We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
'70s horror, Wings Hauser, and B-movie action.
LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971)
When his wife Jessica (Zohra Lampert) is released from a stay in a mental institution, string bassist Duncan (Barton Heyman) quits his job with the New York Philharmonic and decides they need to give up their New York City apartment, pack up their car (which happens to be a hearse), and move to a farmhouse in Connecticut with their hippie pal Woody (Kevin O’Connor), for the good of Jessica’s mental health. And apparently they had plenty of money saved up because, aside from selling some of the items from the house to an antiques dealer, nobody in this trio seems to have any concerns about getting a job once they get to Connecticut. They just hang out in the house, go swimming in a nearby lake, and Woody dedicates his days to spraying pesticide in the apple orchard. They’re so easy-going, when they find a drifter named Emily (Mariclare Costello) squatting in the house, they just let her continue living with them.
Jessica is fine with it when it looks like Woody and Emily are going to become an item, but when she notices that her husband is also attractive to the free-loving hippie girl, it becomes an issue that troubles her mind. Along with the strange girl (played by Gretchen Corbett) she sees lurking around, the corpse that seems to grab her in the lake, and the fact that all of the people in the nearest town are standoffish... and everyone of them has a strange scar somewhere on their body.
Lee Kalcheim originally wrote the screenplay for this film to be a horror satire. The title on his draft was It Drinks Hippie Blood, and the story was about a group of hippies on a camping trip being attacked by some kind of aquatic creature. That sounds like a movie I would love to watch – but when director John Hancock joined the project, he decided to rewrite the project into a serious horror film, only keeping a couple of elements from Kalcheim’s script. And, as it turns out, Hancock also delivered a horror film that I loved watching.
I have been aware of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death for decades and have always had some degree of interest in checking it out, largely because of the title. I used to talk to my sister-in-law about movies a lot back in the ‘90s, and there was a moment when we were ready to seek out Let’s Scare Jessica to Death to give it a watch... until we read a short synopsis that revealed the supernatural elements, killing my sister-in-law’s interest in the film. She had been hyped up to watch a movie about a group of people actually deciding to try to scare someone named Jessica to death, but that is not what the movie is about at all. And when she lost interest, I also set aside plans to watch the film and I didn’t catch up with it until a decade later. Now, after almost twenty more years, I have watched Let’s Scare Jessica to Death for a second time, and really enjoyed it. Apparently it didn’t make much of an impression on me when I previously watched it back in 2006, but this time it clicked.
Sure, the characters can be a bit irritating at times and I was envious that they had so much free time, but overall I found this to be an intriguing horror story, filmed in picturesque Connecticut locations. At times, the surroundings brought to mind Friday the 13th Part 2, which was also filmed in Connecticut – and I appreciate it every time a movie can bring to mind an entry in my beloved F13 franchise for some reason. I dug the relaxed, low budget, down-on-the-farm vibe of this movie and look forward to watch it again. I definitely won’t be letting any more decades go by without viewings of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
VICE SQUAD (1982)
In March of 2025, cinema lost one of its great character actors when the awesomely-named Wings Hauser (of course, that was a stage name; his name was actually Gerald Dwight Hauser) passed away at the age of 77. He racked up 115 screen acting credits over the course of a career that stretched back into the 1960s, and it seemed like I saw him all over the place, in movies and TV shows, when I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But there’s one credit that seems to stand out among all of his other ones. The movie Wings Hauser may be best known for is the ultra-sleazy 1982 thriller Vice Squad.
I had been hearing about Vice Squad for years, and may have actually semi-watched it at some point in the past, but I didn’t actually view it with my full attention on the screen until earlier this year – and when I did, I was blown away by Hauser’s performance as the villain, a homicidal pimp known as Ramrod. Hauser put so much strength and energy into this character, he made the guy come off like an unstoppable force of nature, and it’s truly captivating.
Directed by Gary A. Sherman from a screenplay written by Sandy Howard, Kenneth Peters, and Robert Vincent O'Neil, the film centers on Season Hubley as a single mother who goes by the name Princess when she’s walking the streets of Los Angeles, working as a prostitute. She’s friends with a fellow prostitute called Ginger (Nina Blackwood) – and when Ginger is murdered by her abusive pimp Ramrod, Princess agrees to help Detective Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) bring him to justice. Princess does help Walsh and his fellow officers arrest Ramrod, but the guy is only in custody for a few minutes before he doles out a beating to a pair of officers while he’s still handcuffed in the back of their car, causing them to wreck. He escapes by crawling out of the wreckage and immediately sets out on a mission of revenge, aiming to murder Princess for crossing him.
And that’s the whole movie. Princess continues working the streets while Ramrod gets free of his cuffs, procures a gun, and sets out to find her. Hauser brings an incredible sense of energy and menace to every scene he’s in, while the police officers on his trail often come off as pathetically inept. There’s even a moment where a couple of them get beaten up by an elderly Asian man they cross paths with.
Vice Squad tells an interesting story and has some memorable moments, but it wouldn’t have ended up being half as good as it is if anyone other than Wings Hauser had been cast as Ramrod. Hauser took what would have been a reasonably entertaining exploitation flick and elevated it to the level of a classic.
It’s sad to know that we’ll never have another Wings Hauser performance to look forward to, but he left behind a lot of great work that we can continue to enjoy for a long time to come.
PROGRAMMED TO KILL (1987)
In 1984, director James Cameron brought the world the sci-fi action horror classic The Terminator – and that’s probably why director Allan Holzman and writer Robert Short were hard at work on a movie called The Retaliator (more commonly known as Programmed to Kill, it seems) in 1986. Given that the movie was released in 1987, I was thinking it might have been a RoboCop cash-in as well, but the ‘86 copyright notice on the end credits would rule out that possibility.
The film starts out with a terrorist attack in Crete. A woman named Samira (played by Sandahl Bergman) and her associates open fire on (and toss grenades at) innocent civilians in an outdoor market, killing 24 people and wounding more than 50 before abducting two American children. The CIA responds by sending Eric Mathews (Robert Ginty) and his team of mercenaries to the terrorist group’s HQ, resulting in a firefight that ends with multiple terrorists dead, the American children rescued, Eric wounded, and Samira gravely injured. She’s in CIA custody when she’s declared brain dead... and then the CIA makes a decision that I would describe as brilliant, if I were being sarcastic.
You see, the CIA has been working on a cyborg program, and they figure Samira is a prime candidate to become their “programmed to kill” cyborg. They give her cybernetic enhancements and send her on a mission to wipe out the terrorist group she was previously a member of. As soon as Eric hears about this terrible idea, he makes it his last mission – before he leaves the mercenary life behind and enjoys retired life with his wife and son (the son is played by Paul Walker) – to take down Samira.
Eric is right to be concerned, because while she’s out in the field, Samira unexpectedly starts having memories of her previous life. Memories that cause her to go rogue and start tracking down anyone who was involved with the cyborg program. So now, Eric has to deal with a CIA cyborg that was supposed to exterminate terrorists but is now just a cyborg terrorist.
Programmed to Kill / The Retaliator has the right set-up to be a fun action flick, but the fun is hampered by the fact that this is a very dark, self-serious movie that moves at a deadly slow pace between the action sequences. The action is pretty cool when it kicks in, though – so the movie ends up being a decent watch, while feeling like it’s falling short of its potential. It could have been much cooler, but if you have a soft spot for cash-in, B-level action movies of the ‘80s, check it out.
UNDERGROUND TERROR (1988)
If you have my taste in cinema, Underground Terror – which is also simply known as Underground and was directed by James McCalmont from a screenplay by Brian O’Hara and Robert Zimmerman – will sound absolutely awesome to you. The film stars Doc Dougherty as a rogue NYPD cop named John Willis; one of those trigger happy types who don’t play by the rules and is always getting in trouble with their higher-ups. Lennie Loftin plays Boris Pinscher, a homicidal maniac who gets out of a mental hospital and immediately takes over a gang that lives in the tunnels under New York City. With Boris and his lackeys terrorizing and murdering people in the subway, it’s up to Willis and reporter Kim Knowles (Forbes Riley, a.k.a. B.J. Geordan) to bring their reign of (underground) terror to an end.
That sounds really cool... but the movie doesn’t live up to the potential of the concept. It’s way too dark and dreary, and so overly serious that it never manages to be very much fun. It doesn’t help that John Willis is one of the most unlikable rogue cop types to ever have the lead in an action thriller. The easy-to-root-for Dirty Harry this guy is not. Willis will flat-out murder unarmed suspects through closed doors – and after he gets chewed out by a higher-up for using excessive force to save a woman from an attacker, there’s an inexcusable scene that brings the whole movie down. Willis witnesses another woman getting attacked by two creeps in the park and is so discouraged by his dealings with the justice system, he just walks away and lets her get attacked. Whatever those creeps intended to do to that women, Willis leaves them to it. And, in that moment, makes us wonder why we’re even bothering to watch his story at all.
This does, of course, eventually build up to a subterranean action sequence where Willis takes on Boris and his gang, but it’s not exciting enough to be worth the journey it took to get there.
Drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs hosted a screening of Underground Terror on The Movie Channel back on January 27, 1990, and he shared my opinion about the scene where Willis ignores the attack on the woman being the scene that ruins the movie. However, most of Joe Bob’s hosting segment was focused on the Abdomenizer, a piece of plastic that was meant to provide back support while a person is doing sit-ups; a rather worthless piece of exercise equipment that was a big deal at the time because it was being sold on an infomercial that was in heavy rotation. Joe Bob does a 4 minute comedy routine regarding the Abdomenizer (which people used as a snow sled so often that they put a sticker on it warning that this piece of plastic was “not to be used as a sled”), and those 4 minutes of Job Bob talking about the Abdomenizer were better than the entirety of Underground Terror.
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