Is a biker movie not enough action for you? What if I told you that a biker gang named The Devil’s Advocates happen upon some warlocks and then one of them is bitten by a female werewolf and transforms under the full moon? How’s that sound?

I literally just told you the entire plot of this movie. Soon after the cult members cast a curse on the biker leader’s (Stephen Oliver, who was married to Lana Wood, sister of Natalie Wood and also the star of Motorpsycho and Angels from Hell) girlfriend that makes her turn into a werewolf, she turns him as well. Soon, the bikers are being killed one by one until they see their leader and his girl transform.

The bikers head back to the church for revenge, but suddenly stop when they see themselves in the cult lineup.

This movie has been sampled by Rob Zombie repeatedly, including the line “We all know how we’re going to die, baby. We’re gonna crash and burn.” It’s also better than anything he’s done since The Devil’s Rejects. Actually, it’s probably better than that, too.

Real bikers were used for all the stunts in this movie, so it has a real authenticity to it. And the weirdness of the cult’s rituals breaks into that so nicely, giving this movie a real air of pure strange. The cult leader, One, is played by Severn Darden, who played Governor Kolp in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. He’s so great in this movie!

The soundtrack is also so good. It’s very blues country rock with a bit of doom. It’s perfect for the action on the screen. This movie gets a very high recommendation!

Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? Maybe. Maybe not. But if you ask me, this combination of the occult and biker culture ranks really close.

Tom Latham (Nicky Henson, Witchfinder General) leads The Living Dead, a motorcycle gang that causes trouble and occasionally dabbles in black magic. The worm filled apple didn’t fall far from the tree — Tom’s mother, deceased father and butler Shadwell (George Sanders, All About Eve and Rebecca) follow the Left Hand Path. With their help, he learns how to die and come back from the dead — roaring from his freshly buried earth on his motorcycle (later Lemmy would do this in Motörhead’s “Killed by Death” video).

Soon, one after another of the gang commit suicide and return from the dead. Soon, the gang is killing cops and menacing babies. And their names! Gash, Hatchet, Chopped Meat, Hinkey and Bertram! This movie is about pure mayhem! I wonder, was all of England in the grip of Satan in the early 1980’s?

Director Don Sharp keeps things stylish and moving. This isn’t his first go-round with frogs in cemeteries, pacts with the devil, mysterious suicides and zombies. Check out his other film, Witchcraft. He was also behind Dark Places, Hammer’s Rasputin: The Mad Monk and the final movie in The Fly series, Curse of the Fly. This is his best work, though.

You should pretty much quit whatever it is you’re doing right now and go watch this. Luckily, it’s streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

I’ve been thinking about that song “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” by Whale a lot. The song is pretty crazy, best described as a dancy punky ditty about, well, who the fuck knows what it’s about. The video is even stranger, highlighted by lead singer Cia Berg cavorting about with red frizzy hair and braces. The whole album is pretty decent, with Tricky producing a lot of it.

I’m telling you that so I can tell you that the video for the song won the first MTV Europe award for Best Video. And it’s director, Mark Pellington, was the person who helped create today’s film (he also directed the video for Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and the movie Arlington Road).

As a Pittsburgher, this movie is somewhat important, as it was filmed here and in nearby Kittanning, PA. Which is somewhat humorous, as Point Pleasant, WV isn’t far at all. They could have just filmed it there. There’s a mothman statue, after all.

A lot of the script was changed, as this movie is based on the work of John Keel, the paranormal researcher who wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies. Pellington rejected numerous screenplays that were literal takes on Keel’s work, instead wanting to explore the psychological damage that UFO witnesses endure.  In the book, Keel went into deepest, darkest West Virginia to interview folks who had seen the huge winged beast called the mothman. At the same time, he began receiving strange phone calls, reports of mutilated pets, visits from men in black (in fact, Keel coined the term!) and it all ends with the collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River.

Whereas the movie posits that the collapse was never solved, experts determined that an eye-bar in the suspension chain caused its failure. And in reality, 46 people died, not 36.

The movie is therefore fictionalized, sharing the story of Washington Post columnist John Klein (Richard Gere) and his wife Mary (Debra Messing) being involved in a car wreck that leads to her dying of a brain tumor. Before she passes, he finds a notebook filled with pictures of a strange beast.

Between time distortions and loops, strange phone calls, visitations from his dead wife and premonitions, this film does a good job of conveying the terror and confusion that the paranormal can unleash.

My theory has always been that nuclear waste near Point Pleasant unleashed holes in the time/space continuum and the mothman, a fifth-dimensional creature,  was unleashed on our 3D space — bringing weirdness in its wake.

There’s a great shot at the end of this film, where the cars drift to the bottom of the river and holiday gifts float and headlights stretch out into nothing. It’s probably the eeriest scene I’ve seen in awhile. According to IMDB, Gene Warren III and five other model-makers, plus two production assistants, spent three full months to fabricate every piece of the bridge set from scratch. He estimates 20,000 individual pieces of steel went into the construction, in order for the ultra-photo-realistic 1/6th scale model suspension bridge to support all the model vehicles and ultimately collapse like a full-scale steel bridge into the water. It really shows — this practical effect looks perfect.

I usually don’t enjoy big budget films, much less ones that take so many liberties with their source material, but this one always wins me over. It’s worth a watch.

One of my interns at work asked me the other day, “You watch all of these horror movies. Don’t they scare you?” No, they really don’t. Not anymore. Some of them disturb me, like the cannibal films. But only one still kind of scares me. And that would be Hellraiser.

There was a time, before the eight sequels to the film and BDSM became well-known fodder on shows like Law and Order that Hellraiser seemed like it came from some alien land more than its true origins. The monsters of the piece, the Cenobites, looked like nothing we’d never seen before, all leather, blood and open festering wounds. The idea that sex and pain could be united wasn’t trite back in 1987, so it’s difficult to convey the power and fear this film had. It feels wrong. It feels dirty. It feels evil.

How this movie was made for $900,000 blows my mind. It looks lush and gauzy at times and at others, like when we see Frank’s heart and veins being formed, positively nightmarish. It shouldn’t be this good — it was Clive Barker’s directorial debut after seeing two of his stories, Underworld and Rawhead Rex, get made into films he didn’t agree with. What kind of deal with the devil did this guy make to turn out something so perfect on his first try?

The misconception that many people have of this film is that the Cenobites are the villains or the horrific part of the film. If we go to the poster for proof, it says “Demon to some. Angel to others.” Pinhead and his gang are there to move the story forward and certainly look frightening, but they are bound by the rules of Hell and the Lament Configuration, the puzzle box that sets the events of the film in motion. Matter of factly, these rules aren’t truly defined yet — is Pinhead a tortured soul stuck in the wheels of some hellish bureaucracy? Who created these boxes? None of this matters — “You solved the box. We came.” Yes, it can be that simple. You don’t need to know all of those answers right now. When Frank buys the box and Morocco and solves it, he gets the answer to limitless pleasure and the drug of all drugs — as Frank says, “I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible.”

That’s one of the real horrors of this film: people will do anything to chase a high. That high may be drugs. It may be pain. It may be a sexual experience that makes the mundane life you’re stuck in — like Julia, bored with a suburban life with a husband she never really wanted in the first place. The chance to be with Frank again, no matter if she has to seduce and kill for him, is everything. Notice that as he gains more muscle and skin with each drop of blood, she becomes more and more attractive, her skin gaining new color.

The main horrors of this film are family and other people. The Cotton family had issues before the Cenobites took one step out of Hell. The most horrific part of the film comes when Frank wearing Larry’s skin, stares at his niece in a moment of sexual longing and says, “Come to daddy.” Sure, there are horror film trappings, but this type of morally bankrupt behavior isn’t something confined to the cinema. So much of the betrayal and madness of Frank and Julia could happen. It happens every day.

Hellraiser exists on the border of reality. It’s fantastic, but it feels like it could happen. It’s the dangerous fiction that could overwhelm your truth if you go too far. In that it’s quite similar to Barker’s Candyman, which posits that saying the name of its titular character three times in a mirror is all it takes for him to come for you. That seems too unrealistic, but do you want to take the chance? And much like the black leather garbed creatures in this film, Candyman must adhere to a dream logic that only comes into our reality when you allow the genie from the bottle.

Ready to experience this movie? Grab the Arrow Steelbook release of Hellraiser at Diabolik DVD or watch it on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

I love horrible movies. I always wonder, “What’s my limit? How bad can it get to make me hate a movie?” The new barometer for bad has been found and it is Microwave Massacre.

Donald (Jackie Vernon, a raunchy comedian who was also the voice of Frosty the Snowman, which still kind of blows my mind) works construction by day and has another job by night: dealing with his wife. She keeps cooking gourmet foods that all come out bad and he yearns for the bologna and cheese sandwiches that his co-workers are chowing down on. Then, his wife buys a gigantic microwave, which makes even worse meals.

Our hero, such as he is, comes home and loses his temper about all the bad meals and ends up killing his wife. He doesn’t remember any of it the next morning as he has a big hangover. He starts cutting up his wife’s body and rolling it in foil. Once he accidentally eats some, he learns how delicious she is. And oh yeah, her head is still alive.

Soon, he’s sharing the meat with his friends and starts killing prostitutes to make more of his secret recipe. Of course, all this cooking leads to a heart attack. And a visit by his wife’s sister, who he has to tie up and gag with bread.

Of course, all good — or bad, this movie is Troma level bad — things must come to an end. Donald dies of a heart attack, the pacemaker in his chest canceled out by the microwave, which still has May’s living head inside.

The box art is amazing. That’s the nicest thing I can say. Otherwise, it’s a painful exercise in puerile humor and poor effects. Watch with caution. That said, if you want to see it, you can get the Arrow release at Diabolik DVD or stream this at Amazon Prime.

I was shopping at The Exchange — it’s a used DVD store you can find in both the Pittsburgh and Cleveland areas — and I was listening to a kid excitedly describe a movie to his dad, breathlessly detailing how a space station crashes and all these boxes fall into zoos and game preserves and how regular animals become so big that he couldn’t even figure out how big they are. It sounded like the best movie ever made, because it was being remixed through the brains of a ten-year-old. So that’s exactly how I approached the movie, deciding that instead of being critical, I should just remember how I felt watching movies like Destroy All Monsters.

Rampage is big, dumb, loud and silly. Guess what? It’s also exactly what it should be — a giant monster movie based on a video game starring The Rock. If you are expecting Truffaut, get the fuck off my website.

Directed by Brad Peyton, who also worked on Dwayne Johnson’s films Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and San Andreas, this is a fast-moving slam-bang action fest. And if you’re looking to shut your brain off and just watch giant monsters decimate cities and one another, good news. It’s exactly that.

The Athena-1 space station — owned by the evil gene company Energyne — is being destroyed by mutant rats when one lone doctor manages to get research canisters back onto Earth, where they crash land into the swamps of the Everglades, the forests of Wyoming and the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary.

That’s where primatologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) works. He’s a former US Army Special Forces black ops soldier whose record is filled with redacted missions and was also part of an elite anti-poaching unit. If you’re saying — but wait these things seem quite ridiculous — of course they do. Certainly you can be all these things and more, also able to speak to gorillas and have an albino one named George as your best friend. It’s The Rock — if he wants his character to be able to juggle thunder and fart fire, just let him.

George ends up finding one of those samples and begins to grow, just as the other two creatures — a giant crocodile and a wolf — do the same. The bad guys lure them to Chicago with a sonic beacon, all hell breaks loose, the US Army obviously screws things up and only a rogue government agent (played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan as if he’s having the most fun ever), The Rock and a scientist (Naomie Harris, The Pirates of the Carribean films and Moneypenny in Skyfall and Spectre) can save the day.

If watching a team of mercenaries battle a giant wolf that can shoot quills and fly seems like your idea of a good time, well, here you go.

It’s packed with product placements, like the Bronco that The Rock drives (it’s actually an unreleased 2004 concept car) and a Dave and Buster’s being destroyed — look for Rampage: City Smash to play when you’re there! — but again, I gave this movie the widest of berths.

If you were ten years old again, wasn’t this what you’d want to see? The Rock armed with a grenade launcher teaming up with a white gorilla as he battles a real life dragon? Don’t lie. You totally would.

Call it Carnivore. Or Campsite Massacre. How about one of its working titles, like The Creeper, The Forest Primeval, Three Blind Mice or Bump in the Night? Or the name that it was released as, The Final Terror. What you get is a backwoods slasher film packed with actors before they got famous, like Daryl Hannah, Adrian Zmed, Joe Pantoliano and Rachel Ward.

We start with Jim and Lori, who wreck their motorcycle in the woods. Jim’s hurt and Lori goes to get help, only to return and find Jim dead and hanging from a tree.

A group of campers make a campfire and tell a story about the rape of a young woman who goes insane and now lives in the forest. Why this would be a fun tale to share is beyond me. When they wake up, two of the crew, Marco (Zmed) and Eggar (Pantoliano) have disappeared.

Meanwhile, Mike (Mark Metcalf, Neidermeyer from Animal House) and Melanie go swimming and have sex, which means they will soon be killed. As always, don’t fuck in the woods. This prophecy comes true as Mike is killed and Melanie taken.

Nathaniel and Dennis (John Friedrich, TV’s The Thorn Birds) search a cabin, only to find a severed wolf’s head. And the killer appears to Margaret (Rachel Ward) while she sleeps. Even worse, Vanessa (Akosua Busia, The Color Purple) tries to take a poop and Mike’s severed head falls onto her.

It turns out that the killer has been in the basement of the cabin all along and he’s just waiting to do insane things to the group, like keeping a jar of human hands and tossing Melanie’s dead body into their raft while they’re going down the river trying to escape. Wendy (Hannah) gets attacked by the killer but narrowly survives.

Everyone begins fighting, with everyone thinking that Eggar is the killer. But the truth? It’s his mom who gets killed by a trap that Dennis has set.

The stories about shooting the film are a lot more interesting than the movie. One night, locals gave the crew marijuana brownies, which sent several to the hospital. Later, someone put a Redwood tree into the middle of the road to damage one of their cars. Get out of the woods, Hollywood weirdos!

Director Andrew Davis would go on to create Above the Law, Under Siege, The Fugitive, Chain Reaction and Holes. Any of these films are better than The Final Terror.

You can grab the blu-ray from Shout! Factory or watch this on Amazon Prime.

They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and the cities will be your tombs. With that line, you know that what you’re about to watch better be the most mind-blowing horror film possible. Good news — Demons is all of that and then some, the kind of movie that has everything that I watch movies for.

I can’t be silent or still while it runs, growing more excited by every moment. It is the perfect synthesis of 1980’s gore and heavy metal, presented with no characterization or character growth whatsoever. It’s also the most awesome movie you will ever watch.

This is an all-star film, if you consider Italian 80’s horror creators to be all-stars. There’s Lamberto Bava directing and doing special effects, Dario Argento producing, a script written by Bava, Argento, Franco Ferrini (Once Upon a Time in America, Phenomena) and Dardano Sacchetti (every single Italian horror film that was ever awesome…a short list includes A Bay of Blood, Shock, The Beyond, 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Blastfighter, Hands of Steel and so many more), and assistant directing and acting from Michele Soavi.

The movie starts on the Berlin subway, where Cheryl is pursued by a silver masked man (Soavi) who hands her tickets to see a movie at the Metropol. She brings along her friend Kathy (Paola Cozzo from A Cat in the Brain and Demonia) and they soon meet two boys, George (Urbano Barberini, Gor, Opera) and Ken.

The masked man has brought all manner of folks to the theater: a blind man and his daughter and some interesting couples, including a boyfriend and girlfriend, an older married one and Tony the pimp and his girls, one of whom is Shocking Dark‘s Geretta Giancarlo. As they wait for the movie to begin, a steel mask in the lobby scratches her.

The movie that unspools — a slasher about teenagers who disturb the final resting place of Nostradamus — also has that very same steel mask. When it touches anyone in the movie, they turn murderous. At the very same time, one of the prostitutes scratches herself in the bathroom and her face erupts into pus and reveals a demon. From here on out, the movie becomes one long action sequence, as the other prostitute transforms into a demon in front of the entire audience.

Meanwhile, four punks do cocaine in a Coke can and break in, releasing a demon into the city as the rest of the movie audience attempt to escape and are killed one by one. Only George and Cheryl survive, as our hero uses a sword and motorcycle to attack the demons before a helicopter crashes through the roof. But then the masked man attacks them!

I’m not going to ruin the rest of the movie, only to say that even the credits offer no safety in the world of Demons. And oh yeah — Giovanni Frezza (Bob from House by the Cemetery) shows up!

Look for Argento’s daughter Fiore as Angela and Ingrid the usherette is played by Nicoletta Elmi, who was the baron’s daughter in Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, as well as appearing in Baron Blood, A Bay of Blood and Who Saw Her Die?

This is but the first of a series of movies with the title Demons. I can’t do justice to the twists and turns of how that all works. Instead, I turn to the master, Joe Bob Briggs.

Demons is ridiculous. Pure goop and gore mixed with power chords, samurai swords, punk rockers and even a Billy Idol song which had to blow the budget. It also looks gorgeous — filled with practical effects, gorgeous film stock and amazing colors, no doubt the influence of Bava’s father. The scene where the yellow-eyed demons emerge from the blue blackness is everything horror movies should be.

This doesn’t just have my highest recommendation. It earns my scorn if you haven’t seen it yet!

You can grab the Synapse blu ray or DVD at Diabolik DVD or watch it on Shudder, which offers versions with and without Joe Bob Briggs commentary.

I love George Kennedy and want to state for the record that he deserved way better than this film, which is a total piece of shit. That said, I’ve proved time and again that my favorite movies to watch are mostly made out of fecal matter, so let’s dish.

Genetic Laboratories has decided to create a poisonous mutant cat that lives inside the body of a cute house cat. Why would they do this? Who knows, but it’s a good thing they did, or we wouldn’t have a movie.

The cat ends up on the yacht of “Wall Street” Walter Graham (Alex Cord, Michael Coldsmith Briggs III of TV’s Airwolf), who is running away to the Cayman Islands to escape the SEC. Along the way, he’s brought his bodyguard (Kennedy) and a bunch of hot girls and their boyfriends. Holy shit, there’s Clu Gulager, Burt from Return of the Living Dead! There’s Austin Stoker (Assault on Precinct 13, Horror High, Battle for the Planet of the Apes)! And Rob Estes from USA’s Silk Stalkings!

This Japanese box art should tell you all that you need to know:

Or perhaps you’d like to see the German artwork:

The Uninvited was written and directed by Greydon Clark, who also directed Joysticks, Wacko and Satan’s Cheerleaders. I would hope that any of those films are better than this. Becca looked at a photo from this movie and said, “Is that a stuffed animal?” Yes, it is. That’s the level of special effects you’ll see here.

There’s also George Kennedy getting bitten by a demonic cat. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this, I don’t know what will. You can watch it on Amazon Prime or grab it for $4 from Cheezy Flicks.