Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (1992): or, Hello, Norma Jeane

Riding on the Night Train to Terror, Part II! (Click here for related posts)

If you've been reading this site for a while, are a Mill Creek fanatic, or just have alarmingly little going on in your life, you probably know about the mash-up of movie madness that is Night Train to Terror. If not, a brief catch-up: in the movie, God and Satan hop on the titular track-based transport to "review" three cases whose outcomes they can't decide, for some reason. Meanwhile, a cadre of headband-and-sweatsuit-clad 80s pop singers croon the most infectiously inept ditty ever written in the dining car. The stories themselves are actually 3 full-length b-movie bombs that have been ruthlessly cut down to 25-30 minutes each, with the effect of immersing the viewer in a disjointed nightmare-logic ride that is often entertaining but NEVER makes the slightest bit of sense. For more detail, see my full review HERE.

Recently I made it a quest to seek out the three movies that were mashed to a pulp in service of NTtT, to find out if they could possibly be as mad, bad, and dangerous to watch at full-length as they were in abbreviated form. In the case of my first experiment, The Nightmare Never Ends (review here), the answer was a reverberating YES. So, buoyed by my enjoyment of that flick, I recently dove into the second, with the unwieldy title Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. I expected ineptitude; I expected illogic; I expected Madness.

But what I didn't expect? To find that the mashed-up movie in question was ITSELF a mash-up! Layers within layers, people! Who'd have thought?

"You rang?"

According to imdb user todmichel (http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0945188/comments)--who as near as I can figure is the world's leading authority on the subject--director John Carr started the movie sometime in the 80s, then for whatever reason (funding problems, I presume) left the film unfinished and went to England for a time. In his absence, his incomplete footage was incorporated into Night Train to Terror, released in 1985. Producers then added footage and released a "complete" version of the movie on VHS, entitled Scream Your Head Off, surprising and displeasing Carr on his return to the states. (Try as I might, I could NOT locate a copy of this version.) Some time later he decided to complete *his* vision of the movie, somehow convincing original star John Phillip Law to come back and shoot new scenes to flesh out the gaps. This final, official version he called Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars, which was finished and released on VHS in 1992.

It's important to have all this information up front, as it explains a lot of inconsistencies of tone, stlye, and even medium. However, it can't explain EVERYTHING...thank god!

Stephen King in an uncredited cameo

We open at Forest Lawn cemetery in LA, where Special Needs Cyclist Sidney (Mark Petrich)--wearing a fetching ensemble of overalls, goggles, and World War I leather flying helmet--is visiting the grave of everyone's favorite bombshell, Marilyn Monroe. "Is Marilyn buried here?" a couple of tourists stop to ask. "No! People think she is, but she's NOT!" he replies, cryptically. (Ba-dump.) Sidney then gets gone with the Schwinn and returns to his place of employment, a private asylum that looks like the interior of someone's condo, and brings breakfast in bed to a mysterious inmate...no points for guessing who.

Meanwhile, sometime in the 80s, newlywed Harry Billings (John Philip Law) and his nameless wife are driving from the ceremony to their honeymoon getaway. Sadly Harry decides to take a detour down the Stock Footage Expressway, where they are sideswiped by a semi and thereafter plummet a dozen feet off a bridge toward a watery grave. Somehow Billings survives, but his wife--whose entire role consisted of staring bright-eyed at her wedding ring and loosing one rather impressive scream, and who I can't even guarantee was in the same car as Law--is killed.

Harry is extremely depressed, as we realized when he's discovered sleeping barefoot atop his wife's grave. With nothing left to live for, he returns to the scene of the tragedy and flings himself into the water, but is rescued via jump cut and finds himself in the hospital, where attending Dr. Nobody quips, "This one's goin' to the sanitarium!"

John Phillip Law: What a difference seven years makes.

Back at said sanitarium, Dr. Brewer (Arthur Braham, doing his best Alfred Hitchcock impression, which I have to say is a fairly decent one) and hulking assistant Otto (Night Train/Court alumnus Richard Moll) are ministering to a bikini-clad blonde bound to a stretcher. She resists their attempts to "help her," but the doctor is not worried. "She'll come around," he lisps. "They all do." When a lost couple arrives to use the phone and Otto kills the husband and kidnaps the blonde for similar tie-down activities, we start to believe that this asylum may not be on the up and up.

Harry arrives at the asylum (again via jump-cut), and Dr. Brewer and his MILF-tastic partner Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff) decide he'd be the perfect replacement for their former kidnappy muscle Robert, who had to be lobotomized when he got too greedy. Reasoning that "Suicide attempts are a manic-depressive state of mind. The fastest way of curing that is electric shock treatment!", Brewer pumps Harry fulla volts, erasing his personality temporarily. They then train him to go out into the community and kidnap every blonde he can get his paws on, bringing them back to the asylum so that they can be similarly tabula-rasarized and sold into white slavery to the OPEC board member--complete with suit, giant sunglasses, keffiyeh, and suitcase full of cash) who comes by every now and then to replenish his harem.

"There must be some mistake--I only wanted a back-wax!"

While wandering around the asylum between assignments, Harry discovers the Mysterious Madwoman's room upstairs, and of course the inmate is revealed to be none other than the one and only Marilyn Monroe! Apparently she's been starring in her own mashup of Oldboy and Some Like it Hot since her apparent death, confined to this room with only the numerous photos of herself on the walls (including an awesome velvet rug painting!) to keep her sane. As she explains:

"The story they told me here was, when the studio dropped my contract, I was signed by an independent company to do a film. I didn't know that it was owned by Powerful People! They never intended to make the film! They insured my life for millions of dollars, and then they murdered a lookalike Marilyn Monroe, and left her in my bedroom!"

But you don't know how hot till you try.

That's all well and good, but why would Powerful People--powerful enough to find a perfect lookalike of Marilyn and murder her, get away with it, and then incarcerate the real Marilyn for twenty or so years--not simply murder the real Marilyn instead? And WHY are they keeping her imprisoned? Clearly not to sell to the Arabs, or they would have done so by now. Harry is wondering these things too, and reaches the reasonable conclusion that she's NOT Marilyn, but a crazy woman who just thinks she is. That doesn't stop him from visiting her every time he comes back from snatching an innocent into white slavery, though, and as their love blossoms, Harry's core decency starts to return and they plan a daring escape.

So most of the movie is John Philip Law putting himself in different situations where he can mack on blondes--which include hanging out in bars, posing as a taxi driver at the bus station, cruising for Elderly Care Nurses in the public park, and in the most memorable scene, visiting an evangelical church--slipping them a mickey, and then taking them back to the docs to fuel the whole Blondes-for-Cash revenue stream. Interspersed (and seldom connecting) are his scenes with "Marilyn" (played all "Happy Birthday Mr. President" breathy by busy TV actress Francine York), torture scenes with Docs Fargo and Brewer shocking the shit out of writhing bikini blondes strapped to gurneys, and Richard Moll occasionally popping up to swing a comically large cleaver at some would-be escapee's head.

"It's not what it looks like! Well, okay, it is, a bit."

You might be wondering how well Carr was able to blend his scenes shot pre-1985 with those shot in 1991 and 1992, and the answer is, not so well AT ALL. While the asylum and many of the kidnapping scenes were shot on film and have a nice shadowy look, the "Marilyn" scenes look to have been shot on a consumer-quality video camera with the warm, yellowy glow of overexposed photos. Worse, there's a very noticeable and absolutely pervasive tape hiss in these scenes, which magically disappears whenever we get back to the asylum in the 80s. Also, the gore and nudity scenes used so prominently in Night Train to Terror (usually involving Moll's Otto character molesting the inmates) are missing from this version, and might have been among the unauthorized footage producers shot for Scream Your Head Off.

Further, Carr was either unable to or uninterested in matching the sets from one segment to the other. The asylum of the Marilyn scenes is CLEARLY not the same building as the hospital in the older footage, and in fact looks like somebody's apartment or a rented condo. (Her "cell" even has a security peephole in the door!) Furthermore, while John Phillip Law is still a handsome man, you can clearly see the difference the 7 years lapse made on his looks. His acting in the 1985 segments is passable, but in the '92 segments he's phoning it in while sleepwalking (often barefoot, for no reason that's ever explained). One has to wonder why he returned for the reshoots--my theories are that either Carr is a personal friend to whom Law owed a favor, or else JPL found himself short of cash in LA and needed the work to finance a flight back to Europe. Or maybe those electroshock scenes weren't done with props. At any rate, it's bad.

"Please, just try to relax."

"Okay, Vicar," you might well ask, "So the movie is a laughably inept hodgepodge of unmatched footage. But what about the MADNESS?" Sadly MA&BB does not approach The Nightmare Never Ends in this regard, but that's not to say there aren't a few high spots. To wit:

• Sidney the Bicycle Boy's impromptu airplane impression.

• An odd scene in which Dr. Brewer gives Harry an injection that "puts him under hypnosis," then implants the suggestion: "Harry! No woman can resist you! You are Casanova!You are the sexiest man in the world! There's Dr. Fargo! I want you to turn it on! Incidentally, her first name is Jane!" Dr. Fargo is unimpressed, which leads Casanova/Harry to quip, "I'm giving you two choices, Jane--either you give, or I take!" Fortunately he snaps out of it before either occurs.

• Marilyn's little girl/Norma Desmond stylings in an extended, odd soliloqy.

"I don't know, Teddy...what has no thumbs and would really like a BJ?"

• Random belly-dancing sex-slave in the hospital foyer. Later, the Arab prince loads all his purchases into the Royal Saudi Winnebago!

• As the Least Stealthy Kidnapper ever, Harry visits a church and sits right beside his Dolly Parton-haired mark, introduces himself to the congregation (without even sunglasses!), and takes Protestant Grape Juice Communion...so that he can drop the drugs in his victim's plastic one-serve communion cup! How does he get her from the church to the asylum? Via jump cut, of course. ;)

• A nearly effective Tales from the Crypt-ish "doc operated on by the lobotomized patients" scene.

• And in a throwaway scene, Richard Moll lurching toward a cabinet to reveal a collection of heads, and an empty jar with Harry's name on it!

"Quit Night Court on ME, will ya, Anderson? YOU'LL PAY!"

Objectively, there's really no way Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars could have POSSIBLY been any good. The odd idea of Marilyn-as-Oldboy is intriguing, but only goes so far, and without any nefarious plan for Harry to save her from, falls absolutely flat. I'd kind of like to see the Scream Your Head Off version just to find out if the gore/nudity additions do any good, but I'm guessing the improvement would be negligible. As a movie whose backstory is more interesting than the flick itself, I give Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars 1.25 thumbs. Unless you're a Richard Moll/John Philip Law completist, stick with the Night Train version.

Years of dramatic training could not prepare JPL for the distractive power of Southern Baptist Hair.

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

The Nightmare Never Ends (1980): or, Ridin' on the Night Train

Riding on the Night Train to Terror, Part I!

Early in the history of MMMMMovies, I reviewed a little-known anthology flick Night Train to Terror (1985). That movie, notorious among 80s video trash connoisseurs and Mill Creek Enthusiasts, is a gloriously inept hodge-podge of three full-length movies whittled down to 30-minute chunks and slapped in a frame story that has God and Satan taking a cross-country train ride to review problematic "cases" while a group of would-be new wave punks in the dining car sing one of the most insidiously catchy 80s pop tunes that's ever got stuck in my head. (Seriously.) I assumed at the time that the butchered features, while certainly not the work of master filmmakers, would have to be better films at their full running times, since the stitched-together leftovers were not so much a challenge to the viewer's ability to follow them as a direct assault on the very idea of coherent storytelling.

But now I've seen 1980's The Nightmare Never Ends (aka Cataclysm), the full version of the third boxcar on that infamous night train, and let me tell you parishioners, I was wrong. Or rather I was right, but not in the way I thought. No, not that way at all.

Allow me to elucidate.

"Reed" Richard Moll puzzles over how to expunge this film from his resume.

Simply put, The Nightmare Never Ends is a wonderfully entertaining movie for all the wrong reasons. The acting, editing, and screenplay (by Academy Award-winning writer Philip Yordan!) would easily rank near the bottom of anybody's "worst-of" list. To call the story disjointed is to drastically understate the explosive nature of its disjointedness. The direction can scarcely be commented on, since the credits list not one, not two, not five, but THREE different directors (Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Gregg C. Tallas), which probably has a little to do with the flick's piecemeal vibe. Add a dash of Nazisploitation, a whole lot of blasphemy, and a truly amazing performance by cinematic bottom-dwelling legend Cameron Mitchell, and what have you got?

A movie that had me grinning like a grade-A eedjit all the way through, and turning off the DVD with a song in my heart. That's what.

As we open, Nobel Prize-winning author James Hansen (Richard Moll, easily the most talented thespian in the film--yes, you read that right) and his surgeon wife Claire (Faith Clift) are on their way to Vegas, presumably to escape the nightmares Claire's been having--nightmares that seem to consist entirely of stock footage of underwater volcanic vents. (Hey, everyone's got a phobia.) Escape proves impossible when Claire is singled out by a stage-show clairvoyant who looks like Marty Feldman's younger brother and falls into a trance at the merest suggestion.

"It's pronounced EYE-GOR."

Apparently the undersea volcanoes in Claire's dreams were just a placeholder for what's really troubling her: NAZIS! Suddenly we're whisked back in time to 1944, where an evil but very pretty young Nazi Officer busts up an opulent Third Reich Rave by gunning down the all-girl string orchestra--which really, you know, is just rude. Back in the clairvoyant's dressing room after the show, he warns Claire that her visions point to something demonic; but Bull, I mean James hurries her out and before you can say "Gimme that Prime Time Religion!" Feldman the Younger drops dead, a strange "666" tattoo on his scalp. WTF?

Suddenly we're in the apartment of the aged and extremely disoriented Mr. Weiss (character actor and Hollywood Blacklist victim Marc Lawrence), who gets all palsied and excited when he catches a TV interview (broadcast live from the intermission of the New York Ballet--do they do that?) with prettyboy rich-kid Olivier (Robert Bristol, clearly Sean Cassidy's evil twin), who is the spitting image of the Nazi Officer who killed Weiss's parents at Auschwitz, and not coincidentally the big beautiful baddie from Claire's dream. As it turns out Weiss is not just a confused old man, but a NAZI HUNTER, and he's sure he's found his man, despite the fact that the quarry hasn't aged a day since 1944.

Doddering and incomprehensible, Weiss calls in his neighbor Lieutenant Stern (Mitchell), a loose-cannon cop with a bad attitude. ("I'm only the police in the 5th Precinct--the rest of the world, I don't give a damn!") Still, to calm the old man Stern takes him to the ballet theater before the final curtain, where they see Olivier exit and follow him back to his opulent mansion, The Round House. (Not, unfortunately, The Road House.) Despite many raucous protestations, Stern just can't convince Weiss that the boy in the house is the same Nazi Bastard from Weiss's own childhood. I mean, he can't, can he?

"Hotsy totsy, I'm a Nazi!"

Meanwhile, back in Plot A, we learn that James got his Nobel Prize for his research into THE DEATH OF GOD--seriously--and has just published his prize-winning manuscript for popular consumption. This involves book signings, interviews, and his very own TV special in which he plans to "shatter the myth" of religion. Surprisingly, no one seems too upset by all this, except for one woman at the local Waldenbooks, who calls him a fiend in a whisper before walking out. Everyone else seems to accept his Divine Obituary as the un-Gospel Truth. Everyone except Claire, that is, who we further learn is a devout Catholic.

So Weiss gets out his antique Luger and goes to kill him a Nazi, but is surprised in the house by a demon of some sort jumping out from behind a curtain--it happens kind of fast. Anyway, he's dead now, a new 666 tattoo to go with his concentration camp numbers, and guilt-wracked Mitchell swears to find out who did it and why. Olivier--who is actually THE DEVIL (<--Spoiler), wants to fund Hansen's further "research," since they're fighting on the same side. Meanwhile, Rasputin-like defrocked priest Papini (Maurice Grandmaison) is trying to convince Claire and that the devil wants her soul, and only she can stop him.

When I lay it all out like that, it sounds like a fairly straightforward story, doesn't it? Well friends, that's a testament to my consummate writing skills, because this movie is absolutely NUTS.

Yes, that's the edge of the sets. IN FRAME.

First of all, the acting. Faith Clift as Claire is called upon to carry at least one third of the movie; I don't know which of the three directors she was sleeping with, but I hope she was good in that arena, as she literally could not be more awful here. Delivering every line as if she were the stagefright-stricken relative of a used car salesman pressed into service for a public access commercial, Clift is an absolute vaccuum of talent. In fact, she's SO bad, she's absolutely hysterical to watch! It's like her performance sucks so hard it turns itself inside out and becomes a glee-inducing work of art. The truly terrible lines she's given to say only paradoxically help matters.

Also turning in a performance that's so horrendous it's awesome is Cameron Mitchell, no stranger to such a phenomenon. His line readings are so haphazard and pause-strewn, I'm nearly convinced that Mitchell improvised them all, with a gut full of cheap bourbon and only the most rudimentary idea of what the scene was supposed to accomplish.

Richard Moll gives the best performance in the movie, faint praise indeed. He really gets into his blasphemous TV special monologue especially, delivering arguments against the existence of God that sound like they came from a gaming messageboard OT thread as if they were the most profound, earth-shattering revelations ever. Added joy comes from the fact that Moll and everyone else in the cast seem to be purposefully drawing out every line, speaking in a slow-motion cadence that is as perplexing as it is entertaining. You'd think it would get old, but for me it never did.

Cameron Mitchell searches in vain for his dignity.

The three plots of the movie--Claire and James' story, Cameron's investigation, and Olivier/the Devil's machinations--must have each been directed by one of the trio of credited directors, but all are so inept it hardly makes a difference. The stories seldom overlap, and as a result characters are forgotten for huge chunks of run time only to be reintroduced via jump cut. My advice is don't worry about it--just go with the manic flow.

It would take me hours to catalog all the incidental crazee in the plot, so instead I've decided to present some of my favorites in bullet-list form:

• After Mr. Weiss's death, Marc Lawrence reappears as Cameron's partner, Dieter. His character does nothing but deliver one-liners and die.

• Characters periodically start screaming their lines for no discernable reason, only to deliver the next chunk of dialogue in a perfectly calm monotone. Not one character--ALL OF THEM.

• Olivier, who looks like he should be the lead in an Andy Warhol movie, seduces Claire's nephew's fiancee and takes off his shoes to reveal a CLOVEN HOOF. You just have to see it.

• Actual dialog between Cameron Mitchell and Olivier:
  Cam: "To you, I'm a cockroach."
  Olivier: "Worse. A PIECE. OF. CRAP."
  Cam: "Be careful Mr. Olivier--don't step on me, or you'll never get rid of the smell!"

• Out of nowhere, Olivier has a demon assistant. Named Ishtar. In a bikini:

Belial Got Back

• Claire visits a black occultist who out of nowhere goes on a racially explosive diatribe: ""I am a black man--a n*gger in your country...You are a rich woman, I'm sure you have many powerful friends...but they couldn't help you...you had to seek the help...of a N*GGER!" Where the fuck did that come from?

• Cameron, on having spent too long going through Mr. Weiss's papers: "I see swastikas swimming in my oatmeal!"

• Confronting the devil he never believed in, Richard Moll's character is suddenly attacked...BY A GROUP OF WILD WEST INDIANS!

• All this, and what has to be the most EPIC DISCO SCENE EVAR.

Disco for the Devil

There's so much more awfulness to be enjoyed, but it all leads up to a final confrontation between Claire and Olivier, where she performs what has to be the only OPEN HEART EXORCISM ever committed to film. Words fail--you just have to watch.

Or don't. I know full well this kind of thing is not for everyone, but for me, it was a brainfuckling trip through Wackyland, and that's a trip I'm always up for taking. Bad on almost every level, it was just what I needed to get me through a boring, uneventful evening. Much as I want to give it three thumbs, I'll split the difference between my experience and that of normal people and peg it at 2 thumbs. Not for every taste, but if it sounds like yours, it should leave you licking your lips.

A few more images from The Nightmare Never Ends:

The Devil Meets the Hardy Boys
Slaughtering the Bull
Surgical Kill-Face
"What a country!"

Hood Ornament

Devilectomy
"Oh, Vicar!"

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...

Night Train to Terror (1985): or, How Bull Killed My Brain

Some movies have a very rigid narrative structure, moving inexorably from point A to point B to point C, never getting sidetracked by subplots or unnecessary comic relief scenes, following the story in a straight line until the inescapable conclusion. While this might not offer many diversions, the approach is good for straightforward, no-nonsense storytelling of the sort utilized by directors who have something important to say and need to say it as forcefully as possible.

1985's Night Train to Terror is not one of those movies. It is a movie whose narrative structure is so floppy and loosely defined it would make overcooked spaghetti look like spines constructed of adamantium vertebrae. Constructed from the clippings of 3 other movies that (thankfully) never saw the light of release, this is one big hunk of 80s cheesecake. And while there are a few things here worth watching, such a recommendation should come with the strong caveat that watching the entire movie from start to finish WILL MAKE YOU DUMBER. It won't make you feel dumber, or just confuse you and give you a case of see-sickness (pun intended)--it will literally kill your brain cells and leave you a stupider person than you were when the opening scene rolled. I'm not joking. You have been warned.

But what an opening scene! We open with some stock footage of a locomotive going through the woods, which are some very nice shots, truth be told. Then we cut to an obvious cable-access quality sound stage made up to look like a train, where some of the most amazingly extreme 80s dance/new wave rejects you've ever laid eyes on are rockin' the house...er, car...with the infectious tune, "Everybody's Got Somethin' to Do (Everybody But YOU!)". And when I say "infectious," I mean LIKE THE PLAGUE. You will not be able to get this tune out of your head, no matter how many times you whack your skull with a cookie sheet. It weakens your mind and sets you up for the IQ-assault to come. But hey, at least you're smiling when it happens. The dancing is a sight to behold, as are the fashions. The lip-synching is Milli Vanilli quality, and the smoke machines are in full force, though whether this was for rock-n-roll effects or supposedly the steam from the train, I couldn't tell.

"Everybody's got somethin' to do--EVERYBODY BUT YOOOOOOOOU!"

Next we follow a zomboid conductor to a back room, where God and Satan are sitting by a window, waiting for midnight when the train will crash and send everyone on it to their "final destination." There's some very nice Christmas lighting out the window that's meant to be a starry sky dashing by, and God and Satan trade verbal barbs for a while like old friends who have grown a little irritated with each other. Finally they decide to get down to business, reviewing the "cases" of the people on the train who are going to go up in a fiery cataclysm at midnight. Yes, they're doing some preemptive divvying up of souls. The lights go down, the train window transforms into an LCD flat-panel monitor, and God and Satan (and we) look out the window into another movie, hoping it will be better than this one.

Largely a vain hope, though this new movie does have a few things to recommend it. One, Richard Moll (aka "TV's Bull") plays the orderly at an insane asylum where his main job seems to be strapping big-haired, big-boobied blondes to gurneys naked and pawing them while they shriek for a few seconds. Nice work if you can get it. Anyway, early on we see a very well-realized car-crash scene where our hero and his never-to-be-mentioned again wife go sideways off a one-lane bridge (how'd THAT happen?) into the water. They're rescued by Bull and his disorderly orderlies, all in the employ of a wrinkly one-time glamor queen who's also a mad scientist or something. Apparently they have a side business at the asylum picking up women, harassing them with Bull's black-tee-shirted manliness, and then cutting them up and selling them to medical schools. Or something. It's really hard to follow.

So the hero from the car wreck is brainwashed into going out and kidnapping more babes for Bull to bisect, and he also has an affair with the mad scientist chick, and eventually his conscience awakens and he puts a stop to the whole mess and kills Bull, while the mad scientist chick is lobotomized by some escaped patients who used to be doctors there. Anyway, it's obvious that this was a full length movie that someone took the scissors to and trimmed it down to 30 minutes, leaving us with the aforementioned wonderful Bull scenes (one later where he even gets to tease a victim with a hacksaw, a highlight) and some strobe-light narration that will give you a mental seizure. This one is almost worth watching, or at least fast-forwarding to the Bull bits, as he steals every scene he's in.

Then it's back to the train for a wrap-up commentary by God and Satan, and some more music and dancing from the band. Not "more music" as in "the next song in their set." No, "more" as in "more of the same song." EVERYBODY'S GOT SOMETHING TO DO--EVERYBODY BUT YOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUU!!!! Still, it's mesmerizing, what with all the bold primary colors and the spiked hair and the headbands and the weird asymmetrical rag shirts and the mascara. And that song...it haunts my dreams.

The next "case" is a real mind-blower, and the one part of the movie I can actually recommend watching all the way through. We open up at the Dingaling Brothers and Stock Footage Carnival, where we see lots of folks having fun. Then we meet an 80s video model moonlighting as a popcorn seller, who attracts the attention of a sleazy moneybags guy who comes up and buys all her popcorn, then buys her. I don't want to spoil much of this, because your jaw will be dropped for most of it, so I'll just encapsulate the rest of the episode in a few sentences. The girl becomes sleazy guy's mistress, starts an affair with a handsome young stud, and then brings him along to the sleazy dude's next party, where out of nowhere we learn that they're all members of a "death club." Every month or so they get together and face death--in the form of some extremely convoluted Russian roulette-type game, except that it's INSANE. To give you an idea--the first one involves letting a giant, venomous, claymation insect out of a bottle and sitting still while it buzzes around trying to decide which of them if any to sting. It's LOOPY.

The other members of the club are great characters--an aging beauty queen, Jimi Hendrix's less successful and talented brother, and a chubby Bela Lugosi impressionist. As their games go on the original heroine gets crazier and crazier, the sleezoid gets more jealous, and finally it all ends with a hired-gang kidnapping (love those 80s gangs!) and a wrecking ball-roulette game that goes predictably wrong. Don't miss the "shocking" death of one of the club members, which goes on for hours. Must see, start to stop, on this one.

And then we're back on the train, and someone shouts to the band "ONE MORE TIME!" and we're off again. This time there's an added bonus, however, as the song turns into a Muppet Show Ballroom sequence, as the dancers and band members start talking about what they're doing there, and wondering about the strangeness and all. We get them questioning the zombie conductor (sometimes poking their heads INTO the car from the WINDOWS--apparently they were all clinging to the side of the train as it whistled down the track), and we get a wonderful break-dancing sequence that brought tears to my eyes...tears of LAUGHTER. Besides the Bull scenes from the first episode and the entirety of the second, the only must-see scenes are these 3 musical interludes. Really, it's pure entertainment.

Then we come to the last "case," which I'll be honest, I don't even remember clearly, as Bull-induced brain damage was setting in. Bull was in this one too, playing a famous author who had "proved" in his book that God is dead. (Richard Dawkins? Christopher Hitchens?) There's an undead Nazi (the worst kind!), and a concentration camp survivor who wants to hunt him down, and then he gets killed by a Halloween mask, and this Dorian Gray stuff is going on, and then a bunch of stuff happens, there's more claymation when somebody gets dragged off to hell, and the movie ends. Really, I fast-forwarded some of it, and was too tired/stupid to remember the rest, but it wasn't as good as the other stuff.

So all in all, I'd say this is one to watch with the FF button down. Let up when you see Bull molesting blondes, or the 80s band playing/dancing, or for the entirety of the second episode. Otherwise, keep the hammer down. Your brain will thank you.

1 thumb overall, but 2 for the second segment, which averages out to "average" again, 1.5 thumbs.


Note from the HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?!?!?! Files: screenwriter Philip Yordan, who gets the blame credit for this script, won an Academy Award in 1954 for his screenplay for Broken Lance. BELIEVE IT...OR DON'T!

MORE MADNESS...

Summary only...