Tag Archives: Hollywood 90028

Sex-Crazed EVIL Goes to an All-Girl School! “Delinquent School Girls” reviewed! (VCI Entertainment / Dual Format Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Delinquent School Girls” on Blu-ray and DVD from VCI Entertainment!

Three insane asylum inmates incarcerated for their perversive and deviant acts escape their small confines of a cell and the electroshock abuse.  On the run, the people they encounter to pillage what they need find themselves either enamored with them in drink and spirit as well as the initially force exploitative intercourse that becomes more pleasurable and desired.  When they invade the outskirts of an all-girls private school, they stumble upon an elder biology professor taking advantage of a roofied young admirer, two busty kitchen cooks giving them only minor trouble before having their way them, and two poolside lasses eager to be pleased.  When they encounter what remains of the student body left behind on holiday leave in the gymnasium, the group of voluptuous young women are subjected to the whims of the maniacs before they fight back with their learned karate lessons as they spill out of their karate uwagi jackets. 

There’s no decade genre that can more outrageous and controversial than the scantily-cladded, seventies exploitation and Greg Corarito’s 1975 “Delinquent School Girls” fits the bill with sexed-up prison escapees finding themselves fleeing into the sheltering arms of half-naked and promiscuously feisty schoolgirls.  Also known around the world as “Carnal Madness,” and more selectively, alternatively titled as “The Love Maniacs,” “The Sizzlers,” and “Bad Girls,” the film is a mix between sexploitation and crude comedy, penned by the American B-movie and pornographic director of “The Sadistic Hypnotist” and “Hard on the Trail” Corarito and alongside fellow adult oriented filmmaker John Lamb (“The Starlets”) and Maurice Smith (“The Joys of Jezebell,” “Love, Swedish Style”).  Riding the Russ Meyer gravy train of slapstick sleaze and high energy antics, Smith and Lamb also serve as producers of the film that was shot under by Alpha Productions in Santa Barbara, California. 

Not to be taken overly seriously, despite its licentious context of male prisoners holding hostage and raping women, “Delinquent School Girls” isn’t centrically focused on the schoolgirls although the title suggests as such.  The attention is mostly set on the three fugitives absconding from law enforcement and these are not just any prisoners; these are demented sex maniacs.  While the label is perversely provoking, only one of them is truly aberrant in his hunt for the opposite sex.  Being more of the muscle and the muscular brute of the group is Bob Minor (“Coffy,” “Foxy Brown”).  A regular actor in early blaxploitation, Minor indulges his character Dick Peters’ sexual deviancies by nearly bedding every woman he encounters and compares himself to being God’s sexual gift to women.  Of course, the women love it because they’re either sexually repressed by low libido men or just naïve and horny.  Peters is not however the leader of the pack, a position taken with great ostentation and theatrical direction by the demanding Carl C. Clooney who talks a good act of deviancy but never really follows through with any carnality.   Clooney is played by Michael Pataki who we just reviewed as a Marlon Brando impersonator in the “The Last Tango in Paris’ sex-spoof, “The Last Foxtrot in Burbank,” directed by debuting Charles Band.  Pataki does a fair share of impersonations but none really home in on a certain celeb, but he uses his farcical approach to be the pack leader that calls the shots and reins in a randy Peters with absurd choice considering their fugitive state.  The last of the trio is Stephen Stucker, who you might recognize from the “Airplane” spoof movies as the flamboyant air traffic controller with his trademark androgynous voice and mannerisms, playing the “gay man” of the group and has zilch sexual aggression or desires toward the women.  Considering the female cast there’s isn’t one that stands out as a full-fledged protagonist in what is more of a collective effort amongst the troupe, beginning with some slightly more principal leads in porn star Colleen Brennan, a busy and fiery redhead who takes no crap from a male dominated society.  Before full transitioning to the adult industry with such titles as “Daisy Chain,” “Maid in Manhattan,” and “Tower of Power,” Brennan was at the cusp of sexploitation with genre films like Russ Meyer’s “Supervixens” and Stu Segalls “The Dirty Dolls.”   Promiscuous women flow left-and-right through the entirety of “Delinquent Schoolgirls” with other notable performances from Zoe Grant, Debbie Raymond, Brenda Miller, Jane Steele, Betty Johnson, Valerie Anderson, Kay Lange, Doree Vega, and nude model with large bombshell breasts, Roberta Pedon.  Ralph Campbell (“Hollywood 90028”) and John Carpenter regular peripheral actor George ‘Buck’ Flower also co-star

“Delinquent School Girls” is pervy but not grossly over-the-top in its sexploitation subgenre.  To counter the depravity and objectification, there’s theatrical melodramatics and plenty of comedy to offset a lopsided licentiousness.  Dick Peters provides the perversion, Carl C. Clooney provides the excessive, madman performance, and Bruce Wilson, played by Stucker, is a riot of feminine mannerisms and one-liners without being an oversized caricature of a gay man on screen.  The trio is almost like a ruffian version of the Three Stooges without the eye-poking, forehead slapping, hair pulling slapstick.  Clooney and gang are also a traversal entity, meaning they travel from their escaped holding cells to the school for troubled girls in a when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object scenario as the escapees run-through and overcome all obstacles in their path – an old man and his sexually frustrated wife, a roofie slipping biology teacher and his unconscious pupil, two feisty kitchen maids – until they meet the school age women in the middle of nightly karate class nonetheless.  That’s where the buck stop and the rebellion against the convict’s joyride comes to halt and in the middle is all the sullied interactions that kind of wind up being turned onto a corrected head – the sexually frustrated wife gets her fill while the husband gets amiably drunk with the two holding him hostage, the roofied girl is saved from a snake stimulated biology teacher and rapist, and the two kitchen maids happily share meal around a card table after being ravaged with no complaints.  While contextually the subject matter can be dark and sharp, “Delinquent School Girls” has a good-natured attitude about the whole ordeal that makes this emotional calorie intake all the lighter. 

Jumping jack jugs that spill right out, upskirts of high school schoolgirl outfits, and plenty of long-legged, bare-chest exposure, “Delinquent School Girls” bares the mark of sexploitation with pride and caters to a comedy that neutralizes the often shame audiences that comes with bleak and hard to swallow the exploitation of a slew of sexpot ladies in the film.  The first film on the Psychotronica label from VCI Entertainment, “Delinquent School Girls” arrives on a 2-dsic, dual-formatted, DVD and Blu-ray set.  The AVC encoded BD25 has a 1080p, high-definition resolution and the DVD is MPEG2 encoded DVD5 with an upscaled 720p standard definition.  The Blu-ray edges out the DVD counterpart with better clarity around the often congested in variables and in the restored 4K scanned transfer of the original 35mm negative that never provides a consistent detail quality or color.  Some cells appear yellowish, others are often speckled by blow up, a few has lighter contrasts that bleed and meld objects, but there are more scenes of well-delineated and detailed-oriented scenes that granular specifics on skin and textures.  Night sequences are hit-or-miss with a chiaroscuro lighting of key areas, such as Roberta Pedon’s extremely large and oval shaped breasts.  VCI transfer does it’s best to refine the cheaply and does a good job reconditioning previous home video versions, retaining healthy grain, some speckling, and little-to-no damage or compression follies.  The uncompressed English track, a LPCM 2.0 mono, is centered inlaid and focused but discerns any ensuing chaos well enough to provide distinct entities without being a cacophony.  Dialogue comes over clear and distinct; we get some real nice clarity and vocal difference from the three very contrasting convicts with their personalities.  There’s not in the depth or range department as medium shots are often overlaid with voiceover dialogue and range is limited to the Foley wallops of kicks and punches.  English subtitles are optional available on each disc.  Special features are included on each disc as well and they include an archived commentary by actor Bob minor with Los Angeles-based documentarian Elijah Drenner hosting, Pscyhotronica:  Dive into Cult Cinema featurette, and original trailers for the film.  The release comes in a traditional Blu-ray Amaray with reversible sleeve artwork containing pieces of original artwork.  Both discs are region free for the rated R release that has a softcore runtime of 89 minutes.

Last Rites: A comedy first with perversities as a secondary, “Delinquent School Girls” is a gambol of a good time in its eccentric and wanton unprincipled behaviors, saturated with feminine succulence and dastardly deviance.

“Delinquent School Girls” on Blu-ray and DVD from VCI Entertainment!

Screenland’s Bright Lights Can Turn One Lonely Man EVIL! “Hollywood 90028” reviewed! (Grindhouse Releasing / 3-Disc Blu-ray and CD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Hollywood 90028” 3-Disc Collector’s Edition Can Be Preordered Here!

Having moved West from a small Ohio town a few years back, photographer and video cameraman Mark found himself stuck shooting nudie reels for a low-budget porn producer.   A solitary life lends Mark more freedom then most to wonder about and driver around on the streets of Hollywood with ambitions for a legit job of shooting regular material that doesn’t humiliate him.  Troubled about his childhood past involving the death of a younger brother and with his frustrations within his video film capturing vocation, Mark finds himself in the company of young, attractive women who find him easy to talk to and attractive as well, but when Mark reaches a limit, aberrant thoughts take over and he strangles them to death.  When he meets starlet Michele on one of his shoots, Mark believes he’s found the woman for him, one that can relieve the pressures of life and work with nothing more than her beauty.  For Mark’s abnormal mind, love at first sight might not be that easy.

Writer-director Christina Hornisher tackles trauma induced behavior and the Hollywood pull of small-town aspirations chasing dreams in the drama-suspenser character piece of “Hollywood 90028.”  Hornisher’s debut feature film released in 1973 also became her only feature credit as a director who supplied arthouse substance but also embodied a different kind of substance, the grueling confiscation of hope for work, stardom, and love, perhaps even sliding into a bit of escapism, as the bright lights of Hollywood draw the flies to the flame.  Shot on location in and around the Hollywood, Los Angeles area that also had scenes fillmed directly at and underneath of the self-referential hillside Hollywood sign landmark before the iconic, globally recognized attraction had been fenced-off with visitation restrictions post-film in the 1980s and further protected with security systems in the mid-1990s.  Hornisher also self-produced the film which was also known under alternate titles as “The Hollywood Hillside Strangler,” “Twisted Throats,” and “Insanity.” 

Christopher Augustine, who would also have a part in “The Doll Squad” of the same year, played Mark the calm and restrained pornography cinematographer and editor.  Not as sleazy as his title, Mark’s reserved nature doesn’t stop him from photographing and working diligently on splicing film without completely cutting off from the world but does make him quiet, observant, and intriguing, or so does Michelle thought.  Michelle’s a smalltown girl who moved West to work in the fame industry who soon finds herself being financially forced out of legit paying gigs for more sordid, sleazy work.  Played by Jeannette Dilger, who would actually have a role in the adult film “Young, Hot ‘n Nasty Teenage Cruisers” a few years later, she would spark chemistry with the mustached Augustine that allows their Mark and Michelle to fall in love that isn’t amorously glamorous but has innocent notes of flirtation and a lot of walk-and-talk realism onscreen relationships tend to omit.  Hornisher determines Mark to be the centerpiece of her character study.  Every scene caters to Mark’s interactions with Michelle, his professionalism with sleaze producer Jabol (Dick Glass), and the two other women he meets and eventually strangles.  Where Hornisher isn’t her best is in the building up of Mark’s suppressed sociopathic behavior, stemmed from a brief opening montage of a preteen Mark and his large family that implies his involvement in the accidental death of a younger brother, with ever delicate triggering that doesn’t solidify calling back to his aggressive-resulting trauma.  “Hollywood 90028” cast rounds out with Dianna Huntress, Beverly Walker, Kia Cameron, Ralph Campbell, Melonie Haller and Gayle Davis.

Though her first feature credit, Hornisher had the makings of a competent, auteur filmmaker.  “Hollywood 90028” evaded the conventional narrative structure and one-trick pony photography with more arthouse ambition that saw not only panning and tracking in her cinematic cache, but a stunning and incredibly quick finale zoom out from the Hollywood sign of smooth drone quality but completed in 1973 with a helicopter soaring over the Hollywood district.  Use of spliced-in cells of modeled sex representation as well as sign denotations of the character’s dialogue and thoughts, a kaleidoscope lens utilized during an intimate love scene, and the greater use of off-screen dialogue over on-screen conversating creates a thin layer of psychological realism in contrast to the actual realism between Mark and the rest of the characters.  Mark’s sullen display of emotions throughout the story culminates with his unconscious destructive demise after finally expressing a sliver of elation with Michelle but that’s also when he realizes that his tragic past and present psychosis will never let him go and will destroy anything that tries to replace it.  In one theory, Hornisher might have kept Mark in the same clothes throughout most of the picture to depict a deranged mental image; his constant choice of clothes is a hangup that can’t be let go for sharp-eyed viewers who wish he’d change out of his denim, long-sleeved shirt and denim jeans.  Unlike Mark’s unchanging denim statement, Hollywood in Hornisher’s film is a city captured in time; much like the Hollywood sign had gone from an area of loitering to now protected from the public, the fornicated fleapits and the colorful and character-building structures of Hollywood have long since been razed and rebuilt into the more glamourous, if not still snakebitten, Hollywood you see today. 

Grindhouse Releasing has gone the extra mile in not releasing a standard version of “Hollywood 90028” with standard fare and a rink-a-dink, barely passing muster transfer, but releasing a definitive chef-d’oeuvre of this lost Christina Hornisher film.  The new 4K restoration created from the original 35mm negative makes a statement that they underrated, underappreciated and the underbelly of indie cinema will not be ignored and, instead, be celebrated in retrospect, recoloring, and painstaking supervision in the efforts of all areas of rejuvenation.  The 3-disc, Blu-ray and CD set has an AVC encoded, 1080p high-defintion, 50 gigabyte capacity on the feature disc.  Presented in anamorphic widescreen 1.85:1, the Grindhouse Releasing restoration gives “Hollywood 90028” a fresh coat of paint on a precise saturation spectrum and illuminates details from the limitations of untouched, processed 35mm triacetate.  The original negative appears to have survived the test of time with barely perceptible, thin vertical scratches that were more sporadically sparse than a nagging nuisance.  Grain’s healthy and natural looking in the overlap and the contrasts levels clarify stark delineation and depth, attributing to finer details on textures and skin tones when mostly interior scenes.  Exteriors lose some definition because of the natural lighting and contrast levels typically lower to more create deeper shadows and amalgamation between object and background.  Video bitrate decodes a nice low 30s Mbps. The back cover does not provide explicit specs for the audio but my setup picks up the English language mix as a DTS-HD master audio stereo (the menu setup states mono) is the adequate acquaintance to the visual elements with an ADR dialogue recording, that to note has nothing to do with the release’s presentation, does feel detached in some regard to the visual character temperament despite its well-preserved clarity and projection, but the real star of the audio makeup is the Basil Poledouris (“RoboCop”, “Starship Troopers”), remastered by Jussi Tegelman soundtrack that is a delicate and absorbing mix of piano, wind-instrument, and percussive that reflects Mark’s wondering loneliness and reserved longing as well as introducing jazzier sax and guitar tracks for livelier montage moments.  Suddenly, we’re thrust into string-laden, semi-dark and low-tones for Mark’s buried spiraling. English subtitles are available.  Grindhouse Releasing had some so bonus content they added a second disc with the first containing audio commentaries with film enthusiast Marc E. Heuck, the film’s editor Leon Ortiz-Gil, and cult and porn director Tom DeSimone who attended UCLA with Hornisher, the original, unrestored, X-rated alternate scenes, Christina Hornisher’s experimental 16mm short films, cameraman outtakes, still galleries, radio spots and trailers under the “Hollywood Hillside Stranger,” the “Hollywood 90028” trailer, and the Grindhouse Releasing coming attractions.  The second disc contains retrospective interviews with stars Christopher Augustine, Jeannette Dilger, Gayle Davis, and editor Leon Ortiz-Gil in a near feature length making-of, a theater presentation discussion with Christopher Augustine, and a Tom DeSimone retrospect on Christina “Tina” Hornisher.  The third disc, a soundtrack CD of Basil Poledouris eclectic composition, is 17-tracks deep and comes in a customer sleeve inside the beautifully illustrated and tactile slipbox.  Instead, a slightly larger than normal Blu-ray Amaray case without the Blu-ray logo with the original poster art as primary cover with the new slipbox art on the reverse side.  The Blu-rays set on top of each other, staggered, on the right side while the left houses a 24-page booklet filled with color pictures, poster art, and historical, anecdotal, and analytic context essays from Marc E. Heuck, David Szulkin, Richard Kraft, and Jim VanBebber.  Grindhouse Releasing’s region free “Hollywood 20008” hits retail and online stores November 26th and has an 87-minute runtime under it’s not rated package

Last Rites: Grimy Tinsel Town sets the backdrop and insidiously swirls inside the mind of the forefront encased and bejeweled inside a Grindhouse Releasing special that’ll never have you look at Hollywood the same again.

“Hollywood 90028” 3-Disc Collector’s Edition Can Be Preordered Here!