After much debate we decided to include excerpts from the above magazine copy which we found in the office. The decision is based on the fact that it had to be owned by somebody from the Give Me Head team because nobody has worked in the office since they left. We also know that the building had been empty for at least ten years before CEO Cassidy had briefly taken up residence owed to numerous fire hazards that only he was aware of and thus ignored.
The only other explanations are action movie loving squatters or kung fu movie loving Satanic ritualists had moved into the offices after the summer of ’88. Or perhaps somebody had tried to turn the former Give Me Head HQ into a movie set. In fact that place would make an ideal location for a movie about the looming corporate zombie apocalypse. Perhaps that’s what Cassidy set out to achieve without ever fully realising it. Maybe he really was another misunderstood genius who was lost to time.
Reel Mayhem was a monthly magazine which first hit the top shelves in 1975; roughly the time when lots of Italian directors got bored of the same old inoffensive drivel and started to slip in the occasional sliced eyeball torture scene and called it art before anyone else could call it gratuitous violence. Ever since there has been this raging debate whether an Italian man getting his nuts cut off by a serial killer wearing a plastic bunny mask should be seen in the same light as a van Gogh painting. The jury’s been out forever on this one.
The magazine covered a lot of genres but seemed to favour movies featuring action men kicking the shit out of tons of sweaty bad guys. There were so many of these movies in the 1980s that a cottage industry came along and made heroes out of local nobodies.
Looking back it was an interesting time for cinema. Quality control was all but scrapped. Authenticity, however, really shone a light during this decade. At the same time they openly stuck a middle finger up the arses of the big budget brigade over in Hollywood. The interesting thing here is that if you watch a lot of action movies from the 1980s today, the only visual difference between big budget and low budget is the size of the explosions and the handsomeness of the lead role. After that they are pretty much the same.
Anyway, so long as these movies had action men fighting bad guys from one place to the next, an evil end boss from a far away country (usually Russia because of the Cold War situation) and some romance pinning everything together then millions of people would end up watching these movies thinking they were fantastic. All of us here at RF Productions are inclined to agree that they remain fantastic.
What’s also interesting about this period is that VHS trailer sequences were chockful of fake ones. The reason for this is that those people working in mamma’s cottage were making trailers before the actual movie as to generate interest. But because they were churning out so much fodder, they sometimes completed the film years later. Or, just like this beauty, they would die a slow death.
There’s also an online forum whereby members swear to high heaven that back in the 80s, every so often they would press play and proceed to watch two hours of trailers with no feature film to be found. Even more bizarre is that they wouldn’t even notice because they’d drift into a state which they describe as “hypnotic boredom”.
They’d watch all the trailers while their brain froze over and then after the final trailer had finished, they just presumed that they had watched a feature length movie that didn’t make any sense. It’s only since 2017 that the forum emerged yet there are endless testimonies claiming it’s only now that the can remember. By 2018 the forum was flooded with conspiracy theorists claiming that it had something to do with alien experiments or North Korean intelligence gathering. Please note, however, that no evidence for these theories has ever been found and, as always, we remain impartial anyway.
When I think back to watching thousands of trailers for zero budget action movies from the late 80s, I feel as if I can recall some of those trailers clearly, but I can’t remember many of the movies. I don’t believe these “serial hypno trailers” actually exist. However, I think the reality is that in most cases the trailer was way better and way more important than the movie itself. If people bought the movie based on the trailer only to watch something terrible, they’d already spent their money for the privilege. It was a sound business practice back then.
We were glad to see Tam Crump (not his real name) in the pages of Reel Mayhem because we actually know who he is. However, before embarking on this project, we wouldn’t have known that he existed in the same world as this one. We certainly feel all the wiser for gaining this knowledge.
The reason we know Crump is because the late Mitch Thorne had worked with him on the Last Bullet franchise. It was easy to locate his back catalogue online. I wouldn’t recommend it except for Last Bullet III which has some quality close combat scenes.
The magazine article informs us that Crump had been to court three times in three years for the same crime: impersonating a police officer. Crump denies this and instead claims that it’s just an extreme form of method acting which only happens once per movie and doesn’t cause any harm. The San Jose Police Department beg to differ.
Crump had been successfully sued on each previous occasion and was given some conditions which he routinely discounted. The current trial could see him banged up as a disobedient prolific offender who won’t remove his earplugs. He also states in the article that he can’t lose this case because he would love to go to prison for a year or two as it would help to make him a better actor. Now that’s some serious swagger.
Reel Mayhem also featured interviews with B-movie actors and cult figures. So long as they had a role which made them the good guys going after the bad guys then they could be featured in the magazine. That’s what it seems like to us anyway.
A case in point is Troy McKinney. In his article Troy explained how sudden fame nearly killed him. One minute he’s working on a television set assembly line; the next minute he’s in the jungles of Vietnam, alone and beating up hundreds of Viet Cong enemies while shooting dead many more. In the following three years, he made 10 movies and 3 series, playing the lead role in all of them.
He explained that after his last movie was released and the PR slowly wound down, he decided to take a short break. But after the first weekend he had a full blown breakdown and began to stockpile tinned foods, whiskey and grenades. He boarded up his doors and the rest is history.
We would now like to turn your attention to some VHS covers which we found in the review section of Reel Mayhem. You might wonder why they look worn when everything else looks tidy. We think VHS video covers from this era must come looking battered. If you disagree then we don’t really care.
Reel Mayhem appears to be written for the connoisseur. You had to have a serious interest in these sorts of movies to buy copies religiously. Which member of the Give Me Head team fits that description? At a stretch we can only say Tin Man although we wouldn’t bet money on it. Perhaps we may come across more information about the owner further down the line.
Regardless it was fun to archive this edition. It teaches us a fair bit about what trash cinema looked like around the period of Cyberia’s production.
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