Made for television in the 70s, lost in the 80s, and the sixties sequelized in the 90s. Let’s take a look at three more I just added to my collection.
TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (1978)
This is actually a sequel to the 1976 made-for-TV movie The Savage Bees, which I probably saw on television when I was kid. I purchased Terror Out of the Sky for an anal, obsessive reason—it was the only horror movie in which Grizzly Adams starred that I didn’t yet have in my collection. Ah, Dan Haggerty, with that delicious beard and feathered 70s hair.
Anyway, now that I own and have watched this one, I feel no need to buy the first film. This isn’t even a direct continuation, features none of the same characters or actors, and is just total dullsville.
Scientists engineer evil queen bees and accidentally send a bunch of them out to beekeepers to add to their hives.
It’s up to Dan Haggerty, who plays a pilot, to fly the heroes of the film to various locations to retrieve the queens before it’s too late. There are a couple of bee attacks along the way, and a surprisingly gnarly shot of a post-attack victim’s face, but it is all just totally mundane.
The big climax has killer bees wreaking havoc on an outdoor family event, entrapping a bunch of kids in a school bus, and a mission that requires a beekeeper to be lowered down onto the bus from a helicopter to attract all the bees onto him so he can then transport them to an enclosed environment.
It’s all about as 1970s made-for-TV as it gets…except for that post-attack face. EEK.
THE KISS (1988)
I’ve waited so long for this one to get a Blu-ray release, but it just isn’t happening, so I finally picked up a Spanish DVD release…which means one of the boutique labels will probably announce a Blu-ray release any day.
The Kiss is one of a long line of movies about a distant relative or stranger that comes to live with a family and proves to be a witchy woman.
In this case, two sisters are separated as children. Years later, one sister gets a call from the other sister. Soon after she dies in an awesomely gruesome car accident, her sister shows for the funeral, and the husband invites her to stay with him and his teen daughter.
It’s a pretty basic plot. The mother’s sister seduces the husband. People close to the family start dying mysterious deaths. The daughter begins to figure out that her mother’s sister is some sort of witch.
But what sets this film apart is the hilariously cheesy and freaky stray cat minion that attacks the family any chance it gets.
It totally steals the show, along with the slug thing that slithers out of the witch’s mouth during the final battle to chase the daughter around the pool in the backyard.
The most laughable moment of all is when the family friend tries desperately but keeps failing to drag the daughter out of the pool as the slug gets closer and closer…when there’s literally a ladder the daughter could use to just climb out of the pool right next to her.
THE BIRDS II: LAND’S END (1994)
It’s astounding to see people still shitting all over this movie. I get that it’s a sequel to a Hitchcock classic, but let’s put things into perspective here. It came out over thirty years later, and it was made for TV, so why would you even watch this at all if you were expecting some sort of high-quality sequel? Then consider that it took only a little over a decade for us to get from the masterpiece Jaws to Jaws: The Revenge, which is the equivalent of The Birds 2. Then take into account that Jaws existing inevitably led us to six Sharknado movies, and people watched the fuck out of those.
In other words, The Birds 2 is exactly what you should expect. It comes to us from Rick Rosenthal, the director of Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection, and it does just what it’s supposed to do—rehashes the original, throws in the crucial cameo, ups the gore, and leaves things open-ended for another bad sequel.
So a guy comes with his wife, daughters, and dog to an island for the summer. They’re still grieving the loss of their son. The wife starts getting too chummy with a photographer played by James Naughton. Tippi Hedren, the original queen of The Birds, has a small role as a woman who works at a general store.
And of course, the birds start acting weird. They land on swings and jungle gyms a lot. They seem determined to attack the main guy as much as possible. I can see why.
And they even seem to be smart enough to get revenge on anyone who knows too much about them and smart enough to cut phone lines when people try to call for help.
Yes, it’s all that bad.
Even worse? The family dog gets attacked and dies.
There’s none of the tension and mesmerizing camerawork from Hitchcock’s original, but the situations from 30 years before are mentioned, and the final act is a blast. Everyone on the island flocks to the docks to get away, and it becomes total chaos as the birds make a meal out of all of them. Plus, some dumb ass shoots a bird with a flare gun and causes a chain reaction of explosions in the process. Most unforgettable is when the family hides under a flipped boat; the screaming daughters are more irritating than the screeching birds pecking at it.
