Twister's Revenge!

Trucking Hell

Twister's Revenge!
USA 1988 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers but... really?

Okay... wow. This is going to be a short review. I’ve seen some terrible films in my time but this is easily one of the worst, almost beating out Harlem Nights as the film I’d most want to walk out of. Bill Rebane’s ‘comedy action’ movie is the last of the films in the Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection that Arrow put out and, yeah, I’d have to go on record as saying that the majority of this box set is terrible. The Game was watchable and The Alpha Incident was a film I’d probably watch again but, not much to recommend in this one. Not least, Twister’s Revenge, which manages to fail to deliver on both the action and comedy that I’m assuming it was trying for.

The plot, such as it is, tells of a young couple, Dave (played by Dean West) and Sherry (played by Meredith Orr). They play those big, US monster truck shows... you know, those trucks with the raised chassis and the humongous tyres? He’s the driver and she is the computer programmer and fixer for the new artificial intelligence installed in their new truck, Mr. Twister (so there’s half of the title explained... you’re on your own trying to find any ‘revenge’ in this movie though). So Mr. Twister, the monster truck, can think for himself, talk to them and he is their friend, it would seem.

Anyway, since the whole kit is worth 200,000 dollars, three wiley but low in intelligence redneck thugs who work at the local scrap yard, called Kelly (David Alan Smith), Bear (R. Richardson Luka) and Dutch (Jay Gjernes), decide to steal the truck and all its gear. Bear is the really dumb one and is pretty much the less upright, male equivalent of the kind of character played by Regina Carrol in Blazing Stewardesses (and you can read my review of that one here). The first third of the movie is the thieves attempting and failing to steal both the truck and the van full of computer equipment. So they kidnap Sherry on her wedding day and tie her up next to some TNT in an old abandoned mine shaft, holding her to ransom for a few days. So Dave and Mr. Twister go out of their way to make life hell for the three crooks and rescue Sherry... which is the next two thirds of the movie.

And it’s mostly action but it’s fairly low budget and consists mostly of long, extended and very dull car vs truck chases (culminating in a similarly extended tank vs truck sequence) which... well, it’s just boring. And all along the three are trying to be as funny as they can for the audience and... yeah, I wasn’t laughing along at this one I can tell you. I just felt insulted and that maybe Arrow should be paying me to have to sit through this one.

Even a terrible song and dance scene can’t save the picture and, while the director does try to get creative once, in a very brief shot of the main male protagonist taken so that it’s looking through a spider’s web in front of his face, there’s not really a great deal of interesting stuff going on visually in this one either. And it’s not the most carefully filmed movie I’ve seen. For instance, in the big tank scene where it’s just Dave and the three crooks running and rolling along in the deserted junkyard, there’s a spot where a crew member can be easily seen in the distance, walking along and not minding what’s going on near the front of the screen.

Another point of interest is the use of the truck as a comically intimidating entity, where the background music, including a backing beat, alludes and finally, very briefly, breaks out into the John Williams Jaws theme at one point, before hastily doing it own thing, presumably to evade anyone having to pay any copyright.

All in all, Twister’s Revenge is certainly a low note to end on in the Weird Wyoming boxed set and I won’t be recommending this film to anyone anytime soon. The action scenes, which are plentiful and maybe all that the film is made up of are mind numbingly boring on their own and... yeah... those are the highlights. I hate to give a bad review but, yeah, I won’t be watching this one again. A short review for a film that I’m hoping will leave my headspace sometime soon. Maybe I’ve exorcised the memory with this review.

The Game

Afoot

The Game
USA 1984 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: The usual spoilers.

Okay, yeah... The Game is another one from Arrow’s recent Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection that I kind of liked. I mean, it’s no The Alpha Incident (reviewed by me here) but it’s better than Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here), Invasion From Inner Earth (reviewed here) and The Demons Of Ludlow (reviewed here). I mean, it’s not gobsmackingly brilliant but it’s certainly watchable and... cheap looking but entertaining for the most part. For a Bill Rebane film, I’m taking that as a win.

It starts off with a nice but brief credits sequence comprising a series of static shots of various title and credit cards placed on some mostly well known board games. We then get into the plot which belongs to that relatively small but tried and true genre of the eccentric rich person inviting a number of guests to his/her house to try and survive the weekend. In this case, it’s three eccentric multi-millionaires... as told by an opening narration performed mostly in rhyming couplets... and their hotel resort The Northernaire in Wisconsin (which is now torn down, in real life, it would seem).

They invite a bunch of people to play their ‘game’ for the next few days while they themselves are absent (aka controlling things from a locked off, boiler room grotto at the centre of a hotel). The game is called ‘Game of Fear’ and it’s basically the cookey rich folk piling on horror and death scenarios in an attempt to get each player to leave the grounds... with the last player standing receiving a million dollars. Don’t ask me to highlight any of the actors or actresses in the movie specifically because, as usual with a Bill Rebane movie (and a surprising number of movies actually), the IMDB is no help at all in providing photos of the actors in the movie so, I have no real way of matching them up and I don’t remember names so well.

Anyway, it’s typical of this kind of movie up until a point and I had no problems with it, for the most part. The various scenarios on offer by the millionaires are things like a tarantula on a plate, a shark fin in a swimming pool, blasts of fog and freezing cold air, a stalking but pretty unthreatening hunchback (who later turns out to be a well spoken hired hand in a neat little twist before a more elaborate reveal) and some kind of bed burster reminiscent of the chest bursters in the Alien movies... just less well done and surprisingly hard to rig. Which is where things get a little different to a lot of movies of this type... I’ll touch on that in minute.

The film has the usual trimmings such as the various hotel guests either gelling (and having sex) or arguing about what the heck is going on, even at one point getting into a stalk and kill gun fight with each other when the pressure gets turned up. The actors are, mostly, fine and overall the film has a comfortable vibe to it. There are a couple of things which set it a little off kilter though.

For instance, there’s a scene where somebody puts a water snake in a swimming pool. Then we see one of the ladies sitting up in her bed to go for a swim... but double exposed on the camera so she steps out of her body and leaves herself laying on the bed still. This is a strange enough occurrence by this point of the movie but she then goes for a swim and gets attacked by the water snake... until she wakes up back in bed and that sequence was all a dream. However, if it was all a dream, then why did we see someone putting a water snake in the pool before she went to sleep. Hmm?

Another strange thing is, when the last three surviving people are each promised a million dollars and taken away from their resort to meet the others, who were transported to a nearby hotel, only one of the former guests is there. It turns out that, more than just The Game was going on and real supernatural forces have also been actually killing the guests, finishing with the three millionaires. They are killed but wake up from death near the end, in a kind of afterthought moment, which might be just leaving the camera running after the scene was finished and then using it or... well, it’s a double rug pull that doesn’t quite make sense by the time we know there are real supernatural shenanigans going on also, I would have to say.

Most of the music for the film, credited to composer Bruce Malm, is completely not what you would expect for a horror/thriller picture. It’s mostly ragtime style piano music in the style of Scot Joplin and it puzzling why some of it was used the way it is... it’s a pleasant enough listen but does pretty much nothing for the atmosphere of the piece, that’s for sure.

And that’s me pretty much done on The Game. As I said, entertaining enough and one of the highlights, I suspect, of Bill Rebane’s filmography but, it’s probably not going to be for most folks, I would have thought and it’s not something I would be happy to recommend to most people unless they have a specific reason for wanting to visit something like this. For my money, The Alpha Incident is still the jewel in the crown of this Arrow boxed edition but, I still have one more movie in there to watch.

The Demons Of Ludlow

Pianist Envy

The Demons Of Ludlow
USA 1983 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers I guess... if you ever wanted to watch this one.

The Demons Of Ludlow is the fourth film of six of this director’s movies featured in Arrow’s Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection and, alas, it’s not a great one either. Nowhere near as good as the one film from this set so far which I did really like, The Alpha Incident (reviewed by me here).

The film stars Paul Bentzen as the preacher of the small village community of Ludlow and, he’s an actor I actually quite like, having been exposed to him purely from the films in this boxed edition (he was also in The Alpha Incident and Invasion From Inner Earth, reviewed here). It’s a shame then that it turns out the actor only made seven movies in his whole life... he didn’t play in his next two films (his last) for over 20 years after making this one. Here, he is one of the two main protagonists, along with a woman who is returning to Ludlow after a long absence, having left the village as a teen. Now, however, she’s a reporter and, remembering the terrible old stories of her grandfather, she returns when it’s celebrating 200 years since it was founded, to see if there’s a story.

Turns out, there is.

This film is an unashamed cash grab/emulation of all those popular American slashers of the 1980s, specifically those with a supernatural bent. In this case, it shares more than a few similarities with John Carpenter’s, then fairly recent, all time classic horror The Fog (reviewed here). Alas, although it shares a few thematic elements with the Carpenter movie, such as the bicentennial celebrations and some homicidal ghosts wandering around, it doesn’t really share the quality of the partial inspiration for it and, although Rebane occasionally tries to lift the film with interesting stabs of shot design, there’s nothing as interesting as in The Alpha Incident. A shot where the preacher (who finds an ancient artefact in a wall, just like Father Malone in The Fog), is framed in a mirror and another person framed within a cross in that same mirror is notable but, not something that can save the movie. There are some nice shots of long cast shadows throughout but, nothing that really catches the eye and interests the mind on a visual level consistently, I felt.

The town takes receipt, on its 200 year birthday, of an old piano sent by the family of the man named Ludlow, who founded the town originally. However, it turns out his hands were cut off and he was exiled from the village and sent away to England... but now he’s returned in the form of this ‘haunted’ piano, along with his old timey ghost cronies... to shoot, stab, hang and tear people apart with some of the cheaper and unimpressive practical effects I’ve seen in 1980s horror movies, it has to be said. One guy’s bloody stumps where his hands should have been are literally just him clenching his fists with a bit of red on them, for instance.

The piano itself is kinda strange apart from, you know, being haunted. When it’s played it starts off sounding a little like a harpsichord but then you realise it’s just a synthesiser being played on the soundtrack and you don’t even need to see the various actors’ hand movements not synching up to tell you this. It sounds just awful and, though Ric Coken and Steven Kuether’s score is mostly appropriate, coming off with a kind of cheap Bach on a Casio synth vibe to it, it’s nothing to write home about either and, to be honest, adds no tension to the film. It’s a million miles away from the terrifying synth scores that Carpenter was supplying for his movies.

There’s also a strange, glowy, neon green hand which occasionally makes a killing entrance onto a scene or two but, yeah, it doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything in the plot (other than it’s on the side of the ghosts). Perhaps it’s a stand in for one of the town patron’s hands but, yeah, it looks more like an alien hand, to be honest. Either way, it fails to be unsettling and maybe that’s my main take away from this movie. The Demons Of Ludlow is a comfortable feeling film but it’s not really entertaining in any manner and it totally fails to be scary or disturbing at any point. There are no scenes in the movie which are likely to scare you the way the director is obviously intending they will so, yeah, it just feels a bit damp and limp and I really can’t work up enough enthusiasm to object to it, in all honesty. It is what it is and it’s probably not something I’d recommend, to be honest and... having a flying piano near the end in no way makes up for anything else in the movie. These aren’t the demons you’re looking for.

The Alpha Incident

Take The A Strain

The Alpha Incident
USA 1978 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: An incident or two of spoilers.

Well, I finally saw a Bill Rebane movie that I really liked. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still quite cheaply made but, since not a great deal of large budget stuff happens, it doesn’t matter if we don’t see any of it on screen because this kind of script is perfect for low budget.

The film starts off with a credits sequence over footage of blood cells, cueing you in straight away that this is going to be one of those viral movies like The Andromeda Strain (reviewed here) or The Satan Bug (reviewed here). Indeed, like The Andromeda Strain, this particular type of virus comes from space, specifically brought back from Mars via a Martian probe. A team of scientists are studying it in a lab and trying to figure out what causes it to kill their various rats and mice, in some instances forcing their brains out through their heads. About a fifth of the action takes place here, crosscutting from the main focus of the story and back to these labs every so often but, once again it is man’s folly which brings about the ‘incident’ of the title (although what the heck ‘Alpha’ is supposed to be isn’t really made clear... I couldn’t find mention of it in the movie).

The film even has a real old-school Hollywood star in it, in the form of Ralph Meeker, who you may remember in such parts as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer in the outstanding Kiss Me Deadly, or as Kolchak’s buddy in the original TV movie of The Night Stalker. He was just recovering from some kind of heart attack when he made this so he doesn’t do much more than sit around, get up and talk a little while using a load of facial expressions for the most part... but that’s fine. That’s pretty much everyone’s role and, that’s part of the beauty of the film.

Anyway, the majority of the martian virus is being transferred by train to another lab for military experimentation, so it’s shunted into a siding by a small town railway station one morning. However, what the government guard on the train didn’t realise is that one of the curious train guards, played by George ‘Buck’ Flower, allowed his curiosity to get the better of him and he snuck a look at the mysterious cargo, accidentally breaking it and absorbing the virus through the broken glass lodged in his hand. Still not knowing what it is, he greets and has contact with the three workers in the station’s office the next morning and then, when the government guard, who may or may not be infected, finds out, he quarantines the place and the government evacuates the town and puts the national guard out. The government guy wounds one of the three, to stop him from leaving and also wounds Flower, who manages to make it into the surrounding forest to die.

And from here on in, the film becomes an intense, claustrophobic study of four people... the old timer (Meeker), the obnoxious one, the sexy lady and the government’s man... as they are forced to be in lockdown together. Later on, as new things are understood about the virus from the scientists working around the clock to find an antidote, it transpires that the thing activates and kills you when you fall asleep (which may or may not be a nice nod to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers). So the army send a helicopter to drop off coffee and amphetamines and, yeah, things get intense with the four people, who happen to find themselves in a Bill Rebane film... and, as I mentioned in my reviews of Rebane’s Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) and Invasion From Inner Earth (reviewed here), Rebane seems to be all about mutual dislike and confrontation.

The film even has some really nice cinematography throughout too (probably from the director or one of his family) and includes some nice frame compositions. Such as a wonderful moment when two scientists are talking halfway up a stairwell. We see them from the side, framed in a kind of artificial diamond shape made from the tops and bottoms of the flights of stairs above and below them. It looks pretty good.

Or another moment when two of the men at the station are having an argument just outside the office. As they verbally spar in the foreground, we can see Ralph Meeker through the glass door quietly observing them from inside, his head perfectly framed in the top panel of the door.

There’s also a wonderful scene in a laboratory in the third part of the film where the colours are all slats of oranges and reds, which really lift the humdrum nature of the scientist sequences at this point.

Somehow, through all of this, the director manages to squeeze in a shot of Jenny, the female member of the station office workers, played by Carol Irene Newell, as she undresses and, believe it or not given the scenario, shoots a sex scene with her in it too. I guess it’s as good as any way to stay awake although, she seems a bit reluctant, to tell the truth.

And if you’ve read this far... here’s where the spoilers reside so, if you’re looking to see this anytime soon, skip the last couple of paragraphs. Fair warning.

Unlike some of Bill Rebane’s earlier movies, which often had a small but positive silver lining behind the ending... this movie is unflinchingly pessimistic and bleak in its outlook. Meeker is the first to go and suddenly throws a fit after he doses off, followed by a nice practical effects shot of his rubberised head with its eyeballs popping out and his brain making its way out the back of his skull (this is the most graphic I’ve seen Bill Rebane get, thus far). This is followed by the sad and lonely Jenny blowing her brains out in her car and then, when the government man and one deliberately obnoxious character are the only two left, the audience gets the news that the government is giving up on them as no cure has been found. So they helicopter drop off an ‘antidote’ for the people, not realising they’d not all take it at once. The obnoxious fellow does and they find out, to their dismay via his death, that the antidote was a cyanide capsule. Then the government man falls asleep but then, the next morning, he wakes up unscathed and he realises he was never infected by the virus himself... which is a bit of a waste because, well, lets just say that fans of George R, Romero’s classic Night Of The Living Dead will recognise that this has pretty much the same ending and leave it at that. So, yeah, pretty bleak.

All in all though, I have to say I really enjoyed this one. The film even has an original score this time around by Richard A. Girvin. He puts one foot wrong early on with some overly comic music for when Flowers goes to investigate the cargo in the train but, mostly it’s very cool, understated work which goes well with the chilling tone of the movie.

As I write these words (probably at least six months* before this review gets up on the site... I have a bit of a backlog of reviews to publish) I’m still in the newly extended coronavirus half-lockdown shilly shally which the government have lengthened rather than put us in proper lookdown and closing the borders. So The Alpha Incident was kind of a comforting watch in terms of having a situation I could directly relate to. Ralph Meeker’s character sums it up nicely when he’s talking to the government man... “I sure never expected anything like this’d happen in my life.” Yep, I think that goes for all of us in the world at the moment, to be honest. The Alpha Incident is a really cool movie and I’m happy to have been acquainted with it, thanks to Arrow’s Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection. I hope some of the others I haven’t watched yet are as good as this one.

*More like 18 months, it turns out

Invasion From Inner Earth

Cabin Fever

Invasion From Inner Earth
USA 1974 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

 Warning: Spoilers on this one. You probably won't want to watch it anyway

Okay, so the second film in the  Blu Ray box set from Arrow called Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection is Invasion From Inner Earth. It’s a small, microbudget film, made in Wisconsin and set in Canada (from what I can make out). Alien beings have taken over the Earth and, there’s not much made clear about them (although there is conjecture at one point from one of the more likeable characters that they are martians living inside the Earth just resurfacing, at one point). They manifest themselves very occasionally as a flying saucer, an echoey voice on a radio or, most often, as either a red gas or a red light. Anyway, most major cities have been wiped out by the aliens but this is news to a bunch of young pilots who have been staying at a log cabin in the wilderness for a few days. They fly back to their airfield, some miles away and, as they do, the opening credits finally kick in.

Okay... so I’ll say up front before I get to the rest of it that there is no music credit for this film and on the IMDB, Rebane is listed as music editor. Some of the music here is obviously library music. But the main title music... well, it could be library music I suppose. What it actually is, is a very bad cover version of Ennio Morricone’s opening title music for The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... sounding very much like somebody, perhaps Bill Rebane himself, is performing it on a very cheap Casio keyboard. There are maybe two notes changed in the melody but certainly not enough to distinguish it from the original theme in any way whatsoever and I find it hard to believe that there was never a law suit about this piece of music. I mean, you have to hear this to believe it... wow. It’s like somebody tried to make the famous music sound as bland as they possibly could... and succeeded admirably. Incidentally, the direction credit on this is simply, Directed by ITO. Ito was Bill Rebane’s name in Latvia before he came to the US and changed it to William.

Okay, so after this bonkers musical detour, the plane with the pilots land at the airfield but everybody else is dead by the time they hit the ground. They even see a plane crash when its engine cuts out. As they explore the airfield and the nearby lodge, two of the pilots encounter a red spotlight randomly probing walls etc. Anyway, they all get back on their plane and go to stay back at the log cabin from whence they come.

Pretty much 95% of the movie takes place in that cabin, as the five people (four men and one woman) speculate as to just what the heck is going on and why they can’t get anyone other than an obvious, alien voice on the radio. And that’s pretty much it for most of the film. You get the occasional taste of what’s happening in the outside world, including ‘the last radio DJ’ who seems to be broadcasting to nobody... but pretty much this carries on the trend in Rebane’s movies for any action happening off screen, for the most part. Even the airplane crash near the start is off camera... we just hear a noise as it crashes and then, a little later, two of the team come upon it in the form of... I don’t know... like an elabourate bonfire but certainly not looking like a plane crash.

This film also carries on with that little thing I noticed on Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) where two or more of the characters have a certain underlying hostility in their interactions. It’s like the director prefers when some of his characters just don’t get on. I guess it makes for dramatic dialogue, perhaps. The most cranky of the five tries to escape in the plane when supplies run out but a red alien light explodes his vehicle mid air. Then one of them tries to escape in a handy snowmobile but, when he encounters a red gas, he suddenly vanishes from existence. A similar thing happens to one of the three remaining friends when they try and hike out a couple of days to the nearest town in the treacherous, snowy waste. At the end, one man and woman get to the nearest, deserted town and then... well... they disappear and are transformed into two, half naked children who are walking in green fields. And that’s the end and... nope, no clue. I guess maybe they are the new Adam and Eve or... yeah, I don’t really know what’s going on here to be honest. The lack of clarity, cheap production values and suspicions that not all the footage required was actually shot, contributes to an ending which is far from satisfactory or, really, in any way penetrable.

All that being said, though, I liked the movie, in a ‘spectator sport’ kind of way. It felt easy and comfortable. Nothing much happens and it’s genuinely too ridiculous to really cause either offence, outrage or pretty much any other feeling than, perhaps, the feeling of being slowly anaesthetised as the film drags on. It felt like an easy place to inhabit as an audience member and I certainly didn’t hate it so... yeah... that’s my takeaway from Invasion From Inner Earth. I can’t say I’d particularly recommend it to anyone ever but, like Douglas Adams’ description of Earth in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, I would say it’s... mostly harmless.

Monster-A-Go-Go

Gone Ghoul

Monster-A-Go-Go
USA 1965 Directed by Bill Rebane
(with additional footage by Herchell Gordon Lewis)
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Monster-A-Go-Go is the first film in a Blu Ray box set from Arrow called Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection. I’ve already talked about Rebane in my review of the feature length documentary which also comes as part of this set (reviewed here) and I have to say that, while I wasn’t expecting much from the film, it comes over as a lot less interesting than I was expecting. Bill Rebane himself has called this the worst movie ever made but I think he’s maybe being a little hard on himself... he’s obviously never had to sit through Eddie Murphy in Harlem Nights.

The brief plot of the film is actually a little like Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (and subsequent film adaptation reviewed here) but, you know, without any marked quality or dramatic impetus to the story. A basic summary would be that an astronaut who has somehow grown to enormous size arrives on Earth when his capsule returns but he is missing, strangling people and accidentally killing them with his lethal space radiation. As the film progresses, his space radiation gets bigger in an ever increasing radius around him until it threatens to engulf a city. Then he disappears and turns up well, with no radiation and at normal size. And that’s it... and as much as that plot summary sounds like it might be ‘so bad it’s good’... it’s not. It’s just so bad it’s incompetent most of the time.

Okay so, Rebane’s first attempt at film making was certainly a learning curve. He decided to shoot the film, then called Terror At Halfday, in order of the scenes (rather than the sensible way) and he ran out of money after a few days. When he eventually raised enough money again to resume filming, most of the actors were unavailable... which explains why most of the characters just disappear after the first 20 to 30 minutes into the movie, to be replaced with new characters fulfilling the same functions. Apart from one actor who played a character who had already died. He was available so he just takes his wig off, wears glasses and returns as his own character’s twin brother, who is also a scientist.

Then filming halted again with the movie still incomplete and pretty much abandoned. Four years later, Rebane’s friend, the Godfather Of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis, needed a second feature to play with one of his cheaply made movies. So he bought the film and added a few more scenes with different characters (random sequences of dancing and people running away from the ‘space mutant’s point of view’ character), added his own narration to try and fill in all the gaps and, you know, actually tried to convey to the audience what is actually going on... where he really is trying very hard to sound like Rod Serling introducing and narrating an episode of The Twilight Zone... and released it with a new title, Monster-A-Go-Go.

And, yeah, it’s cheap and not particularly cheerful.

The man playing the astronaut Frank was a natural giant... very tall indeed and so he was perfect for the role. Except you never see him in long shot interacting with anyone else so you can’t actually see how tall he is. He’s only in the film maybe a total of two minutes, scattered in various quick shots throughout the narrative and, sometimes he has papier-mâché on his face to show his mutation and, sometimes he hasn’t and they just forgot. Most of the things he gets up to take place off camera, presumably because it’s cheap (although I understand that approach is a Bill Rebane signature so, I’ll reserve judgement for now) and so things like the death of a helicopter pilot are heard through a policeman’s radio, as he is in touch with them. So... “My god....eaaaaaggghhhhh”, for example. The voice over narrative tells the audience that his body is “horribly mangled in a way no one had seen before.” When we do get a quick look at an actor standing in (err... laying down) for the dead pilot a little later, no mangling seems present.

Some of the edits are so badly done that I can only assume  a lot of the shots required weren’t covered on the shoot. This creates moments when it just looks like the film broke and the actors are just a little later into the same performance. And the sound is terrible as all the ambient noise is captured on the microphones. And there’s no music in the film apart from a song on the credits and at a night club... so there’s nothing to help mask the inadequacies of the sound. Indeed, in one sequence, instead of being able to dub on the sound of a phone ringing, someone just makes a brrrr brrrr phone noise off camera and this is as good a stand in as they can afford.

And, like I said, at the end the mystery just disappears into the ether and we are told by Herschel’s pseudo-Serling voice-over, because obviously we’re not going to see it, that everything is back to normal and everyone just turned out fine. It’s an ending as terrible as the rest of the movie, to be sure.

But what is interesting is... some of the characters just don’t seem to get along and they go about their daily duties giving the impression that they are barely able to disguise their contempt of each other. I don’t know for sure but I’m interested in finding out if this passive hostility in the characters crops up again in Rebane’s work. I guess I’ll know soon enough... there are five more of his movies in this set from Arrow for me still to watch. As for Monster-A-Go-Go... can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone but I may find later that it’s a very telling starting point for this independent director’s career.

Who Is Bill Rebane?

Acid Rebane

Who Is Bill Rebane?
UK 2021
Directed by David Cairns
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

After mostly enjoying my experiences with low budget film-makers courtesy of Severin’s Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection (the index of reviews of all the movies in this set can be found here) and Arrow's own He Came From The Swamp - The William Grefé Collection (reviews under titles in index), I thought I’d give Arrow’s next ‘low budget/big box set’ production a go in the form of a film-maker I wasn’t familiar with at all (or so I thought), so I took a gamble with Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection in the hopes that, like those two prior box sets I mentioned, the gamble would pay off. The set collects together six of the director’s pictures alongside a brand new documentary and, like those former box set experiences, I plumped to watch the documentary, Who Is Bill Rebane?, first so I could get an idea of what this guy was all about.

The film starts off with one of two very small clips of famous film critic and director Mark Cousins who is asked where he places the work of Bill Rebane and his one line, quizzical response, gives the documentary its title.

I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed by the quality of this documentary, as I had been on those other two box sets but I don’t think it’s the fault of the writer/director... who supplies a kind of intensely driven, almost poetic voice over narrative to link the various clips of talking head interviews of people who are either deeply appreciative of Rebane or who have worked for him in some capacity or another (usually lots of capacities, I guess, since these kinds of low budget films usually have everyone pitching in to do everything they can).

Born in Latvia in 1937, young Ito Rebane managed to survive the Russian invasion and war, somehow, moving with his family to the USA in the 1950s, when he changed his name to William Rebane. He invented a 360 degree film projection system called the Cinetarium which was ahead of its time somewhat and which failed to garner much interest or be in any way successful. His first film was shot in stages as money ran out, meaning characters dropped out halfway through and prompting, in one instance, an actor playing a character who was already dead returning to play that character’s brother for the next segment of the film. The film was eventually ‘ballasted out’ with even more inserts added in by the Godfather of Gore himself, Herschel Gordon Lewis and released as Monster-A-Go-Go (it’s the first film in this set so, yeah, expect a review of that one here sometime soon).

After stupidly turning down the chance to make a picture for Sam Arkoff, Rebane moved to Wisconsin, which everyone interviewed for this film agrees is a very strange and off kilter place to live (they only decided necrophilia should be made illegal in 2008)... and built a studio there, where he made low budget movies which, sometimes gave good returns but, he rarely saw any of the profits himself. His wife was his producer and sometime assistant director and it sounds like he’d get his whole family involved on occasion. Perhaps the stark, driven but flattened quality of Who Is Bill Rebane? is such as it is because, from the sound of it, many of the films Rebane made dealt with big background ideas that rarely manifested themselves overtly in his films but were constantly talked about and which, it seems, often featured endings which were ambiguous at best.

Perhaps his most famous movie, The Giant Spider Invasion (not included in this set, sadly) is one of a couple of exceptions to this rule because, you do see a VW bug made up to look like a giant spider. It sounds ridiculous and, when you look at it... it really is ridiculous. I didn’t think I’d ever seen a movie by Rebane but, when one of the people being interviewed describes how well, against all odds, that movie played with cinema audiences and then described a scene about a lady accidentally drinking a drink made when a tarantula is liquified in a blender, I actually remembered the scene and recalled I’d actually seen this movie play at a cinema in Enfield Town, here in the UK, back in the late seventies as part of a double bill. And yes, I do remember the audience reaction for this scene being really big... I also remember not liking the movie that much though so, there’s that. However, having said that, I now feel the need to seek out a copy of the movie from somewhere and lay that ghost to rest.

Actually, one of the things this movie has highlighted is that some of the more interesting looking Bill Rebane movies, featuring monsters like Big Foot and a swamp creature, are not actually included in this set. However, it does have a few films with some interesting premises to them at the very least so, yeah, I am still looking forward to exploring these sometime soon.

And there’s not much more to be said about this. If you want to hear stories of how Rebane shot a private eye mystery which involved a talking bear played by a man in a suit (another one not included here and which I absolutely have to see) or how pop legend Tiny Tim starred in a slasher movie for Bill but also replaced all the light bulbs in his room in Bill’s house with 250 watt light bulbs and expanding the water bill with his 45 minute showers, then Who Is Bill Rebane? is definitely the place to find out about this stuff. It’s not the most entertaining documentary in the world, it has to be said but, it’s done nothing to dispel me from watching the six films in this set and I am suitably intrigued and ready to delve into the somewhat deadpan world of this weird Wisconsin director. I’ll let you know how that goes.