Lew Landers directed this suspense thriller "inspired" by the classic radio series. A boy witnesses a man murder his wife in a train station in the dark of night. The killer then decides to find the boy...
Stars: Charles Russell, Mary Beth Hughes, Lee Patrick, Nana Bryant, Billy House, Roscoe Ates. 62 minutes in black & white.
Lew Landers is probably best known to monster movie fans as the director of Return Of The Vampire (1944), starring Bela Lugosi
Broadcasts of the original radio version of the horror/mystery/suspense series “Inner Sanctum” occasionally can be heard on Radio Drama online
"Inner Sanctum" is not available at this time on video or DVD But listen to these original radio broadcasts of radio's scariest series:
Monstervision's Joe Bob Briggs Looks At
Inner Sanctum 2 (1995)
Tracy Brooks Swope is not crazy about her new medication
"Joe Bob's Drive-In" for 3/6/95 By Joe Bob Briggs
Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas
This guy got his head cut off by an elevator in the Bronx.
Did you hear about this?
The guy's gettin off the elevator, it starts to go up real fast while the door is still open. The guy loses his balance, leans TOWARD the elevator, and it cuts his head off, and the HEAD goes rollin around in the car with five other passengers, and the BODY falls down the shaft. And for five minutes all these people had to stand there lookin at the head until they were rescued.
But what was strange about the news accounts is that there were all these people saying, "What can we do to make sure this never happens again?"
"What state agency is responsible?" Stuff like that.
Politicians were demandin that the elevator company check ALL its elevators, to make sure nobody's head gets cut off in the future.
Listen to me. This is not EVER gonna happen again.
There are some things that are not EVER gonna happen again.
This is a one-time deal.
About a hundred things had to go wrong, ALL AT THE SAME SECOND, for this to happen.
Why is it that, when somethin like this happens, everbody wants to set up an Anti-Cut-Off-Your-Head Elevator-Rights Committee? Do they really think they were having meetings at the Otis Elevator Company, where a bunch of evil shifty-eyed fat guys sat around saying, "Yeah, SURE these elevators could slice off a guy's head, and the head might go rollin around in the car--but THAT'S A RISK WE'RE WILLING TO TAKE"?
What do they want em to do--invent some crash-test robots that will stick their heads in an open out-of-control ascending elevator car, to see if they can survive?
But there are people who still think, "This never should have happened. They should have KNOWN about this." And so they get all self-righteous, and by the time they finish, they've convinced themselves there's a conspiracy by American businessmen who are TRYING to cut off the heads of unsuspecting elevator patrons. They think some engineer wrote up a set of specs on the elevator, and said, "Hey! Looky here, Bob! If we set this gauge just so, it might shoot the sucker up three floors with the door open and rip off a guy's head who's leanin the wrong way! Come on, let's try it! Here, I'll figure out the setting so the head will end up in the car, but the BODY will fall down the shaft."
It was an ACCIDENT.
There IS such a thing as an accident.
Even in America.
I'm surprised I have to explain this stuff.
Speaking of rolling heads, this week's flick is "Inner Sanctum II," which is a horror flick DISGUISED as an erotic thriller, starring Tracy Brooks Swope as the whiny wife in a wheelchair who murdered her slimy husband in "Inner Sanctum One." Now it's two weeks later and she's having nightmares where ex-husband Joseph Bottoms appears to her as a leering macaroni-faced zombie.
Somebody's trying to drive her crazy AGAIN, to collect on her inheritance. Is it her Brooks Brothers brother-in-law with the snotty attitude, Michael Nouri? How about her live-in nurse, Jennifer Ciesar, who spends most of her time aardvarking with the gardener/handyman in the upstairs bedroom. David Warner of Time After Time is a shrink who makes house calls, and it looks like he might be mixing a little waheenie juice in Tracy's daily medication. We shouldn't forget Nouri's snotty wife, Sandahl Bergman, who likes to throw playing cards at her husband right before they have sex.
And, yes, ladies and gentlemen, she's back. She used to be Margaux Hemingway. Now, for some reason, she's "Margot" Hemingway. But however you spell it, she's the whiskey-voiced one with a lisp, reprising her role as the dead husband's money-grubbing business partner.
I've seen approximately 16,000 erotic thrillers, but it's the zombie thing that makes this one different. Because she's going crazy, but she's NOT crazy about one thing. There IS a zombie in the house.
He takes a long time getting us there, but once he does, director Fred Olen Ray of Dinosaur Island delivers with this one.
Eight dead bodies. Five breasts. (All of them are stunt breasts, adding to the despicable state of the erotic thriller industry today.) Tomb dancing. Multiple aardvarking. S&M nightmares. Thigh massage. Hypodermic to the neck. Sex with a goo-spitting skeletal zombie. Neck-cracking. Throat-slitting. Grapple hook to the neck. Strangulation. Catfight. Head rolls. Kung Fu. Zombie Fu. Vase Fu. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Sandahl Bergman, as the bitchy wife of the wicked brother-in-law, for saying "I don't FEEL like being pleasant!"; Tracy Brooks Swope, as the woman on the verge, for saying "They're not like dreams--they're more like horror movies"; and James Booth, as the goofball cop who says "If being broke was a crime, this guy would be doing life."
Three stars.
Joe Bob says check it out.
JOE BOB'S ADVICE TO THE HOPELESS
Victory Over Communism! The Southeast 14th Drive-In, at S.E. 14th St. where it meets Highway 65/69 in Des Moines, Ia., gives you a triple feature for $5.50 and still packs em in at a rare historic ONE-screen operation. Sam Graham reminds us that, with eternal vigilance, the drive-in will never die. To discuss the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get free junk in the mail and Joe Bob's world-famous newsletter, "The Joe Bob Report," write Joe Bob Briggs, P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221. Joe Bob's Fax line is always open: 214-985-7448. Joe Bob even hangs out on CompuServe: 76702,1435.
Dear Joe Bob,
In the midst of some sort of mid-life crisis (I'm 36) I decided to go back to college, which I left before I finished about 15 years ago.
One of the courses required for a degree is, of course, U.S. History, which comes in two parts: the part before the Civil War and the part after the Civil War. I was taking the second part from a Professor Goldman and he says that when it comes to the "wild west," a) there was no "wild west," and b) the "cowboys" learned everything they knew from their predecessors, "the Vaqueros," i.e. riding, roping, quick-draw fan-firing of six-shooters, etc., and c) the "Texas Rangers" were nothing but hired assassins. Also, that cowboys generally lived a bleak, dreary and boring life that wasn't any more exciting or interesting than the lives of the poor factory working class in the East who wasted their money on the pulp novels that created all the hype about cowboys in the first place.
Since Texas has a baseball team called the Rangers and a football team called the Cowboys I'm not so sure Professor Goldman would be able to get away with saying this stuff if he were teaching United States History there.
What is the official Joe Bob/Texas view of this period? Would you have rather worked as a cowboy or in an 1880's sisal factory in Boston? Were the Texas Rangers a bunch of thugs or were they more like on the TV show where they acted like "Hawaii Five-O" agents on horseback?
Please, Joe Bob, I need some answers.
Sincerely,
Jan A. Weith
San Jose
Dear Jan:
Nobody in Texas ever denied that the cowboy was half-Spanish, half-Anglo. The combination of Mexicans and Anglos riding together is what made the King Ranch possible. In fact, the best trick ropers in Texas, to this day, are Mexican.
But that stuff about the Texas Rangers is fightin words. Mr. Smarty Pants History Professor needs to go back and read the definitive history of the Rangers, by Walter Prescott Webb, and pay close attention to the chapters on Jack Hays. We could USE a few Texas Rangers today. They might have been low-class, but they were heroes then and now.
I mean it .
I'm surprised I have to tell you this.
Dear Joe Bob Briggs:
I just saw what may be the "feel-bad" movie of the year, and I wondered if you had an opportunity to view this unbelievable collection of crack, rape, porno and other vivid scenes starring on Harvey Keitel as a corrupt New York cop in "The Bad Lieutenant." What is the meaning of life for the life Harvey enjoys in this film? And why was this film on many of the critics' Top Ten Lists? Although I grew up near Hollywood where many of these scenes were real, somehow to have them all in one movie was a bit much!
What is your take on the film?
Best wishes,
W.B.
Prunedale, Calif.
Dear W.B.:
Harvey is the world's most disgusting actor, so, of course, I worship him.
Abel Ferrara happens to be the world's most disgusting director.
Put them together, and you have "The Bad Lieutenant," the first movie in history to make New York City look WORSE than it actually is.
I loved it.
Hey Joe Bob,
What do you think of this on Rush Limbaugh guy? I'm a little worried because my Dallas boyfriend went and paid money to hear him speak. Should I try and have a sense of humor about Rush, or should I run screaming from the Dallas dude?
Thanks,
Jennifer Watson
Sacramento, Calif.
Dear Jennifer:
Never trust a guy who can talk that much without taking a breath.
Joe Bob,
The latest Houston tabloid headline:
"'I am sorry the girl is alive,' teen-age Satanist tells police" . . . "'I blame the movies for the way I feel about hurting people,' the suspect said in the statement. "I study the movies and like the one called Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Lots of people get stabbed in the movies."
This jerk makes us legit true crime and horror fans look sleazier than necessary.
Oodles of Easter joy,
Terry Watson
Houston
Dear Terry:
The religious fundamentalist zealot killers, like David Koresh, get all THEIR ideas out of the Bible. Maybe we should get rid of that, too.
Dear Joe Bob,
I agree with you about the recorders. They do sound like sewer rats. Is there any way we can rid the world of these pesky things (recorders, not sewer rats)? Third graders would thank us for generations to come.
Yours truly,
Jon S. Wesick
Austin, Tex.
Dear Jon:
The only reason people would teach impressionable young children to make noises on a plastic flute would be to train the little monsters for psychological warfare. We already BEAT the Iraqis. Let's scale back a little bit.
Lew Landers directed this suspense thriller "inspired" by the classic radio series.