Reviews

Lenny (Mark Hennessy) and Bruce (Scott King) are taking photos of bikini girls on Venice Beach when they accidentally film a murder. The only clue? A woman with a rose tattoo on her butt. Now, Mr. Karrothers (John Vernon) is sending his hitmen after them.

Featuring a score by a very young in his career Hans Zimmer, this Nico Mastorakis directed and written movie moves fast and soon has Lenny and Bruce - along with Lenny's bully brother Skip (Steve Donmyer) - catch up with that tattooed behind. It belongs to Christie (Hope Marie Carlton, Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Picasso Trigger) who, of course, once dated Skip. The law thinks she's a killer but Lenny thinks otherwise.

You may or may not know, but I've been trying to watch every Tara Buckman movie, so I am pleased that she shows up here as the wife of Vernon's character. Ted Lange also plays a man who is at once unhoused on the beach but perhaps the smartest character in the film.

This is a mix of high and lowbrow, as most of Mastorakis' movies are. It has allusions to Blow Up while also naming a character Mario Argento. It's also ridiculous at times, but never boring. I don't believe Mastorakis can make a boring movie.

Julius Lazar (Dick Gautier) and his secretary Missy (Amy Lyndon) have finished up planning his next movie Sex and Violence when they decide to get away for the weekend and go to Hawaii. She has no idea what she's doing, so that allows T. C. (Will Egan) and Bo (Steve Donmyer) to break in at the exact same time as two of Lazar's disgruntled employees, Paco (Fernando Garzón) and Lee (John Kreng). Luckily, Bo has a second personality named Simon who is super strong - look, you're watching a Nico Mastorakis movie, these are the plot twists you grow used to - and he's able to defeat the two of them, setting T. C. up as Lazar and himself up as a director as young and morally unencumbered actresses show up to become famous in the next big movie from Hollywood's most popular exploitation director.

If you're looking for a movie just for nubile and often nude women, well, Mastorakis knew what you wanted. There are ninety women in this, including Bunty Bailey (Dolls, a-ha's "Take On Me), Teri Weigel (one of the few women to be both a Playboy Playmate and Penthouse Pet, as well as an adult movie star), Roxanna Michaels (Caged Fury), Penny Wiggins (who was The Amazing Jonathan's assistant Psychic Tanya), Marjean Holden (Sheeva from Mortal Kombat Annihilation), Christina Cardan (Chained Heat) as a non-SAG actress, Kahlena Marie (Streets of Death) as a SAG actress, stuntwoman Laura Albert, Heidi Paine (Wizards of the Demon Sword), Debra Lamb (both Stripped to Kill movies), Jesae (who became adult actress Elise di Medici), Becky Mullen (who was Sally the Farmer's Daughter in GLOW and is also in the Van Halen video "Poundcake") and Donna Spangler (Amityville Witches).

While all the women are trying to get a part, DuBois (Ted Lange) shows up with several members of the mob to take back the money that Lazar took from them for his new movie Pink Thunder. There's also Michelle Wong (Julia Nickson, Rambo: First Blood Part II), who comes to audition just to tell Lazar how much she hates his movies and ends up becoming T. C.'s dream woman.

This has so many ridiculous scenes, including gay bodyguard ninja Brucie (Dan Spreaker) beating up an entire collection of bad guys and Bo getting his brains back from a hypnotist (Ji-Tu Cumbuka). None of it is politically correct, much of it is goofy and Mastorakis shot this because he was looking for somewhere fun to live. He stayed in the mansion that this was shot at for three weeks.

Andrea (Adrienne Barbeau) is a widow whose husband was an astronaut. She's come to Greece to raise her son Tim (Jeremy Licht). One day, walking the beach after a storm, they come across a man (Keir Dullea) in the surf. He doesn't even remember who he is, so Andrea calls him Glenn. She begins to fall in love with him, while Tim sees him as a father figure. The island's people seem to be weirded out by him, other than Dr. Barnaby (Peter Hobbs), who learns that he has two hearts. In time, Glenn tells him that if he ever had something like a father, he wished that it would be him.

Glenn ends up being Jesus - or the brother of Jesus - who has come here from the future. He has powers that we don't and is able to see Tim get accidentally shoved off a cliff by a very cute dog in a scene that made my jaw drop. Glenn is able to bring him back to life, but when he's unable to do the same for other kids, the village turns against him. Also: Why would Andrea give weed to a man she thinks is a murderer at worst and an amnesiac at best?

Dullea is really great in this, as he plays the confusion perfectly. It's wild to see director and writer Nico Mastorakis tackle such a serious subject, nearly making both a Jesus Christ and superhero movie at the same time. If Jesus came back in time to Earth, I imagine that it would be only right if he got to sleep with Adrienne Barbeau.

Based on the stage play The Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller, Doctor X shouldn't be disregarded by today's horror fan just because it was made in 1932. It's packed with murder, cannibalism, sex workers, strange relationships, frightening special effects and so much more. Because it was made in the two-color Technicolor process, it looks nothing like you'd think either, nearly a painting come to life. Large cities got to see this version while other countries and smaller towns only had black and white, which is how audiences saw this movie when it made its way to television in the 1950s.

It was feared that the color print was gone until the death of Jack Warner, who had one. The true color vision of Doctor X was donated to the UCLA Film & Television Archive, who did a digital restoration in 2020.

Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is writing about The Moon Killer, a serial murderer who has been killing during every full moon. Each body has pieces missing, as if they were eaten, which has driven the police insane as they search for suspects.

Doctor Xavier (Lionel Atwill) is the police's expert on the case, yet they believe that he may be the suspect as well. After all, the brains are removed with surgical skill with a scalpel similar to the one he uses. If not him, it could be the other experts at the Academy of Surgical Research: Dr. Wells (Preston Foster), an amputee who has written several studies of cannibalism; Dr. Haines (John Wray), a voyeur; Dr. Duke (Harry Beresford), who is paralyzed and Dr. Rowitz (Arthur Edmund Carewe), who is studying the mental impact of the moon.

The police are morons, as they trust Dr. X enough to let him investigate this case, bringing together all the suspects. Each of them is connected to an electrical system that tracks their heartbeat in the hopes that reenacting a murder will tell Dr. X who The Moon Killer is. Only Wells is not in this experiment, as the murderer has two hands while he has just one.

As Dr. Xavier's butler Otto (George Rosener) and maid Mamie (Leila Bennett) act out the horrible slaughter, Taylor starts to fall for Dr. X's daughter, Joanna (Fay Wray), despite the fact that she outright hates him for writing that her father was probably the suspect that everyone should watch for.

The lights go out and when they come back on, Rowitz is dead, a scalpel in his head. That night, when his body is set out, it gets cannibalized. Mamie runs and Joanne must take her place as the experiment continues, but that's when the killer - SPOILER! - is revealed as Welles, who has been creating inhuman flesh and he wants to kill Dr. X's daughter next.

She's saved by Taylor and because this is a pre-Code horror movie, he sets Welles on fire and tosses him out a window.

The success of this movie led to Atwill and Wray appearing in Mystery of the Wax Museum. Before that release could be filmed - which also has effects by Max Factor - they were also in The Vampire Bat. While The Return of Dr. X is not a sequel, Night Monster, which also stars Atwill, is a remake.

The Moon Killer is based on Albert Fish, who was called the Moon Maniac. He was still murdering while this was being made, as he was arrested shortly after this was in theaters.

Doctor X is from some other world, a place filled with weird jokes, strange killers and a doctor's home that seems like it's more dungeon than domicile. I can't wait to go back there again.

Warner Brothers hired David Kajganich to write they wanted to be a straight-forward remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but Kajganich changed the script to reflect contemporary times. I believe that each generation gets the body snatchers that it deserves, from the Cold War McCarthy menace of the 1950s, the end of the world gloom of the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the gory yet doomed 1990s Body Snatchers.

The explanation for the aliens in this version is very scientific. A space Shuttle crash lets loose a fungus that is scattered across the country. It infects people and when they go to sleep, it reprograms them. CDC director Tucker Kaufman (Jeremy Northam) is the first to be changed and his ex-wife Carol Bennell (Nicole Kidman) notices that he has become someone else. One of her patients, Wendy Lenk (Veronica Cartwright), says the very same thing.

This film is way ahead of the conspiracy theories of today, as Kaufman uses a flu vaccine to further spread the alien contagion throughout the world. I'm shocked more Twitter - sorry, X, I forgot - users haven't been screaming about how this movie was the government telling us what they were going to do.

Carol and Dr. Ben Driscoll (Daniel Craig) attend a dinner party where they witness the transformation of a human into an alien. By now, they've been doing research with Dr. Stephen Galeano (Jeffrey Wright) that shows that anyone who has had acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is immune from the aliens. Thanks to movie logic, this includes Carol's son Oliver (Jackson Bond).

Carol is eventually infected but this also brings in a bit of Elm Street as you must stay awake or you will be an alien. Luckily, she remains alert and her son is the key to fixing things, even if the society that the human race returns to is violent and emotional, unlike the perfectly ordered world that the aliens promise.

Originally directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel as a nearly effects free invasion movie, the studio was unhappy and asked for The Wachowskis to rewrite and reshoot some of the movie. After a year of the movie not progressing any further, James McTeigue was hired to shoot action scenes. During these, Kidman was injured and broke her ribs. That said, she made $17 million off this.

Remember when I said that each generation gets the bodysnatchers it deserves? This one is very 2007. I can't remember much of that time and it seemed that everything was being remade as a faster and less soulless version of what came before. It's a great looking film, it has pleasant leads and it tries to be about the forces that rule the world. Yet it comes after three versions of Jack Finney's story The Body Snatchers that each had a point of view about the world and how it needed to change. This one ends with no horrifying conclusion, just the pod people waking up as if they were in a dream. Compare that to the horrific closes of the 1970s and 1990s takes.

Princess (Season Hubley, who was Nikki in Hardcore) is walking the streets to make money for her daughter Lisa losing her job. Sunset Boulevard is dangerous, as you know if you've watched the same movies that I have, but never more dangerous when pimp Ramrod (Wings Hauser) is running things.

LAPD vice squad sergeant Tom Walsh (Gary Swanson) brings Princess down to the morgue to look at the body of her dead friend Ginger (Nina Blackwood, former MTV VJ) and tell her that she'll be busted for cocaine and lose her daughter if she doesn't help. Yeah, every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.

Even when she helps the cops catch Ramrod, he easily escapes, starting a reign of terror on the Sunset Strip looking for Princess, promising that she will be killed. He even castrates her former pimp, Sugar Pimp Dorsey (Fred "Rerun" Berry losing his dick? No!), and beating men and women alike into the great beyond all as he gets closer and closer. At the same time, Princess is turning tricks in fancy mansions, getting into coffins with old men who like to pretend that they are dead. That's because she knows that the vice squad will never be able to change what happens on the streets.

I would not deserve this site and you reading it if I didn't mention that one of the working girls is Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith.

Gary Sherman should get more credit than he does. I've never seen a boring movie from him. Wings Hauser is also an absolute maniac beyond all other lunatics in this and even sang "Neon Slime," the song that plays at the end.

Supposedly, Martin Scorsese got in a fight with Dawn Steele over this movie, saying that it deserved to be the best movie of the year.

The opening says, "The motion picture you are about to see has been produced with the cooperation of law enforcement authorities. Though a work of fiction, it is a composite of events that have actually taken place on the streets of Hollywood." That's true. Producers Brian Frankish and James Robert Dyer approached Sandy Howard about making a reality documentary about prostitution with interviews from pimps, sex workers and the LAPD Vice Squad. The project eventually became a movie with Howard, Kenneth Peter and Robert Vincent O'Neil working on the story.

Also known as Barn of the Naked Dead and Nightmare Circus, this is one of those movies where no one is even sure who made it. Sure, Alan Rudolph is listed as the director, but stuntman Gerald Cormier - also the leader of the film's distributor CMC Pictures - is credited. Some say that he's Rudolph. Star Andrew Prine says that two other directors made this before Rudolph and Cormier was one of them. Writer Ralph Harolde could also be Rudolph.

Andre (Prine) has built a circus in the desert, located right on top of a former atomic test site, and keeps kidnapping showgirls like Simone (Manuela Thiess), Sheri (Sherry Alberoni) and Corinne (Gyl Roland) and even female scientists, training all of them to perform for him. He also has a cougar that he lets loose on them and there's something inside the barn that loves to kill women.

Simone is worshipped as the lost mother Andre can't have, as he tells her of his past. That's better than Sheri, who has been picked to be the new Reptile Girl as Andre flings snakes at her. Then, the girls free Andre's father (Gerald Cormier) from the barn. Nuclear fallout has made him into a crazed psychopath and he kills everyone in his path with only two girls escaping. That's the scene that the agent of the Vegas girls, Derek Moore (Chuck Niles), and the cops discover when they get there.

Andrew Prine said, "This is the only movie I ever regretted making."

He should embrace it. I love the circus tent in the middle of the desert and the sheer lunacy of this movie. It's just so out there and it shouldn't work yet it does just long enough to rush to its bloody end.

Also known as The Hooker Cult Murders, The Pyx is based on the novel by John Buell. The pyx is a container used by Catholics to hold the Eucharist, literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the form of blessed unleavened bread.

While directed by Harvey Hart and written by Robert Schlitt, this was a movie that Curtis Harrington had wanted to make for some time.

Elizabeth Lucy (Karen Black) is a barely dressed sex worker who fell out a window, a bloodstream filled with heroin, clutching a crucifix and a pyx. Sergeant Jim Henderson (Christopher Plummer) wants to figure out why she died, which takes us back through the last few months of her life.

As he grows closer to the truth, meeting the people in her life, each of them dies in different ways. That's because Elizabeth was the victim of a cult who had desecrated a piece of communion and were offering it to her as part of a Black Mass, presided over by a Catholic priest. As she was trying to save her soul, she jumps out a window to her death.

That priest, Keerson (Jean-Louis Roux) claims to be possessed by the devil and only the bullets of Henderson's gun set him free.

The end of this is strange from a Catholic perspective. Suicide is one of the biggest sins of the church and it keeps the soul in limbo or sends it to Hell, depending on which of the teachers you believe. Would Elizabeth be forgiven for this death as she did it to remain free of Satanic power? I wonder.

Noel Black made his name with a short entitled Skaterdater and he made Pretty Poison, which is an incredible movie but died at the box office. Then, his career fell apart. He said, "The gold-plated nail in my career coffin was pounded when, after the box-office failure of Pretty Poison, I accepted a dreadful project, Cover Me Babe, that never should have been made. I reckoned that it was better to stay active than to wait for a project I believed in. That was a mistake. It was followed by another mistake, Jennifer on My Mind, one of the dozens of unsuccessful drug pictures at the time."

After working in TV, he came back to the big screen - or tried to - with this film, which was originally called Marianne. It took six years to come out on video under the title Mirrors.

He also directed Mischief and Private School, two teen sex comedies that are way better than that genre may lead one to believe.

Marianne Whitman (Kitty Wynn, Sharon Spencer from The Exorcist) and her husband Gary (William Paul Burns) are on their honeymoon in New Orleans where she's soon the concern of a voodoo group who want to put another soul into her. To get what they want, they'll murder dogs and even her husband in a dust-delivered asthma attack which is really the wildest way someone dies in a 70s occult movie outside of The Omen's gore Rube Goldberg destructions of humanity.

Dr. Godard (Peter Donat) tries to help, but Marianne is trapped in a slow burn 70s possession film with an ambiguous ending. Visually, this is a great film. As for the story, well, it's a mess. It does have a great party scene - every 70s occult movie should - with Willie Tee And The Wild Magnolias funking it out.

I love this in spite of its problems.

I'm still trying to figure this out.

Made as Nightmare at Blood Castle, this is about Dr. Arthur Blackwood (Bill Greer, who co-wrote the script with Deedy Peters, who were a comedy team; he would go on to write and produce House Calls, Goodnight Beantown and Charles In Charge; she would be in 17 episodes of House Calls), who runs his own sanitarium and is doing experiments on the forces of evil. Deedy also plays his wife in this, who is working with the sheriff (Jim Dean) to figure out why some teens have been killed. She should be looking inside her own house, as her husband has a hunchback (Pierre Agostino) and they're whipping girls and locking people up in cages.

This is the kind of movie that has a wig budget, a spaghetti monster, guillotine suicide and dialogue with lines such as "When I saw Mr. Zolak's head severed from his body, I felt a definite sexual thrill. I must be very careful." Also snakes.

Somehow, this is PG. 1970s PG. You know what that means.

Director Charles Nizet also made The Ravager, Voodoo Heartbeat and Rescue Force. There's nothing like this, a regional movie in the desert that has women put in coffins with poisonous snakes and it feels perverted but it's not as dirty as it feels, which means that it's really deranged.

A cave blows up at the end. I still, as I said, have no idea why.

Homicidal (1961) Posted on November 2, 2024 by bandsaboutmovies William Castle mortgaged his house and formed William Castle Productions in 1958. For his fifth movie after Macabre, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler and 13 Ghosts, Castle had another of his gimmick ideas: the Fright Break.

Before the end of the movie, a 45-second timer would tell audience members that they could get a free refund if they left now. The first night Castle tried this, they all did. Some even came back for a free second show, so he had numbered and color coded tickets. This cut down on the people seeing his movie for free, but there were still some people who wanted a cheap night out.

Castle wouldn't allow them.

He created the Coward's Corner, where a voice over would laugh at the people leaving, forcing them into a yellow corner. He even wanted to paint their backs yellow, but this was too much for theaters.

I learned about this from John Waters, who said this in his book Crackpot: "He came up with "Coward's Corner," a yellow cardboard booth, manned by a bewildered theater employee in the lobby. When the Fright Break was announced, and you found that you couldn't take it any more, you had to leave your seat and, in front of the entire audience, follow yellow footsteps up the aisle, bathed in a yellow light. Before you reached Coward's Corner, you crossed yellow lines with the stencilled message: "Cowards Keep Walking." You passed a nurse (in a yellow uniform? ... I wonder), who would offer a blood-pressure test. All the while a recording was blaring, "Watch the chicken! Watch him shiver in Coward's Corner!" As the audience howled, you had to go through one final indignity - at Coward's Corner you were forced to sign a yellow card stating, "I am a bona fide coward." Very, very few were masochistic enough to endure this. The one percent refund dribbled away to a zero percent, and I'm sure that in many cities a plant had to be paid to go through this torture. No wonder theater owners balked at booking a William Castle film. It was all just too complicated."

Emily (Joan Marshall using the name Jean Arless) convinces the bellboy at a hotel to marry her and she pays $2,000 to him. Late in the evening, they drive to the justice of the peace and start the ceremony, only to kill the official and run, laughing about it to the mute old woman, Helga (Eugenie Leontovich) that she cares for.

Then we meet Miriam Webster (Patricia Breslin), who has just come back to America with her brother Warren (spoiler if I tell you). Warren is the sole heir of the family, as their abusive father has just died, and if he marries, he will get the money. Miriam is going to marry Karl (Glenn Corbett), who catches Emily destroying his fiance's flower shop. It turns out that Emily and Warren are married. They're never seen together.

Well, after Helga goes up the stairs on a stair lift and her head falls off, Emily is revealed. This has a lot of Psycho in it, yet it still feels like a unique film. It's certainly a major reveal and I'd rather you watch the movie. I'd like if you'd watch several William Castle movies.

A few years in the past, Jeff Ashton (David G. Cannon), Doctor Ray Sanders (John Crawford), "Mad Man" Herman (Marvin Kaplan) and Ted Rogers (Ray Dannis), among others, were caught in a cave-in. With the prospect of survival seeming zero, they agreed - well, everyone except the victim - to cut off Ted's arm and eat it.

Now, Jeff has just received an arm in the mail and "Mad Man" is killed on the air during his radio show, his arm amputated by a crazy killer. With the help of Ted's daughter Teddy (Deborah Walley), they look for Ted, who is missing. But ah - she's been working with her Uncle Roger (Bob Guthrie) to lure Jeff into a trap where he'll have to eat his own arm to live!

The lesson of this movie: Never trust the mail when it's delivered by Angus Scrimm.

Directed by Thomas S. Alderman, who wrote the story with Darrel Presnell (from a story by Marc B. Ray and Larry Alexander and additional dialogue by Kelly Estill), this is a grimy thriller that has cannibalism at its heart.

Christine and Betty (Ann and Vicki Michelle, who are real-life sisters; Elke Sommer was their au pair as they grew up) are runaways who want to be models. Christine is soon hired by an agent, Sybil Waite (Patricia Haines) but as you can tell, this isn't a movie about modeling. It's about the occult and the job in the country Christine gets is all about getting her in the coven of Gerald Amberley (Neil Hallett) and into his bed; both happen and she soon learns that she can control white magic or magick if you wear Stevie Nicks garb. Sybil is down with darker magic and wants to control Betty.

There's also this guy named Johnny (Keith Buckley) who wants to help Betty escape, but he also wants to deflower her because, you know, guys.

This was filmed at the Admiral's Walk in Pirbright, the same place where Terror and Satan's Slave was shot. Director Ray Austin started as a stunt man on movies like North by Northwest and Operation Petticoat; working with Chee Soo on The Avengers, he helped Diana Rigg be the first Western actor to do kung fu. He was married to Yasuko Nagazumi and the stepfather of her daughter Miki Berenyi from the band Lush. He also directed The Return of the Man from U. N. C. L. E. And The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman.

Writer Hazel Adair created the soap opera Crossroads but didn't make this movie under her own name. Along with wrestling announcer Kent Walton, they created Pyramid Films. She became Klaus Vogel and he was Ralph Solomons; they also made Clinic Exclusive, Can You Keep It Up for a Week?, Keep It Up Downstairs and Game for Vultures.

Ann Michele went on to be in Psychomania, House of Whipcord and Young Lady Chatterley, while her sister Vicki acted in Queen Kong, The Sentinel, the TV show 'Allo, 'Allo and The Greek Tycoon. Supposedly, Anthony Quinn "personally asked the producers to reduce the size of Michelle's part thinking that her good looks and bright costume would detract the audience's attention from him." They have both spoken badly of their experiences on this movie, saying that they were hardly paid and pressured into more nude scenes than they had agreed to.

The Streets of Bangkok is based on the Boris Karloff film The Mask of Fu Manchu and it finds Jean Rollin not on a beach or a falling to pieces mansion with vampires living inside clocks, but instead a comic book mystery. Don't worry. He didn't forget to have naked women in it.

Secret agent Rick (Gérard Landry) is killed looking for a biological weapon. The photos on his camera are of a sex worker named Eva (Yoko) who is now wanted by the spies and the syndicate. The syndicate! What is this, a Doris Wishman movie? Rita (Brigitte Borghese) and her two female hitwomen are everywhere looking for our heroine.

Eva is rescued by Claudine (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl), but they're soon in the clutches of the syndicate and Eva gets chained up and whipped because Eurosleaze. There's also a lot of scenes of Eva dancing - Yoko only did two other films, both adult movies but at least one was a James Bond parody, James Bande 00Sex 2 (thanks Gentry on Letterboxd) - but she's good in this and, as you'd expect from a Rollin movie, inordinately attractive.

This has the biggest mud wrestling arena I've ever seen, Françoise Blanchard rocking a mullet and an ending that has the good guy prove he's not so good and Eva shooting him with tears pouring down her face. And people tied to the train tracks and endless massage scenes!

You might be bored by this. As for me, I found the joy that is the weird timing of a Rollin movie, just endlessly hanging out near the infinite void as he makes a Jess Franco movie, pretty much.

I discovered this movie from Unsung Horrors, who said that it was "Somewhere in between Jean Rollin and Ogroff."

How could I not want to see this?

Martine (Isabelle Goguey) has just left her boyfriend and taken on a live-in job as a nurse and housekeeper for a retirement home. Is it weird that it's called the Deadlock House? Is it strange that Mademoiselle Hélène (Betty Beckers) keeps playing the same song incessantly on the piano? Why is everyone a vegetarian?

Trapped for her first two months and unable to take any calls, Martine soon learns the routines of the patients. Nicole (Charlotte De Turckheim) is on the same plan, waiting for the time she can see her boyfriend. But before that, they have to take care of the strange people here, including the always knitting, revolution spewing Jules (Michel Debrane), the unparalyzed wheelchair unbound Léon (Jean Ludow), the huggable and always hugging Pascal (Georges Lucas) and so many more, babbling about how life used to be so much better as they live out their dying days. There's also the custodian, Flavien (Michel Flavius), who occasionally whips the old people when he isn't bothering the girls.

Why two months? That's how long the residents make a body last and they're all hundreds of years old. As a nurse is due to go home, they take her from her bed, slice her throat and start to devour her body. Also: There's a serial killer on the loose.

As good as this is, the ending is a let-down. The old people get sloppy after so many years of being ideal killers and eaters of people. Why? And just why - spoiler - get rid of Martine at the close like that? I'm all for a downer ending, but this is pointless after we've loved her for an entire movie. Otherwise, I really enjoyed it!

I watched this on basic cable at my parent's house with my brother once and I was so shocked that the Coreys would be in an erotic thriller. Since then, I have watched so many giallo movies and am even more shocked that two of America's teen idols - fallen on rough times, mind you - are basically in a movie that seems with a little more sleaze and perhaps a prog rock soundtrack could be giallo.

Made for HBO and eventually released on VHS, this film was directed by Brenton Spencer (who ran camera on First Blood Part II, Friday the 13th Part VII, episodes of SCTV and Blue Monkey) and written by Robert C. Cooper (who produced, wrote and directed many episodes of the Stargate TV universe), Blown Away centers around Megan Bower (Nicole Eggert), whose life is tragedy-ridden. Her mother died in a car accident and she's nearly killed by a wild horse before being saved by Rich Gardner (Corey Haim). That night, she invites him to her home for a party and into her bed, but as her father Cy (Jean LeClerc) is his boss, he runs as soon as the rich old man gets home.

His girlfriend Darla (Kathleen Robertson) finds out and dumps him, which allows him to date Megan until her father disapproves. Rich goes to his brother Wes (Corey Feldman) for advice, who tells him to win her back. This includes fighting a man who she pays off and starts making out with and getting in another fight at a bar with Darla, all before the next day, when Rich catches Wes in bed with Darla. Meanwhile, Megan asks Rich to kill her father as revenge for killing her mother.

The next day, Darla dies in a horse accident - these horses in this town! - and Cy supposedly beats Megan into oblivion. This causes Rich to go all in on the plan, which is to put a bomb on Cy's bike. He watches as the old man is blown off his bike and off a cliff, but as he falls, he tells him that he didn't kill his wife. Rich is now the prime suspect for Detective Anderson (Gary Farmer) and he refuses to rat out his lover. As for Wes, well, he's angry that his brother killed Cy and not their abusive father.

You know where this is going. Megan and Wes have always been together, but she's only for herself, so she kills Wes and almost kills Rich before the cops show up and do what cops do and that's shoot to kill.

This is the movie for girls who grew up on the Coreys and want to see them bone. They rented this in the days before online porn and Netflix and chill, threw on the rental while their boyfriends said it was dumb and then realized that they could get away with seeing Nicole Eggert nude and everyone was as happy as fumbling teenage sex can make you pleased.

It's like a Lifetime movie except you get to see the bare asses of both Coreys. You may watch this and wonder why guys would kill for Nicole Eggert and as someone who has written many essays and done the homework and cleaned the houses and been there in bad times for women who had no interest in me yet were attractive in my past, I will tell you that none of those girls were Nicole Eggert in a quasi-giallo so yes, I would have blown her dad up real good no questions asked, no quarter given. This is why I was a dopey fat teenage in Western Pennsylvania and not a 1980s star in a Canadian direct to cable erotic thriller.

Also: If you want to see Corey Feldman do his dancing moves and then get shot with squibs going wild, this is the movie for you.

Billy DeLuca (Bill Paxton) has just finished two years in jail. He goes right back to crime, getting his brother Virgil (Brad Dourif) to help him get revenge on the ice cream company that caught him stealing from the company funds. If he gets to kill the guy who caught him, Earl Byrd (Michael Lerner), and manager Ms. Grafungar (Lainie Kazan) even better.

"Chop 'em to the left! Chop 'em to the right! Chop 'em every chance you get! Fright, fright, fright! All right, creeps. It's fourth and ghoul. They're probably expecting us to run a ghost pattern, so let's run a scream pass instead. Of course, I could pull out a few other surprises from my playbook, like tonight's tale. It's about a couple of brothers who are planning a little high scaring of their own, in a nasty bit of offense I call: "People Who Live in Brass Hearses.""

Billy loves his brother, but he has such a limited intelligence that he can't stop yelling at him. Imagine how tense things get when - spoilers! - it turns out that Earl also has a brother, a much evil and conniving person than anyone else, and he's fused to the ice cream man for life and has been stealing even more than Billy.

Directed by Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) and written by Crypt vet Scott Nimerfro, this has a great cast and a gruesome bad guy. Well, nearly everyone is the bad guy. You know what I'm trying to write.

It's based on "People Who Live in Brass Hearses" from Vault of Horror #27. Written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Jack Davis, this tale is about Mr. Byrd, a strange old undertaker who has a twin brother. That's the only thing the story has in common with the TV show.

Has my love for bootleg mummy movies gone too far?

Rameses Karis (Sal Longo) is definitely one of those guys who would be in a camera club in the 1950s, paying gorgeous women to take photos while he's surrounded by other socially awkward men. Yet it's 1993, so he is able to invite all manner of models to his house where he takes perverted snaps of them and then uses their bodies and blood to fuel the mummy (Dave Castiglione) that is sleeping the sleep of death in his basement. Or, in his words, "I need virgin's blood to revive the ancient warriors and put Egypt back on the map." That's why he's paying girls of loose morals to come over and strip down for him and his camera.

There's no nudity, which makes this feel even pervier - the True Detective magazine effect that I have mentioned before - and it's the same thing over and over (and over), as the cameraman takes photos, spies on the women undressed, sends in the mummy, they faint and then they kill the woman and drain her blood. Repetition is a major part of comedy but it is even more a major element of a fetish, even one where someone wants to see women faint and get their blood drank by a bandage-wrapped undead Egyptian.

This was released by I. D. S. Productions/WAVE Productions, and yes that last company should let you know that this is totally non-porn porn. I both want to meet and don't wish to ever know the person who jerks off to this and there's no way I'm shaking their hand or even fist bumping them to say hello.

The women include Marlene (Michelle Caporaletti, Hung Jury), Marilyn (Cristie Clark, Curse of the Swamp Creature 2), Susan (Terri Lewandowski, Wayne's mother in Santa Claws) and Dawn (Dawn Lewis).

Rameses made the mistake of killing Kris (Amanda Madison, Red Lips), so her twin sister Jean (also played by Amanda Madison) hunts him down. She's nearly killed by a mummy before a policewoman (Clancy McCauley, The Kind of Meat That You Can't Buy at the Store) and Jay (Aven Warren, who did makeup for many movies like this) shoot the shutterbug sadist and pours Egyptian water on the mummy. Roll the rasterized credits.

I'm not going to say that this was good but it's definitely a movie that I can watch and get a vibe out of. It's just drone, the same thing over and over, a mummy looking like he got all his makeup at Spencer's at best and lots of bad photo sessions and alright blood drinking. It's calming, as I'm anxious now trying to get a job and I'm not telling anyone in my interviews that to find my zen I sit and watch films where dime store wrapped cadavers munch down on vacant eyed women and yes, some dudes jerk off to it, but I use it to get high.

I mean, I want a job.

Sergeant Dragon Ma (Jackie Chan) is back and has been sent on a new mission, far from the pirates who have pledged to kill him at the end of the first film. He soon learns that his new assignment, Sai Wan Police Station, is full of corrupt police like Superintendent Chun (Lam Wai), all except for one officer. He takes that man, Ho (Kenny Ho) and three of his friends to try to arrest gangster Tiger "Awesome Wolf" Au (Chan Wai-man) and is nearly killed. He's saved at the last moment by his friends in the Marine Police.

Once he gets through that challenge, Dragon gets set up for a jewel robbery and must work with revolutionaries to clear his name. If that's not enough, he also has three incredibly attractive women to deal with in Yesan (Maggie Cheung), Miss Pak (Rosamund Kwan) and Carina (Carina Lau), who gets kidnapped by the same criminals who have tried to ruin Dragon Ma's reputation.

Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung only have cameos in this, allowing Chan to take center stage. Who knew that a martial arts movie could pay tribute to the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton while changing the way fights would be filmed? Instead of lining the bad guys up one at a time, Chan battles numerous opponents at once.

By the end, even the pirates love Jackie. This movie is worth watching so many times as the sets, costumes and action has to be savored.

Nick Box claims that this is a re-imagining of his earlier film Elevator to Insanity, which itself was a spoof of elevated horror, and that this makes fun of both that genre and Amityville movies.

A photographer (Gus Capucci) gets on an elevator that he rides for the entire movie.

That's it.

Sure, sometimes a woman (Bryonny) gets on and gets off, but they never interact. There's also a ballet dancer who he sees when the doors open and also a lady that screams at him for six minutes. That's right. Six entire minutes of one scream.

Sometimes, he escapes for a moment, then hears a whole bunch of phrases like "Believe in yourself" before he's back on the elevator, the woman gets on and off, and we watch him stand there for around forty minutes.

Finally, he gets to the floor he should be on and takes photos of corpses, just in time for a jump scare. Someone else gets in the elevator as the movie comes to a close.

This has a $3000 budget and I have no idea where it went. It's like with each movie, Nick Box is trying to make the worst Amityville sequel, which is impossible because you can't go lower than zero, right?

I'm waiting for a good Amityville and this supposedly makes fun of movies that just put that name before another movie and yet, it does the same thing. When I'm dying, I'll remember this movie and hate that I wasted moments of my life watching it.

The second of The Inner Sanctum Mysteries series of movies, these Universal B movies took two weeks and $150,000 to make. Director Reginald LeBorg was given the script on a Friday and had until the following Monday to start making this. It was only his third film but I think he did quite well, despite having to use the prefab sets and day players.

While he's on vacation in the South Seas, Professor of Ethnology Norman Reed (Lon Chaney Jr.) meets a jungle white goddess named Paula (Anne Gwynne, one of the first scream queens and the grandmother of Chris Pine) who he first encountered when she was just a child and her father was a professor of archaeology who worked with Reed. Going by the actual ages, she's 26 and Chaney is 38, so it doesn't seem all that far apart (I mean, the same age difference between my wife and me) but physically, she seems like a child compared to Chaney. It's also strange that he knew her when he was just a little girl and now he's in love with her, taking her out of the jungle and back to Monroe College as his wife.

This upsets Ilona Carr (Evelyn Ankers, who was often cast opposite of Chaney), who always saw Reed as hers. Professor Reed is one of those absent minded men who surrounds himself with younger women, like his new secretary Margaret (lovely Lois Collier), who fall in love with him and are decimated when he actually does show attention to another woman. It's not like he's using his status and authority to take advantage of them, but in today's world, it still seems weird.

When Prof. Millard Sawtelle (Ralph Morgan) is discovered using a student's essay as the major part of his most famous work, he shoots himself. This angers his wife Evelyn (Elizabeth Russell), who thinks that Paula is pushing her husband to take over the department. As for the couple, he's forced her to give up all of her voodoo, so she feels like she can no longer protect the man she loves.

This is quite important as Melissa's jealous boyfriend David (Phil Brown, who would many years later be Uncle Owen Lars) comes to kill him and ends up shooting himself, which makes it look like Reed has killed the boy who has come to punish him for touching his pure lady.

Ankers and Gwynne were best friends, so when the normally kind Ankers had to act mean, the entire cast and crew would start to laugh.

Written by Brenda Weisberg and Scott Daring, this is based on the Fritz Leiber story Conjure Witch, which was remade as Burn, Witch, Burn!

This is also part of the Universal Shock Theater package of 52 films. These movies made up much of the library of channels that had horror host programs, much like Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater.

David L. Hewitt was an illusionist in the Dr. Jeckyll's Strange Show who wanted to be in the movies. He wrote to Forrest Ackerman and gave him his script Journey into the Unknown, which became The Time Travelers. After that, he directed the 3D short Monsters Crash the Pajama Party, which played with spook shows, as well as Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors, Hell's Chosen Few, The Mighty Gorga, The Girls from Thunder Strip and The Tormentors. He's also Gorga in that giant monkey movie.

When this movie was released by Regal Video in the 80s, it was retitled Alien Massacre and it could have either been this movie or Dr. Terror's Gallery of Horrors in the tape you got. That movie has no aliens. Neither has a massacre. But the box art and tagline, "Blood flows like water," got plenty of people to watch whatever it was.

Let's head to the future of 1975, where Steve (Roger Gentry), Doc (Vic McGee), Charlie (Jerry Rannow) and Dorothy (Eve Bernhardt) have barely made it to Mars alive. After crash landing, they battle monsters in the canals of the red planet, avoid a volcano and get caught in a dust storm, all of which makes Charlie lose it and start shooting his rifle at everything.

They find a stone road that leads them to a city that is empty other than a dead Martian and a silver globe which mentally directs them to fixing what has been broken and reveals the face of John Carradine, who tells them how Mars once ruled the universe before coming back to their home to ponder the next stage of evolution. Then, the city goes back into the planet.

Obviously, this is The Wizard of Oz in space, just like Zardoz would kind of be a decade later. That movie wasn't made for $33,000 with a Don Post mask and it was not also edited for spook show audiences. It also rips off plenty of sound design from Forbidden Planet.

John Carradine gets to read a long speech, intoning ""Space is vast, time is long. It was then that we impaled time on an axis. Eternal stillness, transgression upon time. Time tugs us to our yesterdays almost as strong as all the unborn tomorrows that stretch through all eternity." That's really all it took to make me love this movie.

Peter Cushing was originally cast in this as Julian Fuchs and completed one day's filming before leaving when he learned that his beloved wife Helen was dying from emphysema. He was replaced by Andrew Keir and this was one of the many troubled items of this production, as just five weeks later, director Seth Holt had a heart attack and collapsed into cast member Aubrey Morris's arms before dying. Michael Carreras finished the filming, but Holt was rewriting the movie almost every day, as he was unhappy with Christopher Wicking's script, which was based on The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker. So is The Awakening and this is way more interesting than that.

Professor Fuchs (Keir) has found the tomb of Tera (Valerie Leon), a queen so unholy that she was drugged into suspended animation by priests who buried her with her relics, guarded so that she would never rise again. Fuchs becomes obsessed and creates a new temple under his home, where he brings her body. He also gives his daughter Margaret (also Leon) Tera's ring and tells her to always wear it. Soon, the powers of the queen tempt the young lady into acts of evil.

Corbeck (James Villiers), her father's rival, starts to use her to gather all of the evil treasures. When they are taken, the owners die one by one. Finally, they are used to bring Tera back from the dead, only to have Fuchs and Margaret try to stop her. They kill Corbeck, but the queen has risen, killing Fuchs and battling with Margaret as the temple falls all around them.

Here's the most incredible part: in the hospital, we see a woman wrapped in bandages, the first mummy of the film. Who is it? We're never told as she opens her eyes. It could be either woman and sadly, we never got a sequel to this. I wish we had, as despite all of the issues, it has a gorgeous look to it and I loved seeing Leon in a leading role.

This played double features with Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. I can't even imagine that!

Korean shaman Lee Hwa-rim (Kim Go-eun) and her assistant Yoon Bong-gil (Lee Do-hyun) have been hired by a wealthy Korean American family to determine why their infant son is sick. It turns out to be something called the Grave's Call, as an ancestor wants something from them. They take the family's eldest member, Park Ji-Yong (Kim Jae-cheol) to the grave of his grandfather, along with a Feng Shui expert named Kim Sang-deok (Choi Min-sik) and Yeong-geun (Yoo Hae-jin), a funeral home owner, to see what they can do to stop the curse.

Kim Sang-deok is wary and doesn't trust the entitled family and their plans to excavate the grave without cremating what is left. Hwa-rim and Bong-gil perform their ritual and a human headed snake appears. As you can figure out, this is a bad omen. Then, a custodian opens the coffin, hoping to find treasure. This unleashes the angry spirit of the grandfather, who worked with the Japanese during War World II and was never given a proper burial. He kills Park Ji-Yong and several members of his family before Sang-deok cremates the grave and saves the child.

Months later, Yeong-geun and Sang-deok meet with the gravedigger who killed the snake, who has been upset since. The grandfather's grave site was sold to him by a man named Gisune, who ends up being a Japanese shaman named Murayama Junji, who has been killing local priests and animals. Hwa-rim and Bong-gi are attacked by this samurai ghost, which becomes a ball of flame before possessing Bong-gil.

Then we learn the major plan of the Japanese, which was to leave iron spikes throughout Korean, enabling them to destroy the magic energy of the country and claim it. Gisune has been protecting his spike, which is a headless samurai, inside the grave of the grandfather. The four gather to remove this magic from their homeland and end the reign of the Japanese ghost.

Korean shamanism is something I haven't seen much of in movies and director and writer Jang Jae-hyun has created something really wild here. It's a bit long for those without much attention, but it's also nearly two movies worth of story as you can consider the reveal of the Japanese magic to almost be a sequel.

The director may be a Christian deacon, but he had his actors study real rituals from shamans in order to accurately portray them. There was even a shaman on set.

Yet this is about more than magic. The four heroes are named for the martyrs of South Korea who fought against Japanese colonial rule. There are some big ideas in this and it's worth taking the time to absorb it.

Charles Marquis Warren directed this and the film it played double features with, The Unknown Terror, before creating Rawhide and adapting Gunsmoke to television. It was written by Catherine Turney and was based on her book The Other One.

Dick (Arthur Franz) and Mandy Anthony (Peggie Castle) are on vacation with her sister Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt) when Mandy passes out and loses the child in her womb. She also refers to Dick as Dickens and will only answer to Felicia, the name of the dead wife that Dick never told his second wife about losing.

She demands to be taken to her parents, Mr. Bradley (James Bell) and Mrs. Bradley (Helen Wallace). Dick tells Kate that the Bradley women were all evil. So evil that when Mr. Bradley says, "God will punish you for this," Mrs. Bradley answers "You believe in your God. I'll believe in mine."

Felicia then tries to murder Kate, who only wakes up when she hears the voice of her sister, and then kills Copper the dog, who hated her and adored the new wife. Kate decides that she needs to know more and follows Nancy Cordell (Marianne Stewart) to the coven run by Maître Victor Renall (Otto Reichow), who was in love with Felicia and is angry that her mother did magic without him.

Dick's friend John Mitchell (Don Haggerty) is able to save Kate through his love for her when she's attacked by a spell created by Mrs. Bradley. He feels like he causes Felicia's death, as she said that she would kill herself if he didn't make love to her. She backed up and fell off a cliff, but now she's in Mandy's body and runs to Renall after her mother kills her father and Renall's spell kills Mrs. Bradley.

You know who finally stops the devil cult leader? Nancy. She was in love with him and even in death, he loved Felicia. She shoots him and Mandy comes back to her body. Her sister tells Dick that her sister should never learn the truth, which is kind of not women staying together.

The sales guide for this movie had this advice: "Have a woman dressed as a zombi wander about the streets near the theatre bearing a sign with the picture's title, such as: I am Back from the Dead. Come and see me at (name of theatre)."

I loved this, as you can imagine, because it's so rich in its occult wackiness. In 1957 there were devil cults in the suburbs and people's moms were in them. It's also terrifying because I do not want my ex wife showing up in my wife's body.