Words Seem Out Of Place

I recently revisited  Aerobicide  (1987), also known as Killer Workout , a film that's usually considered a fairly unremarkable example of the slasher genre. The plot is straightforward enough: a mysterious killer is murdering people at a posh Hollywood health spa. His or her weapon of death? A large safety pin, of course. I mean, if that isn't remarkable, I don't know what is. While the film's plot might be simple, the final act makes tries to throw in a bunch of shocker twists, none of which make a lick of sense. The acting throughout is mostly forgettable, except when star Marcia Karr glares menacingly at everyone, which she does in almost every scene. She's glorious as Rhonda, owner of the aptly named Rhonda's Workout. There are also some laughably silly fight scenes between big burly dudes with mullets. The kill scenes are quick and dirty, nothing too memorable. If this all sounds like I'm telling you Aerobicide isn't worth your time, t...

It's been a while, so I'm overdue for another odds 'n' sods post, rounding up stuff I've written elsewhere in the great beyond we call the internet. Some of these go back several months, into last year even, and others are more recent, but all of them are about one of my favorite topics: cult classic films. And for me there's no doubt the films discussed in these articles and reviews are absolute cult movie solid gold. At times Nurse 3D  plays a b-movie Single White Female on acid. From wisecracking, half-naked interstellar space babes to erotically charged nurses behaving badly, from several different women on brutally single-minded revenge missions to one of the great movie urban legends of all time, these pieces run the exploitation gamut. If memory serves, the great Rhonda Shear hosted a few of these movies on USA Up All Night . For lovers of all things cult cinema—my fellow disciples of Rhonda Shear and USA Up All Night and all yo...

Looking back at the pop culture mainstays of this Gen-Xer's gloriously misspent youth. The most notorious scene in Stuart Gordon's 1985 Lovecraftian science fiction horror comedy Re-Animator involves a talking severed head (!) going down on the young—and stark naked—ingenue, Barbara Crampton. It's as horrifying as it sounds. Ms. Crampton had already proven comfortable with onscreen nudity, baring all in her first film, Brian De Palma's erotic thriller  Body Double . In this scene from Re-Animator, though—just her third feature film—Crampton's fearlessness with her body is downright remarkable. The scene offers a quick, shocking few moments, but is also played partly for some extremely uncomfortable laughs. The film's black humor is unparalleled precisely because it's unafraid to be wildly inappropriate. And it doesn't get more inappropriate than that scene. Crampton would go on to star in a slew of low-budget cult classics, from...

In the rabid movie-loving corner of Twitter known as #filmtwitter, June has become synonymous with "Junesploitation," a month-long celebration of all things exploitation cinema— trashy slashers , blaxploitation , Andy Sideris's bullets and babes flicks , silly space opera , teensploitation , and so many more, including  nunsploitation  of all things. For a lot of us, every month is a celebration of exploitation cinema, of course. Between falling down the rabbit hole that is Tubi's enormous selection of trash cinema , and Joe Bob Briggs's recent season of The Last Drive-In on Shudder, my viewing habits of late are all about trash. Which is just how I like it. Fittingly then, my first "Writing Roundup" of the year consists entirely of reviews of cult films plus a heartfelt appreciation for a woman who played a big role in igniting my love for B-movies in the first place. It's been a long time since I've done one of these roundups, so here a...