Warning: Spoilers Ahead.
Just when you were thinking this pre-credit sequence was the wrap-around story for our anthology, we are introduced to an half-asleep mom with perfect hair, Eva (Marilyn Hassett), and her too-old-for-this-shit 12 year old daughter Diana (Lauren Woodland). While watching NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) on TV, Diana decides the movie is boring (What?! Go to your room! Right now!) and wants mom to tell her a bedtime story. Seriously, this is the wrap-around. Diana wants Mom to tell her an original story off the top of her head, because she's an author after all, regardless of the fact that she is way too old for that sort of thing. Mom thinks about it and decides that a story about the Viet Nam war is just the ticket for a young girl. Full disclosure, I'm not the parent of a young girl, so what the hell do I know? But I don't remember any PLATOON (1987) t-shirts at Hot Topic back in the day.
Utilizing some stock footage from the TV series VIETNAM WAR STORIES (1987-88), we are introduced to our team of four diverse soldiers who are introduced bitching and griping before the Sarge decides that they should split up for because, I guess, that the lowest unit of military forces is not small enough. Sarge and Porky (Phill Meske) spot a VC with a roll of toilet paper (because, sure, why not?) and take off after him while Hutch (Bobby Hosea) and Opie (Glenn Morshower), after admitting to a lack of heroism, investigate a tiny village that has four G.I.s all torn up in the middle of the huts. After much arguing about what happened (says Hutch, "VC don't rip nobody's arms off!"), they spot a topless local sprinting into a hut. Feeling that this is a threat that they can handle, our men in green give chase and escort her back to camp while proposing a myriad of sexual fantasies. At the camp Sarge and Porky (so named because he's way too fat to have ever made it through basic training) show off their spoils, a VC prisoner who is clearly a Latino dude, and drool over the girl. One by one the "feisty little gook" seduces, sprouts fangs and heavy eyebrows and kills the team off camera with sounds of a tiger on the soundtrack. The twist here is that another team of diverse soldiers finds the four torn up G.I.s and the whole scenario repeats, right down to the dialogue and the streaking girl.
What, this damn kid is still awake? Yep, time for another appropriately YA story. This one is about a group of 30-something "college kids" who are predictably drunk, loud, and mean. You know they are college kids because the guys will raise their beers and yell "it's beaver time!" at random intervals. This is amusingly translated in Brazilian as "and time for porn!" After a round of strip poker in which (big surprise) Becky LeBeau's character, Joanne, is the loser, they decide to prank the nerdy, virginal classmate Martha (Lillian Byrd) by setting up a fake seance in which they plan to "bring back" their dead math teacher Old Lady Clausen who knew Martha. The big plan is to get Martha naked and scare her so bad that she will run out into the streets with no clothes on and be really embarrassed.
Yeah, it's a hell of a plan. Martha really wants to join these lunk heads, so she goes along with it, allowing her bare chest to be painted with a pentacle (not even an inverted one) while the douches knock on the table and say spooky things from a mic in another room. The big payoff is supposed to be Joanne in face cream, bursting in and pretending to be Old Lady Clausen, but instead she passes out and the real Claussen comes back from the dead and is really pissy because Martha wouldn't let her get in her pants. I guess the joke here is that the math teacher was a lesbian and... well, that's about it. Unlike the first story, this seems totally on brand for something a 12 year old would enjoy. Questionable parenting, sure, but it plays to the crowd.
Following another Spooky Lady montage, we get the third and, thankfully, final story, this one starring top-billed Dick Sargent. Yes, the same Dick Sargent whose decades-long career is probably best remembered by his replacing Dick York on "Bewitched" in 1969. Unnamed newlyweds (Sargent and Marilyn Hassett) decide to spend their honeymoon night in the back of a taxi parked over a city view. Yeah, this one has got to knock this kid out, for sure. While "comically" and enthusiastically making out in the back seat, the taxi driver notices that in the mirror it appears as if the groom is gettin' jiggy all by himself. Cut to the couple at home and after his bride says that she's hungry, the groom suggests "steak" to which the horrified wife says "WHAT?!" Hooboy, this isn't foreshadowing, it's forebludgeoning. The wife works odd hours at a blood bank (ok, ok, we get it, jeeezus!) and doesn't like going to the beach or baseball games ("because of the bats"), and nearly chokes to death on a salad that the husband made with... yep, you guessed it, garlic. Cue the muted horns. Wha, wha, whaaaa.
After dinner, the husband cuts his finger while doing dishes and the wife rushes over and sucks his finger, which he finds odd. Kids love Dracula references! Just when things are getting freaky between the sheets, the wife informs her husband that if he wants any more action, he's going to have to go shave. Then she mentions that there is a full moon out and that she has a surprise for him. He replies he has a surprise for her too and she sprouts fangs and he sprouts fur and we cut back and forth for far too long. And that damn kid finally falls asleep, as does the audience. Actually, I lie. What really happens is the mom and daughter suddenly turn to face the camera, both sporting vampire fangs. Ugh, make it stop!
Just when you thought you were finished with this mess, we get yet another Spooky Lady montage, this time with clips from all of the stories that we just watched which goes on for three full minutes. This is followed by a slow credit scrawl over outtakes of actors flubbing their lines, including Bob Cook hisself blowing his lines and then throwing a hissy and blaming it on another actor. I'm not sure why Bob would include footage of himself looking like a total jerkwad, but ok.
The usual school of thought is that horror anthologies typically have one really good story and then are bolstered by two lesser stories. Sometimes movies will buck that trope and deliver one clunker after another. While I can think of other examples of bad low-rent indy horror anthologies (TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE (1987), anyone?), it's hard to think of any that sport a large number of cast members that actually went on to have successful careers. Not to mention the fact that the movie never even made it on to US shelves, ROCK-A-DIE only appearing on video in Brazil, Japan and Mexico, as far as I can tell.
In '89 ROCK-A-DIE was teetering on the edge of being obsolete before it even got before audiences and ultimately never got released in the US. Even so, this is surprising as the ravenous hunger for VHS genre movies in video stores was still going strong until Blockbuster, and to a lesser extent Hollywood Video, bought out all of the mom and pop video stores in the early '90s and began dictating what the public would be allowed to see from their offices in the conservative mid-west. This helped wipe out the horror genre for a few years until DVD started the cycle all over again. It's interesting how quickly these undulations in the market came at that time, where as today folks are complaining about "superhero fatigue" for a market boom that started nearly 20 years ago.
This one is really a bit frustrating as it could have been far more fun than it is. The comedy aspects are as joyless as the relentless padding that is required to bring the movie up to feature length. It barely delivers any horror, other than the torn up soldiers in the first episode and the cheap, but cool undead face of Old Lady Clausen in the second one. Dick Sargent's werewolf makeup is downright embarrassing, looking more like a hairy catcher's mitt than a werewolf. On the other hand, it's got Becky LeBeau topless, which is always nice and it's shot on film. Shooting on film automatically brings it up to respectability, though the estimated $375,000 budget probably got eaten up by that very thing, not to mention even as feeble as Dick Sargent's career was in '89, I'm sure he took a chunk out of what was left. This leaves little to put up on screen, but you can make up for it with some creativity. I mean, if you have any. The first story in Nam could have been pretty good with just a little bit more money for a halfway decent were-tiger costume, a bit of gore or even more scenes shot at night. Hell, I'd settle for some foley'd sound effects of automatic weaponsfire instead of the raw pop of blanks being fired, though to be fair, the weapons fire is mostly just from a hilarious moment where Sarge fires his M16 in the air while screaming and crying after finding Opie dead. You'd think the meatgrinder that was Nam would have left him a little numb, but I guess he really liked Opie. The wrap-around really should have been better, but I guess Cook was struggling to shoehorn something in to fit his concept that wouldn't cost him a bundle and couldn't be bothered to go all David Lynch and make some sort of nightmare baby with a goat fetus, which is a shame.
This was Bob Cook's first film of his own creation. He is credited as assistant director on three films prior to ROCK-A-DIE, but this was his *ahem* baby and established his mini production company B.C. Films in Florida. He has gone on to make 10 more movies, including the lamentable LYCANTHROPE (1999), which managed to ensnare Robert Carradine, Michael Winslow and Christopher Mitchum for a few days of shooting. Then there is his most recent, SCREAM TEST (2020), which I'm going to pass on because there is no way a 2020, shot on digital, Felissa Rose no-budgeter is in any way going to make my world a better place. A man's gotta know his limitations.
Opening with a scene in which an alleged rock band (billed as Danger, but not to be confused with the active Swedish band) is being harangued by their manager (writer-producer-director Bob Cook) to come up with a song for a horror movie by morning. The band, who are repeatedly referred to as a rock band, are aghast at such lowly endeavor. "A horror movie?" they groan. If you ever forgot that horror was considered a flogged horse at the end of the '80s, here's a reminder and it won't be the first, but more on that later.
We then cut to a woman in a low cut, black dress with tiger in a cemetery for no adequately explained reason, before we get the opening credits which include a bells and synth cover of... yes, Rock-a-Bye Baby. Bob Cook must have been really excited by his high concept. I hear cocaine will do that to you, but I have no proof of this.
Man, if that doesn't knock some kid into dreamland, I don't know what will! In between the stories, in addition to the wrap-around, we get more footage of the wannabe Elvira with the tiger in the cemetery with some of the band members dressed up as cheesy movie monsters, intercut with scenes of the story that we just watched all set to a song called Spooky Lady. "Spooky lay-daaaay, whatcha gonna do? Spooky lay-daaaay, she put a spell on you." Spooky lay-daaaay, what's this all about? Spooky lay-daaaay, pad that run-time out.
1989 was a precarious year for horror films. It didn't take even a decade for slasher movies and horror films in general to go from boom to bust. As we all know, John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN (1978) ushered in, what was at the time, the modern horror movie. Inspired by Italian giallo films, HALLOWEEN in turn inspired many knock-offs that became institutions in their own right. These institutions begat sequels and other knock-offs that filled video store shelves in a time where anything and everything could be released on video and make whopping great loads of cash. At about the mid '80s, slasher fatigue set in. The success of the humor-filled gore-drenched RE-ANIMATOR (1985), which was so popular that it received an expanded R-rated version and a massively edited 59 minute version broadcast on television's USA Network, led to a preponderance of horror comedies completely taking over the horror market. In a few short years this too burned itself out leading to the explosion of "horror-thrillers" or just straight thrillers in the '90s.
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