I love that this movie starts with this crawl: During the 1980s over 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic Cults… Another 30% rationalized the lack of evidence due to government cover ups… The following is based on true unexplained events…”

With this burst of white on black type, The House of the Devil sets itself up as not just an 80s loving slasher, haunted house and satanic panic film. It reaches back to the occult film roots of the 70s, when every movie was supposedly based on a true story. This worrisome addition — it could have happened to someone you know — pushes this film past simple pastiche toward work of genius.

At some unnamed time in the 1980s, college student Samantha Hughes (Jocelin Donahue, who played the younger Barbara Hershey in Insidious Chapter 2, which is a meta bit of casting if I’ve ever seen one) wants to escape the college dorm she shares with her boorish roommate. A landlady (Dee Wallace in a great cameo that does as much to ground this film within its time as that title card open) says that she reminds her of her daughter, so she forgoes a security deposit, which gives hope to our struggling heroine.

A potential babysitting job for Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan, who is always a welcome site) and his wife (Mary Woronov, who we love so much we made a Letterboxd list of her films). Samantha wants the job so bad that even after the first attempt at getting it falls through, her best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig, who would go on to write and direct Ladybird) tears down every other flyer, ensuring that she gets the job.

Things get weird. But hey — when the job pays $400 for just a few hours, weird is fine. Unbeknownst to Samantha, a mysterious stranger has already killed Megan and delivers a pizza that begins to warp her mind. There’s a great Walkman scene here that ends with a vase broken, the reveal that the original family in this house is dead and that all is not what it seems.

Then Samantha wakes up, bound and gagged inside a pentagram, whole the Ulmans and their son (the stranger who killed Megan and delivered the pizza) begin a ritual with their “mother” which involves forcing our heroine to drink blood from a goat’s skull. For a film that has crawled to this point, all hell quite literally breaks loose in a fervor of gore, flashes and quick cuts. It appears that our heroine has been picked to become the mother of the devil, but she has her own ideas of how to escape that fate.

The 16mm film look of this film — as well as the zooms within the frame — is a signifier that this film is of the decade — and the one proceeding it — that inspired it. It feels real, however, and not just a movie claiming to be Carpenter influenced. It lives and breathes and sounds of the time.

I haven’t liked much of director, writer and editor Ti West’s other films, but here, I feel like he captured eldritch energy in a bottle. There’s even a reference to the Patrick Dempsey film Loverboy, as the mysterious man asks if Samantha wants extra anchovies, the code that that film’s pizza shop used to indicate whether or not they should send one of their male escorts. Plus, the name of the Ulman’s is taken directly from the hotel manager in The Shining, a film that West has cited as an influence.

You can watch this movie with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder.

Daughters of Darkness is a good title, but its French nom de plume, Les Lèvres Rouges, is so much better. Look — if you’re going to have a 1970’s vampire movie, it should probably be a lesbian vampire movie while you’re at it. This one is Belgian. And director Harry Kumel claims that he based Delphine Seyrig’s character after Marlene Dietrich and Andrea Rau’s on Louise Brooks, so there’s that.

A newly married couple named Stefan and Valerie starts their honeymoon at a grand hotel on the Ostend seafront, intending to catch the cross-channel ferry to England. They’re there offseason, so the hotel is empty and their relationship already seems off to a poor start as Stefan doesn’t want to introduce his new wife to his mother.

When the sun goes down, Elizabeth Bathory arrives and with a name like that, well, you know what you’re getting into. Throw in the fact that the concierge says that she’s the same age as when he saw her as a little boy — I’ve actually had something similar happen in my real life and its scary as hell — and three murders of young women in Bruges last week and the plot thickens. Or congeals.

The more the Countess grows obsessed with the couple, the more sadism and violence we see, ending with Valerie taking over the role of the Countess and seeking new victims, the sole survivor of their games of sex and death.

This is high art masquerading as horror with some exploitation along for the ride. At the end of the 20th-century vampire film, even death and evil is exhausted, only finding solace in convincing the innocent of the ease by which they may fall into similar depravity.

You can watch this for free on Vudu. It’s also available with commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. 

Herbert West is amazing from the moment he walks into this movie. That’s all due to Jeffrey Combs, who owns every movie I’ve ever seen him in, like Castle Freak and The Frighteners.

Back when he was at the University of Zurich Institute of Medicin, he brought his dead professor, Dr. Hans Gruber (yes, the same name as Die Hard) back to life. However, the dose was too big and there were horrible side effects, he had to kill him, yelling, “I gave him life!”

He’s figured out a formula that can re-animate the dead and now he needs bodies which he can get thanks to his medical classmate Dan (Bruce Abbott, Bad Dreams). Of course, nothing is going to end up going well for anyone.

That’s because Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) is in love with Dan’s girl, who is played by the always amazing and forever young Barbara Crampton (who is also incredibly great in Castle Freak, Chopping Mall, Channel Zero: The Dream Door, We Are Still Here and more).

Miskatonic University is not ready for the sheer amount of gore and shenanigans that West is about to let loose. And when Rufus, Dan’s cat, is killed, well, why not bring him back to life and leave a note to explain?

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As a result of this experiment, West and Dan get banned from the school, so they start breaking into morgues and injecting corpses with glowing liquid. Soon, the dead are violently rising to life and one of them ends up killing Megan’s dad, Dr. Halsey. So of course, they have to bring him back from the dead.

Dr. Hill ends up learning that our heroes — such as it is — have brought the dead back to life and he tries to take the formula. West will have none of that and lops off the evil scientist’s head with a shovel, then bringing his head and body back from the dead.

Bad idea number, well, I’ve lost track. That’s because for some reason, the undead Dr. Hill can control the other zombies and now, he’s taken Megan for his own. If you think it’s disgusting that a zombie body places his own head in a pan between a naked woman’s legs so that he can go down on her, perhaps you should skip this.

Seriously: when David Gale’s wife first saw this scene, she stormed out shouting “David, how could you?!” They divorced soon after. For what it’s worth, Gale said that he felt “spiritually bereft” after filming the scene.

The film ends with West fighting Hill’s zombie intestines and Dan trying to bring Megan back from the dead. If you’re thinking sequel, so was everyone else, thanks to the 1990 follow-up, Bride of Re-Animator and 2003’s Beyond Re-Animator.

This whole movie is the result of a party conversation. Director Stuart Gordon was complaining that he’d seen too many Dracula and not enough Frankenstein movies, so someone asked if he had read the H.P. Lovecraft story that this movie was eventually based on. He hadn’t, he did and the rest is history. Bloody, bloody history.

Want to watch it for yourself? It’s on Shudder with and without commentary by Joe Bob Briggs.

I’m proud to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was born in the same town as me, Pittsburgh, PA. He was lured from a career as an educator into being a radio station manager and then, well, advertising got him. I can relate. I’ve spent the better part of 25 years doing the same. But then Lewis got smart. He learned how to make money.

He began making movies with David F. Friedman, starting with Living Venus. Their nudie cuties would be innocent today, but showed way more skin than mainstream films. These weren’t high art. They were made to turn a profit and they sure did, from movies like Boin-n-g! and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre to the world’s first — and probably only — nudist camp musical, Goldilocks and the Three Bares.

Once nudie movies got boring, Lewis needed another tactic. He found it. Oh wow, did he find it. Gore. Blood everywhere, guts all over the screen and no limits to the depravity that he’d fester on drive-in screens nationwide. It all started with Blood Feast.

This is a pretty simple film: Faud Ramses wants to make sacrifices to the Egyptian goddess Ishtar to resurrect her, so he kills beautiful young socialites when he’s not catering their coming out parties. He’s also wiping out anyone that requests a copy of his book, Ancient Weird Religious Rites.

Shot in Miami, Florida — where life is cheap! — in just four days for just $24,000, Blood Feast used all local ingredients for the gore, except for a sheep’s tongue that came from Tampa Bay. Friedman was a genius at publicity, helping the film succeed, giving out vomit bags at screenings and even applying to get an injunction against his own movie in Sarasota so that it couldn’t be shown.

Lewis and Friedman didn’t stray too far from their sexy roots, bringing in June 1963 Playmate of the Month Connie Mason to star in the film. She would come back for Lewis’ even more astounding Two Thousand Maniacs!

As for Lewis, he left filmmaking in the 1970’s, served some jail time for fraud and then began copywriting his way to even greater success, a second — maybe even third or fourth career — later in life. He wrote and published over twenty books, including The Businessman’s Guide to Advertising and Sales Promotion, Direct Mail Copy That Sells! and The Advertising Age Handbook of Advertising. His books were all over the place at my first agency job and I was shocked to discover that the author of these books — one of the godfathers of direct mail and eblasts — was also the American godfather of gore. Sometimes. life makes sense.

In 2016, Arrow Video released a huge boxset of his films and the man whose work was often in grimy drive-ins and Something Weird video cassettes finally began to be appreciated as an auteur. Funny, as he was the man who said, “I see filmmaking as a business and pity anyone who regards it as an art form.”

You know those movies that they warn you about and tell you that they’ll warp your mind and make you a maniac, how you’ll never be the same again? This is that movie. You should probably watch it right now.

It’s available on Shudder with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs.

I haven’t heard more people upset about spoilers since the Star Wars prequels, so please consider this sentence the spoiler space you very well may need if you don’t want to learn more. Then again, I’m going to discuss the idea of this film more than the actual movie itself.

Avengers: Endgame is the blockbuster of 2019. It’s a juggernaut that has the biggest cast of any superhero film ever, wrapping up almost 12 years of storyline and multiple movies, all to answer the question that came up at the end of Avengers: Infinity War:  after you kill half of everything, what happens next?

There’s been a lot of soapboxing and online hand wringing about this film. Plenty of people feel the need to show that they’re above the paltry populace, happy to proclaim their intellectual superiority and state that comic book related films demand that adults remain stuck in the days of adolescence. Much like the issues of today’s politics, I’m not going to change anyone’s mind that feels that way. All that ends up is two people shouting their talking points and refusing to learn anything from one another. But my snide comment is this: can’t you just leave well enough alone?

This is a popcorn movie that appeals to the biggest audience ever. And that’s fine. You can ignore it if you like — we’ve never lived in a time where there’s more opportunity to enjoy the media that you want. Me, I ignore mumblecore, critic beloved films and Oscar-bait movies for the most part. And that is also fine.

All that I know is that I’ve seen nearly every Marvel film with the same set of guys that I’ve seen movies with since I was 25 or so. Each movie is an event where we get the chance to grab a meal, catch up and enjoy one another’s company in the midst of our exceedingly stressful and busy lives. If a movie can do that, it’s already a success before you even watch one frame. Movies bring us together, a light on the cave wall where we can hear a fantastic tale that’s bigger than us. That’s what this movie is — modern mythology of larger than life heroes who are the best of all of us battling the worst villains possible.

Spoiler warning part two — here’s where I get into major plot points. You’ve been warned.

More than the overall tale, I enjoyed the story beats here. Hawkeye becoming Ronin, enraged that evil survived the purge while his family did not. The main sacrifice of this film isn’t Black Widow’s, but his. He was the first person who saw her as more than a killing machine and gave her a chance at life. Now, she repays the favor, taking him from killing machine back to family man. However, he must sacrifice their friendship and the knowledge that her loss will always be in the background when measured against the perceived greater loss of Iron Man.

But hey — I’ve always loved the background characters more than the heavy hitters.

There are moments here that really portray what the three main Avengers have had to give up to protect us. Iron Man must lose the stability and family he never knew he needed. Captain America’s longing for Agent Carter, trapped by a glass wall that may as well be decades and not inches thick. Thor’s descent into depression as he realizes that he couldn’t save the day. Their fates each show them finally achieving the final part of their hero’s journey save Thor, who is fated to repeat his journey over and over throughout rebirth after rebirth, even after Ragnarok, the end of all things.

Those small moments mean more than the big explosions and special effects throughout this film. Tony’s quick hug with his unsuspecting father. Thor’s moment with his mother, who sees right through his deceptions. Even Quill’s way too brief reunion with Gamora. The heart behind each charcter is why we care. There are hundreds of superpowered characters on the screen. The fact that we know the minute motivations of more than one of them is a credit to this tale.

I love that this film both wraps up and begins new stories at its close. Sam Wilson must become Captain America, finally receiving the approval and friendship of the Winter Soldier. Thor realizes that his role is to be an adventurer, not the king, and gives the ownership of Asgard to Valkyrie. Even Steve Rogers realizes that despite becoming a grief counselor and telling people to live the new life they’ve been given, when the opportunity arises to return to his life, it’s one he should embrace.

Speaking of Rogers, I haven’t heard an audience start cheering in the theater for a long time. The fact that he’s able to lift Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer, was not lost on this audience. Before, he was able to budge it. Now, his journey has made him truly worthy to lead the forces against Thanos, even if he appears alone at the seeming conclusion of the final battle.

I also like the synchronicity that the first words that kicked off the Marvel cinematic universe were Tony Stark saying, “I am Iron Man,” which are also his last words. There’s just something poetic about that.

Hey look — I was happy that Crossbones got a few seconds of screentime. I’m that kind of geek. And if that fact upsets you, I’m never going to convince you that this is a good movie.

Between our Bigfoot week of films, ten Bigfoot films to watch list and interview with The Weirdest Movie Ever Made author Phil Hall, we’ve really covered sasquatches, skunk apes and abominable snowmen over the last few months.

Now, we’ve been sent Seth Breedlove’s On the Trail of Bigfoot to check out.  This six-episode series was filmed in fourteen U.S. states and features over twenty different witnesses, investigators, historians, and researchers.

From the earliest known reports of apelike creatures in the 1800s to the modern day, this series takes you through a journey of all things Bigfoot. Director, writer, producer, narrator and star Breedlove was out in the woods of America seeking evidence and came away thinking that there just may be something out there in those woods. That’s because as he created this six-episode series, he experienced several incidents — even as he struggled to stay objective and not become part of the story — as he met both skeptics and believers.

This series offers some evidence, like the traditional footprint casts and hair samples. But there’s also recorded sound and video, as well as an entire museum in Portland that shows the start of the recorded incidents of wildmen, forest giants and forest devils. There’s plenty of places to look for Bigfoot: the forests of the Pacific Northwest’s Olympic Peninsula, the hills of our home state of Pennsylvania, deep southern swamps ala Arkansas’ Fouke monster as seen in The Legend of Boggy Creek, the Ouachita Mountains of Oklahoma, southeastern Oklahoma, the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio.

In particular, the second episode really shines as it breaks down the four major personalities of Bigfoot tracking (Rene Dahinden, John Green, Dr. Grover Krantz, Peter Byrne), their egos and how their relationships broke down as they chased the creature over their lifetimes. Instead of finding evidence, most of their time was spent arguing, according to Peter von Puttkamer, the maker of Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot. I also really enjoyed how the third episode showed how many of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot reports also dovetailed with UFO incidents, as well as how The Legend of Boggy Creek changed how the public viewed Bigfoot.

The running time of each episode just flies by. They’re packed with info and really tied in so many different species of Bigfoot and places they’ve been sighted, as well as how mass media has portrayed these creatures.

On the Trail of Bigfoot is available on Amazon Instant Video, Vimeo OnDemand and VIDI Space, as well as DVD. For more information, visit the official Small Town Monsters site.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this series by its PR team, but that has no impact on our review.

Madman Marz isn’t Freddy or Jason or Michael Meyers or even Leatherface or maybe even Chucky, but dammit he exists. He exists!

Originally based on the upstate New York urban legend of Cropsey, the film’s premise and slasher were both changed at the last minute once the production team discovered that The Burning was filming at the very same.

It took eight months and hundreds of attempts to get an investor — plus a last-minute rewrite to make the movie more unique — but this non-union effort finally made it to the screen.

A group of senior counselors and campers — Gaylen Ross is the only one most people know, as she was in Dawn of the Dead, and plays Betsy under the stage name of Alexis Dubin — gather around a campfire to hear the head counselor Max — who the filmmakers wanted to cast as Vincent Price, which would have been bonkers — regale them with the tale of Madman Marz. He killed his family with an axe and then survived a lynching attempt before disappearing into these very woods.

Richie, one of the kids, throws a rock into Marz’s home and shouts his name, learning no lessons at all from this urban legend. Richie soon sees Marz in the trees — ironically, the cast would see a mysterious person in the woods while they filmed this movie — and before you can say Pamela Vorhees, they’re all getting killed one by one.

T.P. is set up to be the hero here or he at least gets to have hot tub spinning something with Betsy. Seriously, this whole scene is lunacy, as they roll around and have what seems to be the unsexiest sex I’ve ever seen. Betsy then becomes the heroine, but she ends up blasting one of the other counselor’s brains out with a double-barrelled shotgun and narrowly helping the kids escape on a school bus before getting hung up on a hook and setting Marz’s house on fire.

So yeah. The killer survives, the kids are traumatized and there’s an awesome theme song, sung by Tony Fish, the same guy who plays T.P. There’s also a scene where Max lectures about the right way to play the game of axe in the stump, which is kind of like the sword in the stone: “Losing, winning – what’s the difference? Play the game with a fair heart, and you’ll always be able to look yourself in the mirror. Play too hard to win, and you might not like what you become.”

This movie is packed with parts that will make you scream in terror, laugh in utter glee and sing along like some demented maniac. In short, it’s everything a slasher should be. It’s also a reminder that even a non-legendary slasher is still a better movie in 2019 than the finest studio releases.

This is a movie made for 2 AM at the drive-in, bombed out of your mind. You can watch it with and without commentary from Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. Or you can go all in on the amazing Vinegar Syndrome re-release.

You can watch Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio’s Cropsey, their 2009 documentary about the New York City urban legend, as a free-stream courtesy of Gravitas Ventures You Tube and Tubi Tv.

As a kid, I was totally obsessed with Japanese culture. In the late 1970’s, we had Godzilla, Gamera, Johnny Sokko, Ultraman, Battle of the Planets, Starblazers and Speed Racer all on TV at the same time. The thing is, I was the older brother who always felt like the screw-up, so Racer X was my hero. I avoided this movie when it was released. How could it live up to my memories? I’m pleased t admit I was wrong. This movie is crazy in all the best ways.

After years of this movie never getting made, The Wachowskis were able to bring it to the screen. Just from the beginning — where time overlaps and we get both the backstory of Speed, his brother Rex and the race that they’ve both won — this movie grabs you. Yes, it’s way too CGI intense but at some point, all the blurring and spins and overlaps just win you over.

Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch) loves racing and loves his family — Pops (John Goodman), Mom (Susan Sarandon), brother Spritle, chimp Chim Chim, his mechanic Sparky and his girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci) — even more. He once had a brother named Rex who left the family for racing and became one of the dirtiest racers in the sport before dying in the Casa Cristo 5000 cross country rally. Seriously, the flashback scene that tells you all of this will either thrill or exhaust you.

Everything from the show is here, from how Speed leaps from the Mach 5 and the screen turns to pose in the original animation to characters like race fixer Cruncher Block, Inspector Detector, Snake Oiler and Prince Kabalah as well as the Mach 5, the Shooting Star, the GRX race car and the Mammoth Car.

In a better world, the fact that this movie exists in a candy-colored neon world would have been seen as a welcome escape from the grim and gritty world that we live in. Sadly, it was not to be, although the film made up from its box office losses via merchandising and video sales.

At one point, Julien Temple was to direct, Johnny Depp was to play Speed and Henry Rollins was going to be Racer X. I kinda wanna see that movie now.

Brian Yuzna produced Re-Animator and From Beyond before directing his own film, the completely insane Society. Keep in mind that the same guy who created these films also wrote Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

The character of Faust comes from the comic book created by David Quinn and Tim Vigil. I was shocked that this movie was made, because the series is absolutely besotten with sex, violence and sexual violence. Once, I met Vigil and bought a bunch of art from him. He asked if I wanted to buy a huge pen and ink of an orgy with demons alternatively having sex with, killing and devouring gorgeous women, sometimes at the same time. I demurred and he replied, “Fucking pussy.”

Artist John Jaspers sells his soul to the M (as for Mephistopheles) (Andrew Divoff, Wishmaster) so that he can gain revenge against the gangsters who killed his girlfriend. That deal comes with a price — at night he becomes a demon that loves to kill and often does so for M and his lover, Claire. But when he falls in love with his psychologist Jade, he decides to turn against the devil.

Jeffrey Combs from Re-Animator shows up as a policeman, for those of you who love his work. And if you love the effects of Screaming Mad George, he made the final monster, which is really something.

Faust is a weird movie. It’s probably too strange and graphic for most folks. And for the fans of the book, it doesn’t go far enough. That said, much of the dialogue and set pieces from the comic made it to the screen intact, probably because Quinn was the screenwriter.