What do Blue Demon, Mil Mascaras, El Medico Asesino, La Sombra Vengadora, Tinieblas and Black Shadow do in their downtime when they’re not wrestling? They ride motorcycles. And when they’re not doing that, what do they do? They fight terrorists, mad scientists and monsters. As you do.

If you’re not prepared for the world of the Mexican luchador superhero film, let me warn you now: these movies are completely unhinged.

A mad scientist hates masked wrestlers, so he has imbued an army of little people with the power of ten great athletes and outfitted them with transistor radios that turn into guns. There’s also an incredible scene where the little men in red suits show up behind the scenes of a beauty pageant and slap every single beautiful girl into submission.

Let me sell you on this: masked men race boats, hang out with pretty girls and throw small men into the scenery at will. If that doesn’t convince you, there’s no real hope for your soul. You also get to see every lucha in here have an actual match, which is always nice.

I wish they still made these movies with today’s stars like Caristico and Dragon Lee Jr. battling against vampires, robots, werewolves and Bárbaro Cavernario. I would cry tears of blood and make my pilgrimage to Arena Mexico where I would kneel in supplication to the gods of lucha!

If I were the Mexican Joe Bob Briggs, I would end this by saying, “Cinco estrellas échale un vistazo.”

Known as Attack of the Phantoms in Europe and Kiss Phantoms in Italy, this movie has been an embarrassment to Kiss the band and their fans, the Kiss Army, for years. As a six-year-old in 1978, I was certainly aware of the band, as many of my friends had the toys and their older brothers and sisters had the records. But they always seemed strange to me — I was always wondering why they weren’t heavier. It wasn’t until I moved past their 1980’s work and started to enjoy the first few albums that I learned just how much fun Kiss could be.

That’s probably why this movie doesn’t upset me at all. In fact, I kind of love it.

In 1977, Kiss had an income of more than ten million dollars. Their manager Bill Aucoin believed that the traditional cycle of album releases and touring had taken Kiss as far as they could go. So what was the next level? Kiss would become superheroes. Seeing that band boss and bassist Gene Simmons was a huge comic fan, this move made perfect sense.

Round one was a Marvel comic, with the band mixing their blood into the ink for the cover. Round two was this, a Hanna-Barbera produced movie that was a rush job, with all four band members given a crash course in how to act that didn’t really take for anyone but Simmons, who would go on to menace Tom Selleck in Runaway and John Stamos in Never Too Young to Die.

Screenwriters Jan Michael Sherman and Don Buday spent time with each Kiss member so that they could properly learn their characters. “Space Ace” Ace Frehely was known to be pretty strange, frequently saying “Ack!” The writers decided that he would be like Harpo Marx and that would be the only word he would say. Ace responded by demanding more lines or he would quit the film.

Both Frehley and “Catman” Peter Criss hated the long downtime that comes with movie making. They were both dealing with substance abuse issues at the time, too. Nearly none of Criss’ dialogue is his voice. It’s Michael Bell other than when he sings “Beth.” In fact, Frehley got in a fight with director Gordon Hessler (Scream, Pretty Peggy) and left, so for one scene you can clearly see his stunt double taking his place. How can you tell? Well, Ace isn’t black but his double is.

Much of Kiss’ acting in this film is them performing in the parking lot of Magic Mountain in front of 8,000 fans. Those fans were drawn by free tickets from local station KTNQ and DJ “The Real” Don Steele, who shows up here, as well as in plenty of Roger Corman alma mater films like Gremlins, Death Race 2000, Rock ‘n Roll High School and Eating Raoul. In 1970, he was so famous that a “Super Summer Spectacular” spot Don Steele contest led to two teenagers trying to track down the DJ accidentally ramming a car into a highway divider, killing a man. The case that came out of it made it the whole way to the Supreme Court of California and Weirum v. RKO General, Inc., 15 Cal.3d 40 is still studied in American law schools in regards to the subject of foreseeability in torts law.

Within Six Flags Magic Mountain, Abner Devereaux (Anthony Zerbe, The Omega Man) is upset that his animatronics are playing second banana to an appearance by Kiss. That may be because his creations have been eating up park revenue. Devereaux is a real piece of work, enslaving Sam Farrell and other employees and a gang of punks (one of them, Dirty Dee, is played by Lisa Jane Persky, who was an early CBGB audience member and girlfriend of Blondie bass player Gary Valentine, who write “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” for her. She has gone on to appear on Quantum Leap and in multiple projects with Divine. Another punk, Chopper, has a vest with a Satan’s Mothers patch, the exact same logo that would be used again the next year for Walter Hill’s The Warriors).

As Sam’s girlfriend Melissa searches for him as the mad scientist of the park is fired and Kiss plays their concert. After the show, we realize that Kiss are nearly ascetic magicians given to magical pronouncements and superpowers, particularly “Demon” Gene Simmons whose voice rumbles whenever he speaks and “Starchild” Paul Stanley who can read minds.

Devereaux eventually steals the mystical talismans that give Kiss their powers and replaces them with evil robotic duplicates. Of course, Kiss gets their powers back and wins over the crowd and saves the park.

Before the movie aired on TV, a private screening was arranged for Kiss. While their management and hangers-on loved it, the band was incensed and refused to allow anyone to speak of the movie in their presence.

This is quite literally a Scooby-Doo movie, only topped by the 2015 cartoon Scooby-Doo! and Kiss: Rock and Roll Mystery, where Kiss wrote a song all about Fred, “Don’t Touch My Ascot.”

Ironically, soon after this film, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley would replace the increasingly unreliable and out of control Ace and Peter with an endless series of duplicates who had no ownership or voice in the band’s future. So you can kind of watch this film as a precursor to the very behavior that band would embody in the future. Perhaps the robotic Gene is now the real Gene? The mind boggles.

If I ever met Simmons — my brother has, he gave a keynote speech at a Major League Baseball annual retreat, something I find inordinately hilarious — I hope he looks at me and roars like a lion before intoning, “No gratitude need be voiced. Your mind speaks to us!”

Martin Davidson directed the teen classics The Lords of Flatbush and Eddie and the Cruisers, but today we’re talking about his lone superhero movie, an early entry in the form that starred Three’s Company lead John Ritter and Anne Archer. Obviously, the success of Superman had a lot to do with this movie.

Steve Nichols (Ritter) is a struggling New York City actor posing as Captain Avenger to promote a film, but when he stops a robber in costume, he learns that he loves playing hero for real. Soon, he’s working for the mayor’s staff and Bert Convy and Kevin McCarthy, which thrills me to no end.

The mayor’s goons, however, are shady and their plan to fake Captain Avenger’s heroics gets exposed by the media. However, Nichols girlfriend Jolene (Archer) convinces him to leave the mask behind and become a real hero.

Keep an eye out for former Howard Stern Show reporter Penny Crone, a young Kevin Bacon, Dr. Joyce Brothers and Robin Sherwood from Tourist Trap and Death Wish 2.

There are also several references to Taxi Driver in this movie, such as several scenes of cab drivers hanging outside of the Belmore Cafeteria at night and Leonard Harris, who played Senator Charles Palantine in Scorcese’s film, as the mayor.

Inspired by the huge success of the Japanese superhero versus monster fare such as Ultraman and Kamen Rider in Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers produced the first Chinese superhero in 1975, which they called Infra-Man. However, they pushed the envelope created by the Japanese even further, inventing a world where a school bus can crash, Hong Kong can be destroyed, an earthquake can happen and monsters appear all within the first minute of the film.

Let me see if I can summarize the blast of pure odd that I just watched at 5 AM: Princess Dragon Mom (known in the original version of this film as Demon Princess Elzebub) is a ten million-year-old mother of monsters who wants to destroy the Earth. She carries around a whip and has a dragon head on her hand, but can also turn into a monster herself. She also has an entire legion of beasts ready to do whatever she asks, like her assistant She-Demon (Witch-Eye in the original), who is an Asian girl with a hand that has an eyeball in the middle of it. Also: both of these ladies wear metallic bikinis with skulls all over them and have several costume changes. They also have an army of cannon fodder dressed in skeletal costumes, which was obviously the influence for the Skeleton Crew in the new episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

They’re battling with Science Headquarters, led by Professor Liu Ying-de. He’s used the BDX Project to transform Lei Ma (Danny Lee, The Killer) into the bionic kung-fu kicking motorcycle riding Infra-Man, who has whatever powers he needs for any situation. He’s also really good at getting tall and stepping on monsters until their green blood pours out. Bruce Lee tribute actor Bruce Le also appears as Lu Xiao-long, another member of the team.

You get all manner of monsters in this one — the Emperor of Doom, the Giant Beetle Monster, an Octopus Mutant, the Driller Beast, a Laser Horn Monster and the Iron Fist Robots. All of them are given to dramatic pronouncements, overacting and blowing up real good.

Believe it or not, Roger Ebert said, “When they stop making movies like Infra-Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Twenty-two years later, he went even further: “I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

He’s right — this movie is completely unhinged, with dragon witch women who threaten to throw little girls down volcanos, blotting out the sun and rocket fists. They should have made five thousand sequels to this.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Sergio Corbucci is known for making some of the most violent spaghetti westerns ever committed to the screen, including Django, The Mercenary, Navajo Joe and The Great Silence. In fact, his contributions to exploitation film are so important, he received a special thanks at the end of Kill Bill Volume 2. He was also known for the exact opposite type of film later in his career — ridiculous comedies.

Police officer Dave Speed (Terence Hill, The Call Me Trinity) going to the electric chair for what will be the fourth time the state has tried to execute him for the murder of his superior officer and friend Sergeant Willy (Ernest Borgnine, The Devil’s Rain!). Yes, this is a comedy. Yes, I saw this when I was eight.

Dave gets blasted by nuclear radiation while trying to serve a parking ticket and ends up with all manner of powers, like super speed, endurance, telekinesis, ESP, hypnotism and invulnerability. The only problem is that the color red shuts his powers off. He and Willy soon battle the mob forces of Torpedo (played by formerly blacklisted actor Marc Lawrence, who was Mr. Weiss in The Nightmare Never Ends segment of Night Train to Terror) and his girlfriend Rosy Labouche (Joanne Dru, older sister of Hollywood Squares host Peter Marshall).

The bad guys set up Dave and leave Willy to drown on their ship the Barracuda, but our hero finally escapes from prison and rescues his friend, despite him being frozen for weeks. He also flies on a giant bubble of gum and then drops into the Earth and emerges on the other side in China.

Hill and his frequent partner Bud Spencer made plenty more movies with Corbucci, as well as two other cop movies — Crime Busters and Miami Supercops.

If you had HBO in the 1980’s, there’s no way you missed this movie. I think that it aired every single night. According to the February 1983 HBO Guide, Super Fuzz aired 8 times in one month. Seriously, people never got sick of this one.

Oh those heady days of 1996, directly between Batman Forever and the movie that destroyed not only a franchise but nearly a genre, Batman and Robin. That said, the history of this movie goes beyond that.

The Phantom is a newspaper adventure comic strip that was created in 1936 by Lee Falk, who worked on the daily strip until his death in 1999. first published by Lee Falk in February 1936. Based in the fictional African country of Bangalla, The Phantom is also known as “the ghost who walks,” and is the 21st in the line of Phantoms, as it’s considered a legacy identity. Falk had already been a success with another character, Mandrake the Magician.

That character was going to be turned into a movie by Sergio Leone, as was The Phantom, but that project never materialized. Then, Joe Dante was attached to the project, working on it with the writer of Innerspace, Jeff Doam. The project was pulled when the budget was too high, particularly because of a winged demon at the climax. A year later, the movie was back in production without the demon and the funny parts of the script were not played as comedy. Dante refused to take his name off the film, so he’s credited as an executive producer.

Originally, the Phantom was going to be either Bruce Campbell or Kevin Smith — Ares of the Hercules/Xena TV shows — before the role was given to Billy Zane. The story was based on three different Phantom stories: “The Singh Brotherhood,” “The Sky Band” and “The Belt.”

We start back in time, as a young boy watched Kabai Sengh (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Shang Tsung from Mortal Kombat) murder his father. He jumps into the ocean and washes up in Bengalla, where he is given the Skull Ring and devotes his life to fighting crime. The identity of the Phantom is passed down from father to son, which leads people to think that the hero is immortal.

In 1938, Kit Walker (Zane), the 21st Phantom, fights a group of mercenaries led by Quill (James Remar, The Warriors) in the jungle over the mystical Skulls of Touganda. It turns out that Quill is the Phantom’s Joe Chill — he killed his father — and has escaped to New York City with the Skulls. Also, the Phantom’s dad (Patrick McGoohan — The Prisoner!) shows up from time to time to give him advice ala Obi Wan-Kenobi.

Meanwhile, Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson) comes back into The Phantom’s life, as she was a college girlfriend. Her uncle owns a newspaper that has been investigating businessman Xander Drax (Treat Williams, Dead Heat) who is connected to all the business that the Phantom is battling.

That’s when we meet the most fascinating person in this movie, Sala (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a femme fatale air pirate who, in the newspaper strips, is in love with the Phantom.

Of course, the evil Kabai Sengh’s descendent is behind everything, leading to a battle in the jungle with the Skulls and the Phantom’s ring being the fourth skull that can stop them.

The Phantom feels like a movie out of time, much like The Rocketeer and The Shadow, earlier 1990’s films that failed to find an audience. That’s not a bad thing, but just the facts. People weren’t ready for sunny, happy heroes.

A young soldier escapes a seemingly endless war and winds up in the middle of an entirely different battle. Now he’s trapped between the desires of two desperate women.  It’s another lost Greek film found by the folks at Mondo Macabro, who seem to specialize in discovering movies that you never knew about that you suddenly find out you need to own.

Ermina (Franca Parisi, Atom Age Vampire) is trapped in a loveless marriage to a farmer who only cares about getting rich selling moonshine to soldiers. And the other woman (Greek singing star Alexandra Kyriakaki) is much younger and lives in a world of fantasy. They’re both in love with the soldier who has been hiding in a barn and falling for both of them.

I was really struck by how rapid the cuts are in some of these scenes, almost a strobing effect as the emotional anguish increases. This movie has the kind of insane love in it that causes women to pull knives and fight one another in the mud. There’s also a great scene in here when the younger girl casts a love spell to try and keep the soldier all to herself. Gisela Dali — the Greek Bardot — has a brief role here as the witch who aids her.

This film was edited — and perhaps directed — by Bruno Mattei, who remade it in Italy as Armida, a Wife’s Story with Parisi returning to star in the remake.

You can get this on a double blu ray disc along with The Wild Pussycat from Mondo Macabro.

NOTE: This film was sent to us by Mondo Macabro, but that has no bearing on this review.

The Wild Pussycat is an unsung classic of exploitation cinema. Originally made in 1968, it wasn’t released for four years and then only in a censored version.

It’s a simple story: Good girl Nadia investigates the death of her sister, who was exploited and driven to suicide by her pimp. Now, she seduces the man, drugs him, then imprisons him in a hidden room that has a one-way mirror. On the other side, she continues her seduction by dancing for him and having affairs with other men and women while he can only look on.

Sure, The Wild Pussycat has rough subject matter, but it wasn’t a porno throwaway. Its director, Dimi Dadiras, directed more than fifty other films and its star Gisela Dali was known as the Greek Bardot.

This is another example of Mondo Macabro stretching out and grabbing films that most people would never know of. This film has never been released anywhere in the world on home video before now. This release includes both the 1972 Greek version (with much of the sex removed and a drug-dealing subplot inserted) uncut export version.

Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei would remake this movie in 1975 as Emanuelle’s Revenge, with George Eastman playing the role of the pimp.

As always, Mondo Macabro has put together an amazing release, finding something I didn’t even know was out there, making it look better than it ever has before and adding bonus features on top of all that. They’re putting out some astounding releases and deserve your full support.

You can get this on a double blu ray disc along with The Deserter from Mondo Macabro.

NOTE: This film was sent to us by Mondo Macabro, but that has no bearing on this review.