Reviews

"Welcome aboard, fright-seers! Looking for a little hell-iday fun? You've come to the right place! We specialize in all sorts of hackage tours! (cackles) So what will it be? A few days in a scream park? Or would you like me to book you into a nice, quiet dead and breakfast? Or perhaps you'd like to go treasure haunting like my friend, Red. He wants to steal a priceless black pearl in a tasteless tidbit I call: "Dead Wait.""

Red Buckley (James Remar) and his partner Charlie (Paul Anthony Weber) have been planning to steal a black pearl from plantation owner Emilie Duvall (John Rhys-Davies). There's not much time, because the island where Duvall lives is about to be taken over by a revolution. So Red kills Charlies as they argue and decides to get the pearl for himself. He then meets Emilie at a bar - he's pretty sickly, as he's filled with water worms that have carved tunnels through his skin - along with the man's much younger wife Kathrine (Vanity), who seduces the crook and they decide to kill her husband and split the pearl. The problem? Emilie has a worker named Peligre (Whoopi Goldberg) who does voodoo and plans on taking care of Red.

If you're wondering how gross this one is going to get, well, Emilie has swallowed the pearl and Red has to dig through his worm-filled corpse to find it. That's what you get when Tobe Hooper directs! But seriously, this is an intriguing episode.

It was written by Gilbert Adler, who also wrote Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice and directed and wrote Bordello of Blood.

There's also a scene afterward where the Crypt Keeper has a talk show and interviews Whoopi.

Crypt Keeper: Oooh. Talk about being headed off at the pass. We've got a guest, kiddies. Whoopi! It's a pleasure to meet you. I want you to know that I loved your movie The Killer Purple.

Whoopi: That's Color Purple, Crypt Keeper.

Crypt Keeper: Oh! Right. Well, um, congratulations on winning that Academy A-weird.

Whoopi: Well thanks, but it's actually called an Academy Award.

Crypt Keeper: Whatever. Look, it's a pleasure to meet a big star like you.

Whoopi: Now, you're a pretty big star. I mean, I'd love it if you would be in my next film.

Crypt Keeper: Really?

Whoopi: (pulls out a machete) Yeah, it's just a bit part.

Crypt Keeper: I'm flattered!

Whoopi: But you don't know what bit I want.

Crypt Keeper: Well, as long as I don't wind up on the cutting room floor!

Whoopi: (Points the machete at him) Okay!

Crypt Keeper: (Gasps)

Whoopi: (Smiles at the camera)

This episode is based on "Dead Wait!" from Vault of Horror #23. It was written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Jack Davis.

Also known as The Rejuvenator, this forgotten film was inspired by The Wasp Woman. It was directed and co-written by Brian Thomas Jones, along with Simon Nuchtern (who directed the new sequences for Snuff as well as Savage Dawn and Silent Madness). Steven Mackler, who produced this film, had met Jones after he was impressed with the director's short movie Overexposed. Mackler had a deal with Sony Video Software to make three movies and sent him the script for a movie called Skin, which was writtem by Nuchtern.

In an interview with Matty Budrewicz, Jones said, "I read the script and, when I finished, I said to myself "I can't direct this script, but I know how to make this movie. It's Bride of Frankenstein meets Sunset Boulevard! I pitched the concept to Mackler and he let me rewrite it."

As for his changes, he stated, I've never really been a true fan of blood, guts and gore so when I was writing I tried to weave in all these themes of vanity, addiction, obsession and greed. I really wanted to make it my own movie-something really heartfelt and dramatic."

Ruth Warren (Jessica Dublin, who was in Trinity Is Still My Name; So Sweet, So Dead; Fragment of Fear; Sex of the Witch; Death Steps In the Dark and much later Troma's War) is a rich actress who has aged out of leading roles. Dr. Gregory Ashton (John MacKay) has been working for her in an attempt to make her young again. He's running out of time, as she's grown frustrated by a lack of results.

His new formula needs testing but she takes it, amazed at the results and becomes a younger woman by the name of Elizabeth Warren (Vivian Lanko). What she didn't know before she took the formula is that it was based on parts of human brains and she must constantly be given those pieces of mind, so to speak, or she will transform into a monster that is chronically hungry for brains, more brains.

It's never been released on DVD or blu ray, which is shocking when you think that it's exactly the kind of movie that Vinegar Syndrome puts out. It's not just a cheap direct to video film, though. It is filled with heart and characters that you start to care about along with sequences filled with goopy FX that stand up to anything else from the late 80s.

Plus, it has an appearance by the Poison Dollys, an all-female heavy metal band from Long Island. Members Gina Stile, Gail Kenny, Mef Manning and Roulette started as a cover band but added originals as time went on and worked with Kip Winger. One of their songs, "Love Is for Suckers" was recorded by Twisted Sister.

Gina Stile left Poison Dollys to form Envt with her sister Rhonni and was in Vixen from 1997 to 2001. She also played in Ban Animals, a Heart tribute band along with Marco Mendoza, Yngwie Malmsteen drummer John Macaluso and Great White bassist Teddy Cook.

How did I never see Rejuvenatrix until now?

Jones looks back on this movie with some sadness: "I've always been quite disappointed it never got the exposure or recognition I feel it deserved, even though it has developed its fans from those lucky enough to have seen it. The reviews and the fact it did OK on video... I probably should let it go but I'll always hold a grudge for that SVS guy who didn't understand the genre or its fandom and realize the potential of what he had."

Ghosts began production in 1993 under the title Is It Scary? With the director Mick Garris and was supposed to play before Addams Family Values. For a time, it was the longest music video ever - Pharrell Williams' "Happy" is longer now - and is still the most expensive at $15 million. That's because it was all paid for by its star, Michael Jackson.

A lot of that money is because Jackson backed out of the original plan. Garris went to film The Shining miniseries and Stan Winston, who did the makeup and special effects, took over.

Unlike Thriller and Captain EO, two of Jackson's long and expensive videos that were seen by millions and can still be watched in some places today, Ghosts has disappeared after playing before Thinner.

In a small town, The Maestro (Michael Jackson) loves to scare kids - Mos Def is one of them - and perform magic tricks. The town's mayor comes to kick him out of town, saying, "He's a weirdo. There's no place in this town for weirdoes." If this feels like how the public was treated Michael Jackson in 1996, it's no accident.

Also: the mayor - as well as the ghoul version of the mayor and two other characters, Superghoul and a skeleton - is played by Jackson.

The Maestro challenges the mayor to a scaring contest and the first to show fear must leave town. He brings his entire family of ghosts to dance with him, then possesses the mayor. After that, the Maestro says that he will leave town, but falls to dust and then rises as the Superghoul. This makes the mayor so upset that he dives out a window, allowing the Maestro to remain.

I do have to say, a thing lost about Jackson after all his life's controversies is just how good his music is. This features several I hadn't heard before-"2 Bad," "Is It Scary" and "Ghosts" from HIStory and Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix - and they're really amazing. The dancing is great, too, as are the effects, if somewhat dated.

Of course, this was made after the first time that Jackson escaped child molestation charges and this feels like, well, that trial. Except it gets supernatural.

Written by Jackson, Garris, Winston and Stephen King, this has one jaw dropping moment, when Jackson becomes a dancing skeleton and escapes his mortal form. I've always wondered if he wished that he could do that in reality.

Nathan Rabin explained the end of this way better than I can and his words prove why he inspired me to write about movies: "Ghosts has a happy ending: The common folk and especially their adorable children welcome Maestro back into the fold and embrace him for being a showman and an eccentric with a straight line to the spirit world. In the real world, alas, Michael Jackson wasn't as lucky. He had to die young and mysteriously to rehabilitate his terminally tattered image."

Director and writer Roland Emmerich said, "I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth's crust displacement theory in Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods."

In that book, Hancock states that a civilization near Antarctica left "fingerprints" in Ancient Egypt and other civilizations, such as the Olmecs Aztecs and Mayans. Hancock believed that in 10,450 BC, a major pole shift took place that brought Antarctica closer to the South Pole, causing global destruction and sinking Atlantis. This is based on the Charles Hapgood's theory of Earth Crustal Displacement, which has no geological experts supporting it, as the model that they follow is plate tectonics. There's also a strange - well, isn't there always - strange racist bent, as there is no way - according to the author - that "jungle-dwelling Indians" could not possibly come up with a sophisticated calendar and it had to be an master white race who taught them.

That same book also inspired Emerich's 10,000 B. C.

This starts in 2009, as geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and astrophysicist Satnam Tsurutani (Jimi Mistry) determine that a new type of neutrino from a solar flare is heating the Earth's core. Adrian alerts White House Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) and President Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), who start a plan to save humanity without warning them and causing a panic.

By the next year, forty-six nations are building nine arks in the highest point of the world, in the Himalayas, to be able to survive a new flood. Any major artifacts are stored in secure locations while the people in the mountains start to work on the arks, like Tenzin (Chin Han), the brother of Buddhist monk Nima (Osric Chau). The money comes from rich people, like Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Buric), a rich Russian who plans on saving his girlfriend Tamara Jikan (Beatrice Rosen) and his twin sons Alec and Oleg (Alexandre Haussmann and Philippe Haussmann).

Former science fiction writer Jackson Curtis (Jon Cusack) works for Yuri as his chauffeur. The call to board the arks comes in, just as Jackson returns from a vacation with his kids Noah and Lilly (Liam James and Morgan Lily), getting them back to his ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and her new husband, Gordon (Tom McCarthy). Having met conspiracy radio talk show host Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson) on the vacation - as well as Adrian, who has read his book - Jackson starts to believe that the Earth is doomed, a fact that is told to him by the Russian twins.

Jackson gets to his family with no time to spare as all of California falls to an earthquake as he races to the airport and Gordon gets the plane off the ground as the runway cracks and falls. Trying to get Charlie to find out where the arks are, he decides to stay and watch Yellowstone's supervolcano, which kills him.

Nearly all of the rest of the world has died other than Carl, Adrian, First Daughter Laura (Thadiwe Newton), the Russians and Jackson and family, who all make it to the Himalayans and only Yuri and his boys have tickets, stranding Tamara, who is taken in by Jackson and family, who meet Nima, and all of their families try to break into one of the arks.

Nearly everyone after everyone died dies - I have a major problem with Tamara dying as she's treated as an afterthought throughout the whole movie and her sacrifice is treated as nothing, with no one sad - and Jackson and his ex-wife reconcile and Adrian and Laura get together as the arks make it safely away from the flood.

There's an alternate ending where Adrian's father Harry (Blu Mankuma) and his jazz singer partner Tony Delgado (George Segal) survive. It's pretty much a return to 70s disaster movies and I like that.

How it was marketed was controversial. There was a website for the Institute for Human Continuity, along with Jackson's book Farewell Atlantis and radio broadcasts from Charlie Frost, as well as his site This Is the End. Visitors could also register to get a ticket on the arks. NASA's David Morrison was upset by this, as he got a thousand or more letters from worried people thinking the site was real. He said, "I've even had cases of teenagers writing to me saying they are contemplating suicide because they don't want to see the world end. I think when you lie on the internet and scare children to make a buck, that is ethically wrong."

It also had a new commercial placement that had never been done before. Called a roadblock campaign, it showed the thrilling two-minute escape from the earthquake scene - it's the best part of the movie - on 450 American commercial television networks, local English-language and Spanish-language stations and 89 cable outlets at some point between 10:50 and 11:00 P. M. 90% of all households watching ad-supported TV - 110 million viewers - saw the commercial.

The whole idea of 2012 being the end of the world is supposed to have come from the Mayan calendar. But nope. They found a series of astronomical alignments that would happen in 2012, which only happened every 640,000 years, as the sun would line up with the center of the Milky Way on the day it would be lowest on the horizon. Versions of this alignment happen every December, to be honest. And while the Mayan Calendar ended in 2012, they didn't see it as the end of the world.

Emmerich claimed, "I said to myself that I'll do one more disaster movie, but it has to end all disaster movies. So I packed everything in." Then he made Independence Day: Resurgence and Moonfall.

In 1954, Walt Disney Productions bought the film rights to thirteen of L. Frank Baum's Oz books - all of the remaining books other than The Wizard of Oz - for their TV series Disneyland. The Rainbow Road to Oz was planned and it would have featured many of the Mouseketeers, including Darlene Gillespie as Dorothy Gale, Annette Funicello as Princess Ozma, Bobby Burgess as the Scarecrow, Jimmie Dodd as the Cowardly Lion, Doreen Tracey as the Patchwork Girl, Tommy Kirk as the son of the Wicked Witch of the West and Kevin Corcoran.

The songs "Patches,""The Oz-Kan Hop" and "The Rainbow Road to Oz" were previewed on September 11, 1957 on the Disneyland show's fourth anniversary. A few months later, the project was cancelled, either because Walt Disney was unhappy with it, the actors couldn't carry a real movie or the budget had grown too large. The rest of the songs would finally be part of the 1969 Disneyland Records album The Cowardly Lion of Oz.

Roger Ebert called William Murch "the most respected film editor and sound designer in the modern cinema." After working on the sound of movies such as THX-1138, The Godfather and American Graffiti, he edited The Conversation and Apocalypse Now (he also won an Oscar for the sound mix) before suggesting that Disney make their Oz movie in 1980. As they were about to lose the rights, Disney took him up on his offer and selected him to direct and write along with Gill Dennis.

It would be the only movie Murch ever directed (he did do one episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "The General") as he would go back to editing, working on The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the restoration of Touch of Evil. He also won Oscars for sound and editing for The English Patient and editing for Julia, Cold Mountain, The Godfather Part III and Ghost.

Murch based this movie on the second and third Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, along with elements of the book and stage play of Tik-Tok of Oz. He also used parts of the book Wisconsin Death Trip - yes, this gets that dark - and went as far away from the original movie as he could. The main goal was to be more faithful to the books than the 1939 movie which is why this is a cult film and not a success.

It was not an easy film to make.

Filming was to be shot 75% on location but a switch in Disney leadership led to the budget - which had already gone from $20 to $28 million - pushed the movie to Elstree Studios and the Salisbury Plain, where temperatures were so cold that lead actress Fairuza Balk would cry from the cold but never complain.

At some point, original cameraman Freddie Francis quit, frustrated by working with Murch.

A few weeks later, Disney was unhappy with the footage they had seen and fired Murch, who said that he felt "...what the soul feels after it's left the body after a car accident - pain but tremendous relief."

Then his friends Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola spoke up for him and informed Disney that they wouldn't be all that friendly with the studio if Murch couldn't finish his movie. Lucas also promised that he would replace Murch if the director had any problems.

Dorothy Gale (Balk was picked from thousands of actresses and said even getting to audition for the movie was a huge deal) has been taken to a sanitarium by Aunt Em (Piper Laurie, yes, Carrie's mother was Auntie Em) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) because she won't stop talking about Oz. If you had been to Oz and it was in color and you lived in black and white and had friends like a talking lion and fought winged monkeys, would you ever stop? But to stop her from her delusions - or reality, as it were - Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson, Merlin from Excalibur) and Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh, the co-creator of Upstairs, Downstairs) plan on sending Dorothy to electroshock therapy.

This movie already upset me as Toto runs out to join Dorothy as she's taken away and she silently mouths the words "Go home. Please go home." He howls in abject sadness.

Lightning takes out the power and a young girl helps Dorothy escape down a river, where Dorothy floats away on a chicken coop. She wakes up in Oz with a chicken named Billina (Mak Wilson, voiced by Denise Bryer) who can talk. They learn that the Yellow Brick Road has been destroyed and all her friends the Tin Man (Deep Roy!), the Cowardly Lion (Johann Kraus from Hellboy II: The Golden Army) have been transformed into stone. She's attacked by The Wheelers, but saved by Tik-Tok (played by Michael Sundin and Tim Rose - who was Howard the Duck and Admiral Ackbar - as well as being voiced by Sean Barrett, whose voice is also in Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal) - a mechanical man - who told her that the King of Oz, the Scarecrow, had told him to wait for her.

They go to Princess Mombi (also Marsh), who collects peoples' heads. They barely escape and discover that the Nome King (also Williamson) has taken the Scarecrow (Justin Case). As they ran through the Deadly Desert, they meet a new friend in Jack Pumpkinhead (played by Stewart Harvey-Wilson, voiced by Brian Henson) and the Gump (played by Stephen Norrington - the directed of Death Machine, Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and voiced by Lyle Conway, who designed the Blob effects in The Blob), whose head is used to fly them to the mountain of the Nome King, where the big bad transforms everyone but Dorothy into ornaments. She saves everyone by guessing that they are all the green ornaments, then gets her ruby slippers back - MGM owned the rights to those and they aren't in the original story, but Disney wanted them and paid huge for it - and wishes everyone back to Oz.

Everyone from Oz wants Dorothy to rule their world, but she wants to go home. She meets the rightful ruler, Princess Ozma (Emma Ridley), who was the girl who helped her to escape. As she goes back to Oz, Auntie Em tells her that the mental ward burned down and only Worley died while his nurse was jailed for their horrible operations on young women. When she gets to her room, she can see Ozma and Billina in her mirror.

Harlan Ellison said, ""It ain't Judy Garland. It ain't hip-hop. But it's in the tradition of the original Oz books."

Neil Gaiman, years before he wrote Sandman, reviewed the movie for Imagine magazine and said that it was "Terrifying and visionary, funny and exciting, Return to Oz is one of the very best fantasy films I've ever seen."

Other critics - and audiences - were not as kind. It's a movie that none were prepared for, thinking it would have the same wonder as the movie they had seen on TV so many times without knowing the original stories.

The film wasn't a financial success. But it was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Academy Award but lost to Cocoon. The nomination was given to Claymation master Will Vinton, Ian Wingrove, Zoran Perisic and Michael Lloyd.

Pen Densham had a cool path to directing. He left school at fifteen to be a photographer and shoot The Rolling Stones, then moved from England to Canada to direct commercials and documentaries with Marshall McLuhan. He then formed found Insight Productions with John Watson and earned 70 international award for their movies, including two Oscar nominations. One of the movies they made, If Wishes Were Horses, was called "The best film of any length shown on Canadian TV."

It brought him to the attention of Norman Jewison who got him to Hollywood. He and Watson started Trilogy Entertainment Group, serving as creative consultants on movies like Footloose and Rocky II before becoming big successes with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. They also produced the new versions of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, as well as Poltergeist: The Legacy in the 1990s and 2000s.

He also directed two movies, The Zoo Gang and what we're here to talk about today, The Kiss.

Felice Dunbar (former model Joanna Pacula) and her sister Hillary (Pamela Collyer) are totally living the start of The Parent Trap. Felice is to live with her aunt (Céline Lomez) and Hillary with her father. As they take a train away from the Belgian Congo, her aunt - wearing a serpent medallion - attacks the young girl. The lights go out as she kisses her, blood coming from her mouth, and when they come back on, the aunt is a lifeless deformed body and the little girl is alone but has the talisman.

Years later, Hillary lives in America with her husband Jack (Nicholas Kilbertus) and her daughter Amy (Meredith Salenger). Her sister calls her in the hopes of meeting her family, but she refuses. She goes to a gun shop and while looking in the window, a car smashes her into the store, killing her.

Five months later, Felice - who works as a model - shows up in town and moves in. Next door neighbor Brenda Carson (Mimi Kuzyk) reacts to her as if she is a cat and becoming allergic. Amy hates her aunt immediately and after making fun of her with her friend Heather (Sabrina Boudot), her BFF is almost murdered when her necklace gets stuck in an escalator. This is absolutely my childhood trauma, so I'm glad I didn't see this until now.

Felice starts making moves on her sister's widower, while Amy confides to her boyfriend Terry O'Connell (Shawn Levy, who directed the Night at the Museum movies) about finding her friend's bloody sunglasses inside her aunt's room, as well as a serpent talisman. Terry follows her aunt to a hotel room where he watches her in the midst of a ritual. She transforms into a cat and nearly kills him. He barely gets away, only to be run over and his death made to look like a suicide. Amy then tells a priest who remembers Hillary telling him about her sister and how evil she was. He tries to run when she shows up and spontaneously combusts. How many powers does this werecat have? And how wild it is that when they do a DNA test on her, it shows that she is already dead?

Felice reveals that she must continue living - inside the blood - of Amy, trying to transform her into what she is. It takes Brenda the neighbor, Amy and her father - as well as garden shears, a propane tank and a swimming pool - to stop her.

This was written by Stephen Volk, who also was the writer of Gothic, The Guardian- that makes sense - and Ghostwatch.

Mama Sue Flay (Trinity The Tuck), Robin Banks (Heidi N Closet), Bella Da Boys (Crystal Methyd), and Olive Wood (Cara Melle) are four drag queens on tour that planned on playing at a famous club, The Bold Tuck, but have accidentally been booked at The Bold Buck, a biker club in the middle of nowhere.

It's a mistake that any of us could make, right?

They try to make the most of it, as the bartender Dusty (Neil Sandilands) pays them anyway and at least two people show up, probably the only other two LGBTQ+ people for miles, Jax (Donia Kash) and Steven (Gabriel Harry Meltz). As they start their act, Travis (Daniel Janks) starts screaming at them to get off the stage and in all the confusion, another local, Marv (Gustav Rossouw) starts to bite people. Yes, we're in Bat Country and the film seems like Slither, Feast, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, VFW and From Dusk till Dawn having a few drinks with To Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

In no way is that a bad thing, as this movie has style, great lighting, fun special effects and plenty of surprises to dish out.

It's a movie aware of vampire movie history as well as one that doesn't make the locals all into bigots and even gives Travis a redemption arc that he never would have had unless he met our heroines and fought vampires with them. The ladies also struggle against in-fighting and realize the love they have for one another.

Also: garlic bread and a sprinkler system make for some amazing weapons. You don't have to dress like Blade -- to call out a great discussion in this film -- to be a bad ass vampire killer.

I had a blast watching this. It feels like it needs a bigger audience than just a Tubi Original -- not a bad thing, I love these movies after all -- and it feels good to see drag queens unite a town and disrupt both vampires and those that are close minded. If only the real world could be the same.

18-year-old Helen (Carla Juri) wants her parents to get back together, has a different idea of hygiene than most girls (she loves all the fluids and smells of her body, even mucus, menstrual blood and earwax) and pushes the boundaries of what most of her friends want sexually, such as going to a brothel (to be fair, her friend Corinna (Marlen Kruse) has a boyfriend that asks her to, well, give him a Cleveland Steamer).

As she shaves herself too quickly, she's cut and has to go to the hospital where she falls in love with a nurse, Robin (Christoph Letkowski) who is quite shy and has never gotten over having his heart broken by another nurse that he works with.

Directed by David Wnendt, who co-wrote the screenplay with Claus Falkenberg, based on the book by Charlotte Roche, this has a heroine who dreams of the childhood that she once lived yet every memory is horrible, such as her jumping into her mother's arms and her mother moving and telling her not to trust anyone, as well as a father who has no interest in anyone.

Obviously that's why she began sleeping with as many people as possible at the age of fifteen - no judgement - and is looking for a world to be part of. That said, to get there, you have to get past a heroine who spends the beginning credit scene playing with her hemorrhoids and then tasting her finger. And despite all that, you start to feel for her, even if she only seemingly cares about herself and hope that she can get past the life that her parents and their selfishness has doomed her to walk.

Once available on the Catacomb of Creepshow fifty DVD set - along with a few other Visual Vengeance releases - Torment was directed by Steve Sessions, who also had Aberrations and Contagio released on Tubi by the label.

Laura (Suzi Lorraine) has just been discharged from a psychiatric hospital and her husband Ray (Tom Stedham) plans on taking her to their cottage to relax. She has problems, some of them unreal such as seeing dead bodies inside every garbage bag, and some real, which may include a killer clown who goes by the name of Dissecto (Lucien Eisenach).

Ray has stopped believing anything his wife says or sees, so when she claims that a sheriff (Ted Alderman) has stopped by looking for two missing Mormon missionaries (Jade Michael LaFont, Luc Bernier), he thinks it's all in her psychotic head. But oh no. A killer clown has both those men and we watch as he slowly kills them.

I wish that this movie had more of the is she crazy or being gaslit vibe, as it's given away way too soon that the clown is a real person. Yet Lorraine is so good in this that she transcends this issue and brings the film up, including some stalking scenes that are incredibly suspenseful in spite of the budget and how it makes the clown's costume look like it came from the Spirit store.

How weird is it that there are two killer clown movies with the same title? There's also a 2017 movie.

Chris Stokes and Marques Houston have combined to make almost a movie a month on Tubi. From You're Not Alone, in which the hero watches a masked and gloved killer murder his wife and then come back for his daughter to the mancrush gone bad in The Ex Obsession and three of The Stepmother films, they've laid claim to being the most prolific -- if not the best -- team making Tubi Originals.

Angela (Veronika Bozeman, who was in another Stokes film Still Here) is a CIA agent who loses her husband Jason (Chris Moss) to what she thinks is a heart attack. As she raises her son Jason Jr. (Jered Cheatham at age 12, King Cheatham at age 7) with the platonic support of her agency partner Byron (Lance Gross, the Sleepy Hollow TV show), she finally decides to leave the life behind. That is, until one of her toughest cases comes back and Dmitri Merciano (Charlie Weber), the man who actually killed her husband, many of her fellow agents and nearly murdered her when he discovered that she had been working undercover to get him.

Like so many Tubi Originals, this starts in the middle of the a story (in media res as a better reviewer would tell you) with Bob's Coffee Shop blowing up real good and nearly killing Angela. There are several big explosions in this, way bigger than you'd expect for the usual budget Stokes and Houston receive.

That explosion would be the second time the main bad guy kills someone she loves, as a bomb wipes out Byron the very day he decides to tell Angela how much he loves her. The bad guys also kill her mother Carolyn (Janet Hubert, the first Aunt Viv from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) but not before she goes old lady Arnold on several of them before being killed by a female assassin with a katana.

That said -- this movie is pretty fun and it's nice to see people of color and women represented throughout as total bad asses, good and bad characters included. There's also a lot of camaraderie between the agents, like a retiring agent named Lisette (Zulay Henao) and Vivian (Annie Ilonzeh), one of Angela's best friends in the agency who gets caught up in the war between our heroine and her arch enemy. Plus, Malik Yoba from New York Undercover is the leader of the good guys, Director Walker.

There's also a date scene inside a Bob's Big Boy and man, I wish we still had those out here. And Stokes shows up at the end as Barry the mailman!

Another victory for this team.

First off - this movie was directed Sam Firstenberg. Yes, the same person who directed Revenge of the Ninja, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Ninja 3: The Domination, Riverbend, American Ninja, American Ninja 2, Cyborg Cop, Cyborg Cop 2, Delta Force 3: The Killing Game, American Samurai and so many more amazing films.

What's wild is that it was written by Samuel Oldham (who edited Cards of Death) and Edward D. Wood Jr.

Yes, that Ed Wood.

Supposedly, there is footage in this of an uncompleted Wood film, Amazon Women from Space, and it's worked into new things that Firstenberg shot.

On Firstenberg's old web site, he said the following:

"One day I got a phone call from my friend, scriptwriter Sam Oldham. The excitement and urgency in his voice told me something was up. I felt right away that this call was going to change things for me. And I was right.

Sam is a devoted, if not fanatic, fan of old sci-fi flicks. VHS, DVD, posters, props, magazines, websites, you name it, he loves it. Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Queen of Outer Space, The Creeping Terror - these are the kinds of movies he lives for. When he called me, he was working at one of the small, dingy, forgotten film vaults that exist all over Hollywood. His job was to check the condition of old negatives and prints stored in rusting tin cans, to see if any were worth saving, and catalog them.

You all know of Ed Wood, director of the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space, the man who was crowned the worst director of all time, and immortalized in Tim Burton's movie. Many people are devoted to his work; he is probably the original cult director, and his name is connected to quite a few tacky Hollywood projects. But for many years, rumors have circulated in Hollywood about one last project Ed Wood started but never finished. He either ran out of money or died before it was finished, depending on who tells the story. Ed Wood was so strange that it is not unlikely that such a film, or part of a film, really exists. The supposed title of the lost film was Amazon Women From Outer Space, definitely a typical Ed Wood title. No one has come up with any evidence to authenticate the rumors, but nevertheless, they keep resurfacing. Not long ago, however, a lost and forgotten Ed Wood script was found and produced - so you see, miracles can sometimes happen. You can imagine the excitement that would be stirred up if any "lost" Ed Wood footage were discovered today."

Later, he reveals what was found in those vaults.

"He tells me he's found some reels of celluloid tucked away on a hard-to-reach, cobweb-covered shelf. After running the film through the viewer, he now strongly believes that he has discovered the lost Amazon Women From Outer Space. "And that's not all!" he says. "There are script pages too, ten or fifteen of them! They were in a paper bag underneath the film cans! This is impossible, but I've got it all right here!" He sounded like he was about to leap right through the phone line. "Yeah, right," I said. I am notoriously skeptical when it comes to sensational information. On the other hand, Sam's knowledge of sci-fi films is vast. He can recite 20-minute passages from any old horror or sci-fi flick, so I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was after midnight, but Sam asked me to come down and look at the footage. I found myself twenty minutes later in a pitch-dark, rat-infested alley off Santa Monica Blvd. In Hollywood, knocking at the back door, and soon we were hunched over the viewer, watching the moving images on the small square glass. I am not an expert on old sci-fi flicks, nor on Ed Wood's filmography, but it struck me immediately that my friend might be right. The yards and yards of unedited material we viewed were so tacky, so ridiculous, and so incoherent, that they definitely had the Ed Wood touch. The footage was full of Amazon-type women running around in skimpy outfits on cheap spaceship sets. But the cans and boxes were not labeled, and the scenes were not slated, so there was no way to determine whether Sam was right. None of the actresses was even remotely familiar either. And the script pages he mentioned? I turned them over in my hands, fearful that they would crumble to dust right then and there. They seemed to correspond to the film images. We knew we had to contact experts in the area immediately, to help us authenticate, recover, and maybe even restore the remnants of the historic Amazon Women From Outer Space."

Professor Harvey Kirk (David Rabius, who was also in The Girlfriend from Outer Space, which he probably brought up when he auditioned) is a sex addict whose marriage to Barbara (Barbara Sharp, who also produced this and another Oldham-directed movie, Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy: Fallen Idol) is almost finished. She's trying to set him up by having her friends come on to him and beyond that, he's being watched by alien women - several are his students - and then they take him to their planet and start using him to populate the race as otherwise, all they will have is more women.

Michael Dorn - Worf! - is a bartender. Once, I saw him at a convention and someone asked him what he liked about being on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He answered that he was happy that he wasn't playing a cop after a career of playing police officers like Officer Jebediah Turner on CHiPS. The person asking said, "Worf is a security officer, so you're still a cop." He was so sad that he just walked off the stage.

The Amazons in this movie are played by Valentina Chepiga, Elise Muller (who was also in Beach Babes from Beyond), Sherry Goggin (an American Gladiators contestant), Jayne Trcka (she's the most Amazonian of the Amazons in this), Lauren Powers (well, she's also pretty big), Cynthia Bridges, Brenda Kelly (who is also in another Oldham movie, Close Encounters of the 4th Kind: Infestation from Mars), Timea Majorova (who was in the movie Bigger, Faster. Stronger with Powers), Nicole Rollolazo, Viviana Soldana, Andrulla Blanchette (her IMDB background says that she is the most successful female British bodybuilder in the world and the only British bodybuilder to win the Ms. Olympia), Elaine Goodlad, Kat Meyers, Gayle Moher and Lena Johanessen.

Back to that Wood footage. Is it real?

Firstenberg said, "The next few weeks were devoted to running the material by authorities on Ed Wood - film historians, directors, sci-fi buffs, and the hard-core sci-fi B-movie geek crowd. This process proved to be an emotional roller coaster for us, and by the end of it, we felt as if we'd been turned inside-out. As soon as one expert supported the Ed Wood theory, another would dismiss it as preposterous. Sam and I were nervous wrecks. Did we have something, or didn't we?

One of the people we approached was a hard-core sci-fi fan, Dr. Elliott Haimoff, Ph. D. A documentary producer, Elliott was so excited when he heard about our discovery, he immediately insisted on joining us on our mission. We decided that the evidence strongly suggested that the footage was, indeed, Ed Wood material, and as a trio of producer, director, and writer, we resolved to rescue and restore the treasure we had found."

Later, he specifically refers to the footage by saying, "We had our Ed Wood-type movie - the most hideous, ridiculous, campy, tacky sci-fi we ever saw. It was one ugly baby, worse than Plan 9 - and we were in love with it. The plan was to give it the right exposure, bring it out to the public so the sci-fi crowd could judge it for themselves. But the product was too short, at 62 minutes, and it had no beginning and no end. It was clear that this movie, which we now officially called Amazon Women From Outer Space, was never completed. As exciting as it was, we all felt unsatisfied. Discussing and debating our predicament, we made the decision to go the extra mile and attempt to extend and complete Amazon Women into a 90-minute full feature, with a beginning, middle, and end. It was too good to neglect. Having in our group a writer, a producer, an editor, and myself a director, we were confident that we could pull it off. Sam Oldham bashed out a script utilizing the original pages, first off. In the revamped story, the Amazon women from outer space realize they need a male in order to ensure the survival of their species, and find the ideal mate on Earth. They kidnap their chosen male, and the story is off and running. With the male at the center of the new script, the title of the new movie became The Interplanetary Surplus Male and the Amazon Women of Outer Space."

The film seemingly had major issues with the financial backer, as Firstenberg went on to say that they had no money and "the entire cast and crew stayed on and worked for deferred payment in order to complete the 18-day shoot. Miraculously the filming was completed to my satisfaction, using credit cards and other funds our producer scraped together."

Robert Lee Collins created Police Woman and was going to be the director of Star Trek: Phase II before Paramount chose to make a movie instead of a new Star Trek series. He directed this movie, which was written by Ralph Helfer (the creator of the Marine World/Africa USA theme park), Ken Noyle and Robert Blees (Curse of the Black Widow, Frogs).

Made the same year as Roar, this is the same story but no one was insane enough here to allow animals to get as close as they did in that movie. Helfer also acted as the animal trainer.

The movie starts with this..."For many years, Africa, the world's hungriest continent, has been plagued by drought. A vast body of land encompassing twelve countries exceeding in size all of Western Europe, has been devastated. Ancient tribes have been forced to leave their villages to seek work in the cities. Those who remain poach starving game herds. Hungry predators seek food in any form. Not even humans in remote areas are safe from the predators... The motion picture you are about to see is based upon actual events." And ends with this..."This story was based upon actual events. During the past 5 years of drought 742 attacks upon humans have resulted in over four hundred deaths... and the drought continues."

That means that this movie is torn from the headlines.

Maggie (Michelle Phillips) and her family live in Kenya and a pride of lions has surrounded their home. Luckily, they have a man named Casey (Tom Skerrit) staying with them and perhaps that will be enough.

There are some scenes that make this worth watching. One has the entire family having a sing-a-long - keep in mind one of the kids just watched a lion maul a housekeeper to the point that you can see meat coming out of the mannequin and this is a PG rated movie - while a lion sneaks in and eats another staff member. There's also a lion that somehow gets in the chimney and just comes on into the living room to start attacking children.

This is a total vanity project for Helfer, as his daughter Tana plays one of the kids, Kristie. Anothe character, Wendy, is played by Anne-Marie Martin, who was Clea in the TV Dr. Strange, Kim in The Shape of Things to Come, Wendy Richards in Prom Night, Jessica in The Boogens and Darcy Essmont in Halloween II (nurse Karen's friend who reminds her she promised to give her a ride home). She was also Dori Doreau on Sledge Hammer! And would later marry Michael Crichton, who she met on the set of Runaway. Later, they would write Twister.

"Good evening, culture vultures and welcome to another installment of Mash-to-Pieces Theater. Tonight we ask the question - 'To be or not to be?' Or in this case, an actor stuck with an average face who's so sick and tired of auditioning he's willing to do almost anything! Did I say almost? I call this sickening saga "Top Billing."

Barry Blye (Jon Lovitz) is a struggling actor - "Acting!" as he would bellow as The Master Thespian - who is angry that an old classmate by the name of Winton Robbins (Bruce Boxleitner) is wasting his skills by doing commercials. Barry has the dream of being in Hamlet, yet he is destroyed when his agent (Louise Fletcher) leaves him, his girlfriend Lisa (Kimmy Robertson) breaks up with him and director Nelson Halliwell (John Astin) picks Winston over him.

Of course, Barry kills Winton, only to learn that he was playing Yorick and not Hamlet. As for the director and other actors, they are all escaped mental patients (including Sandra Bernhard) and they needed a skull for the show. Barry's skull is perfect for the part, even if Nelson once doubted his look.

Directed by Todd Holland, who is from Kitanning, PA and helped create The Larry Sanders Show, Malcolm In The Middle and Wonderfalls, and written by Myles Berkowitz (who directed, wrote and appeared as himself in the documentary 20 Dates), this is a pretty fun episode.

This episode is based on "Top Billing," which was in Vault of Horror #39. It was written by Carl Wessler and drawn by Reed Crandall. The comic story has the actors being in the early 1800s and Blye killing Winton and Nash, his fellow actors, before learning that he was not in a theater. He was at the Woltham Insane Asylum for Actors and they needed his skull.

Shot on Super 8, this film tells the story of how PR exec Jim Matthews (David Rommel) tries to leave his wife, genetic designer Meredith Weaver (Anna Zizzo) for his secretary Jenny Dole (Joan Dinco). His wife doses him with her latest experiment, which causes his extremities that start thinking on their own and destroying his mind. Yes, his hands, his arms, his legs, even his cock all can move away from his body to kill and feed, kind of like a demented version of the Myron Fass Captain Marvel that split. Into different parts.

Directed and written by Tom Berna (his only film, however he has acted and provided special effects for several others), Colony Mutation has great acting from Rommel and the relationship between Meredith and her sister Suzanne (Susan L. Cane) feels authentic. How strange that a body horror film is mostly about the human emotions of a marriage being destroyed and a woman falling in love with a man who is already taken.

That said, it's as dark as dark gets and the special effects are the result of the beyond microbudget. But who cares when the idea is this good? Where else would you get a movie with a killer penis and a man who no longer can control his body because he couldn't control his body? Milwaukee, Wisconsin was far from Hollywood and films made like this are the last bastion of what regional filmmaking was, grimy and rough blasts of unreality that infect our brains.

They're making Twisters this year and you know, I don't care.

I never saw this movie when it came out but my wife did.

I only knew it from the pinball machine.

Last year, she made me watch this movie and you know, I came away wondering how anyone could leave all that food behind at Aunt Meg's house and then she put it all in bags for everyone because she's used to all these storm chasers in her life.

Yes, storm chasers. My aunt used to follow tornados with my grandmother but they just had a little Cutlass Ciera. They didn't have Dorothy and a cool truck, much less a woman who would make gravy for them.

Twister is a strange film because it has great talent - Bill Paxton, Philip Seymour Hoffman - in the service of a Jan de Bont summer blockbuster. That means that there are moments that are total popcorn as trucks raise twisters and then moments of longing and romance that feel honest, thanks to Paxton and Helen Hunt.

Maybe it makes sense, I figure, that there was no script pitch for this movie, but instead a proof of concept clip of the visual effects by Industrial Light & Magic. When you need a movie to go with all those computer animation, you used to get Michael Crichton (who co-wrote this with his wife Anne-Marie Martin).

So here's how it happens: Bill Harding (Paxton) is now a weatherman but once, he was a storm chased along with his soon-to-be ex-wife Jo (Hunt) and he has to track her down to get the divorce papers signed so that he can marry Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz) who gets a raw deal in this movie to be honest but you know, when you chase tornadoes your whole life with a girl who lost her family to one, you have to imagine the sex is like getting tossed around the bed by an F5.

But yeah, while everyone is getting Dorothy IV to send out probes and watching Cary Elwes get pulped by a twister, poor Dr. Melissa is stuck in a truck with Dusty (Hoffman) hearing about how cool weather is. And she's a therapist!

At least it's based on some facts, as The National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma trained the crew on weather safety and brought the actors along on a tornado chase. There was a moment in the script where one tornado lasted for 36 hours and they shot that down. Speaking of Oklahoma, the production shut down so the cast and crew could pitch in and help after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Also in case you want to talk about stormy weather, the crew wanted to kill Jan de Bont. The camera crew l- ed by Don Burgess - said De Bont "didn't know what he wanted till he saw it. He would shoot one direction, with all the equipment behind the view of the camera, and then he'd want to shoot in the other direction right away and we'd have to move everything and he'd get angry that we took too long ... and it was always everybody else's fault, never his." Five weeks into filming, the director knocked over a camera assistant who missed a cue and Burgess and his crew walked off the set, much to the shock of the cast. They agreed to stay Jack N. Green and his crew took over. Sadly, Green was injured when a house rigged to collapse did so with him inside it before filming started. He injured his head and back, which led to de Bont being director of photography for the last two days of the movie.

This movie was filled with injuries, as Hunt had a door hit her in the head and she and Paxton both had their retinas burned because of how intense the lights were during the inside the truck scenes.

Both the soundtrack and the orchestral score featured Respect the Wind," an instrumental composed and performed for the film by Alex and Eddie Van Halen. Again, speaking of storms, another song - "Humans Being" - was a big mess for the band Van Halen. Lead singer Sammy Hagar didn't want to be working as his wife Kari was pregnant and they wanted to naturally deliver the child in Hawaii. He also believed that the band should rest up after touring as Eddie had avascular necrosis, which had him on a cane and painkillers, and Alex was in a neck brace. Their manager Ray Danniels told them they'd get rich off the song, as if they needed more money.

As they wrote the song, Alex called de Bont and asked him how closely he wanted the lyrics to be to the movie. De Bont said, "Oh, please don't write about tornadoes. I don't want this to be a narrative for the movie." Hagar asked for some footage and the lyrics he wrote were "Sky turning black/knuckles turning white/headed for the suck zone." Yes, he started the song not supposed to be about tornadoes by writing about tornadoes.

As Eddie told Guitar World, "And so what does Sammy come back with? "Sky is turning black, knuckles turning white, headed for the hot zone." It was total tornado stuff! Not only did Alex tell him not to do that, but the director of the ******* movie told him, "Do not write about tornadoes.'""

Hagar claimed de Bont loved a demo he recorded in Hawaii and provided "300 pages of technical weather terms that tornado chasers use" that had the word "suck zone" in it. He also explained to Livewire, "The new manager that came in wanted us to do a greatest-hits record with both Dave's era and my era with two new songs from me and, not to my knowledge at the time, two more songs from Dave. We ended up using one of them for Twister, and that was the end of the band. I wanted to do a whole record. I didn't want to do a greatest hit record. I didn't think Van Halen was there yet."

Six weeks after the premiere of the movie, Hagar was out of Van Halen, replaced by David Lee Roth, who was soon replaced by Gary Cherone.

I love that this movie was so loud and had a bass-heavy sound that destroyed the speakers in theaters everywhere. A tornado hit a drive-in theater in Thorold, Ontario, on May 20, 1996, damaging a screen that was due to play this movie.

We don't get many tornadoes in Pittsburgh but one of the few took out my childhood drive-in, the Spotlight 88, and I have hated tornadoes forever because of that.

Directed, co-written (with Inserts director and writer and Mahogany writer John Byrum and Marsha Sheiness) and produced by Michael Walters - his only movie - Have a Nice Weekend is an early slasher that attempts to be ripped from the headlines as it starts with Chris coming home from Vietnam, burning his uniform and inviting his entire family to meet at their summer home.

Father Paul (Michael Miller), mother Laura (Nikki Counselman), sister Muffy (Patricia Joyce), her friend Ellen (Colette Bablon) and football coach and handyman Frank head off to the island, which seemingly has only two other people living there, Donald and Joan Crab (Peter Dompe and Valerie Shepherd). They have a strange meal where Paul looks at a butcher knife to carve the roast like it's a sexual object and Chris flips out and smashes a radio that dares to speak of the war.

Is it a surprise that Paul is dead the next day, found in the rose bushes his wife was enraged about and stabbed by the same butcher knife he almost came over? Found by Donald and Ellen, now everyone becomes a suspect. And the killing isn't done yet, as there's a garden hoe and a hook to be used.

That said, this feels like a TV movie that no one wants to watch and nobody wants to act in. I do love a sleepy movie, however, and I also adore one that has an ending where it seems like no one knows who did the murders and then someone is like, "We need an epilogue" and it still makes less than any reasonable sense.

Also: Chris gets killed, mom is banging it out with the gardener football coach and Muffy once sunk her fingernails into another girl's face. It could be anybody. Or it could be someone no one knows who just so happened to head to this island to kill. Also also: Everyone hates everybody. Even the boat captain who takes them to their vacation home yells at everyone, the phones have all been cut off for the season (how is that a thing?) and nobody wants to be around anyone. In no way is this like what Barry Manilow sang, "Time in New England took me away to long rocky beaches you by the bay."

This weekend in New England will be the death of these people.

If you've watched every slasher there is, well, you can watch this one too. I may be talking to myself.

That said, it has one great line: "Making a sandwich is a one man job!"

I love Dario Argento. Love his movies. Have his book. A coffee mug from his shop Profundo Russo is in my office. I've watched all of his films so many times I can act them out without a script.

But man, Mother of Tears.

Also known as La Terza (The Third Mother); Mater Lachrymarum, The Third Mother and Mother of Tears: The Third Mother, this is the third movie in the cycle of The Three Mothers. The Three Mothers come from "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow", a section of Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis. Just as there are three Fates and Graces, there are also three Sorrows: Mater Lachrymarum (Our Lady of Tears), Mater Suspiriorum (Our Lady of Sighs) and Mater Tenebrarum (Our Lady of Darkness).

Starting with Suspiria and continuing with Inferno, these are the stories of the three ancient witches who are close to ruling our world. At the beginning of the 11th century, they started of witchcraft as they rose from the Black Sea, making their way across countries, making money and gaining power as they kill everyone around them.

In the late 19th century, the Three Mothers had E. Varelli, an Italian architect based in London, design and construct three buildings for them to conduct their magic. The architect learned too late that they were evil and the places he made have become so corrupted by their evil that the very land around them is cursed.

The first of the mothers is Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, the Black Queen Helena Markos of Suspiria. After writing a series of books on the dark occult arts, Markos started the Tanz Akademie outside the Black Forest. As her power and wealth increased, the locals began to suspect her, so she faked her own death in a fire and passed control to the dance school to her greatest student, who was also Helena Markos.

The second mother is Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, is the youngest and cruelest of the Three Mothers and the main antagonist in Inferno. Her home is in New York City where she keeps E. Varelli as her slave.

This brings us to The Mother of Tears, as the other two Mothers have died as their homes burned. Before Suspiria, Elisa Mandy (Daria Nicolodi) battles Markos, who killed her and her husband. This left Mater Suspiriorum "a shell of her former self." This movie is about Elisa's daughter Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) and her battles with Mater Lachrymarum in Rome.

Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears, Palazzo Varelli.is the most beautiful and powerful of the Three Mothers. We first saw her in Inferno as she attempted to use her magic on Mark Elliot as he studied music in Rome.

Directed and written by Dario Argento (along with Jace Anderson and Adam Gierasch), this begins with the Catholic Church finding a magical runic that increases the powers of Mater Lachrymarum. It is sent to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, where Sarah (Asia Argento) and her boyfriend Michael Pierce (Adam James) work. Sarah discovers the tunic, along with Giselle (Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni) when they are attacked by the followers of the Third Mother. Sarah only survives thanks to a voice in her head.

Mass suicides, murder and insanity take over Rome, as Michael is killed, his son is eaten by witches and the coven plans on doing the same to Sarah. After being followed by Detective Enzo Marchi (Cristian Solimeno), Sarah learns that she has power and the guidance of her mother, which helps her to bring the entire plan and building down on the final of the Three Mothers.

Why did this movie take so long to be made? In 1984, Nicolodi claimed that she are Argento had written a script. That script was not used and neither was a 2004 script that Dario wrote. When the movie was finally made, its distributor, Medusa Film, asked for the film's sex and violence to be edited.

Critics were not kind - they never are to Argento - and he said, "...the critics don't understand very well. But critics are not important - absolutely not important. Because now audiences don't believe anymore in critics. Many years ago critics wrote long articles about films. Now in seven lines they are finished: 'The story is this. The actor is this. The color is good.""

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this movie. Sure, it goes for it and goes even further. But nearly everything Argento has made since, well, forever feels like it doesn't have his heart in it. It doesn't mean that I always hate what I watch but it makes me sad. The inventive camera work, the shock of what will happen next, the look and feel are gone, replaced by something else. As to whether or not that's good, well...it's different. It's something I think about all the time.

To be honest, I kind of prefer Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat, which is an unofficial sequel to Suspiria and Inferno about a director making his own sequel to those movies and being cursed by the actual witches. It's also a total mess but it feels like Cozzi is in love with making it which is what I look for when I need to see something go off the rails.

The Drifting Classroom is based on a horror manga series written and illustrated by Kazuo Umezu, who also had his work turned into the movies The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch and Tamami: The Baby's Curse and the TV series Umezu Kazuo: Kyofu gekijo. The series was originally serialized in Weekly Shonen Sunday from 1972 to 1974 and is about a school building that has been mysteriously transported through time to a post-apocalyptic future.

Directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (who not only directed House, he was also the man who made the Charles Bronson Mandom commericial) with a cast of untrained actors who were actual students at the Kobe International School, this film takes the sprawling story of the manga and tries to turn it into a condensed film. It avoids one of the major points of the original story as the adults almost all go mad and literally go to war with the young children who have to fight back.

I also have no idea why they shot this in English with Japanese subtitles instead of just making it in the native language. It isn't like there was a huge crowd in the U. S. dying to see an adaption of a manga made two decades before outside of some hardcores. Maybe they thought that Troy Donahue was still a big deal?

As if it were bad enough that Sho and the other students have traveled through a time slip, this end of the world situation also has monstrous cockroaches that go wild and attack the school, killing many of the children. Yes, a movie that holds back nothing while also having song and dance numbers every few moments. As you can imagine, I'm fascinated by this film.

There's also a friendly little alien that feels badly that the children have no water to wash their faces, so he urinates in their faces. Where else are you going to see that? Or a child ride a tricycle into the next reality? I'm not saying this is great, but it's weird and sometimes that's better than great.

When I spoke to Bret McCormick, I had not seen this movie yet and wanted to know more.

B&S: You've also made some docs, like Children of Dracula, which seems ahead of its time now in shining a light on a culture some would see as aberrant. What was that process like?

BRET: We ran ads in an alternative newspaper in Dallas and one in LA and then screened through the respondents. It was a very quick production. I was very glad Joe Estevez agreed to narrate. I didn't take it very seriously at the time.

I'm so glad that Visual Vengeance has released it to streaming.

"Are you a Vampire? Vampire's victim? Have fantasies about Vampires?" That's the ad circulated in major Los Angeles and Dallas newspapers and got hundreds of responses. After all, Interview With a Vampire had come out that year.

Directed by McCormick and Christopher Romero, this has a series of people who explain how they either became fascinated by vampires or became one. Well, one lady can only make raw bacon and eat it which doesn't seem to be the kind of life that we were promised by the Hammer films, but what can you do?

One of the people who shows up in this is Tony Brownrigg, the son of S. F. Brownrigg and Libby Hall. He's acted in quite a few films and made a sequel to one of his father's films with Don't Look In the Basement 2.

There are also trailers spaced throughout that include The Twilight People, Andy Warhol's Dracula and The Velvet Vampire, which are all beyond great picks if you want some different views of how movies deal with vampirism.

In the days before basic cable becoming, well, a lot like this movie, these are the films that you'd find in the horror section of your mom and pop rental store but they may not have had a true home. Most of those shops didn't have a documentary section. I would have totally rented this and yes, made a copy of it, and made people watch it and laughed when they thought I was strange because I had memorized so many of the interviews.

Director, writer and star Michael Stone has had enough of Amityville movies.

He said, "Now because Amityville is the name of a town and it really doesn't exist beyond this house and those iconic windows, it really can't be a protected franchise like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. So what this ultimately shakes out to is I could fart on camera for an hour and a half and legally release it as Amityville: Gas Chamber. And nobody would have any rights to sue me. If I wanted to actually make something about the Lutz or Defeo family not so much, but if you just want to make a movie on the cheap and attach a famous name to it, Amityville is a good one to do."

This movie is the result of a joke that spiraled out of control. Amityville: Gas Chamber started as a concept for a 5-10 minute long video on my channel. However, every step of the way was met with "Why not?" Make it a full-length run-time? "Why not?" Give it proper artwork? "Why not?" Seek distribution methods? "Why not?" Now, here we are."

It also has the best IMDB fact: "No dialogue is spoken in this film. Which means every time you aren't talking, you're quoting Amityville Gas Chamber."

This is a movie where a man sits and reads The Amityville Horror while occasionally farting.

It also has occasional subtitles that start with "This is it. This is the movie. I'll be periodically putting some trivia about Amityville here. But this is the movie."

It also claims that this movie is better than Amityville Mt. Misery Road.

I agree.

It's a one note joke and that note is a brown one.

Actually, as someone who has made it through more than fifty Amityville movies, this is not the worst I've seen. That may speak to some of the horrors that I have endured as I struggle through the curse that I have to watch every single movie that has that name in the title and then some.

When a popular influencer named Sasha Joy (Bukola Ayoka) is kidnapped by two criminals -- Elyse (Nicolette Pearse) and Quinn (Craig Arnold), she becomes a big story when it turns out that she's helping the very people who took her -- Stockholm Syndrome is real -- to steal money from some hige mansions.

But is she doing it of her own free will? Or is she now an influencer thief?

Directed by Stefan Brogren (A Chance for Christmas) and written by Andrea Shawcross, this lets us know early on that Sasha really is taking all of her fancy dresses and makeup from June Bentley rich woman who her her mother Trina works for as a maid. She uses her status online to get invited to an opening for model/actress Chloe Clifton (Eden Cupid), which gets her kidnapped by Quinn (Craig Arnold), Elyse (Nicolette Pearse) and Nathan (Oren Williamson) and used online to get money for their robberies and scams.

Have you ever noticed how many Tubi Originals use the narrative structure that starts with a moment at the point of seemingly no return just before the end of the movie and then rewinds to show the viewer how the characters got there? I think nearly every single one starts like this and I've come to expect it.

Kevin Smith made two movies in Pittsburgh, this and Dogma. Well, this is Monroeville, but yeah, Pittsburgh. The director and writer had the idea wince the 90s and wanted it to be a follow up to Chasing Amy. It was almost a series called Hiatus that would have starred Jason Lee as a porn star who came back home. Also: That isn't the Civic Arena, it's the Rostraver Ice Garden but is now the cfsbank Event Center but everyone in town is still going to call it by its old name long after it changes its name all over again.

Zack Brown (Seth Rogan) and Miriam "Miri" Linky (Elizabeth Banks) are best friends since first grade, roommates and both work in Monroeville (she's at the mall, yes, that mall and he's at a coffee shop which is really a Dairy Queen in real Monroeville life). They have no money and the power gets shut off at their house before their high school reunion, where Miri learns that her crush Bobby Long (Brandon Routh) is dating adult star Brandon St. Randy (Justin Long). When they get home, they also discover that two teenagers shot a video of Miri changing that went viral because she wears bloomers. This gives Zack the idea that they should make an adult movie.

Working with a producer named Delaney (Craig Robinson), they start making a parody, Star Whores, before they get all their equipment stolen. That means that they have to use the surveillance camera at Zack's work to make their next idea, Swallow My Cockuccino. All of the adult actors have porn sex; Zack and Miri make love, which weirds them out. She also gets upset when he sleeps with another actress, Stacey (Katie Morgan). When it comes time for Miri to do a scene with Lester (Jason Mewes), he tells her he loves her. She says nothing and he disappears.

Of course, Zack never slept with that girl and she never slept with that boy and they get together. But you knew that.

Smith said of the movie, "I was depressed, man. I wanted that movie to do so much better. I'm sitting there thinking, that's it, that's it, I'm gone, I'm out. The movie didn't do well and I killed Seth Rogen's career! This dude was on a roll until he got in with the likes of me. I'm a career killer! Judd's going to be pissed, the whole Internet's going to be pissed because they all like Seth, and the only reason they like me anymore is because I was involved with Seth! And now I ******* ruined that. It was like high school. I was like, "I'm a dead man. I'll be the laughing stock."" Supposedly, the Weinstein Company's lack of selling the movie caused their relationship to end. Smith saw himself as a failure and din't work for some time after this.

Well, at least it's very Pittsburgh. Zack plays hockey for the Monroeville Zombies, Tom Savini is in it and one of the adult stars, Bubbles, is played by Traci Lords who is from Steubenville, which is close. Smith has seen a lot of porn, because her scene at the end references one of her last films before it was discovered that Lords was underage, New Wave Hookers.

Directed by Yuen Chor and Tun-Fei Mou, this Shaw Brothers movie has two, well, Haunted Tales.

The first, "The Ghost," was originally a movie called Hellish Soul that was shut down and reshot a few years later (thanks Silver Emulsion!). The second, "The Prize Winner," also started as a full-length movie before it was turned into a short and added to this movie.

"The Ghost" has newlyweds played by Ling Yun and Ching Li moving into a new oceanfront home but learning that no one around them is normal. Everyone sleeps throughout the day, even the livestock, and then the visions start. Then there's a car crash. Then a ghost comes back. There's also an eyeball in the closet. But this part is a traditional ghost story and shot as such. It's really good. But where the movie really shines...

"The Prize Winner" has janitor Ah Cheng (Chan Shen) taking a spirit board away from some children in the building. He learns that it is haunted by a fox spirit that promises him all the riches that he can handle as long as he doesn't gamble, have casual sex and murder people. Of course, he does all of those things and this story has numerous funny sex moments followed up by a totally gross ending that blew my mind out of my skull. Turns out that Hong Kong Ouija boards are gigantic and have a planchette that spins around it, which goes round and round until the man is transformed into hamburger. Also: A neighbor has an entire apartment filled with strange dolls.

The two stories don't really work together but I could care less. I was pleased by both of them and the juxtapositive nature of this movie just makes me wish that there were more exactly like it but also happy because it is such a unique film all to itself.

Remember Jen and Sylvia Soska? Well, they just made a sequel -- kinda, sorta -- to Night of the Living Dead and its on Tubi. Yes, the very same Soska sisters who made the remake of Rabid and American Mary.

Now, is that a good thing? Was the remake of Rabid a good idea? Have we gotten so many sequels to Romero's work both from him -- good (Dawn, Day) and bad (everything not Dawn and Day) -- and from the other creators of the original, good (Return of the Living Dead) and, well, weird (Flesheater) and just plain abysmal (Children of the Living Dead). Then again, isn't everything after Romero influenced or outright stolen (Zombi) from his work?

Ash (Ashley Moore) and her brother Luke (Shiloh O'Reilly) are the grandchildren of Ben from Night of the Living Dead and even have the gun he used to kill zombies. Their parents have gone away on Ash's birthday and her friend Iris (Camren Bicondova) offers to watch her brother so that she can go to the Festival of the Living Dead, a concert that is on the same ground where the walking dead first appeared in 1968, with her boyfriend Kevin (Gage Marsh), his brother Ty (Andre Anthony) and sisters Destini (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and Lindsey (Maia Jae Bastidas).

Yes, kind of like Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave. The less said of that, the better.

Written by Miriam Lyapin and Helen Marsh (who also wrote the Tubi Original Deadly Midwife), this kicks up a notch when the concert goers all get in a car accident hitting a zombie and go to the concert to get help. Iris hears that her friend is in danger, so she gets her friend Blaze (Christian Rose) to drive her and Luke to save everyone. Yes, she takes a diabetic child into the heart of the undead.

For some reason, the festival has a giant man to be burned, like Burning Man. Or The Wicker Man. Or Midsommar. None of this has anything to do with the movie you are going to watch and maybe twenty people came to this concert, which feels more like the Gathering of the Juggalos than a concert that is a tribute to people who died. The bands all feel like Warped Tour instead of anything, as if this movie was made in the 2000s for SyFy and was filmed in Eastern Europe just like, yes there it is again, Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave.

I grew up minutes from Evans City and this weird field is not the weird fields in Evans City. Instead, it's all cash in cheap quick artifice and yeah, I should know better, but I never do. Moore and Bicondova are good actors and do what they can, but they there isn't much to save.

Also: How did they get Ben's gun and know he was a hero when he died in a basement and got burned as a zombie? Did we forget, you know, the shocking ending of the movie that started modern horror?

If this movie was just a zombies at a concert film, I'd be fine with it. But by associating itself -- literally inserting itself -- into the trinity of zombie movies, it commits an unforgivable sin. It's boring. There's a great idea in here of a world where the undead have become commonplace and celebrated as tragedies like how 9/11 is a few years away from being another sale day like President's Day. Instead, it's content to be a movie with some decent fight scenes, alright gore and nothing else to add to a genre that's overflowing with movies that added less than nothing.

Also known as Gremloids, Hyperspace was the sixth and final 3-D film produced by the Owensby Studios in the 1980s (the others are Rottweiler: Dogs of Hell, Hot Heir, Chain Gang, Hit the Road Running and Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D).

Just like Star Wars, Lord Buckethead (Robert Bloodworth) has come to Earth looking for Princess Serina and the stolen plans for his Galactic Alliance. He thinks that a woman that he's seen, Karen (Paula Poundstone) is her and that a baker named Chester (R. C. Nanney) is Captain Starfighter. A man named Max (Alan Marx) falls for her and tries to rescue her from Buckethead and his Jawa-esque soldiers. The government is also trying to figure things out and brings in William Hopper, who is Hooper from Jaws played by Chris Elliot and if that makes you happy, this movie will make you beyond excited.

I love that a regional movie made in North Carolina has had such far reaching future impact on politics.

No, really.

Lord Buckethead - it was a man named Mike Lee - ran for Parliament in both the 1987 and 1992 general elections representing the Gremloid party and got 131 votes against Margaret Thatcher and 107 against John Major. Comedian Jonathan Harvey was the next Lord Buckethead in the 2017 general election. And by standing next to Prime Minister Theresa May, he went viral. He got the most votes, 249, but also drew the attention of this movie's director and writer Todd Durham, who sued because Harvey was using his character,. Harvey became Lord Binface and David Hughes was now Lord Buckethead, running as part of the Monster Raving Looney Party, which was founded by musician Screaming Lord Sutch.

As for Durham, he created Hotel Transylvania and directed Tales of the Third Dimension in 3-D.