You'll Find Out (David Butler, 1940)

By 1940, movies about a group of people trapped in an old dark house while a nefarious plan to dispatch one or several of them to gain an inheritance or continue a lucrative grift were a dime a dozen (or 30 dimes a dozen, to use 1940's average movie ticket price), but You'll Find Out manages to inject some pep in the step of the creaky old story by giving it the ol' showbiz razzle dazzle. We're talking horror, comedy, musical numbers, a dog with a man's haircut, and an exciting cast full of weirdos. The couple at the story's center are a pair of milquetoast snoozes, but it doesn't really matter because everything else going on around them is so much fun. I had a great time with this now-obscure oddity.

The second of director David Butler's three movies featuring conductor/bandleader Kay Kyser and his big band, You'll Find Out opens with Kyser and his band, the Kollege of Musical Knowledge, recording their then-popular weekly radio show in front of a live New York audience. The show was a mixture of musical numbers, comedy skits, and quizzes, and we see much of this show (with actors Jeff Corey and Mary Bovard playing themselves) interspersed with comedic vignettes of people in the city listening to it (a cab driver, an old guy in a tenement apartment, a mother taking care of a toddler). It's fascinating stuff if you're interested in showbiz and radio history.

The show's producer, Chuck Deems (Dennis O'Keefe), is feeling good. His high society fiancée, Janis Bellacrest (Helen Parrish), is back in town after three years away at finishing school (barf), and the couple can now get married. The Bellacrests are one of the 400, the list of New York Gilded Age high society families (double barf). Unfortunately, the movie is not about the brutal slaughter of these 400 fat cat bloodsucking parasite dynasties. It's the evening before Janis's 21st birthday, and she's throwing a shindig at the spooky Bellacrest mansion in the nearby countryside after the radio show finishes up, with Kyser and his band supplying the entertainment. Chuck and Janis are a total bore, but they're merely the excuse to get most of our large ensemble to the old dark house.

On the street outside the radio studio, a car nearly rams into Janis. It's the third near-fatal accident for her this week, so she finally recognizes a pattern and lets Chuck know. He does what most men in these movies do after a woman tells them some shit is going down. He says it's all in her imagination, and she needs to relax. Everyone shakes off the near-smushing of Janis, and Kyser's tour bus delivers the whole party-bound gang to the spooky mansion, which is only accessible by a single bridge.

The mansion is even spookier on the inside. Janis's late father collected all kinds of ghoulish artifacts and deadly weapons of murder (a poison blow-dart gun is given special prominence), and the place is jam-packed with them. (Unfortunately, we get some casual racism here about African art objects and the Bellacrest patriarch being murdered by a "savage" while "collecting" said artifacts. Fortunately, it's a pretty minor part of the film.) When Janis's aunt Margo (Alma Kruger) makes an appearance, the old woman seems whacked out of her gourd and pulls Kyser aside to tell him the dead have been speaking to her. We also meet the family attorney, Spencer Mainwaring (Boris Karloff), who is now a prominent judge. Mainwaring lays it on like he's a nice guy, but Kyser gets bad vibes.

After the initial meet-and-greet and assignment of overnight rooms, the party gets hopping when a busload of high society young women arrive. Janis promises the ladies that a second busload of top college men, handpicked by her, will be appearing soon in response to their queries about the party's lack of beefcake (the mostly male musicians give each other the "what are we, chopped liver?" look), but a sudden storm and its attendant lightning take out the bridge before the fellas can make it to the party. A brief blackout follows, and another failed attempt on Janis's life ensues, noticed only by Kyser, who sees the blow dart stuck in the wall. When he tries to show Chuck, the dart is gone.

Power restored, the big band decides to cheer up the young women with a live performance from the ballroom. More musical numbers follow, including a showcase for the only woman in the group, Ginny Simms, and a goofy novelty number spotlighting the band's comic relief, Ish Kabibble (real name Merwyn Bogue), who seems like the prototype for Jim Carrey's hairstyle and comedic personality in Dumb and Dumber. Kabibble has a cute dog with the same haircut. Kabibble was a comedy star and cornet player for Kyser and a few other bandleaders in the '30s and '40s, but his comedic approach was polarizing. On an episode of All in the Family, Maude mentions in disgust that Archie Bunker is a big fan. I wish Kabibble no ill will, but I thought the dog had better comic timing. He was pretty good on the cornet, though.

After the band finishes their three-song set, with a break before the third song (1976 Ramones gigs were longer), Aunt Margo decides to hold a seance, facilitated by her personal guru and spirit guide Prince Saliano (Bela Lugosi). Saliano's seances are like Iron Maiden concerts compared to your usual crystal ball on a card table biz. We get two giant electricity-conducting metal balls on posts, floating objects, Saliano going into a trance, and the floating disembodied faces of people from the other side, speaking in a weird synthesized robo-voice, achieved through the use of early talk box, the Sonovox, which had been invented the previous year. (The Sonovox is also an integral part of the Kyser band's closing musical number, exchanging vocals with Simms.)

Our final major character arrives shortly before the seance, a professor named Karl Fenninger (Peter Lorre), invited by Janis to debunk or confirm Saliano's spiritualist schtick. Fenninger loves to smoke cigarettes while wearing a look of bemused disdain for his fellow human beings. (Personality-defining line of dialogue, delivered quietly to himself: "Why do I have to waste my time outwitting morons?") Even if this movie were a dud, it would've been worth watching just to see Lorre, Lugosi, and Karloff occupying the same space. I love these guys. This is surprisingly Lorre's only movie with Lugosi, by the way.

For the rest of the running time, we get double crosses, homicide attempts, hidden passageways, catacombs, slapstick, and more music. As someone who has had to expensively endure weeks of major plumbing work under my house (our '60s-built cast-iron pipes finally hit the end of their road), I'd really like to know how long it took to create these hidden passageways in the house and how much it cost. Most of it is a lot of fun (though the novelty song "The Bad Humor Man" commits sins against music and comedy); all of it is silly.

Butler, a silent film actor turned workaholic filmmaker-for-hire of studio B pictures who closed out his career by directing 50+ episodes of Leave It to Beaver and the Bobby Vee/Jackie DeShannon teenybopper movie C'mon, Let's Live a Little, handles the chaos of the film's huge cast and its multiple genres with skill. The movie never loses control or gets bogged down, and it remains lively and engaging throughout its running time. The dullsville couple at the center could have sunk this thing if they were the main focus, but, thankfully, the movie spends a lot more time with the band and the trio of charismatic villains. This movie should be better known. How many other horror/comedy/musicals starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre are there? That's right, none.

DeepStar Six (Sean S. Cunningham, 1989)

There must have been something in the water in late-'80s Hollywood that caused so many filmmakers to make movies about something in the water. The 1989 release schedule was crammed up the wazoo with movies about deep ocean crews encountering something unusual under the sea. (Speaking of under the sea, The Little Mermaid was also released in 1989.) On the big-budget side, James Cameron followed up his mega-hit Aliens with The Abyss, a story about a SEAL team encountering aliens in the depths of the Cayman Trough, released in August of '89. In April, ultra-low-budget king Roger Corman retooled an unfilmed 1982 screenplay to cash in on the fad with Lords of the Deep, about aliens attacking an underwater colony of humans. (Hilarious fact about that movie: future award-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski was on the second unit crew and was fired because his footage looked too good, making the rest of the film look even worse by comparison, though they did eventually use portions of it.) In March, Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone director George P. Cosmatos got in on the undersea action with his mid-budget Leviathan, the story of a deep-sea mining crew battling a giant monster in the Adriatic Sea.

Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham shrewdly (some may say cynically) realized how many of these movies were on the '89 release schedule and hatched a plan to deliver a low-budget (in Hollywood terms) but professional sea monster movie as quickly as possible to beat them all into theaters. He succeeded, and DeepStar Six premiered on January 13, 1989, to mostly negative reviews and mediocre box office. (To continue this deep-sea circle jerk, DeepStar Six screenwriter Lewis Abernathy would later snag an acting role in Abyss director Cameron's Titanic.) It's far from an original piece of work and hits a lot of the familiar beats and grooves of the crew-on-a-mission movies, but seen through a 2025 lens, DeepStar Six is a solid and entertaining action/sci-fi/horror movie of modest budget like they used to make 'em before everything had to be green-screen world-building Best Buy-lighting-looking eleventy billion dollar horseshit. Is mainstream Hollywood filmmaking so washed up that mediocre films from the '80s now look like shining gems? Possibly. (Just so you don't think I'm an old man yelling at a cloud, I do think dozens of great movies are still being made every year, but very few of them within the Hollywood system or the major independents.)

DeepStar Six takes place on an experimental undersea facility run by the U.S. navy with a crew made up of navy personnel and civilian contractors. The facility serves two purposes for the navy: a place to test underwater colonization and a location to construct a storage area for nuclear missiles. The current crew is finishing up the last week of a six-month assignment that was supposed to be just four months. Some of them are handling the extended duration better than others, but no one is going nutzo yet. I would like to call the crew a ragtag collection of misfits so crazy they just might work, but, alas, each one is a highly skilled professional with a specific duty, played by a slew of recognizable working actors, the most famous probably being Miguel Ferrer. "Hey, it's that person from that thing," you'll say before checking IMDb.

Those people from those things include head submarine pilot McBride (B.J. and the Bear and My Two Dads' Greg Evigan), Navy SEAL Joyce Collins (Nancy Everhard, of much episodic TV), facility captain Laidlaw (Hill Street Blues' Taurean Blacque), mechanic Snyder (Twin Peaks' Ferrer), marine biologist Scarpelli (Fame's Nia Peeples), submarine co-pilot Richardson (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle's Matt McCoy; he also played Lloyd Braun on Seinfeld), doctor Diane Norris (St. Elsewhere and Ferris Bueller's Day Off's Cindy Pickett), head of the nuclear missile project Van Gelder (The Gods Must Be Crazy's Marius Weyers), geologist Burciaga (Being There and the Raimi Spider-Man movies' Elya Baskin), and two more submarine pilots who control the smaller exploration pods, Hodges (Riptide's Thom Bray, sporting a bizarre and possibly fake beard) and Osborne (Friday the 13th's Ronn Carroll).

This is a well-oiled, competent crew, but a few cracks are showing. Snyder is stressed, anxious, and fed up with being below the surface for so long, and Van Gelder, under tight deadline pressure to finish the missile storage platform by the end of the week, has become a raging prick. In other unprofessional moves, McBride and Collins are hooking up, and so are Scarpelli and Richardson. Despite two couples onboard, DeepStar Six goes light on DeepStar Sex. Even the shower scene is shot from the neck up. It's a soft R rating.

Speaking of the soft R rating, the women in the cast, with the mild exception of a bit of cheesecake stuff from Peeples in the early scenes, are given a refreshingly equal footing with the men. They are just as competent, efficient, intelligent, and capable, and not in a condescending, backslapping, sisters are doing it for themselves way. No big deal is made out of this. No special attention is called to it. It's just the way things are. A bit surprising for 1988/89. 

Back to the movie. When a large cavern is discovered under the proposed missile platform site, Van Gelder rebuffs both Burciaga's requests to run some safety tests and Scarpelli's urgently delivered pleas to study the cavern's marine life and build the platform somewhere else. (Why are they just now building the platform in the last week, and why didn't they know the cavern was there until now?) Van Gelder wants to build his damn missile platform, and since he's in charge of that part of the job, everyone else has to like it or lump it. His plan? Collapse the cavern with explosives and build the damn platform right where the navy wants it, damn it.

As you can probably guess, this depth charge plan goes awry when a sea beast emerges from the cavern ready to fuck shit up. The rest of the movie contains desperate attempts by the crew to repair the damaged equipment, fend off the sea monster (a sort of giant crab version of the predator from Predator), and return to the ocean's surface. Few will survive. If a character reminisces about how much they love their family or the double cheeseburger at their favorite hometown greasy spoon or the smell of the mountain air on the porch of their New Hampshire farmhouse, you know that character is not long for this world.

Yeah, this structure is overly familiar, but the cast plays it seriously and has good chemistry, both the repair/rescue and monster attack scenes are tension-filled nail-biters, and the whole thing is pleasant to look at, with a nice mix of slick professionalism and low-budget handmade craftsmanship. Most of the practical special effects look pretty good, but the cheapier, cheesier stuff is pretty charming, too. I'll take that over the dead digital sameness of the modern Hollywood product any day.

I love the retro-futurist quality of practical effect sci-fi, where the imagined future and the time-stamped year of the film's shooting are fused together. DeepStar Six imagines a future years ahead of ours that also looks exactly like 1988, and I love that. Hollywood movies, even bad ones, used to be time capsules. I don't even know what the hell anything is anymore. Some cloud-storage noplace located everywhere and nowhere. The 21st century has made me a crabby little bitch, but I like texture and goop (not the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop). I just wasn't made for these times.

Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)

If you're a person who primarily thinks of film as a storytelling medium that brings the written word to life through plot mechanics and relatable characters with understandable motivations and behaviors, Dario Argento movies will probably frustrate you. If, like me, you think that film is first, foremost, and last a visual medium, that the collision of image, performance, technique, experience, and emotion in the frame is infinitely more important than what's on the page, and that each film has its own internal dream logic so who cares if it doesn't always make real world sense, then you possibly agree with me that Dario Argento, in his peak years between the early 1970s and late 1980s, was one of the great visual stylists and that his strongest movies are a near-constant delight for the eyeballs.

Deep Red, like most of that stretch of Argento from 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to 1987's Opera, is full of rich, deep colors, ridiculously powerful images, graceful and unpredictable camera movements, especially in POV shots (though Argento is also down to get rough and graceless for maximum effect), gorgeous (or gorgeously garish) set and costume design, a wildly memorable score, refreshingly illogical character behavior, violent murders that are simultaneously brutal and beautiful in their choreography, and a frame that never shows you anything pedestrian or boring simply to move the plot along. Every single person, place, and thing onscreen is of maximum visual interest, even the bathroom tile. When an image veers too close to conventionality or repetition, Argento simply amps up the heavy baroque prog funk of Goblin on the soundtrack to keep it sassy. Each time I watch it, I get less and less interested in the murder mystery at its center and more and more thrilled by its style, technique, and momentum.

The relatively silly plot contains some of the standard traits of the Italian giallo — a black-gloved killer in a trench coat, an ex-pat eyewitness to one of the murders who becomes obsessed with solving the case, violently elaborate deaths, and useless cops — but I never get tired of these old standards, and, anyway, Argento is just using them as the hanger for a pretty spectacular outfit. (I heard some people think anything using an em-dash is automatically AI, but I was using the em-dash when AI was in short pants, son. This post was not written by AI, but it was written by a.i. (an idiot).)

Blow-Up's David Hemmings stars as Marcus Daly, a British pianist teaching at a conservatory in Rome. While walking the strangely isolated streets near his apartment, Marcus stops to chat with a fellow pianist, Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), who is a drunken mess. He's downing drinks on the street outside the Edward Hopper-esque Blue Bar and engaging in a self-pity session about having to scrounge for gigs while his friend teaches at the conservatory. A horrible scream interrupts the conversation, startling both men. Not seeing anything, Carlo shuffles back to his drinking spot, but Marcus takes a second look toward the window of his apartment building and catches part of the murder of the woman who rents the apartment below his, a Lithuanian psychic named Helga Ullmann (Macha Meril). Marcus rushes into the building to help but is too late.

While being held in the apartment for questioning, Marcus meets eccentric, free-spirited journalist Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi). Gianna and Marcus develop a friendship/friendship with benefits/rivalry/rivalry with benefits, and the two become a sort of comedic odd couple trying to beat each other at solving the murder. Nicolodi is always great in her then-partner Argento's movies (and she wrote one of his best, Suspiria), but her performance here is probably my favorite of the batch. I love the scene of her driving him around in her rapidly deteriorating car, and the scene where she beats him twice at arm wrestling (called "Indian wrestling" here for some reason) after he talks shit about women's lib.

The rest of the movie contains several classic Argento setpieces, Marcus the pianist's reckless disregard for his own hands, improper handling of material in libraries and archives (my archivist/librarian/records manager wife was not a fan of this), loud birds, weird dolls (including a mechanical one), great architecture, bold eye makeup, artistically satisfying mega-violence, and memorable appearances from Clara Calamai as Carlo's oddball ex-actress mother, redheaded child star of multiple '70s Italian horror films Nicoletta Elmi playing another really weird kid, and Geraldine Hooper, an androgynous woman who further plays with gender fluidity here in her performance as an androgynous man.

A side tangent: Argento doesn't get enough credit (and was incorrectly labeled a homophobe by centrist liberals whose goal is mainstream respectability and performative uplift) for his films' use of gay, bisexual, gender-fluid, and trans characters, even when they're a bit exaggerated (the gay private detective in Four Flies on Grey Velvet is so over the top he was criticized as a stereotype by some critics, but he's presented as one of the most likable, honest, and life-filled characters in the movie). Even when he misses the mark a bit, I get the impression Argento's portrayal of these characters is coming from a place of genuine curiosity and relaxed acceptance.

Deep Red is top-tier Argento for me. I'm in love with the look of this thing from start to finish. Even if you're a plot-based person, I think you'll at least say "that was cool" a minimum of six times per viewing. It's just so satisfying to watch a scene and think, "I love the colors. I love the clothes. I love the makeup. I love the damn bathroom tile. I love the way the camera moves. I love the music. I love the construction of the shot. I love the wide shots. I love the closeups. I love the way the scene builds. I love the juxtaposition of this shot and that shot. I love everything I'm seeing and hearing right now." People used to make stuff like this. Okay, one guy used to make stuff like this. With a couple dozen notable exceptions each year, where have all the good times gone?

The Mummy's Hand (Christy Cabanne, 1940)

It feels a little ridiculous to be writing a post about a goofy 1940s mummy movie when so much tragic insanity and injustice is happening in the world, but I've been dealing with tragic circumstances on a daily basis for more than five years with very little support, and I've learned that enjoying the simple pleasures for at least a small portion of each day is my way of staying strong and sane. In that spirit, here's The Mummy's Hand.

Marketed as a follow-up to 1932's The Mummy and reusing a brief bit of that film's footage during an elaborate exposition scene, The Mummy's Hand has very little in common with its Boris Karloff-starring predecessor other than being a horror movie featuring a mummy and some tomb raiding. It's not really a sequel and is lighter in tone and quicker in pacing, though a little short on intensity. I enjoyed it, but it's a fairly minor entry in the Universal horror canon.

The opening scenes provide some overcomplicated over-explanation, but the nutshell is that the high priest of Karnak (Eduardo Ciannelli) is dying, so he summons his acolyte Andoheb (George Zucco), a Cairo Museum professor of Egyptology, to the Hill of the Seven Jackals to appoint him as successor. The high priest's job is to guard the still-living mummified body of Kharis (Tom Tyler), one of the sect's members. Kharis tried to revive the dead princess Ananka with sacred tana leaves, but was discovered stealing the leaves, had his tongue cut out, and was buried alive. That strikes me as a bit overly punitive, but what can you do?

Here's where some math comes in. To keep Kharis alive, three brewed tana leaves must be given to him as a drink every full moon. If interlopers attempt to break into the tomb, a nine-tana-leave brew turns the mummy into an ass-kicking but still controllable force of nature. If you give the mummy more than nine tana leaves, he becomes an uncontrollable, all-powerful immortal. It was Karnak's job to administer the tana brew mixtures, and now Andoheb has the responsibility.

Meanwhile, unemployed and nearly broke archaeologist Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and his wisecracking sidekick Babe Jenson (Wallace Ford) (because every archaeologist has a wisecracking sidekick), stranded in Cairo, find a broken vase at a bazaar, and Banning thinks it comes from Princess Ananka's tomb. He plans to scrounge up some funding for an expedition to the Hill of the Seven Jackals in the hopes of making some bank and returning to the workforce. An eavesdropping street beggar (Sig Arno) seems very interested in this expedition. A little too interested, if you know what I mean.

While drinking in a bar with the world's most expressive bartender (Harry Stubbs), Banning and Jenson befriend a fellow Brooklyn native, traveling magician Solvani (Cecil Kellaway) and convince him to fund and become part of the expedition. They already have another professor of Egyptology on board, Dr. Petrie (Charles Trowbridge). This excites Solvani but angers his daughter, the other half of the magic act, Marta (Peggy Moran). Thinking Banning and Jenson are grifters, she attempts to get her dad's money back. They almost convince her they're on the level, so she skeptically invites herself along to protect her father. This annoys Jenson, who doesn't want any dames ladying up the boys club. It burns him up to have to include a dame, I tells ya. Something tells me Marta will win him over before the expedition's end.

Of course, our expedition (let's be honest, tomb-robbing) team is going to butt heads with Andoheb and his mummy. Andoheb also has plans to make himself immortal, and when he gets an eyeful of Marta, he decides she needs to be immortal with him. She's clearly not on the same page, so conflicts and mummy madness will ensue and the tana leaves will be brewed like they're going out of style (and considering the plant is extinct and the supplies are confined to what's stored in the tomb, they are).

This is all pretty silly, but silent film actor turned director Christy Cabanne (Google him to check out his impressive mustache) keeps things moving at a reasonable clip once the opening scene's info dump is over, and the whole thing remains a breezy good time until closing credits. I also like how the eyes and mouth of the mummy are blacked out when the mummy is in closeup to make it scarier, which also makes it look accidentally avant-garde. It's a visually exciting effect, and it has my official cool mummy endorsement, which was notarized this morning.

I don't have much to say about this one. It's a good time, but it's far from an essential classic. It did get a sequel, The Mummy's Tomb, with most of the cast returning, so expect that review in the distant future, if we have one. In conclusion, mummies are cool, kings drool. Here's to a saner, kinder future if we want it. 

Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell (Alfonso Corona, 1988)

It's time for our third hit off that Deathstalker supply, which, unlike THC, will still be legal in Texas come September (though maybe not legal in school libraries). (Yeah, I'm writing this post at work.) This third Deathstalker movie also features a third actor playing the title role (though original Deathstalker Rick Hill would return to the fold for the fourth straight-to-video installment in 1991) but otherwise sticks to the sword and sorcery formula of the first film, dialing the second film's intentional humor way down. Up against the stylish, goofy, and pizzazz-filled action of the first two Deathstalkers, Warriors from Hell is a bit of a letdown, but it has its moments.

Opening with what can only be described as $2 Renaissance Faire, our new Deathstalker (John Allen Nelson, less of a beefcake than his two predecessors but retaining John Terlesky's frat boy look) is hanging out with some villagers in a field, sparring with a buddy on ye olde balance beame while his elderly wizard friend Nicias (Aaron Hernan) tells fortunes for some coinage. A hooded figure arrives and asks Nicias for a private convo in his tent. This figure is a princess, Carissa (Carla Herd). Carissa is yet another  princess whose family castle and throne have been usurped by an evil sorcerer, in this case Troxartas (Thom Christopher), but Carissa has a plan. She's got a chunk of magic stone, and she needs to find the other chunk. When she puts the magic stone pieces together, kablammo! Evil is vanquished and a lost city appears. She's been given some erroneous information that Nicias has the other piece, but Nicias regrets to inform her that Troxartas has it.

When people start talking about magic stones, my general response is, "who gives a shit?," but if these magic stones lead to good times, I'll allow it. While this magic stone tent meeting is happening, Troxartas' men ride up on horseback with their special masked helmets that look like bat wings ("da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, bat mask") and start kicking villager ass. Nicias tells Deathstalker to save Carissa, and he'll distract the baddies with some wizard magic, which involves spinning around at incredible speed for a minute and then disappearing in a puff of smoke, leaving his footwear behind for some reason. The rest of his clothes are magically allowed to remain with the body.

Deathstalker and Carissa get away and camp out in the woods. Despite Deathstalker's offer to share the blankets, Carissa decides to spend the night in her own tent. Fatal mistake. Troxartas' bat boys catch up to them and fatally wound Carissa. Before she dies, she gives him the magic stone piece. Deathstalker is now determined to avenge Carissa and smush them damn stones together at Troxartas' place.

Deathstalker escapes the horde yet again and hits the road, sans horse. Passing a hillside cottage and barn, he attempts to "borrow" one of the horses on the property but is thwarted by the two women who live there, a potato-loving semi-crone with wild frizzy hair and her sexy daughter Marinda (Claudia Inchaurregui), and their bow and arrow skills. When Marinda pats Deathstalker down for weapons, she becomes mesmerized by Deathstalker's crotch. She gazes into it intensely for an extended period of time, like she's trying to find Waldo. Sensing the mood changing, Deathstalker gives a sanitized spiel of recent events, flashes the magic stone, and tells them he'll be back with hundreds of these stones if he can borrow a horse.

The women invite him to spend the night, but Mom, disapproving of the way her daughter has been checking out the goods, tells him he'll have to sleep in the barn. They have a potato meal with extra potato, and Deathstalker politely tells the ladies he'll catch them a rabbit for breakfast. This makes the older woman furious: "Rabbit? In this house, we eat potatoes!" Ah, I can't stay mad at this delightful lunatic.

Marinda, tired of being a sexy adult woman stuck sleeping in a bed with her insane mother and eating potatoes for every meal, sneaks into the barn for some erotic good times and great oldies with Deathstalker. Troxartas' bat dicks show up yet again, and Marinda's mother, noticing her daughter is not in the bed and putting two and two together, leads them to the barn. Too late. Marinda helps Deathstalker escape, and they plan to meet up later for more sexy times after the magic stone quest is done.

On the road to Troxartas (a fun name to hear and to say), Deathstalker gets tangled up with yet another princess, the spoiled and sassy Elizena, who happens to be Carissa's sister. She's also played by Carla Herd. More on that freak later. Elizena is also on her way to Troxartas because their marriage has been arranged. Carissa was hipper to Troxartas' evil ways, but Elizena is a shallow and materialistic woman who just wants to live in a castle and have power again. She's unaware that Troxartas just wants her for the magic stone. He's no fan of the ladies.

About that. Troxartas' servant/assistant is an attractive woman named Camisarde (Terri Treas). She's hot for Troxartas and repeatedly tries and fails to bust a move with the sorcerer. He tells her that the feeling is mutual, but he's far too busy trying to get the other half of the stone, increase his magic powers, and raise an army of warriors from the dead to do the wild thing. Camisarde is not picking up the signals that Troxartas is laying down, not even when he camps it up in the basement crypt in celebration after he successfully reanimates the dead warriors. (One of these reanimated warriors has the funniest and best line deliveries in the whole movie and steals every scene he's in. The guy rules. I wish I knew his character's name to give him full credit.) Don't feel bad, Camisarde. Elizena is equally clueless even when Troxartas pulls up on horseback in the countryside to escort her to the castle dressed like Little Edie from Grey Gardens with a hint of Freddie Mercury. You're never getting laid, Camisarde.

Eventually, everyone's at the castle and we get wizards, sorcery, battles, pratfalls, magic stone shenanigans, and swordfights, including one of the most bizarre and baffling swordfights I've ever seen between Deathstalker and Troxartas that looks like a cross between a poorly choreographed erotic modern dance performance and a Laurel and Hardy routine.

You'll notice I haven't been saying much about the filmmaking. This third installment in the franchise looks more like television than cinema and is the least visually appealing of the three. I'm not saying the first two Deathstalker movies are wonderlands of visual invention, but they do have some of the ol' razzle-dazzle. The visual style of this movie is basically just to film the script without putting any fucking fairy dust over the bastard, to paraphrase the Troggs tapes. It's a mildly entertaining movie, but it's not as much nonstop fun as the first two.

I said I'd get back to Carla Herd, the woman who played both princesses. Her acting career was short, lasting from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. She appeared in one other film, the low-budget action movie Wild Zone, and had a one-year recurring role on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. Her other credits include episodes of Houston Knights, 1st & Ten, and Monsters. Unless you're a b-movie aficionado, you probably know Carla Herd by her married name, Carla Sands. She married real estate and investment company CEO Fred Sands and took over as CEO after his death. She's also a hardcore MAGA nut whose massive campaign contributions to Trump led to her becoming one of his economic advisors and eventually ambassador to Denmark in Trump's first term. She also unsuccessfully ran for Senate in her home state of Pennsylvania, coming in fourth in the Republican primary that Dr. Oz won. She falsely claimed her vote wasn't counted and that she was disenfranchised, which was disproved by the New York Times. Her ambassadorship included numerous Hatch Act violations, but because we live in MAGA world, nothing happened. She likes to tweet and say stupid shit, including that Danes can't afford cars and have to bike everywhere, a nightmare she claimed Biden would bring to this country ("the horror, the horror"), and that the U.S. should aggressively take Greenland from Denmark. Needless to say, I'm glad Deathstalker didn't end up with Elizena at the end of this thing.