Christopher Lee stars as the director of a lurid stage show in which hot women are realistically murdered on stage.  While preparing his latest play about vampires, people start being murdered in real life.  Since all of the victims have neck wounds that resemble vampire bites, Lee is naturally the prime suspect.

You would think that a movie in which Christopher Lee murders people in front of an audience would be a blast.  You’d be wrong though.  Even though Lee is charismatic, the script doesn’t give him very much to do except act like an asshole.  Once he’s out of the picture, things slow down considerably.  Julian (The Empire Strikes Back) Glover makes for a decent hero, yet his role is underwritten and his character doesn’t make much of an impact on the plot.

Although Theatre of Death has an ideal setting for a horror movie (Lee’ theater is based on the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris), it doesn’t really do too much with it.  The film unfortunately squanders it’s potentially intriguing premise, has a habit of bogging down frequently and overall is really boring to tell you the truth.  While the identity of the real killer is something of a surprise, the murderer comes to an unsatisfactory end.  So does the movie.

AKA:  Blood Fiend.  AKA:  The Female Fiend.

An inbred cannibal living underground in London’s abandoned subway system comes up from the darkness every once and awhile to chow down on unsuspecting Londoners.  When his pregnant wife dies in childbirth, Mr. Cannibal goes crazy and abducts an annoying chick and tries to put the moves on her.  Eventually, her idiot American boyfriend calls the cops and they come and rescue her.

Raw Meat had the potential to be an entertaining horror flick, but you can tell that director Gary (Poltergeist 3) Sherman has a lot of contempt for the genre.  Sherman is more concerned with complicated camera moves and arty lighting than actually delivering scares.  He squandered every opportunity for suspense and kept things so dark that you couldn’t tell what was going on half the time.  It also didn’t help that this movie was paced like old people fuck:  slow and sloppy.  We’re talking Snoozeville here.

Donald Pleasence is the only memorable thing about this turd.  His off kilter performance as the Inspector on the case who goes bonkers whenever he doesn’t get a cup of tea is pretty funny, even though it obviously belongs in another movie.  Christopher Lee sticks around long enough to cash a check and is very good in his one and only scene with Pleasence. 

There are a handful of impressive special effects of half-eaten corpses and some adequate moments of gore (an axe to the skull, impaling, rat eating, etc.), although not nearly as many as there should’ve been.  One could only imagine what kind of movie Sherman could’ve made had he not overdosed on Nyquil before filming started.  Oh well.  Sherman later went on to direct the grossly underrated Wanted:  Dead or Alive. 

AKA:  Death Line.

You know, when I was a kid, watching Skinamax was just about the best thing you could watch on television besides scrambled porn.  Of course you had to wait till about 1:35 am before they started playing the good stuff but every now and then, Skinamax would reward a patient underage viewer with something equally kinky at the far more reasonable hour of 10:00 pm.  One such movie that I caught late night with the lights out and the sound turned down real low was The Howling 2:  Your Sister is a Werewolf.

Now I know the Howling sequels get a bad rap and for good reason too.  Just about every one of them sucks hairy ball sacs.  The Howling 2:  Your Sister is a Werewolf is no exception, but I’ll be damned that watching this flick twenty some years later didn’t awaken the 8 year-old boy inside of me. 

Basically the story is that Reb (Space Mutiny) Brown is attending his sister’s funeral when Christopher Lee approaches him and tells him “Your Sis...” oh shit just read the subtitle, will ya.  Reb takes the news surprisingly well and helps Lee hunt down a nest of werewolves who are congregating in a small village where they await the return of their werewolf mistress Stirba (Sybil Danning). 

This Stirba chick is something else.  She likes to have threesomes with other werewolves who turn increasingly wolfier the hornier they get.  (And just so you know folks, Stirba is a NATURALLY blond werewolf.)

Anyway, Christopher Lee’s gotta stake Stirba with a TITANIUM stake because she’s “immune” to silver.  Luckily for the audience, Stirba is committed to presiding over a werewolf sex orgy before going head to head with Lee for the climatic showdown.

Let me just tell you something.  Sybil Danning in this movie has to be about the hottest piece of ass ever captured on celluloid.  She’s always gallivanting around in these sexy S & M get-ups with her cleavage lovingly heaving up and down.  Sybil pops her top only once during the film, but thanks to the miracle of editing, we get to see those puppies SEVENTEEN times over the end credits!  Amazing!

I’m not going to lie to you, The Howling 2:  Your Sister is a Werewolf is not a very good movie.  Yet it contains so many WTF moments in the course of its 90 minute running time that I just can’t bear to completely dis it.  Christopher Lee standing in front of a star field and reading a bunch of werewolf mumbo jumbo?  Check!  Geriatric werewolves being ensnared by a doily that the filmmakers woefully tried to pass of as a “net”?  Yup!  Puppet shows being shown IN THEIR ENTIRETY?  You got it dude!  Midgets getting tossed out the windows?  Right on!  Rubbery looking gargoyles shoving their tails down a preacher’s throat?  Hell yeah!

But easily the best thing about The Howling 2:  Your Sister is a Werewolf (Damn, is that a great title or what?) is Sybil Danning.  Whether she’s having magic power battles with Christopher Lee (by the way, these scenes are better than anything Lee did in those Lord of the Rings movies, I’ll tell you that much), zapping a midget and making his eyeballs burst out of his head, or getting horny while watching werewolves fuck, Sybil totally rocks.  I really don’t know why the Academy passed her over at Oscar time.

Yes, if it seems at times that this review is being written by an 8 year-old whose main concern is Sybil’s breasts, then sue me.  The “legitimate” critic in me wants to cite the film for its draggy pacing, the shitty performances (save for Lee and Danning) the horrible effects, the overuse of that damn New Wave song and the general trashing of the original Joe Dante classic.  You know what though; the 8 year-old who first saw The Howling 2 on Skinamax all those years ago never saw the first Howling movie, so he didn’t know any better.  Besides, how many movies can you name off the top of your head that features Werewolf Sex Orgies and Sybil Danning showing off her tits SEVENTEEN times during the closing credits?

The 8 year-old Mitch gives The Howling 2:  Your Sister is a Werewolf ****, if only for the awesome closing credits.  The adult Mitch gives it *, and likewise commends director Philippe Mora (who also went on to direct The Howling 3) for the awesome closing credits.  That makes for a ** ½ average.

Well Lucas the Hutt has already gotten enough of my money over the past 30 years, so I thought I’d throw another $7 his way this week by checking out Star Wars:  The Clone Wars.  If you already don’t know by now, old George has a new CGI animated show coming on Cartoon Network this fall, so to whet our appetites he’s showing the pilot only in theaters in another attempt to sell more Legos. 

The story is basically Episode II ½ with Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi battling the Droid Army of the Separatist leader Count Dooku, who has kidnapped Jabba the Hutt’s son and blamed it on the Jedis.  To further complicate matters, Master Yoda saddles Ani with a precocious Youngling named Ahsoka Tano to babysit and hopefully help bring in the Hannah Montana demographic. 

I’m a Star Wars completist so it was more or less my civil duty to check this flick out.  I’d watched the traditional animated Clone Wars series on Cartoon Network and enjoyed it, so I figured I’d like this about the same.  I was wrong.  First off the CGI animation kinda irritated me.  I mean why the heck did they animate the humans in such an oddly stylized way (inspired no doubt by the old Thunderbirds TV show) and everything else (ships, creatures, landscapes, etc.) to be practically photorealistic?  It’s baffling to say the least, especially when the humans are so dammed expressionless.  If the character design was more congruent to the look of the rest of the universe, I might not have balked.  While the characters leave a lot to be desired, the CGI for everything else is pretty dang good, so I’m willing to give it a pass. 

Uneven animation aside, another problem I had with the film was that it really didn’t FEEL like a Star Wars movie.  It doesn’t start out in the traditional Star Wars manner, which is a little jarring.  (Cartoon Network is owned by Warner Brothers, so there’s no familiar 20^th Century Fox “DUM DUM!  DUM DUM!  D-D-D-DUM DUM!” fanfare.)  We do get the “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” spiel but there’s no opening crawl, just an over-enthusiastic announcer setting up the premise.  I know it’s probably only the Star Wars fanboy in me bitching; it’s just that it starts things off on the wrong foot and the movie never recovers from it.  Maybe that’s my problem; I keep referring to this as a “movie” when really it’s just a glorified television pilot.  It’ll probably play better on the small screen, but if you put your little TV pilot onto 3,000 screens nationwide, it counts as a “movie” to me and it has to be judged accordingly. 

The biggest gripe I had with the flick though was the character of Ahsoka.  This chick makes Jar Jar look like Boba Fett.  She was thoroughly annoying and seemed less like a three dimensional character and more like a ploy to get girls to buy some Legos.  Every time she called Anakin “Sky Guy”, I cringed.  (And she calls him that A LOT.)  Cringing is not something you expect to do during a Star Wars flick, particularly when you’re a rabid fan like me.  What’s worse is that she’s Anakin’s padawan, but that doesn’t make any sense because Anakin can’t have a padawan learner because he’s a padawan himself, and only Jedi Masters can have padawans!  ½ * off for sloppy screenwriting and not following along with Lucas’ established universe rules. 

So uhh… what is there to like?  Well, for starters, the action is almost non-stop.  Like the previous TV series, there are plenty scenes of Clone Troopers shooting the shit out of Droids and a handful of fairly decent Jedi battles, some featuring the female Sith apprentice Asajj Ventress (yet another gal to bring in the girl power audience) who looks like a Sinead O’Connor version of Darth Maul.  And even though many of the original talent from the prequels wouldn’t touch this thing with a ten foot lightsaber, I did get a kick out of hearing Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee voicing their characters again. 

Bottom Line:  The Clone Wars is more or less Star Wars without the humans.  Or the mythology.  Or the heart.  If the original films were missing these three vital ingredients, all that would be left would be the eye candy.  There’s oodles of that to go around in this flick, but ultimately The Force is just not with it.

The good folks at Legend Films continue to release obscure films from the Paramount Pictures archives.  They just sent me a new box of DVD’s to review so without further ado:

Serial (based on Cyra McFadden’s novel) is a black comedy about the oddball well-to-do Marin County, California residents who get easily taken in by the latest New Age trends that make their paper-thin life seem worthwhile.  The bored housewives indulge in kama sutra sex, have inane “rap sessions”, subscribe to mindless psychobabble, dancercise, participate in orgies and dabble in lesbianism while the men smoke pot, hook-up with teenage check-out girls, commit suicide, or join up with the Gay Hell’s Angels. 

Martin Mull stars as the only seemingly “normal” person in the whole town.  Throughout the course of the movie, his marriage to Tuesday Weld crumbles and repairs itself numerous times, but they finally come together for good once their daughter is kidnapped by a religious cult. 

Watching this movie, it’s easy to see why you see Mull almost exclusively in supporting roles because he just doesn’t have the screen presence necessary to carry this spastic and uneven flick.  In a film filled with so many weirdos, having your lead character be this bland is a big misstep because he just blends in with the background while all the kooks are running around.  

The supporting cast occasionally gets to shine.  Peter (The Bob Newhart Show) Bonerz makes the best impression as a coke sniffing therapist who tells his ten year-old patient to “get in touch with your childhood!”  Stacey (Halloween 3) Nelkin is also pretty great as a bosomy nympho space cadet and Sally (Back to School) Kellerman gets to show off her massive tits in one scene. 

Director Bill Persky’s extensive television background is evident because for the most part, Serial plays like a bad R rated sitcom than the scathing satire that it thinks it is.  The crucial flaw is that the flick is all over the place in terms of subject matter AND tone.  I’m sure Persky was trying to ape Altman with all the multiple storylines and characters, but the result is just an unfocused (though sporadically funny) mess.  There are a few good zingers here and there, but most of them are few and far between.  The excellent Gay Hell’s Angels vs. Religious Cult finale is pretty memorable though. 

Even with several major flaws hamstringing the picture, I still say that any movie in which Christopher Lee (With an AMERICAN accent!) plays a gay biker named Skull can’t be all that bad.  Lee also gets the best line of the movie:  “My men are not pansies.  We have terrorized whole communities!  We are tough dudes!”

Serial will be released July 1^st for the first time ever on DVD, but you can get your copy now by going to The Legend Films website at www.legendfilms.net. 

To help update the vampire mythos (not to mention save on the budget), Hammer Studios set this seventh entry in the Dracula series in (then) modern Swinging London.  The results are mixed, but Dracula A.D. 1972 does have it’s moments. 

In the 19^th century, Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) impales Dracula (Christopher Lee) with a wagon wheel.  A hundred years later, a bunch of stupid hippies (led by a fey vampire named Johnny Alucard) revive the Count during a black mass.  To summon Dracula, Alucard tosses a goblet full of blood onto Caroline (Maniac) Munro’s neck, which is the vampire equivalent of tying a pork chop around your neck so your dog will play with you.  Once resurrected, Dracula sets out to be an even bigger pain in the neck, but he’s predictably foiled by Van Helsing’s grandson (also Cushing) who gives him a good old fashioned stake through the heart.   

While it’s good to have Cushing back in the Van Helsing role after a four film absence, sadly he’s thoroughly wasted and only appears in a few scenes.  Speaking of excellent actors with little to no screen time, Lee also does little more than stand around for his limited role and quickly becomes a supporting character in his own movie by letting all the fucking hippies take center stage.  

While the filmmakers may have thought that setting the film in present day might have had it’s advantages, what they didn’t figure is that it would also hopelessly date the flick to no end.  So that means if you like your vampire movies filled to the brim with hippies, free love, go-go dancing, and the horrid music of “Stoneground”, then Dracula A.D. 1972 will knock your socks off.  Me, I personally hate hippies so the first half of the movie was pretty irritating, but once Dracula showed up and started chowing down of the flower children, things perked up a little bit.  The Wa-Wa guitar music is a plus, as is some decent blood and gore, but for the most part, this is just a mediocre entry in the series.  The next installment of the franchise, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, was also set in the present day, but upped the sex and gore quotient considerably.

Johnny Alucard gets the best line of the movie while conducting the black mass:  “By the 6,000 terrors of Hell, I baptize thee!” 

AKA:  Dracula Today.

A troupe of traveling performers are invited to put on a show for the mysterious Count Drago (Christopher Lee) at his remote castle.  Drago gets his kicks by stuffing animals and soon sets his sights on stuffing his visitors and adding them to his collection of taxidermed critters.  The actors start dropping like flies and it’s up to the pretty ingénue of the group to put a stop to the Count’s mischief. 

Castle of the Living Dead has a potentially interesting idea but is hamstrung by a muddled approach and sluggish pacing.  Although the film is slow going at times, director Luciano Ricci is still able to build a modicum of atmosphere, especially during the scenes inside the titular castle.  While the flick is drawn out a little TOO much and features more than it’s fair share of padding, Castle of the Living Dead remains worth a look for the performances alone. 

Lee is excellent as always and gives a mannered performance that balances charm and menace expertly.  Sporting a gauntly figure and a snappy goatee, Lee dominates every scene he’s in and is a real treat to watch.  It’s also fun spotting a young Donald Sutherland in a dual role as both a constable and an old witch.  Seeing his familiar features covered in make-up is a hoot and he was obviously having a blast. 

On the whole, the flick isn’t nearly as scary as a trip to Grandma’s but there is one scene that gives new meaning to the phrase “Dwarf Tossing” that has to be seen to be believed. 

Co-scripter Michael Reeves also did some uncredited directing and would later go on to helm the classic The Conqueror Worm shortly before his untimely death.   

Sutherland gets the best line of the movie when he advises Lee to “Send those gypsies packing!”

AKA:  Crypt of Horror.

Hammer’s Dracula series was always hit and miss, but you could always count on them for a sinister performance by Christopher Lee.  He’s pretty great in this, his fifth essaying of the role, but he is done a great disservice by the wildly uneven script.   

Case in point:  In the opening scene of the film, a bat pukes on Dracula’s cape, which instantly brings him back to life. 

Two minutes in and I’m already having problems with this movie’s logic.  Definitely not a good sign. 

Anyway, Dracula isn’t alive for more than ten seconds when a group of angry villagers are knocking down his door trying to burn his castle down.  Drac ingeniously sends out his trained army of killer rubber bats to chow down on all the womenfolk while the men are out storming the castle, so it’s all good though.

Meanwhile, a hapless dude gets comically accused of rape and has to seek refuge in Dracula’s crib.  Dracula offers him a place to crash, but you can probably guess what the Count has in mind for the poor bastard.  When his brother and his fiancée show up looking for him, Drac sets out to put the bite on them too.  In the ridiculously stupid ending, Dracula gets struck by lightning (LIGHTNING!) and gets turned into a walking Molotov cocktail. 

The movie earns points for at least trying to be true in some respects to Bram Stoker’s original novel (no, he didn’t write the part with the puking bat) but too much of this mess is just plain silly and those rubbery looking bats are hard to take seriously.  In addition to the unintentional laughs, the filmmakers sprinkled in liberal doses of bedroom humor as well, which only adds to the film’s identity crisis.  Things also get extremely bogged down after the romantic lead gets Janet Leighed halfway into the film. 

On the plus side, the flick features a few shocking, albeit brief gore scenes (one woman has her eyeball mauled out by one of the voracious rubber bats) and some tantalizing glimpses of nudity.  The film also contains some genuinely ghoulish moments too, like when Dracula snaps and stabs his bride to death with a dagger for cheating on him, but it’s just a shame that director Roy Ward (Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde) Baker couldn’t have paced this thing a little better.      

Scars of Dracula may be one of the weakest of the Hammer Dracula films but if you have a rubber bat fetish, this’ll definitely knock your socks off. 

Christopher Lee returns for his third turn as Dracula in director Freddie (The Evil of Frankenstein) Francis’ handsomely mounted but hopelessly empty vampire flick.

 
This time, old Drac gets resurrected when a lamebrained priest accidentally awakens him from his slumber.  (The circumstances are just too preposterous to go into.)  Dracula learns that another priest has barred his sanctuary with a golden cross, which drives the Count positively bugshit and he sets out for revenge.

While I have always been partial to Hammer’s Frankenstein movies, I have to say that as far as vampires go; you can’t get any more badass than Christopher Lee.  They actually gave him some lines in this one and while he’s quite menacing and authoritative in the lead, the rest of the movie is a turd.  

The first and last ten minutes of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave works like gangbusters, but everything else in between is a bore.  The biggest problem is that Lee is absent for too much of the movie.  When he’s not on screen, the audience has to suffer through a bunch of stuffy Brits who parade around spouting endlessly about God knows what.  At times, the film plays more like an episode of Masterpiece Theater than a down and dirty Dracula picture and the gratuitous innocuous romantic subplot really grates on the nerves too.

Also, the flick is rife with continuity errors.  At one point, Dracula casts a reflection in a stream of water and we all know good and well that vampires don’t cast a reflection.   In another scene, Dracula is clearly seen walking about in the daytime!  That’s inexcusable.  Didn’t anybody know anything about vampire lore before they sat down to write this mess?

Although the film is maddeningly slow for most of the running time, it does have it’s merits.  In addition to Lee’s aforementioned performance, the flick has a few gory stakings, including an impressive scene where Dracula lands on a golden cross and features a couple of bosomy women getting bloody hickies from the good Count.  The flick also has a great opening scene where a dead girl is found hanging upside down in a church bell, but unfortunately, nothing else comes close to matching it.

Lee returned in the next Hammer Dracula installment, Taste the Blood of Dracula, the next year. 

Amicus, the main competitor to Hammer Studios for British horror films in the 60’s made a spate of horror anthologies (mostly comprised of three short stories each) that were more often than not completely enjoyable.  With The Skull, they tried something a little different by doing away with their regular formula and ventured into the realm of feature length horror.  To ensure success, they even hired such Hammer vets as Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Michael Gough to star, and even tapped Freddie (The Evil of Frankenstein) Francis to direct.  While it’s not quite up to par with some of Amicus’ other offerings, The Skull is nevertheless a breezy horror outing with a capable cast and a few memorable moments.    

Cushing plays a collector of occult relics who purchases the skull of Marquis de Sade from a shady charlatan.  Little does he know that the previous owners of the skull all ended up with horrible fates.  You see, the Marquis’ spirit still inhabits the skull and drives it’s owners to murder and eventually kill themselves.  Pretty soon Cushing starts hallucinating like a hopped up hippie and imagines himself playing Russian Roulette in an empty courtroom, being trapped in a room where the walls close in around him, and (of course) sees the skull floating around chasing him.  He then goes insane and goes on a killing spree.

Francis builds in a modicum of atmosphere to the proceedings, like the pre-title sequence in the graveyard and the scenes where the skull flies around menacing Cushing.  The shots where the skull is superimposed over the action are quite effective and the final portion of the film (which is done completely without the benefit of dialogue) is also well done.

The biggest stumbling block is that the script (based on a short story by Robert Bloch) is way too thin to sustain a feature length movie.   On top of that, The Skull suffers from a leisurely pace and has far too many lulls in the action for it to be entirely rewarding.  If Amicus had shortened this down to about a half an hour and placed it in one of their numerous anthology movies, it could’ve made for a memorable segment.    

In my book though, any movie starring both Cushing and Lee (even films in which they only share limited screen time like this one) is automatically worth watching.  Both of them always deliver top notch performances, even if the films themselves come up a bit short.  Fans of both Cushing and Lee will no doubt enjoy their work here, but they’ll ultimately wish the script had a bit more meat to it.  

The Skull will be released June 3^rd by the good folks at Legend Films who are now releasing several titles from the Paramount Pictures library on DVD for the first time.  For a complete listing of all their upcoming releases visit www.legendfilms.net today.