Who wants some REVENGE!!!!!

HOW TO GET REVENGE (1989)
D. Bob Logan
?????
S.O.V.

Really rare straight to video "how to" tape hosted by a perky (and way too clothed) Linda Blair on how to get revenge on those who have wronged you in some way shape or form. For "entertainment purposes only" of course! So Linda, dressed like she is going to a Sunday school picnic, hosts this discussion video on how to stick it to your enemies. Or even family members who have fucked you over royally along with several "special guests" who claim to be private investigators, cops, and other specialists in the game of getting even. They all seem to be out of work, welfare line actors reading off of cue cards giving you advice that could land your sorry ass in jail if you are not careful. But some of the tricks they impart are indeed vicious enough to be amusing. As long as you understand that trying to actually pull some of this shit off also includes things like felony charges if you get caught. A little detail they completely forget to mention throughout the video.

Okay, so not a damn one of the following Linda Blair photos are going to have anything to do with the video being reviewed. I am sure this will make you very sad.

The show separated into sections involving types of revenge like using the phone, getting even using the mark's car, or what you can do if you can get into their house! Yes you read that last part right. This video actually suggests you try a little breaking and entering for some hilarious laughs to get even with the person who screwed you over! But first things first, it starts with the little things like ordering multiple pizzas or take out foods and sending them to the enemies home. The Private investigator suggests you go to a hotel and steal some stationary and write a note explaining that on a certain date the mark checked in with his "wife" and she left a shoe there and they are sending it back, expecting to be reimbursed for the postage. Then actually mail with the note a sexy high heeled shoe you have bought from a Goodwill store. The trick is to make sure you have specified an evening you know the mark was not at home and address the package to his wife so she reads it. Viola! You've ended his marriage because she thinks he is cheating on her! Linda Blair gets a big kick out of how that has ruined some poor schmuck's life!

Why was there never a Linda Blair Workout Video? that was the rage in the 80's and even Traci lords did one! I certainly would have watched it!

We also get a couple of re-enactments. We meet some super dorky schmo who had a dickhead assault him in a restaurant because he wanted the window seat. Dumping the nerd's food in his lap. So this guy went to our revenge smart Private Investigator to learn how to get even. They set it up so the asshat first gets fifteen different take out places coming to his home with food he didn't order at once. Then during that confusion they plant a realistic toy gun in his beat up pick up truck (who would have guessed he was a good ol boy? But then shouldn't he have already had a gun in there?) and then called the cops reporting that he was seen near the site of a bank robbery that happened earlier that day and he had a gun in his truck! So he was arrested and taken in by the fuzz! Naturally he was let go when it was seen to be all a mistake but the embarrassment and hassle made it all okay for our hero.

If the creators of the "How To Get Revenge" video had any brains at all they would have had Linda wear this outfit for the shoot instead.

Another gal goes to the P.I. because her jerk off college jock boyfriend was cheating on her with a cheerleader. The P.I. was so touched by her sob story (because she looked just like his daughter! Her big titties had NOTHING to do with it!) that they schemed up a dirty little plan that carried over to ruining this bitch's life. Not only at this college but for several others too. Our gal went to the free clinic to get checked out and stole a whole pad of stationary. She used it to write up a summary explaining that the cheerleader girl had sexual relations with basically the whole football team. Problem being that she had many sexually transmitted diseases including syphilis and that it was their duty as the sexual disease center to alert the college health department so they could alert her former partners. Within a week she was a pariah at the school and everyone thought she was a disease carrying whore. she dropped out of school and went to another school and this girl sent the same letter, just with names changed, to that school too. Thus ruining her life there too! Just because this gal fucked her man. Oh yeah, she made sure her man was left out of the revenge, cause it wasn't his fault!!! Once again Linda Blair laughs in stunned shock and awe at the appropriateness of the lives laid bare.

The rest of the show is just instructions on how to do certain gags. Most of them simple like calling in instructions to get people fired from jobs, or make their spouses think they are cheating on them. Most of these are irrelevant now because of caller I.D. and star 69 technologies. But back in the day they were hot stuff. There is some fun stuff about screwing with people's mail, also HIGHLY illegal, that includes putting them on all kinds of mailing lists so they are inundated with junk mail. Putting them on porno lists so they get all kinds of nasty porn they will be embarrassed by or fuck up their marriage. Or the best, put ads in porno mags, especially gay ones, with their pictures. The most brutal revenge schemes in here at the ones dealing with fucking up peoples cars. These are all pretty legit and would work, and are not surprisingly, very illegal. They range from letting the air out of all four tires to putting sugar and sand in the fuel tank and radiator. The most fun one was to put cooking oil in the windshield wiper fluid tank and replacing the fuel cap with a locking one so when they go to get gas they can't get into it anymore. Then there is the old stuffing a potato into the exhaust pipe so it backfires. But wouldn't that cause carbon monoxide to build up inside the car and potentially kill the person inside if they sat there long enough?

Finally there is the section on messing with the mark's home. This is felony business here folks, but they show you anyway. This goes from putting a water hose in the mail slot, glue in the locks to putting fish eggs in the air conditioner unit so their house stinks up. Then the dummies suggest if you can "get inside the house" that you turn up their thermostat all the way and glue it in place so when they get home their house is like an oven. Or maybe it is on fire! Did you idiots think of that? Or get into their refrigerator and stuff it full of their dirty laundry. Or put all their expensive china in the dishwasher and put a pouch of black dye in there and turn it on! "Use your imagination folks" is the command of the day? Well, you'll have to use your imagination when you are fending off the gigantic, horny, felons intent on throat raping you after you've been sent to prison for trying some of this shit. I guarantee Linda Blair will not be there via satellite cracking jokes and thinking its funny. Well then again she's not working much these days, so maybe she will...

Jesus, god this is a wrong headed mess of a video. While it is amusing and some of the stuff funny I cannot believe it was floating around out there for legit sale. This is the kind of thing you would have seen for sale in the Lampoonics catalogue or in the underground, traded amongst militant survivalist groups. Sorta like the home made James Bond booklets that explained to you how to kill people in their sleep with tennis balls and playing cards. Something that passed hands secretly and in the stealth of night, not at the local Major video or Blockbusters and hosted by an on the decline starlet looking for cash.

I mentioned before that these photos of Linda Blair had nothing to do with the video being reviewed right?

Speaking of Linda Blair hosting this, if you spent the money to get her to do this gig, at least you could have gotten her to show some cleavage for fucks sake! Having her dressed like a school marm from LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE was a terrible idea and a waste of her best assets. Linda was at her healthiest peak in 1989 and lets face it, the material she was given was doing her no favors in the acting department. So all she had to work with was looking foxy, and the costuming dept fell down on that job. Though to be fair she seems to be enjoying the malicious, mean spirited, nature of the whole gig, laughing and guffawing at the low down, dirty tricks on display. So when she is mean to you at a convention next time you see her, don't let her know were your car is parked. She might have some shit planned for your ass.

There were no clips of this on you tube (big surprise) so here is a pretty terrible interview from the early eighties (posted by J4tH.com who you should pay a visit to if you get the chance by the way).



And here she is walking on BROKEN GLASS (oh NOES!!!) on the no sadly defunct CIRCUS OF THE NETWORK STARS on CBS circa the early 80's ENJOY!


Reviews © Andy Copp

A true Heretic abuses expectations

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) - The Director's Cut/ Fan edit D. John Boorman Warner Brothers 1.85

For years I have heard nothing but how this movie is an unmitigated disaster. One of the worst sequels ever made and just a train wreck of a film from beginning to end. Misguided, miscast, incomprehensible and just plain unwatchable, unless taken as a comedy. Being that I consider The Exorcist one of the greatest films ever made, I just didn't want to sully that film in my mind and so I never bothered with this one. Now, that never stopped me from seeing The Exorcist: The Beginning, so I really have no arguable point to my madness. Also there have been many alternate cuts to Exorcist II over the years, with the final DVD that Warner's released being the longest one. this apparently was the same as the version that Warner's released to theaters in winter of 1977 that was universally panned by audiences and destroyed by critics. So much so that director John Boorman agreed to the film being pulled from release and personally recut the movie from 117 minutes to a much tighter 110 minutes and re-arranged much of the storyline, using some stills and footage from the original film to make it flow better.

This fan edit that I watched tonight originated from the tracker site Demonoid and was put together from a cat named PhineasBg who has lovingly reconstructed that 110 minute "director's recut" from the available DVD and an ancient VHS tape. His goal to replicate what many consider to be John Boorman's true directorial cut of the film. I have no frame of reference as to whether or not he succeeded in doing so, except to say that I thought the movie was far better than people have led me to believe over the years. This was in no way the flaming pile of shit people have accused the film of being.

After an awkward opening explaining the incidents of the first film through still frames and voice overs we are introduced to Father Lamont, played by Richard Burton. He is in Africa on missionary work but confronted with an exorcism of a local woman that goes horribly wrong. seems the woman was a local healer but the demon won't let her go and she dies in a wall of flames. Back home the Church sends Lamont to investigate the death of Father Merrin from the first film. He discovers Reagan McNeil (the now quite gorgeous teenage Linda Blair) in some sort of experimental hypno-therapy with a new age Doctor played by Louise Fletcher. The three of them begin to use a new strobe light driven device to go into deep hypnosis trances to get at Reagan's memories of the demon possessions only to realize the demon's themselves are very much still alive in her.

So far so good. A little Sci-Fi heavy, very New Age, but a very interesting take on the material. Not scary, but headed into a different direction and in no way rehashing what we have already seen from the first film. Then the film takes a hard left turn that has left many audiences really cold. It delves hard into the African native cultural beliefs dealing with things like plagues of locusts destroying the land, being driven by demons and taking on spirit animals to confront such demons. The film mixes these native approaches to spirituality with the new age hypnotism therapies, and a constant questioning of faith in Christianity. Christianity starts coming up very short by the end of the film. But the elements that seems to put people off, at least among my friends, is the dealing of spirits with representational animals and insects. The locusts, which throughout the bible have stood for the destruction of the land, are prominent in this film representing damnation. they represent the spread of the demons and the force of evil. The image here being, literally, a large locust flying around leading hordes to the next bit of prey. We get to see James Earl Jones as a tribal Priest dressed in the skins of a giant Locust whose spirit animal is a giant Leopard who is able to control the locusts. when it is revealed he is not a God at all but a scientist that has studied locusts a lot of the imagery that has come before falls into place. He explains how the locust spread destruction when they are agitated and angry, especially in large packs. He then explains how they have bred a new locust that will have the power to calm the other locusts. Something we see a local native boy who was a faith healer trying to do, when he falls possessed earlier in the film.

The whole while Pazzuzzu the demon inside of Reagan is trying to become unleashed but is battling the positive side of Reagan as well which will become the Black locust, the healer. Which we see in action when she, without trying, heals an autistic child just by talking to her at the psychiatric hospital earlier. The final battle will be between the Evil doppelganger Reagan, possessed by Pazzuzzu and the healer Reagan, the Black Locust. With poor Lamont having to fight the final battle to tear the heart from the demon to stop it once and for all.

What we end up with here is really a film that is quite unlike anything else. A child progeny of the drugged out, coked up, weed smoking late seventies, when people were wearing crystals, checking out new religions and questioning anything and everything to do with faith and the universe. While the first Exorcist movie was in essence a very Catholic film that re-enforced Christian and Catholic dogma and morality at the end of the day (I still love it anyway, and most people totally miss that it is a very moral, and pro church film) Exorcist II is looking in a completely different direction. Here the director (and ghostwriter with partner Rosco Pallenberg) are exploring the conceits that maybe organized religion isn't the answer when faced with raw evil. The film rather smartly pits Catholicism against science, against new agism, and most importantly what many would consider outright Paganism with the African magic and tribalism. By the end of the film it is the African Tribalism that has the answers, leaving all the other systems of worship and faith trialing behind. If the film is watched carefully it is as much a conical of Father Lamont's spiral out of his faith as it is a weirdo horror/fantasy about demons and Locust Spirit Guides.

Still the movie is far, far from perfect. It's over ambition renders several scenes on the pretentious side, and even cut down to 110 it is a bit too long. Richard Burton was reportedly drinking quite heavily during production and his still performance and profuse sweating shows this to be true. There are a couple of scenes that are clearly supposed to be directed in a dreamlike manner but just come off as goofy instead.

But most of the movie is a visual feast, with breathtaking cinematography, great locations, both on site and in studio. an incredible score by Ennio Moricone, solid acting form most of the cast, and Linda Blair right as she is hitting her stride into adult hood. There is a lot to appreciate in this film. Is it an appropriate movie to be a sequel to the classic The Exoricst? Probably not. Is it a good film, ripe for rediscovery, full of mental stimulation, incredible imagery, and lots of interesting and challenging ideas? Yes sir, that is exactly what it is. And I will take that.



Andy Copp