Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Candy Stripers

We’re running out of patients!

I’m going to break out the world’s smallest violin here.

I was due to spend this Christmas with my family in Scotland. This, at the best of times, is a horrifying prospect, involving arguments, enough Scotch to kill a small island, more arguments, shite food and I have to take the train for the privilege. However, due to a contact lens related disaster, I had to disembark the train at Newcastle and go to casualty. The lens had gone bad, and had sealed itself to my eye. As such, it had gouged the surface of my cornea, and I couldn’t get the bastard out. Anyhow, the Doctor removed it (made a sound like velcro when he took it out), gave me a telling off, and made me come back in the next day (Christmas Eve).

So, what has this got to do with a shady little B-Movie? Simple, he prescribed me three sets of eye drops and ordered me to stay up 24 hours putting them in every hour on the hour. This would, I felt, be a challenge as I was bound to be half cut and ready for bed. There was but one solution: watch any old bollocks on TV and hope for the best. So, at 2AM on 24th December, your humble narrator was sitting in a severely uncomfortable chair, shivering in a room with no heating watching Candy Stripers on The Horror Channel. This is by far the most stringent test that I’ve ever put a schlock vault entry through. The goal was simple: Candy Stripers had to be entertaining enough to stop my dozing off. 

Jarv’s Birthday Series Redux: Wild at Heart (1990)

Welcome back to the Birthday Series. This time around, I have, as noticed, developed a far more high-brow list than the previous run. So, I’ve endured the quirky melodrama of Almodovar, and now I’m girding up my loins to take on the master of surrealist incomprehensibility, David Lynch. The film in question was the surprise Palme D’Or Winner, and features one of Nicholas Cage’s most definitively crazy performances: Wild at Heart (24th August in the UK, 17th August in the USA).  Variously described as being the bastard lovechild of Badlands and the Wizard of Oz, Wild at Heart is an iconic American road trip movie; a star-crossed love-film languishing amongst the freaks and degenerates of an American underclass overlooked by most film makers.

May contain one of the most spectacular head explosions ever filmed and spoilers below. 

Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Street Trash

 

Get a fuckin’ job!

I haven’t done a vault review for a while, due to being perpetually distracted by the Birthday series, and as a result I’ve partially forgotten the format for these. So bear with me a bit on this one. My research this morning has told me that Street Trash is considered by many to be a masterpiece of “grindhouse”, a slick and gory black comedy made for peanuts; an archetype of modern exploitation that transcends its humble origins and becomes something more despite the almost total absence of budget. I’m not so sure I agree.

Contains melty tramps and spoilers below.

Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Blood Camp Thatcher

None of us had a chance when we were picked to play Thatcher’s fucking game!

Being as I am actually English, and did grow up under Thatcher, I have to take issue with the above quote. Everyone survives playing Thatcher’s game. You won’t have a job, or be a productive member of society unless you’re a banker or something, but death isn’t on the cards. However, I’m not actually talking about that Thatcher, instead I’m talking about a ruthless Australian prison warden in a fucked up dystopian future. Incidentally, the alternative titles to this film are Escape 2000, and the quite magnificent Turkey Shoot. Turkey Shoot, by the way, is far and away the most appropriate title for this gloriously sleazy piece of exploitative schlock.

Contains massive amounts of violence and spoilers below.

Jarv’s Schlock Vault: Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers

The CHAINSAWS used in this Motion Picture are REAL and DANGEROUS! They are handled here by seasoned PROFESSIONALS. The makers of this Motion Picture advise strongly against anyone attempting to perform these stunts at home. Especially if you are naked and about to engage in strenuous SEX. My conscience is clear, (signed) Fred Olen Ray.

Jarv ‘s Rating: There was no way this was going to get a low rating from me. So as a result, I give this truly hilarious little piece of grindhouse exploitation 3 Changs out of 4. This film is fucking mint, as any film about naked women wielding chainsaws as part of a lunatic cult of chainsaw worshippers that dates back to Egyptian times led by Gunnar Hansen should be. Highly, highly recommended. Get the beers in for this one, and trust me, it’s a blast.

It’s taken me a while to track this film down. I first heard about it years ago in context of a story that may or may not be Urban myth. The tale goes that one of the actresses (and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers features three of the B-movie scream queens) broke a strike to appear in this film. By changing her name and crossing picket lines, she seriously damaged her career and was forced into even sleazier cinema as a result. The actress? Michelle Bauer, and it’s worth noting that she followed this film with a whole plethora of soft porn nonsense, from which she’s never really recovered. The point of this anecdote is to illustrate what utter fucknuts unions are, particularly unions in the creative industries, and it’s a crying shame that a decent jobbing actress working in cheap and cheerful schlock was punished like this for wanting to pay the rent. I’m, admittedly, assuming she considered it punishment. She may well have liked doing soft core porn, who am I to judge?

The Night of the Demons Series: Night of the Demons 3

This has been a remarkably easy series to do so far. This isn’t much of a surprise, given that the 3 original Night of the Demons movies are all basically the same film and follow a strict recipe laid out in the original: scary house + incredibly stupid teens + shitloads of gratuitous nudity and sex + gore= fun. Basically, the golden rule here is if in doubt add tits. Works for me. This second sequel, called Demon House in some parts, is the last on-screen appearance of Amelia Kinkade, who went off to telepathically train pets or some such after this, and it is to her credit that she managed to almost make Angela, demon goth queen of a schlocky B-movie series, into a memorable character. Much of the relative success of this cheesy little series is down to her turn, she’s sexy, evil, and downright comical on more than one occasion.

The Night of the Demons Series- Night of the Demons 2

This series has been knocking around in my mind for a while now. I first saw the original Night of the Demons (reviewed here) and decided that I needed to see the rest. It’s a solid gold sliver of cheesy schlock, a blast from start to finish with more nudity than a strip club, thefts from seminal horror films, clichéd horror mainstays, an Edam-fest of a script, and more fun than one mind can handle. It’s also dumb as fuck. Hysterical, but unfeasibly stupid. Given that it was made for less than Michael Bay spends on lunch, and turned into something of a hit, it was only a matter of time until the attempt to cash in was made. To be absolutely fair, although it isn’t exactly screaming for a sequel, the central premise is established that these events take place every Halloween, so it isn’t too much of a leap of faith to wheel out another batch of dopey teenagers (played by actors in their late 20’s, of course) for more demonic and nudity filled frolics.

Just Pillow Talk’s Birthday Nightmare: Friday 13th (2009)

Welcome back to the series that has grown men crying like little girls. This journey has really been the stuff of nightmares, and in the future bloggers will no doubt use it to scare their children: “You behave yourself or I’ll make you review Just Pillow Talk’s Birthday Series. It has tigers in hats in it”.

Scary.

Still, there’s been a suspicious amount of grade inflation going on recently, but surely this crappy remake of a fairly crappy original can’t get off Scot free. I mean, it’s Platinum Dunes, for fuck’s sake! This is a nailed on 0 film, and if there’s any shenanigans and suspicious 1.27 ratings, then well, really, I will step in.

Let’s see if such drastic measures will be necessary

Video Game Adaptations: Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich

Yes, yes, I know that title says “The Blood Reich Bloodrayne 3” but I’ve just looked it up on IMDB, and it’s actually Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich. Which is only marginally less dimwitted.

Jesus suffering fuck, why do I keep doing this to myself? I’m almost on the verge of binning this stupid series altogether if I don’t find a good adaptation in the very near future. In the meantime, I’ve got to dredge the contents of my memory to produce a review of a film I can barely fucking remember, one from German turd-meister Uwe Boll that’s so inconceivably boring that despite gratuitous boob and lesbianism, I still can’t recall a damned thing about it. This is going to be a tough one. 

Jarv’s Birthday Series: Piranha 3D (2010)

I’m nearly there now. In case you don’t know what the score is with this series, it works like this: Droid came up with the idea last year, and it’s intriguing enough for a few of us to take it on as well. We’re watching one film released as close as possible to the day we were born on each year that we’ve graced the planet. My run has been comparatively simple (well compared to poor old Just Pillow Talk’s), with an eclectic mix of the good, the bad and the ugly, and as I near the end, I have to say that I’m feeling really quite pleased with how it has gone. The joy of this series, is that you get to watch a lot of films that you either needed to be reminded about or hadn’t seen to begin with and the chance of rooting out some overlooked gems is fairly high. In my instance, I discovered Reform School Girls, The Driver and Invincible as films that really came in as a pleasant surprise. The flip side is that you also have to watch a fair old amount of shit, but you can’t have everything. I will sadly, be returning to this series in the next few months, as I made an unfortunate cock-up with 2009 and there are a hell of a lot of films released next week that I’m interested in. And an Almodovar film that Mrs. Jarv is interested in. Pah.

Nevertheless, 2010 was another interesting year, Werewolves on the Moon was coming up to being one year old, and I had mostly refined my conversational style to the standards of this review. In all honesty, actually, I look back at some of the early ones and cringe at how comparatively unsophisticated they are. Not that my more recent ones are a model of finesse and craft, but you get the idea. After much rambling preamble, it’s now time to take a look at 2010’s effort: Piranha 3D (release date either the 20th or 26th of August globally).