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Released by: Culture Shock
Released on: February 22nd, 2022.
Director: Daniel Peterson
Cast: Dana Ashbrook, Liane Curtis, Lezlie Deane, James Daughton
Year: 1989
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Girlfriend From Hell – Movie Review:
Writer/director Daniel Peterson’s 1989 epic Girlfriend From Hell opens on a distant desert planet where a man we later learn is named Chaser (Dana Ashbrook from Twin Peaks!) is blasting away with a laser gun of sorts at a monster that we don’t really get a good look at. When a snake crawls up his pant leg, he blasts it and it turns into some red energy and heads to Earth.
Cut to cool characters Diane (Lezlie Deane of Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare) and David (James Daughton from Animal House) as they prepare her nerdy friend Maggie (Liane Curtis) for a blind date with his geeky pal Carl (Anthony Barrile). Despite the fact that Maggie's got a hot new dress, she's as awkward as awkward can be and Carl is no better, his dad (James Karen) telling him the best thing to do to impress a girl on a first date is to stick his tongue as far down her ear as he can.
Regardless, they all head over to the house that meathead birthday boy Rocco (Ken Abraham) shares with his goofy girlfriend Alice (Hilary Morse) to celebrate for a bit before heading off to an Italian restaurant to meet up with Bible thumpers Fred (Sarah Kaite Coughlan) and Teddy (Brad Zutaut). Before they leave, however, a pentagram shaped beam of red energy hits Maggie and transforms her from nerd to nympho in a matter of seconds. Carl, when he gets an eye on his transformed date, is definitely into her - and so are all the other guys! But Maggie isn't quite right. When she drives them to the restaurant she tries to run over a gang of heavily armed nuns, and when they get there, she mouths off to the staff and patrons alike, eventually leaving with Carl when she can't get any tequila. They fight some tuffs on the way back to Rocco's place where the rest of the group arrives in time to hear her and Carl going at it upstairs.
From here, Maggie’s behavior gets increasingly bizarre and leads Diane to figure something is wrong with her friend. When Chaser shows up and claims that Maggie has been possessed by the devil, she and he team up to try and save her as well as the souls of the guys that Maggie has so easily seduced.
There’s nothing here to take seriously, it’s all played for laughs and admittedly some of those laughs fall pretty flat, but there’s something about Girlfriend From Hell that is… endearing. It’s definitely a time capsule in a lot of ways, a garish and tacky showcase for all that the late eighties was in terms of fashion and style, but the over the top and ridiculously clichéd performances are charming in a braindead sort of way. The optical effects that are featured in the film also give away their age but that isn’t a bad thing, especially if, like some of us, you grew up in the decade in which the movie was made and appreciate the type of weird optical effects that the movie delivers. The nostalgia rush that the movie gives in pretty hefty doses makes it easy to overlook the logic gaps and plot holes and lack of character development – the movie doesn’t really need any of that.
Performances are amusing. Liane Curtis does a great job of going from awkward to alluring, turning Maggie from a dork into a doll, complete with massive hair, tacky wardrobe and way too much makeup. It works surprisingly well and she throws herself into the role quite admirably. Lezlie Deane plays the smart and aggressive Diane quite well, her character grows on you as the movie plays out, while Sarah Kaite Coughlan provides some fun comic relief as the cock-phobic puritan. Hilary Morse isn’t given as much to do but she and Ken Abraham are basically cartoon characters here and are fun to watch. Anthony Barrile isn’t going to floor anyone but it’s fun to watch him fall under Curtis’ spell, while James Daughton and Brad Zutaut are okay, if not all that memorable, in their roles. Top-billed Dana Ashbrook is quite funny as Chaser, he and Deane wind up making for an entertaining duo in the second half of the film as they’re forced to team up and sort this all out.
It’s hard to guess how this movie will play for those without a soft spot for the era in which it was made, but fans of corny, goofy eighties nonsense films will find a lot to like here.
Girlfriend From Hell – Blu-ray Review:
Girlfriend From Hell arrives on Region A Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition presentation framed at 1.85.1 widescreen with the feature taking up 20GBs of space on the 50GB disc. The picture quality here is strong. There’s good detail noticeable throughout and the colors, many of which are quite garish in the way that you’d want the colors in a late eighties movie to be, are reproduced very nicely. We get strong black levels and good depth and texture while avoiding obvious compression artifacts, edge enhancement or noise reduction problems. Skin tones look good, contrast is fine and overall, this looks really good.
English language audio options are provided in 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo with optional subtitles provided in English only. Aside from some really noticeable sibilance in a few scenes, the audio quality is solid. The film’s score and bouncy soundtrack selections sound really solid here, and there are no problems to note with any hiss or distortion. The track is balanced nicely enough and the dialogue is always easy to understand and follow, but the sibilance is hard to ignore.
Extras start off with a feature length commentary with Director Daniel Peterson that is a lot of fun. He goes over a lot of details here, covering the fonts that were used in the opening credits, the optical effects used in the picture, the locations that were used and what it was like shooting in Red Rock Canyon, how much fun the cast were to work with, how he wound up getting James Karen to give him a day of his time to appear in the film for scale, the wardrobe on display in the film, bringing the film in on a pretty low budget, using two shots more often than planned to showcase the interactions between the cast members, how Liane Curtis used a hairstylist that she knew to create the wig she wears in the movie, how the movie started off as a film full of kids based around a babysitter from Hell, changes that were made to create Girlfriend From Hell, where the film makes an homage to Carrie, the stunt work shown in the film and quite a bit more. There's some dead air here and there but overall this is a pretty good listen with a lot of good information in it.
From there, we dig into a series of interviews all moderated by Brad Henderson starting with a forty-one minute piece with Liane Curtis who talks about how she landed the part in the film after originally reading for Maggie, what attracted her to the project, how she has a little Maggie in her herself, how actors are conduits for someone else's creativity, the lake of preparing for some of the bigger moments in the film, how all Hell could break loose at any time during the shoot, how she and a few of the other cast members had known one another for a few years before the movie started shooting, how she enjoyed working with people she'd known for a while, filming the driving scene and how she learned to drive by stealing her mother's car, her thoughts on Karma, meeting the guys from Culture Shock when they wanted to re-issue the movie and lots more. Curtis is a character and you've got to appreciate her honesty and openness here.
Producer Alberto Lensi is interviewed for five minutes about how he first met Dan Peterson after comnig to Los Angeles from Italy when Peterson was lucky enough to be his cab driver, how he got a few scripts from Peterson shortly after and how they wound up working together afterwards. He also talks about his history in film production, other projects that he's been involved with, being on set every day of the production, his thoughts on how the movie turned out and more.
Actress Sarah Kaite Coughlan spends thirty-three minutes on camera talking about how she landed her part in the film when she met Dan Peterson while working as a waitress at a Hollywood hot spot, how she got herself into character which landed her the part during the audition phase, how young the cast was and what it was like on set having a lot of freedom as an actor, not knowing anyone when she first arrived on set, friendships that have lasted since making the movie, her thoughts on the film's release history and its straight to video distribution, the film's cult following, a few other genre films that she's made over the years and how she feels about the film getting reissued.
We also get a forty minute interview with Girlfriend From Hell: The Musical creator Sean Matthew Whiteford who speaks about how he first saw the movie during one of its many airings on Comedy Central, how he went ahead and started creating a musical version of the film, where the musical version has been performed and his hopes for the project.
The disc also includes just short of seventeen minutes of cast audition footage taken from the original VHS tape featuring Liane Curtis, Leslie Deane and Ken Abraham sorting out their characters, a Girlfriend From Hell music video set to some set photographs and a massive and very extensive still gallery. Finishing up the extras is a remastered original trailer for Girlfriend From Hell, a Culture Shock Releasing trailer reel (featuring spots for Cannibal Hookers, The Death Collector, Creeptales, Goodnight God Bless and Zipperface), menus and chapter selection options. This release also comes packaged with some cool reversible sleeve artwork.
Girlfriend From Hell - The Final Word:
Girlfriend From Hell is eighties schlock of the highest order but, despite some pacing problems, it’s got a weird sort of charm to it that makes it a pretty watchable endeavor. Those with a nostalgia for the eighties will get more out of it than those without, but there are some fun characters and performances here, despite the inherent goofiness of it all. Culture Shock has pulled out all the stops for the film’s Blu-ray debut, presenting it in nice shape and with a whole lot more extras than anyone probably ever expected, giving the film a proper special edition release.