The world of exploitation film ripped open and laid raw for you to experience. From 70's grindhouse to current underground, it is all here. So ripe you can practically smell it.
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 PRAIRIEwas 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!
The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2008)D. John Eric DowdleMGM1.85
When I first saw a poster for this larger budgeted serial killer/true snuff film horror, the first thing that jumped into my head was that it was going to be an August Underground rip off. That some enterprising up and coming Hollywood upstarts had seen those movies and figuring that no one in the mainstream knew what they were that they could just take the idea and redo it. The posters and ad art seemed to be just that. that a bunch of video tapes are found containing the home movies of a psychopath torturing and killing his victims. Take an underground, hardcore horror and water it down for the masses and claim originality.
Well the final film of The Poughkeepsie Tapes isn't quite that, though it wouldn't surprise me if that was still involved in the inspiration somewhere. The film is actually more of a recreation/put on of the standard court TV true crime documentary. You know the type, where various talking heads are interviewed about the case, giving insight into the killer's mind and life, while inter cut are the tapes this killer supposedly made himself. Not really a bad idea for a movie and sometimes it works here. But most of the time it doesn't.
The film tells the tale of a killer whose has yet to be caught, but the authorities have gotten close enough to him to have found a closet full of video tapes that show him butchering, torturing and assaulting his victims. The film goes through various experts, police officers, psychiatrists, specialists and family survivors to try and figure out how this happened and why. The acting ranges from convincing to pretty bad. And so does the writing and directing. A couple of really horrible scenes stand out in my memory such as a moment when the killer is watching a victim through her window on the video camera and apparently has her phone bugged too because he can hear her conversation. Her conversation consists of dialogue about how great her life is, how perfect everything is, except she feels like there is something really bad about to happen. that it will all come crashing down any moment. It's supposed to be ironic because we are watching it from the killer's point of view. Its not ironic, its stupid. It's bad writing. Another moment has the killer, videotaping all the while, approach the grieving mother of one of his victims as the mobilize a search party. He starts questioning her and she figures out it is him, but no one hears her cries. In theory this should work as a scene. I'm sure this kind of thing has happened in real life. But the handling of it is so lame, with the killer laughing like a fiend, and the Mom over acting that it is suddenly like a Snidley Whiplash cartoon. If the killer turned the camera on himself he would be twirling his mustache wildly. The interview scenes are handled alright for the most part except one expert who looks a lot like Herschel Gordon Lewis, that for some reason they kept slowly twirling the camera. I guess for effect, but it just looked amateurish. There is another expert on post mortem butchery who is so over the top and silly that they really should have just cut him out of the movie altogether. His performance is embarrassing.
But the meat of the movie is the snuff film scenes. If they work the movie works right? I mean the whole premise rest on if those scenes are believable. Well to the average moviegoer who hasn't seen much underground cinema they are probably pretty effective. They are grim and ugly and seemingly don't flinch. They are more violent that most people will be used to. But if you don't look away you will notice that they are more manipulative than actually violent. Whenever there is any real nasty sadism the victim ends up just off screen, so we hear them being pummelled but really don't see it. Plus the scenes are highly stylized with professional lighting, and the video quality itself is so distorted and processed to look like home movies that it becomes distracting. No one's home movies ever looked like this. But the biggest problem is that they have music and sound design, and very manipulative at that. The music and sound reach this unbearable crescendo when something bad is about to happen, often you don't see the actual act, but the sound fills it in for you. If these were real home movies none of this would apply. It is too Hollywood to even remotely be real.
There are some good things about the movie though such as a subplot about a woman the killer keeps as a sex slave for a number of years. We see the progression of her as she is broken into becoming a complete submissive until she is finally rescued and cannot reintegrate back into her normal life. In fact her story is, in a lot of ways, more interesting than the main story the film focuses on. There is also a scene where one of the FBI profilers visits Ted Bundy that is well done and the guy playing Bundy is pretty effective.
Weird thing is that though I started seeing posters for this movie at least a year ago, and spots for it appeared on you tube around the same time, it is still unreleased. Granted it is a hard sell to a public who flock to see cheesy fun time horror movies. This would not go down well with the teenybopper fans. But it makes so little sense to advertise a movie widely then just shelve it. But someone in Hollywood liked it enough to give the brothers team who made it another job as they went on to direct the remake of the excellent Spanish film [REC] called Quarantine.
