Dreamaniac (1986) Film Review! I Hate Every Second of It!

This film hurt my soul.
Do you have any idea how bad Dreamaniac is? Easily one of the worst movies I have ever seen, no questions asked. I am fixated with 80’s horror and the old straight-to-VHS films, but this one is worse then anyone would have imagined. I think the problem starts with this one when the movie is sort of about rock and roll and whoever made it was not terribly well-informed as to the music of the time. The main character has a whole bunch of t-shirts for hair bands, but there is no hair metal that appears in the film. The film uses instead very stock 80’s new wave music. Making reference sort of to the idea that was big at the time, the kid in the hair band t-shirts is into black magic. There is a girl of his wet dreams that he summons using magical rites. The hair band kids’ girlfriend throws a party with her sorority friends at the kids house, and the demon girl shows up and starts killing people. There’s a lot of nudity and sex in this one, soft-core elements, I have a feeling the guy who directed it was gay much more male nudity then female in this film. If you like to get aroused with music that sounds like Devo outtakes at best on in the background, this is the film for you. They do cocaine at the party of course.
The demon girl goes around killing the teenagers. I can’t express how bad this film is, it really should not be viewed. I usually like this kind of thing, but even I can’t deal with this one. My thoughts watching it are when is this crap going to end.
It all takes place in a house on one night. It doesn’t make any sense that they wouldn’t hear the screams in this house. This film is more dreadful then Re-Animator. The ending is also very stupid.
This film has no redeeming value.

Satanic Double Feature:
Prime Evil(1988) and Satan’s Slave(1976)


These two films that feature black robes and naked breasts satanic ritrual type scenes.
Prime Evil is like no other in the history of film for me. I am an avid fan of puppetry, especially bad puppetry in horror films. There is no question which film has the crappiest puppet of them all. The depiction of Satan in this film appears to have been made of Papier-mâché. The same is true of a creature in the film Terror Overload, but that film was clearly tongue in check, which is not the case with Prime Evil.
This film has an undercover nun infiltrating a pack of Satanists. The one of them has a granddaughter who is a fully grown woman whose a virgin because her father made child pornography of her (she reveals this to her boyfriend in a hilariously poorly acted sequence) which is required for one of their rituals to summon Satan. The granddaughter is a social worker and then all the chicks the satanic cult kidnap are the hookers she works with, the leader of the cult is priest trying to seduce the granddaughter- something along those lines.
I’m not even going to try and go through all the holes in the plotline of this film. It is an oddly paced film as well. It is also very difficult not to laugh out loud thinking of that crappy puppet. The soundtrack is cool, minimal electronic incidental music with the classic 80’s horror film feel. They did manage to have a couple of very beautiful actresses take go topless for this one. The dated hairstyles and clothing are also amazing in this film. I laughed at this one a lot. It’s a joke. This film must be watched in the spirit of mockery. It doesn’t work or even make sense to watch it in any other light.
I do have a real affection for puppets and the use of puppets in 80’s horror films though. I’ve listed Ghoulies as my favorite film a number of times. I don’t know what it is. I suppose they just make me laugh.
Satan’s Slave is on the other side of the disk I have with Prime Evil on it. A Trip With Teacher and Brain Twisters are on the same disk but neither of those films are worthy of an entire review. A Trip With Teacher is the one with the teacher and a bunch of teenage girls in the van that are kept hostage by two bikers which is just to implausible. Brian Twisters is a really bad 80’s film, I don’t think it was released any form until the 90’s.
Satan’s Slave is a nice British flick from the 70’s with somewhat the feel of the “folk horror” films of the 60’s and 70’s such as Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man, this one also has a good. Norman J. Warren is perhaps best known for the unfortunate film Insemenoid, one of a number of bad films with human female being raped by aliens or other strange creatures including Galaxy of Terror and Humanoids from the Deep. This is not to say that Satan’s Slave is not sexually whacked out, the dude is in love with his cousin in it. Its another film with a lot of black robes and naked breast kind of action in it. It opens with one of those black robe naked chick on the altar scenes. Actually, there’s a real viscous sexual assault scene in the first few minutes of the film. Victoria York goes to visit her uncle who stays with his son and her cousin Steven and the uncle’s secretary Francis who bangs Steven. The car explodes with her parents in it Steven though has an incestuous fixation with his cousin. They get it on too. But Catherine has all kinds of psychic visions of a witch being killed and other things. The uncle is into black magic, and casts a spell that makes her boyfriend back in London jump off a building. Wait, the chick gets it on with her cousin and they don’t make anything of the fact that its incest in the film!
The evil uncle’s secretary reveals that the uncle wants to bring this ancient witch back to life through her in a ritual to bring back an ancient witch that she is a direct descendant of, which has to be performed by her 20th birthday, and the race to escape the British manor is on.
They did some half-way decent horror flicks in the 70’s over in the U.K.

AL ADAMSON DOUBLE FEATURE OF DISGRACE!

Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)/Cinderella 2000(1977)

Al Adamson was a creator of many grindhouse horror films in the 60’s and 70’s. He is not super well known for such work like, say, Ed Wood. I’ve seen two films by him that are both very different but both incredibly bad films that would make an incredible double feature of crap if you’re into bad movie nights and such.
There was a lot of weird ass soft-core floating around in the 70's, puppet porno (Let My Puppets Come, baby!), porno musicals, porno cartoons. I've sort of wanted to review Once Upon a Girl on here, at some point- that’s cartoon porn. There was a bunch of porno based on fairy tales spawned by Bud Townsend's Alice in Wonderland. Before Charles Band directed Ghoulies (films Cinderella and Fairy Tales from the 70's are now difficult to find). I reviewed a bunch of that stuff for this site, Let My Puppets Come, The Beast. The Geek is one about Bigfoot made number 1 for my worst films ever list when I was writing for www.pollystaffle.com back when I lived in Las Vegas. Cinderella 2000 is another one of those weird ass soft-core films from the 70's.
Cinderella 2000 is a soft-core film of sorts (it would likely only be R by today’s standards) with disco musical song and dance numbers based on the story of Cinderella set in a super cheesy sci-fi future where computers decide who can have sex, and lawbreakers are hit with a shrinking ray. There's a robot the looks kind of like a penis that does a little disco dance number. How bad are we talking? We're talking Cinderella's homosexual fairy godfather (get it? He's a fairy!) comes out of a flying saucer and people in huge bunny masks start copulating and worse prancing around to disco. The plot is the plot of Cinderella, except that there's this thing about the society without sex and the happy ending is that Cinderella gets the dictator to lift the sexual ban by giving him a blowjob that cures his impotency.
I suppose these oddly themed porno flicks from the 70's the puppet porn and the cartoon porn, the fairy tale pornos, Cinderella 2000 have a kind of value in being relics, in being part of cinema history. There might also be artistic value in the perversion of them. A lot of these films like that I've viewed have made me fairly uncomfortable, Let My Puppets Come did, The Beast did, and things in film or other arts that make us uncomfortable have struck a raw nerve, they have hit on an issue by transgressing against something in our taboo structure. Maybe not as much so as The Beast, Let My Puppets Come, or The Geek, but I did find this film made me a little bit uncomfortable. It’s a relic of kind of creepy 70's jerk off material. There's a disco-dancing robot whose head looks like a penis in it. You know how disco kind of has a little bit of a sexually perverted edge to it? That's Cinderella 2000 for you, freaky freak disco culture's overlap with some of the soft-core porno of the time, which got into some very odd themes.
That film is probably a work of genius compared to his earlier film The Blood of Dracula’s Castle from 1969. That film is kind of lame even for a low budget grindhouse film of the period. If you’ve ever seen The Dunwhich Horror from the same era by Roger Corman, that’s a vastly superior film. The Blood of Dracula’s Castle is pretty stupid even for its period. This guy inherits this castle were Count Dracula’s been hanging out in Southern California brings his girlfriend with him. You could more or less guess the plot from there, except that they have a weird serial killer friend named Johnny and a butler that goes on and on about the moon god Luna. Sorry, no blow jobs in this one. The Blood of Dracula’s Castle actually comes on the same DVD in a Grindhouse collection with the film Blood Mania which is vastly superior.

Music Review-David Lyudmirsky's Their Only Dreams- WRETCHED!

Their Only Dreams

Pop Tart/Darling in Dream Dimension

Music review

Alas, the whole culture of bands, music magazines, “projects” and general shit that floats around that no one cares about.
Their Only Dreams is a musical project by a guy out in California named David Lyudmirsky. I think it is probably just him with a four track or his computer or something. I had to turn if off because I couldn’t stand the sound of it. I did a little research on-line. The only press this guy gets is on little blogs like this one. There is no evidence that David Lyudmirsky has a real following, so he doesn’t have much to be smug about. That is a very important distinction that should be made- The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, the Strokes- they made crap music and they ended up grabbing a bunch of money and fame. Then there are these other bands that exist that made equally crap music, people I went to college with or met in New York- they didn’t even make money or become famous. They just made music nobody cared about. That’s Their Only Dreams.
Oh what do they sound like? I guess it’s supposed to be psychedelic music. A couple of tracks sound a little bit like a goth band maybe. Goth I liked a lot in high school and college but I’ve probably worn it out by now. Psychedelic is kind of interesting but I haven’t used illegal drugs in years now and it went along with a strong political leftism and I’m a libertarian conservative now, so I don’t really relate to it much anymore. That’s actually being too nice to Their Only Dreams. Their Only Dreams sounds like a guy screwing around with a four track or some music software.
He’s got a song called “Cool Crowd”. I don’t know if this is a fantasy he created for lack of friends-the lyric is “I wish I had been invited”. What, is he locked in his closet with a copy of Penthouse and some airplane glue?
Actually it does kind of remind me of something else, but not in the favorable way. I remember back in the 90’s when I was in high school, when the big magazines to read about bands in were Hypno and Mondo2000, issues of which are now rare. I was thinking of horror films to look into to review and I recalled a movie called Jugular Wine being reviewed in Hypno magazine. Jugular Wine isn’t even on DVD and there are some old issues of Hypno on e-bay and Amazon, the one with the review of Jugular Wine I haven’t seen. That was when Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails were huge recent phenomena. Beck was in there a little bit. Very early on Beck would kind of screw around with lo-fi. Ween did some similar things I recall. That was like almost twenty years ago now. It sounded progressive at that time when Ween and Beck did it. I don’t find myself going back to it, downloading the early Beck albums or early Ween. There are reasons back issues of Hypno have become rare. I had a Hypno t-shirt in high school, ten years from now they’ll probably have thrown Beck, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It is what it is or rather it was what it was. Fifteen to twenty years ago Their Only Dreams might have ended up in Hypno or Mondo2000 and come off as progressive or interesting, but twenty years after the fact?
Does this guy even gets chicks at all? He kind of looks like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs.
It’s some bad, bad music. That’s almost redundant these days.
I’ll tell you when I stop bullying these guys, is when the women connected to these bands start sleeping with me. Your chick bassist is my new girlfriend, we’re done. I don’t give a pan review of your stupid band. Until that happens, your band is fair game. This guy probably never even had the chick bassist…

Viler Jehovah Deported?

Yes, the rumor that Viler Jehovah was deported came to me yesterday through the much more well known painter Paul Richard, I had some stuff still left at Paul Richard’s studio in Greenpoint to get sent down here to Philadelphia. Viler Jehovah is a figure of mystery, a homeless painter and musician from Mozambique, of which little is known and less is fully understood. Directly before I moved to Vegas in the fall of 2008 I produced an album length demo for Viler Jehovah, whose real name I don’t know. If there is enough public interest I may put some of that material on-line. I have heard the rumor through Paul Richard that he was a career criminal. That was never clear to me, it would make some sense because he had laptops and it was not clear how a guy that lived in the tent by the river could afford such things, but it wasn’t like I would go to the squat were the guitarist Miles Emery lived and record with Viler and a twenty dollar bill would disappear from my wallet or anything. What Viler had told me is that he had sold drugs to keep alive but that he didn’t use them because he was a Christian. I’m not sure how that works. My problem with the guy wasn’t so much that as that he would not shut up about becoming famous. At that time, I was working to becoming certified as an NRA Firearms Instructor which shows you exactly how much faith I had in being able to make money through the arts and becoming magically famous. That is to say, none at all.
The story about Viler being deported is a little vague, having come to me from Paul Richard though Harry Essex, who has a long history of schizophrenia and substance abuse. The story goes something to the effect that Viler got arrested for something, and gave the police some fake name, and asked if they could get verification that he was a citizen or something like that, and they called Harry. That would be quite a hail Mary seeing as Harry sells women’s clothing he finds on the street. The details are not clear on this one.
There’s a bunch of weird stories about that guy. One is that he walk around in heavy clothes during the height of the summer heat in what the street artist Leviticus referred to as a “bubble suit”. The other was that he prepared food at Paul Richard’s studio and was careful his food was thoroughly cooked because he was afraid of getting AIDS from eating food that was not cooked well enough.
If anyone has information about the whereabouts of Viler and his magical bubble suit, contact me here.

The Fantastic Journey of Goblin Album Review!****!

The Fantastic Journey of Goblin
By Goblin (review)

This is the third of a series of reviews on here going through a bunch of those 70’s “so ahead of their times” bands. It started when I wrote something about This Mortal Coil’s version of Big Star’s “Kangaroo”, and people started finding my webpage because of that, hence the review of Big Star’s Third: Sister Lovers and Van Der Graaf Generator’s The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other. Because I am also a fan of horror films and lower budget cinema, it would be natural to review Goblin, a criminally underrated band. Then in terms of horror films, it has been more and more my inclination to follow closely the films that my old boss William Powell at the Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas shows at his screenings, because I feel that William Powell has a kind of genius for curating such things. Most of the better horror films I’ve seen I’ve either seen because of him or he’s ended up showing it. He screens films almost every weekend, that’s quite a skill that he’s been able to avoid showing a lot of the lost and poor films like Humanoids from the Deep and Insemenoid. Powell likes Argento so the band Goblin is on the kosher list of 70’s “way ahead of their times bands” that the new review could be because of their connection with the films of Argento, Powell has shown Suspira which Goblin did the soundtrack for.
Legendary Italian horror director Dario Argento found this progressive rock band in the 70’s and used them to score his zombie films. They are perhaps the most underrated band in the history of rock, except amongst horror film fans, who often revere them. The question is I’m sure does their music stand up on its own seeing as you can buy their music on its own. The answer is yes. They are an incredible band on their own. The notion of a horror obsessed “gothic” rock was still a number of years away when Goblin were first called into do the soundtrack for the Argento film Deep Red in 1975, a good five years before the term “goth” turned up. Do not misunderstand me- Goblin do not sound like a goth band all the time. The track Tenebre sounds like the cheesiest disco ever made if anything, with the kind of old vintage analog electronics bands like Air and Stereolab went nuts for in the late 90’s, around the time it became fashionable to be very into the Vampyre Lesbos soundtrack in the early years of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I’m not sure it sounds like they are using a Moog. That’s what it sounds like. Everyone in Williamsburg was trying to get their hands on a Moog in Williamsburg in 1996, it felt like.
During the 80’s though, they did make a whole lot of cheesy 80’s sounding soundtrack music. Particularly a winner on this collection is the theme from Phenomena. That is that weird one Argento made about the chick that communicates with insects. That’s really good. The whole album is really good actually.

Jonathan Whittle-Utter, Love Coach Scott Catamas, and Peter Joseph!

Based on some of the figures that have kind of popped-up in my social circles in my life lately, I’d have to be very skeptical of people offering a complete transformation for the better through their little new age church or movement. I think I’d prefer to take the advice of someone who told me that they were offering me path to degradation and lower levels of consciousness. ”I am a spiritual teacher” that is probably a good indication of real pathology in-and-of-itself.


1. Jonathan Whittle-Utter:

People who’ve followed my work for a while will remember this guy, but I will recap for people that haven’t been up on the Whittle-Utter Catastrophe.
This freak came up last summer, somebody sent me a link to his webpage he is an actor and a filmmaker. I thought it was hilariously funny how bad his attempts at art films were. Back when I was still in Vegas I reviewed his first film back on the old Wacky World of William Wheaton blog at www.pollystaffle.com. He did not like that and so he sent me a very cryptic and somewhat hostile e-mail. I laughed at him, put that on-line, and then found another film of his to review. He sent another cryptic e-mail. I was sure to keep record of it because when you send a second hostile e-mail to someone, you start to enter into dangerous legal grounds. He is apparently part of the Human Potential Movement. I found an essay by a guy who did lectures over at their little Esalen Institute compound that I think explains the psychology behind Whittle-Utter’s strange behavior well- here’s a link to it-
http://www.jenniferchien.com/library/movement.pdf

2. Love Coach Scott Catamas-

Here’s a link to some “Love Coach” Scott Catamas-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XF4iv_KCJw&feature=related

I’m impressed by how trivial and uninteresting the people he counsels problems appear to be. Ah, but they live in those problems, don’t they! Catamas throws around the term NVC (Non Violent Communication). Here’s a video clip of some other NVC freak screwing around with hand puppets-Again, regressive role-playing-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bydhuxilg_A&feature=related

This one comes from the case files of my friend PI Jan B. Tucker. This guy has a criminal prior for pimping but he has all kinds of crappy relationship counseling videos on YouTube. I was considering reviewing his relationship DVDs but the filmmaking of Jonathan Whittle-Utter is almost merciful by comparison. He’s tied to a politician you may have heard of. I kid you not, Al Gore hangs out with a New Age pimp! The free world was once a bullet away from being run by a guy who hangs out with New Age pimps! Makes you wonder about that scandal a while back with the masseuse that said Al Gore sexually assaulted her…
I’ve been told that this is only the tip of the iceberg really, and that we see more on this one in in the news in the future. On the topic of small world-ness, I was able to trace Scott Catamas as doing events at a place called Harbin Hot Springs run by an organization called the Heart Consciousness Church-
“Heart Consciousness Church owns and operates Harbin Hot Springs. It is not a church in the traditional sense of buildings, structure and congregation. It is an embodiment and a manifestation of the New Age – that common thread uniting the human potential movement, the holistic, natural movement and universal spirituality.”
Small world! Human Potential Movement-as in Jonathan Whittle-Utter! If they’re all about this Human Potential Movement over at the Hot Harbin Springs, Whittle-Utter and Scott Catamas can hang out there together and snack on some mixed nuts.
The issue Jan B. Tucker worked on involved a child custody battle in which a set of 10-year-old quadruplets where apparently living on the “Celebration of Love” tantric-polyamoury group in Tiburon lead by a woman named Lori Grace. I think the grounds for child endangerment there are legitimate.

3. Peter Joseph:

I already did a review of one of his films on here, and I don’t care to do another review because that would mean watching his films again, but there really is more backstory to discuss and information coming to me about this guy. He came up because when I left Vegas I stayed briefly in New York with the painter Paul Richard, an old friend. Here is one for the depth of totally bizarre trivia-Paul Richard’s e-mail list is handled by Peter Joseph’s ex-girlfriend. Apparently, Peter Joseph’s nickname were he used to work was “Peter the Angry Dwarf”. As I already covered in my review of his largely discredited conspiracy theory film known as the Zeitgeist Movie. He’s into a lot of weirdness about ridding society of money, how Jesus was originally an astrological metaphor and the historical figure never existed, etc. Elements of the Zeitgeist Movement appear to be drawn from sources on the political right, in terms of things like the Federal Income Tax, but they want to get rid of currency. Jared Lee Loughner liked The Zeitgeist Movie, it came up a little bit.
Peter Joseph's cult is called the Zeitgeist Movement. It apparently split off connections from another older organization called the Venus Project, which is where he grabbed his whole trip about saving the world through doing away with currency. This clip of Peter Joseph throwing a first rate temper tantrum shows exactly how he got his nickname.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AseTgMygNdM

We’ve got some real winners here!