HELLO AND WELCOME TO VHS WASTELAND, YOUR HOME FOR HIGH RESOLUTION SCANS OF RARE, STRANGE, AND FORGOTTEN VHS COVERS. EACH OF THESE BIZARRE GEMS IS SCANNED AT 200 DPI. SIMPLY CLICK ON THE THUMBNAIL OF ANY VHS COVER TO DOWNLOAD THE FULL HIGH RES FORMAT. WE WILL BE ADDING A NEW COVER DAILY, SO BOOKMARK THIS SITE AND CHECK BACK OFTEN. WE'D ALSO LOVE SUBMISSIONS FROM YOU. IF YOU HAVE A VHS THAT IS WEIRD OR RARE, JUST EMAIL US AT MADHATTERDESIGN@GMAIL.COM. REMEMBER TO SCAN THE FRONT, BACK AND SIDES OF THE VHS AT 300 DPI. WE WON'T ACCEPT LOW RESOLUTION FILES. WHILE YOU'RE HERE, GRABBING OUR AWESOME FREE VHS COVERS, FEEL FREE TO CLICK THE "DONATE" BUTTON ON THE LEFT. IF ENOUGH PEOPLE SEND US SOME CASH, WE MIGHT BE TEMPTED TO KEEP BRINGING YOU THE COOLEST, HIGH RES VHS COVERS ON THE NET. BUT IF YOU GREEDY, COVER GRABBING... I MEAN... YOU WONDERFUL VISITORS TO OUR SITE, DON'T COUGH UP A DONATION, MAYBE WE'LL JUST FIND SOMETHING BETTER TO DO WITH OUR TIME. LIKE GO MAKE NACHOS. MMMMM... NACHOS. SO HELP A BROTHA OUT AND DONATE A LITTLE DOUGH TO THE CAUSE.

LASTLY, WHY NOT VISIT OUR PARENT SITE (SERIALKILLERCALENDAR.COM). IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH VHS COVERS BUT I THINK YOU MIGHT BE PLEASANTLY SURPRISED BY WHAT YOU FIND. OR NOT. I DON'T KNOW YOU. MAYBE YOUR NOT SURPRISED BY ANYTHING. MAYBE YOUR THE KIND OF GUY THAT SEES A COW FALL OUT OF THE SKY AND EXPLODE LIKE A PIÑATA AND YOUR ALL LIKE "HUH, THAT WAS WEIRD." MAN. WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU ANYWAY? JEEZ. SOME PEOPLE.

BUT NO. SERIOUSLY. GO BUY SOME CRAZY AWESOME TRUE CRIME MERCHANDISE AT SERIALKILLERCALENDAR.COM. INCLUDING THE SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE, THE SERIAL KILLER TRADING CARDS AND MUCH MUCH MORE! DO IT. DO IT NOW. CLICK THE LINK.

REVIEW OF The Alchemist (1983 Horror Movie)

From silveremulsion.com

The Alchemist was shot in 1981 but wasn’t released until 1983/1984 in Europe and 1986 in the US. It has a very low-budget look to it that kind of works against my enjoyment, but there was enough here to keep me interested for most of the movie. Part of this could have been the faded VHS source I was watching. I’d love to see it on a nicely mastered DVD, but so far it has yet to be released on the format in the US.

The setup is simple. In 1871, an alchemist lures a woman to his campfire. When her husband comes to rescue her, the alchemist tricks the husband into stabbing his wife. The alchemist curses the man to live as an animal for all of eternity. The credits run over multi-colored slow-motion fire in a great, simplistic sequence. This is a pretty awesome opening and following it, I was ready for an amazing hidden gem of a film.

It’s now 1955 and Lenora (Lucinda Dooling) drives along a mountain road. She is struck by a vision of the woman from the prologue and a demon. Soon after, she picks up a hitchhiker and a much stronger vision comes upon her. She blacks out and almost drives over the cliff. Lenora receives these visions because of the efforts of an old woman who tends to the cursed man-animal. She performs spells and rituals to try and lift his curse and has unknowingly brought Lenora’s soul into their predicament.

First thing, the music is fantastic! Charles Band’s brother and frequent collaborator Richard Band provides a haunting, creepy score. It is by far my favorite part of this movie and sets a great, dark tone right away. I’ve liked the small selection of his other scores I’ve heard, but this easily rises to the top of the pile. I’ve included below a sample of the main title music for your enjoyment. Just imagine the fire in the picture to the right moving in slow-motion and changing colors now and then for the full effect. It’s really a shame that the film doesn’t live up to how awesome this music is.

The acting is bad, but watchable for the most part. It’s a low-budget horror movie so if you’re really into that sort of thing, you come to expect a different level of acting from the players and are okay with that. For all its flaws though, the film is technically sound and well-made. Charles Band makes the most out of what he’s got with confident shot selection and editing. It ultimately fails to excite completely because the middle section of the story gets a bit drawn-out and tired due to its relative similarity to the Dracula tale, but the film is still worth watching for genre fans.

The Alchemist isn’t all that gory, but when it is, they don’t mess around. One scene where the cursed man-animal kills a deer shows him digging his hands around inside the bloody, gnarled carcass and it looks real and convincing. Later on, dudes in cheap foam latex masks and leather jackets get killed and Band chooses tight close-ups of the wounds to showcase their final, bloody moments. It’s trashy but effective, making for some choice moments of nasty fun. The non-gore effects are great too. The old woman crafts a glowing green potion that features some great animated FX. The finale of the film is simply fantastic, featuring a shimmering hellgate and a red-sky surreal vision of that other land down under that looks surprisingly believable and realistic. And when the villain gets his, it is satisfying and gory, just as it should be. There’s even a great time-lapse decomposition, one of my favorite effects from 1980s horror films. It’s not as good as the one from Evil Dead, but it’s still damn good.

In the end, this is a good, low-budget horror movie but it does have its boring spots. It’s only 78 minutes but it feels a lot longer. The storytelling gets a bit confusing at times, but it adds a level of mystery to the film as you are trying to figure out exactly what’s going on. As much as I enjoyed watching this, it seems like a TV movie at times, but probably would have had more impact at TV episode length.

LITTLE MARINES : AN ADVENTURE - REVIEWED BY ZACH CARTER

I forced my Mother to rent Little Marines an obscene number of times from Video Depot, our video store of choice when I was a kid.  I loved it.  Watching it now though I have no idea what about the movie appealed to me when I was a kid.  It's low budget keeps it from ever becoming the sort of action spectacle that the filmmakers probably wanted it to be.  You could never mistake it for something like The Goonies, another of my childhood favorites.  The most exciting action set piece is a chase scene between bikes (some BMX and one dirt bike that's only going as fast as a BMX to maintain the illusion that there is a believable chase going on) all set on an unattractive mound of dirt in the woods.  And the characters talk way too much about their feelings to keep the average kid entertained.  What I was drawn to as a child in this movie is beyond my adult comprehension, but the cynical grown up in me loved every second of this bizarre, southern-fried piece of cinematic gold.

The movie opens by introducing us to Stevie, the token fat kid, as his teacher spanks him in front of the schoolhouse.  And when I say spank I mean paddle with a large oar.  After his corporal punishment she tells Stevie to "have a good Summer."  I'm assuming the filmmaker's intended there to be a lesson in there somewhere; the teacher isn't a bad person, she just knows that sometimes the only way to get your point across to a child is to hit them in front of their peers, or something like that.  You'll learn valuable life-lessons like that throughout Little Marines.  We're quickly introduced to the other two annoying pubescent boys who make up the bulk of the cast; Noah, the sensitive one, and Chris, the tough guy who hangs out with geeks to make himself seem cooler.  They also have a friend named David, but it's best to ignore him because his Mom is a bitch and she won't let him go on the coolest camping trip ever.  The boys (the Little Marines if you will) have had it planned for months, an awesome weekend camping trip to kick of their Summer vacation in style.

Pretty quickly after the opening credits it becomes apparent that the main reason this movie exists is to instill good morals into unsuspecting children.  The Little Marines themselves have impeccable morals.  When a totally ridiculous drug dealer offers the boys free joints from the window of his red Corvette they rebuff him without even considering their options.  "No way man, we don't need drugs to have a good time."  When Stevie crashes another kid's model airplane, instead of riding away on his bike or making Chris help him beat the kid up, Stevie actually pays for the damages.  After setting up their teepee, the Little Marines even erect a flag pole and stand at salute while the national anthem plays on their tape deck; the patriotism is actually enough to bring a tear to Stevie's eye.  It's easy to see why this movie won the American Family Alliance Award of Excellence in 1991.  The Little Marines bicker like any good friends, but when push comes to shove they're always there for each other.  Like when local bully and dirt bike aficionado Snake corners Stevie and pelts him with paintballs (causing him to curl into the fetal position and cry), Noah and Chris are there to lure Snake away and save Stevie any further embarrassment.  Or when Noah has a hard time dealing with the recent death of another of their close friends, Chris and Stevie take the time to listen to him and help him remember the good times that they shared.  Lucky for us though, all the sentimentality that the American Family Alliance found so sincere and heartwarming, we can now mock openly.

Even with all of the aforementioned excellence, my favorite scene in the movie is the one where the boys happen upon a mysterious, machete-wielding man in the woods near their campsite.  They approach him with extreme caution but that doesn't stop Stevie from being caught in one of the man's many booby traps.  Chris and Noah watch in horror as the man approaches Stevie with his machete, thinking that Stevie may spend the last moments of his life hanging upside down from a tree.  Little Marines could have taken an amazing turn at that point and become the best children's movie of all time.  But unfortunately it didn't, that man's just a friendly camper who tells the boys a sob story about a drunk driver killing his wife and child.  Noah opens up to the man and tells him that his Father was killed in Vietnam before he was even born; I did a little math and can't really wrap my head around how that's actually possible.  A more likely scenario is that Noah's Mother has lied to him all these years and doesn't actually know who his real Father is.   

In the big finale (which is totally anticlimactic) Stevie and Noah finally get their moment to shine when they save Chris from drowning after a diving accident.  They drag him to the shore and revive him with the sorriest excuse for CPR that I've ever witnessed (which is to say they laid Chris face down in shallow water and then a fat kid sat on his back).  Then the movie ends abruptly with a freeze frame of a triumphant Stevie raising his fist into the air, which only made me wish that I was watching The Breakfast Club instead.  Little Marines is probably only amazing if you have fond memories of it from childhood, but I can't do anything but recommend it.

REVIEW OF Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

From aftermoviediner.com

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama probably didn't win any awards, but I think there is one it could definitely compete for: All-Time Best Movie Title. While I lean towards giving that honor to Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, (come on, that's pure poetry), Sorority Babes could give it a strong run for its money.

(I would add the Troma-rific "Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell" to this list - Ed.)

My first experience with the film, which stars horror royalty Linnea Quigley, Michelle Bauer, Brinke Stevens, Robin Rochelle Stille, and Andras Jones, was thanks to USA Up All Night. That series - and Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried, who alternated nights hosting - were crucial viewing in my teen years. It ran the kind of movies I'd rarely seen before, one B-movie schlockfest after another, every single weekend. I can directly trace my love of bad movies and exploitation films back to Up All Night. Without it I may have found my way to these films eventually, but with it I was hooked at a young age. And Rhonda? It's as if a teenage boy created her in a lab, Weird Science style: much like Elvira, she was funny, self-deprecating, and clearly dressing to impress hormonal adolescents. Most importantly, she was our guide through the wild world of cult classics.

I distinctly remember this episode of Up All Night, partly because of the film, but mostly because Quigley dropped by to hang out with Rhonda. It was as memorable an evening as you would imagine. After each amazing Rhonda and Linnea interlude, I'd get back to the action at the ol' Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. The movie's tagline is almost as brilliant as its title:

In a bowling alley from Hell, there's only one way to score...

As a teenager, I spent most of the film's running time hoping "one way to score" had something to do with Linnea. Or Rhonda. Or preferably both.  Look, I spent a lot of weekend nights at home, what can I say. When writing about our past, we owe it to ourselves and the world to paint as accurate a picture as possible of those times. I can laugh at that kid's raging hormones now, but it's a simple truth that nothing makes some teen boys happier than bad movies and the scream queens who starred in them - or in Rhonda's case, made goofy jokes about them after every commercial break.

Here's a quick overview, anyway: the action begins when some dorky college boys spy on two pledge-babes being initiated into a sorority. The girls' initiation involves some tame paddling of butts, and whip cream. I'll leave the rest to your imagination (or, just look at the image above). The boys get caught by sorority house members, who "punish" them by making them join the nubile pledges on their initiation mission to steal a trophy from a bowling alley. Why do the boys even bother tagging along? The answer lies with their raging hormones and the first two words of the film's title: sorority babes. Duh.

Once inside the mall where the bowling alley's located, the kids run into Spider (Quigley), a biker-punk who's breaking into the bowling alley because, why not? They find the trophy, but unwittingly release Uncle Impie (I'm not making this up), who kind of just looks like a demented gargoyle-puppet. The mischievous, jive-talking hobgoblin (really, I can't make this stuff up) grants them three wishes. Of course, this being an exploitation film featuring horny teenage boys and the uberbabe Michelle Bauer as pledge Lisa, one of those wishes obviously involves turning Lisa into a lustful lingerie model with only one thing on her mind (I'll let you guess what that is). She spends most of the film acting like a cat in heat, the wishes are granted, Impie keeps on being impish, and there's an old, mostly deaf janitor in the bowels of the mall who tells Spider and Calvin (Jones) about the last time Uncle Impie escaped into our world, thirty years ago. There's also lots-o-death, but not much in the way of blood or guts.

It should go without saying, but Quigleyis the film's best asset. From the moment she appears, she elevates the movie into cult classic status. Spider becomes our unlikely hero, but one who seems entirely bored by all of the demonic mayhem at the mall. Every line she delivers drips with sarcasm. Spunky Spider and cowering Calvin are adorably mismatched, leading to moments like Calvin asking why she's always so sarcastic, and Spider deadpanning, "It's a way of life!" Quigley is her usual spitfire self, clad in red leggings and sporting gloriously big '80s hair, she spars verbally and physically with everyone that gets in her way. Hell, she even decapitates a zombiefied sorority babe! It's always a pleasure to watch one of the best scream queens in action.

Does Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama live up to its awesome name? Well, it certainly doesn't skimp on sorority babes, and Uncle Impie is a slimeball, but there isn't much bowling alley action - although there's plenty of locker room action with Bauer, if you know what I mean...and I think you do. The film is also too darkly lit - except when it's blatantly highlighting the actresses' cleavage, of course. Still, we do have Quigleyturning in a spirited performance and the whole thing is a blast, and beyond silly, as it should be. You don't name your movie Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Ramaand aim for high art. I hadn't seen it since that first viewing on Up All Night in the Year of our Linnea 1991, but it's just as much fun now as it was then. Only thing missing this time out? Rhonda. That's okay though, because the movie's Up All Night episode is archived on Rhonda's YouTube channel:

Apparently, it's the series' most requested episode, which isn't surprising. Not only do Rhonda and Linnea do their thing together, but the first half of the episode finds Rhonda in an educational mood - which for her means retrograde flirting advice, cleavage, a tiny dress, and a mortarboard perched atop her bleached blonde mane. Rhonda 101: higher education never looked so good. All kidding aside, Rhonda did teach viewers one crucial lesson: cult movies rule, and they always will.

So, kick back and stream Up All Night at select intervals while watching Sorority Babes, for the full 1991 experience. Relive your wasted youth. That's my plan!

REVIEW OF The Supernaturals

From somethingawful.com

As is so often the case in our line of work, the opening sequence of The Supernaturals can only be described as a grotesque war crime. The main difference is that this time, it's not a cinematic atrocity, just the regular kind. We kick things off on a Civil War battlefield, where a Union captain is making a group of captured rebel soldiers march through a minefield that they laid. He tries to justify this by whining about how he "lost a lot of men" to that minefield, although given that the field seems to be the size of a tennis court, we feel like those deaths are sort of on him for not just going around it.

For the extra evil cherry on top, the human game of Minesweeper includes an 8-year-old boy who they found wandering around in a Confederate uniform[1]. Don't worry though, little Johnny Reb is also a necromancer for some reason, and he raises a zombie army to get his revenge...eventually, like in 100 years or so. The movie never explains what happens in the meantime, but we're picturing him just sitting on a porch with a mint julep in a white suit, complaining about the heat while a zombie fans him with a palm frond.

We'll give some credit to The Supernaturals for being the closest thing to "atmospheric" we'll ever get to see in this job, although there's a pretty thin line between slow-building suspense and abject boredom which they occasionally cross. The bigger problem is that the atmosphere of dread is brutally undermined at every turn by our modern-day victims, the 82nd Comedy Warfare Division, a fresh-faced squad of trainees straight out of the Prankademy:

We didn't know "put a can of beer in a skull and shoot it" was actually a prank, but maybe we're just not on the same level as these battle-hardened veterans of prank war.

Leading the Komedy Boot Kamp Death March to Nowhere (tm) is none other than Nichelle Nichols, who we sure as fuck never expected to show up in this column, ever. Maybe she was looking to break some more ground as the first black female drill sergeant in movie history, or maybe she just found it really cathartic to get to yell at someone else about operating the radio for once. Oddly enough, one of her soldiers is fellow future Star Trek alumnus LeVar Burton, who we'd like to think he ended up on Star Trek entirely due to Nichelle complaining about how "even goddamn Star Trek was a step up the dignity ladder from doing this shit." Of course, we'd also like to think that his Reading Rainbow experience would have prepared him to read scripts before he signs on to them, and yet here we are.

Whatever you're imagining is about to unfold in this battle of modern soldiers vs. Confederate zombies, odds are you're paying way more attention to the context than anyone involved in The Supernaturals. Let's see here, we have a black sergeant vs. civil war zombies and ghosts, surely both sides will be dealing with some particularly complicated emotions regarding...nope, never mind, nobody notices any of that. Well, at least it's still a classic tale of zombie revenge for a horrible injustice[2] that...no, wait, actually all the zombies are working for the now-decrepit necromancer kid and his dead ghost mom, they don't actually give a shit about being blown up 100 years ago.

Whatever the hell is going on, all of the soldiers are scared shitless. In fact, they show way more fear than your average group of teens in a party-mansion-turned-murder-house movie, although that's more a commentary on shitty acting in those other movies. In the end, they're saved by the fact that one of their squadmates looks exactly like the ghost lady's husband, who uses his family resemblance to finally talk down the now-decrepit Grand Wizard of Dixie and make all the ghosts and zombies vanish. Either that, or he just listened to some random asshole telling him to take apart his zombie mother nightmare after 150 years and go "OK, sure, when you put it that way, zombies are bad!" We're not really sure, but both options are equally unsatisfying. All we know is that we're no longer afraid of the South Rising Again.

APRIL 5 VHS MOVIE REVIEW : NIGHT OF HORROR (1978)

Watching this film is like having a very painful bowel movement, you know, the kind where you're in a public place and the pain starts to build up and you have to press your ass cheeks together with all your muscle power as you jump into your car and try to make it home before you explode and then you make it home and sit on the toilet screaming in pain as the excrement pours out in a burst of agonizing thrust that nearly sends you up to the ceiling. That about describes what it's like to view this film which concerns four "adults" whose camper gets stuck in what turns out to be a Civil War battlefield and encounter ghosts of soldiers that died there. There's no words to describe how bad this film is. The photography is so bad that at one point there's a big black blotch at the bottom center of the screen for at least ten minutes. The acting (by Steve Sandkuhler, Gae Schmitt, Rebecca Bach and Jeff Canfield) is so poor that you can hear dead actors moaning in their graves. The piano music just drones on and on and the direction by Tony Malanowski consists of static shots of talking heads and Civil War re-enactment footage. Malanowski would later make the similarly-themed CURSE OF THE CANNIBAL CONFEDERATES in 1982 which also starred Sandkuhler and Bach and work in various capacities on Don Dohler's NIGHTBEAST the same year before becoming an editor on such films as FELONY (1994) and MUTANT SPECIES (1995). Thank God for small favors. If you must watch this film, do it with a roll of toilet paper handy. You'll thank me later. Malanowski wishes Don Dohler good luck in the credits. He must be the Prophet of Doom! A Genesis Home Video Release in SP mode and later released by Star Classics in EP mode. If this film ever gets a DVD release, I'll eat my own excrement! Rated R, but there's nothing here to warrant the rating. { text from critcononline.com }