The Curator of Schlock #397 by Jeff Shuster

Eight Legged Freaks

Giant spider movie. 

“You want the pills, I need the dough,” the drug-pusher-disguised-as-a-pizza-delivery-guy said. I saw the name Gary engraved on his jacket. 

“Okay, Gary. Just give me a few minutes,” I said, trying to stall for time until the crazed vigilante ninja, The Revenging Manta, came to my aid. 

“My name’s not Gary,” the drug pusher said, setting the pizza box full of fentanyl on the shoe counter. “Goose Lord and his guys beat the pizza guy senseless for his tip money. I was there. Took his jacket as a souvenir. Great disguise, huh.” — To be continued.

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Tonight’s movie is 2002’s Eight Legged Freaks from director Ellory Elkayem. To think, this movie came out the same year as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. The two movies are a lot alike as they both feature spiders.

Other than that, the two movies are totally different. Actually I am not sure why I brought that up.

The movie begins with a truck transporting chemicals. The driver swerves to avoid hitting a rabbit. One of the cans of toxic chemicals falls into the nearby river. Great. Thumper got saved, but now the town of Prosperity, Arizona is doomed!

Next, we get a scene with the town spider collector, Joshua Taft (Tom Noonan), showing off some exotic spiders he got from Brazil to young science nerd, Mike Parker. Joshua has been feeding them crickets he found by the toxic river. This has mutated the spiders. After Mike leaves, Joshua and his pet parrot are attacked by the mutated spiders and devoured. You know, if the pet parrot is fair game in a monster movie, all bets are off.

We get introduced to other characters. Mike’s mother is Samantha Parker (Kari Wuhrer),  the town sheriff. Mike’s sister is Ashley Parker played by a young Scarlet Johnson. David Arquette plays Chris McCormick whose father owned the town’s abandoned mine. He’s at odds with the town mayor, Wade (Leon Rippy), who wants everyone in town to sell their property to the corporation that produced the toxic chemicals. You also get the town conspiracy nut, Harlan Griffiths (Doug E. Doug), a goofy deputy named Pete (Rick Overton), and Chris’s chain-smoking Aunt Gladys (Eileen Reilly). And there are a bunch more goofy townsfolk where those came from.

What’s the plot of the movie? Giant spiders attack an unsuspecting populace. If you’re a fan of cats and dogs, I’m sorry. There’s a scene where deputy Pete’s cat has a tussle with a spider inside the walls of his house and you can see imprints of the cat through the plaster. What else? You get to see some ostriches dragged through the ground. Oh, and we get to see Scarlet Johansson tase a guy in the groin causing him to pee his pants.

The movie culminates in the town barricading itself in a shopping mall against an army of disgusting giant spiders. The effects are done with computers. CGI from twenty years ago doesn’t hold up well, but I give the animators points for having these giant spiders move like actual spiders. 

Eight Legged Freaks is streaming for free on Tubi. Check it out!

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #393 by Jeff Shuster

The Girl in Room 2A

Beware of cults!

The Revenging Manta, the self-appointed defender of downtown Orlando, gave me the skinny on the horrific plans of the crime syndicate known as the Iguana Consortium. I can’t go fully into the details. Let’s just say it involved lollipops, fentanyl, a rubber dinosaur suit, and a ferris wheel. Evil was about to be unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens of Orlando. — To be continued.

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This week’s movie is 1974’s The Girl in Room 2A from director William Rose. That name sounds suspect as the director of another fine Giallo from the land of Italy, but what do I know? Hmmmmm. The Italian name of this movie is La Casa della Paura. Let’s check the IMBD. What’s the name of the director? Carlo Campogalliani? I knew it! I knew It! Oh, wait. It looks like it’s just a movie with the same title that came out in 1921. William Rose it is!

What’s the plot of The Girl in Room 2A? A pretty young woman named Margaret Bradley (Daniela Giordano) is released from a woman’s prison or a rehab facility. I’m not sure which. Point is Margaret has a disturbing past. There’s a scene where she goes into why she was sent to prison in the first place, but I zoned out while she was talking. Maybe I was too distracted by the evil cult kidnapping young women and subjecting them to torture and death.

The movie begins with one such kidnapping. A young blonde woman is knocked unconscious and kidnapped only to later get stripped naked and bound. She does her best to escape the blades that keep trying to slice into her through the walls of the small room she’s tied up in. Eventually, a red caped figure donning a red ski mask unties the blonde woman and shoves her into one of the blades. The corpse of the young woman is then rolled off a cliff. I’m sure the police are quite baffled.

Turns out the young blonde woman stayed in the same room at the same halfway house that Margaret finds herself in. Upon entering her new apartment, Margaret lifts up a small rug to find blood seeping through the floorboards. Margaret finds a washcloth in her bathroom, mops up the blood, places the rug back, and goes about her business. I’m sorry, but if you see a giant swath of blood on the floor of your new residence, get the hell out of there!

In another scene, we get to know the cult a bit better. A Mr. Johnson (Frank Latimore) is doing research on the cult for a book he’s writing, but one of the cult leaders, a Mr. Dreese (Raf Vallone), ain’t having it. He tells Mr. Johnson he won’t allow his group to be exploited just to make Johnson a richer man. Dreese then locks him inside a room on one of the upper floors of the old manor house. Later, some cult members enter the room and force Mr. Johnson to burn his hands on a hot railing near a roaring fireplace.

The torture escalates from there. The guy in the red devil outfit starts stabbing Mr. Johnson with a poker. With nowhere to run, Mr. Johnson jumps out a window, falling to his death. The cult then sticks the corpse of Mr. Johnson in his car and sends it careening off a cliff. Funny enough, the car explodes before it hits the ground. It must have been a Ford Pinto. I can’t help, but think that getting forced to jump out a window by a sadomasochistic cult was just a typical Friday night in 1970s Italy. You can catch The Girl in Room 2A streaming for free on Tubi.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #392 by Jeff Shuster

Naked Girl Killed in the Park

Was she killed by the house on the edge of the park?

One doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Yes, I’m glad a crazed vigilante known as the Revenging Manta saved me from being beaten to death by a bunch of hooligans. Still, I was a little annoyed I had to foot the bill at the Waffle House. Why couldn’t we go dutch? He said ninjas don’t carry their wallets with them. That’s a load of bull. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it’s not like I’m floating in cash either after traveling all around the United States and Canada with a kangaroo to take care of. — To be continued.

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This week’s giallo masterpiece is 1972’s Naked Girl Killed in the Park from director Alfonso Brescia. This movie also goes by the title Girl Murdered in the Park. That’s what it’s called on Tubi anyway. The top review on the IMBD labels it as an “uninspiring and boring Giallo.” I don’t know. Giallo is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s kind of good. Be forewarned though, the English dub track is badly in need of a remaster. You’ll be struggling to make out what the characters are saying around the hisses, pops, and static.

Our movie begins during the bombing of Berlin toward the end of WW2. A mother and her son are tied up while a Nazi officer rigs a plastic explosive with a timer. A young woman is with him who may be his girlfriend. She almost wants to interfere, but the man takes her with him, leaving the mother and son to a horrible fate. Fast forward to a 1972 Germany where an old man is found exiting a funhouse ride with a bullet in his head. 

The man is Johannes Wanterberger, a wealthy German business man fled to Brazil after the war due to him being a Nazi.  He returned to Germany after he had made his fortune with his lovely wife and two daughters. It also seems that Johannes took out a one millions dollar life insurance policy a couple of hours before he was murdered. The insurance company sends one of their investigators, a handsome young man named Chris Buyer (Robert Hoffman), to investigate the family for foul play. 

This sounds like the plot of last week’s movie, The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail. As I watched, I wondered if the murderer would turn out to be the insurance investigator like in last week’s movie. Crap! Spoilers! Sorry! Anyway, Chris poses as a newspaper reporter and seduces Catherine (Pilar Velázquez), the youngest member of the Wanterberger clan. She’s beautiful, but has a weak heart. Unlike her sister, Barbara (Patrizia Adiutori), who is a constant flirt with Chris. I think the mom also makes a pass at him.

Anyway, it turns out Chris is young boy from the Berlin bombing scene at the beginning of the movie. Chris is the illegitimate son of Johannes Wantenberger. His mom must have shielded him from the blast of that plastic explosive and he’s been planning revenge on Johannes Wanternberger all his life. This means that part of his revenge meant sleeping with Wanternberger’s daughters. This means Chris had sex with his half-sisters. I think I’ll stop writing now.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #391 by Jeff Shuster

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail

Money Money Money!

The ruthless vigilante known as the Revenging Manta spilled his beans to me at a Waffle House. He was once a humble haberdasher and family man. He had a loving wife and young daughter until the Iguana Consortium, a unified alliance of all the gangs in Orlando, FL, demanded protection money. When he refused, their leader, the Goose Lord, murdered his family right in front of him. That day he swore revenge against the Iguana Consortium, donning the guise of the Revenging Manta. — To be continued.

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It’s August and I want to write about giallo movies. What’s a giallo movie? That’s kind of hard to explain. Much like porn, you’ll know one when you see one. This week’s movie is 1971’s The Case of the Scorpion’s Tale from director Sergio Martino. The movie begins in London with a young woman named Lisa Baumer (Ida Galli) having a torrid affair behind her husband Kurt’s back. Not that he’s going to find out since the airplane he’s traveling on blows up.

In Athens, she meets a handsome man named Peter Lynch (George Hilton), but she quickly deduces that he’s an insurance investigator. Later, Lisa runs into Lara (Janine Reynaud), her husband’s late mistress. Lara tells her that Kurt was going to divorce Lisa and marry her. Lara demands half of the insurance money or she’s going to have her lawyer, Sharif, rearrange Lisa’s face. Lisa evades them thanks to aid of Peter Lynch. When she gets the check, she insists on getting it cashed right away instead of waiting until she’s back in London.

Anyway, turns out Lisa’s husband had a life insurance policy and Lisa is the lucky beneficiary of a million dollars! She just needs to travel to Athens to collect it. Some creeper named Phillip is blackmailing Lisa for hundreds of pounds. There’s also a man in a fedora and sunglasses stalking her. Lisa comes home to find her apartment ransacked and Phillip bleeding out on her carpet. Oh, well. Off to Athens to collect that money.

With a handbag stuffed with a million dollars, Lisa heads back to her hotel room and books a flight to Tokyo to meet up with her lover, Paulo. Somehow I don’t think Lisa thought this through. If you walk around with a million dollars in cold hard cash, you should expect someone might try to rob you!. Lisa orders a taxi to take her to the airport later that evening, but a black gloved killer sneaks into her apartment, slashes her throat, and steals the money. Wait! What? Lisa was the protagonist of the movie and she doesn’t make it past the half hour mark. All bets are off!

From here we follow Peter Lynch as he works with an Interpol inspector to find out who murdered Lisa and stole the million dollars. First stop is Lara’s place since she threatened Lisa the day before. Peter almost gets his head hacked off by the killer outside Lara’s place. Lara denies having anything to do with Lisa’s death. Peter befriends a lovely reporter named Cléo Dupont (Anita Strindberg). She helps him investigate the case while having a torrid affair with him. The gloved killer takes out Lara and Saffron. Who could it be? I’ve never been good at guessing these things. There’s a big shocking twist at the end and plenty of gruesome deaths in-between. Check it out!

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #390 by Jeff Shuster

The Ice Road

Liam Neeson in an automobile. 

Life can be funny. One moment you’re getting assaulted by a bunch of hooligans, the next moment you’re sitting in a Waffle House, eating a Hashbrown Bowl across from a vigilante ninja known as the Revenging Manta. He was sliding pieces of a peanut butter chip waffle through the folds of the purple silk that covered his face. He then sucked a cup of regular coffee right through the fabric, leaving a circular mocha stain behind. 

“Do you ever uncover your face?” I asked. 

“Never,” he said as he maneuvered a sausage patty through the fabric. — To be continued.

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This week’s movie is 2021’s The Ice Road from director Jonathan Hensleigh. It’s a Netflix original movie and a Netflix exclusive so maybe you kids can take a break from binging Stranger Things and watch Liam Neeson as a washed up trucker named Mike McCann. Yeah, don’t expect any September courtships in this movie. You do get plenty of ice and snow and trucks.

Mike McCann is a down on his luck trucker who is the primary caretaker for his brother Gurty, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and aphasia. A bunch of miners up in Winnipeg get trapped after a methane leak causes an explosion. Turns out the miners had turned off their methane detectors for an extra hundred dollars a month. This was the policy of the company’s corrupt vice-president to get them to drill in unsafe environments. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it saved the company enough money that he could pay for that solid gold hot tub he’d been wanting.

With the miners quickly running out of air, it’s up to a ragtag convoy to deliver wellheads to save them. Jim Goldenrod (Laurence Fishburne) hires Mike McCann and his brother along with a young woman called Tantoo (Amber Midhunter). The company is paying a lump sum of $200,000 to split among the truckers. If any truckers die along the way, that’s more of the pie to divide up among the survivors. What’s the danger? To get to Winnipeg, they have to drive on a road made of ice.

Confused? So was I. Apparently, the river systems in Canada get converted into roads once they freeze over in the winter. The Canadian government checks these roads for safety,  They make sure the ice is thick enough for safe travel. This is the ideal way to get supplies to the more remote communities up there. Still, the idea that some frozen water is the only thing keeping one away from arctic oblivion is hard for me to handle. 

Anyway, along for the ride is a company stooge named Tom Varnay (Benjamin Walker). He’s not there for the money. He just wants to make sure the operation goes smoothly and the miners get rescued. Jim Goldenrod’s engine seizes up and Mike and brother go back to help him out, but things go awry. I really didn’t want to see Laurence Fishburne get dragged to a watery grave by his big rig and if Laurence Fishburne can die so early in the movie, all bets are off. We also learn that there’s a saboteur among the truckers that doesn’t want them to reach their destination. Will they survive?

You can catch The Ice Road on Netflix streaming. You can also catch The Unexplained with host William Shatner on Netflix. Did you ever want to see William Shatner ramble on about The Winchester House or the Chupacabra? Then this is the show for you. When you can recite the tale about the woman who was struck by lightning twice and survived, you’ll be the delight of the next cocktail party that you’re invited to. Trust me.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.

The Curator of Schlock #388 by Jeff Shuster

Non-Stop

Liam Neeson on a plane.

Where did I leave off? Oh, yes. Three goons were about to beat me to death in a darkened alley when a figure clad in purple ninja armor appeared from the shadows. The lanky goon emptied a clip in the ninja’s direction, but his ninjatō deflected every bullet. Sword in hand, the ninja drove the blade into the lanky goon before the criminal could squeeze another shot off. The other goons scrambled away and the ninja turned his eyes toward me. — To be continued.

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This week’s movie is 2014’s Non-Stop from director Jaume Collet-Serra. This is an action-thriller movie starring Liam Neeson, a genre he’s been prolific in since 2008’s Taken. There’s a pretty good ensemble class here with Julianne Moore, Michelle Dockery, Anson Mount, Lupita Nyong’o, and Shea Whigham to name a few. And the movie is under two hours so it won’t waste too much of your time.

Non-Stop begins with Bill Marks (Liam Neeson) sitting in his car at the airport making himself an Irish coffee. This is to insinuate that he has a drinking problem. He’s also gazing fondly at a photo of a young girl which we later learn is his daughter. Bill boards a plane set for London and ends up seated next to the lovely Jen Summers (Julianne Moore). Bill gets nervous as the plane takes off so Jen holds his hand until they are in the air. Bill tells Jen about the  lucky blue ribbon his daughter gave him. Blah. Blah. Blah.

It’s about this time in the movie that I become suspicious that Bill is hiding something and he is! Bill is the air marshal for the flight. He has a special air marshal blackberry and Bill gets a whopper of a text. The text reads that a passenger will die every twenty minutes unless the killer receives $150 million dollars in a special bank account. Time for panic!

Bill consults the other air marshal on the flight, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), about the threat, but Jack figures it’s someone playing a prank. He enlists Jen and a flight attendant named Nancy (Michelle Dockery) to watch the security monitor and circle the head of every passenger that may be texting him when Bill texts the killer again. I wonder if an alternate title for this movie was The Texter. Would you go see a movie titled The Texter? No, of course not. You want to watch a movie called Non-Stop because of the promise of non-stop thrills.

Bill gets into a fight with Jack in the airplane bathroom. Turns out Jack is working with the killer for bags of money because being an air marshal is a thankless job or something to that effect. He offers to cut him in, but Bill refuses. A tussle in the bathroom results in Jack’s neck getting broken. Bill didn’t want to kill Jack, but he had a gun pointed at him.

The authorities on the ground relieve Bill of his air marshal authority when they discover the bank account the money is to be transferred into is in Bill’s name! He’s being set up! Time is running out as the texter promises to kill a passenger every twenty minutes until he gets the money. I sure hope the next victim isn’t the pilot. The stakes keep escalating as the movie runs along. There’s a suitcase full of cocaine that is also concealing a bomb, but I better shut up now before I spoil the twists at the end. I was yelling at the screen when I found out who the killer was.  Unfortunately, there is no scene of Liam Neeson angrily punching the killer into the plane’s engine. Oh, well.

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Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, and episode 496) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.