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.

Wheeler Dixon and Sidney Paul made so many of these movies, and you may get confused because they all seem so similar. Yet you must go down this corridor and expose yourself to each of their films.

What connects these films? The fact that they continually remind us that aliens want to eat us. How do they know this? They’re so sure of it. They even say that alien civilizations might view Earth as “nothing but a slaughterhouse, an alien food breeding ground.” Paul calmly asks frightening queries, like “What will save us then?” and “Are we being watched by creatures from outer space?”

This movie is washed out; it has wild folk music mixed with library sound effects, and a rambling narration that seems to ask you questions every few moments, and I always find myself having a conversation with it. Yet this is the kind of thing that totally speaks to me, a nearly lost film that has never come out on DVD, even, one that’s hiding on YouTube and feels way stranger than any of the Ancient Aliens shows that litter cable.

There are a hundred or more ideas in here. If one of them were true, it would destroy your mind. Do aliens live inside the sun? Are ancient cave drawings and burial tombs in Greece and Peru blueprints for fuel thrust systems and a pressurization chamber? And, as always, when are extraterrestrials going to treat Earth as if it were Golden Corral?

It exists in a strange limbo, too psychedelic to be a serious documentary and too earnest to be pure fiction. Because this film relies heavily on public-domain NASA footage, military archives, and stock science clips, it feels like a dream of 20th-century progress reinterpreted through a lens of impending doom.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Buddy’s (Brett Baxter Clark, Nick the Dick from Bachelor Party, Bruiser from Teen Witch and the gardener of Young Lady Chatterley II; seriously these are the kind of roles that make me light headed when reading an IMDb and that’s not even bringing up the Andy Sidaris movies and starring in Delta Force Commando, Deathstalker IV, Cirio H. Santiago’s Eye of the Eagle and Cobra Mission 2) origins are like a mix of Superman and the Terminator. He wants to come to Earth to fight a great evil, so he’s put in a tube and launched here, but gets to our planet buck naked. He doesn’t beat up some bikers for his clothes, however. 

After rescuing Lora (Pamela Saunders, who appeared on All My Children, Ryan’s Hope, Loving, and Days of Our Lives), she asks him to help her with her literacy center.  

Every superhero needs a supervillain, and Buddy has a lame one in a pimp named Mr. One (Reggie De Morton, who started his career alongside Robert Kerman and Jamie Gillis in the adult movie Fiona on Fire; he’s also in Satan War and Legion of Iron). This pimp is enraged that Buddy is teaching gang members how to read, as well as do more positive graffiti and build futuristic cars. This is cutting into the profits of his girls, so he sends some cops to beat up Buddy, who ends up in jail.

Buddy gets shot and becomes, well, a ghost. Luckily, the gang members remember how to use guns, so they shoot Mister One and toss his body into a smelter. This allows Buddy to go back home, where his father (Norman Budd) is so proud of him.

Man, this movie. Women are menaced with snakes and a power drill. Mexican gangbangers learn how to read at a higher level. Custom cars show up, like a fiberglass Invader GT5. Buddy learns kung fu just by watching it. And it has the alternate title King of the Streets? And a ninja is played by Frank Dux, the man whose life story of lies would become Bloodsport? Plus a lot of nudity as Mister One sends his girls to sleep with politicians?

Imagine if Space Jesus wasn’t fighting Ted Turner and Satan, like The Visitor, and instead was kind of remaking Death Wish 3, yet with more breakdancing. 

This was directed and co-written by Ed Hunt, who also made The Plague, The Brain, Bloody Birthday, UFOs Are Real, Starship Invasions, Point of No Return and Diary of a Sinner. He’s joined on the script by Ruben Gordon (Legion of Iron), Buddy Pearson (who also wrote Firebird 2015 AD) and Steve Schoenberg. 

Amazingly, movies can still surprise me. If you’re looking for a movie where a Messiah from beyond solves the crack epidemic with literacy and breakdancing, Alien Warrior is the only choice.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Over the course of this movie, the Taylor family will be destroyed.

At first, they get together for the parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Georgetown professor Ellen (Diane Lane) and restaurateur Paul (Kyle Chandler), attended by their four children: lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Rob (Daryl McCormack); out lesbian stand up Anna (Madeline Brewer); young scientist Birdie (Mckenna Grace) and failed writer Josh (Dylan O’Brien) and his fiancee Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), who was once one of Ellen’s students.

Liz surprises Ellen by gifting her with her new book, written with Josh’s help: The Change: The New Social Contract. The cover shows an American flag with the stars centered, supposedly to represent Americans uniting around the political center. Instead, it leads to a one-party system that is somehow even more fascist than the fascist state we live in right now.

Within a few years, The Change has taken over the United States, and everyone worries about the future. Liz gives Birdie a password to a noted virology database to help her in her career and eventually gets her an internship with the Cumberland Corporation, which has sponsored this movement. Yet Ellen won’t play nice; she vandalizes The Change flags and eventually gets confronted so many times that she goes missing.

As time passes, Josh becomes more assured and changes into nearly an archenemy to the family. Cynthia gets pregnant but aborts the child without telling her husband. As if these family gatherings couldn’t be more tense, Ellen tells Liz that if she messes with her family, she will kill her.

Eventually, The Change has taken over the country and soon, the world. Enumerators come to the house, looking for Anna, while Cynthia is drugged out of her mind. Birdie uses her knowledge of viruses to suicide bomb a bio-weapon attack at the Washington, D.C., Cumberland headquarters while the family is gathered for the 30th anniversary. Police arrive and begin attacking people; Cynthia stabs Josh, and the parents are arrested, their heads bound like the painting they met in front of, René Magritte’s The Lovers.

Wow, right?

Directed by Oscar nominee Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi, The Hater), the film is a brutal political allegory that uses a 10-year timeline to show how quickly civilized society can pivot into authoritarianism through the lens of one family’s collapse. The tension between Ellen and Liz  isn’t just political. It’s a personal vendetta. Liz was a former student whom Ellen once publicly humiliated for her radical one-party thesis. The Change movement is, in many ways, Liz’s long-game revenge against her former mentor.

Interestingly, the film never specifies if The Change is far-right or far-left. Komasa intentionally kept the ideology vague to focus on the mechanics of fascism: the vertical flags, the stars in the center (symbolizing the death of federalism) and the way neighbors turn on neighbors.

I saw this on a plane and had no expectations. Obviously, Lionsgate buried this. How would you sell it today? Polish director Jan Komasa makes this melodramatic yet in the finest ways. It’s a powder keg, and I couldn’t believe these things were happening in a modern film. Do what you can to find this.