Cry Havoc (2019)

Cry Havoc is the closest we’ll ever get to see the Charles Bronson vs. Leatherface movie that Cannon could in theory have made circa 1987 when they had both the rights to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise and Bronson as their action movie main man. Golan-Globus might have let such an opportunity pass them by, but in 2020 you can see Hungarian Charles Bronson lookalike Robert ‘Bronzi’ Kovacs trade blows with a masked serial killer in Cry Havoc. It’s a film that brings out the two big guns of Rene Perez’s directing career, this being both the fourth in his ‘Playing with Dolls’ horror series and a vehicle for his Death Kiss star Bronzi.

Wedding two of the strongest aspects of his career, means that Perez here has to juggle the responsibility of playing to the Death Kiss crowd, who’ve shown up to see a 1970s look Charles Bronson blowing away the bad guys in a 21st century movie, as well as deliver the horror movie goods with a fourth helping of his ‘slasher movie fused with the Most Dangerous Game’ series. Its quite a big ask to satisfy both these camps, but somehow Perez has done it again... put briefly and bluntly Cry Havoc is a fuckin’ doozy that finds Perez firing on all cylinders.

Cry Havoc catches up with the series’ villain, a man known only as The Voyeur (Richard Tyson) as he continues to use his vast wealth in the pursuit of the monstrous. Despite now being hunted by the FBI, The Voyeur still pursues his obsession for luring fame seeking starlets to his isolated compound and recording their deaths on CCTV. Expecting to star in a reality TV show, his victims instead find themselves being hunted down by Havoc (J.D. Angstadt), a hulking, barbwire clad mass murderer who The Voyeur has sprung from jail. Threatening to topple this macabre house of cards are two outside influences. One is Ellen Weaver (Emily Sweet) an ambitious local TV reporter who sees tracking down The Voyeur and scoring an interview with him as her ticket to the big time. The other is a rogue police detective, played by Bronzi, on the trail of his estranged daughter, who went missing after ‘auditioning’ for The Voyeur. True to the Bronson/Paul Kersey persona, Detective Bronzi doesn’t mind bending the rules to rescue his daughter, or unleashing a hail of bullets in the direction of the bikers and mercenaries who’ve been hired to guard The Voyeur’s compound.

Four star vehicles in and the spectacle of ‘Bronzi’ has lost none of its head turning appeal, it’s as if all the nostalgia and goodwill for the Cannon era movies has somehow willed Charles Bronson back into existence. While comparisons have been made between the Perez/Bronzi films and the ‘Bruceploitation’ kung-fu films of the 1970s featuring Bruce Lee lookalikes, you never truly bought into Bruce Le and Bruce Li really being Bruce Lee, certainly not to the uncanny degree that Bronzi evokes Bronson. The only accurate comparison i can think of would be with another Robert... Robert Sacchi, the so-called ‘Man with Bogart’s Face’ who made a career out of his resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. Whereas with the Bruce Lee clones your imagination had to do the heavy lifting when it came to kidding yourself that they were Bruce Lee incarnate, with Bronzi and Sacchi the difficult part is remembering that they are just lookalikes. It’s far, far easier to get lost in the illusion, Sacchi and Bronzi both having this ability to seemingly bring these Hollywood icons back to life in out of time, out of place contexts. There’s no way you should be able to buy into the idea of Humphrey Bogart being alive and solving murders in a 1970s giallo, but that’s what Sacchi managed to achieve when he played the lead in 1972’s The Bogeyman and the French Murders. Likewise Bronzi manages to convince you he IS Bronson here, despite being parachuted into an extreme 21st century horror film franchise.



The head-trips that the Perez/Bronzi films play on the unsuspecting are entertaining in itself. Overhearing a puzzled ASDA customer questioning what an ‘old’ film like Death Kiss was doing among the new DVD releases, since “he’s been dead years” was priceless, but the confusion appears to work both ways. A recent viewing of The White Buffalo (1977) prompted a friend to ask “is that the real Charles Bronson or the Hungarian one?” Not even hearing Bronzi’s real speaking voice in the recent ‘Once Upon a Time in Deadwood’ failed to shatter the illusion, the resemblance is such that you talk yourself into believing that ‘Bronson is playing a Hungarian character in this one’.

Previously seen as the goody-two shoes girlfriend in Perez’s The Dragon Unleashed, Emily Sweet is given the chance to play a far more morally ambiguous character this time round. There are echoes of Stretch from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Barbara Crampton’s character in From Beyond about Sweet’s character Ellen Weaver, who lets her ambition override common sense. Her quest for a one to one with The Voyeur dictates Weaver has to hand over her mobile devices to The Voyeur’s second in command Mrs Wallace, and allows herself to be blindfolded and lead to The Voyeur’s lair. If that wasn’t enough she also has to get dolled up in a tacky, light up bridal dress for his amusement.

Cry Havoc offers up a particularity bone-chilling incarnation of The Voyeur and a terrific Richard Tyson performance to bring it to life. No longer the handsome, thrill seeking bachelor seen at the series’ outset, The Voyeur of Cry Havoc is a bearded hermit of a man, resembling Jim Morrison towards the end. There is an amusing personality clash between the naive and cheery Ellen (“to law enforcement agencies and reporters you’re Elvis”) and the abyss gazing nihilism of The Voyeur. While he goes to his philosophical dark place “truth is realising that if god did exist he would be ashamed of us for being a bunch of self-serving apes that only care about acuminating wealth” she futzes about with her hair and struggles with the straps of the ridiculous bridal dress she’s been forced to wear. It’s not long before Weaver commits a journalistic faux pas, managing to offend The Voyeur by making reference to snuff films. “I refuse to call my work something as loathsome as snuff films” complains The Voyeur “they were the most honest expression of humanity that I’ve ever seen”.

In keeping with his sadistic nature, The Voyeur wastes no time in turning the tables on her, tapping into Ellen’s estranged father issues and metaphorically twisting the knife. There is the unnerving realisation that as a single woman without a father figure in her life, Ellen perfectly matches the profile of his regular victims, and that she too has gotten caught up in his trap.
The ghosts of 1980s slasher movies and Charles Bronson vehicles might haunt Cry Havoc, but this tête-à-tête between Ellen and The Voyeur does also provide some relevant 21st century commentary on the rich’s increasingly sociopathic attitude to the poor, society’s blind worship of celebrity and reality TV, and the demeaning hoops that young, career minded women are expected to jump through in order to achieve success. As Mrs Wallace tells Ellen “if you want to interview the extremely wealthy, you’re gonna have to get used to being toyed with”.

 

Full of dreams of dollar signs, stardom and an anchor job at CNN, Ellen Weaver initially comes across as the epitome of the vacuous, fame seeking culture which the series has cast a critical light on in the past, most notably in the reality TV show themed Playing With Dolls: Bloodlust. A likeable performance by the up and coming Emily Sweet (soon to be seen in the Castle Freak reboot) does however gradually convince you that Ellen Weaver is a cause worth investing in. Weaver earning her Playing with Dolls spurs by surviving a mauling by Havoc, proving to be a surprisingly formidable opponent by killing off a major character with an axe and becoming a sidekick to Bronzi. What with Weaver’s father issues, and his guilt over being an absent parent, the pair even develop a surrogate father-daughter relationship, which makes the briefness of this union all the more tragic. In a series that has always been big on female characters, Sweet’s performance holds its own against previous series headliners Natasha Blasick, Karin Brauns and Nicole Stark.

Cry Havoc flies off the scale when it comes to the gore score. Not only do we have Bronzi’s gun battles with the voyeur’s goons threatening to turn the woodlands setting into blood squib central, but there’s also Havoc living up to his name. Havoc’s parade of carnage this time around includes depriving one unfortunate henchman of his jaw, splitting open heads, drilling a hole directly into someone’s jugular vein, squishing heads with a mallet, pulling out entrails and near enough cutting one character in two. Flashbacks to the previous movies cunningly provides a way of showcasing material that has frequently been censored from them. The entrail pulling from the first Playing With Dolls film, the toe severing from Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust and the chainsaw to the groin scene from Playing with Dolls: Havoc, all presented intacto here, serve as a reminder that this series has never been a slouch when it comes to ultra-violence. These flashbacks –which take place during Ellen’s Q and A session with The Voyeur- also conveniently act as a way of explaining the events of the first three movies, thus giving Cry Havoc legs as a standalone movie. It’s certainly true that you don’t need to have seen the first three Playing with Dolls films in order to watch Cry Havoc, although it’s hard to believe any horror fan wouldn’t want to check out those earlier entries based on the blood drenched morsels from them that are presented here. Cry Havoc is a riotously gory movie that holds nothing back, and more than earns the status of what the late Chas Balun used to call a “chunkblower”.



By the time of the 4th instalment most horror franchises are let’s face it, usually in a less than healthy shape. Phantasm IV: Oblivion, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Hellraiser: Bloodline, House IV: The Repossession...need I go on. Plots have been recycled too often, characters have become too familiar to be frightening, attempts to bring something new to the table –by delving too deeply into character’s backgrounds- only succeeds in demystifying them. Cry Havoc though does manage to dodge all of these bullets. True, we do learn a bit more about The Voyeur and Havoc here, how The Voyeur’s obsession with Havoc first began, and how The Voyeur came to have a masked serial killer for a pet. However it is a reasonably measured amount of back-story that gets the balance perfectly right when it comes to feeding your curiosity about The Voyeur and Havoc, without revelling too much about them.
Four movies in and Havoc still registers as both a force of brute strength and the stuff of nightmares....particularly if you don’t like scarecrows. I know that technically the character isn’t a scarecrow...but with that sack like mask, gloves and several layers of filthy clothing...Havoc may well be the scariest horror movie scarecrow, who isn’t actually a scarecrow. It’s easy to get caught up in The Voyeur’s obsession over just what is going on underneath that mask. It still remains a mystery whether the toying about Havoc does with his female victims should be chalked up as misguided romantic gestures or just stone cold perversity. Either way Havoc’s attempts to endear himself to the heroine of Playing with Dolls: Havoc, by force-feeding her an eyeball, or here making Ellen down a fresh from the jugular glass of blood...are clearly the actions of a man who has allot to learn when it comes to wooing members of the opposite sex.



Action movie set pieces aren’t completely alien to the Playing with Dolls series, even the first film had its gun battles and fist fights, but the decision to port over Bronzi and Death Kiss elements into the series has undoubtedly brought an extra oomph to the proceedings. Each Bronzi movie that Perez makes seems to be referencing a particular period of Bronson’s career. Bronzi in Death Kiss recalls the businessman look of Paul Kersey in the first Death Wish film, with a costume change into the pseudo vagrant, beanie hat wearing Bronson of Death Wish 2 for Death Kiss’ final act. Once Upon a Time in Deadwood channels mid-1970s Bronson westerns like Breakheart Pass and From Noon Till Three, with a bit of Chato’s Land native American cosplaying thrown in for good measure. Here the cool, leather jacket wearing Bronzi suggests Bronson circa The Mechanic, while scenes of Bronzi stripping down to his vest and taking on Havoc with just his fists pays tribute to the bare knuckle fighting Bronson of 1975’s Hard Times/The Streetfighter.
Havoc appears equally furious over being challenged on his own turf and ecstatic to be facing a worthy opponent as the pair slug it out till the point of exhaustion. Every bone crushing blow registers and you can practically taste the blood, sweat and burnt woodlands as the actors smash into the ash covered ground. The film having been shot amidst the aftermath of the 2018 Carr fire which reduced large sections of Perez’s usual Shasta County filming locations to an eerie graveyard of dead trees, mounds of ash and burnt out vehicles. By the end of this battle of King Kong Vs Godzilla sized proportions, it difficult to know what is in worse condition, the actors or the location.

Like its Bronzi Vs. Havoc match, this is one for the history books, relentlessly entertaining, Cry Havoc is proof positive that the American grindhouse movie is alive and well and living off the grid in Shasta County.

Ice Queen (2005)

Nostalgic for the days of ski resort themed sex comedies like Hot Dog: The Movie (1984) and Ski School (1991) but think that what that genre needed to kick it into the 21st century was a snarling she beast? Then you –dear Sir or Madam- are the target audience for 2005’s Ice Queen.

Before the film shows off its 1980s teen sex comedy influences though, Ice Queen blows its load with a high octane opening that sees grumpy mercenary Mac (Neil Benedict) masterminding the ambush of a military convoy. Utilising a gunship helicopter, Mac easily lays waste to the convoy, causing much vehicular destruction in the pursuit of his grand prize. The top secret merchandise that the convoy was transporting being a prehistoric cave woman, recently discovered in ice and kept alive in a cryogenically frozen state by the US government. Much of Ice Queen’s budget must surely have gotten sucked up by this opening scene, which comes close to being worthy of a big budget action movie, since the rest of the movie is a more humble, cash strapped affair in comparison.

Over at Snowshed lodge ski resort, the staff and the holidaymakers celebrate the end of the skiing season by holding a Wet T-Shirt competition. Rambunctiously entering into the spirit of things, our dim-witted horndog hero Johnny (Harmon Walsh) tries to talk Elaine (Jennifer Hill), the girl with the biggest boobs in the resort, into entering the competition. Elaine however is a woman whose contradictions are almost as large as her breast implants. “Wet T-Shirt competitions are totally demeaning...and I’m kinda shy” Elaine tells Johnny while flirting with a passing reveller “but where else can you make $500 that fast”.

After waking up hung-over in Elaine’s bedroom the next morning Johnny is horrified to discover that not only has he no memory of the night before, but he also appears to have been talked into ‘loaning’ Elaine the money he was meant to have used to pay his girlfriend’s rent. Johnny’s latest sexual conquest might make him a hero to his bozo buddies Jesse and Devlin, but now there is a mad rush to find the money to pay his girlfriend’s rent and cover up his cheating. Johnny’s nemesis is another character right out of the 1980s teen sex comedy scrapbook. Audrey (Tara Walden) is Johnny’s ball busting superior at the resort, who is hell-bent on ruining straight guys’ fun and likes to emasculate Johnny and his homies by referring to them as ‘girls’. All the men in this film hate Audrey cause y’know she is a woman in a higher position of power than them...and a lesbian. Audrey is especially set on getting Johnny the sack from the ski resort after she overheard him bad mouthing her. “I can’t just fire him for calling me a bulldyke” frets Audrey. “It was big bulldyke” sniggers one of Johnny’s homies.

Fortunately Johnny’s boss, comedy fat guy Ed (John Romeo) is a big hearted pushover who is happy to loan Johnny the money to cover up Johnny’s infidelity, despite the fact that Ed is also the uncle of Johnny’s girlfriend Tori !!! Ed also proves his homie allegiance by pranking bossy boots Audrey, offering her some stale biscuits to eat after she comes looking for Johnny in the Ski Resort’s canteen. Ice Queen is an ardent defender of a dude’s right to ogle wet t-shirt competitions, cheat on their girlfriends, lose their girlfriend’s rent money, give lesbians food poisoning and cause avalanches. Well, in fairness to Johnny it is his job to cause small scale avalanches. Johnny and his friends’ role at the resort being to let off small, controlled explosions on the mountains in order to prevent a large scale avalanche. Trouble is, they are as terrible at this job as they are everything else. Johnny’s pals being so hung-up on whether or not he did it with Elaine, that they let a charge off too early. Inadvertently burying Johnny- who’d been skiing back to the resort- under a small scale avalanche. As if Johnny’s day couldn’t get any worse, the Ice Queen finally commeth. Now being transported by plane, the Cave woman/Ice Queen wakes up in a bad mood, rips off the hand of the pilot then puts her arm through him, causing the plane to crash into the mountains. This of course triggers a second, more severe avalanche that buries the resort under snow, leaving Johnny, his pals, girlfriend Tori, Ed, Audrey and Elaine at the mercy of the Ice Queen.



Having transformed from an attractive woman into a grotesque monster mid-flight, the Ice Queen herself appears to be the embodiment of someone’s lifelong hatred of women, what with her bad teeth, bad hair, terrible table manners, bloodshot eyes and violent demeanour. She is played by a British actress/model with the kind of double-barrel surname that demands you say it with a posh accent. Ms. Ami Veevers-Chorlton has graced the pages of FHM and Elle, and her biggest brush with acting fame was a role in the Bond movie ‘Die Another Day’. So, naturally Ice Queen shows the attractive Veevers-Chorlton ‘as is’ for about five seconds, before burying her under five hours worth of prostatic make-up designed to make her look as ugly as possible. While giving her no dialogue whatsoever unless you count 90 or so minutes of yelling “ggggrrrrrr” and “aaaaarrrrrgggghhhh”. 

Producer Peter Beckwith clearly fancied himself as a cut-price Irwin Allen of the DVD era. His back catalogue mostly consisting of the likes of Landslide (2005), Killer Flood: The Day the Dam Broke (2003), Frozen Impact (2003) and Lightening: Fire from the Sky (2001). Films about avalanches seem to be a particular Beckwith forte, evidenced by this, Icebreaker (2000), Icebreaker 2 (2000) and Trapped: Buried Alive (2002). All pointing to Beckwith either being a man with a paranoia about avalanches, or a man who knew how to spread about the stock footage he had of real life avalanches. 

The combo of stock and original footage in Ice Queen’s two avalanche sequences impresses. The bad, mid-2000s CGI and shots of toy cars buried in snow...maybe less so. It does further fuel the suspicion that most of the budget went on that gun-ship helicopter when you see the toy car collection being brought out to simulate the avalanche’s aftermath. Come to think about it, just why are there so many cars on the Ski Resort’s car park when all the holidaymakers are meant to have left by this point. Did they all decide to leave their cars at the resort and just walk home instead, all the way from a Ski Resort in the mountains!!!



Overall Ice Queen suggests the work of someone who’d gotten out of the wrong side of the bed that morning, and decided to get their jollies by rattling politically correct cages. “There are species out there that can change gender or eat their own young” explains do-gooder boffin Dr Goddard (Daniel Kuhn), to which grumpy Mac quips back “Yeah...they’re called liberals”. True, flipping the bird at political correctness is in keeping with the film’s 1980s sex comedy lineage, but Ice Queen presses down so hard on that pedal that it threatens to sour the good time, smut comedy vibes this film is trying to channel.

Insults like ‘bulldyke’ and ‘snowflake’ are batted around, but Ice Queen’s one true sweetheart is ‘bitch’, used so often it’s difficult to believe some behind the scenes misogynist wasn’t getting a charge out of it. Just about every character in the film gets one, sometimes two, opportunities to call the Ice Queen a bitch. Variations used include “one cold bitch”, “one drunk bitch”, “ice bitch”, “blue wriggly bitch”, “some screaming utter bitch thing”, “crazy bitch”, “it’s showtime in bitch town” and perhaps most cutting of all for a woman “bad fashion bitch”. The latter insult refers to the Ice Queen’s apparel, a spandex costume that the US government had squeezed her into after thawing her out, which resembles a joke-shop version of a H.R. Giger suit. Hell hath no fury like a bitch in spandex.



To give credit where its due, parts of Ice Queen are legitimately funny, such as Elaine’s defence of her character “I’m not a hooker...I’m in law school” or the gang discovering the Ice Queen’s Achilles heel is heat when they accidentally immobilize her by turning on the hand drier in the ladies’ toilet. Not forgetting Audrey’s hilariously insensitive way of breaking it to the others that one of their number has been disembowelled by the Ice Queen “someone got hold of your friend and turned him into a frozen food display”.

Nor can you claim that Ice Queen isn’t involving, especially when you find yourself pondering over questions that the film itself can’t be bothered answering. Do liberals really eat their newborn young? Did Johnny really give Elaine his girlfriend’s rent money or did she just steal it? And did Elaine actually win the Wet T-Shirt competition? We hear the reasons why she needed to enter the competition; she wants to put herself through law-school. We natch’ get to see her heroically overcoming her ‘shyness’ and pouring a jug of water over herself, and of course the competition itself, but never discover if those boobs helped put her through law school.



At a time when it should be fully getting its horror movie groove on, Ice Queen’s script (written by three people, which might explain its multiple personality issues) gets preoccupied with absolving Johnny and Elaine of guilt and redeeming the pair in our eyes. Ya’see ....everything bad that Johnny and Elaine did at the start of the film was in fact the fault of Johnny’s friend Devlin, an utterly secondary character we barely meet in the movie. According to Elaine, Devlin discovered she was in dire financial states and offered her $5000 to have sex with Johnny. Now, judging by what we do see of Devlin, he looks like he barely has $5000 to his name, let alone to giveaway. Since he is also a sexually desperate looking, wannabe horndog, wouldn’t you think he’d use that $5000 to coerce Elaine into having sex with himself, rather than his more good looking and successful friend? Who knows what went on in Devlin’s head -he’s long dead by the time these revelations come out- but it sure must have been dark and hollow in there.

Determined to prove to Tori that she isn’t a slut, Elaine tells Tori that she wasn’t planning on going ahead with sleeping with Johnny for money if he turned out to be unattractive, but “he’s pretty buff”. Tori, therefore, should forgive Johnny and take him back, because a man who other women want to have sex with for money is always worth keeping hold of. Good god, the twisted morality of Ice Queen is something to behold.

There is actually some confusion over whether Elaine and Johnny really did have sex at all. Sure, we do see them having sex in a hot tub early on in the film, yet both later sincerely swear to Tori that nothing went on between them. So, did the filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it by both showing Elaine’s boobs during that hot tub sex scene then later redacting this ever happened in order to show these two characters in a more positive light?



It’s far easier to have sympathy with the Ice Queen herself, a misunderstood monster if ever there was one. Everyone has such resentment and hostility towards her as they bombard her with ‘bitch’ insults and put downs over her looks. Mac starting the chauvinistic ball rolling by suggesting that rather than bringing her out of her cryogenic state under ethical conditions “I’d wake her up quick and make her do a shimmy dance”. Sure the Ice Queen does kill people, might not be the greatest of conversationalist, and her fashion sense is a little rooted in the 1980s, but c’mon...she is kinda cute. Especially when she starts to sexually come on to Johnny... you can still tell there is an attractive model with a double-barrelled name hidden away under five hours worth of prosthetic muck.

Rarely will you find yourself getting behind a villainess as much as you do in Ice Queen. Rarely will you find yourself wishing violent death on people as much as the sorry bunch of asshats this film dares call characters...even if deep down you know the full extent of your bloodlust will never be satisfied. Yep, sorry to say some of them do make it to the end credits unscathed. The Ice Queen’s infatuation with Johnny getting the better of her. Resulting in a preposterous gender reversal on the climax of Ridley Scott’s Alien that sees Johnny taking on the Ice Queen while distractingly stripped down to his underwear “what this chick needs is a Wet-Me competition”.

Ice Queen is a cheap cocktail of disaster movie, creature feature, 1980s sex comedy throwback and aggressive, liberal baiting. However if you were that girl in high school who had bad teeth, bad hair, could never get a date, got called a ‘bitch’ for no good reason, and whose dirt poor parents sent you out every Halloween in a costume that they’d thrown together from leftover spandex and plastic tubing, you now have a horror icon you can relate to on a personal level in the Ice Queen. Worship this bitch.

Flesh Eater (1988)

Flesh Eater has become something of my go-to dumb horror movie to revisit over the Halloween season. It first entered into the lives of the British public back in 1993, when it was known as ‘Zombie Nosh’. Prior to that this was a film you’d occasionally see mentioned in American magazines like Fangoria and Gorezone, but appeared too gory and too obscure to warrant a UK release…that was until Vipco came along. By 1993 Vipco were pretty indiscriminate when it came to what they were putting out. At the same time people were learning the hard way that not every Vipco video release was going to be another Zombie Flesh Eaters, Shogun Assassin or The Deadly Spawn. Although the company had come back strongly in the early 1990s with titles like those, only a couple of years down the line they were scraping the bottom of the barrel with borderline unreleasable movies like Brain Fix and Flesh Eating Mothers, or bores like Death of a Nun and The House Where Death Lives. So, by this time Vipco releases were best approached with a degree of caution, and the company was beginning to acquire the nickname ‘Shitco’. I do remember that Zombie Nosh came out the same time as Vipco’s release of Night of the Bloody Apes. Both made it to the shelves of HMV the same week, and like a fool I picked Zombie Nosh over buying Night of the Bloody Apes instead. A costly decision since that Vipco release of Night of the Bloody Apes instantly became a collector’s item, due to the fact that it was accidentally released uncut and had to be withdrawn from sale. So sadly when I came back for it the next week, Vipco’s Night of the Bloody Apes VHS was gone from the shelves, never to be seen again. For further fear of kicking myself, I’m not even going to try and look up how much that Night of the Bloody Apes tape fetches these days, but I’m damn sure it’s more than their release of Zombie Nosh, destined to become the unwanted, unloved deadwood of the VHS era.

Only Vipco would have been interested in putting out a film like this in the early 1990s, and they’d certainly be the only company interested in releasing it as Zombie Nosh. A re-titling, apparently in keeping with Vipco boss Mike Lee’s puerile sense of humour. This being the man who insisted on the farting sound effects that accompany the ‘Muck Men’ in his 1986 production ‘Spookies’. By all accounts the tone can always be relied upon to be lowered when Mike Lee is around.



This is a film that floated around under a number of titles, it was initially known as Revenge of the Living Zombies, then Zombie Nosh, before finally settling on Flesh Eater (onscreen title Flesh Eater: Revenge of the Living Dead) which now tends to be regarded as the official title. Whatever you call it, this was the magnum opus of actor/director/producer/cameraman Bill Hinzman (1936-2012), whose 15 minutes of fame rested on his appearance as the graveyard ghoul in the opening of the 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead. Hinzman was one of a group of people –including John Russo and Russell Streiner- who spent the rest of their careers attempting to monetize their connection to Night of the Living Dead. Their output inadvertently putting forward a strong case that George Romero was the real talent on that film.

Famously, no one involved in Night of the Living Dead ever made a great deal of money out of the film, due to it accidentally being released without a copyright notice, immediately placing it in the public domain. Meaning anyone can release the film, air it on television, make bad remakes of it, or colorize it with crayons. In the UK, I don’t think the public domain status of Night of the Living Dead really became well known till the DVD era. All the British video releases of NOTLD, the pre-cert one on Intervision, the colorized version that Palace put out in the 1980s, and the restored, b/w version that Tartan released in the 1990s, all had an air of above board legitimacy to them. Its only when DVD came along that its public domain status was exploited to the max, resulting in the situation we have today, where if all the UK DVD releases of Night of the Living Dead were lined up together they’d probably stretch from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. Even now disgraced tabloids got in on the act, when the News of the World gave out their own DVD release of the film free with the paper. Britain’s nadir when it came to ripping off Night of the Living Dead though seems to be the made at a Butlin’s Holiday Camp, shot in 3-D remake of NOTLD starring Gemma Atkinson as Barbara. This has been sitting on the shelf since 2013, although if you’ve ever wanted to see ‘Buuuurrbuuura’ depicted with a strong Bury accent, a two minute trailer for ‘Night of the Living 3D Dead’ lies in wait for you on YouTube. I’m sure we can all agree that what was sorely lacking in the original Night of the Living Dead was a fetish for Gemma Atkinson’s feet and a stuffed 3D squirrel.



What with everyone and their barber dragging the name of Night of the Living Dead through the mud, why shouldn’t the people who were actually involved in NOTLD also get in on the act. Flesh Eater then was Bill Hinzman’s attempt to make money off that film, having been cruelly deprived of actual royalties. Flesh Eater is basically a bad 1980s cover version of NOTLD, (sort of) performed by the original artist, but with all of the intelligent lyrics jettisoned in favour of gore and female nudity. Flesh Eater grew out of a Pittsburgh Sci-Fi convention where Hinzman began to get recognized, alerting him to the fact that he and his NOTLD character had an audience. Despite Hinzman’s plan to bring back his NOTLD character being met with a letter of attorney from George Romero, Hinzman pressed ahead with his attempt to turn his NOTLD graveyard ghoul into a horror icon in the era of Freddy and Jason. Flesh Eater is pretty blatant when it comes to Hinzman reviving his NOTLD character, same clothes, same make-up, with only a few alterations presumably to appease George Romero’s lawyer. Hinzman’s zombie is now super-strong, with the ability to throw men half his age around rooms. Hinzman’s zombie hoards are also prone to making ‘arrrrr’ and ‘ayyyyyeee’ noises, making them sound more like pirates than the living dead. Hinzman’s zombies always seem to be on the verge of saying ‘pieces of eight on a dead man’s chest’. Although NOTLD co-writer John Russo wasn’t involved with this film (in fact Hinzman’s intension to make the film was also meant with a letter of attorney from Russo) Flesh Eater subscribes to a back-story that Russo is forever trying to push in his own NOTLD related ventures. That of NOTLD’s zombie outbreak being the result of a Satanic cult whose black magic is responsible for bring the dead back to life. A path that puts these efforts at odds with Romero’s post NOTLD films which increasingly point to medical or scientific explanations. Not for a moment do you believe that devil worship or the supernatural play any part in the world of Dawn…Day…Land…Diary or Survival of the Dead.



Favouring the Russo, rather than Romero, take on the NOTLD mythology, Flesh Eater finds Hinzman’s zombie being accidentally released from his coffin by a farmer. Quite how he came to be in a pad-locked coffin after the events of NOTLD, is left to the imagination, cryptic references to events that happened many years ago at a farmhouse seem to be as legally close this film can get to proclaiming itself a NOTLD sequel. Natch, since this is the 1980s, a bunch of teenagers, all of whom look like they’re in their 30s, are on hand to party, be massacred and brought back as zombies. After all what self respecting teenager doesn’t want to drink cold beer and make out in the chilly, autumnal looking Pennsylvanian wilderness. Whatever else can be said about Flesh Eater, there isn’t a great deal of filler here. It is a film that knows exactly what the VHS era audience wanted, namely zombies milling around and gory deaths, neither of which you’re ever far from in Flesh Eater. Before long, Hinzman has torn out the throat of the farmer, impaled another character on a pitchfork, and pulled out the heart of a female victim. Having had their numbers decimated, what remains of the group of teenagers holds up in an old farmhouse for a Night of the Living Dead re-run, yes….they do that boarding up of the windows bit, yes….there is a cowardly Harry Cooper type among the group. Whereas it took the entire movie for the zombies to storm the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, Flesh Eater takes all of about ten minutes to work its way through that plot.

Imagine a version of Night of the Living Dead that made the most blandish, forgettable characters from that movie the main protagonists. That’s what Flesh Eater does, the only two characters who go the distance here being Bob and Sally, the film’s equivalent of NOTLD lovebirds Tom and Judy. Bob, played by John Mowad -or as I like to call him ‘Sylvester McCartney’- might be one of the more memorable actors in Flesh Eater. Not on account of his acting (which is as underwhelming as everyone else’s) but due to his remarkable resemblance to both Sylvester Stallone and Paul McCartney. Celebrity lookalikes might be ten a penny, but Mowad must be fairly unique for resembling two famous people, especially as the two parties in question don’t really resemble each other. By rights someone should have taken Mowad to one side, pointed out his resemblance to these famous people, and he could have made his fortune that way, rather than making $25 a day appearing in horror films. Clearly this wasn’t the case though as Mowad returned several years later in Santa Claws (1996) another film “from the makers of Night of the Living Dead whose names weren’t George Romero”.



The rest of Flesh Eater consists of Sylvester McCartney and his girl running around trying to alert others, only to be given the brush off, at which point the zombies show up, make pirate noises and eat everybody. It’s rare for a scene in this film to end without a blood splattered payoff. The fact that Flesh Eater takes place on Halloween allows the zombies to move around with immunity, being easily mistaken for Halloween revellers, while simultaneously resulting in Macca’s attempts to raise the alarm being dismissed as a Halloween prank. Going to their deaths as a result are a succession of farmers, cops and an entire family with Hinzman indiscriminately murdering the mother, the daughter (played by Hinzman’s own daughter Heidi) and a fresh out of the shower babysitter. Director Bill Hinzman is especially fond of casting actor Bill Hinzman in scenes opposite nubile young actresses, one of the perks of being a filmmaking multi-tasker, I guess.



Considering that it is set on Halloween, some of the outfits characters adopt in this film are pretty darn puzzling. As a kid did you ever feel like celebrating Halloween by dressing up as an angel –surely a street cred killer on Halloween- or as a homeless old vagrant? These though are the costume choices made by the kids of the ill-fated family in Flesh Eater. The boy who dresses up as a homeless man (referred to in the end credits as ‘The Little Hobo’) sports a fake beard that makes it look like he is actually going for the Chuck Norris look, but not even being a kid and looking like Chuck Norris can spare you from a violent death in the merciless world of Flesh Eater.

Some questionable Halloween costumes also dog a second batch of obnoxious teenagers that the film wheels out towards the end. They too eschew horror themed costumes in favour of dressing up as soldiers, karate teachers or in togas (a la Animal House). While the girls come in hula skirts or in a sexy cheerleader get-up (natch’ Hinzman gives himself a scene with that girl, natch’ she’s topless at the time). In typical Flesh Eater anti-logic the only character who bothered to wear a horror themed outfit, the drunk guy dressed as Dracula, is the only character we never see in a zombified state. Flesh Eater’s one stab at originality is to have a character die whilst wearing a chicken outfit, dooming ‘Big Chicken’ to walk the earth as a zombie in a chicken costume. A zombie movie first, fer’sure.

True to NOTLD’s indie roots, Flesh Eater is a piece of blue collar, regional filmmaking through and through. So expect unknown actors, shared surnames amongst cast and crew (indicating family favours have been called in), rural Pennsylvania locations and no Hollywood airs and graces here. Bleached denim, baseball hats and lumberjack shirts are the predominate wardrobe here. While 1980s Hollywood was busy whoring soft drink brands in their movies, local brew ‘Iron City Beer’ is the subject of product placement here. Tagged onto recent DVD releases of Flesh Eater is ‘Flesh Eater: Back into the Woods’ a half-hour making of documentary that is pure comedy gold. Much in the way that the ‘Blood, Boobs and Beast’ documentary about Don Dohler, rehabilitated Dohler’s films in the eyes of many, similar stories about the pratfalls of low-budget filmmaking here help humanize the Flesh Eater crew, make you realize the odds they were up against and bring a whole new dimension to Flesh Eater. If the film is a first time watch for you, I’d highly recommend checking out the making of documentary beforehand, being privy to all the backstage drama and craziness adds allot to viewing the film itself. Supervisory producer/actor Andy Sands and Make-up artist Gerry Gergely are especially rich sources of unenviable yet wild and hilarious stories about the film. Between them they have enough anecdotes to suggest its making could have formed the basis for a zany 1980s comedy with Hinzman as its disaster prone hero ‘Ernest Makes a Zombie Movie’ if you will. The trials and tribulations that befell the crew included a dancer, hired to do nude scenes, who had to be recast after she showed up on set with a black eye. The assistant make-up artist, a wannabe rock star, also made his presence felt on the film by crashing his father’s truck into Gergely’s car on the first day of shooting “after that he damn nearly decapitated me with a band saw blade which he broke…and smashed my thumb the second day of shooting with a hammer while I was holding a nail” remembers Gergely.



All the comedy highlights of the documentary belong to Hinzman though, whether it’s accidentally chewing down on a pig’s heart under the false impression it was a prop heart (“what are you trying to do poison me? This isn’t gelatin, this is a real heart”). Hinzman’s cost cutting decision to make his own blanks for the production, also resulted in him being shot in the foot while directing a scene. Puns about Hinzman biting off more than he could chew and shooting himself in the foot by making Flesh Eater….just seem too easy to make. Hinzman himself emerges as a very likeable, down to earth, family man with only the slightest hint of bitterness that Romero’s success wasn’t extended to other NOTLD alumni “you can hit a lucky streak, like George Romero did, and get a reputation, but most of us just keep struggling along and taking out the garbage like everybody else does”. The making of documentary does give you a greater admiration, if not of Hinzman’s talent, than his ‘have a go’ attitude. Even if the film was a cynical NOTLD cash-grab, the pig’s heart and foot shooting incidents convince you that the man paid his dues along the way.

I suppose you could consider Flesh Eater the American equivalent of Italy’s Burial Ground/ Zombi 3/ Nights of Terror (it can certainly go head to head with that film in terms of aka titles). Its ultra gory, occasionally perverted, has no intelligence behind it whatsoever and frequently threatens to OD on unintentional hilarity. In other words it was the perfect fodder for gore obsessed teenagers with low-attention spans and easy access to VCRs. So of course I loved this film back in the early 1990s, and although it is slightly more embarrassing to admit it today the fact that I’m writing about it must mean I’m still a sucker for Flesh Eater’s idiot-dunce charms. Its Halloween setting makes it the perfect party movie for the time of year when society gives you carte blanche to drink, dress up in silly outfits and gorge on dumb horror movies. What better time then, to watch a dumb horror movie in which characters themselves drink too much and end up stumbling around whilst wearing silly outfits, Flesh Eater is Halloween in a nutshell. So this Halloween, raise a glass to the legacy of Bill Hinzman, the man who gave us the iconic graveyard zombie in Night of the Living Dead, then years later returned to give us a zombie dressed in a chicken costume.

Firestar: First Contact (1991)

In space no one can hear Cliff Twemlow kicking your ass. Journeying beyond their usual Mancunian settings, Firestar: First Contact finds the GBH double act of director David Kent-Watson and lead man/writer Cliff Twemlow looking up to the stars (and Ridley Scott's Alien) for inspiration.

Currently only available on DVD in Germany, where presumably the sight of North West observatory Jodrell Bank being passed off as a NASA style space base 'Solar Command' will go unnoticed, Firestar: First Contact stars Twemlow (acting under his latter day pseudonym Mike Sullivan) and Oliver Tobias as world weary astronauts who spend the working week blasting UFOs in space and their days off partying hard in Manchester. In a cheeky move Twemlow gives himself an "and introducing" credit, even though he had first appeared in front of the camera nearly thirty years earlier as an extra on Coronation Street.

On a return trip to Earth, John D. Trooper (Twemlow) and Captain Bremner (Tobias) receive a dressing down from their boss Commander Vandross (Charles Gray) who never the less takes an interest in the star shaped object the pair have discovered in space. Despite grounding Bremner on earth, Vandross soon sends the rest of Trooper's motley crew back into space, where a none too pleasant extra terrestrial surprise awaits them. Slow to start, with lots of earthbound dead air (there to get the money's worth out of name actors Gray and Tobias) Firestar is a bit of a slog until an Alien finally makes an appearance and starts dispatching the crew in nasty ways. Firestar is by far the bloodiest of all the Twemlow/Watson films, hearts are ripped out, arms pulled off, faces are shredded with glass, and flying metallic objects embed themselves in people, suggesting that Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm might also have been an influence.

Firestar's cast is rounded out with familiar faces like Brett Paul (a.k.a. GBH's Brett Sinclair) and one time Bond villain John Wyman (who once portrayed Twemlow in the 1982 film Tuxedo Warrior). However it is left to everyone's favourite former bouncer and library music composer to square off against the green, bug-faced alien, who sports secondary mouths in the palms of its hands.



In retrospect Kent-Watson and Twemlow really didn’t have the budget to do this outer space scenario justice, all that early 1990s CGI hasn't aged well, to put it mildly. Firestar: First Contact capitalized on the era’s craze for Laser Quest, the indoor laser tag game. The entrepreneurial Twemlow persuaded the owners of the local branch of Laser Quest to let them film in there, and an instant sci-fi movie set was born. Financing for the film partly came from the notorious Dutch millionaire Ger Visser (convicted of forgery and bankruptcy fraud in 2016).

Twemlow is his usual charismatic self, but his script is uncharastically banal. Maybe Twemlow was out of his comfort zone writing a sci-fi movie, or maybe the script was written in a hurry to take advantage of the availability of Laser Quest, but his personality and sense of humour is largely lacking here, save for a couple of witty scenes between Trooper and the ship’s female computer. It’s the only one of his films that I’ve never really connected with. The ultra gory last half hour partly reprieves it and since the production gave the cast an excuse to run around Laser Quest, swear, and end up dunked in slime and Kensington gore, a good time seems to have been had by all. Well, apart from the chap that played the alien, who suffered an on-set groin injury after an explosion left him with a shard of plastic embedded in one of his testicles. Literally and figuratively, Firestar truly is a film that took balls to make.

Although it isn’t my favourite of the Twemlow films, this is undoubtedly one of his most popular and well travelled offerings. Firestar: First Contact played on UK cable channel ‘HVC’ in the 1990s, was released on VHS in Japan and Germany and has turned up twice on DVD in Germany (once under its original title then later as ‘Spaceship Firestar’)

Psycho from Texas (1975)

Psycho from Texas….now there’s a movie title that takes me back. If you were around the bargain basement video shops of Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s a run-in with this film was inevitable, you just couldn’t move in those places without tripping over a copy of it. My own initial encounter with Psycho from Texas came at ‘Pricebusters’ in Blackpool. Pricebusters was two floors worth of market trading stalls, hidden away in the basement of which was this stall selling cheap video releases of horror and exploitation titles. Truth be told though, there were places like that scattered all over Blackpool back then.

Their niche was the type of videos that never made it into the rental shops or chains like HMV and Our Price, this was the absolute underclass of the video industry, labels like Apex, Network, Viz, Elephant Video, Stablecane, Bronx Video, all those here today, gone tomorrow outfits. If you were growing up in the era that came after the fleapit cinemas and the video nasties, and prior to the internet and DVD, this was how you got your education in exploitation movies. To venture into those bargain basement VHS shops really was a trip into the unknown. Very little documentation of these types of film were readily available then, and even if it was, most of these films had been re-titled anyhow. For reasons that looking back on it you can’t help thinking were a bit suspect, especially as you often had entire video labels that put out nothing but re-titled product, which dare I say is an ideal way of keeping one step ahead of a film’s rights owner.


Don't Look in the Basement- the entrance to the long gone Pricebusters


Anyway, it was in Pricebusters that I encountered the likes of Exorcist 3: Cries and Shadows, Al Adamson’s Dracula Vs Frankenstein (re-titled: Revenge of Dracula), The Witchmaker, Night Fright, Malpertuis, Walerian Borowczyk’s The Beast (re-titled: Death’s Ecstasy), Borowczyk’s Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (re-titled: The Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll), Death Curse of Tartu and Werewolf Woman, all thrown together in a Blackpool basement, along with this ‘Psycho from Texas’ film. Not that it was called Psycho from Texas back then of course, the film had been re-titled ‘The Butcher’ by a distributor called Bronx Video, who liked it so much they put it out twice, under two different covers. One that sold it as a horror movie, and had a Michael Myers type mask on the cover, and another that had a cartoonish drawing of someone getting shot-gunned to death on the cover….which completely spoils the end of the film by the way. Every one of these films was an adventure in itself, would you stumble upon a lost gem, or be bored to tears by the likes of Wendigo and The Thirsty Dead, be off to Italy for a heavily-cut Lucio Fulci film, or experience an art film in horror movie clothing like Malpertuis and the Boro movies.

Let’s not look back on the VHS era with too much misplaced nostalgia though, don’t forget that back then these films were frequently cut, panned and scanned, and quality wise looked like shitty 3rd or 4th generation copies. No one remotely sane would argue that this was the ideal way to watch these movies, but such video releases brought these films allot of attention, put them out there at affordable prices, thus making them easily accessible to the common man, and helped pave the way for the whistles and bells, deluxe treatment that some of these films are receiving on blu-ray today.



VHS cover courtesy of Charles Devlin 

Psycho from Texas is a prime example of the kind of American regional obscurity that you tended to encounter in bargain basement video shops back then. The type of films that cast a spell over British VHS viewers on account of their ability to spirit you away down the forgotten, dirt roads of America’s past. You knew with films like these that you were seeing an America far removed from the gloss of Hollywood. We’re talking films made in places like Florida and the Deep South, films directed by and starring people you’ve never heard of before, and chances are would never hear from again.

Psycho from Texas’ director Jim Feazell, sort of fits the bill in that respect, this being his one shot at directing, producing and writing a feature film. Prior to the film though, Feazell had been kicking around filmmaking for a number of years as a stuntman. He’d done stunt work on Chisum, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Once you realize the Peckinpah connection, the ending of Psycho from Texas makes perfect sense, it being everything you’d expect from someone who’d worked under the tutelage of bloody Sam. Feazell was also the author of several books, whose plots make you wish he’d directed more feature films. Who wouldn’t want to have seen a film version of Feazell’s horror novel ‘Return to Heaven’ in which “Chuck Abbott, three years after he and Bubba destroyed the demon from hell” returns to “help Bubba quell another bedeviled shroud of evil that had enveloped heaven”.

Believe it or not, Feazell did actually base Psycho from Texas on a real-life story, that of George James, a rich businessman who in April 1967 was held against his will by two men who forced him to sign cheques over to them, before James managed to escape and alert the authorities. Feazell filmed Psycho from Texas in Eldorado, Texas where he lived and where the actual events took place. What made it onto the screen though can’t really claim too much basis in reality, with Psycho from Texas it feels like we’re getting a 10th generation retelling of a true story. Where every time the story has been told the teller has added their own salacious details and blown incidents that little bit more out of proportion.

Rechristened ‘William Phillips’ for a big screen, the film’s George James character is a widowed rich businessman with a blonde daughter and a luxurious mansion, who enjoys fishing and inexplicably likes to hang around with poor black children. Like Conrad Bain’s character in Diff’rent Strokes though, Philips is just a big hearted guy who loves to reach out to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and who could knock that, after all

“Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum 
What might be right for you, may not be right for some 
A man is born, he's a man of means 
Then along come two, they got nothing but their jeans 

But they got, Diff'rent Strokes 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world 

Everybody's got a special kind of story 
Everybody finds a way to shine 
It don't matter that you got not allot 
So what 
They'll have theirs, and you'll have yours, and I'll have mine 
And together we'll be fine.... 

Because it takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world 
Yes it does 
It takes, Diff'rent Strokes to move the world”



Left to its own devices this film could have played out as a gentle drama about how fishing can bridge boundaries of age, race and class in America, but ya’ can’t be having a film called Psycho from Texas without having a Psycho. So…enter Wheeler, a psychotic drifter played by John King III, the kind of mean looking sombitch that sure makes you glad you never got to meet John King II, or indeed John King- the original.

It might be blasphemous to mention them in the same breath, but in its own amateur hour way Psycho from Texas anticipates ‘Henry- Portrait of a Serial Killer’ in several ways. There are flashbacks to the bloody aftermaths of Wheeler’s crimes, as you see one of the …you suspect many… dead corpses that Wheeler has left in the motel rooms of America. Wheeler’s back-story is your typical serial killer sob story…Momma was a whore, young Wheeler got exposed to some inappropriate fornicating, now he hates all women cause they remind him of Momma….you know the drill. Wheeler finds his own Otis in Slick (Tommy Lamey) a low-IQed, mustachioed criminal who Wheeler is partnered up with to kidnap Mr. Phillips. Needless to say, what with Wheeler’s psychopathic tendencies and Slick’s general air of incompetence, together this duo are definitely not the greater sum of their parts.

As you might expect from a film made by a local resident Psycho from Texas has a great feel for its area, and gives the impression that very little has changed about the South since the days of Gone with the Wind. Phillips’ grand Southern mansion and gospel humming black maid is in sharp contrast to the dirt poor areas of town he drives through to pick up his young black fishing buddy. It might not have been Feazell’s intension but such scenes do hammer home that this is still a place of the haves and the have-nots, with the houses along Philips’ journey being little more than shacks, and a bucket full of dirty water being unceremoniously thrown out onto the street as Phillips drives by.



It is hard to know who Wheeler hates most rich people or women…who of course remind him of Momma. “I’d sure likely to take a pretty girl into the woods than a hairy legged old man” Wheeler bitterly complains to Phillips. Whoever came up with the music for Psycho from Texas appears to have been singing from a different hymn sheet than its director. Whereas the C&W songs on the soundtrack practically weep for Wheeler’s lost, tormented soul “I’d give my very life away, everything I own, if I could turn his world around”, the film seems to revel in portraying him as a tough, heartless bastard. Would you give your very life away, everything you own, for a man who moments later is brutalizing a harmless old man onscreen and referring to his daughter as a “stuck up bitch”.

As per their real life counterparts, Wheeler and Slick kidnap Phillips, take him to a woodlands shack and force him to sign over cheques. Psycho from Texas also sticks to the facts when it comes to the pair’s plan quickly going belly up. Wheeler goes to cash the cheques but can’t stay out of trouble for long, getting into a fight with a drug dealer, having more childhood flashbacks and raping and murdering the Sheriff’s daughter. Slick also fails miserably to live up to his name, and gets drunk, which allows Philips the chance to escape. Given that Slick sports a red hanky in his left pocket throughout the movie, which as per the rules of William Friedkin’s Cruising, means Slick is into gay S&M, old man Phillips was perhaps wise to make a quick getaway.

Psycho from Texas is the stuff of VHS era legend for two reasons, one of which is the foot chase that goes on…and on…and on. Slick’s pursuit of Phillips beginning at around 40 minutes into the film and ending at 66 minutes in. Roughly taking place in real time, Psycho from Texas might well contain the mother of all movie foot chases, played out over a landscape of cow fields, woodlands and muddy swamps. For thespians Tommy Lamey and Herschel Mays, this must have felt less like an acting assignment and more like the obstacle course from hell. As even the significantly younger Tommy Lamey appears visibly exhausted at one point, your heart has to go out to Herschel Mays, an out of shape, bespectacled, bewigged old man that this film seems determined to give a fatal coronary too. Psycho from Texas’ never ending foot chase also gives Tommy Lamey the chance to shine as the film’s comic relief, with plentiful opportunities to laugh at dumb ol’ Slick, as his pursuit of Phillips is impeded by a skunk and then a herd of pigs, all of whom add to the overall humiliation of being unable to catch up to a wheezing old man.



The second reason for Psycho from Texas being the stuff of VHS era legend is, but of course, it’s theme tune ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’. Psycho from Texas’ love affair with that damn theme tune knows no bounds, it’s rarely off Psycho from Texas’ jukebox and is repeated ad infinitum during the film. Along with the foot chase, this song puts forward a case that words like ‘overkill’ and ‘repetition’ were not part of Jim Feazell’s vocabulary. Once heard, impossible to forget ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’ is another C&W number that begs audience sympathy for the unsympathetic Wheeler

“Yesterday was a long time ago, 
Yesterday he did not understand, 
Now he’s learned how to hate, to kill and to rape, 
He’s lived a thousand lives and Wheeler knows, 
The fear of being a man, 
But fears come and go, and Wheeler doesn’t know, 
What’s to become of his soul”. 

There are further lyrics but if you’ve ever seen the film they should already be imprinted on your brain, and if you haven’t seen the film its best to experience the Psycho from Texas theme song for yourself. ‘Yesterday was a long time ago’ rivals ‘Keep on Driving’ from Pigs (1973) and the theme tune from Hitchhike to Hell (1977), as the most catchiest ditty ever heard in a regional exploitation film.

 

Psycho from Texas originally unspooled for local audiences in 1975 as ‘Wheeler’, self distributed by Feazell and bearing a phony PG rating (note the lack of MPAA logo on the poster). After lying dormant for a few years, the film was reworked in the late 1970s, with additional scenes shot to beef the film up to an R rating. A turn of events that meant Jim Feazell had to get all Jim Sleaze’ll. John King III was recalled to shoot a scene featuring Wheeler with a (dead) nude woman in a motel room, also added were explicit flashbacks involving a mangy salesman humping away at Wheeler’s no-good mother.

The most noteworthy scene that transformed the PG rated Wheeler into the R-rated Psycho from Texas, involves Wheeler getting into a bar fight and then blowing his top at a barmaid whose indifferent attitude has wound him up the wrong way. It’s an add-on that gave the film its biggest claim to fame, on account of the unfortunate barmaid being played by future scream queen Linnea Quigley, in one of her earliest screen roles. The years in-between did nothing to dim the bug eyed intensity John King III brought to the role, as Wheeler hollers “now bitch, let’s dance” to poor Linnea, who is forced to dance, strip, then has beer poured over her by the sadistic Wheeler. Talk about a trial by fire – or should that be trial by beer- introduction to the film industry. Then again, in a career that would see her being impaled on deer antlers, be eaten by zombies and pushing lipstick into one of her breasts, Linnea certainly began and she meant to go on.

After being shopped around under the titles ‘The Hurting’ and ‘The Mama’s Boy’ this new version of the film finally resurfaced under its now best known title ‘Psycho from Texas’, presumably dreamed up to cash in on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which was enjoying a successful Stateside re-release in 1981. Its distribution in the NYC area was handled by New American Films, a company ran by gay porn director Joe Gage, who soon after would himself be branching out into R-rated exploitation films (Breeders, Bad Girls Dormitory) under the name Tim Kincaid.



In the UK, Psycho from Texas was meant to have been cut by 5 minutes and 20 seconds by the British censor for its late 1980s VHS release. A fact that immediately put it on the radar of sleaze film fans who figured that any film which warranted such heavy censorship had to be worth seeking out, at least in its uncut state. The irony is that, I now suspect Bronx video never implemented the cuts that the BBFC insisted on. The Linnea Quigley scene, surely the only scene that could have warranted such excessive censor cuts, was intacto on the Bronx release, and while the version the BBFC passed ran 78 minutes, the Bronx tape clocks in closer to 84 minutes. For that Bronx video deserve kudos, even if you suspect that their issuing of it uncut was more down to error and incompetence rather than an attempt to defy the British censor.

There are a couple of different versions of Psycho from Texas floating around however. Some versions of the scene where Phillips escapes Slick allow it to play out in real time, while other versions curiously depict Phillip’s escape via a series of dissolves on Slick’s face. Evidentially language edits have also been made to the film at some point as well, as there exists racist and non-racist versions of Psycho from Texas. In one version of the film the redneck Sheriff makes reference to “that little nigger boy that fishes allot with Bill”, while other versions awkwardly edit out the racial insult. The deletion of that tiny piece of dialogue can’t hide the fact though that films like Psycho from Texas weren’t made for sensitive times. Scenes involving Phillips’ black maid becoming hysterical and wailing “lord ha’ mercy” while crawling about on her hands and feet having seemingly been included in the film to give racist whites a few belly laughs. As I say, films like this sure weren’t made for sensitive times.

Yesterday was a long time ago…yesterday people went to drive-ins and bargain basement VHS shops to watch old geezers being run ragged and neekid young ladies having beer poured over them…you might not have had to go to Texas for a chainsaw massacre, but you do have to go to Psycho from Texas for a 26 minute foot chase.