MOTORCYCLE SQUAD (1937) – This neglected little honey is one of the earliest, if not THE earliest, biker films. Kane Richmond and Wynne Gibson star in a story about a motorcycle cop who is dishonorably discharged from the police force as part of a ruse to send him undercover.
Seems a pack of motorcycle-riding crooks are at large and our hero’s skill with a chopper makes him the ideal next recruit for their gang, all the better to bring them down from within.
With my weird sense of humor I get a huge kick out of this film’s cleaned-up 1930s version of what would become biker movie tropes in later decades. And there are moments when you’ll be half-convinced that the creative team behind the 1960s biker movie Wild Rebels based their flick on Motorcycle Squad, albeit with a drag racer infiltrating the gang instead of a cop. Continue reading
GHETTO BLASTER (1989) – Rose Marie, best known as Sally Rogers on the ancient Dick Van Dyke Show, started in movies at age 4 in 1927 billed as “Baby Rose Marie.” Legend holds she was in a Vitaphone SOUND short released as an opener for The Jazz Singer, usually credited as the first feature-length movie with sound.
I’ll start the review-proper for Ghetto Blaster by pointing out that you should buy this film for the Battlestar Galactica (Original Series) fan in your life. Richard Hatch from that show tries to portray the kind of grim and relentless inner city vigilante made iconic by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. 



FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY (2013) – Halloween Month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog with this odd mish-mash of a film. Frankenstein’s Army is one of those horror movies which is presented as Found Footage for no reason and even though it’s set during World War 2 it’s being filmed in color for no reason at all and it’s being filmed by a Russian film crew for ABSOLUTELY no reason at all.
Dr Frankenstein has been doing experiments for the Germans, working on those Top Secret “wonder weapons” that Hitler and his propagandists kept reassuring the suffering German civilians about. Stalin wants our heroes to determine the nature of Frankenstein’s creations and take him into custody to continue his work for the blood-soaked Soviet dictator.
ROCKTOBER BLOOD (1984) -This example of the Heavy Metal Horror films of the 1980s was produced, directed and written by Beverly and Ferd Sebastian, a well-known pair to all of us Bad Movie Geeks. The premise of this hilariously bad movie is that Heavy Metal star Billy Eye programs something sinister into his latest album by way of backward-masking. (Like “I buried Paul” and others)
Here at Balladeer’s Blog my love of enjoyably bad movies has been well established. You can count me as one of the many “Human Breens” as fans of filmmaker Neil Breen are called.
As with the best of the bad auteurs Neil churns out productions that are uniquely his own. There is no mistaking a Neil Breen film with a film made by anyone else. Picture The Room’s Tommy Wiseau trying to make a David Lynch movie. But with a LOT more needless violence against laptop computers.
DOUBLE DOWN (2005) – Neil Breen starred, wrote and directed this movie – and quite obviously he or an associate even wrote the IMDb description of the plot. That description calls Double Down “an edgy action thriller,” which would certainly come as a surprise to anyone who has actually SEEN the film.