NIGHT VISITOR (US - 1989) Directed by Rupert Hitzig. Written by Randal Viscovich. Cast: Elliott Gould, Allen Garfield, Michael J. Pollard, Shannon Tweed, Richard Roundtree, Derek Rydall, Brooke Bundy, Teresa Vander Woude, Scott Fults, Kathleen Bailey, Teri Weigel, Henry Gibson, Bruce Kimmel, Ann Dane. (R, 93 mins) A ludicrous "Satanic Panic" riff on the '80s horror favorite favorite FRIGHT NIGHT with a bit of Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, 1989's NIGHT VISITOR (just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion because physical media is dead), was pretty much swept under the rug by MGM/UA, who only got it on a handful of screens in a very limited release before it turned up in every video store in America. Horndog high school prankster and bullshit artist Billy Colton (Derek Rydall) gets pretty excited when sultry tease Lisa (Shannon Tweed) moves in next door. His mom sends him over with a gift basket and he gets a peck on the cheek goodbye as Lisa welcomes an older gentlemen friend at the door. His bedroom window happens to face hers, so he digs out a long-unused telescope and watches her having sex with the man, and from her look toward his window with a smile and wink, she seems perfectly OK with his newfound interest in voyeurism. When another guy stops over the next night, Billy is convinced she's a high-class prostitute but his dork buddy Loomis (Scott Fults) and platonic crush Kelly (Teresa Vander Woude) think he's full of shit. Determined to convince them of his hunch, Billy gets a ladder and takes a camera up to Lisa's roof to peep in her candle-illuminated bedroom window to get proof. Of course, it's the exact moment when a screaming Lisa, handcuffed to the bed, is stabbed to death by a robed figure wearing a horned goat mask as part of a Satanic sex ritual. Billy is attacked through the window by the killer and manages to snap some shots in the process before ripping off the goat mask. And wouldn't you know it? The killer is Billy's asshole history teacher Mr. Willard (Allen Garfield), who just had him suspended for excessive tardies and setting off an explosive whoopee cushion in class, which was actually dumbass Loomis' doing.
Capt. Crane (Richard Roundtree as yet another irate police captain in a late '80s B-movie) seems skeptical of Billy's story, especially with his history of pranks and dog-ate-my-homework lies, the fact that there's no photos of the killer since he forgot to take off the lens cap, and that he was on Lisa's roof peeping in the first place. But Crane is dealing with a series of serial ritual-style murders of prostitutes, with Lisa the latest victim, so he visits Willard's house and finds him and his half-wit brother Stanley (Michael J. Pollard, cast radically against type as "Michael J. Pollard") weird enough to consider Willard a person of interest. As well he should, since Willard permits Stanley to keep a hooker (Teri Weigel) chained up and ball-gagged in the basement as a human toy, and Willard starts threatening Billy over the phone and after class (cutting off a snip of his hair for a future ritual) since he knows his secret. With no one to turn to, Billy reaches out to his late father's buddy--alcoholic, retired forensics cop Devereaux (Elliott Gould)--to help prove Willard's guilt.
Cranked out in two-and-a-half weeks by debuting director and former producer (ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, WOLFEN, JAWS 3-D) Rupert Hitzig, NIGHT VISITOR never takes itself too seriously. Or rather, the legitimate actors working through a career slump because they've got bills to pay never take it too seriously, with Pollard in particular grinning and smirking throughout and looking openly contemptuous of the material. Top-billed Gould doesn't even appear until halfway through and doesn't really look like he wants to be there, even though a hilarious climactic showdown pitting a shotgun-toting Gould against a chainsaw-wielding Pollard is almost worth the price of admission. NIGHT VISITOR might've worked more effectively if Garfield (also Gould's nemesis in Peter Hyams' amazing BUSTING) and Pollard weren't goofing off like a comedy team most of the time. From Mr. Willard's first appearance being a fussy, irritable prick to his students, a toupeed Garfield--a Character Actor Hall of Famer in the news a few months ago as one of the first Hollywood figures to succumb to COVID-19, contracted in a nursing home where he was living after a massive stroke in 2004--plays the character like a comical creep, coming off less like a malevolent threat along the lines of Chris Sarandon's vampire in FRIGHT NIGHT and more like a Satanist George Costanza.
As played by Garfield and Pollard, there's no way a pair of clowns like Willard and Stanley could get away with these murders for as long as they do. The name actors probably got onboard because they knew Hitzig from his producing days, which would explain Henry Gibson's improbable casting as a police department psychologist (Gibson, Garfield, and Gould were all in Robert Altman's NASHVILLE in better days). The best part of NIGHT VISITOR is Tweed, who's killed off rather early but is an absolute charmer in her brief screen time (the wink and the goofy grin she gives Billy as he spies on her from his bedroom feels like something she came up with on her own), and was always a better actress than her prolific career in countless unrated DTV erotic thrillers in the '90s would indicate. This also marked the beginning of Rydall's very short-lived career as a horror star, following this with the title role in the same year's PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC'S REVENGE and the 1991 cult favorite POPCORN before quitting acting to become a writer, scripting several episodes of POWER RANGERS WILD FORCE and the sixth BEETHOVEN movie.
IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT (US - 1991) Directed by Nico Mastorakis. Written by Nico Mastorakis and Fred C. Perry. Cast: Jeff Lester, Adrianne Sachs, Marc Singer, David Soul, Tippi Hedren, Brian Thompson, Shannon Tweed, John Beck, Jack Kehler, Shelley Michelle. (NC-17, 112 mins) If there's a genre of exploitation trash that's been woefully under-represented on DVD and Blu-ray, it has to be the straight-to-video, unrated erotic thrillers that were constantly gushing all over the new release walls of America's video stores throughout the first half of the 1990s. A couple of years ago, some of us hoped that Synapse's Blu-ray release of the 1995 Jim Wynorski-directed, Julie Strain-starring SORCERESS would herald the much-anticipated resurrection of these things, but it's been largely crickets and tumbleweed since. Shout! Factory recently released a POISON IVY box set, which is a start (even though the fourth one is a Lifetime movie, for fuck's sake), and Mill Creek has some Andy Sidaris joints on the way for the T&A action crowd, but where's the BODY CHEMISTRY, NIGHT EYES, INDECENT BEHAVIOR, SECRET GAMES, ANIMAL INSTINCTS, or MIRROR IMAGES collections? Where's the Shannon Tweed triple features? Where's the IN THE HEAT OF PASSION or SCORNED double feature Blu-rays? Fortunately, Vinegar Syndrome does their part to satiate the burning desires of those who were powerless to avoid the seductive early '90s temptations of any VHS box displaying the magic word--"UNRATED!"--with their Blu-ray release (because physical media is dead) of 1991's IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT, directed and co-written by Greek exploitation auteur Nico Mastorakis (more on him here).
Playing like a weird and utterly nonsensical fusion of a late '80s Italian fashion giallo and a prototype of the in-its-infancy DTV/Skinemax erotic thriller while somewhat prefiguring the "virtual reality" craze that would kick off with the next year's THE LAWNMOWER MAN, IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT centers on Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester), an in-demand Malibu fashion photographer with a glowing, fluorescent waterbed, who's suddenly plagued by horrific nightmares that look like garbled video transmissions, where he believes he's killing a beautiful woman he's never met. He even wakes up in the act of strangling his current friend-with-benefits, sultry model Lena (Shannon Tweed), who's shocked but still turned on ("Your hand was around my throat, I couldn't breathe! But I almost came..."). He gets nowhere with a shrink (David Soul), who simply advises "You need a good night's sleep," which is kinda hard with a bed that serves as a source of bright, blinding light. He also gets some jokey support from his fridge-raiding, bodybuilder best buddy Phil (Brian Thompson), and for some reason, clears his head by hanging out at the beach and having pizza with a homeless guy (Jack Kehler, best known as The Dude's dance quintet landlord in THE BIG LEBOWSKI). It's here that he sees a panicked, pony-tailed guy on a bike wearing a T-shirt adorned with the airbrushed image of the mystery woman's face. Scott does some digging and gets nowhere with Rudy (John Beck), the shop owner who made the shirt, but immediately after, the mystery woman arrives at his front door. She's Kimberly Shawn (Adrianne Sachs), who rides her motorcycle right into his living room and explains that Rudy knows her ex-husband, though she's very vague on the matter. Of course, Scott and Kimberly begin a passionate fling, but he's still haunted by visions of himself--or someone--killing her again and again.
Released straight-to-video in February 1991, IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT was among the first films to be slapped with an NC-17 rating, created the previous fall as a replacement to the stigmatized X and first given to Philip Kaufman's controversial HENRY & JUNE. There's plenty of skin, grinding, and high-in-the-sound-mix slurping in the film's sex scenes--not to mention a peculiar use for a dish of marbles--but what's here really didn't seem NC-17-worthy then and it definitely doesn't now (Mastorakis said the MPAA had a problem with the shots of Sachs' vigorous thrusting on top of Lester). The cuts had to be minimal since Republic Pictures Home Video released it in both NC-17 and R versions (the latter presumably for Blockbuster), and both clocked in at 112 minutes. Filled with plenty of neon set decor, acid-washed jeans, big hair, and wailing saxes--the tell-tale sign in these things that people are about to get busy--IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT is very much a product of the DTV erotic thriller in its early stages, but it has a more ambitious storyline than its fellow genre standard-bearers like NIGHT EYES, LAST CALL, and the later flood of post-BASIC INSTINCT knockoffs that were down the road.
Ambitious though it may be, that storyline doesn't really make much sense, especially when a sinister, smirking Marc Singer shows up in the third act for the dual function as the film's villain--the kind of guy who has an ominous wall of TV monitors in his living room--and dutiful Basil Exposition, giving a long, lecturing speech about Scott being the unwitting guinea pig in a government-contracted experiment using TV signals sent through an implant in a tooth as a means of mind control. You'd think with all the money invested in this project, they'd use this technology in a financial or even a MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE or PARALLAX VIEW way rather than just voyeuristically watching some douchebag fashion photographer bang models on his ridiculous glowing waterbed. Mastorakis specifically namechecks Brian De Palma and one could see this as sort of sci-fi-tinged BODY DOUBLE, and the stylishly foggy, blue backlit climax serves to demonstrate Mastorakis' affection for the work of Michael Mann, and to his credit, he does seem to recognize the campy elements, with some outrageously suggestive use of finger food during Scott and Kimberly's dinner, along with an overflowing bottle of uncorked champagne, stopping ust short of cutting to a shot of a speeding train entering a tunnel. Mastorakis would also have us believe that Kimberly's laserdisc movie library consists of two Nico Mastorakis films (THE WIND and GLITCH) and he also has a brief role for one-time Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren as Kimberly's mother, complete with a shoehorned-in reference to THE BIRDS. The film gets points for its terrific B-movie supporting cast (Tweed is very charming here and you'll wish she had more screen time), but is severely deficient when it comes to the leads. Sachs (best known as the brunette hooker in the "Bitches leave!" scene in ROBOCOP) is gorgeously seductive, but she can't act, and Lester (whose most high-profile role prior to this was as one of Bo Svenson's deputies on the short-lived 1981 TV spinoff of WALKING TALL) is like a bland, blank Michael Dudikoff. Both would be out of the acting business within the next two years, though Lester embarked on a second career directing TV commercials and music videos, and has been married to Susan Anton since 1992. IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT isn't a great movie, but it's at least unusual for its type, and it was fun experiencing its rampant silliness again after all these years. Let's get some more of these things out on Blu-ray!
STEELE JUSTICE (US - 1987) Written and directed by Robert Boris. Cast: Martin Kove, Sela Ward, Ronny Cox, Bernie Casey, Joseph Campanella, Jan Gan Boyd, Soon-Teck Oh, Sarah Douglas, Shannon Tweed, Robert Kim, Peter Kwong, Al Leong, Phil Fondacaro, Asher Brauner, Dean Ferrandini, Big Bull Bates, Kevin Gage, The Desert Rose Band, Astrid Plane. (R, 97 mins) In the annals of ridiculous '80s cop movies, STEELE JUSTICE fell through the cracks and still flies under the radar today. An action hero straight out of the McBain playbook, disgraced L.A. cop John Steele is perfectly played in Rainier Wolfcastle-style by a teeth-gritting Martin Kove, then best-known for both his role as Isbecki on the popular CBS series CAGNEY & LACEY and as Kreese, the asshole sensai of the Cobra Kai dojo in the KARATE KID movies. A Vietnam vet-turned-renegade cop who refused to play by the rules, Steele was thrown off the force for insubordination by perpetually irate Chief Bennett (Ronny Cox, basically playing a sniveling "protect the shield" version of his BEVERLY HILLS COP character). Steele, the kind of badass who wears a live coral snake (named Three Steps "because three steps, and you're dead") around his neck, is pulled back into action when his Asian-American ex-partner and Vietnam buddy Minh (Robert Kim) and his family are massacred by the goons of drug kingpin Pham Van Kwan (Peter Kwong), a prominent figure in the "Black Tiger" Vietnamese Mafia. Of course, it goes deeper than that, as Pham is the son of Gen. Bon Soong Kwan (Soon-Teck Oh), a corrupt South Vietnamese military official who was smuggling CIA gold and tried to have Steele killed in the final days of the war. Understandably still holding a grudge, Steele is recruited Shriker-from-DEATH WISH 3-style by Bennett, who wants him take out the trash while keeping the department's image squeaky clean. Or, as Bennett explains to Steele's reluctant new partner Reese (Bernie Casey), "He isn't being recruited...he's being unleashed!" In addition to avenging the death of his best friend, Steele has to contend with clueless, desk-jockey cops and his corrupt former commanding officer Harry (Joseph Campanella) being in cahoots with Kwan, who's now a respected L.A. businessman who's also hooked up with the ambitious, spoiled daughter (Shannon Tweed) of a powerful mafia boss. Any chance all concerned parties will converge at an abandoned factory at a waterfront shipyard? And that a crane will somehow be involved?
There isn't a single cop/action movie cliche that goes unused by writer/director Robert Boris, who also wrote 1973's ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE and 1983's DOCTOR DETROIT. The film is filled with stunts and brutal violence but it's silly enough that you have to wonder if Boris was making a comedy. You know there's no way anyone in the cast is taking it seriously. Certainly the actors saw the absurdity of Minh's daughter Cami, the only survivor of the massacre of Minh's family, being played by Jan Gan Boyd. That same year, Boyd played a Secret Service agent who sleeps with Charles Bronson in ASSASSINATION, but here she is in pigtails and dressed like a little girl, skipping around and calling Steele "Uncle John," an actress in her mid 20s playing a role that seems like it was written for a six-year-old. Steele's ex-wife Tracy (Sela Ward) is on hand to humanize him while trying to tell herself she doesn't still love him, admonishing him with "The war isn't over for you...it just changed locations." Of course, there's a "working out/preparing for battle" montage set to a driving, AOR hard rock tune, in this case Hot Pursuit's "Fire with Fire." And it doesn't get any more '80s than the L.A. hotel lobby shootout where Tracy is directing a music video for Animotion ("Obsession") singer Astrid Plane (as herself), when Pham's guys (including perennial '80s henchman Al Leong) show up to kill Cami. Steele and Reese, a budget-conscious Riggs and Murtaugh, arrive only to have Reese barely survive a bullet to the gut and Steele shot with a poisoned dart. That's no problem for Steele, who dives head-first through a window into a banquet room, slices his arm open, sucks out the poison, and cauterizes the wound with a conveniently unattended sizzling pan in one of the greatest scenes ever.
It gets really good around the 4:00 mark
Released by Atlantic, STEELE JUSTICE opened on a handful of screens May 8, 1987, the same day as Francis Ford Coppola's GARDENS OF STONE and the John Cusack comedy HOT PURSUIT. It expanded across the country over the next few weeks but never even cracked the top ten, petering out in late May with a box office take of just over $1 million, more than double the take of Cannon's NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET, another neglected cop flick from earlier that year. For a movie that was equal parts RAMBO, DIRTY HARRY, and LETHAL WEAPON, STEELE JUSTICE surprisingly never found an audience (it opened in my hometown of Toledo, OH on May 29 and didn't even play for a full week, gone five days later to make room for the Wednesday opening of THE UNTOUCHABLES). It didn't even really break out on video, which is a shame. Was STEELE JUSTICE a spoof and none of us realized it? Is this the STARSHIP TROOPERS of '80 cop actioners? Sure, it's a stupid movie but it seems to recognize that fact. There's something ludicrous happening at any given moment (Steele driving a truck through a Black Tiger billiards hall and beating the shit out of everyone is great, but why is he wearing too-tight burgundy slacks?), and Kove is a blast as Steele. Needless to say, the failure of STEELE JUSTICE didn't open any doors for Kove as a big-screen action star. After the end of CAGNEY & LACEY in 1988 and THE KARATE KID PART III in 1989, he found a lot of work in the world of straight-to-video throughout the '90s and into the '00s for directors like Cirio H. Santiago, Joseph Merhi, and J. Christian Ingvordsen. He remains busy on TV and low-budget schlock to this day (he's in Syfy's upcoming LAVALANTULA sequel 2 LAVA 2 LANTULA!, one of 24 IMDb credits he's got for 2016 alone), and is a regular fixture at fan conventions thanks to his KARATE KID notoriety. One of the most entertaining action movies Cannon never made, STEELE JUSTICE is junk, but it's junk that deserved a better reception than it got. It's just been unleashed on Blu-ray--unfortunately, with no extras other than a trailer--by Kino Lorber. Nearly 30 years after it bowed to instant oblivion, let's hope STEELE JUSTICE's day has finally arrived.
