Back in 1986, there was a very real idea that we had broken the world. Or the ozone layer.

Discovered in 1913 by French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisso, it absorbs most of the world’s ultraviolet radiation. This layer of protection for us was destroyed after years of pollution,  chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and bromofluorocarbons, which means unabsorbed and dangerous ultraviolet radiation was now hitting us at a higher intensity.

You can feel the effects now when there’s a bad weather quality day, as what they call bad ozone can cause harm those with respiratory illnesses such as asthma, COPD and emphysema. Code orange kids, unite and try to take over while hacking up your insides.

I tell you all this to inform you that in 1986, there was a hole in the ozone layer and that seemed like as good a reason as any to cause zombies to wander Texas.

Directed by Matt Devlen, who directed and wrote Tabloid, as well as the man who wrote The Invisible Maniac — and produced Crispin Glover’s What Is It?, which quite frankly blows my mind — Ozone: The Attack of the Redneck Mutants is the movie brave enough to answer the call to make an ozone-related mutant zombie shot on Super 8 epic.

The spiritual cousin or some family to The Abomination — which has a lot of the same cast and crew, as it was shot first and then this came next — this all starts with Kevin Muncy (Scott Davis, Cody from The Abomination, get ready for a lot of …from The Abomination mentions) sneaking into the trunk of the car of Arlene Wells (Blue Thompson AKA Carolyn McCormick, Bret’s wife; of course she was in the movie you already know I’m going to talk about, playing Kelly. She also edited his movies Blood On the Badge and Armed for Action as well as acting as the costume designer for Time Tracers). They’re on their way to Poolville, Texas — an incorporated community of around five hundred people in North Texas that’s close to the birthplace of Robert E. Howard — he was from Peaster, TX — and Mart Martin, as well as the final resting place of Chewbacca. No, really. Peter Mayhew lived in Boyd, TX.

Anyways, Poolville is at the junction of farm roads 3107 and 920, named for the big pool of water in the middle of town. There are five churches, one for every hundred people.

Back to Ozone. Get ready to meet characters with names like Outhouse Mutant, Car Mutant, Country Store Mutant, Granny Mutant, Big Fat Mutant and Melon Mutant. There are lots of melons. This movie has more watermelons than Mr. Majestyk. It also has effects that make me genuinely concerned for the actors in this, as the effects look like being tarred and feathered. I can only imagine that the zombie makeup stayed on their skin for days and that throwing up all of the multicolored liquids gave them all diarrhea.

This also has some kind of misplaced love story, as Wade McCoy (Brad McCormick, Ike from…yeah, repetition is the essential comedic device) has promised to pick up Loretta Lipscomb (Ashley Nevada AKA Barbara Dow who is in…actually a whole lot of movies, such as The Invisible Maniac, Mad At the Moon, Deathrow Gameshow, Curse of the Queerwolf, Nudist Colony of the Dead, Witchcraft IV: Virgin Heart, Cage II, Red Lipstick and G.I. Jesus) for the talent show down at the general store. We also meet his mother Ruby (Janice Williams), who at one point invites Kevin and Arlene to a picnic that turns into chaos. 

I asked Bret McCormick about this movie and he filled in a lot of the gaps for me.

“We agreed to do these two movies back to back. It was supposed to be like a one-month thing with ten days on each movie. He was supposed to go first. And at the last minute, he backed off and bailed out. So I went in and shot The Abomination first and we shot for 10 days and that was kind of it. The production of Ozone went on for like 22 days. And it got to the point where we just kind of had to say it’s time to stop because it could have gone on forever.”

As to how they were able to just shoot whatever they wanted and not be bothered, he said, “In Poolville, back in those days, I mean, you could shoot a scene on one of the dirt roads, run through the town and be out in the street for 30-40 minutes before a car came by. We were largely undisturbed with pretty much anything we wanted to do out there. The locals, some of them were curious and, you know, helped us out and played big parts in the movie.”

This is the kind of movie where puke and blood get on everything. That’s how they do it in Texas, the kind of place where a chainsaw massacre gets filmed in a way too hot shack filled with real animal guts and the sequel is made in a newspaper printing facility that had ink pouring down the walls and everyone had some mysterious respiratory illness. It feels handmade and not perfect and that’s how movies should be, messy affairs that make you laugh or throw up and sometimes that happens in the same moment.

The score is great, too. The music crew was Richard Davis (who also worked on Dear God No!, Amazon Hot Box, Monsters and, wow, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), John Hudek, Lasalo Mur and Kim Davis, who has worked as a location manager on movies like Alita: Battle Angel, Stone Cold, Problem Child, Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss and Don Henley’s video for “The End of the Innocence.”

Where The Abomination is a film about darkness within the light of religion and literal cancer coming to life to be a Biblical end times beast, Ozone is happier to just be people hooting and hollering, shotgun blasts blowing melons to bits and an ending that’s beyond deserved.

The Visual Vengeance release of Ozone: Attack of the Redneck Mutants has extras including a new director-approved SD master from original tape elements, plus two commentary tracks, one by producer Bret McCormick and star Blue Thompson and another with commentary with Sam Panico of B&S About Movies and Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum. Hey that’s me!

Plus you get a new Blue Thompson interview, an Ozone and The Abomination location visit, deleted scenes and outtakes from producer Matt Devlen’s personal archives, a Muther Video VHS intro reel, interviews with Devlen, a short film, acting reels, a public access review, a podcast, an image gallery, a trailer for Tabloid, Visual Vengeance trailers, a “Stick Your Own” VHS sticker set, a reversible sleeve featuring original VHS art, a folded mini-poster, a limited edition O-Card with alternate art by The Dude, a 12-page mini-comic book, an Ozone mutant puke bag and a Muther Video logo stick. You can get this from MVD.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Chris Stokes never lets you down. You know, when he and Marques Houston put together a Tubi Original, you’re about to get high entertainment, some level of sleaze, and the kind of viewing experience that quickly goes by. 

Sean Stevens (Nate Wyatt) is one of the world’s biggest pop stars. After being robbed and knocked out, he wakes up in an unfamiliar bed. That’s when he’s introduced to Stacy Freeman (Asia Holiday), who tells him he is in a safe place.” However, safety is an illusion; Stacy reveals herself as his biggest fan and claims she is the only one who can properly care for him. As you can imagine, she goes all Misery on him, keeping him locked up all for herself because she’s a megafan of his singing and makes him perform just for her. Sure, he only has one song, but come on. Just go with it.

Stacy isolates Sean from the outside world, gaslighting him by claiming his family doesn’t actually want him back, hoping to convince him that they only want to profit from his fame. While the world searches for the missing star, Stacy keeps him captive, driven by the fact that she has been waiting so long for this moment. Who can blame her when she builds a specialized room for Sean, not for his comfort, but as a studio where he is forced to write and record an entire album dedicated solely to her, Phantom of the Paradise-style.

Of course, like all Stokes’ projects, this ends with a cliffhanger, and I assume that the second — and third — films were all shot at the same time. I don’t see that as a bad thing. When a movie has a psychotic fake wedding ceremony, you can never hate on it.

I love that — like Italian exploitation directors of old — Stokes starts from a template, whether that be an erotic thriller, a child gone bad movie or, in this case, a kidnapping by someone with mental issues movie. Then, he fills his cast with people of color and goes from following the blueprint into his own thing, unafraid if things feel off or weird. These movies exist in their own universe, and if Tubi really were the mom-and-pop video store I dream it is, they would have their own shelf with his name above it. Kudos.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The beauty of this new Strangers movie is that somehow, some way, it has made The Strangers: Prey At Night into a much better movie just by virtue of its existence. Just like The Strangers – Chapter 1, this was directed by Renny Harlin, written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, and shot in Slovakia. 

Does Renny Harlin have photos of studio heads with goats? Because seriously, how does one make some of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history and keep coming back? Who is demanding his movies? Who wanted three Stranger movies that start with the worst conceit: What if a home-invasion movie, centered on the randomness and lack of knowledge about the why of its antagonists, overly explained their motivations to the audience?

Anyways, we’re in Venus, Oregon, a place where we learn that Pin-Up Girl is really a waitress named Shelley (Ema Horvath) and she and the rest of the Strangers — Scarecrow and Dollface — are looking to finish off Maya (Madelaine Petsch), a victim who lost her husband (Froy Gutierrez) but survived their last assault. Now she’s in a hospital, which may as well be Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. She’s half-alive, the cops are covering things up, and she soon is chased throughout the place by the Strangers, even hiding inside a morgue drawer with the body of her dead boyfriend.

As her family makes plans to get her out of town and to Portland, she hooks up with Nurse Danica (Brooke Johnson) and her roommates Chris (Florian Clare), Gregory (Gabriel Basso) and Wayne (Milo Callaghan). Don’t get used to them or the cop who helps her, Billy Bufford (Joplin Sibtain).

At least Maya is able to kill a wild boar and eliminate one of the Strangers, but not before we learn that Shelley and the man who would become Scarecrow attended a school together, where they killed a girl named Tamara. And now you know, I guess.

This whole thing felt pointless, but I was trapped on a plane and couldn’t exactly walk out, so I at least finished it. I await the last chapter, as I will probably watch that on a long flight as well, my chosen place to see movies I feel obligated to watch.

Directed and written by John Hayes (End of the World, Dream No Evil, Garden of the Dead, Grave of the Vampire, Jailbait Babysitter, and so many more; he also made adult films like Baby Rosemary, Hot Lunch and Pleasure Zone as Harold J. Perkins), The Hang-Up is all about vice cop Sgt. Robert Walsh (Tony Vorno), who the force uses as an undercover transvestite despite him looking nothing like a woman. He spends his nights dressed as the very degenerates he spends his days arresting with a vitriolic, borderline obsessive hatred. And even when he has his landlady throw herself at him, he can’t get it up. Other than that, his life is horrible as he just sits at home, alone, drinking Coors Light in bed. 

Then he meets sex worker Angel (Sharon Matt) and falls in love. And that’s when things get worse for him. He falls in love with her, and we get the idea by the end that she’s just playing with him, luring him into the underworld that he was so intent on destroying. 

I was pretty much astounded by this. Sure, it’s exploitation and has so much rawness in the way people talk and act toward one another, but it somehow aspires to be so much more. The Hang-Up is a fascinating relic of the roughie era. It’s a film that exists at the intersection of hard-boiled detective noir and the raw, unwashed spirit of the sexual revolution.