ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: New York nightclub The Matador becomes the site of a high-profile murder that attracts the attention of an obsessive detective, a TV news reporter, and an elusive being living outside the realms of time and space. Their stories converge with that of a new-age cult operating at the command of an ultra-intelligent supercomputer named Bolero. 

Writer/director Jonathan Rosado plans to blow you away all the way back to the halcyon days of seventies and eighties underground cinema with his trippy feature Matador Bolero. Shot on Super 8, the film boasts a cornucopia of exploitation cinema elements and feels like something unearthed when a modern excavation under a former 42nd Street grindhouse theater discovered it in a well-preserved film canister.  

Yes, everything described in the official synopsis takes place in one manner or another, but nothing is as simple or as crystal clear as that synopsis seems to promise. Matador Bolero feels more like a series of vignettes ranging from plot elements to topless peep show performances to blasts of psychotropic visual patterns to . . . well, we don’t want to give everything away. You’ll see, if you choose to take the ride. And you should.

The performances range from head-scratching to good but the cast members are all-in throughout. The three most recognizable names are genre stalwart Kansas Bowling, Jack Irv, and musician Yves Tumor. The Suede Hello provides an excellent score that is heavy on synthesizers and distorted electric guitar. 

Matador Bolero is not for everyone. For some it will be exactly the kind of unusual fare that they seek. For others, it may feel like an endurance test. Adventurous viewers seeking an offbeat slice of weirdness crafted by a filmmaker who made exactly the film he envisioned will want to check this one out. 

Matador Bolero opens in New York on May 22 and Los Angeles on June 11, 2026 with a national expansion to follow.

Sweden, sex, Satanism, seventies. 

Many are the reasons I watched this.

Skräcken har 1000 ögon (Horror Has 1000 Eyes) was directed by Torgny Wickman and occupies a strange, atmospheric intersection between Gothic horror and the early 1970s erotic exploitation boom. While often dismissed as mere sexploitation, the film is surprisingly effective at building a claustrophobic, dread-filled environment.

The vicarage in Northern Sweden serves as more than just a setting; it’s a pressure cooker. Wickman utilizes this holy location to great effect, contrasting the stark, pious exterior of the priesthood with the simmering pagan rituals occurring behind closed doors. You can feel it in the air, a mix of religious repression and burgeoning occultism that feels genuinely stifling.

Hedvig the maid (Solveig Andersson, The Lustful Vicar)  is the undisputed engine of the plot. Unlike many horror antagonists of the era who are motivated by simple madness, Hedvig’s malice is methodical and ritualistic. Her self-mutilation (the bloody cross) serves as a physical manifestation of her rejection of Sven’s (Hans Wahlgren) religious world. I wonder, is it really her sliding into his bed or just a dream?

The tragedy of the film lies in his wife Anna’s (Anita Sanders, who was in Tinto Brass’s Nerosubianco, Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Silvio Amadio’s That Malicious Age and Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales) perspective. She wants Hedvig but has no idea why. She isn’t just fighting a witch; she’s fighting her own trauma after losing their baby, which makes her an unreliable witness in the eyes of her husband.

The Sensuous Sorceress is a quintessential example of folk horror. While the erotic elements are front-and-center, the cases of violent death and the mystery of the question marks left behind provide enough narrative weight to keep it from feeling hollow.

This is one of the few movies I know of where a man is killed by a piece of bread.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Before this movie, director Pim de la Parra and producer Wim Verstappen were the kings of Dutch sleaze. Operating under their legendary Scorpio Films banner, these guys were cranking out high-energy, low-budget, skin-filled exploitation flicks like Blue Movie and Frank and Eva. They knew how to put butts in seats. But then, after Suriname gained independence from the Netherlands in 1975, Pim got a massive dose of national pride and decided it was time to make art with a capital A.

The result was Wan Pipel. The very first feature film produced in the newly independent nation of Suriname. And holy hell, did it ruin them. Pim completely lost his mind over the budget, blowing past every financial guardrail, which caused a massive, permanent blowout between “Pim and Wim.” The movie tanked at the box office, Scorpio Films went belly up, and a glorious era of Dutch grindhouse cinema died right then and there.

But man, what a way to go out.

The plot plays out like a sweaty, politically charged daytime soap opera. Borger Breeveld stars as Roy, an Afro-Surinamese student living the good life in the Netherlands with his blonde Dutch girlfriend, Karina (Willeke van Ammelrooy). Roy gets a telegram saying his mother is dying, so Karina lends him the cash to fly back home.

Once Roy touches down in Suriname, the tropical heat and the cultural awakening hit him like a freight train. He forgets all about his studies and the Netherlands and falls head over heels for Rubia (Diana Gangaram Panday), an Indo-Surinamese Hindu nurse. The problem? The local Afro-Surinamese and Hindu communities are locked in deep-seated, conservative cultural divides. The romance starts a literal community revolt. Even when Karina flies in from the Netherlands to drag Roy back to reality, he refuses to leave. He’s home, he’s staying, and he’s going to build “One People” if it kills him.

For a guy like me, who usually watches movies about people getting eaten by mutated swamp monsters, Wan Pipel is an absolutely fascinating watch. It has that raw, sun-baked, mid-70s aesthetic where everything feels intensely real, sweaty and slightly dangerous. It’s a movie caught between two worlds — just like Roy. On one hand, you have the gorgeous, lush backdrops of Paramaribo and the Surinamese landscape, and on the other, you have the heavy, heartbreaking weight of post-colonial trauma and racial tension.

Willeke van Ammelrooy is fantastic as the jilted Dutch girlfriend, bringing a weirdly tragic European perspective to a movie that is actively trying to break away from Europe. Borger Breeveld plays Roy with an earnest, stubborn intensity that makes you root for him even when he’s being an absolute disaster of a human being.

The Cult Epics release of this film features a new restored 2K transfer; commentary by film historians Lex Veerkamp and Bodil de la Parra; an introduction by Pim de la Parra; the making-of; an interview with Willeke van Ammelrooy by Guido Franken; and a bonus short film, Aah… Tamara, a gallery; trailers; new artwork design by Juan Esteban R.; a double-sided sleeve with original poster art and a slipcase. You can get it from MVD.

The sophomore feature from Celine Song, the director who had everyone crying into their popcorn with Past Lives, Materialists is all about the high-stakes, maximum-dollar world of New York City matchmaking. Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a professional love-broker who fixes up wealthy elites but can’t seem to sort out her own damage. She finds herself locked into a classic, agonizing love triangle between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a ridiculously smooth, billionaire unicorn client who represents the ultimate material jackpot and John (Chris Evans), her rough-around-the-edges, emotionally raw ex-boyfriend who is still dreaming about growing old, getting wrinkles and having kids together.

Song uses this glossy, high-society setup to deliver a deeply cynical, yet strangely hopeful examination of how modern capitalism has basically colonized our love lives. It’s a rom-com where people actually talk about the financial math of marriage, the cost of a twelve-million-dollar apartment and the cold reality of trading youth for security.

The pacing can be incredibly deliberate, and some dialogue-heavy scenes drag out just a few beats longer than they need to. But if you appreciate a movie that takes a trashy, daytime-television plot structure and elevates it into a sharp, beautifully shot critique of modern existence, it’s well worth the entry fee.

The A24 Blu-ray has a director commentary, a making-of feature, a composer deep dive with Japanese Breakfast and six postcards. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Founded in 1974 by harmonica player/vocalist Kim Wilson and guitarist Jimmie Vaughan (brother of Stevie Ray Vaughan), The Fabulous Thunderbirds were originally just a blues band, before their sound evolved to include rock and soul.

Recorded live at Warehouse Live on June 30, 2006,  this release captures Kim and the boys playing songs like “Tuff Enuff,” “Painted On,” “Wrap It Up” and “Pretty Baby” live. I don’t even want to tell you how earwormy these songs are to me.

Directed by Alan Ames, the visual quality feels like a glorious, upscale time capsule from the mid-2000s standard-def era. But honestly, if a blues-rock concert looks too clean, it loses half its soul anyway. You want to feel like you’re standing in a packed Houston venue with a slightly sticky floor and an iron-clad rhythm section echoing off the concrete walls.

You can get this from MVD.

Look, I usually spend my time watching 1970s Italian cannibal flicks, shot-on-video weirdness or movies that get under a 2 on IMDb. But every now and again, a movie comes along that is so completely outside of the B&S comfort zone that I just have to sit down and watch it.

That brings us to Someone Like You.

It’s a 2024 faith-based tearjerker directed by Tyler Russell and written by his mom, Karen Kingsbury, based on her own bestselling novel. This is pure, unadulterated, wholesome melodrama made for the crowd that thinks a PG rating is pushing the envelope.

The plot sounds like something out of a weird 80s sci-fi soap opera, but played with absolute, deadpan earnestness. Sarah Fisher pulls double duty here as London Quinn and Andi Allen. London tragically dies early on, leaving her architect boyfriend, Dawson Gage (Jake Allyn), utterly shattered. But wait! It turns out London was an IVF baby and there was a secret second embryo donated to another family. Dawson tracks down the biological secret twin sister, Andi, and healing, tears and clean romance ensue.

What makes this movie worth talking about for a drive-in mental case like me? The cast connections, of course! Well, the moms are played by Robyn Lively — yes, Lana from Teen Witch — and Lynn Collins, who was Silver Fox in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Dejah Thoris in John Carter.

Someone Like You knows exactly who its audience is. It’s sentimental, it’s glossy and it moves with the slow, deliberate pace of a Sunday morning. It treats its bizarre embryo-swap plot with the kind of soft-focus reverence that secular critics hate, but Kingsbury fans absolutely devour.

You can get this from Deep Discount.