th, 1987

Serial: None. The movie plus the Host Segments filled the whole 2 and 1/2 hours.

Host Segments: A look at odd rock and roll movies.

Movie: The members of KISS take on Anthony Zerbe’s Phantom, a mad scientist who works for an amusement park. (Do Disney World and King’s Dominion also employ mad scientists?) Each member of KISS has various superpowers and they use those powers to battle Zerbe’s robot monsters which include duplicates of themselves.

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2014/04/30/kiss-meets-the-phantom-of-the-park-1978-on-the-texas-27-film-vault/

HORROR OF PARTY BEACH (1964)

Original Broadcast Date: May 25th, 1985

Serial: The Phantom Empire (1935)

Host Segments: During one segment Richard stuffs his mouth with hot dogs in such a way to make himself resemble the multi-tongued monsters in the movie.  

Movie: This is one of the most famous bad movies of all time. Nearly every Movie Host show has presented it at some point. Radioactive waste causes the mutation of scaly sea monsters called “zombies” even though that’s NOT what they are. The Del Aires perform some odd but memorable songs and the monsters all have multiple tongues which look like hot dogs.

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/05/31/bad-movie-horror-of-party-beach-1964-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-may-25th-1985/

TRUNK TO CAIRO (1966)

Original Broadcast Date: February 9th, 1985

Serial: None. The movie plus the Host Segments filled up the entire running time.

Host Segments: A look at movies featuring the James Bond wannabe’s from the 1960’s like Derek Flint, Matt Helm and so many others.

Movie: Audie Murphy stars as CIA agent Mike Merrick, a ridiculous attempt to start an American version of James Bond that fell far short even of the aforementioned Derek Flint and Matt Helm characters. Hell, Merrick’s not even Bart Fargo or Neil Connery. In this first and last Mike Merrick film the superspy tries to stop a former Nazi scientist from helping fanatical Egyptian Muslims develop high-tech missiles to use against Israel and Europe.

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/04/04/the-first-bad-movie-shown-on-the-texas-27-film-vault/ 

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES. Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog are very familiar with my Bad Movie page. Laughing at bad and weird movies is one of the great joys of life so I often post holiday-themed looks at cinematic turkeys around Halloween and Thanksgiving. The Yuletide season has its fair share of turkeys as well, so enjoy this examination of more Christmas season bombs than even Henry Kissinger ever dreamed of. In keeping with my blog’s overall theme I will exclude overexposed movies like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and the Mexican film Santa Claus. Visit my Bad Movie page if you want full-length reviews of the following flicks.  

THE CHRISTMAS MARTIAN (1971) – This Canadian flick is dubbed into English from its orginal French so viewers get treated to the Old School bad movie fun of the actor’s lip movements rarely matching the words being said. An annoyingly whimsical and whacky Martian gets stuck in Canada at Christmas time. A young brother and sister help the alien visitor repair his Ed Wood- level spaceship and save him from suspicious Canadian authorities. Yes, it all seems … reminiscent … of the much-later movie E.T. but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. (?)

The Martian overdoes the zaniness factor to such a degree that even Charles Nelson Reilly would have told him to tone it down a little. He also wallows in a Canadian candy treat that looks a lot like Reese’s Pieces. Just sayin’. Randy and Richard on The Texas 27 Film Vault showed this in the 1980’s. 

SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY (1972) – Ever want to see Santa Claus sweating so much that his red pants cling to his butt tightly enough for his crack and each buttock to stand out wide and proud? THIS is the movie for you! (And please stay away from children.) Santa’s sleigh crash-lands in Florida and becomes “stuck” in about an inch of sand on the beach. A profusely perspiring Saint Nick telepathically summons help from a group of children (who do double-duty as Santa’s elves back at the HILARIOUSLY cheap North Pole set) who try to pull his sleigh free from the tiny powder of sand covering its runners.

This unforgettable bomb features songs so poorly-recorded you can’t make out most of the lyrics, an almost disturbingly pointless visit from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and repeated plugs for the ersatz amusement park Pirate’s World. The Ice Cream Bunny was the park’s Mickey Mouse- style mascot and there’s a Pirate’s World kiddie movie awkwardly inserted into the body of this joyously terrible Christmas bomb. Thumbelina in some versions and Jack and the Beanstalk in others.

ELVES (1989) – This horror film stars Dan Haggerty as a department store Santa Claus who tries to thwart the plans of octogenarian Nazi scientists who plan on using demonic elves from Norse mythology’s realm of Alfheim to take over the world. No short review can possibly do justice to how enjoyably awful this fairly gory movie is. Part of the fun lies in the fact that the filmmakers can’t even keep their own story straight, sometimes telling us the Nazis want to use hideous, violent elves as an army of conquest, sometimes telling us they want the only elf in the film (despite the plural title) to mate with the movie’s heroine in order to spawn a Master Race and at other times telling us the elf needs to mate with the woman at Midnight on Christmas Eve to give birth to the Anti-Christ. All this plus lots of dead teenagers.

THE ENERGY CAROL (1975) – An animated Canadian educational short that was used to educate students about energy conservation. The Scrooge stand-in gets taught all about energy-wasting past, present and future to try to get him to change his profligate energy consumption at Christmas time. After driving home this message with as much subtlety as a jackhammer this educational short ends on a “meh” note by implying that energy conservation might not really be all that important after all. Hilariously wishy- washy time-waster.

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1974) – The dumbest of all animated Christmas stories. Even as a little kid I wanted to kick this special’s merciless Santa Claus between the legs over and over again. When ONE dorky mouse writes a letter to the newspaper debunking Santa’s existence old Saint Nick shows a decided lack of Christmas spirit by pompously deciding that NOBODY in the town will get any gifts. The town constructs a massive clock that plays a butt-kissing song to try to appease the wrath of the power-crazed Dread Deity of Yule, Kris Kringle. Luckily this works or else the town would have probably resorted to sacrificing virgins to convince the dark Noel god to show mercy on them. The town should have told Santa to watch The Grinch Who Stole Christmas to learn a few things about the season. Then, as the town’s verbose mayor might say they could tell Santa to affix his lips to the collective gluteus maximi of the entirety of the hamlet’s populace – oh, heck, to kiss their asses!

NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980) – The New Year’s Eve entry in the 80’s trend toward slasher flicks for every occassion on the calendar. Kip Niven, David Niven’s son, plays the mass murderer who kills at least one person each time Midnight arrives in each of America’s time zones. Roz Kelly plays an elderly punk singer who is not punk in any way, shape or form and who is hosting a New Year’s Eve special like a certain elderly DJ used to host. Lack of logic abounds, as do interchangeable victims, no-name musical acts and a long, pointless battle between our slasher and a biker gang! 

HAVE I GOT A CHRISTMAS FOR YOU (1977) – This telefilm could also have been titled We Wish Jews A Merry Christmas to more accurately reflect the ham-fisted (as it were) nature of the proceedings. Jewish community members volunteer to work on Christmas Eve for various Christian acquaintances so they can spend the holiday with their families. The good intentions of this combined Christmas/Hanukkah special are undermined by the Borscht-belt comedian caricatures of both the Jewish AND the Christian characters. You’ll have fun laughing at the blatant ethnic stereotypes, the cliched stories and the phony made-for- tv emotions while also having fun with the overdose of kitsch-casting. Milton Berle, George Takei, Jayne Meadows, Kim Fields, Steve Allen, Wolfman Jack, Herb Edelman, Adrienne Barbeau, Jim Backus and many others appear, to nicely set up an evening of trivia-centric joking with your friends as you watch this baby.

A COSMIC CHRISTMAS (1977) – Half-hour Canadian cartoon that features a trio of aliens who look like high-tech versions of the Three Kings who brought gifts for Baby Jesus in Christmas stories. Unfortunately this does NOT mean we’re in for some Ancient Aliens-style fun implying the Magi were really extraterrestrials or “exa-tuh-ES-tee-alls” as the guy with weird hair on that show says. These three space travelers have been on a nearly 2,000 year journey to investigate the Star of Bethlehem which was visible from their galaxy apparently. A little Canadian boy and his comic-relief goose named Lucy teach the aliens the meaning of Christmas, including a lesson about forgiveness when some teen punks try to kill and cook Lucy for Christmas dinner. Nonsensical Yuletide pablum has never been so much fun to laugh at!     

SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984) – “You’ve made it through Halloween … now try and survive Christmas!” So went the ads to this most notorious (but not the first) movie to present a slasher dressed as Santa Claus. The more recent movie Santa’s Slay was INTENTIONALLY cheesy but the 1980’s killer Santa movies were trying to be real horror films which makes them a lot more fun to laugh at. Well, that and the evil nun who drives the killer santa crazy as a child in this flick. The presence of scream queen Linnea Quigley and the in-your-face ad campaign are this film’s biggest claims to fame, and its sequels aren’t even worth watching to make fun of.

See also TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT (1980), which features Jennifer Runyon AND Harry Reems of all people. A slasher in a Santa Claus costume kills several co-eds as well as the inept cops who come to protect them. High body count but many of the killings are lit too poorly to see clearly plus one character goes nuts and literally just does a ballet dance for the final 15 or so minutes of the movie. …

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980) – About a slasher in a Santa suit who has kept a list of who’s been naughty or nice and sets out on Christmas Eve to kill everyone on the “naughty” list. Features a hilariously lame final scene I wouldn’t dream of spoiling. This movie is so mind-numbingly boring that it’s the one to watch if you’re sharing it with the wimpier breed of bad movie buffs. …

And DON’T OPEN ‘TIL CHRISTMAS (1984), a British horror film about a lunatic killing people dressed in Santa suits for the holidays. Britain’s scream queen Caroline Munro sings in a brief appearance and there’s the notorious scene where a Santa gets his penis sliced off by our killer and bleeds to death at a urinal.

Edmund Purdom is slumming as both an actor and director in this flick which features dime-store blood and gore effects plus the most flammable Santa in cinematic history! Oh, and did I mention the black Santa and the beautiful female woman wearing a Santa suit with NOTHING underneath? This one’s hilarious because of the way the British thespians’ inherent dignity is so at odds with the cheap and exploitative story.

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Special thanks once again to Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess, the legendarily lovely Casey James! Casey is introducing my latest look at a bad superhero movie.

SANTO VERSUS THE RIDERS OF TERROR (1970) – Called Santo Contra Los Jinetes del Terror in its native Mexico, this is one of my all-time favorite hidden gems among the wacked-out movies about Mexican wrestler and superhero El Santo.    

El Santo – often called “Samson” in English-dubbed versions of his flicks – has battled Martians, vampire women, vampire men, witches, mummies, wax figures come to life and dozens of other monstrosities. This particular flick stands out to me because of its joyously tasteless brand of “monsters” – a horseback riding outlaw gang of lepers.

Yes, LEPERS! In a move even Tod Slaughter might have deemed too exploitative a group of bandits deformed by leprosy are at large and pulling off a series of robberies. The lepers are led by “Jose”, who leads an escape from a local sanitarium where he and his fellow afflicted are being cared for. A rancher named Camerino strikes a secret alliance with the unfortunate escapees, promising a hideout plus food and a share of the loot if they commit robberies for him.  

These “Riders of Terror” – made up so grotesquely they’d fit right in in a horror film – go into action, successfully pulling off job after job and escaping with ease since neither their victims nor law enforcement agencies want to get anywhere near them. The double-dealing Camerino puts pressure on the hapless Sheriff Dario for his failure to catch the outlaws. Camerino’s plan is to replace Dario with one of his own stooges to consolidate his nefarious hold on the community.

Frantic to save his job Dario calls in that master crime-fighter El Santo to take down the disfigured desperadoes. Santo’s efforts to capture the Riders of Terror come to naught, often because of the way they wield the threat of physical contact as a superpower. At one point the townspeople form a torch-bearing mob intent on raiding the sanitarium and killing all the lepers inside, even though they’re not the ones committing the robberies!    

Luckily Santo and Dario defuse that situation before the mob can enact its moronic plan. Dario’s girlfriend gets kidnapped by Camerino when she discovers his link to the hideous Riders of Terror. In the end El Santo tracks the gang to Camerino’s ranch, defeats the rancher’s thugs and rescues Dario’s gal-pal. He also saves the lepers, who were about to be gunned down by Camerino and his men now that they’d outlived their usefulness to him.

Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess

Happily the lepers are not held responsible for the way Camerino exploited them and, even better, Santo grandly announces the discovery of a new drug that cures leprosy, so the Riders of Terror will soon be back to full health and able to lead normal lives.

As our hero leaves town accompanied by the resounding cheers of citizens and lepers alike the viewer finds themself asking “Did I really just watch a movie which featured LEPERS as supervillains?”

Anyway, I resisted the temptation to start this review with the words “Leapin’ Lepers!” 

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Randy Clower (right) with co-host Richard Malmos as “Film Vault Technicians First Class” on The Texas 27 Film Vault. They’re way down on Level 31. No, not Deep 13 – Level 31.

Randy Clower and Richard Malmos of The Texas 27 Film Vault (both lower right) featured in a Movie Host article with Stella from Saturday Night Dead and Elvira.

Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog know The Texas 27 Film Vault was a great pre-MST3K bad movie show from the mid-1980’s. The hosts Randy Clower and Richard Malmos (also the co-creators of the program) were members of the fictional quasi-military outfit called the Film Vault Corps – “the few, the proud, the sarcastic”. Ken Miller, who played the gung-ho Kilgore-esque Tex on the show was also a co-creator. Tragically Miller commited suicide in 1988.   

The Texas 27 Film Vault aired for 2 and 1/2 hours every Saturday night from 10:30pm to 1:00 am with Randy, Richard, Tex, Joe The Hypnotic Eye Riley and Laurie Savino the Mystery Clip Technician showing and mocking episodes of old Republic and Columbia serials before showing and mocking the night’s bad or campy movie.

Texas and Oklahoma loved this cult show and it’s rare for Longhorns and Sooners to agree on anything! Here’s a look at the Christmas and New Year’s themed episodes of The Texas 27 Film Vault! 

TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT (1980)

Original Broadcast Date: December 28th, 1985

Serial: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940) 

Host Segments: A look at Christmas-themed horror films. 

Movie: To All a Good Night features Jennifer Runyon AND Harry Reems of all people. A slasher in a Santa Claus costume kills several co-eds as well as the inept cops who come to protect them. High body count but many of the killings are lit too poorly to see clearly plus one character goes nuts and literally just does a ballet dance for the final 15 or so minutes of the movie. Alex Rebar of The Incredible Melting Man fame wrote the screenplay and The Last House on the Left‘s David Hess directed.  

Full-Length Review: Not completed yet. I’m hoping research will uncover more info about Randy and Richard’s antics during the episode first.

SCROOGE (1935)

Original Broadcast Date: December 14th, 1985

Serial: Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940)

Host Segments: None have been unearthed for this episode yet. As always if any other fans of this show have any info they would like to share feel free to contact me at Thtcom15 at aol dot com    

We’ve come a long way toward tentatively reconstructing a tiny bit of this show’s history over the past few years so hopefully more memories will be jogged.

Movie: This is the notoriously cheapjack and rushed adaptation of A Christmas Carol. The overall lameness and lack of effort is best represented in the scene with Marley’s Ghost. The ghost is “invisible” so Scrooge simply converses with an empty chair while Marley’s dialogue is heard in voice-over. 

Full Length Review:  Not completed yet. I’m hoping research will uncover more info about Randy and Richard’s antics during the episode first.

THE CINAMMON CINDER SHOW CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (1965)

Original Broadcast Date: December 20th, 1986

Serial: None. Instead Randy and Richard showed and mocked Scrooge Loose (1957) a Gumby short in which he and Pokey battled Ebenezer Scrooge and The Frozen Planet (1962) a Space Angel cartoon about a planet engulfed in permanent winter. 

Host Segments: One of the segments featured Randy and Richard’s interview with Bob Eubanks, who, among many other things, was the host of The Cinammon Cinder Show. Other segments featured the destructive Gremlins-style antics of the Drones, the subterranean race of pint-sized, hard-drinking mischief-makers that the Film Vault Corps had formed an alliance with.  

Movie: It’s not a movie but The Cinammon Cinder Show Christmas Special was a hilarious Time Capsule relic of 1960’s musical pop culture. In its way it was funnier than The Rutles and the 60’s flashbacks from This is Spinal Tap, albeit NOT intentionally so. Sonny and Cher were among the guests on that Christmas Special.  

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/12/23/the-cinammon-cinder-show-christmas-special-1965-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-december-20th-1986/

SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS (1964)

Original Broadcast Date: December 21st, 1985

Serial: None. Instead Randy and Richard showed and mocked A Cosmic Christmas (1977) a hilariously weird Canadian cartoon about three aliens who look like the Three Wise Men of Christian mythology arriving in Canada during the Yuletide season.  

Host Segments: Randy and Richard provoked a tempest in a teacup with jokes about Santa being a child molestor trying to prey on Pia Zadora, who starred in the episode’s film as a child actor.

Movie:  Martians grow alarmed at the joyless, emotionless state of their children so they fly to Earth to kidnap Santa Claus so he can bring his special kind of holiday cheer to the Red Planet. A clique of Martian villains who hate Christmas try to sabotage the establishment of a Martian equivalent of Santa’s Workshop. In the end the good Martians and two captive Earth children help Saint Nick to defeat the bad Martians and an INCREDIBLY annoying comic-relief Martian named Droppo becomes the Santa Claus of Mars. Santa and the little boy and girl return to Earth in time for Christmas at the end of the flick.

FULL LENGTH REVIEW: http://glitternight.com/2013/12/28/a-cosmic-christmas-1977-and-santa-claus-conquers-the-martians-1964/

Terror Train

TERROR TRAIN (1980)

Original Broadcast Date: December 27th, 1986

Serial: Mysterious Doctor Satan (1940)

Host Segments: Randy and Richard’s interview with Ben Johnson, who was one of the stars of Terror Train. Another segment featured a festive countdown to the midnight arrival of … December 28th, 1986 done as a mock New Year’s-type celebration. 

Movie: A New Year’s Eve-themed slasher movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, David Copperfield and Ben Johnson in the Loomis role. The victim of a practical joke back in college is killing off Curtis’ friends on a train ringing in the New Year in each time zone of the U.S.  

Full Length Review: http://glitternight.com/2013/12/29/terror-train-1980-on-the-texas-27-film-vault-in-1986/

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES. Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2011-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’m very fond of cinematic turkeys that have seasonal tie-ins. Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas bombs have gotten ample attention from me, so permit me to follow those items up with this look at bad movies with a New Year’s Eve theme. As usual, full-length reviews of these films can be found on my Bad Movie page.

AKA Time Warp

BLOODY NEW YEAR (1987) – Also released under the title Time Warp but it’s grisly enough for the more explicit title. A handful of British boaters who are fleeing a family of soccer hooligans (no, really) wind up on an island with a deserted hotel that’s been decorated for a New Year’s Eve party since the 1950’s. This Norman J Warren film stars nobody and borrows heavily from Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead in terms of its imitation “Deadites” and its POV tracking shots. It also features a killer who emerges from a movie being watched, a monster who climbs out of a tablecloth, homicidal kitchen utensils, indoor snowfall, laughing shrubbery and living walls. All the chaos is being caused by hapless souls who have been trapped in limbo for decades and will do anything to get out or to drag others into their hellish undead existence with them.

Bloody New Year is a neglected bad movie classic that has all the little extras that separate monumentally bad films from the mere pretenders. An enjoyably catchy opening song called Recipe for Romance adds to to the fun if you’re like me and get a kick out of truly awful movies with goofy but memorable songs. And the two scenes with sentient and deadly fishing nets come across like the towel-in-the-face bits from the Naked Gun flicks. 

This movie is wildly enjoyable but a bit too violent for many viewers. It’s hilariously illogical and loaded with unbelievably lame acting, a pointlessly extended period with no dialogue and a kind of “Haunted House on Acid” appeal. You’ll enjoy watching the filmmakers piss away the few good ideas they had and undermine their movie’s atmosphere by having most of it set DURING THE DAY like The Newlydeads. For added fun you can pretend the castaways are various characters from Lost so you can really enjoy the scenes where they meet their gruesome ends. “Take THAT, Locke, you smiling jackass!”

Terror Train

TERROR TRAIN (1980) – A New Year’s Eve slasher film set on a train carrying a load of partying passengers who plan to ring in the New Year in each time zone of the United States. As required by law at the time, Jamie Lee Curtis starred since it was a slasher flick with a seasonal theme. (Look under the Federal Halloween, Halloween II and Prom Night Act of 1980 if you don’t believe me) A few years earlier Curtis and her college buddies played an initiation trick on a freshman by tricking him into bed with a female corpse. The guy had a nervous breakdown from the ugly near-necrophiliac experience (like sleeping with Barbra Streisand must feel) and is supposedly still in a mental hospital because of it.

Curtis and company are among the partiers on the Auld Lang Syne Express mentioned above and a ridiculously costumed slasher (guess who) begins knocking off her college friends as the train rolls across the countryside. Veteran actor Ben Johnson plays the heroic Train Conductor standing in for Dr Loomis in this flick and David Copperfield himself plays aprofessional magician … and is utterly unconvincing, oddly enough.

Viewers are forced to endure Copperfield’s act which is trite and boring but it makes Terror Train one of the Big Four horror film turkeys that use pointless magician’s acts as filler. (The other three being The Body Shop, Boardinghouse and Funhouse.) This baby has not aged well and is fun to laugh at because of the ubiquitous cliches, dull death scenes, lack of logic and its Sleepaway Camp style twist ending. The scene where the killer’s costume looks like a crazed Gene Shalit getup is a lot of fun.  All this plus a young Vanity! They’re actually doing a remake of this, believe it or not.

GHOSTKEEPER (1981) – One of those infamous Canadian tax shelter movies of the early 1980’s, so you know what you’re in for: the usual slapdash storytelling, low production values and a tale that would have been better handled in the old glory days of radio decades ago. On New Year’s Eve two men and a woman get stranded in the Rocky Mountains following a snowmobile crash. They seek refuge in a creepy old boardinghouse run by the female Joe Spinnell, Georgie Collins. Collins plays an absolute psycho who has two creepy sons, one of whom is a host for the cannibalistic Native American monster called the Wendigo. 

The Wendigo son is kept in the basement where its mother and brother have been feeding people to it for years and our three stars battle to stay alive. There’s also a struggle for freedom involved because the demented woman (who springs a twist that is so lame I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you) is looking for someone to take over her burden of overseeing the Wendigo’s captivity in the haunted boardinghouse. All this plus a Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff – uh, I mean homage.

NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980) – This one is so infamous I’ll just do a quick take. See my full-length review if you want more. As the title suggests this flick is the New Year’s Eve entry in the 80′s trend toward slasher flicks for every occassion on the calendar. Kip Niven, David Niven’s son, plays the mass murderer who kills at least one person each time Midnight arrives in each of America’s time zones. Roz Kelly plays an elderly punk singer who is not punk in any way, shape or form and who is hosting a New Year’s Eve special like a certain elderly DJ used to host. Lack of logic abounds, as do interchangeable victims, no-name musical acts and a long, pointless battle between our slasher and a biker gang!

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

International sex symbol Casey James, Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess.

Special thanks to Balladeer’s Blog’s Official Movie Hostess, the beautiful Casey James, as she helps present another look at a bad or weird superhero film. This time around the subject is the 1968 Mexican film Batwoman (La Mujer Murcielago).

For starters this should NOT be confused with the Jerry Warren film The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman, but often is because Warren was the stateside distributor for plenty of Mexican films in the 50’s and 60’s. This movie is purely a Luchadora film with Batwoman being a wrestler as well as a seasoned crime fighter.   

It’s not quite fair to call this a “bad” film, but it is a bit of a weird one. In my view it’s much tighter and more entertaining than most of the El Santo movies from Mexico. And I’m not just saying that because of how incredibly sexy the star Maura Monti is. She has an arresting (see what I did there) figure that’s perfect for her version of the Batwoman outfit: a bikini, boots, mask and cape. 

Like the Turkish movie Three Dev Adam, which features Spider-Man, Captain America and El Santo, this little honey did not pay for character rights but slipped under the radar long ago thanks to its south-of-the- border origins. Maura Monti has a certain screen presence that was lacking in other Luchadora flicks like Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy. And this movie is nowhere near the embarrassment that Halle Berry’s Catwoman was.

Acapulco is the gorgeous setting for this fun, campy movie. The beachside locale is exploited in a way that makes it kind of a “Batwoman Meets Baywatch” affair with bits of Raquel Welch’s movie Fathom thrown in. Our heroine is called in by international authorities to look into the abduction of multiple wrestlers who eventually wash ashore dead and with their pineal glands removed.

A mad scientist with the sinister name Dr Eric Williams (?) is the villain behind it all and is operating out of a yacht called Reptilicus. He and his incredibly short but otherwise normal-looking assistant Igor arrange for the kidnapping of wrestlers supposedly because they are “the perfect athletes” and thus the best human pineal gland donors. The mad doctor then injects the glands into fish in his aquarium.

The end result of these bizarre experiments is a walking fish-man (Uh. Sure. Makes sense. Yeah.) that can’t help but put viewers in mind of both The Creature from the Black Lagoon AND the amphibious monster from the Mexican horror film Swamp of Lost Monsters, previously reviewed here at Balladeer’s Blog. Needless to say Batwoman takes down all of the bad guys and the mad scientist’s creation.

Maura Monti handles the action scenes in a very capable manner. She’s believable enough (for a superhero/ Mexican wrestler flick that is) whether she’s taking down thugs, schooling sister Luchadoras on the wrestling mats or behind the wheel in a terrific car-chase scene around scenic Acapulco. This chase scene is at least as competently choreographed as the ones in the 1960’s James Bond films.   

The Creature Feature-level monster, the wrestling angle and the regulation oddball song in a Mexican Wrestling Film are the main reasons the movie Batwoman is so frequently found listed in the “so bad it’s good” category. Maura Monti herself is spectacular in all kinds of ways and bears no blame for this film’s poor reputation.

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

Yes, it was Saturday February 9th, 1985 when “Film Vault Technicians First Class” Randy Clower, Richard Malmos and Ken “Tex” Miller went on the air with the very first episode of the legendary cult show called The Texas 27 Film Vault! Years before MST3K this program featured the fictional members of the Film Vault Corps – “the few, the proud, the sarcastic” – showing and wryly mocking some of the worst – or at least campiest – movies ever made, often preceded by episodes of old Republic or Columbia Serials like Radar Men from the Moon, Atom Man vs Superman and many others!  

For the next few years Saturday nights in Texas and Oklahoma belonged to bad movies and serials, Film Vault Corps comedy sketches and interviews with figures like Vincent Price. At least for the 2 and 1/2 hours during which The Texas 27 Film Vault aired. Some of the other beloved figures from the program included Joe Riley (later famous for the cult tv show titled The Hypnotic Eye), Laurie Savino and Doug Bransom, the former Professor Cerberus himself!  

Here’s Balladeer’s Blog’s look at that very first episode of The Texas 27 Film Vault, from way down on Level 31 in the Film Vault beneath Dallas, Texas. There was no serial that first night because the movie plus comedy sketches filled the entire running time. Below you’ll also find the link to my exclusive interview with Randy Clower.  

MOVIE TITLE: TRUNK TO CAIRO (1966)

If the only bad movie show you know is MST3K think of: Operation Double 007, Danger: Death Ray and Secret Agent Superdragon.

The Movie: Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated soldier of World War Two was okay in westerns or military films but he is laughable as a pseudo-suave James Bond wannabe in this flick. For starters his voice is so mild and his mannerisms so meek that he comes across like Ned Flanders: Licensed to Kill! Menahem Golan (as in Golan-Globus Productions) directed and produced this flick that was distributed stateside by American International Pictures, so this was a royal wedding of sorts in terms of cinematic cheesiness.

Murphy plays Mike Merrick, a CIA agent who is assigned to work with Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad in order to infiltrate an Egyptian base. A neo-Nazi scientist played by the very British George Sanders is working with the Egyptians to build rockets capable of wiping out Israel, Europe and the United States. Marianne Koch portrays Helga Schlieben, the scientist’s (Sanders) daughter.

So we have a CIA agent with a Texas accent masquerading periodically as an Egyptian and a German even though he speaks neither language. GREAT personnel choice by the Agency! We also have the aforementioned veddy, veddy British Sanders turning in a comic opera-level rendition of a strutting German. Throw in various Israelis portraying Egyptians and enjoy! Hans von Brosody actually seems out of place as a German playing a German. Must have been some kind of screwup at Central Casting.

This baby also features HILARIOUS day-for-night shooting, a terrorist attack on sunbathers and supposedly Italian submarines with Hebrew signage on their instrument panels (Oy vey!). The final minutes of this enjoyably awful movie take the viewer from Cairo to Rome, partway back to Cairo and then back to Rome in a thoroughly ridiculous sequence of unlikely events meant to highlight Mike Merrick as an American James Bond. Even the humorless Roger Moore would be able to see how absurd Merrick’s superspy antics are.

Audie Murphy and the other players try to play it all as seriously as if they’re on Masterpiece Theater and completely fail to capture the light-hearted thrills of the 007 films. Unfortunately the script’s periodic attempts at humor could be used to induce vomiting if you accidentally swallow something poisonous.

FOR MY EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH RANDY CLOWER CLICK HERE:  –http://glitternight.com/2011/12/22/randy-clower-balladeers-blog-interviews-a-movie-host-legend/

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW – http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

Blaxploitation is as misunderstood and unfairly dismissed a sub-genre as Spaghetti Westerns are. It’s not all pimps, pushers and prostitutes. There were also street-level heroes as colorful as any in the old Pulps. In addition some of the most watchable blaxploitation flicks featured cathartic scenes of African-Americans blowing away Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis plus – decades before Django Unchained – a few Westerns showed former slaves turned gunslingers shooting down actual slave-owners and slave-traders.

Balladeer’s Blog has examined several categories:

BLAXPLOITATION FILMS THAT DESERVE A CLOSER LOOK

Comment: From Pulpish action epics to political satire to black biker films to tastelessly explicit looks at the hardcore ugliness of the Atlantic slave trade, these films boldly went where no mainstream movies of the time period dared to go.  

Examples: Superfly, a neglected gangster classic … The Spook Who Sat by the Door, about a successful armed black uprising … The Brotherhood of Death, featuring black Vietnam vets fighting the Klan … Mister Deathman, with a black James Bond in Apartheid-era South Africa.    

Top Film On List: Darktown Strutters, an in-your-face satire on race, politics and consumerism presented in a style that seems equal parts Richard Pryor and South Park.  

FOR FULL LIST: http://glitternight.com/2012/03/10/eight-blaxploitation-films-that-deserve-a-closer-look/

BLAXPLOITATION HORROR FILMS

Comment: As ridiculous as some of the titles and premises were, there were critics praising these films when they were released. In some circles they were viewed as movies that “daringly inserted African-American figures into traditionally white stories.” 

Examples: Blacula, in which Dracula turns an African Prince into a vampire … Dr Black and Mr Hyde, about a brilliant black doctor whose serum periodically turns him into a violent white madman … Disco Exorcist, in which a housewife is possessed by a Yoruban demon and must be exorcised … The Zombies of Sugar Hill, which features the heroine “Sugar” Hill using a horde of undead plantation slaves to battle the Mafia.     

Top Film On List:  Blackenstein, which featured an African-American soldier who lost both arms and both legs in Vietnam being transformed into a black version of Frankenstein’s Monster. 

FOR FULL LIST: http://glitternight.com/2013/10/12/blaxploitation-horror-films-for-halloween-season/

PAM GRIER’S FINEST

Comment: Ebony magazine called her The Mocha Mogul of Hollywood in the 1970’s. Forget her Women in Prison potboilers and her supporting roles in other films, Pam Grier was at her best portraying butt-kicking Pulp heroines on the big screen. 

Examples: Coffy, in which Pam is a nurse by day but by night becomes “Mystique” a vixen who blows away drug pushers … Sheba, Baby, starring Pam as private investigator Sheba Shayne who takes down gangsters who are leaning on an old flame … Friday Foster, as Pam plays the title comic strip character: a photo-journalist tangling with an organization of White Supremacists.     

Top Film On List: Foxy Brown, with Pam starring as the title figure. Foxy is out for revenge on the white gangster lovebirds who killed the man she loves. Along the way she also topples some of the politicians on the gangsters’ payroll.  

FOR FULL LIST: http://glitternight.com/2012/03/25/pam-griers-four-best-blaxploitation-films-2/

BLAXPLOITATION’S LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN

Comment: Though lacking the screen presence of Pam Grier these ladies still shone as two-fisted, butt-kicking, gun-toting sirens of the city streets.

Examples: Cleopatra Jones, starring Tamara Dobson as the title character, a DEA agent who foiled drug dealers from the poppy fields of the Middle East to downtown Los Angeles … TNT Jackson, about a black martial arts mistress who trails her brother’s killers to the Philippines, where she gets her revenge … Black Lolita, in which a feisty femme fatale brings down a gangster called Big Buddha … Velvet Smooth, about a female private investigator in the middle of a gang war. 

Top Film On List: Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, the sequel which found our heroine in Hong Kong taking on the Dragon Lady (Stella Stevens) who ran her drug operation out of the title gambling establishment. 

FOR FULL LIST: http://glitternight.com/2012/04/08/blaxploitations-league-of-extraordinary-women/

BLAXPLOITATION WESTERNS

Comment: Unlike so many other Westerns these films did not ignore the obvious racial tensions in the post-Civil War West, nor did they gloss over them with just a surface examination. These films let things get uncomfortable … very uncomfortable. 

Examples: The Legend of Nigger Charley, in which a former slave becomes a gunslinger and uses his shooting skills for frontier justice … Take a Hard Ride, the DEFINITIVE hybrid of Spaghetti Westerns and Blaxploitation, with Italo-Western staple Lee Van Cleef along for the ride … Boss Nigger, about a hard-assed black ranch foreman … Posse, featuring black veterans of the Spanish-American War taking on crooked Army officers and Klansmen. 

Top Film On List: The Soul of Nigger Charley, the action-packed sequel which finds the title gunslinger clashing with ex-Confederate soldiers who are rounding up freed blacks out west with the intention of selling them into slavery in Emperor Maximillian’s Mexico.  

FOR FULL LIST: http://glitternight.com/2012/08/08/the-original-django-and-two-blaxploitation-westerns-a-primer-for-django-unchained/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2011-2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.    

In the middle 1980’s/ Way down on Level 31 …

Before MST3K there was The Texas 27 Film Vault! The 30th anniversary year of this neglected cult tv show continues with this look at another film shown and mocked by Film Vault Technicians First Class Randy Clower and Richard Malmos.

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Unknown. Contact me if you have any information on this.

SERIAL: Unknown. Contact me.

FILM VAULT LORE: This was supposedly the favorite episode of the Film Vault Corp’s effects man Joe Riley, which is why he used the title The Hypnotic Eye for his post-T27FV television show, episodes of which are on Youtube.

COMEDY SKETCHES : This episode aired when Randy still “outranked” Richard in the Film Vault Corps and so their relationship often had the “Main Character and Abused Second Banana” vibe like with Zacherle and My Dear, or Dr Morgus and Chopsley or Dr Forester and TV’s Frank.

The Host Segments therefore featured Richard supposedly being subjected to the type of mutilation the hypnotized female victims in The Hypnotic Eye were inflicting on themselves. Joe Riley’s special effect of Richard’s hair being set on fire was as intentionally laughable as the effect in the movie itself.  

THE MOVIE:  

Desmond the Magician wielding the title object.

The Hypnotic Eye is one of the most beloved bad movies of the 1960’s. Its hilariously campy trailer, its sinister Eurotrash villain and its Ed Wood-level police work all make it a true anti-classic. Jacques Bergerac, one-time husband of Ginger Rogers, played Desmond, the magician who uses the title object to augment his hypnotic abilities to an enormous degree.

After various beautiful women appear on stage with Desmond as volunteers from his audience he plants a post-hypnotic suggestion that causes them to mutilate themselves in various extreme ways after the show. Some set their hair on fire, some wash their faces with acid ,some shove their faces into fans, etc. This being an old black & white movie the effects are very tame by today’s standards.   

B-movie mainstay Allison Hayes portrays Desmond’s sinister, secretive assistant Justine, who has her own reasons for wanting to see beautiful women deformed. As for the police detective “hero” Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge), he’s an absolute joke. Picture the policemen from The Sinister Urge, Plan 9 From Outer Space and The Dead Talk Back and you’ll know what type of crack detective work viewers are in for.  

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

I wouldn’t dream of spoiling any of the fun of this film by revealing too much. Be ready to laugh your asses off, even without the benefit of Randy, Richard, Joe or Ken “Tex” Miller adding to the fun. 

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

MARDI GRAS MASSACRE (1978) – Category: A neglected Bad Movie classic, but its hard-core gore will prevent it from ever having a Plan 9-sized cult following

It takes a twisted sort of genius to make multiple disembowelment murders look boring, but that’s exactly what Jack Weis accomplishes in Mardi Gras Massacre! Today may be Fat Tuesday, but let’s rechristen it “Splat Tuesday” in honor of this late 70’s splatterfest. 

The actual “massacre” part of this movie is an incredible disappointment. An insane, hate-filled man with a knife – no, not Jim Bowie (rimshot) – is roaming around New Orleans during Mardi Gras targeting prostitutes as sacrificial offerings to the Aztec deities he worships. That sounds promising for a horror film but the disembowelment ritual is reenacted word for word and movement for movement for EACH VICTIM! There is no variation and also no suspense because after the first killing we know exactly how all the subsequent sacrifices will play out. The only chills come from listening to the awful disco music that plays during the ceremonial slayings. (“NOOOOOOOOOO!”)

What this “horror” film lacks in scares it more than makes up for in gut-busting (sorry) laughs. Mardi Gras Massacre is a treasure trove of all the things we bad movie fans love about low-budget schlockers like this. The flick treats us to:

Real-life Mardi Gras celebrants passing by and dumbly staring, slack-jawed, at the camera, oblivious to how they’re ruining so many shots … almost as many as the director himself ruins in fact.

Actors very obviously – and limply- reading their lines off cue cards held just off-camera. Some people give more dramatic readings of their eye doctor’s charts than these people give to their dialogue.

A lack of opening credits. Just black screen, the movie’s title and then we get plutzed right into the film.

An unintentionally HILARIOUS romantic montage as the cop investigating the murders pitches a little woo with a hooker who helps him journey through the seedier side of New Orleans nightlife.

Poorly- matched shots, so that in close-up the character speaking is seated but in long shots of the same scene they’re standing and sometimes vice versa.

The terrific “to hell with retakes” attitude that low-budget flicks often have when actors muff their lines multiple times and it’s all left in the finished film!

Wonderfully campy dialogue like “I hear you’re the most evil woman in the room.” Classic!

A chase scene that supposedly features the cops chasing our killer but which omits ANY footage of that killer! The resulting scene looks more like the cops are running away from something we viewers never get to see and will leave you rolling with laughter as it goes on and on and on. You get to play “Where’s Waldo” with the movie’s villain.

If you’ve got a weak stomach for cheap gore effects by all means steer clear of this film, but if you go in for the darker and more tasteless offerings from the cinematic badlands you NEED to see Mardi Gras Massacre.

FOR MORE BAD MOVIES CLICK HERE: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Before MST3K there was … The Texas 27 Film Vault! In the middle 1980’s, way down on Level 31 Randy Clower and Richard Malmos, machine-gun toting Film Vault Technicians First Class hosted this neglected cult show. Balladeer’s Blog continues its celebration of the program’s 30th anniversary year. 

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Unknown but definitely before May of 1986. One of the old newspaper articles from early May of that year refers to Glen or Glenda as one of the movies having already been shown on The Texas 27 Film Vault. Anyone with more specific info feel free to contact me.

SERIAL: Unknown. Again, if you have info contact me via my FAQ page.  

COMEDY SKETCHES: Unknown. We’ve exhausted the episodes where I DO know the date, serial and sketches. Contact me.

THE MOVIE:

Glen or Glenda is so well-known I’m sure I don’t need to say much about it. It was Ed Wood’s infamous semi-autobiographical movie about his love of wearing women’s clothing. Incidentally – very incidentally in terms of footage – the movie also touched on the topic of sex-change operations because of the highly-publicized case of Christine Jorgensen.

Randy Clower and Richard Malmos of The Texas 27 Film Vault (both lower right) featured in a Movie Host article with Stella from Saturday Night Dead and Elvira.

Ed Wood wrote, directed and starred (as Daniel Davis) and many of his soon-to- be “regulars” came along, too, like Dolores Fuller, Conrad Brooks, Timothy Farrell, Lyle Talbot … and of course Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s god-like character oversees the movie’s action from on-high while babbling some of Wood’s most notoriously inane and rambling dialogue. (“Pull da string!”  “Puppy-Duck tails” “Bevare … Take Care.”)

The bulk of the film’s running time is spent with characters trying to make sense of the suicide of a troubled young transvestite. There are  frequent detours into pop-psychology notions about gender roles and supposed “norms” for men and women. The difference between transvestites and transsexuals is briefly touched on as well. Since it was the 1980’s Randy and Richard could be very irreverent with their humor, so it’s a shame this episode has not survived.   

The most memorable parts – aside from the usual fun from Bela being Bela, are:

a) the scene that forever changed the meaning of the expression “buffalo shot”

b) the hilariously overwrought ending with Glen’s girlfriend (Dolores Fuller) awkwardly handing her beau the angora top she was wearing 

and c) the demented and surreal portions about a man being shamed for his fetishes while a figure dressed as Satan pops in and out of the footage. It’s like the “Devil” appearances in the movie Maniac. 

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

In a way Glen or Glenda captures the silliness of Political Correctness or any other form of imposing societal taboos. When it came out (as it were) it was Politically Incorrect to openly discuss such matters or to imply that trannies deserved understanding. Today, similarly pompous and finger-wagging asses would consider it Politically Incorrect to ridicule the movie’s awfulness lest such humor be interpreted as irreverence to the “lifestyles” presented.  

No matter what decade it is, people who think they are fit to limit what the rest of us talk about or laugh about are a bigger menace than the alleged “evils” they seek to censor. 

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

Before MST3K there was … The Texas 27 Film Vault! In the middle 1980’s, way down on Level 31 Randy Clower and Richard Malmos, machine-gun toting Film Vault Technicians First Class hosted this neglected cult show. Balladeer’s Blog continues its celebration of the program’s 30th anniversary year.

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Sometime in 1985, possibly February or March. Still trying to narrow it down further so anyone who has information please contact me via my FAQ page. Some info points to this being the first episode in which Randy and Richard used their machine guns and “prop-pack” mini-copters to fight giant rats from deep in the Earth.

Given how central the giant rats would be going forward IF this can be verified it would make this a pretty pivotal episode of The Texas 27 Film Vault.

SERIAL: IF the February or March of 1985 date is correct – and that’s still up in the air – then the serial episode would definitely have been from The Lost City (1935).

COMEDY SKETCHES: The Film Vault Corps (“The few, the proud, the sarcastic”), led by Randy, Richard and Ken “Tex” Miller taking on the first of many packs of giant rats. The effects, models and dolls of the human figures would – for humor’s sake – have been INTENTIONALLY as cheesy as the kind Bert I Gordon used in The Food of the Gods and so many of his other “gigantic  monster” films.  

OTHER HOST SEGMENTS: A look at the many, MANY “size change” movies of Bert I Gordon, “Mister B.I.G.” himself. ( Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People, Earth vs  the Spider, Beginning of the End, War of the Colossal Beast, The Cyclops, Village of the Giants, Empire of the Ants, etc)  

THE MOVIE:

The Food of the Gods was very loosely based on part of H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name. Gordon’s Village of the Giants, about a gang of giant-sized teenagers, was likewise loosely based on an often-forgotten section of that novel.

This movie starred Marjoe Gortner, the child evangelist turned B-movie legend, as football star Morgan (no fuller name given), who travels to a remote Canadian island for a vacation. Unfortunately, thanks to a very embarrassed- looking Ida Lupino, her farm animals plus other wild life have begun eating “the Food of the Gods”, a white substance from deep in the Earth. That food has caused various forms of animal and insect life to grow to enormous size, setting up the usual rampage scenes from Bert I Gordon films.  

Ralph Meeker, Jon Cypher and Pamela Franklin are also along for the ride, with everyone from the Medved Brothers on down making fun of Franklin’s line “Jobs for female bacteriologists aren’t easy to find.”

As always in films by Mr B.I.G. the real fun comes from the laughably awkward and cheap special effects used for the “gigantic” creatures. This film gives us attacks by enormous chickens, roosters, wasps and, of course, rats. And it’s pretty clear rats WERE harmed during the making of this film. For scenes where Marjoe Gortner and company are supposedly shooting the attacking beasts with shotguns it looks like real rats were shot with B.B. guns to get the flesh-rending effects.

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

And at the end a flood wipes out the giant rats (despite the fact that rats can swim), who have besieged our surviving cast members in Ida Lupino’s farmhouse, Night of the Living Dead style. Lots of live rats seem to have been drowned to provide the corpses in the aftermath shots. I know that since rats can be exterminated as vermin it often puts them in a dubious position when it comes to protection in films (there are even “rat snuff” porno movies) but The Food of the Gods goes beyond even Paul Naschy’s Hunchback of the Rue Morgue in abusing them.   

At any rate after the epilogue with Marjoe and friends there’s a pointless teaser for a sequel which features a toddler drinking milk that has accidentally been mixed with some Food of the Gods. 

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

Before MST3K there was … The Texas 27 Film Vault! In the middle 1980’s, way down on Level 31 Randy Clower and Richard Malmos, machine-gun toting Film Vault Technicians First Class hosted this neglected cult show. Balladeer’s Blog continues its celebration of the program’s 30th anniversary year.

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Saturday February 14th, 1987 from 10:30pm to 1:00am. 

SERIAL: None. The movie, Film Vault Corps comedy sketches and commercials filled up the entire two and a half hours this time.

FILM VAULT LORE: This episode marked the second time The Texas 27 Film Vault came with a warning about violent content. It was also at least the second time they riffed on a movie that was originally in 3-D. Randy and Richard did various jokes about wearing 3-D glasses and 3-D effects coming out of the screen at them as they watched the movie.

Randy and Richard firing their machine guns on the T27FV 3D poster.

When you throw in the previous year’s “Mock 3D” interview with Ben Johnson and the 1987 release of The Texas 27 Film Vault‘s official 3-D poster you could say Randy, Richard, Ken “Tex” Miller, Joe Riley and Laurie Savino had a definite fondness for taking shots at the whole 3-D concept.  

 FOR A LOOK AT THE 3-D TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT POSTER (courtesy of Randy Clower) –http://glitternight.com/2013/03/18/movie-hosts-the-texas-27-film-vault-poster/  

THE MOVIE:

Friday the 13th Part 3-D was the most notoriously lame sequel in the Friday the 13th film series during the 1980’s. Not only was it part of the laughable 1980’s attempt to revive the 3-D craze of the 1950’s but it’s also infamous for its DISCO VERSION of the iconic Friday the 13th theme. However it’s essential viewing for horror fans because it was the first time Jason Voorhees put on the hockey mask that is so closely associated with the character.   

Like so many of the INCREDIBLY poor Ft13th sequels this third installment starred literally nobody, featured far too many annoying characters that were obviously there just to get killed by Jason and contained dialogue that does not resemble the way any human beings anywhere have EVER communicated. It also supposedly features the highest number of false scares for a Voorhees movie with more than fifteen.  

Another aspect of the film that grates on the nerves of Friday the 13th purists is the fact that it takes place right after Friday the 13th Part 2, so it features killings taking place on Saturday the 14th and Sunday the 15th, even though Jason’s killing spree should have ended until the next Friday the 13th.

Other elements of the film worth laughing at include:

* The way the no-name lead actress can’t distinguish between screams of terror and screams of orgasmic release.

* In the bad taste department this film features Jason Voorhees’ first pregnant victim.

* Remember the tagline for the 1970’s Superman movie – “You’ll believe a man can fly”? Well with this film it could be “You’ll believe a man can sit on the toilet.”

* The slutty line of dialogue that goes “Was it you, me or the hammock?” Even if you didn’t know that was from a 1980’s slasher film you would be able to guess it.

Never before has a yo-yo with a yo-yo been so terrifying.

* A yo-yo is one of the 3D objects coming at the viewer. Wow!

* Ditto for popping popcorn. Horrifying!

* A drinking game could be played in the scenes where nothing seems to happen except one character calling out the other’s name over and over.

* One of Jason’s first victims in this film is a moronic woman who feels that the ideal time to take down your laundry from the line outside is in the dead of night … after just having watched a news report about how the psycho who killed kids at Crystal Lake is still on the loose!  

* At the end of the movie yet another character in the Ft13th universe goes out on the lake in a canoe. And yet again a figure emerges from the lake to attack them. In this case it’s Mrs Voorhees, whose rotted, zombie form has somehow had its head reattached.  

* The trio of supposedly badass bikers who are so goofy and ineffective not even Aaron Von Zepper would want them in his gang. 

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. 

This is one of my most- requested Bad Movie reviews, so here it is again. Deafula is yet another of those bad movies that has such a bizarre premise that many believe the film to be an urban legend, like the turkey-monster flick Blood Freak. Get ready for a deaf vampire, a very odd witch and the most joyously goofy hunchback in cinematic history.  

DEAFULA (1975) – Category: A neglected bad movie classic that deserves a Plan 9-sized cult following

Good intentions go horribly wrong in this film. Much like with Blood Freak, there are people who insist this film is just an urban legend and that it doesn’t really exist. Those people are wrong again. This horror film is in black and white and, as the title suggests, the vampire as well as everyone else in this movie’s world are deaf and communicate through sign language, billed as “Signscope” in the movie posters and in the opening credits, as if this was a pioneering technical gimmick on a par with Sensurround. (Although considering how lame Sensurround was there may be something to that)

Never fear, though, there is also voice-over narration provided by different people for each actor, so that people who don’t know sign language can follow the story. Obviously this is all very noble, and in fact Peter Wechsburg, who produced this film and stars as Deafula, was responsible for an all-sign language newscast for the hearing impaired. That newscast originated in Portland, OR, which is also where Deafula was filmed.

Deafula, aka “The Schnozz”, menaces a victim.

Unfortunately, noble motives aside, this film proves that certain talents are needed to create an effective horror film and those talents were noticeably in short supply when Deafula was put together. (In England, the BBC series See Hear did this concept in a much more skillful and tasteful way, adapting several classic stories for the hearing impaired, including A Christmas Carol)  Our vampire, Deafula, is Steve Adams, a preacher’s son who, when the blood-lust is upon him, transforms into Deafula in a metamorphosis so thorough it’s more like a werewolf transformation.

Steve’s hair-color changes from blonde to black, including his beard, his nose for some reason gets MUCH bigger and in one of many elements of this film that defy any pretext of logic, his street clothes turn into the traditional vampire’s garb of all-black formal wear complete with opera cape. When his blood-lust is sated, he turns back into Steve and his clothing reverts to his casual street-wear. On top of that, Steve sometimes turns into Deafula in broad daylight, and has no aversion to holy objects, as he has spent a lifetime attending the church where his father preaches.

Obviously we’re dealing with a very bizarre version of the vampire myth a la the horrendous film The Vampire’s Ghost. It turns out Deafula is a human/vampire hybrid, and ever since he was born (and his mother, naturally, died in childbirth) his father has been providing him with some of his own blood on a monthly basis to feed his son’s peculiar appetites. A growing boy gets very hungry, though, and among Steve/Deafula’s childhood flashbacks we see him ravenously biting the neck of his puppy one sunny afternoon and draining its blood.

Meanwhile, Portland, OR is enduring the worst reign of terror since Hello, Larry was set there, as Deafula’s body count is now in the dozens. A very odd and very cranky police detective is in charge of investigating the killing spree and the department has saddled him with a British consultant from Scotland Yard, who is an expert on vampires. This consultant looks like a lawn gnome and sounds senile but he says he killed Dracula single-handed. Later in the film a flashback shows us a newspaper headline supporting this claim. No, I’m serious.

Our lead detective scoffs at the notion of vampires, but his own theories are even more out of touch with reality. He states the twin fang-marks on the victims’ throats made him at first suspect it was a wolf behind the killings (?) and as if that wasn’t strange enough he says he rejected that notion once some of the victims started getting killed in their bedrooms (it being a well-known fact that wolves aren’t allowed to enter bedrooms I guess). 

Eventually Deafula comes face-to-face with the woman who served as a midwife at his birth. She’s named Amy and she’s been heavily into witchcraft ever since the horrific things she witnessed when Deafula/Steve was born. Witch Amy comes complete with a lackey named Zork who has a hunchback and … tin cans for hands. (Idle cans are the Devil’s workshop) Yes, I guess it’s supposed to be this film’s version of “mute” since without hands he can’t communicate in sign language like all the other characters can.

Zork, the hunchback with cans for hands.

Amy says Zork was an evil man, so Satan took his hands. (This provided me with a mental picture of various mothers haranguing their pubescent children with the warning “Keep that up and your hands will turn into cans!”. Hey, it makes as much sense as saying they’ll go blind.) With the creepy yet idiotic faces he’s always making Zork is one of my all-time favorite supporting characters and I’d love to see him tie the knot with Petra, Keeper Of The Graves, from Blood! (qv) 

Amy relates the story of Deafula’s birth and reveals that his father was none other than Dracula himself. Deafula wants to confront Dear Old Dad and makes his way to Drac’s coffin, where he pulls out the stake in Pappy’s heart. What follows is the dumbest and most illogical scene in a movie loaded with them. The guy doing the voiceover for Dracula while he signs actually does a bad Bela Lugosi voice for him.

Deafula’s daddy, Dracula.

Drac resurrects Steve/Deafula’s mother (don’t ask) and in the ensuing battle Deafula is saved by his mother, Maria, and by a ring that was a gift to Dracula from Satan himself, and from Drac to Maria, from Maria to Amy and from Amy to Deafula. The tag line for this flick should have been “Never before has regifting been so terrifying!” Deafula and Mommy Maria re-stake Dracula, causing Mom to die once again, also.

Next thing we know Steve is preaching at his father’s church (Dad died earlier in the film in one of the most laughably inept depictions of a heart attack ever presented on film) when the Scotland Yard consultant fingers him as the man behind Portland’s vampire killings. Enjoyably enough, a puddle of vomit was a crucial clue for the Britisher. For some reason, now that he’s been exposed as Deafula, Steve is suddenly vulnerable to all the crosses in the church and also to sunlight and he dies spouting a demented, albeit impassioned, speech about sin and forgiveness.

We viewers are left with several questions, including: 

a) How did our 2 detectives know to investigate the deaths of the 2 motorcycling hippies, since neither of them was bitten by Deafula, he just used his vampire hypnotic powers to send them driving over a cliff 

b) What is the significance of the frequent use of the number 200 in this flick? I guess if Discordianists can have the Law of 5′s this film can have the Law of 200 

c) Was the cranky detective really taking a leak when he had his back to the camera? 

d) In a world where the Scotland Yard man’s slaying of Dracula prompts a newspaper story complete with a headline saying “Dracula Is Dead”, why does the cranky detective doubt the existence of vampires?  

e) To what non-obscene use could Witch Amy possibly have put a simple-minded, hunchbacked servant with cans for hands?

f) Why would Satan’s ring disappear from Amy’s place every time Steve turned into Deafula?

g) Why did Steve let his father go on feeding his  own blood to him once a month when he was chowing down on the blood of people in Portland every day and night? 

h) Why was Deafula ever feeding on humans at all when the film made it clear he could drink animal blood? Dogs or cows would have worked just as well.

i) How come Steve’s puppy didn’t come back from the dead as a vampire like the puppy in the horror film Dracula’s Dog?

j) And most importantly, since the Scotland Yard man killed Dracula in England why was Drac buried in a cave underneath the Portland Museum?

This film is hilariously bad and the line “A moment ago I asked for some peanuts” is sure to become a catchphrase with you and your friends.

For more bad movies click here: http://glitternight.com/bad-movies/ 

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog, 2011. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Before MST3K there was … The Texas 27 Film Vault! In the middle 1980’s, way down on Level 31 Randy Clower and Richard Malmos, machine-gun toting Film Vault Technicians First Class hosted this neglected cult show. Balladeer’s Blog continues its celebration of the program’s 30th anniversary year.

ORIGINAL BROADCAST DATE: Saturday September 28th, 1985 from 10:30pm to 1:00 am.

SERIAL:  Before showing and mocking the movie our members of the Film Vault Corps showed and mocked a chapter of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). In that serial Ming the Merciless unleashes a disease called the Purple Death on Earth, prompting Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Dr Zarkov to fly to the planet Mongo to find a cure and defeat Ming for good.

FILM VAULT LORE: Fellow Film Vault Fan Doctor X-Rae ( a lady, hence the spelling) informed me that this 1952 film was shown by our boys as part of a promotional give-away of tickets to the Chuck Norris movie Invasion USA which was hitting theaters back then. This would have been similar to the ticket give-away a few months earlier to the 1985 Godzilla remake, for which Randy and Richard showed King Kong vs Godzilla. 

HOST SEGMENTS: Some potential dispute here. Dr X-Rae thinks that this was the episode that showed Randy and Richard seeming to quit the Film Vault Corps (“the few, the proud, the sarcastic”) and through an oddball series of events, winding up in front of a firing squad … and getting shot!

It all turns out to be a dream – see my interview with Randy Clower for details. This would all tie in with the “it’s only a dream” style ending of Invasion USA (1952 version) but there’s no hard and fast rule that the Host Segments HAD to parallel the night’s movie. Randy himself is unable to help as he doesn’t recall either way. (I think I’ve drained the poor man’s mind of every shred of Texas 27 Film Vault memories at this point.) 

THE MOVIE:

Invasion USA presented a hypothetical invasion of the United States by the Soviet Union. Well, technically the invading nation goes unnamed but with their soldiers’ Boris Badunov accents it’s no real secret who it’s supposed to be.

Randy Clower and Richard Malmos of The Texas 27 Film Vault (both lower right) featured in a Movie Host article with Stella from Saturday Night Dead and Elvira.

The film is vaguely structured like a disaster movie as we meet a variety of Americans in a bar – a tractor manufacturer, a ranch owner, a hot babe (Peggie Castle), a boozey Congressman, a smug bastard reporter (Gerald Mohr) and the establishment’s comic relief bartender. An enigmatic and seemingly sinister foreign man is also hanging out at the bar.

As mock newscasts and recycled World War 2 newsreels pretend to depict the actual military invasion of the U.S. we also see the personal travails of our main characters unfold. The tractor manufacturer has his date (Peggie Castle) stolen by Gerald Mohr’s smooth reporter character, then the invading army (which uses conventional weapons, virtually no nukes) takes over his factory to make tanks for their army. He tries to resist and is killed.

The rancher and a quirky cab driver reach his ranch just as an enemy plane wipes out a nearby dam, unleashing waters that wipe out (among other things) the ranch plus him, the cab driver and the rancher’s wife and kids. The Congressman gets killed when the foreign army seizes Washington D.C., leaving New York City the last major city in the country still free from enemy hands.   

The happy-go- lucky bartender brags about how he always avoids service in wartime, immediately following which the Bitch Goddess of Karma causes his bar to get bombed in the next attack. His dead body is found in the rubble, clutching a daquiri tumbler. 

Our two annoying leads, played by Mohr and Castle, romance each other in war-torn New York City like they think they’re World War 3’s answer to Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca. His career takes off as he covers the ongoing conflict (without ever leaving New York City) while she volunteers as a nurse. In the movie’s climax, with New York City itself occupied by now, the reporter is killed for refusing to become a propoganda shill for the country’s new dictators. (Today’s reporters are so shallow they’d be GLAD to do it in the best “Hail Ants” spirit.)

As for Peggie, she throws herself out the window to her death rather than submit to being violated by the horny new masters of New York. SPOILER: It’s all been a dream, or rather, a hypnotic illusion courtesy of the seemingly sinister foreign man, played by Dan O’Herlihy. Nobody ever left the bar. O’Herlihy’s character Mr Ohman (“Mr Omen”) just wanted to show these decadent Americans the importance of eternal vigilance against the Communist menace. 

This is one of the most beloved and enjoyably campy Cold War melodramas. It has a kind of “War of the Worlds radio show but with Commies instead of aliens” feel to it. The timing of the film’s initial release is puzzling to me, however, since the U.S. was among the U.N. nations fighting in the Korean War at the time. Not exactly the lazy, idyllic, peacetime homefront atmosphere the movie tries to portray.

Randy (right) and Richard way down on Level 31 hosting The Texas 27 Film Vault

At any rate the recycled World War 2 footage and attitudes, the low budget and the hilarious dialogue all make this a true Bad Movie Classic. For trivia buffs BOTH original Lois Lanes – Noel Neill and Phyllis Coates – show up in the cast, as do William Schallert and Edward G Robinson, Jr. Lots of fun for Randy and Richard, the former stars of The Trivia Guys (their previous show).    

IN THE NEAR FUTURE BALLADEER’S BLOG WILL PRESENT MORE TEXAS 27 FILM VAULT MILESTONES.

Be here to share the Film Vault Corp’s mission of “safeguarding America’s schlock-culture heritage”. 

FOR ADDITIONAL INFO ON THIS SHOW –http://glitternight.com/texas-27-film-vault/

© Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Edward Wozniak and Balladeer’s Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.