Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, our friends who brought Troll 2 to life, were the writing team behind this, setting the film in the Philippines as a cheap and convenient locale. Lucio Fulci claimed that the script was dreadful and that he tried to rewrite most of it, whereas the producers would contend that Fulci’s initial cut was a little over an hour yet felt much longer than that. They got Fragasso and Bruno Mattei to finish things up. And we’re left to watch the results.

There’s this formula called Death One, which brings back the dead. Why anyone would want to create this for the army is beyond me. But Dr. Holder realizes that this is all just a bad idea, so he resigns. As he goes to surrender his findings, criminals attack (if this movie starts to remind you of Nightmare City, you aren’t alone) and run away with Death One.

That criminal gets infected and even cutting off his own hand — oh that Fulci — can’t stop the outbreak. The hotel he ran to is condemned and General Morton orders everyone there killed and the criminal’s remains burned by his two right-hand men (played, of course, by Mattei and Fragasso).  But just like Return of the Living Dead, the ashes in the air just make things worse. The birds are infected and begin to spread the disease.

What follows is a group of victims gets introduced to us and one after another, they are wiped out with pure malice and utter glee. There are some American GI’s who mention how horny rock and roll music makes them and the girls on the bus they hook up with. There’s a tourist couple, too. No one will be spared when Death One achieves its full power.

Everyone heads to the now abandoned resort and is shocked to find so many weapons. As they are killed off, Dr. Holden looks for a cure while General Morton works on killing off every single person and animal he can find.

Soon, only five of our heroes — Kenny, Roger, Patricia, Nancy, and Joe — are still alive. As soon as I wrote this down, the soldiers kill Joe. Our survivors make their way to a hospital, where Nancy tries to help a woman deliver a baby — bad news, zombie baby — and gets killed. This scene is packed with the gore that you had hoped that this film would bring. Don’t eat while watching, trust me.

Who lives? Who dies? You should just buy this and watch it, right? Right. I will say that I loved Blue Heart, the DJ who talks throughout the film and adored how he keeps doing it even after he joins the ranks of the undead. It reminds me a lot of the DJ as narrator scenes in The New York Ripper.

I almost forgot! There’s an awesome scene where a zombie skull flies out of the freezer and attacks. It wasn’t in the script but instead came from Fulci. He would go on to say that it was one of the most clever things he had come up with and the only thing about this film that he was proud of.

If you’re hoping for the follow-up to Zombi, this isn’t it. It’s still fun and the last twenty minutes or so really pick up. I’d love to see what happens if they ever did a sequel to this.

Severin has released what will probably forever be the ultimate version of this movie, packed with interviews. You’ll hear from just about everyone, including Fragasso, Drudi, Mattei and several of the actors and crew. There’s a big bundle as well if you get this along with Zombi 4 and Shocking Dark. It’s well worth it — this is one company that knows how to make the most out of everything they release.

Director Paul Lynch also brought us the Canadian cutter Prom Night and here, he starts the action off with a bang: on Labor Day weekend 1946, a drunk (Page Fletcher, the title character from HBO’s The Hitchhiker) rapes Ida Parsons at a party her rich father is throwing. She is saved by her dogs, who attack the man before she smashes his brains out with a rock.

36 years later, preppy bros Eric (David Wallace, Mazes and Monsters, Mortuary) and Nick are taking their father’s yacht on a weekend getaway with their girlfriends, Sandy (Janet Julian, who was TV’s Nancy Drew when Pamela Sue Martin left the series) and Donna (Joy Boushel, Terror Train) and their sister, Carla (Janit Baldwin, ‘Gator Bait, Phantom of the Paradise).

After a day of staring at girl’s asses while feeling up other asses (this movie has more nudity in the first 11 minutes than nearly every movie that will come out this year), fog comes in and the boys save a shipwrecked fisherman named Bert. As he recovers from hypothermia, he tells them of Dog Island, the home of lumber baroness Ida Parsons (remember her?) who lives on the island with only her wild dogs for company. It’s at that point that Nick wrecks the boat into — DA DA NA — Dog Island!

Bert gets wounded. Carla gets lost. Nick walks into the woods and gets killed by a gigantic shadowy character. Meanwhile, Sandy and Eric attempt to find Ida Parsons.

While all this is going on, Bert goes into shock so Donna tries to warm him up by stripping nude. As you do. As she lies across his frozen body, the shadowy thing tosses her into the rocks and then rips off Bert’s head.

In the middle of all this, Sandy and Eric discover not only Ida’s house, but Carla, who is alive. You know who isn’t? The dogs of Dog Island, who are all skeletons inside cages.

Our protagonists find a nursery full of dusty toys and a cobwebbed crib, as well as Ida’s diary, filled with frightening photos and insane scribblings of her sick child, who she intended to keep free from sin. And oh yeah — they also find her skeleton.

Everyone wises up and decides to leave Dog Island. They gather some supplies and make their way to the basement, where they find the bodies of Nick and Donna. 

So the story everyone decides to go with is that this shadowy monster is Ida’s son, who somehow lived, and has been driven insane by his mother’s death. He’s incredibly strong, an amazing tracker and sees any outsiders as a threat. You’d think they’d get the fuck away from the house, but no, they go back to get matches and Eric gets killed. His back gets broken all Bane style and Sandy runs to Ida’s room to hide.

When the shadowy man gets there, she wraps a blanket around her head and acts as if she is Ida. I love this scene so much, as we never see the monster and only a brightly lit Sandy. Her words are measured and forceful, but as we look at her face, we can tell she’s never been more afraid in her life.

Just when Sandy thinks she’s safe, she tries to leave the room. However, the mutated man-child realizes her ruse and chases her to the boathouse, where he crushes Carla’s head along the way. Even setting this maniac on fire won’t stop him, because it’s 1982 and this is a Canadian slasher film.

You know what does stop him? A big signpost that impales him. Usually, slashers get stopped by impalement, have you ever realized that?

At the end, Sandy is left alone on the dock, decimated by the fact that she’s had to kill a human being and feeling the loss of her friends. And we notice — she now looks a lot like Ida.

Humongous is sleazy and bloody fun, with a unique killer and plenty of atmosphere. Sure, it’s a slasher, but it has a way better premise than kids stuck at a summer camp or a cursed calendar date. I’ve heard comparisons to Joe D’Amato and George Eastman’s Antropophagus, but this has none of the over the top gore of that film. That’s not to say that there isn’t plenty here.

There’s also a minimalist score by John Mills-Cockell, which really sets the tone and amps up the mood. He also worked on Terror Train and was one of the first people to purchase a Moog synthesizer.

Want to see this one? Ronin Flix has the Scorpion Releasing blu-ray reissue of the film, complete with the American R-rated and Canadian unrated cuts.

A man runs into the night as a woman clad head to toe in body armor gives chase. She has a zombie on a leash that she uses to kill the man. And boom — I’m in as Dead Shack begins.

Jason is meeting up with his friend Colin’s family — sister Summer, dad Roger and dad’s new girlfriend Lisa (Valerie Tian, Juno) — to stay in a cabin in the woods that they got off Craig’s List for way too cheap.

Everyone gets bored quickly and heads out for a hike, where they see the sheer lunacy going on inside the home of the neighbor we saw earlier. She’s played by Lauren Holly (Dumb and Dumber) and soon, she’s looking to take out the family and/or add them to her family of zombies.

Writer/director Peter Ricq puts together a nice little Sam Raimi tribute here — complete with the she-bitch line getting lifted. There are plenty of practical effects and no shortage of gore. Ricq’s band The Humans feature prominently on the soundtrack, too.

You can catch Dead Shack on Shudder right now. It’s a quick watch that I enjoyed. It won’t change your life, but it’s perfect for an entertaining evening. My favorite part was the costume design and poster look — which got me to watch this in the first place!

Thanks to Paperbacks from Hell, I’ve learned all about James Herbert, the British horror author whose four The Rats novels pretty much defined the evil rats against man genre. Imagine my surprise in finding this Canadian horror film that pretty much takes Herbert’s story and runs away with it (or gets away with it).

Paul Harris is a divorced high school teacher and basketball coach who is dealing with rats the sizes of small dogs that have been found living in buildings containing steroid-rich grain (ripped from today’s headlines!) that the health department orders burned. Now that the rats are homeless, they’re looking for a new home and new eats, too.

First, they surround a baby in a high chair and make him a snack. Then, they get a senior citizen. Soon, they’re chasing down Scatman Crothers and eating him, too! Oh no, Scatman!

Even spraying the rats with gas does nothing. Nope, instead they attack a bowling alley and a movie theater showing a Bruce Lee movie (director Robert Clouse also directed Lee’s Enter the Dragon and Game of Death). None will be spared as the rats feed. Not Trudy (Lisa Langlois, Happy Birthday to Me), the cheerleader in love with Paul. Not her best friend Martha (Lesleh Donaldson, Curtains, Funeral Home, Happy Birthday to Me). And certainly not the mayor who acts like he’s in the Canadian version of Jaws and then has a party on a subway train that gets infested by rats. Finally, Paul, his love interest Kelly and his son make it through the rats’ nest only to get on the same train as the mayor’s dead body.

So how did they get the rats for this movie? By putting dachshunds in fur suits, a The Killer Shrews plan if I ever heard one. Sadly, one of the dogs died during shooting as it was suffocated by its suit.

Herbert referred to this film as “absolute rubbish.” Sadly, we’ve yet to see the definite adaption of his work. We’ll have to make due with this, I guess. Where I disconnect with the film is that I could see it happening in New York, but Toronto? That’s the cleanest city I’ve ever been in. I bet the rats could do much better elsewhere.

Shout! Factory put this out on blu-ray a few years ago, but it’s now sadly out of print. Do what you can to find it — you can put on a loop in your home, along with other “always on HBO” fare like Flash Gordon, Superfuzz, Midnight Madness, The Car, Sharkey’s Machine, Modern Problems, Scavenger Hunt, They Call Me Bruce, Electric Dreams…Home Box Office in the early 80’s, what a time to be alive!

SPOILER WARNING: Most of the movies that we talk about here are more than 25 years old, so I never worry about spoiling their plot. This movie has been in theaters a day or so and depends on surprises so much that I feel that discussing them, much less how I feel about them, will ruin the movie for anyone that hasn’t already seen it.

When I was a kid, my parents often discussed a movie that they had seen when they first started dating: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. People had been talking about how amazing the film was and when they went, they sat there confused and upset in the theater. For years, any time they rated a movie as boring, too strange or overly hyped, they would reference Argento’s film. I always wondered if it upsets them that I grew up loving horror and giallo films so much.

One day, I explained what I thought that movie was about to my parents. There’s gender reversal, as well as being a foreigner and the isolation of modern life, filtered through the lens of an auteur. Maybe it didn’t all make sense to mom and dad, but I think my explanation made them get a little more of why I liked it so much.

My wife and I are planning on having kids someday. If one of them ever sits me down and explains why this movie is good to me, I’m going to fucking disown them.

This is yet another in the wave of important modern horror films, movies that people are all too eager to proclaim the next Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist for this generation. Think The Babadook or It Follows. If you liked those movies and found that they were important films packed with “something to say,” then you’ll love this movie and feel that everything I have to say from here on out is basically the words of someone who “just doesn’t get it.”

Director Ari Aster claims that he grew up on horror movies, saying things like “I just exhausted the horror section of every video store I could find.” There’s no denying the talent that he has. But after 127 minutes of film that felt like 127 months, I wanted to be an editor more than I ever have before.

If you thought movies like The Witch moved slowly, the glacial pace of this film makes that film seem like a slam-bang Honk Kong action pic. It takes forever to decide on what the movie is even about, smashing our expectations and killing off a major character — again, let me reinforce that spoiler warning — when Charlie goes to a party, has an allergic reaction and is beheaded while her brother races to get her to the hospital.

That was the one true surprise of the film, one that made me think that it was getting ready to gear up and deliver on its promise to be the scariest movie of our generation.

Look — I’m not going to deny the talent of the people involved in the film. Toni Collette is an amazing actress and she imbues the mother of this film with true emotion. It’s as if her parts of this film seem to be a drama about dealing with loss and never truly understanding our parents and the gnarled roots of our family tree.

Up until now, you’ve been led to believe that this movie is all about Charlie seeing her grandmother, being basically raised by her and even wondering what is meant by the line that she wished that she had been born a boy. But when she’s taken from the film, it becomes all about the family coming apart at the seams.

No matter how far from a traditional horror film this movie wants to be, it comes back the traditions of what not to do in horror film situations. Do not go to a teen sex and drug party. Do not take leave your weird sibling along to said party. Do not engage in magic rituals or you will unleash something you cannot control.

In these new and important takes on horror, these old tropes still remain. Did people feel like this when Argento, Polanski and Romero reinvented horror? Were their films seen as endless parables that meander and go nowhere when people were only used to B movies and classic monsters?

I worry that when it comes to a movie like this — and the aforementioned other modern horror films — that I simply do not have great taste. That my love of pure junk like the films of Mattei and Fulci has made it impossible for me to recognize a true piece of art when it makes its presence known.

I’ve read post after post from people talking about how this film stuck with them for days, how they can’t shake it, how truly horrifying it was. And I sat there, in the theater with an audience that was as confused as me. I’ve seen comments like, “how dare people laugh at this movie” or “how do these non-horror loving people dare to ruin this movie by saying they don’t get it.”

Well, I got it. And I didn’t really like it. I think it’s because you can boil down so many of these films as simply being bad people or bad parents and if we solved that issue, we wouldn’t have these horrors. The mother in The Babadook is a shitty mom. Toni Collette’s mom was shitty — well, she was also a cult leader at best and the conduit to a legit King of Hell at worst — and Annie was a shitty mom too when you get right down to it. Nobody can communicate and pays the price for it. And then there always comes a moment where these horror movies, where people proclaim “it’s more than just a horror movie” yet they still succumb to the conventions and tropes of the genre and appear to be absurd. And then people don’t know how to react. And then people just laugh at the movie and further upset the folks who want these important movies to be sacrosanct.

While I was watching this film, a man snored loudly to my left and I wondered what magical dreams that he was having and how I could experience them instead of what was on the screen. I was jealous of the fact that his girlfriend allowed him the pleasures of dreamland while my wife continually poked me in the ribs to keep me awake during the slow opening of this film before it ground its gears and moved even slower, like a doom band that never gets past playing 19 minute long songs about how shitty life is, but has never listened to anything of Black Sabbath past the first album and learned that they can get quite funky at times and change it up.

So how do I reconcile all that with reviews like this one from Pete Travers from Rolling Stone, who said that the film and its performances “for sure will keep you up nights. But first you’ll scream your bloody head off.” Again, I saw this with a packed house that only reacted with laughter.

At no point did I find myself enjoying this. Instead, I was concentrating on the technical aspects, appreciating the artistry on screen from a very how is that shot framed perspective. That’s when a movie stops working. Then, I was trying to think of movies I could compare this to, like Don’t Look Now and The Haunting of Julia, movies that take the loss of a child and convert it into horror. Why do those movies work so well and this just feels like claptrap to me?

Look — movies can really be about anything you want them to be. You can love the art — like The Holy Mountain — while embracing the lowbrow — like City of the Living Dead. You can react to a film however you wish, whether you want to laugh at it or be afraid or love it or hate it.

But let’s be perfectly frank. I hated this movie. It doesn’t matter to me how many people love it or proclaim it as high art or say that it’s the scariest movie they’ve seen and how much it haunts them. That’s great — I’m happy that they had such a reaction to it. My reaction differs and I’m willing to sit down and ponder for nearly three times the length of this film exactly what I have to say about it. And that, I guess, is something of a success for this movie. Films should make you think and consider and examine. And this movie certainly did that. It also made me wonder exactly what I’d chose to watch when I got home to exorcise its stink from consciousness.

It commits the most cardinal sin of all movies: it is boring. Somehow, a movie where a woman saws her own head off is exceptionally boring. That’s quite a feat.

This movie is style over substance, an effort that tries to tell a story that has no character to root for or care about. We have no idea what they are battling against so we have no way to figure out how they can avoid the outcome. I feel like I wasted money on this film, which is rough yet I can get it back, but I also wasted so much time caring about it and watching it, which is something that I can never get back. It needs an editor that could have trimmed its various narratives into a better collective whole. It’s like steak on steak on steak, covered with 19 kinds of steak sauce, all eaten slowly through a straw after someone else has methodically chewed it for you. And after all that, it tastes like shit.

The trouble is, that I know that the next time there’s a big important horror movie, we’ll be there on opening night, eager to see something that exceeds our expectations. We’ll buy into the hype all over again, because we want something to do exactly what it promises. But again — that’s the power of film and why we love it.

You may have a different viewpoint. And that’s great, too. I’ll be happy to read yours, think about it and discuss it. Feel free to share it below.

Not many of the movies we cover have won Oscars, much less the Best Picture. But in my eyes, movies like W Is War or Rats: The Night of Terror are entertaining as hell and it doesn’t matter to me what the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think. But hey — we have an actual Best Picture as our movie of the day.

Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins, Paddington) was found near a river as a child with wounds in her neck. She’s mute and lives alone above a cinema and follows an incredibly strict schedule, eating the same meal and masturbating underwater every day. Her life seems regimented and ordinary, except that she works in a secret government lab at the height of the Cold War.

She has two friends — Zelda (Octavia Spencer, The Help), a co-worker who acts as her interpreter and Giles (Richard Jenkins, The Cabin in the Woods), a closeted gay man who is struggling with sobriety and keeping his advertising career.

What makes the story move — and her life change — is “the asset.” It’s a mysterious Amazon creature that was once worshipped as a god (Doug Jones, Hellboy). Despite the warnings of Col. Strickland (Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals), she becomes close to the creature.

Somehow, the scientists want to use the creature to help America succeed in the Space Race. General Hoyt orders that they need to vivisect the monster, with only one scientist — Robert Hoffstetler — pleading for its life. The secret is that he is really Dmitri Mosenkov, a Russian spy whose masters have asked him to kill the monster, too.

Elise learns of the plans and convinces Giles and Zelda to help her. Mosenkov helps as well. She keeps the creature in her bathtub, planning on releasing him into a nearby canal in a few days. Strickland goes wild — whether because he was always crazy or because he fears for his job and life or the drugs that he’s taking, as the creature bit off his fingers and his body is rejecting them.

Meanwhile, Giles discovers that the creature has eaten one of his cats, Pandora. He startles it and it slashes him in the arm and runs away. Elisa finds him in the cinema and brings him back. As a way of apology, he touches Giles’ arm and head. When he wakes up the next morning, his wounds are gone and his hair has grown back.

In a fairy tale like scene, Eliza fills the entire bathroom with water, making a world for her and the creature to share. They make love. This scene turns many people off to the movie, as how could a human woman fall in love with this monster? This is something director Gullermo del Toro had planned since he worked on a reboot of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And if we follow this theory, Eliza wasn’t fully human anyway.

The plot moves into overdrive, as both Strickland and Mosenkov are given ultimatums. The military man has 36 hours to get the creature back, while the spy is due to be extracted. The creature starts to die, too.

Strickland tracks the spy, killing his handlers after they shoot him. He tortures the dying man in a grisly scene until he gives up Eliza and Zelda. When he goes to Zelda’s home, her husband gives away the entire plan. But Strickland is too late — Eliza has already taken the creature to the water.

The government man arrives and shoots both Eliza and the creature, but the monster heals himself, slashes Strickland’s throat (taking his voice, just like Eliza has none) and brings her into the water, where he heals her wounds and transforms her scars into gills.

This is a gorgeous film, with a well-considered look and feel. The color palette is spectacular and makes sense, as Strickland fears the color teal and Eliza slowly gains more red color as the movie progresses.

There’s also a bravura scene that recalls Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet. It totally takes the movie into an even more fantastic world, if that is possible. It’s my favorite part of a film that I found plenty to love in.

This still isn’t my favorite del Toro movie (I love Crimson Peak so much), but it’s still one of the better movies you’ll see. You know who doesn’t agree with me? Rex Reed. He called it “a loopy, lunkheaded load of drivel” and, referring to Hawkins, said that described people with disabilities were “defective creatures” and that her character was mentally handicapped. Oh yeah. And he also thought that Benicio del Toro directed it. I’ve hated Rex Reed’s reviews since I was a kid and this doesn’t change my mind at all. Perhaps we should remember his turn in Myra Breckinridge when considering his reviews.

Several have called out that this movie shares graphic similarities to the video game BioShock, as well as thematic similarities to the 2015 short film The Space Between Us, Rachel Ingalls’ novel Mrs. Caliban and a play called Let Me Hear You Whisper, where a cleaning woman falls in love with an intelligent dolphin and tries to rescues him by putting him a laundry hamper. Hmm. To his credit, del Toro claims that the movie was inspired by a conversation with author Daniel Kraus.

I have no idea how to explain this movie to you. There are moments that are pure ridiculousness. There are scenes filled with amateur hour acting and effects. And then there’s an ending that is powerful and shocking. It’s really a rough one to figure out. I loved it — but it’s another in a long line of movies that I don’t recommend to anyone but the people I know who will get it.

The old VHS box explains it like this: “A group of college students on holiday become prey for a killer and his two sadistic and demented sons. One son, an unlicensed doctor, is mentally unhinged by destructive brain parasites. The other son, a shy and lonely psychopath, falls in love with a dead girl. While the insane boys are blundering through their destructive rampage, the father stalks the night with random violence. Though he is shot, beaten, and run over by a car, the maniac cannot be defeated.

One by one the students enter the horror house, where they must face the malignant forces left behind by unnatural scientific experimentations. They are hunted down, tortured and eliminated until only one girl is left to fight for her life against the trio of murderers.

Directed by the notorious rock video maker, Richard Casey, Horror House on Highway 5 is filled with strange humor and wild action.”

We go from a typical slasher murder right to a classroom, where he assigns three of his students to go to Littletown and investigate Bartholomew, a dead Nazi rocket scientist and make model rockets.

The most studious of the kids, Louise, goes to interview Dr. Mabuser, who is the one with bugs in his head. His brother (or partner) Gary falls in love with her, but they still use an iron to sear her breast in some Nazi black magic rite. While that’s going on, Sally and Mike go to the quarry to smoke weed and make model rockets. And then there’s the whole matter of the guy in the Richard Nixon mask who can’t be killed (and who is listed as Ronald Reagan in the credits).

Obviously, no one paid for the music used in this film, as it has everything from “Rumble” by Link Wray to acid rock to violins to surf rock like The Safaris to The Dictators and The Count Five playing “Psychotic Reaction.”

And then the ending! Seriously, the last two minutes of this film, where one of the victims thinks that she has escaped, feels like the movie that Rob Zombie has always wanted to make.

Director Richard Casey was behind several music videos for bands like Blue Oyster Cult, whose songs are said to have coded messages relating to The Process Church. In 2014, he directed a spiritual sequel, Horror House on Highway 6, which is about the following: “A college student is injured by a malfunctioning soda machine on Highway 6. His fellow students take him to a doctor who lives in a basement bomb shelter and awaits the second coming of Elvis Presley. They can’t leave, and a killer stalks them with an ax.”

You can check this out for yourself on Amazon Prime or order the Vinegar Syndrome lovingly restored blu-ray. They claim that it’s one of the most confusing and compelling homemade horror films ever made. They’re right. You can also grab it at Diabolik DVD, but stock is limited!

After an engaged couple mysteriously disappears in the Bermuda Triangle, her father organizes an expedition to get to the truth. And the truth? Extraterrestrials are carrying out studies on the human race!

The best part of this movie is the opening, where a monologue starts us off, quoting from several books over UFO footage. This has nothing to do with the rest of the film, which makes it even more awesome.

People get possessed by the Bermuda Triangle, ghost ships show up and the ending is a lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, if you also added in a giant Moai from Easter Island. Yes, it’s the second best part of the film. And oh look — Mike is played by Gianni Garko, who you’d probably know better for playing the character Sartana and being in Devil Fish.

Director Tonino Ricci also directed A Man Called Rage and Cave of the Sharks. Hopefully, those movies are much better than this one, which is very talky and every time it aspires to be something interesting, it runs as hard as it can away from it. But the beginning and the ending? Worth watching.

If you want to see it for yourself, Cult Action has the DVD and you can also watch it on Amazon Prime.

“Venice before the year 2000. Squares, museums and churches. Tourists crowd the streets. Venice is threatened by the high tide. The seaweed is killing the oxygen in the waters and the putrid waters are corroding the foundations of the city. This is Venice today. What will happen tomorrow?”

Say what you will about Bruno Mattei, but the dude knows how to grab you from the first frame of travelogue footage!

The film starts in a control room, where a bunch of dudes in grey and yellow futuristic jumpsuits watch a research base and most of Venice fall into chaos, as one guy keeps screaming that there are mutants everywhere. There are no survivors, just chunks of videotape that they watch.

Basically, if this feels more like Aliens than the Terminator rip-off you were expecting, buckle the fuck up. While this movie was released as Terminator 2, Mattei and his cohorts Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, who activated their Wonder Twin powers of insanity to create Troll 2, refuse to stop at covering one film. Oh no — this movie is too strange for that.

They decide to assemble a team — the Mega Force! — to investigate and they bring Sara, a scientist, along to find the diary that has the answers to this breakout. Samuel Fuller from the Tubular Corporation asks to come along, just like Bishop. The fact that two of the members of the team are Geretta Geretta and Tony Lombardo from Rats: Nights of Terror are all the reason I needed to purchase this. The even more amazing fact that Geretta is playing a tribute version of Vasquez from Aliens is the icing on this slice of exploitation tiramisu.

Geretta’s first line is “Alright you bunch of pussies, I’m back and I’m kicking ass!” Then, we watch one of the kinda sorta Space Marines on Operation: Delta Venice practice his nunchakus with his back to the camera. Come on dude — work the hard cam. Also: the Mega Force’s base looks like a high school locker room. Also also: they are not Megaforce.

There’s a member of the Mega Force that has long blonde hair and wears Oakley glasses and a red bandana. I love him already. Geretta’s character, Koster, then starts to yell about Italians being allowed on the mission and gets into a racially motivated fight with another crew member. Mega Force! Get it together!

If you haven’t picked it up yet, I love this fucking movie. This is why I watch Italian low budget genre films all wrapped up in one messy package. The acting is either way too intense or has stilted line readings, sometimes within the same sentence. The costumes are laughable. And the action is everything you wish there was more of in other films without pesky things like character development and a plot to get in the way.

Every time I worry that I’ll never find a film like 2019: After the Fall of New York or 1990: The Bronx Warriors, Italian filmmakers surprise me with something wonderful. All you need are some vests, bike helmets and soccer pads and a fancy synth score and you have a futuristic army ready to do battle with whatever the hell the bad guys in this movie are.

The Mega Force finds a bunch of people inside the alien eggs, but those people beg to be killed before grabbing and choking Koster. Soon, the aliens or mutants or whatever they are decide to throw people around and kill everything in their path. If you love movies where people fall to their deaths, this should be in your collection.

If you thought there wouldn’t be a Newt character, you aren’t watching much Italian cinema. Yep — in the midst of all this craziness, a small child has survived.

The best scene in the film has the soldiers all trapped in a room and the scientist vainly trying to open the door by pushing the left button. Clearly, there is a button on the right, too. She ignores this and keeps jamming the left button like someone trying to make the elevator get there faster. Finally, after screaming, monsters blowing up and much death, someone finally tells this brilliant scientist to just push the button on the right. Holy shit — this movie is awesome.

I have learned many things from this movie. No matter what language you speak, your scream sounds pretty much universal. You can fire a Franchi SPAS-12 one-handed and accurately hit a target. And while I previously was taught that seaweed is really algae and algae helps provide much of the Earth’s oxygen, in the world of this film this is not true. Basically — fuck science!

I wonder — was Samuel Fuller named for the director? Why is Venice the center of the world? And why, when I knew this was also called Terminator 2, was I so surprised and elated that the Bishop character was also a Terminator?

Finally, the ending — if you think that they’re not gonna get time travel somewhere in this wedding soup…just wow.

If you come to a party at my house in the next few months, chances are that you will be forced to watch this movie while I scream like a maniac and laugh my ass off. You have no choice but to comply.

Of course, Severin put this out. Grab one now — don’t delay!

Feed Shark

Did Roger Corman sit in a room screaming, “Make me more amphibian monster movies NOW!” into the telephone? Because this week, that’s the feeling that I’m getting. This time, Barbara Peeters got the call (Joe Dante turned this one down), although the final film was nothing like she wanted it to be and she tried — and failed — to get her name removed from the credits.

Fishermen catch what looks like a monster. Then, the son of one of them is dragged under the waves by an unseen beast. Another fisherman fires a flare gun that sets the whole boat on fire, killing everyone. Pre-credits, this movie is already meaner and better than most of what we’ve watched this week.

Jim Hill (Doug McClure, TV’s The Virginian) and his wife Carol (Cindy Weintraub, The Prowler) see the boat blow up and then their dog gets eaten (and his remains thrown up on their porch). So yeah. Things are off to quite the start.

Meanwhile, Jerry and Peggy (Lynn Schiller, Without Warning) are swimming and fooling around, but Jerry ends up torn apart and a fishman rapes the girl, causing the director to want to leave the picture. Seriously — they kept her name on the film. Time’s up, Roger Corman.

That scene is repeated with Billy (future ventriloquist David Strassman) and Becky, with yet another fish on female rape. All manner of folks are attacked, but Peggy somehow survives.

Meanwhile, Canco is opening their new canning operation in town. It turns out that the monsters that are fucking everyone to death are the result of Canco using HGH on salmon that were in turn eaten by larger fish who then turned into humanoids. From the deep? Yes. Humanoids from the Deep.

Luckily, Jim and Dr. Susan Drake are on the case. Their big plan? At the town’s fish fest, when the beasts attack, they dump gasoline in the lake and set it on fire. So not only is there no safe zone for women, fuck the environment, too. While all this is going on, Carol is attacked by two monsters but survives. Oh yeah! Vic Morrow is in this mess, too. And if you think Peggy is going to give birth to a fish baby, then you haven’t been watching this film.

Actress Ann Turkel chose to do this film — originally titled Beneath the Darkness — because: “It was an intelligent suspenseful science-fiction story with a basis in fact and no sex.” She was enraged as well at what the final film ended up being.

Corman remade this film for Showtime in 1996, with the sex and violence scaled down. That said, he of course reused the Salmon Festival footage for the remake. Why actually shoot something new?

Well, if you’re looking for a grimy, fishy film, this is it. It’s certainly more entertaining than the last two Roger Corman fish films I suffered through. You can watch the Shout! Factory release to get the best possible version. It’s also on Amazon Prime.