FEATURING: Michael Cole, Deborah Walley, Johnny Desmond
PLOT: When a storm, and his passenger’s birth pangs, force a charter pilot flying a pregnant woman and her husband to make a sudden landing during a storm, the travelers find themselves trapped in a strange community.
COMMENTS: Another brainchild of Arch Oboler, The Bubble is an odd little curiosity. Oboler had a surprise hit with the first American 3-D picture, Bwana Devil, in 1952. Fourteen years later, he tried to replicate this success, despite the subsequent boom and bust of the 3-D fad. Not only do The Bubble‘s technical gimmicks hearken back to the 50s, its plot derives heavily from another cheap sci-fi horror flick made ten years previously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But while Body Snatchers would earn a place in the American psyche, and become subject to numerous remakes (along with Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film these earlier efforts anticipate), The Bubble never gained quite the same degree of cultural cachet.
TheBubble begins in the heart of the action. A young married couple, Mark and Cathy, plan a brief stay in a remote mountain cabin before she gives birth to their first child. They hire a charter pilot, Tony Herric, to fly them to their destination but their plans go awry when they encounter unexpected bad weather and Cathy goes into labor. After losing radio contact, Tony makes a sudden descent onto what he thinks is a landing strip, but turns out to be a deserted stretch of road flanked by street lamps. Having no idea where they are, the trio seem to experience amazing luck when a cab pulls up out of nowhere.
“Cab, mister?” asks the driver. Mark and Tony hurriedly explain how they need to get Cathy to a hospital ASAP. “Cab, mister?” replies the driver, as though he hasn’t heard a word they’ve just said.
They manage to make it to the hospital, but since the baby is a month premature, the doctor insists on keeping him in a incubator for at least a week. While Cathy recovers in the hospital, Mark wanders empty streets, trying to find a working telephone. Having no luck, he finally runs into Tony at a bar that looks suspiciously like a saloon from a Western movie set. Here they encounter more odd behavior from the bartender. Like the cab driver, he’s a one trick pony. He polishes glasses and repeats the phrase, “What’ll it be, gents?,” but that’s it.
The 3-D action heats up a little when a cabaret dancer performs, her fishnet-stockinged legs projecting off the stage into the audience, which includes the very appreciative Tony. He then offers her a drink, and in an otherwise unexplained moment, the tray of beer bottles and glasses floats off the counter and flies across the room—
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DIRECTED BY: Zachary Winston Snygg
FEATURING: Zachary Winston Snygg, Amy Lynn Baxter, John Paul Fedele, Carl Burrows
PLOT: When terminally dweeby patsy Jack lands in jail after getting caught up in a drug deal gone bad, he emerges from prison determined to seek revenge on those who hung him out to dry, including his hot girlfriend.
COMMENTS: It’s hard to overstate the impact that Quentin Tarantino’s one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had on the film world, especially to indie moviemakers who were looking for a seat at the table. While horror has always been a good entry point into the business, the genre elements and risks from too-effective shocks and gore would sometimes keep talented directors and screenwriters waiting at the kids’ table. Tarantino offered another way in: high-impact violence, often outrageous in nature, supported by snappy, adventurous, reference-laden dialogue that invigorated actors and thrilled audiences. This turned out to be such a successful formula that cinemas were soon inundated with low-budget, microbudget, and even no-budget copycats that checked boxes for gunplay, smug smuttiness, and a deluge of word vomit without any of the original’s flavor or depth. (To be fair, one of the perpetrators of this unfortunate trend was Quentin Tarantino.)
This is how we come to Blood, Bullets, Buffoons, a clear debtor to Pulp Fiction‘s legacy two years after that film’s release. A true hustler, Snygg has racked up 44 directorial credits to date, many under the name “John Bacchus.” Titles like Lust in Space: The Erotic Witch Project IV, Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell, and The Heaping Bouncy Breasts That Smothered a Midget that tell you everything you need to know about his auteurial aesthetic. To peruse his IMDb page is to scan a catalog of softcore horror flicks, reality show spoofs, and blockbuster parodies with production values that would make Asylum Entertainment blush with embarrassment. BBB is actually one of his earliest efforts, so if anything, expectations should be kept even lower.
One endeavors to be kind to a production with limited resources. Should it matter that a courtroom looks like someone’s living room has been lightly dressed (right down to the curtains covering the windows behind the judge)? Can we overlook the fact that Jack’s prison houses only two inmates, or that the warden’s office is located in a foyer and is open at all times? Is it worth noting that no one in the entire production can afford a suit, let alone a scene-appropriate costume, and that Jack spends a large portion of the film in the T-shirt and shorts that he might wear to the gym? Honestly, I think we can probably let all that go, because verisimilitude and visual splendor are not really the selling point here. No, what we’re after is… well, it’s all in the title, isn’t it?
This is where the movie falls apart, because while there is a fair amount of cartoonish violence, those first two Bs are not really that present. Instead, there’s a lot a scenes where men talk about their difficulties with women in thick Jersey accents and language that more than hints at an inherent lack of respect. (There’s a charitable interpretation of this as a knock on toxic masculinity, but it is desperately unfunny Z-grade Tarantino jibber-jabber, and frankly reads as a tacit endorsement of said toxic masculinity.) There are also a fair number of scenes where a topless woman is shoehorned into the frame in a wild stab at sex appeal. So perhaps Boorishness, Breasts, Buffoons would be a better title. But the most accurate B would be Boring, because much of the film is given over to long stretches of nothing happening whatsoever. In one scene, for example, Jack goes to a strip club with his posterized portrait of one of the people upon whom he intends to enact revenge. He enters and watches a nearly nude woman writhe around him before she directs him to a topless dominatrix, who extracts ten dollars from the hapless Jack while she is abusing a paying client, before finally getting around to telling him that his target will be here tomorrow at noon. Cost to us: five minutes of unrecoverable life. Uncovered breasts: four. Plot advancement: none at all. Much of the movie is like this. Jack’s pre-crime life, his recruitment into the operation, his time in jail and his daring escape, his plans for revenge and his artful dodging of the police, and all the poorly choreographed action… staged in the longest, least compelling, drawn-out manner possible.
Snygg hangs most of his film’s potential on the appeal of Penthouse Pet Baxter, who plays the utterly uninterested love interest. Though she is much talked about, her presence is limited almost entirely to some black-and-white flashbacks in which Jack struggles to get her attention, plus a final scene where her character’s arc meets a stupid and pointless conclusion. It seems Snygg can’t even figure out how to use the closest thing he has to a star. He can’t even finagle a topless scene out of her. It’s important not to classify this as poor-man’s Tarantino, because poor men deserve better. Blood, Bullets, Buffoons is depressing, bearing few assets and wasting them anyway. It is strange to see an opportunity like this spoiled in such a cavalier manner. But after all: a buffoon is a clown, a bumbling fool. You can’t say the title was wrong about that.
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DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson
FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower
PLOT:The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.
COMMENTS:The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into Andy Milligan‘s uniquely nihilistic world.
Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.
His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.
Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.
The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand Continue reading CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)→
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DIRECTED BY: Carlton J. Albright
FEATURING: Edward Terry, Joan Roth, Stacy Haiduk
PLOT: Imprisoned as a juvenile for a murder spree, Luther is released on parole and terrorizes a family in a remote Illinois farmhouse.
COMMENTS: What is the goal of imprisonment? Some argue deterrence. Others rehabilitation. A few would make the case for vengeance. Or perhaps it’s some combination of these. Carlton J. Albright and his team put these socio-philosophical concerns aside in their chronicle of Luther the Geek: a madman who began as a mad lad, murdering three people after a formative encounter with a circus performer who ripped open the necks of chickens for the amusement of the crowds (and to earn his much-needed liquor).
Amongst that crowd, Young Luther is thrown to the floor in a scuffle—smashing out his front teeth in the process. Fast-forward twenty years (all of them in prison), and his parole is reviewed by five prison officials, among them a “bleeding-heart” female who notes Luther’s commendable behavior prison, his lack of speech notwithstanding. Luther, you see, merely clucks. By a vote of three-to-two, he’s set loose, and the inevitable ensues.
Albright lucked out finding a performer like Edward Terry, since to whatever degree it may be argued that Luther the Geek works, it could not work without Terry’s all-in performance. His Luther is not fit for society, and quickly murders again. An hour or so of this eighty-minute movie takes place in an out of the way farm, during which—through a series of commendably paced, shot, and edited chase, scuffle & violence set-pieces—various victims are bloodily dispatched by the titular geek.
Why are we here, though? The pay-offs will interest slasher fans. Titillation seekers get their thrills from the buxom daughter. The rest of us may find Luther the Geek an oddity (if not a weird-ity) worth checking out. Through much of the dialogue-free performance from Terry, I was reminded of 183’s Angst. Luther the Geek sort of plays out like that German film’s American hick cousin. Indeed, one weakness I found in Angst is not present in Luther: there is no inner monologue. We have no real idea why this nut is doing what he’s doing; and Luther is all the more terrible and, perhaps, sympathetic for this lack of elucidation. As a violence picture that goes for the throat, there’s a strange undercurrent of pathos—and a remarkable finale that doesn’t chicken out.
FEATURING: James Craig, Tota Kondo (Revenge of Dr. X); Jason Evers, Virginia Leith (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)
PLOT: A double-feature of The Revenge of Dr. X and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, presented as if it was taped off of a local TV broadcast complete with VHS tracking errors, amateur commercials, and more surprises.
COMMENTS: OK, so TV stations used to broadcast cheapo horror films late at night (especially weekend nights), interrupted by badly acted commercials for local pizza parlors, shoe stores, and video rental joints. If you never experienced this phenomenon—or if, for some sick reason, you want to relive this insomniac entertainment—the retro-weirdos at Bleeding Skull have come to your rescue.
Thankfully, they don’t recreate the experience faithfully, but instead imagine the broadcast as it might have appeared if you were dead tired and fading in and out of consciousness, or if you had the flu and had taken a greater than recommended dose of Nyquil before tuning in. First off, the movies are heavily edited, to fit into a brisk 72 minute total runtime, including commercials, station IDs, and a few other intrusive surprises I won’t spoil. The ruthless edits are not a problem with the Ed Wood Jr.-scripted Dr. X, an extremely dull and padded Frankenstein variation about a NASA scientist who decides to spend his vacation in Japan engineering a giant, mobile Venus flytrap. In fact, this crap still drags a little when cut down to about 30 minutes. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die moves much faster, and is still relatively coherent in the edited form, but they unfortunately cut out one of the WTF-iest moments (the catfight scene). The nearly-coherent editing exaggerates the surreal elements of the originals, while jettisoning a lot of blah filler. (Watching Dr. X unedited is recommended to cinema masochists only.)
Secondly, the two movies are not only edited, but manipulated. First off, synthy new 80s vintage soundtracks have been added— a pipe organ patch with a Casio keyboard beat underneath, that kind of thing. The digital doodling is more profound in the colorful Dr. X. Tracking errors and faded color are kept (and new ones are added), along with overlaid images: sometimes from other scenes from the original film, and sometimes from outside sources, so that suns and galaxies and landscapes and abstract dust storms occasionally play over the duller imagery. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is less altered than Dr. X—it plays straight for most of the time—but there are a few fun stylizations. One motif is that, in the more delirious second half, the mad doctor’s assistant is always shown in a different “film stock,” which looks like they played a battered VHS tape on a particularly staticky cathode tube TV set, filmed it with a cheap camcorder, and re-edited the new footage into the movie. Another cool idea is that when Jan’s severed head is monologizing, the “camera” does a slow zoom to focus directly on her mouth. Along with the soundtrack, these experiments supply the new reimagined content. I only wish they had pushed things even further. (The trailer is actually a little misleading, implying more video manipulation than actually shows up in the finished product.) The concept of using public domain B-movies as canvases for Stan Brakhage-type experiments is a thrilling one, and that potential is barely scratched here. Hopefully they will push the conceit further with the promised “Phantasmatapes 2.”
The Blu-ray includes uncut versions of both features, in VHS full-frame scans complete with lousy sound and picture quality. The Blu-ray wraps the whole package up with a commentary track from Choi and Ziemba and three nostalgia-themed shorts: a mini-documentary on the “Max Headroom” pirate signal broadcast from 1987, a supercut of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” scares, and another mini-doc on the early 80s moral panic around the Dungeons and Dragons game. All in all, this compilation will resonate strongly with a certain demographic—you probably have already decided if you’re in it—and is at least worthy of a gander for others.
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![Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/517+kf4mNAL._SL500_.jpg)