Amazon Prime video is amazing. This isn’t sales pitch. It’s the truth. What finally sold me was the sheer amount of movies that I can search through. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to the shelves of an old mom and pop video store. Ah, the old days of Prime Time Video, where I’d look at all the lurid horror boxes and try to decide how many I could watch in a weekend.

Blood Beat is one of those box covers you’d look at over and over again, trying to decide whether or not you should rent it. Then, when you finally sit down and take it in, it blows your mind and you try to describe it to your friends and they think you have to be making it all up. Ah, the pre-internet days. Well, now that we’re all online, I’d like to think of you as my friend. And I’m going to tell you all about this crazy movie.

Fabrice A. Zaphiratos has two directing credits to his name and this is one of them. That’s a shame — his direction here tends toward the strange and unexpected. There were moments here where I just yelled in glee at the TV, shocked at what was happening. It’s not the best movie you’ve ever seen, but it aspires to be one.

This feels like a regional horror movie made by a bunch of European art directors on too many drugs. It’s also the only Christmas horror movie I’ve ever seen that has a psychic samurai slasher. But it really isn’t even about Christmas. It’s also the only film I’ve ever seen that has a murder scene synched up with a girl’s orgasms. Also, the house the family lives in tries to kill everyone at one point, but no one decides to leave it.

This all starts with Cathy and Gary talking about how they’ll never get married, despite him wanting to be a father to her children. This scene feels like something out of a pure drama and not in a tacked onto a horror film way. I actually thought I had accidentally loaded up a student film or an attempt to film a 70’s hard and honest look at relationships. But soon enough, Dolly and Ted come home. Ted’s girlfriend Sarah is the cause of great concern, as Cathy’s psychic abilities warn her of the young girl. Surely, she’s seen her before. And when Sarah finds a samurai sword in her bedroom, things get strange.

As weird as the film gets, it never plays anything for laughs. It’s earnest and deadly serious. Unlike a modern film, it explains nothing. You’re open to explain for yourself why the mother and girlfriend have a psychic link. Why is the killer a samurai? Why are there strange video effects throughout? Why is the mom a painter? I’d love to discuss this film at a party with a roomful of people who have just watched it.

This movie is why I love movies. It feels like a discovery. I want to share it with you.

Vinegar Syndrome has put out what has to be the definitive release of this film. It’s packed with extras and an embossed slipcover. You can also find it, like I did, streaming on Amazon Prime.

Oh Canada. We’ve celebrated your movies for an entire week and you continue to deliver pure blasts of polite insanity to our streaming devices and DVD players!

Halloween night 1966. A priest named Zachary Malius kills seven frat boys from Winfield College for breaking into his family’s crypt and recreating an occult ritual. He’s placed into an insane asylum, where the laws in Canada are, well, insane. He’s never fed and has been in a catatonic state for years, surviving by eating bugs.

Kids have learned nothing in the intervening quarter century as they go right back and do the ritual again. Malius comes back to life and starts doing what slasher villains do best — wipe out people right after they get done having sex. At least he has the excuse of being a priest. One wonders why they decided to make him like Freddy Kruger, yelling things like, “No sex! No TV! No parking!” That said, the fact that the Catholic Church covered up these crimes should come as a shock to no one.

Sam Rockwell shows up briefly as the younger version of the character that Darren McGavin plays for the rest of the film. Jorja Fox from TV’s CSI also shows up.

Director Brian Owens is also behind 80’s video fave Brainscan. There is one genuinely unnerving scene where a crucified Christ comes to life and starts screaming, then falls to the floor and breaks into small pieces. Shades of Enter the Devil!

There are moments of slow motion flashbacks and hints of art here that are undermined by horrible looking titles. It’s like his movie got only so close to being well art directed. It’s not the best or worst slasher ever, but it won me over. Maybe I was watching it at 2:30 AM, which always helps matters.

You can get the Code Red blu ray of this movie at Diabolik DVD or stream it on Amazon Prime.

Satan himself releases snakes on a small town, all to get back at the ancestor of St. Patrick. If this sentence makes you say, “And then?” you are the person that this movie was made for.

The majority of director Bob Claver’s work is on the small screen. So if this feels like a TV movie to you, that’s fine. Is that even a bad thing? Not in these parts.

Father Tom Farrow (Fritz Weaver, Creepshow, Demon Seed) has lost his faith. His town? It’s getting a new dog track. And then the devil makes all the snakes go crazy! He teams up with Dr. Maggie Sheridan (Gretchen Corbett, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death) and herpetologist Dr. Paul Hendricks to save his town before its too late.

This is the debut of Christina Applegate. Her mother, Nancy Priddy, also appears in the film.

It was shot by Dean Cundy (Halloween), so there are some moments of artistic flourish despite the low budget. There’s also a scene where a snake gets its head shot off that had me fall on the floor in a fit of hysterics.

Honestly, I’ve never seen a movie that somehow rips off Jaws and 1970’s occult cinema at the same time. It also has some elements of rural backwoods melodrama, so if you like that sort of thing, this would be the movie for you. Also — a drunken priest! I’m sure here’s an IMDB search list for that!

Shout Factory released this on blu-ray along with Empire of the Ants. Talk about a double feature!

The same Bob Clark that did Porky’s did A Christmas Story and also made Black Christmas and Deathdream. He even produced the film Moonrunners, which inspired TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard. He also made Turk 182! (if you had HBO back in the day, you saw it), Rhinestone and the Baby Geniuses series. Yep. Bob Clark pretty much did it all. And here’s one more completely great thing he created.

Alan (Alan Ormsby, who would go on to write Deathdream, Deranged, My Bodyguard and direct Popcorn) leads a group of actors who have all gone to an island together for a night of shenanigans. Sure, the island is a cemetery for criminals. And of course, he’s going to do a seance to raise the dead. And while the whole thing is a joke, Alan is genuinely upset that the dead aren’t walking the swamp.

They do find a corpse — Orville — and Alan uses it to continually harass his actors. And the ritual really did work, as the dead begin killing everyone off one by one.

The shift from comedy to drama to horror in this film is startling. The cast is amateur, but the terror feels real. The dread and doom at the end, as the zombies board a boat as the lights of Miami are in the background and atonal music plays are as perfect as film can be.

Clark shot this movie at the same time as Deathdream, using some of the same cast. A surprising moment in the film is that while there are two gay men — and they stereotypically lisp — they play an integral role in the film. That’s pretty woke for 1972.

Stick with the slowness at the start of this film. It will pay off by the end. I give you my promise. You can check this out on Amazon Prime.

Killer Workout is not the same movie as Death Spa. Sure, they’re both about a killer let loose inside a health club, but they’re totally different movies.

Originally titled Aerobicide, this is all about a fitness club in LA owned by Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr, Savage Streets). The co-owner is her twin sister who was burned in a tanning salon two years ago and is presumed deceased. The action kicks in when members of the gym start getting killed in horrible ways. And by that, I mean a giant safety pin. Yes, this is the second movie I’ve seen in the last few months where a pin is used to kill people (Lucio Fulci’s Murder Rock, stand up and take a bow).

This is the second David Prior movie I’ve endured in the past few days (The Final Sanction will be posted soon enough). It’s also worth mentioning that even after the final kill and reveal, there is still an extended aerobics number. If you miss the 80’s, particularly spandex and people wearing outfits that put their entire butt on display, I’m pretty much telling you that this is the exact movie you’re looking for. Unless you were thinking of Death Spa.

You can get the Slasher // Video blu ray at Amazon or watch this for free on Amazon Video with a Prime membership.

Armand Mastroianni brought us the screen debut of Tom Hanks in He Knows You’re Alone. Here, he combines a cast of people who will make you say, “Hey isn’t that…” and puts them up against an army of undead Confederate soldiers.

During the Civil War, a Confederate town is taken over and all of the soldiers are ordered to walk a minefield, including young Jeremy, who is forced to do so because he has on the uniform. Only he and his mother survive.

Fast forward to 1986, where the Army’s 44th division — the same one that screwed over the southern soldiers in the past — are conducting war games under the command of Sgt. Leona Hawkins (yes, that’s Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek). There’s also Pvt. Ellis (Maxwell Caulfield, Rex Manning himself from Empire Records), Pvt. Lejune (Talia Balsam, Crawlspace and the first wife of George Clooney, as well as the daughter of Psycho‘s Martin Balsam), Pvt. Osgood (Levar Burton, uniting the original and TNG Star Trek casts), Pvt. Cort (Bobby Di Cicco, The Philadelphia Experiment), Pvt. Mendez (Scott fucking Jacoby from Bad Ronald) and Maurice Gibb in a cameo as a Union soldier (he also wrote a soundtrack that wasn’t used).

Of course, someone fucks around in the woods and the undead rise to claim the living. Everything feels rather low rent, which is fine, because the actual zombies look rather good and the reveal of who is behind the actual return of the dead is rather interesting.

This is way better than it should be and in the hands of a better director would have been pretty interesting. As it is, it’ll definitely pass an afternoon.

You can find it streaming on Amazon Prime. Otherwise, this has never come out on DVD, only a VHS release. They must have just taken one of those copies for the one that’s streaming, because it’ll remind you of renting a 1986 film after twenty years of rentals, tracking problems and all. If that makes you happy to read, thanks for being one of our readers. You’re on the right website.

Harry Thomason and his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason created TV’s Designing Women and were a 1990’s power couple, playing a major role in getting President Bill Clinton elected. But way before that, he wrote and directed this Rod Serling narrated film.

This movie presents its tales as true, set up by not one narrator, but two. Yes, Rod Serling was not enough. Let that sink in.

“The Heptagon” starts at the funeral of a college student. It turns out that three guys all played a prank that led to his death. A curse from his mother — the seventh daughter of a seventh son — leads to every one of them dying.

“The Darkness” is about a boy’s dog disappearing into a hole to hell and his father going insane after he tries to visit the hole. This feels like a retelling of the Shaver mysteries (see our review of Beyond Lemuria to learn more), although one possibly insane IMDB reviewer claims that they’ve been to the actual hole. There’s also an IMDB review of the film from the voice of the hole itself! Does this have something to do with the voices from Hell that have been proven to be audio from Baron Blood?

Finally, “The Girl on the Bridge” retells the urban legend “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” which has variations all over the country (check out this North Carolina one). Rosie Holotik from Horror High and Don’t Look in the Basement plays the title character, which takes this movie up several letter grades.

The end of the film feels like it keeps wrapping everything up, only to take us back to the beginning and tell it all again. It’s a really strange narrative device that probably was the only way that this movie got to a long enough running time to play in drive-ins.

This film is an odd duck. It’s so awesome in parts and so bad in others. Serling’s voice is perfect, but you can tell he had nothing to do with the writing. And yet, it all feels like something you’d love to watch all fucked up at a drive-in around 3 AM. So, you know, this would be a definite recommendation.

Thomason would follow this up with The Great Lester Boggs, a motorcycle film featuring ex-football player Alex Karras as a cop, The Day It Came to Earth and Revenge of Bigfoot, which starred Motel Hell‘s Rory Calhoun. Then, after writing and producing for The Fall Guy, he started moving in much more powerful circles.

If you want to see this for yourself, Diabolik DVD has the Code Red blu-ray that combines this film with Sasquatch. Or you can watch it for free on Amazon Prime.

Six strangers are thrown together as part of a slasher movie re-enactment. It seems like good fun, what with them being left in the woods and pursued by serial killers. But what happens when it becomes real? And who will survive? And, of course, what will be left of them?

Marcienne Dwyer starts with the heroine, Alex, who is filling in for her boyfriend’s best friend as they go to Slasher Sleepout, an escape room style weekend. The relationship between her and Nathan, as well as the event itself, are not what they seem. While Alex seems like the best girlfriend ever, the truth is much different. And Nathan’s reasons for bringing her aren’t all that pure either.

All manner of slasher tropes show up here, from the sinister gas station to the victims that are along for the ride, like the gothy and gore-obsessed Marina and Pitch, horror film lover Larry and Tim, who is a cipher and may just be part of the game. They’re all abducted and taken into the woods for the game, where there are set clues and objects that they all need to get to the next point.

Halfway through the movie, a stylistic change suddenly happens, taking the film from Friday the 13th to Saw. That’s also when we learn a lot more about our two main characters. There’s a lot of fan service to slasher fans, but if you’re looking for a film that recalls those movies and says something new, this isn’t it. It’s not a bad film, but the narrative switch veers from pure slash and stalk to psychological horror.

This is co-writer (along with Trysta A. Bissett) Preston DeFrancis feature directorial debut and he does pretty well with it. I’ve read other reviews online complaining about the poor acting of some of the characters in here, but I didn’t really notice. That said, if you look at most of the stuff I watch, I care more about being entertained than by the quality of the performances. I chalked it up to the slasher roots at the heart of this one.

To be honest, I liked where the film was heading before the shift, but I was still entertained by where things ended up. But hey, make up your own mind. You should watch it for yourself. It’s streaming exclusively on Shudder.

Ken Hughes directed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mae West’s Sextette. Did that prepare him for this Western take on a giallo?

As the last child is picked up from a daycare center, Anne is menaced by a man clad in black leather, wearing a motorcycle helmet and wielding a traditional African kukri. He or she chases her to a merry-go-round and spins her into being decapitated, her head found the next morning floating in a bucket.

Judd Austin (Leonard Mann, star of many Italian productions including The Humanoid) is the cop who wants to solve the case, which takes him to the night classes at Wendall College. This isn’t the first murder with a severed head being found in water and it seems like there may be a serial killer. But who could it be?

It turns out that many of the murdered girls all went to the school and were all involved with Professor Millett. Or maybe it was Gary, the mental busboy. Or it could even be Miss Griffin, the administrator of the school. But surely it isn’t Eleanor, Millett’s live-in love and a starring role for Rachel Ward.

There are the bones of a great slasher here. There’s a girl in a diving suit who gets decapitated and we see her head fall into a turtle tank. There’s a head that was used to make some soup. There’s even a head in the toilet.

What it does need is just a little bit more gore and plenty more style. It’s competently directed and the mystery is decent, but imagine how this film would have played out with just a little more panache. I’m not saying it’s a horrible film. I’m just saying that it could be so much more.

That said — you won’t waste your time watching it. And now, this hard to find film is now playing on Shudder!