SCORPION THUNDERBOLT – Yes, it’s Scorpion Thunderbolt, the horror movie that has absolutely NOTHING to do with EITHER scorpions OR thunderbolts! They could have titled this thing Terms of Endearment 2 and it wouldn’t have been any less appropriate.
Potential viewers will find various years of release listed for this flick like 1983, 1985 or 1988. That’s because this is another of those bizarre cinematic cut-and-paste jobs that we fans of bad movies just love, like They Saved Hitler’s Brain, Spookies, Pink Angels, Monster A Go-Go and so many others.
The original film was titled Grudge of the Sleepwalking Woman and was a Taiwanese horror movie from 1983. Balladeer’s Blog’s old friend Godfrey Ho, the Schlockmeister General of Hong Kong cinema, bought the original movie. That Dr Frankenstein of the editing room padded the film’s run-time by adding some kung fu fights and one of his usual non sequitur movie quickies starring Richard Harrison, then tried to pass the mess off as all one movie. Same ol’ same ol’ for Godfrey Ho, in other words. Continue reading
Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’ve always had a soft spot for the Resident Evil movies. I’m not implying that they’re good by any means, but as guilty pleasures I consider them pretty watchable in a Spaghetti Western sense. You don’t expect logic or well-maintained continuity in the original Django or Sartana series any more than you do from the Stranger or Hallelujah flicks or any of the other lower-level pulp series of Italo-Westerns. 
Seventies chop-socky films are another example. You might watch them but you sure as hell can’t defend them from criticism. 
SIX-HUNDRED & SIXTY SIX (1972) – Directed by Tom Doades and written by Marshall Riggan, this film is a very unusual blend of science fiction, horror, post-apocalypse drama and religious message. Cult actor Joe Turkel, perhaps best known as the ghostly Lloyd the Bartender in The Shining, stars as Colonel John Ferguson. 
Obviously, a post-Omen film would not blow their story’s final reveal in the title, like we get with Six-Hundred & Sixty Six.
THE KINDRED (1987) – This monster movie was the third horror project from the writing and directing team of Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow. 
Rod Steiger, just one year away from his outrageous tour-de-force performance in the slasher film American Gothic (with YVONNE DE CARLO), plays Dr Phillip Lloyd, the villain of the story. The mad Dr Lloyd has been trying his own hand at the kind of research that Amanda Hollins excelled at. To that end he’s been paying an unscrupulous ambulance driver to covertly provide him with accident victims to use as human guinea pigs. 
Regular readers of Balladeer’s Blog may recall how fond I am of Clive Barker’s novel The Hellbound Heart and the subsequent Hellraiser horror film franchise. Mike LeHan and Paul Gerrard directed and produced a 2013 spec trailer hoping to get a reboot of the series greenlit. 
Balladeer's Blog 