Released months before lead Hiroko Yakushimaru’s Sailor Suit and Machine Gun, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s first groundbreaking teenage idol picture is a dazzling mix of special effects and blue-screen artifice, much like the film most know him for, House. Yuka (Yakushimaru) is a schoolgirl who discovers that she has psychic powers, just in time for the freethinkers of her school to come under attack by fascist mind-controlled Venusian kids led by the icy, telepathic Michiru. They enforce a New Order under the guise of academic excellence and discipline that may be the start of the planet going all bodysnatchers. 

It should come as no surprise, given who made this, that this movie goes all candy-coated, what with animation and art intruding into our reality whenever they want to. This was adapted from a novel by Taku Myamura, and it has no problems putting its emotions and politics right in the open. But this isn’t an art film; it’s a crowd-pleaser starring a woman who would become one of Japan’s biggest idols quite shortly.

The film is aggressive in its use of blue-screen composites that don’t strive for realism. Instead, they create a paper doll aesthetic where Hiroko Yakushimaru feels like she’s drifting through a living manga. Expect synthesized skies, hand-drawn lightning crackling over school hallways and dream sequences that bleed into the real world without warning. It’s a film where the background is just as likely to start moving as the actors.

Speaking of the house, in Koji’s home, check out the framed photograph of Yôko Minamida, the actress who played the aunt.

The Cult Epics Blu-ray of this film has a 2K transfer and restoration, and extras like audio commentary by film critic Max Robinson, a visual essay by Phillip Jeffries, an Obayashi poster gallery, trailers, a new slipcase art design by Sam Smith, a reversible sleeve with original Japanese poster art and a repro 24-page Japanese booklet. You can get it from MVD.

Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) is a divorced U.S. Army veteran living in North Carolina who decides to rob McDonald’s to pay for his kids’ welfare. He knows how to break in at night and be ready for the next morning. He treats people well and uses his powers of observation, but is still a criminal. When the police catch on, he’s arrested at his daughter’s birthday party. That doesn’t stop him, as he escapes from jail and lives inside a Toys ‘R Us before starting to rebuild his life with his widow, Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst).

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, this is an incredibly sweet movie that may just humanize the real Manchester, who really did commit these crimes and then escaped from prison twice more. In an article in The Charlotte Observer, Elaine Snyder, who worked at one of the restaurants that Manchester robbed, said, “I just don’t understand why they would want to praise him and give him all this recognition for something very devastating to some people. I’m not sure that I agree with that.” In the same article, the real-life Leigh Wainscott said, “I just hold onto the good stuff. I just know what a kind, sensitive, caring person he is.”

Corrections 1, a website devoted to law enforcement that states that it is “the leading online community and resource for corrections worldwide”, said “The film wants audiences to like Tatum’s Manchester despite overwhelming evidence they shouldn’t. It attempts balance but misses the mark entirely, divorced from the reality corrections professionals cannot escape: charm is often predation, circumstances are context, not justification, and every crime has material consequences the camera never captures.”

As nice as Tatum seems, I couldn’t help thinking about the people that the protagonist charmed and how he would soon let them down. Maybe I watched this in the wrong mood, but I came away thinking he was the villain, not the dashing Robin Hood. 

The Paramount 4K UHD of this movie has featurettes, deleted scenes and alternate scenes. You can get it from Deep Discount.

1 hour and 45 minutes of absolute malarky. Yes, Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul are back, making another video that could be interchangeable with the others they made, but I don’t care. I’ve watched them all.

While they also dropped UFO: Top Secret and Attack from Outer Space the same year, this one leans much harder into the science of space travel. It features an extensive, purely theoretical sequence about a manned mission to Mars, detailing the terrifying risks of retro-rocket failure and the math required to keep a tiny ship from being swallowed by the sun’s gravity. There’s also a surprisingly detailed look at the then-new Space Shuttle program, framed as the practical future of reusable space travel.

The film spends a significant amount of time showcasing archival footage from the U.S. Air Force, including the 1959 Corpus Christi sighting and the famous Tremonton Film of 1952, which depicts a cluster of five glowing discs moving at speeds estimated at over 3,000 mph. Each of these is called out by case number, like Project Blue Book, which we have at hand whenever we watch 70s alien documentaries.

This time around, there’s less about aliens wanting to eat us and more fuzzed-out space rock. Sure, there’s plenty of rambling, but I just love the feedback and rocking breakdowns in these songs. And man, that rambling. The narrator suggests that life might not be limited to little green men but could exist as crystalline formations or even as entities that live within the sun’s solid, cool core. 

One of the most convincing clips they show is a 1967 snippet from a Western movie set in Camarillo, California (there are also rumors that you can see a UFO during Rio Grande). While filming a close-up of an actor, a humming, white dot drifts across the background, performing erratic maneuvers that the crew can’t explain. 

Yet, unlike the rest of their movies, this has a rare moment of skepticism when it’s pointed out that some famous saucer photos bear a striking resemblance to the underside of a standard infrared chicken brooder.

You can watch this on YouTube.

In this doicumentary on Gunnar Hansen, you get to hear from some real luminaries: Bruce Campbell, Danielle Harris, Barbara Crampton, Gunnar Hansen, Edwin Neal, R.A. Mihailoff, Kane Hodder, Dave Sheridan, Felissa Rose, Michelle Bauer, Tiffany Shepis, Brian O’Halloran, Debbie Rochon, Fred Olen Ray, Brett Wagner, Betsy Baker, Allen Danziger, Kim Henkel, Daniel Pearl, Joe R. Lansdale, Jeff Burr, Tony Timpone, Michael Sonye, Del Howison and Bret McCormick, all discussing how they not only worked with the actor, but got to know him.

This isn’t just a list of credits. Instead, it feels like a collection of people who genuinely loved the man. They move past the surface-level trivia to discuss what it was like to share a meal or a long conversation with Hansen, proving he was the kind of person you’d want to have dinner with rather than an unapproachable celebrity.

You also get to see clips and hear stories about the films Hansen was in beyond his role as Leatherface, including Mosquito, Repligator, Hatred of a Minute, Witchunter, Rachel’s Attic, The Business, The Deepening, Swarm of the Snakehead, Brutal Massacre: A Comedy, and Gimme Skelter.

While many horror retrospectives feel like dry, insular vanity projects, this documentary breaks the mold by focusing on the man, not just the mask. It paints a portrait of Gunnar Hansen not as a scream king icon, but as a poet, author, and deeply kind soul who just happened to wield one of cinema’s most terrifying weapons.

In so many of these docs, it feels so insular and even pretentious. This film isn’t. It presents a man that you would like to meet and have dinner with, not an unapproachable actor who would look down on you. That means it’s a winner.

Extras include an audio commentary with director and writer Michael Kallio and editor John Wagner; extended interviews with Jeff Burr and Michael Feisener; a chat with Danielle Harris; a trailer and a featurette on more stories of the actor that didn’t make it into the final edit. You can get it from MVD on Blu-ray or DVD.

I’m sad that I only have a few Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul paranormal docs left, but instead of being upset that it’s over, I will be happy that I had the experience.

The film begins with a classic Dixon/Paul flourish: A young boy walking down a city street at night. The narration immediately pivots to the jugular: Will he be attacked by a ghost? Will he, as all Dixon/Paul films eventually ask, be eaten by an alien? What walking horror from the realms of nightmares will bring him the endless embrace of death? It’s a lot of pressure for a kid just trying to get home, but the film insists that the lights of the city are not a comfort that can dispel the aura of gloom.

The narration also informs us that photos of ghosts are hard to come by, so this starts to ramble into UFOs and Bigfoot. It’s not what I signed up for, but here I am, fully buckled in. In the same way this film cannibalizes a hundred stock photos and library films, music supervisor Jim Cookman dives into a sonic fever dream. We get fuzzy blues rock, synth dibble-dabbles, somber piano plinking and sound effects that sound like they were rejected from a sub-Outer Limits TV show.

This has it all and by all, I mean ectoplasm coming out of the mouths of 1920s Spiritualists (which the film tells us is a very dangerous procedure), the red eye of Jupiter, the Abdominable Snowman, ghost towns created by Manifest Destiny, so many goats, a ghost pony that haunts an English churchyard and moments where the stock footage, voiceover and music don’t line up, but I kind of love these films for that. So many people refer to them with terms like bad, boring, inept and incoherent. 

That’s so wrong. Where else would we learn about a train haunted by a phantom so horrible that passengers were routinely beheaded? Who would let this train keep operating? Or the claim that earthquake survivors work tirelessly to limit “ghost activity” after a disaster? Did you even comprehend that? I didn’t. This leaves me, as all of Wheeler Dixon’s work does, with a thousand questions and zero answers.

I also adore that someone on IMDb presented the following factual errors:

• Rasputin was not “killed by the Palace Guard” as the narration states, but rather by Prince Felix Yusupov. The prince shot Rasputin in the yard of the Yusupov palace and not in “an abandoned wing of the palace” as the film states.
• H.G. Wells and Orson Welles were not contemporaries and did no collaborative work.
• Mary, Queen of Scots, was not known as “Bloody Mary.” That was Mary I of England.
• A frame from the Patterson-Gimlin film, shot in Northern California and purportedly showing Bigfoot, is shown in black-and-white and described by the narrator as a photo of Bigfoot “striding across the icy tundra of the Himalayan mountains.”

Keep in mind, this is a movie that asks whether UFOs are flown by ghosts or whether ghosts are really the living dead from outer space. Facts are in short supply.

Bonus points for the appearance of the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu, who is apparently responsible for destroying crops with desert winds.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Is Spinal Tap II strictly for the devotees who can recite the exact dimensions of a Stonehenge prop? Probably. But as a card-carrying member of the Tap-heads, I couldn’t care less. Getting eighty more minutes with Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls feels less like a movie and more like a family reunion where everyone is slightly more deaf and significantly more delusional.

The plot kicks off with a brilliant piece of continuity: Hope Faith (a pitch-perfect Kerry Godliman), the daughter of the band’s legendary, cricket-bat-wielding manager Ian Faith. She’s inherited the band’s contract, which is a legal albatross that forces the trio into one final show.

The problem is that Nigel and David won’t speak to each other. They may not even know why. At this point, Nigel owns a cheese-and-guitar shop; David is making music for true-crime podcasts and on-hold messages; and Derek is still into rock operas like Hell Toupee and running a glue museum.

Despite struggling to find a drummer — no one wants to die of misadventure or choking on someone else’s vomit — Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco, whose girlfriend Annie Gordenier also shows up in the movie as her parner) joins up and adds the positivity the band needs as they nevigate growing old, advice from Paul McCartney and nearly murdering Elton John during a performance of “Stonehenge.”

Sadly, live concert footage was filmed at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, for the concert Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. The project was delayed indefinitely after Rob Reiner, who directed and played director Marty DiBergi, and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were killed.

Seeing Paul Shaffer’s Artie Fufkin still looking for a kick in the ass, Fran Drescher’s Bobbi Flekman still holding it together as a Buddhist and June Chadwick’s Jeanine Pettibone trading her zodiac charts for a nun’s habit made me smile.

I didn’t think too deeply about any of this. I just wanted to laugh and, as always, Tap provides.