Is there anything more stressful than meeting your girlfriend’s father for the first time? How about doing it at a lavish, Kafkaesque hotel where everyone looks like they walked out of a 1940s noir and a doomsday cult is busy prepping for the arrival of a cosmic god?

The Birthday premiered at Sitges in 2004, blew the minds of everyone who saw it (including Quentin Tarantino, who reportedly loved it), and then… nothing. It vanished into a black hole of distribution hell for nearly twenty years. But thanks to the psychotronic archaeologists at Arrow Video, Eugenio Mira’s nightmare-fueled screwball comedy has been resurrected.

Corey Feldman stars as Norman Forrester. Now, let’s talk about Corey. We grew up with him as Mouth, Edgar Frog, and Vic from Stand By Me, but you have never seen him like this. Norman is a man of pure, jittery anxiety. He’s a high-pitched, stuttering mess who just wants to propose to his girlfriend, Alison (Erica Prior). He’s playing against type so hard he practically invents a new type.

The film takes place in real-time at the Grand Hotel, a sprawling, opulent set that feels like the Overlook’s more claustrophobic cousin. Norman is trying to navigate the social minefield of Alison’s wealthy father, played by the legendary Jack Taylor. If you’re a fan of Eurotrash and cult cinema, you know Taylor. He was in everything from Jess Franco’s Count Dracula to Conan the Barbarian and Pieces. Seeing him go toe-to-toe with a manic Feldman is the cinematic crossover I didn’t know I needed.

As the night progresses, the screwball half of the movie begins to bleed into the cosmic horror half. The hotel staff is a little too polite. The guests are a little too strange. And there’s the matter of the sect that believes tonight is the night their god, Fu-Manchu-style deity or otherwise, is finally going to be born.

Director Eugenio Mira, who would go on to direct Grand Piano, is a technician of the highest order. The camera moves here are insane. We’re talking long, sweeping takes, split-screens, and a sense of geography that makes you feel like you’re trapped in the hotel right along with Norman. It’s a movie that feels like it’s vibrating at a different frequency than anything else released in the early 2000s.

Why did this sit on a shelf for two decades? Maybe it was too weird for the mainstream. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for a prestige Corey Feldman performance in a Spanish-produced English-language occult comedy. But the wait was worth it.

The limited edition Arrow Video 4K UHD and Blu-ray releases include a 4K restoration from the original negative; audio commentary by actor Corey Feldman and co-writer/director Eugenio Mira; a new interview with Mira, shot exclusively for this release; an in-depth breakdown of a scene from the film by Mira, featuring archival behind-the-scenes footage, storyboards and rushes; a 2024 Q&A with Feldman and Mira from the film’s 20th anniversary screening at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas; the original and 20th anniversary trailers; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options and a collectors’ booklet featuring new writing on the film by Bryan Reesman. You can get this on 4K UHD or Blu-ray from MVD.

In a dark and twisted tale set in Las Vegas, a deranged slasher targets a group of aspiring young escorts. As the body count rises, the women band together, using their wits and determination to confront the killer. Will they survive the night, or will the slasher claim them as his next victims?

Death-scort Service (2015): The setup is classic grindhouse: a group of working girls in Sin City finds themselves in the crosshairs of a serial killer who isn’t just looking for a thrill. He’s looking to turn the desert red. This isn’t a whodunit with a library and a pipe; it’s a who ’s-gonna-survive with a blade and a grudge.

Director Sean Donohue assembles a rogue’s gallery of indie horror stalwarts and adult film crossovers to populate his slaughterhouse. Krystal Pixie Adams (Michelle), Amethist Young (Gwen) and Ashley Lynn Caputo (Missy) lead the pack. Caputo, in particular, is a veteran of this kind of low-budget mayhem, having appeared in everything from Night of the Living Dead: Genesis to The Uh-oh Show!. And in a move straight out of the 1970s playbook, the film features a big star doing a cameo in Evan Stone. I mean, he’s a big star according to my hidden browser history.

That said, if you’re offended by, well, just about anything, this movie is ready to gross you out. It truly has some repellent death scenes, and if that’s what gets you going, good news! This is for you.

Death-Scort Service Part 2: The Naked Dead (2017): Sean Donahue returns with a sequel in which Michelle (Krystal “Pixie” Adams) is left behind to start over and forget her black past. There’s a new killer in Las Vegas out to see that that never happens.

Well, guess what? She’s dead in a few seconds, killed in a bubble bath, and we move on to new victims. Spoiler, huh? What if I told you someone’s ladybits have to deal with an electric carving knife?

This is an unapologetic exploitation flick. If the first movie was a peek behind the curtain, this one rips the curtain down. There is an absolute mountain of nudity on display here. Give it up for Bob Glazier. In the first film, he famously gave us a sack-tastic cameo, but here? He goes full-frontal. He’s bricked up, on display and apparently very proud of it.

This also goes totally Boogeyman II to show us most of the first film. Respect.

Taste Me: Death-Scort Service Part 3 (2018): The girls at the Tasty Chicks escort service are having a rough week. There’s a serial strangler stalking the streets, turning their colleagues into headlines and the police are—as usual—three steps behind. Defund the giallo police, defund the slasher police.

Enter our protagonist: a mysterious drifter who steps in to save a girl from an abusive john. He takes a bullet for his trouble, but in the world of these movies, no good deed goes unpunished or unrewarded with a stay in a brothel.

The drifter gets hauled back to the Tasty Chicks HQ and as the girls nurse him back to health, they realize they’ve got a potential pit bull on their hands. They offer him a job: stay in the house, keep your eyes peeled, and keep the Strangler from getting through the front door.

As our drifter recovers, he starts noticing that the Tasty Chicks are keeping some secrets of their own. It’s not just a killer outside; there’s something rotten and possibly cult-like happening inside the walls, like eating people. Whoops, spoiled again.

This one was produced by Sean Donohue, who did not direct or write. Instead, Chris Woods took over.

Extras on this SRS release include commentary tracks, photo galleries, trailers and behind-the-scenes for all three movies; FX footage; short films, a mini-documentary and more. You can get it from MVD.

Most people hear the name Johnnie To and immediately think of bullet-riddled suits, slow-motion standoffs and the cool-as-ice nihilism. But he can direct a gritty triad war in his sleep and then turn around and break your heart with a melodrama.

Louis Koo (Throw Down) stars as Michael, a Hong Kong megastar who has everything until he gets dumped at the altar in front of a stadium full of fans. It’s a public execution of his ego. Naturally, he does what any self-respecting icon would do: he goes on a world-class bender that ends with him passed out in the high-altitude forests of Yunnan.

He’s found by Sue (Sammi Cheng), a woman who runs a lonely guesthouse and has her own baggage. Her husband vanished into those same woods years ago, and she’s been living in a state of frozen grief ever since. As Sue nurses Michael back to health and sobriety, the movie shifts from a star-is-born setup into a deeply felt meditation on how we use stories to survive. It turns out their lives were intertwined long before they met in the mud. As Michael sobers up, he remembers that Sue was an early member of his fan club, and that he was the reason she and her husband met.

This isn’t just a romance; it’s Johnnie To’s love letter to cinema itself. There’s a movie-within-a-movie subplot here that explores how films help us process the pain that reality makes unbearable. It’s meta, it’s emotional and it features Sammi Cheng and Louis Koo, the golden couple of HK cinema.

The Radiance Films Blu-ray of Romancing In Thin Air has extras such as a newly recorded interview with screenwriter Ryker Chan; audio commentary by Hong Kong cinema expert Dylan Cheung; a visual essay on Johnnie To’s romantic melodramas by Sean Gilman; making-of and behind-the-scenes footage; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow; a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Jake Cole and archival writing by David Bordwell and it is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

If you think the legal system is a mess today, take a trip back to 1970s Palermo, where the line between the badge and the bullet is thinner than a piece of cheap deli ham. Director Damiano Damiani (Amityville II: The Possession) drops us into a world where justice isn’t just blind; she’s been paid off and left in a ditch.

Martin Balsam is Captain Bonavia, a cop who has spent so long staring into the abyss of Sicilian corruption that he’s finally decided to blink. He’s tired of the rules letting the big fish swim free, so he plays a dangerous card: he releases a total nutjob from the asylum just to watch him take a shot at a local construction mogul. When you’re dealing with guys who pave over bodies with concrete, Bonavia figures a little insanity is the only way to get a result.

Ben Gazzara was approached to play this role, but turned it down. Years later, Martin Balsam thanked Gazzara, as the role had given his career a fresh start.

But things don’t go according to plan. Instead of a clean hit, the plan goes south, and now Bonavia has a shadow: Franco Nero. He plays District Attorney Traini, an idealistic young gun who still believes the law actually means something. Balsam is the weary soul who’s seen too much and Nero is the sharp-suited crusader who thinks he can fix it. Their chemistry turns a standard procedural into a psychological warzone.

You can’t talk about this flick without mentioning the score. Riz Ortolani cooks up an innovative mix of jazz, pop and electric guitar that keeps your nerves on edge.

This Radiance Films release has a 2K restoration presented with Italian and English audio options; new interviews with Nero, Michele Gammino, editor Antonio Siciliano and music expert Lovely Jon about Riz Ortolani’s score; an image gallery; a reversible sleeve featuring designs based on original posters; a limited edition booklet featuring archival interviews with Damiano Damiani and it’s all presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

If you’re a fan of the kind of cinema that feels like a pressurized steam pipe about to burst, Takashi Miike is your dude. While most directors would be happy finishing one masterpiece in a lifetime, Miike dropped Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q and The Happiness of the Katakuris all in the same year as this movie, a yakuza epic that trades the cartoonish gore of Ichi for a dense, Shakespearean power struggle drenched in sweat and cigarette smoke.

It all kicks off when a yakuza member, played by Miike himself, decides to violently assault a hostess on rival turf. He gets whacked for his trouble, and just like that, the match is dropped into a pool of gasoline. This isn’t just a street fight; it’s a catalyst for a full-scale gang war, as every faction in the city scrambles for a piece of the pie.

Written by Shigenori Takechi (Graveyard of Honor), Agitator isn’t just a shoot-’em-up. It’s a dual-layered look at how the mob actually works: You’ve got the senior figures like Mr. Kaito (played by Hiroki Matsukata, The Rapacious Jailbreaker) doing the backroom maneuvering. These guys treat human lives like chess pieces, playing a slow game of political redistribution. Then you have the low-level soldiers and street-level mobsters who actually have to bleed for the decisions made in those air-conditioned offices. The movie builds toward an inevitable collision where the suits and the tracksuits finally clash in a messy, tragic finale.

For the longest time, we only had the theatrical cut. But Miike doesn’t do brief. This release finally brings the two-part, 200-minute extended version out of the shadows of Japanese VHS obscurity. It’s a sprawling, epic deep dive into the yakuza underworld that demands you sit down, shut up, and watch the world burn.

As one character says, “If life is shit, then why shouldn’t the two of us smash into it as hard as we can?” Any movie that ends with two men driving a stick of dynamite into a building is one I love.

The Radiance Films Blu-ray of Agitator has a high-definition digital transfer of theatrical version and a standard definition transfer of 200 minute extended version of this movie, presented in its original two-part form; a newly filmed interview with Takashi Miike; audio commentary by Tom Mes; a trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Tom Mes. You can get it from MVD.

You know the story. The dirt-under-the-fingernails kid who looks at the smog-choked horizon and decides he’s going to be the one holding the briefcase instead of the plow. It’s the American Dream, right? Only this is Poland in the wake of WWII, and the ladder is made of socialist bureaucracy, party favors and a soul-crushing urbanization that makes a concrete slab look like a warm blanket.

Grzegorz Królikiewicz (Through and Through) takes the Citizen Kane blueprint, shreds it, and feeds it through a Cold War meat grinder. We follow Michał Toporny, a peasant boy who climbs the social mountain until he’s a high-ranking official. But Królikiewicz isn’t interested in a polite rise and fall biopic. He wants to show you the gears grinding the human spirit into dust.

Cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński (who did the dizzying lens work for the cult slasher Angst) turns every frame into a psychic battlefield. The compositions are so original that they feel like they’re trying to escape the screen. It’s all wide angles and distorted perspectives that make the city feel like a beautiful, sterile prison.

We’re dropped into the life of Michal Toporny (Franciszek Trzeciak), a peasant boy who decides that the mud of the farm isn’t for him. He starts climbing the social ladder of post-war Poland with a speed that would give his ancestors vertigo. But this isn’t a local boy makes good story. Instead, it’s a local boy burns every bridge odyssey.

Michal ditching his rural roots isn’t just about moving to the city. He discards his wife and son like yesterday’s newspaper to marry Wieslawa (Beata Tyszkiewicz), a woman who represents the socially upstanding life he craves. He eventually claws his way to the top of a mining company, but the view from the peak is pretty grim. Wieslawa gets tired of being married to a man who’s more in love with his career than her, leading to an affair with a younger engineer that hits like a cold splash of water.

We fast-forward to Michal not as the young and vital man we have watched, but instead as an old and sick person trying to glue together the shattered pieces of a relationship with the son he abandoned decades ago.

The Dancing Hawk (or Tańczący jastrząb) is a brutal reminder that the higher you fly, the more everything below you starts to look like a target—until you realize you’re the one falling. It’s ambitious, it’s ugly, and it’s essential viewing for anyone who thinks climbing the ladder doesn’t require leaving a few layers of skin behind.

Extras on the Radiance Films Blu-ray, which has a 4K restoration by Filmoteka Narodowa, include an interview with critic Carmen Gray; two short films by cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński; a reversible sleeve featuring original artwork by Jerzy Czerniawski and Andrzej Klimowski; a limited edition booklet featuring new writing by critic Piotr Kletowski and it comes in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip, leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. You can get it from MVD.

The Running Man was a troubled production, with original director Andrew Davis (Under Siege, The Fugitive) being replaced a week into filming by former Starsky and Hutch actor Paul Michael Glaser (he’s gone back to acting, but not before giving us the magic that is Kazaam).

In his book, Total Recall, Arnold wrote that this was a horrible decision, as the director “shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes. In fairness, Glaser just didn’t have time to research or think through what the movie had to say about where entertainment and government were heading and what it meant to get to the point where we actually kill people on screen. In TV, they hire you and the next week you shoot, and that’s all they were able to do.”

Written by Steven E. de Souza (who had a hell of a run, writing Commando, 48 Hrs. and the first two Die Hard films, while also adapting Mark Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales for TV as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs) from the Richard Bachman book (Bachman was and is, of course, Stephen King, who was using a pseudonym to see if his success was due to talent or luck. A Washington, D.C. book clerk named Steve Brown discovered the truth before an answer could be found. In fact, Bachman’s next book was to be Misery, which became a King novel. The Dark Half, which became a George Romero movie, is based on this experience. In the original book, hero Ben Richards is nothing like the physical description of Arnold, who is near-superheroic.

The film starts with the premise that in 2017 — a time we’re all sadly too familiar with — the U.S. has become a police state after a worldwide economic collapse — perhaps not as close to home, but uncomfortably nearby. Actually, it’s way too fucking close to reality, as the opening text tells us that the “great freedoms of the United States are no longer, as the once great nation has sealed off its borders and become a militarized police state, censoring all film, art, literature, and communications.”

Within two years, the only thing that keeps the populace under control is The Running Man, a game show where convicted felons battle for their lives against the Stalkers, who are presented as pro wrestling/American Gladiators-style stars. Damon Killian (Richard Dawson of TV’s Family Feud and Hogan’s Heroes, as well as one of the first people in the U.S. to own a VCR) hosts the proceedings and remains one of the enduring reasons to enjoy this film. One gets the idea that Dawson was keen to parody his years of hosting game shows, and he cuts through this film, making his role so much better than it deserves to be, whether it’s his ads for Cadre Cola or the way he shits on everyone in his path, even lowly custodians. IMDB states that plenty of folks who worked with Dawson on Family Feud claim he was exactly like this character, but that seems like sour grapes in the form of hearsay. Anyways, worried that ratings may slip, Killian pushes for Ben Richards, the “Butcher of Bakersfield,” (actually, it was all a setup and he was wrongly convicted of killing citizens during a food riot) to be the next runner.

Ben gets caught because instead of staying at a resistance camp — post-prison break, where people’s heads get blown up real good — with fellow escapees Weiss (Yaphet Kotto from Alien and Live and Let Die) and Laughlin, he decides to find his brother. Instead, his brother has been taken in for re-education. In his place is Amber Mendez (Maria Conchita Alonzo, Predator 2, The Lords of Salem), the composer of the music for The Running Man.

Richards takes Amber hostage, but she knees him in the little Arnold, and he’s caught with a big net. Oh yeah — we also meet Mick Fleetwood as a resistance leader here. Remember how I said he played himself? Here’s my evidence. He states that the government has “burned my music,” and his second-in-command is named Stevie, after Fleetwood Mac band member and former flame Stevie Nicks (but is played by Dweezil Zappa, who is also in Pretty in Pink and Jack Frost). In exchange for Killian not putting his friends into the game, Richards enters the contest, only to learn that it’s all a lie and they’ll all be part of The Running Man.

The game begins and immediately, Richards does something that’s never been done. No Runner has ever killed a Stalker, but he bests and kills Subzero (former pro wrestler Professor Toru Tanaka, who played just about every Asian henchman ever. He’s the butler in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, he’s one of the heavies in The Last Action Hero, he’s Rushmore in 3 Ninjas and his IMDb filmography has many roles that simply list him as “sumo wrestler” or “bodyguard.”).

Meanwhile, Amber learns from the news that the media’s presented truth does not line up with her memories — Richards is accused of killing numerous people whom she did not see him murder. Her detective work gets her caught and now, she’s on the show.

Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch, Arnold the Barbarian from House 2) kills Laughlin before Richards dispatches him. Dynamo (played by Erland van Lidth, a classically trained baritone opera singer, who is actually singing the aria that introduces himself), another Stalker, kills Weiss before Richards flips his buggy, trapping him. However, Richards refuses to kill him, which increases his popularity. As the downtrodden people of the U.S. regularly bet on the game, they suddenly stop betting on the Stalkers and bet on a Runner for the first time — to the anger of Killian.

Killian offers Richards a Stalker role, but Richards turns it down. In retaliation, he sends Fireball, one of the most famous Stalkers, after Ben and Amber. He’s played by Jim Brown, who knows about the world of blood and circuses, seeing as how he is a former NFL football star. Plus. he was also in The Dirty Dozen and Mars Attacks! Fireball’s pursuit takes them into an abandoned factory where they find the charred remains of past winners — all lies, as they were really killed by Fireball, who is killed by his own weapon.

Totally losing his mind, Killian wants to send the game’s biggest star, Captain Freedom (Jesse “The Body” Ventura from Predator), to take on Richards. Freedom refuses, so the show creates a CGI version of reality in which Captain Freedom wins by killing Richards and Amber.

Meanwhile, Mick Fleetwood finds our stars and helps them get into the control room, where Amber kills Dynamo and Richards reveals the truth. Killian begs for his life, as all he was doing was giving the people what they wanted — death and chaos. Ben refuses, sending Killian into the game zone, where his rocket sled hits a Cadre Cola billboard and explodes.  Boom — a happy ending, as Ben and Amber romantically walk into the sunset, until you realize that their victory has changed absolutely nothing and society will just keep on being the same exact way.

Remember when I said this movie hasn’t aged well? I’d argue that it looks worse than the much smaller-budgeted Warriors of the Year 2072. The costumes look cheap, the video screens look sadly composited, and everything feels woefully low-budget for a film that cost $27 million dollars to make.

And what of the claim that this film’s post-apocalyptic future is better than our own? One only has to watch the scene where Richards is caught at the airport. Today’s post 9/11 security checkpoints are way worse than anything the hero of this film encounters — he’s never frisked and the tourists freely walk onto the tarmac of the airport, just like folks once could.

Honestly, director Glaser was in well over his head. If a director like Paul Verhoeven was at the helm — like Arnold’s Total Recall — the sheer ridiculous nature of a game show controlling the world could have really been a winner. As it stands here, this is a fun film that makes you wish that it could be so much more — kind of like eating Buffalo wing flavored chips and wishing that they were really Buffalo wings.

In truth, life imitated art in this film, as it inspired the aforementioned American Gladiators and the dance routines were choreographed by future reality game show hostess Paula Abdul.  And the Adidas-sponsored costumes of the Runners hint at the days when everything would have a branded logo.

You can get The Running Man from Deep Discount.